Boats are the new horses
A few years ago, in the Before Time, we were finishing up a unit on The Apology, when a student said, “Why the constant horse metaphor? Why?”
The horse metaphor irritated my student (no pun intended) and somehow my student’s question became an inside joke I had/have with that particular cohort.
Fuckin’ horses.
There is a lot of Horse Metaphor in The Apology.
I would dare say either Plato got a little ham-fisted with the horse metaphor, or Socrates’ did.
It is a lot of Horse.
Life has been a lot of Horse lately, though my metaphors have all tended toward the nautical.
In the desert, I am thinking of the sea.
Contrarianism is a gross character defect that I think I may possess when it comes to the myriad discussions I have with myself about myself.
Like this one: is work worth dying for?
I see myself often as a small little boat on a vast ocean.
I keep telling myself “you cannot steer the ocean.
You can steer your stupid little boat.” And many days, reader, my boat feels like it’s taking on a lot of water.
When people suggested (and we did) that my uncle quit smoking or at least “cut back,” he would always, always, always say this, “Yeah. Well. Everyone fuckin dies of somethin’, don’t they?” Or some version thereof.
I don’t know, can’t know, if my uncle could have bought himself more years by quitting the cigarettes, and that doesn’t even matter anymore.
He is gone. He is at perfect peace. On some plane, I can hear and see him having a toothy, smoky, mischievous laugh at our expenses. How ridiculous we are. Whatever the Truth (capital “T”) is, my Uncle Al knows it now.
The reason I bring up my uncle and the smoking is this: I have spent the last six and a half months thinking, tirelessly, of ways to heal myself, to make myself well (body, mind, soul) and sometimes I have succeeded and sometimes I fail fucking spectacularly.
Work.
I mean the work we do to pay the bills, now.
What I do to pay the bills is also tied to my identity, to my sense of purpose and meaning, to my way of living the values I purport to hold. I decided when I was very young that if I had to work — and I had to work — I would do my damndest to find work that used my weird skill set. I have learned, largely on my own, how to channel my craziest impulses into reasonable, worthwhile, meaningful investments in time so that I can pay my Big American Bills*, and my students might better understand a concept, a version of history, a text.
*Cancer is really fucking expensive. If you’re ever thinking of getting yourself some cancer, make sure you consider the serious financial investment that is having-the-audacity-to-get-cancer-in-America.
Having damn near killed myself twice in the past year by pushing this little body past her limits, I am working really hard on setting boundaries for myself and NOT transgressing those boundaries.
One boundary I have set for myself, this year, is this: Allison listens when her body asks for rest.
And why do we do this?
We do this because when Allison pushes her old-ass, cancered-up body into situations that it’s not up for, the body gets even MORE fucked up. And then Allison gets depressed because her body is malfunctioning and her melancholy makes everyone around her fuckin’ miserable.
Very good.
Is it though? Or is this the way we’re supposed to live? Just keep throwing our bodies into situations we cannot physically handle. I mean, I swear, come at me with the emotional/psychological pains. I can take that shit. Make me fatigued? I fall apart completely. Because the kind of “fatigue” I feel at 45, living with Metastatic Breast Cancer, is not “uncomplicated.”
My uncle’s death is hitting me in unexpected ways: powerful bursts of joy, rage, chaos, and calm. There are moments when it feels so fucking wrong that he is gone “so soon” and moments when I feel utterly at peace with the fact that he is gone. That’s normal “grief stuff,” and this death goes deeper for me because it has me questioning some of the ways of being on this Earth that people once told me were “correct.”
Spoiler alert: I think 80% of the people I ever knew were utterly wrong.
And I think, these days, I am sometimes “overcorrecting” in order to arrive at a work-life balance that has not been revealed to me yet. And I think, right now, I am operating some days from a place of great, profound, sorrow and fear. And I’m not sure, reader, how to fix that. I’m not sure how to fix the voice in my head that says, “That’s what people do: they toil, without mercy, until they die. Fuck. Your. Feelings.”
And I don’t know if I can accept this.
And I don’t know if I ever want to be mean and hardened enough to accept this.
And I don’t know if I am willing to die, in my fucking forties, on Late Stage Capitalism’s Heap because that’s “just the way it is” when I feel, in my heart and soul, like this middle-aged body of mine, that has endured so much in its short time upon this Earth, can in fact heal. I believe I can be well because I have felt healing happening inside and outside of me ever since I decided to quit torturing myself with alcohol and self-loathing. That day, the day I decided to get Sober, I said to myself, “Okay, girl. Some people might have kicked you around, but you are no longer going to be part of that ‘some.’” And I stopped kicking myself around. And I stopped regarding myself as a horse. Horses are horses. I am not a horse. I am a human being. When I am in the classroom, a huge part of my work is letting my kids know that being human matters and that being human fucking means something. Some days I don’t know what the fuck it matters or means, but usually that feeling is fleeting, and if I see that feeling through without buying a bottle of Maker’s Mark or a pack of Camel Lights, then I’ve done my part in not employing old coping strategies that were actively, you know, killing me.
I got new glasses today, reader. It is good to be able to see well again — I mean as well as I can ever see. I swear to fucking god I am one lens flick away from being issued a German Shepherd and a pair of dark glasses.
I have to make jokes, reader, because at this point in my life my vision is almost a handicap and I do not say that lightly.
And to be losing my vision to this extent, as a writer, a reader? It is very sad to me. And yet my vision feels so “small” in this sea (looped it back, fuckers) of troubles that I forget sometimes that I have this problem and my vision, as everyone who knows me well knows, is an actual fuckin’ problem.
So I make stupid, insensitive jokes.
I have yet offended myself.
