Blog – Lisa Marie Blair

What Thanksgiving Can Be

I’ve never been a fan of the Thanksgiving holiday, for many reasons, but mainly because as a practice of gratitude it was too little, too late, too commercialized, and too superficial.

Thanksgiving, I used to think, was just a time of looking back on the year and picking the things that made you most happy and celebrating them. These past years have shown me what Thanksgiving can be. It’s a time to remember what drives you, to name it and place it foremost in your mind and heart and hold tight to it through the hard times to come. It’s a time to remember not just your blessing but what you live for.

The benefits of practicing gratitude are well-documented and understood and putting aside the horrible history and the fallacious teaching behind its meaning, Thanksgiving is a chance to renew the hope, the resilience, the purpose of your life. It’s a time to remember that there is still good left in the world and recommit to being part of that good, not just for others but for yourself first!

People have a hard time feeling grateful and we have an even harder time expressing it. The negatives, the setbacks, and the hindrances overshadow the progress and the privilege. My wish is that there could be more balance for each of us. That we could hold both the hurt and happiness in our hearts equally. I want you to know you can love life, all of it.

It’s easier said than done, I know. These last few years have been especially hard— for all of us. What I want to say to all of you is that there is always something left to hold on to and that something is what will give you the strength to continue on.

Humans are at our best when we have a reason to get up, to work, to try. Even if you don’t have a grand accomplishment or love to celebrate this year, I hope you can find a small dream, a small good, a small pleasure to claim as your reason. It’s there. Search inside. Search the faces of your loved ones. Search for what is missing around you and let yourself be what you need.

Life is beautiful, and you are no ordinary thing. Even if you are all you have, you can be grateful, at least, for that grand gift and choose to live for you.

This past year I have worked hard to practice gratitude and I can honestly say it has had a big impact on my feelings of accomplishment, self-esteem, and my overall happiness. Some days I feel I have so much to be grateful for that my heart hurts from trying to hold it all.

I’m grateful, as always, for my beautiful, smart, hilarious, thoughtful wife. I’m grateful that we have seen another year, that we have grown closer than ever, and that we have endured our hardships and come out stronger, wiser, and more loving than ever. I’m grateful that there are still so many years ahead for us to fall more in love.

I’m grateful for my family. I am grateful my mother recovered from her heart attack. I’m grateful that we are all so close, even if we aren’t near each other. I’m grateful that we can work through our annoyances and frustrations. That we have a place to be loved despite ourselves.

I am grateful for all I have accomplished and all I have learned this year. I feel like I made real progress. I feel like I have grown. I am not who I was at the start of the year, or perhaps I am only more myself than I have ever been. My life is becoming something real, something mine, something I only dreamed of.

I’m grateful for my friends. My family must love me, and my wife took a vow, but my friends are under no such obligations. It feels good to be liked. It feels good to know I can enrich other’s lives. It feels good to have people in your life who encourage you, help you, who understand where you are and what you want from life.

I’m grateful that I’m not where I once was, that I’m not who I once was. Sometimes I am even grateful for my problems because they mean that there is a chance to overcome, to prove something, to grow.

I’m grateful for all the small things too: my dog who has carried me through the loss of my cat earlier this year. I’m grateful for the plants that brighten all my drab spaces and remind me that there is life beyond what humans make. I am grateful for my notebooks that give me a place to say the things I can’t out loud. I am grateful for those pages where I can be myself no matter what promises I break or how I neglect them.

I’m grateful for the beautiful sunrises that uplift my morning commute and the moon that always finds me when I need something bigger than myself to look to. I’m grateful for the work I do. While it isn’t always my passion, it at least gives me a chance to have a positive impact on the lives of so many children.

Despite my complaints, I’m grateful for all I could do for others. I’m grateful to be for others what I so often needed and I’m grateful for knowing that if I weren’t here I would be sorely missed. There have been times in my life when I felt very much the opposite. I’m grateful for healing, for the past becoming more and more the past, and for forgiveness, which seems more and more possible all the time.

Last, I’m grateful for this space and for all of you, for reading, commenting, and sharing. It feels good to write something people like, that resonates, that connects. I know I’m not here much lately, but things are changing and priorities are rearranging. I hope one day to be someone you all are grateful for too.

Thank you for reading and I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving.

2022 // Pay Attention to the Present

“Document the moments you feel most in love with yourself—what you’re wearing, who you’re around, what you’re doing. Recreate and repeat.”

— Warsan Shire

It’s that time of year. The first day of the next 365, when we all resolve to become that better version of ourselves we wish to be. We start diets. We join gyms. We quit smoking. We challenge ourselves to work harder, create more, reach for that unachievable goal, that impossible dream somewhere, someday.

I’d love to join you all in these grand goals, but if I’ve learned nothing else these past couple of years, it’s that the best way to keep from breaking a promise to yourself is not to make one at all.

I, admittedly, have broken a lot of promises, and the disappointments have piled high. So, this year, I am making no such promises.

It’s not that I don’t trust myself. Moreso, it just feels cruel to hold the future me to present passions. I put my future self in a box when I do this. I make a servant out of her and don’t think for one second about what she might want when her time comes. If I’ve learned a second thing these past years, it’s that present needs always trump past desires.

Life never looks the way you planned it to. Most of my days go off the rails within the first few hours and by the time I can catch my breath, the to-do list, the habit trackers, and the writing are far forgotten about. All I want then is to rest, to be with my wife, to lose myself in social media, in another episode, in a good night’s sleep.

There’s never time for what I wanted in the first place. There’s never time for all those grad goals and habit changes. And slowly, slowly, the person you were when you made those plans changes. Your wants change, but you can’t give up, you can’t fail, so you force yourself to chase a fading dream.

Another pandemic lesson: New year’s resolutions inevitably lead to future feelings of entrapment or future feelings of failure because we don’t leave any room for change.

This year, I have very few resolutions. I actually have only one. Pay attention to the present.

This year I’m asking that I only notice the present and do what feels right in that moment. On the surface, this seems counterintuitive. There have been plenty of nows in which I have done exactly the wrong thing. I have wasted time. I have done the opposite of what I wanted. Looking back, the mistake wasn’t choosing wrong, it was giving up the choice entirely.

This year, I’m not looking forward, and I’m not looking back. I am not wishing nor am I regretting. I am learning and shifting. I am choosing.

I’m giving myself permission to want something different and asking only that I stay true to that. The hard part is knowing what you really want and you cannot see it with time pressing in on both sides. The present has to get bigger, but as the world tilts further and further toward chaos, it gets harder to stay in each moment.

Free will is a spectrum and our capacity to choose waxes and wanes with stress, emotion, and information. For the past two years, the world has been thrown into utter disarray. For the past two years, I have felt my stress levels rise, my energy levels decline, and misinformation has overwhelmed me. That isn’t even accounting for all the loss.

Under those conditions, how can I promise to work out, eat right, or write? Under those conditions, how can I expect to have any sense of willpower?

You cannot account for the impact that pandemics and politics will have on the personal. You cannot know when your whole world will be turned upside down or emptied of everything that gives it light. What you can do is observe. What you can do is ask. What you can do is make sure you are truly giving yourself what you need now.

Sometimes that is doing nothing, but more often, what you need is to do something.

The what of my resolution boils down to mindfulness, a practice that sounds simple but is harder than it seems. The how of my resolution might sound complex, but it comes as easy to me as breathing.

All my life I have kept a journal. Since I was a teenager, my notebooks have been a place to explore and explain myself to myself in a way I can understand. These diaries were often the closest thing I had to a friend, and I have filled many with bits of small talk, encouragement, and tough love. I would not be who I am, I might not be at all if not for those blank pages being so patient with me.

But life changed, obligations grew, I become an adult and told myself to leave childish things behind. I turned to those pages less and less and without a past self to talk with, to egg me on or offer advice, I have felt more and more untethered in time.

This year I want to return to these pages but this time with the purpose: noticing. A journal is a place to pour the present into. It’s a place to ask: How have I changed? Do I want this? What can I do right now? Social media won’t give you that. Nothing on your phone will. You have to slow down. You have to look, and it can take many ways of writing to see.

Last year I bought a planner hoping it would help me keep my focus, but that wasn’t the best way for me. Turns out I want to do the same things every day and none of it is enough for a planner. So, this year I’m trying something different. I took the lead of one of my favorite writers and artists, Austin Kleon, and bought another planner, but not to track all the things I want to do, but to track all the things I have done. A logbook.

There are other notebooks for other things too, lists and fragments of all kinds, and each carries its own part of me in it. Each is a record of where I have been and a map of where I am going, and all it takes is to record the present.

I’m also starting a sketchbook this year. There are some things in life language is too poor at capturing. Our eyes are the primary way we take in the world and our minds alter the image to highlight what is important. Memory makes its cut and its additions, reinterprets and feeds the new picture back. Each time it’s pulled up, it’s different. Each time you pull it up, you are too. I’d like to get back to capturing these iterations again.

There are also apps and of course, this blog, all of it part of an interconnected system for seeing myself, my world, and working out what my work actually is. All of it is only a way for the subconscious and the conscious to circle around, to start and save their conversations that say one thing in the moment and another in a different time.

These words are the well of my life and I don’t want to lose any more of either.

It sounds simple, just write it down, but humans are notoriously bad at noticing the present, let alone recording it with pen and paper. We’re too busy reliving the past—when we aren’t avoiding it that is—or dreaming up an impossible future neither of which I want to do here because neither has ever led to any real accomplishment.

This leads me to one last hard lesson I am bringing with me to the new year: You cannot change what you do without changing who you are.

This may be hard to hear, but the person you are right now does not want to eat right, exercise, quit smoking, start a new hobby, or write that book. The person you are right now wants to be the kind of person who wants to do those things.

I’m not saying this to shame. I’m saying it to start the year off with the right mindset. Harsh truths are needed sometimes. I am not yet the kind of person who wants to write every day, who wants to write well, who wants to write thought-provoking essays. My first ambition is simply to be her.

And I suppose this is no new revelation, only a different way of saying habit-forming.

I have poor habits right now. I have no discipline. I am often short-sighted. That’s hard to say and harder to hear, but you have to accept where you are in order to get anywhere else, right?

My hope is that, like tracking your calorie intake, the act of having to write it down will be enough to force the right choice, but I’m taking it to an extreme. I’m recording it all, thoughts I have, movies I watch, people I meet, and conversations I overhear. I want to see what simply seeing will get me.

No grand promises and no lofty goals this time around, just seeing and recording, just pen and paper. In 2022, as in any year, nothing will be for certain, but every day means something. The course can always change, but the future has to go somewhere. How we spend our days is how we spend our life and I won’t let either slip away.

The Worst Way

Out of the dark subconscious, a chant echos along the many hollows of the mind—I need, I need, I need! Sweating with shame, ego drips sweetly from the mouth—I love you, I love you, I love you. You think you found the best way to have both, but you only found the worst way to do either.

All We Can Offer Anymore

I used to enjoy waking up to watch the news in the morning but between the past presidency and the pandemic, I’ve been feeling rather pessimistic about both the current state of our world and our collective future.

It isn’t just the news stations. It’s social media too. I log into Facebook and Twitter and I see so much pain and anger. Everywhere I look the world is burning, flooding, and fighting. People are sick. People are tired. People are lost and afraid, but nowhere are people at all willing to put petty differences aside to save the whole of humanity.

Sure we could change, but we won’t. We are a historically stubborn species and once we have decided on a course, almost nothing will move us. I don’t really blame us. We have our language and our reasoning, but deep down there is hardly any difference between us and the rest of the animal kingdom.

We want power, status, and wealth: things we think promise survival. We are wrong by instinct. We are driven to our destruction by our very biology.

So, it would seem that the human species is experiencing its last death throes and we are bringing the entirety of life on this planet with us. Facing such mortality, all I have found to be grateful for is knowing that I will not live to see the worst of it, only this awful beginning.

I’m grateful too for the bubble of happiness around me. The cushion of love and support I have is such a privilege and I wonder to what end I could put it to use for a greater good. I may be disappointed and depressed by the state of the world, but I still care, and I want to help.

No one of us can save the whole of it or stop what is now an inevitability. We have failed ourselves and each other, but there is no undoing or redoing. All we can do now is focus our personal privilege and small actions on easing suffering where we can. This is the work we have now. This is all we can offer one another anymore.

Break Like Waves

Crisis after crisis, they break like waves. Some can ride them, and some get sucked under. It all depends on how you start and the skills you cultivate. It depends even more on the ones who taught you and the ones who are meant to pull you out.

What I Wish the World Could See

It was Valentine’s Day, 2017, just over four years ago now, that I was formally, and finally, diagnosed with an inflammatory bowel disease and nothing in my life has been the same since.

I spent the evening before preparing for my first colonoscopy. I had a place all set up with blanket and pillows halfway between the kitchen and bathroom so I could choke down large glasses of prep every 15 minutes then run to the bathroom after throughout the night without waking my wife. It was the first of many depressing evenings we’d spend apart because of this disease.

I was only 32 and far too young in my mind to be preparing for my first colonoscopy, but I knew something was terribly wrong with my gut. I’d been bleeding more and more heavily with every bowel movement up to 15 or more times a day for over a month before and between the pain, exhaustion, and fear I was left little more shell of myself.

The disease was already chipping away at my work performance, my relationship, and my sense of self worth. In that short time, I had started missing days at a time of work. I was unable to socialize with my friends and family. I was too tired to spend time with friends or family, take care of my home, or do anything of the things I enjoyed. It would be my first lesson in this disease. It doesn’t take long for it to strip you of everything.

Arriving at the doctor’s office my dignity was quickly stripped as my clothes we removed and I was wheeled lying down into a room to face doctor whom I’d never seen and who would see more of me than anyone had. I’m thankful for the sedation that came next and the memories I will never have.

I woke afterward, confused and hungry, in a small room with my wife waiting for me to return. She helped me dress and suffered my memory lapses through the last of the sedation. I remember only bits and pieces of what was said then. I remember being handed a packet of papers printed with images from inside my body in exquisitely horrifying detail.

I remember the words ulcerative colitis coming from the doctor and trying to connect the meaning of the diagnosis to images of deep red seeping through the inner wall of my large intestines.

Ulcerative colitis is a type of inflammatory bowel disease, similar to the more widely known Crohn’s disease. My official diagnosis is Ulcerative Pancolitis, meaning that my entire colon is chronically inflamed. This causes debilitating symptoms and, if untreated, can lead to life-threatening complications.

Since that Valentine’s day I have experienced some of life’s steepest ups and downs. There have been a myriad of treatments, procedures, and pills that all work for a time before the troubling but all too easy to dismiss symptoms return and I head straight back to square one. I’m still searching for a new and lasting normal that I can live with but as more years pass and more damage is done the ultimate and last line of defense approaches—surgery to remove my entire colon.

This may sound like a “cure” but I am assured that I would simply be trading one set of problems for another. Still, from here, life without a colon looks better and better all the time. Until then, there are steroids and immunosuppressants. There are meal replacement drinks, supplements, and probiotics. Until then I am simply surviving, but I wonder, at what cost?

To be fair to my body, most of the hardships I face aren’t all down to the healthcare system with its exuberant costs and many layers of bureaucracies. Most of what makes this disease hard to live with comes from society with its values and norms that when can’t be met place the failure squarely on the individual and names them inherently weak, broken, and attention-seeking.

The hardest part, in other words, is a lack of understanding on the part of people who do not have to fight the same battles I do.

The truth is, my disease is often invisible so in an effort to make my life—and the lives of those who suffer similarly—easier, I’ve decided to quit bearing this burden in silence. I’ve decided not to pretend I am normal or delude myself into thinking that I can keep up. I do not hide and I do not minimize. I advocate for myself. I ask for help and insist on rest. I make this invisible disease visible. I educate everyone around me.

So, in that vein, here are some of the ways inflammatory bowel disease has changed my life that I wish the world could see:

Pain

When I was first diagnosed, people were very sympathetic to the pain I was in but as the days of pain became weeks and months at a time, I noticed the comforting words waning. Someone at one point said to me, “If it’s everyday I would just assume you would get used to it.” You don’t “get used to” pain. It never stops hurting the same as the first time and as long as I am flaring it never stops hurting. I can push through the pain but you can’t imagine the energy and emotional toll that takes to complete everyday tasks though this.

Fatigue

It’s not the same as tired. It’s a kind of exhaustion that can’t be cured with more sleep, though the body tried. Drowsiness overwhelms me and like a someone who is starving and can only think of food, or severely dehydrated and can only think of water, my mind is often consumed by thoughts of sleep. My mind plots at work looking for dark corners to close my eyes in and I daydream about the moment I can go home and lay my head down. I’m often unable to fight off the drowsiness and days have gone by where tasks, events, and even quality time with my loved ones have to be put off.

Medications and Meals

Ulcerative colitis, though it is a disease that affects the gut, it is not a disease of the gut. It disease primarily of the immune system and this means that treatment includes both strict medication and meal regimens.

Most of my day is structured around my treatment and nutritional needs. I have alarms and reminders that tell me when to eat, when to take medication, when to take probiotics, when to drink water, when to take supplements, when to add fiber, and when to eat more. It’s a lot to remember, and there are days when I don’t want to live this way. It’s a lot and often it doesn’t seem worth all the effort when I still have debilitating symptoms.

Worse still, when you find what does work, that doesn’t mean it will work forever. Finding the right medication or combination of medications is a matter of trial and error and after beginning a new course it can take weeks or months to know whether a combination or strategy will fail and the process of trail and error must begin again.

Embarrassment and shame

I’m 36 years old now and have had at least 3 or 4 colonoscopies. I will probably have another before this year is out. I have given countless stool samples, sent emails to doctors describing my bowel movements, and submitted paperwork to my bosses explaining my symptoms in great detail.

I’ve used every kind of suppository and enema, cream and wipe. I carry a card in my wallet that explains that I have a medical condition and must be given access to a bathroom when needed. I’ve had accidents when I couldn’t get there in time and now carry a second set of clothes with me just in case it happens while I’m at work or out and about.

These sentences my gross some of you out, but this is my life. I often feel that I have no dignity left, that privacy is a luxury I cannot afford, and that there are whole parts of my experience and many emotions I have to keep hidden out of embarrassment.

Fear

There is so much that is unknown about this disease and without a cure it’s hard to look forward to a life that will look any better than it does when you are exhausted and hurting. I’m afraid of what this disease is doing to me. I’m afraid of what the medications are doing too. I’m afraid of being too much of a burden. I’m afraid of falling behind. I’m afraid of accidents. I’m afraid of food. I’m afraid of surgery. I’m afraid life will never be like it once ways and I’m afraid I will feel like this forever.

Losing your relationships

It’s hard to ask so much from other people. You wish you could be the strong and capable one and take care of others for a change. Over the long-term caring for someone with a chronic disease can be fatiguing in itself. This is normal. This is okay. I have to accept that on some level I do require extra accommodations and emotional care and that means others have to give a little more when I can’t.

I try to be mindful of how much I ask and how often, and only take what help is absolutely necessary. Still, there are months when the flares won’t end and the house is falling apart or my work is falling behind and I am forced to take more than my fair share of the rest rest and respite. In those moments I see the look on other people’s faces. I know they are wishing I was better, and wishing it wasn’t them that had to take on more for my benefit.

Losing yourself

Before my diagnosis, I enjoyed being somewhat active. I used to run and hike. I did simple body weight workouts at home. I went out with my friends. I hardly ever missed work and had a reputation as an exemplary employee who went well above and beyond. I was happier, funnier. I was enthusiastic, focused, and hopeful.

That version of me still exists somewhere. I see glimpses of her when a new round of steroids is started or moments when remission looks possible. When there are days without pain and I’ve been able to sleep for a time, she is there, reminding me that not all is lost, now or forever.

But on days when all I want to lay in bed, when the weight has been coming off and I still find food terrifying, when I’ve had to call out from work again and my wife is missing the person I used to be, on those days, I cannot even recognize myself or this life I’ve come to live.

Love and Community

Ulcerative colitis can be an incredibly lonely disease. No matter how you explain, no matter how much your loved one’s want to understand, no one can know what it’s like to live through what we do, not even our doctors. The biggest help I have found is in support groups. When I have questions, frustration, or fears, there are thousands of people all over the world ready to offer information, advice, and support.

In addition, it’s a credit to my coworkers, friends, family, my healthcare team, and my amazing wife that I have been able to work, love, and live through such pain, fear, fatigue, and shame. Without them I would not have been able to achieve the—admittedly few and far between—glorious months of remission I have known. It is through the love and care they have shown me me that I was able to love and care for myself. It is with them that I have been shown how to find joy in the darkest of times.

This World IBD Day, my heart goes out to all those who truly know what it’s like to live with this disease. No matter how severe your symptoms, or where you are in your treatment, I see you. I know your struggle and I know your bravery. I know how hard you are fighting and I hope you know that even at your worst, at your lowest, at that moment when you want to give up most, you are a warrior.

You are not invisible to me, and I hope one day we will all be more visible to the world.

Seven Lessons on Life from My Houseplants

1. There are other ways to understand.

My plants can’t speak to me, but they have a language all their own and I’ve had to learn to understand it. I’ve had to study soil composition and learn the meaning and purpose of air roots, nodes, and petiole. I’ve closely observed the cycles of new growth and dying back, of yellowing, spotting, and curling leaves. I’ve had to interpret these signs from a perspective foreign to human reasoning.

What at first appears to be a sign of distress could instead be a sign of thriving, a sign of the next cycle, or simply a lesson in letting go. I’ve learned to listen outside of my experience and assumptions and to simply take in what a thing is trying to say.

2. Make time to check in.

A lot can change from day today. Temperatures, amount of sunlight, humidity, growth, and pests can come on and shift within days or even hours. Make time every morning to poke the soil, move some leaves around, inspect stalks and roots, prune, move, or adjust as needed. Make time in the evening too, if you can. You’ll keep from spiraling, from losing motivation, progress, or focus, you’ll keep life from getting too hard to manage and situations from getting too far gone to recover from.

3. Adapt to the needs of each day.

When I first started collecting different types of plants, I set out to set up a calendar and corresponding spreadsheet to track which plant needed water, when. What happened was a lot of swinging from too dry to too damp. A lot of drooping leaves and rotted roots. The problem was, I wasn’t listening. I wasn’t taking into account the changes in temperature, humidity, and light. I wasn’t considering circumstance and change. For some things, planning and preparation are impossible. Some days have to be reacted to.

4. Giving too much can be as detrimental as giving too little.

I’ve often given too much to my plants. Watering before they were ready, placing them in direct sunlight in an attempt to force growth. Soil that’s too rich followed by fertilization far too often, all because I thought more was better. I thought I was doing what was right, but I was only doing what made me feel good and that isn’t the same as love or care. In our relationships, we have to love as others need us to, not as we want to.

5. Appreciate seasons, surprises, and even setbacks.

Viewed within the confines of a home and from day to day today, the life of a house plant hardly seems to change at all, but if you begin to be mindful of the sun, the temperatures, the soil, of each new leaf and each flower, you can see there are seasons even for the sheltered and the carefully cared for.

There are seasons for dormancy, for slowing, for fertilizing, for repotting, seasons to cut back, to water more, and to water less. There are seasons for everything, and no season can be made into another. Take each as it is and for its purpose, you will see so much more progress this way.

6. Take on only what your environment can support.

There are so many beautiful and exotic plants I would love to own, but the hard truth is I live in the wrong climate zone for most. The air is too dry, and the sun sits too low. Temperatures are too cold for too many months out of the year and inside, I have the wrong size windows and none of the faces in any of the right directions.

The kinds of plants I can properly care for aren’t the kinds of plants you see in those Instagram-worthy photos, but they are what works for me, my lifestyle, and my environment. Accepting this has resulted in less stress for me and less stress on my plants.

7. Propagate, give away, share, spread the love.

For a long time, I hoarded my plants. I refused to separate, to cut, to share them with anyone. I had done the research. I had done the work. These pups and propagations were rightfully mine and mine alone, but soon many of them outgrew their pots, my windowsills, and the limits of time I had to give.

I now consider it a testament to how hard I have worked and how much I have learned that I have so much new growth to give away. Now I enjoy potting my baby plants and finding new homes for them. It feels good to brighten the room and moods of loved ones and perfect strangers alike. It feels good to impart these lessons to as many people as I can reach. And if I choose, and there will still always be more left over to keep for myself.

Survivor Love Letter // I See You

Dear Survivor,

I want you to know more than anything that I see you. I do not look past you to your tragedy, nor do I see through you to the future when you are free from it. No, I see you now and as you are now. I see you as you cannot see yourself.

I see you through the lens of this moment and this moment only because I know you are not who you were then and you are not yet who you are going to become. I accept you for who you still are, who you have worked so hard to grow into, and for what I know you carry with you in every waking moment. I accept you. I accept all of you.

I want you to know that though the road has been unimaginably hard, and the road ahead has its own twists and turns, sharp declines, and uphill battles, I will walk the way with you. I will not fall behind lingering over battles already won, nor I will not walk ahead where you are not ready to tread. I will walk the way with you, hand in hand.

I will speak to you along the way so you know you are not alone, and I will listen without judgment when you need to share your deepest pain. I will remind you of what you have forgotten and remember forever the courage you are teaching me to have now too.

When the way gets hard, I want you to know that you deserve your body. You deserve your mind, your heart, your soul. You deserve your hopes and dreams. You deserve your emotions, all of them, from your light and lovely joy to your red-hot burning rage. You deserve safety and a secure sense of self. You deserve to live and, when you are ready, you deserve the infinite love this world has to offer.

More than that, you deserve the infinite love you have to give yourself.

Until then, dear Survivor, I will hold you in my heart until you can hold yourself again. Until then, I will love enough for us both—for the entire world if I have to! I will love you when you think you cannot be loved. I will love you when you would wish me not to. I will love you at your lowest just as much as I would love you at your best because to me there is no difference.

There is only you, beautiful and bright you, shining through, always.

13 Questions

What is your demon?
I have many. If it isn’t a lack of energy, it’s a lack of confidence, and if it isn’t a lack of confidence, it’s a lack of focus. I suspect at the base of them all is the real demon: a fear of change. To move is to risk the worst as well as the better.

What is the most important part of your education?
The continuation of it. I didn’t graduate from high school, but it wasn’t for lack of interest or intelligence. Now that I have overcome so much of what held me back, it’s time to pursue the journey again.

Which “thinker” has had the greatest influence on your life?
There was a time when I would have answered Charles Darwin, Carl Sagan, or Marcus Aurelius, but I’m broadening my horizons and seeking new influence from thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, and bell hooks.

What do you doubt most?
The American Dream. It fails to take into account deep rifts of class, race, and sex and instead places personal responsibility on each citizen not only for their successes but their failures to meet nearly impossible expectations of wealth and health in the face of enormous institutional and systematic obsticals.

What is happiness?
Safety and space, both physical and temporal. So many of us are giving up precious life just to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. This is simply surviving. Being one misfortune away from losing everything isn’t safety, and without time to focus on our more abstract needs or space to make something of our own, we’re hardly better off than animals.

What does it mean to be human?
To be so aware and so affected by the cold indifference of the universe. We cannot live simply by our instincts. We cannot be content with simple survival and procreation. Instead, we must always be “making meaning” and working to “conquer mortality”. No other organism on this planet is burdened by such senseless wants or worries.

What illusion do you suffer from?
The illusion of time. I often can’t believe I am as old as I am, and I certainly can’t comprehend how little time I may have left. In my mind there is always time to do it tomorrow, later, someday. The reality is time is ticking down and there isn’t a second that has passed that I can get back.

If you could choose, what would you have for your last meal?
The same meal I choose every year for my birthday: crab legs, artichokes, and lemon butter dipping sauce that never runs out. I might add a few dozen oysters and a nice bottle of pinot grigio to wash it all down.

The question you’d most like to ask others?
What is a human life worth? It’s easy to trade lives half a world away for daily comforts here at home when you never have to see or think about it, but if you did, would you keep consuming, polluting, voting, or believing the way you do?

Your favourite word?
Melancholy: a feeling of pensive sadness, typically with no obvious cause.

What is your motto?
“It is what it is, and it too shall pass.” Nothing that has passed can be changed and the present is an undeniable result, but that doesn’t mean you should ever feel stuck. Time is always moving forward and nothing ever stays the same. Not your circumstances, and certainly not you.

What is a good death?
There is no good death. There are better deaths, sure, but no matter how you loving or long, rich or influential a life you have lead, it will inevitably end someday and all that you will leave behind is sadness in your wake. Nothing good comes from death.

What is the meaning of life?
Each life has its own meaning, and the only life’s meaning I might know is my own, and even that is unclear. If I had to guess, I would say to open hearts to a truer meaning of love, and minds to a more complex understanding of the self and others.

On Wishing for the Worst

It’s been just short of a week now since news broke that the President of the United States had contracted the novel coronavirus and subsequently was taken to Walter Reed to undergo treatment for COVID-19. Since then many liberals and leftists have taken to social media to voice their fear, anxiety, and compassion for the President’s recovery.

In the ensuing uproar of opinion and speculation, the party has broken into warring factions as the misinformation swirled and tempers rose. On one side many on the left sent well wishes to the president, and many others sent wishes not just of severe and worsening illness but of death as well.

Each side attacked the other, preaching and moralizing about whether or not the act of wishing well or wishing ill on a man who had caused the suffering of so many was right or wrong. They debated what this said about the Democratic party, where it’s been, where it is headed, and how it has become—in the eyes of both sides of the argument—exactly what it professes to hate.

If I am honest, I had myself been fervently wishing the President, and his entire administration would contract the virus since at least last March. I heard his downplaying and his rhetoric. I saw how little action was taken. I marked the way blame was passed, and became disgusted.

I wanted him to catch it not so that he would die from it but so that he would understand the severity of the pandemic, empathize with those most affected, and step up and lead the world. I wanted him to protect those he was elected to represent. I wanted him to learn and if he must learn the hard way, then so be it.

This is not the first time I have wished harm on those who believe and vote politically opposite me. For most of my life, I’ve watched as politicians stood behind podiums to spew hatred and disgust my way as well. I am a woman. I am Black. I am queer. There has been no election cycle I can remember that left me unscathed, and year after year I watch as they take and exchange power and give no thought or care to those like me.

This is why I cannot bring myself to sustain friendships with those who identify as conservative or vote Republican. I know my value as a human being and my experience under their power is of no consequence or care to them. They extend me no well wishes for healing or happiness. Their platform is full of wishes for quite the opposite.

And from where I have stood and fought, as one person with so little power that there are years I believe I have none at all, from here, sometimes, all I have is my anger, my disgust, and my hatred to get me through the shame and fear and disappointment.

These past four years I have clung to those emotions and, if I am honest, I never did have any well wishes for the President or his administration. Then, when the news first broke of the President’s illness, I went a step further and reveled in the jokes and the irony. I empathized with the death wishes and I have to admit I was somewhat disturbed by those purporting to take the high road and wishing the President a full and speedy recovery.

How quickly we forgot the hurt him and his supporters had visited on the most vulnerable and the hurt they yet plan to visit on us. How quickly we forget the victims and those who received no such well wishes or resources for full and speedy recoveries. How quickly we bring the enemy into our hearts.

I wish this man no such healing, but I recoiled at the thought of wishing him from this world. In some ways, it felt right to do so, but I stopped short, though I could not put into words why I felt both ways at once about it.

Wishing death on someone, to me, is not morally wrong, it’s just futile. A wish is not a reality. A wish is just a thought and thoughts come both from us and from outside of us. Thoughts come bidden and unbidden, sometimes understood, sometimes not. We think things we mean and things we don’t mean and those thoughts can lead to action or they can be released to float along back to the void whence they came.

A wish is nothing more than the expression of the emotion and history it was born from. Wishing death on someone speaks more to who both the “wisher” and “wishee” are than about what the universe is capable of or what the future will bring, of which it has absolutely nothing to offer.

Only action can influence an outcome and our thoughts and wishes can influence action, sure, but they will not bring about the desired end alone. But maybe that isn’t the why of the wish at all? Perhaps a wish is just a kind of outlet for all that anger, all that hurt, all that disgust, and that unfathomably deep hopelessness so many of us have been navigating somewhere between these past four years and our entire lives.

When the world hates you, wants you dead, and often kills those who live and look just like you no matter how you beg, reason, or fight isn’t it at least reasonable to see the death of those who incite and justify such cruelty as the only, or at least the most available solution? And when the possibility presents itself through an ironic and almost hilarious turn of events, would you not revel in their fate yourself?

When looked at through a lens beyond morality and through one of human suffering the wish itself is not beyond understanding and those who long for it are not beyond our understanding, but there is something somewhat distasteful about it, no?

The internet and its nests of social media platforms and their promise of anonymity and insulation make it too easy. I worry we say things we normally wouldn’t. I worry we say things we don’t mean to. I worry we urge one another to emotions we might not otherwise feel or express if it weren’t for the bubble of approval and ever-growing radicalism the algorithms place us in.

So, what is right, and what is wrong? More importantly, how do I really feel? I have said the same ugly things I see coming up my timeline. I’ve liked, retweeted, and lent affirming words to those dark wishes. I’ve let myself be dragged along by this dark turbulence and I will tell you it has, at times, felt satisfying, even good, even right and I still leave myself open to the possibility that it is right.

To save 200,000 lives, would you sacrifice one? To prevent the starvation, the mutilation, the indignity, the dehumanization of hundreds of thousands, would you give one? That is how some people see it, and who am I to condemn such a point of view so long as it begins and ends as an opinion and free speech? Who am I to know this is not the greatest good or the justice that the arch of the universe so bends?

I can only decide for myself, and if there is no harm to the world if I wish my dark little wishes and dream of easy resolutions to the pain I want desperately to soothe, then why not? I am, after all, only human and what I want is what any human would, a world where the cruelty makes sense, where great suffering is met with great justice and the righteous always win. I want the satisfaction of an eye for an eye.

Still, I pause, and take note of the claim that when I wish that harm on others, I do something darker and more harmful unto myself. They say the soul becomes soiled and we become what we hate most when we put our hatred to language.

Though I don’t believe in souls, I am conscious of how easy it is to get caught up in your emotions, desires, and need to have the world made right by any means necessary. I know how easy it is to lose yourself before you know you are gone. I know there is darkness in each of us that must be daily kept at bay. So, I ask, what do I do to myself when I wish ill on the living? And what does the desire to see those I’ve decided are “them” say about who I am and who I consider the corresponding “us” to be?

When I wish ill on others, I suppose it says that I am angry. It says that I have found no greater outlet or resolution to my anger. It says I have begun to believe some people are unchangeable and unredeemable and that heir harm cannot be made right. It says that I see their bid to retain power puts all of our lives at risk. It says I am afraid, and when a person is afraid they lash out. They lose rationality. They think and even act in violent and tribal ways. It says I am hurt and sometimes when we hurt we want to see others hurt too.

When I stop to reflect on who I am when I wish others would hurt, I don’t like or even recognize that version of me. I don’t believe wishing the worst on someone makes me a bad person, and I certainly do not think it makes me as bad as the ones who would misuse their power, but I am disturbed by those thoughts. I don’t like what it means for what I believe about the worth of human life and the right each of us has to a certain level of respect and dignity. I don’t like what it means for human redemption and or the possibility for growth and contribution.

Of course, I have my doubts people such as these would ever change and I have further fears for the future should the next four years follow the path of the last. I still cannot, or perhaps will not, bring myself to long for full and speedy recoveries. I simply have no sympathy left for those who would not extend it to the vulnerable ones who suffered before or because of their actions and inactions.

What I would like to do is take some control or at least offer peace to that place in me where those dark thoughts have taken hold. So, I have been thinking of a third path, a place where I can give space to both sides of myself and let my most human emotions and thoughts be free but preserve that sense of optimism in the human spirit and believe if the worth of every life.

For those who have hurt me, hurt others, and hurt the world, I do not wish them ill, nor do I wish them well, instead I am allowing myself a place and the peace of neutrality.

I empathize with those who think their useless thoughts and wish their pointless wishes from places of pain, grievance, and fear. I also give space to those who from their place of protected privilege would extend sympathies to those who have caused great harm but who remain human, and for my part, no matter how the outcomes unfold I will not feel disappointed nor will I feel satisfaction.

I will feel nothing, say nothing, give nothing of myself because the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference, and this is what I choose to extend to those who have used their power to harm and divide, or worse. I offer no wishes at all and no feeling whatsoever for your fate. I leave you to the cold, uncaring universe and watch with bated breath to see how you fare with all the rest of us in such a place.

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Photo by Amaury Gutierrez on Unsplash