I can’t seem to settle on a writing schedule, or even stick to one particular writing project for more than a few days at a time, and the chaos of that has started to undermine even my blog writing, which is usually my reliable safe space each week. Usually, I know I’ll get a blog post done in time, even if I’m four drafts in and still not sure what I’m trying to say by Friday night. Every once in a while, an essay crashes and burns after weeks of effort, but even then, there’s always been another essay in the pipeline, ready to take its place. But lately, I feel like I’m speeding around in circles, starting and stopping each idea without rhythm or consistency, and losing the feeling of structure and safety the blog has always created for me, no matter what else was going on in my life.
I’ve been spiraling through memoir and fiction, mystery and romance, essays and poems, even English and Hebrew, and nothing feels right, nothing feels like a structure I can rely on to help organize all of the different parts of who I am into one consistent whole.
I remember, years ago, when I took a class in how to teach the twice exceptional child (gifted and autistic were the two exceptions they were looking at, for the most part), and I found a drawing that I loved. Some anonymous teacher had drawn a child (huge, filling the whole page) with a scaffolding on either side where the teacher could climb up and add supports as unobtrusively as possible, and ever since then I’ve imagined this scaffolding around me, helping me stay upright, intervening when I start to lose my way. I can almost see it, like I’m a building constantly under repair, supported and in process to something better.
But lately I’ve been struggling to find the right supports, the right structures and schedules and goals to keep me growing instead of spiraling off into the ether. I know I’ll find it eventually, but these moments, where I’m spinning and spinning and can’t find the ground, and my scaffolding is nowhere to be seen, are really scary.
“You’ll be okay, Mommy. I have chicken treats.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
With choir rehearsals and teaching and doctors’ appointments all leading up to the Jewish high holidays, I’ve been a little bit overwhelmed. So, in place of an essay this week, please enjoy these pictures of Tzipporah trying to convince her grandma that she will starve to death if she doesn’t get one more chicken treat.
“My sweet Grandma. I am so hungry!”
“Really hungry.”
“Starving.”
“That’s the one I want!”
“Mine!”
“All mine!”
Shanah Tova! Love, Tzipporah
“Umm, excuse me, but I think I might be hungry again.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
I don’t remember exactly what led me to the Somatic exercise videos. Maybe it was an offshoot of the lymphatic drainage exercises on Facebook, or the meditation videos that were supposed to help me get to sleep (didn’t work), or the exercise videos I was watching in order to piece together a manageable daily routine (didn’t work), which led me to the Tai chi guy who led classes as if they were one continuous dance, and the one where the teacher kept hitting her head over and over again, and a whole bunch of yoga videos that seemed to believe I have a closet full of yoga props, just sitting there, waiting. But finally, I landed on a series of videos that didn’t annoy me too much and that attempted to explain the reason why the teacher was swinging her arms around her body like heavy ropes or punching her legs or swaying drunkenly with her eyes closed.
“Humans are weird.”
I went down this particular rabbit hole in the first place because I’ve been looking for better ways of dealing with my anxiety than just playing games on my phone all day – well, more productive ways, because the games work too well and stop me from doing anything else – and I came across these somatic exercise videos and found one that was only five minutes long, which is right at the limit of my attention span at the moment, so I gave it a try. This one teacher has videos aimed at various different mental or physical health issues: headaches, depression, dizziness, anxiety, etc., and I decided to try one or two a day and see if it was helpful. But first I had to give myself a stern talking to, reminding myself that I was going to give these videos a chance and not let my inner monologue take over, even though there were so many things that cried out for comment, like the white smoke that comes over the screen each time she finishes one exercise and starts the next, or the creepy smile on her face when she gropes her own arms (something she calls “havening”). But, being me, even sitting alone in my room it was hard to do the self-hugging exercise with a straight face, and I didn’t feel the comfort she was sure I would feel, but at least it didn’t hurt (until I tried to do the fifty repetitions she recommended and my shoulders creaked to a stop, cried, and refused to continue). But there were some arm stretches that felt good, and twists that seemed to loosen up my lower back for a second, and neck stretches that actually made my headache go away for a few minutes, so I kept going.
I would say that the underlying theory of somatic exercise (and somatic therapy, and trauma-informed yoga, and whatever other names these tapping and swinging and shaking exercises go by), is that emotions exist in the body and not just in the mind, and therefore they can be accessed through physical exercises. Of course, some of the emotions they tap into aren’t fun, like shame and anger and self-loathing and impatience, but I’m willing to give it a little bit more time, because sometimes the exercises actually help me feel calm, or steady, or even settled in my body. I still can’t get myself to do the lie-on-the-floor-and-shake-your-arms-and-legs-in-the-air-like-a-dying-bug exercise, but I’m doing my best. I just need to make sure I wear long sleeves for a while, because I bruise easily and all of the tapping and havening and shaking leaves a mark.
“And you still refuse to try chicken treats?!”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
After a year and a half of renovation, a new Uncle Guiseppe’s market opened in the same building where the Stop & Shop used to be. In that time, I’ve gotten used to shopping at the small supermarket down the road, where I don’t need a scooter to get from one side of the store to the other. The prices are higher, but the convenience makes up the difference. And honestly, I’m not eager to go back to marathon food shopping sessions and traipsing back and forth from the car with all of the grocery bags. But I was still curious about the new store, and so was Mom, so we decided to check it out, midday on the Sunday of the opening weekend. Yeah, I know. Now.
The plan was to just run in and look around and maybe pick up a loaf of bread, but we’ve always been a family that treated food shopping like entertainment, so the chances that we were going to run in and run out, when neither of us was up to running, were already low. As soon as we got to the parking lot and discovered that most of Long Island had had the same idea at the same time, I should have turned around and gone home, but I asked Mom if she still wanted to go in and got a solemn yes in response, so I kept going. Eventually, I found a parking spot at the far end of the lot, inches from the exit, and Mom grabbed her cane, and I took the refrigerator bags from the trunk of the car, just in case, and we started the trek to the store.
Unfortunately, in the year and a half since the Stop and Shop had closed people had forgotten how crosswalks work, so even after surviving the long walk from the car, getting to the entrance of the store felt like a game of Frogger. And once we found a shopping cart and went inside, we discovered that the traffic patterns inside the store were even worse. People and shopping carts were entering the lobby from all directions and meeting up in the middle. I was intimidated, but Mom was ready for battle. She saw a pile of honeydew melons across the way and went straight for it while I was still dithering on the outskirts with only the cart for protection. Mom raised the melon like a trophy and it looked heavy, so I braved the unbridgeable divide, and tried not to close my eyes each time another shopping cart came at me, and, finally caught up to Mom and the prized melon just in time. Mom was proud, of herself and of me, and then together we made our way out of the entrance hall into the main part of the store.
The first thing I noticed was the high-end pastry counter, because it was right in front of me, and boxes of chocolate were piled on top of the counter and cupcakes and petit fours were dancing behind the glass. Okay, not dancing. Taunting me, but not dancing.
The fruit and vegetable section came next, with four-dollar peaches and every size and color of tomato, but I went straight to the organic section where the ready-made smoothies live. Lately, even trips to the small supermarket have been wiping me out, especially in the heat, so I’ve gotten into the habit of splurging on one of the smoothies in order to recover before driving home and trying to carry the groceries into the house. Sometimes all I can see is the magic word “chocolate,” but this time I was swayed by the bright colors and chose a bottle of purple, or blueberry. Mom hasn’t been shopping with me a lot lately, so she didn’t recognize the importance of this moment, and she didn’t hear me when I suggested she choose a drink for herself (she has a lot of allergies and I always worry that I’ll forget an important one and poison her if I do the choosing), but she didn’t hear me, and I didn’t notice that she hadn’t heard me, and we moved on.
Next up were the proteins: chicken, beef, sausages, etc., which we had enough of at home, so we were able to skip past a few aisles and make our way to the ready-made food section lining the entire far wall of the store. There was a small Jewish food section at the beginning filled with huge containers of chopped liver and individual plastic containers with one potato knish in each, as if they were cupcakes, and the prices scared me away. Then we were in the ready-made food section proper, where teenagers in pajamas and moms with baby carriages and, seemingly, every senior citizen from the entire island were standing in contemplation in the middle of the aisle. There were food counters all along the wall, in a long L-shape that reached all the way back to the entrance of the store, like a savory version of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, but I decided to avoid the counters and focus on the shelves of ready-made meals piled high in plastic containers, because that way I didn’t have to speak to an actual person (it’s like they knew I was coming!). But when I tried to get a look at the different ingredients and prices, I discovered that standing still long enough to examine anything in detail was not really an option.
We had to squeeze through the lines of shoppers, and around random islands of pizza toppings and Italian cheese, to make our way back towards the entrance of the store and then we were swamped by a crowd of people waiting impatiently to pay for their groceries and were carried past aisles of tomato sauce and olive oil and pasta until we hit the next traffic jam, at the bakery section (not to be confused with the high-end pastry section, which was a whole different thing). While we were waiting for traffic to thin out, I grabbed a box of cannoli-cream-filled donuts, because I’m only human.
Eventually we made it to the bread aisle and found a loaf of high fiber bread, and by then we were done. Somewhere along the way, Mom had picked up some fresh spinach fettucine to go with her hard-won honeydew melon, and I gave up on finding the sesame oil, which I vaguely remembered seeing on the shopping list on the fridge. We found a spot at the end of a long line waiting for an open cashier and I finally looked over at Mom, and she looked exhausted. I asked her if she wanted to go sit down somewhere and I could pay for the groceries and get the car, but she said no, if she sat down, she’d never get back up again. Luckily, a nice young man who worked at the store led us to an open cashier (though absolutely no one moved out of the way to allow us through), and we paid for our groceries and trekked back to the car, past many other dazed shoppers, and a few innocents who hadn’t been inside yet.
By the time Mom finally sat down in the passenger seat of the car, and I’d retrieved my purple smoothie from the grocery bags and realized that there was nothing for Mom to drink in either bag, not even a bottle of water, I felt awful. I checked the ingredients on my purple drink, and, of course, apple puree was the first item on the list, so I couldn’t even offer Mom a sip. Feeling like a monster, I sat down in the driver’s seat and drank half the bottle out of self-preservation. Then I piloted us back out of the parking lot towards home, belatedly shaking from the tension of the store.
By the time we got home, I was barely able to stand upright, but I, bravely, carried the two grocery bags up the parking lot steps to the long walkway, where we ran into one of our neighbors and her adorable dog (an ancient Maltese, with a top knot). Of course, I had to stop and pet the dog, and while my defenses were down our neighbor told us that she’d already been to the new store, twice, once at seven in the morning and once at night, when they put their ready-made meals on sale for 50% off and the aisles were blissfully empty. I managed not to growl at her, picked up the grocery bags again and continued down the walkway to our building and up the stairs to the apartment. And then that was it, that was all the energy I had for the day, or the week really. I sat down on the couch and could not move for the next three hours, after which I finally had enough energy to transfer myself from the living room couch to the bed in my own room for a long nap.
I’m still curious about the new store, especially the possibility of going at night when the aisles are magically empty and the ready-made meals are almost affordable, but first I’ll need to wait for this trip to become a vague memory. At the very least, next time I will know to avoid going there over the weekend, though with my luck I’ll show up at 8 o’clock on a Tuesday night and find out that it’s pizza night at Uncle Guiseppe’s and there’s a live band. Eventually, I will get up the nerve to go back, though, and take the time to actually look at the items on each shelf. Given how good the fresh spinach fettucine tasted when we eventually had dinner that night, the pasta alone deserves a second look.
“Mmm, pasta.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
After all of your thoughtful responses to my failed-mystery-writing-summer, I felt like a kaleidoscope that had been shaken back into place. What it boils down to: you don’t have to try to be someone more market savvy, or normal, but you do need to focus on getting your own particular stories written, whether they are fiction or non-fiction, whether the outside world is desperate to hear those stories or not, and stop letting the need to be acceptable cut you off at the knees. Because, really, what if we’re all more interesting than we’ve been given credit for? And what if expecting everyone to hit the same milestones at the same times and learn the same life lessons from our disparate lives is a misunderstanding of why we’re even here in the first place? What if the things that feel vulnerable and not good enough about me are the real things I have to offer the world and by trying so hard to fit in, or sound normal, I’m losing what’s special about me? What if by reading an endless supply of stories about the same successful, good looking, well-regulated people, we’re getting only a tiny speck of the wisdom the world has to offer us?
I don’t completely buy this vision yet, to be honest. I’m still too aware of the American ethos that everyone should be ruggedly independent and capable of surviving by ourselves in the wild; every man is an island, etc. But I’ve never actually been able to live like that. I’ve always needed help to get from point A to point B, and the only real variable is whether I ask for the help I need, or fail to ask for it. And maybe that’s normal. Maybe most people are just putting on a shiny gloss and pretending at normal too.
So, my job is to write the stories, essays, songs, novels, that keep screaming at me to be written, and not to sit in judgement of all of those stories before they’ve even been told. It’s still hard to ignore the voices in my head telling me to just shut up and let the smart, capable, useful people talk, but getting so much support and validation from all of you makes a real difference. I can’t promise that my brain won’t go off the rails again by tomorrow, but at least for a few minutes I’ve been able to take in the love and acceptance you’ve been offering me, just as I am. And I am so grateful to you.
“I could use some more chicken treats, Mommy. just so you know.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
