Tag: crushes

Now I’m 60

Today I turned 60. It doesn’t feel much different than yesterday, when I was only 59. Except the number makes me feel, well, old.

I’ve been thinking about getting older — 50s and 60s old, not 40s old. I’ve come up with the following:

  • Nobody says “you don’t look your age” to me any longer.
  • My colleagues ask me if I’m retiring. If the US had a decent healthcare system, then I would be able to retire.
  • I realize anyone I get a crush on is old enough to be my kid. Total buzzkill.
  • Where did all these bruises come from? Oh, yeah, I stumbled over my feet yesterday.
  • I no longer see myself as one of the fresh new authors out there.
  • Two words: Senior Discount
  • My idea of an exciting evening is curling up to watch TikTok (all the clips of medical shows on there!)
  • I feel very young for 60. I don’t know what I expected.

The Longest Day

Back when I was a pagan

Yesterday was Summer Solstice, and I didn’t celebrate it because I thought it would be on Tuesday. I should have checked the Internet.

I sometimes miss being a pagan, because I always knew when the turns of the year (the solstices and equinoxes) were, and pagans throw a great party. I had a friend who wanted to have an all-night drumming session around a bonfire, and me and my bodhran (Irish frame drum) would have had a lovely time with that. Except for the fact that lack of sleep tended to (and still does) make me a bit unmanageable — weepy and moody. And drumming all night is more suitable for the Winter Solstice, where one would drum to make the sun come back after the longest night.

I gave up being a pagan because I always felt like an impostor — I didn’t believe we were doing any magic, and I felt the symbolism was borrowed from cultures not my own. I am very personal in my mysticism, so I want the symbolism to speak to me. Nothing, alas, has spoken to me in a while.

How would I celebrate Summer Solstice?

I wish I would have pitched a tent in my yard, and stayed awake till sunset and then slept in the tent with plenty of mosquito repellent and on a camp cot, because I’m well over 40. I would have kept the lonely night company. (In actuality, I would have climbed out about 10:30 and gone inside because of lack of sleep. I know myself by now.)

I celebrate by what speaks to me, what makes for the best poetry. Maybe I have lost my poetry, maybe it was all invested in the crushes I had before my age finally caught up with me.

Maybe I need to celebrate the turns of the year again.

Poem and Origin

You break me in this place
Of aborted dreams, this ice
Wrapped around age seventeen,
My missing innocence,
The fear, the blinding fear
That I should love you with this sullied heart.

You remind me of what I haven’t known —
Beam of light in the dark,
Holding pure secrets,
Embracing my dichotomy
And fear, this blinding fear

That I should love you with my sullied heart.




When you realize that crushes, the crushes that started at an entirely too-young age, that persisted through your marriage to a very patient husband, are all ways of trying to break through the dichotomy that permeated your childhood:

I am innocent/I have been used sexually.

Now, as an adult in my fifties, that pattern of seeking someone’s attention as a mystical cure for a secret affliction continues. I learn more and more every time, and I hope to reach an escape velocity from it soon.





The world assumes that those who have been sexually abused as children have somehow invited it upon themselves, that they have somehow lacked the innocence that would have stopped an abuser otherwise. The child accepts this judgment and judges themselves as someone worthy of hurt, and if the child is female, the purity culture surrounding them proclaims them soiled.

I blocked my memories throughout my childhood, only remembering them in adulthood. So I felt sullied but didn’t know  why, and when I hit adolescence, I needed that proof that I was still loveable. And all those other things I felt I was lacking — beauty, personality — got rolled up with the damage from my abuse.

Of Fairy Tales

We long for what we wish to be,
Our crushes a heady potion,
A periapt to ward against our fear
That we are not enough, that we are
In need of rescuing — we rub the lamp
and the prince comes and kisses us.

The prince will never come,
And if he did, he would bear discord
On a silken pillow, and the ugly fairies
Would chant, “You get what you wish for.”
The illusion would break,
And you would feel you never were enough.

We need our crushes, our illusions
So we will be enough in our own worlds,
So we will be enough.

Real-Life Fairy Tale

Nobody thinks they’re going to get old.

I didn’t either. People in my family age gracefully, but I assumed I would age so gracefully that I’d still look 35 when I looked in the mirror in later years. I don’t. I look every second of my 54 years and then some when I look into the mirror — the skin under my eyes is translucent and thin and bears a network of fine wrinkles. I have traces of laugh lines. My hair — everything I didn’t like about my hair at age 20 still applies today, only with 50% gray.  Bizarrely, my face has more character than it did when I was younger: I look at pictures of myself now, and I look less vague and more — I don’t know — striking?

Portrait of the writer as an old woman.

My mother, my role model for all things feminine, hated getting older. Like me, she looked striking as an older woman. Like me, she grimaced when she looked in the mirror.

Like me, she maintained a fairy tale in her mind. In this fairy tale, a young, beautiful man would tell her she was beautiful, and she would be beautiful. There would magically be no repercussions from this on her marriage. In her bouts of compulsive shopping, she picked outfits she thought would make her more beautiful to this mysterious man.

Apparently, I take after my mother here too, except for the clothes shopping.

I occasionally develop crushes on beautiful young men (I am susceptible to beautiful young men). They have to seem like nice, honest men, who would not hit on me or string me along to make fun of me. It can’t develop into anything more than a friendship. They have to be believable if they tell me I’m beautiful. It helps if they’re in another country. The more hopeless the situation, the better.

I can’t ask them if they think I’m beautiful, because that breaks the magic spell, the alchemy that happens when the person I find most beautiful thinks I’m beautiful.

My fairy tale: Someone sends me an anonymous message telling me I’m beautiful, and I have to figure out who it is. Or an non-anonymous message, but they write it with heart. Or someone shows up to my coffee hours on campus*  Notice that I didn’t say flowers. I need words, because I have trouble interpreting anything else.  I need meaning so I can intuit meaning. Flowers will scare me away if they’re florist-types.  Courtly tokens are welcome. Locks of hair?** In other words, an unsolicited message*** with honesty, simplicity, effort. Something transgressive — not in terms of boundaries, but in proclaiming that feelings are important and don’t have to result in harm.

In other words, I have set a nearly impossible quest, just like the set of instructions in the song “Scarborough Hill” (Tell her to make me a cambric shirt /Without no seams nor fine needle work). It’s seemingly doable, except for the part where it violates human nature — middle-aged women are not considered beautiful, beautiful men have suspicious girlfriends, nobody makes an impact on the Internet, people just don’t do that. 

But it’s a fairy tale, a magic quest. And maybe those still have a purpose in life.

* If you are a student, don’t tell me you think I’m beautiful. Just don’t go there.

** Cut the hair at the bottom of the hairline at the nape of the neck. Cut the whole lock, no wider than half the width of the pinky. Secure one end with string or a small rubber band. Mail to my home address.

*** Some of you might be asking about my husband at this time. Richard is a delightful lot of things, the love of my life, but romantic is not one of those. First of all, Richard is one of the most pragmatic people I’ve ever met. He’s in his head most of the time; he’s the “I married you, didn’t I?” sort. He does housework to show me he loves me.  He brought me a lemon tree from Hy-Vee for Valentines’ Day, which shows he knows me better than anyone. But the only time he tells me I’m beautiful is when he’s reminded to. That’s just who he is. He’s a lot like my father.

"I wrote a love song to a sparrow"

I didn’t tell the story I thought I’d tell.

No stories about hardship, no stories about resilience. Somehow, the Dear World storytelling process got to my inner core in less than twenty minutes.

I told a story about love, creativity, and sparrows.

When I was a child, I talked to sparrows. And trees. And squirrels. Mr. Shady Tree lived down the street from me. He had been trimmed to look like a child’s lollipop tree. Now and again I would stop by to visit him. I would offer him invisible TV Dinners and banana splits. He never spoke to me but I felt a sense of comfort talking to him. I talked to the birds in his branches, too. I remember the sparrows best — they were flighty sorts, hopping in small groups from branch to branch, then scattering when cars drove by.

I quickly gathered a reputation from my classmates for being “weird”, and this led to a lot of harassment on their part and a lot of shame on mine. I cared less and less about their “normal”. I isolated myself rather than face the shame.

When I hit adolescence, I discovered more beauty in my world — boys. I felt as if I could study every inch of their faces — their skin, translucent or spotty, their eyes, the truth behind their cryptic scribbles in their notebooks. I could never draw them, never even remember their faces. So I wrote poems. In junior high, I showed the poems to my best friend, and she raised the window sash and announced my crush to everyone outside during lunch. I would spend the time between classes being admonished by the other girls that So-and-So wouldn’t possibly like me back.

The two lived together in shame in my mind — birds and crushes.

One day in college, I wrote a love song about a sparrow. I confess, it wasn’t really about a sparrow — it was about a young man on a bus. He had long, honey-brown hair and round glasses and a faint dusting of freckles and a strong, curved nose. His build was delicate, bird-boned. The rain had drenched him as it had me, but he looked at home in a misty forest, and out-of-place on that grimy bus.

So I wrote the song. Looking back, I had a revelation about this song —  no, two: I had found a way to both talk about my strange reality where birds and trees could understand human speech and maybe even take one on a journey, and I had found a way to talk about crushes without revealing them. I also found acceptance for myself as the child who others found “weird”.

Oh, the song? Here it is:

CHORUS:
Pretty, pretty –
I would not take your feathers,
I would not steal your flight,
I only want to watch you
Spin stars into the night
I’d love to hear your stories,
I wonder where you’ve been,
I wonder where you’re going to
Pretty, pretty.
Who am I to seek you out –
A child who talks to birds.
I’d love to tell you something,
But I stumble on the words.
The poetry of birdsong,
The music of your voice
I wonder where you’re going to
CHORUS
And where am I to look for you?
I’ve squinted at the trees
To watch the flutter of your wings
Float past me on the breeze
The poetry of birdsong,
The music of your voice
I wonder where you’re going to
CHORUS
And who am I to seek you out –
A child who talks to birds.
I’d love to tell you something,

But I stumble on the words.

Personality and a Mood Disorder: Questions in my Mind

The musing below is something that might eventually get edited for the creative/nonfiction book about living with bipolar. I feel I always take a chance writing about being bipolar in this blog –I don’t want to be considered a lesser being just because the jilted fairy godmother showed up at my christening and said, “Just for not inviting me, this little girl is going to have MOODS!”

Thank you for reading.
*******

When I first got my diagnosis in 2012, I was devastated in a way I hadn’t been when I was earlier diagnosed with simple depression.

There’s a certain degree of difference between being diagnosed with depression and being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. In the former, the disorder can be separated from one’s personality easily. People talk about being followed by the “black dog” when they’re depressed. The “black dog” is described as outside, not inside oneself.

In the case of bipolar disorder, however, both the ups and downs are exaggerated by the disorder. People tend to view their positive moments as their genuine self, even saying “I am genuinely happy right now.” If one’s highs are held suspect, the natural reaction seems to be “Who am I? Who would I be without this lifelong disease?”

I estimate my bipolar became active when I was in high school, if not sooner. My mother described me as “an exhausting child”, and I wonder if that was my bipolar ratcheting up back then. My bipolar has had plenty of time to affect my personality:

People describe me as extroverted, outgoing, and a bit eccentric. However, the things I love to do most are more introverted — writing, puttering around in my grow room, and having one-on-one conversations with people. I think the “bigger than life” me — the one who teaches classes, the one who participated in theatre in high school — came from my feelings and experiences while hypomanic. I’m pretty sure my hand and facial gestures come from there as well.

I say what’s on my mind, even when most people would stay quiet. If I don’t, I feel a pressure — figuratively, not literally — in my brain demanding to let the thought out. Is this why we call it “venting”? 

I’ve developed an internal censor and some tact over the years, because when I first came back to the Midwest after five years teaching in New York state, I scared my students. (For the Americans in this readership, think “Consumer Economics by Gordon Ramsey”. Isn’t it “Dave Ramsay”? Not when I taught it.)  I still deal with that pressure, and that mindset that if we would just drag things out in the open, we’ll all feel better.

I get crushes because beauty strikes me like a stab to the heart. Richard finds my crushes amusing because he trusts me not to pursue anything past friendship. He’s right to trust me. I used to tell people I had crushes on them and that I didn’t want to do anything about it. (Yes, they were flattered. Yes, they thought I was strange. No, they never had a crush on me back.) Some of my poetry is an attempt to relieve the pressure.  I’m pretty sure that crushes are not hypomania themselves, but a high I learned from hypomania. When I become hypomanic they become extremely painful rather than amusing.

Depression has not really shaped my personality, because as it is for other people, depression is not me. Depression descends upon me and separates me from all I love with a black shroud. But I’m sure my unleashed imagination, my curiosity, my optimism, my straightforwardness, and my occasional flamboyance (and bold choice in lipstick) were gifts — yes, gifts from hypomania.