I started taking pole dance classes almost 5 years ago. I wish I could say I’m amazing at this point, but I am not. For one thing, my commitment has been sporadic at best. For another, I’m pretty uncoordinated in general, and many forms of body movement do not come easily or naturally to me.

Still, I’ve tried many other forms of “fitness”, exercise, and dance, and none have stuck as much as pole has. I like that every time I go to class, even though I’ve been to lots of classes previously, I always learn a new move. There’s always some novel way to hang or climb or spin. Even just sitting on the pole, you can make all kinds of shapes with your limbs and hips and torso. You can be silly or weird or pretty or just a person making anguished faces because you’ve just smashed the top of your foot midkick, AGAIN. It’s great.

If you’ll allow me a little zen indulgence, lately one of the most interesting parallels I’ve seen between poling and real life is the act of letting go. Many polers are afraid of the spin; they fear falling midair so much that they can’t take the initial, required step. I’ve never had this fear. I fling myself at the pole with abandon, because I trust that even if I do the spin all wrong, the strength in my arms will keep me from doing a face plant. I won’t fall because, at the very least, I can hold myself up.

My problem, my fear, is letting my arms go. In specific sits or inversions, it looks fierce if you can let go with one or both hands. Trouble is, I don’t trust my legs to hold me like I do my arms. I convince myself, as I’m slowly lowering myself backwards, that I cannot possibly, possibly take my hands off the pole. Even though I know logically the ground isn’t far, even though I have never fallen before, even though there are people all around me ready to spot me in a flash, I … just … can’t … let … go. Any and all encouragement is drowned out by my mind just saying no, over and over. I will hold on if it kills me. Which is interesting, considering that letting go probably won’t kill me at all.

To bring this terribly on-the-nose metaphor to a close, sometimes I do finally let go. Oops, spoiler alert. And it’s always the same, after I’ve let go, I am never as afraid as I am in the moments leading up to it. I hold my arms outstretched, or behind my head, and I’m relieved. And then I forget, and fight the same battle all over again the next time.

I know I crave control. So many things in my life feel out of my control, and so much of the time I find myself reaching and grasping and holding on for dear life. It never feels good, but I sometimes convince myself it’s all I have. If I could just hold on tighter, grasp harder, maybe then …

Maybe then what? My life will be perfect? I can finally relax? Loneliness and boredom and frustration and fear will disappear?

At the very least, I expect I would feel the relief of my arms flung wide and my palms open to everything.

Content warning: the complete dumpster fire of the Kavanaugh nomination, talk of sexual assault and trauma, no talk of hope or solutions.
I want to say up front that there will be nothing of substance in this post. Nothing new that hasn’t already been said. But since this is my own special-snowflake Millennial platform, here I am to repeat a bunch of things that are better said by others, because I feel that not saying them would be inauthentic and because I almost feel that I cannot move on to writing about other things without plunging through this dirty river first.

You know how we often get caught in cycles where the cliche “doing the same thing while expecting different outcomes” applies? (Hi, welcome to my career, relationships, exercise goals, and life in general.) Well, I feel like this has happened for progressives for at least the last two years: re: our current administration. Two years ago, when “grab them by the pussy” was part of our daily soundbite consciousness, we thought that there was no way that dude could hold the highest elected office in our country. Then, when that indeed came to pass, we thought there was no way any number of other parts of his agenda would make it out of his on-a-different-planet brain: the Muslim ban, the wall, the continuation of his narcissistic tweets and racist rallies. We continue to watch him say appalling things about whatever minority he feels like mocking and squashing at the moment. You know this. I know this. Why summarize it? Why continue to give it air time, which so often, regardless of our intentions, can mistakenly become legitimacy?

Why indeed. I believe my repetition is incredulity. I’m still shocked. I still feel punched in the stomach when I hear the president mock a victim of sexual assault. “I had one beer. Well, when was the party? I don’t remember. How’d you get home? I don’t remember. Was it upstairs, downstairs? I don’t remember. But I had one beer!” I feel dizzy and about to vomit when that mocking gets cheered for and laughed at by a huge crowd of my fellow humans. The wound scabs over and opens again and again. I feel like I can’t breathe, like I will faint, I’m screaming and who will hear me.

(Please note: the quote above is not in order verbatim because I could not actually bring myself to go back and listen to it again. I would apologize for any misquoting or inaccuracies, but frankly I could care less at this point.)

I have been walking around in a fog the last two weeks, which have felt like years, which have felt like a lifetime. A fog of despair and fear and helplessness and bone-deep rage. I’ve heard so many women say this week, “I no longer feel safe in this country.” I nod and think about the generations of marginalized people before us who never had the privilege of feeling safe.

I am thankful for my therapist. And, interestingly, I am thankful that he is a man. I know it’s his job to let me rage and cry in his office for an hour. I know it’s his job to listen to the sexual trauma I have wrestled with and slept with for years, because I felt I would not be heard or believed by those in power if I set it free. But even though it’s his job, I still hear the compassion in his voice, the generosity of his silences, the respect he has for me in the questions he asks. As far as I can tell, he has never not believed me. I am glad he is a support in my life because he reminds me of all the individual men I love, even when my hatred for the men with the most power feels as though it will crush me.

In conclusion. If your name is Brett or Mitch or Lindsey and you are thinking of changing it, I wouldn’t blame you.

In real conclusion, and on the risk of sounding pat, please, please take care of each other right now. Reach out, check in, hold one another, belong with each other. The three seconds it takes you to say, “I’m thinking of you” or “how are you feeling?” or “I believe you” can be the steeliest strength in the armor that helps us keep fighting. For justice, for love, for safety, for survival.

This morning when I stepped outside to water my plants at 6 AM, the air felt like fall. The light was dim, whereas for months it had been full and bright at this time of day. During the night, a spider had spun its web over the leaves of my tomato plant. Summer Lauren had no qualms reaching through the fragrant stems and demolishing those threads, but today I couldn’t bring myself to destroy someone else’s home.

The breeze was chilly and damp. I slithered my bare arms through the tomato leaves to pluck the small bounty of fruit. I was relieved to stand in mist and coolness. I love fall, though its coming sometimes makes me exquisitely sad.

It’s been a strange summer. Without school, I feel anchorless. My writer friend Kate, who whizzed through Seattle to share a meal with me on her way further north to visit her sister, says I’m right on track with the post-grad blues. She’s two years out, about to publish a book, and finally starting to feel grounded.

I’m also unsettled because of our nation’s climate of hate. I know there are well-made arguments about staying and fighting, or even just staying and witnessing, but I am heartsick over what we know is going on and has gone on in this current administration, and I imagine we actually know very little about the whole of it. Just call me a conspiracy theorist. I am, not in jest, trying to think of any viable strategies of getting out of this country and into one where I feel safer, where I feel like my fellow citizens are safer. Maybe not permanently, but for a while. Canada is so close.

As is probably apparent at this point, it turns out I have very little to write about today. But I did want to sweep the cobwebs out of this corner of the Internet and say hello to you, and that I’m alive, and that I’m glad you are, too.

I often picture a reservoir of joy in my body. Joy that could drown all who I love in its effervescence, infect us all with energy and empathy and depth. I can almost feel it as a physical thing zinging around inside me and making me want to dance ecstatically. Sometimes I feel as though I can’t reach the joy, though. It’s locked up, afraid to be uncorked. Or, I can’t get to it because it’s stuck behind a bunch of other crap: sadness, the difficulty of navigating every day life, the crush of financial trial.

What if this joy in my body is something everyone feels but, like me, struggles to access? What if we could all access this joy, if barriers were demolished so that we could feel the depths of our happiness and love? It’s undoubtedly pretty woo-woo, but it’s what I dream of. What if we all could feel it?

An ex-partner of mine told me once that I had “infectious joy.” As the years go by, it seems harder for me to reach. It’s still there, it must be. I feel it when I hear a resolved chord, when my dog leans her body into my side, when I feed people, when people feed me, when I am invited into a web of connection and misfit community, when I am welcomed into a family, however briefly. During those times, I feel open, vulnerable in a way that is not terrifying, able to give and love with all my defenses down. I am empowered to be soft. These times have been way too brief in my adult life. I want my infectious joy to be more accessible, more ready and willing to come out.

My favorite Lucinda Williams song is called “Joy.” The song’s protagonist says she’s lost her joy and she wants it back, so she’s going to go to different places along her life’s trajectory to try to find it. It’s easy to assume that, “You took my joy and I want it back” refers to a severed love, but for me, I think of it as what the world has taken. It is so easy for our systems and our society to grind me (and others like me) down. We miss our joy. We want it back.

Where do you go, or what do you do, to get your joy? Do you find there are ways to extend infectious joy to others even when you’re still pining for yours to come back?

My parents grew zucchini when I was a kid, and my mother magically turned it into bread. Sweet and spicy, I couldn’t imagine that it contained a vegetable. When I started cooking and baking in college, I used my fledgling Internet skills to track down zucchini bread recipes in the hopes of cinnamon-sweet replication.

Most recipes I found used about a cup of vegetable oil, 2 cups of sugar, and very little zucchini. I’m certainly not opposed to oil and sugar, but I understand now why I had trouble believing my mom’s loaves had any zucchini in them.

I started experimenting with more savory breads. I’ve baked ones with barely a tablespoon of sugar, flecked with sesame and flax seeds, and dense with whole wheat flour. I’ve made a loaf with a combination of zucchini and carrots, with raisins that all sank into a clump as it baked. I’ve considered cream cheese frosting. I’ve considered that my mom’s bread might just be the best there is.

Then I started adding lemon zest, ginger, and curry powder, based on an idea I got from Heidi Swanson. It hits all the notes for me: sweet, savory, spicy, mysterious, something that people have trouble pinning down but find intriguing. I find it addictive.

As a kid, my friends and I would eat zucchini bread for snacks after school. Even my most suspicious-of-zucchini friends were won over.

As a teenager, my August breakfasts were always similar: a hunk of zucchini bread, a handful of blueberries, and whatever awful flavored coffee I was into at the time. (I was partial to hazelnut and caramel.) I’d spend my mornings on the computer, poking around chat rooms eating every last crumb.

I am generally not a romantic person. I will usually side with progress and don’t subscribe to the idea that the “good old days” are worth returning to. I am romantic about food, however, and about food traditions. As a typical midwestern family, our food was not precious or unique. Yet, every time I pull out my mixing bowls and box grater, feel the green watery zucchini strands clinging to my fingers, smell the warmth of spice, I think of being young. I think of my childhood Augusts with autumn breathing around the corner, the start of a new schoolyear, the promise of hurtling towards some bright future. My recipe may have changed, but the feelings remain the same.

Yesterday, I got on a bus and at the next stop, a woman barreled towards where me and my dog were sitting, and screamed, “Ahhhh move I’m getting off!” There was no where for us to move to, we were scrunched as far as possible into a seat; Kiva was well under it at my feet.

Before I could even react, she yelled, “Good thing you’re blind, bitch!” and hightailed it off the bus.

I was left perplexed and pissed, my body instinctively full of adrenaline. The other passengers, in their typical Seattle way, looked everywhere but at me. Their silence held all the desperation of trying to pretend they hadn’t had to witness the last 30 seconds.

Only the bus driver said to me as I was leaving several stops later, “That woman’s been off her rocker for years.”

I nodded in acknowledgement and thanked him for the ride. It took me hours to shake the experience.

I keep wondering what has gone on in her life to make her react that way to me, or to anyone. This incident is similar to others I’ve experienced on transit or walking down the street. I’m always left shaken and wondering why.

I imagine the majority of these incidents are way more about the other person, and about society, than they are about me. This doesn’t hold much comfort in the moment, but it is likely true.

I want some action step, some way to make the life of this woman better. I don’t know how to do that.

This is the thing I tell myself all the time: if I am fortunate enough, some day in my life, to no longer be poor, to not be lonely, to have the community and family I so want to build, to not pay for groceries with EBT, to have health insurance, to not have to compromise for love, to have easy days, I must remember what it was like. I must not be complicit in forgetting, no matter how seductive the thought of forgetting is.

I must remember her, because we are not that different. I must remember, no matter what happens, how struggle feels.

I must never forget compassion.

Things I will do after I Graduate:
• Play lots more music. Private recorder lessons? Finally learn guitar once and for all, so I can sing songs to people? (Only with their consent.)
• Write poetry and not care if it’s bad, cause it will be bad.
• Sleep
• Go on dates
• Or, at least, make an effort to date people
• Long walks. Getting lost. Who cares? I’ll find my way back eventually.
• Figure out how to use my mishmash of skills to get a day job which pays my rent and student loans and allows me to do some fun things? Maybe?
• Get my splits and a decent tree pose
• Perfect my honey lavender ice cream recipe. Candied lavender flowers?
• Sit outside. Read books that are literary embarrassment but make my soul happy.
• Work on my bird listening skills.
• Sleep, more

What else should I do? I’m open to all ideas, I’m going to be so free!

Hi everyone.
So, you all know I’ve been crap at blog updates this year, right? My life is, frankly, in a state of overwhelm. I am now working fulltime, with a 90 minute commute each way. I am writing my creative thesis and lecture to graduate with my MFA in July, finallyfinally!! Last fall, I joined a recorder ensemble and though the music is fairly easy, there’s a lot of it and I’m constantly learning and memorizing new pieces. I’m working on editing a manuscript for a dear friend whose book-length project is way further along than mine. I am trying to do some activism, volunteer at social justice events, etc, whenever it’s possible.
My busy is a very strange kind, because it is quite isolating. Some days, I don’t talk to any humans outside of bus drivers and brief conversations with colleagues. I deeply miss having companionable friendships where we could work on our own things but still be around each other. I haven’t been in seattle long enough, I guess, to cultivate those relationships.
All to say, I think about this blog a lot, and how I’m not writing in it, and then I feel bad for not writing. So, I’m here today to officially put this blog on hiatus until after graduation, after which I will hopefully want to free write again, since I won’t be bogged down in word counts and numbers of pages and how many minutes is this lecture. The best thing about this blog is the freedom it brings, and the connection I feel to those of you who take the time to leave me comments. I promise I read them all and send every one of you gratitude!
So, until midsummer! Love and light to you all

Clementines: they’re called mandarinas in Spain, and when I was studying there in the fall of 2006, I picked a glut of the sun-warmed orbs from a tree in the mountains of the Alpujarras. I wore layers of scarves, because even though the sun warmed one side of my face, the wind knifed its way down the back of my neck. I was raised in the Midwest, so had no experience picking anything off a tree but the occasional late-season, squishy apple; so even though I tried to act blase about the whole thing, I eventually plopped down right under the mandarina tree and peeled away the rind of a particularly heavy fruit. The peel came away easily, smelling like a winter flower. I listened to the shriek of an unknown bird as I ate the segments down to nothing.

I am February cranky, sun-starved, craving warmth, looking for spring. It hasn’t been the rainiest Seattle winter I’ve experienced, but by February, even four months of intermittent rain starts to drag on my spirit. So I eat mandarinas and cling to the memories of sunshine of the past. I stand over bubbling vats of lemon marmalade. I water my anemic bamboo and daydream about lush growth. I run my hands over citrus displays at the co-op, forcing whoever is shopping with me to stop and wait while I heft pomelos, too big to fit in my hand. I succumb to buying out-of-season strawberries, and feel a knee-jerk urge to cry when they taste dry and woody and of nothing. Even though I know the outcome will be this way, year after year, I can’t help it.

What do you do to create spring when it seems so far away?