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Now
I had a vivid dream last night. I was in Las Vegas with my family and we did some imagined ski lift / virtual free diving experience. We went individually and when we “landed” in the lobby of the hotel, there was a guy from college who recognized me. Someone I literally haven’t thought of in decades.

He hugged me in a gentle, squishy, don’t-get-too-close-to-me kind of way. But then, from behind, he embraced me in a hug that was pure affection. He contained all of me with all of him. I melted into the warmth of his body and security of his arms with all of my being.

And then I woke up and felt like an asshole about what I never realized I’d done until now.

Then
He was a year older than me in school and we bounced around each other, flirting and laughing, making out occasionally — generally just having very flighty fun.

He had dark hair and the eyes of a twinkling Irish man I could never resist. In my memory, he also had a killer smile. He wasn’t too tall and I liked that I didn’t have to tax my neck to look him in the eyes. He was a manifestation of the guy I had always been attracted to and was certain I would marry. (Spoiler: I married a tall, blonde and handsome.)

He was funny. I remember we laughed all the time. One night in college, he walked me back to my sorority house after a frat party in the wee hours of the evening. He was cold so I gave him my letter sweatshirt and we laughed hysterically at this XL man in a women’s small sweatshirt. I’m pretty sure we made out, sitting side-by-side on the retaining wall of the lawn of my house, but moreover I just remember the joy of laughing with him.

We never dated in school or were even serious about anything. I suspect young Fisher could sense the danger with me in the way a reef rich with fish will clear out before the shark comes into view. The combination of being openly attracted to me and genuinely nice was catastrophic for any boy in my life.

After college, we loosely kept in touch.

I was surprised when he asked me out. I remember he picked me up in his perfectly responsible car. He was dressed perfectly maturely in an ill-fitting white undershirt and sweater cardigan and he perfectly advocated for himself with the server over a pine nut allergy. He was respectful and kind while I was thoroughly repelled by it.

At the time, I thought it was because he was boringly mature. I felt young and wild and free (in actuality, I was young and neither wild nor free.)

The only other time I recall seeing him after college, I was in the disoriented aftermath of the first JJG hurricane and determined to outrun the pain by simply not feeling it.

It was one of the few times I was stupid drunk. Stupid drunk mirrors freedom. In reality, it’s giving zero fucks while using alcohol to numb unwanted feeling.

I walked into the bar he was managing already stupid drunk. I pushed him through serving doors, up against a wall and kissed him. He was clearly conflicted of having the girl he liked finally reciprocate affection but doing it whilst inebriated and at an inappropriate time.

I kissed him. Trying to will away the pain of JJG. Trying to feel something. And then left.

Now
The shame I felt upon waking and realizing that I’m mean and careless with the hearts of good, kind, nice men who just want to love me — well, I felt so ashamed that I immediately Googled Fisher because I wanted to…I don’t know why. Write him a note to atone? Find out that he was successful and I didn’t break him?

I want a do-over. With Fisher. With every boy I’ve liked. With every decision I’ve made. With life in general.

I so desperately want the trauma and I to be heterogeneous. I want to pick out all the parts of myself from the trauma salad. I expect it to be a tumor that can be excised. But in reality, we are one in the same the trauma and me. I supposed I’m at the first stage of trauma grief where I acknowledge that just maybe there is a different path.

All the time invested in reimagining reality will never bear fruit.

There is no finish line. There are no redos with Fisher or JJG or RT3. There is no running away in high school, rewriting my biography before today, erasing the trauma.

In fact, the guilt I feel today over Fisher and the apology I so desperately want to deliver are most definitely the mutated sadness and empathy I feel for the girl on the retaining wall. She so desperately wants the affection offered, but is completely incapable of accepting it because selfish people systematically and cruelly ripped that from her.

Would Fisher and I been a good pairing? I have no idea. I’ve learned enough in therapy that I know that beating myself up for behavior I now perceive as mean and callous is simply going to trap me in the circle of disrepair. Instead of running this loop, I’ll try to put that energy into pulling myself out of its gravity to deviate even slightly to begin spiraling forward.

KTTW would say there’s nothing to atone for and beating myself up will not resolve anything.

So, instead I will sit with these uncomfortable feelings. I will feel the calm of dream-Fisher embracing me. I will feel sad for the younger me unable to accept the affection of a nice boy. And while I’m skeptical, I will *try* to tell myself it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t my fault. I don’t believe it, but I am willing sit with the discomfort of “what if it wasn’t my fault?”

Regardless, for the first time, probably ever, I’ve accessed a new way forward in my brain that doesn’t involve hurting myself.

Onward.

This doesn’t right the wrongs or fix the disparities. It’s not even “a start.” It’s simply a man being held accountable for the murder of another man.

It’s not a first step. It’s long overdue equally delivered justice.

We all watched a video of this man nonchalantly murdering another man. This is the absolute least that can be done. A reckoning of tectonic shift proportions need to happen, not simply one man being held accountable.

I watched this with my hand over my mouth and tears welling in my eyes. The pride I felt for my city was lost the minute I saw the video of Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd and learned that this is only “the best place in all the land” if you’re white.

The minute the judge read the jury’s convictions, my tears fell and hope overcame me.

Nobody thought the revolution would start in Minneapolis except Prince.

Born in the blur between Gen X and Y, there is a sub-sect known as the Oregon Trail Generation.

Our formative years included both the Dewey Decimal System and Google. Pay phones and iPhones. Cassette tapes and Spotify.

We remember grounding ourselves before we turns on the Apple IIC in the computer lab and the sound of dial-up internet.

The errs in judgement and foolishness of our youth were rarely documented on film and were never published for the world to see.

Today, we’re in our late thirties and early forties. Most of us have realized we’re not invincible. And that we don’t know it all. And, in the words of those who’ve aged before us: youth is most definitely wasted on the young.

I find myself daydreaming about my twenties. Longing for the freedom and unencumbered choice. Tweaked with new regret for failing to live the width of my life and not simply the length. While errantly forgetting the shackles that limited lateral movement.

Now, on Facebook and Twitter, I know very few people care what I have to say. I know this because I care very little about what they say. Social is a place I go to be brave and then cowardly wait for approval of people peripheral to my life.

Social media is to our adulthood as the yellow pages were to our youth. It takes up and unnecessary amount of space in our lives, but conversely provides functionality.

So, like the dysfunctional relationship it is, I’ll log off for a bit rather than severing ties.

21 weeks, 0 days.

Hijacked.  That might be the best word to describe this body at present. A foreign torso complete with two oversized breasts and one protruding abdomen that says to the world with shrugged shoulders ‘might be a baby, might be too many donuts.’

American societal self-consciousness seems like the beginning of a genetic mutation of the second X chromosome. We’re not born worrying about ‘the right’ shade of skin, style of hair, color of nails, fabric with which we strategically cover ourselves. The awareness of those trivial things is learned and made important to us.  We do this to ourselves.

For awhile I subscribed to TIME and People magazines, joking they were brain food and empty calories.  One day, after I finished an issue of People the realization that I only felt bad about my body was startling. I closed the periodical focused on all the parts of my body that I didn’t like, and for the most part, couldn’t change. And I realized I didn’t like those parts because they didn’t look like one-dimensional figures in the media of which I chose to surround myself.  Instead of mirroring the characteristics and inner beauty of the 3D people I admired around me, I was measuring myself against the physical attributes of actresses and celebrities.

As I sit at the gorgeous pool of a gorgeous resort on this gorgeous island and all I think about how chubby I look in a bikini and wising no one noticed me; I’m left wonder what the hell my problem is and how I’m going to get over myself as not to reinforce this superficial bullshit with our daughter.

We took the Enneagram personality test at work and reviewed the results today.

According to Enneagram, I am a:

Helper
Loyalist
Achiever

In reading more about the Helper (aka ‘Two’), I found this paragraph particularly interesting:

Although on the surface Twos appear to feel at ease with others and to be a source of emotional sustenance for the people in their lives, they also suffer from well-hidden feelings of rejection. Twos expect people to not want them around, and they often feel that they need to be extraordinarily kind and supportive to get people to accept and love them. They usually try to conceal the depths of their loneliness or hurt beneath an image of concern for others, focusing on others’ needs to help them feel better. Sometimes it does, but just as often, Twos may feel that others are not appreciating them for their efforts, thus rekindling their feelings of rejection. Then they may become touchy or even openly angry, revealing the extent of the disappointment they are hiding.

Wowza.  For the first part of my life, it was just me and my mom.  Then she met and married The Pedophile, and had my baby brother in the span of ten months.  I was simply a four-year old lost in the shuffle and much too young to understand why I wasn’t the center of my mom’s universe anymore.

Growing up, when I wasn’t merely an object of The Pedophile’s perversion, I had to work very hard to be well-liked by him in order to get him to be a dad.  On the converse, when my mom wasn’t sick, I purposefully drove her into a rage knowing she would lash out. If my mom was hitting me, that meant she cared enough to discipline me. She gave her love freely to us, but it wasn’t her love I wanted. I wanted desperately for her to be my mom and if she wasn’t going to stand up for me, the least she could do was stand up to me.

At age 26, when I told my mom and my brothers what The Pedophile did to me, I already knew my mom couldn’t / wouldn’t leave him.  But my brothers?  They were 20 and 22, I was so hopeful that they would stick up for me.  I didn’t ask them to make a choice, but deep down I really wanted them to pick me.  When they decided to ride the fence with one foot in each camp, I turned that deep and painful rejection into something positive. I took care of them (and everyone else) instead. And I spun their disloyalty into loyalty of my own with rationalizations like, ‘I know what it’s like not to have a dad and I don’t want that for them’ and ‘my mom is too dependent on my dad to leave’ and I resolved to blame everyone’s ambivalence on the person who had caused all of this.

No wonder I quit shortly after credit was given to others and my efforts were ignored by leadership after pulling off an extraorinary 1,100-person, 28-day, 4-wave incentive trip that I planned in six months mostly by myself.  It makes sense that I would banish RT3 from my life when he opted to hang out more with his new girlfriend than with me all the time.  And the fog is clearing as to why I was a master at shunning boys and friends who hurt my heart.

Huh.  I didn’t expect to learn this enlightenment today.  I think I have a few things to share with my brothers.

As I prepare to leave nonprofitland next week, I can’t help but reflect upon the people I’ll also be leaving behind.  BFF is the band-aid holding the place together after Our Fearless Leader (OFL) left in August.  BFF has horrible boundaries and desperately craves acceptance from everyone.  I saw a lot of myself circa 2004 in her and I was antipathetic towards her for it.  Now, I’m merely feel sympathy as she’s rounding 60 and may possibly never learn to find value in herself rather than in the approval of others.

OFL’s departure was the reason I ramped up the job search. She was a brilliant leader.  Only in her absence, however, did it become clear how much shock she absorbed by serving as a buffer between the staff and BOOF!  BOOF! is the chair of nonprofitland’s board, pushing 80, and an idiot.  But she’s a dangerous idiot in that her decisions are based on power and in interests other than the people the organization is designed to help. She is a primary reason I’m moving on and I’m grateful that after next Friday, BOOF! will be a person so unimportant, her real name will fade from memory.  Like Diet Coke Guy. His name has been long forgotten in the decade since, but his self-aggrandizing behavior will forever be infamous.

Nonprofitland’s people were not all case studies. I will miss Bagel.  Bagel is the Finance Director.  She is the same age as my mom, a self-proclaimed ‘angry lesbian’, and one of the kindest people I’ve met.  She’s a bagel — crusty and hard on the outside but a big ‘ol softy on the inside.  She’s probably in my top five favorite co-workers of all time.  She and her partner of 24 years ‘married’ on Nov 1 — as they were finally allowed to by the same type of arrogant zealots who wield powerful ignorance over nonprofitland.  It sometimes seems for every act of benevolence there is an equal act of malevolence in organized religion.

This morning, I rose early and excitedly from bed.  The misadventures of BOOF! and BFF are coming to a close in my book of life.  I am delighted to start the next story.