03.
Thank you for all the love. I miss you too, dear reader. I miss your extending of so much goodwill my direction, my knowing it was sincere because I could feel it in your words. Your gratitude and kindness shaped a beautiful pink bubble you held me inside, helping me continue to attract blessings thanks to those I offered you.
Yes, I’m doing okay, thanks. Unhitched from my weekly horoscope practice, I’m less ungrounded than I feared I’d be. Then again, I’d already begun the work of establishing other self-steadying buoys, based less on outward approval than inward good feeling. I just hadn’t known I’d need those life-rafts so soon, my decision to jump ship having shown up so abruptly, minus any conscious warning.
I pay serious attention to my need for physical exercise almost every day. Being happy in my body is almost more important than flashing you its glow from better angles. Perhaps it’s a factor of age, the wisdom of having cycled through anxieties enough times to realize my mind needs my body in order to calm itself down. I’ve got to move to roll these surges through, remind my pushy brain it lacks control over more things than not, so why exert itself so strenuously? Lend that energy to the body instead, let me burn it on the treadmill, sweat it out my pores, swim until I’m wet and worn enough to lose my lap-count. Shift the rhythm, and the brain is forced to follow.
I read books constantly, fiction, non-fiction, gifts from writers of various styles, temperaments, identity-types. It’s both pure joy and a behavior-modification practice for wrestling the electronics from my hands, for once you start to flip and scroll, and flip and scroll, again, and flip and scroll, again, you blink to find another twenty minutes leaked away on images of people and experiences far too pretty to be true. Books remind me of the fuller power written words assume when chewed on, pondered over privately and quietly, altering perspective, a healthful alternative to all the navel-gazing.
I love my husband, and I love where we live. I love the ever-changing climate in my new locale, a controversial opinion here in Oregon. Hailing from California, I’ve had little visceral experience of the turning-of-seasons until now. We arrived in sweltering heat. Then, seemingly in one day, the enormous birch tree behind our house dropped all its leaves all over the lawn. Almost suddenly thereafter came a long string of short dark wet dreary days. Just when you think you can’t take it anymore, small buds start to appear all around you. They blossom into the brightest colors everywhere you go. The smell in the air changes from season to season, too. I especially notice this because my friend Stephen in SF often asks me what it smells like in Portland today. I search for words to capture scents.
I cannot overemphasize how alien those first few weeks of not writing horoscopes felt, no always-hanging-over task to constantly loiter in my consciousness. Gone was the most obvious evidence I’m not wasting my life—I’m helping people, see?—a quick response to nearly any anxiety of purpose, a self-justifying counterbalance.
While my solid career was built one brick (or horoscope) at a time, an accumulation of repeated deeds, it was taken apart with much much less. A startling farewell. A refusal of further dialogue. A rebellious rebuffing of offers. Within just a few months, you’ve fallen so far off the radar that former students and clients and much-younger peers appear in spots which might’ve been yours, had you still been fresh and ferocious, hungry for it all. But I knew staying put and hanging in, performing another thousand acts to keep myself in the running, would deaden my spirit. I felt it in my bones. A melancholic yearning for what will never come to pass cannot fool me into wishing I’d kept clutching my chances. I’m free, yet wistful.
In between my incarnations, anxiety grows to fill the extra space, its natural impulse to expand into any chasms it finds unless you fill them yourself. I expected that, and I’m here for it. I’m the client now, in twice-weekly therapeutic gut-wrenchers with a man on the other end of the phone witnessing one version of me come to completion while another acts out like an uncertain teen. We do what we do, retrace the steps of how mommy did this and daddy did that, unwind the behaviors into root-causes, cry at the tortures inflicted, and ponder what else is possible. I dive all the way in, as never before. I’m in it for the gold, the recipes for success, to salve the sorrow and cope with the anger, to forgive myself for lurching in needy directions. Sometimes I come right out and ask him to affirm me, to tell me I’m not the worst person ever for feeling like I feel or wanting what I want. I’m thankful he obliges.
Dear reader, I tried to show you my scars, my wounds, and my process. I aimed my confessions at the overlaps we share. But, admittedly, I left out certain specifying facts which might’ve further elucidated my truth. I often felt my omissions made it harder to be seen by you. Could you tell, for instance, I was muddling through a heartbreaking trauma behind the scenes of my writing? Did I imply it loudly enough for you to glean my unspoken pain? Am I allowed to claim that word (“trauma”) as my own, when I know it gets so much worse than anything I’ve experienced? May I now tell you how hard I struggled to keep doing the right thing, at every twist and turn in my traumatic tale, while still dispensing weekly-wisdom words to live by? Who was I to dispense wisdoms? I never tried to act more enlightened than I am.
And would I have deserved your goodwill without my weekly feats, but just for my heart, had I lacked the ambition or mettle to grind out horoscopes all those years? I’m trying to figure that out, as I downshift from astro-character to person. My hunger for achievement, acknowledgment, and admiration was always a silent shadow looming over any generosity in my weekly service efforts. My need to compensate for whispered criticisms about what has been handed to me on a platter was its own voracious counterpoint to what you saw. I had to do this, you see. If I didn’t, the goddesses and gods would judge my indulgence so harshly, I’d lose what I’d been handed. What then?
I want you to see me as more than the astrologer you loved. But you can only see as much as I show you, and I’m afraid of exposing too many details, lest you realize who you thought you loved is actually that too-loud neighbor you hear raging when he drops a jar of pickles or some dude on some app who ghosts if you’re too eager for connection. Like the sentences I spin, my smile is a shield, my meaningful eye-contact a window to the soul of someone who genuinely loves you without wanting you to come any closer. Leave them wanting more: an irresistible seduction, within which to couch the quiet expectation of never being satisfied. Best to keep you far enough away so you’re left to imagine how wonderful it might’ve been to have more of me. Were you to meet this person more intimately, you’d probably be left disappointed or cold. I give you words in desperate fear they’re better than what’s underneath.
the in-between*
© 2020 Barry Perlman