Where Have I Been?
Keeping my head just above water, this gorgeous Diane Seuss poem, and massive upheaval
Here’s my pelvic floor…
Even if you read just a little, don’t forget to heart down at the bottom, share, and comment. It’s so so nice when folks do that.
Where have I been this last month? Maybe my readers have wondered the same? Maybe not. We all have so much going on! I do feel some obligations to you my dear subscribers, to keep things going over here, and I have both missed and not missed sharing my life and thoughts with you in these last two months.
I also try very hard not to get swept up in the Substack analytics that Substack obviously wants us to get really into because they send them to writers often. After a post, while a post is up, how it compares to previous posts, and how you’ve done at the end of the month. I saw this morning I’d lost a subscriber, and had an instant feeling of Oh jeez, I better get back to posting, followed soon after by, Oh well, who cares?
I’ve also been completely unable to catch up anything. Are you having this too? Everything is late. I am LATE. But I’m trying to be okay with this. I don’t like it.
What got me back here today? I’m writing in the moment, in session, with one of my Writing Boss clients. While she works on her Substack, with check-ins from me, I’m also working on my Substack. Thank you X, and if you want me to tag you just let me know. I’m really glad I’ve got you writing, and I thank you for getting me writing. I sometimes forget that while I’m teaching, I’m also learning from my students and clients, and that is a gift I don’t want to take for granted, especially in the midst of so much fuckery, grift, and utter fascist relentlessness.
At the moment, I am able to sit in my desk chair, which I need to replace and/or reconfigure because in the last few months, sitting has become one of the most painful activities for me. So another thing that’s kept me from writing is PAIN. This pain likely began from a pulled muscle in Pilates way back in October or November. I kept going to Pilates and doing a lot of stretching, and it didn’t get worse, but also didn’t improve. In Berlin it definitely got worse, likely from flying and also sitting too long in uncomfortable archive chairs. On the way back from Berlin, I sat for almost eight hours, and the pain became excruciating.
I’ve had an x-ray which shows that I have some beginnings of arthritis, but no other bone stuff that they could see. I’ve started going to a physical therapist (god, I’ve had so many of these in my life) and we’ve pinpointed the situation to be the ligament or muscle between my sacrum and hip. I don’t know, I think that’s what she said. My main goal is to try to get someone to massage my butt, which is proving harder than I want it to be. The exercises are boring and all about my strengthening my pelvic floor and my lower abdominal muscles. Lots of squeezing my stomach together and kegels. Kegels forever I guess.
I am so tired of thinking about my pelvic floor. It’s made of crappy linoleum and it leaks, okay? Or maybe it’s a lush pink palace of soft pillowy flesh. I should go with the latter (or the photo above) because I’m working on not saying mean things about myself to myself in my head.
I am switching to the younger male PT who my friend E recommended and away from the older woman mom therapist because she doesn’t seem to want to touch me. I think she might be touched out, but what do I know about her? I do know I want the therapist who I have seen massaging everyone’s old and slackened muscles, but I do feel a bit yucky leaving the mom therapist.
Oh and politics. Pretty fucking grim, no? I’d say more but everyone everywhere is saying so much, so I don’t need to weigh in. Really. You don’t want to hear my inner wailing. I have not known what to write, and usually I can always write something.
BUT.
Others have said this far more articulately than me (shout out to
for this timely reminder), but for those of us abused by narcissists for some portion of our lives, hearing that gaping hole for a human talk, and now with his insufferable techie boy sidekick and the fathead some call the V.P., well, I mostly CANNOT DO IT. It brings me back to a little girl rage place and I feel like I need to chew my own arm off to escape or rise up like the Dark Phoenix and burn up the world.Taking a breath. My dearest A and I were texting the other day that seeing that criminal do his horrible things in public is like being married to the most unbearable and disgusting man and having to parade him around the world. Like it’s so embarrassing that he’s America’s/our husband. Ewww. Like you can’t take him anywhere, without everyone being like, “You married that guy?!”
Lastly, I so love this Diane Seuss poem that came to me this morning in my inbox from the Academy of American Poets Poem a Day (it’s free and you get a poem in your inbox every morning). The poem is called, “In Life I’m No Longer Capable of Love,” and you can listen to her read it, which I have done like ten times today. It’s such a middle-aged poem and I love it for its candor and short perfect lines. I do feel this way sometimes myself, but I haven’t articulated it at all, really ever so far. Here’s the whole poem:
In Life I’m No Longer Capable of Love,
of that old feeling of being
in love, such a rusty
feeling, rusty,
functionless
toy. In odd
sequential dreams
I can still love.
Love in the old way.
Here is a sweet lozenge.
Here is some broth,
on whose surface
I have floated
edible flowers.
I can feel the old feeling
where I used to feel it,
in my chest.
In the dream I feel it,
but when I wake
the feeling is gone.
There isn’t a word
for the feeling that replaces it.
Not numbness or emptiness.
It is a nameless feeling.
Racy in its own way.
A racy new toy.
The last four lines especially. My god, thank you Diane Seuss. “Here is a sweet lozenge/here is some broth/on whose surface/I have floated/edible flowers.”
Thank you to everyone making art, teaching, fighting, caregiving, resisting, and doing the things that need to be done to fight fascism, authoritarianism, and genocide.
Enjoy the typos!
xoxoxo
Carley
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