“That’s Why I Never Take My Phone in the Bathroom”

First time dancing since my gastric pacemaker surgery...

Welcome to a new week.

Thank you for caring if you care, and sharing [if you would like more or want more to exist], and thank you for… YOU.

‘'First time dancing in about a month.

First time dancing since my gastric pacemaker surgery a few weeks ago.

In the past, I would always keep something going for body and mind, no matter what it excised out of me… but lately, the former won over the latter, and I’ve stopped.

Last week, I sat down and wrote out new ways to reclaim pieces of my grief-stricken life, as best I can in my Kahlo notebook: One included finding time to do “catharsis choreography” (focusing on leaving myself ‘wanting more’ by dancing a little- even if I’m weak, have nanoscopic stamina and such a long way to go; So much hopeful-muscle to build, while building the muscle of knowing that ‘a little bit’ is better than nothing, as an overall mental framework I generally repudiate.

Other aims included what I wrote about recently on here, such as working on the smart phone that’s making me less smart in succinct portions, and replying through pained palms on my laptop only during certain times of the day- my cervical spine craning like a crane, a heron who resents every slipped disc that clips a wing- but then resisting the relentless slaughter-scroll and feelings-of-failure that follow everywhere my phone goes.

“I hate it when it does that!” I yelped at Follin, when my Instagram pulled up a movie-trailer featuring Sandra Mae Frank (someone I distinctly do not hate), moments after I showed said-daughter the trailer for the film The Silent Hour on Prime.

“Remember when I FaceTimed Sandra Mae for Deaf West?” I said to Follin, assuming she might not.

“Yes, I’m obsessed with her,” she replied, very much remembering.

But then… my phone flashed the very same show-bill we were just casually watching by choice, all but ‘taking away’ the choice we pretend to have as humans over what we do with our day- including being ‘off the grid’ when it isn’t ‘work hours.

“Work hours” don’t exist any more to such a level that they need a new type of quotation around them. Some type of invention of marks around the marks- like ““work hours””, or a punctuation that punctures the plasticity of our common-purpose right now, online and elsewhere, akin.

It often feels that if anyone tries to gently abide the Landline mentally I’m trying to hew into my new-new… They or ‘we’ are treated like a pariah; As if it’s rude to need actual fresh air… Actual freedom from constant connectivity… Actual compartmentalization from what you love (the friends you have online and sending Glides to your Deaf-bests) and compartmentalization from what you love (being a human being with a mind that MUST turn off from time to time, in order to survive).

The venerable pages of a book feel like an oxygen cannula to me lately - something I once knew all too well and occasionally still do.

“That’s why I never take my phone in the bathroom,” Follin says, after we both see the trailer on my socials seconds after we watched the trailer on my TV, despite the fact I’m not sure why my hand opened my phone to begin with. If it’s near, my digits just dally towards digital-draw.

“That’s why I love you,” I joked back, not really joking. Knowing all too well the very real dangers of fast-snaps and linoleum in a way that all teenagers can’t seem to know as deeply as they need to know, even though their internal reaction to reading these words will be “I know” - the catchphrase of every gen- despite the fact I very much still believe that kids and young adults are monarch-wings of gorgeously unique patterns, and should not be placated otherwise.

Never the less…. There is more out there than any of us seem to know, and we all are often less for it.

Is it possible to compartmentalize the need to compartmentalize?

“I feel like I’m staring down a crossroads,” I text my husband the day before trying to dance again- the hope of foolishly, flippantly making up steps ‘without overthinking them for a chance’ as my new goal.

“It’s not going on stage,” I said to him, right after showing this mud slapped against the wall after a few minutes of slap-jack making-it-up really quickly. “It doesn’t have to be my most inventive work or something I’ve never done before,” I added, justifying my very justification, “I don’t have to worry about it living up to the gorgeous quality of a company or better dancers right now. This can just be something I chase each week, to keep myself sane.”

I am not sane when I’m not choreographing… But I know there is something very unhealthy in those words. In all of this. In the mourning pouring into the morning you see here. Sculpted in shaky seconds. Expressing what needed to be expressed first. Not worrying about the next feeling around the bend, or the next wound to remove gauze from and exhale as it hits air.

“I’m still popping way too much Zofran and throwing up in the sink everyday,” I’d text him, never one for mincing details where honesty could stand, “Sweating everyday and tripping out on LSD-like LCD-Soundstystem-stress-dreams at night. Stomach pain….”

Concluding: “So the ‘How to keep going with meh quality of life?’ IS something I have to eventually choose to choose.”

But in my own head, I already knew that the choice had been made by the half of my heart still beating, and the desolation of the other bisection that hopes, and the sensibility to leave a phone out of the bathroom and create a landline-family like life once was from someone too young to have that instinct naturally to begin with.

‘First time dancing in a month’- this piece epigrammatically began. No fanfare. No planning. Not overthinking a word. Just a Woolfonian purge as I sit on the edge of an uncomfortable bed, writing this by-accident the second I had the urge, to go with the patterns braided into the grief of this song I can’t shake: “… Patterns” by Laura Marling. (The ellipses of which I appreciate nearly as much as the idea of quotations inside quotations.)

I have to eventually choose to choose…

But the beginning of this writing means I already have.

Thank You. (I know this post is a lot like last week’s, but I consider it almost an “update” on how things are going with ‘carving out time for phones and work’ (so far, mixed reviews. Failing more than succeeding) and a quick vulnerable share.