Confidence.

I'd better try

[silvermei]

You cannot leave unscathed when you live in this kind of proximity to this level of pain. But I think it also does something good—or at least, that it can. That it can make us wear our humanity with more humility, more gentleness.

Rachel Rim, “What a Year of Hospital Chaplaincy Has Taught Me,” No Language but a Cry, April 24, 2022

[silvermei]

To speak of these matters at all is to risk being perceived as a problem, as 'political,' and as being opposed to someone. This is where 'pro' and 'anti' rhetoric is like an unclean spirit corrupting discourse. I can be 'pro' someone and also argue that they shouldn't be left alone with a child or a gun.

David Dark, “Team Normal,” June 17, 2022

[silvermei]

What happened to Jammed Upright??

It still exists... just isn't linked here because it's more vulnerable than what I post here. :)

[silvermei]

Thoughts for my daughter on the occasion of her turning two.

From March 23, 2021

How may I set aside the day? How may I honor you, my child? Honor you with words, with hugs and kisses, honor you with time: all this time between us.

Maybe with a cake. I wish you could tell me what you wanted. A balloon? Something commercial? I resist that.

I long to share in my vision. Not of hope, particularly, but to share in the paths I have journeyed and some kind of meaning I’ve found. I wish I could wrap my arms around all of you, carve out a home where you would be safe, given the space to be yourself, near or far from me, whatever you choose.

I wish I could speak to you of agency and choice and of feeling your own power, your desire to live and to be good. And not to be a competitor to you. To be--not exactly lowly, but rather, to be like you. To be a picture you can trace your fingers on, a branch that you cling to, a coin you kiss and hide away, a light in the window that reminds you you are not alone. I am just an ordinary kind of glorious, like you. But the spark of divine runs in us; don’t you believe it?

[silvermei]

“Be your real self with God – as long as you don’t cross this line.”

Last night, I spoke at Refuge, a student worship gathering at my college. Here’s what I planned to say, although I ended up going almost entirely off-script. If I was trying to get this published somewhere it would be more polished, but if you’re interested in reading this rough version I hope it encourages you.

*

I have a hard time with worship services like this. I’m so grateful that Kaylee invited me to speak tonight but I’ve had such a mixed relationship with corporate worship, and praise songs especially. When I was 14, 15, 16, I felt such a strong presence of God in worship evenings. But then there were years when my heart felt cold and I stumbled through the songs, feeling like a poser, wishing for the passion I used to feel.

This is what I want to talk about today. What do we do when the spiritual practices we’ve been handed stop working? Not the feeling of them being a little dull but still ultimately restorative. No, I mean the feeling of participating in “Christian practices” or holding onto certain beliefs that leave us feeling so guilty and unworthy. I’m not here to exposit Scripture, but I wanted to share from my own experience tonight and I hope that something in this reaches someone who needs to hear it.

*

When I was a teenager, I was really into memorizing psalms and chapters of scripture. My own personal writing started to take on the cadences of Romans because of how much it was in my head. It was a rich practice for me. Prayer was taking walks in my nearby park and entreating God for every need or hurt or praise I could think of. I felt so close to God.

Somewhere along the way that changed. Maybe it was because I broke up with someone I cared for deeply because I thought it was what God wanted me to do. Maybe it had to do with moving to New York for college and not having a church community. I was so busy with school that I didn’t read the Bible the way that I used to. Whatever the cause, I felt only distance from God. I was lonely, melancholy. And guilt about hung over my head so heavily. As I was getting older and breaking new intellectual ground, I started to question some things about Christianity. I wondered if I could call myself a Christian at all, and mourned the loss of a faith that used to make sense.

I think it’s common within Christian circles to hear talk about how God can handle your doubts, and how faith can seek understanding, and how we put our trust in the person of Jesus even as we seek to understand how Christian doctrines are true. But at least in my experience, this can lead to a kind of “safe” doubt, cutting short some of the real work that needs to be done. At least where I’m coming from, there’s so much that says, “Bring your questions to God – but only some of them.” “Be your real self with God – as long as you don’t cross this line.” Like, I don’t know, choosing to love something about yourself that your church sees as a sin. That would be a line too far.

There’s a purported openness to learning and growth, but always with conditions. I have a real problem with this.

I’ll give another example of how this dynamic works. Have you ever noticed how there’s a network of approved Christian conservative things? Like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, good. Rachel Held Evans, universal salvation, divorce, bad. Some Christian gatekeepers decide what kinds of media or art are worth interacting with. When I was a teenager, I read a lot of Christian blogs (like The Gospel Coalition, Desiring God, Focus on the Family, that sort of thing) that were all about discussing culture and thinkers, but there was a taboo on certain forms of Christianity. The episcopal church was seen as “not real Christians” because of their stances of women being ordained and gay marriage. But every now and then someone you trust does point you outward to something new that is then a doorway into a less rigid kind of Christianity.

What was a gift to me in that time of feeling so, so far away from God was that someone from within the orbit that I trusted pointed me to a new way of relating to God. The openness to learn from all parts of God’s world flows out of Augustine’s claim that “all truth is God’s truth.” I learned about who the Japanese abstract painter Makoto Fujimura was because he received WORLD Magazine’s Daniel of the Year award back in the early 2000’s. I went to an International Arts Movement conference because I knew it was connected to Fujimura. It was at that conference that I first heard Christian Wiman, a longtime editor of Poetry magazine who became a Christian after facing a cancer diagnosis. The way he puts it is that he “assented to the faith that was latent within me.” He made it possible for me to see my spiritual distance as a form of faith.

I want to read you a passage from Christian Wiman’s memoir, My Bright Abyss, that represents a slice of an idea that I found so comforting. (Side note: you can read an excerpt from this book here.)

You know the value of your doubt by the quality of the disquiet that it produces in you. Is it a furious centrifugal sort of anxiety that feeds on itself and never seems to move you in any one direction? Is it an ironclad compulsion to refute, to find in even the most transfiguring experiences, your own or others, some rational or “psychological” explanation? Is it an almost religious commitment to doubt itself, an assuredness that, in modern times, absolute doubt is the highest form of faith? There is something static and self-enthralled about all of these attitudes. Honest doubt, what I would call devotional doubt, is marked by three qualities: humility, which makes one’s attitude impossible to celebrate; insufficiency, which makes it impossible to rest; and mystery, which continues to tug you upward—or at least outward—even in your lowest moments. Such doubt is painful—more painful, in fact, than any of the other forms—but its pain is active rather than passive, purifying rather than stultifying. Far beneath it, no matter how severe its drought, how thoroughly your skepticism seems to have salted the ground of your soul, faith, durable faith, is steadily taking root.

Is Wiman the right kind of Christian? Is he orthodox? Probably not. But I hear in that passage an irresistible possibility. Maybe I’m not too far away for God to love. Maybe the fact that I don’t pray like I should and that I can’t quote Romans 8 anymore isn’t getting in the way of God’s love for me. Ironic, isn’t it, because that’s the very chapter that says nothing can separate us from God’s love.

To add to this, I’ll read from another writer I’ve come across much more recently – Krispin Mayfield, who is a therapist and recently published a book connecting attachment theory to religious experience. Mayfield writes, “The reality is that distance happens in all relationships. Couples fight. Good friends can go weeks without a text message. Parents simply can’t be with their kids 24/7. A relationship with God is no different. God sometimes feels close and sometimes feels farther than the moon.” Distance doesn’t have to mean that we’re doing something wrong, and we don’t have to respond with more anxious performance to earn God’s love.

Instead of trying to tackle the anxiety with behavior modification, Mayfield encourages us to reflect on times we have felt connected to God and to envision our Divine Parent’s love for us. This God is one who delights in us and runs towards us even when we haven’t done anything to warrant his favor -- the same image that we find in the gospels in the parable of the prodigal son. Instead of a God focused on pointing out how we would be better if we just changed a few things, we have an image of a God who wants to give himself to us. This is Grace. A gift.

It’s supposedly the core message of Christianity, but I find that it gets tangled up so easily. The love at the heart of our faith gets swallowed up in fear that God can’t take the real version of us. Is there a door you can’t open or a thought you can’t uncover because … well, if you went down that road you might not end up a Christian at the end of it?

When we keep trying to hold it together so we don’t go down that road, faith becomes a performance. A way of being “good” and keeping God happy with you, when your real self lies outside. You are forced to cut yourself down the middle. To stay on the side of holiness or righteousness you have to close the lid of your mind, or maybe turn off your connection to your body, or silence your allegiance to beauty.

What if instead you believed that you were safe to doubt God, or to change your theology, or to enter a space where you just don’t know what you believe? And maybe you’ll make a mistake, or people in your life will reject you, but the love of God will never leave you.

I was always told that the Christian life would mean death. This is troubling because it’s ambiguous. In the name of dying to self, pastors have encouraged survivors of domestic violence to continue to live with their abusers. Those who suffer from religious OCD can drive themselves nearly to death trying to get right with God.

I think that this idea of dying to self is expressing a great and powerful mystery that we aren’t the center of the universe and that God’s vision for us is to participate in self-giving love. And in that, we are restored to our whole and true selves.

I want to be willing to die to my selfishness, to not just gravitate towards my first wish for attention, or security, or control. But I don’t want my faith to cause me to die to everything good in the world. The final vision here is not that God wants us just… dead. The hope is that to follow God is to walk into real, tangible life.

If what you believe about faith is making you feel like hurting yourself or making you hate God, something needs to change.

My encouragement to you is to go where you know, deep in your conscience, that you need to go. Trust that God is always there, always with you. He made the world and no corner of it is out of his reach. For me, taking these kinds of spiritual risks has made me more able to accept myself as I am, receive God’s love for me, and look at the world and see its beauty and say to God, thank you, for all of this.

[silvermei]

Her oldest daughter, Anne, remembers suddenly finding herself alone over the dishes—Mom, suddenly hit by inspiration, had hurried to her room to write it down. Jane quietly tucked away many of her poems without showing anyone, while she used others as personal greetings for friends.

Veery Huleatt, in Jane Tyson Clement, The Heart’s Necessities: Life in Poetry (Walden, NY: Plough Publishing, 2019), 151.

[silvermei]

“Love is a thing which should be put to work in the world.”

“Oh darling, we are such fools,” Jane wrote to Bob on December 26. “Love is a thing which should be put to work in the world, not kept between two people while they make up their minds. That is one trouble with us – we are spending it all upon each other, in our present arrangement.”

--Jane Tyson Clement, from The Heart’s Necessities: Life in Poetry (Walden, NY: Plough Publishing, 2019), 58.

Prose poem generated by reflection on this passage above:

The dream I’ve had since adolescence is to love you and love the world. Now I spend my time on loving myself and loving our own (fearing for the future, trying to become a better person, wondering if it's really true that my healing is bound up in the healing of others, wondering if I have really loved anyone through the new convictions I've developed). I fear that my former wholesome habits have turned to survival, consumption, and, you know, child rearing. I know that the meaning of life is friendship, beauty, and wonder, and I feel the smallness of my love. It would be okay, I think, if I were only to take a grain-size step towards the good. Perhaps that is enough. Or, this time would be redeemed, I think, if I could just rest in my belovedness, like Nouwen says. But then what happens to the dream?

Sketch done just now illustrating it:

And, for context, the dream in its original form: a sketch done March 2012.

[silvermei]

You think, at a certain point in your life, that your impeccable taste will save you. As life goes on, you realize it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Nick Hornby, More Baths Less Talking (San Francisco: Believer Books, 2012), 45.

Here’s the whole context of the quote:

“I am still thinking about these words from Lorne Michaels:

‘The amount of things that have to come together for something to be good is just staggering. And the fact that there’s anything good at all is just amazing. When you’re young, you assume that just knowing the difference between good and bad is enough: “I’ll just do good work, because I prefer it to bad work.”’

Michaels’ observation contains a terrible truth: you think, at a certain point in your life, that your impeccable taste will save you. As life goes on, you realize it's a bit more complicated than that.”

[silvermei]

The fear of being less-than, and what happens when we listen

Today I listened to Katelyn Beaty and Roxanne Stone’s podcast responding to the sexual harassment news at Christianity Today. Beyond appreciating their commentary on the news story, I was especially struck by their discussion of how it feels to reach a certain place in a male-dominated career field, and the misogyny tied up in their feelings of accomplishment. I think this was Stone’s voice, at timestamp 27:30:

There’s this idea that women get married and have kids and then they stop working, and they go home and stay with the kids and maybe they start working when their kids are a certain age.

I wasn’t in that position, and I really wanted a successful career, so I will admit some judgment there of women that did that and there’s a lot of internalized misogyny that we have to deal with as well.

I had these ambitions that I wanted to be in the room with the men. One of the things I didn’t ask myself was why was I so proud to be a woman in the room with the men? And why did I want to be one of the guys? Why didn’t I ask myself, ‘Why aren’t there any other women in this room?”

... There’s that male adjacency that we can strive for and feel really proud of, and that’s something I’m interrogating in myself. I don’t want to be in a room and look around and be the only woman in the room anymore, because I think that it’s a dangerous culture.

I’m intrigued by Stone’s observation that some of her career aspirations, and some of her judgments of other women’s choices, were shaped out of a reaction to a stereotype that she wanted to avoid.

While I’m not part of a male-dominated workplace, I have so much to say about this. First, is it so undesirable to be a woman who has cut back on paid work when she has young children? There’s a whole subset of women (my mother is one) who have preferred to focus on raising children and managing a home, and their family is able to live on the other spouse’s income. To take on the “stay-at-home-mom” mantle is what they wanted, and they can embrace that.

Stone and Beaty appear to agree that cutting back on work while raising children isn’t necessarily a negative thing, though they discuss this from a different perspective: the vantage point of women who want to stay in the workforce but who feel pushed out. Further into the episode, they discuss how workplace policies often don’t support families, so it’s understandable that one spouse would need to reduce the labor they perform outside the home to free up energy to support the children.

On top of this, evangelical circles frequently have rigid gender roles with Scriptural arguments put forward to maintain them—motherhood is seen as synonymous with being the main caregiver for children, and men are expected to be the primary breadwinner—so even for a woman who doesn’t subscribe to those ideals, the culture within an evangelical workplace may pose obstacles to her feeling belonging in the workplace and being promoted as much as equally-qualified male peers. All these forces combine so that when the demands in a family’s work and home life increase, due to having a child or going through a pandemic, it’s often the woman who steps back from the workplace. (Why I don’t think homemaking needs to be seen as the highest calling for women is a topic for another blog post, but keep in mind that these dynamics aren’t unique to evangelicalism. Look at the attitudes and statistics related to paternity leave or reports that women are leaving the workforce at four times the rate of men.)

Isn’t it odd that the narratives around an “ideal woman” are so much in conflict with one another? On the one hand, working women feel judged by their 1950s-type homemaker peers for not being the “right kind of Christian woman,” and working mothers in particular feel judged for not valuing their children enough. (That Lyz Lenz article I just linked is a thought-provoking read for its own sake besides being an example of this.) Yet at the same time, women who don’t bring in an income and instead do the lion’s share of child-rearing are often seen as less ambitious, less capable, less intelligent, or just boring.

What fascinates me is one step beyond these conflicting narratives. What do we do with the insecurity we feel about whether we measure up to some internalized or societal standard of ideal womanhood?

In the podcast, Stone suggests that her aspiration to be “one of the guys,” a woman who’s earned a seat at the male executives’ table, may have caused her to underplay the affect that sexist comments had on her female colleagues. In other words, perhaps it wasn’t so desirable after all to reach the “achievement” of being the only female employee in a room of men. And maybe, in her attempts to reach that point, she missed an opportunity to counteract an unhealthy work culture.

My friend Katy put it this way: “It’s a badge of honor to be a woman among men—but what the hell did you have to do and put up with to get there? And why is that okay or worth pride? Instead, why is it not worth stamping out and making sure no one else has to go through it?”

So here’s where I feel the need to examine myself. In what ways do I accept or endorse standards of womanhood that never should have existed in the first place? What does that do to others?

I remember overhearing someone about five years ago talking about how hard she worked to prevent her resume from having gaps when she had her two children. She said something like: “I didn’t want people to say, ‘you had kids, you did the mom thing for a few years.’”

This statement wasn’t directed at me, but that snatch of conversation implanted in me a new fear. People will judge me if I have kids and stop working for a few years to be their primary caregiver. I’ll be less hirable. I should watch out for that and understand the risks of opting out of the workforce for a while. Is this kind of thing a helpful caution to hear (“forewarned is forearmed”)? Possibly. Doesn’t it also perpetuate these expectations among women, causing us to judge one another by the standards we fear will be applied to us?

I wonder if when we act based on our fear of judgment, we inadvertently contribute to a world that allows that judgment to continue.

When I was pregnant with my daughter F, I felt a lot of internal pressure to have a return-to-work plan in hand before I left for maternity leave. In my head, the sort of working woman I wanted to be was always looking out for the needs of her workplace and colleagues, leaving them with no uncertainty about if she’d return to work after leave. I didn’t want to be taken off of key projects or excused from treasured responsibilities. I didn’t quite make my personal deadline of having a plan before giving birth, but during my maternity leave I decided to return to work full time for the first two months, and then continue in a part-time capacity once Michael’s school schedule started in the fall. Ultimately, I think we made decisions that made sense for us, but I wonder about my insistence on going back in-person five days a week, putting up with pumping (which I hate). Would I have made a different choice if I chose not to listen to my fear of being seen as less committed to my job?

A few months ago I started following a natural beauty Instagram account called “notyourmanicpixiedreamcurl” after a church friend shared one of the posts. The account creator, Helen, challenges why women are expected to wear makeup, shave our legs, and engage in beauty rituals far more uncomfortable and expensive than the hygiene routines expected of men. When Mary gave birth to Jesus, did she have “silky-smooth” legs? Was she wearing mascara?

As a teenager, I intentionally avoided makeup because it restricted my desire to be able to cry spontaneously. I still don’t enjoy it, and I tend to go without because I find it weighs on my face and is cumbersome to remove at the end of the day. But I’ve worn makeup in situations where I wanted to prop up my confidence, like giving a presentation at work or meeting up with my now-husband for the first time after years of not being in touch. Just yesterday I bought a pair of high-heeled shoes to feel more qualified in work settings, even though I know that they’ll be uncomfortable and probably damaging to my feet and back long-term. Conforming to these expectations acts as a shield, and even provides certain rewards. (I always get compliments when I put on makeup, which makes me wonder what people actually think of my unadorned face.) Going without the shield, especially in situations where I’m nervous, feels scary to me. But what’s the alternative? Just accepting that this is the way things are, and we’ll always have to conform to standards that don’t serve us or others?

I’m trying to take manageable risks to live my life without artificial defenses. I’m trying to stop fitting myself into molds I don’t agree with. After years of complaining to Michael that my legs were itchy the day after shaving, this winter I stopped shaving altogether, and yes, I felt a clutch of fear to be in the hospital giving birth to my second daughter with visible leg and underarm hair. What would the nurses and doctors think of me? 

When it comes to the expectations about how to be a woman or mother, I also feel fear of what people secretly think of me as a young mother of two in New York City. At least in this arena, though, those critical voices feel less imposing. I want to live a full life, and that means some form of creative work, hopefully more to come than I’ve been doing. It means making choices to care for my family, whom I adore. I don’t want to give up those things because of what other people might think of me.

But the challenge for me from this podcast is that I should consider bucking unhealthy standards even when following them would appear to serve me. There are others who can’t conform to dangerous cultural standards, and to just accept the way things are is a kind of endorsement. That’s a sobering thought to me, and feels like a challenge to be as courageous as I can be.

[silvermei]

I am shaped by my choice (A choice? — to be born? A choice to receive what was given when to turn it down was an alternative not evident?) to suffer:

To forbid myself the fruit I might have had, Taking instead the stone I thought was mine. Would I wish for others to deny themselves the way I did?

Something elusive in suffering A jewel in it, bloody. Treasure, but also evil.

I cannot fathom my youth without its boundaries But oh how mine twisted me.

[silvermei]

‘You know the woman that introduced me tonight?’ ‘Yes,’ Dad said with that soft voice he had used after he fought with my mother. He must have felt lonely with those arguments. To whom did he turn? If not a God then what? Drinks? His writing endless articles about the politics of being a doctor? All the articles adding up to trying to understand his life as I have tried to understand mine? ‘She was my old girlfriend. . . in college.” Pause. My father and I ignored discussing my personal life. A lonely car stretched out its headlights, the beams fell across the hotel wall like two big warm arms. Then the arms disappeared. ‘I felt a certain warmth at the table,’ Dad said.

Spencer Reece, The Secret Gospel of Mark (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2021), 295.

[silvermei]

pinning down a few stray thoughts

Having children does not exempt you from obeying the dictates of your conscience. (One of my takeaways from our second watch of A Hidden Life, a few weeks ago.) But children also deserve love, stability, consistency. I don’t want to be so concerned with being ‘on mission’ that I don’t provide the most important things for my family. On the other hand, the things we think we need aren’t always what we need. I turn this one around and around. Wanting to be more open to neighbors and to others, to give more of my time. And being protective of our time as a family, especially in giving F one on one time with me.

Best discussion of this I’ve heard is “Radical Hospitality” on the Nomad Podcast. In a comment on the web post of this episode, host Tim Nash says: “One of the things we discovered was that hospitality has to be an overflow of our love of God, of ourselves, and the loving relationships in our household. If it isn’t, then we found we were quickly running on empty.” I find that to be true.

Perhaps I resonate with this question of hospitality because my parents spent a lot of time volunteering their time, especially my mom. They also didn’t always teach us about emotional intelligence, asking for forgiveness, being willing to be wrong. I wish we as a family had had a more open-ended idea of what a good life could look like. In my experience, we spent a lot of time checking ourselves to be the right sort of people, a kind of conscientious that I find crippling at times now that I’m grown up.

I was talking to JS on Sunday about The Recovering, by Leslie Jamison. And I made a connection in that conversation that I found surprising and want to chew on more. This book takes up the question of the relationship between addiction and brilliance, and the stories that we tell about addiction. It connects to an old worry of mine - will I be able to create if I have a stable life? The question as a child teetered more on the possibility of turning out to be wild and free and irresponsible, and that being a good thing for my creative work but bad for my dreams of family. 

My life has settled down pretty squarely with my priorities in the camp of family, commitment, roots. So instead the question becomes, what kind of creativity is open to me with all these relational ties, obligations to stability? Jamison’s version of the question is, “Will I lose my writing if I stop drinking?” But she discovers that alcoholic Leslie wasn’t doing the writing anyway. Her first thought in the morning was about when she going to get to drink. It becomes apparent, too, that her dysfunctional relationship with alcohol is getting in the way of making the growth she needs to have a healthy romantic relationship. She has certain tendencies that she needs to grow out of -- she bases her relationships on performing the most interesting version of herself, that impedes intimacy, and she has a fear of being left alone that shouts so loudly it pushes away someone who is trying to show up for her, however imperfectly. She first asks herself in her journal if this is what being an alcoholic is. Then she says it publicly, by attending meetings, stopping attending meetings, and starting it again. 

She speaks of the banality of the recovery story. It’s the same story all the time, of hitting rock bottom and finding yourself unable to get out on your own. Of needing help from a higher power and from the support of others. This mundanity is written into the AA literature too - either a truth of recovery or a warping of the inconsistent narratives that really transpire.

She weaves in her story with the stories of other writers, poets, musicians, who have wrestled with addiction and sometimes found sobriety. It’s not the simple promise that sobriety is better for creativity. Sometimes it is -- because addiction is so debilitating and blinding. But sometimes just being alive and in a more healthy relationship with yourself and others is worth even losing the creative spark. I fear the loss of creativity, but not so much that I would trade the life I have. (The metaphor to me instead of sobriety is the life I have, where I rest on Sundays, sleep 9 hours a night, shelter other living beings through my consistencies.)

A closing word -- Plough has had some wonderful writing about creativity and parenting lately. The one about Madeleine L’Engle especially. 

[silvermei]

public/private

I’ve begun trying to make art again, in earnest: in such a way that it takes away from other things I am doing. (That’s how I know it’s real.) I’m making plans to go to museums more, not because I have to, but because I need things to interact with.

~~~

I’ve been talking incessantly about the Eva Hesse documentary on Netflix. Let’s talk about it sometime, if you’ve seen it. In it an artist friend talks about Eva always going to museums because she needed food for her eyes. I feel that way, too. I’m reading an anthology from Whitechapel Gallery / MIT Press, a collection of essays about artists and work. It extends what M and I have been discussing about economics and the alienation of work from the worker. And as I read, I’ve been sketching the images that come to mind. I feel alive to be able to doodle and try and I think that I might make something good, someday.

I’ve been thinking, too, about the way we present ourselves to the world. By now, it’s a truism that the more time you spend on facebook, the (generally) unhappier you become. I find facebook to be terrible, and yet, I keep going back: what is it? Is it that I want to do something mindless, or that I want to see what other people are doing?

I jealously guard the special moments in my life. I don’t dare let facebook touch them, and spoil them through the envy or judgment of others (the two main emotions I feel when I scroll).

But here on tumblr, I like sharing my thoughts. My writing is too boring to be used as entertainment, and in this, I feel safer. It’s like, if you got all the way to this paragraph and you still want to envy me or sneer and think about how much more thoughtful you are, I almost don’t care! At least I’ve had the chance to show you who I am.

~~~

Here’s a relevant quote to these ideas about presentation and performance from that book I mentioned earlier, Work.

The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labour which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or effort, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output… . In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR.

- Mark Fisher, extracts from Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, England, and Washington, D.C.: Zero Books, 2009) 39-41, 42-3, 44.

~~~

I’ve been having some health difficulties in the last few months, and they aren’t resolved yet. At the same time, I get the feeling that everybody in church is asking if M and I are going to have kids. And I’m a sniveling, shaking mess when it comes to anything about my body. I feel a bitter conflict in myself.

Yes, I want to be known and cared about–and that involves sharing some personal details in my life–but at the same time, I want a level of sensitivity around these details. Feels like every feminist has an opinion about when is the right time and what are the right reasons to bring another human life into the world.

I don’t want the frivolous gossip. I just want to be cared for. I don’t want my decisions to be anticipated like I’m a horse to be betted upon. Yet, I want to talk about my evolving thoughts in these directions. See the problem?

~~~

I haven’t ever really considered death as something that could happen imminently to me. Now, because of my health (or lack of it), the question comes up. What if I really did die this year? Next year? In the next five? I hope that I become more holy in all of this uncertainty, not just more neurotic and unkind.

[silvermei]

Hang On.

I pull out my journal and select my drippy pen and then remember that Colleen says I should write more on here. Okay then. This is the first Sunday in a long while I've been outside in the afternoon. M and I and two lovely church friends ate outside after church. Because of the way the earth was tilting, and because of the placement of the buildings that surrounded the park where we sat, the shade kept chasing us. I was chilly and moved to sit on M's coat with him so I could wrap mine around myself. I said goodbye to M at the bus stop (it's only a short trip to MA, I'll see him tomorrow night probably) and soon felt a familiar Sunday late-afternoon chill. The feeling of dread, that tomorrow I would renter a harsh world where I do not know who I am. The feeling of a weekend winding down. I can guess at a few reasons I feel that: you know, maybe it's the weather. The late afternoon sun and the leaf-filtered air triggers my memory of this time last year, when I would spend an hour and a half or so on Sunday looking over work emails and preparing materials (maybe more than that, but as the weather got nicer I spent less and less time preparing). Those weekends when M and I would be on the phone for hours, remembering, connecting, spending time together. I remember that season with both grief and nostalgia. It was an incredible time, the opening up I felt - the delight at coming to know him again - the surprise at realizing he had cared for me all those years. It buoyed up even my weekdays, when I was waking at 5:05, brewing coffee and making toast, retreating to my room to check email and read a chapter in my bible, sneaking a snatch of journaling time, and then heading out of the door by 5:52am so I could catch the 5:56am express. I would sing as I ascended the subway steps into the dawn, on my way to a job I hated. It's not just the weather, though, that makes me feel this way. I saw one of my old students today - she skipped up to me for a hug. And you know what else brings on the fear and dread of a sleepy sad Sunday? Tomorrow, I'll be trying something hard and new (yes!). I'm doing a spot of writing for my alma mater, and while it's totally something within my skill set and range of ability, there's a pressure in that I could mess up it would feel uncomfortable. I have that feeling of bracing myself, knowing that I will be asked to perform at a high level, and it will stretch me. Am I ready for this? Probably not. But I'll get there. It's not the same kind of terror I felt with teaching (and even then, I did the impossible nearly every day).

[silvermei]

Feb 2nd, 2017

I left the flowers you gave me, love

Lying primly on the trash receptacle at dinner.

I meant to take them home,

But I did not.

My mind, full of plans & thoughts

Pushed out the flowers from my consciousness

So their absence became evident

Only as my Q zipped past 8th St.

My feet were sore,

My nose, still stuffy.

I was already imagining being at my desk

Putting our guests' names in the Save the Date.

I did not turn back.

By DeKalb Avenue, I remembered:

Deposit that check!

That overdue, hard-won check!

But there were no more Wells Fargo ATMs along the way back home.

My feet were sore,

My muscles ached.

My mind was full of plans and thoughts

And I did not turn back.

[silvermei]

Let me, oh, let me see

the good of wanting and choosing not to take--

this choice we make

together, to wait.

Norris writes of the lives of the celibate:

their lives expressing essential human loneliness.

In them constraints transform to openness,

with time and words they love their friends

(and here I am on the floor, antsy till the waiting ends).

I’m skilled

in impatience; I’m strong-willed

and sad when I don’t get my way.

But I find a hope in me to pray,

God, let your mercy come to me.

Let me, oh, let me see

the good of wanting and choosing not to take.

Let me hold to this choice we make.

[silvermei]

I've seen . . wise old monks and nuns whose lengthy formation in celibate practice has allowed them to incarnate hospitality in the deepest sense. In them, the constraints of celibacy have somehow been transformed into an openness that attracts people of all ages, all social classes.

Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk, 117