Helping

I am eating again and it really isn’t a problem. This is strange because just a few short weeks ago, it was a huge problem. Arguably, it was my biggest problem. I would order my favorite food from my favorite take out restaurants and let it go bad on my coffee table after coaching myself through eight exhausting mouthfuls. I’d order a subway footlong sandwich in the morning for breakfast and make it through half by the end of the workday. My coworker found this to be the most perplexing and amusing quirk and pointed it out to me several times a day, every day. I wanted to tell her that if she wasn’t prepared to wrap me in her arms and let me breastfeed from her huge, matronly rack, then she needed to shut the fuck up about how poorly I was feeding myself. I never said this because I knew she wasn’t trying to make fun of me and I also knew it would be an insane thing to say and it was very important to limit the amount of people who knew that I was going insane.

Anyway, these days I get up and wander over to my kitchen, meander through breakfast prep and before I even know it, I’ve somehow eaten two eggs, arugula, cheese and hummus all wrapped in a tortilla as if doing all those things all in a row wasn’t akin to pushing a laundry machine up a flight of stairs.

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It is in these situations that I feel like a carpenter who has injured my hands and in need of a house. Then, some people who care about me arrive and say, “oh shit you need a house” and I say, “Yes, it appears so”.

They say, “I brought a hammer” and I blink in response because a hammer is handy but if they intend on helping me build a house, they need to be familiar with blueprints, how to lay foundation, lumber, screws, joists, and on and on. I know these things because I am a carpenter. I have dedicated my life to carpentry. To help build a house for another person is not easy and if you want to build a house well, you need years of dedicated practice.

And now, the person is getting impatient, because, to them, they are ready to help me build a house, and I am a carpenter, and I am not telling them how to build the house. They do not like to see me out in the cold. To see me suffering, to hear about how the cold sinks into my bones, man, it makes them so uncomfortable. And they have a hammer and are fully prepared to go get whatever other supplies are needed as soon as they are told what to get from Home Depot goddammit.

This person, who has never been interested in carpentry, is only prepared to help me pitch a tent. So, together, we pitch a tent and I survive the long winter while I let my hands heal. I am so grateful for the tent. I thank god for the tent. I may not have lived without the tent. I still see my breath fog, I still shiver in my sleeping bag, I’m still cold, but god forbid I say any of these things in front of the friend who still has a hammer, who insists they want to help you build your house, who knows how to hammer a nail, and saw through a two-by-four.

This is not an issue with my carpenter friends, who know better then to try to help me build house in these conditions. They bring blankets and warm food and let me have sleepovers. They share stories of the houses they are building, the cold nights they have slept through, ways they’ve learned to better insulate and fortify. We know that we are not just carpenters. We are architects and engineers of the human spirit.

When we are not building houses, we are building temples, and all are welcome to seek refuge.