Hi Helen...
I liked PR's advice about the letter to family.
This is one of my favorite thoughts, if not rules:
Reality is my friend.What I mean is, once I think on that, and after I've done my grieving (e.g., over having a mother who can't love, nno relatives who "get me", two failed marriages) ... then reality becomes something that strengthens me.
Of course, I'm not Rawandan, so there's some danger in this becoming something like, "Everything happens for a reason" which I think is very dangerous (see Cary Tennis column, Since You Asked, on
www.salon.com from yesterday -- I mean, see the Letters people wrote in response).
When I was younger and always, always an outlier (poets don't tend to feel "part of" community things unless they really are determined, which I became--after years of anxiety attacks and depressions)...
I thought reality was an enemy. So I did a great deal of manic free-associating.
I loved it and I also saw it as lonely, and seductive, and not a substitute for belonging. What it took me longer to realize was that I was waiting for OTHER people to give me permission to belong. I had it backwards. I needed to declare myself, "Of course I'm a part of things! Of course I am one of all of us! Of course I am welcome in the world!" (Sure, some people wouldn't want me to feel that way...but there are so many other, whole people, I just started skating past the more hurtful ones when I could. Present boss excepted.)
You accept YOU when you write. I love that.
You can be ordinary also. You can pat down your eyebrows in case they're like Andy Rooney's and scare conventional people, just so you can go sit among the conventional people and pass the peas, and look kindly on the person next to you who's repeating a silly thing ("You are different! That makes me uneasy! But I like peas!") and with a lot of patience and affection you summon up from somewhere deep inside, you can lean over just a little and tell them, "I like peas too. Peas are so wonderful.")
You just sit there being blown away by peas and so full of gratitude, that somebody beside you will just sense it. It'll be like you're two one-year-olds in side-by-side highchairs and you both have just been given a handful of fresh bright peas. Bliss!
I think people who are jittery and scared are put at ease when somebody pats them lightly on the back and passes the peas.
Doodling is a very helpful aid for me in tense gatherings. I need an outlet and need to guard myself so as to neither be overexcited nor overvulnerable, so I doodle something involving, while still looking up and smiling, connecting when I can.
For many years I got through parties by doing the host's dishes. Warm water calmed me, I could see shine and order, I felt like a contributor, and it gave me something to do with my nervous energy.
You might take them a pie. Do you have a farmer's market near where you could get some awesome but bruised peaches for next to nothing?
I think it just might touch their pea-pickin' hearts if you took them a pie.
love
Hops
