The Woman Beneath My Skin
The woman beneath my skin is alternately ravenous, elated, grief-stricken, bored.
The woman beneath my skin is sometimes at peace and sometimes dissatisfied with everything, thinking, what else, what else, what else??
She wants company, she wants solitude. She wants to write, she wants to simply be. She is bursting with stories, she has nothing to say.
She is profoundly selfish, she would do anything for her kids. She tries to be kind to everyone, always. Sometimes she fails.
She wants a new relationship. She wants to get back together with her wasband*. She starts conversations with strangers on dating sites, gets excited, loses interest, all within a couple of days, or hours, or minutes.
She makes up her mind to invest more in her friendships, then forgets to return calls.
Sometimes I get so sick of her.
Sometimes I think she’s a wise woman. Other times a fucking idiot.
Who the hell is she? If I could uncover the layers, peeling back skin, sinew, bone, then unwinding conditioning, identity, ego, what would I find?
Sometimes, when she finds herself disgusted with social media and our communal urge to perform our lives, she thinks in Shakespeare: …but I have that within which passeth show. Then she wonders, Is it true? Perhaps I have nothing within that passeth show, nothing at all. Just a vast unbounded emptiness. And then she thinks: If I could accept this emptiness, embrace it, would it bring peace? Joy, even?
She’s been meditating for close to thirty years and she still sucks at it. WTF?!
She remembers riding home from Spirit Rock with her friend Happy. For years they carpooled every week, San Francisco to Woodacre, an hour plus each way, for Jack Kornfield’s Monday night class. She remembers Happy saying to her, I love everything about Buddhism except the meditating part. Yes! That’s exactly how she feels!
Except sometimes she loves to meditate. But only on her own terms, her own time. She will meditate for 3–5–10–15–sometimes 20 minutes. No more than that. She does not love to meditate for more then 20 minutes. Which she’s pretty sure disqualifies her from ever becoming a Buddhist nun.
She loves to tromp through the deep snow and yet, even though she wrote a whole damn essay about it, on almost every winter day she resists getting out the door. What the actual fuck?!
She says her kids are her top priority, then she forgets to do things she’s supposed to do for them—paperwork, appointments, classes, camps. Then she does it all in one burst, and if it’s on time she thanks whatever goddesses dropped it into her head the day before the deadline instead of the day after.
She feels at times that her life is a seesaw, with all the elements laid out upon its length—children; writing; teaching; friends; family; dogs; home; the body’s demands for food, movement, nature, touch. These elements are constantly changing position, so that as soon as equilibrium is achieved, the balance shifts: one item suddenly gathers weight and everything else slides toward it, becoming smushed and misshapen as she frantically strives to adjust.
And she says to herself, I am not this body or this mind or this consciousness. I am like the snow: It floats, lands, joins with its fellows, melts, evaporates, condenses, becomes rain or sleet or snow and falls to earth again. That’s what I do, what we all do. Each of us is a single ice crystal, particular and exquisite, making the same journey of falling, melding, melting, falling again. She can’t decide if this makes her happy or sad. Both, she decides, at different times, or sometimes at the same time.
Sometimes grief takes her heart in its hand and squeezes so tightly she can barely breathe. Sometimes she reaches for a marijuana gummy, thinking it will make her feel better. It usually does, if only for a while. (But what isn’t “only for a while?”) Other times, just stepping out the door, she inhales the frosty air, looks around at the sky and the trees and the sun glimmering on the snow-covered earth, and thinks, I have the world, and the world is enough. And when that thought comes to her, fully formed, she wants to fall to her knees in gratitude, and sometimes she does. And sometimes not.
*wasband: a husband from whom one is separated or amicably divorced.
This piece and its title were inspired by a line from the poem A Beaver and His Pile of Wood, by Luisa Muradyan
If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy Paint Your Scars With Gold, about the challenges of a long-term marriage, or The Me Who Stayed, about my journey with depression.
Is the person beneath your skin aching to emerge? Off-Leash Writing Workshops provide a supportive container to find your authentic voice and let your words flow out.