Literary Pixie

I am falling off of reality again. The skeleton of being human is turning into mush. It’s an avalanche of sorts. I am here in London – transported. I was in the middle of a crisis, and now I am here in London.

I am in a completely different reality. I am trying to find the ground, to build a ground. I wish I could just take a break from my life in LA. Things could just stop. Still “working” – getting messages about the festival, and human resources trying to decide my situation, still applying for jobs and whatnot.

I am contemplating doing a yoga teacher training program. In October, when I took a health leave – I wrote up this vision of all the things I wanted to do. This is why teaching had become so unhealthy for me. It was so draining and exhausting and all consuming that I had completely lost balance and control of my life and my time and my energy, and all these dreams and visions and goals that I wanted to do on my off time, I was too exhausted to pursue them. All because of teaching.

I went into teaching thinking that it would be a good job for me to have that balance, to have summers off and time to work on these other passions after school – that I would make friends and find community who shared these passions, that I would be supported to share these passions with my students and colleagues and community.

But that was not reality. Far from it. Perhaps bad timing since I started my career as a teacher at the start of COVID, but that vision, that dream has been a fantasy.

That dream is still my dream.

When coming up with this list, I asked myself this question:

What if I could resign from teaching and everything would work out the way that I want? What is it that I want? What would I do?

This was my answer:

• To work on my writing, publishing dreams
• to practice yoga and focus on improving my cooking and meal prep
• to spend time with friends and family
• to rest and relax
• to play and be silly and explore and go on adventures
• to hike and be in nature
• time and energy to meet new people and try new things
• to finish screenplay with Juliana and Whitney
• to be part/create a culture club, a writing group, and a dining group, and to really invest and nurture a friend group and friendships.
• to have weekly family meals
• to dance and go to Zumba!
• to create rituals, tradition, and meditation, and journaling
• to develop my curriculum and pedagogies so that I have one curriculum that I am really proud of
• to network and invest in the ELA writing, publishing, and academic communities.
• to go on a writers retreat
• to learn from amazing writers
• to finish my novel and get an agent
• to nurture and nourish a loving, health romantic partnership, family, and home.
• to research alternative housing communities and find people who want to do co-housing in Los Angeles and build a tiny home co-housing community
• to start my own magazine, zine press, chapbook publisher and distribute it around town
• to strengthen and support the writing and poetry community in Los Angeles
• to write my utopia novel and my us state embassy idea and put on fun events at the house and in LA.
• To go to bookstore and explore the cultural community in Los Angeles
• to focus on my health and read the books to improve my physical and mental health and pusture
• to get my health teacher certificate
• to publish my blow gift magazine

As I retype this, I think that this sounds very much like a smoothie version of my Stability Sammy plan.

I think I need a refresher of the plan.

Obviously, while trying to get stable in LA – I relocated to London (which is very destabilizing) and have to get stable again.

Maybe this is a good thing because since I have left my apartment (my housing), I can’t do any work on that. And since I have left all my relationships in LA ( I definitely can’t do any work on that – although I think I am trying to, which is causing frustration and anguish). I think this means that the main things I can focus on are money and lifestyle, which are too interconnected things, very interconnected.

I have enough money to get me to August – the school year starting. I am working with HR, admin, and some job interviews so that when the school year starts, I will be employed. I may lose my healthcare by becoming a sub, so that will be stressful and annoying. Again – why healthcare should be separate from your job!!

I would feel better if I gave up driving, but if I have to get in a car everyday AND have no healthcare – that’s fucking terrifying. My anxiety cannot cope with that. My therapist is already not part of Kaiser since my experience with Kaiser therapists was not good. And that’s really the only healthcare Im getting. I met with a nutritionist, but she said what I already knew, what I had already learned from books and my own research. She couldn’t help me learn and adapt and support the lifestyle practices. That is the role of a health coach, which is what I am thinking of becoming because that is what I seek.

From my 30 hour PD through the American Lifestyle Medicine association for doctors, I learned that health and lifestyle and relationships are all directly connected and intertwined, and that to improve your health, you have to change your behaviors, change your mindset, change your life.

Pills can reduce the symptoms, but they cannot solve the root problems that are triggering the symptoms that your body is literally creating to tell you – BRO STOP! This is not working!!!

This process though of your body communicating what it needs, and you listening and then making rational choices and taking action as a human living in a society will never end. It is what it means to be alive. Only when you are dead is this work done.

The journey is the destination. This is what that means.

This is what it means by only things can be managed, and that living beings must be led. They are never fixed or finite. And in trying to control them, to hold them, to pin them down – it’s like strapping someone to a metal table and poking and prodding them.

Like Jack Kerouac said, the opposite of death is not living, it is movement.

Or as Octavia Butler said, the only constant is change.

And yet we fight both of these very basic human needs – movement and change.

To move jobs, to move houses, to move your body. Created a society where most of what we label work means sitting in front of a computer screen, where the highest paid jobs (aka the most valuable to society) are done sitting in front of a compute screen.

The people on the frontline aka the people interacting face to face with other humans are the least paid and the least trained, getting the full force of the consequences of the decisions made by people behind computer screens.

This is the society that we have created. This was not created by God (for those who are religious). This was created by Man.

Nature – that was created by God. The universe. Plants and animals. Those were what was here before us and will be here when we are gone. From dust to dust. Animal is what we are.

From “rational” thought we have created society, but humans are not 100% rational. Most of the time, we make irrational choices and then use reason to defend our choices.

This is what we need to do for survival.

I have seen people who doubted whether they wanted to marry someone. There were all these problems and issues, and then, once they were married- they all disappeared.

I always knew we were meant to be. I just knew.

No you didn’t.

I was there.

I heard you doubt and question and complain.

And then you decided to say yes and marry them.

Then you married them.

And now, for your survival, your brain has deleted all the memories of doubts, questions, and worrying – and kept all the other information that told you to say yes.

Because that is what is best for your survival and mental health.

And for those of us whose brains don’t do that, who have become fixated on these negative pieces of information, who become stuck by them. Trapped in fear.

Who experienced severe trauma and relationship betrayal in the past, and whose brains can’t move forward until they learn why did that happen to me?! How can I prevent it from happening again?!

And who have been recreating the same traumatic experiences and betrayal over and over again because they keep making the same choices.

Oh my as I write this, I feel that my soul is in anguish. And I don’t even know what it means for a soul to be in anguish, but those are the words that come to me.

Anguish (noun) – severe mental or physical pain or suffering

Yep, accurate.

Recently, when talking with my American Grandma, we keep stumbling upon a trigger that goes to the very core of me. And it has to do with a conflict I am having with one of my oldest friends, and when those brain cells light up, I am completely triggered and this unconscious response comes out and suddenly I am absolutely miserable and I am crying, and the same words come out every time, “You don’t understand what is like to be a 31 year old woman and to have no children, no husband, and no home. My friend who is married and has settled does not understand, and she cannot help me. I keep driving to see her, but she cannot help me. Then I go back to my own life, and I am miserable. I just wanted to tell her that, that it is not personal, that I still love her and think she is amazing and want to be friends, but that I am miserable in my own life and that she cannot help me, and that I need to spend more time and energy with people who can, and that I’m sorry, and I still love you, and I hope you understand.”

I tell my Grandma, “You are from a different generation. You got married at 18 and had three kids and got divorced at 31. You cannot understand.”

What would my Grandma be doing without her daughters, without her grandchildren. What would I be doing without the support of my grandma, and family members to support me? To still be in relationship with me, even though I am miserable and have been miserable since I returned to Los Angeles in 2019 and started therapy.

Since my body forced me to listen, because I could not stop crying.

I think about what Papa Joe’s life would have been like if he did not have my mom and aunt to take care of him at the end of his life. Actually upon reflection, he was still miserable.

My grandma had done what she was supposed to do, what society told us a good woman was supposed to do, to get married and have children and settle down in a house. That’s the script. That’s the gender script ingrained in us as children.

And I have not done that.

In a way, I am just like her. The reason I have not settled down with a partner is the same reason you got divorced at 31. The partners I have had have been unhealthy for me.

I am trying to learn how to nurture healthy relationships. How to create loving relationships that are healthy for all involved in all parts of my life – at work, at home, in society.

I am not always miserable. Just sometimes. Just when I think about the goals and expectations I had for my life, as well as my core psychological needs of belonging, choice, and competence and am painfully aware that they are not being met and when I feel not strong enough or capable of making them happen. That’s when I feel miserable.

What does it mean to be miserable?

miserable (adjective): wretchedly unhappy or uncomfortable, pitiably small or inadequate

Yeah, that’s pretty accurate.

I have been working to make these unconscious thoughts conscious. Ny unconscious expresses them in feelings and body language, in me crying.

But the only way to take action, to make new choices, to change my life is to make the unconscious conscious.

I have been working on that for the last six years, since I first accepted that I was unhappy in my life.

I remember the exact moment. It was my 25th birthday. I organized The Feminist Toilet launch party in the basement of a gay bar in East London and 60 of my friends attended. Then we went to the Dolphin! I should have been so happy, but I wasn’t. I began to cry.

I told no one. They all saw a happy Sammy, but inside I was so sad and alone. I knew that it didn’t matter if other people thought I was happy or how things appeared on the surface and that by society’s definition of happiness, I should have been happy. It was about how I felt.

And I did not feel happy.

I realized I had to stop listening to society and start listening to myself, to my feelings, to my own thoughts.

That’s was the catalyst for me writing How to Value Your Own Thoughts.

I feel back in that moment again.

Your feelings are how your soul communicates with your personality, and when they are out of alignment- that’s when you feel anguish.

Well, I am out of alignment again. Well – the process of alignment and attuning to yourself is like I said above, a daily process that will never be done.

I think it’s time to have lunch, and then go visit Grandma.

I also think it’s time to go back into the Burnt Out Bitch and finish off Year 3 and Year 4, so I can set my vision and intentions for Year 5.

So I can do some psychomagic on myself, to prepare the rituals and symbolism so that I can channel love and joy and peace and happiness instead of anguish, fear, suffering, and misery. So that these emotions which are healthy and all part of life, communicating critical information about my needs and path can be balanced, can be in harmony.

The dark and the light. The yin and the yang. The feminine and the masculine. Day and night. While we fight against this either/or dichotomy – it is present in nature. Or is there more gradient?

Thanks for reading this rambling thing that helped me process and accept my current present so that I can function and be human and take another step.