25. Paradise, please!
Early on Tuesday morning—on my way to work in Center City Philadelphia for the first time in 12 days, after a magical homecoming tour of Southern Appalachia, feeling fresh and grateful, wearing my brand new Dansko clogs from Discount Shoes on Brevard Road in Asheville—I walked past the abandoned PATCO subway entrance (which I lovingly call the The Hellmouth, for reasons) and I stepped sideways on a piece of broken glass. It happened in slow motion: first my ankle rolled, and I looked down at my feet; just as I saw the glass and registered what was happening, I felt my knee smash into the concrete, and then my elbow. Finally, to my surprise, my head was on the sidewalk, the horizontal now vertical, and my eyes focused just in time to watch my thermos full of hot, creamy coffee roll jauntily down the jagged bricks and splash extravagantly into a foul green puddle of rainwater, piss, motor oil, and sodden french fries.
I was carrying a bag of new (used) books for my office bookshelf and a pyrex pie plate of deviled eggs that I had made the night before for a surprise bridal shower for a co-worker that day, the contents of which splayed across the sidewalk; amazingly, the pie plate did not break, but all the eggs jumbled around in the dish, paprika and orange filling schmeared against the plastic wrap, my pretty star-shaped piping designs and garnish ruined.
Everyone on the street stopped and watched silently as a man picked up my thermos and set it down next to me as I sat on the sidewalk, stunned. He asked me if I was OK and then kept walking. I didn’t know what else to do so I just got up and went into work, cried in the bathroom, scrubbed my thermos with pink hand soap in the sink and drank the coffee, and pressed a paper towel against my bleeding elbow. Later in the morning I picked glass shards out of my hands during a meeting as the pain crept into my ankle, up my neck and over my head, into my ribs, feeling sorrier and sorrier, wanting to cry and cry like a little child.
I felt that I needed to explain myself for my disheveled state, so I told everyone, over and over again, what had happened, not to garner sympathy, but to apologize for myself, for not being better, more together, more amazing. Everyone said I should go home, but that felt ridiculous after a long vacation. I stayed, and I was embarrassed—embarrassed that it happened and embarrassed that I couldn’t stop talking about it.
But the deviled eggs were a hit.
I’ve been unpacking from vacation slowly, savoring every bit of ephemera from our trip: handmade gifts of paper, smoke, clay, ash, and soil—journals, leather earrings, magical stones of red jasper and aquamarine, incense, bath soaks, a flower vase, a teeny bonsai jade plant in a tiny clay pot, black love-in-a-puff seeds, each with a perfect white heart—photographs of moments, pressed in time. It was all so beautiful.
In Asheville, I bought myself a sunburst necklace and when I got home, I found it tangled up in a corner of my toiletries case with a pile of beaded necklaces that my son Jasper made for me several lifetimes ago in preschool: brass buttons and sparkly plastic beads strung on yarn spelling out “JASPER” and “MOM” and “I LOVE YOU.” I cried again, untangling those threads, remembering driving down the mountain road last week that we drove down 18 years ago when we brought the baby home from the hospital in Spruce Pine. Remembering how bittersweet and lonely it was to see this impossibly tiny human sleeping for the first night in our bed, a brand new person in the world, a person without context, without history, without a story at all, save for the very most beginning of one; this memory, in turn, reminding me of my best friend’s son, who I met on the first day of his life, looking deep into the universe of his eyes within the first days of my own pregnancy, my friend’s son who died last summer, who didn’t make it to his 18th birthday, a pain we will all live with for the rest of our lives, life being so precious, love being so bittersweet, everything being so ephemeral and precarious and beautiful and fragile and so, so very painful.
I had forgotten how wildly gorgeous the mountains are, the hillsides terraced with cowpaths, the misty rain and the Joe Pye Weed, how ancient and green and haunted, how a river, running high and fast from a storm, can wash over you and sift out all the stagnant flotsam of your silly life and set things right for a time.
And the people.
The people who love us, who miss us, who came to see us, the people who sat around fires and made food and made jokes and brought gifts and hugs and flowers and kale salads and black-eyed peas. The people we hadn’t seen since before the pandemic, since before Glo died, since before everything changed forever—they were a river too, a cold, fresh current, a bracing energy, setting things right for a time.
And yet, and yet.
I keep falling down.
There was rupture, again, in the form of an old friend who felt the need to tell me about myself, again. To tell me how I made them feel judged, how I think I’m so correct all the time, how I just cut people out that don’t conform to my narrow, righteous worldview.
I don’t want to talk about this.
I don’t want to talk about losing friends again because I’ve been talking about it so much that people are starting to worry about me. I don’t want to talk about it because I’m talking about it so much that I’m making it weird. I don’t want to talk about it because I don’t want to disrespect or ignore the many friends with whom I am not experiencing rupture but instead experiencing mutual love, support, and connection; but I keep talking about it, not to garner sympathy but to apologize for myself, to apologize for falling down again, to apologize for not being better, for not being more together, more amazing. I’m embarrassed—I’m embarrassed that it happened—that it keeps happening, and I’m embarrassed that I can’t stop talking about it.
I don’t want to talk about the dream I had last night of working in some kind of high-security psychiatric prison, a setting which was probably a refraction of my job as a therapist in community mental health, where we have to engage in a daily arithmetic of calculating which death threats from clients to take seriously and which ones to ignore in the name of trauma-informed care and harm reduction, a silly fake math problem of how to stay safe, when someone at my first job in Philly was killed at work by a gun two years ago, when my best friend’s son was killed by a gun last summer, when 1.14 people are killed by guns every single day in this city, but I keep getting told that I’m too rigid about the rules, too righteous, that I think I’m so correct all the time. And the funny thing is, that wasn’t even the main thing about the dream, the main thing about the dream was that a group of young, cool coworkers were all going out for drinks and I tried to go too but was told by the leader of the young, cool coworkers that I wasn’t invited because they saw the night out as a chance to “get clear of me.”
I don’t want to talk about any of this because each time it happens, it reifies and justifies every other time it has happened, and it all adds up to me. I’m the common denominator. I’m the one who doesn’t talk to my parents, my brothers, their wives, their children; I’m the one who has been told about myself by a weirdly large number of close friends and co-workers. I’m the one who is told that I’ll be sorry when others do this to me, that I’ll regret being so righteous when Jasper does to me what I’ve done to my parents, that I’ll be sorry when everyone I love abandons me because I’m just so damn sensitive, because my boundaries are unreasonable, my expectations are too high. I’ll be sorry because I am clearly and obviously the one doing it wrong; everyone agrees. I don’t want to talk about any of this because it confirms my worst suspicions of myself, it confirms what others secretly and not-so-secretly feel about me, but I have to talk about it because the rules here are that I have to tell the truth.
Shuhada' Sadaqat, known professionally as Sinéad O’Connor, passed away two days before my birthday, before my trip. She was so important to me, her music was so important to me, both in high school as she blazed across the sky and the television screen, but also as she aged, messy and seeking and brilliant and wounded and scared.
Much has been written about her life since her death, but this issue of Badreads by
cut to the heart of things for me:We have a global pastime and it’s not baseball or world cup. It’s building up a woman. Making her a saint. A dirty, sexy saint, ambitious saint. A brave, strong, feisty, filthy saint. A sassy, bossy, bitchy saint. An ethereal, frigid, shrill bitch. A hormonal, bitchy, cunty, ungrateful slut. A bitch. A slut. A cunt.
I relate to this; I am not Sinéad O’Connor but Sinéad O’Connor is women. Sinéad O’Connor was healing. Sinéad O’Connor was punished all her life for telling the truth of things, for falling down again and again, for being so fucking righteous.
In this issue of Recoveringby
she talks about all the people who feel the need to tell her about herself:Something is wrong. This is depressing. I am throwing away my career. I am ruining my previous work, you threw away my book, now you see my true colors. I write too much, too lengthy, God damn you can’t with me anymore, I make you sick. I am too vulnerable, I need a thicker skin, I shouldn’t read the comments, I shouldn’t care what anyone but me thinks, I am not being rigorously honest, I keep rebranding myself, I will not get away with this.
So you see, I am not alone. Exhibit B:
at has also lost a lot of friends!These sorts of friendship breakups are both middle-aged problems and sober problems. Yes, some of my friendships have rejuvenated in sobriety, the same way a wilting plant gets happy when it moves into a room with better access to natural light. And others have dissolved very fast. I have had many meetups with old cohorts that were more like exit interviews than reunions.
I have gathered up an arsenal of other people’s words to show you that this kind of thing happens to everyone, especially to good people, to smart people! Here, read this quote from Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami:
Oshima gazes deep into my eyes. "Listen, Kafka. What you're experiencing now is the motif of many Greek tragedies. Man doesn't choose fate. Fate chooses man. That's the basic worldview of Greek drama. And the sense of tragedy—according to Aristotle—comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Sophocles' Oedipus Rex being a great example. Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of laziness or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty; So an inevitable irony results."
So, you see, now, I can explain. See? The reason I keep falling down is because of my courage and my honesty! I can now make you understand why this is not my fault. Why this is all just a great big misunderstanding, a function of the internet, the patriarchy. That other people are triggered by me, because my sun is conjunct my Saturn and therefore I’m a broadcaster for other people’s Saturn lessons, that I’m sober and therefore a clear ringing bell, that I’m strong and people feel that it’s unreasonable for me to have the standards that I have, that I’m strong, and people hate strong women, that I’m strong and people feel the need to take me down a notch.
All of this could be true.
I could be right instead of righteous, not bossy but the boss.
But in the end, none of it matters. In the end it’s just me trying to avoid the pain of the loss, a way for my brain to find a pattern in the pain so I can label it, categorize it, put it on the shelf and catalogue it: remember what happened so you can avoid the pain next time. Remember who’s fault it was. Remember not to call someone a “fucking idiot” for wearing an RFK Jr. t-shirt. Remember not to wear Danskos in The Old City. Remember not to drink too much or too little, don’t go out after dark, floss your teeth, reduce your carbon footprint, smile, get 8 hours of sleep a night: follow these rules and everyone will love you and you’ll be safe and your children will be spared.
It’s all for nothing.
The truth is that there is no avoiding the pain of loss, ever. There is no predicting it, there is no preventing it. Not only can you not avoid the pain of loss but you shouldn’t even try; the trying, the fighting, it only makes you fall harder. As J.P. Brammer from Hola Papi says, “Loss isn’t just a part of life. Loss is life. Loss is how life begets itself.”
What do I even want? To be right? To change? Can I be a better, different person? I cannot. I’m only me. I can’t be someone different if I tried, and believe me, I have tried. The trying, the fighting, it only makes you fall harder.
What I can do is feel it. What I can do is sit with it. What I can do is let the pain and the grief of the loss wash over me, wave after wave, and refuse to escape, to look away. What I can do is look straight at everything.
So many of my clients, women in various stages of recovery from opioid use disorder, speak, bewildered, about how all that their loved ones ever wanted was for them to get sober, and once they did, everyone left or died. It’s incredibly shocking when, after doing the hardest, most lifesaving thing, changing everything in order to live in integrity, to heal, everything still falls apart.
But life does go on, weirdly, improbably; life is for the living, and, as painful as it is, loss is generative, life-giving.
This summer, Venus is retrograde, making the journey from a night sky star to a morning star, and in between, she is invisible, her light obscured by the sun. The ancients understood this transit to be a meaningful metaphor for an underworld journey; a descent into hell, where parts of the self must be retrieved and re-integrated, like Persephone and her pomegranate seeds, a death and rebirth like Inanna, a journey to find and love all the parts of ourselves that have been damned, driven underground, rendered monstrous, unloved, and unlovable.
One night in the mountains, around the fire in Madison County, my friend Steve told me the etymology of the word paradise: it derives from the Greek paradeisos, meaning “royal (enclosed) park,” a private, inner garden, which itself derives from the Eastern Old Iranian world for “walled enclosure,” from pairi- meaning “around” and diz meaning “to make, form (a wall), build.”
What a revelation, that heaven was never meant to be a faraway land in the sky that Saint Peter or a dissertation committee or a jury of one’s peers grants access to based on the goodness of one’s works, but rather: an eternal inner sanctum, created by boundaries, a protected world of peace and beauty and pleasure within each of us dripping with figs, grapes, pomegranates, persimmons, apples and peaches and nectarines, paradise, milk and honey, heaven on earth.
What I wish to cultivate is not the power to control others, not to make them stay, not to make them live forever, not to make them stop thinking and saying things that make me feel bad, but rather: an inner garden so lush and so peaceful that I can find peace and rest inside myself, that I can feast on unconditional positive self-regard and love and comfort and nourishment, no matter how imperfect I am, no matter how many times I fall down, no matter how bedraggled or bedeviled or disheveled I am, no matter how messy my deviled eggs, or how skinned my knees; no matter how tender and bruised my multi-chambered, messy, juicy, pomegranate heart.
Home
If you find yourself in need of a perfect cottage stay on a gorgeous farm, 30 minutes north of Asheville, please consider booking the Farmer & the Naiad:
The World
Two more links, first, a beautiful and heartbreaking story of survival in the face of annihilating energy from a narcissistic parent (or: on the dangerous fallacy of bothsidesism): He’s The Trans Son Of An Anti-Trans Influencer. It’s His Turn To Speak.
And a little obligatory Barbie content:
Nine of Pentacles
This card is the card of the self-made woman. She stands in her walled garden, on her own two feet, in her own paradise, with her falcon and vines and coins and rich and flowing robe, a tiny snail at her feet. This card symbolizes joy, abundance, diligence, and the rewards and fruits of our labors. This week, this season, may your paradise be overflowing, and may your inner garden be lush and bountiful.
Home + The World is a weekly newsletter by 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. All content is free; the paid subscriber option is a tip jar. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you.
⚔️❤️ Jodi
