What I might have been

The strongest driving forces in my life have also been its biggest impediments: the desire to be loved and the desire to be liked.  They have led me into too many unhealthy relationships and have cost me who knows how many acting jobs, not to mention the cost to my energy and sense of self.

I don't blame her, that girl I was who so longed to belong that she would bend herself into all sorts of  inauthentic shapes and sizes, until that bending became a way of life.  I understand her and, after all, she got me to where I am now, which is a pretty fucking fantastic place.  It's just that I'll never know who I might have been, what I might have accomplished, if I hadn't cared so much about what other people thought of me.  And of course the joke is that a lot of them disliked me anyway, no matter how hard I tried.  What a waste. 

Good-bye, Ruth

 RBG is dead.  I'm surprised by how profoundly that has affected me.  I'm feeling very, very low.  Of course McConnell and Trump are rushing to try to fill her seat, which would or will tip the Supreme Court to the right for decades.  The Supremes have already overturned voter protection laws, given corporations the rights of individuals in Citizens United, made GW Bush President in a contested election.  It's sickening.  After McConnell refused even to consider Obama's candidate.  All the hypocrisy and partisanship and ignorance and meanness is really getting to me today.  I've already had to warn SH that storms may suddenly come upon us, and with them bristles and weeping and ranting.

I've sent an email to a friend who is going to vote for Trump because he, my friend, wants abortion made illegal again.  I tried not to blast him too hard with my scathing words, but really, I can't stand the fact that men think they have the right to tell women that they have to carry to term children they don't want.  It's so easy for men to say "You have to" when no man in the past present or future has ever suffered or will ever suffer the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy, even though they caused every one of them.  And I can't stand that the Catholic church is against both abortion and birth control.  I am so furious today, I feel as though I could burn something down if anything pushed on me even a little bit.

I keep telling people that keeping an open heart and a light spirit is our duty during these harsh, challenging, anguished times, but today I'm giving myself permission to feel as low as I feel, to eat potato chips and drink Dr. Pepper and not exercise and cry whenever I feel like it and be as angry, as outraged, as exhausted as I really am.  It doesn't help that I slept very poorly last night.  If I wake up for any reason, the cat hollering or hot flashes or having to pee, my mind quickly starts to gnaw on something or another, have righteous conversations with villains, search desperately for haven.  Oh Ruth, Ruth, we needed you, and you never even got to enjoy retirement.

I can't stand what the Trump Presidency has revealed about this country.

At least the sky is clean again after a week of smoke.  That's something.  I'll be more cheerful tomorrow.  I promise.  But today, it's a bad, bad day.

The Curse of the Mirror

This evening as I was undressing for my shower, I took a moment to really look at myself in the mirror.  I noticed for the first time that my breasts, which have gotten heavy, have begun to sag.  It made me a little sad because they've always been just terrific.

Even in my fantasy that someday I'm going to eat perfectly and do enough exercise that I'm going to get back my 40 year old body, I realized that, without surgery, they're never going to be upright again.  No amount of celery and spinach, no number of push-ups is going to bring them back.  I found myself apologizing in my head to SH for them, because he likes them as much as I do.  Maybe even more.

And I realized instantly that SH would never say something like that about himself to me, never apologize for what he looks like, never.  He went bald quite young, but doesn't now and didn't them seem to have the slightest self-consciousness about it.  When we were courting by phone, early on he told me that he has hair on his back, but not with embarrassment, not with shame.  Just to let me know in case it mattered to me.  It probably had to some woman he was with.  He hardly ever looks in the mirror, which is why his clothes are often askew.  He just does think about, don't care about it.  That is so foreign to me.

I can remember being negatively judgmental about myself when I was a child.  A child.  I don't know at exactly what age that started, but once it arrived, it has never left.  And the thing is, I used to be so healthy, slim, muscular, athletic, with long blonde hair.  I don't know if I was so down on myself because I wanted to be an actress and felt I needed to look good on camera, or if I was just one of an infinite number of girls and women who are taught by an infinite number of teachers that we don't look like her, this model, this starlet, this gorgeous famous woman whose face has just enough of a flaw to be perfect.  I knew my legs were too short, my thighs not skinny enough, I knew my chin was too soft, my belly not concave enough.  I wasn't limber enough, or slinky enough, or exotic enough.

It's brutal, this beauty culture, which infects us all, male and female.  We're taught the perfect prototypes for our own sex and for each other's, and we occupy and exhaust ourselves trying to fit them and trying to find them to make them our lovers, as though that is what matters.

My sister, who is working very hard to lose weight right now, really committed and strong, said that she thinks I accept and like my body, or at least am not disdainful of it.  I don't know.  I guess there has to be a certain amount of unselfconsciousness built in or achieved in order to be an art model.  I did that for about 30 years.  I guess there had to have been a moment when I decided to keep doing it after I hit menopause and my belly softened and my arms sagged and, well, you know.  And in fact, I am rather proud of the fact that a teacher who taught a series of art classes on anatomy would hire me for the session on fat and age.  I think I was a fairly rare commodity: an overweight woman who was still willing to undress in front of a classroom of very judgmental-but-always-respectful young people.  Something built into me or achieved somehow makes it possible for me to be naked, even with this heavy, aging, imperfect body.  My sister is wrong, though; I make low, heavy judgments of myself daily, perhaps hourly.  But I'm awake enough to know that if I'm not going to do what it takes to look more the way I say I want to, then I need to shut up about it.  Until I'm ready to do what my sister is doing and really make changes, then I should give up any, pardon but notice the pun, belly-aching about it.  So I just manage to look as though I accept myself.  Maybe with SH for a role model, eventually I'll learn to.

"I don't like him."

I am endlessly fascinated by words.  I like to learn or make up stories about  how idiomatic sayings get started.  From what I understand, the term "the whole nine yards", for example, comes from the world of haberdashery, nine yards being the amount of fabric needed to make a three-piece suit.  And I like to think about different ways to interpret adages, such as "A friend in need is a friend indeed."  Does that mean that someone who is a friend to you when you are in need is indeed a good friend?  Or does it mean that someone who is in need will act like a good friend so as to get your help?

I'm most interested in synonyms.  They might at first seem silly or unnecessary.  "He walked away", of course, is perfectly fine.  But it paints very different pictures to say "He stomped away" or "He slunk away" or "He tiptoed away."  Because, after all, words are verbal paint.

I've been thinking about the declaration "I don't like him" and thinking of the synonymous ways to say that and how each one feels different.  "I don't like him" is a statement of fact, no dressing, no elaboration, bald and true.

"I dislike him" is more active, has a whiff of disdain, and also a slight equivocation.

"I hate him" is blunt and raw, visceral, not reasoned.

"I despise him" really drips of disdain.  It's almost impossible to say it without sneering.

"I abhor him" is dismissive; there is little juice in it.  It puts the speaker above him.

"I loathe him" is emphatic.  To say it correctly, one has to drag out that long 'o', almost as a way to distance oneself from him.

I'm not sure why I thought of all this just now.  I do think a lot about Trump, although I wish I didn't, those thoughts being counter to good health and peace of mind.  Perhaps that's why this particular examination of synonyms took shape.  Anyway, I love words and what they can do.  That's all.

Another corpse

The corpse in this case is my relationship with a friend.  Perhaps it's just in a coma.  Perhaps there will be a miracle revival down the road.  It's awfully hard to tell at this point.

The murder weapon in this case was conversation.  My friend, the first good friend I made when I moved to my current home city, is an anti-vaxxer.  I've known this for a long time, and since we disagree on the subject, we have in the past managed simply to avoid talking about it.  Because how often in day to day life does the subject of vaccines need to come up?  However, it's harder not to talk about in these days of COVID when a vaccine looks like a way out of hell. 

We got together recently for an outdoor brunch, and it was then I discovered she also doesn't believe in wearing masks.  Once again, we tiptoed around the topic.  I asked a few questions but didn't get into pushing back or trying to change her mind.  But in subsequent emails exchanges, even though we both agreed we need to avoid the topic, we just couldn't keep our hands - meaning our minds - off it.  There was a very quick escalation when she said something insulting, the first time one of us had said something to the other that equated to "I'm right and you're wrong."  I went downhill emotionally and realized actual damage has been done to our regard for one another.  This topic, which might at another time have been dismissible as "I just don't see it that way" became toxic to the point where I'm not sure we will be friends again.

It says something about the hard, divided, upsetting time the country and the world is going through that a disagreement about something that doesn't even really directly affect a friendship can still take that friendship down to the ground and bury it.  If a friend of mine had said they were voting for Reagan (in that era, of course - if they said it now it would be a whole different conversation) I might have replied "What for?" and wrinkled my nose and that would have been the end of it.  But when a friend says, as a friend recently did, that he is voting for Trump, my respect for that person instantly and irreversibly plummets.  He will have revealed that his world view, his sense of what is important, what he looks for in a leader, all of it is so distant from mine as to be virtually - no, not virtually, but completely and utterly incomprehensible to me.

I think that during this era when there is so much chaos, so much uncertainty, so much wrong, and so little feeling that we can control anything of what is happening around us, we as individuals are tending to choose our little square on the battlefield and then defending it with every fiber of our beings.  I can't do anything about Trump's madness and ignorance and mendacity, so what I'm left with is to excoriate anyone who approves of him.  I can't do anything about this lethal sickness creeping invisibly through the world, so what I'm left with is to rage at those people who won't mask up.  It's the lowest kind of victory, but the only one available to me.  There doesn't seem to be the tiniest hope of any of us changing our minds.  Nothing on earth or in the stars could make me look at Trump with less than hatred, so if I won't budge, why should I think those of opposing views will?  And since I know that, no matter how many facts, articles, videos, charts and graphs I throw at a Trump believer or anti-vaxxer she will never change her mind, all that's left to me is to stomp her into mush in my mind, focusing my inchoate rage and despair on her, or him, or whomever.

Several times in the recent past when I have eaten, I have felt an uncomfortable fullness, sort of a pain that's not quite a pain in my gut.  I wonder if I'm giving myself an ulcer with the strain and stress and unhappiness of it all.  No matter how many times I look at my own life and see that it is good and safe and generally lovely, I'm full of acid and depression lurks around every corner.  It's on me to do something about that, and when I figure out what I can to do ameliorate this anguish, I'll let you know.

The mean man and the donkey

I was taking a nice long walk recently, combining exercise with errands.  Near one house, I noticed a small flower pot by the sidewalk.  The pot was surrounded by painted stones, and there was a note inviting passersby to take one so that we might have a little more beauty in our lives.

As I bent down to pick up a pretty green stone, a young man driving by in a truck (somehow it seems significant that he was in a truck) yelled out his window "Oh my god, look at all that ass."  It was not a compliment.  It didn't shake me badly or anything, but it did lightly sour a sweet experience.  I right away called up Sweet Hubby to tell him what had happened.  After all, every creature seeks safety when it feels threatened, and SH is my safe harbor.

SH laughed and said "Did you have your donkey with you?"  I laughed right back and said "Honey Pie, my donkey goes with me everywhere."  We laughed some more about how ridiculous people can be, and SH poured some love all over me, and then it was fine and I was fine and I continued on my way.

It occurred to me that this would have been a very different sort of experience, and would have left a much more bitter taste in my mouth, if I were single now, still wanting love, still wondering why I was alone, nakedly vulnerable to the opinion of others and to my own self-doubts.  What a difference it made to know I was securely loved.

I found myself, find myself still, wondering about that young man, about how he felt as he tossed his ugly little assault out the window.  Did he feel a sly delight?  A sense of power?  A twinge of self-disgust?  Or, worst of all, did he feel nothing at all?  I think I wasn't real to him, my feelings were nothing to him.  I didn't exist except as an opportunity for him to vent some of his discomfort and inchoate rage and the troublesome fears that at least some of the conspiracy theories he reads must be true.  What happened to him that made him so afraid, so angry, so casual about hurting someone?  It's hard not to wonder.