I feel like I am lint rollering the internet and the webs of my brain.
All the Places I Tried to Begin Again
Over the last several years, I have had multiple presences online. Social media sites for business and personal life. LinkedIn posts for whatever work I was doing at the time. Corporate gifts for years, then a system for corporate gifts briefly, then life insurance. On the side, there was the poetry slam group I helped facilitate. Different places to showcase different parts of my life.
My husband’s YouTube channel is mostly him, but I would get a bug in my ear to work on graphics for him. The racing we do as a family with our youngest son landed somewhere on my writer social media and completely skewed the algorithm for a weekend.
Oh well.
I started a blog on LinkedIn for business, and then for when I was looking for a job and writing about the things I was learning through that process.
Writing is my way of thinking out loud to come to a conclusion. Thoughts untangle themselves as they cross our lips or penciltips.
I started a Substack to focus primarily on the book I have just completed. A book told in poetry. Menopause. Reckoning with my mother. Reconciliation. A love story from the black sheep of the family to her family of origin. Then Dad dying suddenly, and the vigil around that.
One book. Complete.
My second book of poetry.
But after the intensity of the writing, starting a blog to go along with it was exhausting before it started. I had intended to have it be background writing while I was writing the book, but the book came out so quickly, in such a short amount of time, that it was all I could do to keep up.
So, slump and start something new?
No.
The Reservoir Was Here All Along
I already have a blog.
It started when the kids were little. Our farm, our homeschooling days, all the art and wonder and creation of those days, the philosophizing that happened along the way because that is how we are wired.
I have written through my life all my life.
This blog is the greatest collection of years of our life.
The Missing Years
There are chunks missing. During the hardest part of the teen years, I was writing on Building Boys, a private Facebook group. I was a regular contributor there, and it saved my life. I wrote the hard days there. The forlorn and lost days. The small miracles. The joys. The really not knowing what was happening.
And the community surrounded me.
They held me up when I could barely breathe.
We had a go of it. We really did.
Bits and pieces of those years come out now in poetry. My boys have given me permission to share what I share about them. They knew even at the time that Building Boys was a place for me to learn and grow and get grounded and come back calmer and more settled. They saw the difference when I reached out for help. They saw when I was working on my responses rather than my reactions.
We were in it together, to a degree.
The Unraveling
During a lot of the last several years, I have been flailing big time. Things coming undone on every level. The world was a dumpster fire, and it was more than I could handle with everything in my own world falling apart.
I was menopausal and did not know it until recently, when everything fell into place. I had all the symptoms except for hot flashes, but hot flashes were the only symptoms I had ever heard about. A video I saw recently put things into perspective.
I have been isolating in my own home. Hiding out in my office. Working, not working, for more hours in the day than is practical or sustainable. Really, I was in here by myself, staring at walls.
Then my parents moved to town, and my inner dialogue went into full force. Juvenile rebellion, mixed with years of opposing sides of almost everything political and religious. Trying to love them as people while bitterly disagreeing with them. Numbing out to the ills of the world so I could be with them. Loving them. Watching them decline. Watching my dad quickly die.
All the emotions.
All the heartache.
All the love and devotion.
And anger that came out of nowhere.
Rage at the world.
Then I came up from writing to see a world on absolute fire. I opened my eyes the week of the news hitting about the 64 million hits to a website. The horror. The female rage at a system broken and designed to destroy us.
I sat and watched the abyss for a couple of weeks until I did not recognize myself. I was feeling such hatred and seeking such vengeance. I was quaking with rage.
The Retreat in the Woods
I went to a retreat in the woods thinking I would get the opportunity to dance and scream around a bonfire and hurl my accusations into the sky.
What we did was harmonize and sing softly and drum rhythmically. We moved gently in our chairs. We hummed. We held one another’s voices and hearts.
It was more than my human brain could process.
It was holy in the most beautiful way.
It was Narnian and sacred and what my soul needed most of all.
I return here to regain my footing in where I stand right now.
Right here.
What I Can Do Now
As much as I would like to be a brave person marching and protesting and putting my life on the line for my fellow humans, I am not that person. I am learning how much my nervous system has been on high alert my whole life, and it is shutting down in big ways.
In puddles all around me.
Or balled up in tension spots along my arms and spine.
I am not sure which metaphor makes the most sense. They both do, simultaneously, unfortunately.
I wrote through the mother and daughter dynamics of my whole life. I witnessed death. I wrote about all the ways that experience hit my body and our family, through dinners and laughter and tears and singing and fights out of nowhere, and then singing again.
What I am saying is, I am not tackling the world right now.
I am doing my part to raise a garden and create some food security here for us and our loved ones. I am learning dry canning to put away beans and rice and soup mixes and instant dinners. Just add water. We are building our fire pit so it can work whether there is electricity or not.
I am not freaking out about the end of the world, the end of democracy, the end of the planet.
I have seen enough of the abyss to know I cannot live there.
I can spiral down and feel helpless and lost and furious, or I can focus on my garden. I can build something beautiful that may sustain us and keep me inspired by the beauty of nature.
Bringing the Little Bits Home
So I am coming back here.
To the place where the record already lives.
To the old posts and the missing years.
To the boys small and the boys grown.
To the mother I was trying to become.
To the woman I am still gathering.
I am lint rollering the internet.
Gathering the little bits of me.
Bringing them home.
