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.

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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 Creation, Waiting, and Time

By Catherine DiMercurio

I don’t have a record player but periodically I think of getting one and it seems every time I do, it’s after I heard a Tom Petty song. I recently listened to a snippet of an interview with him in which he was talking about the process by which he wrote “The Waiting.” You know that one. The waiting is the hardest part. Every day you get one more yard. You take it on faith, you take it to the heart.

He was talking about how a bit of the melody came to him and he played it over and over again for weeks, and then the chorus, same thing. He just played the same thing over and over. The snippet cut off after he talked about somebody knocking on the other side of the wall telling him not to play it anymore but presumably the rest of the song came to him this way, in pieces, over time.

I wish I could speed up processes sometimes, creative processes, learning processes, healing processes. It’s like I’m always waiting for my ability to catch up with my creative energy. My results don’t often match the vision I had in my head and I’m chasing the kind of book I want to write or piece of pottery I want to create. Or, the life I’m trying to build.

I look around at the things that seem to come easily for people and long for something like that for myself. I feel wildly impatient with my slow pace in nearly all things. Sometimes I feel as though I have the mentality of a perfectionist but not the talent, or results, to show for it. I am not meticulous. I am a messy learner with almost no eye for detail. I am full of earnest trying but am frequently wanting something more to show for the effort than what I was actually able to produce. I wake up too early and agonize over glazes I applied too thickly despite my best efforts in pottery class or fret over stories I’ve been submitting for years that keep getting rejected. I wonder, when is it going to all come together, and, what have I missed?

And then, things come together a little bit, all at once. Last year, I did get two pieces of writing accepted at literary journals and they finally were published this past week, within twenty-four hours of one another. And the glazes I’d been so worried about turned out fine, and I threw well that night at pottery class. I enjoyed it thoroughly, that moment where things coalesced in a brief way, knowing that such moments never promises anything. Any future success in either art form will be just as hard-earned and the waiting in getting there will continue to be the hardest part.

I look at all my impatience and I wonder where it’s all coming from and why it percolates everywhere for me. For all my striving toward self-acceptance, this feels out of place. When I step back, I can see that it isn’t there all the time, but it comes back to me, maybe when I’m feeling low about other things. I am trying to pause and consider why it matters so much that I learn faster, glaze better sooner, write and publish more now, etc. I think a lot comes down to validation.

If I’m producing “good” work in a visible way it’s proof, right? I mean, that’s how external validation works. We believe that if others can see something of our “goodness” or “value” then maybe it’s easier for us to believe in ourselves. Alternatively, it simply is enjoyable to feel seen, to have someone else confirm what we’ve been cultivating in ourselves, i.e., a sense of our own worth. For so long, I thought the goal was to not need external validation, that there was something wrong with wanting it. So, I worked diligently on trying to find where this need arose from in my past, how it came to be that I felt unable to sense my own worth. I work at rebuilding my sense of self in the same way that I create, revise, and re-create art in the mediums I’m working in now: clay and words. I’m continually learning how to be me in the same way, with the same habits of working and trying and reshaping and revising. I hum the same bars over and over for weeks. Still, I’m coming to understand that it doesn’t all have to be internal. We must feel safe and good and loved within our own skin, but it also feels good to have someone tell us good things. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying that.

Many people struggle with feelings of not being “enough” or “good enough,” and all for different reasons. I’ve dug into my own reasons, determined to understand them better, because I have found that the only way for me to cultivate healthy self-perspectives and habits is to use precise and loving language in my internal thought processes, language that responds specifically to the lessons and events of my life that wired my brain for self-criticism and an extreme response to anything that feels like rejection.

I am impatient with all this, but I think one of the reasons it takes so long to recover yourself from various types of wounds is that you often can’t face it all at once. It’s too much. It was too much for me to heal in a smooth and linear way and all at once from a twenty-year marriage ending in the storm brought on by my then-husband’s alcoholism and infidelity. Some wounds feel as though they change us at our core, forever, and after bearing the initial brunt of that pain, we begin to understand that the only way to survive it is to take breaks from it. We turn away, we look to others for help. Then we go back to it when we’re strong enough and rested enough.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

What I need is to believe that I have time. That I can keep conquering what I need to, that I can keep writing and learning, that there’s no need to rush. But we live in an urgent world that is always proving that nothing is promised, certainly not how much time any of us have left. But I need to believe that I have time, anyway. That my own pace for healing and nurturing my sense of self, for building my writing self into who she is becoming, for learning all I can in an artform as elusive and slippery as wet clay, is all sufficient. I need to believe that because whenever I try to rush things, something is sacrificed. Whenever I grow too impatient, I wind up falling into a dark place and my energy is then focused on pulling myself out of that instead of all the other things I’d rather be doing.

In a way, that’s my own version of blind faith: that I have time, that we all do. To keep creating the person I want to be, the life I want to have. My pace is neither fast nor slow, just mine, is what I tell myself. The waiting for it all to come together will always be the hardest part, because that’s where all the living is, in the waiting. The moments when things coalesce are fleeting, and the rest is creative energy at work. There is so much beauty and art in the waiting, even if it is the hardest part sometimes.

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 Owls, Cranes, Practice, and Purpose

By Catherine DiMercurio

In the late afternoon, before the light began to fade, I stretched on my purple yoga mat in my bedroom. The puppy, (now two years old), is always at my side and it is no different when I’m standing on my head or sinking into shavansana, corpse pose. He’s right there, at least one paw on the mat, connected to me. When I finished, I found myself thinking that as I go into the new year, one of the things I’d like to move toward is a daily yoga practice. Right now, I do a couple of half hour sessions a week, but I remain stiff in some poses, can’t do some of the things I used to be able to do. So, I’m deciding that I will try to do at least 15 minutes a day. I have other goals for daily exercise, ranging from dog walks to long hikes, and I’ll still do longer, deeper yoga sessions a couple of days each week, but 15 minutes on the other days seems like a reasonable goal, and something I know will benefit me both mentally and physically, particularly as I try to get through these long, cold, dark months. I realized, as I sat on my mat, petting my dog, that my goal did not need to be about getting back to where I was with my yoga when I was younger, or reaching a certain point of mastery over a pose. It is simply this: I feel good when I do yoga. I feel like me and I want more of that.

As I continued to think about how setting this type of goal differed from the ways I set goals in the past, I realized that what I’m after is a practice that is more about habit and effort, rather than outcome. And I began to reflect on how this type of goal setting might be helpful in other areas of my life. Too often I set goals that are achievement-based. I want to be able to do this type of pose perfectly, or get this number of pieces of short fiction published. Then, I further encumber such goals with a timeline. Life teaches us to do this. Self-help books, social media posts, and professional development materials, all often insist that goals need to be measurable and time bound. I even remember reading someplace that goals without a timeline are just wishes.

But I am curious about this: what naturally evolves from a habit-based practice versus achievement-based effort? If I practice yoga for 15 minutes every day and observe my body and my mind, what benefits might I notice? This is different than saying, I am going to do yoga for 15 minutes every day so that I can do a back bend by the end of February.

Likewise, if one of my writing goals is to submit two short stories to literary journals every month, what could grow from that practice of writing and submitting? And how might that practice differ than if I aim for getting, say, three acceptances in the coming year?

My point is that there is so much we are not in control over. And what discourages us, depresses us, keeps us in a sluggish instead of vibrant mental state is that feeling of failure, of letting ourselves or others down, of comparing ourselves to others and not measuring up, because we haven’t gotten to where they are, and shouldn’t we, by now?

Yet, I have little control over whether or not something gets published. I can keep writing, and choose what to submit and to whom, and after that it is out of my hands. We can, to some extent, choose how to spend our time, though we all have responsibilities that can make even this challenging. Still, we can control our own efforts, shape our own habits. What we can’t do is force the world to react to any of that in a certain way.

My writing practice, my yoga practice, my pottery practice—these are more important to me, the doing of them, than the achievement markers that indicate to the world that I’m successful at them. But I get hung up on the proof sometimes. I try to avoid the trap of external validation, though, like most people, I enjoy it. So I want to point to publication as proof of my writing effort; I want to show up in a yoga class and prove I belong because I can keep up; I want to throw a large piece or create something exquisitely artful as evidence that my hard work and practice has paid off. But, what am I really trying to prove, and to whom? Is my desire to demonstrate effort a performance for an audience? Does someone else saying that’s good or I can see you tried really hard matter more than me saying those things to myself? I don’t think that it is wrong to envision what we might accomplish, to want those things, to work toward them. But I’m starting to wonder if practicing with achievement-based goals at the forefront of our effort is the healthy way to go. Maybe, we could let achievement be the by-product of effort, of habit. And if our effort does not produce those tangible markers, then so be it. If we are working with our own satisfaction, enjoyment, thrill of discovery, etc., foremost in our hearts, rather than what we hope to prove to ourselves or others, wouldn’t the habit itself be more delightful to cultivate?

This is not news to everyone, this idea of practicing the things you love, that are important to you, for the sake of the practice itself rather than what you can show for it or get out of it. It’s not even news to me, but sometimes we lose our way a little. The world teaches us to be goal-oriented, our professional lives hammer home messages of efficiency, productivity, success. But I’m finding there is little living happening in that way of doing things. There is striving and measuring, but not breath, pleasure, joy, satisfaction.

While I am often resentful of the notion that I should make New Year’s resolutions, I have always found that it is a good time to reflect. But in reality, I’ve been doing so since the solstice. The time frame between solstice and the new year has been, continues to be, a rich one for contemplating what I’m learning, what makes sense, what doesn’t. In the coming year, I want to stretch as if I’m waking up from all that has kept me asleep, and still, and sad. I want to “relax into the pose,” as my very first yoga teacher taught me.

As the new year approaches, I’m going to continue to reflect on what other habits I’d like to cultivate with a heart focused on the habit itself, rather than what it produces, or how efficiently. This coming year, I want to relax: into poses, practice, purpose. To unfold, to deconstruct the beliefs that have led me to approach goals as rigid, structured things measured by success and failure, beliefs that have led me to view myself in the same way, like an origami crane made of glass, something that can be easily broken, instead of something sturdy yet flexible, something that can be unfolded, smoothed out, and remade.

Photo by Mehmet Turgut Kirkgoz on Pexels.com

After my yoga practice, just after dusk, I heard a great horned owl. Across the street, behind a row of brick ranch houses, is a creek and little woodland strip that separates this subdivision from the next. It is the home for a lot of wildlife—deer, opossums, groundhogs, skunks, hawks, and owls, among others. I don’t know that I can ever hear an owl without thinking of some kind of sparkling magic happening just outside my door. I want more of my life to feel that way, infused with the everyday magic of living things being themselves. I want to be part of that, be completely and unselfconsciously myself, making and unmaking myself as needed, as easily as my owl friend hoots in the settling of night over the woods, as soft as moonlight on feathers. I think our habits and practices can lead us there. Don’t you?

Love, Cath

On Voice, Moment, and Movement

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes moments are motion, and our voice guides us through, if we listen.

Spring weather here can be a strange mix, with warm sun shining down while a frigid wind blows. Moment by moment you are alternately completely comfortable, basking in the sun that soaks into your skin, and then suddenly freezing and wishing you had a hat and gloves. This weekend my emotions played out similarly.

With my son home for a visit, relieving the solitude of my day-to-day life, I alternately felt happy, comfortable, and relaxed, and then suddenly sad and anxious, as if I existed in the moment and the ones just before and just after all at the same time.

In the course of running some errands, we stopped at the pottery studio where I take my class. I picked up a couple of glazed pieces that hadn’t turned out as I’d hoped, then we headed to the nearby gardening center. As we wandered the greenhouses, my emotions were all ebb and flow. There were layers washing over one another: the disappointment over my pottery was softened by plans for how I could improve next time; the excitement over what plants I might buy to spruce up the yard wilted as I worried about costs; but mostly, the joy at having my son home and spending time together was being washed over at the edges with the sadness of knowing we only had a short time together, and with the ache of wishing my daughter could have been with us too.

People say, live in the moment. In that moment, I was giving myself the same instruction. Do not focus on disappointment or sadness; be here with your son and the beautiful plants the smell of hyacinth and this adorable cat who wandered up to greet you. It isn’t as if I ignored joy and dwelled only in the darker thoughts. But sometimes, you have to hold it all at the same time. Sometimes the moment pushes and pulls you as though you are standing chest deep in a big lake and the waves make stillness impossible.

In navigating the movement of the moment, I often feel as though I’m straining to hear a voice over the distraction of ambient sound. I am trying to coax this voice to greater volume. The voice of instinct, of guidance, can be so quiet in me sometimes, but I have begun to understand why.

In my writer’s workshop, we’ve been talking about voice, and the way any novel opening can work if the voice is effective. When I’m writing a novel it takes a while to find that voice. Until recently, I hadn’t realized that the issue of voice in my writing and the strong clear voice of instinct that I have been listening for within me were one and the same.

There are many reasons why it is hard to hear and trust that voice within us, nudging us toward good things, warning us away from trouble. I think it can be difficult to hear your own voice if ever you were told that you were too sensitive or too needy. In response, you might have found yourself voicing feelings and needs less frequently and more quietly. You began to observe, trying to determine what emotions are allowed to be expressed, and when, and by whom. Over time, the weight of what you haven’t expressed makes you empathic. You are in-tune to the deep feeling of others because it is so heavy in you. You might have become a servant to other people’s emotions, knowing how it feels to have things unattended to. Sadly, in this way, we teach ourselves to listen more closely to others than we do to ourselves.

Well-meaning people tried to protect you from a mean world but didn’t understand that your openness and sensitivity were strengths, not liabilities. You didn’t need a thicker skin, you needed understanding, maybe some tools to help you cope. Later, less well-meaning people were able to spot your vulnerability, told you to trust them and not yourself, and that was easy to do, because your own voice had grown so quiet.

This voice is how we navigate everything, so when it is quiet, we are filled with self-doubt. And even when we train ourselves to listen for it again, it is easy to discount it.

I’ve recently tried to start running again, and I’m still incorporating a lot of walking into my running because in the past I’ve made the mistake of trying to ramp up too quickly, and I get injured, and then I can’t run at all for a while. I used to think that I “failed” at a run if I needed to stop at walk. The mindset I’m trying to cultivate now is that a successful run is the one I’ve begun. It is the one in which I listen to my body and walk when I need to.

I used to think that I failed if a story got rejected, if I never heard back from an agent, if the guy from the dating app who was messaging me disappeared. But I’m realizing now that every time I begin again, I succeed. Every time I listen to my instincts and chose hope, resilience, and perseverance, it matters. Of course, we need to rest, to pause and listen to that voice within us, to keep recalibrating our efforts to our purpose.

Do we ever get it right, the balance between when to push ourselves and when to pull back? Or does getting it “right” mean that we cultivate the awareness that balance is achieved through this movement? Sometimes it seems that balance is more about living in midst of that ebb and flow, the push and pull, than it is about a finding that briefest moment of stillness somewhere in the middle of it all. My comfort zone is in that middle space, and I’d love to learn how to expand it, but so much of life happens in the waves pushing and pulling me away from it.

Whether it is learning how to exist in a moment that is filled with the fluidity of past, present, and future all at once, or existing in the process of working through “failure” toward what we value and what we want, being able to accept the movement of the moment, of all that is pushing us and pulling us as we try to keep our footing, relies on us hearing our own voice and letting it guide us. This is our work.

I have learned that I only experience peace in the midst of all these processes when I am able to hold it all at once, when I can embrace a moment and the movement around it. It is the cat in the warm greenhouse, and the cold wind, and the peppering of disappointment and worry, and the scent of hyacinth, and my son with me now, and his imminent leaving, and missing my daughter, and the sunny joy of love, and all of it all at once.

I hope you find peace in the process and can always hear your voice.

Love, Cath

On Truces and Getting Back to True

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes life feels like a strange kind of algebra.

“Truce?” I say. I say this to myself one morning as I fill the kettle. Moments before, I had been staring into the bathroom mirror, questioning my decision to let my hair do as it likes, which is grow unruly streaks of silver. I also tried out different expressions, ones that tried to let my face look more like I remember. Big smile. No smile. Head tilted this way, that way. I gave up, made the coffee, begged myself for some peace.

I am knocking around in this unfamiliar place, in this almost-fifty-one year-old structure, which houses a self that often feels like it doesn’t belong to these bones. But I realized that morning, as I waved my white flag, that this was about more than physical aging. I was doing calculations, I was adding up what could be counted as victories in recent years, subtracting the things that feel like failures, taking into account the variables.

There is the feeling I had in my algebra class long ago. I’d done the torturous calculations and felt uncertain but hopeful about my answer, and then checked the back of the book and realized that no, my answer wasn’t right after all. “I hate this,” I’d say. I even had the moxie to say it to my algebra teacher once. He was encouraging me to keep pursuing advanced mathematics courses, in high school, and later, in college. “No, you don’t,” he told me. “You can’t be this good at something and hate it.” It didn’t make sense to me. I was getting an A in the class, but it didn’t feel as if I was good at it. I was good at my English classes, and I knew I was good, because not only was I getting an A, but those classes were easy for me. And even when they weren’t easy, the hard work felt . . . right. I somehow knew I had the tools I needed to succeed. But algebra, physics, geometry, trigonometry – these were all different. I couldn’t be good at something that remained confusing even when the correct answer was achieved.

So, when I look at my life now, approaching another birthday, single again, physical appearance shifting, still reaching toward goals that aren’t being achieved at the pace I’d hoped, I feel at times that I’m at war with myself. There is a new clarity here, now, in writing that sentence, in voicing it aloud. Often, it feels as though I must be doing it incorrectly. Living. Aging. Being. Working. Right answers are supposed to feel certain, true. And even if you must work hard to get them, that work is supposed to make sense. When it doesn’t, everything feels like algebra.

I wonder sometimes if I should write such things down and share them. But I have to believe, if we are being honest with ourselves, that everyone feels like this at various points in their life. And if we can be honest with ourselves, then we can be honest with each other, which allows us to communicate with one another in the same language. We can connect more truly and deeply with one another. And why else are we bumping around here on this rock floating in space, if not to try and understand each other?

Often, for me, when one element of my life has been thrown askew, everything seems off. I recently purchased a new bike and had been reading about the differences between disc brakes and rim brakes. I came across the phrase, “out of true.” As in, what happens with the braking when the wheel is out of true. The recent ending of my relationship surely has thrown my heart out of true, and I’m feeling the need to fine-tune the way I look at my whole self.

One thing that has helped this process has been reconnecting myself to a writing community, via a workshop I’ve recently become a part of. We met for the first time, over Zoom, and afterward, though we haven’t even shared any writing yet, I breathed deeply for the first time in weeks. I had a tremendous sense of relief that something was making sense once again. And lots of other feelings began to settle down. It is as if writing – and not only me writing alone in this room, but the act of cultivating my writing and my writing life and my writing friendships – is one of the tools I can use to fine tune everything that feels out of true.

As I’ve written in previous posts, writing is the surest, truest path for me to get back to me. We all have our own paths. What are yours? Do you think about them? What do you do, when you feel out of true?

Writing though, as magic as it is, isn’t a panacea. This feeling of being at war with myself calms when I’m exploring and discovering and creating with my writing, or when I’m focused on other things like gardening, but the work of peace-making with myself is complex. Writing can help me work through what needs to be considered and evaluated and re-conceptualized, but I suspect the process will be long, gradual, painful, and largely algebraic. It is a consideration of variables, of working with unknown values, of getting it wrong and then starting again. I have just realized, in writing that sentence, that writing involves the same things: variables, unknown values, failures, new attempts. Maybe this is how the war ends. Maybe reconciliation with self is simply the realization that things are as they are, that they take the work and the time and the patience and the love that they do. That realities don’t change. Whether I’m in algebra or English class, the problems are quite similar, and hard work is hard.

Maybe the trick is knowing which perspectives to shift into depending on what is going on in our lives at any particular time, just the way we shift gears to adapt to changes in the terrain beneath our wheels.

Here’s to getting back to true.

Love, Cath

On Want, Work, and Growth

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes we will try many ways of looking before we can see.

Sometimes when we want something very badly, we will look at it from every angle, multiple times, even creating angles that are not there. Hope can do that – create prisms out of thin air. Shiny things that distract our minds and hearts from difficult truths. But at some point, the blinding brightness of the light is muted by a cloud – of anger, of fear, of sadness – and we are able to see things with a new clarity, and then, to move in the direction we need to go.

I told my sister recently that I’ve been gardening as if my life depended on it, and I wondered if it really did, in a way. Not the fact of my life itself, but the way I want it to unfold. I told her that when there is so much to do, you can hardly even tell I’ve done anything. A lot of the hard work we do can be like that. We wonder and worry about how our efforts will be perceived, though we know how we’ve endeavored.

When we say we want something “very badly” we mean this: we want it very much. Sometimes we are told that what we want is a bad thing to want. It is silly, it is pointless, it is too much, it is ill-defined, you won’t get it, the world doesn’t work that way, who do you think you are, to want such a thing? No one gets what they want. As if wanting the right thing for ourselves and our future is somehow the wrong thing to do. I suppose sometimes it is. I suppose, in some philosophies, the teaching is to eliminate wants, the way some people eliminate carbs. They are bad for us. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe we are all wired differently. Sometimes we simply must respect the differences.

We offer trellises to vines, thinking of future growth. There is planting and wanting and planning everywhere. There is growth in new directions. We are many things at once: the vine, the trellis, and the gardener who plants the vine and places the trellis. We are who we’ve been and who we want to be, as much as we are who we are in this moment. Multitudes, always.

My gardening has involved creating beds and pathways out of an overgrown, weedy, neglected area behind my garage. It was long abandoned when I arrived in this place, about a year ago, and for many reasons, I was not able to make it a top priority. Now, with more time available and some fraught and frenetic energy on hand, I got to it. Digging, planting, creating. It isn’t finished. Like everything good, it is a work-in-progress, something to always tend.

We need the work and the work needs us.

I planted a little baby of an Eastern white pine. I’d been longing to plant a pine tree for a while. I researched them. Realized many of the specimens I thought were pine trees were really spruces. Things often reveal themselves to be something other than what you thought they were.

I looked for trees months ago, but it was too early and none of the gardening or landscape stores had them yet. Then I looked too late, I thought, because I still was not finding what I was looking for. But yesterday, I found the white pine. I greeted this creature, as if knowing it already. There you are, hiding here in the back at this store I never come to. So, there’s hope I guess, buried in gardening metaphors, about timing and finding, maybe. Maybe not. It’s hard to see clearly sometimes. Remember?

My current state of mind is work- and growth-focused. Writing and gardening. Dig, prune. Wait for rain. Be patient. Blossom? Maybe. Sometimes it works out that way.

Love, Cath

On Dreams, and the Shape of Things

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes the true shape of our dreams is not yet known.

Recently, I was asked to take a self-assessment for a professional development workshop. The questions were different than other personality assessments I’ve taken in the past, but the results were similar. Familiar descriptors floated to the surface: introspective, intuitive, creative, nurturing, etc. And I thought, I’ve known all this since before I had words to name these characteristics.

Some things have never been a mystery, not to me, about me.

The mystery lies elsewhere, as our known selves try to find ways to acclimate to the different environments in which they find themselves – to different homes, neighborhoods, jobs, relationships. All those always characteristics adapt into various ways of being, and we come to believe that those behaviors, those ways of expressing ourselves, are the same thing as self. But BEing and ways of being are distinct. At times, they are a close mirror of each other, and it feels as if everything is falling into its place. Then, we find a way to be in our current existence in a manner that is in near-perfect harmony with the self we have always known.

Some mornings, when it is quite early and I want to listen to the quiet in my brain, I warm up what is left of yesterday’s coffee and sit in the half-light of the living room. When there isn’t much coffee left, I add a generous pour of oat milk. It reminds me of the coffee that my mother permitted me to have as child. More milk than coffee, with a little sugar, it is not grownup coffee, and it lets my thoughts be childlike in their wanderings, without a need for order or progress. I remember that younger me having a distinct awareness of a blurriness of self, as if I knew that my consciousness resided in this body and in this existence, but could tell itself apart. I remember a particular moment, sitting in the backseat of my parents’ car, looking out the window at the trees blurring past in the sunlight, telling myself I am me, I am me. I remember discomfort, as if it took some effort to hold within me an understanding of both unity and fracture. The depth of my love for this little thinker, my desire to protect her and that inner world, has never dissipated. When I say that my writing stems from a desire for connection, I do not mean only with others. I mean with myself, including that little girl contemplating matters for which she had no name.

Sometimes, when I’m mulling a tough problem and stumbling up against the self questions that cartwheel in front of me these days, I think of what the people who have known me the longest would say, and then I think of what the people who have only known me since my divorce would say. They are often very different things, which is unsurprising, but which does not help when I’m seeking the through-line. I sense instinctively that there is a truth that I can uncover, as if there is a way in which everything aligns.

We are told to be true to ourselves, but do we know what that means?

When I look at my childhood self I wonder if she is an accurate gauge by which to consider my own current authenticity. Does that put too much pressure on the past, on fallible memory, on a self that, because she is comprised of memories, is more myth than truth?

Our lives are fragmented. We move in between worlds, perpetually navigating different situations and environments and recalibrating ourselves as needed. It is easy to feel as though our understanding of self gets lost along the way. We too quickly become who we are seen as, rather than who we’ve always been.

Recently I have looked at my old watercolor paintings with a fresh eye. I’ve hung up some of my first attempts at apples, completed during a class at a community college when my daughter was a baby, and have judged them far less harshly than I once did. I’m not saying they are good. I’m saying that when I look at them, I feel a connection to the experience of being an anonymous and aspiring artist in a classroom full of unknown people. I barely remember the professor, and I certainly don’t remember any classmates. But I recall the feeling of being there and trying. And I see all my curiosity and earnestness in those paintings.

And curiosity and earnestness feel like links to the little girl in the back of the car contemplating her existence.

I think of how many times those words, curiosity and earnestness, have made an appearance in previous blogs. Those concepts catch with me, like the little burrs that stick to your socks when you hike through a field. I think, this is how I want to be. These qualities underpin one of the refrains that chorused through our household when my children were growing up: try your best. Among other things, it is about being open to learning, and being willing to work hard.

Perhaps this comes with a little too much pressure, pressure that I put that on myself. Often, I’m frustrated when the results do not seem to match the effort. I wonder – was that my best? Did I work hard enough? Did I not learn well? I am trying to be more process-oriented, and less results-oriented, but it is not an easy shift, and perhaps, it is not a necessary one. Perhaps working toward a specific result – a better apple, a published story – is a good and motivating thing for me, and maybe all I need to work on is not being overly discouraged by imperfect watercolor fruit and rejected fiction.

However, I wonder if all goals or dreams are well-served by this approach. Maybe some things won’t look the way we always wanted them to, and maybe that’s a wonderful thing. Pursuing a goal that we are only looking at from one angle may result in us giving up on the goal instead of swapping one perspective for another. Some dreams are more complex than we realize and have many facets; maybe when we focus on a singular component, we can’t truly understand the value of the whole.

There was a book I used to read to my children: The Important Book, by Margaret Wise Brown. Here’s an example of the way this book works:

“The important thing about an apple is that it is round. It is red. You bite it, and it is white inside, and the juice splashes in your face, and it tastes like an apple, and it falls off a tree. But the important thing about an apple is that it is round.”

Sometimes we need to clarify for ourselves what the important part about a particular goal or dream truly is. Possibly, and without knowing it, we do harm to our ability to achieve the dream because instead of focusing on the important part we are expending energy on something we mistakenly believe is the important part. Sometimes, we don’t want precisely what we think we want. When we try to know our own hearts, we have to look well beneath the surface. Our true dreams are often obscured, layered over by years of doubt, history, pain – our own, and that of other people, who, though well-meaning, might weigh in on how our own dreams should look and feel to us. It is no wonder we are often plagued by thoughts of, and fears about, loss and lost-ness. Others might try and tell us what should be important to us, and that can nudge us off course. Do you think the most important thing about an apple is that it is round? I do not. But who am I to say what should be important to someone else?

There is no getting around the fact that the process of making our own hearts known to us takes time, and careful examination. This is true for any dream, wish, or goal that we have for ourselves, whether it is concerned with our personal relationships, or our pursuit of our art, or our work, or something else entirely. I do not know the way to reveal that which I cannot yet see, though I’m certain that I must keep exploring my heart and all its sedimentary layers. This discovery process will involve more ambiguity than I am comfortable with, and that is a reality I reckon with daily.

As an example of all this, I can give you a peek into one of my dreams. My writing dream has always involved publication. Yet, I am beginning to explore the idea that instead of this being the most important facet of this dream, it is but one part of a writing life, which is perhaps more what I’m truly after. In truth, I’m not exactly sure what that means, nor am I certain of the path I need to take to get there. For now, I’m focusing more on what I need to say, and how best to say it. In the coming months, I will be immersing myself in a couple of workshop experiences with other writers, led by artists and mentors I trust. The time feels right for this approach, though the work will be challenging.

This is but one of the dreams I’m searching out the true shape of. Everyone has some. We carry pockets full of stones gathered from lakebeds and we don’t know why. We wish for the unknown to reveal itself. We throw pennies into fountains, wishing, wishing.

On the night of the lunar eclipse, I dreamed I was mending an unknown world with pink thread.

Dream on, friends.

Love, Cath

On Throat-Clearing, Self, and Voice

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes we can almost find the melody.

I put a lot of effort into trying to make sense of things that don’t. In my writing, it feels like the practice of untangling knots that can’t be untied, though each story takes a fresh try at undoing. My brain attacks most present worries in the same way.

When I sit still, I sometimes feel both restless and exhausted. This state is a product of many things – pandemic year, new and old anxieties, writing frustrations, aging realities, leaving and moving and settling in.

In my writing, I begin to wonder about voice – what manner of expressing myself is unique to me, my fingerprint of creative expression. And voice, as in, mine, in this world. Lately I have revisited half-begun stories and can’t take them anywhere. I think of a top spinning at the end of its movement, the wobbly tilt and hobble where I find my creative practice these days. Tops get spun again; I don’t worry that I’m done, but wonder where to go from here, and how.

In a way, it feels as though this year of largely staying in place has been one of incubation. During this time, I focused on trying to make my new house feel like mine. I thought a lot about home. I also began to reckon more consciously and deliberately with the notion of aging. I periodically take photos of myself that I show to no one to document the progress of the incoming greys, and to acclimatize myself to the changing terrain of my face. We have kept ourselves as hidden as possible from the hidden virus, and I have grown tired of hiding myself from myself. But I often don’t recognize me.

I heard somewhere recently that resilience is never losing your enthusiasm in the face of failure. This made me feel angry and a bit deflated, because I want to think of myself as resilient, but I always feel enthusiasm flag when faced with failure. I would counter that resiliency is never losing hope in the face of failure. You can feel defeated, but at the same time you keep fighting for what’s important to you. Enthusiasm feels like a bit too much pressure sometimes. Then again, it is possible that I am not actually resilient. But I am good at hope.

As I’ve noted before in this space, Clarice Lipsector wrote “It is also possible that even then the theme of my existence was irrational hope.” We all have themes, not only as artists but as humans, patterns we observe in our lives, values we attempt to adhere to, wishes we twirl around our hearts. Maybe none of us could extricate ourselves from the themes of our existence if we tried. Some things are as they are. I will find love stories everywhere. I will write them. I will be hopeful about everything and everyone I love. I wonder if all hope is irrational.

Everything I have ever written has turned into a love story. Love, loss, seeking, finding – these are the structural frameworks of most everything I compose. I wonder sometimes, when I feel defeated, and the rejections land solemnly in my in-box, if all I can build are dollhouses, while better writers are busy building cities, universes. But then I think that maybe the world needs dollhouses too. We all need different entry points into the art we interact with. Maybe someone is just waiting for the right-sized door. Maybe it’s all that Alice in Wonderland game of feeling too big or too small to get to where we want to go. But eventually, we find a way to connect.

The themes we don’t stray from are, in a way, one path toward maintaining our connection with ourselves. I have a novel manuscript that has undergone more permutations than I care to number. I have left it unsubmitted for a long time and had nearly decided to abandon all hope (and enthusiasm). But, I have dedicated myself to one more overhaul, and I’m now working with a trusted writer who is helping me take a fresh look at it. I feel hopeful once again, but daunted. Possibly I am not now, nor ever was, up to the task of doing what so many novelists do so well, which is, to do everything well – plot, character, pace, language, theme, subtext, and so on. Everything must be precisely fine-tuned for the work to sing. Currently there is a lack of harmony, there is a lot of out-of-tune warbling, and a fair amount of throat clearing. Sometimes I think the melody’s there though.

I listen for melody too in the world outside my door, but I’m finding it clunky to emerge from this pandemic isolation, as we receive our vaccinations and make plans once again. I see other vaccinated folk pursuing “normalcy” as if they hear a tune and feel compelled to follow it. I can almost hear it. And there are people I’m so looking forward to spending non-masked time with. I can’t wait to spend more than a few odd hours with my daughter, and to see her whole wonderful face the whole time. Yet, in general, I feel both excited and enormously anxious about jumping back into the world at large. Maybe I’m feeling as though I’m still incubating. As with many things, we grow when we learn to be empathetic with regard to the timetables of the people around us.

When I think of empathy and growth, I think of the way growth often doesn’t always look like growth – it looks like incubation, it looks like cocooned pupae. And when I think of empathy, I remember that I often forget to have it for myself.

This weekend I did a little hiking. It felt good to be in the woods. My son took a picture of me at my request and I’ve looked at it many times since, trying to see what I wanted to see there. A recognizable person. She seemed familiar, me and not-me at the same time, but the setting seemed right and that helped. I don’t know why it feels so difficult so often to know and be at peace with myself. Maybe this year too much happened and too much didn’t happen, and it changed me more than I am consciously aware. Maybe the image in the photo is a reflection of reality and it is my ability to see it truly that has been altered by time and experience. Perhaps how we see changes more than what we see, and how we hear melodies differently from one another explains so many things. This is all the more reason for us to cultivate empathy toward one another and to build our reserves of resiliency and irrational hope, as we attempt to both listen and sing in this world.

Love, Cath

On Art, Home, and Haziness

By Catherine DiMercurio

A friend and I recently were writing to one another about why we write. That conversation yielded for me an understanding that why is a question awkwardly affixed to the relationship I have with writing, which is more akin to the relationship I have with my skin than anything else. In a broad sense, it is something I have, something I need, something that protects me.

On a practical level, yes, writing is also something I do. Sometimes it is an act of artistic creation and sometimes it is an involuntary function that happens automatically and silently, the way my brain tells my lungs to breathe. Things are unfolding all the time in my mind and I wish I could somehow capture more of it. Sometimes writing is my only hope for effectively communicating my heart to the world, (or to the more individual and larger universe of me and you).

Sometimes writing is a job and sometimes it is a wish, but it is always skin.

I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years, weeks, days, minutes, always, trying to pinpoint such facets of my identity throughout the changing circumstances of my life. This intense scrutiny was kickstarted by my divorce, though I had long been focused on issues of identity in my writing, always trying to figure out if we become more of who we are as we age, or less.

As I enter my first spring in this new place, I sat down recently with my coffee and felt myself settling in, to here, to now, to me. And I thought, maybe I’ve been asking the wrong questions about identity and self-awareness. Maybe the most direct route to understanding who am now is this: what makes me feel at home within my own skin, no matter where I am?

The first thing I thought of was the coffee I was drinking, as I sat on my new-ish IKEA sofa in this still-new-to-me home. I then pictured myself at my boyfriend’s place, still new-ish to him. It is a curious thing: you find yourself in a life where none of the places in which you find yourself are ones in which you have much history. So where is home, then, except housed within us, and created anew, sitting next to this person who seems able to keep making space for you, and you for him. You put out the welcome mats for one another, sweeping them off or airing them out if there is ever difficult weather.

It is a marvelous but strange thing to be aware of your own history-making. To contemplate the ways in which home and history are related, but not in the ways you once thought. I recommend keeping an eye out for it, for the art you are making of self, seemingly out of thin air, or from webby gossamer strands, every day.

As I walked around the yard with the dogs one morning, it smelled like summer. Recent rain on thirsty dirt, a damp promise of heat panting in the air. I thought of drinking camping coffee, sitting with the kids in the morning, outside the tent, feeling cozy. The memories collaged in my brain, out of order, but collective. This too is history and home and self. It remains, clean and bright and clear, even in the aftermath of events that left much of the past feeling sooty and smudged.

It may seem strange to utilize list-making and note-taking as paths to self-discovery. Such a process lacks the romance of the quintessential road trip motif. However, sometimes things don’t work that way. It is less a fun, crazy journey and more paying attention and hard work. Mostly, I crave simplicity. I want to create obvious paths to certain self-knowledge, so that I can quickly run toward what I know and like about myself. So I can gallop toward safety, when I’m feeling anxious, or filled with self-doubt, or self-criticism. It is so easy for the negative to overtake us sometimes. We need to have our escape routes planned. Sometimes you have to sit down with yourself and go through the checklist, the way in elementary school we had to ask our parents what the escape plan was if the house were on fire. You have to tell yourself, when dark thoughts begin to suck you in, that there are the paths back to yourself, that you know the way. It is too easy to get lost in the thick haze and smoke of anxiety, depression, fear, or grief.

I feel as though I’m often vacillating between extremes – between being overly candid or completely withdrawn, between whole-hearted enthusiasm and active detachment. I wonder how people find middle ground. I speculate that there is a place thought of as “normal” and most of us hover around the edges, not seeing each other, and the imaginary normal place is teeming with a healthy population of individuals that can communicate with one another with ease and confidence. But in reality, most of us fumble, we hurt and get hurt, we regroup, we take deep breaths and fall silent. We clear our throats, and our eyes, try to speak and see, and be seen once more. Sometimes we manage to get it right, to find a safe, strong hand in the haze, and so we practice the art of holding on to one another.

Love, Cath