A NOTE ON THIS JOURNAL

This is the journal I use almost exclusively for posts related to the therealljidol competition. My general journal is elsewhere; I may or may not link folks to it when my participation in the competition comes to an end.

A NOTE ON THE USERNAME

This journal was originally called hideforshame, because it was an old account that I had left over from the days before Basic accounts came with ads, and I thought it would therefore still have no ads. As it turned out that was inaccurate (thanks, SUP!), but by then I'd entered the LJ Idol competition and I didn't want to change usernames in the middle of the competition. But I had a rename token hanging around, so as soon as I got kicked from the competition I switched. The thing about this journal is that I'm trying to write about myself openly and honestly in a way I haven't done online before, so "hideforshame" didn't seem appropriate. Of course, I picked "winterberries" just because I like the name and the image it conjures up, so maybe it isn't much better; but I like it.

So the long ride of my LJ Idol experience has come to an end. Some of you know that this isn't my primary journal, and that I really only began using it for Idol. A few people have asked where my primary journal is, and I said that I wanted to keep the two journals separate for the length of the competition, but that I'd let people know what it was when I was kicked. Accordingly, then...

WHO I AM

Something of an Internet chameleon. I switch in and out of different usernames and find different personas as I go. My longest-running LJ and the place I think of as my Internet home is slammerkinbabe. I went through several metamorphoses over there before arriving at the current version of me that you'll see there, which is a sort of capslock-prone shiny silly person with a propensity for getting overexcited about things like Cabbage Patch Mini toys and the possibility fact of a lesbian love affair between Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett that has somehow skated below the tabloids' radar. That was initially fun, pretending that I was happy all the time, but eventually it started to wear thin. I used to write thinky posts on slammerkinbabe that I had begun to feel less comfortable writing as my friends list over there expanded and I began to feel like I was expected to perform in a certain way. So I decided to do LJ Idol this season to break out of that persona and see who I'd become outside of it for awhile. I enjoyed it, but more than that, I found it pretty meaningful, and it's been an important part of my life these last five months. So while I'm sorry to be leaving the competition, I'm happy to have had the chance to do it.

WHAT'S NEXT

Anyone who'd like to friend me on slammerkinbabe is welcome to, with the caveat that, as noted, that journal is very different from this one. I think it will stay that way, too. I'm going to keep this journal around, and although I'm not 100% sure what it will consist of, I am going to keep trying to be a little more real over here than I tend to be in other spaces. I may play the Home Game on and off, depending on the topics. As well, I suspect that discussion of mental health issues and my own experiences with them will be a big part of what this journal comes to be. Right now I'm just beginning the process of trying to get some disability benefits based on the fact that my mental illness makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for me to hold down a full-time job long-term. Getting on disability's a long, complicated process that's full of red tape, but more than that, I have a whole lot of emotions surrounding it -- should I really do this? Am I really disabled, or just a lazy slacker? How do you define disability? What services do I need, anyhow? Could I hold down a job with appropriate help, and if so, how do I go about getting that? I'm going to have to prove my disability to other people while simultaneously grappling with these issues myself; most of the people in my life think I'm "too smart to be disabled", or that I need to "push through it." I think it will be useful to me to write about that as I try to sort it through. I would like to think maybe it could help some other people who may be going through what I will be going through, as well. Either way, that's probably at least part of what this journal is going to be. So if you're interested in reading that, feel free to friend me here, and if you're not, feel free to do as you like. :)

Anyway. Playing Idol has been great and I'm really glad to have had the experience and to have met so many great people and great writers. Thanks for reading.

I am no longer hiding for shame! I never liked the username to begin with (as noted in the header post), but I figured I ought to hang onto it for the sake of continuity in LJ Idol. But I am slightly less concerned about that than I was ;), and I had an old rename token hanging around from a time when I'd meant to rename my other journal and then couldn't quite go through with it. But I like this username! So. Here I am. Shamed no longer, and if you were wondering who this strange new person on your flist was, wonder no longer.

So, unless something astonishing happens, it's pretty clear that I'm going home in LJ Idol this week: I'm in last place by something like twelve votes, one day into the voting, and five people are going home. So, yeah. It's been a good time, and I'm so glad I did it. I could write more farewell stuff, but I think I covered it all in last week's premature good-bye post. iLose. ;)

Anyway, I would truly love to stay another week -- I'd had my heart set on making the top 25, and I've enjoyed the game too much to be blithe and carefree about leaving. So if you enjoyed my entry this week and feel like throwing a vote my way (note the username switch to winterberries! and note also that it's still between hexkitten and imafarmgirl, the poll having been made before the username change), I'd certainly appreciate it. I am resigned to leaving if that's what happens -- I'm happy to have made it this far -- but it would be nice if the margin were less than, like, 25 votes. Heh.

At any rate. I am watching Annie in the background, and I gotta tell you, you can't really be depressed or upset about anything with Annie in the background. So I'm cool. Thanks, y'all!

(Incidentally -- if I get kicked I'm not sure what's going to happen with this journal, whether I'm going to play the Home Game or not. I am pretty sure it will be staying around, though; I had some other thoughts on what I might do with this journal, but I will elaborate on them as developments warrant...)

When I first heard the phrase "Love means never having to say you're sorry," I was fifteen years old and nowhere near experiencing anything like real adult love, but even then I knew enough to dismiss the line as bullshit. Love is full of fuck-ups, because life is full of fuck-ups. You break one of your partner's trinkets, and that's a small fuck-up, but you're sorry because you love them and you don't want to destroy things they care about, and so you tell them you're sorry. Maybe they know it, but you tell them anyway, because if you stop telling them, after you've broken one too many trinkets and passed over one too many apologies, they're not going to be quite so trusting anymore. You forget your lover's birthday and you tell them you're sorry, because you are and they need to know it. And maybe you choose the wrong stocks just before a market crash and you wind up losing the house, or maybe you accidentally poison the dog, or maybe you fall asleep with a cigarette and burn the house down. And you say you're sorry. And maybe your sorrow is enough to merit forgiveness, and maybe it isn't, but without it, there's nowhere left to go. If you are capable of hurting your partner and not feeling the need to tell them that you are sorry, that is not a sign that your love is so deep that it needs no explanation. It's a sign that you are taking your partner and their love for granted, and that if you don't want to be sitting alone on Valentine's Day, you'd better clean your act up but fast.

No, I've known that line was bullshit for a long time. But Gary set us to find an alternate ending for it this week, and so all week, I've been looking. I ran through a lot of options. "Love means never having to say 'I need you to be more than you are,'" I thought at first. That sounded good, you know? A little long, but fundamentally true. If you love someone for who you they can be rather than for who they are, that isn't love. I almost went with that; I sat down at the keyboard and prepared to tell you all about it. But the words died at my fingertips as I thought of my relationship with my ex, the only ex I've got, a woman I loved and let go and still haven't quite made peace with. She was mean and gorgeous, sexy and furious, passionate and razor-edged; she hated the world and assumed it hated her back, and her influence on me was stunningly toxic. And I did need her to change, to be more than what she was, or perhaps other than what she was. I loved her passion, but I needed her to channel it into kindness instead of hatred. I loved her brilliance and I needed her not to wield it like a weapon, something that made her superior to the common masses. I loved her sense of humor, her intermittent sweetness, her intensity, but what I needed was for her to hang on to those parts of her and let go of the hatred, the poison that was killing me almost as fast as it was killing her. I loved her the way we all love: drawing strength from what's good about the relationship, hoping the bad will change. And when it didn't change, I had to leave. But I didn't leave because I didn't love her. I left because I couldn't bear to be hurt anymore. And it would be easy to dismiss the love I felt as unreal, imaginary, a would-be Pygmalion's love for the Galatea he'd tried to shape and mold and ultimately couldn't. But that isn't so. I loved her, and the fact that I needed her to change had nothing to do with it. I left because I needed her to change. I stayed as long as I did because I loved her.

No, that line wouldn't work either. So I kept on trying. "Love means never having to say 'I love you,'" I thought, in a cutesy epigrammatic moment. If you love your partner deeply enough, I thought, they'll know. If you love your partner deeply enough, your silences can speak as clearly as your words. If you love them, the words won't matter at all. I almost started to write that, too, before I realized it was a complete and utter load of crap, at least as bad as the line from Love Story. Love is not telepathy. Communication is not a betrayal of love. Communication is essential. We all have moments when we're feeling low, when we need to hear the words even if we already know them by heart. And no one ought to understand that better than those people who love us. It's just as well that the general population isn't given to developing cutesy little epigrams like that one. It could destroy a lot of marriages.

So it was back to the drawing board once again. "Love means never having to say 'I give up,'" I thought -- as though no one has ever had to leave a partner that they loved, as though I had completely forgotten the story of the ex that I told you two paragraphs ago. "Love means never having to say 'Happy Valentine's Day'" -- I toyed with that one for awhile, irritated by the millions of dollars that Hallmark is making off a made-up holiday and the constant ads on television that imply that love is meaningless without several hundred dollars' worth of jewelry backing it, but in the end I figured telling your lover "Happy Valentine's Day" is the least you can do for them, so I dropped that one too. I was getting impatient. "Love means never having to say 'You're the lowest vote-getter in LJ Idol this week -- see you in the Home Game,'" I improvised. That sounded vaguely clever, and if Gary were my lover no doubt I'd have tried it; but he isn't, so it's kind of irrelevant. Another entry concept bit the dust.

In the end I wound up with one idea I kept coming back to. Not a silly idea, and not remotely clever. Imperfect, too, but then life often is that way. I floated it past my wife and she fell silent for a minute, considering: "Love means never having to say 'I lied.'"

On the face of it, it sounds all wrong. People lie to people they love all the time. We tell small lies and big ones, to save our own skins or to avoid hurting those we love. We feel guilty, or we don't, but the lies are there. We may feel we have to confess, and when we do, we may say "I lied" right out. None of that means we don't love the person we've lied to. It means that we've screwed up.

Then I thought back over the course of the two relationships I've been in, the one that worked and the one that didn't. I thought of the lies I've been tempted to tell my wife, big and small -- the little purchases I've made that have exceeded our budget, the larger issues I'd just as soon not get into here. How easy it would be to explain this Visa charge as an unanticipated necessity, that bad choice as a mistake or something that never happened at all. There are rationalizations for telling these lies. Ignorance is bliss, right? If you can save your lover hurt by keeping the truth from them, how can you justify inflicting that hurt just for the sake of a principle?

But that's a road I've been down, a long time ago, in the relationship that didn't work. I knew I had to leave long before I did the actual leaving, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I love her too much to hurt her like that, I said to myself, I can't bear to do it. And so I stayed. I let her believe we could go on as we had been, that what was wrong between us might someday be fixed, that I would be there for her always. I told her -- I have never been less proud of anything than I am of this -- I told her I would move in with her. When she moved 1,200 miles away from me to be with her family, I told her I would follow her. I knew that I couldn't, and I knew that I wouldn't, but I couldn't bear to tell the truth, and so I did not. I said it was love that made me lie.

And so I told that lie again and again. I pretended to be making plans for a future that I knew in my heart could never be. And each time I told the lie, it struck a little blow to our relationship, little cracks spreading through the walls, the structure wavering around us. The lies were a betrayal of the worst kind, and no matter how much I tried to tell myself that I was telling them because I loved her, the fact was that every lie I told made the love mean a little less. I thought I was saying "I love you," but what I was saying was "I don't value you enough to be honest with you." And eventually it exploded in my face. And I deserved every moment of the hell that I brought on myself through those lies.

That's why I don't lie to my wife, now. That's the lesson that I learned from that old, bad relationship, the one where love wasn't enough. I love my wife and I know her worth. And I won't chip away at that by refusing to trust her with the truth. It's bad enough for me to do something that would hurt her. If I start compounding the hurt by not letting her know the truth of who I am and what I do, then there will come a time when the things that I do won't matter at all. Either our relationship will be based on reality and honesty, or it will be a pretty, hollow illusion that will collapse in on us. I won't let that happen.

It's worked so far. I've done my normal human share of fucking up, but I've kept away from the really bad stuff so far, the stuff that can break up a marriage. And whatever I've done, my wife knows. We make our peace with it. We've kept the walls solid.

I learned that from my ex. And I did love her, and it absolutely meant having to say "I'm sorry"; but "I'm sorry," in the end, wasn't nearly enough.

So this is looking like my last week in the LJ Idol competition; currently I'm placed second-last among the contestants, and there are six people going home this week.

I've really enjoyed playing in Idol this season, and I'd love to have the chance to keep going. My aim in joining the game was to break away from the shiny-sparkly persona that I try to project on my other journal and to try to dig into some harder and more real stuff that I usually keep hidden. To that end, I decided that I wasn't going to use that other journal to play this game and I wasn't going to take advantage of my friends list over there to ask for votes. I knew this was going to put me at a disadvantage, vote-wise, since that friends list is relatively large, whereas this one consists only of people who have become interested in my writing over here. Still, it was important to me to separate out the two personas. For better or worse, I wanted my writing to stand on its own.

I don't have much hope of making it through this week. If any of you who have not yet voted enjoyed my entry on blankets and would like to vote for it, the poll is here, and I'd be very grateful. Even if that happens I'm not sure it will help very much; I don't have a large friend base, as noted, and in previous weeks people have voted for me and others and then later re-taken the poll and subtracted those votes in an effort to keep their friends in the game. Which means, essentially, that there's a chance people will make an active effort to get me kicked, as they will with others as well. Politics are part of the game, of course, and I knew that going in. I'm not trying to pitch a screaming drama-fit about it; it's the way it goes. You know when you go swimming that you're going to get wet. :)

Nevertheless, I would like to keep playing. I've found it not just fun but very personally meaningful. So if you've enjoyed my writing thus far and would like to see more of it, and you feel like casting a vote, please do. I would really, really appreciate it.

Either way, thanks for reading. Everyone's been awesome and supportive and that is a huge, huge reason that this has been such a good experience for me. Thanks, guys. :)

When I was a year old the blanket was pink with little felt duckies and teddies appliqued on it. It was the perfect blanket to be wrapped around a tiny little body, laid gently across a smooth cheek flushed with slumber. It might have been a perfect blanket but I wasn't a perfect child, so night after night it wound up crumpled into a small wad in the corner of the crib, where it gave me the extra few inches I needed to boost myself up and unlatch the crib door. My parents found me curled up happily in odd places: the bottom of the stairs, the corner of their closet -- the act of escaping was more important than where I wound up. I put my parents through hell for six months, and then I grew up. It was the last time I'd ever use a blanket to escape into the world.

* * *

When I was six years old the blanket was light blue, covered in cottony fluff, and getting thinner by the night. I spent the early parts of each night industriously picking at the fluff, rolling it into soft linty balls, shoving them into my pillowcase when I was done. As my parents dropped in for one last good-night kiss and then headed to bed I let my mind wander from clouds to powdery snowflakes to dandelion spores, stroking my hand over the pills of fabric I'd created. Just before they went to bed I'd holler that I was scared of monsters and beg them to leave the hallway light on and my door open, which they'd do. Then it was time to slip my book out from under the mattress and duck under the covers with it. The thinner the blanket got, the easier it was to read. I couldn't have used a flashlight: they'd have noticed if I'd stolen one, and they'd have seen the light under the covers. What they couldn't imagine was that anyone could read in the dim light of the hallway filtered through a blanket -- but then, they couldn't have imagined that half of my blanket was torn off and stuffed into my pillowcase, either. It was the first time I'd use a blanket for hiding, but it definitely wouldn't be the last.

* * *

When I was thirteen the blanket was a duvet, thick and covered in a mauve floral pattern. It was ugly as sin but it was heavy and opaque, and I loved it for its dark, shielding weight. I discovered my body at thirteen, sweating and gasping, bursting with hormones and steeped in shame. Under the covers, eyes shut, I could temporarily blot out the Catholic nuns and their black-and-white videos on the new temptations our changing bodies would face. Under the covers no one could see me and I could forget about them. I tried to leave the guilt outside, too, but usually it wouldn't go. Darkness and heat and stale air and dampness and labored breathing and corkscrewing shocks of pleasure and shame, shame, shame. I loved that blanket. I hated that blanket. I spent hours and hours of my life under that blanket, the year I turned thirteen.

* * *

When I was nineteen the blanket was a medium-blue duvet, but I didn't care what it looked like. It was soft and warm and I could pull it over my head and hide. That was what I cared about. It was nice. It blurred the edges of things. It kept me safe. I curled up until I was as small as I could make myself, pulled the blanket up as high as it would go without stifling me. The sounds of the dorm receded. My roommate knew enough to let me alone. I spent sixteen hours a day in bed, drifting at the edge of sleep, sliding over into sleep, in and out, safe as long as the world let me be. My dreams were full of cold water, and I'd emerge and clutch the blanket. The world was full of hard edges, and I'd wrap the blanket around me for padding. I have never needed a blanket so badly. A few days after I called the suicide hotline (huddled under the blanket), a few days after I decided to drop out of school, my father came to the dorm and found me curled up inside of bed instead of up packing. When I wouldn't get up, when I didn't know how to face the cold air and bright lights, he grabbed hold of the blanket and pulled it off in one sharp motion. I screamed a scream that went on and on.

* * *

When I was twenty-two the blanket was amazing, soft and puffy and white, an expanse of fabric that went on forever across the surface of the king-size bed at the Westin. It was the first time I'd had sex on top of the covers, not to mention the first time I'd had sex with someone besides myself. I hadn't known that when things happened in bed, the blanket could be a setting or a background instead of a major player. When we left two days later it was mottled with orange stains across the white; we'd had some fun with a bottle of some girly drink called Tangeria. We giggled helplessly at the thought of what the maids would think of the stains. We were twenty-one and twenty-two and we couldn't imagine that anybody else had ever stained a blanket that way, crossed the lines we'd just crossed, done the things we'd just done. As the door clicked shut behind us, I spared one last glance back at the bed. I loved the rumpled blanket. I'd have given anything not to have to leave it.

* * *

When I was twenty-seven, just yesterday, the blanket was a beautiful, lovingly hand-stitched quilt, a wedding present from my mother-in-law. I spent the day with it pulled up under my chin, except when I had to emerge to stagger to the bathroom to be sick. The blanket made me feel a little better, carrying a little of the comfort of all the blankets I'd loved throughout the years. My wife came home from work at six o'clock to find me curled in the bed. She kissed me on the cheek, stroked my hair, brought me ginger ale and saltine crackers. A few crumbs got on the blanket and she brushed them away. When she'd left to make dinner for herself I traced a finger over one of the carefully stitched hearts on the blanket. This blanket is reinforced several times over, made to last a lifetime. I know that it will. I pulled it a little closer, hugged it, let its warmth lull me back to sleep.

Hello, fair friends! Just a quick note -- I am on the verge of being eliminated from the LJ Idol competition, and I'd love to hang in there awhile longer if I could. So if you feel like heading over to the poll and throwing a vote my way, it would be much appreciated. (This week's topic was "It's Not What You Think"; my entry, on the very first foray that my cousins and I made into the fascinating world of the American judicial system, is here.) So vote, if you've a mind to! It's ticky boxes, guys! EVERYONE loves tickies! Trufax, 4 srs.

Thanks, y'all. :)

Court was convened that warm summer day on the black-dirt bocce ball court behind my family's summer cottage. Dress was casual: shorts and bare feet were the order of the day, and the prosecutor wore a bathing suit. The proceedings, however, were anything but casual. My six-year-old brother Billy stood accused of the heinous crime of reading my diary, and should he be convicted, we were prepared to ask for the maximum penalty.

My cousin Robby presided over the court. The whole thing had been his idea, really. When I'd first gone storming around announcing that the lock on my diary was broken and a page had been torn out, Robby was the first to note that that amounted to destruction of property and invasion of privacy. Robby was eleven and watched a lot of People's Court, so he knew about these things. I didn't know so much, but it sounded awfully cool, plus I wanted Billy to pay for what he'd done. So together we went around deposing witnesses and handing out summons. My cousin Kassi got to be the prosecutor because she was the second-oldest after Robby, plus her fourth-grade social studies class had done a unit on the branches of government. I was the plaintiff, unless I was the defendant; Robby and Kassi and I wrangled over that for awhile, unsure of what the words meant, before finally settling semi-randomly on "plaintiff". My cousin May wanted to be a part of the court but we thought she was a little too young to really understand what was going on, so Robby told her she could be the person who held the Bible. There was no attorney for the defense, but we didn't notice and Billy didn't ask. There was also no jury, but Robby figured the judge could handle that, especially since Wapner did it all the time. All in all it wasn't the most shining example of the American justice system that had ever existed, but then again, you could just as easily call us prescient: we anticipated the PATRIOT Act and Guantanamo Bay a decade and a half before they ever happened.

So we had our court: a judge, a prosecutor, a plaintiff or possibly defendant, and the guy who did it. Robby banged a plastic shovel on the card table and announced that the court would now come to order. May came forward to do the swearing-in. As it had turned out we didn't have a Bible at the house, but we had a big hardcover copy of My Very First Dictionary that we could sub in instead, and the effect was very impressive. May swore me in first, then Kassi, in case she decided to testify too. My father, passing by with a wheelbarrow, noted that the prosecutor probably shouldn't be testifying as a witness, but ten years later I would note that he clearly never read Inherit the Wind. There remained only to swear in the accused, who was demonstrating a total lack of respect for the proceedings: while we had been figuring everything out and dragging out the card table, he'd jumped in the pond for a swim. We fished him out and made him swear, except we wouldn't let him touch the dictionary because he was all wet. After that he wanted to go back to swimming, but by then the person who had been watching him to make sure he didn't drown had gone inside for lunch, so he was stuck out in the bocce court with us.

Court proceeded swiftly after that. Kassi put me on the stand and asked me to testify as to the emotional distress I'd suffered as a result of my diary being read and ripped up. I told her it was full of incredibly personal secrets and that it said right out on the front cover, NO BOYS ALLOWED. She asked me to testify as to why I knew Billy to be the culprit, and I told her that he'd been acting like a brat all week. She pressed further, looking for something a little more concrete, or maybe she just wanted to stretch her part out a little longer. I said that I'd found my diary on the bottom bunk, where Billy slept. At that point Kassi forgot whose attorney she was and said "Wait, doesn't your other brother sleep there too?" I replied that Alex would never rip up my diary, because he was nice. We looked over at Billy, who was absorbed in kicking up anthills. Oh boy.

After some foot-dragging Billy consented to be put on the stand. Kassi asked him right out, going for the throat, "Did you rip up Ciara's diary?" "No," he said sulkily, having realized at some point that whatever was going on, it involved people being not nice to him. "I find that hard to believe," she sneered, "given that you broke the lock and read it, then left it on your bed!" "I did not," he said, though he seemed less adamant than he'd been before. Kassi pounced on it. "Yes you did!" she shouted. There was no one around to object on the grounds of badgering the witness, but Robby pounded his shovel-gavel anyway. To be fair, it was an awfully fun thing to do, and he hadn't had much opportunity up to then.

The testimony continued, and it turned out Kassi was a real shark.

-Did you break into Ciara's diary?
-No.
-Yes you did!
-No I didn't.
-Did so!
-Did not!
[The judge banged his gavel.]
-Okay (the prosecutor got sly), fine, you didn't, but what did it say?
[Here the accused wrinkled his brow in confusion and kicked at another anthill.]
-Where were you when the crime occurred?
-When it what?
-When it happened!
-I don't know, when did it happen?
-I don't know! You tell me!
[Another anthill met its death.]
-Did anybody see you ripping up the diary?
-No because I didn't.
-Okay, did anybody see you not ripping up the diary?
-What?
-AHA! So you did rip it up!
-No I didn't!
-Yes you did!
[The gavel banged again.]
-Can I go swimming now?
-NO!

With that concluded, the judge took a five-minute recess to weigh the matter of the accused's guilt or innocence. Luckily it only took him thirty seconds, so the accused didn't have a chance to hop in the pond again. Billy was pronounced guilty with sundry gavel-banging. That happy task settled, it remained only to determine his sentence.

"He has to pay you money," the judge announced.

At that Billy's ears perked up.

"I don't have any money," he said, warily. Meanwhile our cousin Lizzie, two years younger than Billy and a bit out of the loop on the court proceedings, circled back around the court on her tricycle to listen. She'd been riding her tricycle back and forth the whole time, but we hadn't taken much notice: she was younger than us and a sweet kid, and there seemed no reason to pull her from her trike.

"Yes you do too, Billy!" I said hotly, back on the question of his fine. "You got twenty dollars for your birthday!"

"THAT'S MY MONEY!" he hollered.

"YOU READ MY DIARY!" I hollered back.

"DID NOT!"

"DID SO!"

"ORDER IN THE COURT!" Robby had to bang his gavel a whole lot to get the shouting to stop that time.

I turned to Robby. "He has twenty dollars," I said.

"I want a Ghostbusters proton pack! Mom said I could!"

Robby waved that off. Billy had been found guilty; his opinions were inconsequential now. Robby turned to me.

"Take him for everything he's got," he said.

Billy ran off for the house, hollering, "MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!" Robby and Kassi and I exchanged high-fives at our breathtaking legal acumen. "Teach him to read people's diaries!" Kassi said exuberantly. May wanted to know if I would let her have a dollar to buy a "real emerald ring" she had seen at a local trinket shop; "we can share," she assured me. Grandly, I told her that would be fine. Robby began discussing how the money would be collected. I was thinking this was the most awesome thing in the history of ever.

Then Lizzie burst into tears.

This wasn't any little whimper of sympathy for Billy; this was major, out-and-out squalling. We looked over and saw that she hadn't fallen off her trike or gotten mauled by a raccoon. She was staggering over to us, sobbing.

"What is it?"

"I c-c-cah-cah-cah-cah..."

"What?"

"I nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh..."

"What?

"I NEED MY MONEY!"

"What? What money?"

"I cah-cah-can't, I didn't, I didn't muh-muh-mean..." She dissolved completely. "I need my money," she kept sobbing, "I need my money!"

We were beginning to have some doubts about our recent conviction.

Court reconvened.

"What happened, Lizzie?"

"I didn't mean, because I [sobbing] he just said to open it and I opened it because it wasn't locked, I didn't break it, it [sobs] and I didn't read it because it was cursive and Billy didn't read it because it was cursive so he said rip out five pages and my sister said rip out ten pages and he said rip out fifty pages but I didn't because, I, I didn't and I ripped out one page but I didn't read it and I need, I need, I cuh-cuh-can't I need my money I need my money! [sobbing] I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'M SORRY..."

We deliberated.

"Does she even have any money?"

"Her birthday was like a long time ago."

"I got two hundred forty-three dollars for my First Communion."

"She's too little to have a First Communion."

"Does she get allowance?"

In the background, Lizzie gave a bone-shattering howl.

"Okay," Robby said, rapping his gavel and then stopping hastily as Lizzie wailed all the more, "I have reached a decision."

"I NEED MY MONEY I NEED MY MONEY..."

"You can have your money," he said, still more hastily. "We have decided that the new punishment is one penny, or one piece of candy."

"I NEED MY MONEY!"

"It's okay, Lizzie!" I said, kneeling down beside her. "You can keep your money! It's only a penny! Do you have a penny?"

She gave a great big wet sniffle.

"Or a piece of candy?" I said, hopefully.

Sniffle, sniffle. "I have a candy necklace," she said.

"Okay!"

"It's my necklace," she said, starting to sob again.

"Okay okay okay," I said quickly. "Puppa has Snickers bars in the freezer."

"He d-d-d-does?"

"So why don't you get him to give you a Snickers bar, and then you can give it to me?"

Sniffle.

"You can have him give you two and then you can have one too," I said, making a grand munificent gesture.

Choking back another sob, she got back on her trike and pedaled towards the house, leaving the judge, the prosecutor, and the plaintiff-or-possibly-defendant behind her.

"Maybe we should still sue Billy," I said, eventually. "He told her to rip out the pages."

"I think she would cry a lot if we did that," Kassi said.

"Yeah."

"Okay," I said, and sighed. I knew Billy was going to zap me a lot with his proton gun for this one.

So the first conviction our court made was overturned, and as it turned out, we never did have another one. We tried. Flushed with the success of our first court session -- the overturned conviction left us nothing daunted -- when we heard my grandfather complaining loudly that someone had drilled holes in his bocce ball court, the Junior Judicial League swung into action. Unfortunately, we were left stymied when my dad confessed to the crime outright. "Yeah, I was practicing golf," he said. "Dad hates when I do that. I guess I should fill in the holes."

"But... we wanted to have a trial," we said, disappointed.

"I can plead guilty," he offered.

"What does that mean?"

"I can go to court and say I did it."

"But... you have to say you didn't do it or else we can't have a court."

"I don't know what you want me to say, kids. You can have a court and sentence me to filling in the holes as community service."

He was so obtuse.

All in all there seemed to be a distinct lack of crimes needing prosecution in our summer cottage. Regretfully, we found ourselves limited to law enforcement roles, and spent a lot of nights playing Cops and Robbers. There was plenty of fun to be had there, too, and plenty of stories to tell; but I never liked running and hiding half as much as I'd liked that one session of Kids' Court with Judge Robby presiding, and for years found myself wishing for another game with that sort of pizzazz.

Even though, as it turned out, Lizzie never did remember to give me my candy.

Well, never too late to rectify things. Lizzie, I'm linking you here. You've got my address. I'll be looking for some mail.

The first word that I ever read was "pop". I know this not because I remember it -- I don't -- but because my mother delights in telling the story again and again. How I taught myself the alphabet by watching Sesame Street at a time when I was still preverbal, and how she only learned that I knew it when she tried to read me an alphabet book and I pointed out the letters to her before she did; how I read "pop" off the television screen during a Sesame Street short as well. She tells the story with verve, enunciating "pop!" with a three-year-old's vigor, the plosive sound clear and sharp. It's one of many stories about my early childhood that she tells with a sort of happy pride, an incident that obviously made her feel that I was going to be someone special in this world. I'm not at all sure that I've borne out her expectations, but she still has the memories of the original stories, and the telling doesn't get old. Pop.

My first spoken word, in contrast, seems to have been "dada", but I don't know very much about that because it isn't a story that is told much. My mother told me once that "da" is the easiest syllable for a very small child to enunciate and that it's therefore the first word that most children speak. So my saying "dada", I guess, wasn't so special, especially as it didn't happen particularly early developmentally. I don't know whether it was a word that I spoke while looking at my father. I'm guessing that it probably was, or my mother would have considered it a random syllable rather than a deliberate word. But, again, I'm guessing. It's not a story that carries much weight, it seems.

My reading was the centerpiece of my childhood, as far back as my memory stretches. I don't remember reading the word "pop", but I do remember sitting for hours in a corner with piles of children's books, paging through them intently and trying as hard as I knew how to decipher this code that, I sensed instinctively, held endless meaning and mystery ready for the unlocking. My memory seems to slide into time-lapse at that point and I picture the random shapes on the page morphing into distinct letters, the letters into distinct words, the words into concepts and then into stories. The way the story is told, I taught myself. It's a neat little story. I liked hearing it as I grew up, liked what it said about me.

The problem is that like most of the best stories in the world, it wasn't factually true. Yes, I learned my alphabet on my own; yes, I spent a lot of time in the corner with the books, deciphering the code. But I have other memories too. I don't remember my mother reading to me or teaching me to read, although I know that she did. But what I remember with surprising clarity is that as soon as my parents had any inkling that I was interested in reading, my father brought me to Toys R Us and let me pick out a pile of books and a pile of flashcards. After that we spent time every day with the flashcards -- hours that are among my happiest memories from my childhood. The first batch of flashcards were white with light green letters, and they contained simple words: "see", "walk", "sand". I remember being entranced by the nouns in particular, the images they conjured up. We worked through those in my earliest years, my dad sorting them into piles, words I knew by heart and words I didn't, until I knew it all. The next batch was from the same brand, light blue in color, containing more complicated words. I remember being impatient at that point because I'd seen another set of flashcards at the store, much flashier -- they were dark purple, with a bespectacled owl on the front of the packaging, holding a book and winking. I wanted to do those ones right away but my dad said that they had whole sentences on them instead of just words and I should do the blue ones first. I tore through the blue cards and my dad bought me the ones with the purple owl, but as it turned out, I had moved past the flashcards stage. My dad signed me up for the Weekly Reader series, and the Troll book mailing list too. We got two books in the mail every week from then on out. It wasn't nearly enough for me. From then on I read compulsively and alone, curled up in my little bedroom with the terrible plaid-pink wallpaper. I guess the predominant memory that people have of my childhood is of me reading in solitude. Maybe that's why it's always said that I taught myself to read. For whatever reason, the story of the flashcards doesn't get told any more than the story of "dada" does.

What makes this story a moving one for me, from the perspective of adulthood, is that my father is dyslexic. As I understand it, he has a fairly severe form of dyslexia, and one that wasn't diagnosed until he was an adult. He struggled through his school years with terrible grades and routine denunciation from his teachers, and every year he wrote a book report on the same obscure book that he had first read in first grade, so that he wouldn't have to put himself through the process of reading another book. He excelled at sports and found his metier there; after high school he fought his way through the B.A. degree that would permit him to teach physical education to high schoolers. He has worked in a school for special-needs teenagers for the past thirty years, despite the fact that he could be making three times as much money at a mainstream public school. He doesn't talk much about the reasons for this choice, even if you ask him -- "I like it better" is about as much as he'll open up. I've had to infer the connections between his choice to work there and the struggles he had as a child. Just as I've had to infer the connection between his dyslexia and the hours and hours he spent with me and the flashcards when I was small, doing whatever he could to ensure that I would read better than he ever could.

As it turned out, I have built my life around the written word. I have few other interests, and as far as the physical world goes -- the world through which my father moves with such ease, running and shooting and dribbling -- I hate my body and all the space that it inhabits, and if I could somehow dissociate my mind from it and vaporize the whole useless pile of mass I've been stuck in all these years, I would. I live in words the way my father lives in his body, and I don't think either one of us will ever understand the other's experience at all. My father tried for years to get me involved in the children's sports teams that he coached, but I was klutzy and uncoordinated in a way that must have been hard for him to fathom. For my part, I remember when I was in third grade and we were on a long car trip, I tried to get my father to have a spelling bee with me. He refused, although I begged him. As he's said since, he knew that I would win, which would have been less amusing than I, at eight years old, thought it would be.

My mother told me once that my father was intensely relieved when I turned out to have such an affinity for the written word, because he had been terrified that I would inherit his dyslexia. Ironic, then, that the learning disability I wound up with was not dyslexia, but a nonverbal learning disability, which left me free to read voraciously but left me clumsy, stumbling and terrible at math. We're polar opposites, my father and I, and as much as I can't imagine what it would be like to be able to move through the world with the confidence and fluidity that he has, I'm sure he's unable to imagine what it would be like to look at a page and see it resolve effortlessly into words, rather than squirm and wiggle tauntingly.

The difference between us, of course, is that while I'll never be a part of my father's gym-teachery world, there were months when he bridged the gap between his mind and mine -- months that are arguably the most important of my life. It's said that I taught myself to read, but it isn't true. My father taught me to read, first with green flashcards and then with blue ones, and finally with purple ones that I didn't need anymore. He wanted so badly for me to read, to dodge the hardships he'd faced, and he sat with me all those hours and he made it happen. He made it into a game for me despite the fact that reading had been anything but a game for him. I would always have grown into a person who loved to read, I'm sure, but I first learned to love reading at my father's knee. Now I inhabit a universe that he'll never know, but it's a universe to which he first gave me the key.

The story of my father and the flashcards isn't told, just as the story of my first babbled "dada" isn't told. I've always been thought of as my mother's child; my father relates more to my brothers, both sports players, both inveterate members on Dad's Little League, CYO basketball, and peewee football teams.

I don't want the stories to be forgotten, though. I don't want it to be said that I taught myself to read. Dad was there. "Dada" wasn't a couple of random syllables; it was the name of a man who gave me one of the best gifts I've ever received.

I wish I could do something half as wonderful for him.

When I was in kindergarten, there was a worksheet that we did probably once a week. It was a simple line drawing of a street with a sidewalk on either side of it. A car started down the road from one end of the page; on the other end, a child on a bicycle sat on the sidewalk, ready to ride. Our task, as kindergarteners holding the Crayons of Omnipotence, was to draw a line down the sidewalk for the bicyclist to ride on. If he rode straight down the sidewalk to the end of the page, he was safe. If the line veered off the sidewalk and into the street, he would be hit by the car. We were left to imagine his fate after that.

Looking back I suspect that this was meant simply to reemphasize the dangers of riding one's bike in the street, and the comparative safety of the sidewalk. There was a problem, though: my fine motor skills were terrible, far worse than most other kids' my age. The neurological reasons for this wouldn't be known until years later, and that would be years too late for the boy on the bicycle. I christened him Bobby, and every week I watched him die.

I tried so hard. Bobby was depending on me! I would start drawing so slowly, so carefully, but my hand would jiggle a little, and he'd wobble off the curb. Hastily I'd yank him back on, then try to move him forward again, but the overcorrection had already thrown me off, and from then on his path was a wild tangle of zigzags and doubling back. I don't recall a single instance when I managed to get him from one side of the paper to the other without straying into the street. And in my head, the moment that that line touched the wide expanse of street on the paper, Bobby was done for. I imagined him setting off to ride his bike just like I rode mine, the breeze ruffling his hair, happy and carefree. I heard the blare of the car horn, saw him try to weave out of the way. Then the car hit and I could see him in my head, squashed flat against the pavement like a bug, leaking guts and gore. Every week I put myself through this, guilty of manslaughter a hundred times over, writhing in shame and self-loathing. I like to think that my teacher never knew the agony this exercise put me in. If she did and yet kept assigning it each week, she had to be a sadist.

In succeeding years, as mentioned, I started getting little diagnostic labels to explain away all my little neurological idiosyncrasies. It turned out I had a seizure disorder, for one thing, an odd type called myoclonus, which accounted for the worst of my limbs' periodic jerking and flailing. A more consistent problem was my nonverbal learning disability, which couldn't possibly have been diagnosed when I was five years old because no one knew what it was when I was five years old. It's an autistic-spectrum disorder affecting motor coordination and spatial relations, executive functioning and organization, and reading of social cues. And it was the reason that poor little Bobby ended up smashed flat every week.

But I didn't know it at the time. So I figured it was my fault.

And in the years that followed, that theme held. There were so many things I couldn't do, and they were always, always, always my fault. And I didn't grow up in a particularly great situation for a girl who couldn't play by the rules, either. My mother is a wonderful person, but for reasons of her own, order and control are very important to her, and as far as she's concerned, keeping up appearances is essential to keeping life manageable. And I was not good at keeping up appearances. I had wild temper tantrums for no apparent reason, courtesy of the bipolar mood disorder that was my brain's final wonky gift to me. I asked inappropriate questions at inappropriate times. I wouldn't make eye contact, and when asked to I shrank down into myself as though terrified. I hid in corners with books and wouldn't come out. I taught myself to read at three but couldn't tell left from right until I was sixteen. And because I could read and write and spell like nobody's business everybody assumed I was a brainiac, and they certainly couldn't understand why I couldn't do this other stuff that, let's face it, was infinitely more basic. My mom was frustrated. The nuns at my Catholic school -- also sticklers for order and control -- were frustrated. And they kept hammering into me you can do this, why won't you do this, this is easy, stop whining, just do it, and I came to believe that I could do these things, I could button my jacket and tie my shoes and tell time and make friends and get Bobby from one end of the street to the other safe and sound. I just wouldn't. I didn't even know why I wouldn't, but I presumed it was because I was bad -- bad on such a deep-down level that even I didn't know how to get at it to fix it.

When I was growing up, Bobby taught me that the penalty for coloring outside of the lines was death. I laugh at the melodrama of it now. But then I think of how real it felt then -- how deeply rooted my Catholic beliefs in sin and evil were, and how truly I believed that I was a terrible sinner, possibly even evil, for not following the rules that the rest of society observed so easily -- and I stop laughing.

Now, a couple of decades later, I look at my life and realize how much of that I still carry around with me. I still find it hard to keep myself organized and to do things that other people take for granted -- for example, navigating a route to some familiar place that I've been to a hundred times; my mind simply does not store maps the way other people's do. But although that's inconvenient, it doesn't have the emotional heft of many of the issues that have stayed with me from childhood. Such as: I rarely socialize because everything I know about appropriate social behavior I have had to learn by rote, slowly and painfully, and whenever I am out with friends I spend so much time worrying that I am talking too loud and laughing too hard and twitching too much and not making enough eye contact that it seems simpler just to stay in. Such as: I have special spring-laces on my sneakers because I still tie my laces so fumblingly, and they come undone so easily, that I can't stand to try with anyone watching, to let people know that I am a twenty-seven-year-old who cannot tie her shoes properly. Such as: at night, when I am drifting off to sleep and my mind is open to random thought currents that I shut down during the day, I find myself muttering disturbing little things: I'm the worst person in the world, I'll hear myself say, or Somebody should punch me in the head -- or, worse, Somebody should shoot me in the head. I'm not consciously processing these words as I say them, but I will tell you that they're not related to any particular moods I may have been experiencing during the day, not part of my bipolar or any other mental illness issue. Instead, by the very feel of the words passing my lips, I know that they trace all the way back to kindergarten, when I was taught to believe that I was such a bad person that I wouldn't make eye contact and I wouldn't apply myself to my math homework and I wouldn't tie my shoes and button my coat. When I was such a bad person that I killed Bobby, again and again and again.

In life as I was taught to live it, there are rules, hard and fast and clear, and if you're a good person, you obey those rules. They're the lines that we're meant to color within, the lines that give shape, meaning, and, above all, security to our existence. And all my life, I have stumbled outside of those lines. Either I didn't know the rules or I couldn't obey the rules or I couldn't remember them no matter how hard I tried. So often I feel that I want nothing more than to be able to keep within the lines, neat and clean and simple -- the epitome of the good girl, prim and proper and predictable. But my brain doesn't work that way. It never has and it never will. For better or for worse, I'll always be coloring outside the lines.

Sometimes people tell me it's a good thing. That the world has enough predictable people already. That I'm meant to be here on this planet doing my own thing, and that good friends appreciate that even if the Catholic nuns didn't. That there are plenty of people who can color inside the lines, but there are never enough people who'll transgress the boundaries, break the rules, make life interesting.

Who knows, maybe one day I'll even believe them.

Right now, though, what I mostly feel like doing is scouring the Internet to see if I can find that old worksheet my kindergarten teacher used to assign -- and if I can't find it, I'll draw a new version up in Paint. My fine motor skills have gotten better since kindergarten. I think I'd like, just this once, to get Bobby all the way down the road, smiling and safe and ready for the next challenge.

You want to know about cracking up. How much do you want to hear?

* * *

I'm seven years old and I just failed a math test. My father wants to teach me how to do it before the next test but I scream that I KNOW how to do it, I made some mistakes but I KNOW, and they tell me not to use that tone of voice and to quit popping off at them. I yell more and they yell back and I scream and cry and they tell me to calm down and then I run up to my room and fling the window open. I'm going to jump, I shriek, struggling with the screen, I'm going to jump, and in that moment I mean it. The screen finally skreeks halfway open, reluctantly, and I dangle my head out and I'm staring at the concrete steps one floor down. The screen is stuck and I can't get out any further before my father grabs me by the waist and drags me back indoors. When I try it again a few months later, the interior window won't open and I don't know why. Years later my mother tells me that my father nailed all my windows shut. It was sweltering in my room for every summer of my childhood from then on out.

* * *

I'm sixteen years old and I haven't slept in a week. I have a Spanish paper I'm going to fail and a calculus test I'm going to fail and a Greek presentation I'm going to fail and I have two AP exams coming up and final exams the week after that and I'm providing piano accompaniment for five choirs at my school's Music Night and six children who are singing solos at my church's year-end vocal recital. I'm having a full-on pacing-sobbing-hyperventilating panic attack, but it hasn't let up in five days, which is why I can't sleep and why I can't stop crying and my hands won't stop shaking and my brain has turned into a crazy warp-speed carousel that I'll never get off of, ever, until a spring pops loose and then another and I fly into a million pieces, dead. I don't go to school for a week because I can't stop crying or form a coherent sentence. Food chokes me and I lose seven pounds in five days. Everything is wrong with me and everything terrifies me and I should never have been born. I can't understand anything that is going on around me. I stay at my grandmother's house and watch Teletubbies with my three-year-old cousin as Grandma babysits the both of us, and I sob even more hysterically because I can't understand what the Teletubbies are doing. My grandmother gets me a copy of something called Kara, the Lonely Falcon to read, and it seems to be an inspirational book of some kind, but I can't understand it and the little I understand makes me cry harder because it's about how to be a good person, I think, and I will never be a good person. I'm a terrible person. I'm sixteen years old and I'm the worst person in the world.

* * *

I'm eighteen years old and I'm the best person in the world. I'm gorgeous, I'm blessed, I'm God's chosen one. I spent several hours talking to God through the medium of my ceiling fan earlier in the day, thanking Him for choosing me to be a modern-day Joan of Arc or Julian of Norwich or other similar saintlike person, but now it's time for me to let loose and explore the sexual side of my being that was chained for so long because I was afraid to be happy, but now I know how wrong I was to be afraid of happiness, so I am ready to dance my ass off and sing at the top of my lungs and hit on any guy that I see. The night is a swirling mass of color, I'm a radiant beam of light. My mother is worried about me but I tell her it's okay because it's a religious epiphany and what's missing from the world is faith in God, I've just found a depth and purity of faith I never had before so of course I'm ecstatic, and you know the passage in the Bible where it tells about how Jesus walked on water and then Peter followed, well what happened wasn't that Jesus *made* him walk on water, it was that Peter had faith that Jesus wouldn't let him drown, and any of us could walk on water, I could walk on water too, only not quite yet because I'm not that good of a person yet, but I will be, I know I will be. My mother is terrified, she thinks I'm going to drown, but I won't drown. Nothing bad will happen to me. I'm God's chosen one and nothing bad will happen ever again.

* * *

I'm eighteen years old and I'm in a locked psychiatric unit. I'm back where I was when I was sixteen years old but this time when the panic attack had lasted three days with no sleep my parents brought me to the ER and the doctor signed me in here. I can't sleep. There are twenty-five patients and four of them are under the age of sixty. I can't sleep. They shine lights in my eyes every fifteen minutes to make sure I'm not dead. I can't sleep. My roommate is in her eighties, wears a diaper, and can't feed herself. She screams and screams when they try to change her diaper. I can't sleep. I need medication to calm me down but I don't know how to ask and they don't offer because there are two nurses on staff for twenty-five out-of-control lunatics. I can't sleep. I huddle back in my pillow and try to close my eyes, but they make me open them so they can see that I'm not dead. I can't sleep. They are trying to feed my roommate a pill crushed in her oatmeal, and she won't stop screaming. No pills, no pills, no, no, no, no, no, she screams. No, no, no, I scream with her in my head. No one sees me. They watch my pupils dilate, and they don't see me. I am not there. No one is there. A girl is crouching terrified and alone in the corner of her bed praying for sleep that won't come. She can't sleep. I can't sleep. I will never sleep again. I read somewhere that in lab experiments rats can exist for ten days without sleep and then they die. In seven days I will be dead.

* * *

I'm nineteen years old and I have no facial expressions. They put me on medications that took my facial expressions away, but they say it's better than being manic, and I have to believe them because they're the doctors. I write long poems about suicide and put quotes from "Paint It Black" up as my AIM away message. My friends worry about me, then edge away from me when things don't get better. I don't leave my room except to eat, and I don't eat anything except hamburgers, fried chicken, and french fries. I gain sixty pounds. I write lots of fanfiction in which people commit suicide. Something is coming, but I don't know what. I am waiting.

* * *

I'm twenty years old and I have tipped a bottle of pills into my hand. I stare at it. I bring the pills to my lips. I pause. Then I break and I run into the bathroom and I flush the pills away and I'm crying and I run back to my room and I look up the number of the suicide hotline that they give you with your student handbook and I call them and I talk for three hours and I decide to drop out of school. Whatever I was waiting for is over now.

* * *

I'm twenty years old and in another locked ward, but a nice one this time. They have a Scrabble set and an arts and crafts table. I beat everyone on the ward in Scrabble and make little pen holders and keyrings and jewelry boxes for everyone I know, inside the ward and out of it. I'm manic, but they're fixing my moods with meds that don't take away my facial expressions. I go to group therapy every day and talk and listen. There are bad nights when I can't sleep, because I can only sleep listening to music and some of the nurses think that I might break my CDs in half and slice my wrists with one of the edges, but eventually I get a doctor's permission to have my CDs, and the nights get much better. I am in the hospital for Christmas and New Year's, but it's okay. On New Year's we're allowed to stay up to watch the ball drop, and my alcoholic suicidal roommate and the drug-addicted bipolar guy from down the hall and I all sit around making fun of the performers on Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve. I make a papier-mache sparkly ball to drop at midnight and we ring in the new year on our own, crazies hoping this year will be better than the last one. I had almost forgotten what hope felt like, but it's New Year's 2002 and I've found it again, here in this locked ward with manic-depressives and schizophrenics and catatonics and depressives, all of us living lives that no one should have to live, all of us trying our hardest to be well again.

* * *

I'm twenty-seven years old and I have been on medication and in therapy for nine years. I am manic-depressive with particular tendencies towards depression and anxiety, as well as something called sensory integration disorder, which tends to flare up alongside my panic attacks and sometimes makes it very difficult for me to carry on a normal life. But I take five kinds of pills every day, and then I go to work, and I come home and keep my house livable. I am married to a wonderful woman who supports me when things are hard, and I try to treat her with care and to keep my own moods and sanity under control so that my disorder won't tear apart her life along with mine. I work every day on my sanity, and some days I'm more successful than others. But I know what to do, now, when I can't sleep for days on end: I call my therapist and take a dose of neuroleptics until things settle. I know how to gauge my moods so that I can tell when I am going manic and head things off at the pass. I know who I am, and I know that on a basic level, I am crazy. I've known that since I was sixteen years old. But what I didn't know then -- what I have learned slowly and painfully in these past eleven years -- is that I can take control back from my disease. There will be bad times along with the good times, and I know that, but in the end, I will make it through. I won't commit suicide, I won't spend my life institutionalized, I won't lose my facial expressions or my ability to feel. I'm twenty-seven years old and next year I'll be twenty-eight, and I'll still be fighting, and I'll still be okay.

My grandmother is a born storyteller in the purest sense of the word. It isn't that she has a flair for dramatic storytelling, although she does, and it isn't that she has a retentive memory for the details of stories, although she has that as well. However, the thing that makes Grandma a born storyteller is more fundamental. Grandma shapes her life by her stories.

When I think of Grandma's life I imagine it as a huge book, subdivided into smaller parts according to subject heading. There's no sense of a chronological flow of history, and there's no particular sense of continuity between one story and the next. Anecdotes exist on their own, and if you're looking to find any running themes or threads, you'll have to extrapolate that out on your own. Grandma may tell you, for example, that when she was eight years old, her mother had her pet kitten euthanized while she was at school, then told her that she'd given the kitten away to a fishmonger who'd promised to give her the fishes' heads and tails to eat every day. Another time, she might tell you the story of how she tried to adopt a snapping turtle when she was a child, and it nearly bit her finger off, so her mother released it back into a nearby pond and then told her its pen had flooded and it had escaped. And she might tell you about a stray cat that she'd named and tried to adopt when she was little, and how her mother hadn't liked it, and how she'd smuggle it into the house and her mother would throw it out and it never got housebroken so it was constantly peeing on the floor and tearing up the furniture once Grandma had smuggled it in. She'll tell you all of those stories -- and they'll be funny stories the way she tells them, too; that's another thing about Grandma, her matchless skill at drawing humor out of pathos -- but she won't sit down to tell you about her mother, or about her childhood. There was just this funny time, once, with this snapping turtle, and... You fill in the rest.

It's the same with almost everything. I've tried repeatedly to get a sense of the chronology of my grandmother's life and the lives of her children, and I never can get it. No one on that side of the family seems to think of time that way, as a straight line running forward. There are bright bursts of stories, and then when the story is over things will blank out, and then it's on to the next story. I know that my father and his older brother once straitjacketed their younger brother in a coat zipped up the back and then rolled him down a hill and into a yard where lived an extremely friendly, playful, slobbery black Lab. But I have no idea if that was around the time when my father got poison ivy down his throat by stuffing leaves in his mouth as part of his camouflage gear in a particularly intense game of Relievio, or around the time when my uncle caught the lilac thief who had been snipping the best blooms off my grandmother's and her neighbors' trees for years, or maybe around the time that my father fell off a cliff while mountain-climbing with the Boy Scouts and his climbing partner, seeing the fall out of the corner of his eye, figured my dad had just dropped his coat, and ignored it until the rope snapped entirely taut. If there is a chronology in my grandmother's life that I do understand, it is the chronology of her alcoholism, because as a strict One-Day-at-a-Time-er she recognizes the importance of dates and anniversaries and commemorative medallions. I know that she became an alcoholic at the age of five, when her father would throw large parties for his buddies, and she would sneak out when they were gone and drain the last of every cup of whiskey, wine, or beer that had been left out; and I know that when she got sober, she was 31 and when she went to her first AA meeting, someone dropped a tray bearing four hot coffees on her head. She was so afraid that if she moved a muscle she'd turn and flee and never come back that she sat there, hot coffee dripping out of her hair into her eyes and puddling in the contours of her shirt, and she stuck out the whole meeting. That was 46 years ago and she's got 46 years of sobriety to her credit. And with them come 46 years' worth of stories: stories, for example, of "pigeons" who lived in my dad's basement when he was growing up, newly recovering alcoholics with no place else to stay and no one willing to put them up but this nice lady who'd hit rock bottom when a trayful of coffee got dumped over her head. Stories of adventures in helping her sisters, children, nephews, grandchildren to sobriety as well. One thing you don't tend to hear her tell very often are stories of things that went down while she was drinking, although I'm sure there are many stories and I'm sure they'd make any Animal House screenwriter green with envy. She must tell those stories in AA, I'd assume, but they're not part of the grandmother I know.

And yet the simple act of writing that last sentence makes me aware of how carefully shaped the grandmother I know really is, how precisely she selects the stories she tells and the words she uses to tell them. Each story I hear from Grandma is told with the vivid panache of a woman to whom storytelling is an art form. But an artist chooses the image that he wants to paint; a novelist chooses what story she wants to tell. And so my grandmother chooses her stories, as well. They're beautiful, brilliant, hilarious stories, and they tell me so much more than the plain prose of most other people I know. But every once and again it occurs to me that Grandma, the real woman who lived through all these things, may be defined as much by what she chooses to leave out of her stories as by what she chooses to include in them.

In the end I am always circling back to the question of identity. Who am I? Who is she? If we tell the stories of our lives a certain way over and over, if we pick our stories and we shape them and we polish them and we offer them to the world, will we have changed ourselves? Shaped ourselves into something prettier, better, easier? I couldn't pick a specific favorite story because there are too many, and I couldn't get any farther from "any of the stories Grandma tells." In the end, I think the story *is* Grandma. The Grandma I know is the stories she tells me, the mosaic of quips and anecdotes and tales that make up all I know of her. And maybe I know this, that she's a story and it's by her choice, because I have tried so hard to do what she's done -- snip away the crumpled edges, blank out the boring parts and the rough parts and all the rest of the parts that distract from that narrative roundness. Whether it's a genetic quirk or a learned trait or both, I've worked hard at shaping the amorphous, raggedy blurp of identity-glop that I am by nature into a pretty, compelling story to tell.

My grandmother is my favorite story, and a model for my own.

Maybe I should tell her that someday.

I am the sort of person who is not good at confrontation, which means that a great deal of what I want to say seems to go unspoken. It’s a lousy trait, product of a lot of childhood training in being compliant and passive; it’s made still lousier by my natural tendency towards being strongly opinionated and passionate about my ideals. Somehow the soapbox rants that pour out of me so freely when I’m addressing an imaginary crowd dry up and crumble into dust when I’m faced with one person who disagrees with me. And it sucks. It sucks even more when someone is doing something that angers me or hurts me, and I can’t tell them; it hurts most of all when that person is a friend. My tongue goes into knots and won’t come undone. And the hurt or the anger grows and flourishes, and sometimes I can deal with it and sometimes I can’t. Either way, my inability to talk straight costs me plenty.

Given all of that, you can imagine how I felt when I first began to learn about the culture of blogging. When it comes to issues of confrontation, I seem to be forever debarred from aggression -- but here is the Internet, and suddenly there’s this forum where I can proclaim to the world what’s on my mind, simultaneously speaking to everyone and to no one in particular. And as every LiveJournaler knows, speaking “to no one in particular” means “speaking to one very specific person who’s done one very specific thing that this entry is very specifically about”. But you don’t say that, and so the confrontation remains at a comfortable remove. Apparently in the real world, they call this “passive-aggression”, and it isn’t an admirable thing. Here on LiveJournal, though, we call it... well, LiveJournal.

Still, over time I began to feel uncomfortable about that method of confrontation-at-a-remove, too. It seemed immature. I learned, in a few uncomfortable fits and starts, to quit making those angry, public, comments-disabled posts that are designed to piss one person off and get everybody else poring greedily through the comments threads on your old entries to try to figure out what happened. But I never did learn the art of confrontation. I’ve never learned to tell people the things I think they need to know, in an open and straightforward way, before the emotions fester and swell.

There’s one meme I’ve done a few times over, a last weak remnant of classic LJ passive-aggression. It’s that one where you’re supposed to write ten sentences, each directed at a member of your friendlist, and not tell anyone which belongs to who. Well, that meme has kicked up more shit on my friends page than I care to express. It’s not that the entries are always particularly drama-laden, in the sense that they are full of anger or strong emotion; it’s that there is absolutely nothing that is guaranteed to drive people batshit more than writing a bunch of provocative statements and then saying “This might be about you!” Because that’s the thing about that meme -- its raison d’etre: it exists to allow you to say the things you can’t otherwise say. They may not be words of anger, or even words of particular importance, but whatever they are, they’re crackling with enough electricity that they’re not safe to handle without insulating gloves. The anonymity of the meme, the fact that there are a lot of statements and probably even more people reading it, and the simple fact of its being a meme to begin with (memes are lighthearted and fun! Right?) provide that insulation.

I like this meme.

And so I post it, and the inevitable happens. Everyone assumes at least one of the items is about them, and nine out of ten times they guess wrong. Naturally this has the potential to range from being terribly amusing to terribly awkward -- there have been a few times when the wrong people have assumed I had crushes on them, which sort of sucked, and a few more times when people blew up at me preemptively in the comments because they took an item that wasn’t meant for them the wrong way. Looking back over it I’m surprised that I like this meme so much, because I am beginning to realize that although a lot of people take it all in good fun, there’s always a bit of fallout, and that fallout always consists of a lot of anxiety and frustration and occasional anger.

But it’s a safety valve. It allows me to speak words that need to be said, but that I’m not otherwise strong enough to say. And it’s funny, because when I do this, it often feels like the right thing to do. I am telling people things that I need to tell them, and there is a chance that they will read them and know what they need to know. And in the moment, it feels like this is the kind way to do it: that while I can’t say this stuff directly to people for fear of hurting them, if I say it indirectly it will hurt less. I tell myself I’m doing it for them.

But there was something I realized last night as I was turning this over in my head. When I saw this week’s topic, I thought about this particular meme because everyone does assume the items are about them, and mostly they’re wrong. But thinking about the meme got me to thinking about how silly it is that this is the best way I have of talking to people. And I realized that when I write a careful little sentence containing some long-buried truth and then post it as part of a numbered list, I think what I’m doing is writing an anonymous note to someone specific that I want to hear it... but that isn’t it. What I’m doing is getting something out of my system that I’m too chicken to say in any way that matters. The irony of that meme is that everybody assumes it’s about them, and it is by nature not about any of them. It’s about me. It’s about my fears -- my fear that I’ll lose people if I tell them the truth, my fear that expressing anger will make me into somebody I don’t want to be, my fear that somehow the world will blow up if I spoke my damn mind for once. It’s about my feelings and how I want to get them off my chest and somehow magically have there be no repercussions. In the end, it’s about what everything seems to be about with me: using the Internet to hide from the world -- and from myself.

I started to do that meme again awhile ago, when I was scared to speak out loud. I left it undone, partly because the realizations I’ve articulated here were nibbling at the edges of my brain, half-formed but persistent.

I think I won’t finish it. I think, instead, I’ll draft an email. Written to a specific person, and without any pretenses for me to hide behind.

It’s worth a try.

The day that my friend of eight years left my life, she was still in the middle of trying to make preparations and solidify plans, but I was an asshole and so they fell through. She called four times that day and then came to our door, wanting to give back the AeroBed she had borrowed from us. She was on her way across the country, and from there, across the ocean; we weren't going to see each other again for a very long time, if ever. And I had known she would be coming, and I had taken an overdose of sedatives. Not enough to kill me, but enough that I knew I wouldn't be waking up when she called. She was leaving in the middle of a big messy situation, and the upshot was that I was afraid that what she was doing was going to kill her. So I was terrified to see her go and I was terrified of what could happen to her and I was terrified that I couldn't stop her and I was terrified that I would break down completely. I couldn't find any way to wrap the whole horrible situation up in a tidy package, take the AeroBed and wish her the best with a smile on my face. I couldn't find any way to accept that whatever happened, it was her choice, not mine. I couldn't accept that what I thought of the choices she was making -- even if I thought they were wrong choices, even if I thought they were suicidal! -- didn't matter, because she was a grown-up and I was not her. I'd had my chance to express what I thought, and I'd done so; she was going ahead with this; end of story, full stop.

And yet I couldn't rest. My brain was churning and eating itself away with the thought that I needed to stop this. The fight had been lost, but I didn't know how to stop fighting. So I took my overdose and lay insensate while she called, so I wouldn't have to look her in the face as she handed over the AeroBed and feel that frantic thrumming in my chest, that sense that I needed to do something, stop her, don't let this happen for Christ's sake you can't let this happen! I chose unconsciousness instead. She called, called, called, then knocked, then went away. I'll never see her again. I know that.

Six months later I'd understand just how damaging my attempt to take responsibility for her had been to all concerned; but six months later was six months too late. And when she left, I was unprepared.

* * *

She was the one who had talked me through the breakup, years before that. There, again, I had run away when I couldn't take care of someone anymore -- I'd hidden in a hole and waited for the screaming to stop. But back then I was less cavalier with my health and well-being, and I wouldn't overdose, which meant I was left with fewer options to deal with the aftermath when I said the words "It's over". I heard the wail coming through the phone line and then I cut it off, exhaling into the split second of dead air before the ringing and vibrating started again and my brand-new ex's number started flashing. I ended the call. There was another empty second. It started vibrating again.

The phone was set up to kick through to my parents' home line if I let a call go to voice mail or if I received a call while it was turned off, and it was 4 am, so I could neither let it ring nor turn it off. My only option was to keep the line busy and ignore the beeps; that would divert my ex's calls to a different voice mail. And so I picked up the phone and called the girl whom I would betray with an overdose five years down the line, and I chatted to her about nothing at all as the tears streamed down my face and the second line kept beeping. At two-second intervals. At five-second intervals. At ten-second intervals. At fifteen-second intervals. I babbled for hours and hours as I cried in the basement of my parents' house, poking through the detritus of my childhood and reading my friend the names on my brother's old baseball cards. She stayed with me as the intervals moved to twenty seconds, and then to thirty seconds, and then finally to a minute or so. They slowed down more quickly after that, and when it had been a half an hour since the last call I decided to hang up. I thanked my friend and she said to think nothing of it, and I hung up knowing she had been my saving grace that night, because I could not have handled the decision I had made otherwise. She had allowed me to hide from my ex that night, the ex I couldn't have let go of without a foxhole to dive into. And then, years later, the sedatives allowed me to hide from my friend as well. In those years I never did learn anything about preparing to say goodbye.

* * *

The ex was the one who talked me through leaving my parents' house. That time I hid in the bend of a child's slide at the park near the schoolyard four blocks from my house. I had run out in no shoes and with nowhere to go, because I couldn't live there anymore and couldn't figure out how to leave, either. So I'd screamed something I couldn't take back and grabbed my cell phone and then I tore out of the house, tears streaming down my face and chips of gravel biting into my feet. I got halfway to the park before I called the ex. I wasn't making a lot of sense then either, but she was good to me then, and eventually my feet got me to the park. She agreed that the situation that had forced me out that night was supremely fucked-up, and she agreed I needed to get out of my parents' house for good, and she agreed that the particular way I had chosen of making that happen that night flew in the face of all logic and reason, and then she told me what was happening on the episode of American Idol that I was missing until I calmed down and started to listen. So she, too, let me hide, in the safe confines of a child's tunnel slide and a gentle telephone conversation. I'd made a decision I didn't know how to live with, and she helped supply the padding until I could adjust -- until I'd grabbed the first free apartment I heard of, an overpriced bug-infested place an hour and a half from my job. She got me through my own inability to plan and choose deliberately and act rationally. Just as my friend did when I couldn't be with the ex anymore; just as the Ativan did when I couldn't help my friend anymore.

* * *

All my life, it seems, this is how my decisions have been made. I am terrified of change. I see it coming out of the corner of my eye and I freak out, cling to pillows and hide under the covers, pray it won't have to happen. And so when it does have to happen, I am never prepared. The time that other people spend learning to accept what has to be done and making preparations for it, I spend in denial. If you and I are being pushed towards the edge of a cliff, slowly and surely, you are probably looking ahead, gauging the distance to the cliff's edge, and preparing your parachute. Somehow I have never been able to be that sensible. I dig my heels in, leaving long tracks in the dirt, and try to gauge the depth of the tracks; I look around at the scenery and try to pretend there will be something to rescue me coming up over the horizon; in the end, I try to pretend the cliff is not there at all. And when we reach the cliff's face, I will jump; but the most I seem to be able to do in the way of preparation is to take one long, hopeless breath. And the results, the things I do to try to soften the crash -- the hours crouched in playground slides, the months of avoided phone calls and unclear boundaries, the overdoses -- well, they are, inevitably, some kind of fucked up.

"Unprepared" is the way I live my life. And as I look back over the long skein of choices I have made -- or that I've barely made, or that I haven't made at all -- because something in me revolts against the idea of preparedness, I realize how much this has cost me. Worse, I realize I'm not the only one who's suffered for it. I've cocked up my own life and those of a lot of people whose lives touch mine because I can't fucking prepare for anything. Because I look over my shoulder instead of forward. Because instead of praying that I will be able to accept what's coming, I pray that it won't come at all.

I can't go on this way. I can't go on with the overdoses and the pillows over the head and the crying and the hiding. When I saw the topic for this week, I thought at first I'd write about some of the light, silly ways in which I tend to be a chronically unprepared person: the deadlines almost missed, the pants stapled instead of hemmed, the college exams almost flunked. Those are a part of my life too, and part of the same tendency, but they don't amount to a crock of shit when you cast them up against the real issues I have here. Talking about those things would have made my tendency towards unpreparedness sound like mere disorganization, a flighty little foible. And the fact of the matter is, it's not that at all. What it is is cowardice.

I've been too much of a coward to meet life head-on. I've stuck my head in the sand and refused to prepare for anything at all, and when I've gotten knocked around and bloodied and generally fucked up, other people have had to clean up the messes as often as not.

It's got to change.

Maybe just articulating it will be a start.

-Fuckin' foreigner! I am an American, you fuckin' foreigner!
-The cops will be here any minute, lady, and I'm telling you for the last time: Go.
-Fuckin' illegal!

She was a homeless woman in a dirty olive coat and a pilly pink hat, hunched on the floor with all her possessions spread around her in broken plastic bags from CVS. He was a clean-cut Latino man, twenty-something, in a manager's suit and tie. Her things were on the floor of his McDonald's, and they were angry.

-Ma'am, you need to leave right now. Right. Now.

That was how it started. Maybe if he'd started another way, it would have been different. He walked up to her and he had the power: he was in charge of the store, and he had the phone that could call the cops, and she could be arrested for vagrancy, because her hair was matted and filthy and her hands were shaking uncontrollably and the CVS bags were full of odds and ends that gave her life a sense of continuity and permanence that no sane person would find there. Which all added up to -- she looked like the kind of trash the city would like to sweep under the rug. The manager wanted to sweep her out of his McDonald's, that was for sure. Bad for business. And he was the one running the business, and he was the one holding the cards; so he spoke harshly to her from his first word, and he made it clear to her that he didn't like her kind. And she heard him, both what he was saying and what he wasn't. From that moment she knew she had nowhere to go but out.

I saw him speak to her and I thought of the topic of this week's LJ Idol, and I thought that there, perhaps, was my rant for LiveJournal. A rant on the treatment of the mentally ill and the homeless in this country; a rant on the refusal of those who have had the privileges of good health and good fortune to consider the plight of those who haven't been so lucky. That'd make a good rant for a blog. Yeah. I could get behind that.

-You can't kick me out of here! I'm an American citizen! I have rights!

She yelled back even as she was beginning to pull her things together, and this time the manager heard what I didn't. He heard the word "American" and he knew the color of his own skin and, just as she had known what he wasn't saying, he knew what she wasn't saying. He had told her he didn't like her kind; she was telling him, right back, that she didn't like his. And I revised in my head: perhaps here was my rant for this week, instead. Perhaps the brunt of my anger should lie not with the man who was ordering the woman out of his store but with the woman who found a target for all the frustrations and fury with her life in this Latino man, this woman who seemed to believe that no matter how low she got, this Latino man would always be lower, and he needed to know that. I thought about whether that, instead, was the direction my anger should take, the way my LiveJournal rant for the day should go.

I'm an American citizen too. You need to leave. Now.

She was gathering her things, but slowly, probably because of her shaking hands. He was standing over her, taut and wary. For a moment the scene seemed suspended: I hoped it would end and knew that it wouldn't. I leaned against the counter, trying to process what was unfolding before me, trying to understand what I was feeling about the two of them -- the stories that lay beneath the surface of each of their lives, the way this exchange would become a part of those stories. I thought about saying something. I am white, female, and nonthreatening, well-educated but not obviously upper-class; I might have been able to bridge the gap. I might have been able to interpose myself, speak to the woman gently, help her gather her things and leave the store. The manager might have let me help out because to all appearances I am a sane, pulled-together and upstanding member of society. The homeless woman might have let me help her because I would not have known how to speak to her harshly if I had tried, because if my circumstances of birth had been only slightly different -- if my parents had not had the money or the inclination to pay for the psychiatric hospitalizations I went through in my college years -- I could have wound up exactly where she is right now, and the knowledge of that is with me every time that I see a panhandler on the street.

But they were both so angry, and I was afraid of their anger. The edges of the situation were jagged and sharp, and I feared being torn, so I stayed where I was. I collected four salt packets, one after the other -- not because I needed four salt packets, but because I needed something to do while I was pretending I might do something else, until eventually the chance to do anything at all would have passed and I would have a lot of salt packets and a mingled sense of relief and anger. Anger at the world, for being this way -- anger at myself, for not doing anything to fix it.

-I'm American! You're the problem! You should have to leave, not me!
-You are trespassing on private property, and if you don't get out of here right now I'm calling the cops.
-Trespassing? You're trespassing! You're in my country, you fuckin' foreigner! I'm an American!

Just like that everything had spilled over, and the situation was uncontained. The manager's stance had widened, a defensive stance that was ready to become offensive at a second's notice, and he had gestured to someone behind the counter to call the police. The woman was getting up but it wasn't at all clear whether she was planning on leaving or on tearing some shit up. People in the restaurant were giving the scene a wide berth. Controversy was bubbling in the conversations eddying around me: there was a lot of talk about "those people" and not a lot of clarity as to which people "those people" were. The homeless? The Latinos? Neither of "those people" shouting in the corner of that McDonald's had gotten anything like a fair deal in American society, and both had found someone to hold themselves above, someone to turn into a convenient Other. The clerk behind the counter handed me a bag of something that I'd forgotten having ordered, along with a nervous, apologetic smile. I dumped the salt packets in the bag and found a chair far away from the scene and wondered what the hell was going on.

There was so much anger. The venom spilling from the woman's mouth was a rant if ever a rant had existed. The manager was more contained, having learned, perhaps, that anger freely and publicly expressed was anger that could be turned back on you as a weapon, under a variety of labels -- "unstable" or "militant" or "out of control", it didn't matter. But his anger seethed just beneath the surface, and I could imagine the rant he, too, would have once he was safely out of earshot. And I sat and listened and watched and wondered if I could blame either of them. She was sick and homeless in a country that has no compassion for those things. He was Latino and struggling to make a living for himself in a country in which the ignorant and bigoted had surely made it clear to him more than a few times what they figured his "place" was and what they'd like to do to him if he stepped out of it. And he had seen her vulnerability and she had seen his, and they had hurt each other, and the hurt gave rise to rage.

They had their rants, but I have none. I thought I would, but I don't. I understand their anger and there are times when I would share the anger of each of them, but I walked away from that scene feeling nothing but overwhelming sadness. It all felt so empty, somehow. She was right to be angry that she could be arrested for staying in any one place longer than five minutes, and her right to her anger didn't fix anything. He was right to be angry that she called him a foreigner and an illegal with such disdain, and his right to his anger didn't fix anything either. Rants can be cleansing and they can be healthy, but they can poison and fester, too.

I imagine what I saw today will fester, but I don't know. Perhaps that woman has been kicked out of enough places that she won't remember this. Perhaps the manager will brush her off as just another crazy lady, not responsible for what she says or does.

But it will stay with me. And I will keep wondering why the world has to be like this, and how it is that anger can be so justified -- so natural, maybe even so necessary -- and yet mean so little in the end.

I don't have any answers. Maybe if I had some answers, I'd have a rant, too, a nice solid one full of righteousness and certainty. That would fit more neatly into the topic, for sure. It would fit more neatly into my life as well.

But all I have are questions... and under the questions, pain.

This was written for therealljidol. Thanks for reading.

This week’s entry is a political entry. I found that it couldn’t be otherwise.

Because here’s the thing. When I saw that this week’s entry was to be about “hope”, I figured I knew where I was going with it. Hope hasn’t been kind to me lately. I’ve been struggling with chronic illness and disability in a period when I had hoped things would finally settle down and I would be able to live my life with some semblance of normalcy. Instead, I am now worried that my disability may cost me my job -- again. Then, too, I have hoped for the last year that I would be able to publish the novel I finished last November and make it someday as a writer; I caught the interest of a good agent last December, and the surprising swiftness with which that happened led me to hope all the more, but although he continued to express interest in my book and worked with me to complete a series of revisions, for the last three months there has been no word, and it’s been hitting me hard. I don’t know how to hope for my future if I’m not hoping to be a writer. I’ve proven pretty conclusively over the last several years that my disabilities tend to make me all but unemployable in most jobs. Writing’s been my hope. And writing hasn’t been working.

No, I haven’t been a fan of hope lately. So I had my entry all worked out. I thought of the story of Pandora’s box, how that myth never made any sense to me when I was a kid -- how she opened the box and all sorts of evils were released on the world, but she closed it just in time to keep hope in, and so the world bore hope as its solace despite all the terrible things that had been unleashed. If she trapped hope in the box, I wondered, and all the evils had escaped, how did humanity have hope? Shouldn’t she have unleashed it as well? Later I heard a version of the story in which she did let hope out of the box along with everything else, and that made even less sense to me. Why would hope be at the bottom of a box of evil things?

Recently I thought I had finally understood that. In a world full of shit, I thought, hope that life will consist of anything other than shit is just one more torment. And a stupid one at that.

But then, this week, Obama was elected.

In making this entry, I don’t wish to make some huge assertion about my own political values. As it happens most of them do align pretty neatly with Obama’s, but some of them don’t, and that’s not what I want to talk about anyway. What I want to talk about is what it represents that Obama himself, the person that Barack Hussein Obama is and the person that he is believed to be, was elected by a majority of the American people. It was in my parents’ lifetime that Martin Luther King was gunned down, along with so many other civil rights leaders who had once represented hope to an abused people; it was in my grandparents’ lifetime that lynchings were common and blacks lived every day with the fear that they could be murdered on nothing more than a white person’s whim of hatred. We are a country in which blacks have been enslaved, murdered, threatened, and relegated legally to a subclass of humanity. If anyone has ever had a reason to give up hope, it’s been blacks in America.

And this week, a black man was elected to the Presidency. A majority of Americans moved beyond divisiveness and centuries of racial prejudice to cast their votes for Barack Obama. And as the camera panned over the faces of that crowd in Chicago, I saw many blacks weeping, and I knew why. A hope that could once have seemed pointless had just become reality.

I don’t say this to imply that racism is over and done with now. I don’t say it to imply even that, this hope having been realized, there is nothing more to hope for. Hope’s a journey. This was an amazing milestone. There are more milestones to come.

But what I felt last Tuesday, when I shed my own tears upon seeing the words “BREAKING NEWS: Barack Obama Elected 44th President” scrolling across my television screen, was that hope is in fact a journey that is worth making. That if hope was after all at the bottom of that box of evils that Pandora opened, it had been misplaced. That as painful as it can be when our hopes are put off and denied, despair and acceptance of evil is in the end far worse.

And in that moment I was ashamed of my own despair. I was ashamed that I had thought that my own difficulties in the last few years had somehow made it okay for me to stop fighting. I was ashamed to have thought I could give up hope.

I had thought that my life was my own, and that if I abandoned hope it would affect no one but myself. But on Tuesday millions of individuals whose lives were their own came together to cast votes for the candidate that they hoped would change the nation. Whether those votes were cast for Barack Obama or John McCain, they were cast out of a sense of hope for the future. And the result of that hope, of all those people coming out to do the one small thing they could do to avow their principles and try to shape the future, is that a black man was elected President of a country in which, two hundred years ago, he would have been a slave.

So, no, I can’t give up hope just yet.

I am grateful to America for teaching me that lesson.

This entry was written for therealljidol. The polls for this week are here; the poll for the specific tribe I'm in is here. Vote if you'd like, or not if that's not your thing. Thanks for reading, either way.

Also, right: the LJ Idol polls for this week are here, and I am in tribe rm (that's a link to the poll.) I seem not to be able to escape the looming threat of rm. :) And I was hoping I'd get a little further into the competition before I had to ask my friends list to vote for me every week -- I told myself I wouldn't ask for votes unless I needed them enough that bothering people who are not affiliated with the Idol competition seemed worth it -- but, my friends, I am pretty sure that I am sinking fast and equipped with totally inadequate bail buckets. So, you know. If you liked my entry on "Ghosts", you can vote for me, and it will take two seconds! Or if you want to be ethical about it, you can read through all the entries and vote for the ones you actually like best! But when people do that, it seems to be making me lose! So I can't in all selfishness recommend it! Aaah!

I shouldn't enter LJ competitions, I shouldn't enter LJ competitions, I shouldn't enter LJ competitions...

Perhaps if I use an icon containing boobs, people will vote for me? ::thrusts thumb upward at icon, bosoms heaving::

(Apparently I have multiple bosoms now.)