It appears by, well, all accounts, that I have just written a song.
I started at about 7 PM, and finished the initial complete draft around 8:30 PM tonight.
I then cleaned up all of my materials from my task of the day, brought them upstairs where they belong, showered and started preparing myself for bed, and then pulled out my notebook and laptop so that I could type up the lyrics and put them together, organized and in an easily rearranged format.
I then did some slight rearranging, and phrase editing, and am now ready to go to sleep with a deep sense of satisfaction both in my accomplishment and in the awesomeness of the song itself.
I can hardly wait to record it and get some instrumentation figured out for it(!).
(I’m a dork, I know – always have been and always will be, and gladly so!)
I want to get to sleep as fast as possible now, so that I can wake up sooner to work on it in the morning.
Woohoo. Haha
This has really been a fun miniature adventure today and tonight… I kept wanting to write a song this week or next, and I couldn’t seem to get the right style or topic – I kept straying from the focus every time I started to write, and then didn’t like it… until a friend (? We’ll call him that, anyway.) shared a song that he had written…
When I heard the first line, I felt struggle and pain being released… by the second line, I was almost certain I knew the origins of the song, the cause for the emotions expressed within it through its music and words… and it was, somehow, so relatable, although I had never been in the same situation… it was also so vulnerable…, which made it all the more powerful.
Thinking about the song today, I thought, Man, those are Real, meaning the emotions in there…
And it struck me: What would happen if I did that, went ahead and wrote about the heavy, loud emotions going on inside of me right now?
It might be embarrassing…, but it would be honest and to the heart…, which, I think, is a huge part of what makes my friend’s song so amazing – you can feel it, deep inside.
So, let’s get deep and put it onto paper, I guess…
I pondered on it as I walked for a while, listening to musical songs, and then, upon returning home and preparing to start work on a new mala (meditation and prayer beads), I was suddenly feeling a need to write down this idea calling out to me from inside my head – I am real emotions, hear me roar and write me down poetry style(!), it was saying to me.
Okay, so this time all on my own and with my lonesome thoughts has been tough and uncomfortable on me…
🙂
In a way, I’ve been totally fine, yet I’ve been kind of a total mess – I’ve had to sit in some really uncomfortable space emotionally, and, not having any distractions from life has really given me the conscious opportunity to be okay with the discomfort.
So, though it has sucked, it has been good for me as a person, I believe… and it will continue to be better and better for me, so long as I persist is allowing the emotions to happen and then to disappear after being heard.
Also, I desperately miss hugs and physical contact right now… another really stressful point for me that has been bringing up a lot of history for me…, yet a good opportunity for me to learn to be my best self, even in the face of no agreement from the world.
I am finally doing a bit of genuine work for work, as of yesterday, and not just waiting around for e-mails most of the day, however, my time has passed greatly in the pursuit of playing music (learned to play the harmonium!), listening to music, making malas, making an art journal, painting, walking, cycling, checking on my friend’s cat for her, cooking and eating food, exercising, sitting on the porch swing, working on photos, watching(?) a few movies, reading books, daydreaming like no other, reminiscing, eating loquats off the tree out front…, and I started a puzzle today… to name a few of my activities 😂
That vein said, this has really been a wonderful time lately of me exploring my self-expression in my wardrobe… one area where I do feel comfortable and at ease.
I just put on what I genuinely want to wear each morning, and I don’t even have a thought of concern when I have to go outside or to the store – I am comfortable and confident in my clothes, and excited by each outfit, every day… and delighted at how varied it all is, and at how I find myself chuckling at times, when I see how much skin is (potentially) visible – I never would have Dared wear such an outfit as some of these before, even at home… let alone Out in the world!
Yet, today’s outfit was just the same: I dressed how I truly wanted to dress this morning, having true fun in picking out the pieces, and then I had to go to two grocery stores…, and I never even considered a need to change clothes or anything, because I was already so okay with what I was wearing – of course it was fine to wear in public.
And so, I publicked in it, I laughed when I realized how I couldn’t possibly have worn or even considered this outfit in the past, and I was overjoyed at my clear progress in this realm of my life.
The outfit:
I know it isn’t exactly scandalous, but that’s exactly the point: It isn’t scandalous – just great, and it happens to show skin (especially when the wind blows).
And I love and loved it.
So, yeah…, there’s that for joy from today and these past couple weeks. 🙂
Have you ever been so supremely satisfied from a dream, that, even when you wake up and discover that it was all just a dream and is not, in fact, your real life, you find yourself still feeling satisfied?
Despite the harsh reality that those amazing hours on end of your every wish right now in some aspect of your life coming true were merely a dream, and not how your brain felt and believed them to be, your deep-seeded experience of utter bliss is unshaken – you are nevertheless content…
This morning, I was heartbroken when I realized that I would have to accept that my dreams-come-true had only come true in my dreams…, yet, to my core, I was nearly overflowing with love and satisfaction, so fantastic were those lifelike dreams…
I wanted to cry, yet I didn’t even need to do so, for I was so calm and centered in my cellular and brain-function satisfaction from the night’s adventures… my mind had been so pleased, and my body had responded in kind – I was at ease, and I chose to dwell in such a blissful space for a while, merely lying awake in bed, taking note of how wonderful I felt…, and wondering how I might feel one day of those dreams really did come true, but in no way regretting their having been in my dreams last night – a spectacular dream is always welcome, when it is uplifting, inspiring, loving, and empowering… and this one, these ones, was and were.
And then, blessedly, my day today was supremely satisfying, as well – kind of a beautiful combination from the universe for today… how I would love to have another tomorrow(!).
Perhaps I can start the day right with beautiful dreams again tonight…
Here goes…
P.S. That’s a song from a French movie I saw back in high school… it had a lot to do with a roller rink with a slide, and that’s about all I remember, aside from the song. 😛
Yesterday, I was oxen the glorious opportunity of seeing a friend of mine complete an online challenge…
***Small tangent: You see, everyone has been – and by everyone, I mean a lot of people, not actually everyone – doing various challenges in their homes, and, upon completion, challenging someone else (often multiple someone elses) to complete the same challenge.
The ones I have seen have ranged all over the pace, including but not limited to juggling a toilet paper roll like a soccer ball, doing ten push-ups and nominating ten people to do them, doing 25 push-ups, singing a praise and worship song, chugging a beer, and doing specific hand motions to a fast song without being allowed to practice… to name one more than a few. ***End of small tangent
Today, I woke up focused and ready to complete my task, to complete this challenge with which my friend had presented me yesterday… hoping, at the very least, that I could complete it, for it was not an easy one…
Now, what was this challenge, you may wonder… I divulge:
The pants-less challenge: Either take off or put on a pair of pants, without using your hands, while holding a handstand.
Wow, right?
Of course, that’s the kind of challenge you get when you have acrobatic friends who find it funny that everyone is working from home in pajamas most days right now, and who imagine that a good chunk of everyone is at home with no pants on, since there is no one to see…
So, anyway, my friend did it with her onesie, which I found somehow hilarious, and so I elected to do the same with a onesie of my own.
Hers was a panda, and the one I selected for the task was a rainbow unicorn… equally suiting to our personalities, in a way…
It took many efforts – perhaps close to ten – for me to figure out how truly to make everything work and then actually to do what I had worked out to do… I can’t hold a handstand, – just pop up onto one and then come almost immediately back down – so I knew I would have to use a wall… behind that, though, all the rest of the strategy had to come from giving it a try and seeing what happened, finding out from trial and error a bit as to what works and what doesn’t.
Eventually, after lots of practice and a short break, I went all-out and got it(!!).
Woohoo.
Super silly, and I could hardly stop laughing, this challenge was so much fun.
I had been thinking at every challenge how unchallenging it really seemed to me to be, and how not-very-entertaining each one was…, ‘These are lame challenges,’ was a common thought from me… but not on this challenge – it was not only interesting, but kind of crazy, a tad scandalous, challenging, it made me think, and it was totally fun.
I loved it.
Feel free to give it a try in your own home – though no video is required, you might enjoy reminiscing immediately with what is likely to be some comical footage… and you might want to share it, anyway, even if you utterly fail… 😛
Wishing you loads of fun and silliness right now – laughter is, indeed, an amazing medicine. 😉
Because I let myself suddenly believe that something I had carefully placed at the back of my mind and dreams as ‘extremely unlikely, so don’t even bother, honey‘, might actually be not only possible but likely…, and then it seems to be following a path toward not being the case at all, and being disappointingly unlikely, all the more disappointing for the recent hope, and still more so due to the original evaluation of its being unlikely, and yet I changed my evaluation…
So, I not only feel like I am losing a sort of dream, but I feel stupid over changing my mind, and embarrassed at ever thinking it was possible.
And then – as though that weren’t already enough – I have the part of me that believes anything is possible…. and that other tiny part that still, despite the stress, believes that this dream is possible and could really happen, sometime soon, too…
So, it is all so very hard, because I have basically the whole spectrum of positive to negative feelings around it all, each side seeming to be at odds with the other, going back and forth between which one will won out for this particular ten-minute span of time…
Yeah…
Also, I’m tired of having this weight at all – because it does weigh – yet I acknowledge that my dismissing and letting it all go would include letting go of the parts of me that believe it can work out beautifully… and, though I seem to be leaning more and more to the ‘unlikely to happen’ side of things, the fight between the two sides is what makes it feel real, possible, even… without the struggle between them, it wouldn’t be real at all right now… and O want it to be real, so that the possibility of its happening can still exist.
I have not and shall not give up hope… I just feel I need a different approach.
Let’s talk for a minute about how we live into the future…
You know, on any given weekend, Sunday is kind of the sucky day of the weekend, because we are acutely aware of having to go back to business Monday morning… and then, if we have a vacation coming up, we’re overjoyed and excited all the time, all throughout the day, even if it is Monday morning, and we have work to do…, because our vacation is soon(!)… The boring meeting right now has no power over our cruise that starts Saturday morning…
In that sense, we live into our future, right?
Right.
So, for me, I need to be around people – I need to have my solo time, but I also need to be with people, really be with them… a friend(?) recently mentioned the term “ambivert” to me, and I like it… it very well describes my situation with all of this being extroverted and introverted…, which people almost never seem to understand, by the way…
Anyway, I need people in my life.
For the past two weeks, I have been living with very few people in my daily life… it was enough to get me by last week and the start of this week, but then the working from home this week has crushed all interactions with people in my daily life now…
However, I had work to get me through the week, e-mails to exchange, interactions (though cyber) guaranteed to be had throughout the day…
But tomorrow is Saturday… I have no work, no e-mails, no semblance of human interaction…
And I am miserable… I almost – scratch the almost, I feel like weeping, I am filled with such an experience of stress and of being unloved…
There is that beautiful quote of, “I have called you by name; you are mine,” and, though it is used initially as defining a part of the relationship between God and humanity, I feel it applies to how we interact with all things and beings in our life… when I have called you by name, given you a name of my own, I have given you a place in my heart, and you are dear to me – in some way or other, you are mine.
When people interact with me, call me by name, I often am filled with the love that is present in our relationship, whatever that relationship may be… essentially, when people interact so directly with me, I feel and experience their love for me.
In contrast, when people do not interact with me directly…, I sometimes lose sight of that love…, I sometimes begin to convince myself that the love has faded, and that I am left to myself, to be loved by no one else…
And the experience of that always sucks.
Just saying, it does.
And I know that my love is enough, and I know that the pieces of God that reside within me are enough to sustain me and fill me in every way…
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck to feel unloved by the rest of the world.
I know I will be okay… I will be far more than okay…
I’m just letting myself experience this overwhelming feeling of sick right now, so that, in acknowledging it, in allowing the intense, hiding yet ebbing emotions to express, I am able to let it all go, to release it all in a cathartic convulsing of body and searing tears…
It is already late tonight, but I know that I will go to bed in an intentionally much improved state…, and I will get out of bed in the morning and take care of myself – I will play music and make art and work my body as hard as it needs to release anything else that might remain in the morning… if I cannot focus my love on others, perhaps there is something missing in my love for myself, something on which I would do well to improve… I am worth loving, and I know that and experience that with my whole being… even when I stray to wonder at its being true…
Nonetheless, I will take care of myself… I will do what I wish others would do to show their love for me, because I love me, and I am worth being loved (and even lavished), and being all alone for so long and for so much foreseeable future is scary right now…
But perhaps it is this problem exactly that has me in this situation… perhaps I need to grow more comfortable with providing all the love on my own, so that I become fully clear and comfortable in the fact that I do not need the others’ love – I merely want it.
As I was thinking in a dreamed conversation just today, do you really want to be with someone who needs you?… Would you really choose that over being with someone who wants to be with you?
I have said it before, and it still holds true entirely, I want to be with someone – in all my relationships, really – who doesn’t need me, but who wants to be with me nonetheless… who wants not to be without me, and so chooses to be with me.
It is in times of these feelings of isolation that I wonder where the people in my life stand on this spectrum, to what degrees they want me in their lives…
I have yet to find the far edge of the spectrum of wanting me…, but perhaps it will come some day… soon…
Anyway, I’m off to clean up and get ready for bed, now that I’ve finished this whole cry fest… who would have thought that Friday night and an entirely open weekend ahead could be so upsetting??
Haha
Anyway, this was how I spent my evening: eating fancy stew straight from the pot, while watching the first half of one of my favorite films, which was just recently gifted to me for my birthday, all while detachedly wondering about something that won’t seem to leave me alone lately… (I mean, what are you gonna do, right?… it’s like when a song gets stuck in my head… just let it ride, and it eventually will be replaced by something [hopefully] better, you know?)
These dreams feel so real, so vivid… I can almost smell in them… and yet, they are so good, I wake up from them with a seeping feeling of sadness at the loss of them – when I awaken, they end, and I return to a lesser world than the loveliness that was my world five minutes ago.
The tips of my fingers still tingle, and the sides of my arms, too, from the touch of hands and arms in loving embraces.. I can feel the residual pressure on my chest, and the hands in my back… such embraces are filled through and through with satisfying, tactile love…
And, though they are not real in terms of taking place physically, they are exactly what I most need and want, and my mind allows them to be real, so far as my brain is concerned… we already know that watching something being done activated the same parts of the brain as actually doing that something… my mind knows I want this physical expression of love in my life right now, especially considering my current experience of physical isolation, and so it helps to take care of me, to give me what I most want and need… to love me…
And so, tonight again, I suspect, I shall have some more such dreams, and I will encourage myself to be glad of it – it is a beautiful blessing for my mind and brain to take care of me, and I want to respect their efforts with appreciation and gratitude, and to let go easily of my letdown upon waking and discovering that my world has suddenly transformed from exactly what I wanted…
But then…, what I want truly is possible…, so perhaps, one day, it will be my physical reality, and not just in my head anymore.
Now… that would be amazing…
Fingers crossed(!!!).
*Bonus points for knowing the song and singing along!!
I believe that, perhaps, one of my favorite things in life in whenever I have the opportunity to experience, even to witness, someone who is in the presence of his or her true and dear friends… when we are with our closest of people, we do not have to ‘try’ to be anything – there is no effort to be made – because we are able simply to be ourselves… that is the glory of friends…
When I am granted such an opportunity as to be able to witness someone I know with his or her true friends, it is truly a blessing and a gift… one for which I am dearly grateful.
In fact, it is one of my favorite ways to get to know someone new… I do not want to bother with either one of us putting our best foot forward, or putting on any kind of show, wondering what the other thinks, whether she might approve, accept me like this, and then, maybe, one day in the very distant future, accept me as myself…
I want to dive right into the truth of a person, who he truly is… who is she, really?
One of my favorite quotes about friendship was sent to me by the friend of a friend, back when I was struggling to find friends of my own, living in France all those years ago… I have kept it in my files ever since he sent it to me, because it so beautifully expressed my own sentiments, I wanted always to have it on hand…
It is:
“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series
Now, imagine meeting a person who is in that state, in the space of being with a friend, all guards and falsehoods down and dispensed… would that not be utterly spectacular?
To see a person for who he truly is, and not for any of the fears or concerns, hurts or airs… just for who she is…, it would be so beautiful, how could we ever want anything else?
In conclusion, I love who people truly are, and I am filled with love at the opportunity and blessing of being able to see people among their closest of friends, where they simply are their best selves, their truest selves… those are the people I want to get to know… and that is how I want people to know me.
It is funny, the things that get us, that get to us… I have been mostly totally fine with all of the splatters of chaos going on in the world around me these past weeks (the past one especially), and my life has been rather normal-ish… I have been bummed for many a people who have had work closed (and, therefore, no pay) or canceled (performers who, of course, now will not be paid for unperformed shows), but that is it… I have been bummed about it.
Today, as I read the lovely e-mail from Houston Grand Opera, stating clearly and beautifully that they are cancelling their remaining shows, both paid and free to the public, of the season (four altogether, with many performances of each) and that they are still paying 50% to all workers and performers who were hired to work on the shows, and, if we would like, we could ‘click here’ to donate our ticket prices to help them do this (instead of being refunded or having it apply to next season or something), I found myself full on crying… tears overflowing, body shaking slightly, a feeling of failed, helpless distress filling me…
Perhaps it was the first thing that 100% affected me directly, and not merely indirectly…, and perhaps it was that they were doing it all so kindly, handling it so well for the performers and workers they knew would be out of income probably entirely until the public returns to a life that includes theatres and performances and people…, whatever the case, it helped me to experience all the feelings I had been avoiding inside myself about all of this… I am terrified for my friends, these people I love, who work in these industries that have closed, and I am distraught for my performer friends, the people who light up my life for me with their every moment of work – their entire job serves the higher good in my life, lifts my spirits, heals my soul… how can I tell them that everything will be okay, when it very possibly will be quite terrible for them for a while?
I cannot…, but I can love them and value them nonetheless for all that they do, for all that they are, both in the world as a whole and in my life specifically…
I don’t know how I would be in life without them and all that they do and are committed to doing…, perhaps that is why it is so hard for me to know and accept the current absolute halt of their work… they mean more to me and my life than they ever could know or understand.
And I believe they might be feeling entirely useless and stupid and helpless right now…, I want the to know that they are not – they are as amazing as ever, and will be even more so amazing when we move forward through all of this, and they stick to doing what they do so spectacularly, both for themselves and for the world around them.
::big siiiigggghhhhh…
Second thing:
I discovered today that one of my absolute favorite places to sing is in a parking garage… I have turned unconsciously to singing this past week, and unabashedly so.
Walking through the parking garage today, I couldn’t help but marvel at how spectacular my voice sounded, reverberating so majestically around the concrete and air that surrounded me… it was beautiful.
And I am not exactly a fancy or trained singer or anything – very much an average, so far as people who understand and play at least some music go.
It was just so amazing a space for singing, it made my own singing sound worthy of being on a soundtrack…
Crazy, right?
Anyway, I look forward to gathering with friends for music dates in the future, in which we feel not so unlike drug dealers, when we meet up in various parking garages at all hours, like it is totally normal. 😛
In my life, I have often wondered with fascination at the girls and women who show skin other than arms and lower legs when in public (or even in private, but with others present!)… how could they do that?… how could they be comfortable with that, with people seeing so much of them, their bodies, their skin?… how could they even consider wearing such an outfit?…
And then, there was also, without fail, this tiny voice, afraid to speak, even in a whisper from the shadows, that cautiously murmured, ‘Could I ever do that?’
After going through a whole series of this and thats regarding negative experiences with my own body image, and with men as a whole, I was eventually certain that such clothing options were only for the harlots and hoes… at least, that’s what I would be, if I wore such things….
But then, fast-forward another few or couple years to today: I have really sorted through that stuff – intense stuff – and I am in no way in the same space as I was before… I am seemingly not even the same person l (though, who I am deep down is, of course, the same).
As I mentioned, the other day, I wore an outfit that I had dreamed of wearing in the past, but could not fathom its being truly possible that I could wear it…
(And yet, I had the dress… something within me wanted it badly enough, dreamt of it strongly enough, for me to own the dress… I just never really expected to wear it, I think… it was always just a dream…)
Yesterday, when dressing, I found myself wanting to wear this shirt I have had for years – it was in the same scenario with that lovely dress from last weekend – but have never worn… Without thinking much of it or about it, I pulled on the shorts I had planned, added the appropriate bra and the shirt, and continued on in my morning activities… and I knew that I would be seen by people throughout the day… I was fully aware…. including people I know.
It wasn’t until that night that it occurred to me what had happened… including the significance of it.
Today, I had to do the grocery store.
To dress for it, I dropped my PJs, grabbed clothes that had not yet been folded and that would be warm enough for this rainy day and the grocery store, but not hot or uncomfortable…
And this is what I went out wearing:
My lower belly – the skin all the way around – was visible to varying degrees, depending on how the sweater hung… the sweater is holy by design, and, though my skin tone blends with the brown of the sweater, it was totally showing all throughout the sweater, because I had only a light gray sports bra under it, no shirt… the leggings jeans pants things show every angle of my legs and butt… and my hair was pulled up and it of the way, allowing even more skin to show all around my neck, upper back, and the v-neck cut of the sweater on my chest…
And I didn’t… even… worry about it…
Not one bit.
Sure, I pulled my pants up a couple times after squatting or whatever, and they had been pulled down somewhat… but otherwise…, I was genuinely unconcerned about how much skin was visible on my body, how much my body was noticeable.
It all just felt so normal…
When I realized this all, I couldn’t help but smile with genuine delight.
I think I am free… of whatever this mind game was that held me so tightly and for so long… Finally…, I am myself, and I can breathe…
I don’t want to dress like this every day…., but I want to dress like this when I want to dress like this… and the free is finally released from me, and I can act comfortably and confidently in my dressing… at long last, and after so much hard work, I am free…
hannah ananas 