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This morning, I wrote one of the most defiant journal entries of my adult life.
Reminiscent of journals I've unearthed from my 14-year-old self, I scribbled the most confused, angry, faithless words on the lines of the page. You're never too old for this, you're never too spiritual for this. The lines ceased when I began crying—blubbering, really—at my desk. There was no mantra to talk me off the ledge, no philosophy, no will to do the tangible tasks that might improve the situation. I had already made coffee and a yogurt bowl. The only tool left in my tool belt was exercise, and it was already almost 85 degrees at 10:30am. It wouldn't have worked anyway. I was cracked open, keeled over the table, snot anointing the pages where my senseless but impassioned words were.
I had a call at noon. I debated cancelling. The call was with another artist I had known for a few years. Remotely only, but we had a sweet and inspiring friendship—always sending messages of resonance back and forth as we've independently drifted from our more commercial industries into industries of art and craft. The call was for the purpose to discuss our first possible collaboration, and so I didn't want to cancel. But I, of course, also didn't want to upset her or waste her time by not showing up as my best self. As a recovering child of an enmeshed, emotionally manipulative parent, I've done a lot of work over the years of learning to control and moderate my emotions in order to be thoughtful of my impact on others, a grace I was not granted most of my life. But something has been shifting lately that's surprised me as much as it's delighted me.
Last week, I was having a similarly tough day. The feeling was more anger and agitation than sadness. And, instead of moderating it, I found myself leaning into it. I became slightly unhinged. At one point, I actually chased a car an extra block and a half down the street when they pulled a really dumb move and cut me off. I lowered my windows and yelled, "Great driving!!!" at the top of my lungs the whole way. And while I don't plan to unleash my road rage at a ten all the time, there was something about defying the inclination remain socially palatable in an absolutely batshit world that made all the sense to me. We see posts all the time of people saying how absolutely dissonant it is to be existing in a world where they are swiping through posts of their brown neighbors getting kidnapped off the street and babies dying in Gaza next to paid brand sponsorships and "get ready with me's." Well, here I was. Your friendly neighborhood rage-case, here to close the at your local coffee shop, laughing wildly at my display, unnerving and unmooring any imposed sense of normalcy.
So, on this day, as I blew snot into piles of tissues over my journal, wondering if I should cancel my call, I decided I wouldn't. I was able to pull myself together enough to be calm and composed in conversation. But when she tapped into the video chat and we began our expected greetings, “how are you doing?"s that are usually empty, rhetorical inquiries to grease the wheels of the core of the conversation, I decided to deconstruct capitalism in real time and jack the expectation that either of us are machines in favor of being plants—real, soft, organic material that changes with the seasons and the weather and the time of day. A surprising, unreliable human with emotions that matter and are worthy of being woven into my interactions rather than being ignored. This was a step in my emotional development I never could've conceived of a decade ago when I began learning about boundaries and thought that emotional control was the be-all-end-all, not a business-ish call that begins with a conversation about emotions and involves me taking the computer outside to have a cigarette as we exchanged life updates.
What happened next, I couldn't have predicted.
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