A good bruise is a story.

Coming home from Gaelic football training tonight, I caught sight of my legs reflected in the window as I was going up the stairs.

OMG…Those cannot be my legs… I think to myself.  Where are my real legs?

I hold off for a few seconds, before I admit the legs wearing my shorts and my shoes are really mine.  But the grass-stained knee and lingering bruises couldn’t belong to anyone else.

OMG…Those are my legs!  How did this happen?

Yes, it’s all coming back to me…Winter. Grad school. Comfy leather sofa. Take out. Black stretchy sweat pants. Full fat cream cheese. Wine.

And the colour on them.  Where did my tan go?  My legs were not this white in October.  They have to be in league with the cream cheese…

But that’s the sad truth I realize as I puff up the last four stairs.  I see my own story in my legs.

This fantastic example is from last summer’s tournament in Calgary.

I too have been hiding away from the sun for so long.

I too am slowly healing from deep bruises.

I too have taken a few spills and falls, and am showing the wear.

I generally like my legs.  They are a source of pride for me.  They are long.  Strong. Carry me long distances and at a surprising speed.  Rock short skirts. Kick things with utter delight.

They even bruise beautifully.  Bruises are starting points for conversation.

“Here, let me show you my bruise,” I say, inching my skirt up. “You can see that it’s a perfect imprint of the football. It hit me sooo hard when I blocked the kick…”

I write like that too.  I show people my bruises.  I prod at the dark, sensitive spots and wonder about how deep they go. 

I know that they will go away if I leave them there to heal on their own.  But with spectacular bruises, you have two options – wearing pants all summer or being prepared to field questions about them.  “What did you do to yourself now?” is a phrase I expect to hear regularly from May through to October.

Be prepared to tell your story

Being prepared to tell your story means that you’ll be able to connect with others a lot easier.

You will need to think about what you want to tell and what you don’t want to tell.  Sometimes you want to save face (or leg).  I often will omit details, depending on the audience, giving myself the narrative equivalent of a spray tan.  The bruises on my arms from ill-advised run ins with door knobs I  usually blame on brawls in soccer. (Yes, all those brawls in Div 4 ladies’ soccer).

And sometimes you need to tell the stories that you don’t want to.  Earlier this year, one of my epic bruises came from scrambling out of the pool in the least elegant way possible.  It was so bad that despite icing it right away, traces of the bruise still linger beneath the surface of my left thigh. It runs counter to the ideal me that doesn’t crash into every obstacle between point a and point b.  But it captures who I am.  And as we struggle continually to know ourselves, these can be important stories to have clear.

The best stories are sometimes ones that you only tell yourself.  I have a journal that I keep all my private stories in.  They are for me alone, but they are important because they help me track what I value, locate where the tiny bursts of bliss come from in my day-t0-day life.  Keeping these little stories will be invaluable if you are striving to write your larger story.  And even if you aren’t.

We all choose how much of our legs we show, how much of our souls we bare, and how much of our stories that we tell. 

And bruises, they’re just part of the story.

“Your rules are stupid, and they don’t apply to me.” 

Yes, sometimes the rules really are stupid.  So no, I’m not going to follow them.  I’m also not going to read off a script to conform to others’ expectations, especially those expectations inherent with being female.

There are certain ways that women are expected to respond. A few months ago when I was talking to an acquaintance, I mentioned that I like flowers.  ”What’s your favourite flower?” he asked.  ”Roses?” he guessed, before I could reply that I don’t have a favourite flower.

So, I chose this bouquet for the roses, but they were too good to resist.

Yes, all girls are supposed to like roses above all others.

Which is stupid.

I can’t decide between bouquets on a good day, and liking roses the best would compromise my relationship with apple blossoms, sweet peas, hollyhocks, fuchsias, and dahlias.  (Darling blossoms, you know I would never do that….oooh, I missed lilacs, magnolias, geraniums…)  I prefer the roses that I grew up with, pink double roses not related to the tightly wound floral shop varieties.  (Which are quite nice, in their own place.)

So don’t expect me to like roses just because I’m a girl.

I’m also not buying the angry, wronged woman response that is advocated by many of my friends.  I don’t have the time or the energy to do so.  ”You need to get angry with him,” I’ve been told.

I know in that there’s the expectation that I get angry, and stay forever angry from this point forward with the person that wronged me;  shut myself off from someone who I loved to laugh with.  I’m expected to carry a grudge, disparage his character, and turn him into the cartoon villain of my heart.

But I can’t.  And I won’t.

It’s not denial.  Truths were revealed that can’t be unlearned.  As much as I wanted to go back to not knowing, or edit the situation according to my preferences, time only moves forward.

Because I think that I’ve already been angry and gotten over it.  Just like I should have.

I got angry, cried, suspected the worst, and then let it all fall away, like tears evaporating from my pillow case.  Being angry doesn’t make him feel worse, or me feel better.  And while I did go through an emotional trough, I’m through it, I’m on the other side.

There’s no point in being angry on what’s on the other side of the river.  It keeps me from enjoying what’s here, now.

Being angry makes as much sense as having a favourite flower.

And I won’t have either.

 

Last Thanksgiving, things were pretty freaking fabulous for me.  Little things delighted me, like my own reflection while wearing my old black jeans or the sight of the city skyline disappearing into low hanging clouds.  I was filling my journal with lists of how great things were, how excited I was that things were coming together.

My artistic projects sizzled.  There was no doubt that I was pushing myself creatively.  I was taking pictures of things other than my bruises and lunch.  I had enough written on my novel to print out and share with select friends. And that was generating a giant positive feedback loop.  I was glowing with  energy, even though there were days when I experienced my lovely mystery allergies and I had the usual chaos at work.

This is what I'm looking for...a giddy, floral fuelled high.

It didn’t matter.  I had it covered.

I was wearing a cloak of happiness and in it, I looked resplendent.

But that was then.

The past month has been quite the opposite for me.  I have adopted a uniform of sweatpants and sit with my stewing negative emotions while playing backgammon against the computer for hours on end.  My novel has been abandoned in my sock drawer.  I no longer glow, but simply reflect light off of my pale pale face.

In some respects, the catalyst has been the change in how I relate to one person.  One person who is just as flawed as any of us are, and who I would desperately like to forgive.  One person who I wish gone in a long exhale, but want back on the next inhale.

In the best of my analogies, he’s a hollow Easter egg.  Made out of mass produced chocolate.  Everyone knows that the hollow eggs break or melt the easiest, and even though they might contain something cool, like a Kinder toy or Smarties, they don’t last long.

And I don’t want a solid chocolate egg either.  I want a special egg, filled with marshmallow and caramel and made out of good chocolate.  I deserve a good egg. (To reiterate — he’s not a bad egg.  Just a very complicated egg…)

But there’s there’s a glitch in my internal logic right now.  Because I met him right after Thanksgiving, when I was happy, I’m kind of blaming the happiness for my unhappiness.

Yes.  It makes sense to the wounded part of me that wants to curl up at home with takeout and protect myself from any future hurt.  As mad at him as I was for taking me from happy to alone on the couch with dinner for four from Lee Garden, I am a little mad at myself for being happy in the first place.  ”Look, look what happens when you step outside of your box.  You’re no good at being happy, so just stay clear.”

So with that voice chirping in my ear, it will be hard to climb out of this basement.

But I have to start clawing my way back up.

I have to go back to doing what I was doing before being distracted from making myself happy.  I need to write, take beautiful photographs and think grateful thoughts.    And that’s just the beginning.

I need to take this to the next level.  I need to change the way that I think.

Instead of silencing the ridiculous voice that tells me that I shouldn’t be happy, I need to escort it out of the building.  I need to let better thoughts in.

So I’m thinking that by Easter, I should be a lot better.  Hopefully, I will have better perspective on the situation that lasted for 52 pages of my journal.  I will have had the time to recover and start along the path again.

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be interested in starting to look for Easter eggs again.

In another life, not too long ago, I was the recipient of a garbage barge full of horrid advice.  ”Just wait, the right one will come to you,” and “Don’t get emotionally involved,” were two particularly pukey patches on the trash heap.

At the time, it made sense.  People knew that I was going to fail, so it was kind of them to prepare me for it.

“We don’t want to see you getting hurt,” was the rationale offered.  (Read: “You are going to to get hurt, so  just don’t bother.“)

The advice I was hearing was a lot of bull...

And I believed all that garbage, even though I wanted to hear that I should just go for it, common sense be damned, and take a calculated leap.

Very few people will advise you to take said calculated leap, in love or life, and will suggest the safe route.

So I sat around thinking that I wasn’t good enough or emotionally strong enough, waiting for someone to come around and make me happy.

The catastrophe was that I didn’t learn how to make myself happy.

Which caused bad things to happen, like the inappropriate men who told tales out of school and had the logical consistency of a magic 8 ball.  This ultimately made me realize that there was more out there.  They made me understand the value of journalling, helped me breathe life into the dead poet that had been living inside of me for years.  They sent me to the Internet looking for gurus that could shed some different light on the situation — light more sophisticated than “let him seek you out.”

Through the brilliance of social media, I did some seeking of my own, and found ways of divining my own awesomeness and challenging my artistic abilities.  I took courses with people that I had never met to challenge the way I looked at the world and myself.

This made me acutely satisfied with life and flooded me with creative capacity.  I could shoot down old insecurities from 20 paces.  I saw that my old sources of advice were really naked emperors.  I didn’t stop hearing their advice, I just stopped listening to it.

Why is it that no one will advise taking a risk?

I think some people have come to realize that failure sucks.  Heartbreak sucks too.

I agree. But not taking a risk, not even trying, is a worse habit to get into.

Assuming that you’re not strong enough to cope with failure is just silly.  Just accept that if you fail, it’s really a lesson in disguise.  Especially where other people are concerned, there are always good things sprouting under the debris.

Find it.  Nurture it.  Use it to fill pages in your journal.

Use it to learn what you really want out of life.

 

The presents have been unwrapped, turkey leftovers are sleeping soundly in the freezer, and the streamers from New Year’s Eve have fallen to the floor.  It’s the beginning of January in Edmonton, and the beginning of a cold and solitary march towards spring.

But there are still the lights.  

Even as I drive around mid-month, people have left their holiday lights on to stave off the bleakness that sets in here.

But when there’s light, there’s light.

Just behind the bench, there are more lights.

The trees are wrapped in light, as if to protect them from the dark...

The Alberta Legislature building all lit up. Glowing in competition with the lit up grounds.

Just before sunrise, the Christmas tree still glows as work resumes on the old Federal Building.

The light has switched from magical to essential.

I have been absent from my blog for the past two months/10 weeks, and for that I am very very sorry.

I have been absent from other areas of my life as well. 

My academic life fizzled.  My novel moved out of my daily-back-and-forth-to-work bag and into a drawer.  My journal was filled with the ramblings of a crazy woman who could have benefited from doing homework, writing about 1991 and focusing on grattitude and self-love.

The only thing that didn’t suffer was my little habit of taking photos of everything.  Thankfully.  If I wanted to make peace with you, my readers, in person, I would have made you some rich chocolate cake.  As we don’t yet have the technology for me to share cake with you online, here’s a photo that I took in November:

A picture of a particularly stunning flower that I saw at the Muttart Conservatory in November.

I don’t even have a good reason, but I’ll share the story with you.  I met someone at a Halloween party, spent November as a sleep-deprived zombie with a gleeful gaze.  Spent December over-analyzing everything with a fleet of my personal ghosts.  The first few days of January have been spent cowering in the corner, hoping that you would believe that I had seen the error of my ways and that I’m coming back for real.  (And understand about the lack of Internet-based cake sharing technology.  Hopefully, scientists are working around the clock on that…)

I’m coming back because more than my brain needs to invent dire worst-case scenarios, I need to continually mull over what I am learning, what parts of life I am exploring. 

I need to write things out in a way that makes sense to others so that they make sense to me.

I need to share the beautiful things that I see in the world — both the pictures and the stories that are inspiring.

So there you have it, in a nutshell, the direction that I’m planning on taking in 2012. 

And I’m more ambitious than ever.  The plan is to have one word-intensive post per week as well as one that’s mostly photos.  Photos are what saved my creativity during the dark days of the past while, so they’re moving up in status here.

Thank you again, for understanding this glitch, and I look forward to your feedback and comments as we breeze through 2012!

Kimberly

A bar is a lost and found, except it is often hard to tell who or what is lost, and  it’s near impossible to guess what one will find.

The Guinness flows from the cold room to the glass, it is in the process of being found.

I know from visiting the factory that four ingredients go into Guinness – water, barley, hops and yeast.  After the magic happens in the brewing process and the consumption begins – that’s where things begin to turn up.  Bolder words are found within and stories thought buried are churned to the surface.  The pints begins to glow.

The taps sweat as the room warms up.  In a space that I move about in regularly, I am seeing new things.  I have found an alternate version of myself reflected back from the Guinness tap.

Seeing things in a different way does not mean that I am lost.  It just means that I’m finding a different route through.  On this particular night, I was rough on glasses, losing three to the tile floor.  Yet those on the other side of the bar found applauded the crashes.  Two very different journeys of perspective.

 

If anything, there’s the predictability.

Same people, same drinks.  Different stories, faces changing with the seasons.  But always stories to be found.

Always something left behind that you could come back for.

 

I have been so excited and happy lately, it’s like I’m about to evaporate into a cloud of awesome.

In addition to developing upper body strength, excavating the top three layers of both my kitchen and living room, and baking the best chocolate Guinness cake in the universe, I’ve also been creating a little bit.

Research on my novel or whatever-it’s-going-to-be is progressing.  At the library I sifted through the magazines that one of the protagonists would have read in 1991. (In all honesty, it was probably a magazine that I read that year…)  It was easy to sit there and become engrossed in a 20-year old magazine and imagine myself in the main character’s Ked’s.

The story itself isn’t flowing out as quickly as I had hoped, but there’s a lot of processing going on under the surface.  It’s like my brain is the spinning beach ball, but I’m lucky that I’m not in a hurry.  I’ve learned that sacrificing my own clarity around a topic in exchange for word count is a false economy.  If I don’t put the work in now, it will be forced out of me in the editing process.

For creative cross-training, I signed up for an online photo essay course.  So far, I’ve been engrossed in taking photos and editing them to learn how to use the applications.  I’m looking forward to getting right into this.  I am prepared to be perpetually astounded by the work of others in the course and look forward to improving my own skills.

My flower fixation continues, but my goal for the next month is to branch out a bit, and no, I don't mean to trees...

But the one thing that really got my juices flowing this week was writing a tiny, 350 word article that I submitted to a blog.  As soon as I saw the opportunity, I knew what I wanted to write about.

I was consumed by the act of writing the small piece, scribbling away at the main idea from three or four angles until the core of what I would submit began to coalesce.  The time flew by unnoticed as I poured everything onto the page and then chiseled away at what was written to get it down to a mere 350 words.

Within 24 hours of learning about the assignment, I had a piece that I deemed worthy of submitting.

And then I didn’t.

I fought with myself on that one.   The identity of the other people referenced in the piece were deeply veiled.  And as I’ve grappled with before in the past, it wasn’t about them, it was about me.  Objection obliterated.

The crux of it was that I was afraid that others would find the piece immature and think me shallow and weak for getting into the situation that I wrote about.  In it, I admitted not acting in accordance with my own sense of right and wrong.  Or, more accurately, a feeling of what was right versus how good it was to write.

My best magnolia photo from my trip to Sonoma earlier this summer, with the Wow dialed up by a few iphone apps.

Even though that feeling had driven the whole writing process and I had made sure that the situation was only seen as a catalyst for the growth of my awareness and expression, I still could not press Send.

I really thought the piece would shrivel in my draft email folder and become something that I would regret not sending a few months from now.

But on Tuesday, I was not in a mood to negotiate, and I made myself draft the accompanying e-mail, and pressed Send.  It was gone, into the wild.  I was no longer in control of its fate, and that was okay with me.

Even if it never gets published on the website I sent it to, it is a victory.  I successfully fought the internal voice that wanted to hold me back.

And that is exciting.  With other opportunities to draft short pieces for submission coming up, the ability to defeat this ridiculous voice is vital. I know that it will come back and stomp on my creative toes again in the near future.

But I’m ready for it.

And as the month goes on and I learn how to foster and extend my creativity.

The thrills will continue.

There are some things that just make sense, that you know are completely right for you.

This past month, I’ve been carrying around a second Moleskine notebook.  An extra-large green number that already has a nectarine stain on it from being in my bag.  A book that has twelve hand-written pages of dialogue on it.  I will carry it everywhere until it’s filled, and then I will carry it and its successor around until the novel is and I’m working on another project.  I know that I’m in deep when I have exciting aha moments with the characters.  I have called a friend to chat with her about one of the plot snags I have run into to get another writer’s opinion on it.

I love talking to other writers about things like that.  (It’s pointless to talk to others about these things, because it just makes them think I’m crazy.)  The best part is that the response is always encouraging.  ”You should give it a try,” is the response I typically get.  While I could take the risk on my own, it’s nice to know that someone else thinks it’s a risk worth taking as well.

Flowers from San Francisco, near Coit Tower. I had quite the hike up the hill, but the view, and the flowers, were well worth the effort.

The piece I’m working on is generating a lot of excitement in my life.  It’s not excitement in the traditional sense, not a series of messy nights that I’m trying to attach meaning to.  It’s the good kind of excitement that I can talk about loudly in a restaurant without offending nuns sitting at the next table. (Of course, that has really happened to me.)

I’m engaged with what I’m writing.  In everyday life, there’s a corner of my brain that is chewing away on what needs to be written, how things can be developed, and exactly where  I put the scene I wrote in 2009.

This project is also helping me to identify what things aren’t important in my life.  What do I not want to do when I get home from work, what unnecessary stressors are making their way into my brain.

This summer, as I strove to sort things out in my head, I made a list of the three things that I want to accomplish in the next six to eight months.  Writing and fitness are a matter of setting priorities and simply DOING the things I know I need to DO.

The third, well, is a more complicated mix, but it relies on the externalities generated by the first two. (I know that telling people about your goals is key to achieving them, but let’s just say that I’m having difficulty at this time writing about them in my journal.  Small steps…)

Progress on these goals is a very strange thing.  Ink nibbles away at the creamy whiteness of a notebook page.  Bicep curls are no longer confounding or difficult.  New habits are developing.  I have to work on the story or it will boil over like a pot of noodles.  My arms and legs want to feel the burn of resistance at least once a week.

The way I think about my goals has changed.  I am far enough away from my beginning point to see that the journey is well and truly underway. I look back in my journal at the person who was so worried about things that I could not control, things that matter less and less to me each day.  I have to wave at her, then get back on the trail.  Progress is feeding the pleasant addiction I have to creating change in my life.

I look forward, not knowing what the view will be when I get to my destination, but I need to believe it will be magnificent, if not looking out, then looking in.

 

There aren’t any streamers about to fall from the ceiling at midnight.  I’m not drinking champagne or dressed up for a soiree.  That night is four months from now.

Tomorrow is the first of September, the new year for those who are strict adherents to the academic calendar.  And I’m ready for that new year.  I have my resolutions of writing more, exercising more and eating less ready to be set into motion.  So while I dreamt  of how my life will take a better path when the clock strikes midnight, I ordered a pizza and watched Arthur (2011) on pay-per-view.

I’m not starting back at school tomorrow.  I’ve deferred for an extra month.  I meant to take a technology in distance education course (delivered in distance education format, of course), but found the Gender, Culture and Technology course more compelling. I was also waiting to see if my program plan would be approved.  Both worked out well, as the books for the Women’s Studies course arrived today and it’s officially the last course I need to take before my final project.

Statue at Columbia University, a gorgeous campus that I would bend my "no more school" rule to attend. See, I'm not the only one who's habit of hitting the books is set in stone...

There is light at the end of the academic tunnel, which is what makes this New Year’s Eve such a solemn occasion.  Next September, I should have my Master’s degree and little motivation to cross the threshold of a learning management system for some time.  After spending time in three universities and two colleges, it will be time for a break from formal education.

But September 1st is still the day of the expected transformation.  I have new clothes hanging in my closet and new pens and highlighters.  I have made my resolutions.  I have made a plan for getting things that need to be done before my course officially starts.  I have  a chapter or two to write of my novel.  (I love saying that and actually believing it will happen.  So are the first few weeks of being with any story…)  I am signing up for a race in October, so I will have to start running again.  I’ve done an outline for one of my smaller writing projects.  It’s very exciting.

I have also been actively trying to write someone out of my system.

That takes time and patience, and tolerance of tear stains on one’s Moleskines.  Last night, at the suggestion of a blog that I read, I wrote a letter to this person.  It wasn’t a letter that will be mailed, or tapped out into a keyboard anytime, well, ever, but it was an excellent letter.  In places, it reminded me of the poems that I wrote last year, the same tone, the same voice.  I was thrilled to make the connection this morning.

Everything went so well, that as I sat there writing in my journal today at Second Cup, I thought that it would be great if I could sort out the residual lump of tangled emotions that I have before the start of the new month.  At midnight, I would be popping the cork to a new start, to having a clear mind and forgiving heart.

I’m a smart girl.  I’ve been in school forever.  I should know better.  

I know that there’s not a door that I will walk through that will change the way that I think over night.  I know that there’s a series of behaviours that need to be changed.  I will not be healed in one fell swoop.  I would like to be, but it is not the case.  It took a lot last time.  It took some serious distractions.

And those will come.  I will start writing about other things.

I will start writing another chapter, that will lead to the happy ending.

But for now I will celebrate the New Year.  And have a toast to the new me that will come to live in it.