TangledWings

To the Point

Three very long posts requiring a lot of time, a lot of thinking, a lot of revising just to say...

I'm scared.  I'm scared of getting old, scared of the unknowns.  I'm scared of not being young and beautiful.  I'm scared about how my body will change, how I will deal with those changes, and how those changes will impact me.  I'm scared of gaining weight and getting wrinkles.  I'm scared of double chins, flabby arms, and sagging breasts.  I'm scared I will never be who I want to be.  I'm scared I've missed out on something and I can't get it back.  I'm scared I'll never live in peace with myself, that I will continue to hold myself back.  I'm scared I won't be pretty enough, that I'll stop being beautiful.  I'm scared to talk about certain things I think and feel because I'm ashamed they're a part of me.  I'm scared to admit certain things about myself because then I will have to acknowledge they're real.

I'm tired.  I'm tired of carrying around all this bullshit.  I'm tired of the negative self talk.  I'm tired of complementing myself then immediately following it up with an insult (why do I do that?).  I'm tired of not feeling pretty enough.  I'm tired of worrying about my weight and what I eat.  I'm tired of looking at my body and not liking what I see.  I'm tired of carrying around my past.  I'm tired of dragging my story around...it's time for a new one.  I'm tired of constantly comparing myself to others just to feel okay about myself.  I'm tired of feeling so limited.  I'm tired of not loving myself, of not seeing how fabulous I truly am.  I'm tired of the bullshit.

I'm ready for a new way of being.  I'm ready to see differently, to think differently, to feel differently.  I'm ready to take care of myself and value myself.  I'm ready to open my heart to myself.  I'm ready to heal.  I'm ready to embrace and accept my body.  I'm ready to look at my belly, my thighs, my arms and feel tenderness, not anger and dislike.  I'm ready for all the new possibilities.  I'm ready to be better than I've ever been.  I'm ready to be as full and real as possible.  I'm ready to look at myself, not just through myself.  I'm ready for something radical.  I'm ready to replace the bullshit with truth.

I'm ready.

The Shadow Thoughts

Last nights post started with a confession about how hard it's been to admit to myself what I've been thinking and feeling lately.  I made that comment and meant to return to it but got wrapped up in other thoughts and went off in a totally different direction.  I made that statement knowing I was working my way towards writing about my recent thoughts about beauty.  But the post started getting too long and I never came back and tied it all together.  I said these thoughts don't represent who I want to be and so I've been pushing them away.  I've been really haunted (haunted is a good description of it) by the issue of physical beauty.  It has been wearing on me to the point that it's just about to make me nuts and I wish it would just leave me alone already.  But trying to push the thoughts away only makes them more intense.  Although I could say I've been trying not to give power/energy to my thoughts about physical beauty and instead focus on aspects of inner beauty, the truth is, pushing those thoughts away is focusing on them and therefore giving them energy and power.

I hate that physical beauty has even been an issue for me lately because that's not who I want to be.  To be concerned about physical beauty seems shallow.  When the thoughts arise I find I tell myself I want to be better than that and then I shove the thoughts back into the dark.  What I realized this week, and what made me start writing the last three posts, is that our "shadow thoughts" are just like our "shadow selves": the more we push them away, the more we try to cut them out of us, the more we deny they exist, the more frantic, energized, and intense (not to mention frequent) they become.  Moments of peace only come in those moments we choose to own them.  I'm not there yet.  I haven't yet owned my thoughts about physical beauty.  I still feel uneasy about them.  I'm still afraid that admitting I have those thoughts makes me shallow, superficial and bad.  Because that's not who I want to be or how I want to be perceived I have not been comfortable with the issues that are currently wrapping their tentacles around me and pulling me down into the airless depths.

That long, two paragraph introduction and I still haven't mention what exactly it is I've been thinking.  See, I told you it was hard to admit and voicing what I think, putting it into words, letting someone else know, is a form of admission.

I have never felt like one of the beautiful ones.  That is probably true of many of us.  Living in a place where we feel truly beautiful is hard work especially with society constantly throwing its ideas of beauty in our faces.  I’ve had a pretty twisted relationship with my body.    I was overweight as a child and my feelings about being overweight and wanting to be thin led to a spiral of self-loathing and self destructive behaviors that I wasn’t able to begin pulling myself out of until my late 20s/early 30s.  I’ve carried comments about my weight around with me for over 20 years.  I started my first diet somewhere around 8^th grade and I think I’ve probably been dieting since then.  Even when I say I’m not on a diet who am I kidding…more than likely I’m secretly on some type of fucking diet.  And the sad thing is I don’t know that its gotten better for young girls today…maybe its even gotten worse.  There is so much pressure to be thin.

There are times when we view ourselves and life from our wounded places, from the skewed thinking and bad information we pick up along the way.  When I was younger anytime I looked out at the world everyone seemed thinner than me.  I saw myself as the fat girl and even though I wasn’t very overweight that’s the way I began to see myself.  I was a lot heavier then my two sisters and most of my friends.  I remember looking at pictures of myself with my family and thinking my mom was so beautiful and my sisters were so tiny and I was the fat one.  I still find I compare myself to others just trying to convince myself I'm okay.  Even after I did loose weight and was no longer heavy I still wrestled with my body.  My body changed and yet my thoughts about my body didn't so I've struggled to see my body and my beauty from a place of truth.  I still tend to see both from those wounded places. 

I don't practice the same self-loathing behavior I did at one time in my life. I've stopped hurting myself, started to embrace myself more, and I've stopped wanting to erase myself.  But now that I'm staring down the face of 35 some of those issues are creeping back in.  The need to be thin has worked its way back into my thinking.  The fact that I'm aging, my body is changing, and I'm more aware of where I'm heading as stirred my body issues and re-ignited my fears about not being thin enough and pretty enough.  My very distorted ideas about beauty have resurfaced over the past few months and I'm both ashamed and embarrassed.  At some point in my life, when I was struggling with my body, I began to believe I was bad for wanting to be thin, that I was bad for focusing on appearance because I knew the truly important beauty, the real beauty, came from within--our inner or spiritual beauty.  And so I started concentrating and focusing on spiritual beauty, the beauty that is lasting, which was a very healthy and healing thing to do.  But thoughts about wanting to be thin and beautiful would still creep up occasionally and I would get angry at myself because I thought I was supposed to be better than that.

So here I am.  I’m turning 35.  I’m realizing my body is aging and that I’m not getting any younger and all those thoughts about physical beauty are making me crazy.  For a long while know I’ve been working on owning my beauty.  The mirror meditation Liz led a little over a year ago had a big impact on me.  It required I sit with myself, look at myself, and acknowledge myself as being beautiful.  But I have to admit something.  During that time my focus was still inner beauty and I never really sat with my body.  I pushed the physical away in favor of the spiritual.  Instead of looking at myself I think I looked beyond myself, within myself.  Some may think that’s what we should do.  We should make the spiritual our focus because it’s what lasts.  I know I’ve believed focusing on the spiritual is good while focusing too much on the physical is superficial.  I’m not saying that I believe we shouldn’t exercise and eat right and pay attention to our bodies.  What I’m saying is I started focusing on inner beauty to heal what I thought about my body and while that was a really good thing I also think the more I pushed my body and my feelings about my body and my thoughts about physical beauty away, tried to cut them out of me, the more they stalked me.  I placed my focus on inner beauty and yet became anorexic as a teenager.  I tried to put all my energy into spiritual beauty and yet had a bout with bulimia in college.  I tried to concentrate on real beauty and not worry about physical beauty and yet my issues with my body still exist.  I have worked to re-define beauty for myself by making it something larger than being thin and pretty and yet here I am heading towards my 35th birthday and dealing with resurfacing distorted thoughts about beauty.  In other words I've been pushing my body away, pushing my thoughts about physical beauty away, and yet the harder I push the harder they push back.

I feel like I’ve written these three extremely long posts and still not nailed down what I’m trying to say.  I feel like I’m talking in circles but haven’t gotten to the point, like what I need to say is so simple and I'm drawing it out and making it a lot more complicated than it really is.

Continuing our Conversation

Long posts can be difficult to read because they require so much time which is why I wanted to wrap up last night's post and continue it tonight.

One of the most difficult things about what I've been experiencing lately is having to admit to myself what I'm thinking and feeling.  And because those thoughts and feelings don't represent who I want to be I've been pushing them away.  When I turned 30 I was more than happy to leave my 20s.  My 20s were hard on me and I looked forward to entering a new decade with new possibilities for growth and self-acceptance.  Which is why my feelings about my upcoming birthday have really caught me off guard.  I've never resisted turning older.  It was just a number.  The number may be increasing but I still felt the same age.  Although I knew I was getting older I didn't really feel older.  But something about the number 35 feels different.  It's made me realize I am getting older.  With that realization has come a lot of analyzing of my life--reviewing and evaluating the past as well as imagining and planning the future.

One of the feelings that continues to surface as I look at my life is anger.  Maybe anger isn't exactly the right word but it's the one I'm going to use.  It's more the feeling of missing out on something and being a little pissed off that you missed out on it.  And what have I missed out on?  Who I really wanted to be.  You might say well then start being who you want to be.  I am.  I know that I am.  But I can't deny that I've also been feeling some grief, disguised as anger, about what I've missed out on because I held myself back, I was too scared about what other people would think, and I was too busy trying to be a "good girl."  I missed out on a lot of showing up and although I can begin showing up now I'm sad about the time I've lost.  And that's where turning 35 comes into play.  I've had these moments of fear that I don't have enough time to become who I want to be, that a nice chunk of my life is gone and I can't get it back.  Maybe that should inspire me to cease the time I have left and really make it count.  It does...and it doesn't.  Yes it wakes me up to the reality of aging and how quickly time slips through our hands.  But it also has been stirring up a lot of fear in me and I've got to deal with the fear. 

I do recognize that a lot of the fears about aging that I have been having are totally off base and erroneous.  That's what fear is--False Expectations Appearing Real.  But even though I know the things I fear have no substance that doesn't take away the feelings.  No matter how I look at it, when it comes right down to it I'm scared.  I'm scared of what growing older means.  Maybe I should be excited about the possibilities, especially the possibility of the person I can become.  I am.  I may not sound like it in the last couple posts but I really am.  But coupled with that excitement is the fear of who I might not become and the grief/anger about who I wasn't able to be in the past.

There are a lot of beliefs I hold about myself, the world, life, God, that hold me back from being who I want to be.  I don't think we can make it through life without our fair share of skewed thinking.  It comes with being a human being and relating to other human beings.  When I was a chaplain my supervisor liked to call this skewed thinking "bad information."  If I said something about myself, or about life, or about God that was totally off base, something that came from this skewed thinking, he would say, "Somebody gave you some bad information."  And we all carry around that bad information.  We pick it up along the way--from something someone says or does, from something we read, from something we get from the media, etc.  Some of our bad information we hold onto all our lives.  Some of it we're lucky to loose along the way because we find the truth. 

I have a lot of skewed thinking.  God, where do I even start?  A lot of what I've mentioned in the past two posts comes directly from my skewed thinking.  One of the issues that has really been haunting me for the past couple months is my thoughts/beliefs about beauty--primarily my body and physical beauty.  My beliefs about beauty and how I see myself as far as beauty is concerned have really been wanting my attention lately and the fact that I have a big birthday in three days has only fueled the issue.  Someone once told me that it's good when our shit gets stirred up because it gives us a chance to deal with it...again.  Well, that's probably true.  It just doesn't feel good.  It feels the complete opposite of good.  At the time it feels like shit.  And that's how I have felt as I've had all these thoughts and issues about beauty rising to the surface.

It's already another long post and I still have so much more to say.  This seems like a good stopping point so I'll come back and talk some more about the beauty issue tomorrow.   

Scared & Fearless

For his birthday T and I bought the B-Dog his first bike...with training wheels of course.  Once we lowered the seat a bit more for his little legs he was off faster than either T or I could keep up with.  It's a good source of exercise: put the kid on a bike and jog to keep up with him.  All was well until last weekend when the B-Dog took his first spill.  He was flying down the street only to round a corner a little too quickly and wind up on his face.  He limped around for a few days, a big bruise on his knee.  He recovered from the limping in a few days time...except for when the suggestion of a bike ride came up, then the limping recommenced.  He complained that he couldn't ride his bike because his knee just hurt too bad.

Tonight was his first time back on the bike.  I needed to pick up a few things from the grocery store and in order to get a little exercise and help out the environment I thought it would be a good idea to walk.  And it would have been a great idea if it hadn't taken us almost and hour to make it 5 blocks.  Although the fear of falling again didn't immobilize him it did certainly slow him down to a snails pace.  I could have crawled on my hands and knees the entire way and still have been faster than he was on his bike.  And anytime we approached an uneven place in the sidewalk or a gravely area he came to a complete stop.  Sometimes that's what falling can do to us.  We quickly go from zooming around corners to barely moving.

It didn't help that he kept repeating the same mantra over and over again: I'm so very, very scared.  We finally had to stop and talk about the message he was giving himself.  I explained that sometimes when we say something about ourselves again and again that's the way we start to feel.  By saying over and over that he was scared he was making himself feel scared.  Instead we were going to change the message.  He was going to say, I am very, very brave...because he was.  Getting back on the bike after being hurt is brave.  And while our speed didn't increase much at least the message he was giving himself changed.

About a block from the store the B-Dog said, "Mom, what does the word fearless mean?"  I told him it was similar to being brave.  It meant without fear.  He liked that word better and so his new mantra became I am very, very fearless.  We finally made it to the store, purchased the eggs and Teddy Grahams we needed, and begin our slow trek home, the whispers of I am very, very fearless heard just above the crunch of gravel and the squeak of training wheels.  About halfway home B said, "Mom, guess what I am now, very, very scared or very, very fearless?"  Wanting to encourage the positive self-talk I answered, "I think you're very, very fearless."  "Nope," he replied, "I'm both very, very scared and very, very fearless."  And isn't that just about the truth of life--the fear and the fearlessness co-existing. 

I think sometimes I give fear a bad rap.  I think I'm supposed to always live bravely, that I'm supposed to eradicate fear from my life.  But fear has its positive aspects.  It alerts us to when something is wrong.  Its the fear that keeps us careful and cautious so that we can live wisely while living bravely.  It can be fear that pushes us to rely on others when we need them the most...like when we're getting our courage up to ride our bike again and we want someone by our side...just in case.  Its fear that teaches us to look both ways before crossing the street and to watch for cars pulling out from the driveway.  In other words, what I'm trying to say is fear isn't always our enemy.  Fear is that something inside us that just wants to keep us safe, keep us from getting hurt. 

We've been home for over an hour.  The B-Dog is fast asleep...at least I hope so and I've watched Samantha Who?  I'm still thinking about our trip to the store and how it is good to be both very, very scared and very, very fearless.  Maybe instead of shaming myself for the fear I sometimes feel I need to look at my own fear from a different perspective, to see it not as something to push from my life but as something to honor, something to view as I would an overprotective friend, at times too limiting and constraining but at other times very right in its observations, something to couple with my own fearlessness.    

New Ink

whatcha wanna do that fo'
she asks, as if she doesn't know
because this is my body
I answer
and I want everyone to know
it belongs to me
because for too long it didn't and
I'm takin' it back
because for too long I didn't know
I had the right to take it back
because for too long I didn't know how
to say no but now I know better
even though sometimes I still forget
I can say yes, I can say no
I can say don't you dare
but my body can't speak on it's own
I must open my mouth in my defense
because I gave too much away
for all the wrong reasons
but now I know what belongs to me
and I want to write my story
into my skin
so I'll never forget again

I feel like...

I feel like...
a woman who's getting too old, too fast
a woman who hasn't moved in days
a woman whose body aches from this lack of movement
a woman who can't seem to get enough sleep
a woman whose arms have become flabby and whose bell has become soft
a woman with a car seat in the backseat of her car
a woman who feels incredibly empty and keeps trying to fill the emptiness with food
a woman who doesn't have a clue who she is, what she wants, or what might possibly make her feel satisfied
a woman who is so many things she can't make sense out of any of them
a woman who's afraid--
afraid of loosing herself and her voice
afraid of never belonging
afraid of never feeling content
afraid of never finding peace, especially peace with herself
afraid of running out of time
afraid of not connecting to her core
afraid the day will come when she'll never be touched again
afraid some day she'll stop feeling beautiful
afraid of loosing her words, her poems
afraid of always being hungry
afraid of never really connecting to something deep
afraid of never being who she wants to be--who she knows she can be
afraid of not recognizing her own voice
afraid of dying with too much trapped inside
a woman who just ate two vanilla scones and a huge serving of lasagna and doesn't give a damn
a woman who knows something is not quite right but can't figure out what
a woman who keeps taking everything out on everyone else
a woman holding a lot of rage
a woman who can't be still
a woman who wants change but is forcing it and as a result is being destroyed by it
a woman who's lost something but she's not sure what
a woman staring out the window into the dark

This is me today...

Today the weather was so warm I didn't need a jacket and being able to walk into the warm sunshine made me feel alive...Today I'm not certain what I want to write about and decided I needed to simply write about where I am right now, today, because the uncertainty about what to write stems from the unusual week I've had (unusual meaning totally out of our 'normal' routine) and the feelings of disconnection this unusual week brought with it ...Today I want to curl up with my journal and make a list of things I want to do that I don't let myself do because of fear, intimidation, or the simple fact I don't make time for it...Today that type of list seems essential because it will bring me back to myself and that's exactly what I need...Today I wish I could hide away for several hours to make that type of list and do some additional writing because when my words start to pile up inside me I feel off balance...Today I renewed a friendship with someone I haven't seen for almost 5 years...Today I learned that when you've gone into yourself and out again with someone else, seeing that person again is like picking up right where you left off, that deep connection is still there because you have shared far too much of yourself with that person (and vice versa) for it to dissolve...Today I realized how far I've come and where I am headed and that feels both right and good...Today I'm feeling sad about my co-worker leaving his position and moving to another city not just because his position will be vacant but because he really has given a lot to me in the short amount of time I've known him...Today I have decided to make a small career change and although I know it's the best thing for me in the long run I feel grief over the things I will miss about my current position...Today I am opening the door to new possibilities...Today I am being brave and believing in my abilities...Today I sense body image issues beginning to resurface which feels like I'm battling my body again because those issues always bring with them a feeling of desperation and panic...Today I ache to be at peace with myself...Today I hunger for authenticity and the courage to more often make myself vulnerable without immediately feeling the need to draw back into myself, protect myself, and fold my heart back up...Today I wish there were times you could hold on to something and never let it go...Today I'm in denial about some things I'm feeling because I'm not ready to feel them fully and that's okay for the moment but I've got to get real soon because although not getting real is an option it's not the healthiest and wisest and most authentic option...Today my son has strep throat and 5ths disease (sounds dramatic but really it's not) and that has knocked this week out of balance...Today I am resisting my e-mail because I just don't want to deal with it...Today I want to feel beautiful but those resurfacing body image issues are getting the best of me...Today I know those issues are eating at me but I choose tenderness and compassion...Today I choose to love myself...Today I found a sweet card propped against my bathroom mirror left there by my mom...Today I'm grateful that I'm starting to see my mom in a fuller way, not just as a parent, but as a fellow human being with her own goals and dreams...Today I'm planning a trip to my aunt's house for the weekend to take pictures of my newly engaged cousin and although it's family I still get nervous before a portrait session...I'm ready to let go of today...

one of THOSE life moments

we all have THOSE life moments.  moments we know are truly important.  moments we know that when asked years from now to list some of the most memorable moments of your life this moment will be on that list.  moments that cause us to close our eyes and try as hard as we can to etch every detail into our brains so we'll never forget it.  i had one of THOSE moments today.  this afternoon i left work a little early to join a group of strangers in a dimly lit theater to hear Nikki Giovanni, civil rights activist and poet, tell some of her life stories.  i've had many significant life moments and this one joined that list.  it was indescribable. 

i wish i could tell you what it was like to see her step up to the podium, to hear her light-hearted laughter, to hear the words of her poetry from her own mouth.  i wish i could adequately describe her smile, her energy, her humor.  she was everything i expected her to be and nothing i expected.  she didn't read her poetry in the big way maya angelou does (who i've never seen in person, only on tv).  she didn't read it in a soft-spoken way.  she read it like a woman on the phone with her best friend who she hasn't talked to in days, spilling her words quickly and in a tone of familiarity.  she told her stories as if she'd known all of us her whole life, sometimes getting sidetracked, inserting sarcasm here and there, rushing over some of her most important statements, pausing a second so that we could catch it, and then saying, sometimes with a smile on her lips and sometimes with a voice so serious you knew not to cross her, 'well, it's the truth.'  she told stories about living through the death of her mother and shortly thereafter the death of her sister.  she told stories about emmett till and the long trip his mother made from chicago to claim his body, beaten and bloated, no longer recognizable.  she told stories about rosa parks and the significance of the bus ride she took on december 1, 1955.  she read poems she had written in memory of emmett till and in honor of his mother and the porters who stored his body with their personal belongings so that she could take him home where he belonged.  she read poems in honor of the strength and courage, anger and pride, it took his mother to refuse a closed casket funeral.  she read poems she'd written about rosa parks in a be-bop dance style so that kids today would have a way to relate to the significance of what she did.  she told her stories, sometimes with a flash of sarcastic humor, sometimes like a preacher looking for a hearty amen, and we all listened, barely breathing, no one daring to move.  and i don't know about everyone else but i sat there with tears in my eyes.  by the time our afternoon with Nikki was over i had a headache from trying to hold back the tears and it wasn't until i was finally sitting in my car that i let them flow.  she made us laugh, she made us shake our heads in disbelief, she made us gasp in horror, she made us cry, and more than once she made us stand in applause.

after her reading there was a book signing.  i have been carrying a book of her poetry around in my purse for several weeks now.  i've had it with me since the day i saw the poster advertising today's reading.  i stood in line with dozens of others, tears still in my eyes.  but when i reached the table and handed her my book i didn't have her sign it for me.  i told her i had a son who was only four and that he doesn't understand yet, but one day he will, and would she please sign my book for him.  and in the inside cover it now says, to britton, Nikki Giovanni.  by the time he's old enough to begin to understand the importance of the events Ms. Giovanni spoke about the montgomery bus boycott will be 70 plus years in the past.  dr. king will have been gone for over 40 years, emmett till even longer than that.  the stories she shared today will be more a part of history than they are today, some of them lost, some of them forgotten, some of them watered down...that is unless someone keeps telling them...with force, with conviction, without flinching.  and those stories will still be in her poetry, in every word she wrote.  and maybe he'll choose to read them.  and maybe he'll have a clearer picture of the importance of finding your voice and telling your stories, of voicing your anger, of speaking up for equality, of spilling your blood on the page, of fighting with what you've got...even if it's a pen.             

Tears

I finally let myself cry about something I've been holding onto for months.  I've been telling myself to get over it.  I've been trying to convince myself it's no big deal.  I've been telling myself if I was strong, if I was aware, if I was really everything I say I am I wouldn't let this get to me, that instead I would deal with it objectively, and then I've been angry at myself for not having the ability to deal with it objectively.  I've been angry at myself for dealing with it humanly.  And I've been angry at myself for hurting, as if I, as if any of us, can stop the emotions that tend to surface when the world is shifting underneath us and we're struggling to figure out where we belong and what we belong to.  I've been blaming myself, blaming myself for the situation because I couldn't change myself and make myself different.  I've been blaming myself for all the things I couldn't do. 

And then one restless evening while everyone else was sleeping and I was lying in bed staring at the dark ceiling rethinking everything, as I tend to do when I'm replaying something over and over, trying to examine every detail, trying to figure out what I could have done differently so that in the future I won't make the same mistake, I felt something give, just slightly but enough, enough to bring the tears from their hiding place.  In the dark, the only other sounds the breathing of those I share my life with and the creaking of the house as it settles into it's foundation, I let myself cry.  I cried because I realized I'd been beating up on myself for no other reason than being myself.  I've been shaming myself because I couldn't be something I'm not.  I couldn't be different.  I could only be myself.  All this time I've been playing the old 'if I could have one more chance' game, a game that only leads to torture and torment, telling myself if I could have one more chance I could doing everything differently.  But that would mean I'd have to be something, someone, other than myself.  Which is something none of us can ask of ourselves or anyone else.  I've been clinging to shame--ashamed of my personality, my abilities, my limits, my fears, and my humanness. 

When I tell myself I should be different I tell myself I'm not enough just as I am.  When I tell myself I should be someone other than who I am I make myself small.  And I make myself small when I don't allow myself to be what I am--a human, complicated and emotional, born to be in relationships with others and able to hurt when those relationships shift, change, dissolve, fall apart, and don't end up being everything I thought they might be.  And by not allowing myself to feel fully, by not allowing myself to hurt, I sell myself short.

I cried and I prayed and I cried some more.  It didn't change the situation.  It didn't give me any answers.  It didn't solve anything.  But it did move me into a place of deeper compassion and tenderness towards myself and that shift, a shift into acceptance, forgiveness, and self-love, changes me.  It changes the way I see myself, my life, my struggles, my story.  And that kind of change, change that comes from love and not from shame, fear, or force, has residual effects that still linger in the blood after I've cried myself to sleep and then awakened to a new morning with a new perspective and a gentleness that was lost to the pain of shame and blame.      

What I Took with Me from No Country for Old Men

Maybe there will always be a part of me that will push against where I come from.  Maybe there will always be this small piece of me that won't be able to completely come to peace with aspects of my heritage.  Maybe there are some things I will always push against because their familiarity has become binding and limiting and sometimes even boring.  Maybe I'm not alone in this.  Maybe we all have this as one of life's great learning curves.  I acknowledge I will probably always push against the conservatism of West Texas.  I don't see that changing.  I will probably always push against small town limits.  I will probably always push against George W Bush.  I will probably always feel a little self conscious about my strong Texas accent, an accent I'm sometimes worried makes me sound as if I'm not as intelligent as I really am.  I will probably never be able to fully understand some of the beliefs commonly associated with Texas as a whole.  I will probably always have this understanding of Natalie Maines when she made her oh-so-controversial statement about the current president (and by the way Natalie is from my home town.)  I will probably always worry I lack cultural exposure (I remember being a part of a conversation once about pickled herring and thinking, what the hell is picked herring.  But then again they probably aren't familiar with calf frys.)  I will probably always push against generalized statements regarding Texans, statements that assume we're all alike and that we all believe the same things.  I will probably always be drawn to what is different from what I know because different tends to be intriguing.  That is probably why at least once a month I have a very vivid dream about Paris and I wake to find myself aching for a place I know very little about.  That is probably why loosing myself in the streets of Paris some day is one of my life's dreams.  After all, isn't Paris just about the total opposite of West Texas?

But then, despite everything I push against, there will be a little something that pulls me back, not to the limits and the conservatism but to home and everything I know about home.  And when I say home I don't necessarily mean a place.  I mean all those things that make us feel as if we belong to a place and that that place belongs to us, home being more a sense of belonging than a location.  It's those little somethings that allow for moments of peace, moments when I stop pushing and accept where I come from and how where I come from contribute to who I am and who I am becoming.  Little things like Tommy Lee Jones.

I was sitting in a theater several weeks ago watching the critically acclaimed No Country for Old Men.  I enjoyed it, thought it was a very good story, and that it was very well told by the Coen brothers.  I do have to admit I'm not as crazy about it as a lot of critics.  It was good but I wasn't certain it was THAT good.  The one thing I loved most about the film was the performance by Tommy Lee Jones.  Javier Bardem seems to be getting all the attention for his role and that attention is well deserved.  He gave one hell of a performance.  That being said I have to say that for me it was Tommy Lee Jones that stole my heart.  It was Tommy Lee Jones that I found myself watching closely and waiting for his next scene.  I sat in the dark theater noticing the heaviness in his body and on his face, listening to his beautiful Texas accent, and I felt this sudden sense of home, home being everything that was familiar about his character and how all those familiarities gave me a sense of belonging.  I can't say I'm a huge Tommy Lee Jones fan.  I don't know enough about him or his work to make that claim.  I'm not saying every film he's ever made has been brilliant and that he always delivers a stellar performance.  I don't think that's true of any actor.  But what I am saying is that while watching his performance in No Country for Old Men he took me back home, took me back to all the things that are beautiful about my heritage, all the things that are positive about where I come from.  As silly as it may sound everything about his performance reminded me of all I do love about home and reminded me that although I sometimes push against many parts of where I'm from this place still belongs to me...and I still belong to it.  And I left that theater reminded that there really is so much I don't push against, there really are things I do appreciate and value.  There are things I'm proud of.  I left that theater falling a little bit in love with my own Texas accent just because his Texas accent is so completely mesmerizing and comforting in its familiarity.