Eloquent as Fuck - Eloquent as Fuck

Memory and Love

5/16/2019

Today I woke up and remembered the smell of things. I looked outside and decided to say good-bye, again, to the lilacs for one more year. As I walked among them this morning I thanked them for every lilac memory they brought back to me, for every soft purple experience I threw myself into.

Love is like this. As I say good-bye to this relationship, I also say good-bye to so many others. I measure this loss against the others in my life and this one feels like it has instructed me on how to handle it when grief arrives at my doorstep. This loss, in all its brutality, has shown a light onto what I can still hold, and what I must let go.

As I carry the grief with me from this loss, I also carry the lessons, the growth, and the grueling breakthroughs that always happen when you are with someone who challenges you to be yourself.

It occurred to me after my walk that I barely remember the details of my marriage or my wasband; as if that whole series of events took place in another life to another person, and I could feel the relief of it wash over me as I realized that relationship was the one that almost put me to sleep; endless hours in front of the TV, smoking pot, eating ice cream, and avoiding any real conversation that might lead to intimacy.

It is a comfort to know that I did not spend this last relationship sleeping. Though it was challenging, it was a constant call to myself, a song in my bones reminding me every morning and every night who I wanted to be. There was so much effort towards acceptance in the relationship. So much about appreciating the present and examining my role in it.

I started to fear that I might forget him, forget us after a number of years the way I have forgotten my wasband, but I know this is not possible, because though the relationship could not go on, it did prepare me to move forward into a life I could not have imagined before hand. This relationship has been pivotal in that it showed me who I am, and more importantly, who I might one day be.

Slow

5/9/2019

The pace of my life has been rapid. It has been a heartbeat, a half-breath, a quickened pulse of a rhythm that I have been keeping. And it has worn me out.

So I have decided to slow. Now, I rest. I consider. I walk in my big rubber boots in a thoughtful rhythm, mindful of the birds around me, singing their way through the day, keeping their own time while I keep mine. It is something I am not yet good at, this pace. I have to focus on noticing. It is the only way to go slow.

If I take the time to notice the smell of the flowers on the air, the sound of the bees in their work, the look of the clouds gathering in the blue, I can do it. I can slow down and take a measured approach to my life. But when my days are filled with "should's and "have to"s, accidents happen, and I miss a lot of what I have come to enjoy about my life.

But there is more. I have learned a new way to be around people. I have recently noticed that I am not reacting to people's behaviors because it is such a fast rhythm, reaction. It happens so fast I often make mistakes and hurt people, and in extension, myself. The slow way is to consider. The slow way is to think what future me wants to have, and how she wants to feel. This takes a while because I don't know her yet.

But when someone does something that is inconsiderate, or does something that hurts me, instead of reacting to that incident, I go about thinking how to move forward without resentment; how to live my life so this behavior no longer bothers me. It is a process. It is not an in-the-moment thing, so I don't rush. I give myself the time to go forward so I don't subject myself to the behavior that causes me pain. Instead of arguing over what someone did or didn't do that hurt me, I just alter my behavior so I no longer put myself in those situations. Additionally, the pain from the original event dissipates because I am not focusing on what hurt me, or what they did, but on how I can ensure that I won't be hurt again.

It isn't my responsibility to correct the behavior of others. It is my responsibility to go through my life in love, in joy, and in the knowledge that I have control over how I can feel about things, I just need to be methodical and somewhat reserved in what I share of my emotions.

This has been a bit shocking. I suddenly feel an increased sense of comfort around people because I have realized I don't have to trust them, I have to trust myself to do the right thing so I don't end up saying or doing something that is hurtful. I must trust myself to take good care of my heart while not damaging the hearts of others. This is a slow and careful thing to do, but it is one of the most important things I have been able to change.

I look back on my life and see how I have hurt people, and how badly that has always made me feel about myself. I have decided I don't want to carry that with me anymore. It is too much of a load, and I have been the one packing the heavy bags.

After I practiced this a few times, with a couple different people, I felt transformed. I have struggled with feeling taken care of, feeling loved, all my life. It seems obvious now, but I was putting the responsibility on other people when I should have been the one taking the wheel. I have come to see that most people aren't really all that good at taking care of themselves, so expecting them to take good care of me, well...it isn't really logical.

And all of this because I decide to go slow. I know it will be a while before I can do this without thinking, before it is second nature, but the fact that I am able to do it at all feels a little bit like a miracle. It's almost embarrassing to admit that I am past mid-life and I have just discovered how to really take care of myself.

All I have to do is go slow.

Old Work

5/4/2019

"Carry" 1997 5'6" x 3'6" Paper, pastel, clay

There is so much in endings. So much that feels like death and sounds like doors slamming shut. The life, now in the body of death, hums to a close and everything that began, everything that was fresh surprise ceases to be. The future that I thought I saw in the hills of the city has crumbled to dust and everything has fallen through the fabric of what I was expecting would be.

These were the racing, mewling thoughts I tried to manage as I came upon the art work I had made more than twenty years ago. Evidently, the lot of it, about ten pieces in all, had been in storage in some back room of my old school, and in that time, had become the property of that institution, even as it planned to shut its doors for good. Forever. I came to the school's final sale hoping to buy a piece of OCAC (Oregon College of Art and Craft). I wasn't planning on coming across these old pieces of who I used to be.

I picked up a piece from one of the tables I used to wait on when I worked in the school's beloved Hands On Cafe. A smooth, shiny black and purple sphere with the words, "shake it baby" on it, I shook, and the thin rattle that came from within the ball reminded me of the person I was in art school, or maybe, the person I was trying to be. That me seems lifetimes old, but I can still feel her in my bones. She was bold. Maybe too bold. Maybe too mean. She said things without thinking, sometimes triggering tears, arguments, or inconvenient relationships. She tried so hard to shake her demons, so hard to rise above the rage in her veins. She never could quite do it, and she never stopped trying.

I'm still trying. I look at the work I used to make and I can see what I was hoping to become. I don't want to be her anymore, that person. So much has shifted within me, so much of what I used to suppress is now the stuff I celebrate. I love how stiff my old work is, how safe. It is easy work. Functional art that is attractive, but in the end, unsatisfying. I couldn't bring myself to buy one. I couldn't bring myself to buy the person I was trying to be.

There is a heartbreak in my old work. Even in its safety, there is a striving, a yearning to be loved, to be accepted, to be seen that feels so familiar and so desperate. I see how obvious it is now, but then I thought I was being secretive. I thought my ardent desire to be loved was well-concealed and only whispered on my long bike rides to or from school. I never considered that it was so obvious.

I wonder what I will think of the work I am making now in twenty years. Will I see my heartbreak? Will I see something that I am blind to now? Will I even be around to see it? What I will be making in twenty years? Will I still be struggling with my desperate need to both grasp at and push away love? Will I still be trying to rise above my rage, or will something happen between then and now that will save me from it?

These are the things I have come to, after being confronted with my old work and another anchor diminished.

Little Things

4/26/2019

I used to do all these little things for him. When we were first dating, and he would go out on fires, I would research new beers and buy him some to put in his fridge to greet him when he got back. I would leave him little notes telling him I was thinking about him. I would make little objects and put them in his wallet or his bag so he would find them at some point during the day and know I was thinking of him. Later on, I would record me singing love songs while he was out on fires and send them to him.

I did big things for him too, but I so enjoyed doing the little things. I don't know why but they felt more meaningful.

It's fire season again and I saw on social media that he is going. My heart ached for the days where I would prepare surprises for him. I am sad that this summer, I will not be looking forward to his return, and savoring every moment of the time he is here. I will not be working in his garden, or on his house. I will not be doing anything for him to let him know how special he is to me.

I woke up feeling this loss acutely today. I don't know if it was the bird song, or the sun, or cloudless sky, but this morning, the ache from the loss of him brought me back to all the things I used to do for him, all of the ways I could express my love.

But I will move on with my day and build my own garden, work on my own house, create a space for myself that is comfort, love and healing all in one. I will spend my creative energy, as I have these past months, on myself. I have been doing just fine with this since January, doing special little things, making little objects for my home, planting herbs and fruit along what will be a garden path to my front door.

As I work to make my tiny house a home, I wonder if this is what was missing all along. If my efforts to make him feel special took too much of my attention away from caring for myself. I suspect it might be the case. I have a habit of doing this, and for him, I fell so deeply in love that I might have lost myself in it a bit. I do not blame him and I don't regret it. I am happy to have loved him so deeply.

I am also happy that I am now showing myself this love. Happy that my tiny house is not even finished yet it is full of the care I have always brought to my personalized living spaces. I am eager to sit in my garden among the flowers and the herbs and the fruits of my labor and drink in the love I have poured into my new life.

How lovely it is to feel this, how lucky he must have felt to have it. How sad it is that it had to end in order for me to provide this for myself. I feel this as my own failing, and the hard lesson in it grates on the tender edges of my life and points to the work still to be done. This is not the satisfying work of the garden or the home; it is the grueling work of the heart. It is the work that must be done if I am to move on and into any type of new relationship in the future.

But for now I won't worry about that. For now I will work in my garden and for now, that will be enough.

How To

4/19/2019

There are days that wake me from my sound body. They get going before I do and call back to me to shake a leg and move into the bright. I ramble in and bump around between the hours, hands in the deep pockets of my overalls, feeling my way through the flowers and the herbs, the house, the work. On these days, I don't know if I am in a waking slumber or a sleeping consciousness, but as I move through and within this dream, I feel out my life.

I have been quietly counting minutes, raindrops, and clicks of the key board. I count steps. I count bags of tea. I count the birds that visit me in my places and immediately forget the numbers, because after all, they don't really add up, not to anything of substance but a life passing by.

As I go through my days, I consider whether I am spending my time or passing it. I engage as actively as I can, then release the engagement within a terrified wonder. Am I deciding to die or to live? Have I brought the life I have always wanted to me, or just thrown it away? I am in between everything that is this and that, and as I move through, I carry an ache within me that is almost unbearable.

There is great joy too, but this is always tied to events, accomplishments, and experiences. I am striving for a sustain. I am reaching for something that is not dependent upon an action, but on an awareness. I am looking for more than a safe place to keep my things, I am looking for a container for a life of value.

As I plan for the lock for my front door, I bask in the irony of keeping safe all of that which for so long lived comfortably packed away in a basement. I consider tossing it all to keep my home sparse, or at least, free of things that for so long have not mattered enough to consider. I ruminate on the objects I want to live with and around, and at how much joy I will feel at being in a home that feels exactly like me. I used to believe that I could know myself through all the things I use to fill space in my life, but this proved to be a hollow knowledge. Later, I thought, I could better understand myself through interactions and reactions within stressful situations, but this whittled me down to my bones.

In the end, I hope I to recognize myself over and over, within the experiences and events that will make up my life. I will float on within the days that pull or push me through and open myself up to what might come my way. I will listen to the breath rattling within me, feel the heart pumping the blood that rushes, and smell the stink of furious engagement.

And I will continue to ask, "how can I know myself?"

Building It

4/8/2019

Even in my dreams, the ones filled with light and love and unending acceptance, did I not see how much this would mean to me.

After a few years of not really having a proper home of my own, the one I have been building with my own two hands is just about ready to receive me. I guess I didn't realize just how important it is for me to feel like I belong. But it matters, and the fact that I have provided it for myself, with little help from anyone, is a gift I didn't see coming.

I have been going through my belongings, the ones that I have been keeping in a distant basement, and holding them again has helped me to remember my fire. All of the stuff, which is not much in the grand scheme of things, that has filled the edges and corners of my life with comfort are finally coming out of their boxes and into the light.

I have set up my house with a few bird feeders so that the birds will greet me every morning, and I have a window from which to view their antics. This will be a house of my healing, the realization that all I had to give up for a little while was well worth the sacrifice.

It is tiny, my new home, the size of a small bedroom, but what will reverberate within its walls, a life of love and generosity and reflection, will exponentially increase its physical boundaries.

I have lived in many large rooms, many lovely rooms. But with all their beauty and richness, there was hollowness without the fullness of me within them. For no matter how large the room, if you cannot expand within it, then what good is it?

My Aunt had a house of stunning, cold rooms. I remember the smaller me amidst the beautiful art on the walls and the tables, all surrounded by cream and beige furniture. In all that beauty, I was afraid to breathe or even move too much, less I puncture the air surrounding the beautiful things. I would not dare touch them, or even sit without an invite. My Wranglers were always muddy from play, my Zips always caked with the grass and the gravel of my childhood. I could not help but dirty those rooms no matter how small I made myself.

My childhood house was different. Everything touchable, nothing too precious to sacrifice to the fire of youth. My parents loved things, but did not love them more than their small children. For a few years, it was a safe place to play. I can feel myself recreating something like that, something like a place where I am allowed to be.

My house welcomes all evidence of a life well-lived, of my life, no matter how messy, or how inconvenient, I will always be welcome within the walls of my new home. This thought brings me to the edge of tears, where the fullness of my breath rushes into my body and cleans away the sorrow of holding back.

I don't have to hold back any longer, not in my new home.

I'm moving in next week. I'm so excited and surprised by how much this means to me that I almost can't believe it. Thanks for reading and thanks for the messages I get in the replies to my newsletter. They help me get through the dark days. If you are not a newsletter receiver and want to be, just sign up there to the right. If you don't want one more dumb thing in your inbox, I don't blame you. I don't either. It's all I can do to keep up with the 100+ unnecessary emails I get every day.

Prometheus and Truth

3/31/2019

I got home late tonight. It was dark and the stars were out and as I shut the door to my truck, I heard a voice call out to me. The stranger wished me a good night. Standing across the street on the corner, wearing all black and looking intently into his phone, I wondered if I had near-missed him, and when I asked, he chuckled and said, "no, but I did find a _______." I had no idea what he said. The word did not sound at all familiar to my ear, one which has heard all manner of speech and phrasing.

"Huh?" I asked, wondering at the sound of it, a little afraid, a little cautious at his strangeness, and he replied, "Poke Man-Go!" I realized he was looking at the world through an app, so I instantly stopped worrying for my safety, and shouted over my shoulder, "beautiful stars tonight!"

As I walked off I heard him abruptly reply, "huh......oh yeah!"

He had not seen the stars. He had not even looked up yet this evening, this lovely night, the air crisp and the wind a light dance across the street, and the stars...the stars clear and bright and as true as anything I had ever felt. As true as love. As true as peace. As true as desire.

So I walk on and gaze up and remember how different we always end up being, and what I thought it meant and what he thought it meant and how those two meanings would always be separate. Equal. But separate. I would not know his truth and he would not know mine, but I finally understood it, and so I was able to release him for being responsible for what I believed. I didn't need him to understand anymore.

Under the bridge, alone, warming myself by the fire built with my own two hands and happy for the cover and happy for the heat. This fire, my truth, has kept me in comfort, and though the storm rages just beyond the edges of the bridge I am under, I can't feel the rain fall. This understanding comes to me only because I am content to not be threatened by the storm. I am sound where I am. I whistle and hum and hop up and down to stay electric and alive. Happy to make the effort to feel the blood rushing through my body and the hair on the surface of my skin dance in the lovely winds that blow the flames higher.

I dwell in the myth of Prometheus, his gift to us and the torture he suffered. All the meanings and all the ways I could feel that flame. What is fire after all but love? What is fire, if it is not desire? What is fire, if it is not wisdom?

So many things fire can be, even when it is keeping you warm under a bridge at 2 am. Even when it is the fire in the driveway that almost blows up into disaster. even when it is the flame that never quite caught in the wood stove, even as the last bit of it burns out of the relationship.

Fire lives in all things, and while I cannot always start it, I have always known when it is smoldering on the edge of cinder. I see it coming and I do what I can to tamp it down. I do what I can to mitigate the damage. I do what I can, before the fire has burnt out to nothing, to salvage.....something.

Because even the memory of the fire is more than the cinder it leaves behind. The warmth of love, of desire, of wisdom do not come as easily as fire, and I think that was his secret, Prometheus.

He gave us the foreshadowing event of what we might be. What we might know. What we might feel.

And for that, he suffered a lifetime of torture.

And I in return put myself through it, but for who? For what? It is just beyond the surface of my skin. It is just out of reach of my shadow, stretching long in the early morning hours as I emerge from under the bridge and greet the eastern horizon. The storm has passed and I am out of it all. I grip my coat tight around me and head into town.

I hope to meet a stranger's eye, but will not.

I hope to meet the heart of another, but cannot.

It is all me and only me in the dance of another brilliant close, and I am lucky enough to be alone enough to know it.

I hope you enjoyed reading this, or that at least, you understand enough to connect with it a bit. It came through me, so I am not quite sure what it all means. I have literally never been under a bridge warming myself by a fire, but I had the impulse to write it, so I did. Don't worry, and don't give up. Everything that burns down will live again.

Recognizing Myself

3/25/2019

I dig all the dirt and grime out from under my nails with the end of a needle. I notice it at the end of every day, the evidence of the work I have done.

I have energy for all that is work: building the house, making the art, digging the garden writing the journal. I tried fixing the car, and though I was successful, I was not satisfied.

These are my days of recognition, my days of dedication, where I do exactly as I want to do and I change my mind whenever it moves me in that direction. The direction of change, that is.

I enjoy this new freedom slowly, methodically. Without a proper job, I can apply my focus to what is in front of me, and I can choose whatever that is in any moment. This is the only healing I need. I haven't known this softness for quite some time. For most of my life, my days were "should" and "have to." It is not so much the ending of the relationship, but the lack of gainful employment that has freed me up as well. I have had a job of some sort since I was twelve. For the last few years, I have not.

I work, I just work much like Bert from Mary Poppins, I apply myself to whatever the weather and my attitude allows. Last week I painted houses for a few days. This week I'm house sitting. I am also working on some social media projects for an artist I know and helping a lawyer get all of her paperwork organized within processes of efficiency. In between my paid work, I build my tiny home, I paint, I make pottery, and I write.

I recognize this woman, who can do so many things well enough that she can help others as well as herself for as long as it is useful and profitable. This is the woman who wears what she must for the task at hand and is comforted by the feel of her useful clothing. I love this woman. She is a worker. Her boots give her calm as she walks through the world with a tromp and a little smile on her face. She won't bend to the will of anyone for a while, or maybe, ever.

I don't partake in tasks and events I do not have energy for. I tried. Once or twice. It hasn't ended well. I become annoyed too easily when I think someone is trying too hard or if I feel like I have to try at all. Dating just isn't something I have a desire for, and while part of me wonders why, there is this other part of me that knows, the taskmaster, who tells me to keep to myself. She will not have me paying any of my energy to outside sources. She doesn't care if I ever have sex again. She has kept me from shaving any part of my body. She has kept me hydrated, fed and rested. She is focusing me inward to jog my memory.

As I have moved through middle age, I have held the belief that I had to keep my body in a certain sort of shape so that I could have sex as often as possible, always worried that the sex might evaporate. I am amused now at the thought of this. I will never again race to have sex for its own sake. For within the race, I have missed the little things that make it a joy. Now I keep my body in shape to feel strong, because I know myself in that frame. I recognize the able-bodied woman, the one who feels no pain in her physicality and wants to focus on the pain within.

I have been working towards this recognition. I moved so that I might recognize myself again, before all the men, before all the heartbreak, before even the death of my parents. I want to remember all the joy I could carry in my little body as a child. I see her now, that girl, I feel her, and allowing her out has been a revelation. I know that my tears have been due to the loss of a great love, but some of them as of late have been tears of recovery. Recovering what I have been protecting for these many years. Recovering the heart of the woman I love.

I am recognizing the original me as I dig her up from beneath the ashes and rubble of my life. I am rebuilding her into who I always knew I could be, who I had the desire to embody. It is not that I have been lying, or being false, it is that I have been living under the burden of my own expectations and the expectations of those around me. I am letting those go. I am just going to wait and see what happens. These are the moments before the sunrise, before the child jumps out of bed and into the day. These are the moments of surrender, where I wait to see what I might do next.

Hi! Thanks so much for reading my blog. I have a newsletter too, and I make art. If you are interested in either, you can go to the right and find links to take you to these other places. You might also find a link to some projects I have done and to my artist' website. If you have time, great, if not, keep it in your back pocket. See ya next week.

The Birds will Always Remind Me

3/15/2019

Every morning I wake up to pecking at my roof, which is just, as it happens, on the other side of my bedroom wall. Some days I am glad for it. Other days, I wake up, hear it, and I begin to cry. Just like I cry when I hear the Scrub Jay that sometimes calls in my neighborhood.

It's off and on, grief. It pops up sometimes for no reason and stays for as long as it wants, and all I can do is observe and serve it as best I can, which usually involves laying in bed, crying, sleeping, and eating small bits of food here and there so I don't also suffer from extreme hunger. Crying takes a lot of energy.

After it's done, I feel so much better; empty in a clean way. But it seems to come from an endless spring of sorrow that resides deep within me, always ready to burst at the slightest provocation, or, more mysteriously, at no provocation at all.

That's why I elected to stop eating sugar and drinking alcohol in March, because I know that I am fully capable, and have a long history, of using these things as substitutes for what I'm really wanting. If I get to the cake or the alcohol fast enough, I might not even feel the depth and the breadth of my emptiness. That is why I am crying, because I am not distracting myself from the pain of absence.

I haven't missed the alcohol, but every day, at some point, I am really aching for a nice piece of cake, a slice of pie, (damn you, Pi Day!) or some ice cream. My whole body screams for it. But I know if I give in I will put off the inevitable, and I know, deep down, it's a bit of an insult to whatever I might be eating. If I am to eat cake, pie, or ice cream, I want to eat it for it's own sake, not because I would rather be hanging out with my ex-boyfriend.

The truth is I want something deeper, something that came from my past that I hadn't remembered, until my brother reminded me how food was handled in my house growing up. At a certain point in my teens, my mom shacked up with a woman who had a lot of weird things about food. I refer to them in this insulting way because I had to suffer for them. The fridge and cabinets were stuffed with food I couldn't eat because it was my mom's and her partner's. We were forbidden from eating most of the food in the house. The food that I could eat was often sparse and between my brother and I, it was a race to see who would get to it first, each of us worried we wouldn't get our fair share. Sometimes my mom would eat our food and not tell us so that we were fighting with each other over who took all the pizza bread, apples, tortillas, cheese, whatever.

There was so much tension around food in my house it's a wonder I am not more screwed up about it. But the reality is that it was just an echo of the actual issue, which was love. My mom really didn't have that energy for us at that age, and for the most part, we were treated a bit like a nuisance during our high school years. The food thing exacerbated it, but what I wanted was my mom's undivided attention. I never really got that.

I see that in my last relationship as well. I wanted more of his attention, and whether he was giving it to me or not, that is the feeling I learned to feel in my relationships. I found ways to set him up to fail, or ask him for things I knew he would not give, just so I could validate my own feelings of being unworthy. Instead of asking for more, I would allow him to ignore me, secretly making him the villain and myself the victim in a relationship pattern that had been set decades ago.

This loss has awakened all of my feelings of lack, so going back to food and alcohol is my primary urge. It is my goal, in this month, to focus on that feeling of lack, come to terms with it, and grow comfortable with it so that I am not driven to eat something lovely without proper appreciation. It is my goal to understand that I am actually lacking nothing.

I was able to fix my relationship with food when I made it my own. When I started thinking about what I really wanted about food, what I wanted it to do for me, when I started to listen to my body and recognize the signals it was sending when I ate certain things, I claimed ownership of my relationship with my body and with food I would put into it. All the issues I had as a teen melted away as I saw food, more and more, as a way to care for myself, and used it to do just that.

It is the same with the birds. I am birding now, and it is painful because my world expanded exponentially as my former partner taught me about them over the five years we were together. I saw parts of the world I would never have seen otherwise, and I came to see life in a whole new way. Over the years, every time I saw or heard a bird, I would associate it with him, with us. It was a sweet thing that no matter where he was, or what he was doing, he was not far as long as I could hear a bird's song.

This pecking that happens in the morning, the Chickadees that call to me outside my window, and the Scrub Jay I occasionally hear on the wind are a challenge. I don't want to give up the birds, though it is painful sometimes, I want to in some way, make them mine. My work now is to move to a place where I can hear their songs and pecks as a reminder of all that I have, not all that I am missing. When I see a Bewick's Wren or a Flicker, I want to remember all that I was given, not all that I never got.

I will make the birds my own and over time, I will remember the goodness of our trips to visit the birds. I will remember looking out at the sky with him, feeling how wonderful it was to watch the world grow as he stood beside me.

Showing Up

3/11/2019

It is a strange and wonderful thing to be able to sit within years of experience and extract lessons and wisdom. The challenge is releasing the pain associated with a particular kind of experience so that I am not blocked from gaining the lesson.

It is a peculiar kind of accumulation, these lessons, all layered on top of another to create a single image of wise counsel. The achievement is both satisfying and exhilarating, as the work leads to something that very often is hiding in plain sight right in front of me.

The lesson I am just now learning began teaching me in my youth, as most things do, with my parents. After they split, they both fell in love with new people. Their two children, each eight years old, became less important to them as their relationships went on, and by the time they were teenagers, the kids had the freedoms only the neglected enjoy. This had its benefits. I was able to do things most kids would have to wait years to experience. I also had the added benefit of practicing subversive behavior on a regular basis, which would also come in handy later.

Over the course of my life, I noticed that this very early experience attracted and exposed me to a particular type of pain; that of neglect and abandonment. No matter who I chose to partner with, there was always some element of our relationship which involved me putting in my all as the other person slowly withdrew. My marriage was exactly this way. By the time I left the relationship, my wasband was barely doing anything to keep the household going, save the animals and his pot growing operation. When I told him I was leaving, he tried to argue by telling me he would stay up all night cleaning the house, as if that would make up for years of neglecting the relationship.

I also noticed that some of my friendships would labor under the strain of romantic entanglement. That I suffered as I watched friends flirting with my boyfriends or the other way around. As my partner would foster emotionally intimate relationships with other women, even as he sat in bars with me and watched football. This same lesson kept popping up at me, over and over, trying to tell me something that I wasn't getting.

At the end of romantic relationships, and certain friendships, I would find myself digging out the rubble that surrounded me, the rubble that was very much my own accomplishment, in order to find myself again. In order to put myself first.

Then, in honor of my dissatisfaction with Women's History Month, I decided to go out dressed as a suffragette and hand out resistance cards to women on the street and ask them, "don't you want more? More than just a month a year? More than the lip service we are paid, in lieu of actual money?"

For the most part it went well, mostly I was preaching to the choir, but for two women who snapped at me that they were treated well. that they were already treated equally.

That evening I ruminated on the subject and realized that I, just like almost every other woman I had come to know, had been socialized into this. Into settling for what they could get, into sacrificing all for romantic love. It is not that I didn't know this on an intellectual level for some time, but this hit me in the heart, and as I looked back on my life with this in my body, I saw how predictable it all was. That just as women are trained to sacrifice for romantic love, men are trained to foster that.

And this is why we don't show up for each other. This is why there are some women out there who do not see that the struggle that certain women face is also their struggle. This is why the women at work would not back me up when I would talk to them about a particular man who was terrorizing the staff. It is why when I exposed a male colleague for theft, the result was that I was accused of being a slut, and interrogated for it. This is why some women will not support the struggle of others. Because they are too deep in their own self-sacrifice to even keep their head above water. They have lost too much in their life-long search and sacrifice for love and belonging that when others do not choose that path, they are scorned.

So I sit with this truth today, in March, in 2019, and I wonder, how do I break myself out of this, how do we, as society, break ourselves out of a pattern that is destructive for women and men alike? How do we start to recognize that we should not have to give up the responsibility the bond of humanity demands in order to feel loved?

I guess the first thing we need to do is wake up to it.

Next, we have to start showing up for each other.