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This is a Post about my Dumb Old House

I’m not even depressed this time! At least not any more than normal. Is this evolution?

This blog post started writing itself a few weeks ago, as I smeared joint compound onto the walls of my bedroom with probably the wrong tool, having something like a spiritual experience with plaster. Then this morning, a friend shared a piece of writing with me and it had a similar kind of cosmic impact on me – oh yeah, I really like to read and write personal essays.

Back to the walls, though.

It’s been nearly three years since I purchased my house – I still marvel at why anyone gave me a mortgage, but here we are – and my partner and I recently started another renovation project: fixing the first renovation project we did in January of 2021. Fixer-upper homeowners will maybe chuckle knowingly at that particular predicament. In short, we’ve learned a lot, and the bedroom needed some more love.

In peeling and scraping over a century of wallpaper and paint off the walls, we uncovered the original stencil work. The same thing happened when I did a half-assed wallpaper removal in my office last summer. I am very, very tickled by it and very, very said the walls are in such condition that I can’t put it on display for the next century.

As it always does, the project made the bedroom much, much worse than it did pre-project. Plaster pulled away from the lath, opening up deep, ugly, spooky holes in the wall. Century-old wallpaper glue stained the old paint streaky brown. There’s not an inch of the surface without a gouge, scratch, or scrape left behind by tools. And the smell! You know how old paper smells if you’ve ever browsed in a used book store – now imagine what spraying all those old books with water might bring to the surface. It smelled old, it looked god-awful, and each time we get another couple hours work in, our bodies ache top to bottom. It’s a labor that, halfway through, way too far gone, you wonder whether you should just bulldoze the thing and start fresh.

But the we got to the point where the walls were mainly free of debris, any remaining glue or gunk sealed up, and it came time to rebuild. Mudding, or patching plaster, is a task I find therapeutic and not terribly difficult, and so I tend to take the lead on that, my partner opting to sand it all down once it’s dried. Sanding makes me miserable beyond words, so this balances out well.

As I was packing a spooky, gaping hole in the wall with joint compound one night after work, I had a moment of gratitude. I looked at the tool in my hands, probably not very different from the one used to put the original plaster up in 1916, and probably not very different from the one used to build structures hundreds and thousands of years before me. My humble tub of plaster, too, probably hadn’t changed a ton over the years, not really. And as I used my caveman tool and my caveman mud to make my walls whole again, I couldn’t help but feel grateful that I was able to do it, to learn a skill that would help my house stand for years and years to come. To rebuild the room where me and my partner and the dog and many many people in the future will rest each night. To brush away crumbling plaster to make room for a new smooth coat to reinforce my old walls in my old house and make it safe and comfortable for me and my family.

It came as a profound, unexpected comfort in the midst of a project that was beginning to reach the “why did we do this?” point.

You’ll hear me begrudge my old house and all its ailments far more often than I am having these moments of gratitude. I work a nonprofit job where I make more or less a living wage. My house is charming but old, old but charming. It needs a lot of love and has received a lot of love since 1916. It is modest. Because I cannot dump money into contractors to do professional repairs and remodeling, my partner and I watch YouTube and go to the hardware store ten times in a single weekend and we learn to make it whole again ourselves. Even if we could pay a professional, I probably wouldn’t, because I’m a cheap ass!

I look at fixes prior owners made and wish I could hit them upside the head for half-assing it. The next owners will look at my fixes and wish the same. And then I hope they will have a moment of gratitude when they fix some shit I did not have any business trying to fix. I like to imagine generations like that living in this house, do-it-yourself-ers and broke people and potential-seers. If there is a god, may he never let a flipper come to own this funny old house!

For all the trials and tribulations and money-pit moments I have here, I do not often dream of a project-free home. I have friends who I could not pay to live in this house or to work on it the way that we have – they are not interested, and a project-free home is their ideal. No way I can fault them for that. I have other friends who would make quick work of other types of projects, the kind (like painting) that would make a huge difference visually but that for whatever reason I always leave for last.

A coworker and I, similar in age (and in so many other ways, we’ve started to keep a list) and with similar old crumbly homes, compare notes and gripe to each other every day about our projects. “The house has been standing over a hundred years, there’s probably nothing you can do that’ll make it tumble down,” I remind them regularly. They tell me, when I’m despairing, “When you finish, it’ll be like a brand new room.” And we go back and forth like that, probably as long as we both live.

When I daydream about finishing our renovations – the jobs are never done, of course, but we’ll come to the end of the list of things we can do ourselves – and selling the house someday, the house we buy after it is always in similar condition. Maybe even worse, now that I no longer fear plaster the way I did three years ago!

We watch videos of people restoring literal ruins, and while my partner and I are agreed we could never, would never do something like that, I still get the same little thrill at the prospect of rebuilding something from rubble. Someone’s hands placed those rocks there however many hundreds of years ago, building up a wall, and now some person on YouTube is showing us how they’ve made it a wall again. There’s something so beautiful about that to me, the rejection of the potential “disposability” of a place that has made a home for generations of people. When the Instagram girlies talk about romanticizing their lives, I’m not sure this is what they mean, but maybe it is. Something tells me the Instagram girlies are not going through tubes and tubes of Working Hands every winter to combat the plaster wounds and dryness, but the grass is always greener.

Sometimes I think I will find the point of a post by the time I reach the end. Most often I probably don’t. Today I don’t think I have. But I’m grateful to write a post that is not driven by anguish, to have read something a friend wrote that energized the part of my brain that loves reading and writing. In any case, I have sanding to do. This stinky old house won’t fix itself!

With gratitude and scuffed up knuckles,

Lexie

This is a Post About My Adult Baby Sister

I’ve never been a good sleeper, so most nights I read before bed, let my eyes get tired and turn off the light to lie awake for a while, my mind wandering. I don’t have the problem of racing thoughts, just a kind of meandering that generally keeps me up tossing and turning long after my partner and the dog start sawing logs in my ear. Often, I start thinking about my family, or my future wedding vows, or something else that manages to get tears welling in my eyes and dripping down onto the pillow. Something about that sleepy thoughtful hour before I drift off gets me emotional.

Last night I started thinking about my little sister, who will turn 18 in a few weeks.

I am the second oldest of four, all of us spread out over 31 years. I was ten when my little sister was born, eleven when my little brother was, and with my older sister already out of the house and leading an adult life, I assumed the role of eldest child and mom’s right hand. I learned to crochet and helped with my sister’s baby blanket, pored over baby books from the library (it had, after all, been ten years since my mom had last been pregnant), attended most of her appointments. I loved learning about babies, loved feeling like my mom’s partner in crime.

I remember distinctly that I did not want younger siblings. In a Disney princess-themed journal I had in first grade, one of the last pages granted me 3 wishes, one of which was for NO BABY BROTHER OR SISTER! I don’t remember my mom telling me she was pregnant, but by then I guess a switch had flipped and I was excited. My older sister and I had not yet developed a close relationship, being in such different stages of our lives, and so at that point I was living more or less like an only child. I had many imaginary friends, especially after the kids next door moved away, and though we had three dogs I was obsessed with, they weren’t exactly the same as siblings or friends.

On the day my little sister was born, my aunt picked me up from school – my mom was in labor. Despite living in the upper Midwest, I have always remembered that day as having hurricane weather (lol). It was early spring, windy and stormy. I don’t think my mom was in active labor long, or at least it didn’t seem that way for me. I was in the delivery room while she pushed, sneaked a peak at my baby sister crowning and promptly buried my face in a chair in the corner of the room. I wouldn’t say I was traumatized, but I was ten years old, so, y’know. Bit of a shock. And then my sister was born, and the way she cried, we immediately associated with a squirrel. Now, living in a veritable squirrel warzone, I stand by this. The doctor probably said something about her having good strong lungs. Her sex was a surprise and we were over the moon – I suggested her name based on one of my favorite Nickelodeon shows.

My fourth grade teacher, who was either expecting his first child or had just recently become a father, was tickled by my excitement. I remember coming back to school after my sister was born, and Mr. Kirst presenting me with a gift to take home, a couple of teeny tiny onesies for my new baby sister. Back at school, I probably talked about my big sister duties endlessly.

Being a big sister was a role I didn’t know I would love so much. It was, then and now, a kind of motherhood that fills me with such an intense mama bear instinct. I was the helicopter parent in our household, probably. I took very seriously the responsibility of helping raise and care for this new little person, and I still do. That seriousness doubled with the birth of my little brother a year and change later, but by then I was an old pro at changing diapers and supporting wobbly little necks.

Ten years is a significant gap between siblings. There are very few years there where playing together comes naturally, especially when you’re an anxious control freak big sister. While my little brother and sister, borderline Irish twins, have been close as long as I can remember, my little sister has always been fiercely independent in a way that was often at odds with that same trait in me.

Now that she is entering adulthood and the dynamic of our relationship has had time to change and grow – starting to drive, a first job, a first boyfriend all experiences that shifted her from kid sister to person-who-is-my-sister in my mind – I can feel us entering a new era. The same shift happened with me and my big sister; learning to relate to someone whose diapers you once changed as they become an adult is quite a trip.

As girls and young women are wont to do, there was a time when my sister was in her tweens and early teens when I thought: this person is a monster, we will never be able to have a conversation that doesn’t end in an argument, puberty was invented in hell, etc. I have no doubt my big sister felt the same about me. And then, as most things do, that difficult time passed, and both our brains made room for a relationship to bloom.

In the last year or two alone, she has come to confide in me from time to time, to give me sneak peeks into her interior life, to show, if not always tell, who she is and what she cares about. Where, a few years ago, I once worried about what her adult life would look like (going through high school during the pandemic, I believe fully, has set up an entire generation for obstacles we are only beginning to understand) and scrabbled for any information she’d give me about her post-grad plans. By sixteen or seventeen, I was already an anxious mess, attempting to meticulously plan my future. My sister was having more fun, planning less, and it filled me with panic on her behalf. Lo and behold, she has figured things out in her own time, as all of us do. The place in my heart that was once full of worry and anxiety is now replaced with trust and pride.

I can’t compare sisterhood to motherhood, but in my gut I have always held them in a similar category. It is borderline impossible for me to compute that 18 years have passed since my little sister came shrieking into our world. The child she was and the young woman she has become have given me so much – certainly more than I could have guessed when I was scribbling out wishes to never ever have any baby siblings.

I don’t have an outro – I’m just in my feelings. To my baby sister on her upcoming big day: I love you so much and I am so proud of you. To all sisters, little and big: may all that insane, incompatible energy find a place to rest and allow something beautiful to grow.

This is a Post About My Deepest, Darkest Fantasy

I seem to only write when I’m depressed. Sometimes I mourn the days when all I wanted to do was write, but then I remember all that writing energy came from a deep, ravenous kind of loneliness I had to get out on a page so it wasn’t in my gut anymore.

Knowing that this is my habit, I should be grateful that I’ve scarcely written over the last few years. But anyone who knows me knows I love to put my foul moods on show. I can’t help myself. Get it out so it’s not in.

My partner and I are beginning to seriously consider a move abroad. Like probably the majority of my generation who came of age on Tumblr lingering sheepishly on softcore porn and sharing photos of lives more glamorous than our own, I have fantasized about moving abroad since I was a teenager. But it was purely a fantasy. I never scratched the itch by studying abroad, by taking a gap year and trying my hand at travel blogging, have never even crossed an ocean. I grew up working class and that’s a big part of it. But it also just felt a bit like a fairytale, like the kind of thing that happens to people in books and movies but not to little old me.

I don’t know when, but I recently gave myself permission to consider a move abroad as a viable option. Climate-political-gun violence-healthcare-quality of life anxiety have all convinced me that the grass is greener elsewhere. And in many ways it is, but I’m not so naive to think that moving across an ocean will make every aspect of my life better and easier. But I think it might in a lot of the major ways, and so for that reason it’s become a serious consideration. The kind of thing you have to give some time and attention to in case it might be the solution to survival. I read a headline or look at the weather forecast and I look at my partner and I say, “I cannot stay here much longer.” And I mean it sincerely.

Growing up in the upper Midwest I have always known the pleasure and the pain of four tumultuous seasons. The older I get the more difficult I find the winters. Even the right dose of medications cannot prevent the way I feel when I look out the window on an April morning and find that we’ve received an overnight dumping of six inches of snow. It is, and I’m not exaggerating, a moment of anguish that feels impossible to move past. I have to talk myself into letting the dog out, making the coffee, shoveling the sidewalk, sliding my way to the office in my car, which scrapes against several inches of ice and packed snow as I creep out of the alley. My therapist asks how I feel about the weather, first thing every session, and she knows how I’ll answer based on what’s outside the window. It feels pretty pathetic but I can’t talk myself out of that dread. I love the Midwest but it does not love me back anymore.

The shoots in my flower beds are making a late appearance this year but they’re not giving me the boost they usually do. It’s not quite enough to see life finding a way. That feeling is probably temporary but right now it feels like I am in grave danger. The old tricks stop working and I start to wonder if the lilacs blooming will even have an effect on me this year.

On top of that, I love my job and yet I find most of the time I spend doing it painful. Moments of fulfillment are dulled by candid, trusting conversations at the lunch table where we all – with smiles on our faces because we like one another – admit to how tired and depleted we feel. And then eventually we all slap the tabletop and say, “Well, I’d better get back to work.” The other day I had AP open in one tab, looking at photos from Sudan. And then when I got to the last photo, I closed the tab and went to my email to say to someone, automatically, “I hope you had a lovely weekend and got to enjoy the sunshine!” What a bizarre dance we’re all doing, acknowledging the ugly but still going through the motions. It makes me feel a bit Truman Show. I wonder where the cameras are hidden. What’s our tolerance for witnessing, first or second or third hand, every conceivable atrocity at all times, and then carrying on with business as usual.

I work with national partners and so I check the news before I send my emails. What horrific event do I need to be sure to acknowledge before I continue on to the business at hand?

I got a cold and, with the combination of depression, drained my allowance of sick days. If only my body knew that time was finite. I’ll accrue more in a few months and then can get sick again.

So my partner and I are thinking of moving abroad. It has never occurred to us to move elsewhere in the States, somewhere warmer or more temperate. The problem is not the weather, I realized in one session with my therapist. It’s the America of it all. I desperately want to start a family. I will never forgive myself if I do so here. I have to give myself permission to imagine the life I want elsewhere or I will spend my life juggling guilt or yearning. And I can’t stand either condition for long. I have to try something big, a drastic change, to know if the life that I want is possible. And if it isn’t? Well, I enjoy the privilege of a family who may not be as close as I’d like but would find a way to catch me should the floor fall out from under me. My therapist is trying to help me accept that too. The trade off of emotional intimacy and security. Will I need a therapist in Europe? I can say all of this here because my mother won’t read it. I think she doesn’t want to see what she might find out about me. Or if she does, she won’t say that now she knows. I understand.

I am not a complicated person. An adolescence of self absorbed and melodramatic reading material briefly convinced me otherwise, but I’m approaching 30 and I think I might now know more about who I am. In any case I know myself as well as I ever have. It gets somewhat easier to admit that the life I dream of is not here. It can’t happen here. So let me tell you about my fantasy, about the life my partner and I are considering building across an ocean.

There will be a lot of paperwork to start – and probably the whole time, if I’m being honest. Passport applications and visas and a pocket translation book, probably. More likely our phones and a few unsettlingly helpful apps that can scan things and translate them with little effort. Life isn’t so romantic as pocket translation books anymore, I suppose. We will probably land in a small city where rent is affordable and jobs to pay it are easy enough – somewhere that being fluent in English and useless at any other language is, at minimum, not a major issue. I might try my hand at writing about the experience of being an expat and hope that somehow a blog in the year 202X could possibly yield any profit at all. This is a joke, but trends are cyclical, right? Maybe I won’t be sad enough to try.

After learning a serviceable level of the language and solidifying our incomes we will purchase a rural property. It will be old and require work and light years more affordable than the much newer, much needier home I purchased Back Home. I will have to reread some reliable passages to remind myself that this is what I want. We will walk or bike to the market for the majority of our groceries and it will feel impossibly quaint. We will wait on baited breath for the other shoe to drop. And it probably will.

My parents will never visit. As they age, my move will be a constant source of tension, an act of violence I have committed against them. (It will be an act of survival for me.) My mother will die convinced that I started my family 3,000 miles away specifically to punish her. Her grandchildren will not go to school with bulletproof backpacks. She may well never understand that. I’ll forgive her.

I think when I told my therapist about this idea I wanted her to tell me to pump the brakes. But she is the affirmative type so she did not squash my fantasy. And now I’ve convinced myself I may be one of her favorite clients. We’d be friends if I didn’t pay her to talk me through my problems. But back to the fantasy.

My partner will eventually know enough of the local language to find employment somewhere he feels fulfilled. Perhaps it will happen sooner and he will learn the language on the job. I hope so. But he will be tending grapevines and enjoying two hour lunches before long.

I’ve thought a little about what I would do there but more of my fantasizing is focused on three children. My partner, an only child, will read this and say, “No, no. Two at the most.” But what I lack in emotional parental intimacy I make up for in the sweetness of siblings. So in the fantasy there are three children. And their school peers probably sneer at their eau de americain but they do not have bulletproof backpacks. They do not pause math class to run intruder drills and then carry on with the day. “I hope you had a lovely weekend and got to enjoy the sunshine!”

When my children finish school they will return to the home my partner and I have created together when we decided that weekends could not be the only times we experienced joy. My children will not know that the home we created was the result of a fight or flight reflex to survive. That reflex will not dictate our lives anymore. I will email my American therapist to tell her that my European therapist said to stop bothering her, I have all that I need.

Back to Tumblr for a brief moment. One of my favorite uses of that site – aside from agonizing over photos of models tagged with #thinspo for some of my more bleak aspirations – was finding a pretty photo with some fake deep phrase or sentence or uncredited passage edited over it. One in particular has stuck with me: “in a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy.” Google tells me that’s a Jenny Holzer original – should have known. Anyway, my fantasy feels a bit like that. Like I’ve dreamt up away to survive.

It’s been so long since I’ve blogged that I don’t know who – or if anyone – will be notified by the publishing of a new post. Part of the fun of blogging, for me, is the sort of illicit thrill I get when I wonder who will read a post. I have coworkers, family members, old friends who all know about this blog. And though I don’t publicly hide this gooey, strange part of myself, there’s a certain intimacy to my posts that makes me wonder how it makes those relations feel to know me in this way.

I wrote with confidence that my mother would never read this, but what do I know, really?

I wrote this early in May and am now posting it early in June. My heart has healed from that last depressive episode that triggered this post, but the sentiment stands. It’s painful to be here, and every day I think about the sweetness of leaving, the promise of letting America go. If you read this and think, “hey, uh, what the fuck, Lexie?” I implore you to scroll back a few posts. It’s all there, really. I re-read some old posts myself and what I found made me sad. My European fantasy is a choice for myself: I am willing to try anything that might kick the sadness.

Yours,

Lexie

This is a Post About Holding and Being Held

I haven’t written a blog post in a long, long time. I considered writing one when I bought my house, but I didn’t have much to say and I felt weird about celebrating this milestone while so many are suffering, and I didn’t really have the capacity to comment on all of that in a way I was happy with. So I skipped it.

Last night as I was trying to fall asleep I thought about this blog again, and then today a friend texted me that she’d been reading some old posts. I suppose that means I’m due to babble some more.

It’s been a really, really tough year (plus). Today I scheduled my vaccine appointment and I’m feeling really grateful for that. But not far from St. Paul, Daunte Wright was murdered by a police officer named Kim Potter on Sunday and we are once again fighting state-sanctioned brutality and murder and begging for space to grieve and protest. During the day yesterday, the Kenosha Police Department shared a statement that the officer who shot and paralyzed Jacob Black is back on the force and will not face disciplinary action. While protesters were gassed at BCPD last night, a 16 year old boy was murdered by police in Maryland.

I shared on Twitter that having spent nearly a year in (basically) a militarized zone has taken a toll on me so significantly I can’t even fathom how my Black and brown neighbors are finding a way to carry on. At my grocery store, there’s always a police officer standing by the door. Across from the Target I frequent, the St. Paul Western District precinct is surrounded by enough cement barricades and razor wire to take up an entire lane on Hamline Avenue. There’s almost always a police cruiser in the Target parking lot. As a white person I’m not at risk of being brutalized or profiled by this constant police presence, but my neighbors certainly are. The presence of police here where we live and walk our dogs and shop for groceries does not make us feel safe. They are not there to protect any of us – that much is clear by seeing where they’re standing guard.

As of right now (Wednesday afternoon, April 14) we’ve been subject to two curfews this week in St. Paul. On the advice of activists and community organizers, I “broke” curfew Monday night to take Petunia for a walk. It was cold and windy and I was underdressed, so we didn’t stay out very long, but the anxiety was palpable in the air. I’m not much of a spiritual person, but I know that our community is angry, grieving, exhausted, and scared. And (for now) we’re not the ones being tear-gassed in our own homes.

Last night as I was trying to fall asleep and thinking about this blog and what I might write next, it occurred to me how important holding and being held has become to me in the last year. I was never a particularly physically affectionate person, but the mere absence of touch has made it much more precious to me. Holding and being held is important to me and my little family. At night, I hold Petunia in my arms, and she squeezes her nose between my neck and the pillow until she gets too warm and curls up at the end of the bed for a while. Then when I roll over, I lift the covers for her to come back, and she joins me again. We do this every night.

My partner and I tell each other regularly, “I want/need to be held,” and we usually say it with a chuckle, but communicating that need is pretty new to me, and it feels really good to say it and hear it and then be able to receive or provide it. We often hold each other so tight and so close that we’ll laugh and have to adjust – Petunia does this too, coming up for air, smiling, after committing to a deep neck nuzzle for way too long.

On Monday I gathered some donations for our neighbors in Brooklyn Center and met up with my coworker to get some things she wanted to send along with me to drop off. We hugged each other tight when we first got out of our cars, and then again before we said goodbye. Post-hug, she said, “Thanks for seeing the need in my eyes so I didn’t have to ask.” And we laughed, but the limited interpersonal contact we’ve been allowed this past year has been really, genuinely, heartbreaking. This week I just want to hold and be held. I wish that I could hold the families who live across from BCPD and give them somewhere safe to sleep.
When I dropped off supplies at the high school I was in good company. There was a line of vehicles waiting to drop off carloads and carloads of donations of all kinds, and families coming to pick up supplies for the week(s) ahead. After I unloaded I took a drive around the block to check out the situation at BCPD. A long line of at least a dozen military vehicles was coming down Humboldt Avenue and filing into the fenced-off precinct parking lot. There was a small crowd watching from across the street, where apartment buildings stand beside a boarded up strip mall. It made my stomach churn, but the sight has become so familiar over the last year it felt much like being a few miles south in the Twin Cities.

Last week some local Twitter friends – people I know only via Twitter but who are my friends and neighbors, just out of reach due to the pandemic – were fantasizing about getting together for a beer and a hug, somewhere, anywhere, eventually. It feels closer and closer, especially with more of us becoming vaccinated, but I know that when we eventually meet it will be more in grief and exhaustion than celebration. The need to be together while we try to protect one another is so tough to navigate, I think in part because it can’t effectively be done, not really in the way we need it. With the celebration of being together again comes with an enormous grief – lives lost due to police brutality, governmental negligence in the COVID-19 pandemic, cruelty and violence against our houseless neighbors, to name a few factors.

I’m always at odds with how to process and experience this grief that isn’t really mine. It’s communal, but it’s not immediate to me. My loved ones and I have been fortunate in that way and in a lot of other ways. But I am deeply empathetic and my heart aches constantly for my neighbors. There are, genuinely, no bounds to the cruelty of the white supremacist powers that be, and that includes our blue elected officials who willfully sit on their hands and sic police on citizens rather than hear and protect us. I can’t compute it. It shocks me one moment and then in the next, it doesn’t.

In community activism there is a phrase – “to hold space” – that’s used to describe literally creating and maintaining physical, mental, and spiritual space for healing. We try to do this when we hold vigil for the dead, when we create autonomous zones to nurture community members, when we call in instead of calling out.

I hope that you are finding ways to hold and be held. I hope that you will ask me to hold for you what you can’t hold yourself. I hope that my white friends are holding more than you think you’re able to, because sometimes that’s what love looks like, and our neighbors need our love. I hope that you find ways to communicate your boundaries and needs and that those around you can honor that, and you offer them the same grace.

As plenty of people have said already, there is no “after” – not for this pandemic or for police brutality. We will always carry this with us, and those who have suffered the most will carry it more heavily. We need to show up how we can, where we are, and we have to strike a balance between honoring our boundaries and pushing outside our comfort zones. Equity cannot and will not come without dismantling the status quo. Our lives depend on it. Hold those you can hold safely and let them hold you, too. While we all work on this practice, I’ll hold you in my heart. I don’t know how to end these posts without lots and lots of hoping.

As Belinda told Fleabag in one of the single best episodes of contemporary television (Fleabag S2E3), “People are all we’ve got.”

This is a Post about Hm, Some Things Have Occurred

So, the last time we chatted we were in a sexy little pandemic but I found something to be twee about. Shortly after, some more crimes occurred, and I’ve been sad, and my community has been crushed and vibrant and hopeful and crushed and vibrant and hopeful again, every day, on repeat.

On top of that, the pandemic is decidedly worse, and it’s a First World Problem, but my apartment is SO hot. Petunia and I have been melting for about two weeks, depressed and sweaty.

I’ve had a few ideas since I last wrote that I thought might make nice blog posts. The first one was about the little dog I used to walk for my neighbor Madeline as a child. The second was about that same era, when my other neighbor, Nancy, would gather the kids on the block a couple times every summer to make ice cream together. We’d eat it with raspberries from the patch in her backyard, although we griped a lot about the whole ordeal of actually picking the berries. We called the blackberries “black caps” and I don’t know why.

I did a quick search and I guess they’re a little different, but it was always funny to me as a kid.

Anyway, now I’m 24 instead of 23 which feels like a big deal because 23 was such a god-awful wreck for me. To try to turn a new leaf in 2020 is pretty funny, but I guess I’ll try anyway. I am very privileged in that things aren’t so bad for me right now, which makes it easier for me to try to do my part to make things less bad for others.

I wrote my brother-in-law earlier tonight that, in the last couple months, I’ve gotten a greater sense of community here in the Twin Cities than I’ve had anywhere else after any amount of time. I’m sad it took a pandemic and a recession and another tragedy, but I think people really show their best selves when things are tough. The efficacy and spirit of mutual aid—though infuriating, when I think about it within the broken structures in place that cause the plight people face—has really been moving. I have emailed my city councilman so many times I think his assistant is tired of hearing from me. I wonder why I never did it before and I guess it’s because I never cared before, or didn’t care enough, or didn’t know how I could show I cared. I think that’s the case for a lot of people, especially my age, and it’s heartening to see people learn how to show up meaningfully for their neighbors. White people have dragged our feet for a good long while and maybe I shouldn’t be relieved to see us pick up the pace now, but Now feels better than Later. We’re moving, anyway.

Today I saw this June Jordan poem (it’s her birthday) and, though I’m not much of a poetry reader and had never heard of her before, it really knocked me on my ass:

I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
GENOCIDE TO STOP
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED AFFIRMATIVE
ACTION AND REACTION
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED MUSIC
OUT THE WINDOWS
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
NOBODY THIRST AND NOBODY
NOBODY COLD
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED I WANTED
JUSTICE UNDER MY NOSE
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
BOUNDARIES TO DISAPPEAR
I WANTED
NOBODY ROLL BACK THE TREES!
I WANTED
NOBODY TAKE AWAY DAYBREAK!
I WANTED NOBODY FREEZE ALL THE PEOPLE ON THEIR
KNEES!
I WANTED YOU
I WANTED YOUR KISS ON THE SKIN OF MY SOUL
AND NOW YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I STAND
DESPITE THE TRILLION TREACHERIES OF SAND
YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I HOLD THE LONGING
OF THE WINTER IN MY HAND
YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I COMMIT
TO FRICTION AND THE UNDERTAKING
OF THE PEARL
YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME
YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME
AND I HAVE BEGUN
I BEGIN TO BELIEVE MAYBE
MAYBE YOU DO
I AM TASTING MYSELF
IN THE MOUNTAIN OF THE SUN

So many things have been knocking me on my ass lately, but in good ways, I think. My friends and family and colleagues and I have been having conversations that make us uncomfortable, and better, and when I look in the mirror most days I don’t hate the person I see. I can see that she’s trying, I’m trying, harder than I have for a long time—maybe harder than I’ve ever tried—to be a person worth being.

I’ve got four books in progress right now, scattered and splayed open in different parts of my apartment because I can’t focus on much for long. They are: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Normal People by Sally Rooney, Little Weirds by Jenny Slate (of course), and No One Belongs Here More than You by Miranda July. They all ache. I read them and I think, I can’t believe someone did this on a page. I can’t believe they did it for 100 or 500 pages. They’ve been making me think about writing, the way reading always does.

With a new friend I’ve revisited some of my previous blog posts and found myself feeling proud. For years I’d look back on what I’d written and feel ashamed, maybe not horrified sometimes, but mostly like I couldn’t believe my brain produced that and thought it was worth writing down. Undoubtedly I’ll have that feeling again, but I guess the difference now is that I’m writing from a place that feels really vulnerable and unpolished and in the years it’s taken me to accept that part of myself I’ve maybe grown a little affection for it. I think I’ve written before that it doesn’t do me or anyone else any good to hate myself. So there!

I don’t know what to do about this pandemic and all the suffering it’s exacerbated. It feels really miserable and hopeless. I live 2 blocks from the capitol here in Minnesota, which has been surrounded by ugly chain-link fences since George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, and I think, what the fuck are you doing in that big marble building? Nobody’s in there, I know, but the symbol of it makes my stomach churn. Hundreds of people are living in encampments in city parks in Minneapolis while something called a “governor’s mansion” exists and an enormous, plush building sits empty and the people who normally work there wring their hands about what’s “pragmatic”.

Meanwhile it’s a whole election year and it feels laughably stupid, just unbelievably ridiculous. I can’t tell you how much I don’t care. After a truly gut-wrenching, miserable 2016, I feel so far separated from federal government I wish I could fully opt out without being racked with guilt. That’s maybe why I’ve got my city councilman on email speed-dial. Can’t he do something? Can’t I? Can’t anyone? I invoke The Lorax at this point.

As a teenager I had something in my MySpace bio about being a misanthrope and I thought that was pretty cool and tough of me. Frankly, at this point in my life, I’m so soft, I’m beyond bleeding-heart liberalism and just full on—what? Lefty Play-Doh, maybe? Socialist Silly Putty? It’s too easy to be angry and not do anything about it, not ask why I’m angry. I’m angry because people suffer needlessly at the hands of overpaid suits who feign progressivism. I’ve had enough of it. I’ve gotten sick on the fake sweetness of “Midwest Nice”. I think most people have also had enough, and especially in places outside the Midwest, so perhaps we’ll move the needle now, finally. I don’t know what “move the needle” even means and I suspect it’s not enough. But I guess it’s a start. I want to pull a Mom and, instead of just threatening, actually pull the car over on the side of the highway and demand changed behavior. I demand a reckoning and I know I’m not alone. I know that watching—secondhand—the Third Precinct burn felt like Something.

So I’ll hang onto Something for a bit, until it snowballs into Something More, Something Big. You should, too. It feels good.

Lexie

This is a Post about My/Our Butcher Block

I like to cook but I’m not very good at it.

Last night I decided to make pizza, which I’ve done before, but because of the whole pandemic thing and a general habit of unpreparedness, I didn’t have yeast. No problem—10,000 mommy bloggers on Pinterest have prepared recipes for this very issue.

Baking anything with gluten free flour is misery. I’ve accepted it, and that’s why I rarely do it. Making dough with gluten free flour and without yeast is a hell I did not, until recently, know existed. It tasted bad, even doused in sauce and cheese, it was crumbly, and it was nearly impossible to roll out because it had no elasticity. It’s possible—nay, likely—that I missed a step or could have used a better recipe, but half the reason I’m a bad cook is because, despite being a bad cook, I’ve convinced myself I can wing just about any recipe. I’ll probably never learn, and I have a family full of masterful improv cooks to blame.

Anyway, this isn’t a story about my shitty pizza or even my bad attitude about cooking.

While I was attempting to roll out my horrible, cursed dough, I paused for a moment to look at the wooden butcher block on which I was struggling. Growing up, it was the centerpiece of my grandparents’ kitchen, and it came into my possession when I moved into my first big-girl apartment post-grad.

As a child, me and all my cousins and aunt and uncles spent time crouched under the butcher block in the middle of the kitchen—who knows why. If I crouch down to look at it now, I can find my uncle’s first name and last initial written in what looks like red puffy paint on the underside. (Similarly, I remember writing “I love my mom” in pencil on the underside of my parents’ kitchen table).

The butcher block seemed really big when I was a child and small enough to sit under it cross-legged. Now, I have to hunch over it a little bit to chop vegetables or roll out stubborn dough or whatever. My dog Petunia likes to stand under it and wait for scraps to fall.

My butcher block, last spring, with my mom’s favorite “flowers” pilfered from a friendly neighbor’s bushes.

I have no idea what kind of wood it’s made of—it’s…light, golden-ish? And pretty? The block itself is full of nicks and gouges from decades of knives working on its surface. It could probably use a good scrub-down after a couple years in a basement and then hauled between a few homes. It may be borderline gross!

There’s no branding and the design is pretty simple and I wondered if a friend or family member built it for my grandparents however many years ago. I texted my grandma to ask where she got it. I wanted an enchanting origin story and I got one. In northern Wisconsin, nestled in the expansive Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, where my grandpa is buried, his uncle worked in a lumberyard that employed most of the people in the area. They’ve been out of business since before I was born, and my grandparents got the butcher block about ten years before that. A little research led me to a history of the lumberyard, dating back nearly 120 years, and I found myself moved to tears as I scrolled through pictures. I don’t know what it is about the little towns where I spent time growing up and their industrious histories, but the Midwest-ness of it all regularly gets me all aflutter, emotionally.

Additional enchantment comes from the decades of kids and grandkids and grand-dogs hiding under that butcher block. Maybe even great-grandkids, someday.

I’ve had the piece for over a year, so I don’t know what exactly made me stop to think about it now. What I do know is that I miss my family a great deal. We haven’t seen each other since Christmas, and if I can get home by my birthday at the end of June (exactly six months from Christmas!) I’ll be relieved.

Pieces of home are all over my home here, four hours away—the butcher block, a crate from a pickle factory that’s been gone for decades, a stem of wheat from the field behind my parents’ house, a bookshelf and plant stand my great-grandfather built, sweet corn grown by my uncle and sliced off the cob by my mom in the freezer, pairs of jeans my grandpa wore to scraps, various old-timey things my loved ones found, thought of me, and gave as gifts. I am always looking for pieces of home to bring me back when I can’t be there physically. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been trying to learn Polish.

I want to go to the Polish bakery in town that my whole family gripes about, and I want to walk barefoot through my mom’s garden. I want to drive out to the stone barn on the Fourth of July to watch the fireworks with my brother and sister in the backseat and drive to the gas station for ice cream when we get bored after ten minutes. I want to listen to the Yacht Rock station and think about my grandpa and wonder if he’d be proud of me, or think I’m cool, or smart or funny. I want to eat cucumber sandwiches with dill from the garden and scratch mosquito bites raw. I want to smell manure when the neighbor starts prepping and planting his fields and wave when he passes me on a tractor.

Nobody courtesy waves in the city, and it breaks my heart every time it doesn’t happen when I wish it would.

I think a pandemic is kind of like having the flu for the first time when you’re away at college. Your mom’s not there to whine to—and it’s not like she can do anything about it, but when you creep into her room and whisper, “Mom, I threw up,” you feel better anyway. I want to go home and be comforted by the slow familiarity. I’d like to have a beer with my dad and agree wordlessly not to bicker about politics. I’d like to relax my shoulders, just for a bit, and succumb to my mom’s care. I think I would feel better.

Things are kind of crummy. I hope you feel home.

Lexie

This is a Post about Petunia and the End Times

Uh, hey!

It’s been a minute. But if you thought you wouldn’t hear from me in the midst of this shitshow, you were mistaken, and I wonder, really, whether you know me at all!

So, last time we talked (and, probably the time before that and the time before that) I was Regular Depressed. Since then, we’ve had a sexy little economic collapse and pandemic outbreak! I suppose it tracks that now I am Apocalypse Depressed. Truthfully, I did have a couple weeks of that, and of course it’s not over, but what’s become the New Normal has set in a little bit and I have found reasons to laugh and smile and get out of bed, so right now I am doing okay.

As COVID-19 was unfolding in the eastern hemisphere and felt lightyears away, I started getting serious of my longtime desire to adopt a dog and, as it happens, that process—and the spread of a virus—moves pretty quickly!

Wednesday, March 11, my colleagues and I celebrated a huge organizational milestone and went home exhausted and happy with little else on our minds. By the time we got to the office the next day, closures began in the U.S. (including at the location in Houston where we’d had our celebratory event on Wednesday). In the Midwest, we were—and still are, to some degree—a couple weeks behind the devastation. But as the DOW collapsed along with loads and loads of public infrastructure at the hands of capitalism, it became clear that our little, though internationally-reaching nonprofit needed to make some quick changes.

So, like every other business, we got a plan in place to limit staff time in the office. On Sunday I met my dog and her foster for the first time. Monday at work we discussed our plan moving forward. Wednesday evening, after my first day working at the office with only two other people, my dog came home to me. Then before the next week was through, we realized our plan was insufficient.

Fortunately, my first few days with my dog went smoothly. Like most rescues, she’s a little skittish but eager to please, and her favorite thing is to sit on my lap and sleep. So while the world outside started to crumble a little, I was lucky to have a funny little friend to lie on my chest like the world’s most effective weighted blanket.

Our first weekend together I finally broke down. Friday we learned of layoffs at work, and cuts in hours with the ultimate goal of staying afloat while all this goes on for who-knows-how-long. Though layoffs were happening everywhere already and I knew they were a possibility for my org, losing a quarter of our staff in an afternoon was a horrible kind of reality check.

Though baseball season has been indefinitely postponed, my boss called me in as a utility player, and I am so grateful to still have the job I love so much. I am fortunate to work somewhere that leadership is making impossibly hard decisions that will hopefully make it possible to come out on the “other side” of this viable. I am heartbroken by the sacrifices that were made to make it possible and I’m fearful that more sacrifices will be made along the way—I know I’m next in line for potential layoffs, and I am trying very hard not to fixate on it.

My dog’s name is Petunia. After I met her (and learned her admittedly horrible capital-W-White Girl rescue name) I created a longlist of potential new names. Tuesday night, before she was to be dropped off with me for good, I lay awake brainstorming giddily, unable to sleep.

I called my mom Wednesday morning to check in and catch up. The weekend prior, we had planned for my mom and siblings to visit on their spring break, and they’d have left Monday, would have met Petunia with me.

Anyway, I was talking to my mom and telling her that she’d be coming home Wednesday and she asked about a name. I said I still hadn’t decided, and she chatted for a while about wanting to get another family dog someday, and how a name she liked wouldn’t be a good fit for a German shepherd because it was too delicate. My great grandmother on my maternal grandpa’s side once had a scrappy little dog with that name and my mom had always liked it. The name was serendipitously on my list: Petunia. So that felt like a sign.

I am confident that without Petunia my mental health could not withstand the stress of this global pandemic business. The breakdown I had that first weekend we were together was rough, and as I sat bawling on my bedroom floor over the state of the world I kept looking at her little face and feeling grateful she was there. It’s not only obligation, but love for her that lifts me up enough to get out of bed and keep moving forward. She’s also very funny, and it feels good to laugh now that I have limited contact with my friends and family and coworkers.

Settling into the New Normal has been so, so strange for me and for everyone else. We are concerned about being creative enough or productive enough with all this new free time while also trying to figure out how to pay our bills and feed our families. There’s a presidential election on, somehow, that is both extremely critical right now but also feels impossible and frivolous while everyone on earth does damage control. We need change now—or, better yet, years and years ago—but we can’t get the changes we need until we make the Big Change, and that becomes less and less likely as our entire institution breaks down. It feels very bleak.

A couple weeks before All This happened, I went to the Bernie Sanders rally in St. Paul, and it was so wonderful. I listened to local leaders—nurses, teachers, and farmers!—talk about how badly we need to improve our social safety nets and support people who provide essential services and how our only hope of moving toward doing that is Bernie. Thinking back, it feels like sick foreshadowing, though at that point we were aware of the situation in China but still felt pretty invincible, I guess.

The next week, the St. Paul Federation of Educators went on strike to secure more resources for students. The district moved quickly to make sure kids could still get bused to school for meals. Not long before, a group of healthcare providers in the Twin Cities were on strike to negotiate new, fairer contracts.

Both groups made agreements eventually, and the world proceeded to implode on itself. Now, workers from Amazon and Instacart and WholeFoods and a variety of other services deemed essential are on strike to demand hazard pay and safe work conditions. If not now, then when? But we are also in the midst of economic collapse, so these people risk a great deal (financial security, insurance coverage, etc.) and are, it goes without saying, heroes.

I’m not sure what I set out to do by writing this, but I knew I had to write something, at the very least to get it out of my system. My feeble attempts to uplift are made even weaker by the state of the world but I hope that you know that I am still, as always, on your team.

This is an opportunity, if nothing else, for all of us to be better for one another, to pause and consider how our actions (now as innocuous as going to the grocery store) may impact those around us, and consider what small things we can do to help mitigate the inevitable suffering of our neighbors.

It’s a chance to be kinder, more thoughtful, more generous, gentler with ourselves and others. We are living in unprecedented times, and every single person and community will be changed by this experience. Despite our frustrations that wealth and resources are being hoarded and deliberately withheld by those in power, everyday people are acting selflessly and generously to help one another along. No, it shouldn’t be that way, but it is, and so I think it’s okay to be humbled by and grateful to see it.

I really believe that the only way out of this is through, together. Much of the damage control happening right now is because people are choosing to do the right thing, whether governors or mayors or presidents are making the right call at the right time. I think it’s because we love each other, and we know we need each other, and we are doing our best for each other. I am grateful for that.

In any event, it’s April. The snow has all melted here—knock on wood—and with all this free time, lots of people are out walking and appreciating the sunshine. When I take Petunia on walks around our neighborhood, or when I go in to the office to ship packages to customers so we can carry on as an organization, I feel that we’re finding ways to keep moving forward and that has to count for something. If we keep doing that and taking note of who is showing up for whom, we’ll come out the other side ready to make real, tangible change.

As we know, the peak of this pandemic is yet to come in the States, and things will get worse before they get better. Kind neighbors can only take us so far. Please, if you aren’t already, think long and hard about the ways our federal leadership has failed us. If this awful situation has not opened your eyes to the need for universal healthcare and the destruction of capitalism, I don’t know what will. Clearly, our current systems are not sustainable, and they are being stress tested at the absolute worst possible time. This is not normal, or healthy, or functional, or conscionable. The main reason things have spiraled this wildly out of control—besides gross incompetence and hubris—is because capitalism rewards the hoarding of wealth and resources. The money for the change we need is there, but it’s in the wrong hands, and the wealthy are proving they will not “rise to the occasion” to use their wealth for good. We cannot go on like this, and we do not need to be fighting over the resources that we know are plentiful, just out of reach. I hope you see that. I say this out of extreme tenderness and desperation. It does not need to be this way.

In closing, a few thoughts to carry with you as we find ways to carry on:

You’re doing a great job.
I am thinking of you.
Nobody is being as productive as they were Before, and if they are, it won’t last long. We will all burn out, and that’s okay.
Relax your shoulders and un-clench your jaw.
Breathe in the spring air and pause to feel the sun on your face.
Be kind and be patient.
Ask for help when you need it. We all need help.
Take care.
I love you.

Lexie

This is a Post about Retrospect

As a pre-teen and teenager I was always mystified by the magic of New Year’s Eve. When the clock ticked over and I sent texts to my friends, the extra time it took to send my messages filled me with a kind of giddy fear. It felt like the world was starting and ending all at once. I thought, if the world really was ending and communication had failed, New Year’s Eve was a pretty romantic time for it. I probably have my favorite snow day read (Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer) to blame for that strange logic, but it was kind of fun and comforting anyway.

It’s been a tough year and an even tougher decade. I did a quick inventory and I think I can pinpoint a traumatic event for each of the past ten years, which is probably true for most people, but that doesn’t make me feel much better. Of course, I have also had a great many high points, and I don’t want to lose sight of those. To celebrate that, a year in moments:

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

In the spirit of starting of the New Year on the right foot, I’ve decided to try something new. I’ve been attempting to write blog posts for a couple months now to make up for my radio silence, but I just can’t find the right words. I’m having a weird time, but it won’t always be this way.

Looking forward, a collection of words and images that inspire me for the coming year(s):

From Anne Sexton’s *A Self-Portrait in Letters*.

From *All I Know about Gertrude Stein* by Jeanette Winterson.

A sweet and warm New Year to you, friends.

Lexie

This is a Post about my Big, Dumb Heart

As a child I went through a phase for a couple years where I couldn’t fall asleep without praying. I was very consciously not praying to god, because I had been bucking against my catholic upbringing pretty aggressively, but I wanted someone to keep an eye on things for me. This was my prayer:

“Please bless my family, friends, teachers, pets, home, and self. Thank you.”

Not really a prayer, but something similar that ten-year-old me felt covered my bases without lying to god’s face about believing in him. And if I didn’t say it, I couldn’t fall asleep, even when I got a little older and thought it was kind of stupid and wanted to kick the habit.

I’ve been having a rough go of it lately and remembered that and it reminded me of who I am and the condition of my heart and why I have such a difficult time just being sometimes. I have a very big heart, I think, but my brain chemicals are all unbalanced most of the time and so my brain tells my heart to be hard and small and shriveled like the Grinch and I forget how to be cared for. I don’t want to need to be cared for. People ask me how I’m doing and I want to beg them to stop asking because when they ask I have to acknowledge that I’m having a really hard time and my head thinks my heart sucks and my heart is just like oh okay with a cartoon frown tattooed on it.

Anyone who follows me on social media knows my philosophy for a depressive spell is to over-share my way through it. If I yell really loudly that I’m SAD and feel BADLY about myself then everyone knows and it can’t sneak up on me anymore. In theory. So that kind of behavior naturally triggers concern from the wonderful people who care about me, but the exercise is for me and me alone to say I AM BIGGER AND STRONGER THAN MY SADNESS! And so for people to acknowledge this chest beating thing I’m doing makes me bashful and embarrassed and fearful that I am really and truly doing it all for attention when I know I just cope like a clown.

I have to keep reminding myself that just because I’m sad and overwhelmed doesn’t mean I’m doing something wrong. Change is really hard, and I could insert the lyrics to Landslide by Fleetwood Mac here but that would just put me over the edge again and probably drag a few others down with me too. And everyone the world over has been so sweet to me, just overwhelmingly lovely and supportive and kind, and all I want to do is push them away so that I can feel miserable in peace and wait for it to pass. The rest of the world marches on, though, even when we’re grieving.

I’ve been bad at blogging because I’m trying to be good at being alive, or at least just being alive. And that’s not to say I wish I were dead—I’ve been there but SSRIs have since done the diligent work of keeping me afloat—but just that carrying on when you feel like your existence weighs a billion tons is really very exhausting. This is not a cry for help. It’s an explanation. I feel the need to explain myself, which is not something anyone can rid me of, so I’m trying to do that because that’s what I need to do.

It’s also a reminder to you and to me too that everything can be very heavy all at once even when everything was very light just yesterday. It certainly doesn’t help that all the pretty leaves are falling and the temperature is dropping and I keep forgetting to start my car early so it’s warm when I drive to work. Sometimes the shivering feels appropriate though, like my skeleton is rattling around in my body because she is anxious and sad and jangly and the cold is a good excuse to get it out of her system. Out of my system.

I always know I’m really at a low point when I get desperately homesick. My relationship with my family is complicated and strained, so our distance has been mostly a blessing, a cooling-off space between holidays. But I keep calling my mom just to chat, and I really have nothing to say, except that I want to hear her voice and crawl into bed with her like I’ve just woken up startled from a nightmare. And I want to pet my dog and lie in the leaves with her and bicker with my little brother and sister and have my dad make me a sandwich because that’s his love language.

The people who love me have a way of saying “I’m worried about you” that makes me wish I could just vaporize on the spot. It comes from a place of love and concern—I know that. But it’s an entirely unhelpful thing to say to someone who is mentally ill or maybe just Regular Sad. It says, “Your feelings are making me feel bad, and uncomfortable, and I don’t know how to be around you.” Fair enough. But for someone who may or may not be worried about themselves, it’s like asking them to get better quick so that you can feel comfortable again, even if that’s not what you mean.

Truthfully I’m not worried about myself, because I’ve been through worse depressive episodes and made it out the other side mostly unscathed. I haven’t thought about suicide since high school, so jot that down. I’m just sad for myself, because the excitement of starting over is getting squashed under the weight of being sad about it and what it meant to get here.

I think remembering my ragamuffin prayer as I tried to fall asleep last night, sniffling and soaking my pillow with tears, was a reminder that my heart is okay. It’s not a Grinch heart. In fact, it might be three sizes too big. My big weird heart had me cobbling together prayers to a god I didn’t believe in because I wanted my family and friends and teachers and pets to be blessed and safe and warm. There’s a sweetness to that I simply can’t deny myself, and I know I’m capable of it again when I am not so caught up in feeling sorry for myself.

It seems like I’m always signing off by saying I’m doing alright, whether the post is happy or sad, but the truth is that writing it all out gets me to an alright place, if I wasn’t already there. I’m having a hell of a time but I’ll come out the other side safe and sound, because I always do. (And you can and will, too.)

Thanks for listening,

Lexie

This is a Post about the Highwomen

It’s Saturday, which I mention only to contextualize my reason for writing this post: so far, I am having a scientifically perfect weekend, so much so that I felt compelled to write about it.

The last few weeks have been tough, which you’d know if you found my sneaky little post from Sept. 9. I didn’t even share a link to that one because it felt like such a puny little whiny bug of a post.

Anyway, back to my weekend.

Yesterday I drove out to central Wisconsin because my former professor and mentor asked me to speak on a panel about editing and publishing as part of the Young Writers Conference and Central Wisconsin Book Festival. I listened to One Direction the whole drive there and thought I’d lose my voice from howling along at top volume. Once in town, I got to reconnect with my mentor and other friends from the area and talk about books, which I was reminded I love just about more than anything else.

My mentor brought me a loaf of bread from my favorite bakery in my college town, and told me it was sliced by a young lady I hardly know from college and nonetheless adore. While we caught up and talked shop, I recognized a new confidence in myself, although my mentor joked I was funnier on Twitter when I was working retail and fully miserable. It’s one thing to talk about what you love, but it’s quite another to talk about what you love in the context of your job. Every day I pause to think about how lucky I am.

By the time I got home it was dark and I was buzzing with nerd energy and despite my pleading nobody would meet me for a drink to talk about books. So I got into a bottle of four-dollar wine from Trader Joe’s, washed dishes with my headphones blasting my favorite playlist, and danced around my apartment feeling silly and light. Evidently, just a glass of four-dollar wine will get you—maybe just me—positively drunk, and so I feel asleep by 10:00.

I woke up late this morning with the sun on my face. I feel guilty about sleeping in late usually, but it was Saturday and being curled up in my blankets with the window cracked to the early fall breeze was perfection. Eventually I got up and made myself coffee and pumpkin spice pancakes, which were divine. At this time of year everything is turning candy-colored, and I want to eat everything pumpkin spice and butternut squash and corn and leafy and warm.

Over breakfast I watched the last episode of season two of Fleabag—a perfect show, and a perfect episode, by the way—and had a little cry about it. Then I hunkered down on the living room floor and got some work done and wrote a letter to my pen pal, who, this week, signed off with “take care of you and yours.” He’s 4/4 on telling me precisely what I need to hear, and in my last letter I told him so. I think that tickled him a bit. I love writing letters. Write me a letter!

This afternoon when I finally brushed my teeth and got dressed—a fall-colored sweater and my grandpa’s tattered Levis, an outfit full of physical and emotional comfort—I headed out of town and called my mom.

We had a nice talk, and were talking longer than I planned as I spilled about the problems weighing on me and felt relieved as I confided in her. I haven’t done that in a long time. I think she liked to be confided in again. When we got off the phone I tried on two sweaters and even took a photo of myself in a green one because I’m trying very hard lately to look at myself and be grateful for being able-bodied and being alive and honoring my big nose and my funny smile and my tall legs because life is short and I’m not doing myself or anyone else any favors by hating myself.

En route to get groceries I missed my exit and took an alternate route on county roads with my windows down and The Highwomen playing loudly and the epiphany of the perfect day I had on my hands.

I listened to the song “Old Soul” by The Highwomen four times before I finally let the next song have its time and missed another turn as I listened. I kept going back to the chorus:

“Oh to be a wild child for a day
All the promises I’ve ever kept
I’d line ‘em up to break
Oh to be a dancer on the edge
I’d rip the filter from my mouth
And all my cigarettes
But I know I won’t
I guess I was born an old soul.”

How’d they get in my head like that? Lately my skin has felt a little itchy, like the dust on my old soul has built up and needs to be shaken off. I feel like getting in my car and driving to a cabin in the woods and reading and writing in solitude for a month, and I feel like going to a dive bar alone where I don’t know anyone and listening to a crappy band play for a couple hours. I feel like going home and hugging my family. I feel like going to my hometown and returning to my favorite spot to be alone and screaming into the cornfield there until I go hoarse. I feel like taking up smoking and changing my name.

The Highwomen also have a song called “If She Ever Leaves Me” that’s a lesbian cowboy anthem about love and heartbreak and about how if you listen enough times you’ll fall in love with Brandi Carlile. This Highwomen project is so special. It makes me feel like a woman, like Shania Twain, naughty and pretty and strong and authentic. They make me feel like addressing openly the part of myself that feels queer, that may never manifest in a relationship with a woman or non-binary person but which has been thumping in my chest for a long time and has stayed hidden by shame and by feeling as though it doesn’t matter, not really, for a cis woman in a straight relationship to “come out” or identify as queer or even acknowledge it. And it’s not brave or interesting for me to do so, but it feels like something I’ve all but said aloud and when I catch myself wondering why it seems very silly. So maybe it’s a little bit scary to speak it out into the world, but everyone I care about already knows, at least a little bit, probably, and so what does it matter? It’s another exercise in rejecting shame.

Even as I was thinking all this driving along back roads in Minnesota I was thinking about what a beautiful day it was and how happy I am to know that, though things are difficult now, I am doing right by myself by choosing to ask for what I want and need and being kind to myself.

It’s sixty degrees and the sun is shining enough to warm my bones. Tomorrow, it’ll be cool and rainy. The flowers I bought myself at the grocery store smell like life and I have apples and pears in the fridge crisper to make something warm and gooey and sweet. I have a stack of books up to my ears to read, all poised to break my heart and kiss my bruises.

I’m doing alright.

Lexie