NOTES

I am 36 years and until recently I didn’t realize I deserved to be loved just as I am. I had never fully considered that even as flawed as I am, that I could still be loved. My past and negative traits do not exclude me from love, but why did I not know this? Certainly I have loved people and I knew people loved me but there was always a voice that said you don’t deserve any of it. You don’t deserve love.  I recently had a really stressful month. I was in school and working full-time. I was buying a house and was the realtor doing the deal. At the end of it, I was relieved and exhausted and I should have been happy. I had everything I worked for and more. But a voice continued to tell me I didn’t deserve. I didn’t deserve the house I worked for. I didn’t deserve the relationship I worked for. My friends. All of it. I heard this voice before but now I’m what should have been one of the happiest of my life, it was louder than ever. I become edgy and depressed, snapping at people and

I was organizing my bookshelves today and I instinctively pulled out Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. The first line of the book reads, “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.” How succinct. How perfect. Didion’s cool detachment after witnessing the death of her husband is overwhelmingly emotional yet distant and observational . Life does indeed change in the instant. I’ve had two deaths in my life that happened so quickly and they changed my life. I understand Didion’s detachment from the actual event because it’s how I felt. When I was told my father had died, I was preparing to go out to a bar. I told my friends, took a shot and went dancing. As I stood in the hospital room watching the doctors unplug and take my friend off life support, I left. I went outside and smoked. It was all too much. Everyone around me handled those situations differently, but both deaths had a permanent and

Let’s talk about abortion. No really, let’s talk about it. Everyone else is and just like me, I’m sure you have an opinion. As we discuss this we must remember, our opinion doesn’t really matter. What matters is what each particular woman chooses to do with her body. We will not be discussing incidents that involved rape or incest, because quite frankly if you don’t agree that those women and children deserve to terminate their pregnancy, you’re so far past human compassion we have nothing to discuss. To belabor the point, if you think the 11 year old in Ohio who was raped deserves to now carry her rapists baby- we’re done here. Also, if you say things like ‘the baby could be Einstein or Beethoven,’ I can’t. The baby could also be Hitler or Ann Coulter.  Why are people so adamant about abortion restrictions lately? Did the #metoo movement scare men so much they had to think of a new way to silence and control women? Did Dr. Ford’s testimony make you think you didn’t have ownership