Getting by with a little help from my friends
Life feels really weird right now, but also really normal, which is part of why it feels really weird.
It’s one of those nights where I take my migraine meds before bed and hope it means that at least I’ll have a good night’s sleep. I’m not sure if the migraine is really coming, but if I wait until I wake up in the middle of the night with surety, I risk starting the medication cycle at a time that probably means several nights in a row of disrupted sleep—because once the meds start, I usually have to take them about every 24 hours for three or four days before the headache clears. It sucks to wake up at 2:00 or 3:00 AM with waves of pain rolling through my skull.
But I wake up after only two hours, my pajama top damp with sweat. Just this week we switched the sheets from flannel to cotton, because the days and nights have turned a corner and we’re supposed to have a 90 degree day over the upcoming weekend, even though it’s only early June. I stumble to the bathroom in my medication fog, then stumble back. I’d like to change out of the pajama top; it feels cool in a wrong way. But I don’t because that feels like too much effort. I fall back into bed and hope again for good sleep.
I don’t get it. At 4:06 I wake up for the fourth time, and this time I move to the extra bedroom. My husband’s alarm is set to go off at 5:30, and I’m so damn tired. Usually I like to get up when he does, but not on the mornings after nights like this one. The bed in that room still has flannel sheets on it, and I hope they won’t feel too hot. They don’t. They feel like a hug. I’m grateful for them.
While I am lying there, focusing on my breathing (in-2-3-4, out-3-2-1), I hear the sound of water. Water? It can’t be water. There’s no rain in the forecast. Oh, no! I think. We must have left a sprinkler on all night! I get out of bed, open the blinds. The whole backyard patio is wet. I look for a sprinkler, because, sure, my husband might have set it to run on the patio. You never know. That’s how much I trust the forecast. Or how muddled my brain is.
He didn’t. There’s no sprinkler on. I decide that it is raining, even though I can’t see any rain falling down. I am confused, as I’ve come to see weather forecasts as promises more than predictions. I remember, when I was a kid, how adults used to complain and/or joke about how wrong weather forecasts were. No one does that now because they are usually right. Maybe they won’t be now that we’re defunding so many things we haven’t yet realized we rely on.
I get up at 6:30 to make my husband’s lunch, feeling like a 1950’s housewife, or what I imagine it was to be a 1950’s housewife, which is based mostly on Leave It to Beaver, a show I watched in the mornings before school in the 1970’s while my mom fed us breakfast and made our lunches. I probably should feel more like a 1970’s housewife, but unlike my mom I do not have to make lunches and then go to a job. I no longer have kids to feed, and I am retired now. That still feels weird to me, even though it’s been four years since I worked full-time. I am not, like June Cleaver always was, wearing a dress, pearls, heels, and full face of make-up while bustling around the kitchen with shellacked hair. I am wearing the same gross pajama top, though it is now dry. I have brushed my teeth, but not my hair.
I tell my husband the things I had planned to do today that I now will not be doing: Going to the gym, washing my car, working in our garden. I decide that instead, I will try making the granola recipe1 I found last weekend in the Grand Central Bakery Book while I was looking for a cookie recipe. (Their lemon cream sandwich cookie is so, so good.) I take a frozen loaf of bread out of the freezer to finish baking. I make a cup of tea. I feel grateful again.
While drinking the tea, I read an essay by Elizabeth Beggins, “Waiting to Be Said.” If you like what I write here, I think you’d like what Elizabeth writes in her space. You might like her writing more than mine; I often do. Today, her writing makes me feel like I wish I could be a little more polished, or a little more something, more consistently here. And it also makes me feel good. Elizabeth’s essay makes me hopeful (something her writing often does), and it makes me believe in the power of small actions. It makes me think about church.
I think about how I’ve been meaning to write for so long about church, which I started attending back in November. It wasn’t really the election results that sent me to church. I’d been thinking about visiting or years. But it was probably the election results that got me over some hump about it. I’m an atheist and most white people who identify as fervent Christians put me on guard now, but this church partnered with a civic organization to build a tiny-home community in their parking lot to serve unhoused women most at-risk for abuse in traditional shelters (BIPOC, LGBTQ+, mentally ill) and they are what I think of as actual-Christian Christians. Christians who act like the Jesus I learned about as a child. They say, “All are welcome here,” and they mean it. Their reader board messages have been serving me small morsels of real (not fake) hope since I moved to this neighborhood in 2018.
I have been feeling a little ambivalent about going to church, even though I love the work this congregation does and I want to want to go to church. It’s mostly because I am an atheist and so much of what happens there doesn’t quite fit for me, but also because I’m having a hard time really connecting with others who attend Sunday services. I am looking for community, but I’ve been wondering if this is the right community for me, seeing as I don’t believe in God in the way that most others there do. Elizabeth’s essay makes me think about the value of small connections, though, and wonder if I’ve been asking myself the right questions.
Thinking about this also makes me think about an article I read earlier this week, that my friend Jill shared in her regular Monday roundup, Something Good. The article discussed something called “hypernormalization,” a term coined in 2005 to describe life in Soviet-era Russia. As writer Adrienne Matei explains it,
“…hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening. The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.”
Oof, yeah.
Those that Matei interviewed for the article talk about the importance of being connected to each other as a means of countering hypernormalization, which is at least partly what Elizabeth is writing about, even if she isn’t connecting her ideas to that concept. Both pieces get me thinking that the most important thing about church might be just knowing and being known by others who live where I live, rather than finding some perfect kind of community or spiritual practice. Maybe it can be enough—and more than worth getting ourselves there on Sunday mornings—simply to come together weekly with others who live with us and have similar hopes for the world, and that we know their names and they know ours. Maybe that is a more profound act than I have previously imagined.
I wander around our little house for a bit, so grateful for all the kinds of shelter it provides. I am so thankful to be here alone on this rainy late spring morning when I’m feeling crummy, so grateful for my normal life.
And then I open my computer and begin writing these words, so I can remember these thoughts before they slip away from me. So I can share them with you. I told a writing friend, Tracey (whose work you can find here), that I would participate in Jami Attenberg’s #1000wordsofsummer challenge with her. The idea is to write 1,000 words a day for two weeks. I started strong, but the past two days I wrote 0 words.
These words here are not the kind of words I wanted to write when I told Tracey I was in. I have another project I want (or want to want) to work on. It feels more important than what I’ve been doing here. I’ve been finding it hard, lately, to read posts like this one from other writers. (What do all these words of ours matter? Sometimes it feels like we’re all just talking while the sky burns.) But maybe the other project is not more important. Maybe these are the 1,000 words that need to be written today. Maybe it doesn’t matter what words are written, only that words are written. I’m grateful to have any, whether they are some kind of right ones or not.
Showing up imperfectly (here, in my writing project) might be, for me, a little bit like showing up for church. Showing up for life. It’s not exactly what I want, or want to want, or maybe think I should really be doing, but it’s me saying to you, as Elizabeth says to others in the grocery store, Hi. I’m here. I see you, and I’m glad you’re here, too.
It’s me saying,
Life feels really weird right now, but also really normal, which is part of why it feels really weird. Let’s keep showing up for each other as we can, OK? And maybe introduce each other to some of our other friends, so we can make our connections a little bigger, a little stronger. We might need more of that going forward, yeah?
Anything in here resonate? I’d love to hear about it, talk about it, trade thoughts. And a special request for the comments this time:
If you are a person who shares your writing online, maybe drop a link to your work in your comment? I’m pretty sure some of you who don’t know each other would really like each other’s writing. Or, if you’ve already found a writer you appreciate through reading their comments here, let us know that, too.
I know that there’s no digital substitute for things that only IRL connection can bring, but there’s also a real and equally compelling need to connect with those who are our kindred spirits, or might be. I don’t know how it is for you, but some of my most kindred don’t live anywhere near me and I might never meet them in real life. And I am so grateful for all the ways in which we are helping each other navigate this long, strange trip of a time we’re living through.
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Careful if you try it. I baked as directed and it all burned. 🙁 Will try again another day, because I think it would be really good if not burned. There’s a metaphor for ya.
So glad you put words down to share. Showing up as you are is its own kind of church, even with bummer burned granola! Yikes! My mom called this the ministry of failure— not that it is failure, but allowing yourself to be known and seen as less than polished and perfect can feel that way. Keeping it real. Her stance was it allowed others to then show up as themselves once you revealed yourself to be authentic.
The cognitive dissonance of the weird and oddly normal is extreme over here. I find myself gritting my teeth while reading a book or obsessing about what I will cook for dinner tomorrow. ( as of now, baked potatoes)
These touch points in writing from a friend and moments in person keep me grounded and aware of what is.
Wishing you all the nights of pain-free and peaceful sleep.
Life is SO weird right now. I find myself reading Substacks like Robert Reich and Heather Cox Richardson and Hopium -- political stuff I had been avoiding the last few months -- in order to FEEL BETTER about my life. Started reading Joseph Nguyen's popular little book, Don't Believe Everything You Think, and it's helping, I think. Or maybe all of this is just to say I'm looking for someone to tell me: Geez, it's all falling apart and I'm not alone. Also, maybe there's something I can do. I send a little money to ACLU and other than that I'm just treading water here and trying not to go under. Still seeking a diagnosis for the hubs and his mental decline, still living with a person who doesn't know (or won't accept) that he's losing control. I also read Chicken Scratch, by the way (probably because you sent me there on another occasion). And my progressive church has great readerboard signs, too. This is all over the place, which is why I haven't blogged for a while. I will be back: www.bethanyareid.com -- A Habit of Writing.