Journal & Musing

I had a conversation this morning with an incredible woman who I didn’t know was so incredible despite having known her a year and a half. That’s what happens when you don’t talk to people–you never learn how truly amazing they are. I am blown away, and I am inspired by the number of extraordinary life stories this 70-year-old woman has to tell. I pleaded with her to write them down, to write a book, and I passed off that request as an encouragement to record her life story for posterity when in fact my intentions were entirely selfish. I want to read this book. I want to have lived a life as exciting as hers. And maybe I have. Margaret Atwood would be disappointed in me if I didn’t tell my story. But she doesn’t know me, and she would never read me. She simply planted a seed that she intended for anyone who would listen. I did.

To satisfy Margaret’s request and another of an old friend, here is a bit of my story.

. . . . . .

I was maybe five years old at the time, too young to be distracted by worries and too old to not notice the important things. I stood atop a hillside of tall yellow grass spotted with gray, jagged rocks and mammoth boulders. The rolling yellow hills extended in all directions until they met blue sky. Baboons perched on the boulders nearby, looking out over their home with the same wonder. I felt an intense sense of freedom. Standing in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of everywhere, looking out over the vast African landscape made an intense, profound, and everlasting impact. Freedom was a discovery I made through a combination of experiences there, witnessing a dichotomy of human bondage and the vast expanse of the savanna. But magic, the magic of the imagination, is the second most important thing I learned and carry with me still.

My mom kept my bookshelf well stocked from before I could read until our house burned down when I was in junior high. Middle-child syndrome is real, but very young, invisible me was given the gift of books to bide my time alone. One particularly lonely afternoon, I discovered a paperback on my bookshelf that had a picture of a dark, wild jungle, with images of boas hanging from twisted tree limbs and assorted glowing eyes peering out of the blackness. The illustrator had stolen the image right from my memory. My family lived in South Africa and travelled through the southern countries. Our travels led us through a mysterious jungle, the looks of which were amazingly torn right from the cover of that book, Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, of whom I became an instant fan. I wrote a research paper in high school over Kipling and discovered his imagination was like mine. The line between imagination and reality didn’t exist for him as a young boy in the jungles of India. As an adult, he recounted his magical experiences as though he were a child, as though they were real, as I have always done with my African experiences. But in a dark jungle, who’s to say what is or isn’t real?

. . . . . .

Eleanor lived a magical life in her mind and some might say an exciting one in reality. Perhaps she will peek outside from behind the heavy curtains in her living room and let some light in. Maybe even set aside the ruse a bit and put a little of herself into the world. Just kidding. Her ruse is often sabotaged by her inability to keep her own light in. She cannot help being her authentic self, as much as she tries to fool the world. Silly girl.

I had a dream once that I fell asleep on the edge of a plateau that looked out over a canyon. The ground I lay on and all around me was deep red orange, and the sun shone through a deep blue sky. I was warm as I basked in the bright sun overhead, and asleep next to me was another person who in the dream I knew but in reality didn’t. I felt intensely at peace. At times I experience this same surreal feeling while awake. I am certain that most of the world isn’t familiar with that lucid dream state outside of sleep. I count myself lucky. I could possibly blame it on my illness, but I have had these experiences my entire life, long before the illness showed up. I have always felt apart from other people. Awkward, even. Others can’t possibly exist in this world I live in, could they? I dare not ask them.

Bipolar disorder is a gift sometimes. Depression is what I struggle with mostly, but sometimes an overwhelming feeling of passion overcomes me. If I’m lucky, the result is something written or drawn worth of holding onto. Today I drove down the road with my chest ablaze. I turned the music up loud to block out the noise, and I held onto my shirt to keep my heart from bursting through.

When this disorder was new to me, my fear of the impending despair that would soon follow the flames would snuff them out. I eventually learned to hold onto the passion as long as it allowed itself to manifest, and I learned to make the most of the good moments and especially the great ones. I’ve been told that I inspire passion in other people in a variety of ways, but its not me doing the inspiring. I am at the mercy of this illness that only a handful of people know I fight.

Writing helps, but when the words don’t come, my fingers itch for a different kind of keys. My insides resonate with piano chords in a way that writing can’t. I don’t hear the music, I become it. I’ve mentioned this to other musicians, and they say they feel the same. I don’t have a piano anymore, and I fear this flame will burn clean through me without one. Today, I am settling for the keys connected to this screen, but the screen remains lifeless. I envy writers who have a greater gift for wordcraft. What power they have over people like me and, if they are anything like me, over themselves. I haven’t felt that power in a long time, but I hear it knocking. Knocking, knocking, this incessant phantom knocks. Tapping at my chamber door, it is.

. . . . . .

Back in 2006-ish, I wrote the beginning of a book. A chapter. I can never seem to write more than a chapter of anything I write. Not true, but the words are crap after one chapter, so I generally refrain from writing beyond an introduction. I can write a hell of an intro and a pretty good ending, but all the stuff in between lacks the same passion as the punch I put into each end of the middle.

So back in 2006-ish, I started writing. I had a playlist that I listened to obsessively as I spent weeks refining this one thing. The songs were stored on an iPod that has since disappeared, just as that one chapter and any further desire to write did. A few years later, I watched a snippet of Blood Diamond, enough to make me turn the movie off, and I plunged back into writing. The movie scene woke up a deeply-rooted part of me that I had forgotten or maybe didn’t know was there. I hadn’t realized how deeply Africa affected me. Little girl me absorbed, potently, people and places in that land, and they’ve lived in me ever since.

Everything I’ve written comes from that part of me. That’s where the words are buried.

I had a surge of well-being overtake me on Friday. That was God. He does that, you know.

My oldest daughter’s family moved into a new home this weekend, and my husband and I went to Dallas to help out. Going from a small house to a large one makes for easy unpacking, but nothing is easy when you have a baby. My family moved 13 times while we raised our kids. I made that number up, but it’s not a far from the truth. Seems we were always living out of boxes. Not until we moved into the house we are in now did I even unpack all the boxes that I sealed in 2005. The time capsules travelled with us. A clock inside them had stopped like a timeline with a dead end. The last 20 years have been an offshoot of the life we left behind in Austin, and we’ve left crumbs all over San Antonio and Houston and even Dallas a little since the departure. Austin isn’t where we started, but it’s where our kids did, sort of. So Austin kinda feels like home. But not really. Dallas is where I’m from and is the place I always carry with me. Now my daughter is there, so a part of me has returned home. She’s a Dallas-ite by default, and it suits her. My brother deserted Dallas for Fort Worth eons ago, and that place suits him. A bit of Austin, that place is. Stuck between two worlds, that place is, like my brother. My kids aren’t really from anywhere because they are from everywhere, but DNA has a sneaky way of pointing us to our roots.

I’ll never live in Dallas. You can never go home again, a guy said once. The house I grew up in belongs to strangers now.

We’ve been in this house for nearly seven years. I unpacked all my boxes not that long ago, finally, to find a treasure of little girl things and forgotten memories. But I still haven’t put up pictures. I haven’t reached a sense of permanence just yet.

It feels good to be back in my own bed tonight with my own pillows and my cat at the foot of my bed stalking my feet. The cat that travelled with us since Austin is a few feet underground outside my window, so I guess this home is more permanent than I’ve really thought it to be. A part of us will remain in the soil when we leave. And we will leave. It’s weird to think we won’t. A yurt wouldn’t be out of the question for us. But this isn’t Mongolia.

I wake up several times a night and generally go back to sleep within minutes. There is a bit of anxiety that I won’t, but I’ve been lucky. Not tonight, I’m afraid. I saw 2:58 when I tapped my watch. It’s now 3:39. Alarm goes off at 5. Morning comes early.

I haven’t been functioning well the last few weeks, and it’s been getting harder to keep my head above water. A lot is happening, which I feel like I could push through. But I fight my way through each day.

A sticky note appeared on my side mirror on my car one afternoon. The handwriting was that of a little girl telling me that if God is for me then who can be against me. Romans. The note is on my dash now. I saw a video about telling my brain that I am doing great because the brain believes what it’s told, even lies, and the body physically responds accordingly.

I’m sleepy. I will sleep the next hour and a half (resetting my alarm), and I will feel like I had a full night’s sleep. I feel fine.

The great thing about having a blog is being able to say whatever, however, and if someone reads it, great, and if not, great, but the words are in the world, not just your head, and on the page where you put them so you can look at them from a distance. Externalize them to gain some perspective. Maybe get a little perspective from a passerby. Passersby.

It feels good to write on the screen again. I have a few word documents of unfinished stories and such, but I don’t visit them much. I have notes in my phone that I jot down when the inspiration hits. Last weekend I sat in the sunny chair while my daughter studied at the desk next to me, and I read through old journals that have collected in a basket there. Most of the entries aren’t dated, and the journals are mostly blank. They all start with a bang and then fade to doodles and to-do lists. Then a new shiny one shows up. Then another. My daughter made fun of my many mostly-empty journals, and I reminded her that someday she and her sister will fight over them. I then found a page among many empty ones that had something silly written in handwriting that is not mine. She smiled. I flipped through a “600 Things to Draw” book and saw a giraffe on the giraffe page that I didn’t draw. She smiled again. The journals are like fly traps. Leave one out and words and doodles will get stuck to a page by unsuspecting passersby (there’s that word again) who find themselves overcome by a sudden urge to write. Silly little girls are particularly susceptible. Had I realized this sooner, I would have spread cute sparkly traps out all over.

I found my one-thing journal while going through the basket. I don’t remember where I got the idea. Maybe I read about it, or maybe I came up with it (I doubt it). The idea is to write one thing down that you learned that day. Anything. After a lot of days you can see you learned a lot of things. Keep one for a year or more and you’ll see the crazy amount of things that you learned and forgot. I relearned last weekend while flipping through my one-thing journal that worms don’t crawl into apples, they crawl out. Eggs are laid in the blossoms, and the apples grow around the eggs. Then the eggs hatch and the worms eat their way out. Nice.

Today I learned that Jon Favreau is a hotshot director who acts in his own movies. I thought he was an actor who always got stuck playing the best friend. Who knew.

Guess what? Tomorrow is Saturday, and I get to sleep in.

And now it’s bedtime the night after. I could go to bed, but I’m in that weird, loopy state when the words show up.

I’ve been learning things and getting better at fooling people into thinking I know more stuff than I do. Maybe if my brain wasn’t so clouded by exhaustion I could put some truth behind the pretending. I think people would rather the people around them to know things. There is comfort in someone else having the burden of knowledge. There is envy in it, too. I’m not looking for either, I just don’t like to not know things. And I kinda like the facade. Until the pressure to prove myself arises, anyway. In any case, I’m trusted to do as I please. That alone makes the lie worth the fear of exposure.

I do a better job when left to my own devices. Maybe the powers that be have figured that out.

Boy, I’m tired.

The conundrum now is do I eat or do I go to bed? Bed, I think. I’m too tired to chew. But I’m also too tired to get up. If my fingers weren’t comfortably tapping these keys I’d be locked in a state of torpor. I’m sleep-writing. I’m Homer Simpson driving his bed-car off the road into a purpley night-night sky.

Eyes now closing. Delta waves are flooding my brain. I like those.

I wandered around the empty house today, bored, restless, anxious, and looking for something to entertain me. I sat in the sunny chair and glanced over the bookshelf. Touched the books. Picked one up, flipped through it, put it back. Gazed at the craft supplies. Walked back downstairs and wandered through the kitchen. Nothing there. A cat stared at me. I ignored her. An interesting change, I thought. I picked up my laptop and flopped onto the couch. Opened up Eleanor and wrote in a new character, Arnold Crumbly. He’s missing and probably dead. She doesn’t know what happened to him. Neither do I.

As I lay on the couch staring at the ceiling, still in my pajamas, I thought how pitiful I am to want to do all these things but have no desire to make the effort. So I got dressed and drove to Jersey Mike’s. I listened to classic rock on the way there and wondered whether rock music is still being produced. I know what the kids are listening to these days because I’m around them most of the time, and it’s not rock. I have a “class time” playlist to expose them to the good stuff, but they already know a lot of it. It’s fun to watch them sing along while they work. Sometimes they feel the beat and show it.

Right now I’m sitting in a parking lot typing this because I like writing in warm parking lots. Robert Plant is singing, and the sun just dipped behind the treetops. Flecks on sunlight dot the concrete end the cars and the dash. A security guard dressed in black and red is sitting on a horse in the shade like a Mountie, and I wonder what he is thinking about as he watches cars. Watches people. Making up stories about their lives, maybe. I feel ya, man. I feel ya.