Coast & Current

2022 was, at most, a coast. Coasting doesn't feel the right right. Existing? It feels vaindulgent to consider one’s suffering, to let it in but not out. But what good does it do to judge one's self for breadth or style of suffering. So, I just sit in it. Because somewhere along the way I heard that you could observe your thoughts, and that everyone considers their own problems as top-drawer.

I think some of it started with leaving my job at the hospital. It felt really personal. Corrupted. Insensitive. Painful. But, eventually empowering. Can you imagine working for a place for 7 years and the day you leave no one says goodbye? I had nightmares for months. That's how much it got into me. Like a sickness. I couldn't wrap my head around the callousness. I couldn't wrap my head around how they put me in front of the ER to vet people in for Covid. Couldn't wrap my head around how they wouldn't let me use my own PTO. Couldn't wrap my head around how they didn't know what I did there, and then asked me to teach them the week I left. It took near a year to feel like I purged the gross feeling that I had just willingly given 7 years of my life to a place that didn't care about me at all. That's really tough to sit with. Perhaps that's common.

And then I learned a new trade, which was uncomfortable but stimulating. I had to set aside any self-worth antagonizers like the dip I'd take financially, the seniority lost. Though I am currently unfulfilled, I feel more care in a single year here than I ever did at the hospital, which is a good lesson that I learned way too slowly - if you're not being treated well, you don't have to stay. But the problem for me is, I don't know my worth. 

So here's all this change, and I'm financially stalled, but living got more expensive, and the Dems rose gas prices & the Reds went untaxed and Russia and suddenly I've never been poorer. But I say yes to all possible travel, and my new place of work lets me take unpaid leaves, which further dries me (but at least it's for fun), and Hoka is 3-6 months delayed in reimbursements, and house prices skyrocket and outsiders flush in big city cash move in and the whole town feels different. It breathes differently. Hisses in dissentient. How the people treat each other. How they treat people outside. And I want to ask, how does one not feel sorry for one's self? Sloane said his 90-year-old father holds the hand of his 85-year-old mother, mostly to help each other balance as they walk, and how people stop them to say how good they make them feel, to see them. To see old people with linked arms, outside. How they've had fish purchased for them. And this is LA. And I know it's out there. People's kindness. Floating around between pockets & puddles of parsimony. I want to live in the bubble-link of two old people touching. 

While struggling I thought, Buckle Up, Ride Wave. There's optimism in me somewhere, whispering how it'll pass. And I lived between coasting and saying Fuck It. Went to so many wonderful places. Argentina, Duluth, Eugene, Costa Rica, Germany, Czech Republic, Sacramento, San Francisco. I had to. It was only in all of these did it actually feel like I was living. Which means, I have to be gone to feel alive. 

Alright, and then family on all sides was/is probably the largest stimulus for the deep ache. Bone deep. Psychic storm aswirl at all times just murkily lounging behind an inconsequential thought. This is the most difficult stimulus to parcel out, to investigate, to work through. It is blinding and I go numb. I've been thinking on dissociation, the topic of which seems hot; wondered what it felt like when one dissociates; all that came to mind were images of people zoned out. Where do they go? What does it feel like? And then I read something about dissociation being a mechanism for lapses in your childhood memories, or all memory, and suddenly I had a theory to my own. Though I'm not currently suresure, I think I do know what it's like. Where you go. I think it's been a means of my own survival. I think when I say remaining alive or existing or coasting, I mean there's a big box of shit I'm not dealing with, and when it bubbles forward, I dissociate. I'm theorizing. Really how it feels is that I'm numb and then I ache and then I get worried that I'm not doing something I should be doing And my memory is poor.

I woke in the black of an early morning sensing my grandfather (maternal) passed, and then my mother called & confirmed it. When my grandfather died last spring, I was curious about my own strength. I felt safe enough, a little detached. I thought maybe it was because I always had this feeling around that side that we were the fuckups (not necessarily me, but perhaps in solidarity I harbored my own division). They loved us and we them all the same, but that air of black sheepness created the feeling of division, and when you feel divided it's easy enough to consider yourself on the other side. False safety is possible there. I'd drive by his home (where I grew up) and would feel the need to avert my eyes and wish him well. The funeral came months later, on a sweltering summer day at the family property, and when I drove down his long gravel road, it dawned on me that he was gone, and that I, was in fact, not strong, I'd only been numb. It felt better to busy myself, pass beverages, help with the food, than to sit still in the fact that I had not processed his death, months later. It's so obvious, my pain; I was the only one who took a seat under the blistering sun, sweat dripping between my legs and down my back, growing red, while all others gathered beneath tents and the shade of trees. I had to make the hurt hurt more. And it was there at his funeral that two other really painful things happened. One was a good painful - the retired co-workers and friends of my grandfather's told me that my grandfather bragged about me all the time, that he would tell them my results, and air my races. I didn't know that he was that kind of proud of me; it was painful but good. The other - I saw my mother in a state of decomp, jaundiced, swollen, sweating. And suddenly I am a daughter who didn't know that her mother was just fighting for her life for 10 days at the hospital. 

So, there, all at once I'm needing to process my not processing my grandfather's death, the fact that he loved me out loud to others, though it was not necessarily known to me, and that my mother had just returned from hell & that I might lose her too. 

And then I numb out, lay prostrate. Watch a lot of toks. And between, some travels (where I lived). 

There was so much to be grateful for. 

For one, how does a person have 15 other solid people in their life, who live all across the US - and have them meet in Costa Rica and we all fall in love with one another? And still talk all these months later? 

And how incredible was it that I made another US team, got to race in Germany, fell hard or harder still for each teammate and their support people, earned Team Gold, got to travel after. I learned a really valuable lesson over there, one that is life-altering for me personally. And to think of all the things that needed to happen before that lesson could be earned - there was so much to be grateful for. 

And then my grandmother (paternal) in what seemed like a flip of a day, had an aggressive onset of dementia. I went to see her with my father and we broke down, in front of her, while she pretended to sleep. I didn't feel good about us crying about her in front of her. It felt like we were already mourning. Mourning her in front of her still living. I talked about it with a co-worker whose parent had waged a painful war with dementia, and I re-opened that wound in her and she began crying at work. After loosely acknowledging her diagnosis, things progressed fast and hospice began. But everyone tends to say you have no idea how long it'll go. I certainly didn't think weeks. I was supposed to stop by and see her around Thanksgiving, but that previous visit had pained me vividly, so I went and got a tattoo instead. And then the next day she was taken away by ambulance, found to have sepsis, and died in the ER, the hospital capacity at full. Again I woke in the early morning with a start, thinking something was wrong, and my father called not minutes later to confirm. Hearing deep pain in your father's voice is haunting and renders in me profound helplessness. And all I can think of is how many times he said, "Grandma misses you." "Grandma wants to see you." "Grandma asked about her bracelet." And how many times I said I would see her but didn't. And how I didn't fix the one thing she ever asked me to do. 

So I numbed out, laid prostrate, watched a lot of toks. And I tried for the OTQ at CIM, and missed it by 50 seconds, and was getting so sick of myself sending email after email to a brand in desperation to get them to believe in me, when it's hard to believe in me. And never have I considered more than to pick up and go. It soothes the brain on fire, to think about exits.

I want to say: I can't afford a home. I don't make enough money to get anywhere close to ahead in life. My family is hurting. Alcoholism chews at the edges. I try hard to be a good friend, daughter, wife, teammate & leader but feel guilt in not being better. Buckle Up. Ride Wave.