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Oh, so many thoughts, and no way to corral them — that’s not true, I have this way to corral them and what on earth do people do who don’t have this to steady them? Even when I’m not normally journaling as I have been for the last three months, I write. Really, what do people do? Talk on the phone? Post on Facebook? Seems like we all need to be heard, and to me sometimes it’s enough to just be heard by myself (though then I ruin it all by posting my morning pages on my blog, which is something of a nervous tic—I post, therefore I am).

Went to see Hilton Als speak last night. I’d originally wanted to cancel and stay in and be sad some more, but when I offered my tickets to my sisters, B said she was already going and C said she wanted to go, so then I wanted to go, too, to be with my sisters. It was great, and he was wise and funny and sweet, but there was something missing from him. C said he felt somehow empty, or flat, and I said that he didn’t seem quite authentic. I figured out what it was in the middle of the night—he admitted no flaw that I remember. He showed nothing broken, and therefore, he didn’t feel quite real to me. I like seeing brokenness next to patched repairs. I think it might be one of my favorite things about humanity—when we meet each other and display the cracks. I lift my shirt and show you my scar, and you lift your shirt and show me yours. Hell, even if you don’t show me yours, I want to tell you about mine, so that I feel less ashamed and perhaps you feel emboldened at a later point.

And I’m so broken, in so many ways. I fail and screw up and land in the wrong places over and over, and if I keep all that secret, then I choke and drown in my own shortcomings. But if I show them, I own them. I am given empathy (not the scorn we naturally expect when rolling over to show our bellies) and then I can show more. I like using the belly analogy because my own belly button is like a saloon’s swinging door—it’s been opened and shut by various surgeries so many times I can barely stand to look at it.

So therefore, I look at it.

Navel–gazing.

Which is EXACTLY what I’m doing now, what writing often is.

And that’s interesting—it’s one of the things new writers are scared most of. “Am I navel–gazing by writing this? Am I just solipsistic and annoying and self–obsessed?” Well, hell, yes! We all are! I think the more we can admit the automatic narcissism that lies within us the easier we can feel about it. It doesn’t make us narcissists in the clinical sense of the word. I’d argue it does the opposite—it gives us empathy for everyone else around us, each of whom thinks they are the center of the universe. And that’s fine. They should.

I’ve said this before, but when I meditate I take a moment to notice how I feel physically, emotionally and spiritually. I try not to judge the answer, just to notice it.

Spiritually, since I’m not religious, I like to inhabit for a second the awareness that I am all that matters in my solo world, the only person living in this body, and then I like to immediately think about that the fact that I’m one of over a hundred billion people who have existed on a planet that is in one of a hundred billion solar systems that is in one of a hundred billion galaxies. I’m literally nothing. I don’t matter—this can be argued empirically. But maybe what I do and say and who I touch matters a little bit. I let myself have this small hope, and it feels large. The knowledge that I’m so small can be frightening, yes, since this body is all I know, but it’s also comforting. No matter how much I screw up, it’s not that big a deal.

And I still get to stand at this desk and look out my windows and see the sunlight on the green, grassy hill that hangs just under my porch eave. I look at a couple of dozen houses on the hillsides, their windows shining in the sun, and think that in each of those houses live people who are exactly as tiny and as huge as I am, with all my same emotions, all struggling to avoid pain and find love and connection, and that in itself makes me feel like this life is sacred and shared.

This idea lets me get excited about tiny things like really excellent backpack zippers, and also about really huge things like birth and death, the universe’s creation and its annihilation.

And I’m allowed to get super excited about the fact that I get to sing Xanadu’s Magic at band practice on Sunday. It’s little (huge) things, of course, that matter.

Last night I started reading May Sarton’s At Seventy, the journal she started on her seventieth birthday, and I’m in love with her. How did I go so long without reading her? It crosses my mind that her voice is so familiar to me that perhaps I have read her, but I don’t think so? She writes like someone I could know, and I refuse to think she’s dead, even though I know she was born in 1912. I’d love to look up her Wikipedia but then it will tell me when she died, and I can’t know. I do think that there’s another volume of journals after this one, and that means she didn’t head out with this book, which is delightful to know.

When talking to a coaching client yesterday, she expressed an idea I hadn’t thought about much before—the idea that older women do not, in fact, know everything. The wisdom of the crone still includes lots of confusion and apprehension and everyday humanity which makes sense! Of course it does! There’s something in my heart, though, that believes a woman of seventy or eighty must have it all dialed. She just gets it.

And in many ways, it already seems like May Sarton does, even though she says she doesn’t.

“I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward, but I look forward with joy to the years ahead and especially to the surprises that any day may bring.”

I love this. I always wonder when I’m going to start looking backward, and I haven’t come close to wanting to do so yet. I have a romantic image of sitting around with my journals and morning pages one afternoon (should this be a Replenish assignment?) and see where I’ve come from, but I haven’t. I think I’d be both too overwhelmed and also too bored to survive the experience. I know I caught some of the past Rachael in those pages, but how much? Will I recognize her? At least I should read the parts that I wrote in the treehouse hovel apartment, because obviously, I can’t get that place out of my mind. My sister said last night that maybe it’s a place of fertility for me, which struck a resounding chord. Yes, that might be it, but how do I claim that? Or do I need to? Is there a need for exorcism or is it just what it is—a place I’ll always dream of like tsunamis and Venice?

Last night with sisters at the Alley, talking about Mom and the way she was able to lose it on me, something neither of them remembered. (I deserved it. I was the bad kid and couldn’t stand my mother from 14-17). One sister wanted to know where she was all the time Mom and I were fighting, and she said, “Maybe I was at swim practice.” Yes, she probably was! She always succeeded, and I was the underachiever, though I didn’t know that at the time. I think I fought depression so much and didn’t know that, either.

I just knew I wasn’t good enough, never good enough, and of course, that was exacerbated by the fact that when I tried to write, the one thing I wanted to do, I couldn’t figure out how to break in.

Writing was a forest that was closed to me, walled off. I had to earn my way in by building a ladder to get over the wall, but I kept looking for a door, for a break in the stones. I spent years walking around the forest, searching for my way in. Much later I found out that the only way to build the ladder was out of words. I find myself wishing someone had told me this clearly, but I bet they did. I bet Anne Lamott says something like that in Bird by Bird.

I wasn’t ready to hear it, probably. I had talent, I thought, and talent had always opened doors in walls (to other things) for me. I thought if I had enough talent, I’d deserve to find the door.

I gave looking for a long time. Then I painstakingly built a ladder out of words. Now I live in the forest, and it’s such an amazing place to be.

This morning I got up from bed with one intention: to rent a house in the middle of Oakland, maybe Rockridge or Temescal. I was still in the middle of a dream, and I think it’s the closest to sleepwalking I’ve come since I was a kid.

I’d been having a dream in which Lala and I were living in the old hovel apartment that haunts my dreams. Again and again, I find myself there. Like the dreams of tsunamis and not being able to get into Venice, it’s one that recurs at least once every couple of months. In the dream, I was standing in the bathroom looking at the floor that was cracking and falling in by the toilet. I could see where Lala’s footprints were denting the filthy linoleum. I knew that the house was falling down the hill, but I also knew that since it was our house, we could get $2800 for rent for it (this came directly from a real Zillow email from yesterday). I thought, hey! We’ll rent this place out, and rent a smaller place for ourselves in the neighborhood where there are restaurants and shops and cafes.

I literally got out of bed, thinking that I’d like to pay maybe seven or eight–hundred dollars for a place. I was headed for my computer and Craigslist when I ran into the real Lala in the real living room of our real house. Startled, I thought, Hey! I love this place! I don’t want to move!

The funniest part is that I thought we could rent in Rockridge for $700. And I just looked – there’s only one place for rent there that would allow the animals, and it’s $4850. Of course.

And I love this house. I love this neighborhood, though there isn’t any place to walk except up the hill (which isn’t bad!). I guess yesterday I was thinking again that we could rent this out for our mortgage and move to New Zealand if we wanted to. It’s always in the back of my mind. Not like I have time to play much more with the idea right now – not sure we could afford to live in or near Wellington, where we’d want to be. But it’s still a thought.

I’ve become a good sleeper. Not always: I had terrible insomnia two nights this week. But sometimes, maybe most of the time, I SLEEP. After seventeen years of a job which prevented this, I’m still amazed that this is my life. I sleep. It’s wonderful.

I just did my first inversion! First handstand! Against a wall in the office, of course, and I climbed up into it rather than kicking upward to get there, but still.

I did the backing up and walking up the wall thing, seen here. It felt pretty amazing. I loved the strength of my arms and the way my body felt. My body was shocked! What are we doing here? Are we really upside down? Should we be here? Is this dangerous? Or is it fun? I can’t decide! 

I read someplace that the easiest thing to forget to do while inverted is breathe, and I found that instantly true. I was holding my breath, and when I eventually did breathe, I could feel my lungs startlingly higher in my chest than they usually are.

I felt strong, and I know my shoulders and pecs are strong from yoga, but I think the next step is to walk my hands while in that position closer to the door, which seemed completely impossible to even imagine. Now I understand why they say to save some strength to get back out of it. I could just unfold myself down today because my hands were still at least three feet away from the door, but had I been closer, I couldn’t have done that.

I’m going to try one inversion a day for a year, but it’s unofficial. Maybe I’ll record some, maybe I want. It’s just something I want to do. 2018: Year of Being Upside Down. The view is different. Okay, the view is just of my office door. You know what I mean.

But my vision felt fresh when I stood back up, and I have a happy gratitude for this body I’m living in.

Inward: I feel good. Delicious yoga this morning that made my body feel like one piece again. Joanna Penn and I talked on the show the other day how yoga brought us both into our bodies after somehow managing to live 40+ years being just a head in space. Three, maybe four years ago, I couldn’t isolate muscles in my body to relax them. If I noticed myself hunched up, I didn’t know what to do about it. I’d try to release the tension, but I didn’t know how to drive the vehicle I was in.

Now, I love living in this body.

And the yoga–eyes still happen. This morning when I was done, I went into the kitchen and was astonished at the beauty of the bright white clouds above the trees behind Juan’s house—they scudded inland, high and fast. The bare trees were dark below them, and they reminded me of that Magritte Empire of Light I love so much and always visit when I’m in Venice. I saw it because I was there, because my eyes were open in that post–yoga glow.

Then I took a shower, which I normally dislike. It’s not that I hate washing or the water or anything—it’s just such a BORE. I’d much prefer to take my nightly bath to get clean, but I needed to wash my hair, and I tell you what, being in the shower right after yoga is amazing. I could feel the water and instead of barreling through the steps to get done as fast as possible, I just let myself feel how good it was to be there, under the warmth. I do yoga most mornings, and it almost never fails to bring me into alignment with myself. Yesterday I skipped it because of time constraints, and I felt the lack all day.

When I do yoga, my bones fit inside my skin.

Lala was SO sweet to me last night. I was in a terrible mood, grumpy and on the edge of tears all evening. All she did all night was try to make me feel better. She offered to drive in the rain and dark to a friend fifteen miles away to borrow a couple of pills for me (I’ve run out of my SSRIs due to a shipping snafu – hopefully I’ll get them in the mail today – if not, I’ll go wait in line at Kaiser). She offered to go get ice cream. Wait, a minute, maybe she was just trying to get away. I wouldn’t blame her. I wanted to get away from me, too.

And it makes me realize (again), how debilitating depression is. I had this moment with Mom when she was sick. She had severe dementia for about three days as the calcium flooded her blood, and I wondered how can people watch their loved ones go through Alzheimer’s. It was unbearable.

In the same way, me with my low–grade, treatable depression – I realize when I’m low that being clinically depressed or having major depression is like nothing I can even imagine. I’m not trying to compare anything here – emotions and brain chemistry are exactly individual. But I feel deep, desperate empathy for those suffering interminably. My depression is and always has been driven directly by hormones. My hormones are out of whack, and the SSRI helps with the lifting up of serotonin or whatever it is that makes me feel better. I tried diet, exercise, and meditation when it landed on me five years ago after my hysterectomy, and the only thing that helped was the anti-depressant – it made me feel normal. (That and it helps hot flashes, which is great, as I grew back an ovary after full hysto and am now going through SECOND menopause at 45 – allergic to estrogen and phytoestrogens. Right now, 3 days off my medicine, and the hot flashes are fifteen minutes apart. I’m about to give birth to the sun.)

But I have that option for my depression. One little pill can make me feel normal. Not happy or sedated or perked up. Just normal. I hate that everyone doesn’t have that option.

Again, I’m stuck staring into the fact that I’m so incredibly privileged, in every way, and instead of dodging guilt about it, I’m just going to allow myself to feel gratitude for it.

I’m grateful that I have health–care. That there is a rug beneath my feet that I can sink my toes into. That my dogs are cute. That I have a passion for my work. I’m so grateful for Lala.

And for coffee. Always, for the coffee. (I’m back on it. One cup (sometimes two) a day. It’s amazing. I’ll probably give it up again at some point for health reasons, but right now, the coffee is in my life and DAMN, is it delicious.)