Almost Over

We gave notice on our apartment a few hours ago.

I'm so excited to be leaving. SO EXCITED to be leaving.

One year ago today I lost my job with The Man. I have been unable to find a job since.

I think that's a sign that it's time to leave. There's no hope for us here.

Though I'm not sure if I am excited about where I am going or relieved to be leaving where I am.

Today is playing out much as I thought I would - laundry, packing, clean sheets, towels are heading into the dryer in like five minutes.

The only side trip today was an outing to the Coinstar machine, where our three years of pennies, dimes and nickles added up to $30.48 (which ended up being $30.50 because there are no pennies any more). I then lost that $0.02 when I bought an X-Tra Large Froster at Mac's and Joe bought two Two-Bite Brownies for $4.23 (which ended up being $4.25 because there are no pennies any more).

Hockey's on the laptop, it was gorgeous outside, I'm going to talk my husband into doing something about dinner, and then I will continue going through my craft supplies, trying to get what I need down to one box.

I'm STILL trying to make the one box work.

Surprisingly enough...

I'm not really angry any more.

Disappointed, yes.
Like a failed state, definitely.

But mostly I just wish we had enough money to just fucking leave in the morning.

Unfortunately, someone in Alberta, Saskatchewan, or Manitoba won the $30 million on Friday night, so my "leaving town independently wealthy" fantasy remains unfulfilled.

Now the task list is very simple.

Package up what we're taking, sell our portable air conditioner, (used five times, four years old this summer, perfect condition, $100 - East Van), throw out everything that we're not taking, buy a car, Joe writes an exam, we leave.

The exam will happen on April 19. We will leave as soon as possible after that date, but definitely before our tenancy expires on April 30.

I can barely stand the wait. I just want to go so badly.

Bonus Thanksgiving

One of the coolest things about marrying an American is getting Bonus Thanksgiving.

I love Thanksgiving and getting a turkey between Thanksgiving and Christmas is going to be awesome once we start celebrating with family again.

Joe misses his Thanksgiving and considers his Bonus Thanksgiving to be in October. It's like a warm-up turkey for the November and December feasts for him.

Thanksgiving is our favourite holiday. I like it because it's secular and is generally just about getting together and eating and drinking and hanging out with people you don't get to see a lot.

This year both Thanksgiving and Bonus Thanksgiving aren't being celebrated at our house because most of our friends aren't in Vancouver any more, we don't really have the budget or the space for holding a celebration for the few friends that are still around, and to be honest... I'm so tired.

I've got a lot going on right now and NONE of it seems to be working out into a job. Well, 60% of what I am doing isn't even public yet, so I suppose I'm having unrealistic expectations about some of my efforts. I'm about a day behind schedule so I hope I can make up some time tomorrow.

So in the spirit of Bonus Thanksgiving, I am thankful for good friends, better health than could be expected, and the best husband any woman could ever ask for.

I am thankful. So thankful I am not going to give up on getting my life together.

Because they care?

The MS Society of Canada’s mission is to ‘be a leader in finding a cure for MS and enabling those affected by MS to enhance their quality of life.’

We want to hear from you! This fall, the MS Society of Canada is launching The Listening to People affected by MS initiative. The nation-wide survey will be available on November 22, 2012.

More information on the MSSC's patient survey can be found here.

What is the Listening to People affected by MS initiative?

This initiative is a multi-pronged evaluation which has the single purpose of hearing from Canadians affected by MS about their quality of life priorities, needs, and barriers so that the MS Society of Canada can better inform decisions that relate to our programs, services and advocacy.

I'm interested in taking part in this if only to point out that more work and advocacy needs to be done around employment and NOT HAVING HEALTHCARE TEAM MEMBERS DISCOURAGE WELL PEOPLE FROM WORKING.

(I'm screaming on the inside.)

This survey is only open to Canadians, but when I answer it I will note the questions and post them up here for my US, UK and Australian readers (I have Google Analytics) to consider, or answer in the comments, or answer and send to your local MS agency.

I suspect that nothing will change if what we collectively end up wanting is too expensive, but hey... if you don't ask you'll never receive.

***

Am I the only one who wants to head out to Great Canadian Superstore to see if they can land a box of those President's Choice Cheesecake Lollipops *right now*?

DAMN YOU GALEN WESTON!!!! DAMN YOU TO HELL!!!!!!!!!!!!

Facts

I'm a member of Team No-Babies but...



I still don't have a job.
I have a better idea of what to do.
I can still walk and see.
I have an internets full of dancing babies.

Good day.

Progress

I spent from Thursday to Saturday with a couple hundred professional organizers.

I am kind of excited about the idea of joining them.

I'm starting a blog on organizing in the next month or so and will launch a business in the spring.

This is how it is supposed to be, I think.

I got some pretty cool swag, met some interesting people and I'm looking forward to next year's conference.

But I'm more excited about the ideas I got, the direction I was offered and the possibilities of where I could go with this.

I'm pretty excited but I can't say too much yet.

Stuff that's got me thinking

1. I was told the other day that my biggest barrier to employment was that I was too awesome. For serious.
2. What would/do I consider success?
3. I need to make some time to change all my passwords to 14 characters or longer, including numbers and special characters (if allowed). When will I make that time?
4. I love The Container Store and they have no plans to expand to Canada at this time and that makes me sad.
5. Self-employment, even part-time hours and part-time income, is looking and sounding better and better.
6. I might have to learn to like people more than I do in order to be successful in business, even part-time.
7. "Everyone's a libertarian until their state is under 10 feet of water."
8. I wonder if I could convince Joe to change our last name to something cooler?
9. If it weren't for the internet my life would be totally different. I would not live in Vancouver, I would not be married to the person I am married to and would not have spoken to anyone I have spoken to (other than my mum and my sister) in the past two months.
10. I forget where I was going with this. I wonder if that is a problem like my word choice cognitive problem?

Fail...

...Fail again. Fail better.

                 - Samuel Beckett

You keep showing up. That is huge. 

                - My friend Erin

I have never spent much time trying to be perfect. I have, however, spent innumerable hours just trying to be good at something. I don't need to be, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to be, the gold medal winner or the Oscar winner, or the Nobel Prize winner.

I just want to be good at something that matters to someone other than me.

I love the great projects and hate the daily maintenance. I love it when my to-do list is full of things I only have to do *just this one time* and start changing the due dates on the things that I do every day or are part of my weekly or monthly routines.

Routines are SUPER GOOD for my mental health, and when I get overwhelmed by what to do next my routine list is the place where I set order from my chaos.

But I rebel. I ignore it. I do something more fun.

I stay up all night 'net surfing for tiaras. I read entire websites on stain removal. I use the "Explore" function on Google+. I do anything to avoid the unpleasant or uninteresting.

EXCEPT when I am at work. I do the boring, unpleasant, routine stuff first just to get it out of the way. Also, there is WAY more boring, unpleasant, routine stuff to do than there is interesting, fun, new stuff to do.

Coming to accept that life is very rarely a barrel of monkeys has been especially hard to do since I quit drinking like an asshole 19 years ago. This is how I become a grown-up, I guess.

(Ooo... lights just flickered and there's thunder outside. My battery is charging, so I should bail.)

The Elements of Style

I blog because I don’t have to be good at writing to blog. I don’t get criticized for how I write. No one cares about my run on sentences or that I type how I talk: ‘net shorthand, jargon and colloquialisms included.

I blog because it always surprises me who is paying attention.

I blog because I like hearing “yeah... me too. ”

I’ve got this idea percolating. I know that people will be critical of it, so I don’t tell. So I’m going to spend the next year sketching it out and we’ll see what it becomes. 

Trying not to plan the result is hard. 

Trying not to decide which designer I will wear when I get my first interview on The Daily Show is harder.

(The answer is Chanel, but we aren't going to talk about that.) 

 Joe has convinced me to take a six week writing course starting at the end of September. I have no fucking clue what good will come of that, but it's something. It will make me feel like I am doing something to get closer to where I want to be; even though I'm not sure "where I want to be" is. 

So in the meantime I will pull out my battered copy of Strunk & White and remind myself that...

Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating...

and try to keep myself from puking.

The Johari Window was presented to me by one of the best women I know in the whole world. I gave it a good deal of thought, and chose the word “brave” for the last word to describe her.

She is brave.

She is brave enough to try things and then stop doing them if they aren’t a good choice for her regardless of the consequences. She’s learned to say no, to question her socialization, and to think critically about the world.

That is brave.

* * *

Writing is dangerous for me. I tend to think and rethink and type and delete the words before I get too far. It is as if these pixels that form words on my screen are permanent even though they haven’t been published. I can’t unthink them, but I can make their manifestation, however fleeting, disappear with several pushes of the backspace button. I often publish things I am later embarrassed I wrote. Even if I get better, I suspect I will always feel that way.

Writing sometimes feels like cowardice. My recent post about misogyny and gender feels like a cop-out to be writing about it and not be out there doing something and saying something to someone who might be able to change the world. I’m not that person. I don’t know anyone who might be able to change anything about the world. I just write about it, sending my organized pixels out into the world for all 26 of you who read.

Current Events

The more time I spend online reading the news about the world, the more I am hopeful that the Mayans were right and it will all go up in flames in December.

I have been avoiding stories about the Aurora, Colorado movie theatre shooting last week. I have many thoughts about it being more difficult to get licensed to drive a car than it is to get an assault rifle and how no one from the NRA can tell me why it was right that the man who shot up this public space had access to that weaponry. But that's not the point of this post. I won't engage in any conversation about the 2nd Amendent (because I'm Canadian, and other than the basic constitutionality of keeping and bearing arms, I am not equipped with either the facts or the culture to engage in a debate).

But I do know that Caleb Medley went to see a movie with his wife and got shot in the face for his trouble. I know that he is (or was) a Wal-Mart employee without health insurance who lost an eye and suffered some brain damage a couple of days after he got the biggest break in stand-up comedy of his life and a couple of days before he became a father.

Caleb Medley is going to live through this, it appears. The hospital has told his family that his medical bills could be as much as 2 million dollars.

The part of Caleb Medley's story that hits home for me is that this person is chasing the one dream he's always had while trying to pragmatically do right by his commitments and then the world comes crashing in on him in one crazy moment, through no fault of his own.

If you can help Caleb Medley with whatever kind of help you can offer (there's a mailing address at http://www.calebmedley.com/help if you want to send goods or cheques rather than cash online) I am sure the Medley family will appreciate it.

Because as difficult as the the changes this month have been for me, they pale in comparison to being shot in the face at the midnight showing of the latest Batman movie.

The one thing I always return to

I have mentioned a couple of times before that I have been going through my old journals; re-reading them before running them five pages at a time through the household shredder.

(As a side note, I really hate the person I was in 1997. If I knew you back then, I am so sorry. Really, I was spaz-tastic.)

(As a secondary side note, if you knew me in 1997 and your name is Virgil, I really am sorry... but upon further reading, you might have had it coming. Just sayin'.)

But I digress.

What comes out loud and clear in my journals of the late 1990s is one thing:

I found solace in barfing the contents of my brain onto the pages of an 8.5"x11" spiral-bound notebook. I found so much solace in this I would easily fill 5 to 10 pages a day of worries, obsessions, ideas, plans, hopes and fears. On and on, for pages and pages, trying desperately to figure out what was wrong with me, why the gods weren't helping me (I fancied myself a pagan in those days) and why, oh why, was I not writing my book or finishing my screenplay when I was practising writing every single day by belching out these  worries, obsessions, ideas, plans, hopes and fears. After I did that, the words of my master work should just come pouring from my soul into my fingers and onto the page via keyboard or pen.

That's what the purveyors and evangelists of the spiritual practice of being an artist had told me would happen. It would all just come out as I got out of god's way.

That never happened. My screenplay still sits as a first draft treatment, complete with sound track and Oscar acceptance speech, in a manilla 10"x13" envelope in my box of journals, really bad poetry, and first chapters of no less than three books that I can remember. There may be more.


In the past few days I have been introduced to the idea of never writing without a purpose. If the words aren't coming for my memoir project, then I switch to writing a blog post. If neither of those are working out, I'll grab a Red Writing Hood prompt from Write on Edge or I will write about the topic of the day from the book A Year of Writing Dangerously or write what I remember about an event that happened on this day in history.

And I'll save what I write for some future time when it is useful as a blog post or it fits in with the memoir work I am doing. (And I am doing it, 30 minutes to an hour a day, and I will get that mutherfucking thing DONE.)


My worldview has changed A LOT in 15 years. I no longer believe that writing is a spiritual path to god, but I am starting to believe that it might be a calling. A vocation, even.

I'm not convinced it is my calling, but it is definitely someone's. "Finding my passion" seems like such a crock of self-delusional shit for the privileged white person that I dare not involve myself in discussions about it.

But I do think it's (not ha-ha) funny that I always end up back here at the keyboard or at the blank page with pen in hand, trying to write something that is less shitty than the last thing I wrote.

(Booyah, monsters. 498 to go.)

Why I am Still Alive

In exactly four weeks I will turn 38. I will have officially lived 20 years longer than I had planned on. It will also mark the 8th anniversary of the day I decided I wanted to live.

“That’s a little over-the-top, hey, Drama Queen.” I know that’s what you’re thinking. Hell, it’s what I am thinking. I detest Past-Me and the person I used to be.

I know what stopped me from killing myself in the summer of 1992. I decided to live for someone else who really needed me to take care of myself. I didn’t do that well, but I really tried. I tried harder at that than almost anything I had ever tried at up to that point. We got through it. I made good choices then, and I have absolutely no regrets. But I didn’t really land on my feet. I made some awful choices after that.

I followed that up with more terrible choices, the worst kind of choices and finally started to move forward with merely bad choices. My choices got less bad over time, until the week before my 30th birthday. I had received some rather devastating news with regard to my health, I was unemployed, I was off-again with the guy I had been on-again with for the better part of a year, I was living with my ex-boyfriend who was trying to get me to snap out of it and being super unhelpful about it, and I had never, ever, felt more alone in my adult life.
I started planning. I started trying to figure out a way to die that would inconvenience the least amount of people. I started writing wills. I started listening to Portishead, Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan (The Triumvirate of the Suicidal Female).

A friend I used to have on the internet sent me a birthday package which included I'm the One That I Want. Margaret Cho spoke to me... DIRECTLY TO ME... when she said:

I am not gonna die because I failed as someone else. I am gonna succeed as myself. And I'm gonna stay here and rock the mike until the next Korean-American, fag hag, shit starter, girl comic, trash talker comes up and takes my place!

I was in tears. I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed my heart out there in my roommate’s bed, because the only TV in the house was in his room. I did not stop crying for 20 or 30 minutes.

I am not gonna die because I failed as someone else.

The very next morning, on my 30th birthday, two people I knew only from the internet and had never met in person conspired to have me woken up by the floral arrangement delivery man. A bouquet of 4 amazing star-gazer lilies and other flowers arrived at my door. I cried some more.

That is the moment I decided that shit just HAD to change. I got a sucky job that I turned into a slightly better one by October of that year. I dated some. I went back on-again with the guy I had been off-again with and we did that off and on thing for a few more months, until I finally decided I just didn’t want to do that anymore. I was finally making good choices.

A twenty-year-old choice and Margaret Cho are the reasons why I am alive today, for better or worse. I’ll admit that there are times, especially when I think about how MS has changed my life and how it is probably going to steal everything I love about my life in the not-so-distant future that I regret making that decision. The two people I love the most wouldn’t even know me if I had and there wouldn’t be a whole lot of people in the world who would miss me at all.

But I’m here and, though I make better choices these days, I am still trying to figure out what the point of it all is. I don’t have a career. I have a boring life with a man I adore. I’m 25 lbs overweight but I have good skin and pretty good hair. I listen to electronic music and do cross stitch. I write words sometimes. I erase or fail to save most of them. I have MS. It has stolen many of the things I used to love.

I’m almost never happy. But I am hopeful that someday I will succeed as myself.

Sidetracked

So Kimli posted this today. I laughed.

So I immediately thought of these lines from Margaret Cho:

"Because there is no such thing as a straight man with visible abdominal muscles. You have to SUCK COCK to get that kind of muscle definition.

It doesn't work for women.

You know I tried, okay?"

Then that reminded me of when Margaret Cho saved my life. So I started putting that in a post but it was a little heavier than I wanted to post today. I wrote something incredibly safe.

Then I remembered she said this:

Silence equals nonexistence. If I don't give too much information, if I don't go there, it's like I was never there in the first place.

So I wrote as much as I could so it wouldn't embarrass anyone else. I got angry about having to edit myself because of the world today and being unemployed and made some sort of "Why I oughta..." statement. And then I watched the A&F video again and laughed.

Now if I could only remember what I was doing before the visible abs happened.

Almost Internet Famous

In having a look at my traffic sources (because I am a big nerd about such things) I found out that my post, Battles, was featured on Carnival of MS Bloggers last week. I am humbled that someone found something I wrote interesting enough to pass along.

MSbloggers.com is run by Lisa Emrich, one of the first people I met online when I was newly diagnosed. Her personal site Brass and Ivory was the first site I sat down and read after seeing some of the articles she wrote for HealthCentral.com on MS.

I like her style and the way she handles her dual diagnosis of MS and rheumatoid arthritis. She's out there every day advocating for patients and educating the public on these two diseases. As an MS patient, I'm glad we've got someone like Lisa in our corner.

I'm looking forward to her stories when she returns from Europe.

Thanks Lisa for doing what you do.

Fabulous

I treated myself to a one bit of household fabulousness in honour of my present housewifery.

I BOUGHT A FABULOUS APRON FROM GRAMMA MAY HANDICRAFTS ON etsy.com!

It is well made, sturdy, machine washable (in cold) and can be tumble dried on normal.

It's perfect, matches my household gloves, and looks great with pearls.

"Gramma May" is located in lovely Steveston, BC and she offers local pick-up! At $50, her aprons are a steal.

Mine is in a super cute black with cupcakes print and pink trim and bows. Here's some detail.

If you too have a June Cleaver alter-ego, you need a Gramma May apron. I feel like my life is now closer to complete.

I spent some time on the phone with one of my healthcare professionals today. The progression of this phone call was a direct result of yesterday being my birthday. I am currently in the middle of what has become my annual existential crisis. It happens to coincide with my semiannual check in with my nurse when she asked about my mood. I was bored at work so I told her the truth. Her response was exactly this:

“Lori, maybe you just have to come to accept that there are some things you aren’t going to be able to do every day. Instead of habits, maybe what you need is discipline to start again after you have to stop.”

So that’s it.

I set up schedules, to-do lists, reminders and book appointments with myself. I start off really well, but then something happens:

Like I have a great exercise schedule going for four weeks and I’m on top of all the tasks I need to get done around the house and then out of no where I can’t keep my balance anymore, my calves go into spasm with every flex and I can’t safely lift a weight over my head. This goes on for close to three weeks, when I just give up and write myself off as broken and my house gets dustier and the clutter just moves around more;

Like I get all these healthy meals and plans together and it goes really well, until we have one bad month with bills. Then it’s food on the cheap and fast food lunches, because they’re the only ones around for $5 or less. I’d pack lunches to take to work, but my boss won’t let me cook food at work or eat at my desk because it makes the office smell. (Yeah, I know.);

Like I get this amazing morning routine together and then my body becomes broken and don’t have anything healthy for breakfast, I’m terrified that exercise will break my body further and I won’t be able to get to work, so I end up waking up in the morning unable to bring myself to do anything but slide into clothes, pull on a hat, guzzle a cup of tea and stagger to the bus stop;

And like when I start to fail at everything I want to be good at I end up swimming in this vat of sticky oozing self-loathing and anxiety that keeps me up until the early hours of the morning, wired on all the caffeine I had to drink all day to keep from falling asleep at work.

I realize that if I am going to have to type at work, some nights I am not going to have the nerves available in my hands/wrists to work on my book that night. Sometimes I will really have to rest them and not be able to type much at all on Saturday as well. But I can bang out a couple of hand written pages each day on my lunch hour. I go for a walk every day it isn’t raining or too hot (which gratefully is most days).

It doesn’t feel like enough. It is going to take 60 days for me to write my Book in a Month. Perhaps even longer. Tomorrow is payday, so fresh fruit and vegetables for dinner.

I don't believe in happy endings

A man I once loved said to me, “No matter what, unless we die together, it will all end in tears.”

Happy endings seem to presuppose that changing the legality of a relationship, leaving a crap job or getting out of a place you don’t want to be is an “ending”. I have never known a single human being who’s life stopped at the point where John Hughes would end the movie. An ending, happy or otherwise, begets a beginning.

I have been laid off from jobs that I hated because of financial cutbacks no less than 3 times and was able to collect federal Employment Insurance benefits whilst I tried to find something more suitable. I have yet to find that job. I don’t believe it exists. So while the ending was filled with relief the subsequent financial instability and settling for yet another job I knew I would hate didn’t really make that ending happy. The new beginning it begat wasn’t very good either, and I suspect that when my current job does come to an end I will feel anxious relief. I won’t know where I am going, but it will be different from where I was.

Having never been involved with a team or project that had an ultimate goal or finite outcome, I guess I will never feel the intense emotion of that kind of happy ending. Upon further consideration I suppose that some of the work I did in politics could have been considered to be happy endings, but the election outcome was never the end. Winning political office is never the end all and be all. The work begins the next day to begin to hold office. Just shortly after you start to feel that things are flowing as they should, it’s time to run for re-election.

What I do believe in is happy beginnings. The stereotypical “Boy marries girl” is not my idea of a happy ending. In my case it was the happiest beginning of my life. If our relationship had a “Happy Ending” I would have to say that that was the day he moved to Canada to be with me; one month before the wedding and 10 months after the first time we spoke. It was the end of long distance phone calls, the end of trying to carve out time for travel, the end of trying to find a way to work out our schedules so that we could still have lives and take care of each other across two time zones and an international boundary.

I wasn’t sick then. He was just a month after donating his mum a kidney. He had just dropped everything - the life in the city he had lived in for the better part of two decades, the job he’d had for most of that, the apartment he’d rented for years and years at that point - to give his mother an organ, move to a foreign country and marry a woman he had known for less than a year.

I have been kissed a hundred thousand million times but there are three that I absolutely won’t forget. The first one ever, the first one with Joe, ever, and the first one with Joe on the platform at Main Street/Science World Skytrain station as I went to pick him up from the station. That was the first kiss I ever got from him that wouldn’t start a countdown to his departure. He was home, and I knew that I was ending all of the long-distance bullshit that had taken over my life in the previous 8 months.

That was the moment in my life when John Hughes would end the movie. But as suddenly as that happy ending was realized, it was over. That was a new beginning. That was the start of something that we carefully considered, planned for and fretted about for the previous 6 months. That was the moment our new life had begun.

Mi amore vole fe

What do I want? I am far more certain of what I don’t want. What little I do know I want are small victories or pie-in-the-sky outlandish, never to really happen dreams.

One of the small victories I want would be to have then spastic tension in my left calf let go for just a day.

One of my pie-in-the-sky outlandish dreams is to write a memoir worth reading that won’t make what’s left of my family angry at me or get me sued.

I want to be able to smell coffee without wanting to puke, but I also dream of winning the lottery and living it up.

I want to know what the future would be like if I didn’t have MS. I dream of the day when MS is cured and I can stop holding my breath, waiting for the next bad thing to happen.

I want to have a spontaneous memory of my past that does not include an anxiety attack. I dream of the day when I can afford to have my hair, nails and toes done, brows and a wax job all in the same month. That dream seems pretty out there right now. I have expensive maintenance costs.

I want to be joyful a little more often. I dream that the next time my grandma sees me she will remember me. I want to be more creative on a daily basis, but I dream of being able to dance again.

I want to know what I am good at and I dream of the day when that is obvious. I want to show the world that logic isn’t terrifying. I dream of a day when all my friends are equal in the eyes of the law in every country around the world.

I want the day to come when I am able to stop making lists. I dream of the day when I am able to get through a day without forgetting something important.

I want to quit my job. I dream of the day when I own a real sofa. With cushions and stuff. I want to get more out of what little time I have. I dream of the day when I have enough energy to even attempt to take advantage of that time.

I want the Montreal Canadiens to win the Cup next year. I dream of the TD Garden and the Wells Fargo Center blowing up and taking their respective teams with them. (Not the players... but the buildings and franchises.) (Well, maybe some of the players.) (And Bobby Clarke... and hopefully Garry Bettman is visiting.)

I mostly want security; a most likely scenario going forward that gives me the odds on what kind of life I am going to end up with. I want to love my life and dream of knowing for certain what I am meant to do. I want to continue to love Joe.

I want to believe in myself. I want to believe that if I were tested I would stick with my values. I want to believe that there are few things worth dying for and that if I was faced with them, I would. I want to believe that I am a person of character. I want to believe that my personality doesn’t sell out my character.

I dream of loving my life.
(love needs faith)

Where I am at.

This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.

Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.

— Gwendolyn MacEwen - "Dark Pines Under Water," The Shadow Maker (1972)

(emphasis mine)