Why flinging yourself off the ledge is a good thing.

I have written, in the past, about how I truly enjoy spending time alone.

This is not to say that I don’t enjoy the company of others, or that I don’t have genuine interest in people. I thoroughly enjoy time with friends and acquaintances alike, and I’d say that other human beings interest me more than almost anything else.

These things, enjoying time with others as well as time alone, are not mutually exclusive. While I like people, I need a considerable amount of time to myself. I always have, and I always will. There is a sense of overload if I’m around too many people at once or for too long. I literally require the decompression that being alone brings.

I revel in being isolated in quiet, adore to be wrapped in nothing but my thoughts. There is a level of reflection and philosophy that I am incapable of reaching in any way other than alone in stillness. On the other hand, I delight in pounding my brain with loud music and smiling at a room that holds only me while I assault my surroundings with my interpretations of the lyrics and melodies. This is like medicine for my soul. I need it as much as I regularly need to feel sunshine on my skin.

So yes, I like to be alone. I like to have my thoughts to myself, to be able to control my environment, to be the master of my domain at any given moment. I am a hair away from saying that my sanity actually hinges on my having time alone regularly.

And so it feels odd to say that I’m horribly afraid of being alone.

I don’t think I’ve ever really admitted that. I’m afraid to truly stand on my own.  Confessing that is difficult for me. I have always valued strength and independence, wanted those qualities for myself. Yet I feel as if I hold my head high on the outside, while in reality, I often tremble and cower inside myself.

Many years ago, fearing that he would never marry me, I suggested to my long time boyfriend that we part ways.  He had given me some ominous answers to some very pointed questions, and my heart was registering some unwelcome and heartbreaking truths.

I told him that I felt I had lost myself in him. It would have been unfair of me to blame him for that, and I most certainly didn’t, but I had allowed myself to be dependent on him for so much, practical as well as emotional, for so long. I’d poured myself into him. I always knew I shouldn’t but I felt powerless to stop doing it.

When I realized that he would likely one day need to flee the suffocation of my pressing need, that he would surely turn and walk from me eventually, I panicked. I felt the crushing fear of falling alone on that impending day.  How could I protect myself?  How could I learn to be stronger?

I had to force a situation that would make me let go and step away. Inside, I knew I had to take a leap, to make myself learn how to stand alone. Jumping, after all, always seems easier than falling.
It is not. Falling happens. Jumping takes courage.

He did not disagree with me that we should part ways. Even though it was my suggestion, I have always been pained by that.

And so, what happened then, after separating myself painfully from my best friend of 7 years?  Did I spend a good deal of time alone afterwards, learning to trust my ability to be an independent person? No. I lacked the courage to jump.

I am so ashamed of that.

I immediately started dating the man who would later become my husband. I leaned on him as hard as he would let me. He let me lean in all the way. My ex told me in a sad tone, after learning I was seeing someone else so soon, “You are dependent. You just go from one man to the next, always looking for someone to take care of you because you’re afraid.”

I was stung by his words, angered. I dismissed them as jealousy.

The kicker was that I secretly knew he was right.

I held my head high and moved on. I said to myself that I couldn’t walk from the love John was offering me, that I couldn’t allow myself to pass up a chance at happiness. I told myself I’d regret it mightily one day if I did.

Those things are true, I was not lying to myself.

But the other truth, the one I’ve never admitted outside my own head is that I was also afraid to do what I had set out to do. I was frightened to stand completely alone in the world, daring it to knock me down.

“What if it really does?” I thought. I wasn’t confident enough in myself to believe I could get back up.

Was it a mistake that I did not take that time and learn the value of being strong in myself? In a way, yes, very much.

You see, it is not so much that I am truly weak, or unable to stand on my own, to be a strong person and take care of myself. Even through my fear there is a knowledge in my core that I am strong enough. Fear has a way of making you near-sighted, though. I am often unable to see my core. I believe the lies that my insecurity whispers so close to my trembling ears in moments of doubt.

I do not regret loving my husband.  And how could I regret a union that brought me the joy that is my son?  I do not.  This is my life.  I take my past and wrap it like a bow around the person I have become.  I cannot change my past, but I can most certainly examine it, always reflecting on where I have been, learning, and watching where I am headed.  I am the constant analyzer, if you will.

The mistake was not that I allowed myself to love and be loved. That is never a mistake.

The harm was in not allowing myself a chance to see the living proof of my own strength. If I had jumped, I’d know for sure that I can fly, and that would have banished my fear of falling infinitely.

Today’s post is my answer to Broccoli, a writing challenge at {W}rite-of-Passage.

The following people took the challenge, too.

My resolve doesn’t celebrate The New Year.

Do you make New Year’s Resolutions? I don’t. I never have. I have always seen making them as this thing that other people do, like buying lottery tickets or having sex on airplanes. I don’t do it. I think it must be great fun considering all the hype, but I’ve never felt the particular need to do so myself. Besides, I can think of good reasons not to buy a lottery ticket (I also don’t burn money or throw it in the trash), and who wants to try that hard for an orgasm with the airplane sink faucet up their ass? Those bathrooms are seriously cramped. Count me out.

When I was 24 I had the realization that I had tried my first cigarette at 12, and technically, I’d been smoking for half my life. Whoa.

For half of my life, I’d been working on an addiction that held no positives for me or anyone around me, and something about that made me realize what a hold those damn things had on me. It was the disgusting and shocking realization I needed to be completely ready to give up the dangerous habit for good. I was successful. I have never looked back, and my only regret is that I ever picked up that first cigarette.

I had attempted quitting two previous times. I can’t remember specifically why I embarked on the effort the times that I failed. When I try, I draw up vague ghosts of reasons like, “smoking is bad, m’kay” “smokers smell even worse than patchoulied up hippies, man,” and “that shit is expensive, yo!”

None of those reasons was the right one for me. Yes, of course, not killing myself and polluting the environment SHOULD have been good enough reasons, I know. Chalk that up to Me = Assholeface. For whatever reason, I didn’t have true resolve. I wasn’t ready then. When I was, however, I was passionate and serious. Something inside of me would not let me fail.

I think this encapsulates the reasons why I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. It feels like a faddy waste of time – if I’m ready to make an important change in my life before the New Year, I see no reason to wait. If I’m not ready at the New Year, I see no reason to force a change that is so much more likely to end in failure.

Will you be ready to stop smoking/lose weight/quit being a nagging bitch of a wife in 2010?

If so, will you be ready because it’s the right time, the reason is pressing, and you feel passionate about it? Or will it just be because the page on you calendar flipped over and you feel trapped by tradition? If you fail, will you get back on the horse, so to speak, and kick that thing’s ass? Or will you give up because “it’s just a NY resolution” ?

All of that being said, I feel the need to make the point (lest you hurl rotten tomatoes and used tampons at me) that I DO think it’s AWESOME to make healthy and positive changes in your life, no matter what time of year it is.  If The New Year is your time, go for it.  If you like to make a New Year’s Resolution, I do hope you’re successful. And if you’re not, there’s always 2011, right? *wink*

As for me? I resolve to stay up too late and drink too much on New Year’s Eve.  That’s about as far as I can go.  Baby steps.  I think I’ll wait until at least when pigs fly out of my anus 2020 to even think about hitting that ‘nagging bitch of a wife’ one. I can’t imagine being anywhere near ready for that ever anytime soon.

Today’s post is my answer to The Resolution, a writing challenge at {W}rite-of-Passage.

The following people took the challenge, too.

A transformation.

It’s a ring.

When I’m asked what Christmas gift I remember the most, this ring is the first image that surfaces in my mind. One of the most beautiful opals I have ever seen sits like a regal queen atop a shining, golden band. On each side of her, like ladies in waiting, is a tiny diamond, twinkling playfully.

I am not obsessive about jewelry. I appreciate things of beauty, and with these types of decoration I tend to gravitate towards simplicity.

I had never before received expensive jewelry from a lover. I had never really desired it, to be honest. Regardless of that, I found this piece perfect. When I opened the box, I was floored and pleased.

It is beauty, basic and true. I loved it immediately, and still do.

A person special to me worried over the selection of this ring. He had labored over this choice, and this ring had spoken to him.

While it is certainly true that the ring is stunning, that is not why it is my most memorable gift. There is magic in my memory of this gift, but it is not because I received the ring on Christmas day.

The real magic lies in what it later became – an engagement ring. The man who painstakingly chose that gift for me did not know that later I would switch the hand on which the Queen Opal rode, as promise to marry him.

My most memorable Christmas gift was a pretty, shiny adornment that later transformed into a symbol of love, basic and true.

Beautiful.

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Today’s post is my answer to The Gift, a writing challenge at {W}rite-of-Passage.

The following people took the challenge, too.

Time-traveling in my mind.

At first I think that surely I can’t remember something from such a long time ago. I mean, if I were trying to call on a specific, dramatic memory, I’d have more confidence in my ability, but this? I’m doubting I’ll reel in anything of describable value when I cast my line into what have become the murky and age muddled waters of my memory.

Elementary school lunch wasn’t important, it was just another thing that happened every day, in the same place, with the same people. I don’t need that information anymore. It has to have been crowded out by important things, I think. But instead of fishing a boot or an old tire out of those polluted waters, when I close my eyes I see into my mind, as if through the crystal clear waters of the Caribbean. It is almost like I am actually standing outside that cafeteria, looking in through the rectangular windows at rows and rows of tables, each one lined with chattering children.

Then suddenly, I’m not standing outside the windows anymore. In a flash, I’m inside the room where the ambient noise rises ferociously with the spark of my transition. Utensils scrape across and smack into plastic, segmented tray plates that clink against one another and slide along table tops and counters in search of final resting places. Chairs scratch the floor both meeting and departing table tops, as diners come and go. Bags, books, and other items thump and bump as they drop into waiting places, becoming items of secondary importance now that the task at hand is eating, socializing.

Above and beyond these sounds there are the types of audible events that come only from the mouths of humans: talking, laughing, yelling. The majority of this is of the child variety, mostly high-pitched, squeaky, and giggly. Most of the yelling is happy, jovial, prankish. Occasionally, there’s an angry yelp or an adult admonition. The overarching effect of the mingled, youthful voices in all of their utterances is a feeling of busyness, of pleasant fellowship and mirth.

I feel, in my mind, as if I’m standing there, having entered suddenly, but still separate from all of this, just taking it in with my eyes closed. But the deeper I go, the more I process. I’m allowing myself to sink into those waters and wade out to a place where eventually there’s a drop-off. I’m going to fall right in.

It happens, and the next transition hits me with cool, hard plastic under my posterior. My legs dangle towards the floor, and I grasp a metal fork with curiously uneven tines in my right hand. The fork is poised over a pretty ugly example of fruit cocktail.

The cocktail isn’t half as bad as the rectangular piece of gooey mess masquerading as pizza. I know this and at the same time, I also know I love this disgusting mockery of a real pie, just as I love the grease laden tator tots that neighbor it in the adjoining tray segment.

I look up and now I’m taking in a sea of faces at my level. Instantly I’m overcome with emotions that blast me almost simultaneously: wonder, excitement, insecurity, awkwardness, need, desire, invincibility.

This is youth, glorious youth. I have more than just miles to go; there’s a path stretched out in front of me to what seems infinity.  All I can see is shining horizon and I know that forever is just over the hill up ahead.

For a moment the sounds disappear. For a heartbeat every smell of sickeningly delicious grease puddled over cheap cheese on soggy crust is undetectable. The cool, slick cardboard milk carton under the curled fingers of my left hand disappears. All the children move in slow motion.

I feel like a time-traveler in my own mind, and for just that one moment, there’s a distinct and deep pain that knifes through me, witnessing this slice of my past, this irrelevant little reenactment of an any-day sometime so long ago in my life.

I want to stand up and scream, “We are all here again! Back here again! Have we made mistakes!? Let’s do better this time!”

But then it all rushes back in with its loud busyness, its irreversible hurrying of children forward into their fates. For a moment, I feel defeated, and then I blink my eyes, and it all swirls away like bath water that flows down the drain, pulling away both the bright, gleaming bubbles and the dirty scum that once clung to you, in the same smooth motion.

As I open my eyes in the here and now, I reflect on that moment at the end, that painful longing to hit the “restart” button. But I’m here, for better or worse, and it’s okay if I can’t change the things my little self so worried about for that brief spell inside my mind. She forgot for a beat that out here on the other end, I’m not too shabby, and even the mistakes have had a hand in making me who I am today. No regret.

Well, I do kind of wish she had grabbed one of those tater tots and slammed it. This lagging metabolism is a bitch.

******

Today’s post is my answer to The Lunch Box, a writing challenge at {W}rite-of-Passage.

The following people took the challenge, too.

She is.

On a quiet, December night she thinks of him, and the memory of a possibility lost is another layer of coldness that presses in, needing to be held off with blankets and distractions.

She is secretly timid, quiet, and lonesome. Her long tresses are convenient because she can hide behind them if she wants to, when the need for cover arises.

Her hair can’t shield her from my voyeurism. I can see past the layers of distraction she throws up around her; a true rendering of her personality plays out visibly in the moments when she believes that no one is watching her.

I am always watching.

The true feelings she secrets away in the depths of her being, what fools call “deep in the heart,” I am aware of, as keenly aware of them as the casual observer is aware of the color of her eyes, or the curve of her hips.

Even now, her unconscious actions betray her true thoughts. They are evident in every facial expression between beats, the little flurries of movement from her hands, and the way she lightly bites her lower lip for a split second before a strained smile replaces the temporary slip. Each of these things speaks.

The messages are indiscernible to most, the language indecipherable. I, however, am aware and fluent.

In this moment she is lost, alone, unsure. She is yearning, needing.

No one else knows her as I do. There is not another soul who can truly understand what she feels. Surface rules do not apply to the reality of her emotions. One must dig much deeper to nick the hidden, vulnerable secret.

She is easy for me to understand. All that she is can be unlocked with ease.

Of course, I have a bit of an advantage over the rest.

I am her.

The blankets are never thick enough.

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Today’s post is my answer to a writing challenge at {W}rite-of-Passage, “Character.”

About menstruation, armpit hair, floaters, etc…. oh, and writing well.

So, I’ve been quite brilliantly not writing near as often as I used to here for some time now. I’m perfecting this art I like to call “Ignore Your Blog Until It Dies.” I think I’m doing a *really* good job. Only, I keep popping back into frame and, you know, it’s because I love you. And because I like to run my proverbial mouth write. Also, a little bit because of how good you look in those jeans, and that you’re kind of slutty. But mostly the thing about how I like to write. Yeah.

I used to post something every day – and while I’m not interested in pushing myself to a “per day” schedule anymore, I do want to get back to writing more often. And because she’s awesome like that, Leslie (aka Mrs. Flinger) has been thinking of this whole “let’s get back to writing” thing, only she actually wants it to be GOOD WRITING (oh, shit) and after several email brainstorming sessions with a group of amazing women (I think someone added my name to the email list by accident, but I wasn’t going to rat myself out) there’s a little movement, or community, going.

Leslie has launched a Ning site to fuel this, and it’s called {W}rite of Passage: taking the challenge to write well.

So I’m jumping in. I’m going to take the challenges and post my shitty drafts in answer to them here for you to look at and laugh while you point and say, “this shit is supposed to be good writing? BAHAHAHAHA.”

Of course, instead of just being a turd, you could join the network and get your ass in gear, too.

Today’s Challenge? Embarrassing story.

And you know, I am having a little bit of difficulty coming up with a topic because I never have embarrassing things happen to me, and I never do embarrassing things.  I have a hard time even understanding what this whole “being embarrassed” thing is like.  I am poised, confident, and graceful.  Whether by luck, chance, or higher power, I am immune to awkward situations.  All of the stories of my life are calm, without incident, and there is truly a spirit of class and dignity that surrounds all that is moi.

Also, pigs fly out of my butt and there’s a unicorn eating rainbow striped cotton candy on my back lawn, right next to the leprechaun who is counting out all the gold he’s going to leave on my front step later today. Now, excuse me, because it’s time for me to go climb on the back of my friendly, neighborhood dragon and go for our regularly scheduled flying playdate with Peter Pan and Mary Poppins.

I am having trouble because I’ve already written here about all the most embarrassing topics that come to mind immediately.  Like when my mother announced that I’d started my period in front of our male, European house guests.

Who do you tell?  If you’re like me, you tell your mother.  And you don’t enjoy it.  But you get it over with, and then you expect it to go away.

You don’t expect to be washing the dishes after dinner, minding your own business, and have your mother practically float into the room on her Mommy Pride and gush about it to the two MALE, European house guests sitting at the kitchen table.

They speak very little English, but you quickly see that they have perfected that Creepy Guy Look Of Knowing And Thinking Ew Things, because they are aiming it right at you.  Picture it, right now.  If your skin didn’t crawl, you don’t know what I’m talking about.

I.Couldn’t.Believe.She.Had.Done.That.

She CLEARLY hated me. I was SURE of it.

I just wanted to DIE.

Or the story of my first pit hairs.  Yeah.

I remember when I first started getting armpit hair.

I was mortified.

My mom?  Was excited.

I was sitting on her bed, with my hands behind my head, all chilled out, leaning back.  I can remember her noticing the armpit hair and pointing it out, smiling and gesturing.  The expression on my face had to have been one of complete and total terror.  She, on the other hand, was dangerously close to suggesting we should have a parade for my pit hair.

I could see myself on the lead Pit Hair Parade! float, my arms strapped up and to the sides.  Large spotlights would aim at my pits and flower adorned arrows would be positioned to point right at the tiny hairs there, in case people were not aware that LOTUS.HAS.PIT.HAIR.NOW!!!

I slapped my arms down, and tried to change the subject, while mentally willing with all my might that time would just stop.  Maybe God really did exist and I could pray to him right now to erase this?

Because it was embarrassing.

Or maybe you’ll remember when I talked about how I made sure that John would truly fall madly in love with me, one day becoming my husband.  I had a foolproof plan, really.  All you dating ladies should try this out on your man.

John told me that when we were first dating, he had an interesting experience. He was visiting me at my apartment in Winston-Salem, NC. We had been hanging out, laughing, having fun, etc. He had to pee. He got up… walked down the hallway, and went into the bathroom. Closing the door, he turned around, and lifted the toilet seat.

And witnessed a large, brown floater.

Sexy or what?

And you’re probably thinking that I *forgot* to flush.  Ah, foolish one.  Everyone knows that Surprise Shit is the way to a man’s heart. It’s either that or food. Or blowjobs. Or something. Clearly I’m an expert.

When it comes right down to it, a great many of my embarrassing situations don’t really stand out because they are the majority of the strands that weave the I’m A Dumbass Idiot tapestry of my life.  It all just blends together to create the badass that is Loter.

So what if I’ve puked on the side of the highway in my underpants?  Big deal if I drove a car up past the parking space and actually right into the wall of a building once?  No problem if I leave my wallet at home when I go shopping, hold bows up to my crotch in department stores, lose my car in parking lots, say horribly stupid things to people in practically any social situation, walk into doors and fences, or melt my food processor in my oven because I was too lazy to clean it and instead shoved it in there so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore and then forgot and preheated the oven for dinner while it was still inside, like a completely idiotic assface? So what if I write long, run-on sentences just because I like the way they sound in my head and think you should, too?

So what? I am still awesome.

And I’d love to delude myself talk about that in detail, but I really have to go now.  I need to put on my magical, vanilla-scented Invisibility Suit and take my pet dinosaur for a walk down our gold-paved street.

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Here are more people who took the “Embarrassing Story” Challenge today.

Join up at {W}rite-Of-Passage and then add yours, too!