careful what you ask for. (Patreon)

{public post}

hello my dear loves

how are you? where are you? how are you feeling? tell me. i'm reading comments.

this ...  moment. holy mother of what.

i texted with ani difranco and we both expressed the same thing:

we kept wishing we had more downtime with our families.....and

we shoulda been careful what we wished for. this wasn't exactly what we meant.

and....does that mean this is all our fault?

i'm sure you will all be excited to see the actual black eye, care of my sweet monster of a four-year old. it wasn't actually a "punch", it was more like...a tumbling, chaotic head-bonk. he hurt his head, and my head slammed into the head board, and...here we are.

i'm glad it bruised. i think i know why. 

i watched my head yesterday. my eye, for bruising, and my mind, for answers.

i know a lot of you have read my book, "the art of asking"...and now that we are under indefinite quarantine, one of the things i'm hoping to do is a serial live-streaming reading of the book...i think it's got a lot to offer the world, message-wise. these are unprecedented times. 

everything and everybody is upended...and lots of people are going to have to ask for a lot of things. and lots of people are going to need to give a lot of things. and it is going to be more important than ever to know where we are, in the larger circle of asking and giving. sometimes we will have to switch spots 35 times a day. it is all going to get really confusing. what does help look like?

i'm reminded of a new york times article i read the other day, about super-generous neighborhood volunteers accidentally infecting their elderly neighbors.

the art of asking is infinite. help isn't always what you think it is, and help is not always on the way. sometimes it's best to take care of yourself, sometimes it's best to send the flare up, sometimes it's best to put all your bullshit aside and dive into the water to save someone. 

we never know in the moment what the right decision is. we guess.

early in "the art of asking" i tell the story of my first memory...about falling down a flight of stairs and being horrified when the adults in the kitchen didn't believe me, didn't believe that it had happened. there was the pain of falling down the stairs - the shock, the wind knocked out of me - and there was the pain of not being believed. the pain of not being believed was 1000x worse.

.......

i hope it bruises

is something i must have thought thousands of times in my 43 years.

i hope there's proof

....then they'll believe me.

i remember thinking this a million times as a child.

if it leaves a mark, it really happened.

it really hurt. it really happened. they won't believe me if there's no mark.

believe me, believe me, believe me.

see me, see me, see me.

the pain is real.

i swear. 

please....let it bruise.

................

i'm forty-three and i watched myself thinking this way last night.

i'm forty-three and i've been watching my weird, under-current emotions about coronavirus for a month.

neil himself has a strange relationship with pain, suffering, aid and care-taking (i talk about that in the book, too), and calling on him for help reminds me a lot of going back into that "they won't believe it's real unless there's blood gushing from a would" weirdnesses i felt myself paralyzed and trapped by as a kid.

last night, with my eye pounding and my four-year old maniacally laughing and shrieking in the hallway (there's nothing like having to listen to a laughing four-year old when you are doubled over in pain and the source of the pain was the four-year-old), i found myself thinking 

i hope it bruises. it really hurts. i bet it'll bruise. i hope it bruises. 

why did i hope it bruised?

then they'll believe me.

who's them?

neil.

who else?

i dunno. anyone. the internet. the world. my whole past. the cosmos.

it really dies hurt, amanda. you don't have to prove this to anybody.

yeah i do.

why?

i don't know. because i hate it when people don't believe me.

..............

it bruised.

it felt wonderful to see the bruise. i felt like an acknowledgable survivor of a single moment.

i am so weird.

but i bet i'm not.

................

ever since the coronavirus became an imminent thread to our existence, ever since it took over the news cycle, ever since this insanity became the new normal, i've found myself having this dark, subterranean thoughts.

i was talking about this with an old NYC friend a few weeks ago, right before the shit really hit the fan.

about how i felt the morning of 911, in my apartment in boston, thinking

maybe this is good. 

why could this possibly be good? how could thousands of innocent people dying be good?

because so much is so bad and people don't see it. maybe this will be the bruise that people see, and then maybe things will get better. 

how?

i don't know exactly. i just feel it. i want it to bruise. i want

proof.

...............................

careful what you wish for.

watching the difference between the american response, the UK response, the australian response, and the new zealand has been terrifying and fascinating.

this is the view from our new house.

new zealand locked shit right the fuck down. 

right. the fuck. down.

as soon as their was community transmission, they moved.

the NZ government has always been pretty sane.

it's why, given all of our options in an oh-fuck crisis, i chose to fly neil and ash (and xanthea, bless her) over here instead of scrambling back to melbourne, or back to the states. there were three or four days there where we were weighing every pro and con. we knew that wherever we put ourselves, we'd probably be stuck there for a while.

the government here feels like a group of real human beings pretty much doing their level best to take care of the other human beings.

jacidna ardern, the prime minister, has been doing nightly facebook live streams from her own home, where she's very open about the fact that she's toilet training a toddler.

she says things like

we know we can't do this perfectly and there will be guesses and mistakes, but we're going to try our best to get it right....

and

we really care about all the families in new zealand and we want to answer your questions, so ask, and we will all figure it out together...

cut to donald trump.

cut to boris johnson.

cut to scott morrison in australia.

the lockdown here in NZ is so hard that police are likely to stop you if you drive, to see where you're going.

this is the playground near our house:

good. i don't mind. i'm glad.

neil and i haven't left this house for six days, except one neighborhood walk i went on.

to the cemetary. (can't kill the goth in me).

i've been crying, i've been scared, sad, homesick, confused, grateful, overhwhelmed.

a whole new place to live, a whole new government, a whole new life in the blink of an eye, and all the privilege in the world to be able put it into place when so many people i know are suffering catastrophically.

do i hope it bruises?

oh man.....i don't know.

there's that temptation.

looking at the upsides, looking at the climate crisis, i find myself thinking:

maybe this happening was a good thing. maybe we needed a bruise to believe. 

maybe, maybe, maybe.

................

i am still backed up, i have hundreds to thousands of emails i haven't answered, michael is still recovering from COVID-19 in brooklyn and i've told him to take it easy and take care of his mental health before helping me. hayley is in lockdown in her tiny NYC apartment and is making due. my whole team is suffering and scared. literally almost everyone i know is suffering and scared right now.

my friends in new york are all strating to know someone who has died.

it's going to get worse and worse as the days roll on. i am blinking my eyes, unbelieving...feeling that dark feeling....did i cause this? did i want time off with my family on a hill THIS BADLY? is this my fault?

of course not. but in crazy times, mind gets crazy.

michael needs his own oxygen mask, and i need mine, and hayley needs hers, and then we can hopefully really, really start helping, planning, charting a course without puking on the map at the same time.

i've been starting slowly to piece my mind together. 

the kitchen is organized now. we have a chore planner. we have a grocery list and once a week, we will leave the house. i may even start looking at my email.

i've got a lot to say about the patreon itself, and what's going to happen (and not happen), but i just don't have it in me yet to get down to business.

i know you'll forgive me.

and i know you believe me.

i'm nursing a real bruise, inside and out.

gimme a couple days.

love,

a

p.s. brina viglione sent me this. it made me happy.

------THE NEVER-ENDING AS ALWAYS---------

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