So buy it/make it once doesn’t mean zero maintenance.
When I made this 6-ply jute crochet jute bag in February or so, I waxed it with melted beeswax then.
But beeswax wears down, so it has to be reapplied occasionally.
And the waxing cuts down on the jute shedding but does not eliminate it. So, the whole bag has to be emptied and vacuumed out and I used tape to catch the fibers still caught after the vacuuming.
And then I melted my wax, and used the dedicated brush I have for this purpose and went over the whole thing in the kitchen with melted beeswax. Then I went to our bathroom and used the hair dryer on high to melt the beeswax into the bag.
I did the waxing process twice when I made the bag to begin with, but doing it again every few months is probably going to be a good thing, at least for a while.
And while I didn’t do it when I put the straps on, I used leather conditioner on the straps today, too.
The longer luggage strap is permanently affixed— I used 2-part jeweler’s epoxy to permanent close the clasps to the bag.
Mama and Daddy gave me the 16 inch Holdfast stabilizer in 2018 or 2019, and it is perfect for days that I want a shorter strap— the luggage strap tucks in the bottom of the bag just right, as seen in this photo:
The Holdfast strap comes off on days I have my laptop in the bag, or on days it’s otherwise packed to the brim with camera gear.
In general though, Jared’s lining has proven to be hardy and holds up to my wear— I did manage to get an ink stain in the pocket and I tried the rubbing alcohol trick and while it didn’t completely do away with it, the stain does look more like a color block than a pen accident. The stain is deep enough to not be visible at all and is light, so it is just a part of the bag now.
I’ve decided when the lining does eventually wear out, I will use stitch removers and cut it out and we’ll just make a new one.
This bag is big enough to hold anything I want to carry on a regular basis…. If I remove the Holdfast strap I can fit my MacBook, a notebook, my paper calendar, and my camera with a lens attached. If I don’t have the MacBook in it I can carry a camera (or two) with two lenses in pouches.
I kept 4 other purses for days it’s either not practical or inappropriate to carry this big bag.
But I do love that it has turned out to be practical. Making bags like this has killed my purse addiction. It took 4 attempts to get one that was just right, and I don’t follow a pattern for these, I just stitch in the round till I decide it’s big enough, and then stitch till it’s tall enough. Not hard, except on my hands. Being able to make my own bags that fit my lifestyle better than anything I have ever found in stores has pretty much made it impossible to consider buying a purse off a shelf pretty much ever again.
And re-waxing with beeswax once every few months is just fine with me, if this will last me several years before I have to make another one.
Eventually I intend to try making a smaller one. Haven’t gotten around to it yet.
I wrote yesterday about exactly what psychosis looks like in my life.
Cue November of 1998. That is exactly the state of mind someone I know walked into my dorm room around 9 PM in the evening in November of 1998 ….. that warped center of the universe is the precise state of mind I was in at that time. My fourth manic/ psychotic episode at the time.
I can’t recall the storyline in question of that episode. Except that I was pretty sure I was the literal center of the universe…..that is a recurring theme in these episodes.
My room was a mess. I don’t know exactly why I had torn it apart. I’d stopped sleeping days before out of distress that a childhood friend had died in a car accident, probably stress about schoolwork, too. It was close to the end of the semester. I was in the process of supporting another friend through an abortion.
It took until February of 2010 to be able to admit to myself— to see clearly, even as my mind was ill— that he had raped me in my first actual sexual encounter with him in November of 1998.
I remember the day clearly that Jared first suggested that my first encounter with him had actually been sexual assault. I was standing in the hallway, he had come up in conversation, and Jared was standing at the kitchen sink of our Essex Drive house. I can picture the scene clearly, even over probably 17 years later.
I remember telling Jared, “No, it wasn’t like that.” I mean, there hadn’t been violence. He hadn’t had to hold me down. It certainly didn’t look like movie rape scenes. I mean, the sex had been my idea, probably. He was just agreeable.
I didn’t realize that the very fact that I had been manic to the point of psychosis at the time meant I was actually legally incapable of consent to sexual activity.
He had been in my room at the behest of the campus because they had contemplated forcing me to go to Grady’s psych ward against my will. It was his whole job that night in my room to determine whether they needed to come back and take me to the hospital.
And it was in that environment, that this person, who knew at the time I had never had sex with anyone, decided that having sex with me on that visit was a good idea.
I told him years later that I had always wanted to marry the first person I was with sexually. He said he hated when women said that. I shuddered in that moment, realizing he’d heard it before.
I remember sitting in the local friendly mental ward by myself late one night writing that February of 2010 (they allowed us markers and paper)….and writing about this person, and all of a sudden I wrote “RAPE,” in connection with wondering how that person was doing because I hadn’t talked to him in a while.
I think I must have screamed. I remember the doctor on call at the time ushering me into the refreshment room shortly after I wrote the word— otherwise I have no idea why in the world she would have been at my side—and she offered me some water, and having me describe what I had been writing about. I told her the whole story.
I don’t know for sure, but whatever she documented that night….I’m pretty sure at least a portion of my PTSD diagnosis is based on that hospital stay. I’ve never seen my own records.
Writing the word happened before I was conscious of what writing the word meant. I can’t describe the feeling of having an entire worldview— my entire known history with a person— flip like a switch precisely like that.
That probably happened on a Thursday. I know that because Saturday or Sunday would have been a visitation day, and I wasn’t allowed visitors the next visitation day. I wasn’t allowed visitors because I’d been injected with haldol and was pretty darn close to a drooling pool of mess. I remember collapsing under the medication counter, in grief, I remember the injection, and I remember that my eyes wouldn’t focus for a good long while after that.
I’d seen the group therapy leaders talking to people in session, telling them that they may not be able to focus or understand what was going on, and I remember being that person the session leader was glancing at as she said that, in the day or so that followed.
That is the shocked stupor that my system went into, realizing that maybe my sexual history was maybe, to all appearances, not as it had seemed in years prior.
See, that’s the thing about mental illness and psychosis. It’s not all delusions and disorganized thinking. Sometimes, in the midst of it all, there are piercing glimpses of actual, true reality in ways that my brain compensates to be blind against, for survival’s sake, in my regular daily life.
I got a withdrawal with hardship from four of my five classes that semester, in the Fall of 1998, thanks to documentation from my psychiatrist. My English teacher refused the W in favor of a WF because she had already distributed the final.
I’d still considered him a friend after I married Jared. The two of them never met, but they’d spoken on the phone because I wanted to talk to him while I was in a mental hospital after my Lamictal allergy in 2008.
He was always pretty forceful and leading in our rougly 4 years of active sexual activity, between 1998 and 2002 or so.
Jared takes it further, to define most if not all of those encounters as repeated assaults.
I used to complain that Jared was not forceful enough in his approach in the bedroom— I wanted to be “taken,” as I would tell him, sometimes close to tears in my disappointment.
I know now how those pleas must have pained Jared, as he understood exactly what my sexual past entailed, as he learned my needs and rhythms and how I understood sex was supposed to be, in realtime.
I told him last Fall that it was my literal cross to bear that my beloved alma mater continues to honor someone who probably never should have graduated had I had the wherewithal to report what had happened back in 1998.
And so, I sit here, on random Friday nights in Gallery Row, safe with Jared, and I try to write about other things.
And yet, my brain always goes back to the drama. The finding peace amidst the constant mental dissection seems to be my life’s work.
I had someone repeatedly beg me to “not be mad at me for the things I did,” his words, a while ago.
What exactly did he do? Which thing, of the several I’d accused in the past, was I accurate about? I knew what I was angry about, but without an actual confession, with a blanket appeal for forgiveness without the itemized list, what was I to not be mad about?
I will never know.
That was December of 2024. It took me to October of 2025 to tell him in writing, that, why no, forgiveness was permanently off the table. In the same note, I basically told that person that he would not be in the line of work he is in today had I acted within my rights decades ago, had I known better at the time.
I’m pretty sure that is the line that earned me permanent silence on his end.
The forever silence is new. For someone who likes to have the last word, I wonder exactly how hard it is for him to restrain himself. The thing is, when that person is silent, it’s not because he wants to be. It’s because he knows it’s in his best interest to be.
And, it took me until April of this year to decide that yes, I was ready to extend forgiveness. I told that individual he owes me nothing; there are no strings attached; I forgive him.
And what has morphed since then is a feeling of pity for the smallness that is his outlook on life and relationships.
Opportunists sell themselves short on what capacity for human connection they may be capable of in their lifetimes. I’ve known more than one in my lifetime.
And just because certain vocations reward opportunism and narcissistic traits, success in those fields does not mean those people have any greater happiness because of their success.
In this particular case, I’m pretty darn sure that this person goes around punishing himself on the regular. A universal truth is that professional success does not mirror life satisfaction. In fact, my theory is that it is possible to use professional endeavors to mete out self-flagellation in real-time in ways that only those who have known us — really known us — recognize immediately.
And so, I actually do stand by that decision to forgive. I am choosing to move on with life. There actually isn’t a lot that would make my already happy and full life much happier. His lost access to me has been a precious gift I didn’t realize I needed.
Writing is far more fulfilling, and I have three lifetimes’ worth of material. I’m only just getting started.
And in this case, I am the smarter person, I am the stronger person, and I get the better sleep at night, I am certain.
Love is not enough to make a relationship work. It’s just not.
And I know, I know: the romantics out there would say to me: What in the world are you talking about? Love can only be enough.
But…..this is what I know: Love is just not enough.
I know this at a visceral, core-of-my-being.
Love is not enough.
You cannot love someone into living into their potential. You cannot love someone into actually trying. You cannot love someone into helping them to become a functional human being.
Love is just not enough. At all.
I’ve written at length about one core traumatic relationship, and another I write about hardly at all.
Why?
Because it is that painful.
Because that is the reason I know love is never enough.
If love were enough, I would not spend my days these days knowing there is a high likelihood that someday, there is a very high likelihood that someone I loved once upon a time will end up in a pauper’s unmarked grave, with no one to claim a body. There will be no obituary; there will be no one who was once close to him to know he is gone.
I have spent thirty-one years mourning this person in slow-motion. I was fifteen years old when he old me that he was self-destructive; about his chosen method of ending things; and the only thing keeping him from acting on his urge was the idea of me standing over his coffin, crying.
Love is not enough.
Fifteen year old me did not know that when people are self-destructive you don’t just listen; you actively seek assistance for that person.
I will not stand over that person’s coffin someday because I will not be notified.
I worry a very realistic worry that no one will be notified. There may be no one to notify.
And yet, I’ve already done the mourning: I’ve mourned in real-time, in slow-motion, for thirty-one years now.
I’ve done the crying over his coffin, before it ever happens.
Thirty-one years is a long time to feel responsible for someone else’s life.
I was fifteen years old. Fifteen.
I couldn’t drive by myself yet.
Love is not enough.
It should have struck me as odd when he chose to not go to school when he graduated. I was prepared to break up; I remember the morning I told him it was okay if we saw other people; shortly after he graduated.
He didn’t go to school. He didn’t go to work.
It was nearly a full year before he told me he was waiting on me to graduate so we could go to school together.
Looking back, my response should have been, “You might have wanted to talk to me about that.”
I wish he had talked to me about that idea before he made that sort of decision.
It accomplished his aim; it’s how I ended up at Georgia State because he refused to entertain any other school ideas than the Art Institute of Atlanta.
I engineered my entire college choice around a guy. There was no choice. I applied nowhere else. I had options; I had no idea.
Love is not enough. If it were, then some level of appealing to his sense of ambition might have worked when both myself and his family attempted to convince him to avail himself of the tuition-free attendance that was available to him through his mother’s employment, to Emory.
I didn’t really realize I was in danger yet.
I should have realized I was in danger.
There were no hints of being afraid of him at all until I decided I wanted to be able to see other people.
That happened the first week of classes my Freshman year.
I went out for pizza with someone else and I remember being terrified to tell him.
There were hints, little warning signs I didn’t know to see at the time.
For instance, we started dating in late January of my first year of high school and for Valentine’s Day that year, despite the fact that we were barely saying two words to each other on the phone yet, he showed up to school with a giant gift bag full of gifts for Valetine’s Day: love-bombing.
Sometime around Christmas the next year we skipped a Christmas party and I knew my parents were out at their own Christmas party, so I showed him where we lived.
A few weeks later a rose was left on my car.
It was a full three years after my graduation before the gravity of the danger I was in showed in full-force: he was prepared to use lethal force on anyone who encroached on me, his possession. And a week later, he proved that he was willing to use my own fears against me, to compel me into staying by force when he felt me finally slipping through his fingers forever.
I firmly believe I would not be alive today had I stayed beyond that Spring of 2001.
The terror remains; the knowledge of his likely present circumstance is of little daily comfort. I have had two nightmares in the last week about this individual coming to hurt me. The knowledge that he likely doesn’t have the will or the means to come to my home are of little comfort.
I wake up in the night and exclaim, breathless, “JARED!” before I think about it, before I am awake even, to reach over to find my 2026 safe space exactly where he has been for the past twenty-one years. Jared, without fail, either reaches over for me or says, “I’m here,” without exhaustion for the repetition that doesn’t disappear year after year, seemingly decade after decade. He knows my ghost; he has met him face-to-face. Jared is unafraid.
And still, I am unsure which terror is stronger: the idea that this individual will potentially end up in a mass pauper’s grave someday, or the idea that he may show up to cause me or my family harm. Both are true: I am afraid of him, and I am afraid for him.
And whatever the trauma-bond, I still say there was love.
Jared and I are at Gallery Row, and Jared is engrossed in this work project he has been working on for at least a solid two weeks straight, and for once he was thrilled to call our date a “working date,” despite the fact that most of the time when I want to bring my laptop to Gallery Row to write, Jared says he doesn’t need his laptop; that he is happy to work off his phone.
Which, to understand that, Jared has a Google Pixel Fold, so he does actually have massive phone screen real estate when he wants to and needs it. And, arguably, he is one of the few people in this world who does, actually need it more often than not.
I am up to page 160 in “Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott, the chapter called “Letters.”
The book is sort of quaint even if it is still applicable to a writer’s life; it is a little window into what being a writer in 1994 would have been like. It’s hard to remember that life really was like this in my early high school days. She talks about writing on her word processor. She talks about distractions like someone calling you on the phone, or random regular procrastination-like distractions. I would like to see how she would update this book to account for social media and texting and the level of arguably world-changing distractions we have in 2026.
I just finished the chapter on finding a writing partner and I like that idea and I do run what I write by Jared, but Jared isn’t really that invested in the work; he is invested in making sure I am happy. So his advice is mostly placating and “uh-huh, Sweetie, that is nice.”
I do actually have an ideal writing partner whose opinion on my work I would deeply respect, but that person is unavailalbe for a variety of reasons and likely not interested in the gig. So, I go at it alone other than Jared’s cursory glances at whatever I’ve written. I’ve suggested the prospect previously to the individual in question to crickets. Rejection is hard.
The truth is, I write to process my world. That’s the whole reason I write. The idea of writing fiction is wholly unappealing; I don’t really do well on letting things go in my history, obviously; either.
And the truth really is stranger than fiction, I’ve found, personally.
But sitting here in Gallery Row on a Saturday night instead of our usual Friday night, I am finding that I really am settling into being a boring, settled, middle-aged wife. And, I like it.
Last night was our semi-monthly Costco run and we might as well have been sitting at an upscale restaurant than that Brookhaven Costco, with me savoring that strawberry-vanilla swirl decadent ice cream under the flourescent lights and the umbrella over our table. The thing is, at age 46 I do lament so much of what happened in my high school and college years. It is easy from this vantage point to sit here and think “What in the world was I thinking?” in reference to a lot of different experiences and relationships and things I did willingly.
But, if I hadn’t actually participated in those relationships and experiences, would I have recognized the safety Jared represented in 2003? I’m really not sure I would have.
Jared had to tame me. I was really like a wild animal, with quaint belief systems and thoughts about how the world and relationshps should be.
Jared says he plays a long game. Sometimes he alters that to say he plays a “long, long game.”I don’t know that he could have predicted taming me would take 23 years of knowing me, though.
Jared would say he hasn’t tamed me at all. I don’t think he thinks I have mellowed with age.
And I wonder what 24-year old me would think of the past 22 years. My small social circle is entirely different. I have become a near-hermit after being a social butterfly in my early 20s. To be completely honest, it is a near-miracle that I survived my early 20s, on so many fronts.
It is a miracle for different reasons that I survived my 30s and early 40s, bringing two children to adulthood.
I think I have tamed quite a lot over the last 20 years, though. And encounters with a past individual and experiences involving that person over the last couple of years have made me grateful I was able to retreat to Jared’s safety at home, after exploring attempts at closure in one situation.
And I did get that closure, even if it didn’t look exactly like I thought it would.
I’m pretty sure it looks exactly like Jared thought it would though. He was never going to tell me what to do but he knew that person wouldn’t respect boundaries. I’m still grateful for the experiences anyway.
Now that I’m eight months out from last contact with that individual, it feels like a story I couldn’t have written as fiction any better. I’m really not sure why some people have self-destruct modes, or why some people’s self-destruct modes look wildly like incredible success on the outside.
But, I got an inner look to that person’s self-destruction in slow motion in an up-front seat during a couple of very abbreviated sessions, and I came away from the experiences feeling like why yes, karma is real, and the universe is one giant balancing act and equalizer.
And I am grateful the past played out the way it did, even the recent past.
The quiet after mass-blocks on all the drama-causing individuals from my past is rather jarring, though, and the room it leaves in my brain is like a vacuum that I am struggling to fill with anything other the ghosts of their stories.
The thing is, which ghosts to tell? In what order? There are so very many of them. Sometimes those ghosts wake me up in the night, prompting me to fold myself deeper into Jared. Sometimes they invade a sunny afternoon, prompting me to lose hours to doomscrolling because distraction is better than facing that there are stories begging to be told.
And then, because there are blocks and mutual decisions for forever silence between me and these people, I find there are things to say and I have no one to talk to but the ghosts. And Jared. And thankfully, Jared has yet to get tired of me saying these things.
But I say them to Jared in an effort to escape putting them into writing for the world, too. Because some of what I have floating around in my heart feels too big to capture. Too dangerous. Some of what I feel like saying feels like I might lose my very soul if I capture the truth of what I really think and feel in writing….the rage, the heartbreak, the sorrow, and yes, even the love that exists to this day.
Even if Jared says a more accurate term for the word “love” is to substitute more appropriately “trauma-bond.” I say it is overly-simplistic to reduce years’ worth of relationship dynamics to simple “trauma-bonds.” Life is not that neat, unfortunately. Life is not that simple even when entire relationships were built upon emotional manipulation by a suicidal individual who I was not equipped to help at age 15, and actual sexual assault in a dorm room at age 19, and actual captivity in the blackness of the night at age 21.
And even so, the universe is an equalizer. I see that in the ghosts I’ve blocked, and I see it in other ways in my daily life still present.
So, I try to be more present in my marriage on a daily basis. Periodically as I write this I glance up at this man I have known of for a couple of weeks’ shy of 23 years, and I love that I think I have mellowed and he is not so sure. I love that we have three children, two of whom are now adults now. I love that we are raising three very driven individuals who have goals and aspirations and dreams just like we have had.
I love that even though we will have no one at the high school in the Fall, we will still go to band practice on Thursday nights. I love that our youngest will want that.
I love that I have goals myself now, after so many years of feeling like literal wastes of space aside from the identity of mother.
I love that routine is in reach, it is taking its rudimentary forms even before life changes in ways it will never retreat back to, when both our big boys go off to college in the Fall.
And, I truly never thought I would be one of those women who, in my late 40s, finds herself thinking that she would never go backwards in life to experience younger days. But instead, I find myself excited about the future, excited about the current state of my marriage, and excited to spend more time getting to know my children as big kids and adults.
But, the ghosts are there. And there are stories to tell. And even if they are trauma loops, they are my trauma loops, and in processing them maybe there are kernels of wisdom; warnings for other women to maybe learn from so that we can all heal a little more than we are today.
Because what happens when one of those perpetrators goes on to wild success and no justice? What happens when I get confirmation that yes, even wealth does not buy morality or a heart or respect? What happens when I find out for sure that it has not bought that individual love or freedom?
What happens when another perpetrator goes on to near destitution and deep drinking and psychological problems? What if this person was someone you were sure you were going to marry, when they were your high school sweetheart and life was quaint and there were no real problems?
But….then…..there were no real problems for me aside from scoliosis and teenage angst and recent family tragedies. This person had to go work in a strip club on school nights, in the kitchen in Atlanta because his mother thought it was the best money he could make as an 18 year old.
What happens when I learn that maybe trusting my brain was never the problem? What if I just stop and realize that we’ve all done the best we could?
And the last two years, finding closure in myself with the wealthy individual, has taught me that some people just seek out drama and that person seeking out that drama isn’t always me. Some people are magnets for it.
And I know what is wrong with that person, too, because his childhood and coming of age was equally tragic, if more privileged: tragic for entirely different reasons.
And so, I do the best I can. And I look up at Jared occasionally, immersed in his coding project for work that has made him so invested in his work lately and energized, and I am grateful. I am grateful for my life, I am grateful for our children, I am grateful for our home, I am grateful that I imported this man from Nebraska who had never so much as stepped foot on Georgian soil before he came to see me for the first time in September of 2003. I am grateful that I got homesick in 2007 and came running back and I am grateful that my children have each gotten a stellar education.
I am grateful that we are weird people, that we have strange inside philosophical family jokes that probably make no sense to other people, I am grateful that our children like philosophy like we do, even if Jared and I do lean more easily into the theology-related philosophy than our children naturally do.
I am grateful that I can rant about my past, I can write, I can talk, I can cry. I can also say, “Sweetheart, I am spiraling,” and Jared will bring me back to the present in some way or other or encourage it as best I can let him at the time.
And so: there are nights like tonight, where we find ourselves at Gallery Row: each of us writing for entirely different reasons, each of us equally satisfied. I find no answers, I avoid talking to the ghosts another night, and all is well with the world.
