Crying out

The poem I posted recently has become a pretty big theme in my life. For my birthday in particular, I made some noise in order to receive the milk of loving. I enlisted five of my most trusted girlfriends to be my birthday love angels. I requested that they spend as much time as they had available on my birthday being with me so that I could feel loved and supported. I also enlisted another friend to be my designated driver that evening. I requested a foot massage from a friend and a back rub from another. And later that night, I asked someone for a birthday kiss, on the mouth with tongue and everything. I got everything I cried out for.

I’m 36

I feel great. I was at Mount Shasta for a lovely trip with my aunt earlier this week. I just did yoga and meditated. I am wearing my birthday necklace from my aunt and my new birthday dress from myself. My friend Kelly is about to come over to watch me open my birthday packages that came in the mail. Later today I am having people over for a potluck, and tonight I am going to an awesome party that I have been excited about for weeks. This is my year. I’m a Fire Dragon, according to Chinese astrology. Something great is about to happen, I can feel it. Let the celebrations begin.

My new favorite poem

God created the child, that is, your wanting,
So that it might cry out, so that milk might come.

Cry out! Don’t be stolid and silent
With your pain. Lament! And let the milk
Of loving flow into you.

Rumi

Good bodies

This week I finally read The Good Bodyby Eve Ensler. At the time she wrote the book, Eve was 45 and hating her round belly. She then traveled around the world to interview women about their bodies. The book had been on my wishlistsince early 2006. My wishlist has been near depleted multiple times since then but somehow nobody ever got that book for me. Maybe the time wasn’t right.

I am almost 36 now and can no longer deny or hide that my body is changing. Eating a little less for three days used to give me a flat belly but that’s no longer enough. While I have had stray gray hairs since I was 23, the growing gray colony on my head is now undeniable. Those are the main two things that are different: A rounder belly and grayer hair.

Of course, my body has never been exactly the way I wanted it to be. I have always been at war with one body part or the other–mostly my belly and my hair. Could that be why those two parts are “aging” faster than the rest of my body? Are they trying to force me into accepting them by becoming ever more unacceptable? Maybe.

It’s fucking hard being a woman in this culture of unattainable beauty standards. And the lack of compassion from both men and women about just how hard it is drives me nuts. Not too long ago I had a conversation with one of my lovers about my boobs. I had overheard another woman say that her partner’s two favorite things were bacon and her boobs. Hearing that had given me a little sting because none of my partners had ever referred to my boobs that way. So I asked my lover, “How come my boobs aren’t your favorite thing in the world?” And at first he said things like “I don’t know, I’m not a boob man.” And I kept pushing and pushing and asking “What is wrong with my boobs?” And finally he caved and said “Okay. They’re a little saggy.”

BAM.

Now granted, I could have approached the issue in a more direct way. I obviously didn’t really want to know what was wrong with my boobs. I wanted some reassurance that my boobs are awesome. I wanted to hear something like “Vera, I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to be all over your boobs. They are spectacular.” And it’s true: My boobs are a little saggy. This is actually not (or at least not yet) because I’m getting older or because I haven’t been wearing a bra: They have been that way since I was 16. It’s because they are quite big and quite heavy.

So while my lover was being honest, I also felt very hurt. It was the stereotypical “Do these pants make me look fat?” moment that didn’t go so well. There is a lot of judgment and ridicule in our society of women who ask those kinds of questions and have those kinds of insecurities. Men want us to not be so sensitive and to just get over it. And of course they also want us to be beautiful. Women want us to be confident and feminist and to feel sexy and beautiful from the inside. I just want some compassion for how hard it is to find a balance between beauty on the inside and beauty on the outside.

I have brought up my own body issues with my therapist a few times, who is also a woman in her 30′s. And I was afraid that she was going to judge me as superficial, as unevolved, as unenlightened. I was afraid that she expected me to be “better than” to worry about what my body looks like. But she said “Yeah, that’s what it’s like to be a woman. Many of us are afraid to lose our youth and our physical beauty.”

I just want some acknowledgment of that in our society. It’s not fair that gray hair on men means something positive, but not on women. The Good Body talks about how Isabella Rosselini’s modeling career was over at age 40. She tried to speak up, tried to make a stand for the beauty of aging women but she was silenced again and again.

I have heard it all before, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, “If you feel good on the inside, you are beautiful on the outside”, “People are attractive at any age.” They all sound very nice in theory but are not really reflective of what it’s like to be a woman, even in the progressive Bay Area. It’s like saying that Blacks and Whites receive equal treatment in America. It would be oh so nice if it were true, but it’s not the world we live in. Not yet.

A 74-year-old Masai woman named Leah is quoted in the The Good Body as having said: “I love my body. [...] My legs are long. [...] My breasts, well look at them, they’re mine, my breasts [are] so long.”

I’m totally going to steal that: Look at how long my legs are! Look at how long my boobs are!

Visiting bottom

I went to an interesting emotional place this week. It’s where I ask myself “Why go on living?” It’s where I am single and lonely and have been for a while. It’s where I remember that even if I have another relationship, I will likely eventually end up in the broken-up place again. It’s where I remember that all the people I love will age and die and hurt and disappoint me. It’s where I start hating my body.

There is a very young, anorexic part of my brain that is convinced that if only my body was perfect, everything would be okay. Or maybe my body doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough. I just want to be cute. If I picture a cute creature in a lonely place, I am sure that they are going to be okay. If I picture a non-cute creature in a lonely place, I am not sure that they are going to be okay. Sometimes I am not sure I am going to be okay because I am not sure if I am cute enough, if my body is good enough.

And even if I look in the mirror and my brain tells me “that is an attractive person in the mirror, and that is you,” sometimes when I haven’t been in a relationship or sexually active for a while, I don’t feel attractive on the inside. I feel like a repulsive monster. I feel like everyone will want to get away from me, especially attractive people.

So I went to this place this week, this place of hopelessness and despair where I blame my body for everything that is wrong in my world. And in the past I would have gotten stuck there for weeks or months, which has happened at least twice before. But this time I only went there for about an hour. Maybe it’s because of all the therapy I have been doing or because I have been studying psychology, but somehow I was able to hold my hand while I went down there, to the bottom, and able to just poke around without being consumed by the feeling of despair. I knew that this wasn’t me and this wasn’t the truth. And I also knew that it was a normal and natural feeling and is simply human. Humans go to this place regularly, not just me. I knew that there was nothing wrong with me for experiencing this feeling, and this time I knew this not just in my head (like “oh yeah, that sounds nice”) but with my entire being. I knew that it wasn’t my fault. And because I understood that it wasn’t my fault, I was able to pull myself up again.

And then on a whim I decided to pick up a bookthat Amy had given me a few months ago and started reading it. And in the first few pages, I came across this sentence:

I reread Camus on suicide as the logical choice in an absurd world.

Yep, humans feel this, even famous authors.

Emotional optimism

The other day I met a very nice man at a taco place I was at for lunch. I had seen him there the previous day as well, and he had looked at me multiple times. I had started feeling judgmental and hostile. I had imagined that he was either judging me or wanting to have sex with me. At one point, he walked right by me and looked at me again, and I decided to brave all my prejudices and look back. And he smiled at me with the sweetest smile and said “Hi.” I smiled back and said “Hi” as well, trying not to show too much of the big bite of taco that was in my mouth.

I talked about this encounter in therapy that night. I said that I tend to feel a basic discomfort and fear around men, unless they are established friends/loved ones/co-workers/etc. This discomfort is due to sexual tension, male supremacy and the possibility of rejection. I often withhold friendliness, kindness and openness from strange men because I don’t want them to reject me or hit on me. The concept of rejection is terrifying to me. I hate turning people down almost as much as I hate getting turned down myself. And so I scowl at men and mostly avoid eye contact. This has come up before. The issue is usually not as apparent when I’m in a relationship. Then it sort of makes sense for me to keep my distance from men because I am, well, taken. But when I’m single and open, I start to wonder how the hell I ever expect to find a new boyfriend if I avoid eye contact from men and am generally afraid of them. And whether I am wanting to meet men or not, it seems that with my coldness I am ripping off myself and others from potentially pleasant encounters.

So the next day at the same taco place I see the same man in line in front of me. And this time he smiles at me again, multiple times, and I smile back. And he says “Are you having a good day?” And I say “Yes, are you?” And he says “I’m having a GREAT day.” And then he introduced himself. On his way out he stops by my table and says “It was nice to meet you today.” He was about to leave when I said “Are you working? You seem really happy.” I was wondering if he was maybe on vacation or had just retired or something. He said “I’m always happy.”

And that’s when we continued our conversation about happiness. I told him that I was always trying to be happy but that it didn’t always work. I said that I had been on a spiritual path for about 8 years and that it was generally helping me to be positive and calm, but that I was still often unhappy. He said “You have to be happy when you’re happy, not when you’re unhappy.” I agree with this and it’s in line with my new year’s resolution: To let myself be. That is, to let myself be happy when I’m happy and to let myself be unhappy when I’m unhappy. I asked “You said you’re always happy though. How do you do that?” He said “Well, I think I’m just an optimist.” I told him that I considered myself an optimist too. I told him that I was very good at positive thinking and could see the positive side of just about anything, but that my feelings were often not positive, and that no matter how positive my thinking was, my thoughts couldn’t change my dark, depressed feelings when they come up. He said “Well, I think I’m an emotional optimist.”

This concept of emotional optimism was intriguing to me. I may be an emotional optimist; I may just not know it yet because I haven’t felt all the grief and rage that are inside me. I shared with him that I was in therapy, and that there was just so much grief inside me, it just kept pouring out and out, and it hadn’t stopped for months. Even before I started therapy last July, I had been crying just about every day for about a year. He said “You have to feel all that grief.” It’s true, I agree. I am really getting that now. It hasn’t felt like it was okay for me to feel the grief and the rage because they were what had ended me in the mental hospital in the first place. All my life I had thought that I would be okay as long as I kept those feelings under control.

But I am not okay. Not yet. I am getting more and more okay every day.

I am fucking ANGRY at my parents for having put me in the mental hospital.
And I am fucking GRIEVING all the self-worth and self-esteem that I had to live without because of this experience.

This is not about me blaming my parents. This is about me feeling the rage and the grief that have always been there but that I wasn’t allowed to feel if I wanted to be a functioning member of society, and that I have since been beating back into myself to get stuck there.

Just because I am angry doesn’t mean that someone else did something wrong.
And just because nobody did anything wrong doesn’t mean that I am not angry.

I AM ANGRY!

Morning yoga

When this video made the rounds on one of the mailing lists I am on, I got inspired to do short yoga sessions at home. The girl in the video does pretty intense yoga for 3 minutes and 29 seconds to a really pretty song.

The first time I did it myself, I did it to the song from the video. I did whatever yoga poses I felt like until the song was over. I felt really good afterwards, physically and emotionally. And ever since then, every morning before my shower I have put on whichever song I most feel like listening to and done yoga until the song is over. Sometimes I do it again at night, and sometimes I use a 15 or 20 minute song, but usually it’s just a 5 minute song.

It’s been about a month and a half, and my body and soul are thanking me every day.

Some sentences make me happy

My school readings are so precious to me. They make me feel known and understood.

This morning I read about subjective omnipotence and objective reality. Subjective omnipotence is what a baby experiences: It has a need, cries, and then, as if by magic, the mother’s breast appears. The baby feels as if it is making the breast appear with its omnipotence: A wish makes things happen. Objective reality is when you grow up and realize that you depend on others’ wills to fulfill your needs. What happens in between these two forms of experience is the transitional experience.

My book Freud and Beyond says:

“The person who lives completely in objective reality is a false self without a subjective center, completely oriented toward the expectations of others, toward external stimuli.”

“In experience organized according to objective reality, the child feels she has to find the desired object out in the world; she is acutely aware of the separateness and distinctness of the object and her lack of control over it.”

“What is crucial in good-enough parenting with respect to transitional experience is that the parent does not challenge its ambiguity. The specialness of the teddy bear is accepted.”

After I read this, I felt good. I held on to my book like a treasure for it holds a truth that is helping to change my reality.

Seriously

I asked my brother if he noticed any change in me since the last time he saw me about a year ago, and he said “You’re not as serious.”

I win!

Maui playlist

I just spent four days on Maui with my brother and some of his friends. They were all here for a tech conference, and I joined them afterwards for a few more days of laziness on the beach. My favorite part was last night when it was just my brother and I in our room, and I played some music for him on my phone. These are the songs I played, all new favorites from within the last year or so:

Led Er Est – Plants
Led Er Est – Port Isabel
Proem – When Frailty Fails
oOoOO – Burnout Eyess
The Soft Moon – When It’s Over