Late at night,
when you have to
step outside of yourself,
stop your own breathing,
and slow your racing heart,
enough to verify that
the people who
yell at you and
spit on you and
beat you up and
leave you bruised
have taken their own
shallow
shuddering
breaths
in the
lonely darkness,
that they are
still alive
and you are
still here
to keep them safe,
that is the
season of refreshment.
Breath is
the great equalizer
in this
moment of vulnerability.
Take it.
I have never been able to view myself as smart. Other people would hold that for me- teachers, tests, peers. My self esteem would not allow it. My parents had a systematic lack of regard for what I HAD done versus what I COULD do. “A 97? Why not a 100? A 100? Why not perfect attendance? We’re worried about your weight. Say, why are you coming home in tears so often? I guess it’s a teenager thing. Must need some space.” I lived in the shadow of my own potential, and my potential whispered sweetly about dreams and a future and having worth.
I cried writing the end of that sentence right there. It sinks me that I remain so far away from viewing myself as a creature with worth, yet I can dialectically hold the concept that all lives have inherent worth. I remain a raw, rotten lump of meat in the corner, an exception.
It’s been a rough 6 weeks or so. I’ve gotten strep, kinda beat it, had it come back with a vengeance and morph into walking pneumonia. My testosterone shot caused a giant weird painful lump in my leg. My mental health regressed enough that I ended up in a crisis residential program for a week. Additionally I’ve been in the ER three times, the Urgent Care once, and my PCP once. I got in a car accident and messed up my shoulder nicely. My anxiety is through the roof. Also, I’m not sure if it’s related to the car accident or the strep-hell but I can’t bind because it makes me completely unable to breathe. I’ve missed enough work that I’m worried about whether they’ll just give up on me like my last employer did.
I also got married, so that was cool.
I kept doing this weird thing during all this stress though. I kept house shopping.
See, I found out we were eligible for a down payment assistance program that’s really nifty.
It was a fun distraction if nothing else. But I let myself hope, and when it came down to it, if you’re getting 36 hours and your company still calls you part time, you have to have been there for 2 years.
Bye-bye hope.
I’ve had big dreams in the past.
Now all I want is a cute little fixer-upper and to SOMEDAY finish a damn degree above an Associate’s.
I was supposed to be so smart. One of those assholes that throws off the curve.
I’ll probably work entry level for the rest of my life because I am deeply, profoundly mentally ill.
Maybe smart doesn’t mean much if you’re broken.
The big bad monster crept out of my mind to stab potential repeatedly.
It doesn’t whisper anymore.
It’s hard to come up with a way to say a resident sharted in their charting summary.
She looked a little proud of herself for an instant before it happened, almost like this was a punishment for the two staff she was talking to. She may have forgotten that she had been constipated and in a lot of pain, so laxatives were given. She waved the air behind her and warned people to get away. “Ooh, boy that stinks.” Then her face fell. “I think I shit myself.”
“Then go to the bathroom.”
She said, “No, really, I think I pooped.” This time she was quieter, conspiratorial..
I made a large gesture towards the bathroom with both hands.
She finally shimmied towards the restroom muttering “I can feel it…”
A few minutes later she emerged. “I get to be excused from group.”
Group was still a ways away. “Or you could change and then go to group.”
Her eyes narrowed, she seemed to be calculating how she could still change her clothes and manage to get out of going to group, but she went to change with no further complaints.
Five minutes into group she comes out. “I really need to shower.” It wasn’t hygiene time, but the supervisor was going to make an exception in this case. However, another resident overheard that and wanted to shower too. So I got them their soaps and towels, and an additional resident walks up, asking for deodorant.
I swear to god, I spent the next 20 minutes in a conversation about which of the three deodorants she had was the best, and “is that the superman logo on the front of this label”, and “I’m pretty sure this one isn’t mine but it’s got my name on it.” By the time I finally managed to wear her down into making a choice, she hands them all back to me and says “I didn’t actually need one right now, I was just checking them.”
I don’t really know what the moral of this story is. If you administer a laxative, you’d better be prepared for nihilistic deodorant juggling?
By the way, my solution for the charting? “She tried to get excused from group about a half hour after she farted and had a, erm, fecal experience.”
I was proud of a particularly nice weld. It lay between each hunk of steel, puddles so tight and smooth that it looked like metal bred with liquid silk. I wanted to show it off, so I pulled off my helmet, which had no doubt left strappy sweat marks trailing through my hair, and went to where my brother, face contorted, was setting up the CNC mill. I watched the wiggler approach the shaft for a moment, then stop. I took my chance.
I asked my brother “Are you grumpy?”
He replied “I’m always grumpy. What do you need?”
“I just wanted to show you a weld that’s pretty special looking.”
As we walked over, he asked, “Does it glow in the dark?”
“It can if you give me twenty minutes. I do have that spray paint.”
He stood over the bench and examined the part. “Huh. That’s pretty nice.”
I would never expect higher praise from him.
“I got thoroughly chastised by Krista for throwing away a banana. She said you’d still eat it.” My dad was busy writing a check for the Snap-On man but he still smiled.
My mom pitched in “He still might if he can find it in the trash. What was wrong with it? Was it bad?”
“No such thing as a bad banana,” my dad chirped.
My mom made a blanket disagreement. She’s not sure if there’s any such thing as a good banana.
“It wasn’t ripe.”
My father turned turned to the Snap-On man and said “I get a lot of crap for pulling thing out of the trash. Reusing paper plates…”
“The dogs already cleaned them, so they should be fine!” My mom grins.
My father nods to her and says “She draws the line at floss.” He pauses. “At least after the dogs got a hold of it. ”
The Snap-On guy keeps grinning while I huff. “I remember getting all kinds of mocked when I brushed the dog’s teeth when I was in 4-H.”
I think he gets a lot of amusement out of this particular stop. Whenever he leaves, he reminds us to “Have fun, and be good!”
I woke up early, under the advisement to see the day as an opportunity to create. The night before, Denise had been teasing me lightly about my last blog post via text. Very shortly, I was in her car, driving to a storage place as a GRMakers field trip. At one point during our conversation, I turn on my hippie voice and declare “I’m just one of those artist types, man.”
Quick and devilishly observant as ever, Denise replied “So you need constant reassurances and validation?”
She had me. “I don’t know abou- Yes.”
As we laughed and I made faces to exaggerate my hurt, I was actually feeling a little stung. She was quick to reassure me. “It’s totally okay, I am too.”
We reached our destination, a large brick building with an entryway of swooping curved metal. We were there to meet a guy who buys up the fixtures and furniture of businesses that close down and resells it. His warehouse is massive. The downstairs is rented out, and we passed factory workers, who would look up from either their phones or their work and watch us curiously. There were rows upon rows upon rows of racks filled with racks or barrels or little metal tidbits. The place seemed endless. Then we got upstairs, where we could really dive into the miscellany that we were there to look at.
~
As I walked up to rest of the group(inspecting desks), Buttercup broke from the herd to say hi and pulls me aside. “You know, as you were walking up here- today is the first time I can like SEE that you’ve lost weight. You’re like a different person.” Sometimes I think he says these things just to perplex me. It’d be within his personality to drop weird statements to throw me off. He’s one of my truest friends, but about 12% of the time he’s an asshole. There’s the 88% of the friendship where he builds me up and we joke together and muse about people, but the 12% can rip you right down(hence the nickname Buttercup). I didn’t get his motives, he had a funny look on his face and we’ve got enough history of us pushing each other that I’m generally second, third, and fourth guessing anything he says.
I don’t usually see the lost weight(about 45 pounds), I just see how far I have to go to. And I’m certainly not a different person. In fact, that’s the wall I keep bumping into with my mental health. I know that no matter how I progress or what changes I make, I’m still me. And I’d still be living my life. But the real key of this whole experience was that it’s winter. This is the first time he’s seen me without a hoodie or jacket on in months. Of course I finally look like I’ve lost weight.
~
As a fledgling makerspace, this place was ideal to outfit the place. We eagerly plotted about desks, chairs, materials racks, transformers, carts, saws, dust collectors, fans, cables, shelves, and a welding table. The two things that interested me most were the barrels of chain(for my chain horse idea) and these great big metal spoke wheels that were pulled from an overhead conveyance system. When I saw them, I saw Giraffecycle.
Giraffecycle is a very old idea of mine, I’ve wanted to build her since I was a small child. It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. A pedal powered vehicle in the shape of a giraffe. Preferably life size, and with an articulating neck.
Building her would be a dream come true.
Eh, probably never gonna happen. But there’s power in dreaming, and I was basking in that joy for the rest of the day.
~
After that I went to work. The slightest task can become a festival of tangents there. All I had to do was assemble two more parts to fill an order. I made the argument for setting up a machine to make new parts for an order, but my father insisted that I sand some polished display hinges to send them out, he’d rather get the order out ASAP. I didn’t want to throw away the work that someone had already put into polishing them, but I did as he asked. It involved chucking up the little lathe with a thin rod wrapped in sandpaper and center drilling one end. Then put the rod between the chuck and the live center support, and after more fiddling around, flipped on the lathe and started to sand the tricky inner curve of the part.
The sandpaper immediately shredded. We had center drilled the wrong end, so the sandpaper was wrapped wrong. More fiddling around, cleaning the rod and replacing the papers. But I got it done, went to the other buffing jack to sand the rest of the part, and reassembled the hinge. Then we realized there are no more flanges, and my father decides that if I have to make 2, I should make eight instead, that way the whole order will match instead of some having a zinc finish and some plain.
So I start welding flanges. At one point, I notice some moisture on my glove. I was baffled. I looked at the ceiling for a leak, I wonder if maybe I had wiped my nose or something without remembering. Then I look at the torch. The water cooled TIG welding torch. There was a leak.
I only had two more parts left, 125 amps of electricity and a leaking torch, bad idea, but surely it could hold out for two more parts? The next arc strike makes my hand tingle. BETTER NOT.
I watched for a moment as my dad repaired the leak. “I guess I’ll go vacuum or something.”
“Don’t you want to know how to do this next time it happens?”
“Yeah, but I also feel bad for not being productive right now.”
I stayed standing right there, productivity be damned. Learning is important too.
Repair complete, I finish the parts and my father and I had another discussion, where it was determined that we should indeed set up the CNC machine and run more new parts. Turns out that the 2 pieces I had worked so hard on had a different hole pattern than the rest. It took until after I sanded away the nice polished finish that I was so keen to preserve earlier. Sigh.
~
My evening was spent at Celebrate Recovery and ended with squeezing arms wrapped around my ribcage. Trudy came to visit me and brought with her a hand lettered card for me with a quote from Sir Francis Bacon. It represents our shared struggles and was really very sweet. It’s going on my wall.
“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.”
Right now I am certain of only one thing; that it’s time for bed.
My father was cleaning up from the chaos that the finished Nissan and unfinished Chevy left when I called him over, proud of my welding. I wanted to show off a particularly nice part.
The reaction was immediate when he saw the neatly pooled rings of metal.
“WOW. Keep it up.” And then, quieter, more to himself, “Bugger. You make mine look bad.”
That’s a special joy. I wouldn’t say that the student is surpassing the teacher, but I’m making progress. Now I’ve gotta get better than him at aluminum.
Today at work was directed by super effective frantic energy. From the time I go there to the time I left, huge strides were made on the Downs body, a 33-34 Chevy fiberglass shell that we were developing hinging and safety features for. I was elated when we finally got the door swinging after having worked on those blasted mounting plates and the jam. I wish I could say my father was as excited as I was, but he just immediately focused on the next thing without taking a moment to appreciate that victory, a supremely important one for me.
It was amazing how effective we were being. We got more done today than in the past week combined. The power of deadlines, I suppose.
My mom walked up at one point just after the first swing, and I forced her into sharing my elation. I got a fist in the air and a halfhearted “Whoo” but that was better than nothing.
When the guys came to pick it up, they were excited about what we had made. They talked about how cool it looked, and how more and more people were looking for the kind of features that we were designing. It was very satisfying, because for me it had just been routine, but they saw magic.
After work, I went to my CR step study. One of the members gave me a birthday present she had been working on since finding out that my birthday had been before last week. It was sweet and heartfelt and I felt totally undeserving. All of the girls wrote notes on the back of an art frame that says “You are loved.” They barely know me, why should they love me? And yet they choose to. It’s baffling to me.
The Downs body is going to a car show, as is, with all the rough stuff exposed. And I’ll keep walking through CR, and letting people see a bit of my rough stuff.
“It’s just flat not gonna go.” I was quite certain about changing out the reciprocating saw blade for a different style.
“That is absolutely not what you say about that.” He picked up the new blade and walked over to the bench grinder.
“You gonna inflict some positivity on it?” I remained skeptical.
“It’s not whether it will work, it’s what are you gonna do to make it work.” It took a few trips to the grinder and back, but he reshaped the blade enough to make it work.
“There.” He tightened the blade into place. “See if it’s got the woogity woogity.”
It did.
I always wonder about whether that type of fiddling is worthwhile. It just seemed like a worthless distraction when I could surely find another way to expand the hole. After all, he was under the gun for four different projects, and he still took the time to tighten up the sledgehammer after I had noticed it and saw that the head was loose. We hadn’t even known where it was for the past several weeks. It was not important to do. He should have been working on wiring the Nissan. But as soon as he heard something was wrong with it, he pulls himself away to fix it. After all, if something can be improved by your presence, you should do it. That’s just the way he is. Distractable, for one.
We had sat in silence for awhile. Not the whole ride, just a few minutes. We had just had a discussion about the theology of a couple members of my writers group, where they fell short, why they might think that way, how they would be perceived. As we got close to home, I decided to be brave and mention something I was actually thinking about, all day, from writers group.
“So, another person there told me that some of the stuff I wrote about you was the most interesting of what I brought. That our relationship was complex; it’s obvious how you’ve shaped me since I’m interested in different things than most girls.”
He edged to the stop sign, about as aggressively as normal despite the fresh and constant snow. “Hmm. You wrote about me?”
“Yeah, kind of, just stuff that I pull from my daily journals. Snippets. Conversations. Interactions. But now I have to deal with the fact that the most interesting thing about me is my father.”
“Huh.”
We slipped into silence again. We often do. I don’t know if that’s because we are comfortable sitting in silence together or just because we’re alike enough that there seems no point in bantering. Or small talk or, you know, honest feelings.
We pile out of the truck. I head to the shop to let my dogs out. He apparently had the same thought, and he always lopes along faster that I do. I can never keep up with him, he’s at the second door while I open the first. He calls into the darkness “INTERMEDIATES!” while I yell “Doggieees.” He calls them intermediates because they own two miniature dachshunds, my sister has a Golden Retriever, and my two weenie mutts lie squarely at the awkward intersection of “too big to be lap dogs” and “too cute to keep off the furniture.”
I decide to pursue the matter. I ask “What do you think of that?” and he immediately turns to look at me, and then in the direction that I’m looking. He’s searching for whatever I was talking about, and I remind him. “My writing.”
He looks at the floor. “It’s probably more a matter of you being a complex person than our relationship being complex. I don’t think we do complex things. You’re thinking deep on it.”
It feels like a victory to hear him call me a complex person. That means that to him, I’m more than just my lack of discipline or the boiling self hatred that I feel defines me. Complex. Complex is good. I can deal with complex.
I smile and pull out my phone, tapping away to make sure I remember the quote correctly. He grins and peers over at it. “You writing more?”
Always.
Rexicorn 