time and tide

One of the puppies’ people has returned for regular visits this summer because her job at the school district is on pause for a couple of months. They hadn’t seen her since February, and the pictures she sent me of their reunion were hilarious. Max jumptwirling in the air, Ruby trying to embed herself into her body. As I was prepping to leave that morning, they were typically morose and sporting their Dickensian street urchin vibes, so meek and pitiful — how can they possibly be left alone in these mean streets, a.k.a. the vagina couches?!?!? — but I kept saying to them, “One of your people is coming today, it’s going to be amazing!” For some odd reason, that didn’t lift their spirits.

Seeing those snapshots of unbridled joy got me thinking about time — our sense of time, my sense of time, their sense of time. When I leave the house and forget something, I am greeted with the same level of vigorous joy at being gone for 20 seconds as I am at being gone for 10 days. (And I swear I don’t fuck with their chi and “forget” things only to enwrap myself in their joy. Promise.) The sensation is a leveling of time, reminding me that we are always only in the now, and that these other attempts at measurement and tracking are simply illusory methods of control over the pace and rhythm of our lives.

It’s a shift in perspective to try to be present in a culture that is constantly pressing you to look toward the future. A friend of mine was talking about his daughter (who is in her mid-20s) because he is concerned that her perspective is too mired in things that she cannot control. But so many of those perspective shifts are rooted simply in time passing, distance, enough space to see things more clearly. I think of all the iterations of therapy I have delved into, how each was a deeper unraveling of the onion-that-is-Kat, how things said to me by my therapist of 15 years ago flew right over my head, only to land squarely dead-center when another therapist said it years later. That we can only hear, see, feel, understand exactly what we’re ready to hear, see, feel, understand, in that moment.

I’d say that I wished I had known when I was younger that this slow, revelatory process would take place over my entire lifetime, but, of course, I probably wouldn’t have been able to absorb it. I mean, I have been joking for a long time that the day I wake up and say, “Oh, wow, now I get it!” I will die the next day. So, I suppose I knew at some level that there is an element of trust in the process that one must put into the endeavor of living.

Another recent perspective shift was inspired by another friend, a nearest and dearest who is going through what seems to be a rather sad and common experience at present (at least, she is one of a few women that I know who have experienced something like this recently): To be partnered with someone who cannot (likely because of their own onion-unraveling-process) make meaningful changes in order to continue being in the partnership, and when the break-up occurs, only then do they seek therapeutic help and return with a mental health diagnosis. Often, with the idea of “see, here’s what’s wrong with me, this is why I am who I am, now deal with it.” But sometimes, not — sometimes they step up to the plate and make real efforts to unravel their business.

But the latest example returned with a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, which I didn’t know much about, and which sounds quite painful to live with. Once I read more about it, I was struck: All of the chaos of my most recent romantic foray rolled up into one giant shitshow of a thought disorder. There were things that happened in that relationship that didn’t fit nicely into my understanding and experience of narcissists, having been well-versed in them since childhood, and when I would respond how I had learned to in order to set boundaries or protect myself from a narcissist’s wiles, the situation would often go off the rails. Similarly, there was a large amount of behavior that didn’t align with narcissism, at its core, and so attempting to understand and navigate those, parse through them in the chaos, was a bit crazy-making.

As I read more about this particular condition, I gained new clarity and perspective on the experience, why certain things happened the way they did, and it even allowed me to dip into my deep well of empathy and begin to let go of the vestiges of anger that have been hanging around my heart, hitching rides into my dreams any time I’m feeling particularly low. Healing from the experience will still take some more time, and I am taking it, but this new understanding, this new perspective and framing, of being in a partnership with someone who has undiagnosed BPD, and who is made utterly miserable by it — that is creating space and time for a new perspective on what I experienced, how I experienced it, and what I can take away from it.

Now, the basic facts don’t change, and there was certainly usery at the heart of many of the core issues with our dynamic, but realizing that there was a deeply-seated thought disorder running the show behind the addiction, behind the anger, behind the mood swings, behind all of the pain and porous sense of self — that is a bit of peace and a bit of a gift to myself. It enables me to give the grace required to let that chapter go, cycle on, delve into new adventures.

When I was in Mexico recently, each morning was met with a blanket of sargasso on the tide. Watching the intrepid workers clear the sands each day, I remember thinking, I hope they can use that for compost.

The last night I was there, I met a couple who shared with me that as sargasso breaks down, it becomes poisonous, so it can’t be used to make compost. I was struck by the reality that the excess sargasso, whose production is largely driven by climate change, is thriving on these tides — and we just keep sending each other out with shovels and wheelbarrows every morning to fill them up, hoping to remove the evidence of excess in our hearts and souls.

Ultimately, these tides and this time are Sisyphean in their design. A good reminder, really, to do what I can to allow those natural cycles to grow, expand, evolve — and to do whatever I can to keep the sargasso from filling all of my nooks and crannies.