11.19.06
Posted in Big Agnes, Photos at 3:31 am by jeci
After the Airport Saga in 10 Parts and my last post, I thought I’d stick in some filler. You know, like TV shows do. Maybe next post will be a pre-Christmas hiatus cliff hanger so that you’re sure to tune in in January. Anyhoo, so remember back in August and September when I was talking about posting pictures of our camping trip and rescuing a cat? And how I was going to make a new category for Big Agnes? Yeahhhhhh. Well, I’m finally getting around to doing that stuff. (This is, by the way, my pattern. I plan on doing stuff, it gets put off, and then I follow through long after most people would have just let it go.)
The Big Agnes category is already up. In case y’all forgot, Big Agnes is my joke that only I think is funny. So, really, she’s like all my jokes. I’m taking pictures of Big Agnes on all our travelling adventures, just like the folks who take pictures of their garden gnomes all over the world. Only Big Agnes is not a garden gnome, she’s a tent. Named Big Agnes. A TENT NAME BIG AGNES. It still amuses me. Also amusing? Titles like “Big Agnes in Paris.” (And OhMyGod, now I want to go to Paris.)
The next installment in Stuff That Happened Two Months Ago is our camping pictures. I debated whether it was still worth posting them, but it was one of the best camping trips we’ve ever had. The memory of it can still soften the edges of my day. I find myself staring out of my office window over a bleak horizon of snow-dusted buildings and savouring the memory of the sound of the Ram River rushing past our tent, the mist that rose from the river in the morning, the Northern Lights that swelled and sparkled over the tree studded mountains at night. And then, working in a stuffy office is not nearly so claustrophobic because there will be another summer, another adventure, the secrets of another river revealed.
Road Trip
The Ram River
Hiking
Inukshuk
Biking
Chillin’
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11.18.06
Posted in Second Verse Same as the First at 7:04 am by jeci
Warning: This post is darker than normal. Regularly scheduled sarcasm will resume next post. Let’s consider this a rare exercise wherein I make myself vulnerable and talk about the stuff I never talk about directly with anyone, ever, and…wait, why am I doing this? Right. An exercise in being vulnerable. Ungerrrrtttt…here we go.
With Schnozz’s brilliant and witty Stupid Girl posts and then Shannon’s raw post about reading her old journals…Well, I started thinking about when I was 19. And…where do I begin? So, the thing is, I spend a great deal of time and energy not thinking about my past because it hurts. It hurts and there is nothing I can do about it, so it will always hurt. I can’t go back and save young me and I can’t change what happened to her even though that is what young me deserves.* All I can do is be nice to me now. And don’t get all Dr. Phil on me because I don’t pretend in any way that all those things didn’t happen—I’ve incorporated them into my overall truth—but I don’t dwell on the details because they break my heart. And, really, why walk around with your heart breaking when you’re actually pretty happy and having a blast, at least so long as you don’t start dwelling on the times when you weren’t happy?
And then this week. This week, everyone is opening up about what happened when they were 19 and I naturally got to thinking about me at 19 and wanting to find some way to share it, but reflexively wanting to be all witty and clever about it, like Schnozz.
But I can’t. I mean, for one thing, it’s not funny. At all. It’s gruesome and violent and terrifying and sad. And it would be a total disservice to myself to make light of the things that happened to me.
And then I found this post over at Greek Tragedy. This got me to wondering what I advice I would give myself if I could go back in time and have a tete-a-tete with 19-year-old me. The thought of it was so delicious, intoxicating almost. There are so many tragic mistakes I could avoid, so many heartaches, if I had only known. And then something interesting happened: when I thought about, when I really thought about what it would mean to prevent the horrible things that happened, I found there were very few things I would want to change.
What if I were to go back and prevent myself from dating abusive fuckwits, thus sparing myself from years of physical and emotional hell? What if I hadn’t been roughed up and shoved face first into Rock Bottom? Wouldn’t that be better?
Maybe not.
In my experience, once you land face first on Rock Bottom, you basically have two choices: you can grovel out an increasingly bereft and brutal existence and discover that Rock Bottom is actually made of quicksand, not rocks, or you can claw your way back into humanity.
And, God, the ascent to humanity from Rock Bottom is really fucking hard going. Once you’ve gotten your passport stamped by a trip to Rock Bottom, it’s almost easier to go back—Rock Bottom’s gravitational pull is strong. And we all know that succumbing to gravity and, moreover the inertia of your life that was established before you had any say in it, is easier than fighting it. You can’t compromise. If someone tries to grab you by the ankle and drag you back down with them (people making the trip down to Rock Bottom rarely want to go alone), you gotta shake ‘em off. Fast.
Maybe if me and Rock Bottom hadn’t come eye to eye, I would have settled for a life partner who, although perhaps not an rageaholic asshat, wouldn’t cherish me and my feelings in the way that I (and we all) deserve. Thinking of it that way, I’m kinda grateful for Rock Bottom. Thanks to the memory of the cold, hard, but suspiciously shifting surface of Rock Bottom, if someone doesn’t respect me, I have not hesitated to drop-kick them out of my life. With alacrity. I am still, in my core, exhausted from what happened and I simply don’t have any emotional energy left to expend on encouraging people to be more respectful of me. You can be nice to me, or you can fuck off. Period. Frankly, I like the hard won simplicity of this.
So what would I tell myself if I could go back in time and sit my 19-year-old self down? Some of it is shallow, but still important. Some of the shallow stuff is just about loving yourself, which I really didn’t know how to do (and am still learning, to be honest). And there are some kicks in the teeth that I would like to save myself from.
The whole exercise made me realize that sometimes the Universe kicks you in the teeth because you need it. And, if you don’t learn from it, She will kick you in the teeth again. And again. Until you learn.
And, then, sometimes the Universe will kick you in the teeth for no reason other than the fact that the Universe is random—only not really when you think about it—and sometimes in the middle of orchestrated syncopation, notes collide and teeth get kicked.
Since having my teeth kicked pointedly was necessary to my survival, I would like only to save myself from the odd random collision, the incidental and unnecessary teeth-kickings, just to make life a little less painful, to cut myself a break or two, since the random lottery that is life had thus far cut me a raw deal.
So, teenage/young adult me, this is what I would like to say to you:
- Please just eat. Food. Fat-free Pop Tarts do not count as food. It is a shame to waste a perfectly good metabolism on not eating. I know that 97-pound Kate Moss is busy messing with your head right now, but she is only like that because she’s on heroin. You will never look like that because you are too smart to do drugs.
- To that end, while you’re eating, (and to somewhat contradict No. 1) can you scarf down a few extra Bounty bars? When you’re 30, you won’t be able to so much as sniff a chocolate bar without gaining two pounds.
- Please also drink water. I believe if you had drunk water sometime before 2001, you would maybe have less early onset crows feet when you’re 30. Oh, yeah, and it’s good for you. You know how you’re always so tired when you wait tables? That’s because you’re not eating or drinking anything.
- When you are 30, you will rue every single day you didn’t wear sunscreen.
- At the risk of all the self-respecting choices you will make later, if you get the feeling that someone is bad news, they are. It’s OK to risk hurting someone else’s feelings if yours are at risk.
- While it’s perhaps necessary at this point to date inappropriate men, maybe you should put a cap on the number of times you will allow someone to break your heart. Three? Four? I don’t know. It may prevent you from losing some of your heart’s sweet softness later on. Once hardness creeps into your heart, it’s hard to overcome.
- That day when you’re leaving your grandpa’s and you get the feeling it’s the last time you will see him? It is. Go back and tell him how much you love him. Not a day will go by when you don’t think of him and miss him and wish you had.
- I know you won’t believe me when I tell you this, but you are not stupid. You can not only go to university, you can get honours in university. One day you will have two degrees. Yes, you. You are going to go to do grad studies at McGill. Don’t waste another minute stifling yourself in dead end jobs because you don’t know yet that you can do more.
- Every time you cut off your long hair, you hate it. Don’t waste time on haircuts you don’t like when having long hair makes you feel pretty. And one day you’ll accidentally get a mullet and it will suck for a full year after and, seriously, no life lesson is worth a mullet. You already know that you are vain beyond reason about your hair. It is perfectly fine to indulge in one vanity in this lifetime.
- The day your best friend offers to drive you to the doctor’s so that you can get tested for mono, don’t go. You are going to get into a car accident and her car will be trashed and she’ll be traumatized and even though you’re wearing a seat belt, you’re going to hurt your back very badly and it will hurt every. single. day. It’s simply not worth it for either of you. I can tell you right now that it’s mono. Of course it’s mono—you’re 20.
- You have a half brother that you don’t know about. I’m telling you now so that you aren’t so blindsided this time around when your parents drop this bombshell. It’s actually not such a big deal and, in the end, a series of events will conspire so that everyone but you meets him and then he moves to Germany and no one ever hears from him again, so there’s no need to get worked up about it.
- Your beloved aunt is sick with something treatable. Make sure she goes to the hospital, otherwise she is going to die unexpectedly and far too soon and your heart will break. It will be the kind of heartbreak that you never get over. You will always wish you had known this and now you do. She loves you. Unconditionally. Right now, you don’t know what that means, but you need her. If only for how much you love her.
- All that…stuff that you’re so hurt and confused about is not your fault. It is so hard to separate stuff that’s directed at you from stuff that’s about you, but I promise it is not about you and it is not your fault. If you run into 30-year old you/me, please remind her of this. Sometimes she forgets.
—————-
*OK. My first and probably longest ever footnote, which is actually more of a sub-post. If you are a parent and you’re reading this—how do I put this?—be the fuck nice to your kids. Seriously. I debated whether to say anything along these lines because I didn’t want to veer off into pedantic melodrama. I decided to leave it in because this is the kind of thing that doesn’t get said enough and our society’s silent epidemic of domestic abuse continues to fester, thriving on secrecy and a collective fear of talking about things we don’t talk about.
Moreover, whenever people open up about abuse, we always put the onus on the victim to speak up and get help and call this or that number. How about this? If YOU can’t be nice to your kids, if YOU can’t stop yourself from berating your spouse or your child (and I KNOW you know what you’re doing when you do it), and if YOU can’t stop yourself from raising your hands to them, then YOU are succumbing to the worst kind of cowardice. It is time for you to shut up. Shut up. Suck up your pain and YOU call a helpline and YOU get help and YOU take responsibility for the futile shit storm you have created in the life of your family.
All that being said, if you are being abused by someone, you deserve so much more. Speak up and get the help you need and deserve. Abusers, in reality, don’t take responsibility for the shit storm (that is, at its core what abuse is about—not taking ownership of oneself). You are going to have to take on that responsibility and it’s the shit end of the stick in every way. I’m sorry. Your abuser is not. Get help and get out. Helping yourself is going to be hard, but you owe it to yourself.
Speaking of responsibility, for society in general, uh, newsflash: a) Children aren’t capable of helping themselves because they are children b)When you’re getting the shit knocked out of you, child or adult, it is incredibly shitty and dangerous and horrible. A victim of abuse is focused solely on survival in the most immediate sense. Finding out about and phoning some helpline in secret so the abuser doesn’t know or find out may not be as much of a priority as doing what it takes not to get killed for another day. Therefore, it is OUR responsibility not to turn a blind eye to domestic abuse. Speak up. Phone the police every time you see or hear violence. Every. Time. Reach out to someone if you know they need help. Don’t waste your energy judging or patting yourself on the back because you would never “let” something like that happen to you. Please. It could happen to absolutely any one of us (which is why we exert so much energy pretending it’s not happening or pretending it’s the victim’s fault, isn’t it?).
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