the truth of tigers and terror, or "a manifesto."

I'm told that I can be terrifying.


Most of the time, this amuses me and also makes me a little proud, in equal parts. I like knowing that people see me as assertive, and I've found that some people just naturally consider an assertive nature "terrifying" (oh, well). I like exercising my leadership skills, which include listening to and supporting people. I strive for mild, unless the situation calls for fierce. Generally, I balance it all well. Except for when I don't. But in the big picture, I never strive to be considered "terrifying."

Well, almost "never." 

                                                                   ___________

The silver lining of dealing with some terrible personal situations over the past year is: There's something about people doing terrible things to you which prompts a reevaluation of your relationship with yourself. When someone treats you badly, you become aware that, aside from the pain and resulting anger, there is a real sense of injustice involved. Some of it is tied up in the inevitable why would this happen to me?, but in a way, your sense of injustice at mistreatment is a pretty accurate barometer with regard to your self-relationship: your sense of injustice at having been mistreated is directly linked to your sense of personal worth. 


Sometimes, you may find that you've been figuratively beating the crap out of yourself, but didn't realize how wrong it was until someone started figuratively doing it for you. And sometimes, you realize that the rage consuming you is the result of recognizing for the first time:

I do not deserve that. From anybody. 

This is not something to "move past." This is something to listen to, to explore. Why am I so very, very angry about the past year's events? 

It was an epiphany, in the midst of processing the (figurative) puke-inducing horror-fest that was 2012. Not a big whoooa kind of epiphany - more the kind where I'm left thinking why in the world did it take me so long to give myself this permission?

I, as a woman, have been denying myself a fully-developed sense of worth. I've been flagellating myself for aligning with other peoples' expectations, limitations, and narrow perceptions.There are all kinds of reasons for this, with all kinds of origins. None of that really matters, for these purposes. What matters is how it's played out inside my head for years. It goes something like this:

My eyes are too small. My hands are not pretty. I'm too fat. My hair is impossible. There's that one tooth. That would look terrible on me. And that, and that, and that. I have to be perfect at what I do, or I'm otherwise worthless. Get it perfect. Get it perfect. Tell as little as possible about yourself, because once the questions start, how could you ever explain? Who would ever want me. I can't be cutesy. I hate myself. I'm too complicated, and not in a humble-brag kind of way. I don't fit with these people, or these people, or these people. And all of it is completely, utterly my own fault. All of it is bad.

Do you hear all that crap?

I - as a woman who was abused in childhood, who was assaulted as an adult, who was subject to sexualization and programmed with all kinds of ideas about her body as a child, and is now subject to seemingly nonstop onslaughts against her sexuality as an adult, from religious institutions which claim I should fill a lesser role than that of a man, to secular media and advertising which profits from me cultivating dissatisfaction with myself, to a dating culture which is just filthy with shallow self-centeredness - I am issuing a manifesto. Right now. Because I have been shouldering this from all sides for YEARS, and it ends today.

In each of the aforementioned settings, I am finished allowing myself to shoulder blame for the fact that I'm not seen as anywhere near "ideal."

I am not she's in need of humbling; I am not a fat chick; I am not aw, she's so pretty, if only; I am not there's a girl in the kitchen? if I weighed one hundred and five pounds, I would not be dang, she's hot, holla holla holla, I can ha yo numba. If I were still active in church, I would not be do you adhere to the literal meaning of Colossians 3:18? hmm?

I am incredible. I am fantastic, and gorgeous, and quality. I am made up of all the qualities that last. I am the best friend you've ever had, whether we're friends or not. I am probably smarter than you - quick, and witty, and I can read you like a book within the first five minutes of our meeting. Whatever happens, I want what's best for you, and I will go to the ends of the earth and put up with nearly anything in order to see it happen, because I believe in you, at all times, in all ways. My brain is fantastic, and sometimes really dumb-nerdy, but always fascinating, and I am downright sexy for it. I have beautiful eyes, and a fantastic smile, and I'm personally not entirely happy with my body, but because I want to be healthier. Really, truly? The interest ends there for me.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that any man on earth would be lucky to have me. And I'm getting tired of fumbling around with men who have potential. Potential is sexy when you're in your 20s and nobody really knows who they are. Once you hit your 30s, "potential" starts to look like "you need a little more time in the oven." You have great potential, you think? Move along, and stop wasting my time. 

I am far from perfect, as I also have a horrible temper (lately), and am impatient, and I'm prone to abandoning everything in the universe in order to master a particular project or skill, which is how I became a good violinist, and which is why I refuse to even attempt French macarons, and I swear that improving my sushi skills is going to drive me straight up a wall, but we're just not going to think about that right now, because we're still full of sunburn recovery and the thought of climbing anything makes me want to cry (also: I'm hilarious).

I am a vital agent in this world, a force from which good, strong, lasting things come about - not a blight, a trophy, or a potential trophy. It's not arrogance. It is confidence, which has been trying to overtake me for awhile, and which I kept resisting because look at me; how could I deserve to be confident, across the board when I meet none of the standards? Unbelievable.

I don't fit in a crappy sexualized culture.

And I don't apologize for knowing it.

And I'm tired of downplaying it.

And I never will again.

Because all the stupid rules that apply to situations with these kinds of expectations? I reject them outright.

You are not allowed to sexualize me.

Yes, you. Right there, sitting in your chair. You.

I don't care whether I know you or not, whether I love you, or respect you, or have ever met you, or will ever meet you. I don't care if you're a friend, peer, teacher, acquaintance, public figure.

You are not allowed to reduce my value to what you make of my sexual appeal.

You are not allowed to evaluate my worth via my sexual behavior.

You are not allowed to impose standards of "sexy" on me which are related only to what you can see with your eyes. You may hold those standards if you must, but when they cross my threshold, you and I are gonna scrap. Count on it. Because how dare you even try to reduce me.

You are not allowed to dictate my perceived potential via my gender, and you are not allowed to assign me roles that sound like "help mate." And I have a reached a point where I am absolutely finished with quiet politeness over the issue; I am no longer willing to assume that a person who perpetuates inequality has good intentions. I don't care what your intentions are, and it's not my job to frame them as something benign. Stop it.

You are not allowed to expect any of your attitudes to affect my happiness or worth.

Because, you see, this becomes a personal thing, beyond how I experience it. I am helping to raise three little niecelets: three tiny forces of nature who take no crap because they're unaware of the crap that's out there, and are unaware that they are, culturally, expected to take it. They are charmed little watercolor crystalline sparklers, and although I am grateful for men and women of character in the world, I know that my girls are also growing up in a world full of industries that profit from their personal unhappiness, a world full of little boys growing into men who learn to be charming, not sincere, so that they can use their insight to prey on women for cheap thrills, a world which narrows the definition of "beauty" to tits, ass, cheap fame, and vapidity.

You should know that if you are reading this as a person or industry who is party to any of these sins committed against humanity via its force of women - it is a personal thing, for me. Not just because I am a woman who just learned how to build myself up against your crap, but because when I gather my girls close, and we chitchat about days, or play science games, or read stories, or laugh at toe humor (don't ask), and I know that they will lead lives far away from my arms, for years to come, these incredible little world-changers - your sins are personal. You commit them against my girls, and all girls; you stack the deck against babies who have never considered concepts of "lesser" based on criteria that does. not. matter. You have not seen anything like a tiger defending her young until you've seen this aunt the day one of her babes comes home wounded from this kind of crap.

I feel like I've just awakened to a truth that's been skirting me for years. 

And if I tell you that I know these things, maybe you can know them for yourself, too.

And my nieces, in seeing me walk replete in the knowledge of my worth, can see my permission to know it as truth for themselves.

I would love it if they could see you know it, too, reader. Man or woman. Whoever you are.

I refuse to play by these rules any longer, and I will call out these injustices as I see them.

And if you perpetuate these "rules," you should find me terrifying right about..... now.

when mama's happy, everyone's happy... or not.

So you know all that hippie crap I wrote yesterday about Mama Beach and she loves you and her loving bosom and yada yada yada? 

 

Yeah, sometimes all that flowery, I-spend-too-much-time-in-my-own-head stuff is true.

But sometimes, instead, Mama Beach can be a real (I'm trying not to cuss so much anymore, so here's a picture of an adorable, totally real seahorse instead).

Because listen (commence whiny-ish voice). Sometimes, you're in Florida, so you spend a lot of time at the beach, okay? and so your skin is kinda used to it. And you even wear your sunscreen and all that, but not as much as you should, because you want a tan. Yes, it's dumb,and bad.

But then bang pop flash kaboom, life blows up, and you have to move away for a few months, and really, let's not talk about that, except for the fact that you have to move up north during winter months, so you spend about seven months under a zillion layers of snow and fabric, and also, you work nights, so for all you know, the sun could've been permanently devoured by benevolent Mama Beach, because you literally do not see any sun for weeks at a time...

And so you come back to Florida all pale and quivery, like a little grubby maggot, and what happens is that you drive straight to your friend's house to pick her up so you can go to the beach together, and there's no time to spare because after months of frozen frozenness, you are now less than seventy-five miles from a beach, and if you do not immediately plunk your large self upon a beach you are going to crawl out of your own skin and devour yourself like a giant angry albino post-orgasm mantis (what does that even mean?)...

And so you spend the entire next day at the beach, too, resulting in a mild sunburn, one not nearly as intense as some you've dealt with in the past, you cocky veteran of beachism, you. You're barely pink (this descriptor makes you think of mid-well steak, which should've given you a clue, but nope, because beach); within a day or so, there's no pain and only minimal peeling (still bad, I know, but see above, where it says "dumb").

So you and your beach buddy stay within five miles of the beach all week to celebrate your homecoming, and you get a crappy hotel room (and now, one week later, you still suspect there might've been fleas in that room, but suck it up, buttercup, because beach). And it rains for the first two days you're there, so you actually engage in non-beach-related activities for awhile, which feels a little foreign, but what are you gonna do, because omg, stop raining, when does it ever rain all day long in Florida except for hurricanes, this is completely unfair, but then the sun comes out and you get a few good beach trips in, even though the weather is still a little iffy and the sun is elusive, so Lovey-Hippie This-Is-The-Dawning-Of-The-Age-Of-Aquarius Mama Beachy-Boo-Boo still barely cooks you past tartar. You're definitely unseared. You would make an ugly, pale stock. You sleep just fine and require no extra hydration.

Until your last day.

Your last freakin' day.

"Sympathy and trust abounding" my [seahorse].

Because on your last freakin' day, you and a whole group of little beachlets head out for one last rendezvous. And for the first time all week, Mama Beach ain't holding back. The sun is like BAM, and the clouds are like nope, and you're squinting behind your sunglasses, and you wore sunscreen, but there's a constant, cool breeze which offsets the fact that Mama Beach is braising you with her invisible death rays of deathness. Somehow, Mama Beach has made the leap from loving matriarch to maniacal teenaged boy - the kind who likes to fry sidewalk ants with magnifying glasses, or place an innocent, trusting frog in a pot of comfortably cool water, then place that pot over a fire and watch, rubbing hands and cackling, while that poor i-haven't-really-been-in-the-sun-for-months frog is blissfully cooked alive.

And now here we sit, with second-degree burns, and the sleep, it eludes because we cannot lay down, and the skin, it is red and thickened beyond the point of those tiny blisters, but the blisters, they are the size and thickness of thumbs, and they stand out from my skin like barnacles and horrify me, and I contemplated posting pictures, but they really are disgusting, and plus, it's like a boob shot, and I'm job-hunting, so no, because I've heard that employers tend to find boob-shots distasteful. The burns are so bad that my whole body is swollen from fluid retention; I haven't showered, left the house, or been in the vicinity of a bra in three days; I groan up and down from the couch like some highly-pregnant mammal; the TV just showed a beach scene, and I involuntarily whimpered a bit. If someone were to slap me right now, I think I'd choose to just go ahead and drop dead.

Lesson learned. Lesson sooo-ho-ho-ho learned. SPF 50, every hour, forever and ever, amen.And umbrellas and helmets and knee pads and yurts, if necessary. Because Mama Beach has a sadistic streak, and at any time, she go all Mommy-Dearest on you, just because she can. 

The best part?

I'm supposed to take my mother to the beach this weekend for Mother's Day.

*Helpless gesture.*

I hope cannoli cake is an acceptable substitute for "fun" in the sun.

so i went to the beach.

So I went to the beach.

I really need some new beach pics.

Here's the thing: When you're at a crossroads, The Beach is always going to be the right decision. Pay that bill today, or let it ride? Beach. Use thyme, or let the white wine and lemon carry the astringency on their own? Salt water. Should I pursue another restraining order, or see if threats to my life choose instead to dress in rainbows and tranquility?

Sand, ladies.

The beach cures what ails you. And if nothing ails you, you're a lucky panda, indeed, because if nothing ails you, the beach rises to meet you in joyful expectation. She rejoices in you with open arms, like a mother; for eons, she has. She cushions and augments your celebration, cradles you until you're satisfied, then releases your newborn self infused with the drowsy, nourished heat of her ancient bosom. And then she awaits your return.

As for me: plenty of things have ailed me over the past year; a bit longer, even. So my relationship to the beach is one of faith in collapse, and salt water from without and within, and deep breaths. A nighttime beach is the holiest of sacred spaces, in which the impossibility of the sky's breadth is offset by the low-hang of the stars, charmed and ethereal and shimmering in cold pewter. The sky on a nighttime beach, and the way the wind whips and lifts upward in a startlingly noise-void vacuum toward the moon, is a more direct conduit to God's ear than anywhere else on earth, like an aural illusion: if you whisper here, I can feel your breath in my ear from a million miles away. A nighttime beach glides over my brokenness in that benevolently indifferent way of elderly women who have experienced more pain than I, who are utterly convinced of renewal and who settle themselves in the dark, expectantly facing eastward. 

The beach as Mother saved, and saves, my soul for the God who made us both, and preserved sparks of my inner life when it was destroyed: both in my being there, and in my knowing She waited for me, that Her darkened sandbanks still bore the imprint of my deepest grief and most profound connection to the sacred, that the searing truths of violation and restoration, betrayal and solidarity, and God-sanctioned, white-hot fury stretching the limits of my own skin still screamed and swirled within this wild-cultivated presence of holiness.

I was gonna write a really funny thing about my really awful sunburn... but let's just leave it at that. 

crumbs from the table. fantastical.

Dude, do I need some therapy. 

I sit down to write, and I got nothing. Mostly because I got a whole bunch of everything, all of which should be worked through privately, none of which you really want to hear about, but all of which has set on my head and shoulders like a fitted slab of blacktop. The rough, pebbly, brittle, sunbaked kind, which can be found in abundance on any of Florida’s elementary-school playgrounds, on which I left lots of knee- and elbow-skin while grudgingly participating in mandatory touch-football before I knew of such victories as faking cramps.

 

There’s the stalker thing, obviously, and the rest of 2012.

But I’m mostly back to preoccupation with the big, crippling anxieties of life, like am I doing what’s best for me? and will I ever own my business the way I want to? and why does the field I love have to pay soooo baaaaadly? and omg debt, and I want to do 34859348 things but how can I ever narrow them down and I don’t know where to start with any of them. 

I want to write.

I want to travel.

I want to be a voice in food.

I want experience. 

And I can do the crap out of every single one of those things… if I just knew where to start with any of them. 

All good things. 

The excitement of anxiety, when life deals you crushing blows, but you emerge with dreams intact enough to continue obsessing over them like an overprotective mother. 

Although sometimes, I still think I should’ve just gone to seminary. 

__

There’s still all the ugly to sort through. 

The stalking situation has completely changed my life. 

While I’m always hesitant to put those words before people, there are times when the situation rears its head again, when it’s necessary to explain my presence here in The Frigid North, particularly to my supervisor and the security personnel at my place of employment. When it’s necessary to tell strangers about painful things without having gotten a grip on those things, I hate that they can see it all over me, the physical yearning to explain, and in explaining, to understand it to its depths and back, to conquer it. 

I moved here because of a stalking situation. The situation is still active. Here are pictures and information. 

When the time comes for those words, I can never seem to just say them succinctly, clinically. I haven’t yet settled myself with A Script – a rehearsed sentence or two perfectly calibrated to put the listener at ease while discouraging questions and settling a matter as a small part of my bigger story. 

Part of this, too, is – and don’t get me wrong, because I’m so not all about victimhood, I’m really not – but part of the communication difficulty is resisting the urge to clarify my role as a victim, and not a participant, in the situation, because you would not believe – you would not believe – how quick people are to blame a stalking victim for his/her victimization, criticize his/her responding to the stalkers’ threats, and belittle or invalidate his/her subsequent reactions.

It’s like, after the first time or two of accepting support from people only to find that they actually find you complicit, you just can’t find your words. 

And it’s hard enough, trying to frame someone else’s insanity in a way that sounds rational enough for others to understand – but when you’re blamed for it, you scramble for a different way to explain, a different way to understand it, even, so that people will please just understand that this isn’t an indictment of your own character; even though it became huge, and even though you had to make huge moves to distance yourself, it’s not something you’re responsible for. It’s not. My hands are not dirty – neither in the stalking’s inception, nor in my having to accommodate it. 

I’m struck by the similarities between stalking and rape, and their aftermaths, and peoples’ reactions. 

Dear relationships have been strained because of this, and I don’t know how to make it okay again. 

I still can’t wrap my mind around the finality of actually having been threatened and stalked by someone who was once, and still is, dear to me; I still can’t yet accept that there is no discussion to be had, no closure to gain or offer, no way to know if the danger will ever end, no way to offer comfort to this tormented person whom I loved, and absolutely no setting in which it would be appropriate to even try. 

I would rather go the rest of my life without speaking another single word about 2012 to anyone, anywhere, ever. I trust nobody with the most painful year of my life. Keep it secret; keep it safe.

 

But errbody know it don’t work that way.

You talk, in the proper settings, and you get it outside yourself, and turn it over in your hands, and take in all the angles. And eventually, the focus widens to include it as part of a big picture. Private, but not secret; safe, but not hidden. 

I still think I’ll end up in seminary sometime soon. 

Meantime: Crumb buns, which were an occasional thing from my childhood when my grandmother would visit New Jersey, where she spent much of her adulthood. I’m sure these aren’t authentic in any way; I don’t even know if there is an authentic crumb bun. 

But: streusel.

That is all.

Crumb Buns

STREUSEL:

3 cups all-purpose flour

2 tsp. cinnamon

½ tsp. salt

2/3 cup brown sugar

1/3 cup white sugar

1 ½ cups (3 sticks) cold butter

Combine all the dry ingredients. Cut the butter into the dry ingredients until it looks like blah blah blah I’m sure you know how to make streusel. Set aside.

DOUGH:

3 ½ cups bread flour

½ cup cornstarch

2 ½ tsp. instant yeast

¼ cup granulated sugar

1 tsp. salt

½ tsp. ground cardamom

1 tbsp. vital wheat gluten (optional; makes a fluffier, springier bready thing)

1 ½ cups warm milk, around 90 degrees

2 eggs, room-temp

1/3 cup shortening

Egg wash (1 egg whisked with 1-2 tbsp. water)

Combine the dry ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer; mix well to fully incorporate the wheat gluten, otherwise you’ll have ugly strings of gluten running through your dough as soon as the liquid hits it. Ask me how I know this.

Combine the wet ingredients in a separate bowl. Make a well in the dry, and pour them in. On speed 2 with a bread hook, knead until the dough comes together; at that point, time it for 10 minutes, or watch for it to become satiny and pull away from the sides of the bowl. Cover and rise for 1 hour, or until an indent remains in the dough when you poke it.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Deflate gently and divide dough in half. Roll out one half. Brush with egg wash, then sprinkle evenly with about a quarter of your streusel. Roll up and slice into one-inch rolls. Place in greased baking vessel of your choice. Repeat with remaining dough. Brush the rolls lightly with egg wash, and pile the rest of the streusel evenly on top. Cover and let rise for 1 hour, or until nearly doubled in size.

Remove plastic, and bake for 15-20 minutes, or until golden and internal temperature reaches 190 degrees.

You can either sift powdered sugar over the rolls (once while hot, again when cooled), or let cool completely and drizzle with icing of your choice.

Serve it on a Christmas plate. It'll make you feel better.

"raise my hands; paint my spirit gold."

Memories live. Even when we deny them air. Even when they're dead. Even when we kill them.

Memories live.

There is recall, which is simple and factual, and there is memory, which is dynamic and almost lyric, and they are not the same. For me, memory is delicately layered, in that way of little-girl Halloween costumes or dance uniforms, where different shades of brightly-colored tulle, layered together, surrender their distinct characters into one color to a faraway eye.

The memories of my life breathe and shimmer; they are vivid, and they consume- not quite flashbacks, but maybe not quite anything else.I don't remember them; I don't strain my eyes to find bride-veiled truths obscured by time and mental priority. I don't often dare invoke them and I don't search for them; they find me. All of them, parts of me; children of my life, bound for silence and locked away by a mother overwhelmed by their energy and need, judged guilty in air tinged with the betrayal of my abandonment when to simply sit in their presence is to feel the weight of everything I forfeited, everything that was taken, everything I never reached for.


From the first sensual pull of memory against my attention - a taste, a smell, a song, a specific lilt of phrase - I'm compelled forward, as toward a source hungry to consume me, and I'm drawn directly to the center of each distilled, crystalline moment of my life, held in vacuum awaiting my return, and I am brought to my knees by the vividity that awaits me - the exact texture of evening sun filtering through blinds to land on a dusty wood floor, and what words or movement hang uninterrupted in the air as though I never left; the systematic beauty in the chaos of a juggernaut kitchen, printers shrieking out tickets into the heavily-aromatic humidity, and the screeching of interlocked gears hurtling forward forward forward on their axes to shouts of garde manger, pick up course two, four-oh-one! how long? pick up! on the fly! pick up! pick up! pick up! and the sheer primitive panicky God-infused brilliance of it all; the unspeakable moments of breakage; the full rote movement, daily thereafter; the glory, as pewter flung high toward the sun.

Always true to me; always constant; never lacking, as though to punish my absence. Always waiting.

There is no simple recall, for the memories of my life. They are agony, and they intoxicate; I would die to lay them to rest, as I've never been able to.

But I want to stop leaving parts of my life behind; I want to helm a cohesive narrative as I move forward. I feel like I’ve instigated such camouflage that my entire experience, over the past year, is a series of well-placed mirrors that keep me hidden from everything.

I am sorry, to the children I've buried deep, who pressurized and stretched to join hands into bands of dark, fiery mineral beneath a black plane of earth, who have never known the fresh air and living green laughing under the sun's energetic attentions, who have suffocated absent the handiwork of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loves mischief as communion.

Wait for me, all of you; I'll come. 

non-christmas thoughts, from a valley.

I'm not alone often; I work long hours, so most of my alone time is occupied by sleep.

When I am awake, I am fine - incredibly busy, always tired, earning respect and creative freedom at work, getting my financial feet back under me after the quick pick-up-and-move of this year. Busy times, occupied mind.

But when I'm alone, and when I don't have to work, I'm unable to fend off this year; I'm overwhelmed, and I can't sort out the rage from the grief from the really scary rage.

And I, who would tell you anything about me as long as it denoted direction and momentum and power, will admit, when I'm alone, that I drive around in my SUV with the seats folded down, because it's easier to see if anyone is hiding in the backseat; that I still search the apartment every time I come home; that I consider dark possibilities, that once felt like something in the world, and now I feel so very, very small, and that, for the first time in my life, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to do.  

You experience childhood tragedy - you grow up, you take ownership of how it affects your life, you make decisions, you choose growth, you move on, and the world becomes yours.

But tragedy as an adult - in the form of other peoples' crimes against you - it's a whole different ballgame. Even if the crimes are similar, especially if they're not. When you're a little kid, you're at everyone else's mercy; part of growing from it, as an adult, is to learn what you should have been able to learn as a child - what kind of person to be in the world, the cause and effect of your place, and actions, in it. As a little kid, you don't know what to call it; as an adult, you call it "developing boundaries" and "learning to navigate relationships" and "avoiding red flags."

And let me tell you, it is hard work.

When I was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, and beyond, I worked my ass off in therapy becoming, in many ways, who I believe I was always meant to be.

And it is amazing how a single year can be so full of crime and tragedy, and by the end of it, the entire world is alien all over again, and you don't know who you are, and all the difficult work you did in order to feel secure and entitled to personal power in the world is devastated.

I don't understand why this year happened to me.

I really don't. And I want to. And I never will. And there are no words for the rage and grief, and the animal they become.

To say it's unfair enrages me for the inadequacy of those words. 

Trite God-isms burn my entire body like acid.

I am fighting with God. On his birthday, even.

Whether or not he's fighting with me, I don't know.

But I am fighting, and I am wrestling and angry, and the God I want to fight with right now will fight back, because I know of not a single other way I can ever express how betrayed and abandoned I feel right now - by God, and nearly everyone else - than to engage the one who knows everything and scream every iota of white-hot, hard-earned savagery directly into his face until I can scream no more.


My faith seems to consistently play out as a pursuit in my life, rather than an end goal. God and I appear to be relentless in our pursuit of each other, for better or for worse, til death do we meet.

Right now, that feels like much more a burden than a comfort.

 I don't care if you don't find it beautiful. I don't find it beautiful, either.

thankful, believe it or not.

I’d been in culinary school for about a year, and had been working at my first restaurant job for about two months, when I visited a years-long friend in a different state. Within the first hour of our visit, Friend informed me: “You’re a lot harder. There’s not really as much grace going on in you as there was.” 

As Christians, grace is central to our identity, right? So I internalized the comment as criticism. It has haunted me a little, became the hazy background to everything I did and turned everything a washed-out shade of guilty, self-interested peach, like old lingerie, or dirty china stacked in a sink. Not much grace going on there, huh?

The professional kitchen isn’t a place of grace, at least in my experience. It’s a stainless-steel-reflective arena where the product either is, or it isn’t, and there’s no middle ground. It’s either perfectly cooked, or it isn’t; it’s either clean, or it isn’t. Lesser efforts will fly, in a pinch, but it’s like limping along on a bum leg. 

I mean, the professional kitchen was modeled after the brigade system of the French military – one head honcho, several smaller honchos, keeping the underlings in line. The military – how do you grace-ify the military? You don’t. Fall in line, or get out; get it right, or face “discipline.” And it’s not personal; screamed maternal insults or flying plates serve as expressions of bigger principles rather than specific weapons on their own, and everyone goes for a drink after, settled in and among themselves. 

No, there's not much grace going on. But things are simple. If you have sense, it's a world that is fairly easy to navigate. Grace becomes secondary to order, because it can.

So I find myself changing. I want to write I struggle with grace anymore, but honestly? I don’t find the need to struggle. I don’t find myself in a place where this priority shift is cause for reflection. 

That troubles me. I shove it to the back burner, as though unsight really does beget unmind. Am I really as engaged in this shift as I should be? keeps boiling over. I just don’t have the energy. 

I know that grace is my own lifeblood, but God, I am wilting under the sole burden of other people’s crimes.

I am tired of taking deep breaths and trying to understand the dark, inflicted places which motivate such people, and I am actively putting down a mindset that tells me that, I, as a child of God, always owe his other children the grace of trying to see their Big Picture, that I should bear responsibility for trying to understand, always, why they re/act the way they do, and let this inform the way I re/act toward them. 

I am tired of owing, and owning. I am weary with establishing new boundaries – trying to find reasonable, healthy footing between I will extend you grace and you, in your determined unhealth, are owed nothing. I am weighing the possibility that I am closing everyone out of my own experience so that nobody can expect engagement from me in return; ask nothing, owe nothing, risk nothing, feel nothing, coast. [Emo, party of one.]

 

If I could just stay in a kitchen, I would. Because if you’re rude, you’re outnumbered; if you suck, you get fired; if you’re whiny or psychotic, you’re not busy enough; if you’re quality, you’re respected and rallied around. I am craving straightforward protocol and clarity; I am weary of nuance and sometimes, I am sick and tired of the complications, demands, and potential injuries of grace. One foot in front of the other, and call it a pity party if you like (not to my face, if you're smart), but I am tired and, yes, angry and resentful, and furious with God, wrestling like Jacob with misplaced offerings of grace limping forward, unclean and imperfect and broken-hipped because grace bit me in the ass. 

I’m wandering around in foreign blackout valleys; I’m scanning invisible horizons, holding out hope out of habit. This is a brand of anger with which I’m unfamiliar, and I find that long-resolved questions of why carry glaring, alien need.

I want to set fire to his hazy peach and set up clear, straight lines of justice. But justice eludes me. And it enrages me to write that there's not a thing I can do about it.

That's where I am. And God is here, even if I refuse to look him in the eye, as if I could.

Somehow, I'm thankful to be here.