My mom taught me a way of thinking about purchases when I was a kid. I think it was part of my Real Life Math homeschool learning. She said that when you buy something, you can divide the price by the number of times you use it to figure out how much it costs per use.
Of course, more expensive items or seasonal items that only get pulled out at certain times of the year take longer to bring the per-use cost down.
In 2014, I climbed Mt. Hood in Oregon with my dad and my sibs. It was in celebration of my dad’s 60th birthday.
It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done. Despite it being June, an icy wind was blowing when we started the climb in the middle of the night. The tiny crystals were flying in our faces, and I felt like an ant clinging to the surface of the impossibly huge face of the mountain. Our crampons kept us from slipping off the slick surface of the icy snow, but it felt like we could fly off the slope with next gust of wind.
The fancy hiking boots and ski-grade mittens I’d purchased for the climb kept me warm and dry. When I came back to New York, I didn’t need them anymore. While it was winter up on the mountain, it was spring back home.
I went to high school at a tiny seventh-twelfth grade school in the Southern Tier of New York State. With 96 students in my graduating class, we got pretty close over the course of the four years I was there.
High school is an interesting testing ground for relationships. As teenagers, we kind of know we don’t know everything. We also think we know enough, and more than most of those around us.
Self-knowledge is tough because with all the new hormones, we’re still getting to know the person we’re becoming.
I had some memorable friendships in high school. One was a frenemy, if you can have a guy friend who’s a frenemy. We were often at odds, always fighting like siblings, and we drove each other crazy.
Even then, we both realized the reason we rubbed each other the wrong way so often was that we were very alike, and we saw in the other person things we hated about ourselves.
When I was a between 11 and 13, I had a few black t-shirts and a pair of black jeans.
Around that time, there was someone in my community who was too old to be attracted to me. It was someone who went to my church, who I saw regularly and couldn’t get away from. He would stand near me at during youth group or at the back of church after the service, and quietly say things to me. One day, he told me I looked good in black.
So I stopped wearing it.
I was reading something online recently, and the website did that thing where instead of a list of links at the bottom of the page, they have the next article right underneath the first. It’s just there waiting for you, and you can see it before you’re even done reading the first article. The bait article was a list of celebrity memoirs you just have to read.
I’ve read a few memoirs, but they aren’t my favorite genre. I’m not into celebrity culture or the lives of famous people. Being famous sounds like my worst nightmare, so why would I want to read about someone else’s experience with it?
But one of the top images in the bait article was the cover of This Is Just My Face: Try Not To Stare, by Gabourey Sidibe (gei·br·ee si·duh·bei). I’ve heard the name before, but I’ve never seen any of her work. I just saw her face on the cover and thought, I have to read that book.
This post picks up where this one left off.
The night I wrote the post about finding healing, I sat hunched on the sofa over my laptop, with terrible posture.
I’d been resting my stiff neck on a hot pack all afternoon. I had tried to meditate it away, pray over it, and medicate it. I’d talked with the Chaplain about the stress I thought was causing the pain. I’d slept flat on my back to reduce tension, and had done every other thing I could think of, including giving the rest of my family massages. (Fellow women may understand this subtle form of communication?)
I was pretty sure I was going to have to seek professional help in the morning.
