One Year

Jason was supposed to turn 33 today. It always felt weird that between the beginning of January and the end of April our ages were off. For a few short months we were three years apart instead of four. When I was younger I liked the feeling of catching up for a little while, but it always felt like resetting to the way it was supposed to be when April 30 rolled around and I made fun of Jason for being old. I keep remembering a conversation we had on his 30th birthday. I was 26 and 30 sounded far away and vaguely scary. Jason was so excited to turn 30. He said he had enjoyed his 20s but was glad they were behind him. He said he felt like he had figured some things out and was ready to move forward and be in his 30s. A new and different kind of adventure. It made me feel glad and hopeful that he felt that way. I hoped that would be how I felt when I turned 30. Then I made some more jokes about how he was old and he'd always be the old one.

He only got two years of his 30s. It's so goddamn fucking unfair. The only person I knew who wasn't on some level freaking out about getting older but was instead excited to start a new decade and he only got two years. I am so goddamn angry. I'm angry that so much time was stolen from him. I fucking hate the people who did this to him. Hate is a strong word and blah blah blah but I do. I hate them. I don't really believe in God or Fate or any specific higher power but I hate all of them, too. They took my brother. They took his life. He had so much left. He and Gaea lived in their new house for six days. They took his future. They took their future. They took our future

I wanted so much to be different between Jason and me. We talked about it the summer before. He came to Florida for work and we each drove two hours to meet for dinner. We wanted to be more honest with each other. We wanted to be more involved. We wanted our relationship to be more real and deep and we vowed to work on that. It was off to a slow and bumpy start and I was unhappy about that at the beginning of 2017. I was frustrated and feeling hurt and a little angry but for the first time ever I was starting to feel like it was okay to feel angry. After all, Jason was the safest person in the world to feel angry at. We had literal decades to work all this out. He was the only person I felt confident I wouldn't lose.

Fuck this whole goddamn world.

And now for the first time the balance isn't being restored. Jason isn't turning 33. Next year I'll turn 30 and I won't get to ask my brother how to feel excited instead of scared. How to treat a new decade like an adventure. In three years, assuming I'm still here, I'll be older than my brother. That was never supposed to happen. If I live a long life I might be decades older than my big brother who, no matter what, was always supposed to be the old one.

I am so angry at reality. I am so angry at everything. Nothing was ever supposed to be like this and there's nothing anyone can do to make it any better.

I miss my brother. I am so scared of a long life without him. I would say that I want just one last hug from him but that's a lie. I want at least 50 more years of them.

Fuck Star Wars

You know what I want most from the Star Wars universe? More than land speeders, more than ATATs, more than Leia's hair or Wookies or BB-8? More than fucking Ewoks???? Force ghosts. I want to look up at the end of The Last Jedi and see a wiggly blue outline of my brother sitting next to me, smiling his goofy smile and lifting a glass to me like he's fucking Obi-Wan. Even if he was inexplicably Teenage Jason like after they remastered the originals to include Anakin for no good reason. I'd be fine with that.

This is not fair. This is so fucking unfair and unjust. I don't want there to be a Star Wars movie that I've seen and he hasn't. I couldn't wait to tell him after The Force Awakens how I'd started crying in the theatre because all my life Star Wars felt like it was made for him and I just loved it from the sidelines but now finally, FINALLY  there was a Star Wars movie that was made for ME! But I didn't mean just me. I was excited to be able to share it more fully. I will also be crying in the theatre for The Last Jedi. Probably the whole time. Like, from beginning to end, no matter what is happening on screen, just that weird lady sobbing in the back of the theatre. That's me.

Some of my clearest and youngest family memories are of watching the Original Trilogy together. Jason was obsessed. I can't count the number of times I watched those movies and I never watched them without him until my senior year of high school. We went to see all of the Prequels together. By the time Episode III came out he was old enough to drive us to the theatre and to this day that is the only movie I can think of that we ever went to see just the two of us. Makes that whole volcano scene worth it.

He had all the books. He had light sabers. He had Darth Maul's double-sided lightsaber. I'm pretty sure he dressed up as Darth Maul one Halloween. All our favorite puns were Star Wars-themed. Two years ago he got me a Rey shirt for Christmas that I wear all the time now. I stole the Rey doll he used to keep at his desk at work. You get the picture, right? Star Wars was a huge part of Jason and a huge part of our relationship.

And I'm not even really sad. I mean, I'm sure there's a giant ocean of sadness lurking somewhere underneath but my primary emotion is anger. I am just so fucking angry. Why isn't he here for this?? How can the world be moving on? How can it possibly have been seven months already? Every passing day feels like it takes me farther and farther away from my living brother and I just want it to fucking stop. He should be here for this. He should be here for all of it. This isn't what was supposed to happen. This isn't fair. This isn't right. I am just so goddamn angry at the whole fucking universe and I can't imagine ever not feeling like this, deep down, just under the surface, somewhere in my heart for the rest of my life. Fuck this. Fuck you. Fuck the people who did this. Fuck everyone who gets to just be excited about this movie. Fuck everyone who gets to see this movie. Fuck 2017 and every year that comes after it. Fuck Star Wars.

Useless Words

Tomorrow is the six month anniversary of my brother's death. Tomorrow, one of the people who killed him is being sentenced to 92 months in prison. I have tried and failed to write about what the legal process has been like for me. It's been heart-wrenching. It's given me whiplash more than once. It makes me question basic human decency. And it's only over for one of them.

The most significant change since I heard the whole story, since the charges for Vehicular Homicide were handed down, is that I have stopped thinking "my brother died" and have started thinking "my brother was killed". It seems like a small thing but the correct words make a world of difference. I don't have the correct words. That's why this is the fourth draft of this blog post I've written this month. It's why I didn't write a victim impact statement. The judge can't increase the sentence because the defendant took a plea deal, so my words will not affect his jail time. I do hate the people who did this but it is not the kind of hate that fuels me or stirs me to action. It is a useless, sad, tired hate. The kind of hate that won't be made better by seeing Meekins' face, by humanizing or dehumanizing him, by trying to make him feel guilty or express remorse before he goes to prison. I don't think it would work, anyway. He hasn't done either in his hearings so far.

It's not as if this is justice, anyway. I do not want these people who use cars as weapons indiscriminately to be allowed on the streets, but that doesn't mean that either of them going to prison is justice for my brother being killed. It isn't. There isn't any justice.

The lawyer told us that the victim impact statement was "really about honoring Jason". By trying to sum up and speak out in a court of law what my only sibling meant to me and what my life looks like now that he is gone. By trying desperately to make people who don't care about my individual story or his individual life, care. I don't believe that would honor Jason. I believe I honored him with puns and stories and glitter and enormous hugs at his memorial, his wake, and at the 100 Days. I believe I honored him by giving up on changing the past and just grieving for the person and the future that was lost. I believe I honor him by thinking about him every day, and by trying to live my life without him even though I still have no idea what that looks like.

I worship words, but I don't have the correct words for this. I don't have any words for this. Pain renders words useless.

"It Comes in Waves"

I've had some pretty intense grief waves the last couple of days. I keep writing and erasing ways to express it because I want it to be new and interesting and poignant and well-written and extremely personal but also unobtrusive and small and in no way inconvenient to anyone and not scary to share. Fuck that.

I miss my brother and I want him back. I'm angry that I don't get to make new memories with him. I'm trying desperately to remember absolutely everything we shared these last 28 years but the more I try to cling to memories we have the more they'll change and fade away (which is a real cognitive truth that I only know about because Jason gave me all of the episodes of RadioLab and I listened to them obsessively while I was living in the middle of nowhere in Texas).

I'm mad and I'm sad and I don't really need anything from anyone, I just need to keep living my life while I feel like this because it's never, ever, ever going to go away. I'll get better at handling it, I'll get more used to it, it won't take me by surprise as much, but this is my life now: Waking up from a dream where I can see 10 year old Jason clearly, running barefoot in the thick summer grass catching fireflies with me at Gram and Pop's house, and having to remember. Outright crying in a cafe because I wanted to participate in the "Compare pictures from 2012 to 2017" thing on Facebook and the only pictures I'm tagged in during 2012 were from the last Christmas I spent with Jason. Swallowing the urge to punch people in the face for mentioning their living siblings that they get to see.

I'm trying to make new friends down here but it's hard. I feel like if you didn't already know me before April 30, 2017 you will never really know all of me. Part of me is gone. And how close can you really get to people who can't ever see all of you?

I can't decide how to end this blog so we're going to do a Choose Your Own Ending. You pick:

1.(Shame) But all that being said, I'm being pretty self-involved right now because a lot of other people are hurting and there are so many disasters going on in the world right now that my own pain shouldn't matter.

2. (Optimism) But all that being said, I'm going to be totally fine because I have friends and family and love and graduate school and I know I'll move forward and get better.

3. (Gratitude) But all that being said, I am really grateful for getting to have my brother for the 28 years that I did. I'd rather have the pain of missing him now than never to have gotten to have Jason as my brother. Thank you so much for staying with me as I go through this painful journey.

4. (Defeat/Depression) And all that being said, I'm going to go back to bed to watch Firefly and replay all of the scenes where Simon is real sweet and brotherly to River over and over again and cry.

5. (Guilt) But all that being said, I am going to ruminate on what I could have done throughout the past 28 years if I had had the knowledge and emotional maturity of an adult when I was a child and also if I knew the future so that I could have *both* forced us to be closer sooner and talk a lot more *and* somehow convinced Jason and/or Gaea not to drive that day because if I think about it hard enough maybe I can change the past, even though that is literally insane.

6. (Honesty) All of these endings are a little true and a little not true and oversimplified and unrealistic. I'm glad I wrote all this stuff down. It's good to get it out but it's not really going to help that much. All that's really going to help is time, which is the absolute fucking worst and I hate it. Now I'm going to try to get some work done and then try to relax some and enjoy things and try not to let the grief take over but also try not to go numb because it's easier.

On Mental Illness, Grief, and The Way Forward

I post a lot of stuff about self-care on Facebook. I want to share it to help other people take better care of themselves. To be totally honest I am probably the actual worst at self-care in the whole world. I'm working to get better but it's a long slow process during which Gordon and Andrea have quadruple-handedly been keeping me alive. Seriously, they are basically the only reason I haven't been eating nothing but ice cream for four months. Why I sometimes get to work. Why I drink any amount of water. Gordon has been carrying me. Andrea too. For the most part I have acted less grateful and more like the gravely wounded guy in a war movie, all "I'm done for, just leave me, go on and live your own lives and let me die in the mud."

Because you know what? Feeling bad feels good. It feels warm and comfortable and safe. It feels just and righteous to spend all my time going over how everything could have been different and feeling blame and shame. I don't know how being raised by agnostics got me this crazy intense Catholic guilt but it snuck in there somehow and it stuck hard. It's like scratching a mosquito bite for ten minutes. It feels so good while you're doing it and you know as soon as you stop you'll feel terrible and realize how much you've hurt yourself but in the meantime it feels like sweet release so you do it for as long as you can before the "Ow ow ow I wish I hadn't done that" sets in.

These are obviously all deep-seated problems I've had for a very long time but I was getting (slowly, a little bit) better at them. Then I lost my brother and with him any feeling that I had any control over anything in the world and honestly a huge sense of self. So much of my identity and feeling of safety in this world - way more than I'd ever realized before - hinged on the knowledge that I would always be Jason's little sister. I mean, I always will. But he was supposed to be here for it. I've panicked and agonized over what would happen if any number of people I love died but Jason was not on that list. It was taken as a given that he just...wouldn't. It seemed impossible to the extent that I never even considered the option.

I had a dream last night - among a huge number of anxiety dreams - that the car accident was just a cover-up. That Jason had been killed by the government because he'd invented a software that would revolutionize virtual reality as we know it and [dreamlogic dreamlogic] the government couldn't let that happen. I was finding out about this from crazy news stories, no one had told me, but now there was a huge investigation being launched. And while it was terrifying and gut-wrenching I woke up feeling a little sad that I was back to a reality where there was no reason. Not even dreamlogic. Just garbage people driving like garbage and a split second of time in the exact wrong place.

 There are supposed to be reasons for things. If there's no reason then feeling like it's my fault, no matter how nonsensical that is, is better than confronting the idea that there is almost nothing in this life that we can really control. And I mean, of course, this is the response to a traumatic event - falling back on comfort and old habits and things that feel safe. But I've been kind of shitty to everyone in my life during this time. Especially Gordon. I rely on him and a few friends, then I get scared to rely on anyone and I push them away. Rinse, repeat.

It's time to be done. I've been so jealous of the beautiful and wonderful community that Jason and Gaea built for themselves, together and separately. I want it. But I don't think you can build a community without letting yourself/admitting that you need to rely on other people. As both Gordon and Gaea have said separately and in different ways, "This is not the way forward." The 100 Days...Celebration? Ceremony? Thing? The 100 Days Thing was about welcoming the family back into society. It took me about a week longer and some really poor treatment of my partner to understand what that means. I don't have to stop being sad. This will hurt forever. I don't have to stop processing, it's important to keep doing that. But it's time to stop consuming my entire life with grief and pain and self-hate. I recognize that I didn't come to this decision on my own but I have made it mine now.

I hate it when people say what dead people would or wouldn't have wanted. It usually seems disingenuous and presumptive to me. But I do know that my brother wouldn't want me to use his death to fuel my own self-hate or self-pity. Anyone who knew anything about Jason would know that. I do know that he wouldn't want me to dwell on the parts of our lifetime together where we disagreed, where we hurt each other, where we took things too personally. Even though it isn't fair, I am still alive. He would want me to act like it.

"Everyone knows you're going to live
So you might as well start trying"
-Regina Spektor

So I am actually self-caring: paying attention to what I eat and drink, resting, meditating, finding outlets, staying off Facebook (hopefully not forever but long enough to break my obsession that makes me think more about how to post about what I'm doing (and what people will say about what I'm doing) than what I'm actually doing and that keeps me scrolling and feeling jealous of my friends doing amazing things in California, Australia, Alaska, wherever, instead of paying attention to what I actually get to do). And I'm trying to remember that I am excited about graduate school, that I've wanted this for most of my life and I have it right now and I'm up for the challenge. That I have a fantastic partner and some great friends and that I will make more. That I can dance and move my body and fight for social justice and the fact that Jason can't anymore should not make me feel so guilty that I don't do what I can do.

My eternal gratitude to Gordon, for giving me way more strength than he had to give. To Andrea for keeping me fed and keeping me company, to Maggie and Jenny and Emmy and Gaea and my Mom and my Dad and Lizzie and Lizzi and Madie and everyone from my extended community who reached out and to Nell and everyone in Jason's extended community that reached out to me, too. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I'm going to start finding the way forward now. But I'm also still going to need you all.

My Non-Instagram, Non-Facebook-Worthy Emotions

I am not okay. I'm pretty good at hiding it, I'm really good at obfuscating or omitting details or denying it even to myself but I am just not okay. I haven't been okay for a really long time. About a year ago I was diagnosed with a long-untreated mental illness and have been trying to deal with it (I'm not comfortable talking about it much yet). I confided in Jason. We were trying to let it bring us closer together, but there were a lot of ups and downs and a lot of painful hashing out that had to happen first. And then 84 days ago my brother died and I have just fucking disintegrated.

I am hurting the people I love the most. I am feeling disconnected and far away from everyone I love. I am awful to be around. I am barely working. I am numb or having panic attacks, with no middle ground. I don't want to live in this world. I don't want to be me. I have gotten it into my head that the way to fix all of the problems would be for me to go back in time and surreptitiously unbuckle my seatbelt just before my car accident two years ago. If I could be 100% positive that me flying through my windshield at 70 miles an hour would prevent Jason and Gaea from being hit by those fucking psychotic drivers, I would do it in a heartbeat. If you're reading this and you love me, I'm sure that hurts to hear. I'm sorry. It hurts to think. It hurts to say. It sure as fuck hurts my partner. It hurts like hell not to be able to stop thinking.

I have people I love. I have a partner, I have friends, I have family.  I have a snake. I have a lovely house and I get to garden and do things I love. I can make more friends. I live in a city with my fambly. I am getting my master's degree at a fantastic school in a fantastic program with a fantastic project, which is a dream at least 6+ years in the making. I have a hard time feeling any of it.

I don't want to be here. I don't want to stop feeling devastated. I don't want the pain to stop. I don't want to admit this is real and can't be changed. I don't want to heal or move forward. I want to want all those things. I want to want them so badly. But honestly, I don't want anything. I want to take other people's pain away but I can't.

I'm not suicidal. This is not a cry for help. I'm in therapy and I'm going to a Coping Skills group and I'm meditating and I'm on medication. It just all fucking sucks and as a culture we don't talk about mental health and as a person I have been posting nothing but happy nonsense and political reposts and I didn't want to be lying like that anymore.

Good Advice

Mock me for having 10,000+ emails in my inbox all the time if you want, but I'm telling you you're missing out.

I was searching for something unrelated and found the sweetest email from my big brother while he was in the Peace Corps in Vanuatu to his terrified little sister who had recently graduated college and was feeling lost. I turned to a book on Buddhism he'd given me before he left ("lent", "gave"...what is the difference, really?), something I keep telling myself I'm going to do again any day now and haven't yet. There was a lot and it was all great but my favorite passage was this one:

"We get so wrapped up in our delusions, desires, attachments, plans, fears, expectations, etc. that we forget to actually live our life.  Yes, we need to do things like plan and save for retirement.  We don't, however, need to save every penny we can so that our life sucks today but will be full of comforts in 20 years.  What if you get hit by a bus in 19?  The practice is about finding the balance of living like you'll die tomorrow and planning like you'll live forever.  Of course you need to make plans, improve yourself, build relationships, get an education, and save for the future.  You also need to live your life.  There is so much in our experience every day that we ignore.  So much beauty we miss when we are stuck in our heads.  I will find myself striding down the road to Melsisi, thinking about my lesson for the day or what I'm going to eat for dinner, or what witty comeback I should have made hours earlier.  Then something will catch my attention and I'll realize that I've been completely ignoring this beautiful place in which I live."

It's good advice. Advice I've heard from everyone, advice that is easy to think about and (at least in my case) almost impossible to follow. But it felt so good, hearing it from him. Hearing that your self is just a story that you cling to even though it's always changing and that "Suffering is caused by our desire for the world to be other than as it is." 

My last post is an example of me 100% rebelling against all of this advice. Dwelling on the story that we weren't where we wanted to be as siblings and now we don't get to get there. Clinging to the idea that he isn't really dead, that it's my job to save him and also everyone. I am not good at following this advice no matter how many times I hear it or who I hear it from. I will not get better at it just because I read the words he wrote to me five years ago.

But just for a minute, while I was reading them, I got to feel pure, unattached grief without shame or blame or clinging or terror or anxiety. Just love with no place to go.

Grief is a Form of Love but Maybe Also a Form of Insanity

I've been having a lot of trouble with tenses lately. When I talk about Jason do I have to use past-tense? I hate it and sometimes refuse. I still say "I love Jason" because that is firmly in the present and doesn't stop, but I also sometimes say things like "Jason once told me that he thinks..." which is past and present at the same time. When I refer to what is now just Gaea's house I find myself unable not to say "they're fixing it up".

I am in this very weird stage of denial, and have been for a while, where I know and believe that Jason died but do not believe that he is dead. This can't possibly be forever. No way. A thing happened and it was terrible and it is terrible still but like, nothing this bad could be true forever. Even Trump has term limits. It cannot keep being this way indefinitely. I find myself thinking about things I wish I could do with my brother, like taking him out to my field site the way I took my mom this week, as things I will do with him, you know, when this whole death thing is over.

Usually I feel like it is my job to make it stop. Like, if I could go back and change some of the things we said to each other in the months before he died. If I could take back some of the words and some of the feelings it could end this extended Scrooge scenario where I'm supposed to learn some lessons and fix how I act and then go back and avert the Darkest Timeline. Or like maybe I can't go back but if I treat everyone in my life perfectly now and make them all feel good all the time and be a better more open person then this whole "death" thing will end and I get my brother back.

I can't tell if this is normal grief or me going insane. Maybe feeling like you're going insane is a part of normal grief. Or "normal" grief for someone who also has unresolved mental disorders.

I suppose it is interesting and also pertinent that Christians and people of many other religions do think that they have to be very very good the rest of their lives to see their loved ones in the next life. I get why that is comforting. If I believed in that kind of afterlife I would throw myself into volunteering and do everything I could to make sure I got to see my brother again. It would be nice to have a concrete thing I could do to work towards it.

But I don't. I'm not Christian. I'm not religious. I don't believe that when I die I'll meet Jason on a cloud and we'll wear Birkenstocks and fly around. I don't know precisely what I believe but it's not that and that's a different blog post.

Instead I feel stuck. I feel helpless. Call me a classic younger sibling but I feel like there must be something I can do to get what I want, to get my brother back. I don't want to heal. I don't want to move on. I don't want to stop obsessing over what I could have/should have/done/said/if only...because that's giving up on the idea that I can fix it. That I can get to the Underworld level and drag him back like a video game. If I start to heal I might start to forget him. If I start to move forward I might leave him behind. Assuming I live five more years I'll be older than my older brother. That's unacceptable. I refuse to do that. I don't want to wallow for the rest of my life, either, but there has to, HAS TO be something productive I can do for Jason, for my parents, for Gaea, for his friends, for my friends and family, for anyone else who is hurting. I need to make it up to him, make it up to them. But how could I?

Did you know that the more often you remember things the less accurately you remember them? Because every time you call up the memory small things change and then you call up the slightly changed memory and it slightly changes again and again and so on. I want to remember everything. I want to build a perfect memory castle in my mind, but the more I try the more likely the memories are to slip.

Then there's the whole part where we are siblings. We fought. A lot. Mostly when we were kids, but also more recently. We've been arguing lately. I was still feeling pretty freshly hurt on April 30th. I was only feeling hurt because I love him so incredibly much, but still, I was hurt and angry. Do those feelings no longer count? Sometimes we didn't talk for long periods of time. Not that big of a deal when you're going to have each other for the next fifty years at least. How do I stop beating myself up for not calling him monthly or weekly or daily knowing what I know now? Do I focus on remembering the things I wish were different just as much as the good times?

When I was at my grandfather's funeral in Virginia I had a dream that Jason was there with me only it wasn't an idealized vision of sibling love, it was what would actually probably happen which is that there would be some awkward silences. We would argue about something and I would feel like he wasn't listening to me fully and he would not understand why I wouldn't just let it go. Do I let him become a more perfect but less interesting person in my head? Is that kind or a disservice and to whom?

Shouldn't I wallow and feel terrible all the time? After all, there is no good reason why he should have died and I shouldn't. It probably should have been me. Shouldn't I never ever feel better? But also, do I now owe how I live my life in part to my brother? Should I be happy sparkly rainbows all the time? How can I learn to take up more space in other peoples' lives when I know that A) I am a shambling wreck right now and hurting the people I love, especially because I'm not even ready to try to do anything but grieve and B) by loving other humans I am opening myself up to the possibility of another beloved life that might just be lost too soon.

Is there a way to grieve healthily? If you grieve healthily does it mean you didn't really love the person who died? Is worrying about how I'm grieving super self-involved? Should this whole blog post be about other people and not about how I feel? Is it okay for me to decide it's okay for me to feel okay sometimes?

All this, to say: I've got therapy on Monday.

Grief Realtalk Part Deux

I've had a couple of good days in a row. Or at least, I haven't been sobbing much. It's hard to tell if I'm feeling better or just numb. And if I am feeling numb, that's bad and I should stop. And if I am feeling better, isn't that just awful? It's been less than a month! I should still be a completely wrecked shell! What does it mean about me as a person, as a sister if I'm starting to get over it?

I did some good self-care stuff this morning. I even got dressed and wandered the farmer's market downtown with Gordon. I was having a lovely time looking at sparkly sparkly jewelry I would never buy when a young mother behind me admonished her child, "Be careful, Jason!"

Then I started crying and hyperventilating in the middle of the farmer's market.

I'm not over anything. Of course I'm not.

Now I just need to convince myself that it's okay to not feel devastated constantly; that even enjoying myself on occasion or having a couple good days in a row are not things I should feel incredibly guilty about forever. Also numbness is probably occasionally necessary and okay in small doses. Just believing those things are okay is going to be hard. Grief is a lot of work.

Grief Realtalk

The stages of grief are bullshit. Like, I have definitely felt most of them: bargaining, wishing I could somehow trade my walking away from a car accident two years ago for Jason walking away from this one; depression, for sure; denial, comes and goes; but they're interspersed with lots of other feelings and they appear and disappear in a random order.

For a few days now I've been mostly solidly stuck in Anger. I am angry at the people who offer comfort of the "You'll see him again" or "Your dog is comforting your brother" variety. So far no one has said to me that everything happens for a reason which is good because I would break their nose. I am angry at you for having siblings. Not that I want anyone else to feel these feelings, I don't wish that or harm on anyone, but fuck you for still having yours when I'm alone in a way I was never supposed to be.

I am angry at the assholes who ran that fucking red light. I am angry at everyone I see driving even a little erratically. I'm angry at all the Gods and gods I don't even believe in. I'm angry at myself for things I said and didn't say, things I did and didn't do. I'm angry at time. I am so, so angry. And I have no idea what to do with it.

It is Not My Job to be Pretty

I'd like to first start off by saying that I IN NO WAY look down on or seek to change people who love makeup, who take pride in their artistry with it, who love high heels or fancy suits or dress to impress or any other way they want. If that makes you happy, more power to you! This is not about "that shouldn't make you happy". This is about slowly realizing that it doesn't make me happy, and that I don't have to do it anyway.

Until very recently I had rules about how I could dress. There were fewer and fewer of them as I grew older (I learned to love my legs and not feel like I needed to hide them in order to shield the eyes of the masses, I even learned that it's totally fine if I don't shave them all the time AND that sometimes I really do want to shave them and BOTH of those are okay). I bought huge silly glasses because I wanted them, without trying them on first, and then I bought giant BLUE glasses which I have always wanted and never thought I was allowed to have because they make me look silly not pretty. I shaved my head and I didn't look as pretty without my curls but I looked like a badass which is just as good, maybe better. I learned that leggings totally, totally are pants and that "my stomach isn't perfect so I can't wear crop tops" is stupid.

The titular realization really started with shaving my head. I wanted to be cool. Like, literally. I was working outside for ten hours a day in hot, humid, Florida and any hair was too much. I wavered about it for a while but the decision to do it came from that realization. "It is not my job to be pretty." My job is to be a field biologist and to love and enjoy my body and do what makes me feel good and shaving my head helped me do all of those things. I had to haggle with the barber, who did not feel comfortable shaving my head and at the end told me I was "lucky to be pretty enough to pull it off" which made me super uncomfortable, but it felt awesome and it looked super cool. I started posting pictures of me making silly faces instead of always smiling perfectly. I started barely looking in the mirror or at pictures before I posted them because my hair always looked the same, and that has continued since my hair has grown in. I don't know what it's doing up there, it's just kind of crazy curly and doing it's thing. It does its job, I'll do mine.

I've barely worn makeup in years but I've recently decided that even for big events there is no rule that says that I have to try. Sometimes I want to and it's kind of fun if I can make it look nice but I really don't like how it feels on my face and how hard it is to get off and how stressful I find trying to put it on. So. Why do it, unless I want to? It is not my job.

Similarly, I've very recently started Accepting my Eyebrows. I have Some Eyebrows. I kind of wish they were less bushy and shaped more nicely. But you know what? I really don't wish that enough to painfully pluck them all the time or pay someone to rip the hairs out or learn how to do whatever other methods of hair-removal there are. I used to shame myself when I didn't remember to pluck regularly. Which was always. Because I hated doing it and it was a chore and it is NOT MY JOB. So instead I have embraced my weird bushy eyebrows. And if I feel compelled to pluck them, I will, it's not a hard and fast "plucking your eyebrows is giving into misogyny" kind of rule, it's just...if I want to I will, if I don't, I won't.

Some Eyebrows

The rule I haven't stopped to consider changing (until now) is my No Warm Colors rule. Back in middle school I went to one of those Makeup Parties where they try to sell you makeup and tell you things look good on you so you'll buy them, etc. They did this thing where they lay two fabric swatches across your chest and had everyone look at your face. One side was Cool Colors and one side was Warm. They went around and did this to every girl in the room. Most of them looked basically the same on both sides but they got to me and everyone in the room went "Oh my god, you look SO bad in warm colors." So from that day on it became a Rule. More than a rule, it became almost a disability. "Oh man, I love that shirt but I can't wear warm colors", etc. I never questioned it. They had told me it made me look bad. I could not knowingly do something that makes me look bad. It's against The Rules.

A few months ago I bought a bright pink shirt at Goodwill because I was going to some Breast Cancer Awareness night at a club with a friend and everyone was supposed to wear pink. It was only a few bucks and the cut looked pretty good on me but it was definitely a Warm Pink and so I would only wear it for this one occasion in which I was forced to and then I would donate it back or give it to someone or only wear it for fieldwork or exercise or something where no one would see me.

But it stayed in my drawer. And I liked it. It stood out among my sea of blues and greens. I wore it to yoga a couple of times. I wore it when I was just lounging around the house. I would never want anyone in the outside world to see me in it, but I could wear it with my dark green pants on days when I felt shitty and feel like an adorable watermelon instead.

And today I was digging through my shirts for something to wear and I looked at my bright pink shirt and thought "Oh, but I was planning on going out today so I probably shouldn't..." and then I thought "OH MY GOD IT IS NOT MY JOB TO LOOK PRETTY" and I put it on. And you know what? I really don't think it looks bad. Maybe I will buy more pink things. Or yellow. Or orange! Maybe I am ALLOWED TO WEAR ALL OF THE COLORS!! What a crazy world that would be!

Pink shirt, hair going everywhere, silly face, bushy eyebrows. This is the first picture I took and it is fine. I don't have to take 8 more and pick the VERY BEST ONE. This is so fucking freeing, you guys!

A Midwesterner in Louisiana

So far I haven't really had "culture shock" down here, but then, I haven't gotten out that much yet, either. However, I have noticed a few key differences.

For one thing, it is already spring here, and spring lasts for *months* not just two weeks!

Administrators

Having now spoken to what I can only assume is roughly half of the administrators on campus for various things, I feel I have a firm handle on this one.

My whole life it has been impressed upon me that when you walk up to someone, say, a receptionist or other administrative-type-person from whom you want something, you stand very quietly and hopefully until they acknowledge you. In the Midwest if you get impatient or just anxious that they might not have noticed you and say "Um, excuse me?" very sweetly before they are done doing whatever they are doing you will get a glare-smile and they will be icily polite to you in a way that makes you feel ashamed and also fear that they will "lose" whatever precious paperwork you just handed them.

Here, no one will pay any attention to you if you are just hovering over their desk awkwardly. They will just keep doing whatever they're doing, even if it is blatantly texting on their phone, until you announce yourself. Then they will drop whatever they're doing and turn to you and you (read:me) will brace yourself for their Smile of Death or even worse their one finger and "I'll be with you in a moment" said quickly without looking at you or moving their mouth. But instead, miraculously, they are cheerful and happy to help you! Sometimes they even tell you about the last time they had to get an X-ray or whatever you're trying to get accomplished. They aren't angry at you for speaking at all! They just weren't going to be the ones to end the unbearable awkwardness. I'm starting to wonder if maybe no one down here feels palpable unbearable awkwardness permeating every situation the way Midwesterners do. (That is a Midwest thing, right? Not just me?).

Similarly,

Passive-Aggression

They do not know what passive-aggression is. Or at least, they only play in the minor leagues. At my UU service last week the Reverend was talking about how everyone seems to be enraged but express it politely (he did not even use the term passive-aggressive) and my heart fell for a moment because I thought the South was so much more open than that! Then he gave some examples which were things like "Oh good, I'm so glad you were late, it's not like I had anything else to do." Which is not even a little bit polite and I can't even imagine a real human saying that. A Midwesterner would say "No, don't worry, it's fine." with a strangely fixed smile and murder in their eyes.

How Are You?

THEY REALLY ACTUALLY SEEM TO WANT TO KNOW! I am so used to using no more than two words to express my mood to anyone who asks, even friends. I have the habit of saying "Pretty good" even when at a funeral or in the hospital for a car accident or whatever. Because there is that permeating sense of awkwardness if you try to reply for real (with friends we circle back to it eventually, but the most I usually open with is "Not great" and wait for them to signal that they are interested in hearing more).

Here they describe their illness symptoms, tell you all about the problems they're having with getting their house restored after the flood, tell you about how they've been working at this same store for 41 years and never really had a dream and never want to learn to cook (true story, that happened within a minute of meeting someone). IT'S FANTASTIC! Sometimes I start to get impatient and I frequently respond "Pretty good, how are you?" and then listen to 10 minutes of information but I love it and I want it and I'm going to get better at giving people my full attention and telling them something real because it seems really important.

I'm kind of freaking out.

This is an extremely weird time. Two days after the inauguration of Trump I moved almost as far south as I could get, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to start a masters degree at LSU in Renewable Natural Resources. It's currently halfway through my first week. Longing for my partner, missing my friends, not sure how to find community here, not sure how being myself will be taken by my new colleagues. I feel constantly exhausted by the deluge of horror that's spilling from the white house every day, but I also feel really excited to be in this beautiful place following my dreams. My dreams to research and conserve our beautiful world and the creatures in it who are being harmed by human nonsense. Like the two ridiculous pipelines Trump just okayed and the extraction and use of fossil fuels which I'm sure will increase since the EPA is basically on lockdown right now and everyone employed by the DOI is supposed to stop communicating with the public and if it were possible Trump would order that use of the phrase "climate change" be made a felony. The CDC even had to cancel a summit on the health effects of climate change which should NOT be a political issue! Not allowing the sharing of that information is murder.

Meanwhile I'm down here overjoyed because I FINALLY have access to every science database that has ever thwarted me by asking exorbitant amounts of money for anything more than an abstract (you mean I can search Wiley AND Science Direct????? Ravenclaw HEAVEN). My project is to look at the effect on nesting waterbirds of a restoration project on a barrier island to mitigate sea-level rise due to climate change. This project is basically perfect and I've been wanting to go to graduate school for six years and I'm HERE, studying wetlands in one of the most unique and well-preserved areas for wetlands in the world (but also incredibly fragile and susceptible to things like oil spills and climate change). I'm also feeling more comfortable being openly queer than I ever have before (or was, before I moved South), something I've worked hard at for a really long time.

So I'm so excited and I'm terrified all of this is going to get ripped away. I'm pretty sure all my funding is through the state of Louisiana but I work in the USGS Cooperative Unit here at LSU which is who pays my advisor and is a part of the Department of the Interior. I am actually not positive whether any of my grant money comes from them or not. So far they are not affected by the same shutdowns the EPA and Forest Service and National Parks are, to my knowledge but...is it only a matter of time? Will Wisconsin actually shut down their DNR and if they do will other states follow them? Will I be unobtrusive enough to be allowed to continue my research? Will there be renewable natural resources LEFT when I graduate, much less jobs to research and protect them?

Am I safe as a queer female scientist in this country? Should I even bother applying for healthcare down here since it seems to be rapidly disappearing? Is it selfish to worry about all of that when I know I still have a lot of privilege and am not in as much danger as immigrants, Muslims, black people, and many other groups? I read an article recently saying that in order to preserve the strength to stay angry and keep fighting back you have to pick and choose a couple of causes to rally behind because you will burn out if you try to do everything at once. That makes sense to me. But how can I choose? The ones that affect me most? The ones that do the most harm to people in general? How can I, as a feminist, as a queer woman, as an empathetic human, not also stand up for black lives and native lives and Muslim lives and immigrant lives and science and truth and art and justice and prison reform and the environment and living wages and healthcare for all and freedom of the press and against LITERALLY EVERYTHING TRUMP STANDS FOR. How can I not be there for all of it? I mean, I actually can't. It pulls me apart when I try, I go numb and catatonic and useless. And I try to tell myself that the research I'm doing is resistance, is helping, that taking care of myself is necessary to revolution, that caring for my friends and family is too, that just being me is an act of rebellion, etc. etc. etc. but I don't know if I believe any of that. What could possibly be enough against this much evil?

27 Things I Learned in my 27th Year

1. Explanations and apologies are not the same thing.
2. It's okay to take a break.
3. I am not nearly as trusting or open as I thought I was.
4. How to tube and tag venomous snakes.

5. I have a mental disorder.
6. "Sometimes human beings just have to sit in one place and, like, hurt." (Infinite Jest)
7. I can just book airline tickets without permission from anyone else.
8. How to safely engage in civil disobedience/peaceful arrestable actions.
9. How to deepsea fish.
10. Polyamorous relationships are hard but great and totally worth it.
11. How to ear-tag small rodents.

12. You cannot force someone to love you the way you want them to, and if the way they want a relationship is too painful for you, you CAN walk away.
13. I'm better at cooking than I thought I was.
14. I can let other people take care of me. Sometimes. If I try really, really hard.
15. How to get angry (not just abstract political anger but like, at humans I know and love).
16. I look damn good with a shaved head.

17. How to commit.
18. You don't have to be tolerant of hate, ignorance, or intolerance. This includes arguing civilly to try to change minds.
19. It's okay to be wrong sometimes.
20. Anti-depressants/-anxiety meds aren't terrifying and didn't change my personality. And they actually can help a lot.
21. How to bachata.

22. Leggings are pants and crop tops are shirts.
23. How to find Bachman's sparrow nests.

24. What shame is. But like, in the way that a fish learns what water is.
25. I'm better at embroidery than I thought I was.
26. Our country is way more horrifying than I thought. Just way more.
27. It's okay to tell the truth.

America's Ghostwriters

Okay, so in my little corner of the internet we’ve been talking a lot about how to deal with white supremacists/racists/misogynists who refuse to respond when called out. The Liberal view, the view that I have always had, is that these are Good People who just don’t understand the implications of what they’re saying and that we need to meet them where they are and do the emotional work for them so they will see how harmful their views are.

This is coming up again while I listen to Immigants (We Get the Job Done) from the Hamilton Mixtape (by far my favorite song on this album besides Dessa’s). How is it possible that people hate immigrants? That “immigrant” has become a bad word in this country? I mean, if you want to talk about white and nationalistic privilege I am about as high on the scale as you can get. I had an ancestor on the Mayflower, I had one who signed the Declaration of Independence, I had ancestors on both sides of the Civil War, everyone in my entire family – both sides – was in this “country” before 1700 – before it was one. If I can see that our country is built on the murder of millions of Native Americans, forced immigration/slavery/oppression of African Americans and oppressed and vilified immigrants from all over the world – that we wouldn’t exist without them and that they make our country and our lives measurably better and that it is ridiculous to deny immigrants, especially refugees, entrance to our country and equal rights and every possibility that is supposed to be the cornerstone of being an American…if I can see all that other people must just not be looking. If I could just open their eyes. If I could just trigger their empathy. They have to be able to feel it. They HAVE to. It’s just ignorance, and ignorance has to be fought with information. Right?

But through a conversation with Gordon I realized that for anyone spouting these views who is unwilling to engage when they are called out it isn’t really about ignorance. They don’t really think that nonwhite people/people of other faiths/women/immigrants aren’t people…they just don’t actually care whether they are or not. This argument is physically painful to me, that someone could not be blind to what they're doing but actually just not care, but I think that it's true of most of the kind of bigots we're talking about. You can’t get them to engage their empathy because they are purposely shutting it off. They want things to be better for them and they don’t give a flying fuck about anyone else in the world and they’re using bigoted rhetoric to advance that position. Engaging their cover argument legitimizes it.

Here is the paraphrased conversation I just had with Gordon that finally has me feeling like giving up on arguing sense and empathy into humans who refuse to employ them and instead focusing my energy elsewhere. There are two ways this conversation goes:

Bigot: Group X aren’t people and don’t deserve the same rights as me and I’m going to crush them for my own benefit.

You: You can’t say that! Group X are real people and you should care about them and imagine them complexly and think about it from their perspective here let me explain why…

You will lose. You have already lost by engaging because they don’t care whether they should care or not. They don’t. You can’t convince them. You will expend a huge amount of emotional energy and they will MAYBE come away with something to think about that MIGHT EVENTUALLY blossom into understanding but they WILL NOT immediately change their mind except in EXTREMELY rare circumstances.

Bigot: Group X aren’t people and don’t deserve the same rights as me and I’m going to crush them for my own benefit.

You: You cannot say that.

Them: Stop me.

You: I will.

That is the only way you win. Don't convince them. Stop them.

Word Portraits

               In the age of selfies, when everyone carries a camera in their pocket and knows precisely what they look like at every moment, there is a burgeoning new market for the return of portraiture. Not with paint, no of course not. No one now would sit still that long or pay an artist when they can style themselves into oil with a few swipes of their finger and a good filter. They can post it immediately and gather Likes. It’s the easiest thing in the world.

               But perhaps these people who constantly show the world how they wish to be remembered could benefit from Word Portraiture. Anyone can take a selfie but who can describe themselves with accuracy? Who knows how they move? How they look in unstudied moments? For a nominal fee I will paint you into a prose-poem. Like any good portraitist I will soften your wrinkles and make warm the light. I will learn the briefest flash of your eyes, the falter of your lips, your shyness as you glance aside. I will witness you with all the accuracy you can handle.

               So come into my shop. Sit with me in motion and emotion. To ease your mind I will share my story. I would have been a writer but I had no gift for plot. Good with verbiage but not verbs. My characters moved through one dimension with a complicated grace but nothing ever happened to them. I was an artist, not an author; words were just my medium.

               It’s been two years and I am still in business. The secret is to be studious but soft, true to life but just a little sweeter. Look around the gallery and sample my wares. My hourly rate is reasonable; all you have to do is let me in. Without Da Vinci all that’s left is Mona Lisa with a selfie stick.

Live Broadly, Love Deeply

There’s a kind of motto I came up with (or stole? It’s so hard to tell) when I was in Texas trying to figure out what the hell I was doing with my life. “Live broadly, love deeply”. It is still kind of a mission statement of my life but the thing is it’s hard to do both at the same time.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been cultivating the courage it takes to living broadly. Going new places, trying new things, spending a lot of time alone doing the things that I want to do, experiencing new parts of the country and the culture. I started dancing again: first jazz, then hip hop, then Latin, I learned how to catch and tag sparrows and rats and snakes, I tried new restaurants by myself, went camping by myself, spent all day with the ocean alone, had strange wonderful conversations with random strangers. I’ve seen and done a lot of amazing things and I am extremely proud of the person I’ve become in that time (or perhaps, always was).

But it’s been really, really lonely. I have a lot of friends I love a tremendous amount and a couple I even keep in pretty good contact with but the phone can only do so much. I’ve made a lot of fantastic acquaintances. I love meeting new people, but it’s hard to really get to know them beyond a surface level, hard to integrate yourself into their life when you both know you’re leaving in a couple months. Hard too, to break yourself of the habit of being a loner enough to try to get close to them. It’s a layer of protection when you know you get attached easily and are leaving soon (plus a lot of underlying trust issues that made me want to be a loner in the first place but we won’t get into that here). Here in Florida has also been the least social field job I’ve ever had. Even though I live with several people who all seem pretty cool, I almost never see them. We all pretty much just smile and wave when we pass each other in the kitchen and basically don’t talk or hang out. It’s weird. And that was sort of how I felt living in South Carolina, too. It felt very temporary. Living with my parents was very familiar but also a little uncomfortable. There comes a point at which you can’t go home again, not for very long (especially when “going home” is a brand new house in a state you’d never been to). I made some friends but by the time we started getting close I was leaving. I loved Charleston, I loved exploring the city and living on the coast and all the new experiences, but it was broad and not deep.

I left Wisconsin triumphantly in January, planning not to come back for more than a short visit for a long time. I’ve been saying I want out of the Midwest for YEARS and I do hate the winters and the springs, now that I know that spring in the Southeast lasts for MONTHS and is BEAUTIFUL and full of FLOWERS instead of lasting for two weeks and being mostly mud.

But I went back to Wisconsin a few weeks ago. I’m sorry if you’re a Wisconsinite reading this and I didn’t tell you I was there. I was only going for a few days and I wanted deep quality time with the few people I was going to see. I stayed with Gordon, with whom I’ve had a strange, slowly growing relationship for a while now. We’ve been quiet about it, we didn’t really know what it was. It didn’t truly solidify into something really real until we saw each other again. After months of phone calls it felt so good to be with him. So much better than I imagined. It was indescribable. I don’t even really want to try except to say that it was such an intense amount of love and care that it was sometimes too bright to look at.

I went down to see Jenny and her brand new tiny human. I got to the hospital the day after she gave birth. I’ve never seen a baby that fresh before. I helped Jenny get in and out of her chair, still in a lot of pain from her C-section, and held baby Charlotte who slept peacefully and made tiny squeaky noises while Jenny and I talked about our lives and our loves and everything. Rob stayed to chat for a minute before he went off to check on Ryker and they both insisted if I ever wanted to I could stay with them and Charlotte’s hair and chubby cheeks were softer than anything in the world and it felt unbelievably good to be a part of that family.

LOOK AT THAT FACE

The next day we met Maggie for breakfast. I literally ran down the street and flung myself at her. God I love her so much. We held hands and sat in a tree and dangled our feet over the water and talked about everything and cried and laughed and hugged and kissed each other’s faces and I have missed her. So. Much. And we vowed that even though we are both terrible at long-distance communication that our love will never ever ever decrease, only increase and pieces of me that I hadn’t realized were missing fell back into place. 

After that Gordon and I went to see my horse. I’ve owned Lark for 16 years and I hadn’t seen him since January, one of the longest absences ever. He let me hug his face – which he never does. He stood completely still while I untangled his tail for an hour – which he never does. He was patient and sweet in a way that showed me that he had really missed me. I rode him bareback and it felt like coming home. Gordon even got on – his first time on a horse – and it was maybe the cutest thing that has ever happened. Afterwards we stood with Lark as he ate grass, just standing quietly with him and listening to the munch of his teeth which is one of my favorite sounds in the whole world. I like to just stand while he eats, to be part of his herd, because that’s how horses bond. Gordon understood and stood quietly with us, the three of us herding.

TRUE LOVE

And I burst into tears. Gordon put his arm around me and I buried my face in Lark’s mane and Lark made comforting munchy noises and I just sobbed. It felt like my heart had grown twelve sizes and still overflowed.

The truth is that I am really good at the living broadly part. It’s not that hard for me at this point. I like being alone, I’m brave about trying new things, I am curious and fascinated by everything…I could spend my whole life skating along the surface exploring new things and meeting new people. Loving deeply is hard. I didn’t realize how hard until recently. Through a lot of talking to Gordon and some therapy and some medication I have realized…well, a lot of things that I’m not going to go into now. Suffice it to say I’ve been numb and terrified for a very long time. I crave deep, real, love, but never feel like I can break through and find it. I haven’t felt it in person like that for a very long time and I certainly wasn’t prepared for feeling so much love so intensely in 24 hours.

For a long time, I thought that real strength meant Independence, meant being off on adventures alone. And I’ve certainly found that kind of strength in myself the last few years and I love it and it is so much fun. It’s one of my favorite things about myself. But I think the much more difficult (for me) kind of strength and courage is the strength to be open and let others in. That would be a much braver act for me. I still have a lot of work left to do but I am definitely less numb now than I have been in a very long time. I’m not ready to settle down forever, but I want a community. I want people around that I love and to build real trust, to really feel like I can be open. I want to be able to really get to know new people. And really get to know a new city! I want to be a regular somewhere. It’s so strange that that sounds so much more terrifying to me than running off and living in a trailer in the middle of nowhere in Texas, or driving all over the country on a solo roadtrip, or any other low-paid, short term, dangerous job alone in the boonies. I think a lot of that has to do with the fear that learning to love deeply and trust others and forging a friend family for myself will take away my ability to run all over the world alone and do crazy shit, but that’s the beautiful part: I don’t have to choose. I can have both. Live broadly AND love deeply, after all. I just have to prove it, to work hard at it. It’s a challenge. And luckily, I’m both competitive and stubborn.

So this is my current Life Plan:

Tomorrow is the last day of my job here in Florida, which I have absolutely loved. I’m going to go back to South Carolina for a couple of days and then I’m driving back to Wisconsin and staying with Gordon and Andrea for a while. I am extremely nervous and excited about this. I’ll visit as many Midwest friends as possible while still having time to just be in Beloit. I’ll really sit down and work at applying to grad schools. Two to three years for a masters is a good amount of time to find a new place, settle, make new but real friends, build a community, etc. But before I go to grad school, I’m going to Europe. Alone. To just wander and adventure and see things I’ve never seen before.

Live broadly, love deeply. This is my plan, anyway. Maybe it’ll fall through. Maybe I’ll chicken out. Maybe something will go terribly wrong. Maybe I won’t get into grad school. I’m terrified about basically every part of it, but then again, I’m terrified all the time. So. Nothing to do but walk forward with my eyes, mind, and heart wide open and see what happens.

Go Fish!

It feels so strange to describe what I'm about to describe as a huge adventure, an ethical experiment, a big step in my life, when I know for so many people it is enormously commonplace. But, there you are. I just ate fish! Let me explain.

I've been a vegetarian for over 14 years now, more than half my life. I went cold turkey, so to speak, no easing into it by cutting out red meat first, no slip-ups in all that time, no exceptions for holidays or shellfish, nothing. My reasons for becoming a vegetarian were mostly centered around the cruelty of slaughterhouses but as I grew up I learned more about the incredible unsustainability of meat and fish consumption in this country as well as the inhumane practices and in time I just lost my taste for it in general. Until recently I was pretty positive I would never eat meat again. For the last two years through friendships with some extremely ethical hunters I've started to consider it but something was always holding me back: I would never feel comfortable eating meat without facing the fact that I was taking a life in a direct way. If I went hunting in a sustainable way, if I killed something, and watched it die, really felt the sacrifice that was being made for me, then I would eat meat again.

But the opportunity never presented itself, plus I was worried after all of that I wouldn't like it or I would get sick - either due to guilt, the placebo effect, or the fact that I don't have the enzymes to digest meat anymore - whatever the reason, I'm really not into vomiting. I try to avoid it at all costs. So I had settled into believing I would probably never eat meat again.

Until, as a thank-you for all our hard work, the head of the gamebird lab at Tall Timbers offered to take us all on a deep sea fishing trip in the Gulf of Mexico. I said yes, excited for the sun and the sea, and did a lot of soul-searching about how I felt about the fishing. Gordon was enormously, incredibly helpful, having done a lot of the research I was now trying to do in one night. He had researched, for instance, the fact that suffocation/freezing are actually pretty painless ways for fish to die. That their bodies just sort of shut down gently like falling asleep. I researched the species we'd be likely to catch to make sure we would be harvesting sustainably (http://www.seafoodwatch.org/), and I tentatively decided that when I went I would fish, that if I caught anything I would try to cook it and eat it and use this as an opportunity to explore my world in a new way.

We woke up at 3:00 am to get to the boat by 5:30 when it was supposed to ship off. Most of my coworkers aboard were kind of good ole boys and there were bets laid on who would get the biggest fish and plenty of southern trash talking. There was also sea and sky and wind and it was lovely to be on the water and heading out far enough that we couldn't see the land.

Sunrise as we set sail.

Also we saw dolphins!

Before we even got to the first place to drop our lines there was a tug on one of the trawling lines, continuously streaming from the back of the boat. My bosses were extremely excited for me to catch something so they had me sit in the chair with the rod and reel as fast and hard as I could. I caught the first fish of the day: a fairly small king mackerel. The first fish I'd caught since I went catch and release fishing for tiny freshwater sunfish with my dad when I was nine.I got high fives and a healthy dose of pride.

The rest of the day was fast and furious fishing. More often than not I baited my own hook, even though poking a hook through a dead fish's eye made me wince every time. Once I accidentally grabbed one of the live bait instead of the dead ones and I could feel its heartbeat as a strung it on my hook. That was horrifying. I seriously considered putting it back but no matter what I did that fish would be used as bait that day, and my inability to kill it would not save it and ultimately it was fulfilling its purpose in the food chain to help us catch the bigger fish that would feed us, but it was still a feeling I will always remember, the fish limp and cold in my hand with the dull beating in my palm. 

I watched the fish we brought on board intently to see if I could tell whether they were suffering. I am not an expert in animal cognition but at this point I'm a pretty keen observer of animal behavior and to my eye it looked like Gordon's research bore out. Once on board, once the hook had been removed and they were laying flat in the cooler, the fish quickly settled down. If poked or riled they would flop and seem to gasp but when left to lie in the thin air on a bed of ice they seemed to settle and expire as peacefully as possible. I did my very best not to turn away from any of it.

I caught two more king mackerel - fun because they are real fighters - including the biggest mackerel of the day! I caught two runner jacks and a bonita - a beautiful fish that put up a hell of a fight. I caught a tiny red snapper, too small to keep, that the deckhand slid off the hook and back into the water for me. My last catch of the day was a small vermilion snapper, right on the border of being big enough to eat. The first mate was busy, so I hauled it up myself, held the almost beatifically calm fish in my hand and ever so gently coaxed the hook out of its mouth and where it had been wedged below its eye. It didn't puncture the eye, the fish didn't seem to feel it, but it was dainty work to pry it loose without ripping its face or puncturing its eye. I did it patiently, without making the fish squirm too much, and then let the small fish slip back into the deep water. That was my last catch of the day and it felt good to end on a note of mercy.

To be honest, it was fun. It was a new experience. It was sun and salt and surf. It was fighting with nature in a new and unaccustomed way, sometimes triumphing, sometimes bringing up my hook to find I'd been outsmarted. It felt like being a part of the food chain in a way I'd never experienced before. There was a nice camaraderie on board, I got a little southern twang going trash talking with all the dudes. All in all, it was a pretty wonderful day.

The king mackerel I caught, biggest of the mackerels we caught that day.

In the end, I didn't keep much. Most of my catch went to the other folks aboard to keep them from buying grocery store unsustainably caught fish which I feel really good about. My boss took the mackerel I first caught, the small one, home and cleaned it for me. They all insisted I take two of the snapper fillets home even though I didn't technically catch any.

I'd caught and killed fish all on my own, now the only thing left was to learn to cook it. And see if I liked it. And if I could keep it down. Well, it took two weeks to get the time and to get my nerve up but tonight I cooked the mackerel, the one I caught and killed myself. I haven't cooked any kind of meat since I was young enough to need adult supervision. I've never cooked fish. I looked all over the internet for different recipes but the most popular ones were always very simple. In the end all I put on it was olive oil, salt, pepper, paprika, and lemon.

I broiled it for maybe eight minutes, completely unaware of how to tell when fish is done.I felt pretty confident that it was done well when it moistly fell apart when I tried t transfer it to a plate. I screwed up my courage, took a bite, and...

I loved it. It was DELICIOUS. Light and lemony and perfect. It was moist and practically melted in my mouth. I was so afraid that the texture would be abhorrent to me but I just loved it. I had to force myself to eat slowly, little bites, and take breaks to make sure my stomach didn't rebel at any time, but it's been an hour and I've kept it all down! I ate the entire thing. It was absolutely delicious. It felt so good to know that I had fought for this meal, that I had won it in a contest of strength and learned to cook it myself and that I was enjoying the fruits of my labor. I felt bad that it was at the expense of another living creature, but it felt good to be a part of the food chain in a new and interesting way. Also it was SO GOOD. I ate salad along with it to trick my body into digesting it well.

I don't think this is the end of my vegetarianism in any way. I still consider myself a vegetarian. I will probably eat those two red snapper fillets in my freezer and still consider myself a vegetarian. I may never go fishing again. I may make it a staple of my diet - fresh fish caught by me. I'm really not sure what it means about the future, but it was a really excellent experiment and experience! I found out that I am stronger, braver, and better at cooking than I ever thought I could be. I did something brand new, something WAY outside of my comfort zone. I took a risk, I took a chance, on a gut feeling and advice from people I trust and respect, and it turned out beautifully. Honestly, better than I ever thought possible. My world is a little bigger now.

Snake face, baby bird heart

I haven't posted much since I got to Florida on Monday and here is why: I've been trying to figure out what to say.

I love to be seen as adventurous and brave. I am both, I know I am, but it's the side I like to show off best. I like to post beautiful pictures and crazy stories and leave out the hard stuff unless it's funny or shows how tough I am.

I love being the person who lets a snake crawl up their face.

I adore my crazy adventurous job. I want to post pictures of mice and lizards and songbirds and Spanish moss and leave it at that. Would it be better if I did?

Or should I tell the whole truth? The truth is that in addition to being brave and adventurous sometimes my heart feels like this:

Gaping towhee nestlings we found yesterday.

And by sometimes I mean a lot. It's hard to admit but just as real and I am tired of trying to push it away or harden my poor baby bird heart.

This is the longest I've ever been out of the Midwest. I've had lots of little four month adventures, to Australia, to California, to Texas, to South Carolina, but this is the first time I haven't gone back. It feels right and it feels good and it feels terribly lonely and isolated and scary. I'm not even sure I can be homesick - what home is there? And I'm not building one here, I'll be moving who knows where in four months. I'm trying to become a turtle through sheer force of will.

No, not homesick - heartsick. I miss my people: not just in the Midwest, all over the country, all over the world. Everyone is moving or putting down roots and doing great things either way and I'm so happy for everybody but I worry a lot about the people I love disappearing or not knowing how important they are to me. To anyone who is or has ever been close to me (if you're reading this chances are it includes you) here is what I want to say:

Don't forget me. I hope you carry me around in your shell the way I carry you. I hope the next time we meet it will be like no time has passed, even if it's years (though I hope it's soon). I hope you like the pictures I post of snakes on my face and birds in my hands and I hope you have crazy beautiful adventures and share them too. And most of all I hope you know I love you and I miss you and I wish we talked more and you mean more to me than you think. Try to reach out from time to time? Even a little, even rarely. My baby bird heart will eat it up. I'm not great at it either but I'll try too, I promise.

Love,

Karis

Wild

Laying here, curled up in the grass next to the river, listening to the wind rattle the long-dead prairie grass, I realize that I am madly in love with the sky. That’s why I feel breathless on those winter days with thick blankets of low-slung clouds. I am longing for my love’s sweet blue face. The warmth of her yellow smile, even in the winter’s cold. I can feel it now, as I gently doze, stroking my face like the hand of a sweetheart. Although there is ice on the river I am not cold. I lay still, pressing my heart against the earth like a lover after sex, feeling snugly secure of my place between the earth and sky.

It has been too long. I always let myself get to the breaking point before I come back here. This is where I am me, but I am used to the cage that I accepted for most of my life. I’ve been getting bolder. Over a year now of slipping out of the cage, climbing over the back fence, roaming farther each time. I still come back though, lock myself in out of comfort, duty, habit. But I know that it is not where I belong.

I am not a true wild thing yet. “I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself” (D. H. Lawrence) and that is something I have been quite a lot in the last months. But I am growing wilder. My body is changing with my newfound freedom. I used to be all ample curves, not overfed but soft, domesticated. Now I am angular, bones and muscles and hard edges. I can go for longer between meals. My eyes can see better in the dark. I am no longer stricken by terror in the quiet, longing to fill my every moment with human voices to dull the fear.

And there is quite a lot of fear. Stuck halfway between, I fear both the unknown and the cage. I am more elusive than I once was. I do not trust myself yet but neither do I trust anyone else. It is exhausting, which is why I return so often to the safety and consistency of the cage, but that no longer feels like home. I run myself ragged, flailing and clawing wildly, feeling lost and alone and running in circles, trying to decide who I am. Eventually I always find myself here. Safely tucked between the earth and the sky, breathing into the slumbering grass, my face caressed by the last rays of sunlight. This is who I am. Remember. You already are everything you want to be.