Muchness and Light

In the garden of memory, in the palace of dreams, that is where you and I shall meet.

Since my thyroid radiation in July, I’ve been struggling with still feeling like general crap. Fatigue and brain fog have been intermittently worse. A pretty leisurely two-mile walk with Rango and the boys recently wiped me out for two days. My bloodwork shows wildly-swinging levels of thyroid hormones, indicating that the regrown tissue is indeed dying off, though it may be months before it normalizes.

With that has also come more weight regain and self-recrimination and outright self-loathing.

I have tried to get back into the gym even semi-regularly. It’s hard enough to juggle work and school and kids successfully, and trying to find even six hours a week for myself in that is sometimes unmanageable. Of course I know the exercise will actually help me to feel better, but the fatigue that comes with hypothyroidism can be unimaginably oppressive.

Recently I started a series of virtual races through Yes.Fit. Of course I chose the Alice in Wonderland themed races. After I complete so many miles, as tracked by my Misfit activity tracker, my medal is sent to me automatically. As of today, I’ve completed three of the six Alice races, totaling more than 60 miles.

As it does every day, Facebook was kind enough to remind me this morning of memories from this day in previous years. I find it interesting to see how life has changed over the last few years, but I tend to face those reminders with some trepidation. I love the pictures and funny quotes from my boys from their younger days. Sometimes the memories are useless or now meaningless, or sometimes even too painful, and I’ll delete them. Sometimes I leave the painful ones, knowing those ghosts will haunt me again next year, because I’m either not ready to deal with them or I know they’re so important that I will need the reminders again.

But today, there were two things, from 2010 and 2011. Not surprising, there were pictures from a 2010 concert, of a band I loved then and love now. It was the second in a series of shows that were seminal for the changes that would come over the following two years. A year later, it was the memory that was down 99 of the 115 pounds in total weight loss. Yet another year later, I’d just separated from my now-ex-husband.

All of that has fueled my writing since 2010, which began with the realization that I’d lost my muchness--just like Alice in Wonderland.

I have said repeatedly over the last year that, for a variety of reasons, I felt like I was back in 2010 and didn’t know why I was reliving such similar circumstances. Regardless of the logistical changes and strides I know I have made, I have replayed the past in tandem with the present and come up with only confusion and emotional failure. I have continually grappled with figuring out which choice I didn’t make or should’ve made differently. I’ve tried to re-learn whatever lesson I obviously needed to repeat.

But somehow, I keep sliding farther and farther into the past. Where 2010 may have felt like a rabbit hole, 2016 is feeling more and more like the other side of a looking glass. Where then felt new and exciting and rebellious, now feels reflective and reversed and exhausting.

What is it? What did I miss? What do I need now that can only be retrieved from then?

It just so happens that Alice Through the Looking Glass comes out on DVD this week. Of course I saw it in the theater when it opened--how could I not?--but I really didn’t love it as much as I did the first one. It was beautiful, and I looked for the clues to my missing lessons, but the torment of Time was unsettling to me. I could willingly believe in a lost young woman traveling to surreal place and conquering her fears, but it was almost impossible for me to suspend my disbelief as the same woman mended old wounds.

But maybe that’s it. Maybe my path has been a big circle, and maybe the obstacle is an unturned stone.

Certainly I can pinpoint errors and mistakes and regrettable decisions, but I feel like I have done everything in my power to apologize and make amends for those actions. I would say I have done my best to move on, but I damn well know there are frozen moments that continue to haunt me.

I don’t know what it is, but there is something. It is maddening, appearing and disappearing, always just out of my reach.

So I’m starting back at the beginning, at Alice. I am literally retracing my steps, one foot in front of the other, until I can find a way to the next landmark on this destination. I don’t want to believe that I am personally destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over, that there is literally no way to avoid spiritual repetition. I’ve already seen the White Rabbit, I just passed the Cheshire Cat and am making my way toward the Mad Hatter. There is still the Caterpillar and the Queen of Hearts.

After that, I’m seriously considering the Pac-Man races, where I get to eat a series of brightly-colored ghosts.

Learn to cry like a baby, then the hurting won't come back.

After the boys went to bed last night, I started to cry.  Almost fourteen hours later, and I haven't stopped. 

I've been on the phone with the girls for most of the morning, trying to get to the bottom of it.  And there is a bottom—I can tell it's there—but I haven't found it yet.  I know the freefall won't stop until I do.

There's so much going on right now.  I'm worried about my sons and money and my neverending divorce.  I have to find a job, but the boys were promised that I would still be there for them when they got home from school in the afternoons, that the basic logistics of their lives wouldn't change, that they'd still be able to do all of the things they've become accustomed to doing.  With one of them having been sick for several days recently, I don't know what would've happened if I'd been working. 

I'm worried about what I'm writing now, that I won't have it finished before I go into pitches with agents in November.  No, I know I won't have it finished.  But I don't want to do some half-assed job that turns out to be the chick lit that I hate.  The story I have is good, and I can do it justice, but it's complex and intricate.  It will take time to get it right, and I'm afraid that I will miss or outright blow an opportunity that maybe I don't have the right to even fight for. 

Everything is in process.  There's nothing stable or secure right now, and that is—today at least—unbearably frightening.  With everything churning at once, it feels like I'm in a freefall, down some fucking rabbit hole that I didn't choose.  This isn't like adventures before, when I've jumped in feet first and excited about wherever I landed.  Nothing under me feels solid or safe.  I feel scared like maybe never before.  I feel strangely helpless in this moment, and I am not a helpless girl. 

Today is one of those days when I feel paralyzed by own fears and insecurities.  I don't feel hopeless; I know that what ebbs must flow.  I am uncomfortably anxious about when and how that will happen.  I understand the why, so at least I can remind myself of that, for whatever good it can bring.

There's nothing profound in this, nothing important in what I'm sharing.  Muchness and Light has always been my outlet for writing about my own journey and the growth I gain throughout it.  I try to share some insight with my readers, usually because I find the same insights through my writing. 

Today there's nothing insightful.  I just needed to get it out. 

Climb on down the rabbit hole, tell Alice that Elvis wants his crown back in his grave....

I get off on experience.  Rather, in understanding an experience fully.  No matter how minute it may seem to someone else, I like to delve into the intricacies of something and get a complete perception of the thing. 

Boredom can set it quickly with me, though, and I often abandon the something when I feel like I know it completely, or if I feel like I can see the end of the ride.  It takes a lot to hold my interest for a long time.  It takes even more sometimes just to capture my attention. 

Even Alice (Lewis Carroll's original Alice) wasn't so interested in the talking White Rabbit; she didn't find him to be curious in and of himself.  It's only when "the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet.., she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge."

In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.

She jumps down the hole, curious about the things she sees as she falls—the cupboards and bookshelves that line the walls of the passage, the empty ORANGE MARMALADE jar that she refuses to drop because she doesn't want it to land on anyone below her.  And she doesn't look down, doesn't watch for what's to come, because it's dark and she can't see what's there. 

Honestly, I'm attracted to rabbit holes.  There's something alluring about the experience that looks like not much of nothin'.  From the outside, from the onset, it's just a hole in the ground.  There may be a rabbit.  There may be a snake.  There be just a hole.  But you can never know until you look inside. 

For Alice, the inside of the rabbit hole opens up a fantastical world of imagination and nonsense, of life lessons and epiphanies, but she does nothing with that.  She wanders from place to place in Wonderland, questioning everything but never coming to any real understandings.  Interestingly, the White Rabbit appears three times in the story, ushering Alice from one mad situation to another.  He's not the reason she does anything; he's simply a catalyst to move her from place to place. 

Eventually Alice becomes maddened by the surreality and wakes from her dream, having learned nothing about herself or life or anything.  "You're nothing but a pack of cards!"  She is, after all, a child.  And it's Alice's sister's thoughts that close the story, hoping that Alice will keep her girlish whimsy and be able to share her curiosity with other children when she's a grown woman.

Conversely, Tim Burton's Alice—the grown, almost-adult Alice—is the one who doesn't leap down the hole.  Instead she sees the White Rabbit (Nivens McTwisp) running through the garden and is immediately captivated, chasing him in an attempt to flee her own surprise engagement party.  Just when she loses sight of him, he grabs her by the ankle and yanks her off her feet.

She was falling down the rabbit hole.

This time Alice is looking around as she tumbles, scrambling for anything that will help her make sense of what's happening, that will help stop her fall.  She again grabs the empty jam jar, but this time she drops it without thought of who or what may be below her.  She keeps falling, "...down and down and down into deeper darkness, where there was no longer anything to hold on to."

McTwisp still appears to help move Alice from one absurdity to another, but his role is much more intentional than it was for Carroll's Alice.  He reveals that he had gone above ground to actively seek Alice, to return her to Underland (Wonderland) to fulfill her destiny of slaying the Jabberwocky.  He does everything in his power to help propel her toward her eventual conclusion of self-revelation and self-acceptance, though he's still not a major character in any traditional sense. 

Almost Alice's journey into the hole is not of her own doing, though it's certainly her choice to chase the rabbit that led her toward the discovering of it.  Once inside, she again battles her own preconceptions to make sense of everything around her.  Even though she seems to forget this third trip into Wonderland, she is left with the revelation of self-confidence that she didn't have before.  She returns to the garden where she first saw the White Rabbit and finds herself clinging to the edge of the rabbit hole.  She pulls herself up and out of the hole and returns to the party to share her insights with everyone else. 

I tend to be a hole jumper.   I often seek out the rabbit holes and go sometimes head first into them, just to see what's lining the shelves and to explore the possibly-unimaginable that I might find inside.  I'm fascinated by those new things, no matter how dusty or potentially frightening they may be, because it's an opportunity to understand something in a whole new way. 

Sometimes I'm dragged down the hole, pulled in by my own White Rabbit, and I'm more likely to tumble, to not be able to get my bearings until I hit the bottom.  Hard.  But I will eventually find a way to upright myself and take a look around and try my best to make sense of it all, even if it ends up making sense only to me. 

The biggest fear, of course, is that it's not a rabbit hole at all, but just a hole, that there is no experiential advantage to be gained.  In that case, I pull myself up and out, and I keep moving forward along my own garden path until the Rabbit rushes past me again, leading me on to my next discovery.