10 Ways to Feel

On this past summer

Quick Note: Tomorrow night (10/4) I’ll be hosting One Page Wednesday at Literary Arts in Downtown Portland, 7pm. Alissa Hattman (author of the new novel SIFT) is the featured reader. After Alissa’s reading, we’ll invite folks from the audience to come up and share a page of work from a work in progress. It’s free and a lot of fun.

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1. Sometimes I feel like a failure. I try not to think about this too much, but if I’m feeling particularly bad about myself, I can count the ways I’ve failed the younger version of me. Not always. There are days when living is a triumph. I don’t mean it’s a triumph because I was productive. I mean I’m triumphant because I’m alive on this planet, that I didn’t die when I wanted to, that of all the times and places to have been born, I was born here, in this body, at this time. Other times I can only see the ways I could be living a more honest life, one where I cook delicious food for every meal instead of eating another bowl of cereal and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, where my brain doesn’t betray me, a life where I am bright and focused and not in my head about whether people like me. Maybe a life where I don’t care if other people like me. Success does not erase feeling like a failure. I may always try my best, but sometimes my best isn’t very good.

2. There is something that glows inside me. Who knows what it is? One morning in July it is particularly bright. I’m in the San Juan Islands where my friend is going to marry my other friend. The sea knocks against the beach. Finches whip across the sky. I sit on the patio with friends, and no one is concerned about the busyness of the day. We chat about books and tell old stories. I am honest the entire time. Later, I descend the stairs in a hot pink asymmetrical dress, cut high so my left thigh pokes out. My wife, who stands at the bottom of the stairs, gasps and takes a picture with a nearby disposable camera. I feel loved, and it’s clear to me I deserve it.

   

   “Weird Barbie Descends Staircase”

3. I have a particularly bad day in August, one of those “feel like a failure” ones I was talking about earlier. I can’t concentrate. I’m staring down the barrel of a novel draft deadline and I can’t get myself to the desk. I haven’t written a newsletter in two months, and although no one holds me to that schedule, it feels like I’m disappointing myself. I spend all day watching Instagram and not working. I read articles about impulse control on my phone. One site says the best thing to do is give into the impulse until it’s satisfied, not particularly sound advice for a recovering alcoholic. Another article tells me to meditate. I put down my phone and lie face down on the rug in my studio. The green shag fibers reach into my nostrils. I sit up in a sneezing fit. I cry. When I look at the clock, I realize I haven’t eaten in six hours. I wait another hour before eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I am, suddenly, motivated again.

4. I spend much of August bartending. There’s not much that could have been done to avoid it, though I tell myself that other people are better with their money, that they don’t owe back taxes and they save and make budgets, so they don’t have to bartend while they finish books between teaching jobs. All I want is to write, but my body won’t let me. She is tired from making drinks, talking to strangers, and running food from the expo table to table 77. God, why do I always have a free minute when table 77’s food is up? It’s all the way outside and around the corner on the sidewalk. There is the faint scent of sewage in the air. When I drop off a slice of pecan pie, I notice the smoke has turned the sky the color of lime pith. I note it, so I can write about it later. Some mornings before I bartend, I sit in my chair in my studio and stare at the wall, thinking about nothing and absolutely everything all at once. I do this once for an hour and a half. It’s not working, but it’s not not working.

5. I do not like my body during this time. I had a breast augmentation revision surgery last fall, and I convince myself the surgeon fucked it up somehow. I stare at photos of other people’s breasts on the internet for an hour in bed. A lot of them look like mine, but I think some of them look better. I focus mostly on the ones that look better. I am mad my body only ever looks like my body.

6. Lately, I feel like my life is mostly a response to the world around me, like none of my choices are my own, only reactions to this bill being past due or this home repair popping up. In early September, my wife hears that someone close to them is sick and dying. They drive ten hours to take care of him, and I’m in awe. It was never a question of if. I do my best to support them from home, but they are in the middle of nowhere. I lose my mind a little. I decide that I haven’t been able to get any writing done because my studio is too messy. I put together two bookshelves and clean furiously. I listen to TOOL at high volume and rearrange our living room next. I do every piece of laundry in the house. Soon it is six pm and I am due at a friend’s house for dinner. On the way I find a table on the side of road and throw it in the back of the car. I realize I might be going through something. This is not like me. I stay up with my friends talking about everything: their recent wedding, sex, work, the table in the back of my car. Seeing them is good. I remember that I am a human in community with other humans. I stay up until three in the morning sanding the table. It’s good to exert control over something, sandpaper grit pulling paint and varnish from the table’s top.

7. Over the next few days, I sand the table, and I start to love my body again. One night in particular I take a video of me working the wood. I straddle it and my tits sway under the work. I recognize that I’m grateful my body is mine to keep. I send the video to my wife, and like magic it travels into space and back down, landing 600 miles away in a prairie in Montana.

8. I decide that actually it’s fear that’s keeping me from working. I sit down and write down every fear I can think of. The list is long, pages and pages of fears, ways I do not trust the world or myself. I go over every fear, digging at its root until I realize that all my fears stem from just two: fear of the unknown and fear I’m not good enough. I fill up pages with writing about where these fears come from. I play fake worst-case scenarios through to the end. I write how I would get out of these situations. I realize that because I was raised in Christianity, I’ve been told my entire life I will never be good enough, that God would only ever let me into heaven because of the loophole he built when he sent Jesus to die. I haven’t believed in a Christian God in over twenty-five years, but the way we are raised puts barbs in our sides, anchoring these beliefs in our guts. As for the other fear, it seems plain silly. The unknown has given me the best moments of my life: moving, fucking for the first time, sobriety, falling in love, transitioning. Everything is unknown before we meet it. I read the pages out loud and cry. I’ve cried so much this summer. I burn the pages in my kitchen sink.

   

   All Things Go

9. My wife comes back. There’s big grieving in our house. I am grateful to be a part of it. My wife has always shown me how to mourn. I mourn the loss of a friend. I don’t write but I don’t feel like a failure. There’s no way to write about this time. How do you write about a void?

10. In September I go over everything I’ve written this summer and realize I’ve rewritten 290 pages since June. I don’t remember rewriting any of it, but it’s all there, including a new outline with a better, more satisfying ending. I make a big to do list for my fall. I write in the mornings. The rain comes back. Fall term starts up. I meet with students who are excited about writing. Being back on campus feels like returning home. I’m almost ashamed to say that I’ve always found comfort on college campuses. Maybe it’s my whiteness. Maybe it’s the validation I feel when I’m invited into academic spaces. It’s probably both. Receiving invites in part due to my whiteness. I still feel so much fear. I still feel like a failure who doesn’t do all that she should every day. I still see the part that glows.