Silence comes easier than exposure. It is perhaps why I’ve written so little here over the last few years. The public discourse has become raw, unfiltered, and not at all circumspect. Revealing, but not necessarily enlightening. We’ve accustomed ourselves to knee-jerk reactions and assumptions in real time, as many of our transactions are in digital shorthand. We’re a few short steps from LOLs to just grunting at each other. Perhaps re-joining the public sphere is my way of pushing back on a world that operates in acronyms. Maybe I’m just getting old and irritable.
Autumn brings on a sweet melancholy that puts me in a state of unrest. I feel the need to clear the decks, wipe the slate, and expunge whatever mental beasties have taken up residence in my brain. So here I am, beginning to write again of self, of life, of finding perspective in order to regain my equilibrium. It’s scarier out here on the information superhighway than it was when I started this blog in 2012. You’ve barely pulled into the lane before you’ve been honked at, cussed out, corrected, and finally, just to make sure you don’t make this mistake ever again, run off the road into a ditch.
I should be at a point of fearlessness. My life is more than half over. There’s no career-building, toddler-juggling, or rat-racing left to be done. Now it’s me and whatever bad habit chickens have come home to roost. Sleep injuries, slackening muscle, and 14 pairs of eyeglasses, each with its narrow purpose (no reading expiration dates-driving in the dark-working on computer combos). This is where I’m at and it sounds, from my description, that I should be huddled in a corner mourning my deterioration. On the other hand, time has sorted out what is and isn’t important in the most inefficient way possible – slowly making me too tired to give a shit about stuff I’ve spent a lifetime giving a shit about.
I’m a few months away from graduating with my MFA in Creative Writing. For those who still engage in the MFA or not to MFA argument, I don’t have any answers. There’s no magic beans for writing and even a degree won’t change that. I will be teaching more, though, which is a surprising joy that I’ve discovered over the last couple of years. I’ve finally given up the ghost on short form social media. It had a deleterious effect on my mental health in terms of anxiety and constant adrenaline shots of rage. I’ve resigned myself to never knowing what anyone is talking about ever again.
It’s a few weeks away from the midterm election. I’m working as an election judge and hoping not to catch COVID or a bullet (insert wry laugh). My mailed absentee ballot was accepted yesterday. I put out the VOTE! sign in my yard. I’m volunteering in a voter education organization. This all adds up to me not having to pay attention to pundit-polling fuckwits anymore. Might keep it as a permanent policy. I’m not delusional about the power of the vote – when a loud minority has worked so hard to delegitimize our elections and suppress voter participation, a vote either counts more than it ever has or not at all. Either way, voting is one of the few things in our locus of control.
Perhaps this is less an argument against silence, rather an advocacy for the judicious application of our voices – where they will be heard or where they are needed. Neither bystander nor chicken little be. And unlike the whiplash reactions of social media, we can take a beat, write a few drafts, break through the hardness and habituation of personal opinion in order to cultivate curiosity. I think the road ahead will become more difficult and there will be a tendency to stratify opinions into intractable, inflexible ideas at the exact moment when adaptability, creativity, and joy are needed to survive. Nobody fights harder for a better world than someone who recognizes the joys in it.
There are fires everywhere and no matter what you do, there’s always someone there to explain how you’re doing it wrong. Perhaps this is why social media is not a good place for most people – you become paralyzed by the possibility that what you say will be judged harshly, no matter the intent. I’ve leaned into discomfort, knowing that I will make mistakes, whether it be in regards to social justice or the environment or well, anything. As a writer, the fear of making mistakes is untenable. We only find our way by making the mistakes first and hoping that a kind friend or competent editor reigns in whatever insensitive, incoherent garbage we create before it hits the public eye.
My writing always starts out as a dear self until the ripples carry me far enough away from ego to get some perspective. I know that by the end, I will have learned something. If you find something here, all the better. I am here, ready and willing to make mistakes. Go make yours.
Congratulations! You’ve reached a milestone. With luck, you will reach many more. Like menopause and cashing out your 401K. Maybe you’ll patent an invention or live to see your grandchildren graduate. Maybe you’ll travel the world and dive off cliffs or maybe, like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, you’ll see the world from your armchair through observation and a lot of knitting.
I have had a messy life. Or I should say lives. Once I was a poor kid growing up in a rural town. Once I was a soldier. A college student. A janitor. A tutor. I became, for a longer term, a spouse and a parent. I traveled. I stayed still. I ran. I grew fat. I shrank. I trained in martial arts. I learned to abhor violence and guns. I briefly tried politics. I grew up evangelical. I became enamored of Buddhism. I went to therapy. I tried on personas, boyfriends, jobs, hobbies. Humans shed and grow almost 1,000 new skins in a lifetime. Why would anything about us stay the same throughout our lives?
We also live in a world where everyone has opinions and way too many ways to convey them. Outside entities want you to like and thumb and swipe your way through life. They want to elevate your sense of self-importance so that you volunteer every aspect of your life like wares at a marketplace. This is the nature of consumerism, the nature of data mining and advertising. This is not the nature you want to cultivate, because in the cold dark night, when you’re alone, none of those entities will be there for you. You must learn to trust yourself, to spend time in your own head, to be your own confidant and best friend. Know yourself best so that you might understand others more. Listen more than you speak.
The lessons of generations before me eventually landed hard on my head. No matter what rights have been gained, no matter what ground has been covered, you can’t have it all. You shouldn’t have everything at once. To learn how to deeply appreciate one thing, one person, one moment is to learn how to better appreciate everything else more. To savor a moment is a luxury in a society that tells us to quickly want for the next. Defy the speed of the world around you. Slow down. Feel the joy of the moment. Be in it.
The world is full of wonders and dangers and conflict and love. We often judge lifetimes by accomplishment, by enduring works of art or invention or unfortunately, wealth. Most of us won’t end up on a college reading list or in a history book or on a Forbes list. But we can have lives well-lived, make the lives of those around us better, ensure that we do more helping than harm. Life is an adventure of your own making. Make it well.
Instead, I play “spin-the-bad-news-wheel” rolling from one news source to another. I’m rage-reading Twitter. A good day is one in which I shower and make one family meal. These days, I think about the repetitive pacing of animals in the zoo. Early in the morning, I walk my neighborhood – nearly the same route every day, in order to avoid other humans. The days all run together to the point that I’ve taken to writing the day and date on my whiteboard.
I return to the toolbox – meditation, exercise, gardening, writing. Halfhearted attempts at best. I even tried to add a little ritual here and there. During meditation, I decided to try some old incense. Buddhists do it. They seem serene. If serene means filling your house with acrid smoke that smells like an ashtray on fire, then I’m zen itself.
The upside to the pandemic is (and I say that, acutely aware of my privilege at the moment) that the 
to be different. Maturing, evolving, kinder, with a sense that we truly are all in this together. I don’t fool myself, though. I knew after the 2012 Sandy Hook murders of school children and staff when nothing changed, that my country was its own worst enemy. And here we are, forced to watch as our government, led by cynical ignorance, fumbles about with our lives.
rless Fridays are about lives lived in spite of our fears, living a life that is about curiosity, compassion, and courage. If you just got published, something wonderful happened to you, you witnessed an act of kindness or bravery, or you have someone in your life who amazes you, drop your story into my contact page or email it to TheGreenStudy (at) comcast (dot) net and I’ll run it on a Fearless Friday. If you’re a blogger, it’s an opportunity to advertise your blog, but this is open to anyone who would like to share. These will be 100-300 word stories, subject to editing for clarity and space.
If you want to really challenge yourself, read Valerie Tarico’s latest post “
One of the tools we use is 
Jamison Hill at 
Cheryl Capaldo Traylor at 
She’s a neuroscientist, goes geocaching, plays the violin and viola, practices photography, writes, and juggles (I made that one up). K.L. Allendoerfer at 
My resume and personal history reads like the life of someone who is very…confused. It wasn’t until I read Margaret Lobenstine’s 
It was at a relative’s funeral over 15 years ago that I began to wonder about my ability or inability to love. The spouse of the deceased, an awkward and unlikable man, cornered me. He began to explain my relatives to me in critical terms. She doesn’t know how to love. They are such cold people. He would never understand love. Grieving requires latitude, so I stood there, numbly, and listened as he described the people I loved as terrible. And maybe they were.
Once I started college, I couldn’t relate to the excitable undergrads and buried myself in work. The cracks were beginning to show. I began to suffer chronic depression. The emotions that I’d suppressed had begun to curl inward and were finding their way into toxic relationships and self-destructive behaviors that left me gasping for air.
It started with decisions. A decision to leave a dead-end job that made me feel stupid. A decision to leave a relationship that would have gone nowhere, a relationship that made me feel inferior and worthless. A decision to leave a town where I’d worked through a lot of permutations and none of them fit.
The softening of middle age isn’t just happening around the middle. I seem to be leaking tears and flashing smiles at the most inopportune moments. It feels like an odd awakening to the exquisite beauty of this fragile existence.
It’s love turned outward. It’s that moment when it cannot be contained and wrangled into submission – when the impulse to smile or laugh or cry is no longer embarrassing or shameful. It’s startling when it happens. My first thought is always “Who is this weirdo and what do they want?” But defensiveness obscures my vision, makes me miss the moment, the connection. Curiosity is the antidote and is, in some ways, the best gift of love we can offer each other.
The Green Study 