Fairies Welcome

If your life needs some magic, may I recommend a five-year-old? You don't necessarily need to birth and raise this five-year-old. You can simply invite one over for an afternoon. Cheaper, faster, and far less mess.

Wombat and his father.

Take a five-year-old to a redwood grove near your house and he will discover a gate in a chain link fence, a gate you never saw, despite multiple trips to this exact spot. Walk through the gate and you'll find a path under ancient trees. Follow the path and you'll find a hobbit door.

Walk through the hobbit door and you'll find a place you thought only existed in Victorian children's literature. A secret garden. A Narnia, once summer beats back the ice. A babbling brook winds under the redwoods, with bridges leading to giant mushrooms and dinosaur ferns and wooden benches surrounded by riots of violets. Sun filters through the leaves to hit the flowers and warm the water. It's perfect.

Knowing it exists in the world means you can walk there almost every day - and I do.

Once you return home from your adventure to feast on potato chips, you realize how small your house is, when filled with a family of four. One room, with a bed under the eaves, a tiny kitchen at the back and enough seating for three people, if you pull the chair off the deck. So the children will occupy themselves by jumping merrily on the bed, tiny faces smashing themselves into your pillows as they hurtle themselves through a profound experimentation in the rules of gravity.

Soon the eldest will notice a small pink and green bowl on a stack of books. In the bowl are two tiny pink silk pillows, one labeled "create" and the other "joy." He'll arrange the pillows, find a cloth your mother used to wear around her hair in the '70s, and tuck it in with the pillows. He'll add a sparkly multifaceted ring from the cup of jewelry in the bathroom and, as the crowning touch, a potato chip. This, he tells you, is a fairy bed. The sparkles to attract and the potato chip to entice closer.

The next morning, after they're gone, when you're prosaically clearing away the potato chip because ants, you'll look up. Etched into the window, above this tiny bed, is a fairy wing.

Magic.

An Ode To The Broken Hearted

Let it hurt. Because the more you feel it now, the less you'll feel it later. Keep breathing. Keep air cycling through your lungs and let that breath reaffirm your life when you feel like you want to die. Care for yourself physically when your emotions are battered and exhausted. Drink water, nap, exercise out the pain and the anger. Keep breathing. Keep feeling. Care for yourself the way you would care for a wounded pet or a beloved child. Know that the shattering of something you wanted is clearing the way for something more, something better. Not a better person but a better fit, a better match.  Know that you are loved, even if it doesn't feel that way. Yes, your heart has been tossed onto the funeral pyre to go up in flames, but the old heart must disintegrate before a new heart can be born.

If you feel like your heart is a blackened, charred cinder of nothing in your chest - congratulations. You tried. You opened up. You exposed your tender bits and even though it feels like a tiger just ripped out your jugular - you won. Because you were brave. Because the only people who find victory are the ones who are also open to taking a beating. Letting someone near your tender, easily bruised heart is the ultimate act of courage.

So lick your wounds and keep letting those emotions rise to the surface because the power of that hurt, that anger, will keep walls from forming, will keep the arteries to your heart from hardening. That means that when the time is right and the person is right, you will get what you always wanted. 

Trust that whatever happens is leading you toward something better, something more suited, something more beautiful. The old and broken must dissolve before the new can sidle in. If you feel that you are the one who's old and broken, allow that to disintegrate too. Because you are as whole and perfect now as you were on the day you were born.

Yes, you loved that person, for their beauty, their foibles, their unique humanness. Of course you did. But they were not the source of that love you felt, they were only its mirror. That love came from you, when you decided to focus it on them and their beauty, their foibles, their unique humanness. Once you've grieved and felt all the painful things we'd prefer not to feel, once you've realized that feeling those feelings makes the feelings dissipate, even if it takes longer than you'd like - that's when you can open up again to the next gorgeous, foible-filled human who catches the strings of your heart.

Love is not limited to one person, one life, one source. Begin to feel love in everything that surrounds you - a home you love, a pet you adore, books that make you happy, the movement of the leaves in the trees. It's everywhere and the more you see it, the more it will find you. Because you were born to be loved and that love surrounds you, even now.

X = Me

Solving for x is astonishingly easy, as it happens. If I am the x factor, then the x factor is me.

Simple, right? Almost brutally so.

What's particularly brutal is that I've known this for years. My brain understood. People told me, books told me, my reasoning skills parsed it out. But just because you understand something doesn't mean you know it. Just because you know something is true doesn't mean your heart or your emotions have any idea what that big gray lump in your skull is prattling on about.

I am the x factor. Not because I'm the reason dating hasn't worked, but because I need to focus my attention on me.

If I am the x factor, that means I get to put all of my time and attention into things that make me happy, instead of going out on first date after first date in a time-consuming attempt to play the numbers and manipulate the system into giving me what I want. I get to put my energy into what feeds me on a deep level, rather than spending my time trying to create some safe, loving space for someone else because I thought that if I make them feel loved, they'll make me feel loved.

Pro tip: That doesn't work.

Trying to force people to feel something - even if it's something we all want to give and experience - is a really bad bet. Good intentions, poor execution. People can feel it when you're coming from a place of need, rather than a place of "here, I have so much that I would like to share it with you." I can't name that place because I haven't found it on the map yet. I'm still looking.

In my efforts to find me in this new map, I have claimed this month. All of it. All of it is mine, henceforth to be known as Be Nice To Amber month. You don't have to be nice to me, but I have to be nice to me. Being nice to me means no dating. No online suitors, no constant checking of the apps, no wondering when he's going to respond. Unless some epic romantic comedy kismet slams into me at the grocery store, I will go on not one single date. Instead, I will focus on what makes me happy, rather than on what someone else is thinking or feeling. A month of fixing up the hobbit hole and going to yoga and reading Harry Potter in the fairy garden that was recently discovered near my house. A month of less caffeine and no self-recrimination. A month of things I rarely allow myself, like manicures and chocolate bars* and afternoons at the beach.

* Lies. I always allow myself chocolate bars.

My month began on June 11 and will end on July 11, my 36th birthday. Everything feels better already. Lighter, clearer, like I'm more me than I have been in a long time.

Maybe the best way to date is not to date at all.

Solve for X

In five years, no one I've dated has lasted longer than six weeks. They slide out of my life like water down a windshield, droplets that leave shadows of themselves behind long after the liquid has evaporated. I am romantic teflon.  My brain looks for patterns, because that's what brains do. 

I sleep with them too soon and they disappear. I show too much emotion and they disappear. I ask for something and they disappear. I try to deepen what we have and they disappear. 

I am the x factor in all my relationships. Since I'm the only common denominator in my experience, I need to figure it out.

Solve for x.

But solving for x feels heavy, exhausting, full of self-recrimination. If not full-on existential despair than at least a solid dose of melodrama.

But when you want something enough, you will brave what you'd rather avoid. So I dig through the layers, sorting through my psyche and its tender bits like I sort through my books, hauling some to Goodwill but picking most of them up and then putting them back down again, not sure if I still need them. Maybe this book will help me some day. Maybe this book will be the answer to a problem. Maybe this was meant to be mine. So I continue to haul heavy boxes of books between apartments like I drag along the ghosts of past relationships.

Solve for x.

I'm scared of losing myself.

I'm afraid I can't have what I want.

I'm too much or not enough. Either way, I'm not right.

The specters of my past experiences continue to rise, lighter, gray like smoke instead of sticky black tar, but still rising: the idea that emotion will frighten people away, that communication will make everything go bad. The idea that I'm not enough. Or that I'm really just too much and who has time for that? Either way, I'm not right.

But then I begin to wonder if maybe I'm looking at the wrong piece of the equation. If I solve for x, I get a relationship with someone I adore. But maybe I need to be solving the equation that will lead me to myself, rather than to the idea of another.

10 Things You Learn While Waiting For Your Dad To Die

When you’re young, you’re made of titanium. You toss back six shots of tequila and bounce out of bed the next morning. You run ten miles on a whim without strategic retribution from your hamstrings. You believe everyone around you is similarly immortal. But as you get older, that sunny surety of triumph begins to fray. You notice your parents aging. Maybe a friend has died – before their time, a tragedy – and it begins to dawn on you that none of us are long for this world. As you watch your father die – before his time, a tragedy – you learn that maybe it isn’t such a bad thing. That maybe everyone has their own time and space to occupy and all you can do is make it worthwhile.

1. When in doubt, lie on the ground. The ground is always there for you. It holds up your house and your car and your favorite coffee shop. It catches things you drop. When death happens, the ground beneath your feet will be your best support. Go outside and lie in the grass beside the hospital parking lot, because it will soothe you in ways you didn’t expect. It will catch your overflowing emotions and your overflowing tears. The earth beneath your feet – or your back – is the ultimate support system that no one can take away from you.

2. People want to help. Doctors want to help, nurses want to help, friends want to help, family wants to help. All that stops them is the lack of time or not knowing what to do. Or possibly your furrowed, scowling brow. But feel free to furrow and scowl as needed – they’ll get over it.

3. Social media can be a life-line. When you’re trapped in a hospital room, sometimes all you have is that tiny computer phone in your pocket. Putting my last days with my father on Twitter is one of the best things I’ve ever done. It provided a record without relying on my memory – a memory that loses details like a sieve loses water – and it gave friends and family a way to check in and reach out.

4. Drugs are awesome. I didn’t get to try any – hospitals frown on that sort of thing – but the second they stopped poking and prodding at my dad and hooked him up to a giant bag of happy, everything got better. His personality, buried under pain for months, started to surface. His brain wasn’t there, but morphine allowed his heart to make a final appearance.

5. There’s no shame. No shame in buying fresh underwear from the nearest jcpenney because you have nothing clean. No shame in eating McDonald’s for breakfast every day. No shame in clipping a nurse with a paper airplane you throw over your father’s hospital bed.

6. Be selfish. Selfish is a dirty word, especially at hospital bedsides, traditionally recognized as excellent spots for sleepless martyrdom. But you can’t help anyone else unless you’ve already given yourself what you need. If you need to bail and go to New York for a month while managing things from afar, do that. If you need to sit with your father for ten minutes an hour and then spend the rest of the time roaming the halls, do that. Do jumping jacks in the hallway. Poke incessantly at your phone. Do anything that fills you up – it will keep you from hitting empty before your father does.

7. Crack yourself open like a lobster. There’s unlimited love out there and you get as much of it as you want. You just need to reach for it – by sharing your experience, appreciating the time with your family, letting your friends support you. Pain will shatter what you knew, but the wreckage can nurture something better. Opening yourself up when you’re destroyed allows an unexpected tsunami of love and support to pour into your soul and fill the cracks.

8. Trust the process. If your father is dying, allow that to be the right thing. Allow it to be what is best for him and best for your family, even if it doesn’t feel that way. Allow the path he’s on to be the right path.

9. You have more love and strength than you ever imagined. Waiting for a loved one to die will show you exactly what you’re made of. Sure, you may lose it and occasionally feel like what you’re made of is heaping tablespoons of crazy, but eventually you’ll drop down far enough to find that untapped well - and you’ll surprise yourself.

10. Lose your fear. You don’t need to cling to fear as if it’s a blanket that will keep you safe. It won’t. When the worst happens and you survive, you realize that the worst isn’t as bad as you imagined. Yes, it’s terrible. Yes, it’s heartbreaking. But there are so many beautiful, tangled bursts of light contained in those dark moments that you learn how deeply life will bolster you up, support you and cherish you, even as it tears things away.

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Originally posted on Thought Catalog.