Broken

It's something that we all are, at least a little bit.

It happens to some of us really early on, and others not until later. I'm starting to believe though, that by at least your mid thirties, something about you is going to be a little broken. And that's ok. It really is. It makes you more human, more compassionate, more understanding, and more interesting.

I feel like in order to really exist, in the most complete way, you have to have known both absolute joy and absolute desperation. You have to have known pain and to have suffered, at least a little bit, in order to experience true empathy. And I think that empathy is essential.

We are all we have you guys. Us, you and me. The friends, family, colleagues, and even the strangers. The randoms on the street. This is what we have. So why not just embrace it? In all of its broken glory. Help each other and be fucking good to each other.

It seems so simple.


My son turned 14 an hour and a half ago, in his eyes, though truth be told I think that more accurately he turns 14 in about 5 hours. I was never the kind of mom that remembered the exact time. I was too tired. I don't think that makes me a bad person. I know what's important and it isn't the time of day that he was born, it is rather that he was born at all, and that I let him fall hard into my heart. He has stayed there for a long time and I can't see him going anywhere anytime soon. He thinks he's halfway out the door. On his way to being a full blown grown up.

But he still tells me that he loves me. Often. Without fear and without being forced. He says it at random, while running back and forth from his den of video games to the kitchen or the bathroom or a friend's house. He is the best part of me, made whole and alive and separate all at once. He is the best part of a broken me. And as a human, he will have broken parts too, and likely does already. I have space for all of him always, love for him always, even the broken him, the grown up him, the him that needs me less and less all the time.

I guess I break more as I write this. And that's ok too. In the morning I will make blueberry pancakes and he will open his presents and then he will play video games with his friends and I will be a shadow. Then for dinner we will make veggie sushi together because it's his favorite and that's that. Another day, another year, my heart always growing so that he will fit.

We adapt. We grow. We have to.

Leopard print

It's like this pseudo jungle. I built it for myself out of one night stands and failed attempts at being exceptional. I've noticed that I must be doing this wrong because I hit enter to try to get line breaks and it all just looks like one big chuck of writing when I post it. I fail at some things in life. I think we all do, but I'm willing to admit it. I think many are not able to do that. Like for example, this one space after the end of a sentence thing is hard for me and even though I know that I should be doing something else to make my line breaks show up, I will probably just keep doing it this way. I will probably end up with two spaces after each sentence end that I intended to be a line break. Or maybe not. Who knows. It's after 3am and I should probably be sleeping, but since I don't have to work I am totally unconcerned about that fact. So I will sleep in. Most of the day probably and that's totally acceptable to me. My son is a teenager now so he is also still awake, because he doesn't have school in the morning so why should I impose some bullshit sleep time on him? I do hate to be a hypocrite. So he is up and I am up and we will both sleep in and then when I go back to work and he goes back to school we will both shut it down at normal people hours. I have discovered, as a parent, that treating him like a human being has been the most effective way to get him to also treat me as a human being. He's a kind person. It's lovely to watch. I said I was going to write here at least once a week. This is what you get for tonight. I just hit "preview" and there were no line breaks, and not even the two space thing happened. I have to learn how to make that happen. No one reads large blocks of text anymore. Twitter dumbed everyone down to just a few lines. I get it.

Ponytails

I don't know. This title probably doesn't mean anything. I took a walk around the city today during work. I noticed all these little things. Things that people probably don't usually notice, or at least I don't imagine that they notice them. Like when the wind is blowing a little bit, the leaves on the ground move around like they are slithering, like they are crawling, like they are making a great escape, like they are trying not to be stepped on. Some of them though? They seem more like they ARE trying to be stepped on. Little suicidal leaves with a death wish. Maybe they know that the world is supposed to end tomorrow. Or maybe they are among those who instead think that tomorrow marks the beginning of a shift in consciousness. We won't ever know. Not until someone discovers a way to speak to leaves, and to understand their language and intentions. Then it was wine o'clock. In the office. One of the execs is leaving. I'm trying to start using only one space after each sentence. It's difficult. We get so trained to do things a certain way, so conditioned to do the right thing (or at least what we believe to be the right thing.) Shifting is hard. And I feel like there is a lot of shifting going on. In my own life, in my son's life. In the lives of my friends, my family, my colleagues. We are constantly re-imagining ourselves and the world around us. I have a weird fascination with ponytails. The way that we can get so attached to something as bizarre as the hair that grows out of our skulls. Dead already by the time we see it. Yet we keep it there, wash it, and touch it, and take really good care of it. Most of the time. Yet we so rarely take care of each other. We should take better care of each other.

Don't bother me, I'm writing.

A friend of mine commented the other day to just write one thing every day, even if it's just a sentence. So in light of that, I am writing one thing here. It's more than one sentence, because how can one only write just one sentence? I want for us to be more real, more authentic in our interactions with one another. Not like, me & you as some anonymous reader (as though anyone reads this!) Rather, us, as humans. Let's hug more. Talk about our feelings more. Share more, and touch each others' motivation for existing. Let's do that.

3-4 Hours per night

Dear people of the internet, Every night I say to myself, and often I say it to whomever I am chatting/talking/hanging out with... "I ABSOLUTELY HAVE to get to bed before 2am." This is usually around 10 or 11pm. Then I isolate, get in my head, and start writing something, or reading something, or doing something completely useless on the internets. Then, before I know it, it's almost 2am again. 3-4 hours of sleep per night. That's what I usually function on. Usually I take extra long naps on the weekends to make up for it, but lately I haven't been able to do that because of the THINGS and STUFF that I've been doing. 3-4 hours of sleep. It's not much. Not enough, that's for sure. And so, here we are, and it is exactly 1:25am as I write this. I will get maybe 3-4 hours of sleep tonight. The thing is... it's sort of ok. Because I'm happy. I really am. It's strange. Happiness. It's a bizarre concept. I'm learning to work with it. To welcome it. To appreciate it for what it is. No judgement.

I suppose this is a space for writing

Writing. It's this thing that I once did for fun. Then I did it for school. Recently I've been doing a bit of it for work. What's missing is the fun part. When I started writing here I was all excited, hopeful, ready for anything! I am now working in mental health. I don't even do the really hard work with people, just research, and it's exhausting, I have to say. We are working on a couple of projects now that will attempt to bring better, more person-centered care to those who have literally been left in the gutter to rot. That however, is not why I'm here. I'm here to talk about writing. About how important it is to use your words. My son is about to turn 14. How insane is that? He asked me what he could possibly get me for xmas and I said "dude, write something for me." Simple! And it should be simple. Words bring us together, allow us to understand little pieces of one another that would otherwise go unnoticed. It's important that we see those glimpses. It's imperative. We need one another. Let's do this man.