I’ve escaped. I read this interesting book sometime ago — “Kindred” by Octavia Butler — in which this woman travels, involuntarily, back and forth through time. For some reason, she keeps dropping in on this plantation family, suddenly appearing and disappearing from their lives. A family already dysfunctional, her last visit is a culmination, a harvesting of seeds already planted. And on her trip back, she leaves part of herself behind. Literally.
I give myself congratulations on escaping that hellish roommate situation, but something was lost in the struggle.
Fighting Right
Someone told me once that they had given up drinking. They found that they had to give up family holiday get-togethers though. It wasn’t because the family drank during the get-togethers. It was because the family used the get-togethers to verbally and emotionally beat the shit out of each other. Drinking was probably a time-honored tradition and a way of self-medicating, a way of steeling oneself against the damage they were about to inflict and the damage they were about to receive.
I found myself fortifying myself with cooked food. I kept going back to the raw (or I kept going back to the cooked, depending on how you look at it).
I had a hard time staying raw when I was with an alcoholic boyfriend as well. It is — or it is for me — almost impossible to stay raw when surrounded by extreme negativity and destructiveness. It’s hard to stay raw when everything around you is focused on dead things.
Re-establishing and Rebuilding
And now I not only have to find a way back to good habits, I have to find a way to do that while homeless. It’s going to be interesting.
I think I’ve figured out a few ways to do this. Coming up with solutions is easy; it’s the implementation which demands more of me. One is to find a store which sells raw food, or a restaurant and work there part-time (or full-time if they pay well). The second is to volunteer anywhere where they have a kitchen. That gives me access to at least soak things and store them in the fridge, as well as keep other goodies in the cabinets. Even a job with a kitchen and a desk means access to processing and storage.
New Steps
What keeps coming to mind as I start gathering lists of non-profits, health food stores and restaurants is that I’m approaching this problem the wrong way. I keep trying to disregard the warning, but it keeps coming back, bright and early.
When I ask for the way then, it says that the idea is to get closer to the live things in life, and I will find myself naturally gravitating back to the raw without all this researching and planning and scheming. It seems more indirect to do it this way. And it is incredibly unfamiliar.
What feels more familiar is the way I stopped drinking. Just stop. Or try. Two and three times a day, ninety or more times a month until finally you break free. Apply nth amount of willpower to the nth degree until the chains snap.
This way of … attending to the spiritual side so that the physical side follows is … something I haven’t done as much in my life. Looking at the process from this side of things, I don’t really trust it. I can’t see how it works or how it could work.
But.
But I feel the difference even when I think about the two ways of doing this. Making lists of non-profits feels less alive than taking a walk in the park. “Interviewing” charities to see if they’re going to fit my needs feels more deadening than writing a blog entry.
So I’m going to do it this way and see how this unfolds.