๐ฝ๐ป ๐๐๐ข๐ ๐๐๐ ๐ป๐ฎ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ป๐ฎ๐ถ๐ฎ๐ท๐ฝ | #๐ท๐ถ๐ถ๐๐๐ข๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐
I'm starting a 100-day thing. Today. Or yesterday. I guess we'll decide together.
I looked around. I love what some of you are writing. Some of you... are probably going to hate me. But I can't think about that right now, because right now... I have a blog. A diary. A place to get this out. A place to let a little light in.
It got heavy. Even when it didn't need to be. Because I was carrying it alone. It was never meant to be that way. Certainly, Handsome helped.He carried as much as I ever said I needed, collected the debris in my wake. But I was a people-pleaser. I had my reasons. So many reasons to keep saying yes. To let the moments take me. I did it the wrong way faster than I felt there could be a right way. I see a right way now. At least, a different one.
In 75 days, I'm seeing my last client.
I hope. For a while.
I hope that this little accountability experiment in blog form helps me keep count. Tomorrow, when the world feels loud and I am tempted to reach for something to quiet it, I hope I remember that I want to retire in 75 days and be ready in 100 for something new. I hope I remember that this hasn't really been working for me. Even if it could. Even when it should.
Nobody call the Reverend. No demons have departed. I wasn't born again, abashed and seeking the truth of Paul or the sudden spine of moral superiority. Rather... I need time.
Time because some people called me a whore when I felt like a hetairai.
Times when the family who was supposed to love me for who I was only liked when I maskedโand the heathens I unmasked for brought me headache medicine and cat food.
Times when even though I've been the crying wife at home, I understood it's never that simple. I understood how he still loved her. How he didn't want to be here... exactly. How he didn't mean to be hungry. And neither did I.
I didn't mean to need his money. Life got expensive faster than we could manage... not for lack of trying. It's earned calluses on my hands and I've seldom known people with a stronger bootstrap reach. Those bootstraps didn't mean much when I was still sad and Handsome got hurt in too-short order.
None of the heroes or adults or sane authorities I'd been promised showed up to explain how to keep getting out of bed every morning to feed systems that don't feed back. But they didn't.
Greetings from rock bottom in the crack people sometimes fall through. I'm reporting live. I've learned a bit here.
Forgive me for thinking some of you are awfully quick to judge. I can be, too. It's been a rigorous self-examination. Certainly, I've made excuses. Certainly there were days I took the easy way or tried to sleep in, days I didn't wake before dawn or bother with the donuts. Maybe you can find a way to measure me with what you believe... sort me into a house or get the lay of my land... maybe you've sized me up already. I'm here for it. Here to talk about it. This is what I need time for.
Time to think about why it felt bad and why it felt good. Time to talk about how I felt powerful. Times I disassociated. Times I'm glad I didn't. I need to think about whether it's a path I'd never want for Easy, or a path that I'd be proud for someone to follow. It could be. But not this path. Not the way I've been doing it.
In our great euphemism... I had a knack for making pies. I shared pretty openly. My husband, Handsome, was very proud of my baking. He liked sharing my desserts at work and before long, people were coming around and making requests. It was fun and a little messy and a little wild and we felt alive.
Too fun? Too alive?
The grocery dollars were already a little harder to stretch. I think Hemingway said you go bankrupt two ways: slowly and then all at once. Where we were headed, even a bankruptcy attorney was a luxury expense. Too many private jets to Dubai? No... just the regular blue-collar thing. It seems the sum of all our combined education and professional effortsโand there really were effortsโis a unique math. When you factor in cost of living, there was already an imbalance.
It's no small truth that with employer-sponsored life insurance, or even social security, Handsome and I are worth more dead than alive on paper. If you think it matters, I can tell you I did, too.
Where I am from... who I am from... what this all cost... there's a lot to say. The part I need time for is this... I am not ashamed. When I am in this room or in their arms. I've learned things. Things nobody seems to listen long enough to hear. Things I take too long to say.
Did you know that bodies can forget aesthetics? That pair bonding is not the same as sexual monogamy? That silence is keeping more people apart than words?
Did you know he can love you and provide for you and take you on vacation and be terrified of life without you and still be so fucking lonely?
I've brought a widow back with a song. I've been a muse. I've been a relief. I've been why he was nicer to the kids that night. I've suggested the restaurant and the birthday gift that brought you closer. You just didn't know it because you saw me... like I sometimes see me. Through the lens of my mother. Of a church. Of a world that teaches strange things about scarcity and love and possession and connection and closeness and hunger and need and intent.
I'm not retiring because I can't handle nuance. I am retiring because I can't handle it alone.
I can't carry your marriage and grief and loneliness and unpredictability and need and desperation and attention and lust and love right now. I can't carry it because it's unpredictable. Some seasons of my life have flourished in spontaneity, but I'm approaching 43 and I have dreams, too.
Some days, it was the misters who couldn't make it and that meant a moved bill or another notice. Sometimes it was me... another day I couldn't face the world as it saw me.
I don't know if I did the wrong thing or the right things in the wrong order. I don't know if I'd started here instead of there, if I'd had a little release valve or an industry friend or a shoulder angel, I might have never become all those ugly little words. I don't know how to love the truth I found in those rooms without hating myself for why the rest of you hate me... but I think we need to talk about it.
I also might not have found the truth that I didโthat exists in a room where two people can occupy a space and commit an act that is somehow everything in this world and also nothing... and how that made me want a voice I could use...I just don't know how.