Pain

Have you ever wanted something so bad you could taste it? Like dark, black chocolate on the tip of your tongue, or a sour patch kid that made the glands in your neck ache? Like that visceral? Something so big it could change the trajectory of your life? (Although I don’t recommend putting that kind of pressure on, well, anything.)

What did you do?

Did you go after it, or did the courage run out of you like melted ice cream through a cone on a hot August day? 

I only ask because I took a shot as brazen as a half court toss at an ALL STAR  game, hopeful, no, make that knowing—that I would make the basket—NO net—and then I didn’t. You have to admire that about me. I have so much conviction in the most unlikely of circumstances. It’s either endearing as hell—or bat shit crazy. No one can decide.

Thwack! was the sound the ball made as it hit the headboard, or the backboard, or whatever they call that clear plastic thingy behind the basket that keeps the ball from killing the crowd. 

I hear it was a near miss, but it was a miss just the same. 

I tried to duck but the thing had momentum as it careened off my face, bounced once, and hit me in the gut knocking the wind out of me. That’s when I realized there was no ball or missed throw, I had probably just swallowed my Adams apple on account of disappointment.

The crowd laughed. Not really. Nobody said a word. 

Even the voices in my head had the decency to take a short coffee break. And if you ask me, that’s why the feeling of having failed on an epic scale only lasted a few seconds. No peanut gallery dared chime in. They just let me marinate for a sec. When I regained my breath I read the email again. It was so fucking polite and encouraging it almost made me forget they’d rejected my work. Almost.

Maybe reject is too strong a word. They took a pass sounds better. Less soul crushing.

“We hope this “no” lights a fire in you to chase that “Yes”! Were their exact words. Who’s soul can stay crushed when they put it that way? Not mine, that’s for sure, especially since I’m profoudly NO challenged. Always have been. Cannot take it for an answer—EVAH!

Someone much wiser than me once said, “Disappointment is taking score too soon.”  And being a retired “scorekeeper” I immediately tried to tally how many years I’d wasted, until I ran out of fingers and toes and then I just decided I had to take that advice to heart.

Besides, when is no ever really no? I mean in my book (the only one that matters) it’s always been the placeholder for not yet.

I’m not gonna get into the weeds with this thing, I’m only here to encourage everybody to take chances in their lives. To get into the game. To do the hard things. To feel scared. To stretch like a goddamn piece of saltwater taffy. I’m not gonna lie, the sting of rejection—yeah, it hurts, but it only lasts a second, like a flu shot. And even though a part of me felt like shit, a bigger part of me was absolutely EXHILERATED!  Because for me, knowing that I never even tried was unacceptable.

Ask anyone who’s had any success and they’ll tell you about all the times they got knocked down to the ground. But, honey, at least they were in the arena.

Since at my age, unless you’re attempting something extraordinary you rarely, if ever, hear the word NO, (seriously) I have had a pretty amazing day processing all of this. And I have to say that as the disappointment faded, the void that was left was filled with something unexpected… pride. For having the audacity to dream as big as I did. 

All of this to say, you guys, please don’t live small, afraid of the pain. DREAM BIG! You can take it from me, it’s not gonna kill ya, l know that because last time I checked—I wasn’t dead.

Carry on,
xox

Throughout the years I’ve run my life through numerous filters. I think we all have. And most of mine have ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous.

After a nasty break-up, my filter informed me that ‘all men cheat‘. If things went south for me in business, the filter which I ran my life through convinced me that I ‘couldn’t catch a break’.  For a short period of time it even told me that leaving the house without lipstick was ‘bad luck’.

It has become my practice, as of late, to run everything I do through the most recent filter—the shit to value ratio—which is exactly like The Law of Diminishing Returns, except it has to do with shit, and how much we take to get what we want.

It’s not very scientific, and in fact, it flies in the face of most societal norms. But it makes life so much easier, which makes me happy, and at this stage of the game I’ll choose happiness over almost anything else.

If you’ve never heard of it, it goes something like this: How much shit must I endure to get value?

Here are a few examples from my life. I think you’ll see what I mean.
For instance, how long is the drive (i.e. how many hours of my life will I lose sitting in traffic) for that thing I absolutely need to do? (The answer for me is: if it goes beyond 30-40 minutes—I rethink it. But there are some exceptions, I’m not an asshole.)

How much mindless chit-chat is required to get to the authentic, substantive, issues that I’d rather discuss? (My endurance time is getting shorter and shorter. Soon, I’m afraid I’ll stick a fork in my eye at dinner parties after only ten minutes.)

How many horrible, unreadable first drafts come before I can cobble together one good sentence? (The answer is nine.)

How long do you stay in a loveless relationship just for the security, or because you’re too lazy to leave? (The answer for me was seven. And that was four years too many.)

How many hours and dollars will you spend to battle the effects of aging? (I stopped dying my hair blonde which turned out to be the best money I haven’t spent in years!)

How many years will you suffer the whims of a terrible boss? (Twenty. And he wasn’t all bad. Said the woman who stayed too long.)

And how much pain will you endure? THAT is a biggie for me and the answers these days is… NONE.
I won’t suck it up and suffer for anyone anymore.

I won’t continue to hike with oozing blisters.

I won’t get the lip injections on a whim because I met you at the dermo before lunch.

I won’t get micro needling, dermabrasion, or that Hannibal Lector looking peel to promote collagen. Fuck collagen. It’s highly overrated. (But just in case I’ll drink some collagen protein.)

I won’t starve myself to be a size six.

I won’t let the highly recommended, sadistic woman with the indiscernible accent, burn skin tags off my body with a glorified cigarette lighter. (I got up and left when she wanted to look for them around my ass.)

I won’t try to keep my uterus inside my body. I won’t lalalala my way around that fact that it’s let it’s true feelings be known to me FOR OVER A DECADE. It protested in the only way it knew how—pain and bleeding. After I ignored that, it enlisted my bladder as an unwitting accomplice. Apparently, my uterus was going to ride it like a manatee low enough into my body that if I had a good laugh, or a sneezing fit, they could just slide out of me. No big deal.

Last year, I finally ran my loudly protesting lady-bits through this new filter—and had the damn surgery!

I recently read that Lena Dunham relinquished her uterus and while I know she is so much younger than me, it’s the perfect example of shit to value—and it had to go.

Too much shit for not enough value.

I’ve also recently begun running “the revisiting of old emotional wounds” through this filter. Listen, It was all the rage to do this back in the day. I did it. We all did it. We dove head-first into our pain, writhing around in it like pigs in shit.
But now I see my younger friends wanting to go down that road and I’m not sure I think it’s a good idea to go back in time and dig up all the buried bodies. Why?
YOU’RE DIGGING UP SO MUCH SHIT.
SO MUCH! The wounds are old—and they’re DEEP! 

And looking back, if one dollar is the highest return on that emotional investment, I may have gotten, in the end, maybe, forty cents on the dollar of value.

All I’m saying is that perhaps there is another way? A better way? A less painful way?
I suggest that first you run your life though this shit to value filter. I wish someone would have suggested it to me when I was thirty.
Or forty.
Or fifty.

Carry on,
xox

Since we’re all just making this up as we go along, I have a question for ya, because I haven’t been able to figure this one out for myself. What is the deal with women and pain? And do we tolerate more than we should? 

I suppose we can include men in this too. I mean I heard a man, a doctor of psychology, talking today about men tolerating discomfort. He cited having to pee really bad at a movie and not getting up until the “urge” had turned to an “imperative”. If you asked that same man (preferably after he relieved himself) what the movie was about, he’d have a hard time telling you. His discomfort took him out so of the moment it actually disrupted his quality of life.

Gotta go potty – 1
Quality of life – 0

Which brings me back to real suffering…and women. Why are we willing to sacrifice our quality of life even for one minute let alone several months or even years? Maybe it stems from the fact that we are genetically wired to push something the size of a bowling ball out of a hole fit for a marble without a complaint?

I don’t know. What do you think?

I had a friend in high school who suffered excruciating pain during her periods. The cramps were so debilitating she had to plan her activities so they wouldn’t fall close to “that time of the month.” When I told her that wasn’t “normal” and asked if she’d seen a doctor she replied, “Oh, gosh, no. I just figured every woman suffers like this.”
Uh, no. No, we don’t.

Cramps – 1
Quality of life – 0

What about men who cheat and the women who love them?

It seems improbable that any woman in her right mind would stay with a man who cheats and yet history and my contact list are FULL of them! And these are not stupid women. On the contrary, some of the smartest, funniest, most accomplished women out there have had their marriages hacked by the nanny.

And it doesn’t happen just once. Some men are serial cheaters.
And these amazing women look the other way. They settle.

I can understand the rationalization—because I’ve heard it all.
It can be a financial thing. Or a little kid thing. It can even be an “I’m just not ready to leave yet,” thing. Still, if you dig below the surface, just past the cave where the soccer team and their coach were trapped, you know, thousands of feet deep where all of the feelings have been buried. There, in the pitch-blackness, lies an endless stream of tears and rage. Along with a reverberating chorus of bats singing “Why aren’t I enough?”

Infidelity – 1
Quality of life – 0

Every one of these examples speaks to me. What about you?

I’ve had to pee so bad I’ve used a bush on the side of the road because I didn’t speak up when there was a perfectly good bathroom an hour earlier. I toughed it out. I guess I’m so familiar with discomfort, it barely registers…until it’s almost too late.

Same with my lady parts. I had a fibroid, okay make that eleven, that gave me a uterus the size of a sixteen-week pregnancy. It crept up on me slowly, over a decade, but come on!  There was bleeding and pain and there may have even been waddling and some incontinence when I laughed (which means I basically peed a little ALL THE TIME). Why was it okay to tolerate that? 

I have no idea. Like I said, I’m familiar with discomfort. 

I too had a boyfriend who cheated on me. I loved him something awful (which should have been an omen). And I can totally relate to the Why aren’t I good enough for you? syndrome. I was so distraught I thought it was somehow my fault which he LOVED because that meant he was completely and totally off the hook. I did research to fix us. I read every book on relationships and what goes wrong. I laughed at all of his jokes, cooked more of his favorite foods, and waxed off all my pubes.

But we all know that wasn’t the answer. So what is?

I know of two times he strayed and I forgave his lying ass, but I soon found out that was just the tip of the iceberg (the iceberg I wanted to tie around his scrotum to give him a tiny popsicle dick).
But I’m not bitter.  

So…please explain this to me. Why is it okay to settle for less and tolerate pain?

But first, go make yourself a sandwich, and buckle up. I have a feeling we’re in for a long, bumpy conversation.

Carry on,
xox

This morning. Interior — My house — Husband’s office.

Janet enters the room dressed in workout gear. She sits down on the step for the first time in three weeks without wincing and puts on her shoes. Her husband is at his desk distractedly looking at car porn on the computer.

Janet: I’m going to try the hike today.

Husband: Do you think that’s a good idea?

Janet: I’m feeling better. Besides, I’m tired of sitting on my ass. I need some fresh air.

Husband: But the hike? We have air here.

Janet: Sally will be with me…

Husband: That’s what worries me.

Janet: I told her I would only do the first half. (Beat) I’m walking toward the pain.(Beat) Hey, tell me I’m brave.

Husband: Are you? Is it? Is it brave or is it stupid?

She stands up, gives him a kiss on the back of his neck and leaves.

So, yeah, that happened this morning and it got me thinking.
What is bravery anyway? Doing something IN SPITE of the fear, right? Marching ahead. Not being swayed by the voices in your head who’ve cautioned you, and warned you, and have now called a special session in order to intercede on your behalf.

But wait. Doesn’t brave always look like stupid first?

Half a hike is all the brave I’m capable of these days. A tiny shot glass full of bravery.
I’m not out there slaying dragons, raising kids or starting organizations that curb the spread of human trafficking.
I’m putting one tennis shoe’d foot in front of the other—on a dirt hill—three weeks after surgery.

The repercussions of this simple act could be terrific—or horrifyingly stupid.

But isn’t that the way you walk that kind of tightrope (literally and figuratively?) You cross your fingers (Dear God not your toes) and you hope if you fall that you have panties on when your skirt flies up and over your face, that you don’t scream something you’ll regret, and all the way down —you pray for a net .

You want to change jobs. The voices all yell “That sounds stupid”, as they hand you the fourteen-page manifesto on why that’s such a bad idea.

The same goes for changing spouses, hair color, sexes, or your mind.

“Isn’t that stupid?” they ask with concern, and they are genuinely concerned about the really bad choice it looks like you’re about to make.

But I say it’s brave.

It’s scary as shit—but you’re doing it anyway. Walking straight into pain. Yep, brave always looks like stupid first. Mostly to the cautious and uninitiated.
Or to the husbands who have to pick your sobbing ass up off the floor when you “overdue it.”

Anyhow, that’s my belief and I’m sticking to it.

And just so I don’t feel bad, let’s say, for now anyway, that it’s okay to take our bravery one tiny shot glass at a time.

Carry on,
xox

I put my earrings back on today.

That is no small feat since I have four holes in each ear, a product of a self-piercing binge back in the seventies.
My father said I looked like a Christmas tree, meaning I suppose, that I was “over-decorated.” Loving everything Christmas, and never understanding the concept of less is more or that fact that something could ever be “over-decorated”, I took his remarks as a compliment and have worn depending on the decade, either safety pins, tiny gold hoops or eensy diamond studs in all of the four holes that wind their way up each ear.

I mention all of this because when you have surgery the hospital insists that you remove ALL of your jewelry.
I saved that ritual for an hour before we left the house. I told myself that I couldn’t get nervous “until the jewelry comes off.”

As I removed each earring, putting it into a small dish of cleaning solution, I played a little game.
It’s something I do when I have what I view as an obstacle looming over me and the game went like this:

I reassured myself by saying, “When I put these earrings back on—the surgery will be OVER.
This private Everest of mine will have been summited.
I will be in the clear—with a flat-ish stomach—and a bladder that doesn’t have an elephant sitting on it.”

I thought it would just be a couple of days.

Little did I know it would be more than a week later.

Every day, as I shuffled over to my bathroom sink, bent in half like a one thousand-year-old woman to brushed my teeth and look sideways at my filthy bed head in the mirror—I saw the little dish of earrings.

You know how when you don’t feel great even the most mundane task feels Herculean? The thought of struggling with eight tiny earring backs made me nauseous.

By Thursday the liquid was gone. The earrings, sitting in a heap of dried up ear yuck taunted me.

Sunday night they made me cry. But so did breathing, laying down and sitting up, so don’t blame the earrings.

I wondered if I’d ever have the stamina to struggle with them. I didn’t feel fancy enough for jewelry. Would I ever be over-decorated again?

At least I still had my nose ring.
The admitting nurse had gone mildly apoplectic when she saw it. “You have to take that out,” she said sternly at five thirty the morning of the surgery. I lied and said I didn’t know how. She came over, standing close to my face, eyeballed it suspiciously, tore off a piece of white tape she had in her pocket, and slapped it over the thin gold hoop on the side of my nose.

Anyhow, this morning, when I looked at the earrings…and they looked back at me…we all agreed that today was the day. I rinsed them off and one by one and on this lovely April morning, I over-decorated the Christmas tree.

Carry on,
xox

Before I type one more word I want to make it clear that despite all evidence to the contrary, this post will be brought to you by the word/feeling—appreciation.

I appreciate so much the fact that due to the marvels of modern medicine, I stand before you today uterus-free. That is true.

I appreciate general anesthesia and the effect it has on a person. One moment you’re lying there counting to fifty and the next thing you know your entire nether region has been dyed orange with antiseptic, a nurse is harassing you with questions like what is the capital of Nebraska? (Omaha), what is the level of your pain (what pain? We haven’t started yet—silly), and the fact that you can’t for the life of you figure out how much cotton it takes to dry up every ounce of moisture in an entire human being—and who the fuck do you have to pay around this joint to get some ice chips?

I appreciate downtime. That week or so that’s required to get back on your feet and up to speed with life.

Every word of that was bullshit.

Surgery made me lie.
There, I said it.
I can’t explain why or how it’s happened.

I did feel appreciation for like a minute and then I went directly to feeling appalled.

Appalled!

Recovery from surgery is appalling. But I guess everyone knew that but me!
And now here’s the truth:

HOW HAVE I BEEN LUCKY ENOUGH TO HAVE NEVER BEEN CUT OPEN UNTIL NOW?

Sorry for yelling, but seriously? I’m fifty-nine and all I have to draw on surgery wise are just a couple of laparoscopies which are holes punched into you that can be closed with super glue. If you’re lucky they use your belly button. It’s just hanging around, all of its best days in the rearview mirror, so why not? It was made for hole punching. It’s kinda far away from your knee or your hip, so I wouldn’t suggest that they use it for those procedures–but as for my lady part removal— it was a no-brainer.

At least that was the plan. Plan A & B. It wasn’t written in stone, but still, cutting me open was…plan Q.

The bitch put up a fight. Instead of two hours, she fought for five.

Of course, my body parts would fight to remain inside. It’s cozy in there and they are most definitely well fed.

She was a big girl. Bigger than they had expected. And stubborn. Like a bull. She was the Bea Arthur of uteruses.
“We’re gonna need a bigger…hole”, someone said.
So they decided at the last-minute to cut me open, a three-inch c-section did the trick.

It looks spontaneous.
Like the last-ditch effort to remove something that doesn’t want to leave. Like those battering rams that punch giant holes in the doors of deadbeat, crack head squatters. It is not the clean edged, precision cut of a surgical scalpel, no, I look to have been cut open by a shard of glass from a broken bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

My incision has duck-lips. (See photo at the top), and it feels like a red-hot branding iron is searing my flesh every time I even think about moving.

I have questions. Lots. Okay, two.

1. How in the hell do women have an incision three times as large as mine and deal with a small infant? I would throw a crying baby out of the window right now. I kid you not. Ladies, you have my deepest respect. If I could bow to you without passing out—I would.

2. Who do I talk to about this because I’m appalled? This was supposed to be easy! Bea, (my uterus) and I sat down for weeks beforehand with tea and those expensive chocolate biscotti and had chit-chats about how this was going to go down. It was agreed that I had been more than accommodating, that eviction was imminent, and that she would go without so much as a whimper.

No one was expecting a bar fight. Least of all me.

So there you have it. My Sports Illustrated Swimsuit days are over, Bea obviously had her fingers crossed when she swore to me she’d leave without a fight, and mothers with c-sections are fucking superheroes.

Carry on,
xox

Love. This.
Carry on
xox

A lot of us are experiencing our own personal pain AND tapping into global, collective pain at the same time.

We’re marching, or emphatically not marching.
We’re crying in the kitchen, out of the blue. We’re heavy with emotion by noon.

My loves, it’s critical that you let the pain move through you. You have to keep letting it go. And like, there’s no need to worry about being too detached from what’s going on. Because there’s new pain arriving daily. If you’re awake you will hurt. I’m with you…in profound agony over the state of the world. And, my faith and resolve are brighter than my doubt and stronger than my grief.

It’s an hourly practice to find that balance.

Feel it, fully, but don’t grip the pain and use it to bolster your position or identity. Holding on to pain is how you get bitter and brittle, and incidentally, much less effective.

It’s a feminine skill to process other people’s pain. Empathy. Whole humans feel things. Deeply. And then the heart wants to make something with the pain — to run it through its ventricles and transmute it into goodness. It’s a beautiful inclination. But we’ve got to keep our “pain processing for other people” in check or it will bring us down.

We might tell ourselves that taking on the collective pain is a form of being of service.
And it is — we’re in this together. But too much of that is martyrdom. And when you’re a martyr you become a burden on the system.
The pathway to the conscious management of psychic pain:
1. Feel your own pain. Analyze why YOU are personally affected.

1. And if you’re able, try to let it go by the end of the day if not sooner. Of course this is nearly impossible. But the intention will create a shift.

2. Observe other people’s pain. Seek to understand it. Relate or sympathize.

3. And if you’re able, let it go by the end of the day if not sooner. Very difficult to do, but NOT impossible. And then…return to your personal gratitude and power. Because… you must be in touch with your own blessings in order to be of service.

This is a daily practice because we’re all in pain. Humans, animals, Mother Earth…all hurting, badly. We have to let go of the pain on a regular basis so that it doesn’t backlog and turn into inflammation, depression, confusion. Or worse, blind rage.

Everyday, let it go. Give it up to Life, to God, to the cosmos and trust that we have the strength to heal. Speak out. Get a therapist for the sole reason of talking about world events and your rage and feelings of helplessness — and empowerment. Please, move. Get to a yoga class, or run your ass off a few times a week — for emotional reasons, not just for your ass. Dance! You’ve got to move the pain out of your body and psyche so that you can keep going. And we need to keep going.

If each of us made the effort to let go of pain and return to trust then there would be less pain in the atmosphere.
And with less pain in the atmosphere not only can we see more clearly and make more of an impact, but the low vibration stuff and fear-mongers have nothing to feed on and nowhere to hide. (Negative energies can turn a cloud of fear into a shit storm. So let’s not feed the cloud.)

Confront the pain with your unwavering trust and gratitude for being alive. This is where the limitless power is. Pain release and faith are a very effective way to serve. Every day. Over and over again… so we are free to rise.

Yessss. Press share to all the deep feelers in your life. xo

http://www.daniellelaporte.com

I don’t know about you guys but I love “unknown”. “Unknown” is so wise and says the greatest shit. Which leads me to believe “unknown” knew I needed to remember this now more than ever.

Carry on,
xox

Hey you guys,
Digging around in my “dead drafts” file I came across this stream of consciousness, shitty first draft of an actual event that happened to me last year at this time. Since it’s a year old I suppose it’s a Throwback for a Thursday. Right? And since I know most of you, no, make that all of you, have loved and lost, I thought I’d share this unabridged account of just how much I suck at it. Loss that is. So here goes. 

Carry on,
xox

I wish more than anything that I had a profound and pithy quote befitting this story, instead, all you get is:

“Omg,omg,omg,omg,omg,omg,omg,omg,omg,omg,omg,breathe.”~ Me

I heard his voice again last night. For the first time in thirty years.

This is a voice I would have given my left tit to hear back then, back in the days and months after our break-up in 1986.

Truthfully? I would have sold my soul, my car and my beloved cat to hear him say my name in that seductive way he had.

Just one… More…Time.

Shameless doesn’t adequately describe me.

Neither, do I have enough fingers or toes to count the number of times I sold-myself-out emotionally.

I would call, he would answer and I would hang up. Or, I would get his out-going message on his answer machine and since I knew he wasn’t home (he was never home), I would call back and listen to it ten to fifteen times in a row with the intensity of a FBI voice analysis expert, searching for any small hint in the tone, or the words that he used as a clue to his state of mind.

Was he happier without me? Or did he sound like wads of Kleenex were shoved up his nostrils, his heart-broken into tiny pieces that were scattered across the globe by the wind—like me?

Mostly I did it because second only to his smell, I desperately ached for the sound of his voice. That along with a longing for reentry back into his inner circle from which I’d been banished.

He was the drug and I was the addict.
He was the tall, cool drink of water. I was dying of thirst.
He was the Sun, and whatever small ray of attention he chose to shine on me, like a sunflower I reached up and reveled in it.
He threw his scraps of attention to my bruised and broken heart as I rolled around in the dirt like a feral animal, begging for more.

You get the picture. Shameless.

It had to be enough—but it never was.
Because that’s the thing about that kind of love. The always evident, finite nature of it, creates mental insatiability.

From the beginning, the deep tone of his voice could magically make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
Like a musical instrument, my body was specifically tuned to him–it had a visceral reaction—every cell vibrating with desire.
It was crazy. At nearly thirty years old I’d never felt anything like it.

My love for him felt crazy. So, I began to mistake feeling crazy—for love.

It culminated in a real eye-opener when I jumped out of a second-story window and chased his car down the street. In that moment it turned dangerous crazy. Stupid. Untethered to reality.

At no time was I aware how unsustainable that kind of love, lust, obsession was.
Nothing that burns that hot can survive as it consumes everything it touches. It must flame out. It must. Even volcanoes go dormant.

I thought I would never get over him. The mere mention of his name could send me to bed sobbing for hours.
The pain was simply unbearable.

In order to function in the world, I put myself into an emotional rehab of sorts. I removed all signs of him from my immediate surroundings. First I got rid of all the gifts he gave me. An 80’s abstract patterned sweatshirt, a small, carved jewelry box. Then I took the pictures of him out of their frames. Well, to be honest, for years I left them in the frames and covered them with more current shots of friends and family in the hopes that this was all just a bad dream and we would eventually reconcile and I could put our pictures front and center once again.

Slowly, I erased all of his saved voice messages. They were like the tiny airline bottles of booze alcoholics save in case of an emotional ”emergency”. A quick fix. A masochistic game. A rush followed by the pitiful groan of my heart as it dropped like a piano from a fifty story building. Over, and over, and over again.

First to go were the simple ones, “Hey babe, just checking in.” Hearing those only hurt a little bit, like a blister or a cold sore.
I could hit erase on those and not immediately burst into flames.

The next ones, the ones that were funny or touching, well, those hurt like I imagine a cracked skull or broken bones do. I would suffer physical pain for days after deleting those.

The last ones to get erased took me the longest to let go of because of their intimate nature.
They held my heart in chains and like a prisoner with Stockholm’s Syndrome I feared I’d die if I we parted.
I threw up for four straight hours the night I had the courage to hit ERASE on those.

Detox. It was Emotional Detox.

I’m not proud of the fact that it took me five years to become neutral. Yes, you heard me. Five fucking years to get that man out of my system. But I did.

Eventually, I healed and as part of that healing, I held a ceremony where I burned everything. It was my graduation ritual. Emotional rehabilitation complete.
As I watched all of the cards, love letters and yes, finally, the photos of us disintegrate into ash and swirl their way back into the aether, I felt free. He no longer held my heart prisoner. I was literally and symbolically free of him. Finally! And I have to say it felt fan-fucking-tastic!

So, you can imagine my reaction when a few weeks before Christmas, out of the blue, after thirty years —he reached out on Facebook for connection. And it triggered in me the most curious mixture of love and hate, attraction, and revulsion, curiosity, and fear.

Anyway, we agreed to talk. On the phone. Like for real.

He is fifty-two to my fifty-seven years and still in dire need of a “sensitivity chip”—just as I remembered.
He laughed hysterically when I said I was fifty-seven. “Yeah, sure you are” he guffawed, “You just keep telling that story.”
“I will, because it’s true,” I replied with a half-ass laugh, trying to keep things civil. Truth be told I wanted to reach though the phone and stab him in the neck with a fork. Come to think of it, it was not an unfamiliar impulse where he was concerned, but the rage he was still able to trigger shocked me.

Remember, we burned HOT.

After listening to him for a while, it was clear as he reminisced about our on-and-off two years together back in the eighties that:

1. He remembers that time fondly. Like, scary, made up memories of weird things that never happened, fondly. I do not. I was not my best self back then. Not even a little bit. Think, hot mess. That time turned into a catalyst for my own self-reflection and introspection. I’d jumped out of a fucking window overcome by lust so I’d say I was a girl desperately in need of some self-respect. It was not my proudest moment and as a result, I did decades of work on myself after that.

2. Our five-ish year age difference which I will admit felt much larger as a twenty-five-year-old woman with a twenty-year-old man (boy) had grown to a much broader span of his memory (hence the snide remarks). In HIS telling of our tale, the age difference has grown to decades. He is now Ben Affleck and I am Dame Helen Mirren, (who by-the-way admittedly looks better than I do in a bikini), but that is neither here nor there—the woman is seventy. 70!

3. His life has fallen to shit. He is re-connecting with me because he has become the Mayor of Martyr-ville. As he explained it, when his beloved father passed away, he gave up a thriving career and a life filled with fancy houses, cars, tons of money and super-models, (insert HUGE eye-roll), turned his back on love and ever having a family of his own, to live in his childhood bedroom taking care of his ailing mother and special needs sister. Oh come on! He’s NO saint. I can hear you, don’t turn on me now!

Why do guys do that? Why do they call you after they’ve fallen down the rabbit hole? I KNOW with every fiber of my being that if his life were going well he may have looked me up out of curiosity on Facebook (like we all do), but he would have NEVER in a million years have contacted me. I know that because I’m over fifty and life doesn’t work that way.

He sounded to me like someone who was in dire need of the three “C’s”. Camaraderie. Consolation. Contrition.
I don’t think I’m the right person for the job. I tried for about thirty minutes. Then I couldn’t wait to get off the phone and back to real life. You know, MY real life of fancy houses, cars, and super models.

For several days afterward I felt emotionally unstable. Like I’d been massaged by a plunger or punked.
I couldn’t tell if he felt bad about how things had ended and he most certainly didn’t call for my forgiveness.

You know why? Because he has no idea the suffering I put myself through. Did you catch that? I tortured myself. Everyday. All by myself.

So… why did he call me? Why was I the one he chose to soothe him? Honestly? I have no idea.

One of my friends who is familiar with our saga asked me if I somehow felt vindicated by his shitty life. You know, the best revenge is living well and all that. So…did I?… Maybe…and Yuck!
Had I learned nothing? Great. There go tens of thousands of dollars spent on three decades of self-help.

After feeling ashamed of myself, I have also started to figure out why I feel so out-of-sorts.

Perhaps because it was clear he still inhabited that wild, careless and dangerous place I had turned my back on years ago, and maybe I was afraid that hearing his voice would somehow lure me back there after being off of that sick, adrenalin high for thirty plus years. Perhaps.

More likely it’s because I have absolutely no desire to re-live the past. Even those lusty, tempestuous years with him. Like I said, those were not the good old days for me and no amount of reminiscing will make it so.

I have a distinct memory of something my mother said to me as I writhed on her bed in my broken-hearted agony—so here’s your quote. “He’ll come back. One way or another, they always come back.”

I lived breathlessly off the fumes of that hope for many years like a lost Mariners wife waits for the sea to return her beloved. Until eventually, facilitated by the passage of time, the entire situation was no longer a trigger for tears but an ancient, distant memory.

Then… he came back.

This is a post from two years ago and I’m sorry to report that I’m still an under-reacting bitch when it comes to diagnosing pain. Please, if you get hurt, NEVER listen to anything I say.
Carry on,
xox

We need to carry this chart around with us at all times, because
most of us have a hard time articulating our level of pain.

My husband goes to the head of the class.
Here’s a classic story that makes us laugh when we’re drunk.

It was back a few years ago, when he discovered (on Web MD in the middle of the night) that he had appendicitis.
I scoffed at his self-diagnosis. Of course, I did. I suggested he had gas and told him to buck up and take a couple of Motrin.
Wife of the Year, I know.

Since he was due to leave on a motorcycle trip to the Sierra’s the next day, unbeknownst to me, he went to the doctor.
THAT should have told me something right there because he’s someone who can have a chainsaw sticking out of his neck and he will sidestep a visit to the doctor.

“Oh, that? Nah, I don’t need a doctor, I’m just going to observe it.”

He called me at work from St John’s, where he had been sent immediately by his doctor for an MRI.

Jeez, I thought. I can’t believe how much they’re overreacting. It’s gas. I’m tellin’ ya.

He got the results while I was on the phone with him. He was told to go directly downstairs to the Emergency Room, where real doctors would admit him for surgery; seems his appendix had a slow leak and I was going to have to give back my medical diploma.

Gas it was not.

I drove like a maniac, in a thunderstorm, in drought-stricken California (in the movie version of this story I’m played by the supremely talented Kate Winslet and this is all VERY, VERY dramatic), to make it across town, at rush hour, to see him before they took him in to operate.

When I got there (late) he was in Emergency, hooked up to antibiotics and pain meds, waiting for his turn in surgery; doing his Sudoku and entertaining the nurses.

“What’s your pain level on a scale of one to ten?” the friendly nurse asked while I was hugging him hello.

“Three or four,” he said, without even a cringe. I’m thinking—gas. It’s a three because the MRI was wrong and he ate a burrito with extra hot sauce.

“Really? What’s a ten to you?” The nurse was curious, since appendicitis is up there on the pain scale—for most mere mortals.

“Being skinned alive or boiled in oil” he responded, completely serious.

“Huh… ” The nurse seemed stunned. “Okay Braveheart, have you felt that? How would you know? I’m asking you as a point of reference.”

Think about it. That’s a great question!
What is a five or an eight or even a ten?

I wondered; have I ever felt a ten? 

We all know those individuals to whom a paper cut is a ten. Are most of us even aware of our pain tolerance scale?

Minutes later his appendix burst. I saw it register on his face like shock. He was fine one moment with his paper-cut three, and then, BAM! It was as if someone had stabbed him and started to skin him alive. He looked very much like #10.

The crazy thing was that if he’d been riding the back country of the Sierra’s—he’d have died.
He hadn’t been accurately portraying his pain because he didn’t know how.
“It’s a ten, it’s a ten, maybe even eleven!” he yelled as she injected morphine straight into his IV, his whole body relaxing, his eyes rolling back into his head.

They rushed him into surgery and he is now happily appendix free.

It appears to me that this list could apply to emotional pain as well.
Will we tolerate three’s and four’s as we “observe” the situation?
What constitutes a ten? The equivalent of emotional stigmata or boiling oil?

Food for thought.

Copy this list and keep it with you – in case someone asks.
I especially love the faces.

Love,
Xox