What's holding you back?
A My Name is Amy
Calypso
by
Amy Byrnes
“I really don’t like working with whiners,” my therapist, Jennifer, said to me the other day when I shared that after going back and reading old journals, I don’t know how she – or really anyone in my life – had put up with me.
“I was such an asshole,” I said.
Pick up a notebook from any year over the last decade and you’ll be treated to a fairly steady drumbeat of inanities. I hate my kids. I love my kids. I’m fat. My family is difficult. I will never find a partner. Dudes suck. I drink too much. I am so hungover. What was I thinking? What am I doing with my life?
The end.
“Maybe,” she suggested, “you need to start keeping a different type of journal.”
Somewhere in the hundreds of handwritten pages in black and blue and purple ink, hidden among the “I Got Dumped” and “No One Will Hire Me” headlines, other things were happening as well, Jen pointed out. I sold a house by myself and downsized. I put three kids through college and launched them into the world to be completely independent. I have a child who’s thoughtful enough to give a kidney away. And, somehow, I’ve been able to stay afloat financially, 10 years post-divorce.
“Sometimes, it’s less about what happened and more about what we did with it,” Jen said.
***
I was Facetiming my daughter the other night and as we were saying goodbye, I held up a book and said I was going to read before bed.
“Haven’t you been reading that for, like, months?” she asked. Since the year began, I have read the first few pages, maybe even a chapter, of about 10 different books piled on my nightstand, but have been unable to complete one of them.
The Song of Achilles is a breezy (as breezy as a seige can be) retelling of the Iliad told by Achilles’ closest companion (and imagined in this book as his paramour). It’s got scenes with goddesses getting pissed and a hunky centaur – which are all the things I generally like in a story. I got hooked on Greek mythology watching our family VHS tape of Clash of the Titans in 1983 when I had chickenpox my senior year of high school and developed an appetite for epic journeys and aversion to oatmeal baths.
The book is by the same author as Circe, which came out a few years ago and told the story of a nymph and daughter of a god who was banished to an island. While there she hones her sorcery skills and uses them on various visitors, including Odysseus who ends up hanging out with her for a year before getting back on his ship and trying to return to Ithaca and his family. As a reminder, Odysseus is the guy from Homer's Odyssey who legit could not get home after spending years fighting that Trojan war. Only a man could write an epic poem where a dude is away for 20 years having adventures and shacking up with gorgeous goddesses and the wife is back at home weaving and raising their son.
During his 10-year journey trying to get home, Odysseus lands on another island with yet another nymph, Calypso, who keeps him under a spell for seven of those years. Even though he longs for home, Odysseus becomes her lover and even weeps for his wife while with his seductive lover who offers him immortality if he stays on the island with her. Eventually, Zeus tells Calypso to cut it out and set Odysseus free, which she does reluctantly and with kind of a stamp of her foot about double standards and nonetheless builds him a raft to continue on his journey home.
***
I wonder if, when he finally got home to Ithaca and was reunited with his wife and son, Odysseus spent much time thinking about all the horrible things that kept him from his home. If he laid in bed at night, listening to the bleating goats and clang of bells outside, if his brain ticked through his catalog of memories of the journey, whether he’d sink into one and focus on all the things he did wrong instead of what went right?
***
The first AA meeting I went to was a scene ripped straight from anything you think you know about AA meetings. I walked past some dude smoking a cigarette outside on the sidewalk in the freezing cold and went down into a fairly grim church basement where folks sat in metal folding chairs around circular card tables. I looked around expecting to see Allison Janney from the show "Mom," but instead saw people from all walks of life. On the walls were prints of sayings like "One Day at a Time" and "Easy Does It," which I would soon hear AAs use in their shares and see in the readings and they'd start to be more than just corny sayings on the walls in some grim church basement.
If nothing else, Alcoholics Anonymous is good for a lot of sayings, and Jennifer reminded me of another one the other day while discussing my decade of inertia: We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.
For so long, I searched for validation, wanting someone to confirm that the story of my past was true. I got dealt some bad cards, made some bad decisions, and dealt with difficult people along the way. For most of my life, I'd been told that what I'd been feeling was wrong and I just wanted someone to say, "I hear you."
And now that I know some of those things to be true, do I cling to that raft? Does that validation just keep me stuck in the stories, Jennifer asked. I’ve often thought of alcohol as my sexy Calypso, trapping me on the island of inertia, but maybe it was really something bigger than booze. Drinking was definitely holding me back, but it might not have been the siren song that kept me from wanting to sail off towards home.
As our hour wound down, Jennifer told me a story about being taught to drive by her father who had driven race cars and took driving very seriously. He told her, “Never look in the direction you don’t want to go.” Maybe I've spent too much time looking in my own rearview mirror.
A much better version of the story I usually tell myself, the one where I'm at the mercy of fate, of cranky gods blowing me off course or seductive nymphs keeping me from moving forward, is that of me steering my own ship. In fact, on the vision board that’s tucked next to my desk, there’s a picture I cut out of a woman at the helm of a ship, the wind blowing her hair as the boat sails through the water.
I was listening to Oprah's podcast a few weeks ago and she quoted the final lines of the Victorian poem "Invictus" and it gave me chills walking my dog along the sidewalks of my town. "I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul."
Seven months ago I set sail from that island where I’d been stuck for so long. And maybe some of what was holding me there was booze, and raising four kids and not really knowing where I wanted to go next. But I put down that glass of red wine I’d been drinking that night as if Zeus himself had whispered, “Enough,” and slowly started to build myself a raft. I still have no idea what direction I want to go, but I know it's forward. I can feel the wind in my hair.
xoAmy
SUNDAY SHARES:
Thought for the Day: this daily email, which comes first thing each day, always resonates. Reading it has become a nice addition to my morning routine.
My sweet doodle is having an allergic reaction to something causing his body to be riddled with hives. It's really quite tragic. I picked up this pillow-y collar at the pet store yesterday and seems much more humane than a scratchy cone and has kept him from licking his wounds.
This was absolutely terrifying.
And despite foot surgery last week, this is my vibe for the upcoming week (green pantsuit included).