i’m sitting in my apartment with 9 mins left until my laundry is done in the washing machine. there are candles lit and i have jazz piano turned all the way up on my wireless speaker, which is doing it’s best to compete with the loud liquid droning of the dishwasher. all of my things are going at once and i am the good kind of tired that only comes with feeling accomplished. it’s monday night, but it feels like sunday. i had today off work for the MLK day holiday, and with those 3 days off, i had enough time to enjoy the weekend while also doing the things i needed – meal prep, laundry, getting gas, grocery shopping, dishes – and i feel like a new person. i daydreamed while walking my dog this afternoon, thinking about what it would be like if i could take 1 day off a month to work from home, and would that help with my overall mood and happiness.
maybe it’s the energy of the weekend, the fact that i had balance. something i’ve been trying to manifest for myself in 2018. i had equal parts relaxation, social, creative, and accomplishing goals. and that’s something to recognize. i crave balance, but i feel like it’s hard to achieve in a 2 day weekend, mostly because we all have obligations we’re met with, things in life that come up. this person’s birthday party, that person’s baby/bridal/etc shower, seeing an elderly relative, spending time with family. most of the time it’s fun stuff – a chance for catching up with friends and family and celebrating and fulfilling that social part of us that needs filling up. but depending on the event, it can take away from those other areas, the quiet times or the errand-y times that help with self care. and so you’re left to try and balance yourself during the week after work, and it’s hard after a long workday to want to work at those things, to work on yourself, to care for yourself. and you convince yourself that watching 3 hours of reality TV is self-care, because you’re relaxing right? but then you realize you’ve been on instagram during more than just the commercials and you have no idea what’s going on, and all of the scrolling through and catching up on other people’s lives leaves you feeling like you’re missing out on your own. so then you look to the next weekend and see how you can fill yourself back up.
i’ve told the universe i’m ready to start dating again, and this weekend, i got a glimpse into the universe delivering, by putting a guy in my path. do i think this guy is the one? probably not. but it’s definitely opened my eyes up to the fact that this is something i can manifest for myself if i put it out there. and by going out by myself on a saturday night all dressed up, i put myself out there and open myself up to opportunities. was it scary and challenging? absolutely. but i did it. and now i’m getting coffee with someone i’m admittedly unsure of, but i thought was interesting enough to talk to again for another hour or so in the light of day. and while my mind wants to say all kinds of no, i have to remind myself – it’s just coffee. we’re just talking. don’t get yourself all weirded out in your head. this is dating, this is what people do.
and that’s the other part, the part of feeling balanced that i realize came with this weekend and hasn’t come in weekends past and maybe that’s why i feel different. i haven’t felt ready to date after my dad’s passing last year, and i feel like i’m slowly crawling out of that hole. i want it. i’m thirty-fucking-four and i want it. and that’s the puzzle piece i’ve been looking for all these years, the missing puzzle piece to feeling balanced, the love. so hear ye hear ye universe, i’m ready. feel free to send as many good mens my way as i can handle so i can open myself up to love. i wanna see what’s out there. and if this weekend is any indication of what’s to come, i’m pumped. i got a lot of livin’, to do.
it’s the second day of 2018 and i’m working hard on fulfilling all of my intentions and manifestations for myself while i have the energy and the willpower to do so.
i’ve started a 7 day cleanse, something i’ve never been able to commit to in previous years (spoiler alert: i’m hungry), but it’s good and i feel ok so far.
i’m picking up my computer and writing, something i’ve been talking about but haven’t really implemented, and i’m hoping this is a first step to get me to do more of it. all it takes it 15 mins a day, and i’m hoping to write out and dig through the crap and find out what i really want to say. it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be authentic. real. me.
i’m choosing love over judgement and gossip and negative thinking. this, as it turns out, is not my natural state of being, i really have to choose to do it. and my therapist told me that by thinking and pausing and doing all of these things, it means that i am present. which is something i’ve been wanting for myself, but didn’t exactly know how to achieve. being present for my own life, taking an active role instead of a passive one. present. i like it.
2017 was a year of loss. i lost my dad suddenly early in the year and i lost my friend angela after a fierce battle with cancer that accelerated very quickly at the end of december, and almost seemed sudden. one day they’re there, and the next they’re not. and i spent most of 2017 grieving my dad in active and passive ways – crying, visiting the grave, telling stories, joining a grief group, working with a grief therapist, doing some of his favorite things, buying him a birthday card just cuz it reminded me of him, etc etc. and i spent most of december emailing texting and laughing with angela, crying in spurts, until she was too weak to email and text and laugh and then she was gone. and i still haven’t really grieved it fully.
so i want to use them, these lives these deaths, to take an active role in my life. to manifest what i want instead of sitting back and waiting for life to happen to me. i feel as though my dad is encouraging me to write and angela is encouraging me to live life to the fullest. so i’m choosing to live, baby. and who knows, maybe this living and manifesting will manifest a husband, the one thing i so desperately want to create a family of my own. i mean, i encouraged angela to go out the night she met her husband. perhaps she’s up there choosing the right one to send my way.
one of the weirdest things about grief and death is the concept of time. after you lose someone, time simultaneously moves both fast and slow and there’s no explaining it any other way except that. the days drag on and yet you can’t believe they have passed. it’s been 8 months now, since my dad died and it both feels like it was yesterday and feels like it’s been forever. time is something as humans we’re always chasing after. we don’t have enough time, we have too much time on our hands, we don’t have time management skills, etc etc. it’s always about time and timing.
i walked by a mural of pictures my mom made for me when i moved to NY so i would have some familiar faces in an unfamiliar place. most of the pictures were taken right before i moved there, around 2008 or so, so they’re almost 10 years old. i looked at the pictures of my siblings and i, on the beach in anguilla, my mom with her horses and my dad playing his bass. i noticed that 3 of the pets – our dog holly, our cat felix, and haley’s dog chico – have since died as well. i looked at all of these pictures, settling on the photo of my dad playing the bass and the thought that kept coming to mind was “i just wish we had more time.”
but what is enough time? is 33 years enough? and all that time i spent away in NY, and all that time i spent angry at him, angry that he was so controlling, angry that he could sometimes be so mean, and angry that he couldn’t change. that was all time away from him. time that kept me apart. but i know i can’t dwell on that. i did the best i could with what i had. and that has to be enough. the craziest thing about death is how final it is. he was here one day, and not the next. i didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, or make peace, or learn a lot of things i had been dying to know or ask him but was too afraid too. and now the time it up.
i think all this is brought on by thanksgiving and the upcoming holidays, something else that’s creeping up along with everything else. time. so how can i use this experience? how can i learn from this, and better spend my time? this is the only life we get (that we know of) so i want to make the best of it. i want to have the relationships and do the things and spend the time that i want to spend with people. i want to meet someone and get married and have kids before my time is up, before my mom’s time is up so she gets to be a grandparent, something she so desperately wants but depends upon us. but how, how to do this while i’m still stuck in a bit of a grief depression rut? i have to find the strength to pick myself up off of the couch.
the quote we picked for dad’s funeral announcement was from the queen song “the show must go on.” and i know he’s looking down telling me the same. but it’s hard.
today is the first father’s day without my father.
earlier this week, everyone kept asking me how i was doing and i kept saying “fine” and i kept meaning it because that is how i felt when they asked me. but now, on this day, the first father’s day without my father, i am struggling. maybe it was having the garage sale yesterday, and watching as crowds of people tried on his clothes, thumbing through the racks of his favorite guitar shirts and shoving their impersonal arms in the sleeves and asking what kind of deal they could have if they bought more than one. this is what’s left after death – strangers wanting deals on a few shirts.
i keep thinking about what we were doing last year on this day, when we picked up mendocino farms and made some mimosas and took dad out on our family boat on the westlake lake. it wasn’t a perfect memory, but it ended up being a nice day despite the fact that he said he wanted to cancel father’s day celebrations due to a “culmination of world and local events affecting [his] outlook.” he was a funny man, that dad. not perfect, sometimes infuriating, but mine. ours.
i woke up with a nosebleed, one of many weird genetic traits he passed on to me, along with a certain degree of translucent irish paleness, his “old” nose (before he broke it) and the signature small carroll mouth, and i can’t help thinking it’s his way of joking around up there on this “bogus media holiday.” i know a part of him wishes he could still be here too, celebrating with a BBQ and a dip with our dog penny in the pool. he loved watching her swim, like he used to love swimming with us as kids, tossing us up in the air over and over and over again. it was always the same – us 5 kids had been in pool for hours while he napped in the hammock, and then all of a sudden, he would jump up and do a sneaky dad dive into the pool while we shrieked and swam after him, trying to catch him and hang on his back. my mom would make nachos and we’d come out of the pool still dripping water as we devoured them.
i just made some tea. i’m listening to classic rock. we used to call this dishes music, because he would always put it on while he did the dishes, before any of us were old enough to help. mom cooked. we danced around in the kitchen to queen and led zepplin and extreme and yes and the who while dad scrubbed plates and hummed along with the bassline. he never sang, he always hummed the basslines. he played us peter frampton tapes in the car, and we kept asking him to rewind the “the wah wah wah voicebox song”(show me the way) so we could hear it again. god, we loved that damn voicebox.
i’m not going to lie, this first father’s day is rough, rougher than i anticipated. and his birthday is next sunday, so we’ll have a double whammy to get through. and then 4th of july, and the list goes on of “firsts” we’ll have to walk through without him. i’m not sure when this pain will go away, or if it ever does or just gets easier to accept as the months and years go by. i know it’s different for everyone. but i’m trying to celebrate the best way i know how, and the best way that i can, on this day today. led zepplin is singing about a whole lotta love and i feel that.
i always get inspiration to write the moment i’m ready to shut off the computer and shut my eyes for the night. why is that? it’s like i’m tired enough to stop overthinking things and just be. and that’s when i want to connect with myself, when i’m most likely to be myself.
i’ve spent the last hour and a half googling things. cherry orchards, farmstays, writing letters to the elderly, dog adoptions. i feel like i’m so obvious that i’m trying to fill some unsubstantiated part of me with something. but i can’t figure out how or what or i have too much ADD to focus and figure out what it is i want to do. and then it all seems overwhelming, so i shut my computer and forget about it until the next day when i go through the same things and the same feelings and it creeps up again and i fight with the computer and i’m no closer to connecting than i was the previous night. and things go unchanged.
i’ve been a little anxious at night recently, i haven’t been sleeping well. part of me thinks it’s because i spend way too much time on my phone and it’s too stimulating before i go to bed. it’s the reason i don’t have a television in my room, but i think i need to enact a strict no phone after 11pm policy. i need an alarm clock.
anyway, i don’t know what this all means. i’m restless. i am in a rut. i need to shake things up. i’m done traveling for a while, and i think i need to make myself stay put no matter how much i want to run away under the guise that i’m living life. ground myself. get in touch with me. connect the dots and see what shape forms. actually live.
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