27. Attitude of Gratitude

Dear Janet:

 As I reflect on the past six years since I moved to Seattle, I am aware of how much I have enjoyed knowing you and having you in my life. From the first time we met at Seattle Vision Care, I knew we were going to be friends, but I am not sure if you know how profoundly you have affected my life and how grateful I am to have you for a friend.

 You were my first girlfriend in Seattle, and due to the previous five years I had spent travelling, you were the first girlfriend with whom I have been able to establish and maintain a relationship in a very long time. I didn’t realize how much I had missed that, or how important it was, until I was building a relationship with you. Of course we bonded over our shared Texas roots, but it takes more than that to have a real friendship. I always thought that in order to have a friend, you have to be a friend first. You epitomized that to me with your bright, outgoing personality and willingness to be authentic. I felt like you took the initiative and went out of your way to be nice to me at a time when my life was in upheaval and I really needed a friend, which I something I have always appreciated.

 You have always supported me both personally and professionally. I remember when I was working as a frame rep, you graciously shared knowledge of fitting eyewear with me. You never condescended to me or made me feel like I wasn’t good enough or shouldn’t be trying to do it. You helped empower me to be successful. You were so cool, you made eyewear cool! Even though I decided it wasn’t for me, I know that a lot of whatever success I attained was because of your assistance. Later, when I finally got the right job, my focus on building my career meant that I wasn’t able to spend as much time with you as I would have liked. You still supported me by visiting my spa(s) and sharing your experiences with others in a positive way to help promote my business.

During a person’s lifetime, they can expect to experience some loss, but most people do not experience it all at once. In a two year period, I lost my grandmother, my mother, my father, two jobs, my husband, and my baby. Words cannot describe what that was like, and how my life was changed. Through it all, I had you, and I can truly say that I have no idea how I would have coped if you had not been there for me, serving as an anchor when I felt completely adrift. The most awkward part was the aftermath, while I was trying to put my life back together and figure out “what next?” While other people abandoned me because they didn’t understand or know how to respond to my grief, you just accepted me and let me grieve, however it needed to be, and never judged, even though I did some (ridiculous? strange? awkward?) things. It’s easy to be a friend in “fair weather,” but you have always been someone I can rely on to be there for me no matter what. Whatever life is serving me, I know I can count on you to help me pick up the pieces or “make lemonade.” 

I appreciate our differences and I sometimes marvel that we are so close because we are so different in some ways, but one thing that we share is our love of crafty things that involve tools. Sewing, painting, home improvement, gardening, all projects big and small, I know we will share them with the same level of enthusiasm. We do have overlapping and differing levels of experience and expertise, so whatever project comes up, at least one of us will have some idea of how to proceed. To paraphrase the old proverb, a job shared is halved and its products doubled. I have always not only appreciated, but thoroughly enjoyed, working with you on our myriad home improvement projects. And I deeply thank you for always being there to help me when I could not have done it alone. Here is a short list of things you helped me with: building two closets and a laundry room, installing three ceiling fans, installing baseboards, rearranging furniture, so much painting, packing and unpacking, and moving, moving, moving! I hope I always get to be your Tool Time Girl (because let’s face it, we both know you’re the Tim Taylor/Al Borland who knows more about tools and how they’re used).

Another thing I love sharing with you is the “great outdoors”. We have been riding our bikes around Seattle for six years and there is no one with whom I would rather go. I love our long rides and talks, spending that time together has been so important for me. You have been in this area for much longer than I have and I grateful for having you as my tour guide to so much of the beauty that the area has to offer from a bike seat. Although we have only been camping once, I know this year we are going to do a lot more and I can hardly wait. I feel like we have barely scratched the surface, and I am so lucky that I get to have a friend to do these things with.

I try to show that I care about you by being there for you, too. I bet you don’t know that I love making “Janet-friendly” food. I know it’s not fun to have food allergies, mine are no cake walk (pun definitely intended), but yours make mine look like nothing. I can’t imagine the daily challenges you go through to feed yourself in a healthy way, and I know you don’t always get sympathy. I think it’s probably a little weird, but I love it that you have these quirks because I love trying to make you feel special by catering to them. You seem so self-sufficient that I jump on opportunities to do something for you. I seriously do not mind making a separate portion of food because it gives me a chance to do something nice for you. And I love it when we eat out together because I have someone that I can feel normal around. In restaurants, I have to special-order my food or appear picky about something, which used to embarrass me around other people, but with you, we both get to be comfortable.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.” As a child from a “broken home,” I did not have that support, I did not often feel special, and I very often felt like my life in this world was insignificant or meaningless. I was lost because I had no people. You make me feel special because you are my person. I know you know what it feels like to have a difficult (or even indifferent) relationship with your blood sister, so I am really happy that we get to be surrogate sisters for each other. I know that I will never replace your real family or your childhood friends (I have those people too), but I am so deeply grateful that we get to be like sisters to each other. We are able to discuss intimate details of our private lives that I don’t share with other people, just the way I imagine I would be able to talk to a mother or a sister. Until I had you, this type of intimacy was completely missing from my life. Because of you, I have “people.” Because of you, I can “ICE” my phone; before you, there was really no one to call. I love my birthday because I feel like it’s one day that I can feel special, it’s my day. I think it’s so cool that our birthdays are so close together because sharing birthday activities with you makes it that much better…and I look forward to celebrating many more of them together.

26. Have a Nice Trip...See You Next Fall??

So I was reflecting on how I perceive what people communicate and how I communicate back to them. I have realized that everyone hears things through "invisible filters" over their ears that are made up of the sum total of all their own experiences (including me). I know my ability to communicate competently was impaired by the way I was raised, and I have been working for a very long time to overcome it, and an article I read last week made me realize I still have improvements I can make and skills to learn. I became very sad, and then instantly angry, bitter, and resentful when I thought about how hard I have had to work to be a “normal” person, and how pissed off (!!!!) I am that I am STILL trying to untie the knots that my mother tied me in.

One thing the article said was, in reference to teaching and raising children, that while not always perfect, parents do the best they can. I wanted to jump out of my chair; I was angry because that’s exactly what she said. It infuriated and hurt me when she said that, because it totally discounts the fact that her “best” was abusive. It’s like she is giving herself a free pass, when it is actually a cop-out because she doesn’t want to admit that what she did was hurtful to her child. If a student failed every test, do you think the teacher would let them pass the class if they said, “But that was the best I could do.” No, I don't think so!

She has the temerity to blame me for what she did because she says I was a “bad child;” why the hell does she think I was a bad child? There was not a damn thing wrong with me except I had grown wearisome of her mistreatment and old enough to stand up to her. In fact, I was not a bad child at all, I was a normal child in a bad environment. I resent so much that I had no one else to learn how to be a human from and that I am still performing psychic surgery on myself to cut out the behaviors that do not serve me, which I learned from growing up in a crazy house. I resent that I did not learn how to interact and communicate with people in a constructive way, making it impossible to relate to other children (or teens), which had profoundly negative consequences for me as I grew up.

It is so hard to let go of the hurt and the anger. I know these feelings are valid, yet do not serve my purpose; I know that I cannot give in to them because that way lies madness (I know, because I have taken that road before and it’s a dead-end). I am not trying to deny my feelings, quite the opposite…venting makes them less powerful. But I also cannot deny the effect that poor communication skills had on my life, and I cannot deny that I am still dealing with the repercussions.

In 1823, Michaelangelo wrote the phrase “ancora imparo” on a diagram; it means “I am always learning.” I have tried to adopt this phrase as an empowering aphorism, but I can’t help wondering what my life would have come to if I had been able to apply the Herculean effort I’ve put forth in just learning how to be normal into some other constructive effort (instead of a reconstructive effort). I could have been a physician, or an astronaut, or who knows what, instead of a person just barely figuring out how to talk to people. She crushed me as surely as if she had put my head in a vise, and for her to say that it was the best she was capable of is far less than I deserve.

And I hate that I continually have to move through this grief. Luckily I am way past denial, I just feel the anger, engulfing me with an almost audible WHOOSH. The bargaining comes when I think, “well if I could just (master this new skill), then I would be okay.” Immediately then I feel depression, because I can’t believe I am STILL going through this and it is so damn frustrating. I have to goad myself into acceptance, because I know there is no other way.

I was thirteen the first time I saw the Serenity prayer, and already a long-avowed atheist, because I could not believe that there could be a God, if he was so cruel as to trap me in such torment without respite or escape. I remember exactly where I was, at a highway rest area off I-10 headed west though the Florida panhandle, back to Texas after a road trip my mother had dragged us on. There was a peddler selling decorative aluminum plaques, three for ten dollars. My mother and my sister wanted souvenirs, so they bade me choose one because my mother had to have a deal, even though I didn’t like any of them. I chose the only one with just words, decorated with flowers and butterflies that made it appear hopeful to me, even though I didn’t agree with the “God” part. It was a long time before I finally understood the meaning of those words, and I was later shocked at my first AA meeting to find out that other people knew them. Since then, I can’t possibly count the number of times I have prayed to myself for serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I gotta tell you, it works, but I had to practice a LOT.

I must seem melodramatic to speak so of my mother. Please forgive me for not elaborating on the morbid details of my mother’s treatment of us, and let’s not even mention dear old dad. I feel like a friggin’ cliché as it is. A veritable Lifetime movie of the week. I don’t want to be defined by my past. I guess that’s why I worked so hard to overcome it, and why I hate it when its effects keep coming up. I know I am doing well to be self-aware, and to apply the tools that come my way. I don’t mean to come across as negative. It’s a journal, I get to talk about feelings, that’s good, even if the feelings I’m having are messy. I don’t want to have emotional diarrhea on the people who have the misfortune to cross my path, that’s what my goal of “maintaining relationships” is all about...not tripping over my baggage. Because let’s face it, everybody has baggage. It’s not whether or not you have baggage, it’s about whether or not you leave your suitcase of emotional garbage out in your metaphysical living room, where you or people visiting can trip over it, instead of safely stored away in an appropriate place, where you can recognize it for what it is instead of trying to pretend it isn’t there. See? Here? This is my suitcase. Oops! Don’t trip, step around, nobody panic.  

Just breathe. Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.