A Shiny, Resilient Hold

I used to think of the “self” as a sort of blob of dough (poetic, I know). I saw myself as this mouldable, knead-able, cut-able thing--every action shaped me in some way, and I’d imagine it affecting the way the dough would rise, get punched down, rise...The deeper issues of life, like death or mental illness or injury, I experienced as chunks of dough being removed. The idea was that the pain of those incidents was severe enough to take a chunk out. Then the form as a whole would have to be reshaped again to become whole, and I saw this as a healing process.  The thing that I like about this image of a person is that it FEELS right. Every harsh event in our lives feels like we are being broken irreparably. After my first friend died, I remember thinking that my life had shrunk permanently. A piece had been taken out of me, and I was...less. I was less without this person as a character in my story.  The thing that sucks about that image, however, is that if you follow i...

So I’ve been thinking a lot about Nietszche’s concept of the ubermensch lately (a process about as geeky as I’m sure you’re picturing it to be). This concept, introduced to us in a torrent of German, basically boils down to the idea that there is this ultimate image of self dangling just in front of us at all times; there is a person there that is our ever forming “who I will become”. The personality carrot.   I think we first develop this personality carrot when we engage those older than us and think “that’s who I want to be.” When we’re seven, the ten year olds a few years ahead of us in school are incredibly “grown up”; they are the image of good behaviour. Intelligent, experienced in relationships, and clearly having figured the world out, we look at them and see the person we want to be.  Now of course, as adults we find this idea comical. Those are kids, right? And we see them as such. Fifth graders don’t know everything there is to know about relationships (...

“Mind if we join you, old-timer?” “Join me, m’son. Join me.” “You work for the railroad, grandpa?” “I work for no man.” -O Brother Where Art Thou What is an oracle? Our histories, our cultures, our families, have centred around this mysterious figure for centuries. Somewhere in our collective thought, there exists a person we all seek. They are the voice of our own introspection; that “gut instinct,” the urge to move forward in our lives and seek resonance with someone and something other than ourselves. We cling to them as a guide. What I find interesting about the oracles in our lives is that 1) we consistently attribute them to outside forces (they are our friends, our ancestors, our books) and 2) we so fervently believe in our capacity for futures that we have created an archetype for individual inspiration.  The oracle as an outside force, I believe, says something about our need for other people in our lives to act as enrichers. Isolation is devastating, a...

I was a child raised by terrible thoughts. When I was about ten years old, they started leaking into my head like a slow poison, making everything I tried to do in my everyday life slightly more difficult. They worked so gradually that by the time they’d established themselves, it felt like they’d always been there. And worse, they were absurd enough that they made me feel wrong. They made me feel broken. I couldn’t share them due to their absurdity.  I would find out, twelve years later, that these terrorising and isolating thoughts were due to a mental issue, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. As the doctor explained it, the thoughts that plagued me were the out of place thoughts that everyone has once in a while. The issue was that my brain couldn’t shut the gateway that created the thoughts, so they’d just recycle over and over. I’d walk by a light switch. My brain would fire out, “if you don’t turn off that light, you’ll get cancer.” Totally and completely absurd. And most p...

Our suffering, our deaths, our births. Our rituals. It is not our acceptance of the falling apart, but our embrace of entropy, that breathes for us. We are maintained in our emotional homeostasis by our rituals.  It is, as we are taught by our small heroes in Lord of the Rings, the small and everyday things that keep great evil at bay. Our rituals teach us how to change through their consistency. Two years ago now, a close friend passed away. Her body gave in to a Probability--an unlikely cancer--and she slipped quietly from our physical world and strikingly into the world of rituals. She became a death ritual.  I want to talk about the death ritual because it’s something we’re all going to encounter and embrace at some point in our lives. It’s a hard and rocky fact that as we age, the body count will only get higher. You can’t undo loss and you can’t undo experience, and you can’t learn from death and keep it from happening. You just have to see it and then figure out...

The first time I ever thought that I might be attracted to women was when I was fourteen. I was in a hot tub with friends, we’d been having drinks, and one of the girls in the group leaned over and kissed me. It was hot. I mean the actual temperature; it was hot, and steamy, and she tasted like mint, and all of this, despite its fairly obvious connotations in hindsight, felt exclusively like a tremendous amount of confusion mounting up inside of me, overwhelming the experience in general. I was a teenager in a fairly accepting environment with not a lot of solid ground. Unlike my friends who were proudly (and of course nervously, and bravely) coming out as gay, or lesbian, or trans, I had not “picked a side”. I knew that I was attracted to men. And now it seemed I was attracted to women.  I was left wondering if maybe I’d missed something; did I just think I was attracted to men because that was the norm? Could my head really do that to me? Or maybe, everyone felt the way I d...

My family is a patchwork quilt. Pieces of age and youth, and seasons (of engagements and winters and babies), of lives, of hand-me-down overalls and personalities, carefully stored in the oak chest. Together, we map and hold the scraps. Stories and history all tied together. Friends join in with spare thread. Colours clash, Smiles crack, and finally it is a defender-- the armor of movie nights the tent of the young the greeter of visitors the spouse of nervous nights. My family is a patchwork quilt.