I'm at the Estes Park YMCA campgrounds with my family. (Cabins, not tent camping.) It's awesome but cold. I feel nuts for leaving Los Angeles in February. I slept terribly last night. Top bunk. My husband stayed home this trip. I was fretting about Instagram, about feeling like I had been an abnoxious jerk to my family, about death. Death. You know, death? I'm worried that I pack my schedule so full of things: two SMC classes, two basketball leagues, a gymnastic class, a lyra class, a screenplay rewrite and a new co-written screenplay. I want to stave off unwanted thoughts and anxieties, but even with a super packed schedule, there are always moments in between for the thoughts to creep in. I can't keep myself fully engaged in something else for 100% of the time. I tried meditating once, a guided meditation for 15 minutes, and I was so bad at it that it made my anxiety worse the rest of the day. There's really something wrong with me, I thought.
My mom told me a story I liked. She's a leader for the little kids at Bible Study Fellowship. These are mostly homeschooled kids, so they aren't the most socialized. My mom and a co-teacher split duties teaching the lesson, planning a craft, facilitating a game, etc. They always have a short rest time where everyone lies down on their towels. They tell the kids to Be still and know that I am God. The kids are supposed to be still. There's a boy named Easton who will lie on his towel flat on his stomach. He'll grab the front ends of the towel and very slowly inch worm his way across the room. Very slowly. "Easton, be still and know that I am God." He looks up innocently. You could hardly call what he's doing moving, he thinks. So my mom lies down on a towel next to him. She puts her foot on the back of Easton's towel. Easton tries to inch his way across the floor, but realizes he's not going anywhere. He looks at my mom who's lying nearby, her foot on his towel. She just looks back at him.
Blog Time!
Bellamy, Dodie – THE BUDDHIST
Published: 2011
Read: 2/2022
I read about this book in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. It’s a collected series of blog posts by Bellamy, an experimental poet who’s writing prose in this instance, about a protracted break up with a man she calls the Buddhist. He is a professional Buddhist in that he leads all these spiritual retreats. The two were emailing incessantly. Bellamy is married to Kevin. “I suppose my situation is reversed at the moment—carefree marriage, bad affair.” It turns out the Buddhist is also kind of married. The two get very close and then as it comes time to meet in person, to get closer, he withdraws. “It’s confusing to encounter people whose love is complex, a doling out and then withholding, an obsession with control. People who cause you so much pain that eventually it doesn’t matter if they love you or not, you just want the pain to go away.” And “My therapist says he’s seen, over and over, the pattern of a depressed guy pulling someone in there with him, and once that person is hooked, he withdraws.” It’s 20% through the book – I can see the progress on my kindle – and Bellamy is talking about how she’s finally at peace. She’s finally over him. This will be the last she talks about him. Incredible. Relatable. “[…] and there it was again, the unshakable longing that I keep thinking I’ve shaken […]” More quotes that I related to:
• “Because this is what I do—whether I want them or not, I push things as faar as they’ll go.”
• “You know how it is—someone enters your life and you feel reborn. All your loneliness is suddenly gone, loneliness is this thing on the distant horizon, loneliness will never approach you again.” I do know how it is.
• “[…] that all relationships are about finding the right distance.”
• “I’ve always loved with an unguardedness.”
• “[…] how I was so focused inwardly on raging emotions and thoughts of him, the world felt insubstantial.”
I don’t totally see myself in this next quote, but I still like it: “But I did love Plath, and I did address raw emotion in my poetry, I was embarrassingly nonfragmented and direct, and, yes, my work was considered stupid and my eyeliner was too heavy and I talked too loud and whenever the opportunity presented itself I was always eager to fuck. I was a bad experimental feminist.” There’s something in the book about not being how you are “supposed” to be and yet disagreeing with the rules of society. But of course, the Buddhist – the person your connected to by that bright beam of attention – might not think like you. He may, he probably will, go along with society. And how to get people by and large to come on board? You probably can’t.
I’ve had crushes like this, although probably not so bad. Not so bad in that I don’t know that I’ve had a crush like this who I’ve also gone in real real deep with. But it was useful to read because I was feeling like a freak. To be married, to keep having crushes. To feel out of control longing and loneliness and desire. To feel like I must be bad in someway. Defected. But here’s a very talented writer with a husband and a strong community of friends, an engaging life, who also feels this way. And she was in her 50s when she wrote this to boot. I’ve never read anything like this. Nothing close to this, and it was electric to feel myself in the pages. To feel both like things are not going to be okay – life is relentless and people are… tough. You can’t just get them to do what you want. You can’t necessarily even help them get out of their own way. – but also things will be okay in that I’m not the only one going through this. That the shame heaped on top of the pain of an experience like that could may be a little less.
She also talks about “masterpiece” writing requiring months and years of sustained effort and discriminating judgement. That seems about right, minus maybe the masterpiece part. In my acting class, the professor told us that talent is in the choices we make. That’s the discriminating judgement. The ideas, the choices. The rest is work.
Last thing: “Anyone would love me. Why won’t you.” And “All my klieg lights are turned on you. The miracle of you.”
Rating: ★★★★1/2
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