A letter for a friend

Dear friend,

You don’t understand. I know you don’t.

You wish you were pretty, you wish you were brave.

You think, “how did you come to this?” After all, you dream yourself a thousand times around the world, but cannot get out of this place. There’s an emptiness inside you and you’d do anything to fill it in.

You feel like kicking out all the windows and setting fire to this life. You would change everything about you using colors bold and bright.

But changing everything? Unattainable. Why would you change everything anyway?

Still, I know you’ve felt lonely times when you could not find a friend.

At night, you find it kind of funny; you find it kind of sad. The dreams in which you’re dying are, sometimes, the best you’ve ever had.

The morning comes. The day brings together the mixing of colors. But it breaks your heart when all the colors mix together to grey. Will that ever change?

Trying to understand, you sing along: It seemed to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind. Never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in. I would have liked to know you, but I was just a kid. Your candle burned out long before, your legend ever did.

You think about his song. It plays over and over in your mind. Though you see yourself a ‘nobody’ in comparison to his muse, something makes you think. It isn’t how you want to go. You don’t want to be snuffed out. Maybe there is still time to be a – somebody.

You are sitting outside. It’s the smell that stops your thoughts. It may be the last whiff of fresh cut grass this year. The days are getting shorter. The nights colder. The grass will no longer need cutting.

You feel an urge to give yourself a chance, an opportunity. To see another summer.

You fold your legs under your heavy body and push up toward the sky. It is not over.

You think about now. You’ve got the sun up there to clear away the clouds. So, why look back when there’s a stunning, blazing, so amazing…now?

You are potential. You are loved.

Signed,

Your friend,

who cares.

 

*Thank you to Sara Bareilles, Dave Matthews, James Taylor, Gary Jules, Elton John, and SheDaisy for helping me put her words to lyrics.

 

Attaching.

My mom asks me “so, what are you up to today?” I freeze. Ugh. What am I up to today? What do I say? Do I say what I’m really up to or do I say what I think she wants to hear?

Anyone who knows me in the very least would probably guess I pick option B. I tell her exactly what I think she wants to hear. Busy, busy, busy. I have all these things in the works and I’m going somewhere. I promise, you’ll be proud of me.

But then, after a while, it’s hard to keep up the façade.

See, I figure if you tell someone that you’re doing nothing when they ask you what it is you are doing, it might make things a little…uncomfortable.

Why should my mom have to be the one who is working, and working hard at that, while I hang out at home playing around with a book I may or may not ever publish, watching video teachings on mindfulness and researching random topics like sinking cities? That’s not fair. I should feel guilt for that…hence, make it up so that it sounds like I’m doing something, right?

Enter the biggest source of my suffering right now. Attachment. Mainly, attachment to my own striving. What is it, in this moment, that I am so attached to I cannot move beyond the guilt and shame I am so very good at feeling?

It is all the things I should be aspiring for. Money, career, kids, travel, a better body and better hair. Need I forget I should have been able to run 15 miles today instead of only making it to 13. Loser.

For heaven’s sake, I should, at the very least, be aspiring to find what my true passions are. Isn’t that what this whole hiatus from the working world was supposed to be for me anyway? Well, you get the idea. I should be doing a lot of things.

But, for the sake of argument, suppose I let go of the attachment to that stuff and actually do spend the next week researching sinking cities – Venice, New Orleans, most of Holland – because I’m not so caught up in all the things I should be striving for. Could be freeing I suppose.

It’s not about not having any pleasurable experiences that come out of money, career, kids, travel, a better body and better hair. It’s about not attaching to them as a source of ultimate satisfaction. Because really, I’m sure you’ve heard this before, you aren’t your money, your career, your kids, the places you travel, the body or hair you have. But, knowing from my own experiences, I hear this stuff but don’t actually listen. Blah, blah, blah.

For example, I’d like to think I am my body right now. I have successfully convinced myself I am gaining weight.

I was obsessively weighing myself each day. Sometimes, multiple times a day. My lovely husband decided I’d had enough fun in my own misery and hid the scale.

Good for him for taking some action. And good for me because I went almost two weeks without the need for weighing. But, like all good things that come to an end, The obsession with thinking about gaining weight came back with a vengeance.

So, like any good person who enjoys making themselves suffer would do, I started brainstorming. If I were him, where could the scale go that she, me, would not think to look? Well, duh, it’s not going to be anywhere in the house (trust me, I searched). Unless he buried it in the backyard, it has to be in the garage.

He went off to work and I went off on my quest for the scale. It was a beacon of plastic silver light shining down at me from a shelf in the garage. Honestly, he could have done a better job at hiding it.

I proudly set it on the concrete floor and hopped on the scale just so I could verify my paranoia. Eek. A little higher than I’d like. I’ll take my shorts off because that should knock off a few ounces.

And why did I do it? Because I like to suffer! Makes me feel like a real human and now I have another excuse to feel bad about myself. Congratulations Jen!

Honestly, though, I’m not naïve enough to say I enjoy suffering. I just don’t know I’m doing it. It’s an innate part of the human condition that I accept as normal.

I suffer because of my own narcissism. I am attached to my body. It makes me who I am as Jen.

I suffer because of the clothes I have in my closet. Hardest thing for me to let go of even if I haven’t worn the thing in 2 years. There is that chance, however improbable it might be, that I will wear that shirt 2 years from now. I get rid of that shirt, and I can guarantee within a few days I will go looking for it. I’ll be wishing I had that one specific shirt, the one I never wanted before it was gone, to wear. What do I do? Let it go? Heavens no. I go buy another one just like it.

Seriously, I know I’m not the only one who does this.

I also suffer because I’m attached to my likes and dislikes. Take pickles. I loathe pickles. I hate when I don’t know they’re coming and they end up on the plate of food without my knowledge contaminating everything else that could have been edible around it with their slimy yellowish green pickle juice. This world would be a better place without pickles.

Right? We all can relate to this. Not pickles specifically, but something. This is all so silly, but it’s so easy to do.

Homework for the week then is to relinquish my attachment to the need to sound intelligent when asked the question of what I’m doing today. Easy enough? We’ll see.

I’ll spend this week instead learning a little more about sinking cities maybe. Maybe I’ll even share some of the knowledge I learn in my next entry.

Truth is, I am doing things today. Why would I want to tell myself what I’m doing is not good enough?