Permission to exist

Being home is weird.  I slip into this weird lethargy and disconnection of purpose.  It doesn’t feel like my life.  Except it is.  So odd.  I am reading Toni Morrison’s “the bluest eye.”  This is a book Cara is reading with her students.  It’s awesome.  There are these amazing descriptions of the most random things, like how it feels to be sick as a kid—like you’re a failure and an inconvenience.  Or how it feels to be yelled at, or be given things you don’t want and then scolded for how you use them, and how it feels to have to have a bath instead of staying creatively dirty… I will have to find the quote. It was kind of about how being clean made you naked and like everyone else. I think she drew on herself or something and being clean took away that sense of individuality.  It was beautiful.  Otherwise it’s a pretty fucked up book, and I’m feeling lazy and like curling up and just reading it forever.
I was thinking earlier about how sometimes it seems really clear just how sad and stressful and painful life really is. I was oiling my shoes just now and thinking about things to say to my friend, Chris, sometime, because if anybody I know understands that feeling, it's Chris.  I was thinking about the Bluest Eye book and just how sad and lost the people are so far.  It’s like… it would never even occur to them how to be happy.  I think I forget sometimes that I learned that I had permission to be happy in college.  That I had permission to be just as much a human being as anyone else.  I really didn’t know that before.  I just thought I was a freak. And by the time I left Keene, maybe the feeling had worn off a little bit and I suspected that Keene was small and silly and maybe not the authority on the rest of the world.  And then I found permission again in Burlington, only maybe it was deeper… it was that I had permission to be human, and that it was OK to be human.  Not only did I have permission to be human, but that I was doing a pretty decent job of it, and even though I was not doing a perfect job at it, that was still ok.  It was such a novel idea that I could be allowed to just be who I was, and instead of needing the hard outer shell of “and I don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks,” I could soften up to have it just be ok to be me, and to think of forgiving each other for whoever we are, instead of saying “I don’t give a shit.”  Because we do give a shit.  So we should cut each other (and ourselves) some slack, essentially.  But every time you leave somewhere, or whenever the authority of that place is called into question (when Keene seemed suddenly small and the people got a little boring; or in Burlington when I realized what a small segment of the population I was dealing with, and how lots of people looked at Vermont as quaint and soft) then things are uncertain.  Then, you don’t feel totally confident that you’re basing your outlook on anything real.  Coming here, I’m still struggling for permission to exist again.  But Joel keeps quietly giving it to me.  It’s sad that it’s all lost now and then.