The hardest things to contend with are the things that feel shitty, but feel necessarily, purposefully shitty. Like you recognize that this is one of the painful tests on your life curricula.

Are you aware of your life curricula? I've always been acutely aware of it. Which truthfully sucks. Ideally, I'd like to go through life doing whatever the fuck I want and not giving a shit about the consequences, karmic or otherwise (Is there an otherwise?). I tried this once. It didn't work out so well.

I realized today that perhaps I haven't been entirely truthful on this blog. Perhaps I'm not as honest as I think I am. I have been censoring my cynicism for weeks, months, years. Maybe a lifetime.

Maybe I've just been humoring myself like forever. This was a startling recognition.

I realized it in yoga this morning. I was more distracted than usual. The guy who looks like Howard Dean lit incense by his feet, which I found irritating. And two blonde women walked by talking about how a coyote had eaten Jessica Simpson's dog, "Like, I don't even know why she sent people to go looking for it. The coyote, like, had the dog in its, like, jowls."

Then a Mexican woman started telling her friend about an expression used in Spanish - something about "taking your foot out of it." Removal of foot. Take out foot, it was such a great expression. I have to remember this, I told myself. Remember the word. Remember the fucking word. Every now and then eavesdropping can reveal such gems, particularly when people talk about language, etymology, emotions, being.

And I realized I wasn't in yoga. I was avoiding myself by getting wrapped up in other people's minds, lives, expressions. This is necessarily a part of being a writer. You let down your own boundaries so you can access other people. But it prevents you from being you, accessing yourself. I spend so much time in other people's shoes, sometimes I don't know what it is to be in my own shoes.

Then I thought about the wedding I had attended two months ago, where a woman cornered me and started telling me the saddest of sob stories. I didn't know this woman. She didn't know me. She told me the saddest sob story I've heard in maybe a few years. She told me that what she was telling me no one knew - not her husband or her parents or her closest friends, all of whom were at this wedding. But as she was telling me the story, I started recognizing a pattern. People often corner me and tell me horrific sob stories. It's been happening for 30 years now. And then I internalize these stories and think about them and carry them around with me. And this often happens at weddings, birthday parties, even my own birthday parties. There were 200 people at this wedding. Why had she picked me to share this story with? As I was handing her Kleenex and holding her hand, I started to feel something I'd never felt before as someone has shared a sob story with me. I felt used. And irritated. T used to tell me that people dump their sad lives on me because I have some sort of empathetic halo over my head. And I was angry at T all of a sudden for saying this to me. After the wedding, I called her and yelled at her and cried. Because I have a right to be irritated and mean and entirely unsympathetic. I'm tired of being manipulated. And I don't have a fucking empathetic halo over my head. Fuck empathetic halos. Fuck me for being such a sucker my whole life. Half the rotten things that have happened to me have happened because I've gotten sucked into something that isn't even mine to contend with.

This morning, on the way back from yoga, I was listening to KCRW and they announced that Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins are breaking up. And I was oddly devastated. Why? I asked myself? Why does this bother you so much? It's like when Heath Ledger died and so many of my friends were kind of fucked up over it, like really affected. And I thought it was sad, but it didn't get me in the gut the way it did for some people. And later I realized that all the people who I knew, who it really had affected, were the ones who had a tremendous capacity to manage their sadness. And perhaps when he died, the worrisome perceived truth that reared its head is that there is no managing sadness. Sometimes its just bigger than you. We all internalize narratives, to a degree, identify with them, feel out the shape of a story, see if it corresponds with ours.

Maybe this is how I felt when I heard the Susan Sarandon story on KCRW. There's no stability, no guarantee of anything. Of course I knew this, in a logical sort of way. But it felt like a personal betrayal, like it was my marriage of 23 years that was falling apart. What the fuck is wrong with me? Why can't I be a normal person and keep all the doors of my house shut? or at least a few of them. It's like those pictures you see of neighborhoods after Katrina. Some days it feels like my whole house is submerged under water.

Maybe I'm temporarily shutting down out of necessity. Because I've been too open for too long. Zen Buddhists talk about how there is no truth, no reality, no belief. These things lead to attachment and attachment ultimately binds and constricts us. The real us, the larger us. I think I have to start to evaluate and question what I've really been believing all this time, about myself, about other people, about life.

Do you wake up some mornings and you can't access familiar emotions? I reach for nostalgia because this is the tool that lousy hacks write with (and live with). But lately, I wake up and I can't even access my own feelings of nostalgia. I somehow managed to abandon them, like a litter of wailing kittens at a bus stop. They'll come back, I suppose. They always do. I wish I could care more, because I am used to caring. Too much for my own good, clearly. I never thought I'd be capable of turning my back on some inherent part of myself, but I did. And I have. Initially you do it because you feel forced to, and then you keep doing it because you recognize some sort of ugly truth about yourself: that you're capable of it. Maybe this is a warped practicing of non-attachment. I don't know. Somewhere along the way, I got sick of being a nursemaid to my own emotional fluctuations, often the result of having to deal with others. And I think I'm tired of writing and living from that place. Maybe not though. I can never tell.

I'm also tired of my own lack of predictability. I don't seem to know how I will react to things and sometimes I scare myself. I change my mind about things approximately fifty times a day and hope that others can read between the lines and decode me. Principle, emotion, intensity, hypocrisy. In NY, T and I were grabbing doughnuts at the Doughnut Plant and I started talking about doughnuts and circles and nostalgia and Atlanta and contradictions and how I hate people who talk incessantly about their principles because dogmatic adherence to anything eventually leads to hypocrisy and T was like, "But you always talk about principles."

And then I realized that I am a hypocrite with no principles, really. And cynical to boot. T watched me eat my peanut butter and jelly doughnut and said, "I wonder what it's like being in your head sometimes."

It's pretty awful most of the time actually. Occasionally, I am entertained by it. Lately, less so. I am going to do another hour of yoga now to quiet my unprincipled, hypocritical mind.