Author: lauren

Because I’ve been there

Last night at Celebrate Recovery a remarkable thing happened. I met a woman, we’ll call her Nancy, who was just off a relapse, and whose life was in all possible ways, falling apart. I’ve been working at CR for some time now, and I still get a little scared when I meet someone like that. Not because they are scary, but because I start sensing my own inadequacies while they’re still talking. I know that I cannot keep that person safe, I can’t make sure they don’t use again, and because I’m already sponsoring a few people, I can’t even give them my number and tell them to call me anytime like I used to do. My “call me anytime” list is a little full at the moment. So I waffle, and I offer to pray for them if they’re the praying kind, and I feel like a failure before anything’s happened.

But last night, while I was just starting to feel like that, someone else spoke up. A woman spoke up that I love, but honestly, I had not seen a lot of leadership potential in. We’ll call her Mary. Mary asked Nancy a few simple questions. Where do you live? When do you work? She quickly confirmed that she lived nearby and worked the same kind of hours. Mary gave out her phone number, said to call anytime, and offered to go get Nancy if she found herself in a bad spot. “Do you smoke?” Mary asked. Nancy nodded, looking at her shoes. “Me too!” Mary said. “We’ll have a cigarette together.”

This morning at Breaking Free, I had a very similar experience. I had a girl I just could not make contact with, who yelled at me and refused to participate or get off her cell phone. While I was at a loss, one of the other women broke in and told her, “This isn’t our regular teacher. Our regular teacher isn’t going to ask you a bunch of times to put your phone away. She’s just going to expect you to turn it off.” She also asked some very simple questions. How long have you been here? How old are you? She found out where that girl was from, that she was brand new to the program and hadn’t learned the rules or consequences yet, that she was still a little peeved to lose some of what she felt was freedom. All the women chimed in to let her know that she was in a much better place than she’d left, even if it didn’t feel like it right now. And they offered her their phone numbers, and told her to call anytime.

It is beautiful to me that being just a few years, even months, along in a recovery process means that you’re totally able to help someone who’s just starting. Which is great for me, because I can let go of the silly assumption that I can or should do it all myself.

It’s Okay to Cry

This is a piece I’ve been doing for a while, and now I have it on video thanks to my dear friend, Heidi.

I was desperately and stupidly trying to write a paper for school the day after my good friend Michele passed away. Frustrated, I called a friend, who assured me that it was normal to be upset. To which I replied, but I have to stop crying! He gently reminded me that it is okay to cry. I felt he didn’t understand that I was crying in class, I was crying on the bus, I was crying the student union, I was crying at small group, I was crying at the freaking grocery store! And while it’s a nice thought that it’s okay to cry, I was finding that the times when it’s really appropriate to cry were fewer than I’d thought. I also discovered that even when I cried in wildly inappropriate places, everyone would act as if I was not crying. Although that felt awkward, I was mostly grateful that I could maintain some modicum of privacy.

One time, though, at a bus stop, a woman noticed that I was crying and kindly asked me if I was okay. Because she seemed to mean it, I told her that I was fine, but I was sad because a friend of mine had just died. “Cancer?” she asked. I shook my head, cried a little harder, and said, “No. She killed herself.” The woman nodded, serious, but not surprised. I went back to my crying, thinking she was done. Then she turned suddenly and demanded, “It wasn’t ’cause of no man, was it?”

I still hold a special place in my heart for that woman.

The Neverending Story

Very good young adult fiction, and thoroughly enjoyable to this adult as well. The pure fantasy of the world inside it is inventive and varied to a wonderful extreme. It does seem that this one book could easily be divided into two, being that there are two great conflicts resolved, one after the other. But the feeling that the book has meandered past it’s natural ending only lasts for a few chapters in the middle, and the plot picks up again. Which normally I would cite as a fault, but even that droopy center is an intentional part of the protagonists development. It’s a great book for storytellers in particular, especially the droopy bit, as it breaks down the individual elements of story in an engaging and imaginative way that won’t be soon forgotten. A small word of warning; the scary parts are actually pretty scary. I read part of this book to a three-year-old friend of mine, and she frequently put her hand on my shoulder to interject a earnest “whoa.”

Artist Envy

I’ve spent the last two weeks or so redecorating our extra bedroom. It was an overwhelming Noah’s Ark motif. Now it’s a small art gallery. It’s a lot better now. There is a lot of creativity involved in interior decorating, and I’m always interested in exploring new art forms.

The shopping is circular, inefficient, and frustrating, although the results have been very satisfying. I’ve outfitted the room completely and stayed inside a modest budget. I really love all the things that have found their way to this room. My red leather chair, my ergonomic laptop desk, the indigo curtains, the sculpted metal curtain holdback, the painted ceramic switch plate, even the luggage rack I purchased for guests has a certain elegance to it.

The work itself can be pretty grueling. I tried to get it all accomplished during the week I had off my nanny job, so I worked on it from morning to evening five days in a row. The fumes, repetitive stress, and just the weirdness of the postures and muscles I was using all made me sore, swollen, and exhausted. After consulting with a nurse friend of mine, I also determined that I might be allergic to the brand of wall paint I was using. The results are fantastic, though. Mint green paint and cartoon animals have been replaced with a gorgeous white called dove wing, and all the fantastic visual art that’s been waiting for a home in our house. And this is officially the only room in the house where the trim and baseboards are not covered in chipped, off-white paint. No, in here they are a luscious dark brown.

Through this whole experience, I’ve found that I can really envy visual artists. It is such a wholly satisfying experience to watch physical things change because of my work. All the questions of whether it’s working or not can be answered by an inner intuition that lies in my eye. It’s beautiful, it has real color, and you can see that it’s different when you’re done. In contrast to how I interact with a novel, there is something powerful about being able to look at a whole piece, just look at it. Maybe I’m just frustrated with the particular piece I’m working on (or not working on, as is too often the case), but it’s hard for me to return to my black words plodding down the electric white screen.

Before

After

Corregidora

A book by Gayl Jones. Corregidora chronicle in a stream-of-consciousness, history-come-present style, the use of African female slaves as prostitutes and breeders. Ick.

I can’t say that it’s bad writing, but I can say that I hated it. Perhaps I’m not deep enough to understand it, or maybe I don’t have the strength to look some of the horrors of the world in the face. I’ll take the blame for my inability to want to read this book, for hating every single page, and being sorry I ever picked it up in the first place. This is very similar to a lot of the literature that I hated in college. It is soul-sickeningly painful to read, and manages to make me feel like a small person for not liking it. I can recognize the literary merit of the piece, even the justice of exposing so hideous a truth. But I do not want to read it, and would not willingly inflict it on another human being.

I will add to that review simply that I have loved Gayl Jones in other books, and that no one should judge her, good or bad, based only on this piece. I recommend The Healing, which is magical.

Centered

I will stand in the center of your love
In the eye of your storm
Your power
Your movement
Your destruction
Your creation
rushing all around me
blinding every other view

I will stand in your center
in the quiet peace of you
wrapped in the swirling chaos of you
You are my sole perspective
Seeing only your gaze
down the howling valley of your storm

I will stand so I am in you
surrounded by you
covered by you
supported by you
Gazed on by you

I will stand in the eye of your storm
because I am the apple of your eye
I am made to live
In the center of your love

A Stress Plan

I’ve had a very rough week, and my stress level has reached an achingly dull apex. My dear friend Malika suggested that I put together a “stress plan” for this day. I asked her what her stress plan was, and she told me that she essentially lies in bed and watches tv until conditions improve. I would like nothing more than to watch tv all day, but I know two things about that. First, I will feel like a fake artist, a lazy person, and a squanderer of the sacrifices my husband has made for my non-lucrative career. Second, the collective guilt of the first thing will make me feel like total crap by 4pm. Quite frankly, I already feel awfully close to crap, so I don’t want to add to it. I asked Malika if she feels that kind of guilt when she employs her stress plan. She smiled her deliciously wicked smile and declared, “Yes, sometimes I hear that voice in my head. I tell it to fuck off.”

I have written some. I take a gritty pride in getting a modicum of work done under the worst of conditions. On all of the worst days of my life, some words have been written. I often motivate myself to continue this trend by saying that Frida Kahlo would be painting in my circumstance. I have this great visual from Selma Hayak’s beautiful portrayal of Frida’s life. A woman crippled with pain, curled in bed, but curled around a small canvas where her one free hand is still painting. This time around I have pressed into that motivation and discovered something new. Frida would be painting, but she would not be painting in spite of her pain. She would be painting directly from her pain. She visualized her life and her struggles in these haunting surreal images, and that is what she left behind her.

Lately, with my stress ever rising as the days drag on, I have been trying to focus on being totally in each moment that passes. Right now, in this moment, I am in this painfully stretched waiting. This moment may be forever eclipsed by the news I do or do not get tomorrow (or the day after that, sadly), but this is the moment I’m in now. This is my only opportunity to experience this day, my only hours to document what this feels like. I do not visualize my life in surreal images. I conceptualize it in playful, curling words. That’s what I’ll be writing today.

Rilke and a Difficulty

Today I’m nannying and reading the great poet Rilke. Rilke keeps assuring me that everything that is real is difficult, that everything that is life is difficult, that difficulties are beauties waiting to be loved.

A tiny child is digging her tiny fists into my soft skin, wanting for the hundred and eighth time today to be in my lap. Not so she can sit and enjoy my willing embrace. But so she can stand on my thighs while she pounds her limbs into mine, like the only possible happiness is for our bodies to be metaphysically conjoined. It was sweet, affectionate the first hundred and seven times, but now my unique identity is getting bruised.

Because of Rilke, I at least consider pressing into the difficulty and trying to love it. So I think about clinging to God’s shins, grasping and pounding and clinging to get closer, closer still. Unlike my clunky, rigid identity, I know that God can take me entirely into himself, can take me ever closer, and that he desires such an end much more than I. Then I think about all of humanity, millions upon millions of discrete beings, clamoring to get in, to be part of this all loving, all accepting whole.

I think about the enormity of a God who can do this too. I think about what it means to be truly omnipresent. I take that difficulty, and I love it just a little.

VM Open Mic

For about a year I’ve been attending the Voices Merging Open Mic, the largest amateur open mic in the Twin Cities. There are roughly 300 people who attend these gatherings. It feels like a concert, except it’s free and the atmosphere (in my oh-so-humble opinion) is a lot warmer. Each artist who makes the list has five minutes on the mic, and there’s always a featured artist who gets a little more time. I love going to these, and I try to get on the mic as often as possible too. It’s great practice, and a great crowd.

This Monday, I attended a VM open mic whose theme was “Let’s Talk About Sex.” I don’t usually perform to the themes, but that one was worth writing a piece for. So I wrote and performed the piece below, which was a ton of fun. Not safe to watch at work, though.