Muchness and Light

And I built a ship for two, it waits for me and you in the dew of the fields.

For me, love is the spark at the center of the universe, the absolute essence of truth and good. It’s the moment of origin at the Big Bang. It’s the snap of God’s fingers to create it all.

There is nothing more valuable to me, whether it’s romantic or platonic or familial. True love that cares and is concerned and active, not mimicry that makes someone seem a more palatable version of human.

Maybe it wouldn’t mean so much, and maybe I wouldn’t love so hard, had I not been hurt in the ways I was. For all of my exploration and self-evisceration, there is no way to know for sure. I don’t get a George Bailey Christmas, when I get to see how my life could have been different. I get the life I create from the rubble, sometimes balanced precariously across a glittery web of scars, littered with lost hopes and dreams.  

But through all of the discord, through all of the incessant buzzing inside me, there is a constant pulse, like a faint homing beacon at the center, echoing in my core, through the emptiest and most desolate parts of me. In me but outside me, like a marker for my path through and out to something bigger than me.

My path to God, to arcane truth and to wholeness.

Love.

If I’m quiet enough and still enough, I can find my way. There is a path. Maybe not for everyone, but it’s the only way I have left to go. Every other direction has been explored, defiantly and exhaustively.

My pasts are tangled like obstacles, certainly, and therapy has been vital in helping me to make sense of it all. To make sense of myself. And it is a process, occurring in the time in space in which I live. Even when I’m not in session, the work is still happening, consciously and un. A slice here and there of a valiant sword, and I can take another few steps. But sometimes it feels like those thorny vines close back up, fueled by their own blood and sometimes mine.

I’m fucking tired from the battle.

Sometimes I want to curl up and sleep, to let it all block out the sun. But every time I have relegated myself to dim solitude, I have been overcome with a greater fear of what hides in the dark, of the darkness itself. And I have taken one more swipe, in the desperate hope of finding someone, anyone, hidden in bramble, who will hold back the tangles for me to step ahead again. A simple man, tattered and bruised, but smiling and willing, offering me a hand to hold to steady me. His boots coated in stardust.

I don’t need him to slay my dragons. If there’s an evil enchantress in all of this, it’s me, desperately trying to protect my own heart.

But, God, that’s too much to ask of anyone. No mere mortal can be expected to love me like that.  And I don’t know that anyone could be ready or able, no matter how much he might want to be. I don’t know if I am ready to believe that someone else even could.

I am not selfish in my intent. I am willing to fight for him in the same ways, to cheer him on and to appreciate his efforts. He deserves someone who will wipe his brow and kiss his face gently and tell him that he’s on his own right path. He deserves someone who will protect him while he sleeps.

I want to be able to grasp his hand, to draw on his strength when I am lacking. I want to be able to call out in the dark and hear his voice as more than a distant echo that might just be my own.

I need the reassurance that comes from knowing someone who loves me is truly and completely there.

Consistency. Reliability.

I have stumbled upon men before, of course, as surprised to find them as they were to find me. But, in the end, they’ve all been nothing more than fever dreams, absurdities fleeting in the light and forgotten in detail if not in feeling. Distant echoes like a memory of thunder.

In my hurt, I have retreated, time and again, afraid of the fear that piles like more rubble, threatening to blot out the sun entirely in self-preservation.

Pandy says love isn’t worth having if we aren’t willing to risk self-annihilation. But I don’t think that destruction of myself is a measure of love. It’s a measure of fear, of protection from the pain of the burning sun on my skin after so many years of darkness. For me, it’s a way to maintain the darkness and comfort from the unknown. It is mimicry of martyrdom.

I want to live in the light. I want to be free of the tangles and the thorns. I want to let the sun burn them all away so that there is no more fight. To stop watering them with my own blood and tears.

I need open space and fresh air. I need the last battle through the brush to be freeing.

And I want to find the source of the pinging, in rhythm with my heart. I want to find the beacon that leads me home.

Because I believe that I will also find a simple man with dusty boots that shimmer. I believe that there will be an arcane, perfect smile and outstretched hands that glisten with dew.

And so I fight. Every day. Sometimes the battle is just to get out of bed and soothe my own fears. The hardest battles are fought in the middle of the night, awake and alone in the dark, knowing that what I want and need most is somewhere out there in a vast universe that is no larger than the breadth and depth of my heart.

The way out is through. I couldn’t go back, if I tried. So I keep moving forward, step after exhausted step, because I believe there is love to be found.

I believe there is love to be found for me.

 

 

And a place in your heart, dear, makes me feel more real.

Last week, I was walking and listening to music, as I’m prone to do. I’ve been walking again a lot lately, both to try to lose the weight I regained over the last couple of years and to clear my head a bit. The last few weeks have seen a lot of processing about everything going on in therapy. I admit to there being a lot of overthinking, as well.

I was listening to the new Mynabirds record, Be Here Now. Their first two records were especially poignant for me during and after my divorce. I hadn’t had a chance to hear this one, so it seemed a great choice for a three-mile walk on a lovely autumn evening. The record is quite good, and I added several tracks to various playlists, as I’m also prone to do. But something—and I can’t be sure what—in the song “Wild Hearts” set me off. It’s as lyrically fantastic as any other song Laura Burhenn has written, but something sent me spiraling toward epiphany.

As I’ve said before, the goal of the Internal Family Systems model of therapy is to reintegrate the subpersonalities that are formed as the result of traumatic events. No matter how dysfunctional their behavior may (or may not!) be, my subparts are trying their best to protect me from hurt and further damage. Some have very simple roles, while others are complex and nuanced in their approach to what they see as their role. They are such an integral part of me that I don’t always notice when one subpersonality is controlling in a situation. (Just think about any time you’ve ever gone off and yelled at someone, had a full-blown tantrum, maybe not even realizing how out of control you are until the moment passes and you’re able to reflect on it rationally. You were always you. You always knew you were you. You were just… not really yourself in that moment.) This part of my journey ends when each subpart is reconnected fully with my Self, which is able to make healthy choices without the need to call on the managers or the firefighters to protect the exiles, perpetually trapped by a moment of trauma.

As I was walking and listening, I had the realization that there is another subpersonality I hadn’t noticed before. In my mind, she looks like a child, though she isn’t. I tried to reach out to her and let her tell me about herself, having an internal dialogue with this deep part of myself. I realized the others had crafted her, had created her from their own bits and pieces. She knows everything each of the other subpersonalities knows, though they don’t each know everything she knows. She acts as sentry for Cissie, a strong last line of defense of the exile, able to protect her (and thus me) with the full knowledge of every other manager and firefighter subpart.

Every time a subpart experienced any kind of extreme emotion, it was transferred onto Pearl. Layer upon layer of hurt and damage, of ecstasy and deep love, grief and agony, irrepressible joy and unflagging hope—all built up slowly to create their own scapegoat, much in the way I created them.

And if I created them and they created her….

Yeah.

Pearl is, essentially, my muchness.

She is the figurative embodiment of everything I’ve lived for the last seven years. She is the angry rebellion against being shoved into a box and denied reciprocal affection. She is the wild abandon that led to not-always-healthy choices. She is the late-night drives with the windows down and the same song blaring for thirty miles. She is the trail of glitter left in my wake. She is the frustration at loving someone so much and not being able to be any more entwined with them.

She is the shame that comes from needing so badly to be loved. She is the uncontrollable, make-me-shake-with-the-sick-of-it-all fear of being emotionally abandoned. She is the overwhelming sorrow from not being able to think of one more thing, the just-the-right thing, to prove that I was worth their love.

Pearl takes those hits, because even the others aren’t always capable of doing it. So they—I—created her, coating both good and bad carefully on an amorphous form disguised as innocence. At the center of it all is the exact hurt and shame that they all fight like hell to protect Cissie from.

Even in the depths of my fucked-up psyche, I tried to make something beautiful from something ugly.

Queen Frostine and I talked at length about it all, as we are prone to do. She was surprised to realize how much of what I do is tied up with self-protection.

“All these things I think about when I think of you, I always just thought of them as personality traits. Now I’m seeing that they’re defense mechanisms, and that is so fucking weird to see.”

And it’s not just the unhealthier traits, like redrawing personal boundaries to accommodate men who refuse to do the same for me. It’s also the gregarious and seemingly-healthy ones, like my openness and willingness to put all of me out there no matter what others think.

Pearl came about as a last line of defense. She’s the general behind my own enemy lines, telling everyone else what to do. And she mimics my voice so well that I let her be in charge.

But she’s not the one who’s supposed to be in charge—I am. I’m the one who gets to make the decisions about what’s best for me, for us. I can have an internal dialogue with these persona, assigned by me as a way to catalog and contain my emotions, to make sense of it all.

The irony is that in dividing myself into these intricate parts, I have compartmentalized my own emotions, segmenting them and locking them away until I’m ready to deal with them—the very thing I hate most when others do it to me. To be ignored, to be dismissed, to be relegated to the dark and dusty recesses of someone’s heart until such time as I am convenient is enraging to me.

But I’m doing it to myself.

It’s time to let them out of their boxes, to remove the walls of compartment and allow them to wander free, talking to each other and to me. It’s time to let them out into the light and the fresh air, to experience my life fully and mindfully, able to see more than the limited view from the bottom of a box.

 

 

 

Underneath my lucid skin, the cold is lost, forgotten.

During an ongoing conversation with a friend about happiness, I asked him what it is in his life that keeps him from being happy.

“What does this elusive happiness look like? What do you believe will bring that happiness? How will it manifest—will you find it, will it find you, or will you make it? What are you struggling against, that you feel is keeping happy away for more than short bursts? What are you willing to change or eliminate in order to make room for this happiness?”

Of course, this banter comes on the heels of my own burst of unhappy this weekend. I have been frustrated that life isn’t necessarily how I want it to be. Since DH moved out of state two years ago, he has had very little interaction with the boys. Phone calls and email have been sparse, and visitation totaled 28 days in that two-year span. (Though I am happy that he has been making a much more concerted effort to rectify that, as of late. <fingers crossed>)

That has left me with very little time in which to connect with myself on my terms. His absence coincided with my starting college and work, so I have lived in the constant pace of mom and student and employee. Constrained by obligation and time and money, I have had to forego a lot of the time to be “free” I’d previously had when the boys were with their father.

Because the boys were getting older and more self-sufficient, I’d been able to take some time away from them, a few hours for class or work or the occasional (bad) date. Then I met Rango.

“Wow,” he said during our first date, “with so much going on, how do you find time to date?”

“If it’s important to me, I will make time for it,” I replied.

Eventually—especially once GOAL was added to my plate—I started to butt up against real limitations. There are only so many hours in a day in which to accomplish what needs to happen in our life. I had to make serious adjustments.

Of course one of the first things to go was working out. If the exhaustion isn’t enough to drop me in bed by 9:00, household chores or schoolwork keep me busy. Now that I’m at Mercer in a program for working adults, my day starts at 6:00 a.m. and often doesn’t end until class lets out sometime after 10:00 p.m.—plus the drive home and the unwinding before I can even sleep before I get up and do it again. Having the boys for nearly 100% of the year also added substantial additional cost; it turns out teenage boys eat a lot, and their school/social activities are time-consuming and expensive.

This week, again, Facebook popped up with my “memories”—pictures from that day in years past. This time it was from a specific night three years ago with Pandy. I looked at the picture and thought, “I miss my purple hair. And I miss my collarbones.”

Toward the end of my marriage, I rebelled against the domesticity I’d created. I felt trapped and struggled to find meaning or purpose that didn’t stem directly from my role as wife and mother. Never happy in the medium, I swung the pendulum so far in the other direction that it, at times, wreaked havoc on my life.

So while I desperately miss the freedoms that come with fully embracing the Sassafras O’Malley persona, I am also careful to remember the confusion and static and sheer craziness that often came with that liberty. Sassafras has a tendency to be where she probably shouldn’t be.

Right now I’m living the life I need to be living: working full time, taking care of and providing for my children, going to school more than half time in order to finish as quickly as possible, succeeding by everyone’s metrics, including mine. And I have the support of a life partner who helps with as much as he can.

But sometimes, I still feel unhappy.

While doing homework over the weekend, I read a quote by Simone de Beauvoir: “Those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest.”

Because I’m not able to do what I want, when I want, I often feel stagnant. I feel trapped by circumstance that’s changing far slower than I would like, given my incredibly impatient nature. Sometimes I feel resentful when that circumstance is to blame for the lack of freedom and the feeling of stagnation. And it doesn’t matter that my head knows better; my gut is screaming that it feels wrong, that it feels too much like my life before, and my heart gets angry.

When I feel those emotions, I have choices in how to react. I can scream and go off my fucking rails, which very people have ever seen. For everything I have experienced with Rango, he has never been witness to a full-fledge Stephie Meltdown. I can choose to hold it all in and just pretend it’s not there, cycling slowly through more resentful. Or I can feel it and acknowledge it and let it go.

Knowing myself the way I do, I usually choose the latter, but Rango called me out on my methodologies. He complained that I become cold and distant, obviously struggling with some emotion that I refuse to let escape the icy surface. He’s right. I eventually found that the quickest way out of my own head was to jump in, dropping into it as quickly as possible, and then use that downward momentum to push off the inevitable bottom, letting the pressure release as I rise back to the top in a stream of my own bubbles.

But as long as I feel like there are things missing or that I am bound by circumstance, I will still have moments of discontent. I will still have impetus to feel unhappy at times.

Maybe happy isn’t the goal. My former therapist told me once that happiness is a fleeting emotion and that content is likely the healthier alternative I am most likely to feel content when I am living my life on my own terms, in my own way and at my own pace. But because I have relationships with other people, especially those three men who live in my house, I am morally obligated to take their contentment into consideration as well. What I want is sometimes in conflict with what they need.

So for now, I’m trying to make the best of it. I’m trying to make those small changes I talk about in my GOAL speeches, to pick up the pieces I keep dropping and put them together in the ever-expanding mosaic that makes up my disco ball. For once in my life, I’m thankful to have these big hands that let me hold more than seems possible.

 

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Simone de Beauvoir

Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

Ain't these tears in my eyes telling you.

 

You were the promise at dawn, and I was the morning after.

My head is a little haunted sometimes.

Because I horde the memories, because I keep an extraordinary amount of minutiae in there, and because I'm an intensely emotional girl, there is a constant swirl of emotion in me. In a given moment, I will drive along a certain street or hear a specific song, and it will dredge up a memory—Oh, I talked to Absolem from that parking lot or That song was playing when Bounder and I <did whatever>--and then I will re-evaluate the entire relationship. It may take hours or it may happen in an instant, but every emotion I ever felt about that person will come in waves of good and bad, roiling over each other and crashing against the shores of my heart in quick succession.

Hurricane Sassafras can be an utter bitch sometimes.

But none of those emotions are happening now. I'm not living the event that led to the original emotion. It's just an echo, a ghost.

"Ghosts can't hurt you," Rango has reminded me a hundred times. "They're powerless."

Theoretically, they have the power I allow them to have, though I don't really know how to make them feel less important. Some have just taken time to fade. There are dozens of faceless, nameless shifting shapes that are little more than a murmur in my periphery.

But then there are the others.

My therapist said to me once that our bodies have a memory of their own, that our memories play out on a deep, cellular level because our bodies were physically present for the events that occurred. As she explained it, this is why anniversaries of powerful and vividly-remembered events can bring on the same emotions that were felt originally.

Right now, at this time of year, I am in a cycle of dozens of anniversaries. For whatever reason, the period from mid-April to the beginning of August is peppered with anniversaries like a minefield of memories. They run the gamut from wonderful to confusing to downright heartbreaking—and sometimes all three at once.

My therapist also had me work on sitting with my emotions, on allowing them to fall in and around me and just be, without reacting or overreacting to them, naming them and being aware of what they were and where they came from. But with emotions constantly on this rollercoaster down Memory Lane, it's too easy for me to become stuck in place, sitting, paralyzed in my useless fear.

And I do know that the fear is pointless and counterproductive. In my head, I am fully aware that what I'm feeling is wrapping its cold hand around my heart because I let it. I know that the ghosts are vaporous re-imaginings of what I remember, vacillating around my perspective at the moment that I am reminded of them.

But what is it about the others that I can't quite seem to escape them fully?

Absolem was both witness and accomplice to the inner transformations that were the cause of so much outer revolution. There are days I think of something that I should tell him and then remember that we no longer have that relationship, that I can't just message him and tell him to call me when he gets a chance. While I miss that friendship, I do not miss the emotional craziness that sometimes ensued because of it. I don't miss those tears, but I do sometimes change the route I drive just to avoid passing my own ghost.

Bounder was... Bounder. He was the one who broke my heart and wouldn't give me the closure I asked for. There was an ending—and one that took far longer to play out than we were actually a couple—but it didn't come how I felt like it should've, and it never will. Because he lives close by, I sometimes pass him on the street. It's not a ghost with him so much as a poltergeist, make me nauseated and ill from a sucker punch to the gut.

There are still some songs I just. can't. bear. to hear.

And with DH, it seems like there should be more than with the others, but there's not. In fact, it happens far less often than it used to. Yes, I've had almost three years to put that damage behind me. Yes, I still have to deal with his shit in my basement.

But I can also see the very best of him every single day in our boys. I chose to have two children with him for a reason, and Max and Tricky remind me all the time of how that decision was the best one I ever made. Somehow I've been able to unpack and repack all of that emotional baggage and keep only what mattered, and it's very rare that those memories have the power to upend me.

So I've been a bit on edge for the last few days. I told the Castration Committee that I felt like I was about to crawl out of my own damn skin again. Last night, the first good spring storm came, thunder like the laughter of those specters. I sat on my porch swing, feeling the cold spray of torrential rain on the breeze like phantasmal fingers stroking along my neck. I let the emotions come and swing with me until I thought I would choke on my own breath.

What was I feeling? Why was I feeling it?

I couldn't name it. I couldn't exorcise it.

One of Rango's superpowers is to be able to replace those memories with his own, our own. He is a Ghostslayer Extraordinaire.

"What do you need me to do?" he asked.

"Nothing. Just hold me."

Is it that you miss them? One of them?

No.

Is there something you're not getting that you need?

Not at all.

It wasn't that I was missing anyone else. I hate to compare old loves—each relationship was special for its own reason—but Rango is undeniably so much more than any of the others. There is nothing any of them was or has that he doesn't offer to me willingly and completely.

"Sometimes I just... hurt," I whispered to Rango.

It just hurts.

And there it was. Just hurt. Not grief or anger or longing or sorrow or love. Just hurt that hasn't fully healed. It doesn't feel like it did when the wounds were fresh, but it still aches sometimes when I twist just right or move too quickly in an unexpected direction. Sometimes I just bump the old wound.

And somehow, giving that to Rango makes the hurt fade.

He kisses me and makes me better.

Today, the ghosts are mostly quiet. They're just kind of hanging out and busying themselves with other things, playing quietly off in the distance. I can feel their presence, see them out of the corner of my eye, but I'm doing my best to stay out of their line of sight.

Somewhere between them and me is him, Rango, who will stand guard for as long as I need.

I'm not so scared anymore.

 

Wonder if I'll ever bury the hatchet inside.

About the time Rango moved into the house with us, I started to realize that I was having a hard time with his past.

Due to the constraints of time and distance and the necessary logistics for the boys, he and I never spent a night in his apartment. He insists that the apartment was never more than a landing pad and that it never felt like home. While I do believe home for him became wherever I was within days of our meeting, part of me still feels like I never got the opportunity to... I don't know... mark that territory...?

It sounds stupid, I know. I feels stupid. Every time some ex comes up, I cringe.

I know part of my insecurity comes from my maladaptive attachment style, which was established in my childhood and then reinforced over and over and over (and over and over and over) in my adult dating life, especially in the two-and-a-half years after DH and I split. I'm a fragile cat, without a doubt, but so is Rango. Generally we are very careful and patient with one another's emotions, lovingly treading across the scarred battlefield of the other's heart.

But really, I have no idea why the hell I am so freaked out when some former relationship of his is mentioned. Because I took the brutally-open-and-honest approach while I was dating, Rango learned probably far more about me in those first days than maybe he wanted, especially my history with the fragile cats.

When you're divorced, or maybe it just happens at this age when you have a good deal of life experience, first date conversation inevitably turns to prior relationships. Were you married? Do you have kids? Why did you break up? First dates are basically an interview, after all—a chance to see if their fuckeduppedness will play well with your fuckeduppedness.

So he knew very quickly that I was living in the same house I'd lived in with my ex-husband. He knew my most painful ex lived just a few miles away and semi-regularly sees me in passing. He knew I'd had a very active dating and social life on the weekends before DH moved out of state and dropped regular contact with the boys.

Hell, I wrote a book about some of it.

In the semi-autobiographical Persona Non Grata, Tierney talks about how she has a hard time hearing about her husband, Sam's, relationship with his long-ago ex-girlfriend:

"I worried for years that you had loved her more than you loved me," I admitted one night.  I couldn't look at him when I said it.  I kept my gaze trained on the darkness in the woods behind our house.

"Why?  Why would you even think that?  Didn't I tell you every day that I loved you?  Couldn't you just believe that?"

"I believed you.  I still do.  But, Sam, you were so broken when you guys split.  I kept waiting for you to come home and tell me that she'd called, that she wanted you back.  I used to dream about it all the time."

I really didn't know that DH loved me more than he'd loved her until the day Max was born, more than seven years into our marriage.

And I know that love should never feel like a competition, but my head is sometimes a mess, and I sometimes feel like I am constantly at battle with the ghosts of the past. I am forever struggling to overcome my screwed up perceptions of how I think other people see me. Often this drives me to be bigger and better and faster and more. I feel like there is so much inherently wrong with me and about me, and that if I can perfect as many small things as possible then the huge amount of bad is still outweighed by lots of little good.

No one is harder on me than I am on myself.

I few weeks ago, I told Rango, "I won't feel secure until I've been with you longer than you've been with [your ex-wife]."

"But you already have."

I looked at him, puzzled. "You do remember that you were married for five years, don't you?"

"Yeah, but our relationship was over long before we even got married," he replied. "Emotionally, we were together for a week-and-a-half."

A few days later, we took our first trip together. Without the boys, we went to Texas for his sister's wedding, which also gave me the opportunity to meet and spend time with his family. We had a lovely couple of days in San Antonio, walking around Riverwalk and later dancing at the wedding, followed by a day in Houston.

 

Wedding Selfie #Sassafras #Rango #JenAndAli

A photo posted by Stephanie Quinn Jackson (@stephqj) on May 2, 2015 at 5:22pm PDT

DH and I had flown into San Antonio once, gone immediately to buy a car, and then drove straight home to Alabama. We passed through a section of Houston on the way. My 2012 trip to Austin by myself was my only real trip to Texas.

Rango spent his teen years in Texas, especially in and around Houston. He lived in various places before moving to Atlanta (to be with [his ex-wife]), but he still thinks of Texas as home. (Well, maybe until he met me.)

Although I'd never been to San Antonio, I set part of Persona Non Grata there. Tierney's life blows up (the climax without a climax) at the Marriott Riverwalk. I spent some time researching and wrote about what I'd never actually seen:

    I walked out from the hotel and turned onto the wide walkways along the river.  I knew there was a coffee shop nearby.  I ordered a frittata and took my coffee to a small table.  I ate slowly, trying to abate the nagging headache.

    I was tired but didn't want to hole up in my hotel room.  I spent a couple of hours exploring San Antonio.  I walked over little bridges and through lushly landscaped mini-parks.  I was impressed by the mix of modern and traditional, of historical and new. 

    I found a shady spot outside a coffee shop, sitting under a bright yellow umbrella.  It was still early, but the River Walk was bustling already with people ready for the new day.  I sketched the profile of a young woman sitting on a park bench, reading a book.  The face of the sleeping baby, parked in his stroller at his parents' table next to mine. 

 

Tierney is hanging out at the Riverwalk in San Antonio. #personanongrata #junkture

A photo posted by Stephanie Quinn Jackson (@stephqj) on May 2, 2015 at 11:21am PDT

Rango and I stayed at another Marriott a few blocks away. On Saturday morning, he happily walked with me to find the spot I'd written. We had lunch at a Mexican restaurant that was included in an earlier draft of PNG. (It was eventually cut and re-written because the scene was lifeless.) And while he knew this was a fictionalized account, that I'd never been to these places, he also knew we were living a moment from the fictionalized account of the events that triggered the metamorphosis that led, in part, to my divorce.

Never did he complain. Never did he express a jealous thought. Not once did he have to choke back an angry lump and leave the room to catch his breath and regain control.

But driving to Houston the next day, picked up by his best friend, some comment was made about an ex they shared. (Who am I to judge someone for dating their best friend's ex?) Sitting in the back seat of the car, I bristled at the mention, knowing full well that she was long, long before me, that the relationship was short-lived and didn't work for a reason, that he loves me more.

Days later, as we were talking about traveling again soon—something DH and I never did together—I told him I would never go to Sweden with him, because he went there to see a now-ex.

"But it's a beautiful country," he argued. "You would love to see it."

I'm sure I would, but I was never willing to go to New Orleans with DH (in theory, because we didn't travel together or take vacations) because India had lived there in her childhood and later gone on vacation there with DH.

I've talked before about how I am a hoarder of memories. Because I remember virtually everything, I hold onto a lot of shit on my big, broken brain. Combine that with my intense sentimentality, and my head is an emotional minefield that I can barely traverse—how the hell is anyone else supposed to get through?

What I realized is that I am more than willing to give Rango the chance to replace some of those memories. Sometimes, he does it and doesn't even know it. Maybe we're having an incredibly wonderful moment and a song comes on that would have previously tied me up in knots, a reminder of a past moment. While there are still songs I just can't bear to hear anymore, there are a few that are now associated with Rango. Maybe it's a trip to a place I've been before or only dreamt about with someone else.

His heart replaced theirs in that memory space.

His cautions that there are formative memories that cannot be replaced. Of course. No matter what he or I do, there's no possible way to replace everything, and I wouldn't want either of us to do that. What happened before is what has led us to here, to the place where our paths converged. It's all about the journey and not the destination.

Yes, I know that I am letting my own insecurities and fears get in my way. I loathe that I think and feel this way. I am repulsed by the dark, tangled emotions that swirl around inside me, ensnaring my thoughts and hijacking what should be a calm, normal moment.

The only way I know to fight the dark is with light. When I don't feel like my own, internal light is strong enough to illuminate the path, I turn into the disco ball, spinning and reflecting a broken, scattered mosaic of brilliance that can be as annoyingly blinding as it is charming in its kinetic chaos.

Through it all, Rango says he is more than happy to be in my shadow, to let me spin in the spotlight while he supports me. I want him to be where he is happy and comfortable. I don't want to ever lose him to the darkness that I refuse to face and enter.

But I really have no idea how to counter the jealousy. I don't know how to not feel like it's a competition, even though it's one I know I'd have won months ago. I don't have a clue how not to snarl back at any of his memories that I'm afraid are snarling at me.

 

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Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

You'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn.

As I was turning 14, I made the decision to leave behind my schoolmates and the few friends I'd managed to make, opting to go to the smaller, alternative magnet high school.  I'd always been an outsider—the strange, poor girl who transferred into the upper-middle-class school where she could be guaranteed the gifted education her test scores demanded. 

In elementary school, I never had classmates who came to sleep over at my house.  My parents and I lived in a trailer two doors from my paternal grandparents, seven miles from the edges of the other school's district.  Occasionally I would be invited to a birthday party or sleepover at a classmate's house, but it always felt strange, like I was included because someone's mother made it that way. 

Junior high was better but only just a little.  I had a few close friends, and my happiest memories of that time almost all involve being at someone else's house.  My friend, Kelly, and her parents never failed to include me in their life, week after week of Saturday sleepovers and Sunday church and family dinners.  Kelly's home was warm and inviting, especially as I was surviving my own parents' divorce. 

I was abandoning the young girl persona of Cissie, but who was I becoming?  Adolescence is a terribly unsettling time, the shift from child to adult.  Confusion and disorientation are rampant, and I was especially susceptible to that.  The gifted high school, RLC, seemed like an opportunity to break entirely from Cissie and the painful memories of growing up different.  The school had its own unique history of being a safe haven for outcasts, a defiant eye-sore of a building in a suburban slum, and the students and teachers were unlike anything I'd experienced growing up in the White Flight safety of mid-80s Bluff Park, Alabama. 

RLC was the place that I became not just Stephanie, but Stephanie Quinn.

 

Quinn - Age 15 or 16

 

 

For a while in the 1980s, monogramed sweaters were all the rage.  I can remember desperately wanting a crewneck one in turquoise, my SKQ initials elaborately adorning the wool blend. 

"They don't do a Q," my mother explained.

I scanned the Sears catalog, looking at the choices of color and style, wistful for the tightly-woven threads that sheened the flourishing embellishment of "Diane Elizabeth Jones" or "Roger Adam Smith".  Q and X and Z just weren't options, so I never had a monogrammed anything. 

By the time I graduated high school in 1990, I had been the only Q-named student ever to attend RLC. 

I was not like other girls.

Looking back, I realize that my habit and joy of finding jellicle names started in my own childhood but certainly continued in my teens.  Budgie and Tomato Butt know who they are, and Tomato Butt began to call me "The Mighty Quinn". 

Who was Quinn?  She was different, even by the strange standards of the socially awkward, creative group she lived and thrived in.  She was tall and big and loud and awkward.  She was a slacker who found it easier to not do something that was hard, because dropping from the lower branches meant a faster, softer landing than crashing from the top of the tree. 

Where Cissie had tried her best to be a good girl, Quinn plainly said, "Fuck that!" and began to demand that life be on her terms.  If anyone expected anything of her, she would go out of her way to do the opposite.  She was openly defiant and disagreeable and rebellious.  She was sneaky and manipulative and mostly learned how not to get caught. 

Because Cissie hadn't gotten the attention and care that she so craved even when she was a good girl, Quinn learned that a gut-wrenching, lung-wailing tantrum could bring about attention.  Bad attention was better than no attention, so she worked with what came easy to her. 

Early in my freshman year, I met a guy at school.  He was a senior.  He never had a jellicle name, though I'll call him Jack for ease of use.  Jack and I were friends immediately.  We spent long hours on the telephone almost every night, talking about everything and nothing.  He would play his guitar in the background while we talked or watched TV or while I did my homework.  When I would argue with my mom, he would talk me down.  When DH and I broke up in that stupid high school way, Jack spent weeks and months letting me talk through it all.  Sometimes I would hear about the girl he'd gone out with over the weekend. 

We hung out some at school, though far less than seems likely given the nature of our relationship.  We kind of made out once, on the third floor hall during our shared free period.  There was no kiss, but my French teacher stopped to talk to us while we snuggled against the painted cinderblock wall near the stairs.  She had no idea that my baggy sweatshirt was hiding his hands on my boobs. 

And Jack and I never failed to tell each other that we loved each other.  I can remember the first time we did, on the telephone while he was at his house and I was at Karolina's.  It was just sort of said after a strange, rough night at the mall, and we continued that tradition for the length of our relationship. 

Jack was also the first person I ever told about my molestation.  He was the first safe place I'd ever known, and then he graduated and went to college.  I have the strange memory of Jack calling me from college moments after my molester tried to grope me for the last time.  I cried, hysterical and broken, explaining that I'd just told the man never to touch me again or I would kill him.  Jack listened patiently and soothed me through it.

When he first left, I missed him but was okay.  We would keep in touch through letters and then the occasional phone call.  (Long distance was expensive in those days.)  Eventually—and some of this is totally skewed by hindsight—I didn't fully understand that I missed him and why I missed him.  I became petulant and argumentative.  There was a nasty exchange of harsh, sometimes vitriolic letters, and then our friendship was dead. 

Eventually I started dating Damien.  The two of them had actually known each other in high school but hadn't had contact in several years.  Damien was loud and gregarious and pushy and funny and strangely charming.  He would call me, while he was dating another friend of mine, and talk for hours, about everything and nothing.  He would play his guitar in the background while we talked and watched TV or while I did my homework. 

Jack warned me not to get involved with Damien, months after our own relationship had passed the point of disintegration.  I specifically chose to date Damien because Jack had told me not to.

Damien goes on to be a tempestuous, on-again/off-again four years of utter Hell.  He was verbally and emotionally and physically abusive.  He was the catalyst for a couple of half-hearted suicide attempts.  He was the intentional, malicious cause of some serious self-harm.   

DH returns to my life.  Twenty years later, I'm cycling through a series of bad relationships with unavailable men.  I'm intently examining my history, unearthing any clue as the what and how and why things went wrong, so that I can at least have the potential to move forward in a healthy, fulfilling relationship. 

This morning, it hit me: I am continually recreating this relationship with Jack. 

Quinn smacked me upside the skull with a derisive, "Duh!"

Hell, Damien and Bounder were even physically built like Jack, and Absolem's hands always reminded me of Jack's.  Interestingly, DH and Jack knew each other, as well, and there was never any love lost between the two of them.

Time and again, I am drawn to creative, smart, funny, unordinary, passionate men.  Men who love music (including a couple of musicians).  Men who can talk to me for hours and meet my need of quality conversation.  Men who don't always have a lot to do with me away from that venue.  Men who hide me and sometimes deny me and the impact I have on their hearts. 

I have never once had an initial exchange of I-love-yous face to face.  I've never had the experience of seeing the look on a man's face when he tells me that for the first time, of being able to look him in the eye when I say it as well.  It has always come over the phone.  Once, it was even in a text. 

For months, I have been angry as hell that, to the best of my knowledge, Bounder never told another living soul that he loved me.  Absolem certainly didn't.  Neither did Katniss. 

And so even Quinn became a secret.  She learned to trade men's secrets and deepest, darkest truths for their affection.  For their love.  For sex.  As long as it was quiet. 

The Mighty Quinn, who has the power to make the crazy better, to return the frazzled to restful normal.  Who knows better how to deal with cold and dark than Quinn the Eskimo?

During the final bench trial for my divorce, the judge asked if I wanted to keep my married name or go back to my maiden.  I knew from experience that it's much easier with schools and friends and the like, when a mother's last name matches her young children's.  I'd also fully established my writing persona as Stephanie Quinn Jackson. 

But I have gravitated over the last few months toward images of Qs.  Initially I saw them as magnifying glasses, as a tool for closer examination.  Then I began to associate them with questions, with my own inner searching.  Lately they've felt more like a reclamation of who I was before DH. 

Today, I see all of that as valid.  I also see her, the 17-year-old girl who wants to make sure I hear what she has to say, who wants to make sure her valiance wasn't in vain.  She wants to make sure I know Jack.

So, Quinn, you crazy nut, I hear you.  I love you, and I thank you for poking me hard enough to make me finally notice the puzzle piece that's been upside-down and sideways for 25 years.  Now take your self-satisfied smirk and go take a nap.  You deserve it. 

 

Teach myself to be new in an instant, like the truth is accessible at any time.

This is my favorite time of year, these very early moments of spring. 

Seasons don't follow a calendar here in the South.  Plants don't check the date to see if they're supposed to bloom.  So even though the vernal equinox won't happen for a few more days, spring has sprung in my world. 

The daffodils come first, often in late January.  We've had a snowier and icier winter than normal this year, but it hasn't seem to have deterred the first shoots and fresh buds from reaching for the sunlight.  Every year, there are a few warm days followed by a few cold and then the first of the spring rains.  As soon as the clouds clear but before anything has dried, my world is suddenly verdant.  The lingering droplets refract the differently-angled sunlight, and everything is green and fresh in a way that makes my heart swell into its own brilliant smile.

It is the return of Perstephanie.

What started as an inside joke with Moonshine more than twenty years ago has become the moniker of a persona.  Major life events always seem to happen for me around the first of March and the first of October, as the world is gearing respectively up and down for seasonal change—during the procession of Persephone from and to the Underworld.  And even though the time around Valentine's Day is often cursed with chaos for me, I always know it is on the cusp of rebirth. 

It's always darkest before the dawn. 

This year, I have been lucky enough to have a significant paradigm shift with the return of lengthening daylight. 

It came in the guise of a man, Rex.  At this point, I am choosing to keep details about him and that relationship within the confines of the tightest of the Inner Circle.  What will happen between us remains to be seen, but suffice it to say that he is the catalyst for a significant shift in my energy.

As has happened before, there was a bolt of lightning.  Again, I am turned to face a man who is a reflection of me in this place and time—simultaneously similar and opposite.  My current story is reminiscent of his past.  Our neuroses and demeanors are so eerily alike that he commented that I'm him with expensive lady parts. 

Yeah.  He's me with a penis.

But he has experiences that I don't, as well as a male perspective that I will never be able to gain. 

He came with brash admonitions to take the things that taunt me, the vices of my self-flagellation, and to put a fence around them, to keep them safely unable to harm me but close enough that I can keep an eye on them when I so choose.  He brought the gentle reminder not to overthink anything and everything at any and every given moment.  And he brought living proof that a single mom of two handfuls of young men can be a successful parent, even in the face of utter familial turmoil. 

Rex is one of those people who are brought into my life to teach me something.  Maybe a lot of something.  I'm almost certain I have something to show him, as well. 

But even if he were to be gone from my life tomorrow, he gave me this little gift of a tool to be able to slow my own head down, not to have to rely on someone else to bring me back to the ground when I glide too close to the sun.  And when it happened, the shift and exchange of energy was so palpable that we both were physically moved and could touch it in that wondrous moment. 

The spring storms will be here soon.  I'm a little anxious about what that lightning brings with it.  But where I felt trapped and unable to move forward just a few weeks ago, I am lighter and freer than I have been in months.  Still stumbling along my path, I'm being rebirthed.  Again.  And I'm skipping my way into my spring. 

 

 

If I fall through that hole, would you pick me up, if I lose my control and break your loving cup?

Sometimes life hurts.

This is something we all know.  Hell, the mere act of being birthed is probably painful—being squeezed and pulled and prodded into a less comfortable, brighter, louder, more chaotic new world.  (Plus, I think gravity just has to suck after being a relatively freefloating form for the entirety of your previous existence.)

Pain is a natural response to damage.  It's the body's way of telling us something is not right.  We are injured or in danger or did something outside the scope of our normal limitations.  Pain is a necessary device of physical form.

But I'll skip the physical pains associated with being human; I'm pretty sure we're all well-familiarized with bumps and bruises and accidents—the inflictions and afflictions that become our personal histories, filled with anecdotes of our agonies. 

It's the emotional pain that is so often the most debilitating and longest lasting.  Whether it be pain from an outside source or from inside ourselves, our souls are molded by both the nature of the damage and the way in which we react to it. 

Jealousy, anger, sorrow, grief... all signs of emotional pain and some kind of damage.  Betrayal, malice, negligence, parting, death... all naturally occurring events in virtually everyone's lives. 

But it is how we face these pains that determines if and when and how we heal from them. 

Sometimes the damage is minor—your best friend canceled dinner plans with you, again, to see her sometimes boyfriend.  Sometimes it's more substantial—the death of a beloved pet.  And sometimes the harm is so great—betrayal by a lover, death of a close loved one—that we find ourselves paralyzed, both physically and emotionally, in that injury, unable to escape the constant gnaw of harrowing discomfort. 

Just like it's physical counterpart, emotional pain is a necessary part of life.  If we are to move forward on our paths—whether individually or with another—we must encounter hardships.  To never feel the deepest despair means we will never feel the greatest joy when the pendulum swings back the other way.  And it will; it always does. 

If it ebbs, it will flow.

If there is no counterbalance, if we are always in the middle of the road, we can never fully appreciate the wonderful without fully understanding the terrible. 

When emotional hurdles are tossed onto our paths, we do have options:

Stop.  Become still in your life and never get past that place in time. 

Go around it.  Pretend it wasn't there and keep moving forward.  Any time we look back, that hurdle will still be there.

Destroy it.  Smash it.  Bulldoze through it.  Throw it into the briars.  It's still there, even in bits and pieces, but now we're exhausted from the exertion.

Go over it.  Jump, climb, crawl or step—whatever works best.  Conquer the insurmountable in the way that suits each of us best.  It can still be tiring, but the force of energy needed to deal with the hurdle is manageable. 

Regardless of how we choose to deal with the obstacle, it's still an obstacle.  It warrants respect and reverence for being important enough to alter our path, no matter how long or short its wielding of influence may be. 

The key to healing from the damage that's causing such anguish is to feel it, to recognize and accept that we cannot go up until we hit bottom.  We must let our feet touch the hard depths in order to get our footing and push off again, bounding to the top.  Floating freely and erratically in our pain may feel comforting for a while, oddly reminiscent of being in utero, but it will not end until we push hard toward the light at the end of the tunnel that is still squeezing and contracting around us as we go. 

It's incredibly difficult to watch someone you love live their pain.  We want to protect those closest to us from harm, but it's impossible.  The acting of even trying to protect them can inflict more damage than we can imagine.  Everyone has to deal and heal in their own way and in their own time.  Sometimes the best we can do is to offer help—a bandage, stitches, or a hand to squeeze when the pain is too much.  Sometimes a lullaby or a soft shushing will be support enough.  And sometimes all we can do is mutely watch them fall, waiting for them to hit their bottom and come bounding back, rushing toward their light.  Our love may cushion them, but it can never fully break their fall.

Sometimes pain leaves scars.  My physical scars are like a topography map of what I've seen and where I've been, but they are a manifestation of healing from deep trauma and heartache that was inflicted by others but mostly by myself.  At the core of me, I am the same person I've always been, but that old Stephanie isn't exactly the same as the one I am now.  I am grateful for the comprehension of joy and love and truth in ways I'd never experienced before, even if it comes from having my world and my head turned upside down.  I am sometimes disgusted by the proof of my own self-inflicted carelessness, but I also understand that it's made me better able to pause in my journey when needed, to ask myself if the choice before me is healthy or unhealthy.  It's all proof that I was, and still am, ready and able to move forward, no matter what obstacles lie ahead. 

Where the clouds pull apart and the moon changes faces, in the quiet, secret places, are you there? Are you there?

I am kind of petrified of the dark. 

I always have been.  I went to sleep every night with my light on until I was in my early teens. 

It's not the darkness, per se, that's frightening; it's what may be lurking inside those shadows that scares the bejeezus out of me.  Too many horror movies when I was far too young to be watching them did nothing to help allay my fears.  Rousing in the middle of the night, I always imagine I see some indistinct, humanoid shape in the corner of the room.  And if I have to go into the hallway or (God forbid) the basement at night, it's always Pinhead that's waiting at the end of my path. 

But the darkness itself... well, that's kind of a different story. 

I love being comfortably in the quiet shadow.  I feel like I can bend and twist the shade into the cover I need, be it a lot or a little.  It's always been the place I was most free to dismiss my misgivings and shortcomings, to release my inhibitions and let my own inner light pulse dimly or brilliantly, as the moment demanded. 

To take away so much of my most used sense forces the others to compensate.  While I may be myopic in shadow, sound and touch become much more keen.  Music and sensation feel electric, and I am wholly entranced by that feeling. 

But that darkness also holds a silence that's begging to be heard.  The stillness contained therein demands a certain consideration, and I am enduringly willing to let that hold my attention, to envelope me in its secrets and dreams and fantasies. 

Inevitably, though, the light returns.  The daylight isn't by default a terrible thing.  It is beautiful and comforting in its own right.  It can also be harsh and terrifyingly revealing.  But I can't hide in the light.  There's little room to be covert when you're illuminated.  Somewhere, between the dark and the light, is the place I am most balanced and most erratic, feeling the tug of two different kinds of truths, their constancy pulling in opposite directions and holding me firmly in momentary stasis.