Sometimes I forget just how much I don’t fit pretty much anywhere. I follow Andee Scarantino and Ash Ambirge, two not-as-out-of-sync-as-me Substackers, and think, “Boy, if only I coulda/woulda been more like them when I was younger”—except I couldn’ta and probably wouldn’ta. At no time have I ever had my shit together the ways those writers do.
My shit never complied enough to sustain employment for more than nine months—and no, I’m not referring to pre-motherhood-ness, which, yes, felt more like a duty than a coming blessed event. None of those wonderful, glow-y sensations, although the estrogen did soften me up, according to my husband. It’s probably telling that I didn’t really bond with Baby until most of it had drained away. More a nursing manny than mommy, I guess.
I accepted my both-and-neither-gender non-fitting-ness as my natural due for sixty-six years until the day I walked into an LGBTQ 55+ support group and found myself—not exactly like everyone else, but remarkably accepted by all assembled. The group’s collective energy non-unhinged me for once (although I certainly unhinged myself that first meeting). Surrounded by mostly gay men, I didn’t so much match their weave as felt part of its thread. I reveled in the comradery until life happened, schedules rearranged, and I lost access to their weekly get-togethers. Still, whenever the stars align enough for me to join their Zoom, I feel “part of” again.
Lemme tell ya, for a multi-marginalized other like me, that’s a hellova fine sensation. Yet here, now, some four-and-a-half years later, said group still constitutes my most fit-inity—a fact so natural at this point it only kicks me in the teeth whenever I must needs fill out a form.
It can hardly be surprising that my non-conforming nonconformity non-fits within any twenty-first century medical, insurance, or government form. Whether too neuro-spectrum literal or creative-spectrum deviant, I can never manage to squish who, what, and why I am onto a standard psych intake sheet, either—and don’t get me started on character-limited social-media descriptions! Fortunately, my aversion to all things religion—be they political, medical, deity-based, educational, or spiritual—protects me from needing to dissect myself into fill-in-the-blank segments too often. But with my business just as multi-pronged as its owner (me), I find that whenever I try to parse WCLLC into key phrases, keywords, or key points, I get so keyed up I can’t think, reason, or function.
Thus bringing me to the point of this diatribe: a Key Secret, to use business-babble, discovered as I once again rolled past depression into melancholia one exasperating day shortly after nightfall. I’ve written about that emotional drop before. It happens every evening when the sun goes down, which, coincidentally, happens at just about the same time I get too tired to keep working every day and therefore must needs find something else to occupy my thoughts and energy.[1]
Thanks to my Sis-by-love, I’ve been taking proteolytic enzymes for about five weeks, and have been feeling so much better physically that I’ve taken to working past sunset… thus leaving fewer hours to get through before I can let myself hit the hay (my nighttime refuge, since I’m always better in the morning)[2].
Ergo, I threw myself into work—my daytime refuge—and began chipping away at my endless to-do list. But no good deed goes unpunished, right, and most of what I’d been putting off involved vertical learning curves for my online virtuality. Thus my tech camel collapsed under one-too-many how-the-hell-do-I-configure-that straws one frustrating day, forcing me to retreat from my computer with waayyy too damn many hours to go before I could snuggle under my amazing eucalyptus-and-micro-fiber Buffy comforter.
And as usual, “How am I going to fix that?! How am I ever going to make that work?! Where am I going to get the funds to cover bladity and yadda and all the rest?!” roared in to fill my headspace as I dabbed at self-soothing with mindless computer games. Wasn’t long before that 20 July 2024 end date started lookin’ mighty tempting again, but hey, I’m nothing if not Einstein’s definition of an idiot. I’ve made an art out of the doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.
So after scrolling through my database of mantras, affirmations, and visionings from all the books I’ve ghosted, read, and reviewed, I turned to the psych-babble, therapy advice, and behavior-modification tricks collected from other readings, listenings, and watchings. I rehashed the how-does-that-make-you-feel dares and the brain-chemistry circular non-resolves gleaned from classes and lectures—not to mention PTA meetings and bipolar-support groups and how-to-parent-your-gifted-child booklets and symposiums and behind-closed-doors confabs, mostly led by EINOs (Experts In Name Only).
Nothing helped. I had too much time to kill and a psyche with access to an equal—if not larger—collection of every failing, failure, and dumbasfuck fiasco it could drag out of my subconscious to counter every feel-better trick I threw at it.
“Practice emptiness,” a long-ago client once told me. “Learn to be still,” she counseled with a knowing smile as she gifted me with a handful of meditation tapes and mp4s. Great stuff, all of it. Really. I usually felt less frantic whenever I could get through one. But I was still always lightyears shy of meditation’s magical promise: Optimism. Contentment. Peace. Solace. And if I relaxed enough, I fell asleep.
“Once you face the truth about your abusive childhood,” overlapping therapists’ voices rumbled in my head, “you’ll be able to forgive yourself and your abusers.”
Shit, wasn’t that the point of MY LIFE AS A TURTLE? Granted, writing it nullified my suicide plans, but no amount of facing, forgiving, blessing, and releasing stopped my yum from being yucked. I was still pandering, weak and weary, to long-inculcated dismay-denigration-despair self-pity.
Out of nowhere, a synapse flickered on, “Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only change form.”
Yeah… so what?
Two brain cells looked at each other and unison-ly said, “In all the universe, there is no such thing as a one-sided coin.”
Uh huh. I know that. What’s the point?
“Negative thoughts are just negative energy,” my suddenly refocused mind recognized. “I cannot destroy said negative energy…. but I’m not the one creating it, either. It has to exist, or I’ll never get to the positive I want…”
Hang on a minute… does that mean I need to stop trying to work around it… redirect it… make it go away? Do I need to… seriously?... just let it exist, undisturbed, unabused? Am I telling me I need to stop trying to control—OMG, I’m vibrating like a tuning fork—and just let all the crap morph into okay on its own! Maybe—really? is it possible? —all that advice, all those affirmations, all that trying to manifest and manage my negative thoughts and feelings are actually disrupting its natural coin flip!
Good grief! Is this how I’ve been self-sabotaging? Cock-blocking my distrust and cynicism so much it can’t dissipate on its own??!
By that point my butt was spasming the way it does whenever I channel Cassandra or any other cosmic entity/power/whatever. What the hell, I’ll give it a try.
I closed my eyes and let myself feel miserable, having to consciously fight the impulse to stop or dissuade or hide as wretchedness poured into my brain, pushed on my shoulders, kicked my solar plexus, and itchy-burned my groin.
What an utterly lousy experience! I wouldn’t let Me try to clear my mind, or reassure myself, or disengage, even as every dumbasfuck mistake, thought, action, event, conversation—everything that was wrong, that I did wrong, that was going wrong—eagerly joined the fray. I actively made Me stop Me from stopping myself from feeling it all.
After I don’t know how long, the electricity lessened. On its own. No mental or physical intervention. It kept ebbing, slowing, lightening, until it just ceased. Gone. Not even an after-tingle left behind.
I was… okay. Kinda empty, in fact.
Still. Clean. I thought… nothing.
Wow. Except: now I know how to man up and take care of that problem I’ve been beating myself up over.
Double wow. I didn’t have to persuade myself; I knew it was the right way to go. The next day, I took that previously unfeasible step—and it worked.
Now, all of a couple week’s later, as soon as I catch myself trying to workaround my fears and panic, I stop and deliberately welcome my doubts, willies, and self-ridicule. I sit, defenseless, with my out-of-control resistance until it dissipates on its own. Which it does, every time. Because it’s just energy. The stronger it is, the more it feeds my dread, the better its flip side turns out to be. Can I get a “Duh”?
O, how I’d love to tell you it’s easy! Nope, it ain’t, at least not for me. In my younger years, in my forties, fifties, and even sixties, I’d been too busy to let sadness or misfortune wrap me in despair. I always had an answer, always figured a way out. But now, post-losing my husband and birth family… post-stroke and broken face… post-so many missteps and wrong choices and poor judgements… the only “easy” in my existence is falling, so familiarly, so comfortably, into desolation.
But I am indeed a stubborn cuss. I’m deliberately grooming myself to catch those downward slides a bit faster, to confront myself with “hey, it’s just energy, I’ll leave it alone ‘til it changes” quicker, and to actively look for those positivity nuggets when the coin turns. Sometimes, it’s just an irrational calm, a quietness part of me wants me to deny. Fortunately, I’m getting better at ignoring my dumbasfuckness.
*sigh* Recovery sucks. Why can’t it just be one-and-done?
By the way, this is not Buddhist enlightenment; I feel no new divine insight. And I’m not suddenly clairvoyant. My cosmos-connection is as it’s always been. On the other hand, I do understand one of my favorite quotes a smidge better.
“When effort is needed, effort will appear. When effortlessness becomes essential, it will assert itself. You need not push life about. Just flow with it and give yourself completely to the task of the present moment...” Nisargadatta Maharaj
My brain understands I must needs purposely non-manipulate what’s already in progress, that wrestling my blackness truncates its natural transformation into lightness. It’s taking my nervous system a bit longer to accept the ludicrous idea that I don’t have to work so hard to make good things happen in my life.
I just have to get the fuck out of their way, so they happen naturally.
Who’d athunk? Turns out The Secret isn’t a deep dive into psychology + religion + spiritual, after all. It’s just (and all of ) bloody physics!
[1] Yes, I know it isn’t a coincidence. And yes, I understand the difference between depression and melancholia. My dumbasfuck-inity doesn’t make me delusional—just irrationally resistant.
[2] This ridiculous habit was ingrained in childhood, when my parents would not allow me go to bed when I got tired. I had to stay up and watch TV with them until it was appropriately late enough. Sometimes it strikes me how backwards my life was: I could not play with my brother, not kiss my father goodnight, not go to sleep when my eyes begged to close.
Genius.