Aja McCullough

The defenestration of blog

Scary Things are Scary

My name is on a cast list! Granted, it’s for the chorus of an outdoor community theater production where most of the performers are ten years younger than me, but this is still something I didn’t think I’d do in my life.

I was never the kid who did things. I was the kid who watched other people do things and thought, “Wow, that’s cool, I wish I could do that!” then resumed reading books about dragons. Over time,  I’ve done a decent job transitioning from a painfully shy master of social avoidance to a plain old introvert. And now, at the age of 30, I’m completely out of fucks to give. If there’s something I want to do, I’m going to give it a try. The nerves and embarrassment haven’t gone away, but I’m learning to live with them.

Scary things I’ve done in recent years:

  • Showing up at sessions. I’m still excited about this one because a lot of my teenage years were spent gawking at Irish musicians and wondering how one could penetrate that little circle of talented people. In the end, I learned that you just have to show up and be awkward a bunch of times.
  • Singing in public. I’ve always loved singing, but the voice is an immensely personal instrument and sharing it is very intimate. I’m baffled by self-promotion; I don’t know how professional artists do it, because it takes a lot of self-assurance to confidently tell someone else that you’re good at something. Also, I assumed a Phantom of the Opera situation was inevitable (A toad madame? Perhaps it is you who are the toad). This past fall I sang unaccompanied on a stage in front of a lot of people for the first time. I didn’t croak. Alcohol helped.
  • Leaving my full-time job to spend more time with my family, pursue writing more seriously, and have an overall better quality of life. More on this later.
  • Embarrassing the hell out of myself at an audition. Thanks to the aforementioned experiment in performing, singing was not terrible. But boy,  I am not a trained dancer. Thanks to what I assume were low standards on the director’s part, I’m going to wear a costume and sing in my favorite musical. I’ve never been in a play before. I have no idea how they work. I don’t know if I’ll be good at it or if I’ll even like it. But I’ll find out!

Despite the fact that we’re bombarded with self-help witticisms that tell us to follow our dreams and live our bliss and YOLO the shit out of life, it takes a lot of effort (and privilege) to do it. It’s not always practical or even possible. But I can say with 100% certainty that when you have the chance, it’s worth it.

Reflection on Surliness

There’s a certain level of introspection that comes with any event that rattles you out of normal day-to-day life. Now is one of those times. My brain is on overdrive, and it’s part anxiety, part a deep, selfish, totally human desire to be liked.

Someone I used to know and care about died. I’ve lost a lot of people in my life, and on the surface it seems like this one shouldn’t affect me that deeply. It’s someone I knew only for a brief time and hadn’t talked to in years. But knowing a person your own age who died so suddenly and unfairly triggers a strange sort of reaction.

The outpouring of love and support for this person and his family is really beautiful. It’s totally deserved in every way, and I hope to never find myself in their position. It’s also heart-wrenching for reasons that aren’t so obvious. I’m introverted. I don’t have a huge number of friends. I care deeply about the friends I have, but I don’t think I’m good at showing it. I’m not really part of any defined communities with the exception of Irish music (and even then, I’m not exactly a pillar). My husband is very much the same. We don’t really have mutual friends, or a shared community. We don’t do anything or go anywhere. We have few opportunities to make new friends, and we don’t take advantage of the chances we do have (see: “introverted”).

For the past week, there’s been a knot in the pit of my stomach. If something tragic happened to either of us, I’m genuinely not sure what the response would be. Again, I hope to God that I never find out. But it’s still… kind of a bummer. I don’t think anyone would say I lit up every room I entered, or that I had a radiant smile, or that I made everyone feel happy and at ease. I doubt that people I knew only briefly and long ago would spend a whole lot of energy thinking about it. My funeral will probably be a reflection on surliness and a special knack for resting bitch face.

Maybe I’m wrong. If I am, I wonder if those sparkly people feel the same way, because a pretty unsettling amount of my mental energy is expended trying to figure out how be the kind of person that people just… like. 

I don’t really have a point, except to say that sometimes life is really hard, and a lot of people probably feel like I do, and we should talk about it more.

A Burning Sun Part 2

Erno had always been a peculiar boy. There were many children in the village before  Sunfire, but he rarely spoke to them. They taunted him for his silence and he was prone to crying. It was unsettling when he looked at you because his eyes were two different colors. Fortunately he never looked at anyone for too long. Sometimes he looked at me, and I smiled at him when I saw it, but he would usually turn away quickly. Every so often he would smile back. 

His family lived in a very small house on the outskirts of town. His father helped the farmers with their harvest, and his mother spun yarn and sold simple woven blankets in town. When Erno was young, he helped his mother with the combing of the wool. When he grew older, he went out into the fields with his father and his arms became stronger and his eyes fiercer. 

One day, Erno said hello to me. He said very little else, but that was ok. By this time he had grown tall and his chest broad. After that day, he would sometimes take my hand and we would leave town and walk together in silence through the fields. He brought me sweets that his mother made, and I knew that they were a special gift because his family had so very little. I always smiled as I ate them, and that made him happy.

Grief

Grief is a fickle bitch. There’s nothing new or revolutionary about it. Every person who ever lived has experienced it in some manner. Sometimes the weight of it is crushing, and it seems like some of us have a bigger load to bear. Each loss is another brick viciously laid on the last, a tower that grows more unsteady with each fresh heartbreak.

This one is particularly cruel. Perhaps it’s the suddenness of it, or the horrible injustice. It’s murder and it isn’t. But there’s no denying that it’s life-ending and life-changing and cruel. Nothing will change that, and nothing will take away the wrongness of it.

I’m not skilled at taking the bad with the good. It’s hard to tell sometimes if the pain makes us stronger, or if all the little cracks will eventually shatter us. So we’re left with discomfort and the messy pain of not knowing. Life isn’t supposed to go this way.

A Burning Sun Part 1

The moons were yellow. We no longer found this unusual, for they had been this way for many months, their pale light filtered through the haze of smoke. There was always smoke now – the funeral pyres were stacked high all along the street, marking the spots where merchant stalls used to stand selling spiced meats and dried fruit and sweet breads. But the smell of roasted meat and cloves had been replaced with the sickly scent of disease and burning flesh and human hair.

The Cerenin women knelt by the pyres praying and wailing and throwing their hands up to the sky. They could no longer see. It was better for them, I think, not to know whose bodies they knelt before. The prayers were the same anyway, whether for old man or child.

The sickness had swept through town without discrimination. Some of us escaped it altogether and we did not know why. Perhaps it was the spark of rage that had lived in us since birth, a spark that had grown as large and hot as the towers of burning bodies. It was a useless, futile anger, the kind that turned back upon itself and gnawed at you because it had no place else to go. We never considered vengeance. We knew it was impossible, mostly because we did not know where to direct it. So those of us who were alive continued living, and those who were not were burned, and the suns rose in the morning and the moons at night.

Aja McCullough