Happy holidays from the Hellish Hand-basket

Another year plods to a close. How do individual moments seem to drag when days, months, and years speed by so fast? The moments of 2022 blend together into a big blur of terror and boredom. 

I'd recap but memory fails.

My friend asked me if I was depressed. I said, I don't think so. After our call, I looked up the symptoms of depression. While I was at it, I looked up the symptoms of anxiety. You'll be relieved to know, I don't have either one. I might have signs of dementia, but it's too soon to know for sure. 

I'm pretty sure, though, that I am still grieving.

Just plain old garden variety grief, not so much for what I’ve lost, although that lingers, but more like grief for the idea of home that didn’t manifest for me since coming to Tucson. I sought a safe affordable home in the desert, and I got a temporary fix, which is grand, but long-term, Tucson did not turn out to be the answer for me, and that makes me sad.

As long as I'm grieving, I might as well add other losses to the list. I’m sad that suddenly I have to take so many meds. I’m sad that my heart is glitchy. I’m sad that my ears won’t settle. I’m sad I will end up joining the vast numbers of "car camping" nomads while I look for my new home. It's going to take a miracle. In other words, luck and persistence.

As long as I'm sad for myself, I might as well add my tears to the universal mix. I’m sad that so many people around the world are suffering. Near and far, life is hard and people suffer. Life has always been hard. People have always suffered. On a suffering scale, is it better or worse now, compared to decades past? I have no idea. How do you define and measure suffering? Can I say I suffer more than you suffer? To me, being cold is suffering. Hothouse flower.

Today is Christmas day. Two of my siblings got on the Zoom today with their respective significant others to do the obligatory monthly family Zoom, which just happened to fall on Christmas day. One sibling was absent. He has always blazed his own trail. Even as I send him texts (where are you? Family Zoom happening now!), I envy him his detachment. There's freedom in remaining unattached.

My family detached from Christmas years ago. When the parents were alive, we'd go out to eat. No cooking, no cleaning. Then we detached from the season by adopting a round-robin secret Santa gift-giving exchange among the immediate family members. Before long, we stopped giving gifts all together. Dad died, Mom became demented, I was broke, my younger brother was busy, and my older brother didn't care. 

Only my sister seems interested in carrying on any sort of family tradition or ritual. Channeling Mom, she sent me a toothbrush for Xmas 2021. This year I asked her not to. I can buy my own toothbrushes. But I think she was trying to hold family tradition together. As we get older, traditions have tattered. Memories have faded. We are widely scattered with no parent to glue the family dregs together. Interest and energy are circling the drain. 

Speaking of family rituals, next spring I'm planning to take a road trip to Oregon. If all goes according to plan, my sister will fly out from Boston. We will drive down to the coast and scatter Mom's ashes on the Columbia River at the same place we scattered my father's ashes, if we can find the place. It might have been washed away by time and tide since 2005 or whenever we did that ritual. Mom's been in a box for almost two years. It's time we set her free. Not that she would care—Elf on a Shelf, Mom in a Box—but I suppose my brother could use the shelf space.

It's possible that I will discover my next home somewhere on that road trip. Fingers crossed.

Free falling in slow motion

Remember when Alice fell down the rabbit hole, and she fell for such a long time, she got bored and fell asleep? The lesson of that story is that waiting for any impending disaster gets tedious after a while when the disaster fails to manifest. I've been in free fall almost from the moment I arrived in Arizona. In April it will be two years. I'm still free falling. 

The descent into the unknown is shaped partly by the imbalance in my inner ears and partly by the declining balance in my bank account. I don't know what the trajectory of my inner ears is going to be, but it's not hard to do the math on the money. I need to go someplace easier on the head and cheaper on the wallet.

I'm planning a reconnaissance road trip in April. Meanwhile, I'm using my free fall time to prepare. I don't know what I'm preparing for, exactly. 

I used to scoff at the preppers. I had an acquaintance who was sure the banking system was disintegrating. Now that I think back, it might have been around 2008. Dang it, she was right! Well, I had another friend who was prepping for the end of the world in the year 2000. Remember Y2K? No? Well, I do, sort of. I have a hazy recollection that I bought a couple extra gallons of water. I did not purchase bins of food to last me twenty years and a gun with plenty of ammo. People did, I heard. I guess their bins of food are nearing their expiration dates.  

In 2021, When I was packing for my move to Tucson, I ordered some camping gear from a survival company. Now I get emails reminding me to prepare for impending doom. After January 6 of last year, I am no longer a skeptic. This survivalist prepper lifestyle thing is somewhat associated with the van life movement, which has a certain appeal to me these days given I might be doing some "car camping" of my own soon. 

I've watched enough Walking Dead episodes to know how to take down a zombie but rioting humans are a different kind of mindless monster. Would I fight to stay alive? I'm not sure. You want my house? You want my identity? It's so important to you to destroy it? Okay. Go ahead. I'm nearing my sell-by date anyway. I had my fun. I grew up in the 1960s! No polio! It doesn't get much better than that for a little lower middle-class white girl. 

I want to shift my perception. It's going to take daily practice. Instead of seeing free fall as a scary negative experience, I want to reframe it as a grand exciting adventure. The trajectory of my life has never been linear. This is just more of that. Instead of criticizing nonlinearity as a failure, why not celebrate the organic nature of creativity? I don't have much linearity in my life but I have buttloads of creativity. 

If I can achieve the spartan lifestyle I am seeking, I'll be able to pursue my creativity and do it within my means. There won't be pressure to "get a job," the single most fatal phrase an artist can hear. I hear the voices of my parents clamoring in my head right now: You can't do that! What if you get sick? How will you live? 

Begone, all you voices. I've done my job caring for others. I've spent enough time and energy trying to fulfill someone else's idea of abundance, prosperity, and success. I'm old enough to make my choices and accept the outcomes. Hi ho hi ho, live or die, it's the creative life for me. 

It looks like the end, but it's not

I am compelled to evaluate everything. I come by it naturally. My ancestors survived by constantly evaluating their environment for threats. Is that a snake or a stick? Is that a tiger or is that just the pattern of dappled shadows among the trees? My compulsion to evaluate everything is hardwired into my DNA. I can’t not. That is what a compulsion is.

Evaluation leads to judgment. Judgment almost always leads to resentment or despair. Rarely does it lead to self-administered attaboys. Whatever happens to me, in me, around me, or by me, I have a continuous stream of chatter in my head: this is pretty good, this isn’t so bad, this is bad, this is really bad, this is the worst. 

My scale is a little skewed. I'm missing the points on the positive end of the scale, the ones that might be marked this is fabulous, this is fantastic, this is the best. I can’t bring myself to type exclamation marks. Consider them implied.

I’m so used to settling for mild resentment, I can’t let myself feel anything above that point on the scale. A good day for me is when I achieve neutrality. When my brain turns off the evaluation wheel and just listens to the wind.

What is success?

The question of the day: What is success? Go ahead, take your time. I'll let you ponder the question for a minute. It's not a trick question, but answering it could be tricky. Maybe write a list. Okay, time's up. What did you come up with? More important, whose version of success did you channel? 

 

Was it the definition of a long-dead ancestor? I pose the question because someone tried to impose their version of success on me today. After the conversation concluded, I realized it wasn't even their own definition. It was really a dead person's version of success. May they rest in pieces. 

The supposed implication was that if I aspired to that definition of success, I would be happy. Or safe, which some might say is more important than being happy.  

Did you make a list? What do you need to have in order to feel successful? Safe, secure, affordable housing and a good job? Maybe a committed relationship, a pet or two, a reliable car, a big-screen TV? Good health insurance, money in the bank, and a 401K? A predictable present and a future with no surprises?

Occasionally, I've allowed someone else's definition of success to influence my decisions. I've discovered the more I pursue someone else's dreams, the less I know who I am. Sometimes I feel guilty that I'm not measuring up to another person's definition of success. I feel ashamed for wanting to succeed on my own terms. That doesn't stop me, though, not for long. 

Success for me is living a healthy creative life of service on my own terms within my means. It's a construct of moving parts. I've had to flex at times. Rarely have I been able to accomplish all parts at the same time. Some parts can flex temporarily but other parts are not negotiable. 

I don't think I was meant to walk the well-trodden path. Sometimes the riskier road calls.