Julie Clarenbach

Finding the Wild Soul Within

  • Caretaking

    Caretaking

    This week a beloved had a depressive episode. It was fast, rough, blessedly short, but it wasn’t necessarily how it was going to go. Hell, it hasn’t been long enough to actually convince me it’s over; it could flame up like embers stirred in the fireplace.

    I felt immediately deflated. For all kinds of reasons, some good and some not so good, I’ve spent the last ~20 years caretaking through various mental and physical health crises. Overfunctioning is certainly part of it, but it’s also true that this beloved would be dead several times over without that caretaking.

    This isn’t the first time that I’ve tried to find my wild, even if I called it different things. Each time, at some point, a crisis would show up and take up all of my time and energy and resources. Once it was over, I had to recover from all of that depletion, and I’d maybe get a little traction and then BOOM. Another crisis.

    So it felt familiar, is what I’m saying.

    It was an opportunity to choose what I’ve chosen before. But a different beloved said something recently about there being a difference between caring for someone and taking care of someone, and that landed for me. It’s the middle ground I’ve been longing for, the space that accounts for interdependence and taking care of people’s needs without letting someone else and their needs be the center of one’s world.

    I chose differently. I didn’t abandon my beloved, but neither did I drop everything else to hover and manage. It might come to that at some point. It’s hard to know. But it was the right choice in the moment, and I can hold on to that the next time it comes up.

  • Wild Dancing

    Wild Dancing

    I’ve been a dancer all my life, but not because I’m good at it. My mom put me in ballet when I was five because I was clumsy, and she thought it might be a good way to help me find some grace.

    It was a doomed venture from the start. I grew up to be short, busty, with powerful thighs and a thick butt I could never tuck under my spine to anyone’s satisfaction. Still, I danced ballet until I hit the awkward point in adolescence when you had to be really committed to ballet to keep taking classes.

    I loved it the whole time. Not every teacher, not every class, not every sequence, but I loved the combination of music and moving my body, making them sync up.

    After I quit ballet, I only danced sporadically. In grad school my friends and I would sometimes go to the club and dance, which was pretty much the only activity you could get me to leave my house at 9pm for. Work had an 80s dance party once, and I danced myself sweaty and exhausted while the CEO told me I was one of the top 5 dancers at the company. Maybe top 10. At a retreat, the leader wanted to teach us all the zombie version of the Thriller dance, and I threw myself into it enthusiastically, only finding out later that everyone else had a much harder time taking in the steps.

    It turns out I’m not actually bad at dance, just ballet, which requires a kind of body and flexibility I don’t have. I wonder sometimes what might have happened if I’d taken other kinds of dance as a kid—modern or jazz or even tap.

    As I’ve been thinking about WILD, dance keeps coming up. I keep longing for it. The problem, you see, is that I have ME/CFS, which is an energy-limiting condition. I have to be careful and strategic about my expenditure of energy, lest I overdo it and crash and become basically non-functional for a bit. So I’ve been hesitant to do anything.

    But I’ve had this condition for a long time now, probably 25 years. That 80s dance party at work? I danced for hours. I was tired afterwards. I slept really well. I had to ask my friend to wash my jeans because they’d gotten so sweaty. But I didn’t crash.

    I’m not going to start with hours of dancing. I can’t guarantee the 80s dance party is a replicable experience. But I wonder sometimes how much of my chronic illness has to do with not being aligned with my soul’s deep gladness and what will happen as I keep working on WILD.

  • Losing Eccentricity

    Losing Eccentricity

    David Lynch died this week, and the two things everyone seems to agree about is that he had a dark and twisted imagination and that he was a great guy.

    That’s not a bad legacy to have when you die.

    I’ve never been a big Lynch fan, mostly because I don’t have the sensibility to hang with most of his work. I watched and loved Twin Peaks, and that was about as much of him as I could take. This is more a commentary on me than it is on him.

    What I mourn is more the example he set, being precisely, exactly himself in all of his weird glory. He was an eccentric, and we have too few of those these days.

    It’s not precisely new or interesting to talk about how everything is being flattened into sameness. The same grey flooring, the same Christian Girl Autumn outfit, the same books everyone else is reading. I don’t exempt myself—it’s what happens when we all play our roles.

    I grew up in the military, where conformity is basically a religion. My mother is mostly concerned with what the neighbors think, and my father is convinced that whatever choice is right for him must ipso facto be right for everyone. My family of origin is pretty conformist, to the point that on both sides of my family there are precisely two of us that aren’t in medicine/accounting/engineering/business.

    What we’re for the most part missing—and what I’m convinced everyone actually has—is a point of view. Idiosyncratic passions and niche hobbies. Hyperfixations and curiosities and strange facts. Part of why the early internet was fabulous was that it was a way for everyone to put their weird out there, and most people did.

    There are so many reasons things changed, why this is an era of conformity, not the least of which is the online vitriol people spew when anyone steps out of line, especially anyone marginalized in some way, and double especially people who are multiply marginalized. I’ve held things back, shown a bland face, kept my passions to myself because it felt too vulnerable to be real.

    All I’ve managed to do is bore myself.

    Part of living into WILD this year is leaning into my own idiosyncrasies, my own passions. Finding more and letting myself be surprised as new ones appear.

    I’ll never be David Lynch, but the goal is to be me. Really, truly, completely me. I’ll keep you posted.