Starting Over

It couldn't be more fitting, to be starting over on a blog that's about starting over.


Think of something you've lost that you've always regretted losing.

I'll go first: a number of years ago when I didn't really know what it meant to "initialize" a disk, I wiped out a number of essays I'd written that I particularly liked. Many of them had never been printed - I was that young in computer world.

It felt like a terrible loss.

Then there was a vey old photograph album, the kind with brittle black paper pages and black & white photos taped in with little black triangles at their edges. It was an album from my mother's childhood, 1918 through the '20's. My brother expressed a desire for it, so I mailed it to him and it was never seen by either of us again.

Now that was a loss.

Starting over from loss can be sort of a pain in the butt, or it can be one nightmare day after another for an apparently interminable stretch. In Freud's classic piece "Mourning and Melancholia" he writes about one aspect of terrible loss that's worth considering. He writes that when we lose someone (or something, I could add), a part of ourselves goes with them.

A part of ourselves, lost.

Freud believed that part of our recovery from traumatic loss is identifying and reclaiming those parts of ourselves that went off with whoever left us (or traumatized us, I could add). Who were you before this terrible thing happened? Happy? Innocent? Trusting? Carefree? Loving?

You may never be the same person you were before you were handed your pile of shit, and you're going to have to accept that at some point. But you can get back a whole lot of what feels lost to you now, and you may even like your new self better.

A super-minor example: I like to switch blog hosts with alarming frequency, I don't know why. My mother used to say that when she was growing up, her mother moved the family into and out of at least three apartments. Which wouldn't be too crazy, but they were in the same building. Maybe I've inherited something that hasn't been isolated on DNA yet.

In any event, the "simple" process of exporting content from one blog site and importing it to a new blog site is either a lovely hypothetical or a downright lie: I can't make it happen. So life has handed me a tiny little spoonful of shit.

That doesn't sound like much, does it? "A tiny little spoonful."

But as you know, if it's on the bottom of your shoe, or in your hand, or on a favorite rug, even a tiny little spoonful of shit is going to cost you some aggravation. How much aggravation depends on a number of things, up to and including how well you've been doing lately and what sort of day you're having now.

In the case of the failed "It's Your Shit" import, the aggravation is pretty darn low. For one thing, I've always liked the idea of re-writes, and "It's Your Shit" didn't have so many posts that I can't recreate them fairly easily. The new ones have the possibility of being better than the old.

For another thing, it truly is the case that perspective is everything. I either have to start over, or I get to start over.

Think I'll go with the latter.

Finally, this enterprise is simply putting words on an electronic page. No more, no less. This morning as I was getting my toenails made ready for summer school (sounds great but I absolutely loathe pedicures. I only do it because sandals.), I was thumbing of course through a People magazine from last month. There was an article about a new book that caught my eye.

The book is called To Hell and Back, and its author is Michelle Knight. She spend eleven years imprisoned in a basement outside Cleveland following her kidnapping. You can only imagine what horrors she survived during that time; that book must have neon trigger warnings on just about every page.

But what Knight is doing is exactly what we are talking about here: she is making her transition from victim to survivor. Here's one news piece: http://www.smh.com.au/world/betrayal-michelle-knight-tells-of-life-inside-ariel-castros-house-of-hell-20140505-37r6h.html

We may not all be kidnap victims, and we may not all write a book to help us regain a life we want to live; but most of us are absolutely capable of starting over.

Go read something by a person who's had to come back from a bigger, stinkier shitpile than yours. It doesn't mean your pile is insignificant! It's just a reminder of human resilience, perhaps at a moment when you aren't feeling very resilient at all.

Other peoples' suffering by no means diminishes yours. I am reminded of an anecdote told about the final hospitalization of the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead. Like many geniuses and trailblazers, Mead had a bit of an ego. In any event, she was complaining to a nurse about the plight in which she was finding herself. Dr. Mead, scolded the nurse, everybody dies.

Yes, replied Mead. But this is different.

Everybody has piles of shit to deal with in life. All different, all in some essential ways the same. So much comes down to what you do with yours. So much comes down to starting over.

It's nice to be starting over with the simple task of putting a few words on a few electronic pages.

Update: It only took me a week, but finally, with two computers running, I found a link to show me how to do the thing to get the thing from one place to the other place. The world can be so easy to navigate once you know how. It's the learning how that gives us all these wrinkles and gray hairs.

Anyway, all the "It's Your Shit" posts from Wordpress have arrived. Whew.