The Wolf

I've been feeling the claws of my wolf tugging at the skin around my heart the past few weeks. She whispers poetry to me as I sit with my legs crossed, my mind humming, words that get lost as the river rushes forward. She wants to speak, to scratch off the sweet facade of my quirky sarcasm, my humor. I'm a dream girl and she's a rabid wolf, but we inhabit the same house.

When we were young, we used to play in an enchanted forest, she and I, dirty hands, dirty knees, a mind racing, in love with everything. Boys chased us, admired us, and we felt no shame, and we loved all of them. We smiled up at the stars every night with hope, no pictures or expectations, just hope that life would always be this close, this immediate and real. 

"One day you'll have to let someone take care of you." He said it to me after church, knowing how I felt about him. The men in my life began to notice me, but shy away from me, to tell me everything, but never speak to me in public. At some point during my adolescence, my focus shifted to the male gaze and away from the wolf, my protector, and I have spent the majority of my life chasing it, like a rabid dog, desperate to be saved, and cared for, to be fed. The Male Gaze. 

As your teachers are attempting to tell you how to see the world around you and decide for yourself what you will do about it all, the rest of your immediate surroundings are drooling over the opportunity to tell you what you must do and how much it will cost. The first thing you learn, as a little girl, is that you must be what you are not, and you are never to be who you really are. "Be yourself" is an idiom that means little to nothing. How am I not myself? When I attempt to live the life I feel I am supposed to live. 

And the fairytale is that someone will save you from the drudgery of a life with no direction...leaving you one direction: attempt to attract and maintain the male gaze. And oh what an occupation it becomes. It consumes you. Look at me. See me. Admire me. 

I hear that I am beautiful but I cannot believe it this morning, staring into my own eyes in the bathroom mirror. The bones in my face are misplaced and misshapen. I am beginning to see lines. I am older than I was even three years ago. Rigid. I don't go out as often as I used to any more, but there are bills to be paid. I while away the hours at work or at home with my dog. I fear the city leaves me feeling trapped.

In so many ways I have become who I am today, who I always needed to be, after roaming the streets of Chicago in the frozen twilight. Yet I struggle to shake the shackles of male attention. How can I exist without it? I wonder. Everything I have ever been taught has projected an image of myself to me as a member of a nuclear family, casting everything I am and always have been as merely a fraction of the whole in holy matrimony. 

I gambled away my life on the idea that my worth could be broken down and placed in a box marked with someone else's name, and that his name would make me free. In my quest to prove that I am smarter than the average white woman, I have spent a lot of money and time just to be able to convince the male gaze that I am worth the attention, the seal of approval.

As a teenager I prayed to God, why did you make me this way if you wanted me to be silent? Why did you make me so loud? I wept, and I begged. I hunched my shoulders and hung my head. I curled up inside of myself until I found that validation...in someone else, and when it ended, I felt the weight of the world crashing down around me. This path of righteousness had led me to a crushing defeat, and I have been desperate to trust myself, much less anyone else, since that day.

How does a romantic recover what is lost when rejection means she herself has fallen short and will continue to struggle until she can prove herself worth it....the male gaze?

Don't be all yourself. There is nothing wrong with you, but maybe don't be yourself entirely right away. Don't put it all on the table. Like a hammer. If I had one...I would hammer in the morning just to piss off the neighbors. 

The girl, the me part of her was tired and sad and scared for a while. She was hungry, starving, screaming at people in traffic, at stop signs, "I am lost! I took the wrong road and now I'm lost! and it's no one's fault and it's everyone's fault, and it hurts like hell." 

And then she wasn't lost. One can only wander so long in the mucky mire of the darkest woods before she is discovered by her wolf half, for if she is half of anything, it is this beast. And then the beast begins to claw away, dragging her fingers through the layers upon layers of delusion, freshening the wounds so that they might heal properly. 

You are just now learning how to live, aren't you? The woman I work with, five years my senior, hypothesizes.  She drives me home on the horrible days so I don't have to ride my bike, and we "chill." She is Puerto Rican, familiar with my neighborhood from the days when it was patrolled by rival gangs. I love the folklore, but even folklore is too safe. 

Retired gang bangers have shown me their battle scars in hopes that I might provide them the comfort they felt certain my respect in conversation truly communicated, bullet wounds. But my wounds are just the same. We fight the absence of choice, carry the rage of our mothers before us whose choices were fewer and voices were ignored or forgotten. We are all the same, the oppressed, and we are all completely different. 

I cannot imagine a world where I fear the pain of a bullet on a daily basis. I cannot imagine what it is like to be intelligent yet marginalized and stereotyped twice as much as even I am, that your sugar and spice must be extra sweet to cover up the chains of an earned collective rage. Black women have the right to be angrier than anyone else every day of their lives. I don't know a lot of things, but I do know that.

And I too own my anger, such as it is, close to my heart, where it is warm. I used to weep for my capacity to love. A burning energy in the pit of my stomach, wasted on my failure to matriculate.

But not failure. Oh no. There is so much use in the world for the love that compels me. There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole, and Gilead is my heart.

You can heal yourself. It is not easy, but it is within you. 

The wolf is in front now, and she roves, and hunts, and warms my feet at night. She doesn't want to bite, but nature compels her toward self preservation. Her language is truth.

I am thankful that we found each other.

Nancy Caroline, a Timeline: 2006 - 2007 (slowin it down a bit)

Apparently...we look like we are "straight up gay" in this picture.

I started Grad School in 2005, drank like a fish, spent New Years in New York after both of my grandmothers died within a month of one another. I tried to date, but everything promising terrified me to the point of self destruction. I did lots of self-destructive things my first two semesters in graduate school. I had never rebelled as a young thang. I was steadfast and loyal....good. Oh how I tried so desperately to be good.

Then the summer came and my best friend and I lived like we were kings....that drank a lot, loved the boys, belched and farted like no other woman has or should, woke up hungover...most days, and laughed...because it was the only true remedy to the hell of real life. We shut down the Hi-Tone (the original Hi-Tone on Poplar Ave) on a weekly basis, broke into apartment complexes with pools and jacuzzis, befriended booth owners at the Memphis International BBQ festival, danced at the Lindy Hop, danced, drunk as hayle at Ernestine and Hazel's, and ate McGriddles....so many McGriddles. We had a love affair with Midtown Memphis. We were partners in crime. She turned to me one night and told me that it was a time we were having and that it would have to end at some point, and she was right. I taught English in the Czech Republic, but not before stopping over in London to visit my college roommate who happened to be there attending art school. We went with an Englishman friend of mine (that I kissed a bunch outside of The Buccaneer in Memphis while a bluegrass band played inside and then months later again in a churchyard in Prague after getting totally wasted at a nightclub on dollar beers) to a club called The End where the DJ Erol Alkan hosted a party, Trash, which he ended every night by playing The Smith’s classic “There is a Light that Never Goes Out,” while the English boys smashed their beer glasses on the floor, and everyone, everyone, EVERYONE sang along like the night would never end and we would never grow old. My local tour guide (and worldwide makeout buddy extraordinaire) also introduced me to my next boyfriend that night, a fella from Manchester that was studying Diatoms to predict climate change (I think) in grad school. We talked about England’s recent loss in the World Cup, to Portugal, and he struggled to describe how it felt to know he had to wait four years for another chance. I helped him by reminding him that presidents in the U.S. serve four year terms. He laughed at my cleverness. He turned to me at the end of the night, pointed up to indicate the song everyone was singing, and yelled over the pulsing crowd, “THIS IS A TCHUNE!” I took a class on Emerson the semester after that summer, and fate’s hand dipped its fingers back into my stew. The instructor, on the first day, informed the class that we would just be reading a lot of Emerson and if anyone wanted to drop the class, that was fine with him. No one dropped, and we entered into a philosophical journey that led me to my research obsession, how to apply Emerson’s transcendental tenets to women in a world that did not allow women the freedom to “transcend.” The instructor introduced me to Margaret Fuller and her essays, letters, journals, and activism began to guide my life in directions I had never imagined. I spent the next two years, travelling with my English gentleman and reading about Fuller, buried in printouts from JStore, academic articles examining Fuller’s relationship to her mentors like Emerson and Hawthorne, her admirers like Poe and Whitman, and her relationship to herself, the most torrid, the most confused, as she wrestled with society’s expectations and her own nature. She was a beast of an intellect, obsessed with learning as much as she could and sharing that knowledge, but her fervor was lost on the men in her life. They did not know what to do with the feelings they had for her that she pressed them to explore in the name of life and liberty. They would fall short, literary giants, lost for words in the company of a woman that did not fit the mold. How curious it is that her history is known by so few…

Beautiful Bar"th"elona

Before I finally put pen to paper to write and eventually defend my Master’s Thesis, We travelled to Spain, Valencia and Barcelona, road bicycles out into the countryside and ate Paiaya and locally grown almonds on the beach of the mediterranean sea as the sun set. Then we fell asleep listening to the echoes of night owl footsteps along the stone streets below us. We fought. We went to food markets and bought avocados that we ate on fresh bread spread with Marmite and bananas. It was weird. We visited art museums and read the labels for each piece, took naps in the park, and fought. We made it to Prague a few days before we were to begin teaching in Pilsen, and we explored her medieval streets until our whole bodies ached, and we fought. Then, we taught English for three weeks in West Bohemia, drank with teachers and students from all over the world but mostly Memphians and Czechs. We smoked Hookah in a tea lounge off a quiet street in the center of the city, drank liqueur that put hair on my chest, and ate beef knuckles and Goulash, slept on beaches in the shade, and road trolleys everywhere.  And we drank beer, rushing under the city from the source, pure and fresh, our nourishment, for in the Czech Republic, beer is food.

Then....I sold my stuff, and I moved to England with the intention of not coming back for a long time.

Catharsis-Farts

Let me get this off my chest in as eloquent a way as possible.

I was sitting on a concrete bench, and there were ants, not a lot of ants, but a few, crawling around on my fingers, and I remember being able to see the moon. It must have been one of those afternoons when you can see the moon before the sun goes down. It’s never a full moon, rather, it’s a moon in transit, close to the beginning of its cycle, thus closer to the earth (or something like that). I remember looking just past his ear as I tried to explain myself and seeing the half moon in the light of day.

I had done a bad thing, he told me. We recently spent the weekend together at our future home out west with our future church, and I had rudely rushed him out Sunday morning while he was being admired by one of the members of the church. I can barely even remember the moment.

The first time we met the members, in December, we had instantly fallen in love with them, and they had fallen in love with us. He told me that he believed he would not have been hired without my charming personality. I remembered him as generally happy and usually admired wherever he went, but he always felt a little awkward and nervous in interview situations. That was where I came in. I was the warmer, the joker, the one to find common ground. I was not, however, much of a lady about it. Ever. Oh how I hated and loved that about myself.

Now it was March, and the preacher and his wife were leaving, waving to us, and calling back that they would go ahead and get a table at the restaurant, but we were surrounded. A shy gentleman had been speaking with us for longer than anyone was comfortable. He wasn’t a bad guy, just one of those guys that keeps nervously talking until whoever is listening cuts him off to leave...to escape. My love was too nice to walk away, so I cut in to remind him that people were waiting for us.

Seems like a normal thing to do, except that I, apparently, am abrasive. The way some had described me to myself at that point in my very early twenties, my voice and words must've gone over like a rusty bucket of soggy diapers.

He told me that he was so embarrassed by that particular interaction that he was listing it as reason for ending our engagement.

We had been together for almost four years, three years when he proposed. We were performing a David Ive’s sketch for the current group of young Christians with whom he was working. It was in Sunday school. Asking me to marry him was in the script, written years before we would ever even read it, but actually having a ring was not. And he had a ring.

Then suddenly, there we were, almost a year later, sitting outside of the laundry room, in the shadow of impending doom. I, shifting my gaze from the ants on my hands to the early moon, was half listening to him explain how inappropriate my behavior had been over the past weekend. He had driven to Dallas from Abilene to tell me all of this. My dad and I had run into him at my place when we got back from dish shopping, for the wedding registry, for my wedding registry.

When I think back to that weekend and turn it around the folds of my gray matter, I remember having brunch at the home of a young married couple from the church. They were quiet and reserved but very intelligent. We talked about politics (within the church) as well as lifestyle, since we were planning a big move west and were looking forward to slower, warmer living. It was dull conversation, if I’m honest, too polite.

Somehow we ended up talking about film, and that conversation made its way to the topic of curse words and sex (or "biblical fornication") in film. He and I were all too familiar with this conversation. We’d had it with each other a million times, and a million times we had been in agreement. Movies were our thing. We went to see so many movies and rented or purchased enough VHS tapes of our favorite films to satisfy the nerdiest of obsessions. We had crossed the bridge from VHS to DVDs together. We saw the rise and fall of Circuit City, and we shopped at the liquidation sales. We basked in our haven of electronics and entertainment like the excellent Americans we were.

This couple was not a fan. They liked movies, but they preferred the ones that didn’t barrage them with unpleasant violence, sex, and language. This was not uncommon among church goers. Entire campaigns to show the world we stood behind our word included pledging, as a Christian, to walk out of movies where the Lord’s name was taken in vain, and I fancied myself one of them for a moment.

Unfortunately, the creative madwoman in my head wouldn’t let me avoid seeing the films that received the highest accolades which were always the films rife with sin. I was a snob and a junkie. We were, together. So I argued as I believed, that if art is to be a reflection of life, it must reflect all of life, even the parts we don’t like.

She (I don’t remember her name, but she was a nurse or something because she was wearing scrubs...or she was just a person that liked wearing scrubs...which is worse, not that being a nurse is bad...just...scrubs) argued that she did not want to fill her mind with such images. I said I couldn’t imagine denying myself knowing how the world works, and what life without church would look like. This was an important moment along the timeline of my relationship with my first love.

And he was my first love. With him, for the first time in my life, I realized that love was easy. That falling in love was something that couldn’t be stopped or controlled, and that the amount of love I had to give was greater than I had ever imagined. I loved him so much it hurt, every single day.

Relationships, on the other hand, were tricky. They required immaculate communication and compatibility. He and I were very young, and he had, I would learn, a few expectations about marriage that I would have never expected. Namely, he had never seen his parents argue, and we argued all the time.

When asked his opinion of “unpleasantness” in film, he surprised me with an about-face and agreed with our new “friends.” It would do us all some good to protect ourselves from having to hear and see, to consume, such violence, such harsh realities. 

Looking back on it, this was the moment I should have known for sure. There were many times before when I should have known something was wrong. He talked about different women, "amazing" women in his life, and I should have seen the lust behind those words, but THIS moment should have thrown me a lot further than it did at the time. 

He, whom I had known so well, was not himself...any more. At least, he was not the man I loved, my heart, my best friend, every night with our feet up laughing about farts and debating the validity of the Best Picture win for Titanic, eating buckets of fries from McDonald's (literally, they sold buckets for a short moment), and laughing our equally unique and ridiculous laughs. He was not himself.

He had not been himself for a long time. I just didn't see it.

I fought him, tumbling into the hole that I didn't even see coming. We wrestled, and I raged. He just wanted it to be easier, and I guess I always knew it wouldn't be...for me. 

A year later, I was in Europe, an overfilled and heavy backpack strapped to my back. It started as motivation, my first effort to build the best revenge: a better life, but revenge is usually misguided, and the most painful breaks are often born of circumstance. We were both victims. 

I don't want to be a victim any more.

I remember a tiny piece of the pain that day every once in a while, when I look up at the sky before the sun has finished setting, and I see the moon. I used to hold onto it like a talisman, a metal of honor for taking it in the face. 

But I had to let it go. I had to stop fighting...without losing my pluck. This is tough to say, but I used to tell people, "I'd rather die than have my heart broken like that again." I'm glad I haven't yet... died, that is.

I was thinking about trying to tie the ants in here at the end, talk about how I don't mind them any more, and how they can't hurt me...but ants are gross...and I will dance on their graves. I will delight in their demise. Is what I'm saying.

Thank you for listening, and pardon me if it seems like I'm abusing our friendship.

Yer Doin' It Wrong

I played the flute for a good ten years of my life. I chose the flute in seventh grade, partly because I was having trouble deciding between it and the oboe, but there had been a kick ass flute solo (probably done on a synthesizer) in a Guns 'N Roses song that summer (maybe you've heard it, November Rain), and my friend Shanda had grabbed my hand and thrust it into the air when Mr. Lumpkin asked if anyone wanted to play the flute. I joined, that day, a small mix of petite girls with pale faces and quiet dispositions. SSSOOOOO me, right?

I took to it very quickly, fell madly in love with the time it gave me, alone in my room, away from my thoughts. I used to subconsciously "dance" while I played. My instructor told me she thought I would fly away flapping my elbows around. I never noticed it. I never noticed anything while I was playing the flute, for a short while.

I played a Yamaha with a silver head, silver plated body, open holes, and a "b flat foot" (mad street cred).

Oh, and I was good.

I won first chair in the second band at all region when I was in eighth grade, which was exciting, but not as good as my predecessors had done. I knew that because people told me, my teachers, my parents, other band members, the older boys in band that used to flirt with me, the mouthy flautist.

Look at my PANTS?!?!?!?!!?

The next year I made first chair first band, and I didn't think I had a chance. I had flubbed the hell out of my scales audition, had a huge tantrum with my instrument while rehearsing that very scale (A major, bastard) earlier in the week, and spent an hour in the corner of the bathroom crying, NAY, weeping about my sub par audition. I hugged my knees to my chest, hiccuped--it was that awful hiccuping cry--and tried to calm myself from the terror of facing the world as a failure.

I convinced myself that I probably just got first chair because the girl who was supposed to "beat" me had mono, and while she did audition, she hadn't been able to devote all of her love to her instrument. She was devoting most of it to her boyfriend...CLEARLY.

But I did score a 111.54 out of 115.

The next summer, my dad and I were perusing the used piccolos at this warehouse collective somewhere in midtown Memphis. It was right before I started driving, so I can't remember exactly where it was, nor do I remember if it's still there. I hated the piccolo. I got it, I understood the impact of that particular register of woodwind on the depth of the music, but I just...didn't GET it, ya know?

There was a lady standing by, listening to me switch back and forth between the piccolo and some of the more expensive flutes. She had leathery tanned skin and frizzy blonde curly hair. She asked me if I was taking lessons with anyone...from where she stood...at a distance. She was wearing one of those broom stick skirts (of course, I probably was too...at that time in my life). My dad stepped in as I answered her. She smiled and rolled her eyes at my answer.

"I know her. She's good...but she can't teach you everything."

She approached my dad with her hand outstretched, a card in it.

"If you want her to learn the whole instrument and its purpose, I can teach her jazz."

"She's happy where she is I think, but thank you," my dad replied to her.

We laughed about it later. JAZZ. HA! What good was THAT going to do me at all-state auditions? I watched her as she drove out of the parking lot in her beat up 86 Honda, struggled to roll the manual window down on the passenger side, and lit a cigarette.

The next few years led me further and further from the flute. I still held onto the idea, went to master classes, went to see the amazing artists that my private flute instructor was able to bring to Memphis. She organized a flute festival and sent me to North Texas to study alongside a dozen other mouthy floutists with one of the most intense and effective flute instructors I have ever met (she made me cry once, in front of everyone). And, yes, I went to "flute camp."

When I came back from camp, my instructor told me I had my sound back, but I knew that I hadn't gotten that thing back, that part of me that was able to completely let go while I played. I couldn't relax, and I couldn't win. I couldn't audition. I became impossibly mortified of being in a room full of judges behind a screen. I told an instructor at a master class once that I might be able to play the song better if the entire audience weren't looking at me, so she made them get up and turn around. I played, and she told me it was all in my head.

My instructor recommended anxiety medication, my parents: therapy. My church recommended prayer.

There was this movement of thought that happened a while ago (if you really wanna know, you can always look things up) called structuralism. It saw (sees) everything as a structure built by society through language to define reality...which means that what we think is reality isn't really because we created the language that defines our reality...so it's our perception of reality...and....also......There was this psychoanalyst that came out of this movement named Lacan who philosophized that the moment we, as humans, learn language, we become separated from reality, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get back to that place where nothing was defined and everything was me and my mom, and I was my mom and my mom was me and the bed and my food and everything. Nothing existed outside of me until I defined it as such.

Except I let other people define it for me...most of us do the same.

That other place, where nothing exists, that's the place I lost. That's the place to which I've spent the rest of my life trying to return.

When I think about it, I sometimes wonder if perhaps taking that woman up on her offer to teach me jazz would have made a difference. I wonder if escaping from all the exercises and metronomes and contests would have led me back to the quiet existence of just me...and the music.

I think about it when I hear jazz, and it sounds so free. I know that anything can be killed, that there are aspiring jazz musicians who struggle to live up to the standards the world has set for them. I know what happens when you forget why you came into the room in the first place, what happens when you let go of what matters for what you THINK matters.

There is nothing so difficult as life in a box. There is nothing so soul sucking as drowning in comparisons.

I was too scared to go to school for music because I didn't want anyone to tell me that I was doing it wrong.

I still have that trepidation with all of my art. My art is my soul, even the most ridiculous parts of my art...s. I take medication and go to therapy all to find and free that part of me I lost when I started to let the world define my terms. I'm trying to define my own terms now. Finally. Please don't tell me I'm doing it wrong.

Through the Mountain

I'm not looking back at 2015. I refuse. I lived 2015 in a dizzy, present, terrified state. I let the winter, incidents of perceived failure, and regret lure me into a tunnel of depression I hope never to see again. It's a tall order. I know. But that is my resolution for 2016. Let me explain.

We can probably all agree that caves are really cool. I remember properly learning of the existence of caves in Coach Dixon's Earth Science class in 8th grade; although, I was always aware of their existence. We watched a National Geographic video in class (a pretty typical occurrence) that presented not only the scientific information but also the historical information on caves in America.

Long after I passed Coach Dixon's class with flying colors, I went caving in Cumberland Caverns with some friends. We ate pot brownies and made shadow puppets on the stone walls after crawling through the cave's hidden tunnels and rooms. For one minute as I lay on my back looking up at the rocks above me, I was seized with the terror that the rocks might come crashing down upon us at any slight movement of the earth we rested upon (paranoia, a pesky side effect of brownies). My brain jumped in quickly and reminded me that, "no, these thoughts are useless," and I let the terror float off into the cavernous darkness. I slept on the floor of the cave that night, dreaming of pink clouds and snoring like a rhinoceros...or an adorable pug.

A few years later, I stumbled upon a cave in the woods in Dahlonega, Georgia (over by the old distillery, you know the one if you live there). I want to know how many terrifying stories one needs to hear about the dangers of going into a cave alone to remove the inherent desire to do just that when one finds a cave in real life. This cave wasn't exactly uncharted or anything, but I did not have the right shoes for the kind of wading an exploration would have required. I still thought about it for a moment.

Floyd Collins

The National Geographic video we watched in Coach Dixon's class featured a brief summary of the story of Floyd Collins through narration, old newspapers, photographs, and sketches of the drama of his imprisonment and death at the hands of our cavernous earth. I hate sketches of past events. Sketch artists are always given license to intensify the drama of situations...especially in National Geographic movies. I saw the terrified face of Floyd Collins intricately sketched every night when I closed my eyes. That's all I knew of Collins, that he explored the darkest corners of earth and that he died, terrified, at the hands of his own lust for a full and glorious life.

While living in Dahlonega and teaching at the university, I tried to convince my theatre students to do the musical version of Floyd Collins' story because it would be an easy set and gorgeous music. It wasn't exactly a known show, however, and putting together a straight play seemed a lot easier and less horrifying than trying to throw together a musically complicated show with myself as the only paid member of the ensemble. Plus, there's a lot of really weird yodeling pieces in that musical.

The tragic outcome

I suppose I wanted to do the show because I was obsessed with the idea that this blank faced historic figure who died so tragically inspired someone else to write such beautiful songs of redemption. With the commemoration of his life in musical form, the image I had of Floyd Collins' contorted and frightened face could relax into peace and beauty.

When I walked into the darkness of depression, I knew I shouldn't have, but I wanted to see where it would lead...at least a very small part of me did, like that flicker of intense curiosity that I always feel at the mouth of a cave. Floyd Collins worked alone. I worked alone, but for far too long. Floyd Collins was trying to find a new entrance to the cave, and I too have been searching for another path...through my life (ooooooooh sparkles of dreamy realization).

I walked through the mountain of my life, surrounded by the demons of my own darkness and searched the images of my past for clues as to which tunnel to climb through to find the way out all while the terror that the earth above me could come crashing down and bury me alive continued to grow to the point at which I could barely stand on my own.

Then, with a lantern, my mother and my father came after me, found me, and began the task of helping me find a way out. They always do that because that's what parents do. They showed me the light at the end.

The nation watched the story of Floyd Collins, as best they could at the time, and an army of locals dug furiously to try to get him out. So too did my chosen family, my friends, notice my drowning and reach out to remind me that I'm not alone, that I'm never alone.

Thus, for 2016, I'm going to focus on that light, and I'm not going to look back without a rope around my waste and someone to talk me and walk me through the darkness. It's not because I'm not afraid any more. I'm terrified. But I don't want to be afraid any more.

I'll never forget crawling through a tunnel in the cave back in Tennessee with my head lamp scraping the rocky floor, and coming to a small opening large enough for one person to stand up at a time. I cast my light along the shimmering walls around me. Rock formations, dripping from the ceiling of the opening shone like diamonds.

I want to see further. I want to see what's in the light, and I want to share it.

My Attempt at a Thank You

I'm trying something new these days. I don't know how to explain it, or why it suddenly makes perfect sense to me to live this way when it seems that only a few weeks ago, I couldn't imagine the world I'm living in right now. A few weeks ago, I had no idea it was possible to let go of worry.

Don't immediately get jealous, ok. It is exactly as good as it sounds, but it is also just as impossibly difficult as it seems. I STILL worry that I'll forget how to do it one day and go back to my previous way of living: in constant knots of terror.

Doing a search for "crying babies" is the saddest thing one could do.

I don't remember the exact catalyst that clued me in to the fact that I was in trouble, but it had something to do with my ever so complicated relationship with my parents. The parent in the limelight for this one: pops.

He was telling me how I needed to wait before putting a deposit down on a new place to make sure my promised room mate was actually going to move to Chicago. It was sound advice, that I had already put a good deal of thought into because my dad taught me to live like that. He had been telling me for forty-eight hours at this point. And I was already stressed out.

Nothing is more terrifying than looking forward to time with a parent, and knowing, just KNOWING, the criticisms that inevitably come along with it. My room will never be clean enough. Nor will my car. 
And surely I could snag a partner if I would just stop doing a list of things that I do...including...sometimes being mean. 

Chock it up to the fact that it often seems that men have a propensity to want to "fix" things. Chock it up to the fact that I still complain about being single, so I'm basically just asking for advice. Chock it up to the fact that I'm a woman and he's a man. Or call it what it is, an attempt to right some wrong he feels he's done me in raising me to this point. 

I have always been cautious, skeptical, and having my heart broken by my best friend when I was a wee young lad of just twenty-four didn't make it any easier for me to ease up on the caution. 

But I remember my dad saying to me once when I was contemplating trying out for the Tennis team in junior high, "Do you really want to try out? What if you don't make it?"

I probably just wanted to wear the cute outfits. 

That was the moment. I think about that breath of time a lot when I look back at how tiny my steps have been in putting myself out there. I think about all the auditions I didn't go to, and the jobs I didn't apply for, and the guys I allowed to be mean to me because I was afraid of being mean to them. And I was angry. For a while. 

But staying angry only hurts me, and I've been doing that for much too long. 

So, when my dad said, just one more time, "please don't put a deposit down on an apartment until you know for sure...," I lost it. I exploded in rage, punched my fist into the palm of my hand like one of those kids in Newsies getting ready to fight the fucked up child labor paper route system through song and dance, and I yelled, "don't you think I know that?! Don't you think I'm competent enough to know that?!? You don't even CARE!!! Leave me ALONE!!??"

To which he replied, "Okay."

If he said anything else, I didn't hear it, I immediately began to gracefully power walk a decent cushion between the two of us. We were on our way to a Cubs game. 

I have no idea how long I walked or how gloriously ridiculous I looked with my fists clenched and my hips jaunting about, this way and that. I was lost in a fog of my own rage. I felt like a two year old again, burning with fury and unable to express exactly why, and with no clue as to how to dry the tears. 

My mind raced over the other men in my life, pictures of moments like I was falling and seeing everything again. And I remembered conversations with my father about how I needed to hold on and be patient with them, try to be less frightening (try to hold back my true feelings). The only trouble is, the only true feelings I was having were the ones that were revealing themselves in my rage, the ones I was denying. 

In that moment I wished more than anything, that instead of cautioning me to stay safe when I wanted to take new steps and try to test my limits, my father had pushed me to step out into the abyss. Instead of counseling me to ignore the feelings that told me to run from different men, I wished my father had coached me to accept nothing less than the utmost respect from any man that would ever deign to love me. 

The truth is, he DID those things, in ways that anyone would attempt in his total lack of knowledge of what it's like to be a girl. For some reason, my brain only noticed that for which I have had the hardest time forgiving myself. 

My dad is, more than anything else, human. My dad has seen me as a tiny baby and, terrified, vowed to protect me at all costs to whomever would listen. My dad promised he would die for me, and I never doubted him. My dad's love for me is no less than super human, but his instinct to avoid pain is the humanity in him. Nothing hurts my dad more than seeing me hurt, and he prays for nothing less than a life without suffering for his daughter every night, in part because he loves me, and in part because he too has no desire to suffer. 

How could I fault my father, who loves me so, for being the very thing that he is: human? 

That is the plight of the parent, the terror of the task. Our humanity will never allow us to live a life without pain, without fear, without fault. For every responsibility we assume, we also adopt the myriad of mistakes we will make while trying to stay the course. 

Yes, both of my parents made mistakes, surely. But they made a lot of good choices too, don't ya think? I mean, I'm kind of amazing. At least, that's how I feel now. 

My dad called me to see if I wanted him to pick me up somewhere, and I yelled, "NO! I want you to apologize!! I want you to say you're sorry for all the things you did to fuck up my brain!!" It seems pretty intense, I know, but don't picture me saying it. Picture her:  

And so, my dad apologized. He didn't go on and on or try to defend his position. He just said he was sorry. He said that he loved me, and he asked if I still wanted to go to the Cubs game. I did. So we met there, hugged, scarfed down some hot dogs and beers and the WORST nachos I've ever eaten, and we watched the Cubs actually win a game. 

And since then. I don't care any more. I just want to be me. I don't want to worry about making me change to fit different spaces. I don't want to keep shredding my heart apart with self doubt and self hatred. I'm no longer interested in the voice that questions the validity and purity of every choice I make. I don't care about being pure. I want my hands in the dirt. I only care about being grateful for the love that I have in my life. I have people that worry about me constantly. I can't imagine what it takes to care about someone as much my parents care about me. I only hope that I can share some of the love I have been given with whomever may need it. I only care about turning some of that love in on my self, and admiring the core of my existence, the chance beauty of my tiny blip of a presence on the timeline of time. 

In other words, I am in awe. 

This Post is NOT for Vegans

Single ladies in the house? Lemme hear ya!!

There is no such thing as simply being a woman. Think about it. One can be a young woman, but once she achieves adulthood around 21, she becomes a single woman. You'd think that around 30, she would finally achieve the status of "woman," but, alas, she is still clumped into the pile of "women" that are single.

A man can be a man. In fact, I bet upon hearing the term "single man," we all feel a little odd. It doesn't sound right. It's not something you hear often. It was the title of a movie. Special. Single men get their own special term: Bachelor. Bachelorette is a meager adoption of the term that barely broaches the topic of what it really means to be one.

A mother can also be a mother. We categorize our single mothers, but we do the same to single fathers. Even saying, "married mother," feels weird.

Mothers are mothers. Men are Men, but women are either single or married, Miss, Ms. or Mrs.

It implies that a woman hasn't really achieved personhood until she is either married or a mother. But I'm not going to knock either. I would like to experience both. I think.

That said, I am a single woman. I am in my thirties. I am not thirty. I am IN my thirties, and I am single.

I actually like it. It took a while. It took years of scrunching myself into a little ball and decrying my humanity without a partner. How can I live without a man?! I put things off (like learning how to pay bills on time) thinking someone would eventually take care of that for me. I did this. ME. Caroline.

I spent nights alone, wishing someone would just "get" me, convinced that no one would, while secretly hoping that by being convinced no one would, I would trick the universe into proving me wrong.

I waited and watched. Watched and waited. Secretly, because NO ONE will want you if they know you want them. NO ONE will love you if you need it too much. I held my breath. I pretended I was someone else. I even fancied myself a femme fatale at times. Followed by a trail of men, drooling, ready to jump into action when I snapped my fingers, but never able to hold the true essence of me: the Single Woman.

But I don't do that any more. I wrestle with dating (it is misery, but occasionally fun), and I wrestle with not dating. I see it as a whole, in its true state, as simply living.

I have found that if I avoid looking at fashion magazines, I feel much better about my body. The same is also true of ignoring the pictures of full and happy lives lived with a handsome man, a beautiful child or two, and fantastic fashion sense and consumer savvy. If I don't let society tell me what life is supposed to be, I get to define it in any way that I desire.

I am learning to be a whole person. I am not free of the longing for companionship, and I am not free of days when I wish the dishes would do themselves or a benefactor would wipe out my debt. We cling to what we know.

These are the aspects of life. These are the things that make life worth living: the uncertainties, the outlandish dreams, the faith that spring will come eventually (for the love of all that is holy), but most of all it is the love.

Love knows no bounds. It has little, if anything, to do with buying a home and having babies. Those things have more to do with the economy than love. If you look for love, you'll find it. I have friends that love me, family that loves me, but more importantly (and sentimentally) I have a me that loves me.

Mothers, go kiss your babies. Men, go kiss your ladies. Single women, go kiss your cats. We all have a great deal of love to share. Don't be defined by who loves you, rather, define yourself by who you love.

Pod World

I have...FINALLY...discovered the wonderful world of Podcasts. I had heard people speak of this world on many occasions, but I had never truly experienced it myself. I recently discovered that NPR.org has an extensive list of fantastic podcasts available to be devoured by my ipod. You can search by title or by subject. I know, I know, I am so behind the times. I get it. Remember, I just finished an entire semester of "Modern English Grammar." I'm way up on the grammar times. Which leads me to one of my most favorite findings this afternoon: A six minute weekly program from Minnesota public radio boasting to discuss all things grammar and the English language. It's called "Grammar Grater," and I think we are going to be really good friends. I am also subscribed to "Crash Course in Islam" because I feel like being able to understand things that I don't quite yet understand.

I'm serious. This might be one of the best things I have ever discovered on my own through many other people mentioning it to me as if I knew exactly what they were talking about. I only recently discovered that I could manually update my ipod. No more lost or triplicated music!

This is a good Christmas gift to myself. Free, too!

I'm not going to tell you exactly why, but sometimes, if you let things go and stop worrying about them (aka...money), they take care of themselves. SOMETIMES.

I think the sun'll come out tomorrow. Seriously.