Strangeness

December 30, 2023 / Hermionejh / 2 Comments

It’s this inbetween-land. Everything looks strange and inaccessible, but it’s also all familiar and available. I think I’m not liking this aspect of human-being.

Anger has saved me lately. It’s raw and vivid, and takes me out of any other feelings. Its also cold and callous. I see pain around me, even within me, and I’m not moved – except sometimes I am.

I will come back to balance & center again – but I’ve been trying to drink it away, and all I get is 15 or 20 minutes of relief, but hours or a day of feeling sick.

It’s not a good trade off. I feel better when I don’t drink, plus I can’t afford it anyway.
I can’t sustain anger either. I have to let the grief be there. I don’t want to talk, I have to walk about and let all of it be there.

So I’ll leave the booze to those it won’t try to kill, and I’ll keep putting one foot in front of the other.

My sister got very sick, fairly quickly – even if it had been signalling its arrival for several years. It was hard to see what was happening until the worst happened.

Systemic scleroderma is a lot like cancer in remaining a general malaise for a long time before it erupts. Some get a milder version they can live with, but my sister got the worst version. It was relentless.

Her death was a relief for her because there was no out. She wasn’t traumatized at the end, her breathing got fast for a few minutes and then just stopped. We did all we could & in the hours before her passing we kept her comfortable, and kept telling her we loved her.

Don’t make any major decisions for a year wiser people say, but all I want to do is run. I want to move to another country or another planet. I want to not be at all anymore, and not because I’m grieving over my sister’s relatively early exit, but because there will be more.

It’s never going to end – it was just much less of it earlier in my life.

Maybe whatever comes next will be amazing and I’ll be so happy once I’m there, but as I am still earthbound, I have to deal with being human. If I hurt myself through carelessness, I’ll just have those consequences on top of getting old or sick.

If I’m going to be here, it’s important to me to be in the best shape I can to live the rest of my time well, and I will deal with my death when it comes.

Sisters Forever

December 14, 2023January 7, 2024 / Hermionejh / 6 Comments

So, what is there to do, after all, when the hard news comes that you knew was coming?

You also knew, and held out hope, that sometimes circumstances come together to change momentum’s direction, or change a person’s mind and will to continue on.

Hope was needed, but now it belongs back in its box.

The story’s end is known – only the timeline alters.

There is no changing what is happening, but I don’t have to hold my breath, or keep anxiety in my heart or mind. It won’t help, and it’s not compassion or acceptance.

What if she were going to a privately held party on a remote tropical island where everything is as you wish? I would feel envious instead of anxious, but I would be happy for her.

I wouldn’t try to delay her flight, or talk her out of going based on my fear.

She’s got her party hat all picked out.

Her dress is floral and flattering, her sandals and bag match, and her heart becomes light and joyful upon her arrival.

Maybe the flight was dreadful and terrifying, but the warm breezes embrace her as she disembarks. The distress of the difficult journey falls away as she gazes upon white sand, an azure ocean, and a forget-me-not blue sky.

Relatives and friends from her entire life are there to greet her, and celebrate her arrival.

She pauses before walking off because she hears crying in the distance – tears for her, and she looks for a way to ease them.

She sees an oyster shell at her feet and picks it up. She somehow knows that if she blows on it, the breeze will whisk it away into the ethers and it will soon gently fall at those sad ones’ feet.

They can know that she is now safe, and happy, and free.

All is well, and as it should be.

Do You Trust Your Instincts?

November 22, 2023 / Hermionejh

My instincts told me to answer this writing prompt today – just kidding!

Do I trust my instincts? I think the poster meant intuition because humans do not strictly have instincts.

The answer is sometimes. I will follow it even if I’m wrong, which I often have been – especially when taking an alternate route while driving somewhere and getting far more lost trying to follow my intuition!

Sometimes it’s my inner voice demanding “Get out of here, NOW!” Other times it’s wanting to be careful of someone I’ve just met. I have seen that warning be unfounded, and I think I might have a faulty “people sensor”.

I will still listen to that sense because being right about them could mean terrible consequences for me.

Several weeks after 9/11/2001, I had the opportunity to go to a Boston Red Sox game with my mother and son, but I turned it down because there was a terrorist threat warning that day. Hundreds of people went anyway, and nothing bad happened except the Sox losing the game.

I still feel like a scared jerk about that – but the consequences if a bomb went off, or an attack happened, felt justifiable to skip it.

I’m not a huge risk-taker, but I have taken risks. So far, so good.

The worst risks are monetary. As a person in poverty, I have thrown a couple hundred bucks away on pyramid schemes that were very effectively talked up. If I worked hard at selling (and recruiting), I too, could be driving one of those pink Cadillacs.

What wasn’t clear was the amount I would have to hustle to sell and recruit to reach that lofty goal.

I was lucky to get out before being burned even more because it takes a sales personality and enough money up front for inventory – neither of which I have.

The good news(?) is that I learned another thing I was terrible at.

I am a good cook, but do not wish to be a chef. I’m good at listening, but don’t have the money to become a licensed social worker. I am a healer, but cannot quantify that into dollars.

I would have to accept donations if a client felt my help was valuable. That is not reliable income, and a landlord or the electric company, or any other utility company, is not known for mercy.

I see people charging hundreds of dollars per session for healing work, and all I know is that I experience some kind of energy flowing through me, but have no idea if I am directing that energy properly – or if it really works. I detest ripping people off.

Are you someone with good intuition? Do you think it is innate or something you cultivated?

If you are someone who has financially succeeded following your ‘instincts’ or intuition, how and what did (or do) you do?

Happy Thanksgiving all, and as always, thanks for reading!

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!

The Hummingbirds’ Departure

September 10, 2023September 10, 2023 / Hermionejh / 2 Comments

Ruby Throated Hummingbird on branch — https://columbusaudubon.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Ruby-throated_Hummingbird_TBenson.jpg

September 8 was the last time we saw the last hummingbird at our feeder, which hangs from the porch beam, and we often watch out of the big window that looks onto the front yard. I don’t normally notice the date, just that they’re gone, but this year it felt like a little grief. Maybe because these last few years have been filled with so much loss.

There were three ruby-throated hummingbirds who arrived in the last days of April or the beginning of May.

The feeder is four sided, with four perches, each in front of a red metal flower petal containing a tube for the hummingbirds to extract the sugar water ‘nectar’, but the hummingbirds guarded their turns at the feeder ferociously – fighting each other off, with each barely drinking for fighting so much.

“There’s enough for everyone,” my partner or I would call out sometimes, but they all wanted the bounty alone. I imagine they would fight even if we had four separate feeders.

We didn’t see any babies this year, and I wonder what happened.

For the first time ever, I saw a hawk swipe a robin chick from its nest with the distraught mother screaming out and attacking the hawk as it tried to speed off – but to no avail.

The hummingbird’s departure is the end of summer for me, even though the temperature this year has remained in the 80°F’s and 90°F’s. Climate change is well and truly here.

I, too, have the pull to move on though – but where? It’s not so easy to pick up and leave when you’ve never learned to pack light. I’ve also never liked change, but I’m drawn to it anyway, and I’m constantly changing – whether it’s hairstyles, or clothing, or organization (ha!).

It’s the big changes that cause me the most anxiety.

Like the hummingbird, maybe I have an internal clock telling me it’s time to go – but where? I have no homing instinct or intuition – and where is my ancestral home? I’m a mutt, as so many of us are. Would it be Canada, or Ireland, or Scotland, or England, or France?

Life has one true caution: “Adapt, or die.” Maybe that’s what my subconscious is trying to make conscious. Prepare, it urges. Maybe I interpret that as “leave”, when it just means “get out your warmer clothes.”

I know that acceptance and adaptation are paramount to survival. All of us creatures are constantly adapting – and we’re good enough at it that we haven’t wiped ourselves out – yet….

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.

Too Much Information

June 17, 2023June 17, 2023 / Hermionejh / 4 Comments

There’s a pile of papers from several years that have been on my to-do list. I’m an information hoarder. I know it’s illogical – especially today when I can ask the internet pretty much anything and get back more good (and terrible) answers than I could ever want.

I learned that information represents safety. Knowledge is power, right? Only I filed that information away in filing cabinets and boxes. I would look at some of it once in a while, and remember why I kept that information, but most of it pertained to circumstances that never happened – like how to survive in the wilderness.

If I find myself in the wilderness, but haven’t read that damn article stored in my filing cabinet, it’s no better than not having it. I learned from various sources to stay in one place until someone finds me. Well that depends on if I’m in an area of regular traffic.

I know I can eat pine tree bark and needles, and to try to sleep off of the ground, and to try to make a lean-to, but I cannot protect myself in every scenario.

Not once have I ever been lost in the wilderness. I only go hiking with someone, and then only on known trails. I am not an adventurer.

But what if a plane crashes in the wilderness and I survive?

I guess I’d have to deal with that then. Honestly, I hope I don’t survive if that happens. I’ve never been good in a crisis, and I have enough PTSD as it is.

When my son was six-months-old, I was camping near the ocean with three friends and their children. Their girls were eight and nine. I asked them to watch my son, who was clipped into his child seat on the middle of the picnic table, while I went to the bathroom. They said yes, and as I walked away, I hear a loud noise and a thud.

I did that seemingly slow-motion turn around to see that the girls must have each thought the other would stay by the table and they were walking away in opposite directions while my son must have rocked forward and tumbled from the table.

A scream came out of my mouth that I did not know I was capable of making, and I shit you not, at least three mothers from other campsites came running into our site while I stood there frozen in horror, believing my son dead.

They scooped him up, and what I thought was blood turned out to be dirt and nettles. They cleaned him off as I regained the ability to function.

It’s rattling me again as I write this.

I was so relieved, and then ashamed that I froze. I am also forever grateful to those women who jumped into action.

I’m recycling reams of information that is good to know, but useless if it’s not in your head at the moment you need it – and you’re able to act on it.

I suppose I shouldn’t feel too bad because earlier that year, my son was choking, and I pulled him out of his high chair, tipped him upside down and thumped his back – and out came the food.

I don’t know why I froze at the campsite, but I’m glad I was never tested again in a seeming crisis.