Tag: life

March 16, 2022

Part 1: Bravery in the bathtub

It was one of those nights.

I ended up on the hardwood floor, alone, half-dressed, curled into a heaving pastry and bawling my eyes out like the little girl I once was. Admittedly, I haven’t had one of these “pity parties” for a while, only tallying up to a few per year in my 30s. They always seem to come after a tornado of tasks and obligations, only after I slow down and come to a stop. It’s like my shadow in all of its “weight of the worldliness” catches up to me and bowls me down like a swift slap to my backside. But like everything else I experience, I always find away to laugh about it later—if I mention it at all.

Let me say, this isn’t meant to demean or to devalue anyone’s experience. The human condition is ripe with reasons to bun-up and break down—internally, externally, a twist cone of both. There is no shame in any of it and I try not to judge. I’ve had my share of Sarah McLachlan moments, you know? I was dramatic as hell in high school, so many emotions. Anyway…

I don’t let myself cry now. I change lanes in my brain before the inner monologue gets a chance to break me. And before you lecture me, I know the spiel. Crying is a release or whatever. I’ve heard this my whole life—a trope that has never manifested itself into my reality. Crying helps some people, but not me. But that’s another post for another day.

This time, post-cinnamon-roll, I thought maybe I could be ballsy enough to write about it. It’s not that I haven’t before. As trite as it sounds, writing has been a coping mechanism of mine since I can remember. Writing is how I’ve wrangled and untangled the many thoughts and ideas that swirl inside of my brain at light speed. Hell, I’ve got a couple of degrees in writing. I have a poetry chapbook that still means the world to me… but this wasn’t a topic I have written about, not really. And though I have never stopped writing, I have stopped sharing my writing. Not very “academic” of me, huh? (I can see that glaring time gap on my CV now. Years.)

But ok, this time, could I uncurl from my floor and write about my experiences? Could I stop self-editing my words into smoke? Could I follow through a WordPress post without simply hitting the “save draft” button and boogying on out of there (never to return)? Maybe. But I’d have to be quick about it.

So I filled a bath with Epsom salt, soft smelling bubbles and way-too-hot water and hopped in. Oh yeah, candles too. I grabbed my iPhone, opened the WordPress app… and here I am, raisining and fingertyping in the one place that doesn’t cause me pain: the bathtub.

It’s time to get out now and I haven’t even begun to share anything, but I know if I hit “save draft,” I won’t be coming back. So I’m publishing. Without too much editing, without photos, without links or carefully inserted post-humor. I’m not going to attempt to make light of this anymore. And I’m going to share it. Because this is the only way I know for sure that I will be held accountable. My OCD is the only thing more powerful than my ADHD. No joke.

Until next post…

June 23, 2020

There’s no karma in weather

We get what we deserve.

Pffft. You don’t believe that do you? I don’t. I mean, I didn’t think so. I think… maybe somewhere deep down in there, I’m programmed to believe this, though. I know you’ve thought it too: If I do good, then good will come to me. We also like to tell each other: Bad people will “get theirs.” These delusions keep us going.

And why wouldn’t we think that? We’re trained from an early age to believe in rewards and consequences. Whether you grew up watching Disney movies and reading fairytales or learning the parables of the Bible, you were taught to be a good person through positive and negative reinforcement. This, then, evolves from the easy and superficial into the grown-up and severe—some omniscient score card, you might say. But if not your parents or teachers or older siblings looking over your shoulder, who is keeping score? The universe? God? You? Tallying up your good deeds and sacrifices, waiting to cash them in for some Get Out of a Jam Free Card?

You know this is complete bullshit, right?

But does that change the monologue you’re having inside your head? Are you still shocked when liars and thieves make it out seemingly unscathed? When bad people win the lottery? Get the girl? Do you tell yourself that their behavior will catch up to them? Does that make you feel better? Do you believe that?

No amount of hindsight rationalizing can blur the truth here. Life is wholly unfair. Bad people win. Good people lose. Good people die. Good people die too soon. Not just good people, amazing people die. Needed people. Talented people. People with so much to offer the world. People who inspire others. Good people who deserve good things die.

Fuck.

Some good people have died in the last few months. Amazing people. People whose lives meant so much to so many other lives. And I just can’t reconcile this in my brain. Even if I know what I know. Even then.

I know some of you have your religion. While it’s not my intention to shit all over that, religion isn’t a good enough answer for me. These are just my opinions, of course. “God” is so good at being a catch-all for the unknown and the unfair. It’s a nice way to comfort yourself, to bandage wounds. But that’s all it is. It’s something we’ve invented to do just that. And why? Because it’s too hard to believe in nothing.

The truth is… the world is precarious. Just because we have a conscience doesn’t mean the universe does. In fact, that’s what makes it so beautiful. We, as humans, spend our lives trying to figure it all out, expecting some predictable outcome… like how Cinderella wins her prince or how the slow-moving, but determined, tortoise finishes first.

But we don’t live in a children’s book.

We love our patterns and scales and even numbers. We spin our wheels trying to create some bigger picture from all of these random pieces, like trying to put together a bad jigsaw puzzle. So when shit doesn’t add up and the scales don’t balance, we’re left in the middle of the floor, sleepless, on our hands and knees, surrounded by all these pieces, thinking maybe we just aren’t getting it. Maybe there’s another way.

But there’s nothing to get. And even in knowing that, it doesn’t make it any lighter.

Hang onto each other. If we are all we have, we are all we have, you know?

June 11, 2015

Some serious flip-flop envy

Ok, so I’m sitting here being a total creep.

A few weeks back, upon getting some worrisome news about a back x-ray, I decided to check in with Children’s Hospital to see if they had any of my old medical records. We’re talking about stuff from nearly 30 years ago. I wasn’t super hopeful, but my mom pushed me to try. At best, I’d get something out of it that would help me (and eventually my docs) to understand the current sitch.

Guess what? After signing off on some paperwork and paying exactly 49¢, the mail came today with my records. I got a CD-ROM with a locked PDF containing scanned in doctors’ notes and pre-op notes and WOW. It’s a little creepy, actually. Some of it is like doctors talking to each other and eeeeee… Why is it so unnerving?

Out of pure Meghan-like impulse, I started writing an understandably skeeved out status message on Facebook. But soon I realized, as the note rounded off its third paragraph, that shit was a little heavier than I first thought, a little too much for a status message maybe. I seem to be operating under this odd cocktail of nostalgia, pride and grief. In fact, I might have just cried as I was typing it, which is both embarrassing to admit and kind of sad to think about—you know, thinking those mean kids from grade school apparently still have that much power over me. (And to be fair, it wasn’t just them. I was pretty mean to myself in those years. So I’ll lump myself into the mean kids category here.)

Originally, the Facebook message was explaining how I was born with a funky foot/leg. A deformity, to be a little more scientific and unsettling. Soon after I popped out, the docs told my mom I would be in a wheelchair my whole life. Can you imagine? But so they ended up doing all these wild surgeries and procedures—ones that were setting a sort of precedence for infants at the time. I had to wear a big honkin’ cast up to my hip (until I was two-ish), but that didn’t stop me. I learned to walk in that thing. I was pretty much a monkey as a child, funky foot or not. No wheelchair, though—not even once.

As an adult it’s so much easier to look at that and feel grateful. I could’ve been in a wheelchair, but now I walk, run, jog… who am I shitting? It’s still hard. It’s still hard not to get frustrated with my foot, even for silly superficial reasons like not being able to wear flip-flops. And I guess that’s the place we live in, you know? I never ever felt “normal.” Now I know that it’s ok, that I’m so “abnormal” in so many other ways that my foot is the least of my worries. Ha.

But when I was a kid, I had no solace for myself. No one did. I used to imagine all the things I wanted, namely being a star on Broadway, were now out of the question. Once I figured it out, of course, and asked the right questions. How could I perform on stage in cool costumes with high-heeled and elaborate shoes if I couldn’t wear 70% of the shoes at the store for “normal” kids? To top it off, I had myself convinced that no one would ever want to date me. Would I be able to date someone and get away with never exposing my foot? Impossible!

I wish that was it, that my self-critique was all I had to put up with. But it wasn’t. Kids caught wind of my foot issues, maybe a pool party or something (those which made me the saddest of all), and they did what kids do—they ran with it. I mean, they really created some cleverly cruel nicknames, though. Some even rhymed! And if that wasn’t enough mean-kid fodder, I was fat. Hah! I absolutely had no chance. All of these things made me the most sensitive, poke-able pint out there… so you better believe the kids ate that shit up.

But hey, this is a big step right now. I’m telling the world the very thing I’ve spent my life trying to hide under socks and Chucks and Doc Martens and water shoes at the beach—I’M NOT QUITE RIGHT AND THAT’S OK. I can’t wear high heels. I can’t wear most shoes, actually. I’ll probably never be on Broadway. And if they make a Barbie of me (like I so thought they might as a child), it would have to have a screwy foot too. And I’m ok with it.

And you know, I’m always pointing a finger indignantly into the air (ask A), saying things like “…and that’s why I don’t want to have kids,” as if I have to defend my decision to be childless constantly. But this is something that stays so real with me. Thinking about how those kids made me feel every day… ugh. And I know how dramatic this all sounds, but it was sort of dramatic. And looking at these scanned-in documents, it still seems kind of dramatic. I just hope these days, we can show kids how to be more tolerant and loving, that we can find a way to make their hearts big and their hurt small. Because it’s one thing if I were to have a kid who is teased or picked on—something that would probably hurt too much to bear—but it’s another thing entirely to have a kid who does the teasing and the picking on. So let’s be the example for them, you know?

Oh, and thanks for reading this slop. <3
mt

EDIT FOR AFTERTHOUGHT: The point of this blog post wasn’t so I could garner pity or be commended. First, it was an emotional response to so many feelings. I felt empowered, like I had overcome some shit and can now speak about it and not be afraid.

Too, I think I’m feeling a little sad about how mean kids could be and how much it has affected my being. So permanent, really. It’s hard for me to even believe kids could be that cruel… and I hadn’t thought about it for a while, so it sort of hit me like a punch in the mouth. I’m glad that I still believe in people and didn’t turn out all bitter and spiteful. And that’s just luck, in my opinion.

Lastly, I think the bigger message is to teach kids to be kind. Not just teach, but SHOW THEM. I don’t mean you have to shelter them and allow them to be ignorant, but what about empathy? I didn’t mention it above (because I didn’t want to get even more cliche and melodramatic), but I’m glad for all that garbage. It helped me to becoming understanding, considerate and sensitive to people and how I make them feel. I have a lot of very real flaws, but I know for a fact that my heart is full. I’m glad of it. Despite. (:

January 30, 2012

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!

“Nuggets,” I like to call them. Those simple, unabashed moments of clarity when someone says something to you and it finally pokes through at the right moment. We’re not all always ready to accept things, you know? We have to be at a certain “point,” people say. Pencil-ended as I was on Friday, my dear friend said something that felt monumental to me. And even that sounds dramatic.

Let me also relay to you that “nuggets” don’t necessarily denote anything spectacular. We’re not talking just epiphanies here. For instance, there was a moment I realized that the scary test of the Emergency Broadcast System wouldn’t, in fact, be beeping if there were an emergency. I used to sit in anticipation— face to the TV screen, wringing my little pink hands and listening to the long drone of that too-loud alarm. Clearly, I was waiting for them to instruct us on the emergency I’d need to hide under my bed from. Then there are the many billboards and signs that I see daily but never stop to comprehend fully. For the record, Steak ‘n Shake has nothing to do with any type of new-rock dance crazy from the 50’s… they’re talking MILKshakes, not BOOTYshakes. Perhaps it’s just the strange phenomenon of hearing something so often that you never even stop to consider what it actually means. Or my IQ is just slightly high enough to enable me shoe-tying and teeth-brushing capabilities. Ha.

Anyhow, this friend of mine—so wise in the world with such brightness, like the contagious kind—she says to me… “Life is too short to spend it with people that make you feel bad.” And something finally sounded to the right parts of me.

Short, sweet and something to digest this snowy Sunday. I hope, at least, a few of you out there are at the “point” where you can gobble this up. Do yourself a favor in 2012… be near the people that make you feel great about you. Chances are, you’re an awesome person and you spend way too much time comparing/envying/letting other people dictate your self-worth. And this is no damn revolution. We KNOW we shouldn’t. But we do it anyway. So just don’t.

Easy, huh? (: