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

On Vantage Points and Variables

By Catherine DiMercurio

My blog pace has slowed somewhat in recent weeks, which happens when I’m deep into processing new things or big things or sometimes, recurring things. But occasionally, life offers a little sidestep, a time and place away from the rush of everyday life to think, or not to think.

Last weekend, the weekend of the autumnal equinox, my sister and I took a camping trip to Michigan’s Leelenau Peninsula. We were anticipating a cool fall weekend, but it ended up being more like summer. Michigan loves to play those kinds of games. We weren’t complaining. The nights and mornings were chilly enough for campfires and sweaters, while the warm, sunny days had us wading, or dunking ourselves, in Lake Michigan.

I have three sisters and a brother, and I wish I could take a solo trip with each of them, but this trip was for me and the sister closest to me in age; we are 14 months apart. We shared a room our whole lives, until we left for college. Our high school boyfriends were best friends. People often thought we were twins. This is all to say, we’ve always been close.

Well, not strictly always. I mean, it was always there underneath, but we have ebbed and flowed with our life events, as people do. But we always find a way to return to each other. I wish life made it easier. But I love that we made it happen for these brief days near September’s close.

We had a beautiful campsite, a literal stone’s throw from Lake Michigan. A cluster of cedars demarcated the perfect place for our tent. We’d set up camp to our liking and made dinner. As we sat down to eat, someone ran by the campsite warning of a storm blowing through in nearby Northport. We could look out over the water and see it brewing. So we threw what we could back into the car, and hurriedly threw up some tarps over the tent as an added layer of protection, though, I’d just re-waterproofed it, but still. No one likes a soggy tent. We could feel how quickly the weather was changing and though we finished before it did more than sprinkle, it had turned into a “team building” exercise. Did we occasionally squabble? Of course. But with my sister, these things melt away. I’m glad things still melt away.

One of the things I’ve come to understand after a couple of years being single is that I’ve been prone to deprioritize lots of other relationships when I’m in a romantic relationship. These last couple of years, I’ve made an effort to refocus on friendships and family connections that I found hard to attend to while I was in the midst of past relationships. As I’m [suddenly and surprisingly] embarking on something brand new, one of the promises I make to myself is that I’ll do better this time. I will pursue balance. I won’t let go of so many things that are important to me as I’ve done in the past. The amazing part is that I’ve already talked about this with the new person in my life. What I mean is that I’m amazed that I am comfortable enough now with myself to have conversations I would have previously avoided, and that me being me is already so well received.

I was grateful, on this camping trip, to find the close bond with my sister was at the ready, not rusty or eroded, despite the toll of the past few years, the events in our lives, Covid, etc. What I wanted to offer was the same thing I seek in my own close relationships: a safe place.

The best relationships—family, friend, romantic—provide this, but not only safety as in, a place free from harm, though that is the cornerstone of any healthy relationship. But also, safety, as in, a place to grow. A place to be supported, a place to nurture dreams, a place to push that border between peaceful comfort and sometimes painful progress. Because let’s face it, growth is often uncomfortable.

As a parent, I remember thinking some mornings that my children grew measurably overnight. I would be standing in the kitchen making lunches, and morning hugs with the kiddos would suggest limbs and torsos newly stretched. The sleep tousled hair on their sweet noggins was somehow nearer my chin. You grew. You keep doing that. This sudden gain of a centimeter was accompanied by aches and pains, and a new but short-lived clumsiness as their brains tried to catch up with their bodies. So much non-physical growth is like that too. We often feel off-balance as we try to catch up to what our inner-selves are doing, how they are adapting to changing circumstances.

I think this is why, as I’ve started dating someone, I feel a discomfort that has nothing to do with this kind, smart, and earnest man who wants to spend time with me. With him, I feel at ease. In the in-between times, there are all sorts of recalibrations happening within me. Some of it is the anxiety I’ve always lived with. Some of it is the what-iffing that is completely natural when entering into something new. But beyond that, it’s as if I’ve been trying to solve an equation without enough information, and with each of our interactions, I’m given the quantity of one of the countless variables, so the figuring begins anew. (Math people – forgive what is likely a faulty metaphor!) This is the self-protective part of me, and I am watching her evolve and adapt. (Initially, she wanted nothing to do with meeting anyone new, but the curious part of myself and the self-protective part negotiated.) She enumerates the ways closeness has yielded loss in the past. And, there is this frantic figuring. Solving, or trying to, exactly how things will go, and what will happen, and how we can magically be prepared for it all.

It is hard to find the right way to explain to her that sometimes safety is in the action of leaving, rather than hunkering down. Whether it is leaving a bad situation or leaving one’s comfort zone to explore a new situation that has good written all over it, leaving is sometimes the way we move toward growth. It is not the safety of stillness (though this too has its season and should never be undervalued); it is the safety of becoming more and more ourselves, of embracing the strength this movement and growth entails. It is the safety of balance, in a way, of learning how to regain it when the unknown happens, when we move toward or away from something and stumble.

As my sister and I hunched over the rocky shoreline near our campsite, pecking around for pretty stones, we talked. About heavy things and about light things. I watched the way she sought out round, flat stones, the way she stacked them in little cairns everywhere we went. We visited several beaches, and she left these in her wake everywhere we went. I could see in them the precision and care that has always been part of her character, the artistry in both the selection of stones and their deliberate placement, their balancing. I could see the way this activity both calmed and delighted her. I loved the way we were able to fashion for ourselves this time in which to be calmed and delighted near each other, by each other.

The way the campground is situated at the tip of the peninsula meant that we had the perfect view of both sunrise and sunset, partially over the water, and partially over the rocky shoreline. I think about that now, this perfect positioning, this sense of being precisely between one thing and another. Certainly, it means something different for everyone who finds themselves there. For me it was a vantage point, from which to consider what’s next, as I move between the safety of stillness toward the safety of growth, even though I know I can never solve for all the variables.

Love, Cath

On Roles and Poses

By Catherine DiMercurio

A scene from Wes Anderson’s new film, Asteroid City, keeps playing in my head. In it, actor Jason Schwartzman plays actor Jones Hall, who is playing the role of Augie Steenbeck in a play called “Asteroid City.” Jones breaks out of his role as Augie to tell the play’s director, Schubert Green, played by Adrien Brody, “I still don’t understand the play!” Jones expresses his angst, asking “Am I doing it right?” Schubert tells Jones that it doesn’t matter. “Just keep telling the story,” the director insists.

The film makes use of a multilayered frame narrative. It opens with a scene from a 1950s television special about a playwright (Conrad Earp, played by Ed Norton) and his play, “Asteroid City.” Throughout the film, the actors are not just playing their role in Wes Anderson’s film; they are playing their role as the actors in the play. As actors in they play, they periodically step out of their roles and interact act with one another (as characters in Wes Anderson’s film). Get it? All of that can be a little hard to follow, but it speaks to something essential about the ways we enact multiple roles in our lives, how interconnected those roles are, and how often we find ourselves sitting with that question: am I doing it right? Anderson’s film and his characters are as self-reflexive as we are.

The director’s answer—It doesn’t matter, just keep telling the story—sticks with me, both as an angsty human with a hazy understanding of her own role in this world and as a writer with a similarly foggy grasp of how to approach that role.

When I was in my twenties and just getting started on my how-to-be-a-writer journey, I had joined a local writers’ group in the town in Illinois we’d just moved to. My then-husband had accepted an engineering position at an automotive plant. The Michigan-based company he worked for often had its contract engineers do a stint out of state for a couple of years before being hired in directly. This was the path we were on. We knew the post was temporary, which made everything feel temporary. There was no sense in putting down roots since we knew we’d be headed home before too long. I knew no one, and had begun freelancing, so I didn’t have a workplace to meet people. So, I joined a writing group. They were an eclectic mix of people. They had an annual gala where everyone read from their work. I was working on a novel at the time. I had never read my work in front of people before, and I was terrified. Yet, I really wanted to belong, to behave as a writer would, so I promised myself I would do it.

At around the same time, my husband and I had also decided to take a yoga class together, a first for both of us, at the local YMCA. Our instructor used to tell us to “relax into the pose.” I clutched this notion like a life preserver as I approached the podium the evening of the writers’ gala. I told myself to relax into the pose of writer. It helped, somehow.

I think of that now because the phrase, which has often returned to me at various points in my life, recalls the themes of Anderson’s film, and reminds me of all the ways we struggle in our various “poses” or “roles.” We ask ourselves, am I doing this right? Because often, it doesn’t feel as though we are. Am I being a good parent, a good friend. Is this the kind of person I want to be. What kind of partner am I. What kind of artist. What kind of me. Sometimes it feels wrong, or strained, or unfamiliar, to be who we are or where we are, or we find ourselves in roles we never expected to be in.

And sometimes we have the opportunity to isolate ourselves from our roles. I recently returned from a solo camping trip. In the woods, setting up my tent, or out on a hike or kayaking, it was impossible to avoid memories of past trips, to see myself through the lens of my various roles. Camping was something the kids and I always used to do together, so I thought of what it was like to be a parent on such a trip. I also thought of a former role, that of “wife,” because I didn’t start camping until I married. After the split, the kids and I continued to take a camping trip every summer.

But now, out there on my own, flooded with memories as I was, I also experienced a whittling away. The memories came and went, leaving me focused on the tasks of camping: gathering firewood and kindling, pumping water from the hand pump, guarding against rain, cooking, and cleaning up. And there was quiet and solitude. I had time to decide based on my own whim what I wanted to do next. Read for hours? Go to the beach? Haul the kayak down to the water for a paddle? Take a hike along the ridge that looked out over the lake? There were a number of instances where I was keenly aware that it was just me, as me, out there. The absence of responsibility to anything but my own needs was essentially an absence of roles. And in that space, I found that my brain was able to disconnect from the perpetual figuring it out that it is always compelled to do, the spider web of concerns and ideas and emotions I feel daily as a home owner, an employee, a potter, a writer, a mom of on-their-own kids, a mom-guardian-friend to my dog, a friend, a freelancer, a sister, a daughter.

I love my roles. They, and the absence of them, make me who I am. I exist both in relation to the people (and dog!) and activities in my life as much as I exist in relation to no one. I think these two modes of being are in dialog with one another, under the surface, in ways we don’t comprehend or have an awareness of. And maybe what I have been trying to do my whole life is to connect with that awareness, that unity that hums beneath it all. Sometimes there is a sense of fracture, the feeling that we are broken apart into pieces, fragments of ourselves. There’s an undercurrent of anxiety or urgency at times, one that is hard to put a finger on, where things feel off, misaligned. Sometimes it seems that our various roles are disparate, independent identities but they are all yoked to the core of who we are, and in that way, are connected to each other. Though, we live in a world where it is not always encouraged or advantageous to bring our whole selves into everything we do, so the prickly sense of fragmentation persists.

After all the afters—after the kids moved out, after I moved out of my old house, after my last breakup, etc.—there were moments I experienced a specific kind of hollowness. The roles I’d been playing to that moment all needed to be redefined, reshaped. But, I wasn’t entirely clear how to do it. I tried to figure out if the roles themselves—understanding them, inhabiting them—were supposed to be my purpose, or, what was the game plan, what did unity and alignment feel like now?

Consequently, I often ask myself am I doing this right? Is this how it is supposed to be? Is this how you do it? Is this how I do it? To see Jason Schwartzman’s character in Asteroid City asking the same questions was piercing, enlightening, and a relief. I always feel as though I’m trying figure IT out. My role. Life in general. The nature of purpose and being and doing. Trying to understand it all feels at once vital and futile, as if, at birth I was assigned a quest that it was not humanly possible to complete. I do not remember a time when I did not have a sense of wonder and confusion about the nature of self, in all its fracture and unity. Trying to wrap my head around what I was and what I was doing here is in fact one of my earliest memories. I don’t think I’m supposed to stop doing that. I’ve realized lately that I don’t want to stop doing that, that I don’t need to. For some time, I wondered if, in the ceasing of that effort, some sort of peace or perpetual happiness waited. Maybe it does, but to get there I have to stop being who I am, and if that is the path, it is not one I am ready to be on.

At the same time, doing all that gets exhausting. It often doesn’t feel like I’m relaxing into anything. Which is why I knew I needed the break that camping provided. Where whim was the guiding force, where all of the talking and wondering and chatter in my brain quieted down. I am getting more in tune with how that balance works for me, between the busyness of figuring out how all the roles exist and talk to one another, and the quiet, blank-slate absence of roles I know I can find when I need to.

I don’t want to be any other way than how I am, when I think about it. Maybe I have more figured out than I think I do, maybe we all do, and the issue we deal with is that this world is loud and full of messages that compete and contradict and confuse. It is full Stuff to Deal With. Jobs that pay the bills but also sap our energy, things that go wrong, that fail in our houses and cars and bodies and hearts. It is so easy to get shaken up, shaken off course, shaken to the bone. Of course we’re going to wonder if this is how it is supposed to be and if we’re doing it right. How could we not wonder that?

Maybe the secret is not to eliminate the questions and the angst, but to stop resisting it. We need to make room for it, get comfortable with it. Relax into it. I think in the end, that’s what was so freeing and elating about the director’s response to Jones’s question in Anderson’s film. It doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story. It was permission. As if someone gave me, gave us all, permission to not have the answer. We can keep trying to figure it all out, if we feel compelled to, if we like it, if that’s the way our brains work, but we are allowed to not find the answer; there is no failure in not coming up with a tidy explanation or an essay on synthesis. We’re allowed to just keep telling the story. It’s our story after all. We can tell it any way we like.

Love, Cath

On Joyful Moments, Good Light, and All Our Selves

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes I reflect on how this blog began, and the name of it. My dog had just died and I was about a year and a half into a new relationship. I was feeling broken hearted and open hearted at the same time. The relationship ended several months later. I took a few months off from dating, then hopped back into something new, which also lasted about two years. Now, that relationship is two years behind me. I didn’t hop back into anything, and another of my sweet pups has passed.

Since that death there have been times over the past two months when it has felt as if things are slowly sliding down a muddy slope. I have struggled to get my footing and little and big things seem to be going wrong. I look everywhere for signs, for tiny joyful things, so I may imprint those things on my heart in an effort stop the mudslide, give me something to hold on to. I know from experience that it is an effective practice, but like everything good for you, it takes consistency and hard work to keep looking. And the more things that go wrong, and the bigger the things, the harder it is to see anything else, harder to feel open hearted in a world full of sharpness.

One of the good things about me is that I like routines. I’m trying to make sure I’m moving more and I bought a pedometer to better monitor myself. Sitting at a desk for 40 hours a week not only has its own detrimental effects but has dulled my ability to gauge how much or little I’m actually moving. Now, my habit is to walk the dog in the morning, take a few breaks to get some steps around the house throughout the workday, then walk again, solo, in the late afternoon or evening. I feel so much better when I do this.

But being a lover of routines has a downside too. It can be hard to try new things. There are a million reasons why I adore the safety and predictability of routines, but basically it’s a combination of how I’ve always been, and what I prefer in the aftermath of some of the roller coaster relationships I’ve been in. Routines keep me writing every morning, keep me and my dog healthy. But breaking them to try other things can be a challenge. Though, trying the New, Big Thing of pottery a year and a half ago was my proof to myself that I can change up the routine and it can be really good for me. And it still feels like a New Big Thing, even though it has been incorporated into my routines.

Routines can also lead us to so many happy moments. My writing practice never fails to ground me, to keep me connected to my self, and to big ideas I want to explore. The quest for little happy moments was most recently undertaken in the aftermath of a storm that resulted in some expensive roof damage. I had been feeling particularly low. But on a routine walk with my puppy Zero, we were led to a beautiful toad. The toad moved in such a lopsided fashion, a half slide, half hop into the grass at our approach that at first I thought it was a wounded bird or something. A good portion of my joy at discovering the toad was seeing that it was an alive-and-well someone instead of a wounded someone.

Other little happy moments that happened recently also occurred as my morning routine unfolded. I typically begin the day with a cup of coffee on the patio when I let Zero out. Yesterday, I was drinking coffee from a mug I threw and trimmed and glazed myself. The coffee contained a drizzle of cardamom simple syrup, as I’m obsessed with cardamom these days. I was surrounded by flowers, including a pretty pot of them given to me by a good friend. It was one of those moments, one I wanted to capture and imprint upon my memory for when times are tough, so that I could draw it like a card from a deck and say See? You felt good and happy and peaceful that morning. This morning too, as I stood on the patio looking out into a pale and hazy morning sky, I was surprised to see an enormous waning gibbous moon. I once wrote about that particular moon phase being my favorite, and it was a delight to see it there, perched and oddly bright in the morning sky. It was such a strange, good light, and I’m glad I took the time to bask in it.

I feel like our brains are constantly shuffling the deck of memories. A song will retrieve a memory so long ago and so good that it bruises you to remember how lost and faraway it is. A smell will bring forth another memory of a kitchen full of people you love, and you will smile. The tough memories get added on their own without any effort. I’ve read that our brains imprint—sear?—bad experiences into our memories as a protective mechanism, but good memories are not written in the same fashion. Though, what greater protection from bad memories is there than good ones? It’s a strange way for our brains to work, but if we want to make protective charms of the good memories, we have to do that work ourselves.

One of the beautiful parts about these little happy moments that we’re trying to imprint upon our brain as memory is that there is a lovely now-ness to them. Somehow noting them as they are happening opens up a pocket of time-space and lets the moment exist for longer than normal. Such moments are as much about future enjoyment of the past as they are about the present. Isn’t it amazing how they can exist and extend in all those different directions?

Still, when things are bad, at least for me, my tendency is to resist seeing things, anything, in a good light. I have to heavily lean into the part of myself that knows what to do, to trust her to pull us out. To take us for a walk, to reach out to a friend, whatever it takes. When I feel clearer-headed, I can see that the part of me that knows what to do knows because she fought for this knowledge. She worked like hell to build the scaffolding for us, to make sure we always had a way out. She helped get us out of bad situations and the unhealthy mindsets that went along with them. When things start to get bad, my thoughts become a mantra of “I don’t know what to do.” But, we have always figured it out. I hope, as I’m building this muscle memory, I can catch myself sooner and sooner each time and remember to trust and work with myself instead of against, to have all the disparate parts of myself pulling together and being a team. One part of my brain looks for the good, joyful moments, another does the research and finds the answers, another knows when we need to get out of the house or talk to a friend. And they all comfort the scared part that is worried about all the bad things that could happen.

Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to have a brain that operates as a singular unit, not a crowd of selves constantly in dialogue. But this is the brain I’ve got so we’re going to keep learning, keep talking, and keep growing. I’m off to jump into my next routine of the day. I hope you have a good one, full of happy, collected moments and good light.

Love, Cath

On Synthesis and Momentum and Messiness

By Catherine DiMercurio

I’ve been single two years to the day. Since the breakup that started this chapter of my life, I’ve spent a lot of time exploring my history and finding patterns and doing long-delayed work. I’ve focused on writing and pottery and self. I’ve mourned old things that it was too hard to fully manage before and I’ve mourned new things and I’ve found unexpected joys in solitude. Despite the periodic bouts of loneliness there’s a lot that simply feels better now. I have worked at discovering what wounds have followed me from childhood and into all of my adult relationships, and have explored many different ways of tending to such things. I’ve found ways to provide for myself things that were missing in a lot of relationships, like emotional safety and respect.

Still, there’s a part of my brain that seems exclusively devoted to tallies. It counts and categorizes the things that have hurt me and the things that helped me to grow. It tells me to keep writing and throwing clay and wandering in the woods. It reminds me of how good it feels to be near a lake and suggests we don’t forget about the plan to move closer to one. It encourages growth and development, but in the ways least likely to cause me pain. It’s very practical, this part.

There’s another part of my brain that unfurls itself like a flag in the wind, singing to me about being in love, and don’t I remember what that’s like, and don’t we want that again? The other part of my brain taps a pen against its clipboard and says something like, “according to the data, this course of action would not be a wise investment of resources. . . .”

They are at odds, and so am I. So for now, I check in with them to see how we’re feeling but stay busy with all the other things. Busy is an easy way to be, between a full-time job, pursuing writing as a serious endeavor, and pottery as art and hobby, maintaining my house and yard, caring for my dog, and trying to exercise and eat well and sleep well, and to generally stay healthy. That all gobbles up a lot of available energy.

At the same time, after my older dog died a few weeks ago, I spent a lot of time just sitting in the sun and watching the irises bloom. Sometimes everything needs to pause. It’s been nearly a month somehow and I’ve been trying to regain my footing. I feel as if I’ve been moving slowly and carefully through the world these last couple of weeks, trying to make sure nothing else breaks.

All this is to say that you get to a certain point and you get to feel very self-protective. I used to feel braver, at least when it came to putting my heart on the line. My loneliness outweighed everything else and it felt like I’d already been through a pretty rough heartbreak, and nothing could be worse than that, so I kept throwing my hat into the ring. But it doesn’t work the way I thought it did. A breakup after a two-year relationship can hurt just as badly as a breakup after a two-decade relationship. They just hurt differently. Hearts seem to have a lot more surface area than you’d expect and can break in a lot of places. And you keep mending it until you have this beautiful piece of art, mended with the gold of all your best efforts at healing, but you tend to get more careful with it. Mended, it’s strong, maybe even stronger than it was in the beginning, but you’re less likely to want to test out that theory.

I think this is why so many people turn to art. It can still break your heart in mighty ways, but they are easier to bounce back from. Art—specifically, my writing—has saved me and picked me back up time and time again. The physical act of it. My pursuit of it, following through with a low-residency MFA program in the middle of a divorce. The people I met, and the community I found. And I swear when I started pottery it was just like falling in love, full of angst and euphoria, and settling into the beautiful harmony between exhilaration and calm. And now there are so many different ways to grow and explore, it can feel overwhelming at times and at other times, I find so much relief in the knowledge that I could study and practice for a thousand years, or at least, the rest of my life, and still have more to learn. And again, I have found a new community.

Sometimes, when I’m not practicing one of these art forms, or actively engaged in one of the other activities that both soothes and invigorates—hiking in the woods, baking, hanging out with my dog, having coffee with a friend—I slip into rumination, or find it hard to stay engaged with work that needs to be done, whether it be my job, or housework, or other routine and necessary things. I’m trying to figure out how to find both joy and contentment in the mundane too, since that occupies a bigger proportion of my time most days than the other things. It was easier to not get so lost in my head when I didn’t spend quite so much time alone, but between working remotely and the kids having moved out and the breakup, it’s been a quiet two years. This time has allowed me plenty of time to do both productive work and to descend into rabbit holes I then have to work to clamber out of.

I’ve often looked back on the moment of impact that changed my life and felt as though it separated me from my shadow, and she became something more substantial, as if an outline had been drawn and filled in with tangible darkness. When times are tough, she seems to gain strength, and when I’m feeling good and strong, she retreats. And what I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is integration. Of attaching that shadow back to me the way it’s supposed to be; of the artistic with the mundane; of joy with responsibility and routine. Maybe it’s more synthesis than integration but there has to be a way it all fits together, for fragmentation to gently morph into wholeness.

When we center clay on the wheel we talk about the way this process encourages all the particles in the clay to move in the same direction, and we learn ways to shape the clay that works with its momentum, and that isn’t at all about forcing it to look the way you want it to. I think that’s a good goal for me too, working with my momentum, and gently encouraging all the disparate parts of me to start moving in the same direction, and enjoying the messiness of the process. It’s all a good reminder too that growth is multidimensional, not linear. It can look like you are spinning your wheels, but you are actually creating something extraordinary.

Love, Cath

On Swimming in the Sun

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes I just want to write about the sun, and the way, after so much chilliness, so many grey skies, it soaks into skin as more than just warmth, weighing more than light. I want to write about the way, no matter how many times I’ve written about pain or healing or difficult times, what I feel often, weaving through moments and days, is a sense of peace, warm and substantial as that sun. I want to talk about the way over the past two years, I have cleared away the debris of several past relationships, and set up camp within myself, creating the cozy, safe place I’d been longing for.

I write often about the things I’ve been working through over the years because it’s such hard labor, hauling away the remnants of collapse. And it helps. It helps me to talk about it and I believe it helps people who visit this space who might be going through similar things.

I don’t live in a rural area but a creek cuts through township where I live, and it feeds a larger watershed. The creek runs along the backyards of the houses across the street and in the neighborhood we see more wildlife than I expected to. Last night at dusk I heard an owl and this morning, geese. I routinely see deer, ducks, and groundhogs, as well as the expected neighborhood critters, like squirrels, skunks, racoons, opossums. Once there was even a heron, looking out of place in someone’s driveway. I love seeing and hearing this wildlife, though I always have the guilty sense of us invading their space rather than the other way around.

But there is pleasure in seeing these creatures in the unexpected place of this suburban neighborhood a stone’s throw from a big city, just as there are unexpected pleasures of working through the difficult challenges I often write about. I so often find surprising pockets of quiet in this busy neighborhood, and I am finding them more often in my mind too, much more often than when my bruised heart navigated one troubling relationship and then stumbled into the next before it could catch its breath. I was always looking for someone to feel like home, to work with me to establish the peace and connection I so craved. Of course I heard the messages of how you have to find these things in yourself before you can find them in another person. My sense at the time was something like, “yeah, yeah, I’m sure they’re in there somewhere.” But I wanted the solid, physical manifestation of those things—home, peace, connection—in another human standing right in front of me.

When my last relationship ended, I remember having the sense both that I needed to find those things within myself but also, that if I did, I wouldn’t care about finding them in another person, that I’d stop looking, and that even if I was happy being alone now, would I always feel that way? It was as if I was trying to satisfy my now self and my future self at the same time, as if I didn’t trust future me to figure out and pursue what she wanted. Because I didn’t. I didn’t trust future me to figure it out any more than I trusted now me.

But I knew my now self needed a break. Time.

And in this time, with all the debris clearing and the setting up of camp and taking stock and being with myself, I have discovered so much that I needed to find. While I’m still trying to rebuild a confidence I probably lost somewhere in early childhood, after one too many comments about being too this or not enough that, I have found ways to untangle the knots of anxiety that used to tighten so easily. It’s not gone, of course, and this would be obvious if you talked to the family members and the friends I confide in, but here’s the thing I learned: it’s okay to confide. That’s one of the reasons the knots are loosened is that I have learned to reach out, to receive comfort, to wriggle free of the shame that is so often attached to what society so often perceives as weakness. There is so much strength in knowing when you need to reach out, and acting on that, and so much value in developing those trusting relationships.

I also have found joy again in the delight I take in simple things. I never realized, until I laughed hard, alone in my house, over some silly memory or a joke I told myself, or a hilarious meme, how wonderful it is to not have to put a damper on your own happiness because someone around you is unhappy. I don’t know if I ever learned how to do that in a relationship. I always felt like I needed to mirror the level of happiness my partner felt, as if it would be offensive to be joyful while being near someone who was either momentarily grumpy or definitely suffering in a depressive state. I have found moments of unmitigated happiness in my yard with the dogs, or on a walk with them, as we curiously explore our neighborhood together. I’ve uncovered the thrill of learning the Big New Thing that is pottery. I have also written so much lately, delving in and drafting and revising and submitting, rediscovering how necessary writing is to my sense of self. I feel so foreign to myself if I miss my morning writing time, whether it’s the aimless wander of journaling or the wild creation of a new story, or the focused attention of revision. It’s no wonder, when I so often back-burner-ed my writing in my last couple of relationships, whether due to time constraints or the overwhelming anxiety I often felt about the relationships, that I felt so out of touch with myself. But I’m back, feeling curious and growing and working and writing and creating.

Photo by Guillaume Meurice on Pexels.com

Sure, I feel stuck sometimes, and I write about that candidly, but I also feel like a clever fish, freely frolicking in a big deep lake, swimming to the surface and warming myself in the sun and diving to the depths to explore. That is, I’m embracing a freedom that while scary sometimes is also deeply peaceful and wonderfully delightful.

My point is that for every point I’ve made in this blog about healing and how hard it can be, there is a complimentary point to be made about the reward, the value, the worth of it all. There is always compensation. There is always the awareness that what I’m building is the foundation for everything that is to come next for me. I’m creating the solid, physical manifestation of the home, peace, and connection I’ve been seeking instead of searching for it in another human standing right in front of me. It’s me. I’ve always been standing right here, but how easily we make shadows of ourselves when it seems like the right thing to do for other people, or because we forgot how to do anything else, or we never knew in the first place. But here we are now, in the sun, at last.

Love, Cath

On the Familiar, Change, and Growth

By Catherine DiMercurio

One of the strangest facets of my existence in the past ten years has been the recurring sensation of unfamiliarity, and how dizzying it can be at times.

When I was married, I enjoyed the feeling that I knew my partner better than anyone else in the world, and I felt was as known to him. Toward the end, that changed, and it began to feel as though he was becoming a different person; the reasons are varied and complex and I have never truly understood how much of that I should allow myself to write about candidly. Suffice it to say that after it was over, I felt as though maybe I’d never known him at all.

In the relationships since, each ended before I’d arrived at the familiarity I craved. I also moved at the beginning of the pandemic, and my youngest went off to college, all of which contributed to the sensation that nothing in my life felt familiar to me any longer. Not my home, not my community, not my solitude, not my self. So much of who we are, at any given moment, feels rooted in place and people. When we look at ourselves extracted from those relationships, it can be disorienting, and it takes a while before we can take advantage of the opportunity it offers.

During my relationships, I was so afraid of loss that I had become someone other to myself, someone who allowed herself to be sloughed off, little by little. I found myself in a dangerous pattern of letting go of little pieces of me, the ones that might get in the way of the relationship succeeding. In the hazy aftermath of it all, after the last one ended, I realized that I did not know how to be in a relationship without this happening. The reason, I began to learn, was that I’d drifted too far from the shores of my own sense of identity. I had forgotten—or never knew—that I was the safe harbor I’d been looking for. The pattern of self-abandonment for the sake of the relationship, for the sake of loss mitigation, had become so familiar it provided its own comfort. It felt easy and good to mold myself into the type of person it seemed my partner wanted me to be. But when things got comfortable, when I was comfortable enough to relax and be myself a little more, it was understandably jarring, and I would back pedal. How much of myself do I get to be, and for how long, became the guiding principles of my behavior. Though there are a lot of reasons things didn’t work out with my past relationships, this is the part that I have to own.

I’ve spent the last two years trying to undo that damage. Some of the rage and grief I still feel over the decade’s losses are rooted in this loss of self—and my own role in it. At the same time, I exist alongside a frustration with time. When I imagine potentially building that sense of familiarity with a new partner, I remember that you can’t create twenty years of history with someone you just met. It’s hard to make peace with what feels, at times, like running out of time. One of the balms for this particular type of bruising the heart experiences is trying to nurture those relationships with friends and with family with whom a history does exist.

But here we encounter another wrinkle. People change, all of us do. And we might find that people who once seemed very familiar to us no longer do, and maybe we don’t seem familiar to them either. And change is such a slippery term, right? It rarely looks how you think it will, in ourselves or in others. To put it more baldly: it hurts. Sometimes it simply hurts to watch people you love become someone else. And our own evolution can hurt, too, when we choose to know and honor who we are. Growth is prickly, painful, and nonlinear.

Sometimes growth is prickly and we long for familiar things we can't have. — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

For a long, long time, the idea that guided my writing was informed by a similar exploration of familiarity and change: do we become more or less of who we are as we get older? Are there essential facets of our true nature that get stripped away or clouded over, or are we growing, feeding that true nature so that it blossoms in a thousand beautiful ways? There is much to think about here, but it seems to me that despite whatever we are doing internally to nurture and protect that truest self, there are external forces acting upon it too. There are people who feed our soul, those who seek to crush it, and those whose aims are more difficult to see, who, for whatever reason, see what is beautiful in us and cannibalize it, because it soothes their own wounded soul. And sometimes we can’t even see it happening, because we are busy being our loving and generous selves. But we are mistaken to believe this is anything other than trauma, and there is wisdom and growth in waking to that knowledge and repairing the damage.

So how do we reconcile this need for familiarity with the fact that everything is always changing? For me, it has become a practice of asking myself new questions. Why am I drawn to the familiar in the first place? What am I truly looking for? The answer is usually comfort. Something needs soothing. All the things that had me craving something familiar—the ending of a relationship, having moved to a new house, my kids moving out—left me disorientated and lonely and I wanted to sink into something that felt like being held. But there was nothing to hold me, so instead, I sifted through old familiar things, held them: photos, books, trinkets in jars, stones from beaches gathered on trips I’d taken with my children.

But one of the most amazing things that has happened in these past couple of years is that I’m learning to accurately identify what I’m longing for and how I can soothe that longing. Not everything that feels like loneliness is loneliness. Sometimes, when the hum of routine has me feeling under-stimulated, I’ll seek out art, nature, company. Sometimes there’s too much happening, and all I want is for everything to slow down, so I’ll do something slow, like bake, sit in the sun, read a book. When I’m longing for connection, I’ll reach out to the people who understand. And sometimes I do genuinely feel lonely and I let myself feel it, knowing that it is a price I willingly pay for peace.

I long to layer all this thinking with some kind of metaphor that captures the feelings I want to convey, but it’s hard because change isn’t always for the better, doesn’t always seem to lead to growth, not when we get stuck in certain patterns. It’s like going through all the trouble of dissolving ourselves in a chrysalis but never becoming a butterfly, when sometimes all we really want to do is be a caterpillar anyway, happily munching on leaves all day. Maybe we do the whole thing over and over again in a lifetime, or maybe we’re always part caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly, all at the same time, with different parts of us transforming in different ways. I think though, at the heart of it all, is a truest self, always longing to be seen, to show us the familiar and changing way back to ourselves, lighting the way like a little firefly in the night.

Love, Cath

On Rage and Other Big Things We Don’t Like to Talk About

By Catherine DiMercurio

I took my rage for a walk the other day because the only thing that made sense was tiring it out. I wondered if it was more like a toddler in tantrum or like a puppy full of energy to spend. But the rage—my rage—was unlike either of those things. It wasn’t innocent frustration opposing the structure of its world and it wasn’t joyful and bored and antsy. It was more sophisticated and self-aware, and I couldn’t think of it in a way that made it seem cute and small and not very dangerous. It was not cute, and it felt volatile and intimidating.

On my drive out to the woods, the rage quieted. Simmered. Waited. I was tired of trying to talk myself out of it, just because I didn’t know where it came from. I was tired of trying to figure out all the reasons I felt so full of this surging and unpredictable reactive energy. But I did it anyway. Was it because of the world at large and all the ways it is hateful and crumbling? Was it frustration with life and how there’s no way off this treadmill of working to pay for a roof over your head and having little time or resources to ever do much else? Was it this new and uncontrollable bristling I feel when I encounter inauthenticity? Or was it the powerlessness I feel when I witness people abandoning themselves the way I once did, in service of people or situations that were hurting them? Or was it simply grief’s companion, still flailing over all the things that still hurt?

I don’t know that I learned how to properly self-soothe as a child. People tell you to calm down but they don’t tell you how. I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out what to do with myself when emotions feel too big for my body. When my kids were young, I would tell them to not do anything with their hands when they were angry because we’re so much stronger when were mad. Mostly this was to keep them for hurting each other when they were upset. We talked about different things they could do when they felt that way. Scream into or punch a pillow. Jump up and down. Take deep breaths. But we probably didn’t talk often enough about all this. I was still learning myself, but I suppose a lot of parenting is like that.

Now, as I began walking a trail covered in snow, several inches deep but packed down by other feet and frozen into other shoe shapes, my own boots slipped and slid. I had decided by then to just let myself be angry instead of trying to figure out why it had appeared out of the blue without an obvious trigger. I tried to not be resentful this time. Fine, be mad, I sometimes told myself, all the while feeling a meta-anger, that sense that I was mad about being mad.

This time, I tried to be agreeable about it all. Okay. Today we’re going to be mad, I guess. It’s okay to be mad. I tell myself this now. Because it is, even though I don’t like how it feels inside my body. And I did try to impart this to my kids, too, that it’s okay to be mad but it’s not okay to take it out on other people. But whenever I tried to apply this lesson to myself, I kept trying to talk myself out of my feelings. Maybe I was told too many times that I didn’t have anything to be mad about.

I have this idea that as an adult I’m supposed to be calm and in control of my emotions all the time. I have a habit of judging myself for the “negative” emotions that take me over. In a way, trying to figure out all the reasons I might be mad felt like an attempt to justify, to counter the “you don’t have anything to be mad about” charge, like part of me was yelling, yes I do! It’s as if I’ve been seeking permission from myself to be angry. I have embraced sorrow. When it visits, I let it stay as long as it needs to. I feel it, I talk to it, I cry. I let it have its say, and that seems to matter. But I’ve been afraid of doing this with rage. It feels too big, unstable, uncontrollable.

As I hiked through the snow, I turned on the path that leads to a loop through a big, open, hilly field. It’s a less popular trail and the snow was fresher here, less hard-packed by the few hikers who had passed this way before me. It was deeper to trudge through, and it felt good, pushing through the snow. I checked in on my rage and it felt like it was diffusing a bit. By the time I’d finished five miles, I felt tired and refreshed. The rage had loosened its hold on me, glad perhaps that I didn’t try to tell it to go away, that it didn’t have a right to be here.

On the other side of rage, it is sometimes easier to see that it’s often about fear and things we have no control over. I always want to understand it because I’m afraid I’ll miss something. People say that you should listen to your anger because it’s trying to tell you something, point you in the direction of something that needs healing.

But the tricky part about healing is that it doesn’t mean something stops hurting. At least, not so far. Sometimes we’re pointed in the direction of our pain and all we can do is recognize and honor it, just like we do with the emotions that brought us there. We self-soothe as best we can. We cry, take a hot shower, go for a snowy hike, scream into a pillow, ask for help or a hug, snuggle the dog. Sometimes we simply must take a deep breath and get on with our day.

Maybe healing is simply showing up for yourself, again and again, without judgement. Without criticizing yourself for having grief, or rage. I think all of us are all the time trying to heal, from big psychic wounds that we never saw coming and stay with us for decades, and from all the little things that gouge at us more recently.

For a week I was not able to pinpoint what it was that had made my insides churn with a rage that seemingly had nothing to do with my life at the moment. Everything had been relatively calm in the days preceding and then I woke up and the rage just hit me. I’ve spent the week thinking about it, and telling myself to stop thinking about it, that the why doesn’t matter. That I did the right thing in finding a way to let myself feel it safely. Anger is a big emotion and it made sense to enlist the woods and the solitude and snow to help absorb it, and that worked.

But it still bothered me that I couldn’t pin it down. This morning, a week to the day, I woke up, and as my amorphous thoughts gathered into language like raindrops on a windowpane melting into one another, I thought, I’m mad at myself for still feeling grief. I don’t want to feel this way. I don’t think I should. But I do. As I walked myself back through the previous week I realize it all started with a dream. I’d woken up, been frustrated that my subconscious was still nursing old wounds, but I didn’t give it another thought. Then as the morning wore on I realized this rage had seeped in from someplace, seemingly all of the sudden. My dream had been forgotten. And I didn’t put it all together until now.

Our minds and hearts operate in strange ways. In the calm and safe world I’ve built for myself, my brain works on things while I sleep, in ways I do not understand, but in waking life, I’m left to process it all along with the residual emotions. I suppose it is all happening the way it should. The part of me that has waited for me to be ready to do this part of the work is nudging me. But sometimes it feels like a war between two voices inside me, one saying you don’t get to be mad at yourself because things still hurt, and one saying, just watch me.

Maybe it’s my job to be the peacemaker. To tell myself that my anger is a valid response, especially since, if I pick it apart, I can see that it isn’t solely anger at myself for still hurting, it’s anger at the people who hurt me, and anger at myself for “letting” them. In peacemaking, I can allow safe spaces for the anger to exist and expend itself, to rise up when it needs to, just like I’ve learned to allow with the grief. Maybe my anger just needs some time alone with me, away from grief.

I don’t know if it will ever all dissipate, or if all these disparate parts of myself will peacefully coalesce, like those raindrops on a windowpane. For now, though, there’s not much I can really do except keep listening, and making space when the big emotions show up and demand attention. Maybe healing is simply showing up for yourself, again and again, without judgement. Maybe life is.

Love, Cath

On Connection vs. Alignment

By Catherine DiMercurio

On a recent frigid Saturday, I gave myself permission to write all day and to not have to worry about anything else. I planned on it all week. I looked forward to it Friday night before I drifted off to sleep, the puppy snuggled against my legs. I woke early, made a big pot of coffee. I threw on some sweatpants and shrugged myself into a sweater. Hours later, when I happened to look in the mirror, I had to laugh at how I’d buttoned it, all askew. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve buttoned my sweaters this way. It started me on down a path though, thinking about alignment, because I can’t unsee metaphors when they jump out at me that way.

Clearly, my desire to write, my writing goals, my writing life—none of that feels aligned with the day-to-day structure of my life. At present, there’s no way around it. Maybe one day there will be away to live differently, where a full-time job with benefits isn’t so necessary, but I’m far from that now. As it is, I’m lucky to have a job where I’m interacting with books for a living. There are worse jobs a writer could be doing.

But I was also thinking about the idea of alignment in terms of relationships. As I’ve discussed here in recent posts, I find myself no longer clear about what it is I want, which comes as a surprise to me. I keep asking myself, do I even want to be in a relationship now, ever again? I saw someone on social media saying that men think they are competing with the top ten percent of other men for women’s affection, but they are really competing against the peace a woman feels in solitude. I know a number of women for whom this is true, and it definitely struck a chord with me.

Whenever I test the waters, start exploring how I might be feeling about the possibility of trying dating again, I invariably think about past relationships. One of the things I have prized most when I’m in a relationship is sharing a deep sense of connection with my partner. I’ve heard myself saying this to friends, whenever I dip into lonely and maybe, that it is this, perhaps, that I miss the most. Connection. I’ve said it so much that I have finally started asking myself what I truly mean by connection. I think, in a romantic relationship, it has several components. Chemistry is one. That feeling you get when you meet someone and feel like something instantly clicks. But that is only a small, shallow part of it. There’s also the intense bond that begins to grow as you share more and more about yourselves, your beliefs, your past. I find the tenderness of vulnerability to be deeply appealing. I have always been more attracted to vulnerability than confidence. In many men, you can see it underneath a surface bravado, like bright, beautiful, curious fish swimming under a surface of thin, clear ice. And I have romanticized this, the idea that I will be the one to tap into that. I think Gen-X women in particular were taught to do this in pretty much every teen movie that came out in our youth, the sweet guy lurking beneath either the bad boy or the cool kid image. The thing is, a lot of men were taught to be this way too, to hide part of themselves away. Maybe some of them believe the “right” person will be able to see them for who they are, maybe some of them just kept building up layers and not letting anyone in.

Still, as I thought about this more, recalled conversations where I believed a connection to be building and deepening, I began to understand that my desire for this type of connection was something that could be, and had been, easily manipulated. While I was opening myself up, ready to share honestly and deeply, the men I dated were more spare in what they shared of themselves, doling out confidences in doses designed to keep me interested, and themselves in control. It’s hard to say what was intentional and what was simply a learned but unconscious behavior, but it created an imbalance that always left me wanting more. And I thought that was the point, that energy, the craving, I thought it all meant we had this intense connection. But, I think that everything I believed connection to be, everything I wanted it to be, was standing in for something that I truly hoped for but have never found: alignment.

I don’t know if my understanding of alignment actually aligns with how the word is sometimes used in some pop psychology/relationship circles. It’s often discussed as shared values and having the same vision for the relationship. I think there’s a little more to it than that. The notion of shared values is a tricky idea. If you’re really into someone it is easy to interpret behaviors as evidence of a shared value, or to think, “close enough!” and shove that square peg in a round hole and call it aligned. What I’m thinking of goes a little deeper. What I hoped for in relationships, what I allowed a type of connection to stand in for, was a common way of being.

I got this wrong too, in the past. I thought after marriage to a mostly extroverted person, that dating mostly introverted people, people like me, meant that I was finding people who approached the world the same way I did. And again, I allowed that to confuse things, allowed myself to believe that there was a connection that was deeper than it truly was.

But those things are different than my way of being in this world. I’ve been trying to pin down with language the way I would describe how I see myself interacting with the world. Where does the “too sensitive” label that was always attached to me arise from? Is it empathy? I do think of myself as an empathetic person. I was the type of kid who felt personally injured whenever I knew someone else’s feelings to be hurt. But, that wasn’t quite exactly the full story.

I’ve been drawn to men who seem to possess qualities compatible with my empathy, men who wanted to make the world a better place, or who had a gentle way with animals, or who were deeply loyal to their friends or family. But as I got to know them better, I also saw other things. It wasn’t that they didn’t behave in kind or empathetic ways. In fact, it was glimpses of those traits that made be attach myself more eagerly to them. But something was missing. It was different for each of them, but I think as I look back, I can see that they all shared some similarities, a conviction of their own rightness in how they looked at the world, as well as some kind of determination to keep a part of themselves closed off from me. There was a lack of curiosity about the way other people, myself included, approached the world, and a lack of openness to other perspectives, to me.

Yes. Openness. And here we are. I feel like I’ve just come full circle, writing this. No wonder I named this blog Chronicles of the Open Hearted. This is it, how I approach the world. My way of being in it. Openness. Empathy is a part, but not all of what I’m talking about. I am not guarded, though I have tried to be. In new social situations, though my introvert self feels quiet, and easily overwhelmed, my empathetic self is eager to find something in common, to make the situation feel less awkward, and invariably, I feel like I’m a little too much myself, too open, sharing too much. Ironically this tends to make things more awkward because people don’t often know what to do with someone that seems incapable of being glib and guarded until you get to know someone better.

I guess what I’m realizing now is that I want to see those bright and beautiful fish right away, without having to glimpse them through a layer of ice. I want heart-on-your-sleeve. I want true vulnerability and earnestness, not a performance of it. I want curiosity and openness, to me, new ideas, the world.

So, what is your way of being? Are you and your partner aligned in this way? If not, how do you make it work? If so, how does that feel? What challenges do you face? If, like me, you’re unpartnered, have you begun to realize, like I have, that you have built friendships with people who share aspects of your alignment?

I can see now how all the things I attributed to connection—chemistry, heady conversations, emotional vulnerability—all these things felt good, but they also created a cloud of sorts, a fog that kept me from seeing what was missing. I was hyper-focused on developing the connection because I believed that to be the foundation of a good relationship. It certainly doesn’t hurt, but both partners must be trying to build it. Still, it shouldn’t be standing in for alignment. At least, not for me. That’s not what I want. I’ve tried it over, and over, and over again and it does not work.

But, it feels good to have arrived at a better understanding of myself. And five years in, I’m understanding this blog a little better. It is about me wanting to connect with you, and always has been. It’s about wanting both of us to feel less alone. But it’s also about openness, because I don’t know how else to be, where to put all these ideas that crowd my brain. It’s my own curiosity, an exploration of ideas as a way of (hopefully) starting conversations, maybe even just the one you have with yourself in your own head.

Love, Cath

On Not Knowing, or, (Not) Navigating Deep Water

By Catherine DiMercurio

I’m not sure why, but part of me still clings to this idea that the clarity I look for as I navigate some of the things I’m struggling with is something that will reveal itself to me as a shout, as a brand new beginning, the shiny other side of the coin, freshly tossed. I want to cross over along the timeline, from one side of a vertical line to the next. To say, definitively, I am here now.

But what the world has tried to teach me over and over is that everything is non-linear. Even a circle would be a welcome, familiar shape, but my life is not that either. Despite the continuity of my days, my carefully cultivated habits and routines, my inner world zig zags, soars and dives, as much as the chaos of the world outside my door.

I began writing this several days ago, firmly convinced I understood my mindset on a particular issue. I had decided I was Done, yes, with a capital D, with dating apps, Done searching for a partner, Done with the false (?, hopefully false) urgency of a timeline. Done with that feeling that I would somehow run out of chances or will or heart if I didn’t meet someone in a certain number of months or heartbeats. I don’t think there is a biological clock to this part. Though, I suppose future-me might wake up one day and wish I had tried harder sooner. But we do what we can, when we can. Don’t we? Don’t I? I mean, it is already too late for some of the dreams I once had. I have run out of time to ever celebrate a 61-year anniversary with someone, as a friend’s post about her parents celebrating their anniversary reminded me. I once had dreams of celebrating those types of anniversaries, but I’m aging out of that possibility. Letting go of that, as I’ve tried to do for some time now, means there really isn’t a clock ticking in that sense anymore. If I do meet someone, I’ll likely wish we’d had more time together, whether I met him tomorrow or in five or ten years.

So, I had let myself be Done. For now. For as long as it feels good to be doing the kind of growing and listening to myself as I’m doing now. Until I know how to do that no matter what. Until it’s like breathing, and something that won’t be abandoned like an ill-conceived New Year’s resolution the second I’m dating again.

Because I don’t want to go back to that way of loving, and I’m scared that I will. I wonder, was the reason it felt so good to be completely consumed by a relationship that I had little knowledge of or respect for myself? Did I enjoy losing myself because myself was such a flimsy concept, easy to let go of, so much so that I didn’t realize that she was lost?

Before I decided to be Done, I had grown more careful, deliberate, about who I entered into conversation with on those apps. I didn’t want to enter into anything nonchalantly. If I was going to expend my limited social capital, it had to be on someone I thought there was a chance with. I didn’t want a collection of first dates with men I didn’t plan on seeing again; I wanted to meet someone who was also looking for something long term, not just gathering with me out of sense of gathering loneliness.

I’m not lonely, which comes as a surprise to me. I have periodic moments or hours, maybe even a day or two at the most, of deep, sharp loneliness. But it is something that happens to me and falls away. It isn’t what I am.

I’ve leaned into that. What does it mean, then, to not be pursuing a relationship? I have always been in a relationship, or in between relationships. Being single but open to something happening still felt for a long time like many things: expectation, hope, wish. The natural order of things had been, for so long, that I was partnered. I always thought that I was a better me with someone else, but I didn’t have much to compare it to. If my time alone were drops of water, they would have filled a few drinking glasses, whereas my time with a partner over the years, between my marriage and my post-divorce relationships, filled up bathtubs. A swimming pool maybe. But, on my own, I am something else entirely. Something that can’t be measured by way of shallow, domestic containers. On my good days I feel like a lake, carved fathoms-deep by ancient glaciers. I have always been this same person, even when in relationships, but I didn’t know her yet. And if I didn’t, neither did the men I was with. How could they?

I often feel slow to understand things. My comprehension feels impaired by an onslaught of input. I’ve regarded myself as deep-thinking, but not quick-witted. Brains work differently. Mine is full of images and words, teeming with them. I can only handle so much external input at a time. So when I look back at what it was like to be in relationships where I prioritized the needs of my partner over my own (and unpacking that tendency is a whole different series of essays) it is no wonder that I have been slow to know myself. Think of all that additional input! Not that you can’t learn anything about yourself in a relationship. I can and did. But because of the way I was going about being in a relationship, there were things that I couldn’t learn about myself until I was on my own.

But for some reason I felt as though I needed to commit to the idea of being Done. To say, I am here now, on this side of that line. I felt as though I had to say, I know exactly what I want and it is this. That way, I know what to do, or not to do, next. When I had a tug of longing to be with someone, I then wondered, did I commit to the wrong idea, the wrong game plan? Do I still want to find someone?

The bottom line is, I don’t know, and I’m not comfortable not knowing what I want. It feels like failure. It feels like lack of insight, not knowing my gut. It feels wrong, and as if it must be remedied. It feels like wasted time. If I knew what I wanted, I could pursue it, and get on to the next part that much faster. It feels like something I ought to be ashamed of and I’m not sure why. Maybe it is because by now I should have this part figured out?

How can I not know what I want? I feel like I was always supposed to know. What do you want to be when you grow up, where do you see yourself in five years, etc. We’re supposed to be able to visualize it so we can manifest it, right?

I think one of the reasons I don’t know what I want in terms of a partner is that I’m figuring out what I want in other areas of my life. I know that I want to continue to pursue both writing and pottery, and I know that I can’t do either of those things without my “real” job that keeps a roof over three heads, mine and the two dogs. And I want a big enough roof so that when my kids come home to visit everyone has a place. And I want to nurture relationships with family and friends, connections that mean so much to me, that have on and off over the years been largely neglected when I was busy being totally consumed by romantic relationships that I let swallow me up. All of this adds up to a fullness I didn’t realize was possible. Sometimes I can’t imagine where a partner would fit into all that, possibly because I’ve never had a partnership where the fullness of both people’s lives was respected and nurtured in a healthy way.

I think the most important thing for me right now is the idea of embracing the mindset of not knowing, instead of fearing it, or, embracing it and the fear. It’s a little like swimming in deep water with no shore in sight. Yet, when I think about it, when we struggle with understanding ourselves, we are, in a way, both the swimmer and the deep water. We can keep ourselves afloat, or we can pull ourselves under. We are vast and deep, not easily navigated, and there is no shame in that. Oddly, what I am finding, is that a person can be true to themselves without having it all figured out.

Love, Cath