I'm Doing It For Me, and Us

“Be lamps unto yourselves. Be refuges to yourselves. Take yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast to the truth as a lamp. Hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Look not for a refuge in anyone besides yourselves.” The Buddha

I did something really, really scary yesterday. Scary, because I did it to save myself, at the risk of losing my person -- the person I didn't know I was looking for, whom I found in a moment of whimsy, and whom I have come to love in ways that I didn't know were possible. My person.

I asked for breathing room, space to examine why this thing that is supposed to uplift and bring joy to my life seems to be the wellspring of so much suffering.

And I am suffering, there's no doubt about it.

But what I need the space to examine is how I am causing my own suffering. And make no mistake, I'm well aware that I am causing my own suffering.

What is at the root of it? There are so many thoughts and fears that arise for me, in both the big-picture sense of it (we are not together), and the quotidian matters (you are doing something else and not talking to me!), that it started to feel as if every phone call, our only source of communication became nothing more than a litany of my complaints and agony. And under that was the knowledge that my suffering was causing him to suffer. He wanted to "make it all better." And he couldn't.

He can't. This is a common affliction of people who are conditioned to be "fixers." They want to wave a magic wand, or say an incantation, and everyone around them will be better. But that's a subject for a different time.

I'm trying to go back to my earliest training and sit down, quiet my mind, and simply examine the processes by which I am creating my own suffering.

Who is the separate "I" that I have created who suffers?

In what ways have I abandoned myself?

Is it possible to be my own mother, and embrace the frightened child within me, and hold her close, loving the parts of me that I label "desirable" (i.e. Funny, caring, loving, generous) as well as the parts that I label "undesirable" (i.e. Angry, jealous, resentful, petty)? A loving parent recognizes these things in her child and still loves her unconditionally.

I have felt those angry, jealous, resentful, petty feelings, and instead of taking care of that little girl, I have hated her and tried to push her away, as she has spilled her anger and jealousy and resentment out into the world, and especially in her relationship. I need to take this time to hold her very closely, as a protective mother might. Not to nurture those negative emotions, or play up those fears, or tell her she's right, but to make her feel safe, and loved.

I was asked the question, "Are you going to respect this relationship?"

I heard fear in that question, fear that's justified by another person's conditioning. If one's experience has only been to be with people who don't "respect the relationship," I understand that fear. And while a puzzled part of me wants to quirk my eyebrow and say, "Ummmm, hi, have we met? I'm Aileen, and I don't cheat," I have to respect where that fear is coming from for him.

So all I can do is answer the question honestly: I am not doing this in order to seek better accommodation elsewhere, and especially not in the arms of another. I am not looking outward in order to find validation or revenge or whatever his past girlfriends may have done. (For all I know, that may have been their last-ditch effort, their hair-on-fire emergency, to get his attention, but that's just speculation on my part.) This time is about sitting down and being quiet and examining myself.

He also said, "You better come back," and the heartbreak in his voice about killed me. There was no way for me to explain to him that this is not about taking myself away from him. It's not, even though it feels that way, because I'm embarking on a period of self-exploration right now.  And this is so important to me, because it's not only to save my life, but to save the life of our relationship.  I mean, seriously? If I was hating myself every single day, literally couldn't look at myself in the mirror some days, how much fun could it have been to be in a relationship with that person?

This is one of those "leap of faith moments" you hear about. And it's terrifying, because I don't know what I'll find off the side of that cliff.  Another tiger at the bottom of the cliff and a couple of mice gnawing at my vine?  I may do whatever work I need to do in the next week or so, and go back and find that Dood has done some soul-searching of his own, and found himself feeling, "This is bullshit, and I don't need this, and you know what? I'm done. See ya."  He may very well look at the last month and say, "I am escaping by the skin of my teeth."  This is a risk that I had to take, however, because when I woke up on Sunday morning, rolled over, and started crying, the next thought that went through my head was, like a bottomed-out alcoholic, "I can't live like this anymore."  I need to eat the strawberry.

I'm grateful to have this practice, and I'm grateful that the last ten years of practice have made me aware enough to recognize all of these things.  And to realize that sometimes you have to go back to "beginner's mind," and simply sit down with what's going on.

It's hard for Dood to see that I've not taken myself away from him. 

And all I can tell him is:  I'm right here, baby.  And I'm not going anywhere.

Letting Go

Impermanence is the one thing we can count on in life.

We are confronted with this fact every day of our lives, and yet we still cling to the idea that we can hold onto something, whether it's a family tradition, a feeling, a friendship, or even a person, forever.

We are conditioned to believe that this is how things are supposed to be.

Although I understood this in a left-brainy, smart-girl kind of way, last summer was a huge lesson, or lessons, in impermanence. Sometimes you can learn something from a book, read it, understand it, even know it a little, but until you're confronted with a trifecta of it, as I was (Punch! Kick! Wham!) it's pretty easy to forget that life itself is nothing but lessons in impermanance.

The person you think you've fallen in love with tells you "Even if I told you I was falling in love with you, well, too bad! I've changed my mind!"

The old pet you thought maybe had another two or three lives in him, well, you come home and find him stroked out on the kitchen floor in a puddle of his own pee and two hours later you're watching some anonymous doctor inject a drug into a catheter in his leg that stops his heart, while his last breath sounds to you like "thank you."

The morning phone call from your sister, the one that stops you in your tracks in the middle of Park Avenue, saying, "Mom died last night," leaving you with those bright spots in front of your eyes and breath that suddenly won't squeeze past the top of your sternum to get to your lungs.

Things like this will remind you of the impermanence of life.

I used to have a friend whom I called my best friend.

Her name was Juliet. We met when we were both young and beautiful and owned New York City. We were inseparable and did everything together -- movies and brunches and drinks and dinners, long heartfelt conversations on the phone and in bars and in parks and on aimless walks through our City that we both loved as passionately as lovers. We were "Sex and the City" before that show existed.

I spent so much time with her family that the extra bedroom in their Fire Island house was called "Weenie's Room."

Our birthdays were three days apart, and her mother would host a dinner party for Juliet every year at her Riverside Drive apartment. Then I would throw a giant birthday bash for myself (any excuse to throw a party, and my circle of aquaintances was massive back then, and my parties were kind of legendary) with a hundred people jammed into my duplex, and my friend the bar owner having to call in the reinforcement keg from his bar sometime around 2am, and at least one visit from the police. Hey, it was the 90's, we were young, and we were having fun.

In 2000, I went as usual to Gwyneth's to celebrate Juliet's birthday. It was an important dinner, because Juliet was going to introduce me to her new boyfriend, Mark. This was exciting. She had mentioned him a few times on the telephone, but only in passing, so I didn't know how serious it was.

Dinner was lovely, uneventful. I liked Juliet's new boyfriend a lot, mainly because they seemed so smitten with each other. She was clearly delighted with him, and he with her. They made a nice couple.

The next day, I called her to tell her that I liked her boyfriend.

"He really liked you, too," she said. "He called you fascinating and dangerous."

Me, dangerous, ha! As dangerous as a Beanie Baby, right? As for fascinating, I'll take it, but as a girl with a happy childhood and no tragic, dark past, I'd hardly call myself fascinating. Or, maybe, as a former boyfriend once told me, my very ordinariness made me fascinating.

I laughed, yeah, just like I do now, at that description.

Saturday, the night of my birthday party, I got a call from Juliet. She wasn't feeling well, and wouldn't be able to come to the party. Oh well, shit happens, right?

After that, many more phone calls to Juliet went unanswered. At first I shrugged it off -- we New Yorkers tend to leave each other alone when one of our own wants to crawl under the porch. We understand that the very essence of New York City is a surfeit of too-muchness, and sometimes you get a little overwhelmed with the too-muchness of it. You need to escape from it, in the only way that you can. You turn off your phone, and maybe hide out in your apartment for a few days, or take long solitary walks where you don't talk to anyone. If you're looking carefully, you can spot people doing this. They have an inward-turned quality to them. The dimmer switches on their auras are dialed way back. If you look really closely, you can see their doggy eyes peering out from behind the wooden steps of their souls.

When days turned into weeks, then months, the shrug turned into puzzlement turned into hurt. I played our conversations over in my head, again and again, trying to figure out what it was that I had said or done. And I kept coming up empty -- the last conversation I had with Juliet was nothing more than normal. Regular. Ordinary.

"See you Saturday," was probably the last thing I said.

When I decided to leave my one true love, New York City, a few months later, Juliet didn't come to my going-away party, and amongst the friends who had traveled from Connecticut and Philadelphia to see me sail off into a new life, there was an empty, silent, Juliet-shaped hole.

I don't know why Juliet walked away from me, and I never will. All I can do is wonder why she decided that I wasn't important in her life anymore, or how I went from utterly indispensable to completely dispensable in the space of a day or two. I can wonder at how such a seemingly cold-blooded decision could be made. I tried to write stories in my head, then discarded each one because I just couldn't know what had happened to make her say, "she's got to go."

To this day, I wonder.

Three days after 9/11, my phone rang. It was Juliet, sobbing.

"Oh, Aileen, what did they do to our city?" she asked.

I was planning a visit to New York for my birthday. We made plans to see each other.

Circumstances, in the form of Bill the firefighter laying his head in my lap, wrapping his arms around my legs, and crying out, "It should have been me! It should have been me!" intervened, and we didn't meet.

I haven't seen my once-best friend Juliet since 2000, and I can only think "I hope things turned out okay for her." I ran into her mother in a restaurant a couple years ago, and I know she got married, had a baby, lives on the Upper West Side. But I'll never know the rest, and I have to be okay with that. Otherwise the not-knowing would make me crazy.

Unlike made-up stories and books and movies, life doesn't always hand you finite endings. You don't always get, to use a term that I find loathesome and pat, closure. This is life, and sometimes it just sucks like that.

I wish Juliet only well, and hope that she has found happiness, no matter what happened.  Just because we went around different bends in the river doesn't mean she's not there anymore -- I know she's still there, and she'll always be there.

I think that somehow, somewhere, she knows this.

Wordless Wednesday

For the Record...

For the record, 2010 wasn't all bad...

*  I wrote 363 posts in 2010. Granted, most of them were written in a two-month self-exsanguination that took place from mid-May through mid-July, but I averaged a post a day. Yay for me!

*  By the end of 2010 I had chiseled and whittled and ramen noodled my IRS debt down to less than $15,000.  No, that's not a typo.  I didn't misplace a comma or add an extra zed.  I know 15K is a lot, but if you knew how much it was when I started at the end of 2008, you'd be really impressed.  Let's just say, over the last two years, I've paid the IRS close to $30,000.   I'm putting this out there because in my travels I've learned that one in FOUR Americans has an "issue" with the IRS.  That's 25% of us. Go out to dinner with three pals, look around the table -- one of you is having an "issue" with the IRS.  So, my advice to everyone, well, at least to the others in my 25% of the taxable population, is this:  File your returns.  Even if you can't pay what you owe (and trust me, if you are middle class, you WILL owe. Quoth Leona Helmsley, only the little people pay taxes), file your returns.  I guess I'm lucky I wasn't marched off to the pokey with Wesley Snipes.  Because trust me, the IRS WILL find you. And they do have a way of  making it as uncomfortable as possible for you -- for me, they cleaned out my bank account two weeks before Christmas.  That'll sure get your attention, lemme tellya.

*  I did lose a shitload of weight, so I look decent in clothes again. It's like discovering a whole new wardrobe in my own closet!

*  Most importantly:  Dood came into my life in sort of a happy accident.  Honestly folks, I'm not attributing it to kismet, or the stars aligning, or to anything other than this:  I was in my office on Saturday, July 24th, getting ready for another one of my summer trips out west, and I ended my day by dicking around on the internet. I opened my okCupid account, changed my settings to "anyone from anywhere," and hit that button named, "Roll The Dice."  His was the first profile that came up, he was shirtless and hot, his profile was literate and clever, he was hot, he played the guitar, he was hot, he had useful skills AND he was from New Orleans. You know, now that I think about it, if I were a checklist-makin' gal, he's pretty much got all the toppings I would have ordered from the ice cream sundae guy, you know, the nuts and sprinkles and chocolate sauce and whipped cream. Maybe a little bowl on the side with pineapple.  Most of all, he seems to like me as much as I like him, at least enough to want to actually consider maybe relocating to a northerly, more Penguin-friendly climate.

I Rode My Bike Today (2011 Intention #1)

I don't believe in New Year's Resolutions. I look at them like any other expectations: they start out all overblown and build up unnecessary hopes (I'm going to lose 50 pounds this year! I'm going to save $100K this year on my $50K salary! I'm going to win the Mega Millions! I'm going to watch less television and start working on a) that book I've been meaning to write, b) the addition I've been meaning to add to the back of my house, c) the career that I gave up when I got pregnant at 22 with the first of you little bastards.

You know how it is.

I do try to have some intentions, though, and since I started off January 1st, 2011 by PICKING A FIGHT with my bf over ridiculous bullshit, I'm rewinding the day and starting again fresh, okay?

So, Intention #1 for 2011:

To keep on taking care of myself in the best ways I know how.

Today this entailed finally putting my beloved R1000 onto the Ascent trainer I bought a year ago.

This was not a simple task, as flipping the bike, changing out the quick release, flipping it back, then wrestling it into the trainer sprockets while keeping it upright would have been easier with two people. But, hey, I'm a gal who's used to workin' things out all by her lonesome, and with a well-placed knee, shoulder, and (miraculously) no broken fingernails, and with no thanks to the crappy illustrations on the instruction sheet, I worked it out.

Working shit out is what I do, after all.

A few adjustments of the resistance, and a careful music selection later, I was pedaling merrily along.

This took some adjustments and not only recall of training from over a decade ago, but some muscle memory, as well.

First, a reminder to myself that pedaling efficiently and well is about making circles, full circles, pedaling all the way around the crank. I remember doing exercises to practice this on the flat parts of 9W. Unclip one leg and let it hang, while keeping the bike moving with the other leg. You have no choice but to make complete circles with that pedaling leg.

Maintaining RPMs: ahhh, my bete noir, and why my knees sound like Rice Krispies when I go up stairs. I had a bad habit of being a showoffy gear-masher on long straight stretches of road, so now I resolve to spin at Lance Armstrong-like revolutions (ever notice how fast his legs are always going? The man was a spinner extraordinaire). Disco music is very helpful for this, as it is usually played at 100-128 beats per minute. I'll spend the rest of the winter pedaling along to some good old 70's disco and by the time I'm ready for outside riding, hopefully the spinning habit will be ingrained.

Net-net, today I did a respectable 30 minutes, leaving me a red-faced, dripping sweatball, but hey, I did a half hour of cardio work and never left the house.

It was fun.