golden ticket…

Some days I miss my old life, where spontaneity reigned and I did’t have to over-analyze every. single. detail. of every. single. moment. When my life wasn’t complicated by pills and devices and pain and dark tunnels of consciousness exploding into piercing white lights, when I wasn’t afraid of my own shadow.

Most things frighten me. It’s not a ghastly nightmarish fear, but a slow smoldering fear of how every single experience will affect my health or, more accurately, how my health will affect every single experience. Will I faint? Will the experience result in a swift retraction of any recent health-related improvements? Or worse yet, will I regret it?

I don’t do much these days. I go to work, exercise, and occasionally the BF and I take the dog to a different part of town for a new “adventure”, which really is just a fancy word for visiting a new park while I alternate between chasing my dog and sitting on a bench willing my heart rate to slow. I want to have more adventures, if for no other reason than to challenge myself and live my life. One of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, wrote “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” Most days I feel like a visitor.

So when I saw that one of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott, was coming to town for a performance, I bought one ticket.

One of the most memorable events of my youth was when my mom took me to see Maya Angelou speak. I adored her books, worshiped her poetry, and respected her civil action. I don’t remember what she said during her performance, I only remember that her words stitched up parts of my 17-year old soul that felt ripped apart by the existential dread of youth.

I have the same hopeful expectations for the Lamott performance tonight, especially now when my soul craves meaningful words to fill its cracks. This past week was overshadowed by a family emergency which I will explain in my next post, but the part you need to know now is that while visiting my grandmother in the hospital, I read to her from Help Thanks Wow, one of Lamott’s works. I am beyond exhausted after only sleeping a few hours all week, and considered giving away my ticket. But I’m hoping that, by attending the performance tonight, something will click and make sense of the last week, that if reading Lamott’s words to my grandmother a few days ago helped bring her peace, maybe they will do the same for me now. Lamott once wrote “You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then to keep on crying; and then, finally, grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination,” and right now I could use both. Perhaps the best place to seek them is at the source.

I didn’t buy a ticket for the BF, so I will go alone. He would have willingly accompanied me to make sure I’m okay, but he has logged enough hours of willingly accompanying me to things he doesn’t really want to do. He deserves a break, and maybe I need to do this alone anyway.

I have no idea how this is going to work. I will have to drive myself to the venue after work. Park and walk to the theater. Stand in a presumably long line to have my ticket punched and find my seat. There will be stairs, or the traitorously slow elevator whose bumps and groans give me tachycardia anyway. It will be a late night, and my current level of exhaustion may very well result in bouts of snoozing during the performance.

But I still really want to go. I will pay for it in the next few days, but that’s the price of doing something you want to do. If it doesn’t go well, at least I will have tried for something. And if it does, this could be the first of many adventures. But either way, it feels like the first step in establishing residence, and not merely visiting this world.

“I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.” – Anne Lamott

Smell ya later.
– Linds