Pieces of Peace

Everyone has marks on their soul. Some marks are thumbprints - a light, loving impression. Some are jagged rents that blow a hole through your middle, scattering the edges of your being until you can't imagine how you'll ever track down the pieces. We all want to find what will truly heal us. Not the flimsy strips of plastic that can't quite grip the edges, but something that allows the fragmented shards to knit together again until the scars are only faint lines of light.

So start looking. But while you search, remember that you are already whole, you are already perfect, and it doesn't matter where you look - if you're seeking, you will find it.

200 Mile Burn

Running always sounded like a dreadful idea. I wouldn't even run to catch a bus, because buses are notorious for being repetitive and you know what's even worse than riding the bus? Running to catch one. The only time I even considered running in my former life was when trying to escape a gang of raccoons. (Roving gangs of raccoons are a more common city occurrence than you might expect.) This isn't the first time I've been wrong about some belief I've cuddled stubbornly close to my heart for no reason at all.

Ragnar

The righteous Honey Badgers of van one: Zach, me, Kelsey, Nicole, Sara, and Drea. 

What I've learned since agreeing to run Ragnar - a 200-mile relay from Los Angeles to San Diego - is that running burns off the crazy. This is helpful, because it takes a vast plentitude of crazy to agree to spend 37 hours in a van with eleven other people in order to run an insane number of miles in Darwinian conditions meant to pick off the weak and cranky.

But wholeheartedly embracing the crazy is my default strategy. So I signed up, trained to run farther than I've ever run in my life, slathered gold puffy paint in the shape of hissing honey badgers onto t-shirts, and climbed in the van that would be our collective home for the weekend.

Climbing out of said van after it broke down at 12:30 at night in order to hitchhike to the point where I would start running many miles down a dark freeway, I might have briefly reconsidered my default strategy. But once I decided to stop worrying and just go, I tore down the dirt hill of our doom, waved my hands at the sky to stop the wind, jumped in a random van (LIKE A BOSS), and all the anxiety about stalled behemoths and dark, desolate runs melted away.

Clambering into an unknown van with a bunch of strange men and a cooler of beer at midnight and praying you get where you need to go is not something you do in real life. But in running life, you hop in, find that every last person in that random van is either snoring or genial - especially when you tell them your team name is Mr Bear and the Honey Badgers over a blare of Irish music - and they offer you a beer before dropping you off exactly where you need to be.

I'd been awake for nineteen hours and I was facing what the Ragnar bible had labeled my hardest run. I'd already run twice - once in the blazing sun up a beast of a hill, a run the powers-that-be had labeled my easiest. My smug, sea-breeze washed jogs had not prepared me for a heat index of a hundred and fuck. But after I handed off food, water, and a sweatshirt to our stranded runner and he slapped the team bracelet on my wrist, I took off.

As I settled into my stride, I realized that just because someone labels something easy, doesn't mean it is. Just because someone tells you something is hard, doesn't mean it will be hard for you. And never underestimate the power of endorphins to flood your over-worked system with peace.

Alone on an empty stretch of road with nothing but quietly chirping insects and velvety dark shadows opening to the brighter dark of a sky dotted with stars, I remembered why motion is always better than sitting still. Moving forward - even if you don't know where you're going and it's so dark you can't see more than a few feet in front of you - always feels better than sitting, unsure and anxious, in the back of a broken van. Moving your feet across miles of road cycles all the anxiety and exhaustion and madly spinning thoughts out of your mind and body and into the quiet ether.

beach wheels

Cartwheels on the beach at mile who-the-hell-knows. 

Ragnar was my own personal Everest. When you aren't getting much sleep but you are doing weird amounts of physical exercise with zero personal space (even if it means you get to spend the weekend petting the heads of awesome people), the situation has a way of turning up the flame on the usually still pool of your insecurities until the water bubbles over.

The patterings of my own mind are always my worst enemy, and boy did it kick my ass during the last eight hours of our journey. But I came away knowing that if I run for long enough, the inside of my brain shuts down.

And when you find yourself holding it together (mostly) while surrounded by people who are also holding it together - even though they're exhausted and dealing with setbacks like delayed flights, injuries, longer-than-expected runs and vans that aren't doing their job - and everyone's working as a loving and respectful team and still managing to be mothereffing delights, you know you've done something right with your life.

Waiting for our final three runners, we sat by the water in downtown San Diego as the sun set over the harbor. When we saw their three dancing headlamps in the distance, we started screaming like loons. As they passed, we joined up behind them to run across the finish line together.

It was the first time I felt like a real runner.

I want to qualify this, because I believe that if you run, you are a runner. It doesn't matter if you run around the block or you run Badwater. If you tie on your shoes and start moving your feet, you are a runner. Just as it doesn't matter if you write on cocktail napkins or head the New York Times bestseller list. If you put words to paper with the intent of telling a story or sharing a truth, you are a writer. That said, crossing the finish line with ten friends after covering 200 miles with our own 22 feet, I felt like a real runner. And I felt like the meaning of the word "empowered" finally dropped from my head and settled into my bones.

Because if we can run from LA to San Diego, what else can we do?

Befriending the Swamp Monsters

My father was a world class emotional represser. And if anyone deserves the comfort of a little repression, he did. He spent his childhood with a dying mother and an abusive alcoholic for a stepfather. I don't even remember most of what he shared with me, because when he spoke of a formative moment of unimaginable violence stemming from what I hope was a broken soul rather than actual evil, the restaurant started spinning and my ears filled with a dull roar and I stopped tasting my strawberry parfait. And that was just hearing about it, half a century after it happened. Because I physically couldn't process such a thing, I remember looking down at my glass dish and thinking, "Way to take the edge off dessert, Dad."

If it took me thirty years to realize I needed to deal with my feelings even without any abuse or tragedy to manage, maybe it's no wonder he hit seventy without letting go of what had been lurking in his body. Instead, he coped the best way he knew how. He leaned on his intellect and stifled his emotions and bought himself an escape, eventually managing to get his younger brother and sister out too.

Last weekend, I was talking to a friend who postulated that each generation heals something, making things a little easier for their children. My dad made a giant leap in just one. We were secure and loved and supported. We vacationed on pretty lakes and were given every opportunity we wanted - and some we weren't so sure about. I slogged my way through piano lessons and happily danced my way through multiple pairs of ballet shoes. I was encouraged to attend any college I wanted and study whatever my little heart desired while I was there. My dad - with the help of my mom - managed to give us everything he never had.

But I believe the emotions my father buried ended up killing him.

When he landed in the hospital last September, he was fully expected to recover. But after lying in a hospital bed in pain for months engulfed by everything he'd spent seventy years avoiding, he wanted nothing more than his next out. But instead of leaving a small mining town in Pennsylvania for California, he had to leave his body for whatever comes after. So he did.

Yes, he left me with a bit of a mess to clean up - no will and no secondary health insurance makes for a bit of a temporary nightmare. But in every real way, he did extraordinarily well by us. And he left me with the knowledge of what I want to give my children: a deep understanding that emotions are nothing to fear.

I was 32 years old before I was able to say "I am mad right now." I was so lost on the spectrum of emotion that I didn't know how to identify something as basic as anger. My feelings were ancient hieroglyphs and my Rosetta stone was smashed. 

But I'm slowly learning that a brief bout of insecurity doesn't need to feel like a swamp monster crawling out of my rib cage. I don't need to try to trap the monster and beat him with a stick so he can't smear pond scum all over my well-ordered life. I just need to notice that he's there, and maybe give him a high five for calling the insecurity - something every person on the planet feels occasionally - to my attention so I can do something about it. Like go find a hug. The swamp monster would give me a hug himself, but he doesn't want to get sludge on my sweater.

I'm learning that the hard feelings are simply another facet in my ability to love and feel joy and cry when someone puts just the right words to music. Sometimes dealing with the rough stuff is cathartic and sometimes it feels like sliding face first down the cheese grater of life without anesthetic. But every time I dig up another feeling and release it into the ether, my life gets a little better.

I like to think I'm learning something I can pass on to my children, that the work I'm doing now to understand my own emotional landscape will heal one more layer of a family history. Because when you allow the pain, you create more room for love.

Ricochet

For months, my life has felt like a puzzle that's been dumped into a blender and switched on without the top so all the pieces fly up in a whirling frenzy and splatter on the ceiling. Some land on the floor, others fly out the open window, and some just disintegrate into ash. Now that I'm settled in one place after ten months of moving constantly, I've spent the past few weeks trying to gather everything into one place. All the cardboard pieces are finally in one room, but I still don't have any idea how to put everything together so it forms a coherent picture.

The Year I Formed All The Good Habits Only To Systematically Dismantle Them 

You know what you're not doing when you're living in a hotel and waiting for your dad to die? You're not drinking a lot of green juice. You're not going for a run every day. You're sucking up McDonald's, because it's the only place that's open and you know what tastes good bathed in the fluorescent lighting of the intensive care unit? French fries and coke.

Moving to Costa Rica for a month last summer put a few dents in my smug little  routines. Moving to Amsterdam for a month poked more holes.  By the time my father had his accident and the hurricane hit Staten Island while my mother was heading into the hospital to have a needle stuck in her brain, things started to unravel. If you've ever talked on the phone with your dad when he made no sense and then called your mom to find out that she wasn't making any sense either, especially if you do this while you're waiting in line to volunteer after a rather intense weather situation that caused actual death only a few miles away from you, you might be tempted to abandon a few well-intentioned life choices. Because you know what tastes good with hurricanes and hospitals? Vodka.

Now I'm trying to claw my way back to a stable life and stable routines and caring for myself in a way that makes me a good human being instead of a sugar-fueled werewolf. And all the stuff that couldn't catch me as I moved between countries and states and cities has finally landed on my head with an audible whoomph. Making salted caramel ice cream and white wine once again sound like a really good idea.

I'm trying to rewrite my story so my life begins to take the shape I want, rather than ricocheting off randomly erected barriers. There is a lot of possibility in that. But it's also tough - it requires battling the demons of depression and isolation and the sweet siren call of a warm chocolate chip cookie. It's a crash course in being kind to myself as I stagger around on wobbly little colt legs, learning what my life looks like now.

Stop Talking To Rocks

Let's take a painfully overused metaphor and hit it with a dead Shetland pony, shall we? Say life is a river. You have two choices: Flow gracefully around the boulders and keep moving merrily downstream. Or get caught in front of a rock until you've created a stagnant cesspool of slimy moss and broken twigs, trapping innocent carp until they're ready to sue you for emotional damage. I guess I have a thing for cesspools. Not only do I stop and make everything slimy, I clamber onto the biggest boulder and have an in-depth and often rambling conversation with it. So now I'm not only stalled, I'm not even in the river any more.

Stop talking to boulders, Amber.

Failed relationships are boulders. How the bastards at the SF parking department held my car hostage again is a boulder. How I don't know how to start something so I'll just think about not starting until despair sets in. Boulders, boulders, boulders.

I'm getting better about moving past them. One of the benefits of 2012: The Year Where a Lot of Shit Happened, is that I concretely demonstrated my ability to step up. Because when life decides to kick you in the ass, you rise to the challenge. You have no choice. So you rally, you throw down, and you cope. Since life has become gentler and I again have the luxury of over-thinking and being a pussy about minor inconveniences, I can at least recall a time when I threw down and coped. There's comfort in this.

On Sunday, I'm moving back to Los Angeles. I hadn't even officially started the hunt - my LA vs SF pros and cons list only had three things on it - when a perfect apartment in Santa Monica fell from the sky (Facebook) and landed in my lap. It has lots of warm LA light, hardwood floors, and my bedroom window faces the sunset. I can step out the door, walk four blocks, and land on the beach.

That's what my bedroom window looks like. Shut up. You'd be smug too.

Before I decided where to land, I dated like a fiend. Because online dating is one of the few institutions that allows pictures of shirtless and disturbingly shiny men to land in your inbox on a regular basis. Sandwiched between the oily abs and incomprehensible grammar are men who send haikus about Duct Apes, change your car battery when it dies, and sound remarkably like Alan Alda while they're saying amusing things to you. It's fun. Except when you realize that you're meeting a whole string of awesome possibilities and you just signed a lease six hours south.

For a few weeks, I felt torn. Awesome men in San Francisco versus awesome apartment in LA. Through all my solo traveling last year, I realized that people are more important to me than places. Love is more important than locale. But I've also learned that I need to give myself what I need because that's the only way I can fully show up for the people in my life.

DAMN YOU, WORLD, AND YOUR PLETHORA OF OPTIONS.

I'm really into this whole "Follow your own inner guidance" thing, the one so encouraged by therapists and earth mothers and people who throw around the word goddess a little too freely for my tastes. Turns out, anxiety and insecurity yell a whole lot louder than "inner guidance." So I spent the month of January practicing hearing the things in my head that aren't screaming at me. I did this by chanting the little phrase that popped into my head the day three things happened: I accepted the apartment in LA, met one amazing guy, then somehow managed to meet another amazing guy. After a day of questioning all my life choices, I banged my head on the steering wheel and this shook loose:

"Trust in the flow of your life."

So I whispered it to myself over and over and over with what might be defined as rising hysteria, stopping only to be glad I was in my car and not on public transportation because I sounded like a crazy person. I am a crazy person but that's no excuse for sounding like one.

What do you do about options? You stop beating your head against some obstacle that you won't even remember once you've moved past it. You guide yourself down the river, but allow the uncertainty to swing you toward something that might be even better than what you hoped for. As much as I love San Francisco, LA is right for me at this point in my life. I was happy and healthy and creative and there was regular goddamn sunshine. All I wanted as I crawled through the last few months of 2012 was a little place by the beach where I could put down roots, maybe not forever but certainly for now. And it climbed into my lap and started purring. Yes, I want to find

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my lobster. But the only way to do that is to continue living the life that's best for me. Because the story is always unfolding - and the more rocks I flow past, the faster it unfurls.