I am weighing a lot of things tonight.  I have, in a stunning little Face Book note I was basically writing to no one in particular to relieve some feelings, alienated people (one? two? who knows) once again by letting my real feelings out.  There is no appropriate medium for doing this.  Not online.  Not to friends in person.  Not to the grocery clerks who are related to everyone I might want to alienate in the future.  There is always a next person.  This is one of the things I do pretty regularly.  Telling the truth doesn't work out well for me, in general.  I get myself in trouble on this blog, in emails, out on the town, and basically anywhere where me and people come into contact with each other.

I am grappling with some pretty awful self loathing at the moment.  Don't worry, it's nothing new.  I do it all the time.  I'm pretty depressed.  Again, don't worry.  I usually am.  The truth, (since I've already gone up in flames today, why not put some more wood on that fire?), is that I try really hard not to announce these things on a day to day basis.  Or, if I do, I do it flippantly so you don't actually really believe me.  Trust me, it works.  Even close friends are frequently fooled.  Why the diabolical lying?  Why the concealment? 

Because when I am honest people either get quiet and make me feel about a hundred times worse than I already do, or they get hurt.  The truth has never set me free.  The truth, it turns out, is not something people particularly like, tolerate, or encourage.  This is why I have found it so incredibly easy to constantly fool people.  I am very good at it, but that's nothing to brag about since another truth is that people are horribly eager to be lied to.

I like being lied to myself.

Yes, Angelina, you are the center of the universe!  (That's such a favorite one.)  Dude, you are so sexy with that huge belly!  (That one's a stretch, but I'm willing to pretend it isn't ridiculous.)

It takes people a long time to start missing me, usually.  Except for Philip and Max, because without me they never have any socks.

This is not where I was planning to go with this.  This little wonder-note I wrote today, all about how lonely I am here in my little town, was not exactly a brand new realization, but it wasn't until today that I realized just how long it's been making me depressed.  Just how hard it's been.  Just how isolated I feel.  I've been fighting off the tears all day.  I'm fighting them off right now.

It is what it is.  I disconnected my Face Book account.  There were 79 people claiming "friendship" with me.  But the majority of those people don't actually give a crap if I'm about to jump off the bridge or not.  I mean, if I really did jump off a bridge they'd surely comment on it, but until it actually happens they aren't particularly concerned.  Face Book is a social networking tool.  I am not, and have never been, particularly skilled at social networking.  I know I appear to be good at it. But that's only because I am a great fake. 

I am not good at small talk.  I always have gems like "I think I might finally be peri-menopausal",  I mean, what does a person say to that?  Or "I wonder how many fungi you have growing on your body right now?" or "I would really truly like to hurt myself right now."  This is what lurks under the very sheer surface of my skin.  Holding it all back is a full time job.  I get especially lonely and leper-ish when at parties, any kind of social gathering, classrooms, groups, and yes, on Face Book that's full of people who might like me but at the end of the day they aren't particularly tied to me (except for my close friends, obviously), and I could regurgitate aliens and I would be an amusement, someone to flit by with a funny comment and maybe, I don't know, a tissue to dab my lipstick with?

Face Book has been great in some ways.  I have found some old friends who I love and had been disconnected from.  It gave me the chance to chat late at night with someone who is a constant inspiration to me.  It has allowed to me to keep casual tabs on people I have missed.  But it has also made me feel all the bad insecurities, outlined by my inability to be comfortable around lots of people, and my deep and utterly awful loneliness.

So tonight I am really understanding the whole reclusive writer life.  I can see why it happens.  I don't have people I can drop in on any old time with Max during the day to relieve my parenting isolation, and I was trying to fill a thousand holes with this whole crazy online social networking thing.  But people are people whether you are online or in person and people make me hurt.  People make me scared.  They make me hate myself.  They make me feel cold inside.  And when I reach out there is often so much silence that I die a little inside.  Constantly.  This is just with all this casual stuff.  People spend plenty of time reassuring me that I'm just like everyone else, but when I open up the dam I always find myself alone again. 

I am closing my Twitter account too.  I am also going to reduce my blog reader to only my online and real life friends with blogs.  To the blogs I love, the bloggers who I truly enjoy.  I'm not going to try to keep up with the whole world anymore. 

It's time to retreat.  It's time to reduce my net to only those people who actually do care about me.  It's time to stop trying to fit in.  I'm not going to look at my blog stats.  Today I realized that it will never matter to me again.  I love it when people come to read here.  I love it!  I love comments and I will continue to enjoy any conversations we might have there.  But I'm not going to try and be somebody anymore. 

I am nobody in particular.  I am not some prodigy the world has been waiting for.  Just another miserable person crowding this earth to death.

This feels like when I was eighteen years old and I read the paper, like I always did, even though it made me anxious and gave me nightmares, and I read about the decomposed infant found floating in the bay and I couldn't sleep and every time I did I felt that tiny person looking at me, asking me why?  I couldn't stop seeing the death in my sleep.  And having become more haggard than usual, I realized that I couldn't read newpapers anymore.  With very few breaks over the past twenty years, I have stuck to it because what I read about the world in the papers is not enriching, encouraging, and often it isn't even particularly truthful.

I may seem like I'm "coping" with life really well to everyone who knows me.  I am not walking the streets with paper bags for shoes.  I seem perky and positive a lot of the time.  I am not having delusions, hallucinations, or talking about killing myself.  I am not wandering the desert disoriented or beating my child.  I am not out having affairs or taking crack.

Let me just say a limp little "yay." for me.

I am not coping well and I haven't been coping well for almost four years now.  If I was coping well I wouldn't be drinking a six pack of beer a night.  I wouldn't be so fat that I am deeply ashamed of my old friends seeing me.  No- so fat that I'm ashamed to see myself, to wake up in this body, to have to put clothes on it, to have to wear it every day.  If I was coping well I wouldn't have ruined all the hems of my shirts from twisting them around my fingers and I wouldn't have permanent callouses on my fingers where I press the knots of fabric into them.  If I was coping well I wouldn't be constantly stressed out.  I wouldn't be eating more than I need to.  I wouldn't be feeling this self hatred swallow me whole.  I don't show all this stuff to you because it's ugly.  Then there's all the rest I'm not going to tell you because unless you're just like me you can't take it.  You can't hear it.  You aren't strong enough for it.

The minute I post this I'm going to hate myself so much more for having said all of this.  Because the silence is going to underscore what I already know.  I predict that I'm going to delete this post within 12 hours of uploading it because I'm not going to be able to bear the quiet out there. 

So I'm weighing what to shut down.  What to reign in.  I evaluate what I already know but have tried to ignore:

1.  No group joining.  I cannot survive in groups.  Groups inevitably make me want to die.*  This means no community groups, garden groups, ice cream socials, or any other fucking stupid thing people come up with to make me feel more desperately alone.  I wanted to rejoin the Slow Food Group here but I know I can't.

2.  I need to focus inward, here, at home.  I need to learn to simply live with the loneliness because I can't change it.

3.  I need to only give energy to things and people that give energy back.

4.  I need to sit with my flowers more often because they are beautiful and they always make me feel more hopeful and joyful.

5.  Cut my blog reader down to only those ones that are particularly meaningful for me.  My friend Sharon finally started a blog and I haven't been keeping up with it. I've been avoiding all blogs because my reader is overwhelming to me.  I've been waiting for Sharon to start a blog forever.  Time to focus in on the people who I love. 

6.  I can't take too much stimuli.  Reduce stimuli.

7.  Be a recluse.  Go ahead, no one really cares if you do anyway. 

8.  Stop protecting everyone else from me and start protecting myself from everyone else.  Dammit, why am I almost forty and still struggling with this one?  I may be the leper here but why do I keep letting people shake the skin off my arms?  I don't have skin to spare.

9.  Stop expecting people to be other than they are.  People are. 


I don't know if my novel will ever see the light of day, but I can say for sure that this whole experience has been transforming.  Disturbing old plaster and knocking pictures off the wall.  Perhaps I will go on to become the most prolifically unpublished author of our generation.

I have discovered that the only way a person can tell the whole truth is to tell it in a broad collection of lies.  Fiction will set you free. Fiction is how people have been telling the truth for a very long time.  We tell in stories what no one can bear to tell in personal facts.  I have seen a view into the possibilities...if I just keep writing books I will not be less lonely but I will find a place to put all this horrid truth.  No one wants to hear about it if you're telling your own story, but if you're telling it about someone who doesn't actually exist, everyone can take it.

It's just fiction.  We all say.

I know now why some fiction has felt so much like a howl at the moon.

If anyone wants me, I'm right here.  Come and get your fill of me any time you want.  I'm not going anywhere but I'm also not going to make it easy to waste me away.

I am still uploading stuff onto Stitch and Boots because I am, as always, passionate about cooking and sewing and growing beautiful things.  I love that blog.  It doesn't matter to me if it ever has a lot of readers or not.  I'm completely free of that worry now.  Still I will develop it for love.  In my own time.  Not under the pressure of some prescribed idea of how blog content should be built.  Stitch and Boots is a thing of beauty and I'm proud of it and plan to keep making it better and better because it pleases me. 

Yours in deep despair, loneliness, depression, panic, and love,
Angelina.



*In case you're tempted to say "God, she's so melodramatic", stop!  Let me just say: fuck you.

I feel as though I have cracked open my skin and found my dead twin crammed up into my lymph node.  I feel like I'm driving on a country road at night and everything I've ever buried is drifting into my headlights and it's a miracle that I haven't totaled my Vespa yet.  Perhaps it's because I keep listening to Pavarotti singing with rock stars I don't even like and am finding something of the elusive charm in this train wreck of worlds- dancing smoothly through the octaves like a well rehearsed ballerina who hasn't succumbed yet to the Snickers bars and Cokes.  Fresh innocent joy.

Though I have said five thousand times that I don't buy into the "innocence" franchise because it's as corrupt as God and Country. 

Music is the only way out of it all.

Pavarotti singing "'O Sole Mio" with Bryan Adams is as delicious and delightful as eating fresh peas off the vine in the blinding heat of the angry summer sun and then running on gangling legs back to shade.  It's exactly like that.

I feel strangely right.  Though I've never felt quite as alone as I do right now.  Alone amidst many.  Alone though I have so much.  I am only beginning to understand this insatiable hunger, this untenable loneliness as the condition of my birth.  I am only just beginning to understand there are no band aids large enough to cover them.  There is no food rich enough to stave off the emptiness.  It simply exists as a function of who I am.  Extant.

Extant.

For me to be broken I had to have been whole at some point, which I never was.  If I was born broken then broken is my whole.

You learn to miss what you never had because other people point it out to you constantly.  You learn to recognize your missing legs because people with legs are always looking at where yours might have been, had you ever had them.  But if you never had legs then there is no actual memory of legs and all the ambulatory freedom they bring to those who have them.  You learn to desire feet where there has only been air but it's abstract because feet are meaningless to the person who has never had legs. 

There can be no ghosts where no bodies have been.

I am beginning to get it and the truth, sadly, won't set me free, because I live amongst humans.

However, I am less afraid now than I was before.  Less afraid of what I'll never be, what I'll never have, what I'll never accomplish, what I'll never say, what I'll never want, and what I'll never understand.

The things "I'll-never" will be legion.  I won't balance my life well because I am not a balanced person and this is my normal.  This is my whole.  I will always be standing on the ledge with my freak banner flying.  I will always be on the verge of jumping.  Not because I want to make you mad, not because I want to scare you, or worry you, or bum your summer out...it actually has nothing to do with you at all.  It's because the ledge is where I live. 

I crack open fresh peas from the vine to add to my caramelized onions in the saute pan and it feels like the very best thing on earth, giddy like first love, delicious like lust, fresh like the first three feet of snow in winter.  I have an incredible joy rising up with laughter, ridiculous, choking on itself, and I'm shouting the words to 'O Sole Mio because I can't sing for shit but I'm so full of this music for the moment, it becomes my matter, my everything, and there is more light in it than I can hold.  I throw the peas into the pan and they brighten and become sweeter. 

I will become completely empty in another few minutes so I enjoy this feeling while it lasts.  Carpe Diem!  Sing the poets - say the truth!  Tomorrow we could all be dead! 

This work is endless.  It frightens me how much of the rest of my life I'm going to be spending carving away the extraneous, tidying up the verbs, adjusting my adjectives to sound less like a kid writing a fan letter, and to tone down the epletives.  It is huge. 

When I was ten and I was sitting in bed with my thousand typed sheets strewn in chaos around me, my fingers working feverishly at such important things like listing names I might need to use for my "characters", it never occurred to me for one second that this wasn't what I was "supposed" to be doing.  It was everything.  My miserable little FM radio playing classical music all day long, and me-shedding typing paper like blood, I opened my veins to the words, I invited them in to a banquet so fine, so rich with iron, so full that I could filtch the over flow and transcribe the crazy conversations through ink and bark. 

On hindsight there couldn't possibly be more dull work than the pedantic sketchings of my ten year old imagination, but I think it's rather sweet that I was so earnest.  It used to make me want to die, my earnestness.  I have had to come to terms with it, because it set up camp in my heart and never left.  I am always so fucking earnest.  I can either be so embarrassed I want to cut off my arms to spite my head, or I can just get over it.

I don't understand when people are joking a lot of the time, even though I do it all the time myself, between long bouts of earnestness.  I now understand that this is what leads people to believe devoutly that I am naive.  Which never, NEVER, ceases to piss me the fuck off.

I am coming to realize that this camouflage* of mine has been necessary.  I am able to shout across the universe that I have a soul so black it can suck your sunlight up in less than one second and everyone nods, smiling, saying "Oh yes, hon, yes, we know." as though they thought what I really said was "I fart unicorns and purple stars!" and they were all so glad.  They were all so happy they brought out enough cupcakes to sustain Stalin's army.

This reminds me of the hillarious recordings of traditionally happy music (like 'O Sole Mio, for example) by The Red Army Chorus which spreads such a heavy heart over joy that even I have a hard time competing with it.

I understand at last that no matter how much I write, here, there, elsewhere, there will always be so much more.  It is my pergatorial hunger.  It is my loneliness reaching out for human touch; my loneliness whose appetite is unquenchable.  If I could I would devour you.  I would subsume you.  I would drink you.  I would taste you.  I would spread you on toast and find out if you compliment wheat.  I would write poems about you.  I would bronze you.  I would be your best friend.  But never mistake this- my hunger has no bottom. 

I am coming to understand that much of my social life is a calculated game of me protecting everyone from myself. 

As if to make a lie of everything I've just said, I also want to give everything I am to you.  There is no corner of my spirit I wouldn't offer up to you with a bit of cheese and a good flagon of wine.  There is nothing I don't want for you.  My love has no bottom, like my hunger.  If you need a kidney I will cut mine out and give it to you on Depression glass.  If you need a jar of my wonderfully fragrant canned vanilla pears to stave off your sorrows I will give you five.  I will let you feast on me when we are both freezing on the desolate snowy passes of the Cascades.  When you bleed I will use my own marrow to staunch the flow.  I will give you all of my words if only it will give you courage.  I will feed you fresh peas and fresh fava beans on pasta to give you the strength to speak your peace, your love, your spirit because this is so much less creepy than everything else I might give to you.

At last, here at the end of the evening, at the close of your own sleep, (during which I have been writing all of this) there is one thing that we can all rejoice in together, that we can agree on, that we can share- the epemeral beauty and sweetness of peas picked fresh from our gardens today which are like delicate drops of green desire.





*This is the first time I have ever spelled this word correctly on the first go.  I am so full of self pride.  I'm so impressed with myself.

I am 130 pages into the first draft of my book.  My book.  Those words feel like a 50 pound weight around my neck.  Which I put there myself right before diving into the deep end.  I am trying to find my way back in.  Already there have been distractions that have made it difficult to pick up the last thread.  Then there's the concern that I won't be able to go back and smooth it all out, make it work.  This is such a strange process-building fictional lives and finding a proper voice to tell it in.  I have three modes of telling this story and I feel I need them all but I'm worried that it won't be seamless, that it will rankle people.  I write, rather predictably, exactly like I always write: darting between humor, introspection, and the dark and dirty without warning, without big neon signs saying "Now be happy!" and then the cue card saying "OK, now be angry!" and "Caution: dread ahead!"

I find myself thinking about all of the books I've loved and I keep trying to figure out what kind of genre this story of mine would fit into and I'm completely stumped.  I don't want to be writing fluff, I think it would be dreadful to write something that could be described as "Chick Lit", but at the same time I don't want to write something as convoluted, dark, depressing, and dysfunctional (not to mention pompous) as the work of Faulkner.  Yes, he's so serious and no one would mistake his work for fluff with all his words dropping from the page like lead weights on your feet.  Do I need to know what my intention is ahead of time?  Do I need to fit in anywhere?  I never have before in life, why would it be different with the writing?

This blog is proof enough.

Here's my writing style: a bunch of heavy subjects occasionally treated with a little irreverence, or sometimes a lot, flitting around the universe on skates, sudden rain, sudden flashes of light, disjointed, rambling, fractured sentences, overabundant use of "and"s, run on sentences, and a breathless array of rich words cramped together then spread out so thin you think you're in the Dakotas.

That's not style.  That's chaos.

This book needs to happen.  So I'm not going to abandon it.  I'm not going to walk away because it feels completely necessary and has taught me so much much already and I'm staring at all my ghosts like I've opened the basement door and there they all are, crowding out into the light.  Crowding around me for attention. 

I am going to have to trust myself because the only other option is to disappoint myself and I don't think I can take any more disappointment in myself.  I have to believe that I will figure this all out.  That once I have the first draft I will be able to work on it all until it feels right, reads well, and makes me feel proud.

I'll be proud if I read it and it says exactly what I need it to say.  And I'll know when I get there.

I am 100% afraid that I will not really make the grade. 

But I'm going to keep giving it everything I have so that I never have to look back and wonder what might have happened if only I hadn't walked away.  Everyone needs something from me and right now, this is where it's all going.

The encouragement you have given me here has really helped me as well, so maybe I need to go reread some of your wonderful supportive comments because apparently some of you think I can do this.  You really are good to me!

I'm going to end this by mentioning something a really close friend of mine, Carrie, has said to me that I keep reaching for and keeping kind of close to me because she seems to have such faith in me and whether or not I deserve it, her words have given me such strength- she said I have a lot of books in me, as though it's just so obvious and thank god I'm finally getting down to the business of doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

Thank you Carrie.

Yesterday I went to the market, the discount grocery store I go to, and I put 7 bags of Goldfish crackers on the belt along with a couple of bags of chips and a few other things and the check out lady asked "So how old is the spoiled kid who gets to eat all this?"

After years of dealing with people's opinion that I am "spoiling" my kid by "allowing" him to be a picky eater it still makes me angry. 

The checkout lady and I talked a bit because even though I wanted to flick her in the forehead I realize that she was just being honest and it never occurred to her to that it might make me feel bad to call my child spoiled.  I explained that I have an extreme picky eater and that I do my best to get the least bad crackers and snacks that I can get away with (that he'll eat) and she picks up a bag of the Goldfish and reads the ingredients and says "These are FULL of crap!"

I'm thinking: Know when to shut up!

But I don't say it out loud because while the inside of my head is full of rude retorts, I live by a code of politeness.

Then she says "You could make your own crackers."

This rendered me speechless, and as most of you know, that's a difficult thing to achieve.

The thing that really gets me is that she works in a grocery store where about 79% of the people shopping there buy white bread and cartloads of crap like those prepackaged kid lunches featuring processed "cheese" and "meat" but she's picking on me because I have 7 bags of Goldfish.

Then the tables suddenly turn and she's revealed that she's got a teenage bed-wetter for a kid and part of me wants to say "Oh?  Well let's talk about that for a while, shall we?"  But I don't.

Instead I think to myself that I'll stick with my stance that parents of special needs kids have to work hard to keep patient with their kid's foibles and as long as we are compassionate, never give up on them, and never stop trying the best we can to keep them healthy- that is good enough.

It's just curious how I never stop feeling bad about my kid's picky eating and how other people's opinions of me as a parent never cease to feel like barbs being shoved underneath my fingernails.