Say the True Things Out Loud

My birthday is Saturday. This is not big news, certainly not in the context of the news right now. In that context, it is not even news at all. If this were a regular moment in time, it still wouldn’t be a big deal. So far, I am very chill about aging. I am just grateful to be here, grateful to have another day - even now, in the midst of all this insanity. I love that I get to be here, that I get to wake up in the morning, that I get to love the people I love.

Redwoods this weekend. Photo credit, my daughter.

I love that there are redwoods and poems and coffee and live music you can feel in your chest. I love that I managed to push two babies into this world, and that they’ve grown into two of the best people I know. I love that once when I was driving and my son was four, he suddenly asked me if I was going to die one day, and his little voice caught and quavered -

and I realized looking at him in the rearview mirror, he had just understood the secret of life: knowing that it doesn’t last forever and neither do the people we love most in this world, so you’d better not waste time.

I love that when my daughter was four, she was singing along to Free Falling and thought the words were: she loves cheeses, and her best friend, too. I also love cheeses and my best friends. I don’t feel invisible, and the only reason it occurs to me to mention - people say it’s a thing that happens to women over fifty. Not to me, not yet, anyway.

There are a lot of things I know about myself that I didn’t used to know. Once when I was five I got upset with my mom. I don’t remember why, I just know that I was beside myself, crying. I said I wanted my grandma, my Nanny, even though I knew she was in Heaven. I said what I felt at that moment, knowing I couldn’t have it - just because sometimes it helps to say a true thing out loud. And my mother said I couldn’t have her because she was dead.

She did not say it in a kind way, she said it in a way that broke something in my small heart. So I said I wanted my Aunt Louise, who was always sweet to me just like my Nanny had been, and my mom grabbed my suitcase out of my closet and yanked my dresser drawers open and started throwing my clothes in without folding them, drawer after drawer. That scared me and I said I was sorry and begged her to stop, and I tried to take my things out of my suitcase, but she would not let me. She zipped it up and grabbed me by the wrist and marched me through the apartment.

She put me in the stairwell outside with my suitcase, and slammed the door. I stood there, sobbing, banging on the door with my little fists and pleading with her to let me back in, promising I would be good. This went on for forty-five minutes. I know this because our neighbor Ulla from the apartment across the hall finally came out and pounded on the door, and when my mother heard that she opened it. Ulla looked at her sternly and said forty-five minutes was too long to punish a five-year-old like that.

But I learned to be good because if I wasn’t, even my mother would stop loving me. She’d put me outside with the trash. Small mistakes can cost you everything, that’s what I learned that night. Lessons like that stay with you, even after a lifetime of work. You learn to keep your mouth shut, to not say the true things, to keep things to yourself. Sometimes I still have to fight against that tendency really hard. Sometimes I do that when I write, I have to fight like hell to get the truth out. I can get very quiet when I’m overwhelmed - with happiness or grief. For the most part it works out well when I push through.

Not always, though. The thing you have to know is that sometimes you can say a true thing out loud and what happens after that is not up to you. You can’t pull the words back through the ether, so even if they were scary to say and you said them because you thought they were good words, once they are out, they don’t belong to you anymore. They float in the air and you don’t get to control the way they land. Sometimes you just have to live with the words you said, knowing you meant them with love, and let the loss settle in where a whole person used to be. Not everything will make sense. Pretty sure that is called life, too, even though it hurts like hell.

So there are things I struggle with, and things I don’t, and birthdays mark another rotation around the sun. It’s a chance to check in on your own progression through time and space if you care to take it. I’ve gotten a lot better at protecting my time and energy. No rolls trippingly off the tongue in a way it didn’t when I was younger. So does fuck off. It is a genuine relief to have that phrase at the ready, especially when people call you a communist or a marxist because you happen to think people deserve to live and love in any way that feels good to them as long as they aren’t hurting anyone, and that we should tax billionaires before we freeze money and food meant for starving kids.

I know what brings me joy, and I know that I will be extremely unhappy if I don’t get a lot of writing time every week, so I have to say no to a lot of everything else. Other things I need each day: to get outside, to move my body, to quiet my mind, to read great writing, to bury my face in the neck of my big muppet of a dog - but some needs will go unmet. That is what we call ache. The not-presence of the best boy curled up at your feet while you write, and the knifing pain of that empty space.

I never want to let anyone down if I can help it, but letting myself down is worse for everyone in my life. Trying to save democracy definitely makes my list of things worth doing. Trying to make sure the people I love know how much I love them is a no-brainer. Spending time with my kids is my favorite thing on this planet. Sitting by the ocean will always soothe my soul.

But hurting someone I love inadvertently or because there’s no other option (as in, the situation has become soul-crushing and change is as necessary as oxygen), or heading into a confrontation, or setting a boundary with a narcissist (you’d think this would be easier because I have had so much practice!) or putting a value on the work I do, or asking for what I want…still working on that stuff. Asking for what I want has never been easy, but maybe by my next birthday?

Tiny example - and I’m sharing this to expose the level of neuroses we are talking about here because maybe you’ll relate, or at least have a laugh - I’d love to get the little orange Substack checkmark by my name. Underneath the desire for a checkmark is the real desire, which is the desire to worry less.

I would like to worry less, wouldn’t we all? I would like to know I’m going to be able to provide for my kids and for myself, too, because I never want to be a burden to them. I would like to not have that gnawing do-I-have-us-covered anxiety thrumming in the background all the time. Some of you will know what I mean, and some of you may not, but I’m so tired of that thrum, and a lot of it is the result of not making decisions that are in my own best interest, financially and otherwise.

I’m speaking historically, now. There have been times when I did not take sound and sage advice because I didn’t want to rock the boat or poke the bear, or because I like to be generous, kind and trusting. But also because I grew up with so many red flags waving, they looked normal to me for a long time. I thought you walked by them on your way to the kitchen. Some things I have learned the very hard way. As long as you learn, you’re good.

If you’re someone who reads on Substack but doesn’t write, you might not know this, but you get the little checkmark when you reach 100 paying subscribers. I don’t write for the money, let me tell you - if you want to be rich, writing is not your gig unless you’re going to write really good thrillers or YA books they can turn into franchises, or cheesy romance novels, or. Wait. Should I write cheesy romance novels?

When you get the checkmark you get more exposure which means maybe more people will see your work and subscribe, which means it might be easier to feed your kids, and pay for health insurance, and college, and all the things that come up that you never expect - like $1500 surgeries for your dog who is suddenly sick (had to put that on a credit card), or a problem with your car, or suddenly needing to flee the country because you have a fifteen-year-old daughter up in these Divided States of Gilead. Yes, that is on my mind.

Then, of course, there are just the regular bills like groceries and the fact that - AS WILL BE A SURPRISE TO NONE OF US - the price of eggs has not gone down. It is a sad reality that living costs money, and when you are raising two humans it costs a lot of money. This is the part where some people who voted for the soulless, lawless bastards currently dismantling the government would say - no one told me to have kids. But also, these are the same people who voted for men who believe my value as a human being is measured by whether or not I have kids. Go figure.

So anyway, I have a lot of subscribers and I appreciate each and every single one of you, and I mean that so sincerely. I am simply not at the number of paying subscribers to reach that magical checkmark threshold. And I get it, because there are a helluva lot of great writers here, and you can’t support everyone, and times are tough. I can’t pay and subscribe to everyone I want to support, not by a long shot. So I decided to run a special, which you can do here. I’ve never done one before.

I went into my Substack dashboard like an animal Monday morning. You would have thought I was charging the Treasury the way I went in there, determined to do this thing called asking for something you want. I set up my special following the prompts. Half off until midnight on my birthday (that’s Saturday night in case you’re wondering). So what is usually $50/year or $5/month is currently $25/year or $2.50/month…Go, shorty.

So then the prompt was, do you want to send an email blast announcing this offer? And I thought about it, and decided, no, no I do not want to do that because the world is on fire. People’s inboxes are exploding with ways to fight the first coup in the history of our country, and nonstop requests to sign this petition, or join this call, or sign up for this class action lawsuit, or add your name to a list of folks ready for a General Strike (I am ready). I did not want to send out an email blast about my birthday special offer.

And also, what about people paying for the regular subscription, were they going to be angry or feel unappreciated? Because I do appreciate them so much. (You, if you have one, I appreciate you so much, you probably have no idea). So I started worrying about that and almost bailed on the entire thing. But then I reminded myself other writers here do this all the time and also drop essays behind paywalls, and I don’t do that, or haven’t yet. And I thought, people will understand, right? They’ll understand I’m just trying to grow this thing and I have kids and I work so hard at this. And then I started thinking about extra things I could offer people with paid subscriptions, like chats just for them, or maybe an extra essay each month or something. I was pacing right about then.

I thought, okay, if I’m doing this I should tell people about the offer in a Note, not an email. A Note is not annoying or intrusive. Obviously, there’s not much point in offering a special if you don’t tell anyone, Chief. This is the way I was talking to myself at this point. This is a thing I do when I need to talk myself off the ledge and am trying not to annoy a friend by calling them in the midst of this kind of spiral. I call myself Chief or Sport or Tiger. I have tools, see. It helps, I take myself less seriously which is good. Feel free to try it.

It worked so well, that it only took me four-and-a-half hours to write the paragraph casually letting folks know about my birthday checkmark special. I only had to screenshot the paragraph twice before I posted it, and send it to two friends after working on it for four-and-a-half hours, and then I only had to tweak it for another thirty minutes so it was breezy. Probably twelve people saw it.

Y’ALL.

What. The. Fuck. This is how hard it is for me to put a value on something I’m offering, that I spend hours on every week. And how much I worry about every little aspect and who I might upset, and whether it’s messed up, and blah blah blah. This is five-year-old me, scared I’m going to be locked out in the stairwell, and love will be withdrawn. I know this. I love five-year-old me, she’s just a kid, it’s not her fault, but she should definitely not be the one sitting at the head of the table, making the decisions. She should be building sandcastles at the beach.

I’m also trying to finish a book and run a business. It’s okay that not everyone will want to take me up on the offer or be able to afford it, even at the special price. It’s fine. It’s also okay for me to ask. It’s insane that I spent five hours worrying about it. It’s sad that it’s this hard for me to advocate for myself, still. But the good part is, I did it. I stayed with it even though it was very uncomfortable. That discomfort is where the growth happens.

It doesn’t even matter if I get the checkmark, what matters is I asked for something I wanted even though it wasn’t easy. I made myself vulnerable, a thing I avoid at all costs unless I feel very, very safe. This happens to be the third very hard thing I’ve done over the last two weeks, so I would love a small marching band to walk through the kitchen if anyone wants to arrange that. I have been swimming in discomfort for months, so imagine all the growth. Yay, me, still growing and shit. The other two things were harder than this thing. I had to work through even more resistance to do them. They are all related to standing up for myself, putting at least the same value on my own needs as anyone else’s, and making smart decisions about my future.

I did have to annoy my closest friends with conversations about them, but that is the cost of friendship. We do this for each other. Sometimes your friends struggle mightily with things that are easy as pie for you, but if you know them well, you understand. You hold their hand. You tell them they can do it, you believe in them. You believe in them until they believe in themselves. That’s how it works, and it’s why we need each other.

One of the very hard things has already paid off more than I can believe. I’ll never get the time back that I spent feeling anxious about it, but that’s okay, that’s the time I needed to work up the courage to do it. The other one is going to take a little more time to reveal its dividends so to speak. That’s also okay. The more I do the very challenging/triggering things and get a good result, the easier it will be the next time. Positive reinforcement and all that. And these are the last of my emotional, interpersonal hard things to overcome, so if I’m at the halfway-ish point of my life and I’m working through the final, sticky, very uncomfortable challenges - if I’m lucky, the second half of my life should be a lot easier. Of course, if I get hit by a truck tomorrow, that will suck for a lot of reasons.

Really what I want to say to you is that there are probably always going to be parts of us that are the hurt little kids we once were. No matter how old I get, there will likely always be a five-year-old version of me, standing outside my mother’s apartment, promising to be good, begging for scraps of love. The good news is, the older me is there with that little sobbing kid, wrapping my arms around her, telling her she deserves a lot better than that. We all do.

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Oh friends, wtf. Another week in this insanity, eh? I needed a rage break, which does not mean a break from making calls or doing anything/everything I can to fight back, it means I needed to find some relief, too. I needed to remind myself that finding joy is also an act of resistance and defiance. Friday is Valentine’s Day, and it’s also the day I usually go live on Zuck’s app, but I detest him, so I thought I’d try going live here on Substack instead. I record the podcast at the same time. I’ll be talking about the same topics I wrote about in the essay, but if you comment, I can riff off your thoughts, too. It’s fun. Well, it will be fun if you come. I always get nervous going live the first time on any app (weird, I know), but I’ve decided this is the year to dive straight into the discomfort. Join me if you’re around. It will be awkward and exciting and we’ll probably laugh and maybe cry. So basically like a typical first date. We can be Valentine’s and Galentine’s. 11:15am PST Friday if you’re around. Meet you in the comments section regardless :) Love y’all.