Reinvention
There is a practice used by firefighters called controlled burning and it is used to maintain the health of a forest. This seems counterintuitive, destroying a part of something to improve its quality of life. But I suppose that depends on how you view the parts that are being burned; are they worth what you would lose if you didn’t do anything at all?
In the span of a month, I feel as though I have been slowly losing the two people closest to me ( real or imagined — they will both read this and I assume they would say the opposite of what I would out of those two choices), in ways I can’t even fully articulate and I am in the process of going through a separation. I could probably control these fires a little more—I could try to pretend I am not an emotional person with insecurities, I could pretend my marriage is working when it very clearly isn’t. But I don’t know what I would be saving by doing that. I certainly wouldn’t be saving myself.
As I write this, I am at a cabin in Laurel, Delaware, about 45 minutes from where I live. I love it here. It is a kayaker’s paradise. It is one of the northernmost places in the United States that has Cypress Trees. I have successfully made my first fire on my own. I cut my finger on a knife. More importantly, I am alone in a cabin in the woods and I have not once thought about the many ways I could be murdered. Therapy works!
When I started writing this post last week it was completely different. And now I am sitting outside watching herons fly by and honestly, everything I previously wrote was whiny bullshit. You should be glad you don’t have to read it. I am grateful you all continue to read what I write even without the discerning eye of an editor who would trash half of it but luckily for you, I edited myself this time.
Here’s what I deleted: Five paragraphs about how I am not going to get to do most of what is on my 40 Before 40 List because I am sometime in the future probably losing my economic status. I mean boo fucking hoo.
I created the 40 Before 40 list when I was in therapy. I had just had a session about how I’m always trying to please people, how I hardly ever say no, how I feel bad if I don’t do what I think others expect of me, how I was tired of being seen as “nice”. So before my next session, I thought about myself, what I wanted— none of the things on my list need another person, I am happy to complete any item on the list on my own. And if my therapist had a sticker chart for good work, I think they would have given me a sticker. They gave me a recommendation on a Dimsum restaurant ( a list item) and said my expectations were mostly realistic. What a well-adjusted person I was becoming! And I lived off that high for a while, reading books, cooking through an entire cookbook, and visiting state parks. I’m going to give myself a little grace here, we did almost immediately after this become immersed in a pandemic that limited some of my ability to complete items on my list. But I got complacent, assuming I could throw some money at an item so I could get it completed in time ( oh shit, I still need to stay in a yurt? Let me just pay $400 for this one night in a Yurt with no bathroom so I can put a little checkmark on this list on my phone). So now I need to reevaluate, again, the things that bring me joy.
I’m not sure I completely know what that is anymore. Maybe, like most things, the joys change and adjust over time and circumstances. But I think sitting alone in the woods was a good place to start. I have not cried at all in the two days I’ve been here. This probably doesn’t sound like a big deal but I assure you, this is a small miracle for me and I’m grateful for it ( my eyes are too as now maybe they can adjust back to their normal size and not live in a Perma-Swollen state)
I hope there will be some lesson from this, finally, my years of collected trauma will end here, one last big one and I will come out a stronger person. A person not so prone to fatalism and insecurity. A person that is always going to feel like she is emotionally a little too much for people but maybe she will get over that and hope that someone (everyone?) is fine with all the crying because she’s kind and funny and bakes delicious cookies.
Maybe this is just a small, controlled fire or maybe my forest is about to burn to the ground. Either way, I get to build something new.
I recently listened to a podcast where they talked about how sometimes the writing is better when the writer doesn’t end their piece by trying to draw a greater life lesson but instead just tells their truth. So that’s what I’m going to do here. Maybe you’ll be annoyed you wasted three minutes of your life reading this thing that could have been a Dear Diary. But I hope you’ll still read next time.
While I am feeling a whole lot of emotions, being scared is not one of them. And I am really fucking proud of myself for putting in the emotional labor — something I won’t write about now or maybe ever because it is between me and me — to get to this point.