I walked up to the cab and hoisted my bag up into the trunk. The cab driver said he would pay me $100 if I could get his wife to carry a bag that heavy just a few steps. She would never even try it! Where had I been carrying it? Oh, London, Dublin, LA.

He asked who was waiting for me when I got home. This is a favorite question of cab drivers. They seem impressed at my self-reliance in carrying heavy bags, then wonder why it is I don’t have a man around to help carry them.

Perhaps I’m too able to carry my own bags?

Who’s waiting for me when I get home? My cats. Oh, so you’re not married, he said. No.

Then he told me that in India, they have a proverb: Marriages are settled in heaven and celebrated on earth”. Translation: it’s already decided who you’ll end up with, and when you meet that person, joy abounds.

It’s already settled in heaven, he told me. Your husband is looking for you. And you are hiding.

I told him I couldn’t possibly be hiding as I’ve been traveling around just about everywhere. When I stop hiding, he’ll find me. Soon, he said.

He also gave me throat lozenge for my scratchy throat. I gave him a good tip.

It’s hard to write when I’m happy. Maybe I have less to think through? I can just enjoy the moments as they come? All I know is that when I feel like I feel now, I can’t stop writing. I write everywhere, all the time. In my head, on paper, on a computer, anywhere, anywhere. I write while I’m dreaming and when I wake I wonder what I meant.

On days like today, I think about leaving and never coming back. And maybe one day I will.

I accidentally read a sad book today. I managed to leave my kindle at home before leaving on a trip, so I stopped at the bookstore at the airport and I was too short to reach the book I wanted. This book was billed as “deeply funny” (etc.), had a cute dog on the cover, and most important of all, was within arm’s length.

As it turns out, the story is about that cute dog. That cute, but very old dog, who we learn at very beginning of the book will likely not make it to the end. This then, is what I read just after I returned home from the vet with my very old cat. Like I said, it was an accident.

And while the book was in fact very sad and the main characters go through one bad thing after another, the story isn’t a black pit of gloom and despair and I realized that at some level, hope was a fragile thread, woven through the sadness.

I sometimes think about not writing here anymore (or at least making it private) so that those who know about it don’t have to worry about reading yet again about the same fears, the same issues, the same whiny inability to fix my fucking life already and get on with things. I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t write here though. The words and feelings would be trapped inside me, tangled up together like string with no way for me to see any of them clearly.

But surely I could find some hopefulness, even if it was a frail thread, barely visible.

I was talking to someone the other day about hope. I said I tried to avoid it. That it seemed too close to desperation. And it still does. Wanting something is meaningless, really. Life is full of too many moving parts and too many reasons why not.

And my hand hovers over the delete key because I see no frail thread here, no laughter in the face of tears, no heartfelt lessons learned, no admiration for courageousness. There aren’t even any cute dogs.

My cat is losing too much weight. He’s lost more than a pound in one week and the doctors are worried and talking about biopsies and potential results and how cats do with chemotherapy. I learned how to give him injections today. I just pull his skin up from his neck and plunge the needle in.

I never knew when I got that tiny kitten, curled up in that little cardboard box, that he would be one of the only constants who would see me through my marriage crumbling apart, most of my family slipping away, the heavy journeys across states, the rebuilding of my life (and again, and again). But here he is. He climbs into my lap and he looks up at me and all he wants is love.

I know there is so much of my life to be grateful for, and I do and I have joy and I know better than to think I’m anything but truly blessed. But sometimes I’m still sad.

I was passing through another airport on way onto another plane the other day and I picked up a Cosmo in an attempt at light and funny reading. Cosmo told me that nothing is so unattractive as insecurity. But here’s the thing. I’m not insecure. I don’t suffer from a lack of confidence. I don’t think I’m undeserving of love. In truth, I’m really pretty arrogant. Because I do think I’m deserving of someone who loves me and for my cat not to die and I’m rather angry at the world that I can’t get what I so clearly am entitled to.

Haven’t I spent too many years giving to other people? Aren’t I pretty enough and smart enough and funny enough and good enough in bed and imaginative and creative and spontaneous and fucking whimsical and interesting? As Avril would say, I’m damn precious, a mother fucking princess, etc.

And yet, all I can do for my cat is learn how to give him injections and scratch his ears and give him love.

A few days ago, after speaking at an event, someone started a conversation with “as a veteran public speaker, you…”

Huh.

Sometimes you get these glimpses of yourself from a perspective that doesn’t include your baggage and failures and insecurities and hopes. You see the baggage-free version you show to outsiders and at first, you wonder who they’re talking about, as this stranger they’re describing sounds nothing like you.

I do a lot of public speaking. People tell me all the time how they don’t know how I seem to do it so effortlessly and how afraid they are to speak in public and they just get so nervous about it all. How do I do it?

What they don’t know is that it’s not public speaking that terrifies me, it’s speaking at all. When you break down in hysterics in sixth grade because your speech therapist insists you call someone on the telephone, when you’re in elementary school, and you’re already the new kid, and the smart kid, the teacher’s pet, and the kids already have a million reasons to choose you as the one they ridicule and then they discover you stutter and it’s like sharks who see blood in the water — when this is the fear you have of speaking, the idea of simply speaking in public is nothing. If you can get over that fear, well, what more is there?

In part, I think it’s this. I should thank the high school speech pathologist who told me I would end up sorting mail in the post office. At my core is a fierce independence I will fight to preserve, and if someone tells me I can’t do something, then please get the fuck out of my way while I do it.

If I were to wax Freudian about it all, I might say that we learn things like relying on others and letting others help us and saying that we can’t do things all by ourselves the same way we learn how to brush our teeth and make toast and look both ways before crossing the street. And when you can’t rely on your parents, not even a little bit, not for support or guidance or praise or validation, you never really learn how to rely on anyone or anything.

So all you know is self-reliance. All you know is to be strong and not to be too loud and to take care of things the best you can. And not to count on anything at all.
The inability to speak due to technical brain difficulties and fear makes self-reliance more difficult. How do you make phone calls when you have an anxiety attack, complete with hyperventilation and sobbing every time you contemplate the idea of it? And (at least in the days before the web), it was difficult to get very far with many things without picking up the phone.

So, I guess I went the other way. I was told that I would never amount to anything because I had trouble getting all the words out talking one on one, so I worked and worked and kept going until I could talk to a thousand people at one time.

Working so hard to overcome my fear of speaking — just speaking meant that I’d already worked through any speaking with the word “public” in front it. It was all public to me.

I started public speaking early, which seems crazy considering my fears and humiliations and inability to communicate, but I didn’t want anything to keep me from doing what I wanted. And likely it was that stubborn independence, which deep down is really a panic of its own: Fuck, I have to be able to do all of this myself. If I can’t, who will help me? When I do something that someone tells me is courageous or strong or hard, I think, but it wasn’t. I had no choice. I had to be strong. I can’t count on someone else to help me lift the heavy weights. So I lift them, strong or not.

In high school, I was on the mock trial team twice, which required quick thinking and speaking with cross-examination and debating and the rest of your team counting on you. I also won the slot of representing my state in Washington DC in a competition that was half essay and half speech followed by a panel of questions.

At my first job after college, I gave lots of training. Now one knew that it scared me so much I spent my own (very meager) salary on speech therapy lessons that I tried to secretly fit in between work and school. Being comfortable with public speaking is something that only happens with lots of practice. The more you do it, the better you are. And since for me, any conversation was practice, I got better.

Which isn’t to say I don’t still get terrified and humiliated and angry. I’m generally fairly fluent these days, although I still stutter every day, at least a little. And I still have days when I can barely say anything at all.

I read a blog post about my weekly podcast once — the guy was mocking me — what was the deal with how I talked? I guess he got me on a bad week. And just a few days ago, I was driving to a friend’s house and the road was blocked off to all but local traffic because of a yearly festival. The friend had told us all to print the email inviting us over so we could show it to the police blockading the road and they’d let us through. I wasn’t able to print it out. So, I slowed down and talked to the cop. I told him the address I was going to, and that I hadn’t printed out the invitation like I was supposed to. I guess I stumbled on the address. “Are you sure that’s where you’re going?” he said. He smiled as though he was HILARIOUS. I guess I have the wrong perspective to get the joke.

So do I get nervous when I speak in public? Not really. Every conversation I’ve ever had has been rehearsal. But do I feel a moment of complete and utter panic every time I’m in the middle of a speech and find myself stumbling over a word, sure that I’ll be unable to utter another word and I’ll stand there, mute and I’ll struggle to get the words out and they won’t come and then what will I do, how will I make it through that? Of course. Of course I do.

But when someone calls me an experienced and comfortable public speaker, they don’t see my childhood and my speech therapy and all the times people hung up on me when I was blocked on a word because they thought the line was disconnected and the teasing and the fear. And that I’ve pulled through and worked and struggled so that all they see is the free and easy speech isn’t being strong. It’s just surviving.

For a long time, I didn’t like flowers. I know, who doesn’t like flowers, right? But I guess I’d gotten so many flowers delivered to me from guys who really didn’t mean anything by it. It was just this easy, hollow gesture rather than anything thoughtful and meaningful. And then there’s the pragmatic side of me that often wins out over my emotions. Where was the utility in flowers? Their only activity is dying.

I spent years of marriage with someone who gave me flowers (even though I said I didn’t want them) and earrings (even though my ears are no longer pierced) in lieu of anything requiring real thought.

But as time went by, I began to appreciate flowers a bit more. They can be beautiful. They can brighten your room, your day. And they can be thoughtful. The thoughtlessness (or not) of flowers has little to do with the flowers and more to do with the flower giver.

But I never thought of them as something I could buy for myself. I guess I was thinking of those stories — women who send themselves roses on Valentine’s Day and sign the card with a fictitious name. I didn’t want to resort to that.

My last relationship was built on superficiality. It’s amazing how we start to think whatever environment we’re in is reasonable and normal and only once we’re removed from a situation can we see its irrationality. Looking back now, I can see clearly that at some level, I felt safer in a relationship in which I didn’t have to open up or become too vulnerable.
But, even if we choose it, a relationship devoid of real meaning can take its toll on your soul. Being with someone who never tells you he likes you or anything about you or that he enjoys having you around can make you feel unlikeable and not worth having around.

And only later do you realize how much living in a world without affection or personal validation has chipped away at you, a little at a time.

Sometimes getting compliments for your professional skills becomes resounding silence — you are bombarded with the overwhelmingly loud absence of any mention of anything complimentary about your non-work identity. “You are great with corporate strategy” translates into “there is nothing about your personality, appearance, personal hopes and dreams, or non-work interests that is appealing.”

In any case, I would occasionally get flowers and I would think, maybe this is some sign that I’m personally (as opposed to professionally ) worthy. Only later I found it was nothing of the sort. I was creating a personal statement where there was none. He might pick up flowers for me, but he’d also pick them up for anyone. In this case, it was the entire relationship that was hollow.

But the idea of flowers was still growing on me.

And yet I still couldn’t buy them for myself. I kind of wanted some around, so I just hoped someone else might bring me some. And people did, every so often - friends who were dropping by for dinner.

It may sound crazy, I know, to want flowers and have the method for getting them be to just wait around and hope. But I kept (and keep, and keep) thinking about that book passage I read last September:

“It’s not that she doesn’t need rescuing but that no one else will be able to do it. She has always somehow known that she is the one who will have to rescue herself. Or maybe what’s depressing is that this knowledge seems like it should make life easier, and instead it makes it harder.”

I know, I really do know, that you can’t wait for someone else to save you and that you, only you can do it. You can’t expect someone else to fix you and make the world all better.

But buying my own flowers seemed like yet another way I had to rescue myself and it was exhausting to think about.

A few days ago I decided fuck it. I can’t let flowers be a symbol of my failures. So I bought some flowers. Bright, yellow, happy.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about our ideal future hypothetical relationships. She thought she might want someone who was funny and caring and thoughtful. I said all I wanted was to be accepted for exactly who I am. To be told that I’m enough.

And while I know intellectually that no one else can save me, I suppose I’d just like to think I’m worth the attempt.