10. A New Jersey of the mind.
Jasper is away at a chess tournament this weekend, so yesterday Duncan and I drove to New Jersey to take a walk on the beach (local parlance: we went down the shore). This proximity to the beach, like the kaleidoscope of food customs and cultures, or the ease of train travel, was not something we fully understood when moving to Philadelphia; now we can’t believe our luck.
New Jersey is a much-maligned place. Growing up, I understood it to be “the armpit of America,” and it was easy to hate. I thought I was in on the joke, without thought to the fact that I, too, was from a place that was considered the armpit of somewhere else.
And then, in the summer of 1996, while the Olympics took over my own hometown, I ended up working at a summer camp in New Jersey. I met people from all over the world. I canoed for seven days down the Delaware River, twice. I could walk down to the town from 500 acres of forest and lake, and take a bus to New York City in an hour. I got a fake ID in Times Square so I could get into the country biker bar down the road. On my nights off, I sang drinking songs with my fellow camp workers: a cadre of Irish and English and Scottish wild-asses, taking the piss.
What makes a place a shithole is not that the people are shitty but that everybody else dumps their shit there. What makes something trash is when someone devalues and discards it. A plant becomes a weed only by virtue of being unwelcome.
As most people can if they’re being honest, I can access feelings of self-disgust and self-loathing quite easily. I can feel it when I touch the hot shame of losing another friendship, the wounded indignation of finding out someone has been talking about me behind my back at work (ME! Who bakes cakes for my co-workers!) or, most especially, when I look in my phone and scroll past the 10 or so names, same as mine, with whom I haven’t spoken in 5 years. As much as I can explain, justify, and defend myself, show you the charts and graphs and reasons, deep down there’s a part of me that knows that all this rupture has taken place simply because there’s something wrong with me: I’m unlovable.
I’ve been working with this feeling through some of the meditations offered by the artist Yumi Sakugawa, like this one: “what is unlovable about you is what makes you uniquely lovable.”
It’s an incredible exercise to try to sit within your most shameful feelings and simply stay there, feeling the feeling, metabolizing it bite by bite. As Yumi says, “your shame is a scary dark cave that feels less scary the more time you spend inside of it. Eventually it becomes another wonderful and mysterious feature in your inner ecosystem that welcomes you in just as you welcome it.”
And when we don’t feel it? It builds up under bridges and boardwalks, multiplies in cesspools and cellars; eventually it catches fire and becomes a toxic plume.
And so all the disowned and devalued and unloved and discarded parts of ourselves: all of our psychic toxic waste, our emotional plastic lawn furniture, our inner carcinogenic astroturf. Hating it doesn’t heal it, it could never. Shrink-wrapping it in a mile of plastic film and shipping it off to a faraway shore doesn’t eliminate it, it just makes it somebody else’s problem. But if we can face it, feel it, tolerate it, we transform it, and we free up a beautiful, generative power within ourselves at the same time.
Tomorrow is the Vernal Equinox, can you believe it? The light has caught up to the darkness, and, for a moment: a pause of balance. May you take a lovers walk. May you beachcomb for shells among the wreckage. May all your shitholes become Shangri-La.
Home + The World is an occasional newsletter from Jodi Rhoden featuring personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake. I’ve included a paid subscription option, but for now, there will be no paywalled content. The paid subscription option is a tip jar. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you. ⚔️❤️
Home
This week, in the grief therapy group I facilitate at work, we hung out in the art room, and I made some arts, and it felt very good.
The World
Guns surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for children at the same time that deaths from mental health conditions (suicide and overdose) rose to become the leading cause of death for pregnant and post-partum people. Yes, you read that right.
Along with the many other things I have quit over the last few years, I am no longer trying to convince anyone to care about other people’s suffering because it sucks the life force out of me to argue with people over basic tenants of humanity- but it’s important to know that these things are happening so we can track them, so we can tell the truth of them, so we can take action that is in alignment with our own values while preserving our own capacity for awe, and love, and rest, and joy.
I know it’s hard. Hand to heart. You’re doing great.
Here’s a quick houseplant/kitten update:
Everyone in this house is obsessed with the bathtub.
Strength
The Major Arcana numbered 8 in the Tarot, Strength represents befriending our bestial natures: our passion, our desires, our carnal instincts. Strength helps us make a useful partnership with the parts of ourselves of which we are ashamed and bring every worst self into integration with the whole. Strength represents determination, self-respect, courage, and power.
May we all befriend the beasts within us. Happy Equinox! Happy Spring!
⚔️❤️ Jodi
Awww! I love you AND New Jersey!! Really amazing writing as always & I’m really mad at your back stabbing co-worker(s)! I thought of you in one of my camp teachers’ meetings when someone used my previous vulnerability against me. It was “only a joke,” but it burned and made me regret showing weakness. I only realized what was happening AFTER the meeting so I didn’t get the chance to eloquently point out what I was feeling but I’m ready for next time! 😘