A rare 100% moment.
Something took me by surprise and I shot straight up in the passenger seat and gasped. I held my breath and swung my attention towards my husband so he could verify that this thing that had just made itself known to me was real. I blinked slowly. I. held. my. breath.
He had no reaction. Awkward.
“What is it? Was it the billboard? Is this a good thing or a bad thing?” he asked me, bracing.
“OF COURSE. THAT BILLBOARD IS A MAN-MADE TREE OF WISDOM, FROM WHICH I HAVE NOW EATEN FRUIT OF WONDER AND HAPPINESS AND BRIGHTNESS,” all things sparkled in my response.
“Oh OK. You know, I can never tell. You do that gasp, and you would think, after all these years, I would know if it’s good or bad. But it’s impossible to tell with you.”
“What gasp? What are you talking about?”
“That gasp that you do. You gasp and exaggerate a pause and exactly, truly 50% of the time you follow it with something like ‘I LOOOOOOOOVE THIS THING SO MUCH. ISN’T IT AMAZING AND LIFE CHANGING?’ But the exact other 50% of the time you say something like, ‘IHAVENEVERHATEDANYTHINGTHISMUCHEVER. THIS IS AN ABOMINATION AND I WILL LIVE AND DIE OFFENDED BY IT.’ I can’t figure it out. You have no tell. Either way, it’s always the same first gasp.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, I don’t do that.”
But I do. I’ve always done that. I gasp and pause in the exact way my husband accused upon realizing I’ve made a big, big mistake. I use the very same muscles to move the very same way when I randomly run into someone I love. I’ve done it when I’ve lost awards and when I’ve won them. I followed that gasp-pause-sequence with tears and garbled nonsense when I paid off my student loans and, likewise, when I learned my beloved bike was stolen. If the colors of a beautiful sunset suddenly strip me of my balance, or if a rat in the subway finds water to drink too close to where I’m standing, I gasp that way.
I can’t do it on command, it’s not within my control. It’s the way I pop the bubble of emotion—any emotion. I’m aware it comes from a natural, deeply stashed purse of feelings. It is the sound of the safe being opened.
Aside from these overpowering involuntary bursts, however, I am reasonable, rational, realistic. Measurable, steady progress is my best friend. I keep an impressively cross-referenced set of To Do Lists and I generally do not use emojis. I lean on structure and the pretty predictability of rules, color-coordination, alphabetically-ordered anythings, and black. Success in the profession I chose for myself is dependent on a sophisticated and unwavering respect for precedent (doing things as they have always been done) and the objective discernment of rights and privileges. I’d give up sleep before I’d betray my intellect with subjective musings of what feels right. I keep appointments and commitments. I do not hyperbolize, but I do pay very close attention to details and aggressively caffeinate.
Based on this, I am 50% reasonable and 50% ridiculous. I don’t have an in-between setting and for the first time in my life I’m realizing that this pendulum is exhausting me. I don’t want to be at either end, but I can never find myself somewhere in the middle. This is my biggest personal project.
Until now, I framed this struggle as one between my heart and my brain. For more than {mindyourbusiness} years, I wrongly imagined that, while my heart was at base, my mind teetered off the seesaw, and then vice versa. I thought that gaspy-Monica was all heart, and day-planner Monica was fully brain-driven.
But for all this time, I have been misdiagnosed. The thing that has become evident to me lately is that both my heart and my brain crowd one side or the other together. That is why I am always so fully entrenched in the reasonable or in the ridiculous at any given time. That is why I can’t find my balance. I see now that I have no trouble reconciling my heart and brain. Mine is a struggle to separate them, play them off of each other.
At distinct points, I have said each of the following:
- “I would never run. Not even if I was being chased by a tiger. Truly never. Nothing can make me run a single block.” AND “That half–marathon I ran was beautiful! ”
- “Tattoos must always be meaningful and momentous.” AND “I got a tattoo of this random thing purely on impulse.”
- “Mushrooms are the feet of vegetables and I would rather eat glass for the rest of my life than a single mushroom.” AND “I will have the mushroom skewers, please. Can I also have a side of the grilled shiitakes? Thank you!”
- “I’m done being a stupid lawyer. It’s the worst job and I’m so done with making someone else’s problems my own only to then have them stand in my way of resolving it.” AND “I love this new amazing lawyer job! It’s so fun and fulfilling to lawyer EVERY DAY!”
- “Organized religion, with its arbitrary rules, falsely deep practices, and blindly-followed outdated traditions, is a scourge on a society tormented by mass disillusion.” AND “Of course, I’m fasting all 50 days of Lent. It’s the most important time to reconnect with the church.”
I’m not fickle. These aren’t mood swings. I’m not getting wiser or collecting regrets. It wasn’t my heart that said one of each pair and my brain that said the other. At the time I said each of these things, I said it with permanence. I said each of these things because, at the time, it was deeply, fully my truth in heart and mind.
When I started this blog, my goal was to bring my heart and brain together because I thought they were at odds. Writing is fun, it’s challenging, it involves making sense of unharnessed feelings, and it’s a hobby I enjoy enough to make a priority. I wanted to a create a place where I could be myself, whatever that meant in the words of that sitting. I thought by posting here I would be lifting the curtain between my involuntary gasps and my deliberate deliberations, between the reasonable and ridiculous.
I said, “I’m going to post one to two posts a month NO MATTER WHAT.” And for over two years, I did that.
But now I find myself saying, “I’m dry. I’m never going to post again.” It’s not that I’m out of material. I have plenty—more tattoos to explain, more embarrassing predicaments to unfold into a lesson, I’ve been collecting hilarious clippings for a Read This and That post for better part of 18 months. But I don’t want to keep burrowing further and further into the only place I can use my reason to show my ridiculous. Being 50% reasonable and 50% ridiculous does not amount to being 100% genuine. That’s what I’m looking to be. And I want to be 100% everywhere—not just here.
I wish I could find a way to work on My Somewhere To Be posts here and there, somewhere between always and never. That wish is probably stronger than my wish to win the lottery. Because if I figure out how to do that, it means that I’ve found balance in my extremes, woven them together and made a comforting blanket that keeps me both warm and cool.
This blog is an important piece of this biggest personal project; it always has been. So I’m not signing off. I can’t say when, but I’ll be back. 100%.