Month: August 2022

collect.

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There used to be a time, when some of us of a certain time, moved away from home, and called collect. There were operators then, mostly women in my memory, who would come on the line when you dialed 0, asking what you needed. A collect call, please. Connecting the call the operator waited while you listened in; a collect call, do you accept the charges? Once there was a yes, the line was open for the conversation and the operator left the call.

There is a time, for those of us from a certain time, when we stopped calling collect, and called direct. Our own phone, with our own long distance plan, and a way to pay the phone bill. That same time would find us talking about what we were doing, or going to do, instead of asking what we should do.

The shift from child to adult is the difference between paying the bill, or calling and expecting someone else to pay it. A way forward where the road becomes our own, and the way to get where we want paved by our answers instead of our questions. This same shift happens well into adulthood, when we have replaced or added to our parents other calls; to friends, work mates, siblings—what should I do, when should I leave, what will happen to me?

I wonder sometimes if those are all the ways we still call collect, still wait on the line while someone accepts the charges, the person on the other end paying for our unanswered questions, accepting the charge of our blame or disappointment when they give us advice we didn’t like, or don’t want to follow; when we don’t know how to stop asking.

What does it mean to call direct? To me it means to pay our own way with no operator interfering. It means to make the calls we can afford, and leave the phone in it’s cradle when we are growing from our question to our answer. It means picking up the phone when there is nothing expected except connection.

transfiguring.

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I was a caterpillar who talked of butterflies. I could see them, winding through air streams and lighting buttercups to dance with their winged hellos. I watched them, forever lilting while I stretched and arched along the ground, ungrounded.

I was a caterpillar who dreamed of butterflies. The dip and draw of yellow dusted flowers, drunk on summer afternoons and the power of fluttering. I kept their company, underneath their dizzy days—did they remember being me? What it felt like to dream of flighted things and the tops of trees, while stopping at walls and rocks, turning back to find another way to inch ahead.

I was a caterpillar who lost the fuzz and fumble of life in dirt, who swung suspended in air filled with the possibility of wings. I am becoming something, quietness dissolving the gravity that held me from becoming what I always was. In the dark and dimness I am seeing for the first time clearly, the legs that held me earth bound lengthening to filaments of flight.

The way toward light and freedom also includes shadows and loss. To move past the ways of looping thoughts and weighted worries means losing the parts who believed that I could feel like I was flying, while staying earthbound. I was never going to reach the open sky by learning to crawl higher, I had to stop wanting to crawl.

Someday I will be a butterfly who forever remembers being a caterpillar. The two of us spinning into a twisted, lifted, lighted miracle.

fold.

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Sometimes a cycle can end with the folding. Even though it feels like the winds are pulling away the basting from the cloth, when the rains soak the pinned edges, all waiting for the moment when the sun comes out, the wind dries, and clean corner meets corner.

So much of self improvement, self awareness feels like washing the same parts of us that keep getting wrinkled, the sitting still creating creases, the running and falling scuffed into stains we scrub—then hang back on the line to dry into a better brighter self on a string of other selves. The trying, followed by accepting, the endless spin cycle of being better—then the pinning in the sun showing things we didn’t see before, back down to wash again. Rinse. Repeat.

It isn’t the parts of you with lines and stubborn stains that need to rest, it’s the one who keeps taking them all down to wash again.

It is enough to fold when dry. Maybe that looks like staying quiet when provoked to guilt, looking away when a wind twisted word turned you sideways, or letting the pins of control fall out of your cracked hands. End the cycle, and fold.

you.

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In so many ways I sought myself through other people, searching for someone to mirror back some understanding, acceptance, a place for me to rest for a few moments. Blending into another is hard to notice, hard to capture why I didn’t feel settled at the end of a shared day.

What I found was not what I intended; somewhere I had become the mirror, acting back what was given, shared, creating agreements and likeness where maybe there was none. I said things were okay that weren’t okay, because I wasn’t. I didn’t know what I was doing so I didn’t know why I was tense and tired. There are other words for this focus on the other; fawning, placating, pandering, people pleasing.

It takes energy to bend into ways you didn’t grow in, to mimic another’s preferences that aren’t your own means to be forever stretched and trying. Living outside your own self is surviving in a climate that you aren’t accustomed to, the thin air making it hard to fill your lungs with someone else’s share of oxygen.

It took me a very long time to understand that survival in any form does not feel good. If you have ever felt invisible, being seen seems worth the price of admission into a venue where for a moment or two, you belong. When you add technology, social media, texting and email, life can become a funhouse of possibility, the myriad ways to be seen and noticed revolving into a frenzy of shifting likes around the flickering fluorescent need that stays the same.

The need stays the same as you bend into ways to fill it, and it doesn’t ever work. There’s the truth; it doesn’t work because it wasn’t meant to work forever. Survival responses are born as a means to keep you alive, then. The same tactics, so necessary at the time, can keep you from living, now.

The best way to know why you do something is to stop doing it, even for a moment. Notice when you fight, leave, freeze and please. It could be the reason you are tired is because you have been doing it for so long. When you look back across your own life, you might see what helped you survive until now was never other peoples’ reflection; what brought you through these shifting floors and tilting hallways was you, always you.