Muchness and Light

The fates are vicious, and they're cruel.

I’ve spent most of the last week recovering from a surgical repair to my left Achilles tendon. It had been bothering me all year, but I’d put off seeing ortho about it, thinking it would get better eventually. I was already battling cervical and lumbar spine pain. I was back and forth to Alabama to see and care for Bumblebee while he was undergoing chemo and then surgery and then radiation. I was starting grad school. I was still raising two teenage sons and working a full-time job.

But after a ten-day study abroad in Berlin, I came home limping. The sixty miles I walked during that trip were invigorating in so many ways. They also gave a nasty bone spur in my heel the opportunity to lacerate the tendon. There was no option but to remove it, which happened this past week.

I’ll spend two weeks in a splint, then several weeks in a boot. I have at least four weeks on crutches or a knee scooter. Physical therapy won’t begin for at least four weeks, and I’m told to expect a year for full recovery.

I can’t do most of what I normally do around the house, like laundry or cleaning. I can’t reach some of the cabinets to put away the dishes. Cooking is awkward. Showering is a convoluted chore. The boys have been somewhat helpful. Friends have brought food. Pandy and Cookie came to help get some things situated for us this weekend. Max is old enough to make a run to the grocery store for me. (Delivery isn’t terribly helpful, as I can’t really put a lot of the groceries away.)

Elevating my foot is key to healing during the first few weeks. I have spent days in bed or on the couch, binge watching television. My eyes have been too blurry from the pain meds to try to read.

In the midst of it all, I am still dealing with the emotional aftermath of this fucking breakup.

I am forced to be still in ways I hate. For years, I have walked to clear my head, and the exercise is incredibly helpful at dealing with my anxiety and depression. But physical limitations this year have made me far less active. I’ve lost muscle tone and gained some weight back, and that is going to worsen over the next few months before it gets better.

All of this makes for a perfect storm of self-recrimination and frustration and anger.

I find myself journaling the same things over and over—hurt and anger and confusion at how the hell I ended up in this place again, how anyone could be so consciously and callously hurtful of someone they professed to love. Then I think about the times I have hurt others, and I question at what point I stop paying some karmic price for damage I’ve inflicted.

When will I have worked hard enough and atoned enough that other people stop fucking hurting me as some kind of cosmic penance? Why am I the one left holding the hurt and carrying the blame for anyone else? Why does there seem to be no consequence for their actions, except what I am left to deal with?

I don’t know how to get past what I don’t understand.

Moonshine admonished me not to lie in bed crying over this and not to let it define who I am, to look at the good in my life and not get mired in the bad. “I really believe that everything happens for a reason, but sometimes we can’t/don’t or won’t see the reason. I think the reason for this is that you needed to see how string you can be.”

I don’t want to have to be stronger right now. I don’t want another Nietzschean lesson in my own resiliency. I am fully aware of my tenacity and my capacity. The one thing I wanted was a partner to carry some of that for me, sometimes when I needed it most, so I didn’t have to keep breaking my back to do every fucking thing by myself.

He told me he would do that. I trusted him and believed him and gave him the opportunity to be taken at his word, and he shrugged and dropped it all back at my feet when I was least prepared to pick it back up.

And he told me it was for my own good.

I am viscerally offended by the cowardice. I am hurt in ways I have rarely been—after having been as open and honest and brave as I could be to even engage in that relationship with him. I am now literally trapped inside my own head with no physical outlet for it, and I want to crawl out of my own fucking skin.

But I refuse to compartmentalize it away. I refuse to pretend it didn’t happen or that it doesn’t matter, because to do so it to traumatize myself in the exact ways others have hurt me. It won’t define me, but it will be another marker on my journey, another cautionary tale of another person who made me carry their shame and who dismissed me with little thought in order to justify their cowardice.

Another on top of another on top of another on top of another….

Except this one promised me he wouldn’t do exactly this, just so I would never have to feel this again.

I’m not grieving him. I am mourning the loss of trust and love and faith—and at a time when I need it most. Hope feels dangerous and is not allowed right now. I am lamenting the death of my own passion, again, at the hands of a man who will never face me to apologize for the catastrophe he created.

And I’m doing it all from forced confinement.

The timing is ironic. Maybe it’s the universe’s way of forcing me to slow down and deal with it now. Maybe there’s something coming that will need my attention and focus, so that I need to be free of this bullshit to deal with that.

Maybe it’s just coincidental assholery.

Maybe none of it means a damn thing.

 

 

And I don't understand. You deserve so much more than this.

When I was a child and would misbehave, my mother would send me to my room, out of her line of sight, with the words, "I love you, but I don't like you very much right now."

I love you, but I don't like you.

I don't like you.

I love you, but....

I love you, because I have to.

I love you, because I am required to.

The more trouble I was in, the more of my name I would hear.  Just "Stephanie!" was a warning.  "Stephanie Karen!" meant I was treading on some pretty thin ice.  "Stephanie Karen Quinn!" meant there was likely a spanking in my immediate future. 

But when I was a good girl, when I was sweet and obedient and well-behaved, I was Cissie.

To this day, I'm not terribly clear on the origin of the nickname.  I know it was given to me by a close family friend.  It was not diminutive of my given name, nor was it reference to my being a sister; there was no sibling calling me Sissy, as is so common in the South.  (I was raised an only child, and my (step/instant/in-my-heart) brother came to live with my mom and stepdad when I was in college.)

I remember being called Cissie until junior high school, when I demanded that both family and classmates call me only Stephanie.  While it may have been sweet inside the family, it was hard to explain this other name that made no logical sense to anyone else.  Eventually I rebelled against this thing I didn't understand and established myself fully as Stephanie Quinn.  When I went to the alternative magnet high school, no one knew Cissie had ever existed. 

Cissie was blond and blue-eyed.  (Stephanie has green eyes.)  She was smart and shy, though she could flourish as a chatterbox when she was comfortable.  For Cissie, it was important to be what Mama and Daddy and everyone else expected her to be.  If she wasn't, she was punished. 

Cissie - Age 3 or 4

But sometimes, no matter what Cissie did, she was just not enough.  She was tall but uninterested in basketball or sports of any kind.  She was smart but sometimes didn't want to do the tedious, necessary classwork.  Sometimes she tried to do it her own way, to challenge and entertain herself, but she would be chastised for doing it wrong, for not doing it how others wanted or expected it to be done. 

Cissie was also scared a lot.  Daddy had a sharp temper and would yell loudly at the least provocation.  Sometimes he would rear his hand back in anger, and sometimes it made contact.  Mama would nod and "Uh-huh" while Cissie talked, but she didn't always seem to hear those little girl words, especially if they weren't the words Mama wanted to hear.  And sometimes Mama would lash out in momentary anger and pop her little arm with the hard plastic hairbrush.  The oval red spot on the back of her arm might sting for hours, but it never felt as harsh as the pressing lump in her throat, the one she refused to talk or cry over. 

Cissie learned to spend time on her own, to entertain herself with imaginary friends and wishes for things that just never seemed to come true.  Cissie learned to bite the inside of her cheeks in just the right way that both kept her quiet and betrayed none of the anger she was harboring inside her little sweetheart mouth.  She had repetitious nightmares of witches and of vampires who lived in the back of her closet.

Cissie was also the little girl who was molested by a man who said he loved her, by a man who told her that if she didn't go along with it or if she spoke about it that she would be in trouble. 

It's no wonder that I didn't want to be Cissie. 

Stephanie - Age 14

 

But lately that little girl has been trying to tell me something. 

After another Fragile Cat skittered away, I was in a text conversation with Bounder (which is a whole different blog post's worth of fuckedupedness):

I'm tired of the hurt, you know? I'm tired of hiding in plain sight.  I don't want to be afraid of the shadows, scared of what seems to be there but isn't.  I feel again like my heart if wasting away.  I can't take another one who stays for days or weeks, with all of his fine words and implications.  I'm better with the balance, and I can't put these lessons into play without another person on the other side of that equation.  I want that safe place.  It's what I miss most, and I'm afraid.

And for all of my crazy, for all of my batshit and intensity, I'm a really good girl.  A guy could do a hell of a lot worse than me.

Very true statement dear...

I feel like being me will never be good enough.  I can either be myself or be what someone else expects.

And that little girl in me started to cry. 

It didn't matter what I did sometimes.  It didn't seem to matter that I was smart or clever or funny, loving or imaginative or curious, as long as I was doing what was expected of me.  As soon as I defied expectations, "I love you, but...."

There is no caveat for love.

There should be no conditions on love.  No one should ever have to negotiate the basics of their personality or their soul to feel that they are loved.  If a man tells me now that he loves me but he wishes I were quieter, less impulsive, less brash, more submissive, daintier, more deferential, I shouldn't accept those things.  I wouldn't accept those things, except I have accepted those things because it is what I learned as a child. 

Be different for me to love you, because what you are now is too much, is not enough, is wrong, and I cannot care for this defiant creature that you are.

All Cissie wanted was to be told that she was good enough, that it didn't matter that she wasn't perfect, that she defied Mama and Daddy's ideals in ways that still made her special and beautiful and acceptable and likable and lovable.  She wanted to know that she was good enough, that she didn't have to keep fighting and trying, that it was okay to be less than perfect.  And she wanted to know that she was good enough, that they would be proud of her for who she was, not for the accomplishments and the grades and the good choices she made that were really never choices at all. 

So for that little girl, to that little girl, I say, "Cissie, it's okay.  You are a good girl.  You were always a good girl.  It's wonderful that you weren't perfect, and it's good that you made mistakes.  You watched and learned, and you helped get me to here and now.  I'm sorry you didn't feel safe and protected and loved like you should've.  You deserved that, not just because you were a little girl but because you brilliantly, spectacularly special, and you were you."

Tonight, I will let her cry all she wants, to let out what is hurting her heart still, and I will tell her as often as she needs to hear it that she was worthy of all of that love, even when she wasn't always shown that. 

Going forward, I will do my best to honor that, to remind her and remind myself that Stephanie is resilient and sensitive because of the bullets Cissie took, that I learned to rebel because of the deference she endured and the secrets she kept, that I deserve healthy love now just as much as she did then. 

We are both worth it. 

 

The person you'd take a bullet for is behind the trigger.

 

In the midst of my hormone-guided tour of my emotional landscape, I started to think (read: cry) about how people can hurt the ones they love. 

Look, everyone does it sometime, of course.  Whether intentional or accidental, we have all acted upon our inherent ability to hurt others.  Sometimes it's an overly-harsh word or a complete dismissal of someone and their feelings.  Sometimes it's even an overtly vindictive act of physical or emotional retaliation. 

Whether or not something is hurtful can depend entirely on your perspective.  What may seem detrimental to one person can be protective for the other.  Circumstances can dictate whether or not an action needs to be performed at a certain time, and the consequences of that action may create a Win-Lose situation for the involved parties. 

There has to be a limit to the amount of self-sacrifice any person is willing or able to make, even if it sometimes means you end up hurting someone you care about.  It seems noble (or something) to be willing to give up anything for someone you love, but the reality of life is that it can't really work that way.  To relinquish every bit of your own power as a human being in deference to another, no matter how much you love them, is to weaken yourself to the point of exhaustion and ultimate self-destruction—physical, emotional, metaphysical, or any combination thereof. 

When you're on the receiving end of the smite, it just feels damaging and cruel.  Knowing that you're the one inflicting that damage can also be incredibly painful.  It's that ripple of equal and opposite reaction and how the energy of your own actions bounces back toward you. 

Given so much of who and what I've lived this year (especially as it trailed the preceding years), it would be easier if I could find some finality, some crux in time, when I could close my heart to certain people and disregard them completely.  My head understands the benefit in being able to close a chapter and box it away, making the people who helped to write those pages mean nothing more than the historical compartment they reside in.  To have the deep emotions we shared be inconsequential as I move forward seems superficially like it would make managing my future much easier. 

To be able to be distant and calculating, allowing me to feel nothing when I inflict hurt on someone else, could indeed be beneficial as I move forward to rebuild my life. 

But I honest to God don't understand how anyone could be so wantonly callous with another person by choice.  It baffles every fiber of my being that anyone could so easily disregard another person they have cared about, especially on such an intimate level.  I both envy and fear that ability to slam up a wall in your heart between yourself and anything that might have been able to reach you, even for a glimmer of a moment.  And how that can justify the hurt it inflicts, I truly don't understand. 

Everything in me shakes its head in confusion at the thought of living like that for a second, and it makes me hurt to imagine it.  It's reprehensible and baffling to me, both because of what it would say about me and about how I attempt to honor what those people meant to me, even when it was in some other time and place.  Maybe that's little girl naive of me.

Hot Pocket says I'm not like most people when it comes to this, but it's the only way I know how to be.  I will forever give anyone the benefit of the doubt and hope that my expectations are somehow proven wrong.  I will likely be forever disappointed and remain just as confused as ever, even and especially when I can logically see the fallacy of what my heart intuits so very clearly.  Where this aspect of my heart previously seemed wistful and charming, now sometimes it seems detrimental and foolish. 

I make mistakes.  I hurt the people I love.  I try very hard not to do that intentionally, sometimes taking the full brunt of the pain myself just to keep the people who've mattered to me from feeling it.  When I do inflict damage, I try to apologize and learn the lesson to avoid repeating it.  I try to make amends when and where I can. 

But I can't be like most of the people I know, who can just cut off their emotions and live as if they're inconsequential.  To close off a part of my heart will undoubtedly damage other parts of it, as well, and the long-term consequences of that are far more frightening to me than the short-term abating of emotion would be relieving.  Numbing it only delays the inevitable and may actually damage everything else that butts up against the numb. 

Somewhere maybe there's a middle ground for me.  I'm not a girl who's happy (or comfortable) in the medium.  When this journey comes to its end, I want to know that I lived this adventure as fully and completely as I could, no matter the circumstances, even if it means having to feel the agony just so I can appreciate the ecstasy.

 

 

You leave my heart in debt.

I hurt my son's feelings.  Badly.

It wasn't today, though it was a recent event.  There was a silly prank gone wrong.  I didn't perform the actual prank, though I did know about and good-naturedly encourage it.  I was absolutely a party to the offense.

At first, I thought he was okay.  Then, as we got into the car to leave the park where it happened, he growled at me from the back seat and told me never to talk to him again. 

I have never seen or heard him so damn angry in his 11-year-old life. 

I felt awful.  In my heart, I felt like he was overreacting melodramatically, but he was absolutely hurt that I could let something embarrassing happen to him like that, in front of friends and strangers alike. 

"I'm so sorry," I said, turning in the seat to face him directly.  "I should have known better.  I should've known that it would hurt your feelings.  I apologize, and I hope one day you will forgive me for that."

He glared at me and looked away.

As I started to back from the parking space, I said, "And I hope you know I wasn't trying to hurt your feelings.  It was just a prank—you normally like such things, and we thought you would just laugh it off.  But I wasn't trying to upset you."

"Yeah," he spat, "but you weren't trying not to, either."

Wham!  Right in the face!

He was right.  And he was mimicking something I say to my boys all the time. 

One of the boys will whack the other one, even unintentionally, and say, "But I didn't mean to do it!"

"But you didn't mean not to do it, either," I'll often respond. 

Sometimes it's not enough that we're passively careful with each other, no matter how aware we may be of the potential impact of our actions.  While another person's response and feelings are in no way our responsibility, there are times when we must be proactive in our concern and be intensely cognizant of how what we do will affect them. 

That doesn't mean we choose what's best for them, just to keep them from being hurt.  Sometimes the right choice is not ideal for everyone involved.  Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where one person will win and one will lose.  Sometimes there just is no compromise. 

When we are careless with each other, that's when we are most at fault.  Unkind words and injuries can hurt, but the real damage comes from the lack of concern, especially when we should have known better. 

As a parent, I struggle with these things all the time.  I know these are lessons that my boys have to learn—how to be thoughtful, how to apologize even when you don't want to, how not to hold onto something grudgefully—but they are the same lessons I find myself relearning all the time. 

Within a few hours, he'd forgiven me completely, but I know he won't have forgotten about it.  (He's just like that.  He gets it from me.)  I hope he knows that I won't have forgotten, either, and that I will absolutely do my best to try not to let it happen again.    

Don't underestimate the things that I will do.

I get that saying you're sorry is an incredibly difficult thing sometimes.  Apologizing to someone you care about, or even someone you've simply impacted in an inappropriate way, means having to admit your own shortcomings.  And I don't mean for little things, like bumping into them or being sick and making some off-handed remark; I'm talking about the truly hurtful things people do to one another.

When you hurt someone one, it usually boils down to one of two things: you were either careless and just didn't realize it would happen, or you had to make the conscious decision to inflict the damage.  Even if the damage was unintentional or unavoidable, you still had to make the choice to act in such a way that was inflicting. 

Today I'm on a rant about people who refuse to acknowledge or accept their accountability in the hurt they cause other people.  An, "I'm sorry, but...," simply doesn't cut it.  It doesn't go far enough in accepting your own role in that damage, in showing any kind of credibility—to others or to yourself.  Blanket apologies, "I'm sorry for whatever I did," really aren't any better.

I've been on both sides of the hurt, certainly.  I have done egregious things to others, on both a large and small scale.  I'm positive I've never always had the opportunity to make amends, even if that was nothing more than letting the other person yell at me and tell me all the ways in which I've hurt and angered them.  But I try to be cognizant of my actions and repair damage where I can. 

Sometimes, though, I need to be on the other end of that.  I need an uninterrupted moment to explode and spew forth all the pent-up vitriol, directed at the person who's hurt me.  And, maybe selfishly, I feel like I deserve that opportunity, to really let them know and feel a bit of what they've done. 

The people who know me best know damn well that my middle name should've been Spite.  Really, you don't ever want to start a war like that with me; I don't play fair, and I can be horribly vindictive.  But I try very, very hard to rein that in and not let it dictate how I respond to hurt.  It would be easy to slip into those dark patterns of lashing retribution, but, ultimately, it does me no good.  The equal and opposite reaction is more pain, self-inflicted and necrotic.  I know that living a tit-for-tat life will do nothing but send me spiraling into some ugliness that only serves to prolong the agony.

So I try a little harder every day not to let it swallow me, not to let it control how I live my life.  I have a thousand other good things to focus on, and I work very hard to tap the energy of those raw emotions and find a way to let them be productive.  I don't always succeed, in which case I do my best to let it go. 

But sometimes I would just like to be able to throw things at the asshats, like a cabbage or a stack of throwing stars fashioned from old CD's.  It's not productive, I know, but it would sure as Hell make me feel better, at least for a little while.