This is not the entry I intended to write today but that is probably just as well.
The intended entry was a far heavier lift and would have made for a concussing first read after a layoff in posts. As a diary entry, it should have come before this one. It hews closer to chronology – which, for whatever reason, I feel somewhat enslaved to serve. The one I didn’t write would have covered the past whereas this one sits squarely in the present.
So, I have ample backfilling to do, and here I am doing none of it.
The intended entry will come. Just not today. We have a lot to talk about. I have a lot to say. It is too much to fit on a plate or even a platter. It will take a meal of many courses. I wouldn’t say that I am back in full toque whirling about from counter to range, but I am at least back in the kitchen and that’s a start.
“I am at least back in the kitchen…” – and, oh, the joy beneath those words.
We’ve been too long without a dinner. It has been painful to me and poor service to you. I’ve been away; and, truth be told, I am not fully ‘back.’ Not the same me. Not the person I was a year or even a few months ago.
It has been a rough stretch marked by a whole lot of suffering. Things that hurt were both exhumed in my yard and landed on my doorstep. It has been… a lot. I haven’t been weathering it as much as I’ve been being transformed to be past it.
I’ve been undergoing an excruciating metamorphosis. It has been a sort of alchemy by fire but there has been no magic to it. It has not been a changing of one thing into something entirely another. It has been more like a distilling of something into more of what it truly is via an infernal divorce from what it is not.
The experience has been altering in a way that is both tectonic and geologic. The long-cooled plates of my life shifted and moved. Beneath them, a geothermal fissure opened up and exposed the obdurate bedrock of who I am as a person to a heat greater than my hardness. Even rock melts under the right conditions. It has been a difficult stretch even for someone accustomed to fire.
With that said, let me allay anyone’s potential worries about me before they set in:
There need be no concern for me or my wellbeing. It has been a painful stretch of emotional upheaval but absent material irreversible harm. There has been no peril to life or longevity – mine or anyone else’s. Having lived through actual crises – and with one tragically playing out in Southern California as we speak – I can tell you, this wasn’t one and isn’t one.
On my personal Drama-Crisis scale, this one has been solidly below the cutoff. It has been a six-foot shit sandwich on a party platter, yes, but even the Super Bowl of Sucking has only so many quarters. Plus, there’s a halftime show.
In terms of what was on the sandwich, there will be time for that… but suffice it to say, it wasn’t a simple PB&J. It was the full #2 at Jersey Mike’s. The Classic Italian. Ham and cheese and other meats. So many other meats. Why does it take so many meats? What even is capicola? I don’t know. Nobody does. It might just be Italian for ‘other ham.’
The point is, there was a lot on that six-foot sub. It wasn’t one thing. It was many. They all hurt. Some were old hurts felt anew. Others were new hurts layered on top. I hurt – was hurt, am hurt – but only in the ways that make for a stretch of hard walking but does not stop you in your tracks.
It has been an unhappy leg, but it hasn’t been a halt to the journey; it has simply been the journey itself. The path is the journey. If we are walking, we are winning. Even when it’s hard going.
I’ve been wounded but not incapacitated. I’ve been sad but not morose; grieving but not in despair. I’ve just been hurt and hurting - and that isn’t life-threatening to me; it is life-affirming. To feel is to live… and, oh, sweet lordie, I’ve been VERY alive lately.
You needn’t worry about me, my state, or my recovery. In the end, I will be left with only silver linings. They will have just been found in a cloud that delivered eleventy-nine lightning strikes first.
I offer all of this, I guess, to set the table for my return to the kitchen as it were. To preface it a bit:
There is some quaking beneath this announcement.
A while back, I popped up at what turned out to be the midpoint not the end of this long painful season. At the time, I felt like I was ‘back’ – I said I was - and then I wasn’t. This time, I don’t feel like I fully am… which, naturally, means I probably am.
That knee-knocking has me feeling a certain kind of way.
It’s like the feeling you get on a day when you are hosting a dinner. It occurs in the last moments before you pivot from the ‘planning and preparing’ to the hectic ‘doing.’ It is a readying for industry. Alone in the kitchen in the calm before the cooking, you make unhurried work of the rolling up sleeves and the tying of apron strings… and then, for just a moment, you come to a stop and just stand there, still… and then you take a deep breath and whirl into motion.
I’m in that place. That moment. That last deep breath before the call to motion. There is an energy to it. We usually record it as ‘nervousness,’ but it is more a sentinel of meaning. It is the physiologic response that comes with caring about what it is you’re about to do.
No one gets butterflies before cleaning out the trunk of their car. We feel it in our belly when we feel it first in our heart.
It is a state of emotional wakefulness that people often find uncomfortable and equate with stressful events. Public speaking, pressurized situations, competitions. The experience of feeling it comes to be a negative in and of itself. That is an association we attach based on a framing of our own. I don’t see it that way. Nerves are proof of life. They are the signal that we are alive and in the moment and have something we care very much about.
Nervy energy sure beats the alternative.
If you don’t believe me, try a little anhedonia for a while…
Find the tingling anxiousness of nerves to be too nerve wracking, give the experience of life fading to a muted gray a whirl. I assure you, after anhedonia you’ll greet the return of that tingle as if it was a war hero returning from the front. You’ll kiss it in Times Square in a nurse’s uniform with one leg cocked up behind you in a picture that will become iconic. You will smooch that damn tingle flush on the mouth.
Ask me how I know…
I’ve had a bit of that lately. Anhedonia.
It has been a symptom not a condition, a byproduct rather than a problem in and of itself. I have understood the underlying causes throughout and known their weight would eventually lift, and so too would the smothering of my joy.
Nonetheless, having no fun is really no fun; misery is misery; and contrary to the saying, it does not love company. Or mine doesn’t anyway. Mine loves to withdraw into isolation. It loves retreating from contact and connection so as to be weathered alone. That impulse is hard to unlearn. You can know it and get it and be fully aware of it when it strikes… but it is hard to surmount.
I’m learning. There are signs of progress. This entry, the timing of it, is one of them.
I am making more of a practice of showing I am hurt when I am, and returning before I’m ‘better’. The old me, the one who didn’t notice his own PTSD until a decade later, would never have written from the bottom of the well about being down and crying in the bucket. That me would have – and did – just steeled himself to the moment, showed only resolve, and led with it so as to bolster others.
I’m not at the bottom of the well per se. I’m more cranking the handle and on my way to the surface. There’s light above and its arrival isn’t in doubt. I’m just less steeled with resolve than I would have once let on - and leaning into putting that on display.
I’m a little squishy but it is a good squishy. It is a stage of growth. It is healthy and good. So is sharing it so openly, so publicly. The older I’ve gotten, the more I have come to believe that the greatest form of self-acceptance… self-love… is being able to comfortably shed all of your armor and walk the world vulnerable to it exactly as you are.
To be able to display your weaknesses, your flaws, your failures, comfortably is to fear nothing, and in that is a far greater strength.
For people who grew up in environments or had experiences that cause injury to self-esteem and self-with, to be fully comfortable with the whole of yourself is to have an unconditional love within that you once had to live without.
So, anywaaaaay, here we are… and here I am.
I’m a little banged up but upright and about - and at last returning to the kitchen...
All of that has me feeling a bit nervy.
And let me tell you, that feeling is a damn joy.
To awaken to the sound of my writer’s voice in my head again feeling eager, excited, impatient, nervous…
Fuck. It’s a damn joy.
It’s ‘Tim Robbins in the Shawshank Redemption after his escape, on his knees in the pouring rain, arms outstretched to the sky….’
It is a relief. A blessing. A gift.
To feel is to live, and, oh, to be alive.
I’m alive, and I’m returning to clatter some pans. Consider this post a note from the kitchen in advance of a rush to cooking.
I don’t know the full menu but I know many of the dishes. There are cookbooks open on counters, and pots on the stove ready to be filled and fired. I will make a mess of the place but there will be food perhaps not gourmet but the kind that warms in winter. Y’all will bring the wine. I’ll bring out the casseroles and corningware, a potholder underneath.
We’ll eat and talk and linger long ‘round the table. The pillar candles will burn low in their simple hurricane glass. We will talk and I will be glad for the company and conversation, but mostly for something mostly felt: the community, the gift of it, the utter preciousness of what it brings into my life and gives me.
At some point, when the eating is long over and a satisfied fullness has lulled the conversation to low, I’ll unsettle the air with an “Oh, hey, I forgot to make a toast….”
The table will quiet, and I’ll start to speak. I’ll stumble less eloquently than I would have liked through a few thoughts. They will be about things I had been feeling all day but hadn’t fashioned into words.
I’ll talk of my joy at the reunion, how much it means to me… and then my voice will catch in my throat, and I’ll look down, turning from the faces at the table, trying to collect myself.
It’ll be the first time all night when I haven’t seemed light and buoyant with the relaxed energy of someone fully present in the moment and happy to be there.
The suddenness of the change, my emotion rising to my throat, my halting to silent will hang in the air for a moment, stopping time, uncomfortable... but then I will gather and look up from the linen with a slight, plaintive smile and tell you in a softer voice how much I’ve missed these noisy dinners, how much I love them.
It will ring as being about more than that though. Obvious will be the unsaid counterpart to the said. Implied behind the happiness will be its hard partner: a period without it.
I’ll pivot to wrapping up my ‘toast’ that wasn’t really one. I’ll say the last few months have been a ride and that I’ll tell you about it next time; and then I’ll close with something like “I’m so glad that we do these. I love this tradition of ours… Here’s to another year of noisy dinners. Cheers.”
Glasses will clink, and the moment will end.
Left out will be the words that caught in my throat when I had to stop to collect myself. They were the same ones beneath every prior ‘toast’ and every future one. They aren’t hard to say. I had just held them back for fear of the weight of water gathered behind them.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you for being here with me.
Welcome back. You are an empath like me I think. We feel things so very deeply like all of our emotions are on steroids - both bad and good. And you can’t turn it off. Nor should you. You’d lose too much of yourself and deprive others who need you to help them carry a heavy load. But it is a double-edged sword and finding a way to hold all the emotions of you and everyone around you is a lot. Writing always helps me sort it all out, make sense of the chaos inside, and share a lesson I’ve learned with others who are feeling the same. So carry on, foot soldier. There’s work to be done ♥️
This. Reading this is relief, comfort, calm. Thank you. I hope you know that there are a lot of people out here like me who are genuinely rooting for you, and wishing you all the best - some of us are not just looking for the latest gossip or “news”. I think that’s because of your writing, and the way that you have invited us to your table. You have created what I feel are very real connections in a sometimes (often) ridiculously unreal world.