A Classical Education: French, Math, Fencing.
I suddenly remembered and missed my accordion this week. I haven't played in years. I've barely played since we've moved up here. I felt a panic thinking that by now I won't be able to pull the notes back to me, that I won't be able to figure out the fingering again. What if I can never untie the instrument again? I suppose the important thing is that I learned to do it in the first place. I did something I had always wanted to do and I got a lot out of it. That's a happy circumstance, not one for regret.Friday with no overindulgence. No overeating. A walk with my kid. Healthy food. Two small homemade cookies, not 5. Stayed up way too late. An overindulgence in hours, not calories or poison.
This picture of me was taken when I was 27 years old. I was going through a small breakdown over the complications of family life and had just decided that bringing new people into the world is selfish and a huge mistake and I was therefore finally decided to never have children. I was at the very edge of discovering my anger. Angry at my mother for being so unreliable and for letting people step on her, my grandfather for constantly disowning us for not being who he wanted us to be, my dad for his denial of the past truths, my father for calling my mother a slut and not acknowledging my brother. At all of them for being unevolved and immature. At all of them for ignoring me until I made it too inconvenient or impossible for them.
I had gained some weight and was getting a little rounded out. It is astonishing to me now what a minor thing it was to gain ten pounds and be a little chubby back then. It never occurred to me that I was capable, under certain circumstances, of gaining another 100lbs and being obese. Back then I was just a little heavy. I started walking more and then I took fencing at the Santa Rosa Junior College.
The fencing was an unexpected revelation. I like wielding a weapon. I liked wearing a uniform and I liked the demands it made on my body. I liked the formality of this old art of killing people with swords. I am not a gun person, as I really already knew, but I am a sword person. I would like to shoot arrows as well. Fencing was making my muscles stronger and I liked the exercises we did in lunging that made them burn and I liked that we did them in formation. Formality of action suits me well.
I was having other revelations at the same time while taking French, math, and accordion lessons. Revelations of language. Language of body, of numbers, of notes, and of words. I was trying to write a book and struggling with telling the truth. It was fiction but "the truth" wouldn't let me go. I couldn't find my way to the truth with lies. I was furiously writing, reading, lunging with foils, doing algebra, and wrapping myself around the French language. All the while serenading bread dough with my accordion. I do nothing by halves. Nothing.
I was also drafting patterns and sewing a lot of my own clothes. I could wear them then. Even being chubby. I want to be chubby like that again. I still had a waist and I miss that body so much. With all its extra padding it was still serving me well. It didn't weigh me down. It didn't hurt all the time. It didn't disgust me or make me ashamed. I was chubbier than a lot of people but I felt fine about that. Chubby isn't ugly to me. Chubby is often prettier than skinny.
It was a great period for a Renaissance woman. I was giving myself a classical education.
I gave up on the book I was writing. I was slowly developing the opinion that I wasn't supposed to write fiction, that perhaps non-fiction was what I should really be writing. This period, in this picture you see here, is when I let go of assumptions I had made about my future when I was ten. This period was an opening and a closing.
Much like today. 14 years later.
Except that my body betrayed me and then I betrayed it. We are picking up the pieces. With Kung Fu. With fiction writing. With many lessons in devastation. With many lessons in tolerance and intolerance. Many lessons in patience and moderation. My body isn't budging. Not an inch. I have in the last two weeks lowered the beer consumption again from 18-24 down to 15 a week. 15 is only 1 above the limit of what is considered an acceptable amount.
From 42 or more beers a week to 15 a week. I'm not even drinking tonic water like I had to do when we first started reducing the amount of beer we were drinking. I am drinking one to two cups of decaf black tea with about a tablespoon of milk and a teaspoon of sugar. Or on some nights I'm drinking an ounce or two of home made ginger-honey syrup mixed with mineral water. I am not overindulging in food. I am not eating mega cheesy things late at night. No pints of ice-cream for almost a year. When I bake cookies for Max I never eat more than one or two instead of eating 5 or 6 like I was used to doing for the last few years.
And you know what? All this moderation doesn't hurt, isn't that hard once you get into the habit. I feel better about myself for relearning to drink life in smaller sips. I feel better about myself for reclaiming my self discipline which is growing stronger every single day. My self respect is very much tangled up in my self discipline. I don't have one without the other. It is my self discipline that has kept me from being institutionalized; from imploding, as I constantly threaten to do. It is my self discipline which has informed my work ethic, my code of living, my self value. It is my self discipline which took myself back from the cutting. From self loathing to self worth.
Self discipline is writing every single day. It's eating well but not more than needed. It's enjoying the gifts of life like beer and sweets in moderation. It's pushing your body to move enough to keep your heart pumping and healthy. It's sticking with a chosen path even when it gets hard. It's coming to work and giving your best. It's about integrity in general and integrity in your relationship with yourself most of all.
The more self discipline you have the better you can weather life's vicissitudes.
When I dream I dream myself as you see me in this picture here, not as I am now. I remember how my body felt back then and I miss it so dreadfully much.
But I don't wish to be who I was back then. I may miss my corporeal self, so much smaller and dutiful to my demands than it is now, but my head was such a mess and my heart hurt so bad from all of my family's pain. I held it all in myself and let it eat away at me. Every single day was a mental and emotional struggle and I was still trying to find the answers without therapy or psychiatric medications which I was still suspicious of. All the herbal remedies, all the assertions that exercise and diet could transform my mental incapacity, were like painful lessons in personal failure. They invited me to believe that I was responsible for my own biology. That my head was messed up because I wasn't doing enough.
I was still trying everything possible and meanwhile it was all getting worse. The depression, and more acutely- the anxiety which had always taken a back seat to the depression before rose to the surface of the turbid waters of my mental life- I was having panic attacks regularly and experiencing numbing of my limbs and even passed out once and nearly passed out often.
Some people will beat themselves up their entire lives for not being able to magically fix themselves without help. I might have gone on compounding my problems by blaming myself for not being fixed by St. John's Wart or meditation and exercise if I hadn't, three years later had a kid which forced me to get help. I wouldn't change that for the world. Getting therapy and taking psyche meds has been one of the best decisions I have made in my life.
I have never believed in regrets yet I have indulged in them for the past couple of years. Questioning myself, my decisions, all of them; constantly asking what I did to make it all go wrong, and wishing to undo everything. Start over. Go back. Change those decisions.
I don't believe in regrets and I'm refusing to indulge in them now. I am reclaiming my dissipated self discipline and though my body won't budge and is still this big unrecognizable thing I hate, I am beginning to respect myself again. If my body won't cooperate it won't be because I'm abusing it. If it doesn't respond it isn't because I'm weak and letting it down. Maybe this is just a case of a large body holding onto calories in primal fear of starvation, as a few have suggested might be the case, or perhaps it's an indication of something deeper malfunctioning. I couldn't be sure before, when I was still eating and drinking unreasonable unhealthy amounts, I couldn't fairly ask that question.
I can ask it now.
I can't afford to get any tests done.
I don't wish I was 27 again.
I don't regret all this pain and torment and dissipation and displacement because somehow, through it all, I found my way to the center of my writing. Through it all I've managed to get answers for my son's challenges and some help for it as well. Through it all I have acknowledged and opened up the rage I refused to touch since I first felt it pushing at me when I was a small child; previously locked into a very tight dark cell in myself like a beast that must be kept in chains to prevent a full moon massacre. Through it all I have discovered the limits of my own tolerance. Through it I have set down the pain of each of my family members to let them sort it themselves and picked up my own.
I want to pick my accordion up again but I need time and aloneness to find my way back to the music. I don't have the time or space to do it right now but something must be shifting to be thinking of this now. After 3 years of being too crushed to sit with it on my lap and find my way through the buttons and the breathing; to be wishing for it now, the music through my skin.
The only thing I miss about the past is a body that I wasn't ashamed of. That didn't hurt all the time. That I could dress how I liked and could reflect my thoughts in cloth and hardware on my sleeves.
A message that only poets can read.
I was also drafting patterns and sewing a lot of my own clothes. I could wear them then. Even being chubby. I want to be chubby like that again. I still had a waist and I miss that body so much. With all its extra padding it was still serving me well. It didn't weigh me down. It didn't hurt all the time. It didn't disgust me or make me ashamed. I was chubbier than a lot of people but I felt fine about that. Chubby isn't ugly to me. Chubby is often prettier than skinny.
It was a great period for a Renaissance woman. I was giving myself a classical education.
I gave up on the book I was writing. I was slowly developing the opinion that I wasn't supposed to write fiction, that perhaps non-fiction was what I should really be writing. This period, in this picture you see here, is when I let go of assumptions I had made about my future when I was ten. This period was an opening and a closing.
Much like today. 14 years later.
Except that my body betrayed me and then I betrayed it. We are picking up the pieces. With Kung Fu. With fiction writing. With many lessons in devastation. With many lessons in tolerance and intolerance. Many lessons in patience and moderation. My body isn't budging. Not an inch. I have in the last two weeks lowered the beer consumption again from 18-24 down to 15 a week. 15 is only 1 above the limit of what is considered an acceptable amount.
From 42 or more beers a week to 15 a week. I'm not even drinking tonic water like I had to do when we first started reducing the amount of beer we were drinking. I am drinking one to two cups of decaf black tea with about a tablespoon of milk and a teaspoon of sugar. Or on some nights I'm drinking an ounce or two of home made ginger-honey syrup mixed with mineral water. I am not overindulging in food. I am not eating mega cheesy things late at night. No pints of ice-cream for almost a year. When I bake cookies for Max I never eat more than one or two instead of eating 5 or 6 like I was used to doing for the last few years.
And you know what? All this moderation doesn't hurt, isn't that hard once you get into the habit. I feel better about myself for relearning to drink life in smaller sips. I feel better about myself for reclaiming my self discipline which is growing stronger every single day. My self respect is very much tangled up in my self discipline. I don't have one without the other. It is my self discipline that has kept me from being institutionalized; from imploding, as I constantly threaten to do. It is my self discipline which has informed my work ethic, my code of living, my self value. It is my self discipline which took myself back from the cutting. From self loathing to self worth.
Self discipline is writing every single day. It's eating well but not more than needed. It's enjoying the gifts of life like beer and sweets in moderation. It's pushing your body to move enough to keep your heart pumping and healthy. It's sticking with a chosen path even when it gets hard. It's coming to work and giving your best. It's about integrity in general and integrity in your relationship with yourself most of all.
The more self discipline you have the better you can weather life's vicissitudes.
When I dream I dream myself as you see me in this picture here, not as I am now. I remember how my body felt back then and I miss it so dreadfully much.
But I don't wish to be who I was back then. I may miss my corporeal self, so much smaller and dutiful to my demands than it is now, but my head was such a mess and my heart hurt so bad from all of my family's pain. I held it all in myself and let it eat away at me. Every single day was a mental and emotional struggle and I was still trying to find the answers without therapy or psychiatric medications which I was still suspicious of. All the herbal remedies, all the assertions that exercise and diet could transform my mental incapacity, were like painful lessons in personal failure. They invited me to believe that I was responsible for my own biology. That my head was messed up because I wasn't doing enough.
I was still trying everything possible and meanwhile it was all getting worse. The depression, and more acutely- the anxiety which had always taken a back seat to the depression before rose to the surface of the turbid waters of my mental life- I was having panic attacks regularly and experiencing numbing of my limbs and even passed out once and nearly passed out often.
Some people will beat themselves up their entire lives for not being able to magically fix themselves without help. I might have gone on compounding my problems by blaming myself for not being fixed by St. John's Wart or meditation and exercise if I hadn't, three years later had a kid which forced me to get help. I wouldn't change that for the world. Getting therapy and taking psyche meds has been one of the best decisions I have made in my life.
I have never believed in regrets yet I have indulged in them for the past couple of years. Questioning myself, my decisions, all of them; constantly asking what I did to make it all go wrong, and wishing to undo everything. Start over. Go back. Change those decisions.
I don't believe in regrets and I'm refusing to indulge in them now. I am reclaiming my dissipated self discipline and though my body won't budge and is still this big unrecognizable thing I hate, I am beginning to respect myself again. If my body won't cooperate it won't be because I'm abusing it. If it doesn't respond it isn't because I'm weak and letting it down. Maybe this is just a case of a large body holding onto calories in primal fear of starvation, as a few have suggested might be the case, or perhaps it's an indication of something deeper malfunctioning. I couldn't be sure before, when I was still eating and drinking unreasonable unhealthy amounts, I couldn't fairly ask that question.
I can ask it now.
I can't afford to get any tests done.
I don't wish I was 27 again.
I don't regret all this pain and torment and dissipation and displacement because somehow, through it all, I found my way to the center of my writing. Through it all I've managed to get answers for my son's challenges and some help for it as well. Through it all I have acknowledged and opened up the rage I refused to touch since I first felt it pushing at me when I was a small child; previously locked into a very tight dark cell in myself like a beast that must be kept in chains to prevent a full moon massacre. Through it all I have discovered the limits of my own tolerance. Through it I have set down the pain of each of my family members to let them sort it themselves and picked up my own.
I want to pick my accordion up again but I need time and aloneness to find my way back to the music. I don't have the time or space to do it right now but something must be shifting to be thinking of this now. After 3 years of being too crushed to sit with it on my lap and find my way through the buttons and the breathing; to be wishing for it now, the music through my skin.
The only thing I miss about the past is a body that I wasn't ashamed of. That didn't hurt all the time. That I could dress how I liked and could reflect my thoughts in cloth and hardware on my sleeves.
A message that only poets can read.
Comments (1)
You are truly inspirational. I think your hindsight exceeds 20/20 and you have a remarkable way of turning an observation around into something with powerful intent.
Just thought you should know. ;)
(BTW - Still reading here, just in shorter stints and commenting less - I will try to get back into the swing of things, because I know I have a lot of your wonderful writing to catch up on!)
P.S. Ah...good ol' SRJC - I could have stayed and taken classes there forever, but somehow I missed the fencing!
Posted by Allison | April 19, 2010 4:22 PM
Posted on April 19, 2010 16:22