#062221: Acceptance, I think

Entries written over the course of the past 3 weeks

Welcome to Dispatch #062221, still another series of thoughts written, re-written then written again over the course of the past 3.5 weeks.

6/7/21: Small talk

At the end of a week, do you ever think, I can’t believe it’s already over but also that it’s just now over?

I don’t know if it is like this when your work schedule’s flimsy, when you’ve “gotten the hang” of a routine you established for a pandemic with the routine now outdating in real-time but mostly I vacillate between thinking I am okay and thinking how embarrassed I am that there is nowhere to hide when the small talk resumes and benignly I’m asked, “What are you doing these days?”

I stare back blankly because the answer doesn’t seem like enough. I’m still not sure if I mean enough for me or for them, but the truth is that “I’m with my kids, I’m writing a newsletter,” so that is what I say.

They look at me sympathetically, “Don’t worry, you’ll figure it out.”

I nod along kindly, feeling in a twisted way reassured that I was right, it’s not enough for them but then I stop myself to wonder if really, they’re telling me not to worry because they sensed the fluttering, they heard the insecurity and they want to assure me it doesn’t actually matter — at least to the extent that they don’t actually care. This is just small talk.

It’s easier to think it’s not enough for them because then I’m too busy thinking about what they think so I never have to ask if it’s enough for me.

I wonder how much of what we say is actually what we mean, how much of what we hear is actually what is said, and how many connections get missed in the space between.

6/13/21: Is it enough for me?

I catch myself some days, when Abie gets home and asks how mine was, not knowing what to say. When I’ve been inclined to say the day had been bad (even though frankly, it was perfectly fine), I wonder why I think it was bad.

Maybe I sent an e-mail, started to write a newsletter, maybe I bought the groceries. I took my kids here and dropped them off there, but what did I really do? I guess what I mean is, was I an insensitive dick to myself? I ask this because of all questions I wrote and deleted before getting to this one.

Did I make intellectual progress?

Was I productive?

Do I know what I want?

Not insensitive or dicky, but it def comes up: Were my kids happy, did I make plans and keep them, connect to someone I love?

*

I was sitting at my computer assembling words on what makes summer sandals good and I was in a kind of flow, not the all-encompassing kind where you lose sense of time and space, but a flow that makes you think: this is getting me somewhere.

My friend texted me an unrelated interruption about feelings she was trying to sift through as they pertained to a fracture that was growing in her belief system, which was being exacerbated by Twitter.

I noticed the juxtaposition of our subsequent conversation and what I had been writing about prior; it gave me this feeling of validation.

Well, at first it was more like, “I feel less frivolous than I did before this conversation started,” and that reminded me of what still seems so hard for me to reconcile, even after all this time: I like talking about sandals so much.

Really, I’m talking about confidence — how you come to know what suits you, what it’s like to go to your closet when you wake up and feel assured that you’ll make something in there to accurately present to the world who you are on that day. I think this stuff is important. I also like talking about life — the fissures of our experiences, the emotional discrepancies that do not resolve because they contract with our shifting values.

Maybe I’ve taken to the former because of how much I like the latter. But for sure, the clothes came first. Why does this still seem so hard to reconcile? Actually, that’s not the question. What I wonder, really, is what I’m still trying to prove.

Isn’t the truth enough?

6/14/21: Nuance

Are you complaining that nuance is dead? In all the conversations I’m having, the same bell keeps ringing: nobody cares for the shades of grey that buttress the bright and dark. “We’ve been flattened! We’re 2D prints!”

They say it often, I say it too, and when I do, I really believe it, but if we’re all complaining that nuance is dead, surely we have a conception of it, an idea that it exists, that we know what it’s like because we understand it ourselves. We’re nuanced, in other words, so how could it be dead if it’s alive in us?

Lately, I finally realize: we’ve just put expectations in precarious places. Or more acutely, we’ve put it online.

But if as they say, social media is a public square, that we are in public online, then by most accounts, we’re also strangers to each other. Or maybe it’s more like acquaintances. Coffee shop regulars? For those we don’t actually know — who we follow, or who follow us, we’re familiar strangers, I say.

Are we supposed to expect nuance — an understanding of our subtle differences — from the unassuming and benevolent passers—no, scrollers—by we encounter?

What are we really asking the scrollersby for? And on the flip side, to whom are we scrollers?

Do we expect that they’ll get us? Do you get them? That they’ll see where we’re coming from, or vice versa? How we got to be this way and vice versa? What we value and care for — and vice versa.

What compels us to yearn for it here in the first place?

Our lives are so unique. The circumstances are infinite, experiences distinct, and the feelings, even if they’re kind of the same, are also so specific. How have we come to believe that even if we “know” each other online, if our mutual understanding is wrapped up in how we think we’re the same, we could ever really get how the other has gotten to think or to act or to be how they are?

Did nuance ever exist in the square? Is it even supposed to?

6/15/21: It may be too much to ask of another but it’s not too much to ask of myself

This is mostly a thing I say to myself every time I expect some courtesy or generosity of spirit from someone else. Why do I expect it, as if I’m entitled, it’s nobody’s job to give it to me. But if I want to take on the task — to deliver good faith where I see it requested in earnest, it’s not too much to ask of myself.

6/16/21: Patience

It’s not just waiting — did you know that?

I revisited the definition recently.

It’s more like waiting and not getting mad. I don’t even mean not taking it out on something or one else, the real zinger for me is that to be patient, you must also extend to yourself.

Like you gotta be kind to everyone — you, too — if you want to really have patience.

Abie and I met when I was 17. We dated for 10 months before breaking up for three years. I have been told that I was very patient during the sum of this time, where it seems the perception is that I was waiting for him to come around to me. Actually, though, I wasn’t patient at all — but it was mostly with myself. I tried to change who I was to become whoever it was that I thought he would love.

I think of it now and feel sad for that girl — 18-years-self-conscious and dying for love. She suspended her selfhood for so much time because of this fear, this insurmountable fear, of being forever unlovable.

It was so scary to me that I look back and see I’d have preferred to be someone I’m not.

After 3 years, I reached a sort of breaking point — I started to take my interests more seriously. I saw new thing, I planted seeds for new life. All those years earlier, my ceiling fell down and today, finally, I could look up and see: the sky and the clouds and these birds chirping by.

Why does anyone choose a ceiling, I thought. I remember I literally said it — “Fuck it, I’d rather be here.”

That’s when we got back together. Somehow, I missed the signal that the reason he came back around was that I gave up the act, stopped trying so hard.

But unconsciously, I started to act again.

Here in the end of the time between, I had learned a new way, I was growing! But this guy — my guy — was from the old way, and I really didn’t want to be sad again.

Yes, he came back around to me but it took me much longer to do the same. Come back around to me, I mean. I tried but could never commit — danced for years between me and the other and when days would end, we’d get in bed and the only thing I could think was how far my feet felt from my legs. How had they danced together?

The thing about patience, I think, is that to really get it, it helps to commit to the truth. Acceptance. Like, can you accept that you’re you? Forgivingly, unapologetically, devastatingly you? That’s first. Then, where are you? I mean deep into the night, when your phone drops and makes a loud noise then suddenly, you’re awake, WHERE R U? You don’t have to like it, you may want to change it but can you accept it right now?

The answer doesn’t have to be yes. It took ten years of trying to prove myself to myself then crashing the proof down on myself to finally punch in and ask.

6/12/21: Honesty

Is not a synonym for beating the shit out of yourself. Sometimes the truth is bitter and harrowing, but it’s not an excuse to keep punching until you’ve knocked yourself unconscious.

Not sure if you need to hear this, but wish someone had told me sooner.

6/9/21: Jars

Maybe the weeks seem too soon to be over but too long to have just now arrived because this is what it’s like when you’re not on the clock of a supervisor, superior, some greater task, or if this is just what it’s like when you have kids. You turn into a jar and your time becomes theirs and all that time just melts together, along with your kids, directly into the jar.

You’re not on the clock of a supervisor but you are on the clock of your kids. And you make their clock, so in that way, it’s yours but still, it’s not really yours.

It can start to feel like I’m trying to squeeze myself into chunks of time that exist in errant, small pockets. And they never quite seem like they’re long but they’re not insignificant either. At first, I thought that it feels like everything is in the way, separating me from this grand, elusive something. A higher calling? My purpose? Divinity?

I remembered this quote, from Scarlett Johansson as Lucy in Lucy,

Time gives legitimacy to its existence. Time is the only true unit of measure. It gives proof to the existence of matter. Without time, we don't exist.

I wondered if that’s what I’m trying to do — exist in these chunks of time. To exist is to be though, and surely I am. Their mother, his partner, a daughter, the jar. I’m all of these things.

This morning I wondered if really what I yearn for is more like a place — a place that is safe, that can hold the big feelings when I’m still not sure where to put them, or more primitively even what they are. How am I supposed to be with them?

A place that will know what to do. My own glass jar

Or not — I think I’d prefer a goblet.

6/16/21: Nomenclature

I met my friend for a coffee last week. She is Korean and was telling me that within the culture she was raised, it is common that after a woman gives birth, she is theretofore known as [insert Child’s name]’s mother.

Within Jewish culture, we’re attached to our forebears. When a man, for example, is honored, he’s called [Name] son of [Father’s Name]. But when he is sick, or confronted by tragedy, he becomes [Name] son of [Mother’s Name]. This is true for women, too.

In otherwise environments, some women are called by the name of their partner, then wife. By that rule, I’m Abie’s wife.

This morning, I had a thought about who I am by these codes, the ones both culturally mine and not — Madeline and Laura’s mother on one hand.

Moise and the original Laura’s daughter on the other.

Abie’s wife in certain environments.

I’ve been inclined to think that allowing myself to be referred to as anything but Leandra is labeling — this absolute and restrictive defining and subsequent compartmentalizing of my identity based on these features about who I’m connected to as opposed to who I am.

But what is the difference? I mean I know there are plenty. To my parents, I’m a girl. To my daughters, I’m a woman. To my husband, I’m a partner. And to myself, I accept that to them, I am all these things — and that to me, I’m so much more.

Have you considered your own vastness lately?

Signing off yours truly,

Leandra