On Stress, Right Answers, and Noticing

By Catherine DiMercurio

I cherish calm, routine days. I think I’ve always been that way, but at this point in my life, I am more thankful than ever for peaceful stretches of time where I’m able write, exercise, work, hang out with my dog, and spend time with people I care about, without anything disrupting that flow. I had the thought recently that I need to figure out how to hang on to that sense of peace when I’m stressed. But a new thought dovetailed into that one. Once I’m stressed, that feeling of peace or well-being or calm is lost or distorted. What I actually need to do is to keep that stress outside of me.

Can we deal with stressful situations without becoming stressed? Is it possible not to internalize it? I have started to wonder not only if it is possible, but if it is the way many people already know how to handle it. Can I simply decide to not let it in? Sometimes I think of stress as a cold shadow, and though I try and stay warm and in the sunlight, I get cold and dark anyway.

Maybe it has less to do with what we let in and what we don’t. Like many people, I use the terms “emotions” and “feelings” rather interchangeably, but there’s a lot of information emphasizing that they are two different things. A Psychology Today article I read provides an example of the emotion of discomfort one might experience at a party. Your stomach might constrict and your breathing becomes shallow and rapid. Maybe you start to perspire. One person might interpret these physical cues as feeling anxious our awkward. Another person might experience the same physical cues and describe feeling excited. I certainly have tried to tell myself at times that the physical experiences that I associate with anxiety, often about a social situation, are actually excitement, hoping that if I labeled it differently it would calm me. It usually doesn’t.

Whether stress in particular is a feeling or an emotion seems a little blurrier. It certainly involves physical changes in the body that we label as “feeling stressed” but it is bigger than that. The Mayo Clinic notes that stress affects our body, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. I feel as though my big “revelation”—the idea that maybe I can choose whether to internalize or externalize it—will not be so simple to enact, given that an external situation that is stressful causes immediate physical reactions in my body; this happens before thought, or regardless of thought.

Is it possible then to experience the physical signs of stress—to be having an internal, bodily response—but still try to externalize the stress? As in: there is a stressful situation happening over there. I can feel my heart beating harder in my chest and my breathing is shallow. And while I recognize that I am experiencing physical discomfort and am feeling fearful, the situation itself is still happening over there. I can choose to react to it differently. I can take deep breaths and stretch and I can trust that I will find a way to handle the details of that situation.

Yet a stressful situation is stressful because some part of us feels threatened. Whether it is related to our own experience or that of someone we care about, we might feel that physical or emotional safety is threatened, or financial stability jeopardized, or there might be some other fear we feel deep down in our bones. It might also be very difficult to see it as something external if it is something related to our own bodies, like an injury or illness.

I suppose some of the best advice is just about noticing. When we’re in a heightened, uncomfortable state, we can notice what we’re experiencing in our bodies and how we’re labeling it. Then we can try to bring our bodies back to a state of calm—by breathing deeply, stretching, jumping, dancing, shaking it out, crying. I wonder if the most important part is avoiding what many of us do: we try to talk ourselves out of feeling what we feel. But what if instead, we attempt to love ourselves through it, and to be curious about why we’re responding the way we are.

Sometimes, the most comforting and grounding way for me to respond when I observe that my body is tense, and my mind is swirling with worry, and my feelings are overwhelming me, is to say to myself: hey, it is normal for you to be feeling this way in this situation. This is a natural response to stress, especially given the circumstances (whatever those may be). Sometimes it is that permission to respond in the way I am responding that makes the path through it a little clearer. This is a generous, loving response that I had to teach myself slowly and painstakingly over a long period of time, that I am still teaching myself.

What’s key here is that when faced with a stressful situation our bodies often have an immediate intrinsic response. It is incredibly challenging to move ourselves toward a calmer state of being if we tell ourselves we should not feel the way we are feeling. But maybe it is possible to take it in steps. Our bodies and minds are going to have that immediate response to something stressful, and that’s normal and healthy. They want to protect us. But once we manage those physical symptoms, and after we’ve been gentle with ourselves and acknowledged the existence of those normal feelings, can we then try to separate the stress from ourselves, can we other it, externalize it, place it “over there” as a set of problems to be solved or details to be managed? It’s worth a try.

Perhaps there is some danger too, in the idea of externalizing stress. That is, we don’t want all big and uncomfortable feelings to be something we see as separate from ourselves, right? I think when we separate ourselves from our grief or rage for example, we lose an opportunity to work through them in a healthy way. But stress is a special beast and maybe it needs special rules to tame it, and to treat its effects on us. It is a strange thing in many ways to try and extricate ourselves from stress and its effects. What I mean is that the world and its energy is woven throughout us and always has been. We can’t float along through this life untouched by things we’d prefer not to experience. It is hard to be soft, to let ourselves have a permeable barrier that allows us to take in as much love as we can, without taking in pain too. It’s hard to live fully and to also protect ourselves. The act of living and pursuing our dreams invites stress and risk.

One of the things that always comes back to me—wise words from a long time ago—is that there is no right way to do this. No right way to heal, or grow, or explore new things, to say yes to some things and no to others. There is no standard, no road map. As a kid, I always wanted to have the right answer, and in school, there always is one. I wanted to get the “A” and to be ready in class if I was called on. I think of my hand, shooting up into the air, ready to be the one to get it right. Throughout my adult years, I have searched out the “right” answer. The right way for me to live, to love, to be, to be me. It’s been hard to trust that I have ways of doing things that are the right way for me, especially since I look at the way my path has been different from that of a lot of people I know. My way doesn’t have to be someone else’s.

Sometimes when I’m not sure about what to do, I feel as though if I listen hard enough and in a particular way, I will be able to figure out what I truly want. I have worried that I’m on the wrong path because I’m not listening well enough.

What I forget is that there is a chance that the part of me I turn to for the “right” answers for myself might not know yet. It’s one thing to trust your gut, but sometimes your gut is still working on things. It’s hard to be patient, to trust in the timing as well as the answer, to trust that I’ll know what I need to know when I need to know it. I wonder, what if I miss it? What if the answer is too subtle, or I’ve been waiting so long I’ve forgotten to listen?

Perhaps, this is when it all comes back to noticing. We must be ready to notice what our instincts, our gut, is trying to tell us, in its own time. Maybe we must strive to dwell in a state of awareness. Perhaps this is part of what I had in mind, without fully knowing it, when I started this blog. Being an open-hearted person means being open to what is happening around us and inside us; it is about cultivating a rich, fulsome awareness. I think of that same hand shooting up in the air, not to proclaim the right answer, but simply to feel the air, simply to notice.

Love, Cath

On Herons, Ducks, and Dessert

By Catherine DiMercurio

I want to be a heron when I grow up. I want grace and patience.

We saw a heron this weekend, my people and I, on a walk after lunch. The heron was standing on a log in a pond, maybe about to catch a fish, maybe not, apparently unconcerned that we were nearby and watching. I wonder what it is like to be still and calm and wholly myself in the midst of a busy, busy world.

If a heron can, why can’t I?

That is, I can, sometimes, but not always when I need to.

One of the things I have always found challenging is finding a way to feel happy, calm, or peaceful in the midst of dealing with some kind of struggle. I always have the sense that once I get past this thing or that, then I’ll be able to relax, find contentment. Maybe that is one of the things this current challenge is trying to teach me. I’m dealing with a major home repair, the kind that requires financing, the kind that it is depressing to spend so much money on, where you aren’t sure you can manage it but you have to. It has left me feeling stressed, depleted, tired. Everyone deals with things like this in one form or another. We all do, throughout our lives. We go through periods when we seem to be hit over and over again.

If we’re lucky, we also go through periods where not much seems to go wrong, and we have an awareness that somehow, bad things seem to be avoiding us. Sometimes, the more things go wrong, the more things seem to go wrong, and it is too easy to lose ourselves in that mode of thinking. Every time I feel this downward spiral, I have to do the mental work of avoiding its momentum.

This past weekend, I tried not to think of the repair that is about to take place, over the course of 2.5 days. When you have a reactive dog, it is challenging to have people who need to work on your house coming into your home. I’m almost as stressed about managing Zero as I am about the financial component of this repair. The disruption to my workday is also a factor. I try to keep things in perspective, try to manage as many of the pieces of the puzzle as I can. At times I sink into a resigned sort of acceptance; this is simply what needs to be done and I’m managing it as best as I can. At other times, I struck with the impossibility of it all, with the fact that not only is there one more thing to deal with, it is a giant thing.

Throughout the holiday weekend, I tried to compartmentalize so that I could enjoy my time, and I did a pretty good job for the most part. I’ve been thinking though about the way people metabolize the obstacles in their life. Some lean into faith; they pray, or accept challenges as some kind of plan they don’t fully understand. Some consider obstacles as necessities in our soul’s evolution. When challenges arise, they are welcomed and met gracefully. Still others embrace the apparent randomness of the universe, and don’t take challenges personally. I vacillate between approaches; I try to be graceful or wise, or calm. But first, it is true that I sometimes panic, depending on the size or severity of the obstacle. I know that part of this reaction is fear, and I ask myself: can I handle this, and how will I handle this, and what if I don’t handle it well, what if I make choices that cost me in ways I haven’t anticipated. That all comes from a not-fully-realized self-trust. But sometimes, I have a sense that though I can handle something, I’m simply tired of handling things. I feel defiant. “No more,” I wish to say, shaking my fist at the universe. But in the end, the fear or panic or weariness is simply futile, and we weather what we must because there is no other way. Life moves us inexorably forward. It doesn’t matter if we feel buffeted by stormy waves, a small duck in a big lake. Sometimes I want to make myself bigger, stretch tall on heron legs, unfurl the full length of my wings and defy storms. But whether duck or heron, we all simply weather the storms in our own ways. We do what we can.

The other thing I’m learning right now is to give myself space to have those moments of panic without judgement. Somethings are genuinely frightening. A huge, unexpected home repair can trigger feelings of financial insecurity in anyone; it is natural that it would leave many people with the sense that something of our essential safety is under threat, especially if we’ve experienced such instability in the past. I might later say, “I wish I’d handled that better,” but why? It is okay for me to feel anxious, to seek emotional support from my trusted circle. I wonder sometimes why I expect that I should feel unflappable, why I view responses such as fear or anxiousness as antithetical to handling something “gracefully.” I do long to feel a sense of serenity, an inner peace that is untouchable, unable to be shaken by woes or threats of any kind. It’s not a bad goal, but if I’m not there yet, then I’m not there yet. There’s no sense in having judgement about it. Maybe going forward, when I’ve had time to rest and regroup after this particular obstacle, I’ll sink into a kind of sustainable peace that will be less disrupted by whatever the next challenge is. Or, at least, I’ll strive for that.

For now, I’ll I can do is endure this latest challenge and trust that I’ve made the best decision I can at the time. I can use all the little tricks I have up my sleeve to get Zero and me through this. And I know I have people to lean on, and I know that leaning on people makes things easier, and also it doesn’t make the challenges go away. We all have to go through what we have to go through, one way or another, though for a long time I think I sort of expected that leaning on someone was sort of like splitting a dessert at a restaurant. You’re too full to have your own, and everyone consumes however many bites feels comfortable for them. But challenges are not chocolate cake.

Take small bites and deep breaths!

Love, Cath

On Burros and Butterflies, or How to Hold on to Your Dreams

By Catherine DiMercurio

When you are snuggled up with yourself on a towel with a thermos of coffee next to you after you’ve dipped yourself in a chilly lake on a cool, grey morning, you forget. You forget about all the things in your life that you needed to forget about for a little while. The things that seem un-figure-out-able. Those are the things that cause me the most daily stress, and having some relief from them was a gift. Lake Michigan is always a gift.

That was one of my favorite moments from my solo camping trip—the overcast day, the cold lake water, the hot coffee. Perhaps I could even call this trip a retreat, in that I retreated from the overwhelming stress of what my job has been like the past couple of months. I hiked and journaled and did some watercolor painting and read a lot and sat on the beach and looked at the water, and swam whenever I wanted. I made campfires. I listened t0 bumblebees in the silver linden tree. I watched butterflies flit through spirea blossoms, through a field full of staghorn sumac, milkweed, ox-eye daisies, black-eyed Susans. I sought calm and coziness.

Returning to the shores of the lake is for me like returning to the first sound you ever knew, your mother’s heartbeat. And it never fails to unlock something in me, this return. Still, this, itself, is part of one of my un-figure-out-able things. I haven’t figured out how I can rearrange my life, or afford, to have a lakeside life. I tried not to think about that on this trip, tried to simply immerse myself as much as possible.

When I’m in proximity to the lake, I don’t think about the not-belonging I feel almost everywhere else. I feel less out of sync with my environment than I have in most of the places I’ve lived. What does it mean to belong to a place, anyway? It is hard to find language that captures it. In some places, you simply feel connected. A place can speak to you—a house can, a lake can, a town can, a tree can—and you understand somehow. It feels like you. It’s a familiarity, in the sense that you recognize something of yourself in the landscape. It feels like home, a returning of you to you.

I’ve written a lot about belonging over the years in this blog. I thought about it a lot when I left the home I’d raised my children in and moved to this nearby township. It’s my fourth summer here and I don’t feel as though a strong sense of belonging is developing. I’ve made it my home, certainly, and my neighbors and I are friendly with one another. It isn’t a bad place to live by any means. But it is a long drive to a body of water. And in light of the dog attack I’ve written about and the number of loose dogs I have seen in the neighborhood, a new sense of hostility has developed. After the last incident a few weeks ago—another large dog was loose, but I spied him before the dogs noticed one another and I turned and we made it home—something in me closed a door, said it was the last time. The last time I risk another attack. It is another un-figure-out-able thing, my love of morning walks with Zero, and my inability to feel as if we can do that safely. I consulted a trainer, and I’m doing everything I can to make sure Zero is still getting exercise and mental stimulation. But it has been tricky. I have been very unsettled by the loss of our routine. And this sense of the neighborhood at large being hostile to us has been hard to shake.

I once had the thought, or the hope, that once I felt at home in my own skin, felt at last as though I belonged to myself, then I could and would feel at home anywhere. And I do feel that I have arrived at a place where I am more comfortable and content and at home with myself than I ever have been. But rather than this creating a situation where I feel at home wherever I am, it instead has intensified feelings of misalignment in terms of me feeling at home here.

And yet, for now, there’s nothing to be done, or if there is, I can’t see it yet. But, in most lives, there are un-figure-out-able things we live with all the time. We circle back to them, or, they circle us, like hawks or wolves. I’m trying not to think of these circling thoughts like predators, but I do feel an urgency about figuring things out. I wonder if I can make myself more patient by imagining them like butterflies or puppies instead. Though I suppose butterflies and puppies and all living things have some sense of urgency about them. Maybe, like everything else, it all comes down to self-trust. We have to trust ourselves to figure out the right thing at the right time.

There is some version of me that will know what to do, when to do it, and how to do it, and maybe I’m still evolving into her.

I think that a recent dream I had reflects how I’m really feeling about these stubborn, un-figure-out-able things. The dream centered on a stampede of wild burros. It was a chaotic scene, but the burros were beautiful—their hindquarters a golden honey color and their forequarters white with dark spots. Maybe, in the midst of trying to figure out what we want and how to get there, part of the process is cultivating an openness toward all the ways we receive clarity about our path. That is, there is some beauty in wanting, no? My quest for the lake takes many forms, but maybe until I land there, I need to (from the safety of some shelter) observe the beauty of the stampede of my dreams. That is, our wanting helps us flesh out the specifics of our dreams, helps us to pinpoint exactly what is important and why. My desire for a safe place to walk with my dog and enjoy experiences with him is leading me toward other ways of interacting with him and building our bond.

So much of mental health, or at least my mental health, is centered in reframing how I look at things: my fears and anxieties, my past experiences, and my own view of myself. My sister recently observed that we don’t hear rain; what we enjoy about the sound of rain is the sound of the impact of each drop—on a window, the pavement, our skin maybe. She made a point of noting that it is only through this striking of water against object that we note the beauty of that sound. It is up to us to interpret how we view the nature of that impact within this metaphor. To me, “impact” is a word with some inherent violence but it is unsurprising that I hear it that way. Sometimes even minor experiences can leave me feeling a bit shaken; I often experience the world as a little overwhelming (sound in particular). But we don’t have to see everything that way, hear it all that way. Lots of gentle things can be described as impact—clapping, any touch, the brush of a butterfly wing against a flower petal.

We do have to trust ourselves to know what action to take and when to take it, to assess the status of our dreams and our progress toward them, but we also can take smaller, gentler actions every day in the way we look at our lives and our hopes. Recharacterizing our perspectives, reframing our metaphors, can help us tame the chaos of our anxieties. And observing the subtle qualities of our desires can help keep us in tune with what we’re seeking. Sometimes I find it exhausting to hold my own hand and walk myself through something that has been troubling me or causing me persistent worry. But I’m glad I’ve learned how over the years. Kind of. And we have to help each other to do the same. It’s not always about listening to a friend or a loved one and offering advice on what to do. Sometimes we just need to hear one another and swap metaphors, share our dreams, create safe places from which to observe stampedes.

Love, Cath

On Wolves and Missions

By Catherine DiMercurio

In Italian, to wish someone good luck you say “in bocca al lupo,” which literally means, “in the mouth of the wolf.” The person you are wishing good luck to would reply, “crepi” (crepi al lupo”), which means “may the wolf die.” It seems that Italians have a good sense of what a dangerous place the world can be, though of course it is an older expression and probably had at one point really referred to wolves. With this expression, used in modern times, folks are expressing a sense of hoping that their loved ones escape some kind of danger or threat. We face different dangers than wolves these days. Sometimes the wolf is the forty-hours of work required to keep a roof over our heads, but which leaves us nearly too spent to enjoy anything but crashing on the couch under that roof. Sometimes the wolf is depression, anxiety, longing, fear. Sometimes it is a loose dog chasing you. Sometimes it is grief and loss threatening to eat you up alive. And sometimes it is much worse than all of that, depending on where you live in this hurting and hurtful world.

When I first drafted part of this essay, the air was cool and the sun was shining and I was outside with my dog, who contentedly sniffed around the yard. Maybe contented is a strong word. He seemed relaxed. We had some good walks last week, having only had to skirt some deer grazing in neighbors’ yards. I find it surprising that I feel like I know less about helping this reactive dog feel okay in the world than I did raising my children, though I suppose when I was in the thick of things when the children were little, I didn’t feel much like I knew what I was doing then either. In both situations, raising the kids and raising the dog, I was/am in the position of trying to help these other souls feel that the world is a good and safe place and that they can be happy, when in fact, the world is often insisting on something else. I am often tuned into my awareness the world is in fact something else.

It is as though I must gently lie to myself so I can gently lie to them because it is only when you believe the lie a little bit that you can relax your sense of vigilance and hold on to and share luminous flecks of hope and peace. They are like fireflies, dancing around us and not wanting to be caught, but luring or lulling us into a sense of calm. But we need that calm, and hope, and peace, to manage existing in this world. Telling these little lies to ourselves is a skill, whether offensive or defensive I’m not sure, but perhaps necessary for thriving. When the kids were little, I struggled with this, how to teach them both how to feel at peace in the world and how to protect yourself from its threats. In the end, I feel as though all I was able to do was love them as hard as I could, while the world taught them the rest, against my will.

Still, I feel safe and good sometimes too. I often feel safe and good when I’m alone in the woods, or in my garden, or by the water, or when I’m with people who don’t want anything from me, don’t need me to be a certain way in order for them to enjoy spending time with me, for them to love me.

But I confess that nothing made quite so much sense to me as did the sense of mission I felt as the parent of my two children. Perhaps the sense of mission is retrospective, and at the time, like I said, all I did was love them as hard as I could. But I suspect that even then a sense of purpose thrummed through me that was different than anything I have felt since. Now though, whatever it was that rose up in me and thrilled to that purpose, still wanders around in the emptied rooms within me, trying to attach itself to other endeavors. But it doesn’t know where to land. I don’t need it to pursue my writing—I’ve always had a different sense of purpose for that; it is like a separate spirit with a unique set of skills that knows how to keep me trying even when I get discouraged. But whatever animated that sense of mission as a mother seems to hover and wait, and maybe it helps me with my dog, but for the most part, it lights up when I interact with the children and then settles back in to wait and wander. On the one hand, the children have blossomed into independent adults, which was the whole point. But on the other hand, I don’t know what to do with this feeling. Some people have that sense of mission about their work, which is a beautiful thing and I’ve watched amazing things bloom from this type of mission in many of the people around me. It’s hard for me to feel that way about my job, and maybe right now there are factors, the job included, that are clouding something that I need to see about where I should be training my focus.

All of this can be exhausting. Does living this way—in a state of looking for purpose, while confronting our fears, and searching for the safe people and places—also make us stronger? I don’t know. What is strength? When I think about the obstacles I’ve encountered in my life, I don’t look back on them and feel like the silver lining is that they made me stronger. I certainly have learned a lot about myself and other people, and perhaps there is strength in that wisdom. Still, I think it is easy to confuse strength and toughness. There is beauty in the idea that we can turn hardship into strength, that what we go through builds us into something fortified, able to both endure and grow. But too often we simply armor ourselves, we build walls, grow scales, we keep out what makes us feel weak or vulnerable, and in doing so, keep out lots of other things, good things. There is some gritty toughness to that and depending on what the world is throwing your way it is a natural and understandable response, and I think it is more common than whatever true strength looks like. There is that same question again: how do we both protect ourselves from the world and find peace and goodness in it?

How do you keep facing the wolves but also keep being open to good things, keep growing? I wish I knew. I wish the world made more sense. Sometimes I feel like I just landed here and am wholly perplexed by this human world we’ve constructed. Sometimes it feels like it makes sense to everyone else but me, but I know that’s not true.

Everyone metabolizes the unease of the human experience differently. Maybe I’m not afraid, maybe we’re not all living life while managing an array of fears; maybe it is something else entirely. It sometimes looks like fear but perhaps it is more accurate to say that our true selves, maybe our souls, are intuiting a dissonance—that clanging gulf between the way the world is constructed and our ability to access what we need to thrive in it. We show up every day into a world that seems designed to keep us in a state of agitation. Everyone puts on the masks or armor that they need in order to live their lives while scared or confused or hungry or grief-stricken or wobbly or exhausted.

And I’m trying to figure out how, in the course of doing things while afraid or exhausted or hurt, people remain open to a better way. If we lead ourselves through the world by our open hearts—yes, scared hearts and hurt hearts, but open—then maybe it can begin to change a little something in this place and we can feel like we belong here, belong with each other.

Maybe that is the mission, to keep living in an open, loving way in a bruised and bruising world. It was perhaps, the mission all along, and maybe I am supposed to be applying the same methods to my own life that I applied while parenting my children. What if we love ourselves as hard as we can? I don’t know why it feels like that doesn’t satisfy the sense of mission but maybe it doesn’t until I wake up and see that it matters. That adults, even those of us lucky enough to still have our parents around, have to parent ourselves sometimes, in the way a loving parent would nurture a child. We still need that. Life doesn’t get any easier and we are still confused and still growing up, aren’t we?, and no one really knows us better than ourselves at this point. Maybe nothing makes more sense right now. Good luck. In bocca al lupo.

Love, Cath

On Adjustments, Distractions, and Tools

By Catherine DiMercurio

On a mid-May morning, mid-week, I take my dog out to the backyard. It’s just after 6 a.m. We won’t go for a walk today because it’s garbage day, and though he is fine with walking past the loud trucks and even the workers, he struggles with the people dragging cans to the curb, sometimes with an unleashed dog tagging along. A month after a loose dog attacked us, I try to minimize the risk of another such encounter. So instead, I train in the yard, running Zero through commands that he does without fail in the house. This is a training step I skipped over when he was smaller, working through familiar things but with added distractions. I was eager and impatient to add walks into our routine and pushed him through a lot of things too quickly. So now I’m taking a step back, trying some things again, but still endeavoring to keep several walks a week incorporated into our schedule. We walk early these days, armed now with an airhorn and pepper spray. Walking just after the sun begins to rise, we see mostly rabbits, and deer. We know the schedules of the folks who have to leave their house before 6:30.

As I try to extend the duration of a “stay” command in the yard, with Zero battling the distractions of birds, squirrels, scents of all kinds, I myself get distracted by the sweet and slightly herbal scent of iris blossoms, newly bloomed. It is hard for both of us to stay focused sometimes.

Mid-May also marks the one-year anniversary of the death of my older dog. It took Zero and I at least half a year at least to stop expecting to see Phin in his favorite napping spots. With every walk I take with Zero, avoiding his triggers, I think of walking Phin, and his joy at being out, trotting along in front of me, excited but also in his own peaceful, exuberant state of mind. He was friendly with everyone, afraid only of loud noises or being left alone. Without Phin, Zero and I have made adjustments, to our schedule, to the way we interact with one another, to the way we interact with our space, a home without Phin in it.

And just before that sad anniversary, we celebrated my son’s graduation from college. I’m now the parent of two college graduates, two people who are healthy and strong and surrounded by people who care about them. I make adjustments in this area of my life, too. I have to, to the way I think of my children and how our relationships have evolved, and will evolve now that this milestone has been achieved. It’s been a while since either of them has lived at home. They’re self-sufficient, and I’ve marveled at how readily they’ve taken on various forms of independence in the years since they’ve been at home. I wonder and worry about how our relationships will change, even though we’re close. We talk and text often; we visit as frequently as makes sense for everyone’s schedules. They have full and wonderful lives of their own and whenever we see one another it strikes me how honored I am to be a part of their current worlds.

In my relationship with my boyfriend too, we are often making adjustments. We navigate, communicate, gain deeper insights about the other as things come up. I’m learning that there is and there isn’t a trick to all this. There isn’t some magic that eliminates the need to do any work. There’s nothing that makes everything easy all the time. But there are ways to make communication more effective. There’s a way to listen with an open heart and a way to speak without defensiveness, and when both people are willing and capable of those things, tough conversations unfold differently than they used to for me. They don’t leave me feeling confused or attacked, but rather, heard and respected.

Life is constantly throwing things at us. I’ve spent long portions of my life believing that you could wait things out, that there would be periods where nothing was being thrown at you and in those times, happiness awaited. But then you learn that not only can you not predict when those “down times” will be, you can’t expect them to last, and when you’re in them, you’re not always aware of it. And even if you are, you might be recovering from the stuff you’ve just dealt with, or feeling anxious about what’s coming next. I get that this is why we get so many messages about “living in the moment” but that can be incredibly difficult to do. For me, this is another adjustment I’m constantly making. I often need to tweak my perspective, and not beat myself up for not having everything figured out. If I was adroit at planning several steps ahead, maybe that would lessen anxiety a bit, or maybe that would simply extend future-worry even farther ahead in the timeline.

So how do we manage anxiety about the future, or concern over how we’ve handled things in the past? How do we cope with the ways things are changing, constantly in a state of flux? How do we accomplish not just making the most of the times in between turbulent parts of our lives, but find some sense of calm even during the storms?

For me, there is a lot of reframing, a lot of conversations with myself where I try to put various things into perspective. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves: I’m safe or I’m strong or I’ve got this or I’m loved. When I’m worried about whether this scenario or that will come to pass, and I’m doing all the what-iffing worriers do, I have to remind myself of things I have handled, have gotten through.

When I was spending time with my son recently, I was marveling at the way, throughout college, both he and his sibling handled their housing situations. After the first stint in the dorm, they each found living situations that they could afford based on the jobs they’d secured for themselves; they found housemates, they signed leases. They handled things. No one was calling me to ask for advice on how one does this, or what does that mean in the lease, or how to handle a roommate or landlord situation. Of course, I would have tried to help if they’d needed it or asked, but they both figured out so much. I was telling my son how impressed I was that both of them did this and my son replied that they’d learned it from me, from the way I figured things out after the divorce: how to be a single parent, how to find and adapt to a full-time job after years of freelancing, how to refinance the house, how to sell a house, buy a house, and how to navigate relationships and grad school in the midst of all this. My son reminded me of how much I hadn’t known how to do or hadn’t been prepared for, and how I just kept figuring things out. He said that’s how he had approached things he wasn’t sure of.

What a gift, to have this conversation, and for him to be able to share that with me. And it was such a timely reminder for me, that even through all the recent changes in my life, I can keep figuring things out, that I do know how to do that.

There are so many things in my life that I thought I’d get to keep. Various loves, imagined futures. I also thought that once I’d achieved a belief in myself, it would simply thrive inside me without needing attention. I’m learning that it needs to be nurtured like anything else. You don’t get to keep anything without taking care of it. Nothing is free, nothing a given. We know this is true for all the relationships in our lives, but I sometimes forget that it is also true for the relationship we have with ourselves. I don’t only need quiet time to myself, and good sleep and exercise, and time to write and do pottery, I need to continually cultivate a healthy mental state, be a supportive friend to myself.

Sometimes this surprises me, that something in me calls for my own attention in that way, but I’m also pleased to observe that other things that I’ve tended without apparent payoff have come to fruition in their own time. A couple of years ago, I divided the irises I’d inherited in this yard and moved some to other locations in the yard. Last year the transplants were still alive, but hadn’t bloomed. This year, the plants are filled with snowy white blossoms, and deep purple ones too, which are about to open. I worked hard and then I waited and things came together on their own timeline. The thing about the waiting is, I didn’t know I was waiting. I had not given up, but I also was not actively hoping. I thought, who knows if these will ever bloom? It makes me wonder what else is preparing to bloom in people’s lives, things we’ve put work into, things we’re not consciously waiting for, things we keep nurturing anyway, because it feels like the right thing to do, it feels like we’re compelled to. It’s the same reason I write, going long stretches without anything getting published. Why I keep signing up for the next semester of pottery. It’s why we try.

There is so little sense to be made out of life. But it is also sort of ridiculous to think it is supposed to make sense. This is another way I try and reframe things. It doesn’t make sense to want it to make sense. All we can do is make our own order here and there, make the adjustments and do the work that allows things bloom in our lives, try to do good and be good. I feel like we do get guidance here and there, about where to direct our energy. Trying to lean into the things that make us feel connected or safe or exuberant or peaceful or joyful—this makes sense. But the world is going to knock us around anyway, and we’re always going to have to make adjustments to the way we respond to all that happens in our lives. I think it is such a delicate endeavor, recalibrating our responses and perspectives as life unfolds, and change is inevitable. We need a variety of tools and skills to keep being able to make the necessary adjustments, and maybe the most important one is patience, with ourselves, as we learn to keep adapting and blooming.

Love, Cath

On Mapping, Risk Management, and Clues

By Catherine DiMercurio

Not everyone prioritizes a sense of safety. Some folks are natural risk takers and enjoy adrenaline rushes, and for other people, that rush causes not a pleasurable feeling, but a host of uncomfortable after effects. Everyone is wired differently. Still, most people want to feel emotionally safe and physically safe within their homes and neighborhoods. I suspect that even the natural risk takers prefer to seek out their adventures rather than be surprised by them on a morning walk.

I’m not a natural risk taker, and I’m okay with that. I can be cajoled, either by myself or others, to try new things, because I do value the growth that new experiences invite. But there are certain environments where I think it is reasonable to expect safety, and one of them is when walking one’s dog in one’s neighborhood.

It’s hard, then, to not look at the dog attack my dog and I experienced recently as a violation and a setback, for both my dog and for me. We’re both okay. It could have been worse in so many ways. But the problem with that “it could have been worse” thinking is that while it does invite you to be grateful for all that didn’t happen, it does dismiss what did. And in the frightening moments when something terrifying is happening, you don’t yet know how bad it is or will be. It feels life threatening. Lots of thoughts flash through your head, and in my case, I had no idea, in the midst of the attack, if my dog would escape without serious, or even fatal, injuries. We’d walked past a house I usually avoid. The dogs are tied up, but there’s no fence. You can’t see them at first, because there are always a lot of cars in the driveway blocking the view. We didn’t see the one that must have slipped his collar until he was running across the street, headed right for my dog, ignoring my firm shouts of no, and my stance, squared off in front of my dog, all of which have gotten us out of other situations with loose dogs.

When we finally escaped and returned home, I both panicked and collected myself enough to check my dog over for wounds. I thought of the minutes that we both fought, and how loudly I screamed pointlessly for help that didn’t come. I thought of how long we were followed by the other dog, and how I repeatedly had to shout and stomp him away and keep myself in front of my dog, to avoid a continuation of the attack. I thought about how it felt like my legs were shaking so badly I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it home anyway. I thought of the woman who, a block over from where the attack occurred, came out of her house with a broom to help fend of the dog so my dog and I could make our escape without being followed. It could have been worse. We ended up not needing to go to the vet, though in the days that have followed, I’ve continued to examine my dog, peering through his thick double coat, studying the wound I missed initially. There’s a minor, scabbed-over line? gash? that could have either been from the harness or a tooth or a claw, but it looks to be healing and I haven’t noticed any signs of infection. I never saw any blood on that first day, and yet, it is scabbed, reminding me of the way I’d skin my knee after a fall as a child, and how the abraded skin would sort of bead up but never really bleed, and then a thick scab would form.

I worry I’ve let him down by not finding it sooner. I worry I let him down. I worry.

He continues to be active, playful, and is eating and drinking normally. He was like this almost immediately. For a week, we didn’t go for walks. We’ve started again, the first time back out being with my boyfriend, which provided us with an added sense of security, in addition to the airhorn I brought along.

Still, I find myself recalling other significant moments in life where my sense of safety has felt similarly erased, as if this event calls up a map, revealing neural shortcuts. I’ve realized in recent days that there are a lot of these shortcuts, and the older you get, the more of them there are. The map is intricate. A song can take us back to a key moment in our past, a smell can, an event can. Every day we have more past than we used to have. Some of the memories we travel back to are beautiful, and some are the worst we’ve experienced. So often, it is the painful memories that surface with ease, seemingly un-dulled by time.

Photo by Aksonsat Uanthoeng on Pexels.com

I remind myself in the aftermath of all this, that it isn’t my job to do everything possible to avoid more pain. It’s to populate that map with so many new, good things that the pathways back to the frightening or wounding memories are crossed over many times with side trails, alternate routes, shortcuts to joyful recollections, to peaceful moments, to delight, to wonder.

Now, though, I’m more fully aware of how wrong a simple dog walk can go. In the past, even though we’ve been approached by loose dogs before, I have felt a false sense of security because the owners have been nearby, or showed up, and things were diffused before they turned ugly. I thought the risk I was managing was more minimal than it is.

At the same time, the usual joy and pleasure of the morning walk is not something I can give up easily. And based on his demeanor the two times we’ve walked since the attack, it isn’t something my dog wants to give up either. We have some work to do. I do think he’s more skittish than usual, and we still need to do things like walk as early as possible so that we can avoid other dog walkers. He was reactive before this, and the attack is definitely not going to help. But, I’m starting a new training plan. I have an air horn. I have pepper spray.

It’s difficult though, to find that sweet spot, where appropriate caution and enjoyment can cohabitate. Where I’m not leaning too hard into risk management, or too hard into peaceful obliviousness. But this is the way with everything. It’s the same in this new relationship I’m in. For the first several months, I felt so self-protective, unwilling to jump all the way into the vulnerability that builds the closeness that I long for. Once you’ve tried to build that over and over with other people and it doesn’t work out, it’s so easy to hesitate, to hold back. Still, things are beginning to change for me, and while I’m not jumping in with wild abandon, I’m wading in, and enjoying the process of slow and deliberate acclimation, and it’s been so wonderful to do that with such a compassionate and loving person by my side. I think he sees my true value because I was finally able to see it (and I see his). All of this encourages the blossoming of trust, which I think of as my body’s and my mind’s own intrinsic from of risk management.

We all have different strategies for getting us through tough times, and sometimes it seems like none of them are particularly effective. I remind myself that the route toward healing is not trying to make myself “feel better.” It’s allowing myself to experience the feelings various events create and trigger. I used to think “working through” things meant thinking my way out of feeling sad or angry or scared. But to a certain extent, I’m starting to understand that being brave enough to not avoid all those heavy feelings is the most direct route toward getting to the other side of them. I often worry that I’m dwelling too much on something, but I believe that sense comes from my habit of trying analyze my feelings instead of simply experiencing them. Maybe it would be better to look at my hyper-focused thought patterns as clues to feelings I need to spend more time with, rather than thoughts that I need to keep rethinking.

I don’t want to feel like I’m prioritizing safety so much so that I’m missing opportunities to experience fun, joy, delight. I want to give my dog a good life, and I want that for myself. As with most things in life, the balance here—between risk management and pleasure-seeking—is hard to achieve. For me, it is important to remember to be patient with myself, and not label my process of bouncing back from a frightening experience as an overcorrection. We were truly in a dangerous situation and the world isn’t telling me to “get back out there,” but a part of me is hearing that anyway.

For now, I’m going to take it slow, and lean into my support system, and populate my map with as many shortcuts to good memories as I can. There’s no right way to do any of this. Safe travels, friends.

Love, Cath

On Mud, March, Skinned Knees, and Transitions

By Catherine DiMercurio

The season is changing, but at times it has felt too early, given the stretch of warm weather earlier in the month, including a few days around 70 degrees. Though I do get out and enjoy the warmer weather, it doesn’t come without a feeling of worry about the overall warming of the planet. Will it be 90 in April? Part of the seasonal shift often leaves me unsettled in a different way. I’m not entirely ready to move away from the cozy feeling of winter hibernation. Sometimes my energy level lags behind the shift in seasons. More daylight is so delightful but it also leaves me with a sense of obligation to make the most of it. I will get there eventually, I always do, but at my own pace, like with everything.

I feel as though I do a lot of monitoring of my own energy level, and I tend to associate feeling good with having lots of energy. But it is certainly true that even when we have less energy, we can also be in a good state. It is hard to remove the judgment from it all sometimes. Maybe it would be better to simply assess, in the same way I check the temperature to see what to wear for the morning walk with the dog, what our energy level is and what expectations we should have that are commensurate with that level. Sometimes I forget that it is just data. Instead of saying that my energy is “low” and that I feel “lazy” maybe it makes more sense to simply say my energy is at a 3 or 4 out of 10 so today I’ll plan to manage these set of tasks and save some other tasks for another day. The world has taught us so much language that is rooted in the idea that productivity is equivalent to value and worth. We feel obligated to “make the most” of sunny days or having lots of energy. We feel good when we “get a lot done.” There’s certainly nothing wrong with getting things done and our jobs and our lives require it. In fact, there is so much required of us it’s no wonder that when we have down time we don’t want to have any expectations about our time or what we do with it.

March has been a sluggish month for me so far. Creatively, I’ve felt muddy. I am not sure why this is, as I have writing projects at all stages of development, from drafting new work to submitting finished pieces and book-length works to contests and journals and publishers. I am at the end of a pottery semester and though I don’t always get the results I want, I’ve been practicing and learning and exploring. But right now, I’m feeling like I don’t have that much to show for my efforts. Intellectually, I know that the “point” of it all is the effort, not the result. A finished or published story, or a ceramic piece that comes out of the kiln looking beautiful are wonderful things, but as many people know, the lift we get from such things is fleeting. Because that lift is simply a feeling. A great mix of feelings, actually, but of course it is the doing from where we derive our true satisfaction. Yet we do need some successes to keep us motivated. The lifts are not insignificant.

Right now I have the sense of something churning that hasn’t revealed itself, as if my brain is working on something in the background it hasn’t shared with my conscious self yet. Will it be a new writing idea, a new mindset, is it processing past emotional turmoil? It feels like something is at work beneath the surface, which makes sense for March, as roots are busy waking beneath the soil and preparing to do the work of growth above ground.

I suppose it isn’t surprising that March – a month of transition – is hard for someone who has always had a tough time with transitions. Not just large life changes but simple things, like saying goodbye to someone after spending time with them. The past ten years have been filled with a lot of transitions in terms of work and relationships beginning and ending and moving houses and kids leaving home. So sometimes I think that when seasons change, I’m bracing for transition, regardless of how I feel about the coming season.

I try to accept this about myself, because everything is easier when you’re not judging your own responses to things, but sometimes my slowness in moving toward the next part annoys me and I get impatient. Impatience gets me into trouble a lot. The need to see progress sooner than I’m seeing it, whether it is with a health goal, a writing goal, a pottery goal, or some other objective creates unnecessary tension in my brain. The pressure we put on ourselves can sometimes be motivating but can also leave us feeling abraded and aggravated. Sometimes my heart feels like a skinned knee. It is difficult to determine what is the right amount to push ourselves toward what we want to accomplish, but to not push ourselves so hard we fall down.

I used to make myself do difficult things, like training for half marathons. I loved running and I loved feeling fit, but I also clung to the idea that being able to do something challenging made me feel strong at a time where I felt like I needed to prove to myself that I was strong. Now, I want to take long hikes because I enjoy them. I combine running and walking for a cardio workout and because I do think running at that level is fun and just enough. It doesn’t need to be extra challenging just for the sake of it. Maybe I’ve run out of things to prove. Or, at least, I finally know my own strength.

Still, I have struggled in the transition from my 40s to my 50s in certain ways. As with most things, we never quite know the ways in which something is going to be difficult until we are in the thick of it. I never imagined aging was going to be effortless, painless, easy. But the challenges hit differently than I thought, and there is so much emotion wrapped up in everything that happens to people’s bodies, lives, perspectives.

I turned 50 in 2020, a few months into the pandemic. I was selling the house where I’d raised my kids, where so much of my adult life had happened. The move itself was physically demanding, with lots of work done on the new house, and on the old house in preparation to sell, along with purging, packing, and physically moving. And the move came after a tumultuous number of years, full of change and heartbreak. So by the time the move was finally complete, I crashed. I feel as though all the exhaustion from the prior years, combined with the move, all caught up with me. Catching my breath took a long time. My energy was sapped. In some ways, I’m only now recuperating. It probably doesn’t matter whether some of my struggles over the past few years were related to all of that, or to the physical act of aging into my 50s, or all of it happening all at once. What matters is how we evaluate things when we pause to take stock of where we are and where we’re going.

I think that’s where acceptance comes in. I fell out of some healthy habits in the years after the move with regard to regular, dedicated exercise, but in the past year and a half, I’ve been trying to rebuild routines that previously served me well, but also to reimagine them, since I’m not the same person I used to be. Still, I find myself resisting the term “acceptance.” It feels loaded, and two-faced. It invites me to step into this next chapter of my life and enjoy without judgement or resistance the altering of old practices and development of new ones that serve me well now, at this exact time and place where I exist as a fifty-three-year-old human. At the same time, it also mocks me and questions me. Acceptance? Do not go gentle into that goodnight! That’s a bit melodramatic to be sure, but it does make me bristle and feel combative to accept things that I don’t feel great about. I’m sure there is a balance to be found but I have not yet gotten there, and maybe the muddy, churning month of March isn’t the right time to look for it.

I wonder if there’s a perspective, somewhere adjacent to acceptance, where we allow ourselves to simply be where we are, where we acknowledge that things are not perfect, and that we struggle with this or that, and that we’ll continue to do so. We know we’ll fight some things and embrace others. We know we’ll make mistakes as well as plans—to improve or change course or reimagine. And we know we’ll enjoy some small victories; it is reasonable to expect some, to keep our eyes open for them. Maybe all of this is a part of a continual process of alignment, where who we are connects with who we thought we’d be, where we find our common ground. Acknowledge and align seems like a game plan I can live with. At least, they are buzz words I can call to mind when I’m feeling as messy as March mud, and when I forget about those sleepy roots beneath the soil stretching out and preparing for growth.

Love, Cath

Coyotes and Sketches and Dreamy Trees

By Catherine DiMercurio

I have today off, and during my dog walk, I had a strange experience that led to a series of strange thoughts, which I sketched out with the pencil of words as quickly as I could when I returned home. It felt the same as waking up in the middle of the night to write down a dream because it seems so full of meaning and you do not want to forget. Maybe it will make sense later and maybe it won’t, but it feels important to try.

This morning, I walked the dog a little later than usual, because I had that luxury today, the luxury of time, and no set schedule. It was sunny, but cold, about 22 degrees. My dog is reactive, a label that I really didn’t know too much about before I adopted him. There is a lot I could write, and have written, about my pup and how he responds to the world, but for now, it’s easier to just say that we try to avoid seeing other dogs while we’re out. A barking dog behind a fence or another dog on a walk can make him jumpy. He pulls, sometimes barks, and it can be difficult to move him past the situation. If another dog is walking on a leash away from us, and we do not follow him, he is actually calm enough to be still and observe, and this is progress, so I reward him with treats. This morning had been rather peaceful, despite the fact that a fenced boxer barked—loudly, and long after we’d past. But my dog calmed himself with some eager sniffing of the path ahead, and I meandered a bit before turning us toward home.

And then we saw a coyote.

The coyote was running in that distinctive loping way down the street that we were headed toward. We were about to turn in the direction the coyote was coming from. We stopped, my dog and I, and both instinctively froze. The coyote turned away from us, probably didn’t even see us, and headed toward the golf course, and the woods near it.

More than anything, I was relieved that my dog had the good sense not to bark or draw attention to us in any way. I didn’t know what to expect, had the coyote turned toward us. Maybe the animal was young and had belated realized he or she was out past dark. It was 9:20 a.m. Maybe they were just heading home, same as us.

It was an unprecedented treat for me to watch this beautiful animal running in front of us. Small, grayish brown, casually quick, hurrying but not sprinting through the morning sunshine.

As much as my brain then turned toward getting home as quickly as possible—I was a little spooked, and so was my dog—part of me turned immediately toward meaning-making, as it usually does when something unexpected like this happens.

I began following two trains of thought simultaneously—one focused on the way happiness is not so much fleeting (as in, quickly disappearing) but fleet of foot (as in, quick and decisive), and one focused on the way so many of us are always on the lookout for signs from the universe.

It is hard to not see an unexpected visitor from the wild natural world, loping through the domesticity of the suburban street, as a nudge. Pay attention, the universe seems to be saying. I feel as though I am always wondering if I’m on the right track, so when something larger than normal unfolds in front of me involving an ambassador from the natural world, I feel as though the universe is reassuring me. This is your sign that you’re on the right track. But what I’ve been wondering lately is that when we are looking for signs from the universe, is it more accurate to say that what we’re looking for is a sign from ourselves? And wouldn’t it be true to say that’s the same thing anyway? Are we not brimming with the universe and does it not expand within us when we make room? Maybe it is guiding us from an internal rather than external vantage point and maybe those are designations that are meaningless to the universe.

With regard to happiness: how like this coyote is happiness and the way it moves through our lives and hearts, deliberately, softly. I want to say swiftly but then I think that the coyote seemed swift to me, but from the coyote’s perspective, how swiftly was it really moving? Isn’t that the same with happiness? The speed is relative. We have an experience and we feel happy and then it is over and the happiness might linger but soon we don’t feel happy anymore and our instinct is to chase it and get it back. But in the now-timeline of the happiness, it is expanding in all its fullness and etching itself in our memory and while we have a sense of it being over quickly, in so many ways it is still expanding within us, but when we feel the now-ness of it dissipated, we imagine that it has darted off, that it is gone. And I’m here to speculate that maybe this is the wrong way to look at it. Maybe it doesn’t leave us as quickly as we think, and maybe we don’t need to chase it. Maybe it isn’t ours to get, it’s just ours to have for a little while, without acquiring. We are just stewards of it for a time, and we must make an environment hospitable for it.

My instinct is to dissect it all, pin it down, put it under a microscope, but instead what I’m trying to do here and in my own thoughts is to let these ideas move through me, and settle where they will, if they will, and enjoy the moments where I’ve been able to marvel at happiness loping through me and the universe stretching out and getting comfortable in the den of my mind. I worry that if I think about it too much and use language less ephemeral than metaphor it will slip through my fingers, through the bright but hazy instinctual way of understanding.

At the DIA this weekend with my honey I stared at the trees in Van Gogh’s The Diggers. What I love about those trees is that they both look like trees and they also look the way trees might look in a dream. Likewise this coyote was at once a now-coyote and something from a dream, constructed out of lines that hummed with color and life and meaning that you grasp only by not trying too hard to see it or hold it. It was something to wonder at.

What if our grandest purpose is simply to find ways to see and feel differently, dreamily, to lean into metaphor and let it shape us. In that way, do we become a part of something larger than ourselves? If we experience the universe in this way, can we understand our world, and our place in it better? And make it a better place? Imagine what it would be like if more people cultivated a sense of wonder instead of war, built a habitat for happiness in their hearts, so it had a home when it visited.

I hope something magical happens to you today, or soon, and you can feel, at least for a moment, the universe expanding within you.

Love, Cath

On Magic, Tricks, and Magic Tricks

By Catherine DiMercurio

There’s something about being in a new relationship in your fifties that leaves you with a whole deck of new thoughts and feelings, which get shuffled around and presented to you, as if some sprite doing the universe’s work is trying out a magic trick. Is this your card?, they say with a flourish. And you study it, trying to figure out if it is, in fact, your card.

What I mean to say is that all new relationships can leave you feeling a little perplexed. After a divorce, no matter how long after, and after other relationships that didn’t work out, no matter how many, when you’re in your fifties and feeling careful and cautious, you don’t immediately believe in the magic part of the magic trick. You’re kind of looking for the trick.

So, this summer, a year after I had reached out to a guy on eharmony and it hadn’t gone anywhere past an initial exchange, he emailed me. I’d had the foresight to give him my email address the prior year, knowing I was about to be done with dating apps. This past August, when I read his email, it took me a minute to connect the dots back to that initial exchange on the app. I then remembered why I had initially reached out: he was a fellow writer, and a professor (I’d joked with my friends about dating a professor. Where’s my professor? I’d ask). It seems he showed up. He also liked some of the same things I did, such as exploring the natural world, hiking. He was a parent, too. There were possibilities here. I had the sense that if I didn’t write back immediately, I would talk myself out of it, and part of me felt like I should give him a chance. I decided to write back before I could change my mind. I was candid about the fact that I was content on my own, and not sure I even wanted to date anymore.

After my last break-up, I had settled into a largely peaceful rhythm that involved following my interests and instincts, enjoying time with family and friends, and reveling in the absence of the particular anxieties my last relationship had wrought upon my heart and brain. Not that this period was angst-free, but when I poked around the notion of what if this is the way it always is—just me and my dog and writing and pottery and family and friends—I was largely okay with that. While I worried that at some point I would wish I had found someone to grow old with, I also was comforted by the idea that alone wasn’t truly something that I’d be, because I have a lot of good people in my life.

Still, I was curious. I suggested that we could email one another and get to know each other that way, as a start. He was agreeable.

We did this for a couple of weeks, and as writers, the format suited us. We sent long missives back and forth on a variety of topics—our pasts, our beliefs, our likes and dislikes, random observations, books, the writing process. It felt like during this period of writing long emails back and forth, we were in a way approximating the feeling of a developing friendship, one that might have taken place in the real world, had we met, say, at a bookstore. I admit though that during this time of correspondence, I was on the lookout for anything I might construe as a red flag, or anything I sensed might spell trouble or be a sign of incompatibility. When I could find none, much to my surprise, I suggested we meet for a hike.

Since that time things have progressed in a way that continues to be dissimilar to any experience I’ve had in the past. He lives over an hour away. There has been little opportunity to just meet for a bite to eat or something, so we squeeze in our time on the weekends. I was finding recently though that I missed the solo down time I used to have on weekends, so I requested we take a weekend off. My ability to make this request speaks volumes. In past relationships, I would have found it very difficult to say something that the other person might perceive as a pulling away or a pushing away. I would have worried that to ask for time for myself would have resulted in their loss of interest. But in this relationship, not only did I feel confident enough of our connection to not worry about my request being misperceived, but I was also keenly aware that I needed this time for myself. I have worked diligently and purposefully toward the goal of being able to recognize and respect myself and my needs, so being able to advocate for myself feels like a necessity, not an option. I know I am a better person and a better partner when I am taking care of myself, not only trying to take care of the relationship. The fact that he received and understood my request without hesitation or negativity was a relief, though not unsurprising when viewed within the context of what I’ve come to know about him.

Still, this is all unfamiliar. It feels healthy and good but the way in which it hasn’t followed the patterns of past relationships has been at times both affirming and unsettling. Hence the aforementioned sprite with the deck of cards and the magic trick. My brain often reverts to questions that seem to assume a norm, a standard. I ask myself: is this how it’s supposed to be (i.e., am I doing this right)? But of course it won’t feel like the past. Not only were there a lot of unhealthy aspects to those past relationships, I am a different person now and am bringing a completely different energy to this relationship. There’s less urgency, less anxiety. I have the sense that we are building something with different tools and materials than what either of us have used in the past. And of course it is going to look and feel different from what other people have; every couple has its unique origin story and history. I love the feeling that we’re building our own story, figuring out the next phase and phrase as we go.

And yes, this is going to mean that at times we pause, looking for the trick. When you’ve had the rug pulled out from under you a couple of times, you tend to be careful of your footing. Or skeptical about the magic trick that seems to be happening in front of your eyes. My instinct is to slow things down, watch mindfully the way it’s all playing out. But sometimes you can’t spot any trickery. Sometimes maybe the magic is just the magic.

Love, Cath

On Coloring Inside the Lines and Owls at Midnight

By Catherine DiMercurio

It’s a strange world to be in, where it feels like it is falling down all around us but we’re expected to still be our best selves, working, keeping a roof over our heads, pursuing our own dreams and our own happiness. It’s hard to make sense of.

I certainly don’t have any answers. I’m just over here coloring inside the lines, keeping my head down and staying focused on my work, whether it’s the job that pays the bills or my creative work. I try to be a good mom when I’m needed, a good friend, a good girlfriend, a good sister and daughter. I try to stay true to myself, pay attention to the world around me. But I also have to resist taking in too much when it makes me feel like I’m drowning.

Still, all of that can feel like you’re keeping busy watering the plants while the house burns down around you. I have dreams about various apocalypses, global and personal.

I try and focus on the whispers of good things, to amplify them, the little moments that breeze through our lives and feel like happiness, joy, silliness, small victories. A laugh shared with my kids, moments of connection with my friends or family, a hug with my guy. Recently, before I went to bed, as I was turning the heat down, I noticed the battery monitor on my thermostat was at one bar. I flashed back to years ago in my old house, not long after my divorce. It seemed that the furnace had stopped working. I had several long moments of panic, and then somehow realized it might be the battery in the thermostat. I couldn’t remove it from the wall though, to get to the batteries. I ended up breaking something on the flimsy plastic housing and then having to tape it back together. Every time I touched that thermostat afterwards, I was angry with myself for having broken it, frustrated that I didn’t have it in me at the time to replace it and figure out how to rewire it. I just lived with it broken but functional. This time, in this new house with the new thermostat that the repair man installed after doing some expensive work on the furnace, I proceeded differently. I was being proactive in replacing the battery, instead of waiting to have the thermostat stop working. I googled how to get this particular model off of the wall, and I changed the batteries (I actually had the right batteries to replace the old ones!). I went to bed, warm and safe, with nothing being broken. Small victory. Such a small victory. But I clung to it nonetheless.

It was hard not to think about how such a simple domestic chore could represent change and growth. We live long stretches of our lives, feeling broken but functional. And eventually, we become new. Well, new-ish. There’s no magic in it. It’s a series of choices, consequences, broken heartedness, healing, and continued striving. It’s work. And often, the amount of work that we’ve done is not apparent until we look back over the years.

When I started writing this post, it was different; it was about belonging. I had attended a pottery show/market with my boyfriend and one of my closest friends and her husband. I saw many people from the studio where I take my class, and I felt like part of the “club” each time I greeted someone, or they greeted me. Later in the week I learned that one of my stories had been nominated for a literary award. It was affirmation, that I am on the right path with my writing. It was a nod to the fact that I belonged here too, in this club of writers. But it was only because I spent years cultivating a different sense of belonging, that I could enjoy these other types. It took me a long time to feel as though I belonged to myself, and without that foundation, I don’t know that these other instances would have resonated as they did. I think my self-criticism would have found a way to outweigh the good things.

Of course, there is still self-doubt, about relationships, creative work, life in general. Sometimes we don’t know if we’re growing or regressing. Sometimes we’re just as nervous about good things actually happening as we are about bad things potentially happening. That certainly doesn’t feel like growth, but in its own way, it is. That is, having an awareness of what we’re feeling and being able to name it is so much better than feeling awash in a vague discontent or despair that we can’t pinpoint. We have cultivated an awareness about uncomfortable feelings in our bodies—an upset stomach, a tight chest, tensed muscles—and we understand that it is because we’re anticipating something. Even when it is a good thing, our bodies sometimes feel this way. And though we’d love to get to a point in our evolution where good things aren’t something we brace for, the growth is in the fact that we get it. We understand that this happens sometimes, that we experience a nervousness and tension, which is part excitement but part anxiousness about the unfamiliar, or which is a sense of caution about potential danger. Sometimes that caution hangs around us like a fog even when we’re standing in the sun. Knowing ourselves in this way, when we haven’t understood such feelings before, and knowing that we can work through them, is growth. But that doesn’t mean it feels comfortable. And it doesn’t mean that working through them is linear.

When I couldn’t sleep recently, I listened to the neighborhood Great Horned owl sometime after midnight. It’s hard to think of a more peaceful sound than such a magnificent bird calling out at night. I read online that the particular call I was hearing was a “territorial” one. I recalled the way I move through my house sometimes, looking at objects that represent my personality or my journey, and I think “mine, mine.” So, I understand the territorial call, the need to mark out space as your own. There is a part of me that remembers every detail of every battle that led me back to myself. That part of me recognizes that being the person I am today represents a hard-won victory, and not a small one. There is another part of me that appreciates the need for a softer approach, especially at the beginning of a new relationship. Not a relinquishing of self, but some kind of flexibility as two people try to understand how to share their lives. That part feels unfamiliar and ill-defined after a long time on my own, and an even longer time getting the balance wrong, relinquishing too much in past relationships.

It’s no wonder that the territorial part of me is hooting in the night, as if to remind me not to forget who we are and how we got here. And that’s okay. That’s the part I’m on. At the beginning of something new, of course this is going to be what comes up as I begin to draw close to someone. But, it’s navigable. The owl knows and navigates the night, and so do we. What’s more, we know and navigate ourselves.

On my desk is a kitschy owl pendant I’ve had for over a decade. I rediscovered it recently, wear it sometimes. It landed on my writing desk at some point in the last week or two. It is almost unfathomable to recall who I was when I first wore it and who I am now. And I’m startled too to think of continuity, and what we retain of ourselves through all the years and all the changes, what has always been a part of us. What a victory, to be able to recognize and embrace all these parts and versions of ourselves, and where we are right now at this precise point in time.

Love, Cath