Among the Roses

Today, I went for a very long walk. I left out of the white picket fence and stopped into Hannah for a coffee (okay, it was mostly just milk…) and was greeted by the friendly baristas. I walked along The Alameda. I walked by the place where I got my Harold and Maude tattoo. I walked by the churches I’ve never been to. I crunched through the early Autumn leaves. I listened to kids playing, babies laughing, moms on cell phones at the park. I photographed a picture of a girl releasing bees from a small house. I crossed the street. I sat among the roses, and thought of you.

I thought about the book in your hands now. I thought about the pictures, how when they came in the mail, I ran my fingers along the white edges smiling in remembrance and in hope. I thought about coffee brown cartoon eyes in all the pictures. I thought about Christmas. I thought about you not talking to me, thought about what you could be thinking about.

If I know you at all, you are not thinking about me too much yet. You are working. Listening to the Hipster International playlist and petting your dog’s smiling head. You are getting things out of the way. You are in your time. You are thinking about how good it is to have things going on, getting things accomplished. You are doing fine.

And in my way, so am I.

This is the thing: I am not looking to “feel better.” I am looking to feel. My whole life I have seen people trying to fix other people and trying to repair their sadness and I have watched tv seminars late at night about people helping other people “get over” heartbreaks and failures, etc, etc. I have heard people go on and on about self-help books and workshops and I have had a psychiatrist who didn’t even listen to my story tell me that I had something distinctly wrong with me. I have had people closest to me find their rescue in those things, and in alcohol, and in hitting rock bottom, and in entering programs. But I am not those people.

I believe in my heart of hearts that those programs and books and teachers guide people in the right direction. I think some of the most valuable stuff of this earth is the human capacity for compassion and helpfulness. I think it is really beautiful to stand somewhere and say I am broken, help me get better.

But that’s not where I’m coming from.

It’s funny how when you tell people about a distinct sadness or broken thing of your life, they begin to give you advice, list off books, tell you not to “fall apart,” tell you how strong you are— and as much as those people are trying, I am not sure any of those people are listening. Or at least I’m not sure that they know me. I’m not looking for a solution. I am looking just to say — this is where I am. This is my heart. It’s okay. It’s just cracking. It’s just life. It’s just feelings. It’s not a problem. I am not looking to “get over it” or get better. I am not looking for a solution or a book to read. I am looking to sit with myself and process my emotions and understand that the person I am is a person I love and respect enough to let follow her own path, whatever that means. I’m not yet concerned with getting better or listening to other people talk because none of those people have actually listened to me. As much as I appreciate the people in my life who just want to help Kate be Kate, I have to know that only Kate knows what Kate needs.

Heartbreak is not a disease or something I am looking to get over. I am not even sure if things have ended yet. I am only sure that in this moment, I am very sad. And I don’t know what’s going on. And that’s okay.

Now, I am sitting in my bed and thinking of a time where you fell asleep on the couch behind me as we were watching Ghostbusters. I remember thinking when you were snoring just how nice it is to be together and alone at the same time, with the same person, in the very same room. I am not ready to let go of you.

Read Full Post »

The Children of the Free Birds

he didn’t know what he was doing either

I grew up without many rules. My parents aren’t super disciplinarian as a duo and are both the kind of people who would rather tell you to march to the beat of your own drum than try to explain to you what the right thing to do would be. I didn’t always see this growing up, but now I realize how important that was in allowing my sisters and I to develop our own sense of morals. Instead of being told that what we did or saw was good or bad, we were encouraged by a lack of direction to create our own structures and opinions. If you know any of us, you probably know we’re all weirdly well-behaved and hate getting into any kind of trouble or breaking rules. This doesn’t mean we go along with what we’re told to do or that we never do anything ‘wrong,’ but just that our independently created moral structure invites us to dismiss things we feel would create more negativity in our lives — like heavy drinking or doing drugs or breaking the law or committing acts of violence (normal kid stuff). I don’t feel like there are any inherently bad things in the world or like people who break laws and rules are necessarily criminals, and I’m well aware of my own sin and shortcomings each day. But all my life I have been aware of my feelings around my actions, and acted according to a wholesome truth. My parents always did what they had to do for the well-being of their children. They also made the world limitless by not imposing rules and laws or threats. For this, I’m forever grateful… and a little bit confused.

Growing up in Georgia, most of the families I knew growing up were church-going and often this dictated a lot of their lives (I don’t mean that in a negative way). Most of my friends did a lot of activities and played sports or were in a bunch of clubs and things, but that’s what I remember most distinctly— the church going. I latched on dramatically to other people’s families, desperate to see what the fuss was about, always wanting to know what was going on, why they were doing that, why my family wasn’t. All of my friends had so many rules, knew bad and good, right and wrong— always according to some bigger authority like a pastor or a coach or their parents. I went along with them and was really drawn to this larger authority. Although I liked it, I know that kind of strong figure can stress out so many people and keep them from finding their own personal truth, since they are constantly seeking to meet the approval of somebody else’s— or, in so many more cases, dramatically go the other direction. But… anyway…

“We walk in obedience to whatever it is that we are chasing.”

I was always very independently religious though. I like God, a lot, and I always liked reading the Bible (along with a lot of other religious texts. I’m really interested in Sufi Islam and Judaism as well, but don’t feel like that negates my Christian preferences.) and I always liked praying. In high school, I went to a church with my best friend Kristyn. The above quotation is etched in the back of my Bible. There was a youth pastor named Mike Deal who said that during a sermon once and to this day it is one of the most important messages I can impress upon another person in the sense that we follow whatever it is we really want: if we see our life shaping up to be something we aren’t proud of, chances are we have lost focus on what it is that we are truly desirous of, or we have stopped caring.

(It’s all related, promise.)

The point is, I’m not sure if I have a clue what it is that I’m chasing.

I feel in my heart that I know who I am. I know every day when I wake up what I want to do that day and most of the time if there is something I’d like to do, I do it, regardless of work or chores or whatever. A lot of times those things are things I want to do at work, small things I’d like to achieve, people I would like to say hi to, ways I would like to help people. I know who I am, what I believe, what I like, what I can’t see myself being. Recently, though, I have felt a sense of hopelessness. Something inside of me feels deeply unfulfilled. I know part of it is the weight of being, the weight a lot of people feel after college, kind of wandering and figuring stuff out. It’s not that I’m not doing what I want- It’s that I don’t know if I know what I’m doing at all anymore. Every day is starting to be confusing and overwhelming, harder than the day before. It is like being alone in the middle of a field and I am tiny in the middle of lots of wheat or some other tall beige plant and I am crying but not screaming, just feeling really unsure and kind of sad and worried.

Now, back to the discipline thing.

I know that part of me feeling directionless and helpless is not having that “thing,” the thing other people have like wanting to be married or wanting to be a doctor or basically wanting to do whatever they decided was either the right thing or the best thing or the thing that their parents would want them to do, or that thing that becomes the thing you do because people tell you it is the thing you are. I don’t think I have that. I don’t think there is just one thing I am supposed to be or one job I am supposed to have. I feel it is my very energy that is my gift to the world— not necessarily my skills or abilities or intellect. But my question is what do I do with that? I guess I am writing this in case other people know what I mean, in case I’m not the only one, in case somebody else needed to hear that somebody else just doesn’t know. But not having a discipline handed to me by an authority figure or the world’s want for me or the expectation of everyone who has ever known me means that when I do figure out what my impact will be, when I am able to navigate myself to know it, it will be amazing because it will be mine. It will be genuine because I will have figured it out for myself. It will be authentic because nobody else told me to do it. It will be worth waiting for. It will be worth the anxiety, the tears, the student loans, the loneliness. It will be worth every moment when I saw other people having it figured out and knowing that my peers were moving into a direction that wasn’t really meant for me.

I open my heart to the rhythm of the universe and hope I find what I am looking for. I don’t know yet what that is, but when I find it, I will be grateful that my family let me do it my way. I will be grateful I did it my way. I will know it is the right thing when it is my thing. I won’t stop trying until I find it. I will continue being obedient to the fabrics of whatever I am creating, obedient to the thing within directing me to whatever I am chasing.

Read Full Post »

The Way – A Hope for Hopefulness

“And yesterday I saw you kissing tiny flowers, 
But all that lives is born to die. 
And so I say to you that nothing really matters, 
And all you do is stand and cry.”

I’m shouting your name on a street corner. It’s not midnight yet, but I go to bed early these days. This is like somebody else’s midnight, I guess. This is like somebody else’s middle of the day, or middle of their shift at a job they actually like (so much time to think— in the quiet, as the rest of the world, or the world you know, sleeps, sleeps alone, sleeps alone next to the partners they love that are genuinely incapable of loving them, cold and broken from trying to mend somebody else’s cold and brokenness, you know what I mean?), or just another moment in time, moving, already gone, like all things, like how glad I am for things to go. You don’t hear me though. They never hear you. You’re just out there, all over yourself with apologies you will never be able to articulate outside of your mind no matter how many times you practice (I swear, if I could just start over. Can we just start over? Without you, my brokenness resonates like a bell tower and makes all the happy people cry. I can start over. Can we start over?), and by the “you,” of course, I mean “I.” And you’re out in the world somewhere smelling like musky vanilla and young love and I’m wondering how to find you, how to unbury you from the weight of language, from the piles of nothing done wrong. It’s nobody’s fault when things don’t work out. [it is what it is] — if you can believe that is another story.

This morning while in my favorite coffee shop ever, I found myself in near tears over a song that does not distinctly remind me of something heavy of my own life, but of my partner’s. This song reminds him of another person, and I take it personally, even though I know that is ridiculous. That’s the nature of me though— sensitive, concerned, heavily invested 100% of all the times. The song is playing these notes and it’s this beautiful, live, acousticy version of a song I used to go crazy over, a song everyone who knows the words to loves to sing along with, a song that is soft and good and hopeful most of all. Knowing that kind of hope rested within him at any time is far away from me, something I’ve never personally come into contact with, only in his past through things I’ve read that he’s written, codes and evidence and incriminations of a former romantic left dribbled all over the internet in different ways, slaughtered by his own self and concerns and the promise that destiny makes us all that “this too shall pass.” I say this and hope not to sound critical. Something I love of the internet is the depth in which I saw so many of my peers releasing themselves, maybe hiding behind code names on AIM or livejournal, but still honesty filled lines like swearing on a Bible and it was like a version of us all behind a screen— and I think this is a gift of my generation. I’ve never been great at being this person, the one writing, in front of other people because I write impulsively, working these moments and hot flashes and the pain of experience purging out of me sometimes in a crude way. I don’t know. I just realize that all this access to the depths of people can also harm you, show you sides of people you maybe could love but maybe aren’t ready for yet. What is there left for you to know of me? My secrets all drenching every blog site available and my radiance pouring from my fingers onto something less imaginative, accessible to your judgments and interpretations and misunderstandings. Hot in the moment and just the way I like it. I guess at the end of the day I am crying in a coffee shop on a hot summer day because of something I’ve made up and because of a lack of feeling in my life today— and today alone. Let’s keep that in mind.

And since I’m being honest here, that hope that hopes inside of my lover (even long since gone and all that) gives me hope that maybe hope can formulate inside him once again. It was hope that saved me, and hope that kills me every draining day of my life. The question is how do I know if I am the one to hold onto a blessing or let it go? Maybe that’s not the question it sounds like, but it’s the one I’m asking.

It wasn’t that song playing, but it’s that song that fits where I’m at from the one you left. In case you are wondering, I am the one crying.

Read Full Post »

How To Love You.

Never good at doing things anyone else’s way particularly, always needing to come around in my own good time, never sure when to speak up and when to let people just read my mind, never certain if snapping at hurt feelings is okay or just kind of inappropriate. I’m not one to care much when people go, more set on the moment than the missing, but I do feel it when things are breaking, when the sunlight is falling behind tree’s calling arms— I can’t feel it when they go, but I always feel it as they are going– and the footsteps you leave behind, trampling poems I’ve written for you in the grainy sand, it’s not something I need you to ask about but I wish you had noticed, had taken a moment to pray for me as I screamed out for desperate salvation. There I go again, I’m thinking, begging people to read my mind and love me and leave me alone all at the same time.

At the root of your hard times, where do you look for answers? I feel that I spend a lot of my alone time talking to myself, thinking in-loud about how the world sees me, what I am seeing in the world, the people in my world, my relationship and connection to the distinct higher being that I associate my formation with, etc. During moments of darkness, those thoughts often are shadowed with hopelessness and deep feelings of inadequacy. Even when I am aware that the darkness is fleeting, I am stuck in that realm. I’ve never been much of a fighter.

The truth is, romance is really important to me— almost more-so than the actual substance of the relationship itself. I am aware of this shortcoming/or whatever you call it. The build up can lead to a lot of heartbreak. From building castles in the sand to slathering mud between cracks of your broken heart, I am trying to be a really great partner so much of the time in a dramatic way, wanting to make those I love feel like they are finally receiving all the magic I know they deserve… and often in the solitude I realize I will always be alone in a very real way until I learn to do those things someday for myself. I’m not like other people in that belief that you have to love yourself before you can love another person- but I believe you can learn to love yourself through learning to love another person. The problem I find is that so much of the time I am busy building great romances for people who don’t want to build them back for me. When you fall asleep in your castle, I am wading alone in the breaks of the waves, crying myself to sleep or something like it.

I am alone in the corner, just listening.

I start a lot of sentences with “the truth is.” It’s obnoxious. I hope my writing someday can stand alone without my prefacing and hiding between uncomfortably constructed sentences— hope someday you can tell I am being honest without me mentioning it. Hope that someday the words are clear enough to sing like hope across something more than blank screens or pages, but into something real, something within the other person, maybe you, if you decide to stick around. Do you know that feeling? But—- the truth is, I hope somebody makes you feel real love. I hope even if it exhausts you both, that whomever you choose to be in an intimate relationship wants to desperately take care of you, love you, build you castles, make you mixed cds, let you cry. The truth is, I loved so hard all my life and kept quiet when it counted so much that I loved people so hard and they didn’t know all of the time and then by the time they figure out what I meant, we were too far away. Unconditional love is not normal, but it’s really important. I know that I have been loved greatly, and intensely. I just don’t know after all if I have ever really felt that.

Read Full Post »

How I Deal with Growing Explodey

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”
-Henry Miller

( It becomes relevant – I promise. )

What I like best about the world is all of it, or most of it at least. I love remembering (in this moment) that my kindergarten best friend had a playground behind her house and how her sister would read us the “wayside school” book series while we wore parts of princess costumes. I love the sound of my cat snoring and purring and the way she is unaffectionate until bedtime, when she reaches out for me with her small paw, just to make sure i’m within reach. I’m grateful for the way it never rains here, grateful for the way people always love to come through, grateful that I am not where I started even when that is exactly what it looks like.

Two years ago between May and June somewhere I moved to sunny San Jose and began a different kind of life than I anticipated for myself. I say this but, the truth is, I’m not sure that I’ve ever expected anything of myself— or my life, or my future. I always just followed my instincts, worked hard, hoped desperately for the best and things have worked out in remarkable ways and I think much of it due to that comedic approach to the world, problems, challenges. A lot changed then because I stopped being responsible only for myself and became responsible for this whole entire team at my job. I have bosses. I have bills. I have a mean cat. But at the end of each day, I still answer only to myself, my own moral code, my own truth. I ask myself how I treated people, how I responded to any moments of darkness, who I behaved as. I sleep easy at night.

Whether your personal truth involves a figure of divinity or is just a human you or is the set of rules your parents have given you, that’s your call. I’m just here to say that if it isn’t authentic, raw, real, true to you as it gets, then it means nothing in this world. You have only yourself to offer — your gifts, words, character, promises, radiance, brilliance, undying music within. Why be given your truth if you aren’t gonna spit it? I had a friend say to me yesterday, “yeah, it’s a cliche, but it’s a cliche for a reason.” Not speaking in the moment to what I’m talking about, she was talking to me now in the future, all tumbling together in the Here.

I think more of us than would like to admit wrestle with what we want for ourselves and what the world expects of us. I’m here to tell you, even in your moments of weakness, that what the world expects of you is meaningless. What you are great at should not be the only thing that defines you— unless you want it to. It’s all whatever you want. It’s all whatever is already burning within you. It is your essence. It is who you are. What you want for yourself is almost as meaningless I think because you are essentially bound to this — there is a purpose, divine and telling of a life worth speaking of. Recently, I’ve been facing this quarter-life crisis, feeling so overwhelmed with whether or not I was doing the “right thing,” whatever that means, when I realized it’s all within me. I already know. I feel it in my heart everyday who I am and how is that not enough to know exactly what I’m doing? Just feel who you are, know that that person is so gifted, know that that person is insanely important— not a cog in a machine but an unrepeatable essence of humanity and the cosmos themselves.

I don’t know. That seems like it should be enough.

Anyway, I hope that if you are reading this that you have people in your life who allow you to process big lifey feelings with them, and that you’re not alone, and that people you know are as good to you when you feel explodey as the people in my life have been with me whilst going through this. The world is big. But it’s not ever going to big bigger than what you are capable of, what you are meant for, who you are. I just hope for you that when you get lost, you know for yourself what you want to do about it, and that you have people in your life to let you feel it out your way.

Read Full Post »