That Was Then, What Is Now?

November 18, 2023 / Hermionejh / 2 Comments

It’s ok if you go, but it’s not ok. Or maybe I don’t know how I feel.

It’s so complicated. This life. Our trauma. You were so mean to me growing up and then we became friendly and we had so much drug-fueled fun together.

You were fierce and brash – so full of your youth and life.

You laughed a lot then, and danced and sang and played.

Life slowly chipped away at you and you reverted to being mean to me again.

I didn’t understand what happened. I remained who I always was. I’d glimpse your old self now and then, and my hope for friendship’s return brightened, only to be dashed with your harsh words. Your inner bully grew, even though I sensed the conflict within you, the desire to be free again.

‘Nothing is wrong with me,’ you would declare. ‘I’m not crazy,’ you spat out from your deeply wounded, deeply guarded self.

No, you’re not crazy. You’re wounded in a way it takes professional help to navigate, but that’s only for weak people like me, right?

I got to be the scapegoated one. You got to see me as more fucked up than you because I couldn’t contain my trauma. The irony is, neither could you – not really.

We were brutalized. We suffered PTSS before it was given a name.

But you pulled into yourself and declared war on the world – and pushed me out.

I never left. I still loved you & waited for the day you might remember the joy we had through the pain that was easier to ignore in our exuberant youth.

I hate seeing you stripped of your vitality and strength. You’re still trying to bully your way through this illness that does not compromise or get worn down. It just keeps punching.

Getting well means accepting that you’re not in charge, and it’s calling the shots. Your chance is in letting go and finding that resilient affirmation to live.

You’re scared and so am I – and I’m still on your side through it all.

It’s ok to go, but I’ll be sad we never got back to the goodness we once had. I’m accepting that it belonged to back then, not now.

I lost you long ago, but keep holding out hope in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

I’m sorry. I forgive you, please forgive me. I love you.

Super Memory Not So Super

September 26, 2023September 26, 2023 / Hermionejh

It was within the last few years that I realized that my memory is sometimes radically different than family members and friends. I don’t have exact daily life recall – and certainly don’t remember all events – but I have vivid recall of full or partial conversations and situations from my childhood, and continuing to the present day.

I recently asked a friend if she remembered something from when we spent a lot of time together in our 20’s, and she didn’t, but it was significant to us both at the time.

I didn’t know that my recall of family and friends past activities, events, and conversations was extraordinary – and was often puzzled that they remembered something vague or nothing. My next-oldest sister didn’t even remember that we had gone to see the band, The Police, together until I texted her a picture of the keepsake ticket stub.

Even my son says he barely remembers his childhood – which is either a good thing or a troubling thing – but if I bring up a specific event, he might have some more recollection, but it’s still way more vague than mine.

I heard a scientist on Alan Alda’s podcast, Clear and Vivid With Alan Alda, who remarked that some people are super rememberers, but then he went on to describe how difficult that must be, and it made me break down sobbing.

It hit me so hard because I didn’t have a name or place for that particular grief for the last few decades since I started feeling so alienated, especially from my sisters. I didn’t know that they don’t have the same vivid memories of closeness and togetherness that I do. I thought they just didn’t like me much anymore.

It’s almost like I walk into a room in the past and I see the setting, the people, and re-live certain conversations, and experience the feelings that I had then – hear the jokes and laughter, or the cutting remarks, and sharpness – and they don’t. At all.

I didn’t know that was a not-so-super power of mine that set me up with expectations that we are all still the same as we always were. I mean, I know we’ve changed and grown (or regressed), but I am still the essential self I was born with.

I have to forget my memories if I want to have current relationships with my sisters, but it’s like having to cut out a part of myself – a real, present self that also lives the past. It’s painful.

Getting “over myself,” as I had been admonished to do throughout my early years, was a big fail. I just learned to shut down, but not get “tougher”.

Being sensitive is a blessing and a curse. Not only am I highly sensitive to moods, but I almost always know when there’s a ‘presence’ – whether a spirit or left-over energy somewhere – and I seem to have the ability to direct healing energy, but I have zero idea how that works. I just know I feel it, and people tell me they receive it.

The irony is that I can’t seem to heal myself, or my progress is glacially slow.

I am hoping my new understanding about being a super rememberer will somehow help me feel less estranged from those I care about. I’m not the only one like this, even if I’m the only one in my immediate circle.

It’s also a reminder to get my memoir done while my memory is still so sharp!

Peace, Love, Grief

August 20, 2023 / Hermionejh

There have been better days lately. I’ve been doing my best to fill up the friend-shaped space she once occupied.

We don’t know what, if anything, awaits us after this world, so it’s a crapshoot if we’ll ever meet again. We won’t have eyes to see one another, mouths to talk and share a laugh, or arms to give a hug, but we will recognize each other if we retain consciousness outside our body.

I saw another old friend today that I haven’t seen in years. He was part of our large mutual friend group when we were teens, and I’m grateful he hasn’t radically changed since then. Matured, yes, but still true to his essential self.

After we parted I was hit with a wave of loneliness or sadness that seemed outsized for the situation, but later realized that it was about belonging – and about loss, because my friend who died in May also belonged in our friend group.

It’s kind of silly that I wanted to cling to him emotionally, as if his presence would resurrect our friend, but she’s gone, and no one can bring her back.

We both had places to be, so we left, and I walked myself through the mental patch of grief left in his wake that he really had nothing to do with.

The starkness of grief can trigger my leftover childhood neglect trauma. It feels like standing alone in the midst of a crowd.

My inner peace comes from the center of my heart, because I have no peace without love, but it’s very hard to find the love without peace. Thankfully, it’s still possible, even if it’s only moments.

I’m still in my life. I have things to do and places to go. It’s ok to still be here. It will also be ok when I’m no longer here.

I wondered earlier today if the experiences we have and the knowledge we gain are not ours alone, but are directly feeding or enriching the spirit world.

It might be that that is not how any of this works, but it made me feel like I’m possibly contributing something worthwhile to the whole.

Who knows?

Good Grief

July 26, 2023 / Hermionejh / 2 Comments

Time has been a strange concept for me. Sometimes I feel like my life has been one long day, and other times it feels like I’ve lived several lives since I was born.

I have clung to people in my past that didn’t cling back, even though we seemed so close at the time. I am lucky to still have a few people in my life that have been my friends through a lot if not most of the journey so far.

I try practicing the Buddhist idea of non-attachment, and try as I might, I still have attachments. I have put time, love and energy into people who seemed to feel the same, but have detached, or our connection didn’t mean to them what it meant to me.

We change. Our desires or our focus shifts and we either fall into, or choose, new groups of friends or acquaintances that give us more of what we’re looking for, maybe?

It’s about acceptance too. I keep hearing the lyric: “If you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with,” from Love The One You’re With by Stephen Stills.

I naively assumed that the people that were with me then experienced our connection the same way – that it mattered as much to them as it did to me.

It’s not bad or good, it just is. The challenge is to accept that. It’s not like I hadn’t been living my life anyway, but I have to incorporate it differently in my mind, and not interpret it like there is something wrong with me. There is nothing wrong with me – or at least nothing that the right pharmaceutical can’t dampen. (Kidding – sort of). I’m still waiting to get into a therapeutic psychedelics treatment.

Honestly, losing my mother, one of my best friends, and two other very good friends in the space of three years has been really hard. I miss my mom so much lately. It’s more the idea of her, I think – like my longing for someone to make my pain less raw. It’s more archetypal than actual because my mother wouldn’t have won any parenting awards. I think I did better, but guaranteed I still fucked up my kid no matter how hard I tried not to.

This has felt so convoluted, but it’s not, it’s grief. Grief is weird and distorting. It feels never ending and frightening to me – like if I feel it deeply I will dive into the darkness and never resurface – but that’s just not true.

Amnesia seems like it would be an ideal solution, but that would just cause other problems. Balance will return, but it will take a lot longer if I keep stuffing this grief under every internal couch cushion I can find, or shoving it way into my psyche’s back closet.

Leaving Claw Marks

July 10, 2023July 10, 2023 / Hermionejh / 2 Comments

Sometimes you just have to let go.

The problem is that anything I ever let go of had claw marks all over it.

We were a solid group of close to a dozen. Me & Jimmy were the younger ones in the group that ranged from 13 to 18 year-olds, but Jimmy was more fully accepted by everyone. Maybe because he was one of two boys in our group that regularly hung out together.

I had such a crush on him, and I didn’t know he was crushing too until one night we were at a dance and we were laughing and running around when he stopped and turned around to kiss me. I was more shocked than anything, but it was nice.

Maybe because I didn’t pursue more kissing, we just went back to the dance and our larger group as though nothing had happened, but continued dancing and having fun.

I was confused. I liked him, had a crush, but some inner sense held me back. I valued him as a friend – and I already had a boyfriend from school – who I rarely saw, and who lived in another town.

But this was summer, and our group met every day. He never said anything about the kiss, and neither did I.

He had a steady girlfriend before the summer was over, and my school boyfriend broke up with me. I had another crush by then, which eventually turned into my first true boyfriend.

We all continued on as a close knit group throughout the next few years, eventually drifting away as we found serious relationships, had children, or moved away.

A few years later, Jimmy started spending more time with my next oldest sister whose birthdays were two days and three years apart. I started visiting her almost every other weekend & we all grew close, had a great time partying, going dancing, taking trips to the beach, or weekends in New York City, and going to dozens of rock concerts. – the B52’s being one of the stand outs that Jimmy and I had such fun dancing to with my next oldest sister.

My crush on Jimmy, who now preferred James, remained. I nearly confessed my feelings, but something held me back.

It turned out he got into pretty hard drugs, and his life was beginning to invite more trouble than not, and I had college to focus on, but that crush remained true.

I accepted that that was all it could ever be, and I continued to value his friendship, but I think something broke for him about me.

Maybe it had been that first non-rejection rejection, but I was moving away from the drug scene – though I’d end up struggling with alcohol abuse throughout college.

I hadn’t seen him for several years after college, and it was so good to reconnect when we bumped into each other in our old town.

We both had a child about the same age, and chatted for a minute. I went to hug his son goodbye as we were about to part and James told me that his son only liked to hug beautiful women. I stood back and said “oh, okay,” and to my eternal gratitude his son looked at me, recognizing the dis, and gave me a big hug. Years later I got to tell his adult son how much that meant to me, regardless of what he thought about my looks. Lol

But, I continued to consider James as a friend – and I didn’t think I was very good-looking anyway.

He and my next oldest sister reconnected a few years ago, and my sister told me that James had bought her a ticket to go see the B52’s. It was so devastating that they didn’t think to invite me. Hadn’t I continued to be as good and true a friend as I had during all those years, seeing all those great bands together?

It took way too many years to figure out that neither of them are my friend anymore, regardless of the reason.

I must have left behind some of the longest, deepest claw marks in the world. I just wish it hadn’t taken me so long to figure it out.

Burning Bright

March 28, 2023April 4, 2023 / Hermionejh / 3 Comments

She laughed and smiled, and went home planning to die.

She drank or drugged to feel different, and for several beautiful minutes she felt whole and worthy, but it was so brief, and it didn’t fill the gaping hole of worthlessness.

Justifying her existence became her job. Hiding became her daily pursuit. Hiding in plain sight.

She couldn’t afford to let you know her even though she was desperate to be known, to be loved, to be accepted – to matter.

Every failure confirmed her lack of value, and she told herself that everyone knew she was shit – it was a pheromone radiating off of her.

Shame was her cloak – its vile fabric wrapping its folds so tightly around her.

She didn’t even know she had fallen back into the pit. She had reopened all the old escape hatches, but they didn’t hide her anymore.

Until she remembered, and really understood that she had to change her self-beliefs – to love her unlovable self, and learn to act differently, nothing could change.

Living was becoming unendurable, but she was still too afraid to kill herself. In a fog of self-loathing, she was gifted the memory of once having worked hard to like herself – even reaching a sense of love and self-worth.

“No one provides worth or value,” came the small voice. “It is always self-derived. It was never fostered as a child – that shame belonged to others who failed their duties. But it’s still possible,” said the voice.

“Let the flicker become a brilliant blaze, and know that all fires go out if they are not fed. And a fire will burn whatever fuel its given – so feed it worthy fuel.”

Addendum: It’s also okay to borrow fuel from others if all you have is shit to burn.

None Of My Business

March 9, 2023 / Hermionejh

I heard something today that I heard a long time ago, but keep forgetting: it is none of my business what anyone else thinks of me, and none of anyone else’s business what I think of them. What I think is irrelevant.

Tending to my own life, to my own path, is all that is required of me.

I cannot count on anyone else – it isn’t fair to put that burden on anyone – but it sure is nice to have friends who don’t mind walking beside me time to time through this world.

My job is to meet people where they are and have no expectations of them. It sounds easy, but it’s not.

I hate change, and I hate having to change. LOL

It’s uncomfortable, it’s painful, even, but it’s life.

Is there some being or force overseeing all of this, guiding us, or willing to guide us if we so choose?

I have no idea.

Sometimes I would like to believe that, but in order to accept that I have to also accept that that force or being is also cool with horror. So I stay away.

Let it be.

I don’t want to argue anyone else’s philosophy, or point of view. Evil exists. We see it every day. It’s so enormous that it’s almost paralyzing, and I have to tune it out.

Maybe I’m a coward. Maybe I deserve all that I get.

I don’t know.

I believed in love. I really thought love would change the world. I really thought showing up and speaking out would change the world for the better.

Maybe it has and I can’t see it.

I don’t know. It feels like just a lot of wasted energy.

I have been very naïve my whole life. I was idealistic, I was hopeful. I’m not ready to give into the forces of evil, but they feel stronger than the forces of love lately.

I’m ready to leave the world – whenever my time comes. I believe I have done my best.

My imagination leads me to a quiet place out in the universe somewhere. There is no sight or sound, and no worries. There is no happiness, no sadness, no anger, no hate, but also no love. It’s just energy, I guess. At least that’s what science says. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, and everything must go somewhere.

Implausible

February 22, 2023 / Hermionejh / 3 Comments

I forgot about the passage of time. I knew it was happening, but I didn’t believe it was real. My body sure knows it’s real.

I didn’t believe I would one day look in the mirror and see my mother as she was at my age – when I thought she was old – but now I know she really wasn’t, at least not in the way I thought of age thirty years ago. It’s all perspective.

It’s also the package deal I accepted by being born. You live, you grow, you age, and then you die.

When I was 12 I saw some illustrations in a book about the human life cycle. One showed a male and the other showed a female going from babyhood to old age. I was so angry and disgusted when I saw aging illustrated, and I vowed it would not happen to me – as though it only happened because some idiot made a drawing of it.

I did not want to become old and wrinkled. I did not want my life to be taken from me. I thought I had beat aging because I remained relatively young-looking for a long time.

I’m certainly not what I assumed about that drawing – that life was over because you’ve aged – but I internalized that. I think I thought that people age because of their attitude. Some people at the commune/cult I lived in actually said that, and I internalized that as well. “You only age because you think you’re going to,” said that 20-something-year-old to the general agreement of the throng of people sitting around.

And I thought we were special. I thought we were “chosen” as I so often heard. I really believed it though. Part of me still believes it despite knowing better.

I failed, I think to myself. I let the world get to me – or I wouldn’t have aged.

I see people give up all the time – otherwise known as acceptance.

I want to fight it. I see people fighting it to the very end. Isn’t that what all the plastic surgery and body modification is about? Isn’t it a wish for immortality?

I have deeper lines and sagging neck skin now. It pisses me off every time I see it. My failure staring back at me.

My mother stopped looking in the mirror and now I know why.

Without the mirror I can feel like I am still young, and believe I look to others as I wish to appear. But then I see that I am somehow cordoned-off from those not-so-young-themselves-anymore, but younger than me, and I am shunted into the next category. It’s just an observation, but sure, it’s sad. It’s probably self-pitying.

The saying: “We’re here for a good time, not a long time,” should pacify me. I repeat many of those type of sayings to myself. “Life is what you make it – always has been – always will be,” – and the woman who said that was about 80 at the time. Grandma Moses – Anna Mary Robertson Moses. It’s just whistling in the dark though. A platitude. A pacifier.

Life happens with or without consent, approval or control. I do my best to be steadfast and positive, but you can only eat so many shit sandwiches before starting to call them what they are.

I am trying to accept my aging in a culture that tells me in a million subtle (and not so subtle) ways that to age is to fail.

I’m a little late to the show but I’m trying to embrace my aging and not just pretend to accept it. How do I do that?

Defiance.

I defy the 12 year-old girl looking at that book making a lifetime judgement through an illustration. She has no right to determine how my life has unfolded, or what my aging means. Fuck her. She’s fucking 12 for god’s sake! I defy the 20-something-year-old know-nothings, no wiser than that 12 year-old, and whose lives unfolded as all life on earth unfolds. They aged, and they died, or they will die. They have health struggles, and memory problems, right along with any wisdom accrued. I defy all the plastic surgery (which I would get in a damn heartbeat if I could afford it), but it’s still an inability to accept aging. It’s also a form of defiance too, though, but it often just looks circus-freakish (no offense to non-conforming circus persons).

So what is wisdom and perspective for? Is it just to talk to myself because the young have no interest in what the old have to say? I don’t know. My son has no use for any wisdom I possess, but maybe my wisdom is just anxiety? I want his life to defy life itself!

Maybe all of our lives do just that in the implausibility of us being here at all.

One Year To Live

July 7, 2022September 5, 2022 / Hermionejh

I heard about taking a year to live as if it’s my last, and I’ve decided to do it. Maybe it really will be, who knows!

My son is getting married in October, and I kind of feel nothing. I guess I’m just neutral? I’ll probably feel more interested or invested at the wedding.

I suppose I could tell my son I am doing this ‘last year to live’ experiment and ask for some time with him, because if it actually were my diagnosis, that is what I would want to have happen.

What do you do with a year to live?

I have made plans to do the things I have always wanted to do – that I can do – and I have started clearing out old files and noticing what continues to have importance to me that someone will have to just dump when I kick it.

When I look back on my life I have so much regret. I did not manage to do the things I said were important to me. Some would say that they couldn’t have been that important or I would have pursued them, but that is not a fair assessment. That is someone looking in from the outside and not chained in a mind like mine.

I understand it’s my own fault in some measure, but I’m also a trauma survivor for whom being able to function has been an achievement of sorts.

We all experience trauma. There is no escaping it. It is what we are able to do in spite of trauma that is our triumph.

Some people who didn’t experience trauma in infancy and continuing through to adulthood might not be as limited by the experience, or maybe they carried on well even if they had intense challenges from the get-go.

That cannot be a measure for everyone else, however. “I did it so you can too,” is one of the most fucked-up things a person can say to another. Tell me how you minimize without telling me how you minimize is what anyone should get from that.

You don’t know me. You don’t know what I’ve lived through, or tried, or continue to work at.

My star was in my ability to laugh and to love.

I did my best to be kind even though I know I’ve been an asshole plenty in my life. I hope that the balance will show more kindness and caring than the opposite.

It is okay to not have reached my goals – at least I had them.

Every time I gave up and railed about life, I got back up.

I lived. I experienced a full range of emotion. I have been a life-long learner. Hell, I’ve been studying Spanish for four years now and I still suck at it – but I haven’t given up. I also tend a garden. I love seeing plants grow – and I love fostering their growth. I adore beauty. Hiking and being in nature fills me with such reverence and joy.

I am with a partner who deeply loves me, and I love him. That was a near miss for me. I had a broken picker for so long when it came to romance that I happily gave it up. Maybe that allowed a space for someone good to come into my life, or maybe I just got lucky.

Sitting outside drinking my coffee on a summer morning with the sun warming me is about as close to paradise as I could imagine.

I will continue to work for peace in this time I have left, and to speak out against injustice.

I’m a bit worried about what’s after this life, if there is anything. I’m not afraid of some terrible god, I’m afraid of being bored. It would probably be good if there is just nothing after this.

If I could report back, I would.

Sometimes The Journey Feels Like Forever

November 12, 2021November 23, 2021 / Hermionejh

“November would be unbearable were it not for knowledge of spring.”

I wish I could remember the author of that quote. An internet search turned up nothing, and I am probably misremembering it, but that is the gist of it at any rate.

I heard it back in my college days, studying literature, and the edge of my brain is saying it was a woman writer in the 19th or early-to-mid 20th century.

I’m thinking of this quote in terms of my mother, beyond this physical world now. I suppose spring represents the mystical realm, where I believe I will see those who mattered to me again. At least the thought sustains me in these darkening days.

The large maple tree in our yard, so recently flush with green leaves – with life – stands bare again as the year cycles. The birth and death of its foliage every year reminds me that I will cycle too, but unlike those leaves, I will not regenerate in the spring – at least not here.

My mother told me once that she heard in her mind: “we’re waiting,” when she stood outside on a frigid winter day, wondering what happens to the leafless trees through the long winter months.

Are you waiting now, Mom?

I glance at that tree through my window, and think about my mother having cycled into the underworld. She is literally under the ground now – no word on what happened to her spirit or soul.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were spirit journalists – envoys from wherever they are now – sending their observations on the work-a-day spirit world back into this physical realm where we could pick up their papers and journals, or read their blogs?

I’d particularly like to read Mark Twain’s (Samuel Clemens’) observations. I’m sure my mother would too.

She had a good sense of humor, and appreciated irony and satire.

I took a trip to my mother’s old trailer, and was depressed about the state of it.

All the wood and the walls and the ceiling and floor are rotting away. All I could think was “as above, so below.” I try not to think about my mother decomposing in her grave – but she always spoke almost reverently about becoming “worm food.”

A grave robber broke into Mozart’s tomb and was shocked to see him sitting there, furiously erasing what looked like one of his symphonies.

“What are you doing?” blurted out the startled robber.

“I’m decomposing!” replied Mozart. (one of my mother’s favorite silly jokes)

Besides missing laughing, joking, and talking with her, it strikes me that I probably never knew my mother as she saw herself, and I didn’t particularly like aspects of my mother that can bring up terribleness even now.

I see my mother through my lens of need, often forgetting that her neglect and dysfunction helped cause much of my disturbed emotional being.

But, I still love her for what she was able to do – for her trying to do better. I remember how she was there for me when my son was born, and throughout his growing up – even though I curse the hell that was wired into my brain, which hurt my ability be the mother I had wanted to be. Even so, I did far better with my son than was done for me.

People like to quibble on the nature vs nurture question, but time and again we see those who mostly had what they needed as children doing far better than those who didn’t. All you need is one appropriate, concerned and loving caregiver to get you through awful circumstances, and perhaps even thrive, but not everyone gets that. Humans are resilient, and I know that we continue on regardless – I and my siblings are proof of that – but we still paid, and in some ways, continue to pay for what we endured.

We are all on a heroes journey. We all suffer, face challenges large and small, and we all have the potential for victory. But those who don’t slay their dragons are not less worthy, they’re just less celebrated, or honored for having done their best. They “failed” to vanquish the darkness, but they still tried.

Sometimes there’s more to love in a loser than in a winner. We can all relate to loss.