Maybe This Is How It Starts

A few days ago, I had a cupcake for dinner. My children had eaten dinner, but I hadn’t, and when I picked them up, they were totally on board with my idea to go to our favorite shop, Milk & Cake, which has not only a ubiquitous frozen yogurt bar, but some of the best gluten free cupcakes (and I assume real cupcakes, too) I’ve discovered.

Because I belatedly realized that a cupcake, even a salted caramel chocolate one, was not a particularly responsible dinner, I followed it up later in the evening with a bowl of dry Honey Nut Cheerios. I felt a little like I should have eaten a vegetable, but having just gotten back from a Thanksgiving trip, my cupboards, like Mother Hubbard’s before me, were bare. Sometimes, faced with such obstacles, we just have to promise ourselves to do better tomorrow…

Later that night, a good friend told me she missed reading my blogs, which I consider to be about the greatest compliment my right-brained self can receive. I think in emotion. I interact with the world by sense and sensation, demonstrative, spontaneous. I am, at any given moment, feeling my way through. I sometimes wish I had a linear, analytic mind. I stumble in debate because “It makes me feel…” is never the winning argument. Cold, categorical logic is my anathema. At times, my brain is a Jackson Pollock painting, even while I think the strong, crisp lines of minimalism might be more settling.

My friend said she missed reading those scattershot missives and I appreciate that. I miss writing them. The problem is, for the most part, I believe in Hemingway’s axiom, “Write hard and clear about what hurts.”

I leveraged that into 2015 blogs about finding myself and figuring out my own wellness. I bled hot and fiery into 2016 blogs about social justice and equality. And I buoyed myself in early 2017 with blogs about empowerment and resistance. When an author is a conduit for emotion, rather than a scribe of it, it always ends up meaning more, I think. Ringing truer. When it hurts, it resonates.

I’ve long held that life is shades of gray. Except that it’s a rioting vivid chaos, as well. The shades of gray give you depth. The color creates the peaks and valleys. And when, somehow, you can pull from your tightened chest and crushed, still-beating heart and closing throat the WHY of it all, even for a moment, it’s like sliding into a pool of cool water on a triple-digit August day. For a moment, you can drift. I haven’t been writing much. And I miss the drift. I miss the catharsis of pulling out of me the eddying current, before it becomes a riptide I can’t manage. I miss the connection and I miss the process.

Part of adulting is both having a cupcake for dinner, and paying out half your paycheck on rent in the same night. It’s having no one to tell you what to do, but… it’s having no one to tell you what to do. And sometimes, it’s realizing that what hurts is not yours alone to purge. That it doesn’t merit a town crier, or walking about with a hemorrhaging wound. Intellectual honesty does not mean everything has to be viscerally pulled from us and displayed. Sometimes, in an age of reality tv, and 24/7 posts and tweets and filters, I think we forget – I know I do – that we can also exist fully, but quietly. The silence is as unsettling as it is important to the right-brained storyteller. At least, to this right-brained storyteller.

A few years ago, I had a friend who believed whole-heartedly in vision boards. It was the basic philosophy of “If you build it, they will come.” Put it on the vision board, live with it, and it will become a part of your subconscious. Do you want to eat healthier? Add more Zen? Do more yoga? Control your self-dialogue to something more positive? Vision board that stuff. Put it into the universe and, as the saying goes, see if it comes back to you. A few months ago, on a trip to the Denver bookstore Tattered Cover, both my brother and I were drawn to a specific greeting card. I bought it. He photographed it.

It said, Maybe this is how it starts.

I vision-boarded that stuff.

Maybe there’s no such thing as adulting. Maybe there are just adults, unsure of how they got to this place, a dozen different places, figuring it out. Maybe there are just people in their 30s and 40s, or 50s and 60s, eating cupcakes and cereal for dinner and calling it good, and eating vegetables tomorrow. Sometimes rattling our logical left brains from their cages, and sometimes steering our meandering right brains down a straighter path. Trying again.

Maybe this is how it starts. And maybe we start again, and again, and again. Getting it a little more right. Inching to the left. Inching to the right. And ending up somewhere in the center.

A few weeks ago, a friend and I were four-wheeling in a section of Colorado that was scorched in the Hayman Fire in 2002. Years ago now, but more than 100,000 acres burned, and five firefighters and one civilian died. Still today, the landscape is irrevocably changed, as are people’s lives. Rebuilt houses sit starkly new on treeless knolls, overlooking acres of forest that is still charred tree trunks spearing into the sky, stark reminders that life changes in an instant. It’s sobering. But in between those dark exclamation points is greenery. Small trees and shrub and forest grass. It’s left brain and right brain, side by side. It’s paying bills and it’s cupcakes. It’s catharsis and renewal.

Maybe this is how it starts.

We burn it down, but we build it back up. We ask WHY… but then we ask HOW, so that we can begin to understand the things that hurt. And, perhaps, one day, much farther down the road, we write about them.