On being wild & bold in life
P.R. This one is really just Abby talking about herself & doing some apologetics for the way she writes and lives. Which is pretty much exactly what her last essay stood AGAINST. Honestly, just skip this one.
On the front page of this website is a photo of me at age 2. The subtitle below reads: “This one’s for her.” There’s a reason for that!
For some time there, I was quite the loud, vibrant, silly, precocious little spirit. I loved the world. I burned for life. Other people had mostly been kind. The psychodramas of my nuclear family unit were mostly happening off stage. I was determined about things - about all things. I was thinking thoughts, and everyone heard every one.
She was fun. I loved being her! For various reasons and in various ways, I feel I lost her there for a while. This, of course, is not exactly possible. She was still right there - just somewhat deflated and boarded-over.
For better or worse, but let’s go with better: I’ve decided to give that little girl some sunlight and oxygen.
All that reserved, private, avoidant shit has protected me very well. I appreciate the way I have taken care of me. But, enough now! I can spend my life winnowing and optimizing - spend it measured and small and quiet - and, well, so it would be.
You may look at this website - all this baring of my soul - and ask what gives me the audacity. Stylistic phrasing choices may be a red herring, so I’ll just spell it out. When it comes to my essays, I write to clarify something to myself. To find something along the way, to export to my second brain so I can drop the bone. If I waited to speak until I was fully formed and done changing my mind, I would die waiting. I’m publishing the process because it’s fun.
Like you, I was sentenced to death when I was born.
This is to say: I am, I am. I am not will be or has been. No more half a life.
Let’s talk to two smart people about this!
Mary Oliver, from Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?
Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
While the soul, after all, is only a window,
and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.
Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
…For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Heidi Priebe, via Instagram
“You cannot have it both ways: you don’t get to keep yourself a secret and also know huge, outrageous, world-consuming love. This is the trade-off and it probably always will be: we can be loved as completely as we’re seen. As completely as we show up, strip our egos down and sit with one another in the daylight of our most outrageous truth. There is no shortcut or cheat code to being loved. There is a field, where everything becomes illuminated. We simply meet each other there or we do not.”
This world is a dichotomy, a double-edged sword in all things. Your authenticity, to some, is showing your neck. It’s bleeding in the water. To others, it will be a refuge for the ages.
Two of the defining themes in my life so far are these: 1) the need to feel understood, and 2) massive platonic love. Which is to say, I have been a “best friend person” my whole life.
Here’s where this essay becomes a love letter to Claire. Speaking of a refuge for the ages.
Claire and I have been in one long, uninterrupted conversation for 8 years. For all the ways my head is in the clouds, her heart is in her hands - and those hands are serving others.
She happens to have an indomitable will. She happens to be the funniest person in the world. She happens to have the exact prerequisite temperament for my specific cocktail of flaws. (In fairness: and I for hers.)
She happens to know exactly what I need to hear, and when. Meaning: she’s good at lying to me. Also meaning: she’s good at cutting to the quick when it counts.
Our friendship has survived and grown stronger through hardships, challenges, and tragedies - all the normal stuff, and some abnormal stuff. We’ve hurt each other, we’ve propped each other up. Ebbed apart, flowed together. Shattered, reinvented, forgiven and been forgiven.
Literally - literally - anything can happen to me. I can suffer, I can get hurt. I can fuck up any amount. I can lose everything else. If Claire will be home when I get home, it will be okay - even if it will be so terrible.
I got a quote for this. Go figure.
Amir Levine, psychiatrist
“Attachment principles teach us that most people are only as needy as their unmet needs… the “dependency paradox” [is that] the more effectively dependent people are on one another, the more independent and daring they become.”
I have known the peace of seamless, cellular understanding between two human people. In many ways, it has set an unreasonable standard for everyone and everything else. In many ways, it has grown my heart 10 sizes like the Grinch. It has made me hungry in life, in love, in my work, everywhere my feet are and in everything I do.
What gives me the audacity? My roots in the earth.
I’ll say it again: I am, I am. I am not will be or has been. No more half a life.