Hi Darling Ones,

Last night I had a conversation with my friend, Em, about writing, writing habits, and routine. It was a great talk and we vowed in the new year to establish a routine and hold each other accountable. I’m excited, because I want to work on my writing and my penmanship.

I’ve been woefully lax on the physical practice of writing. I’m easily frustrated with the tremor and my Floppy Scoop gets tired fast when gripping a pen. However, I really miss writing. I miss jotting down ideas in my planner, which I abandoned early this year due to the poor penmanship.

While talking about writing I confessed to her that I’m always scared before clicking publish on an I Will Dare post.

“Still?” she asked, a little incredulous. “After all these years?”
“Hell, yeah,” I said. “It’s never not scary to put yourself out there.”

I don’t know what was more surprising: that I admitted it or that she was so shocked.

Then I explained to her just because it looks easy doesn’t mean it is easy. Putting your thoughts and feelings out into the world in any way always feels a little dicey. Putting them onto the Internet in the same place, an easy-to-find and reference place, for TWENTY-FOUR years feels like both utter foolishness and extreme bravery.

I mean, come on, is there any body worse than the you from five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago? Ugh. Not to me. Past-Jodi was insufferable and so annoying. Thankfully, I’ve grown, learned more, and do better now. And since this is an ongoing process, old me will always be a little bit worse than present me.

Still, it’s scary! What if people don’t get it? What if I fail at getting my point across? What if nobody cares? What if everyone cares? What if I hurt/anger/befuddle someone? What if I look stupid?

No matter how many times I hit “publish” I still worry. I will always worry, but I’ll always do it because I want to. There is value in what I have to say, in my existence on this planet and in this moment.

The TTHM use to tell me that I should do something scary every day, and boy, howdy, do I ever. Do I ever.

Your favorite fraidy cat,
Jodi

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Hi Darling Ones,

Before I get on with the real confession, I have an initial confession that has nothing to do with the real one.

I didn’t notice until right now that the eyes featured on the cover of The Great Gatsby are not the eyes of famed oculist Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. It’s pretty obvious. I have no idea why I always thought they were ol’ T.J.’s eyes.

For a book I never read during my formal education and only read on my own at some point, The Great Gatsby sure takes up a lot of space in my greymatter.

I keep thinking of the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg because I’m having problems with my own eyes.

Though it seems sudden, my sight has gotten progressively worse over the past month or so in a way that feels alarming to me. I can’t read the laptop screen unless I bump up fonts to baby boomer proportions. Taking off my glasses and pressing my nose to the screen also works. Watching TV is a nightmare.

I literally have trouble focusing.

I have bad eyes. I have since I was a teenager. Corrective lenses have been a fact of my life for 37 years and yet this new, weird blurry vision has freaked me the fuck out.

I’ve been in the deepest depths of a doom spiral. This is the kind of spiral where I keep asking Dr. Google about what could be going wrong and the frightening results paralyze me. The fear keeps me from telling anyone. Instead I grow ever more depressed and anxious while putting on my smiling face. I get so scared about what could be wrong it keeps me from seeking actual help. My brain weasels firmly believe not knowing is better than knowing. They are huge proponents of ignorance is bliss, even though I can’t fucking see and there is no bliss in blurriness. At least not the I can see.

I know it’s irrational and dumb, and yet I still do it. Before you get your lecture ready, I have an eye doctor appointment on Monday.

And, if you don’t know me by now, I am obviously feeling a little better about this because I’m writing about it.

Sister #4 was here last night because she flew out of MSP this morning for a work-reward trip to the Bahamas with Sister #2 as her +1.

After some small talk when she arrived I barfed all my anxiety on her.

“I think I have macular degeneration/brain tumor/diabetic retinopathy/macular edema,” I told her.

“Oh,” she said. “Why is that.”

I explained all my reasons and she listened patiently, nodding her head, and agreeing how all that would be alarming. She also told me how she does the doom spiral too and concludes that she’s having a heart attack or appendicitis at least once a month.

Apparently, this runs in the family.

And then she said, “And it could also be you’re fifty and haven’t been to the eye doctor in two years.”

“Maybe,” I said. “This just feels different.”

She gently reminded me that I have never been fifty before and that my eyesight might be different now. Then I told her she should be nicer to me because I have a brain tumor.

That’s my confession, Darling Ones. I’m still kinda freaked out, and convinced there are dire diagnoses in my future, but a little less so now.

Hope the best for me if you can,
Jodi

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Well, it only took me seven days to utterly lose my shit. I silently cried for about an hour today while simultaneously working, because of course. I feel a little bad that I freaked out the nephews, but damnit I’m human.

If you’re wondering, it seems as though I lost my shit over paprika. We’re out of it, and Cade thinks it’s a necessity we must immediately run to Target to get. He’s not doing well with quarantine and wants to go out at any opportunity. In fact, when he calls in to see if he has to go in for random drug testing (as mandated by the court) he’s bummed when they tell him not to report today.

So when he was bugging me about getting out of the house and getting paprika so he could make deviled eggs, I lost it. I cried for an hour and then explained to him how even though he doesn’t care if he gets the virus, I care if he does, and I especially care if I get it.

I told him and made sure Maxwell, who is flippant about the virus and still going to hang out with friends at their houses, was listening that if I get it it’s going to be a huge, big deal. That if I don’t work, I don’t get paid. I don’t have the luxury of sick time nor do I think I’ll qualify for unemployment. I tried to express that it’s in all of our best interests that I stay healthy. And if I get sick, it’ll probably be because they exposed me.

I suspect they think I’m being irrational and controlling, but fuck man, I don’t know how to get through to them that they should stay home and away from people.

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Apparently, that bad news time is 9:09 p.m. for me. That’s what time Ziggy started singing Sister #2’s ringtone, The Hold Steady’s “Girls Like Status.” My stomach fell. We’re not phone callers. Most things can be communicated in an e-mail or text. Urgent needs can be handled by instant message.

A phone call after 9 p.m. could only mean something bad. I answered the phone and heard a watery, jittery, “Jodi?” Sister #2 then proceeded to sob talk in a language that can only be described as dolphinesque.

“You have to breathe,” I said, making sure to keep my voice steady even though my heart was racing and I was terrified. Between our mom fighting breast cancer and our dad’s history of heart problems, my mind jumped to the very worst conclusions.

“Jaycie fell,” she choked out. My thirteen-year-old niece had gone snowboarding at Buck Hill with a friend. “She had a seizure.”

I have no idea how I remained so calm as I talked to my distraught sister. I think most of my regular responses were cancelled out by the white hot terror that burned through me.

“Okay,” I said. “She’s going to be fine. You have to breathe.”
“I’m just so scared,” she wailed.

Eventually she calmed down enough to tell me that she would call me back as soon as she knew something. Once we hung up, the fear really set in. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to call Sisters #3 or #4 when I had no idea what the hell was going on. So I sat in silence with my phone clutched in my hand and repeatedly chanted to myself “she’s going to be fine, she’s going to be fine.”

I did this for 30 minutes. It felt like four score and seven years.

But I checked my phone and it was only thirty minutes later that Sister #2 called again. Jaycie was fine. She fell, hit her head, and they had her in a neck brace, but she could talk, she was alert, and could move her arms and legs. She was okay.

Seriously, it was the worst 30 minutes of my entire life thus far.

It was only after we hung up that I totally fell to pieces, my body finally acknowledging how scared I was. I bawled through calls with Sisters #3 & #4 where I learned starting a phonecall with “now don’t freak out” is the surest way to get someone to freak out.

But Jaycie is okay. She’s sore and pretty shaken up, but she’s okay. She’ll probably recover quicker than my sister.

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“Let it Be” has never been a particular favorite of mine. I tend to like the more happy, poppy Beatles rather than the melancholy, soaked with meaning Beatles. I’m more “I Want to Hold Your Hand” than “I am the Walrus.”

Usually in times of great fear and turmoil, my internal jukebox turns to “Confetti” by The Lemonheads. I could never explain why that song, it just works. The lyrics aren’t particularly comforting or even, well, meaningful.

But on Friday, when the test results weren’t in our favor my brain clamped onto “Let it Be” and has not let go. I think the Catholicism of my youth has flared up through the grey matter and latched onto something that I can accept on an intellectual level. I have very definite beliefs about Lennon & McCartney, Jesus & Mary I’m not so sure about. But you know, we Catholics dig on Mary. And here I am in an hour of darkness and Paul McCartney’s comforting me. It’s weird.

I’m being purposefully oblique here. I don’t feel comfortable explaining in any kind of depth what is going on. The specifics don’t matter, I suppose. My mom is sick and I am scared. That’s about all I’m comfortable sharing right now.

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