Happy Thanksgiving, Daddy.

Dear Dad,

Today you have been gone one week. You died in your sleep seven nights ago. My daddy has been dead for seven days. 

Today is also Thanksgiving Day.  I'm spending it with Sam's family, up in Tennessee, and it's been a good day. I've enjoyed myself and I'm glad I came. They are so nice, Dad, you'd like them a lot. I like it here.  I love Sam, Dad. I only wish that you could have had a chance to love him, too. I know you would have. 

A few minutes ago I had the brief thought that I should go check my phone because I haven't heard from you today. You might have sent me a text. Then I remembered. It's like that, Dad, it hits me again when I'm least expecting it. In the middle of a conversation, riding in the car, while of chewing a bite food. In the middle of the night, when I wake up with tears on my face and my pillow is damp.  I've been dreaming about you, I know, but I don't know exactly how or what. I've been taking Tylenol PM so I sleep, and deeply, but even in that deep sleep, I'm sad. 

I have never been sad on Thanksgiving before, Dad, but I am today. It's a different kind of sad now, just a little. I told myself it's ok to take a break from the body-wracking kind of crying I have been experiencing. The kind that tears you up from inside, that makes your muscles tense up, where you have to throw your head back and gasp for breath, writhing in a pain you can't touch, breathing in the tears smeared across your face. The kind where you hear the primal, guttural sounds that you can only assume must be coming from you. The kind that leaves you breathless and exhausted. It's ugly crying. I can't keep that up much longer, Dad. I'm sure it will still come like that, but not nightly, not every time I take a shower and I know the sound of water will cover the sound of my missing you. 

Today, it was different. It's settled inside me now. I never knew sadness could do that, Dad. I didn't realize it covered your heart like a blanket, seeped into every part of you, your head, your stomach, even into your fingers. It's not overpowering today, but it's still there. It doesn't leave. Under the happiness I've felt, under the laughter at the dinner table, under the childish joy of watching the parade, it's there. It's an ache, Dad. My heart aches for you, knowing I won't see you again, knowing I can't call and say happy Thanksgiving, just missing you in ways I didn't expect.  That ache is there all the time. Even when I'm not actively sad or crying, I'm conscious of it. Every other thought is you. I need to write out my Christmas cards. My dad is dead. This pie tastes good. I'll never see my dad again. Sure, I'd like a drink. My dad is never coming home. I like this movie. Oh my god, Dad, I miss you. That's how it is. 

I'll be ok, Dad. It's just going to take some time. I'm afraid that after your funeral, people are going to expect me to be okay, to be back to normal. I can't do that, though, Dad. Sam said that people can't expect me to bury my father and just be fine. It doesn't work like that. I'm going to have to find a new normal. I'm going to cry for a long time. I'm going to remember you when I least expect it. I don't know how long this will take, how long I'll cry, or when memories will hit me. I just don't know. I'm afraid that now that the funeral is over, now the real hard part starts. Now I have to live without you. How do I even think about doing that, Dad?  I just don't know. I don't know. 

So, Happy Thanksgiving, Daddy. I have much to be thankful for. Mom and Matthew and Heather and Sam, all of the sweet people who sent cards and brought food and tissues and hugs. I have a good job, sweet pets. I know I'm a lucky girl. But oh my God, Dad, I miss you. I'll be ok. But right now, I'm not yet. I miss you. It's raw and new and I feel scared and vulnerable and exhausted. I'm so thankful for the 29 years I had with you, even though sometimes you made me so angry. You were human. I know that. And I miss it all. 

Happy Thanksgiving, Dad. I love you so much, and I miss you even more. 

Love,

Me

If I wrote a memoir consisting of a series of vignettes, these would be appropriate titles...

"How to bribe you friends with stuffed animals and steal things by stuffing them in your socks:  Kindergarten at it's finest"

"Welcome to Indiana University, where you best is never good enough and you're even dumber than you thought"

"Shut up...please."

"Welcome to CrossFit:  You'll never sit down quickly again."

"Not a way in this world, Lady:  The day I kicked an employee at Victoria's Secret."

"I Am Not Dainty."

"The Story of a Reed: A sixteenth of a millimeter too much here and you've wasted 35 hours of your life."

"My Pinterest boards make me seem so fucking crafty but what functioning adult has time to craft?"

"Before I hire you, I'm going to need you to sing a song about ice cream."

"If you sit on this bucket, you will be fired."

"Stop Sleeping With My Therapist:  How I survived group therapy and thrived in spite of it."

"Buck The Fuck Up."

"The Beatles?  Who are the Beatles?  Here, let me sing you this Bible verse."

"I'm sorry, I don't read books shaped like that."

"Thankful for space, among other things:  A Thanksgiving Tale."

"The First Time I PR'd My Snatch."

"Here at UGA, we're better than you, and we know it."

"You only have a Scarlet A?  That's nothing.  She's got a Scarlet R."  (An accidental parody)

"There are plenty of Mohicans.  Let's not get worked up over nothing."

This came from nowhere

Hope is fleeting, elusive
like the fireflies on a warm summer night.
Racing towards dusk, palms to the sky,
you stand, tippie-toed, ten feet tall
to wrap little fingers around light.
It's here, heart fluttering, you come down to earth,
A piece of the mystery is yours.
Close your hands tight, run home, little one,
eyes alive with wonder.
But when you sit down and look for the light
there's nothing but quiet and night,
and your small bit of life,
which you thought you held close
is for some other hand to catch.

I didn't know what I didn't know.

A progression to a jaw-dropping realization (from my personal hand-written journal):

September 2nd, 2011:
It's amazing how quickly life can change.  I feel so lost and directionless now.  I won't have a master's degree.  Nothing to set me apart.  I feel like I nearly reached something that could prove my worth, but I fell short again.  I don't want to see this as a failure.  I don't want to have failed again.  What can possibly be the purpose of my life?  It seems impossible that there is one now, but surely there must be.


This peppermint tea is calming.  I've been angry today, at everyone and everything.  I think at one time, I was a little girl who had potential to be a great musician, but the talent fell into hands that just didn't or couldn't develop it properly.  I had the possibility in me.  Maybe I still do.  But there isn't time to find it, now that it's time for adult responsibilities.  My practice time just ran out.


From here on out, I'm going to be happy.  My life is going to be quiet and simple and I will go to sleep every night content in my life.  I will learn that my accomplishments and degrees are not what make me worthy of love and happiness.  I am not worth any more or any less without the fancy degree from the prestigious music school.


Yes, maybe I have become as good as I will ever be at the bassoon.  Maybe I've performed my last recital, bowed for the last time, and my facility will slowly wain with time.  But I will never forget how to play.  My fingers will always mold easily to my instrument and I will easily find the notes.  I will never forget a single fingering.  My instrument is forever forged into my being and will always be a part of me.


But I have to believe that with the end of one chapter, another begins.  Perhaps my desire to find and prove myself through my instrument kept me from a truer path.  In truth, bassoon has always been a desperate attempt to push away the worthlessness and unworthiness I was sure would overtake me if I stopped playing.  As long as I was good at playing, I was good at something, and as long as I was good at something, I was worthy of love and friendship and happiness.  Playing bassoon essentially kept me from being worthless.  But now I'm giving it up.  I'm laying it down.  In place of the worry and fear and self-doubt, I'm going to allow myself to become what I'm meant to become.  I'm hoping that if I let down the guard that playing has allowed me to put up, I'll find my way into something really fulfilling.


I'm starting to think that all of this is happening so I learn to love myself just for being.  No masters degree, no big name school, no website or CD.  Just me.  I have nothing to hide behind anymore.  I'm just me, now.  I think the world will accept me much easier than I will.  I have to learn to love myself as I am.  Only then can I fulfill my place in this world.  It's time to let go of everything I've been hiding behind that makes me "special."  I don't need anything else.  It's time to finally, finally let go.

February 12, 2012:

In the last few months, I've been through some very difficult stuff.  Having to leave my grad school program and the city I loved so much too a great toll on my heart, greater than I realized, and I think I fell into a depression deeper than I've ever experienced.  I completely lost touch with who I am.  I didn't read, I didn't socialize, I didn't do anything.  I became a shell of who I was.  I didn't even notice it happen.

But now, with a little space from it all, I realize what a blessing in disguise that horrific time in my life was.  Back in September, when I tearfully packed up my life in Bloomington, IN and moved back to Atlanta, away from my apartment that I adored and into my mother's guest room, I wasn't sure I'd live through the pain.  I wasn't sure I wanted to.  I experienced a death of a dream, the dying of the goal I'd been working towards since I was eleven years old.  At 27, I had come face to face with the reality that I cannot become what I had always hoped to be.  I would never be a major orchestral musician or college bassoon professor.  But now, with the past months between me and that sudden shock and news, I see how it was a blessing. 

I have always struggled with untangling what I do from who I am.  I have always believed, down in my very core, that I am not enough, that I am worthless.  Being a musician kept people from seeing that, in my mind.  If I practiced harder, studied harder, performed better, placed higher in auditions, it was creating padding from people seeing who I really was.  It was a horribly difficult guard to keep up, especially in the music world, because nothing is ever good enough-- you can always do better. 

But now, I'm working as a file clerk in a large law firm in midtown Atlanta.  I'm at the bottom of the ladder of importance.  I am the least paid part-time employee in the firm.  But I am becoming HAPPY.  I have been forced to let go of the core belief that I am more than what I do.  If I based my entire worth as a human being on being someone who files other people's papers, who would I be?  But people still like me, they enjoy my company, they complement me on doing my job well.  And what's more important, I like them, I enjoy their company as well, and I enjoy doing my job well because it comes naturally to me and I feel equipped to do it to the best of my ability.  There is a distinct end to a job you can do filing.  You can label everything correctly, put it in the right place, and leave at the end of the day.  I've never experienced a completed job before.  It's so different from what I'm used to.  If I had not been forced to leave school, I would never have taken this "filler" job, though I thought it was temporary, and I would not know this feeling was possible for me.

June 3, 2012:

I just had the realization that if I decide to go to law school, it wouldn't be because I feel like I need to prove something to myself or anyone else, it wouldn't be a facade to keep people from seeing what or who I really, that I'm or stupid or worthless.  It would be because I genuinely WANT to-- because I enjoy this and I'm naturally good at it and it's not a cover-up for anything else.  It's just me following the path that I've let unfold when I gave up trying to force my life to go in the direction I thought it should go.  Once I quit hiding behind what I thought I should be, I think I've started to find who I really am.  It's all a process, of course, but it's just coming naturally and I'm just riding the waves.   It's effortless.  I'm working hard, very hard in fact, but there is no feeling of fighting to stay one step ahead so nobody finds out I'm faulty or incapable.  I'm not hiding anything.  For the first time in as long as I can remember, I am truly being myself.

Stop paddling against the current and perhaps it will take you where you're actually meant to be.  And your arms won't be near so tired.  Less effort, more peace, more product.  Who knew.

Something I think I should do and someone think I should be vs. what I genuinely want to do and who I really am-- I never understood the difference between the two, even that there WAS a difference, and it feels absolutely, incredibly freeing. 

Giving up the "should" to find the "want."  Maybe not even "want."  Just "be." Just be. So simple.  I'm genuinely blown away.

 And that's where I am.  I may look slightly mentally compromised, wiping tears sitting here in Starbucks, but I don't care.  Rereading what I wrote all those months ago-- I did what I intended to do.  I didn't even realize it.  I didn't see it happening.  But it did.

I have not been this truly excited about my life, since, well, ever.

There was nowhere to put my printer.

One of my mother's favorite saying is "making little ones out of big ones."  This is when your intended task of taking care of something large or involved, be it cleaning the house, filing paperwork, doing laundry, etc, turns into an exercise where you "organize" the task into several more manageable "sub-tasks," if you will.  The organizing into smaller bits takes so much time and energy that soon you run out of time and you're still left with just the same amount of work, but it just looks a little different.  The same also applies if you have so much to do that you don't know where to start, so you just shuffle things from one pile to another without really accomplishing anything.

Making little ones out of big ones.

Yesterday, I did the opposite.  I made a huge gigantic one out of a very tiny one.  There are many thoughts and events leading up to this, so it wasn't completely out of the blue, but basically what my Saturday boiled down to was that I didn't have a good place to put my printer, so I rearranged everything in my entire bedroom to make a place for it.  We're talking every piece of furniture, most of the things on the walls, many of my nick-knacks, and basically my entire library.  Just so there was an adequate, non-cluttered place for the printer to sit.

If you give a mouse a cookie.

Mouse, here.

And even though I used more than 6 hours of my day that I'd intended to use elsewhere and I'm quite sore from lugging some heavy furniture around all by myself, I'm more than pleased with the result.  I was content with my bedroom before, but now I REALLY like it.  I like to think that I've inherited my mother's natural ability to create warm, inviting, comforting spaces, and I think I've accomplished that with this room.  It's so "me."

I have a relatively cozy room, nice place to spend time, and the energy worked just fine for me.  I love all the personal touches and pictures of friends and loved ones.  I don't like stuff in my room that has no meaning or no sentimental value, so really everything in it has either been given to me by someone I love or has a story behind it.  I don't like to have things just to have things.  To me, that's clutter.

But there was no place to put the printer.

Here's where we started:

Desk with unsatisfactory work space.  Perhaps if there was more room next to my desk... But there's no room between the bedroom and closet doors... hmm. 

Bed against the wall and little blue night table, a delightful DIY from Craigslist in Bloomington.  The drawer knobs are from Anthropologie ( <3 )

(Also, that ugly thing above the bed was replaced by a collage shortly after this picture was taken, but before the great-room-rearrange of last Saturday.

So I started by just scooting the mattress in front of the window to see if I'd like it, and although at the beginning I was iffy, I just went for it.  The mess was inevitable.  In order to move the dresser by myself, I had to take all the drawers out.  To move the bookshelves, I had to remove the books.  For everything.  Dresser, desk, two bookshelves, nightstand.  So basically I had a large pile of drawers and furniture and bedding (I'd put all the sheets in the wash during this process) sitting on top of my mattress.  I vacuumed under vacant surfaces as I went along, because really, how often do you get to vacuum under your dresser?  It just made sense.  About two hours into it, I wondered if this was really a good idea.  Here's why:

Disaster area!  I practically needed a hard had. And-- it was HEAVY!

But in the end, I love it.  Now the whole room has a more open feel, it's all vacuumed and dusted and clean feeling, and most importantly, there's a good place for my printer.  Now I can set up my business life in a place that makes sense.

New office setup, complete with printer on my (really awesome) antique telephone table.  Also, I'm a big fan of the little shelf above the desk.

 Bed, dresser, bookshelf, and new jewelry hanger! (I actually already had the shelf, I just had never put it together!  It's lived in its Ikea box in Athens, Bloomington, and Lawrenceville before it made it up on the wall.)

Bookshelf with Friends DVD's, my favorite books (decorating, sewing, and cookbooks), boxes of stationary, photos, and cards, and some of my favorite photos, black in white prints framed in white.

Best of all, this little project cost me nothing, as I already had everything that I used.  And now the room has a brand new, fresh feel to it-- love that!  I'll tell a little about some of my favorite things pictured in this post later as this was just a vague overview of the overall process.

Next up: bathroom and closet.



I'm not sure where I'm going, but I'm on my way.

Be brave.  Be brave.  That's simple yet powerful.  Maybe I haven't been brave yet.  If not now, when?  I'm not who I used to be.  I'm becoming more my true self with every passing day.  True change is slow and hard to see but lasting.  It's all exactly how it was meant to be because this is how it is.  I am equipped to deal with anything because I am strong, not because of pride or arrogance, but because I am creating myself a strong foundation built on truths and knowledge that this, too, shall pass.  I can learn from anything and become more myself because of it.  Who I am is different from anyone else on earth and that is not to be apologized for but celebrated.  And if I don't celebrate this particular combination of amino acids and proteins, DNA strands and electrical currents, experiences, memories, thoughts, hopes, dreams, fears, weaknesses, talents, sense of humor, likes, dislikes, and even the very color of my eyes, who will?  I have never happened before and never again will I again, just like I am in these moments, and now is when it is happening.  I don't want to miss my life.  I want to be present for every single painful and joyful moment of it. 

If not now, when?

Oh, shit, where did I leave my lunch??

I haven't written anything in this thing in a really long time now, but these pics were too good not to put together into a cohesive little post.  I've put them individually on Facebook, but I think that together they're just fantastic.  Enjoy!

I'm not sure why this keeps happening, but I keep finding food left in strange places.  Perhaps it's because people are so distracted these days, not really being in the moment and actually paying attention to what they're doing, but I think this is really strange and slightly hilarious.  Here's a tour of what I've seen:

Can't find your peanut butter sandwich?  You left it on the cement pole at a Chevron in Alpharetta.  Obviously.

Oh, and I found your cookies neatly stacked and still in the ruffly, paper wrapper on the floor of the elevator in the Dekalb County Courthouse.  The one furthest to the right.

And last but not least, Cheetos stashed with the bathroom scales.  Forget buyers remorse, someone felt bad just carrying them around and this display just pushed them over the edge.  So here they sit.  And I'm willing to bet that it's NOT the guy that I saw a month or so ago at L.A. Fitness with the open bag of Doritos propped up on his treadmill.

So, keep your eyes out and perhaps you, too, can find a little snack hiding where you least expect it.