Enter the Lemur, Act IV: Return of the Lemur

For as organized as I am (or, at least, seem to be to other people), if you could see the the inside of my brain on a minute-by-minute basis, you’d be like, “What shaky high school film student footage got lost in here? There’s no plot! Why are there so many abrupt scene cuts? Who made this garbage??” And, for as much as my mind changes direction and seems to land in very obscure (and often scary) places, I’ve never really understood how i stay organized. The organization system is mostly nonsensical, to be fair. It follows arbitrary rules set in place by the lemurs working the levers behind the front desk. (How they got hired is a mystery, but they’re really cute and their contracts are iron-clad.) And the rules change based on the weather or the heart. The more I get to know myself and learn to make peace with the shifting shapes, dark corners and quicksand traps in my brain, the more I think the facade of organization was erected out of fear. Our minds are scary places if we believe every thought is true or that every passing blip reflects our true nature—mine is full of babdooks and long-toothed demons and deep-sea leviathans and even Uncle Boonmee’s monkey ghost son (deep cut, @ me if you know).

But when I’m able to see them change into their costumes behind the scenes, I can start to accept that they’re each just eager actors in a (very poorly directed) play, sticking fiercely to their parts. At first, it never made any sense, and I tried to close the curtains on them and run a more sensible production. But the longer I observe, the more I’m okay with the lack of rhyme or reason. So it might be Black Mirror inside my head, but they say life imitates art...and I don’t know if you guys have seen the world lately, but I think it’s partly based on my brain’s play. I guess all I’m saying is: Don’t be scared of the wispy ghosts and creepypasta monsters in your head; they are part of you—they’re just doing their jobs—but they are not YOU. Also, come see my weird play, tickets available at the link in my brain.

füt nöt: This was one of my favorite Instagram captions that I wrote last year, so I’m reposting it here, because it’s my blog and I can do whatever I want and you can’t stop me wheeee.

I saw the sign, and it opened up my *flush* 

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The enlightenment came in the form of a sign.

A bathroom sign, that is.

Like, a literal sign hanging on the wall across from the toilet in one of the bathrooms at the Integratron, a nexus of New Age activities for open-minded pilgrims (i.e., stressed out Angelenos) seeking solace in Joshua Tree. 

“You cant ‘find yourself’ because you never lost yourself” was the gist of it. “You’re just returning to yourself.” You know, the whole it-was-there-inside-you-all-along! twist ending of every motivational speech. Which, when you think about it, is also eerily similar to every horror movie about internal parasites, but I digress.

Honestly, though, as far as bathroom signs go, this one felt pretty resonant, especially considering I’d been silently chanting “you are always you” to myself during the outdoor sound bath under the night sky at this weird UFO-shaped building in the desert. 

I like to say I’m a healthy mix of woo-woo and rational. I meditate on how things feel inside my body, and I go into nature to ground myself and literally hug trees. I say a lot of mantras to myself. I love organic food and get obsessed with things like einkorn (“man’s first wheat”! The most ancient grain! The grain of everlasting life!). I visualize scenarios like placing balls of light into my chest. I once paid a stranger $250 to “move my energy around.”

But I also like, eat Cheetos and don’t believe in God. I trust science and reason. I like analyzing things to death. And, best of all, I’ve learned over the course of 34 years how to logic myself out of all my feelings so that I feel superior to my softer self, but deeply numb and empty.

So this juxtaposition — or maybe it’s equanimity — of New Age crystal-hugger meets analytical smarty-pants (who do have one thing in common: you want to punch both in the face) makes me a prime candidate for enlightening bathroom decor. I am the first to ridicule the empty generality and mad-lib-like quality of such a statement about finding yourself, as well as the first to look at it wide-eyed and go “wowww, so true, that’s deep.”

But. 

It is true, right? You can’t find something you never lost. Everything you need — everything you are — is always inside you; ergo, you’re simply recovering truths and facets of yourself. Reacquainting with the creative self, with the vulnerable self, with the outgoing vivacious ray of light self that just flickered out over time. Digging up the wounded inner child by opening your third-eye chakra at a nighttime sound bath in the desert, etc. etc.

Yeah, it’s corny, but so are a lot of axioms; corniness doesn’t negate truth or wisdom. There can be a lot of value in a stupid sign across from a toilet, a sign that uses a font that makes you want to cut your eyes out. Sometimes, a sign is just a sign. But, sometimes, a sign is, well, a 

(੭´･ᵕ･ )੭ ☽༓･*˚⁺‧✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* *sign* *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧ 

Meesh + Meesh, Sitting in a Tree, T-R-A-U-M-A-T-I-Z-I-N-G

I feel like I use the word “trauma” too much. That I talk about my trauma too much. That I too often describe events and situations I’ve been in as traumatizing. (Even though they were, indeed, by definition, traumatizing.)

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Part of it is that I feel like pop culture has too eagerly and too greedily seized on this word and watered down its meaning. We joke that it’s traumatizing if our favorite cafe is out of those delicious cookies they bake fresh every morning. That we were traumatized by Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes’ Met Gala outfits. That it was traumatizing when our Pilates teacher told us we had “weak hip flexors” in front of the entire class. (OK, it was really mean of her, though.)

But part of it is that I don’t want to be lumped in as one of those people. 

And then I ask myself: One of what people? People who have also been traumatized by trauma? People who have gone through something traumatic like you did, whose experience makes you feel less alone—finally, because you felt so isolated in your pain, shame, and grief for so long—whose story, whether shared in private or publicly to the whole world, has helped you heal? People who label assault or abuse as exactly what it is: trauma?

Trauma “others” you and keeps you in deep silence for so long; it drapes over you like a blackout curtain and muffles every sound and every feeling. It halts every breath you want to take but can’t.

So talking about trauma doesn’t make me one of those people; it just makes me a person. A person who is trying to exhale. A person who talks about something that makes a lot of us uncomfortable. Because it forces us to reckon with societal, cultural, gender, and sexual norms. Because it asks us to recognize our own fears, flaws, shortcomings, mistakes, mortality, and vulnerability. Because it pleads with us not to be OK with “that’s just the way it is.” Because it’s speaking truth to power, speaking loudly, exposing darkness, laying bare what we we were afraid was there the whole time.

And the more I talk, the more I exhale, the more I draw out the poison, the more I realize just how many people have been there, too.

I’m still getting used to talking about trauma. I’m still getting used to calling it what it is. I’m still unpacking what it means to talk about it outside of therapy or a trusted circle. But I’m working to let go of the notion that it makes me anything other. Talking about trauma—calling it what it is—is one of the biggest ways I’ve begun to feel like myself again.

So, yeah, T-R-A-U-M-A. I’m gonna keep spelling it out; I’m gonna keep saying it.

Spooky Scary First Real Blog *ghost noise*

I keep saying that one day I’ll finally write a first blog post here,

in this space I designated over a year ago to be my little personal blog space but was too busy, too scared, too drained, and too intimidated to write in.

It would be a new blogger, a new tumblr, a new livejournal, a new xanga—it’s a new space, but it’s also old hat for me: a public diary where I’m unabashedly my emotional, overanalytical self, where I say too much and feel too much and allow my sensitive and sometimes dramatic innards to splay brightly across the screen, in hopes that maybe any small part of the jumble inside my head and heart will resonate with someone who comes across it.

This website is my professional website, and I am a consummate professional (ask me about my references!), but I am also a wild, delicate, thoughtful, intuitive, empathetic, impassioned human, and I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. In fact, I want my professional and personal lives to intertwine and overlap and create meaning that echoes back and forth because I believe in a holistic life and self, and I’ve spent the last few years trying to figure out how to do just that. So if I scare you off, if you think I’m too much, if you think vulnerability and talking about feelings aren’t worthwhile … well, it probably wasn’t a great fit, anyway.

Over the course of the pandemic thus far, I’ve seen just how many people appreciate self-disclosure, honesty, and vulnerability—how much people need it. How much people are dying for someone to volunteer it, to give them permission to say the thing weighing on their heart, to point to the dark cloud around their shoulders, to cry without apologizing for it. And I always joke that I don’t mind being the crazy lady who raises her hand first; someone’s gotta start the kumbaya circle, right?

So, here we go. Here I go. Here’s that first blog post. Let’s see what happens, yeah?