kindness

This year, I chose my word for the year out of my box of words. "Kindness" chose me, and it felt right. I haven't felt kind in a long while, to myself or to anyone else. In 2011,  had moments of anger, sometimes intense. I had moments of pain and sadness, after my accident and after a friendship dissolved. I had moments of lonliness. That one permeated the entire year. And it all hardened me. I snapped more than usual. I gave up hope more often than I usually do. I stopped wishing people well. And I did things in my life, to myself, that got me nowhere. Kindness starts with myself, I know this. We all know this.

I never know how each word will play itself out over the year.

I do know that it begins with accepting a broken heart and leaving it open so that love can enter again.

It can manifest itself in small, anonymous acts.

It begs you to recognize your own worth.

It doesn't have to involve lightning bolt moments of great acts to change lives.

It's tenderness comes from loss.

It doesn't mean that you have to roll over and swallow it when others disrespect you and your worth.

It's simply about softening your heart and realizing that the broken spaces are where the light can enter.

Here's to a kind 2012. Happy New Year.

massimo

On September 12, I found out that a dear friend of mine, Massimo, died days earlier. I got to know Massimo when he was living here in the States, but he was a Sicilian, and he died in his hometown of Modica. I received an e-mail from Mass on August 25. He said that he just had a melanoma removed from his neck, but he was fine. I found out about Massimo's death on his Facebook wall. He had been on my mind the past few days.  I think I was sensing that something was wrong. Just this weekend I thought that I would get to Italy, and he could show me around. I thought about conversations we had, and some funny things he'd say to me. He called me "Neeeek" and "Lollo," like Gina Lollobrigida. I thought about how he said that we all had "heavy luggages," meaning that we all carry our emotional baggage with us.  He always made me laugh. Anyway,  I went to his wall to say hello, and I saw the posts.  I contacted his dear friend, Nina, and she told me that Mass was visiting Modica.  He told Nina it has been the best summer of his life. She said he looked "shiney and brown of the Sicilian sun."  On September 4,  he was swimming with some friends at the beach and, though tired, he seemed fine. A short time later he started to feel ill and collapsed, and died 30 minutes later at the hospital. They suspect a heart attack or a stroke, but they're not sure. Massimo would have been 40 years old on September 10th.

Massimo was special to me. He never failed to make me laugh with his broken English and quick wit. He was one of the best photographers I've ever seen. We connected through photography. He always told me that my photographs always involved something solitary, and that it reflected me, and that I must have felt very alone. When I looked at my photos, I realized he was right.  We worked on photos together too. When I read what he wrote about this one, it makes me cry every time.   When I heard the news, I literally couldn't take a breath. When I was in the hospital with my car accident, I couldn't sleep, and I was able to Facebook chat on my cell phone. He talked me through that night in the hospital, and checked on me for days afterwards when I couldn't sleep.

I could write about the loss of a friend, but this post is really about health, both physical and emotional. Massimo had many, many heartaches in his life in the past 4-5 years. They're his stories to tell, not mine, but I will say that I don't think he ever recovered from any of them.  He went on with his life. He enjoyed parts of his life. But at his core, he wasn't happy. There were things he couldn't forgive, or forget, or make peace with. I'd urge him to try meditation, or to try to pray again. He'd listen to me patiently, but he I knew he wouldn't do it.  Massimo was also a heavy smoker. He'd roll pot into his cigarettes too. It was a European thing, he said. They all did it. I'd lecture him and ask him to at least cut back, but he wouldn't hear of it.In the days after he died, I downloaded as many photographs of Massimo as I could from his Facebook page.  In 90% of them, he has a cigarette in his mouth or hand.

Massimo's death was unexpected and it frightens me. Something similar could happen to us at any moment. We'll probably never know what killed Massimo, but I think it was the culmination of many things: an unhealthy lifestyle and too many heartaches. Physical and spiritual.  True health in life has to involve both facets of ourselves.

Now that my accident case has settled, I have the means to actually go to Italy. I always planned that someday, when I went, Massimo could meet me and show me everything. He would have been the best personal tour guide I could have hoped for. I imagined laughter and long talks and photographs. So many photographs.

I bought Massimo the camera he's holding in the photo below. This is how I'll remember him. He was really, really special, and I'm so sad that he is going to miss out on what I always told him would be the best years of his life if he'd just let them be.

  {massimo is also in the header of this blog, on the far right. i miss him desperately,}

the year

For the past 4 years, I've marked each with a word. Sometimes I chose them randomly. Sometimes, like this year, the word chooses me. Last December, when I was thinking about my word for 2011, then word "story" slipped into my head. I didn't hesitate. That was it. At the time, I didn't know how this word it would play itself out. I never do.  It's always a surprise, and at the end of the year, I discover that my year is always crafted with the intention inherent in each word and I didn't even realize it.

Story. 

I started the year full of ego. Despite my ever present debt, and the fact that I still didn't have a man in my life, I felt as though things were OK. And then in mid-January, my job was terminated. I never saw it coming. After a few weeks of crying and stress and sleepless nights, another position opened up, and I could stay. And then I got complacent again. The ego is formidable, and he controlled my life for the next couple of months. I was saved at the 11th hour, and now it was time to party. I found new friends. And this 41 year old woman found a 28 yr old man. It was play time, and I played. My story was writing me, instead of the other way around.

And then God decided to get my attention in a way I couldn't help but notice. In April, in the span of a second, a very large truck ran into my very sporty car, and I was very hurt. I was brought to my knees, literally. Truthfully, I was lucky I wasn't killed.  While you're sitting in your house for 8 weeks, unable to walk, unable to work, unable to do much of anything for yourself, you do a lot of thinking. So, I would sit on the porch in a wheelchair in those early Spring afternoons and watch the traffic go by. I'd cry and think about how I wanted my story to play itself out once I could stand up and get back to my life. I did a lot of writing. I thought about photography. I prayed. I meditated. I hid. And when I stood up again, I was different, and not in ways that were for my benefit, or anyone else's. 

Over the next few months, my story changed. All of my life, I had written myself as the fat girl who faded into the background and who couldn't get a man if her life depended on it. Through the summer, the weight started to come off, despite the fact that I was going out nearly every night of the week, and drinking nearly every night as well. Realizing that life could end at any second made me more bold, and a little reckless. Enter men, several of them, often younger, stage left.  I spent my summer with the 28 year old, and when that situation got complicated, I moved on to another, and another, and another. And then, at the end of the summer, He appeared.  "He" being the one that I've wanted for a long time, but thought I could never have. He rode into my story on his version of a white horse, girded with kevlar and  ready to rescue me and my knee. And then it wasn't just about my knee, but about me, and him, and suddenly it became clear that I could have him. And just as suddenly, I wasn't sure that I wanted it anymore. I wanted him (I still do),  but I didn't want the certain  heartbreak of me wanting more than he would ever be willing to give me. So, there was a retreat, and a sudden shift in the story.  As quickly as he galloped in, he was gone, along with the rest of them. And for the first time in my life, I was OK with it.

I think all that I really needed, with all of these men, was to know that they were interested. Once I knew they were, it was enough. And then, I was ready to let them all go.

And as the men in my life disappeared, so did women. Friendships that I thought were solid broke into a million pieces. In retrospect, nothing is unbreakable, and relationships don't end suddenly, of course. It's a slow process of little things that pile on top of each other, until they can't be supported anymore.  And as the silence turns from days to weeks to months, it all becomes too late to try to fix it.

The chapter was closed. And as Fall started to turn to Winter,  life grew very quiet. I started to think about my story, and I started to write it in new, blank journals, with pseudonyms and a bit more drama that the real story. Laughingly, I call it the book that will be turned into a Lifetime movie. But it's a story worth telling, even with a bit of embellishment, and the scripted happy ending that still eludes me. When words failed me, I started taking photos again. There were portraits, with stories in the faces of strangers and friends. And in the midst of the words, and the photos, my accident was put behind me once and for all with a signature, and a check, and a blank page with more possibilities than I dreamed possible.

The ending to my story is a work in progress. I hope it involves that moment in all great Lifetime movies where the leads unexpectedly fall in love in the middle of a dance floor after they've managed to get past their heartaches and baggage, and yes, the false stories they've written in their own heads about their lives. I don't know what 2012 has in store for me, and I don't know what my word will be yet. I do know that I'm more at peace and yet more restless than I've ever been. I also know that even though life can throw us curve balls, and car accidents, we still have control over our lives. We write our stories every second of our lives with our thoughts and our emotions. Sometimes it takes a few curve balls, and one big car accident, to make us realize it.