I have been attempting, with limited luck, to sit down and work on my “10 Years in The Bay” ‘zine for some time. As I sit down to translate memory into story, I am astounded at how difficult and painful the task actually is. By “limited luck” I mean I am getting some work done, but not much; by “astounded” I mean that I am, on some perverted or Rilkean level, ~enjoying~ both a) realizing there is real pain around some of these memories and b) the experience of that pain as I endeavor to work through them; by “~enjoying~” I mean I am satisfied in my intentional dwelling in and on these thoughts and feelings as a part of my process of self-care; and by “self-care” I mean the labor of working to become something other than what I was when I started out.
This morning I realized that yesterday was the 10 year anniversary of the day I told my then-wife that not only had I been sleeping with someone else, but that that someone else was pregnant with my child, and that I loved them and wanted to be with them. If you can believe it, the story is even more complicated and dramatic than that. But I remember that day like it was yesterday—my memories of my two eldest children are burned into my brain like the photos I took on that day on my old phone
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that I just then, as I wrote that last sentence, realized I still had, then found, then spent an hour looking at and crying, before taking a nap from exhaustion and returning to finish this post. This is the way writing this has been difficult. Earlier this week (inspired by my eldest who makes playlists for all his stories) I started putting together a more or less chronological playlist for my last decade, starting with the music I was listening to when I first moved to California from Kansas in 2011. As I sat on my porch beneath an increasingly powerful deluge of memories and feelings I became overwhelmed, and was unable to write more than a few sentences. Even here, now, after all this time of working on myself and growing and being happy and attempting to face the reality of many difficult memories, the emotional experience is fresh and powerful, as if that which they are attached to are somehow present. And it would seem that the act of re-articulating them into a narrative is a particularly potent access point to them.
About three and a half years ago—after I’d broken up with the woman I’d left my first wife for and found myself living in a tiny room in a random old guy’s house in Oakland— someone was telling me about some person or another’s drama-filled life and I remember thinking to myself that that person was particularly messy. It was at that point that I realized, shamefully for the first time, that I—my life—was actually incredibly messy—that I was the messy one—and that all this time I had been laboring under the illusion that I had been working to make my life not messy. It was at that point that I began the real labor of de-messifiying my life, and I am personally proud to report that I have come a long way, though I suppose another good reason to endeavor writing like this is to remind ourselves that the work is never over, and that there is always work to be done. For me, that work involves this current writing, which will be available in something like an entirety this coming New Years, a holiday people deride for being “just another day,” but that I like to think of as a collective marking of the passage of time, which I personally think is very important, even—and especially—in the midst of an apocalypse.
Keep on digging into the messy and acknowledging the hard feelings---changes blossoms in this sometimes emotionally laden ground. Much love and thank you for the courage and honesty to tell your story.