Folding Paper Wings

She flew too close to the sun

Don’t mind me.

I’m glad you’re here.

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I’m an internet elder – I’ve been active on the World Wide Web since 1995, I believe. I spent so much time in chat rooms that I flunked out of the University of Michigan-Flint.

Social media was not so much as a twinkle in anyone’s eye, yet I’d fallen prey to its allure, and paid a heavy price.

I was able to return a few years later, discovered the siren song of the student center and an amazing cluster of people – newspaper, “Gay and Lesbian Alliance,” as I think it was called then, it was a gold mine of perspectives and people and I sat on a couch in those offices until I flunked out again.

I got my education elsewhere, and tried to exercise more care in how much time I spent listening to and learning from others.

I should have been a student my entire life – I thrive on wading into the free flow of ideas and just soaking it all in.

But what do I mean by the “free flow of ideas?” It most definitely does not mean what Elon Musk says it means, but I’m quite certain he believes whatever Putin pays him to believe.

Email newsletters, then blogs, then fledgling social media platforms, then the all-encompassing Twitter… it’s been a journey! I spent sixteen years on Twitter so far, but the platform is becoming more untenable and unstable and uncomfortable every day.

I’m just beginning to consider that, while I crave the interaction with interesting people and the ability to just listen and learn, I don’t have the patience or tolerance or blood pressure to cope with all the rest.

And if we’re heading toward another Trump presidency, it won’t be safe – I cannot keep my mouth shut. I’ll end up on some sort of watch list and watch lists will be unsafe places to be in the America we’re becoming.

That doesn’t mean I won’t DO things, I just need to stop shouting at fascists until I cry.

I don’t know that I have a point, and I certainly don’t know what to do, but many, many of the internet friendships I value on Twitter are going to just fade away – I don’t know if I want to build more imaginary friendships hoping they become real.

I’m glad you’re here.

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I’ll write every day, I said. I’ll journal it very day, I said.

Sigh.

I’ll do better. Eventually.

I’m glad you’re here.

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I just looked at my Facebook memories and two of my past entries were rather fitting.

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I’m watching the show Severance, and memory is an enormous part of the show. The main characters have had their minds surgically modified – their memory is now spatially dictated. But when they’re at work, they know nothing of the world around them. At home, they know nothing of what they do at work.

The main character had lost his wife, and his sister said, “not remembering her for 8 hours every day isn’t healing.”

It’s my reality. I don’t know if my retention of memory is unique to trauma survivors or neurodivergent people, but I don’t remember much. I have isolated memories, but the rest is gone. As I discovered at work yesterday, just a few hours can do that.

I buried a husband in 2009. I remarried, and buried my second husband in 2015. I remember things about them. But their voices, their faces, most of what I felt around them – is gone. I know I loved them, and not a lot more.

I pray my faith in Jesus isn’t misguided, and that I will see them again. Maybe this is part of what Paul was thinking when he wrote to the Corinthians: “For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12, NRSV UE),” Is memory the same? Is it lost in a haze, and one day the fog will clear and I’ll remember everything?

There are things I wish I could forget. There are things that I don’t remember, but I still feel the physical and emotional scars of events now hidden from me. Does a tree make a sound if there’s no one to hear? Is it a memory if I cannot recall it? Can it hurt me if it does not, in fact, exist in a recognizable form?

I read an Agatha Christie quote recently, “One of the saddest things in life, is the things one remembers.”

I wish I’d kept a journal, all those years. I believe this is what I must do, now, as a way of holding onto whatever there is, of value or no.

The thought that made me pause the episode in shock: the sister’s comment about forgetting not being healing. Is that what still holds me down? I don’t remember much or most of anything, but it’s still eating away at my soul.

If I don’t remember, does it still hurt?

I’m glad you’re here.

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While looking for a theme for this blog, I thought about my love of origami, discovered during the pandemic, and how healing it has been, often just making paper birds.

I thought about my love of origami, discovered during the pandemic, and how healing it has been, often just making paper birds.

As I try to discover and shape myself, Paper birds have been crucial.Test

I’ve also been thinking a lot recently of my lost dream of learning to fly, And how there were years — actual, literal years when I could’ve flown. I could’ve flown in that time post-cataract surgery. It’s easy to blame years of crippling grief, Oh but it’s also simply that I forgot to dream. I grounded myself.

That opportunity will not come again in this lifetime. A dream deferred is a dream lost.

I’m glad you’re here.

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Wants vs. Needs

I've been thinking about the question “does that serve me?” Or, alternatively, “does this move me closer to my goals?”

You would ask me this, on the day of my daughter's wedding? Sorry, carry on.

What do I need? What do I want?

My image for my apartment is calm, cool, and gently lighted. No clutter, except for my craft area (gotta be realistic, lol.

I want to move my body without pain, and have it do what I want. My body serves me, not the other way around.

I just want peace, sunshine, and contentment.

I’m glad you’re here.

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My brain, and my life, are full of clutter these days.

Trying to decide what’s worth saving or paying attention to is a lot. I’m drowning in clutter. I’m going to blog. I’m going to try to stick to blogging. I’ve gotten much better at saying what I want and need to say, thanks to Twitter and its limited number of characters. Sometimes it’s still all just gibberish and nonsense. I’m going to try to use this blog as a “just write, every day” project and see if I can remember how to write long-form again.

I’m glad you’re here.

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Twenty-five years ago, before blogging began, I started following an email list called Nine Lives. Karawynn Long was blogging before blogging was cool, and she was painfully, gloriously real in a way that I didn’t know how to be. I was traumatized and believed my life was normal. I was deeply depressed, believing that to be normal too. I was queer, but even trying to say the words would leave me shaking and nonverbal.

Then along came Karawynn, who had words for many of the things I didn’t – and who once described depression in the most painfully accurate way I’ve ever seen, even now.

I don’t wish to bestow a goddess-like quality upon her – her life was messy, as it can be for so many of us, particularly in our twenties. She knew some different words than I did and it brought a little bit more light to the darkened room I called life.

The funniest things stick with you: Karawynn once toilet-trained her cat. Along with that toilet-trained cat, she drove from Seattle to New York and it was the first time I realized that that kind of bravery is possible.

Anytime, I want to buy from the mailing list, and then the message board that replaced the mailing list. anytime, I want to buy from the mailing list, and then the message board that replaced the mailing list

My life now is simultaneously the most stable it’s been, along, with somehow, being turned inside out and pulled apart, with its threads scattered everywhere, so I find it perfectly fitting that Karawynn has, once again create an email list called “nine lives.” —https://karawynn.substack.com

I don’t believe I had a deeper point to this other than “omgwtfbbq, Karawynn’s emailing again!”

Life is circular, and sometimes, with pimples out of it comes full circle, as well.

I’m glad you’re here.

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