Once a friend of mine explained to our writing workshop class about an exercise that her therapist had given her in loving herself and exercising the pain of self-hatred. She had to spend five minutes a day in front of the mirror and say, I love you, I love you so much, self! All of us in workshop were a grim and surly lot (why else would we be in a graduate fiction class?), and we all laughed. It would take copious amounts of alcohol for any of us to remotely like ourselves, much less love. Loving herself had been my friend's new year's resolution, and she'd been unable to even work herself up to a mild infatuation by March.
As a child, I loved resolutions -- they appealed to my sense of the clean slate. I would stop day dreaming so much, I would clean my room more, I'd stop losing things, I would try not to look like such a ragamuffin all the time. None of those lasted past a week because change is either a slow and miraculous thing, the road to Damascus stuff where you're struck down and blinded or for the rest of us, a day by day gruel to change our habits. The slightest vow, taken seriously, can change your life and bring out all the demons that keep us from what we want. So when I make effort for change, I know I'm in from a wild ride. I haven't made a resolution in years unless you count casting a few good luck spells to bring in happy energy. When I look in the mirror, I don't try and love myself, but I do try to squint a little bit as to see more myself in a kinder light if not a clearer one.
Michelle's Spell of the Day
"I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams." The Seventh Seal
Cocktail Hour
Drinking movie suggestion: Little Miss Sunshine
Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy New Year's Eve! I'll be posting hangover cures tomorrow. Be safe and careful tonight!
9 comments:
Still reading and enjoying both you and the walking man. You seem like a blogging team.
Happy New Year, Michelle!
I never make a New Year's resolution. However, I usually take that first week of the year to send out whatever stories I deem ready, as if that'll make the New Year better than the last. Have a wonderful New Year's Eve.
Cajun Q Mighty Isis
NewYearspells
Fewerhells
saveourcity
FoxyLadyD
R2C2
XSHazammmmmm!!!!!
Happy New Year! Go Lions! Beat Dallas! Lose the first round draft choice! Idiots!
Hey Michelle,
Here's to casting more good luck spells!
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!
Dear Michelle another lovely view and most amusing post as always. I do miss seeing your lovely feet and will have to imagine them there with such darling painted toes. Happy New Year's and many safe Bravos! Champagne toasts and caviar dreams to my favorite Detroiter!
So what's so funny about spending a half hour in front of the mirror telling yourself you love you?
Pesonally it takes me 45 minutes just to get through the upper half of me, slightly bending my head to the right and then the left to kiss each Ahnold like arm muscle, slightly(non-sexually)stroking my well defined pecs, wishing there was a pull tab for each one of the muscles in my six pack so I could drink more of me into me. and all of this came about after I quit using alcohol, before then it was a cheap 5 second, "I love you because you can drink a fifth a night and still bring home a grand a week"
Change comes so easy when you shift a few priorities, 3 hours drinking beginning at 2330 to 45 minutes in the morning.
self loathing has never been in my lexicon, at least not since I left home at 17 and never went back to sponge off my folks for any extended period of time. That is the one resolution I made and kept, get the fuck out of there and don't go back. Other than that one time, I don't think I ever made a resolution or at least not one, my drug induced perpetual fog allows me to remember. Why; what's the use of making promises to yourself to change what you are.
God himself said to Moses "I Am." It's clear to me God was saying i am what I am so if you don't like it, here have a hemmaroid (or is it hemmeroid I don't know and i don't care just as long as i don't get them, because i sit too much doing nothing to like the preperation H greasy feeling)
Besides, I have, as you should, come to understand that every beat of the heart is a clean slate. An entire new lifetime with a past but nothing that can be done to change it and a future that can be affected only by what you are right now. Like me, I am a prick right now and I have no desire to not be a prick in the future therefore no need to promise myself I'll quit being a prick.
Besides in order for me to look in the mirror no amount of squinting will help me see myself in a kinder light, I need to put my glasses on first.
Peace Michelle
SUSAN MILLER: I saw your kind comment and just wanted to thank you. Michelle and I are universal tramps...she rides frieghts while I walk and occasionally we get together at the same hobo camp and trade lies about how well my writing is coming along.
She is actually the first one, besides myself, who thought that i might have tha ablility to string five coherent words together (still have her fooled too) and despite me being a universally disliked prick she still doesn't throw rocks at me when I come walking into camp. But that's only because she's afraid I might brak the bottle of tequila i carry around to buy her amity with.
thank you.
TWM
I love "The Seventh Seal."
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