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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.

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

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.”