Let it be shown to you

When I wake up in the morning the first thing I ask myself is, “What do I need to do?” and the answer I always, always hear without fail is “Take good care of yourself.” I usually don’t know what that means, and it feels so frivolous and trivial. Take care of myself? I have a to-do list to get through! There are bills to pay! People are dying in Haiti! In my best moods, I ignore the guidance. In my worst moods, I get in my car and yell at God for telling me what to do but then leaving out the part about how to do it. In these moments I really just want a mom to hug me and make me dinner and do my laundry and tell me I’ll be okay, but since I moved to California 3.5 years ago my mom is far away, 3,000 miles away, in fact, and so I’d be best to look elsewhere for comfort.

Lately I’ve been uninspired, unmotivated and generally slugging my way through the days. I’ve outgrown the job I’m in and the lack of having a clear alternative for financing my life has sent me spiraling into fear that manifests as trying really hard to cram my personality into a position that just doesn’t fit, to just-make-it-work-god-damn-it. I feel fatigued with living a life that doesn’t work for me anymore and I forgot that I can’t sleep away my problems.

My boyfriend left to surf at 5:30am, but I stayed in bed, perpetually pressing the snooze button every 10 minutes. Months ago I would wake up before the alarm and race down to the beach to jump in the ocean with reckless abandon, but lately I’ve forgotten what that was like, to care about doing what I love. To his and my frustration, I’ve spent the last few weekends sleeping through the good parts. During one snooze button interval this morning a radio commercial came on and the announcer said, auspiciously, that having the life you want just requires taking small steps in the direction you want to go. He needn’t say one more word, because if I’ve learned anything in the last few years it’s that when God throws a life preserver, I’d be best to catch it, so I jumped out of bed and drove down to the beach.

In the winter it’s often too cold or the waves are too big (or I convince myself that it’s too cold and the waves are too big) and so I watch the surfing instead of participate in the surfing, and such was the case today. I arrived in time to see the almost full moon still glaring to the West like a spotlight revealing all that is illusion, and to the East, the sky soaked the ocean in a soft red glow. I chatted with the friends of my boyfriend, a comforting community of surfers and early-morning dog walkers that I’m slowly learning to let in to my reserved, hesitant, still healing life and I watched the person I love glide effortlessly through the ocean doing what he loves most, and I felt happy.

I stood in the crisp , clear California morning and recalled that at this time 4 years ago when I lived in Boston amidst active alcoholism I watched surf documentaries at 6am because keeping my focus on where I wanted to go was the only way I knew to make life bearable, and the only way, day to day, that I could motivate myself to shovel snow off my car and to drive to a job that I hated and to come home again to stand by helplessly, watching the person who created me kill himself slowly with Budweiser as his weapon of choice. I remembered that my journals from that period in my life, filled with photos from Yoga Journal and Surfer Magazine and Coastal Living, are a veritable scrapbook foreshadowing and illustrating the life that I have now. Pausing in the cold January ocean air I ached for a means to communicate adequately the immensity of gratitude that I feel for having the life I imagined, and for knowing that although there is still so much pain and sadness, thing are so much better than they once were. I pleaded silently with God, or the universe or whatever you want to call your higher power that the transformation that happened to me over the last 4 years wasn’t a one-time freak miracle, and that I’ll be able to do it again, this time with the job that I hold. I prayed to God that even after all these years, the rule is still the same: difficult situations can change.

When I left the beach this morning I was moved inexplicably to stop at CVS and buy myself a bag of foil wrapped Valentine ’s Day chocolate hearts. I flashed back to all the times that my mom, a Registered Nurse who worked 11:00pm-7:00am shifts the whole time she raised us, would sometimes on weekends come home in the early morning and leave a box of Dunkin Donuts or some muffins or some bags of chocolates on the kitchen table for us to eat while she took her nap until early-afternoon. Although it was just 8:00am, I ate some of the chocolate hearts for breakfast this morning, because mostly, self-love means revolting against society’s norms. As I unwrapped each heart the distance between my mom and me began to disappear, and I somehow knew all of a sudden the love for us that she must have felt in order to stop at the store after a long night at the hospital to pick up something sweet for us to have in the morning. For a moment I forgot about all the let-downs and all the disappointments and all the times that she wasn’t the mother I wanted or needed her to be and I saw past the merciless, devastating grip of my father’s alcoholism on our family and I realized, in spite of it all, only how much she loved me, both back then and right now. For a moment the love was bigger than the sadness and for a moment I felt like my mom was with me even though she’s so far away and for a moment I could give to myself the love that she used to give me and for a moment I knew how to be for myself the mom that I’ve always needed.

For a moment, I took good care of myself.