For those of you not painstakingly combing my archives because you know, you have a LIFE and stuff (which, hi, tell me how, okay?), I started a project back in January that I call “Bringing Aunt Becky Back.” I realized that I’d lost a lot of my identity while I popped out my crotch parasites and wiped endless poopy butts, and I realized that something had to be done about it before I ended up with Mom Jeans up to my nipples and some sensible white Keds on my feet.

So the Bringing Aunt Becky Back project was born.

The good news is, when you think you’ve lost yourself, you’re never as far away as you think you are. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear, it turns out. The bad news is, if you’re me, you have a lot of work to do to move away from your past.

These are luminous times, and I can’t help but feel that the changes I’m making are, well, change, and change is better than stagnation, so that’s forward movement. Starting therapy (which I return to on Saturday), is probably one of the smartest things I’ve done, and I’m looking forward to finally staring down the demons in my closets and making them dance the Funky motherfucking Chicken.

When you graduate college, it’s assumed you’re going to go on and have some sort of career. In my case, I grabbed my RN-BSN, knowing I would never actually be a career nurse and floundered for awhile.

Then, in the unlikeliest of places, I found something that I was not only (marginally) good at, but also made me happy: words. Glorious, beautiful, letters, strung into patterns, that formed words, put together in such a way that could horrify, delight, and make you weep. Writing. It was like discovering you could breathe underwater.

So I went with it. This had to be what I was supposed to do with my life.

I was fortunate enough to get literary agents and wrote up a couple of non-fiction book proposals–books of essays*–and waited. The stock market crashed, the publishing industry took a huge hit, and people stopped buying books.

So I waited, they waited, I went back to the drawing board, and in the meantime, I sent out essays, knowing full well real writers couldn’t get published anywhere, so the likelihood of anyone in The New Media (a.k.a. The Internet People) (potentially The Enemy) being able to get somewhere was about as good as me winning The Nobel Prize for Awesomeness.

Then I just…stopped.

And last week I had an epiphany: I needed to attack the problem from a different angle. Rather than focus on something so far out of reach, I’d try and do something I understood. So I revived Mushroom Printing as a group blog. I’m talking to a friend who runs an actual shirt screening press about getting “Shut Your Whore Mouth” shirts made.

If any of this leads to something else down the line, I’ll be doing the happy dance until my legs fall off. I still believe that making some sort of career out of writing is what I am supposed to do with myself, but perhaps this just isn’t the time.

It’s time to put my thinking cap on and figure out what to do next (any advice, I’m open to, Pranksters). Besides, of course, form a Neil Diamond tribute band.

Because, obviously.

*if you have signed up for an essay and haven’t gotten it, it’s been waylaid in your spam filter because it comes from a dummy email address. If’n you want it (and you do), email me. There’s a BIG OLD “email me” button on my sidebar. I can send you one.

——————-

It’s Toy With Me Tuesday! I’m talking about making a porno (no, not REALLY making one). Heh. It’s much sillier than it sounds.

When I started the Bringing Aunt Becky Back project in January, I knew that I was sort of at an impasse. Things couldn’t possibly go on as they had been because I was miserable and I’d BEEN miserable for so long that I couldn’t see that the bad days outnumbered the good.

It was time to either continue sinking or try desperately to swim for surface.

A lot of that meant that I had to face the things that were tied around my legs, trying to drag me down, whether or not I wanted to admit that they were there. I tend to be a “LOOK AT THE SPARKLE UNICORN SPRINKLES, PEOPLE” because I’d rather not talk about the 400 pound elephant in the room. Hell, let’s feed him some motherfucking vodka and get this party STARTED and ignore that elephant, why don’t you because really, he just lives here.

Slowly, I had to examine the things that were tying me down and threatening to drown me, accept them, and then cut them off. Because holding onto all of those things was only making me sink deeper and at night, the demons threatened to drag me down to the bad place.

A lot of those hurts weren’t easy to let go and many of those things will forever be a part of who I am because that is what happens: the things that hurt you define you in some small way. Past events, those dictate how you will react in the future.

One by one I examined them, and carefully, I bid them goodbye, remembering that I am a better person for each of the things that I went through. I can’t tell you how many nights I sobbed, maybe not sure why, maybe entirely sure why, letting things go.

I was afraid that when I was done, the person left standing would be someone I didn’t recognize. It has been probably a good 5 years since I’ve been in a space where I’ve been genuinely happy, and when all was said and done, who would be the person left behind?

Shockingly, perhaps not-so-shockingly, the person left standing when I chipped away all of ties that bind, and finally resurfaced for air, was precisely the same person who was standing there before. Exactly the same person.

I’d figured that all of the shit of the past years: the isolation of being alone with the kids, the struggles I’ve had to find my own way, watching my parents both hit rock bottom and then get into recovery, raising a special needs kid, drama with the baby daddy, birth defects, post partum depression, miscarriages, migraines, prepartum depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, being ditched by two of my best friends, the isolation of having a husband who works 80-120+ hour work weeks, all of that, well, I figured that would make me a different person.

In December, this was my New Years Post:

“While Amelia has thrived and continued to place at or above level for every single test that she’s been given, I’ve sort of managed to tread water this year managing to keep my head mostly above water. Lately, I’ve been drinking gasoline to keep warm.

I’m not sure it’s working.

I was diagnosed with PTSD stemming from her traumatic birth and I don’t know if it’s that, or PPD or some other weird acronym, but I’m not sleeping well or eating well, and some nights I manage fight off the demons and others, I’m slain by them.

But I’m hopeful. I’ve been here before and I’ve always managed to claw my way back out of the hole and into the light again.

So I approach 2010 full of renewed hope for the future, because no matter how full of the darkness I feel, I can feel the light on my face and I know it’s all around me. Soon it will be within me.

I am hopeful.

I have hope.

Happy New Year.”

Today, I can tell you, Pranksters, that the light shines brilliantly not just all around me, but from within me, too. There will be days when my demons win because there always are, but today, my demons are at bay.

I am hopeful.

I have hope.

*In the light we shall see light.

One of the best things I learned in high school was not the phrase “semper ubi, SUB ubi” (always wear, UNDERwear) (oh, that AP Latin humor gets me every time), but that the one way to make sure that no one hassled you was to look as though you looked like you knew precisely what you were doing. If you LOOKED like you knew what you were doing, you were probably not setting fire to a locker somewhere. Probably.

It was an early version of the ‘fake it ’til you make it’ adage that they teach people suffering from mental illness, and it’s a good life lesson. Should I ever put together Aunt Becky’s Guide To Life, along with “Pants First, Then Shoes,” that will be up there high on my list of things to master.

I’ve always been remarkably good at it, maybe it’s because my home life was chaotic, maybe I just have a good p-p-p-p-poker face, I don’t know. But I always look like I know precisely what I am doing. And for the most part, I have always simply known that what I was doing was precisely what I should be doing for that time. Even during my blasted nursing school days, whether or not I was HAPPY, it was what I should have been doing because I knew with certainty it must be.

I never waffle much with my decisions, especially my decisions about how delicious waffles are, and I never much struggle with uncertainty. For me there is a single path to follow, and I simply follow it. It’s very dogmatic to be me, I guess, and even though my decisions aren’t always right, there’s never so much as a shred of doubt in them while I’m making them.

Lately, though, I’ve been struggling. Floundering, even, although when I say that, I think of the fish and then I giggle because I think of that Faith No More video with the flopping fish, and then I remember how much I fucking love Mike Patton.

But my decision to be a writer was something that came about as a shock to me. It was like I realized I could dip my head underwater and breathe without a mask. I simply didn’t know that I had any talent for it, and once I did, I was beyond stunned, because you think you’d know if you could do something cool like breathe underwater, right?

I’ve gone after it, balls to the wall, because I realized that this was what I was supposed to do. But for the first time in my life, I became doubtful. Was this really what I was supposed to do?

Where my path before had been brightly lit with gaily colored lights and lighted disco sidewalks (hey, this is MY path, Pranksters and I would bejewel all of you if I could), it turned a murky, cloudy grey. I couldn’t see what I was supposed to do next. I was all kinds of turned around and suddenly a mist crept in and I couldn’t even tell which way was up any longer.

I don’t even know how long I stood there alone, just standing and waiting for a sign. Months, probably. I’m not a big step-on-a-crack-break-your-momma’s-back kind of Magical Thinker, but I needed a sign from God, from you, my Pranksters, from ANYONE to tell me that Yes, YES, a million times yes! this was what I needed to do.

Yesterday, I got it.

All at once, the mist evaporated, the lights turned back on, the disco lights began flashing under my feet and suddenly I could see that I’d been facing the right way the entire time. I’ve always been facing the right way. This IS what I was supposed to be doing all along. Eventually, I will succeed.

In the meantime, I just have to remember that it’s not all given to me to know and that it’s not all within my power. I got my sign, and now it’s time to do my part.

It’s going to be another long, strange trip, but I’m beyond ready and more than thrilled. I’m going to buckle up and hope I don’t shit my pants along the way.

Much.