Medium Thoughts?

Sometimes I think about my missing cat. Her name is “Chop Suey” and she went missing once I moved from an urban area to an area much less urban than she was used to and with significantly more predators per square kilometer. She was a city Stray when she walked into my apartment, but after she was spayed and we moved closer to the wilderness, she couldn’t be kept inside even if we tried and she lasted 3 weeks at the new “less than urban home” before I never saw her again.

I like to think that she was picked up by some old lady who is keeping her inside and giving her treats and love and a way better life than I gave her. That’s best-case scenario. But realistically, she was probably eaten by coyotes. I’m not dumb. And I’m a realist and I understand that’s just the way life is sometimes. It’s a dangerous world. Whether you’re a cat or a human, or anything capable of sentience, nothing lasts forever, and death is what makes life worth living.

But I think of Chop sometimes. At the end of her worst-case scenario. She was probably scared. She probably felt pain. She probably put up as much fight as she could, but her last few moments alive in this worst-case scenario were probably… just f***ing awful. And I don’t blame myself, but I won’t pretend like it couldn’t have happened because it very well could have and to not acknowledge what very well could have happened feels wrong.

I gave her maybe 5 months of love and affection. Cozy places to sleep, good food, water, playtime, pets and cuddles. We were both domesticating each other in a way. But the moto I would repeat to ensure that she wouldn’t go soft and forget the streets she came from was “Stay feral, stay dumb, stay stinky.” And every time I would say it to her, I would also be saying it to myself. So, I too wouldn't turn soft or forget the humble beginnings that I came from.

She was scared when I took her to the Veterinarian for her spay surgery. I Meowed her “What was I made for?” to help her calm down and she was still pretty scared and handing her off to the doctors and leaving was just a fraction of what a mother goes through with dropping off their kid at school, but... I learned that day even just for a little bit, how hard it is to be a mother.

I wanted her to be strong. I’d play rough with her and let her bite me and scratch me up. I’d sharpen my nails on her scratching post right along side her when she would sharpen her claws. I’d take her outside and kept an eye on her when other cats were around to ensure she could handle herself and know when and where to stand her ground or run. I wanted her to be tough, and strong. Just like me. But I wonder if that’s something a parent can teach their child, while still being a parent.

I sometimes think that I’ll go out the same way she did. Maybe not fighting a bigger animal trying to eat me, but I also wouldn’t put it past me and my life. But maybe it’s my paranoia, maybe it’s my guilt, or maybe it’s just a feeling I’m manifesting… but I am a realist and just like Chop, there is a possibility that my life could end violently. And I’m prepared for it as much as I can be.

But I don’t fear it.

When I think about Chop Suey’s worst-case scenario, of course I feel sad about how awful and scary those last few moments may have been for her. But I can also take solace in the fact that I know she had so many, many more moments of love and comfort and pets and purring and fun and a full belly… I can be happy about her life as a whole and not just sad because of the last few moments of her life in her worst-case scenario. And the same goes for me.

No matter how violent or scary or painful the end of my life may be, I’m going to go out fighting and I’m not going to let the last (possibly awful) moments of my life represent my amazing life as a whole.  I wanted her to grow up and be just like me. But now, I just want to make sure that when I grow up, no matter how I go out... I’m just like her.

Feral, dumb, and stinky.

Trigger warnings for; self-harm, child abuse, and physical violence.

(Early morning thoughts 3AM-ish)

I find it interesting how often I jokingly intimidate to “beat someone up” (for lack of a better phrase). 

Making a joke where I threaten physical violence unto someone really doesn’t seem right when I spell it out like I did just now.

Especially considering the fact that, the threat of physical violence being done to me was a prevalent attribute of my childhood experience.

I am physically capable of beating someone up and inflicting physical pain and harm unto other sentient beings. I know this.

I do not remember doing so, other than the single and stray kicks and punches I have thrown to my peers for the dumb (and still wrong and awful) reasons I did in my very young youth. As well as the accidents that happen in life where we all collide, swing an elbow around too fast, or step on a poor fur baby's tail. 

I also know that I can because I have inflicted physical harm to myself. (Not getting into that in this post.) 

I am probably emotionally capable of inflicting physical harm. And me feeling like I can logically rationalize harming another person in any capacity, (self-defense or with malicious intent) is something I am also very worried about in regard to myself.

Logically, I understand beating someone up is illegal and if I do so, I will be and should be fully subject to prosecution and lawfully judged as well as punished if a judge or jury deems it so.

Because inflicting and threatening physical harm to someone doesn’t seem like a good thing. In a perfect world, humans do not need to cause harm to other beings or threaten them with violence.

I know this world isn’t perfect. I know people are not perfect.

I know I am not perfect.

And I am really beginning to analyze and evaluate why I do what I do. How my actions relate to my motivations both in the moment and with my motivations and goals in life and for living. And how my actions may be perceived by others.

And what this all has to do with how I feel about myself.

Hmm…

I’ll wrap this thought up with this; The memoir covering the first 25 years of my life (still in development) is titled “I Break My Own Bones” because I wholeheartedly believe that no one has or will be able to hurt me more than I can hurt myself. And I believe that idea may be alluding to the idea that I cannot hurt anyone else more than I can hurt myself. But I’ll work on that figuring that thought out.

Do your best y’all to be kind to each other and yourself. And I’ll do the same.

And if I have ever hurt you or you have felt threatened by me in any way... jokingly, accidentally, or otherwise... I genuinely apologize for perpetuating the cycles of violence I vow to stop, and heal, within myself and the world. 

Take care, Y’all. ~Enjoy 

I sometimes worry that with all the years I had to compromise feeling my emotions at the cost of “surviving” whatever ordeal I was going through, I will feel alone and never understood.

My Childhood, basic training and the boat, my marriage. Age 10, after grandpa passed, when I convinced myself that crying and missing someone did nothing and that I would either see them again or never again. When at age 19 I framed me joining the military as me "killing my old self" that I worked so hard to create a life for that I could be content with. With feeling so responsible for my Ex that I just had to be in my marriage and sacrifice who I was to just be what my Ex wanted me to be.

I proudly consider myself “broken” because it is the past tense of “broke”. When I learned that muscle growth is simply the tearing of muscle fibers growing back stronger after the abuse. And that calluses are the body hardening to excess friction on parts of the skin. After I learned that the forest fires of my home that I love can cause such devastation, but can bring new life stronger than it was before. After I learned in my “Adult Survivors of Child Abuse” support group about Kintsugi(*1) and how putting gold in the glue that mends the cracks of a broken pottery piece exemplifies the cracks and shows the beauty of breaking and healing. I developed a theme that all of the struggles I was going through could make me stronger if I just got through it. Which inadvertently developed a subconscious idea that the more I could break, the stronger I could be.

Struggle was something I realized I could not avoid in life and so I accepted it when it came and maybe almost embraced it. I’ve seen people my whole life worry and suffer just trying to avoid struggle and suffering and wonder why they “couldn’t just get a break”. Upon hearing that question, I would go through my entire life philosophy and experiences in a single second and respond, cold and callused, with a lie… “I don’t know”.

I worried this cold, callused, and broken person I was would never be able to be a part of society. I had my role, sure. When a decision had to be made that challenged human morality and evoked complex emotions, I could make a logical call and say what no one wanted to admit. I could get things done no one else around me emotionally could because I had already emotionally detached. I had learned to be emotionally detached my whole life in those situations. “Someone has to make these calls” I would tell myself and I knew the cost of making them. The cost was breaking oneself. So, if I, as someone already broken, strong and callused, could pay this cost and break more, I would be happy to, so the good, the less broken among me, didn’t have to.

But fulfilling a role in society can feel different than being a part of it.

Through everything I went through, the most impactful struggle I’ve went through was truly and fully choosing to love myself. No matter what I would do, or who I would become, I had to understand why I made the choices I made, listen to myself and process my feelings and forgive myself for any and all mistakes and shortcomings. Embrace what made me who I was, get my body to the next day, and praise myself for living life according to what I felt was right. Being the example I wanted to follow. And I learned to love how broken and strong and beautiful I had become in body, mind, and spirit. But as I developed this respect for my “embrace of broking” lifestyle, it became increasingly harder to empathize with so many others. 

I have learned to understand that everyone is on their own journey and I take incredible fascination of the multitude of ways life can be lived, especially by humans. The more different that my own way of life someone lived, the more I could learn, seek to understand, and respect how a person has lived their life to be who they are. But there really is no life without struggle and I have taken my approach to accepting, utilizing, and essentially choosing my struggles in a very matter of fact way. 

There is no “one way” or “right way” to live life, but I knew who I was and self-love can very easily teeter to egotism and egocentrism. As much as I understood and respected the infinite ways we learn to live life, I also had to keep a firm grasp on my own ways and beliefs, lest I come apart at all of the cracks I worked so hard to repair. How could I love and respect others who didn’t live like me without compromising loving and respecting myself. 

I feel very alone and not understood sometimes, but quite honestly, I am glad the people I love haven’t gone through the struggles I have to have breaking and healing such an integral part of their life’s engine. I’ve come to accept that people may never fully understand why I live the way I live, but that makes it all the more impactful when people who may never fully understand my way of life, love me for living it. Not just the “end-product” person I am, but the person I am, intertwined in my process of breaking.  

So what have I learned through it all? Be who I am. And when I find people who love me for Who I am, share with them the story of How I became the person that they love. It takes time and a lot of luck finding these people. But thankfully, I have spent such a long time not feeling like I could show the world who I am, that once I began to wear my heart on my sleeves and proudly display the chips, cracks, and gold on my shoulders, people have responded so well to me being who I am. And to hold anything back would be a dis-service to them and myself, so I won’t live any other way. It is so validating for people to take inspiration and praise me for my strength as symbolized by my cracks, but as people have gotten closer and really shared with me their perspectives on my life and their own ways of living, I have come to realize there is an even more important reason for me to live the way I choose to live.

I choose to show my cracks, filled with gold, not as a sign of how strong I am, but as a symbol of how beautiful life is. My cracks don’t just represent me and my strength, but they represent everyone who can love a broken life because I chose to love my own. The struggle, the breaking, the repair, and the broken life that keeps on living and shining with the gold only earned through healing. 

I am broken and beautiful. Take care. ~Enjoy

(*1) "Kintsugi" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi#cite_note-1

Reading doesn't take me anywhere I want to go. Not like it used to. I fell in love with reading from the stories of the Magic Tree House series by Mary Pope Osborne. Where in every story, Jack and Annie would point to a picture in a book and say "I wish we could go there" and they would be there in the story. Because it's just like I've always heard that "Reading can take you to anywhere you want to go". 

As a librarian, if amazes some people when I tell them that "I don't read very much". I love historical research and non-fiction, but I have the hardest time reading a novel. No matter the Genre, no matter the author, I have... the Hardest, time just sitting and enjoying a story with characters and settings. Plots and conflict. Themes and lessons. And I think just now, as I scratched my way through another chapter of a book, I am REALLY.. trying so hard to read...

 I may have figured out why. 

I am too consumed with my own story to be invested in someone else's that they wrote down. I've been living a story 28 years in the making, and I never gave myself the option to put it down and stopped reading it. I've had... so many characters and settings. I've lived through so many plots and conflicts. And I've learned so many Themes and lessons. And it has been.. The Hardest story I've never read because I've been living it continuously 1 second at a time for my entire life.

 I can't read about a character going through their story because all I think about when I follow one along is my own story. When one is angry that someone stole their life savings, I don't feel their anger, I feel mine everytime I lost something I cherished. When one is sad, I don't feel their sadness over not making the cheer team, I feel my own from every time I felt like I failed something. When one goes to a fantastical place, I don't picture it as the author describes it, I visit my own settings, and I go back to the times in my life when I was there. I've never been to space, but I've stood on the edge of a seemingly endless expanse. With wonder, fear, and the feelings of loneliness and isolation with nothing to stare into, but the abyss and yourself. I've never been in a mansion, but I've been in some beautiful homes of people I've known once before and even though they live just a short bus ride away, I may never visit those old comfy couches or view those million-dollar views ever again. I've never had to pretend to be in love for a week while hating my fiancé, (but secretly still loving them? Maybe? I don't know... I'm really struggling to get through this book...) to keep up appearances for a friend's wedding, but I've lied to people I care about. I've pretended everything was okay with my family or my exes. I've acted like everything was okay for so much of my life when it very much wasn't. So no, I don't read much because I am already to consumed and to haunted with my own stories, and characters, and themes, and scars, and lessons and reading about someone else's just holds up a broken, cracked and shattered mirror to my own that I can't look away from.

 Reading doesn't take me "anywhere I want to go". I know exactly where reading takes me and it's to places within myself that maybe I don't want to go to in that moment or maybe ever. 

(Shout out to authors real quick because that's what makes a story good, right? Taking real life and all of the feelings and lessons and people and places and putting them down on paper in a way that (hopefully) makes sense to someone.)

So.... what really takes me "anywhere I want to go"?

Writing. Because when I write... I actually get to go somewhere different than my own life as I remember it. I get to go into my own story. I get to go back to my past and revisit... my characters and settings. My Plots and conflicts. My Themes and lessons. And when I go back, I don't stay there with them, trapped and forced to look at them through the lends of some other author. But only as long as I write them down. Because once I get them out, once I write down my story and turn it into words on a page, it doesn't just become my story anymore. I get to stare at words on a screen or paper that were once thoughts, memories, life, and I command them to take the form of exactly what I choose them to be. Once I write something down. it doesn't control me because I control it. Even if no one reads it, me writing it down creates a new place for my life to live other than within me. A place I can now forget forever or go back and visit whenever I choose to read something I wrote. 

I am so honest when I write. More often than not writing about something is sometimes the first time when I am actually honest with myself about something I didn't even realize I was lying to myself about.  

Sometimes I put more life into my writing than I put into me living. 

So... I think I still stand by my sentiment that "reading does not take me anywhere I want to go". But tonight, I think I figured out that for me, at least for now, it's writing.

"Writing can take you anywhere you want to go"

T.C. ~E

Libraries are like the seas.

Each book, a unique wave of stories.

Made up of the ones before and inspiring the composition and shape of the ones that follow. 

Influenced by a unique blend of forces, 

the moon, 

the wind, 

the creatures in boats surviving on top,

and creatures in their element thriving below. 

Some stories sink deep beneath the waves.

Lost treasures and secrets of our histories.

Some discovered long after their creators are gone. 

And others alive only through legends.

Discovered by the seafaring authors that search for their "White Whales" 

and fact finders that dive for the truth of the depths. 

Some waters polluted, some untouched.

But all connected.

Through language. Through expression. 

Through love.

Love of writing, exploring, and adventure.

Through life.

And hope.

Hope for the future that our stories will be sailed upon again and ever moving, ever living, ever flowing. 

Thrashing ships in storms and offering peace in stillness.

To escape, to chase, 

to test one's might, and in search of the light,

between day.

~

and night.

I have always wanted my life-story to end on the seas. 

And after spending so much of my time in libraries,

 I have no doubt it will. 

*Smile*

Be it the swells or the shelves.

It's written in the stars. 

Fur,

You keep me warm, you keep me dry, you keep me covered, you keep me trapped. You break the wind. You block the wind. I reach out to feel it on the few parts of me you don’t cover. A soft gentle touch on thick my rough hands. What I touch to the earth and plants to feel my surroundings, the only way I can feel things besides my feet. Because you, my fur, keep me apart. You keep me alive, but you keep me from living. You keep me to alive. You keep me to covered, you keep me to sheltered. Could you keep me alive just a little bit less so that I can feel life, (and maybe death), just a little bit more?

 You are rooted deep in me like the great trees that root deep in the ground. I can’t pull you out like I can’t pull out the trees. Not without destroying the earth it sits upon. Not without destroying myself. Do you fall off in your own time like the trees fall down in their own time? The forest ground grows and flourishes from the new light pouring in that the great trees once covered for many seasons and moons. But Fur, you are much too thick to let any light flourish to the life beneath you. Every time the forest burns, it always comes back, not because of the old trees that survive, but because of the new trees that grow. The life that comes up from the life that falls down. If you can never fall do you never grow back?

Thank you fur. You keep me dry. You keep me warm. You keep me covered. You keep me trapped. You are the reason I have lived in this world and lived this life for so long and so well. I wonder more and more, about the life I may never live and the world I may never see. The life you keep me from living by keeping me alive in this one.