A Body of Contradictions

I know a lot of words.  Beautiful words, descriptive words, lyrical words: indigo, gubernatorial, pugnacious, nascent, plop, roan, slalom, egress, gelatinous, glib.

I also know a lot of really ugly words.  Words that cut and bruise and appall.  And one word in particular seems to have played an outsized role in my life so far.  No pun intended.

"Fat" is a very ugly word for me, as I imagine it is for a lot of people: a single, loaded, and surprisingly aggressive syllable, inflected and dripping with invisible emotional punctuation.  I don't so much say the word as spit it out, like a bullet or a challenge. 

When I was twelve, my family went on a ski vacation, and before we left, my mom gave me an old pair of her ski pants to try on to see if they fit.  They did, but barely.

It's worth noting that my mother is 5'11 and had worn those pants well into her thirties.  I was probably about 5'2 or 5'3 at that point and just tipping over the cusp into puberty.

I remember standing in my parents' bedroom in the house where I grew up and enjoying the way the unyielding, waterproof fabric seemed to squish me into a thinner form.  I don't remember exactly what my mother said, but I can take a pretty good guess, which is that she sighed, and said something like, "I used to be so skinny."

I don't know if my mom said “fat” in that instance, but she often did.  Whether explicit or implicit, self-reproach and self-loathing were mundane, painful, and ever present throughout most of my life.

There are a lot of things we never talked about in my family when I was growing up.  One of them was that for many years my mother was anorexic, and that diets and eating disorders have been part of our family's status quo for decades.  Anorexia was one of those things that happened in health books and to unhappy teenagers-- not to good families, who lived in subdivisions, were never divorced, and were chock-full of high achieving daughters. 

When I began to put together the pieces about my mother's eating disorders-- the history, the contradictions, the painful reality-- it was cathartic to actually put a name to it.  And make no mistake, it's hugely powerful to name something, especially with a name that should signal all sorts of trouble and some very serious ramifications.  Unsurprisingly, though, my planting of that flag in my own mind didn't really change anything in my family, nor did it change anything fundamental in my own fraught relationship with food.  Still, it was meaningful.  It made the problem real for me as a problem: this thing is real and it has a name, regardless of whether or not we use it.

The way I say “eating disorder” sounds more like throwing a gauntlet than a diagnosis.

In one memorable instance, I actively called out the inherent contradiction of my mother’s telling me that I was perfect as I was when she constantly fantasized about (and, I understand now, fetishized) her own past, anorexic body.  When I asked her how those two things could coexist, she didn't have an answer.

When I told my oldest sister, who is usually the most articulate and brutally honest of us, about this interaction, she was dumbfounded and impressed. 

"You actually said that?" she asked me, seeming to be almost as unnerved by my gumption as I was.  "Wow."

My sisters and I each have a thread in this narrative, and mine goes as far back as I do-- in fact, further.  My parents were desperate for another baby, and eventually my mother's doctor said to her pointblank that she could lose "those last ten pounds" from her already bare frame or she could have a baby.  Either/or.  So my very existence somehow both saved and ruined my mother's body, and I've been implicated in this whole system for the subsequent thirty years.

My goal here is not, by any stretch of the imagination, to make my mother into a villain.  The other thing we didn't really talk about, but that I had to put together for myself, was that my mother's father was an abusive shithead.  To him, my mother’s only worth was in being exceptionally beautiful, which she was and is.  My grandfather was a photographer, and from the moment my mom went, seemingly overnight, from awkward and gawky to screaming babe, she had a camera shoved in her face, right up until she married my dad.

For the record, my mom isn’t just gorgeous—she’s also exceptionally intelligent and one of the most loving people I have ever met.  She emits this frequency to which pretty much all mammals, and especially the small or wounded, gravitate.  The contradiction I called out hasn’t changed so much as I’ve learned to accept that something can be very real but make very little sense: that someone who has always loved me unconditionally also simultaneously, and unintentionally, taught me a very potent kind of self-loathing. 

As my middle sister told me once, our hating our bodies is because of her, but it's not her fault. 

More than that, I did not grow up in a bubble: the inclination for body-hatred was in no way alleviated by rampant and ridiculous expectations in popular culture, nor in the vicious sport of elementary and middle school mean girls.  All these causes are layered with, woven into, and enhanced by each other.  But in a way, causality and fault are sort of beside the point: I am the agent in my life, and as I close in on thirty, I want to start bloody acting like it.

What that meant for me is that I sought out a nutritionist, with the express if inarticulate goal of becoming "less screwed up about food."  I want to do it so that my darling boyfriend does not continue (as compassionately and kindly as he does) to experience whiplash from my dieting/indulging back and forth.  I want to do it because I want to have babies, and I want those babies not to learn anxiety, guilt, and self-loathing from me in any area, including food.  And, most importantly, I want to do it for myself, because all that anxiety, guilt, and self-loathing takes up an almost obscene amount of real estate in my mind.  Hell, if I manage to shrink that footprint, I could probably learn to knit or speak German again.  A worthy goal if ever I set one.

Of course, I speak only for myself, and I speak for myself as I am thinking about it right now.  As I admitted to my best friend, this may just be the glow of a new way of thinking about eating-- a lot of diets have that "new plan" smell too.  It's possible my enlightenment is more self-congratulatory than bone-deep.  But for the moment, it's working.

It’s not a straight line, and it’s not all forward progress.  It never is.  Nevertheless, if hating my body is something I learned, then I think it’s certainly worth the effort of unlearning it.  And if it’s more like a word or a language, maybe I can’t unlearn it so much as put it aside, not speak it, remove myself from unthinking immersion in that culture, and ultimately, forget it. 

It’s doubtful that I’ll ever forget the definition of the word “fat,” but maybe its meaning can change.  And maybe, someday, it can just be another word.

(Untitled)

Monet's Waterlilies

Robert Hayden

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

In my office, I have this poem printed out and hanging on my pinboard.  It was one of the first personal touches I added when I arrived in the stark little basement room to start my new job.  I wrote about this poem my senior year of college, focusing especially on the line that I am still convinced is one of the more beautiful ever crafted in the English language: “The eye like the eye of faith believes.”

Today, though, as I flipped over to the New York Times website to take a quick break from a project, that was not the line that came to me.  Today, it is the news from Boston that poisons the air like fallout, and I had a sudden need to “come again to see / the serene, great picture that I love.”

My serene great picture is a symbolist painting of an orchard.  I’m a Mannerist fan by preference and a Modernist student by trade (trade being a very, very loose term), but this particular painting is intensely important to me.  After I left my museum job for a graduate program, and realized graduate school sucks, I found myself on a regular basis trudging downstairs to the mental health services department at my university.  I had thought that the Boulder air would be like one of those Victorian spas—it would cure me of all ill-humors and palpitations.  When it didn’t turn out like that, I made my way back to therapy. 

In the lower level of the health services building, they had a small, low quality reproduction of that orchard painting.  I had liked it before I left the museum but hadn’t paid much attention to it.  It was actually kind of ubiquitous: we used it on some of the promotional materials in my department.  In grad school, far from the place I had belatedly realized was home, missing my job and my life in Boston, that painting came to stand for the things I missed.  I’ll admit: I would do some combination of pouting and/or sighing whenever I walked by that reproduction.  It became the shadow of my joy.

Through no small amount of luck, I actually ended up going back to the same museum to a different job after I graduated (though, admittedly, four months and a case of shingles occurred in the interim).  Now, when I’m having a rough day, or I just need a break, I go and visit that painting.  It’s not as huge as Monet’s painting at the MoMA, to which Hayden is referring, but it is serene, and it is great, and I love it.

And I needed it today.

What I found when I flipped over to the NYT website was that the Boston bomber had been given the death penalty.  When the bombs went off two years ago, I was in Boulder, but I felt my heart crack.  That Friday, when the city was on lockdown and the streets were eerily empty, I watched through the news at a distance.  I was so distracted that I came clean with the classes I taught that day: “My hometown is on lock down.  I’m no good to anybody right now.”

In the last several months as the trial has proceeded, I’ve heard about it almost every morning on NPR.  It’s odd to me to think that the trial has been a part of my morning routine since before the city was pounded by blizzard after blizzard—a succession of arctic Mondays—and now through to apple trees blooming and lilacs going gangbusters.  I don’t know why I thought the penalty verdict would take longer in coming, but I was taken aback when I saw the headline.  I didn’t bother finishing the article, but stood up, went upstairs to the galleries, and stood in front of my painting, shoulders hunched forward and trying to keep a straight face.

I’m one of the thousands—probably millions—of people on the outskirts of the Boston bombing.  I’ve written about how extremely lucky I was that all of my people were safe, and that I was able to get a hold of them immediately.  I make no claims to the caliber of loss that so many people have had to endure.  Still, as someone who loves Boston—and goddamn, I love this city—the bombing touched my life, and now, so has this verdict.

I don’t support the death penalty.  That’s such a broad statement to make, but it’s true.  In addition to the irrefutable fact that the justice system is not infallible, and is in fact in many cases deeply broken, I really just don’t believe that there is any justice in taking a life as the punishment for taking a life, or lives.  It’s a gross tautology.  And as the parents of one victim pointed out, the death penalty appeals and ongoing coverage will keep him in the news and those wounds open so much longer than if they had locked him up and thrown away the key. 

So often, it feels like the air is poisoned, that we are surrounded by such senseless, systemic violence.  Or worse, that the “sense” people use to rationalize violence is horribly perverted, that they think the system is somehow adequately self-justifying.  I try to think of what it feels like—“the aura of that world each of us has lost”—and sometimes it’s really hard to come up with.

I don’t have any articulate conclusions.  I haven’t really learned anything among my ruminations on Robert Hayden, paintings of orchards, and death penalty verdicts.  It’s a fucking mess.  

The eye of faith may believe, but sometimes the heart has a really hard time reconciling it all.

It's the Same Old Song: Revised (or, Reading on a Rollercoaster)

The first essay I ever wrote purposefully for this blog was entitled "It's the Same Old Song," and it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, about my oldest sister.

What might be surprising, though, is that in the almost six years since I've written it, the desperate, open wound of my desire for her to like me has somehow-- miraculously-- healed.  Or, I suppose, if not healed, then certainly scabbed over.  Sometimes in conversation with her I will experience a kind of ghost sensation, a memory of my desperation for her to see me, acknowledge me, like me.  It's a very old, very familiar feeling, but it's very much fainter than it was in the past.  It feels as though it belongs to someone else, and in a way, it does: it belongs to who I was, not who I am.  And to be fair, both of us are making every effort to have our relationship exist between who we are now, not who we've been.  We're entering new territory, which is slow-going and difficult, but ultimately worth the effort to break out of our well-worn paths.

The funny thing about familial relationships is that, at least in my experience, they are often repetitive: the arguments and the hurts are more often than not patterned after arguments and hurts long past.  Two quotations come to mind, from wildly different sources.  From Albert Einstein, physicist, we know that insanity is the act of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  And Frank Turner, post-punk part-time-folk general bad-ass musician, aptly sings: "We slip back into grooves that we cut in ourselves long ago."

Same old insanity, same old grooves: it's the same old song.

I have a very vivid memory from when I was in college, home for a break, when after an argument with my sister, I felt as though I was coming over an emotional rise and could see the entire and entirely familiar roller coaster of emotions coming at me.  I believe my response was something like, "Aw crap, here we go again."  In spite of being able to see my reaction coming, the complete and predictable succession of emotions I always seem to have after fights with any one member of my family, at that time I could not avoid them.  

It was like adding insult to injury: not only was I experiencing less than pleasant emotions, I was also suffused with a kind of irritation at their tedium, because I had experienced them all before, in the same order, from the same cues, many, many times.  And I just couldn't quite figure out how to stop it: lap bar firmly clamped over my legs, and away we go.  Oy.

When we talk colloquially about growing up, I think we're most often referring to childhood and adolescence, which strikes me as kind of misleading.  "Growing up" as an idea is actually kind of teleological: it seems to imply a kind of end point after which you will be "grown up," as if you'll ever be done "becoming" (I do beg your pardon, sometimes my inner grad student claws her way to the surface).  For my part, I was surprised when my therapist pointed out that some of the progress I've made in the last couple of years has actually been my growing up. 

I feel that progress most acutely in those moments when I feel the flicker of my old reactions: faint, peripheral, and seemingly on fast forward.  

One of the longest running insecurities I have harbored in my immediate family is that my life is less important than my sisters': because they are so much older than I am, by the time I reach their milestones, they are already on to the next.  When I was graduating high school, they were getting graduate degrees.  When I got my graduate degree, they were having babies.  The things I do in my own real-time seem to pale in comparison.  The babies thing is particularly stinging, as I also have the sensation that there is a serious premium in our family placed on procreation.  Unsurprisingly, when one of these insecurities is alerted-- either by something as faint as a potential resonating frequency or something as direct as a button firmly pushed-- I have a familiar set of reactions.  Thankfully, though, the intensity of my reactions is changing.

Recently, I kind of got the short end of the stick, because I don't have kids.  For the record, I really do understand that having small children is very, very difficult, and sometimes you just need help.  However, other people's needing something can become a pattern of their needs being more important than mine: from visits truncated to bedrooms confiscated to schedules up-ended, it just kind of happens.  And in spite of the apparent necessity of these situations, it kind of ends up sucking for me.  The truncated visit was a recent one, and the other night I told my mom I understood (and I did, and do) that the kiddos are the priority.

"But you're my priority too!" she protested.  I could practically hear her hand-wringing.  She's not unaware of the uneven distribution of resources, though that seldom changes the reality.

"Well," I said reasonably, chopping an onion in my kitchen, "okay, kind of.  But by definition, a priority is a priority.  Somebody has to win.  And that's not me.  And I get it."

The weird thing was, in that moment, I really did get it: I wasn't acting or being passive aggressive.  I was being as reasonable as I actually felt, which is exceptionally novel when dealing with my family (I've found a home-field advantage is extremely helpful in these situations).  Faintly, as if at a great distance, I saw my hurt go through its motions.  Did it still hurt?  Sure, but mundanely, not acutely. 

The funny thing was, after I got off the phone, I knew that if I dwelt too long in my self-congratulation for having become so mature, I'd probably accidentally back myself over a cliff into the hissy fit I thought I'd avoided.  So I put in my headphones, and "Rollercoaster" came on.  I suddenly had a strange image of myself as an adult on a roller coaster from my childhood (specifically Six Flag's "Raging Bull," if memory serves).  I imagined myself reading a book: eyes downcast and attention focused on the page as the world whips around me; hurdling through space, aware of it, but not particularly phased.

A very strange image, but a very comforting one too.  So yeah, maybe it is the same old song, but with a different meaning after so long...

The Question of Collectives

Collective nouns tend to be one of those weird niches of language that is consistently entertaining, whether alliteratively ("a bellow of bullfinches," "a lounge of lizards"), in joke form ("What do you call two crows on a branch?  Attempted murder"), or in personal improvisation ("a stump of corgis").  I was thinking about this the other day in terms of something of the two-legged variety: what is the collective noun for ex-boyfriends?

I ask because it got a little crowded the other morning.

I was sleeping over at my boyfriend's house.  At 6'4, he's a remarkably considerate sleeper: he lays down on his back and conks out completely.  Towards the morning, he might roll over once, but that's it.  Unlike me, he does not magnetically gravitate towards the dead center of the bed and then rotate myself regularly throughout the night like a roast on a spit.  This weekend, in the early morning when he had rolled over onto his side, I found myself staring at his back.

 And then there were three of us in bed, because I was remembering what turned out to be the last morning with the last person I was really in love with.  He had rolled over as well, and I hesitated to curl up against him.  Whatever we had been, which had never been terribly clear, was over, and I was just realizing it.  It had probably been over for a while, but that was the instant that it really hit, and I was crushed.

Back in the present and later in the morning, when my honey and I managed to haul ourselves out of bed towards the goal of making French toast, he tossed me a pair of his pajama pants to wear downstairs.  I had slept in his Moby Dick shirt and added a hoodie for good measure.  At 5'6 (on a good day), I was swimming in everything except the slippers, because I had brought those myself. 

And then there were four, because my most recent ex, whom in retrospect I have come to loathe, always wanted me to look just so-- he professed hatred for my beloved and beat to hell Dartmouth sweats and would whine when I looked anything less than his version of presentable (if you're wondering how I ever came to date this guy, believe me, I'm still asking myself the same question).  Standing in a bedroom two years later, I hoped that I looked kind of adorable in ridiculously outsized PJs, but the stupid ex still popped up to rankle.

On the couch downstairs, we were cuddled up with French toast and "The Soup" on DVR, and the topic somehow came around to gay marriage.  The man in whose arms I was wrapped (and whose French toast I was happily consuming) expressed his frustration at states' dragging their feet over gay marriage.  He told me he just didn't understand how people could continue to be so bigoted.  I expressed my profound agreement but was wise enough to keep mum about the fact that my last long term boyfriend-- who had turned out to be a bit of a bigot himself, which is why I broke up with him-- had just appeared on the recliner next to us.

"Intrusion" as a collective noun is already assigned to cockroaches (insert obvious joke as needed).  Maybe we go with a "haunting" of exes?  Something to think about...

There are those who have said to me in the past that I have terrible taste in men.  I'm willing to admit that there is potentially some truth in that statement on the face of it, but when you go a little deeper, it gets a little more complicated.  Because if I have terrible taste in men, I will always choose terrible men.  Following that strain of logic, is anyone to whom I am remotely attracted ultimately destined to be a shmuck, a bigot, or an idiot? 

God what an awful thought.

For the sake of argument, let's just look at my love life as it is at this very moment: I am dating a man who is very goofy, kind, affectionate, thoughtful, hilarious, and (as I mentioned) tall. He has given me absolutely no reason to doubt him in any way.  We are making plans in the short and medium term.  Things are good-- hell, things are great.

So then why is it so crowded?  Why the haunting?

It makes me a little sad that my boyfriend can make me so exceptionally happy, but that there are times when I still find myself amidst an invisible haunting of ex-boyfriends.  Because I'm not dating them-- with good reason I might add-- I'm dating him.  And I am bat-shit, "Mitzi Gaynor tap-dancing on an overturned rowboat" crazy about him.  Still, most of us bear some degree of scars or skittishness from previous experience.  Sometimes it's very hard to negotiate the warp and weft of a happy present and a less than happy past.  Suffice to say, it can get a little bumpy.

Having spent so much of my life living in my head, I find that one of the scariest and most obvious things about a relationship is that it is with another person.  You can't know what's going on in someone's head all the time-- I mean, really, I don't know what's going on in my own head half the time.  What that means is you can't know the moment when something changes, why it did, or necessarily how to fix it.  You also can't necessarily depend on the things you've learned in the past from other people to be accurate or helpful in the next scenario.

And that is terrifying in a way I think that only falling in love can be terrifying: loving someone's insides (and boy howdy, his outsides too) but being unable to control or even really predict them.  It's ironic, because in a way, I figure that's what love should be: that dumbstruck fascination with someone who is really his or her own person entire.  Not to state the obvious, but love is then, by definition, just bloody terrifying.  But, of course, y'know, in the best way...

My relationship experiences have not been stellar.  That doesn't mean they've all been completely awful either, but I still find myself on the twitchy side, which makes my impression of a normal, balanced human being even more hard to maintain sometimes.  The most terrifying part of all, though, is that he seems to like my crazy parts, that my impersonation of normalcy is totally unnecessary.  I am aware, though, that there is a line between occasionally, adorably twitchy and persistent, paranoid basket-case.  Let's just say I'm working on finding that balance.

Maybe what it ultimately comes down to is the fact that I have a hard time trusting that this wonderful human being would be genuinely crazy about me too, because often I have felt as if there is something about me that's-- quite frankly-- romantically off-putting.  And the only thing I can do to combat that feeling is trust this man, be honest with him, and be as good to him as I know how to be.  There's even the possibility that there are some ghosts of girlfriends past that are visible only to him.  I figure the best way to exorcise them-- and my own ghosts-- is to do one of the hardest and best things I can think of:

To be terrified, yes, but more importantly, to love.  Crazily, un-self-consciously, weirdly, intensely, and in all directions at once, such that the sheer volume of it will simply shove all those ex-boyfriends-- and maybe some of that terror-- collectively straight out the window.

And then it'll be a perfect collective of two.  Not to be too precious about it, but how about a "smitten"?

Again, something to think about.

The Proportionate Heart

When I was a freshman in college, my oldest sister would send me postcards to my school mailbox.  On one of them sometime during the fall, she described a medical appointment she'd had and expressed her dry disbelief that having a small hole in her heart was not in fact a very big deal, according to her doctor.  This postcard was how I found out about her apparently not-emergent heart condition.

I had a meltdown right there in the greasiest dining hall on campus. 

Here's the immediate background:

When my parents and I had been driving to New Hampshire to install me in my freshman dorm, we had stopped in Michigan to visit my sister and newborn niece.  The day we were going to leave, we were sitting in the family room when my usually hyper-articulate sister began stumbling on her words.  She looked bewildered, then terrified.  She was having what's called a TIA, which is a type of stroke.  Her blood pressure had been off the charts when she'd been pregnant, and a small clot had gotten through the hole in her heart, which no one had known about, to her brain. 

As it turns out, if you're going to have a stroke, a TIA is-- odd though it may sound-- the best kind of stroke you can have.  My sister suffered no lasting physical effects, and the hole in her heart was deemed not dangerous enough to merit surgery.

But here's the deeper background:

Seven months before my sister's TIA, my friend Ben had been killed in a drunk driving accident.  Ben had been my senior adviser when I was a freshman in high school, which doesn't sound likely as the foundation for the kind of bond I had to him.  The thing is, when I moved to California and was more lost and alone than I had ever been, Ben was my lifeline.  When he called me to set up our first advisee group outing, we ended up talking for two hours.  He was so exceptionally kind and generous with his love, and I think it would be impossible to overstate what that meant to me at that time in my life, and how grateful I've always been to him since then.

Even now, I refuse to say that he died.  He was killed.  He didn't leave-- he was taken.  I don't know why that language was, and continues to be, so important to me.  But it was, and is, and when I found out he had been killed, I thought I would break in half from the grief.  I had never lost anyone in my life up to that point, and the fact that he was no longer out there-- no longer in the world-- made me want to scream.  I think I actually did do quite a bit of screaming during that winter and the spring the followed. 

Ten months later, when my sister casually mentioned on a postcard that she had a hole in her heart, my own heart did some very basic math:

If losing a friend-- a marvelous, loving friend-- had made me want to turn myself inside out to escape the pain, then even the possibility of losing my sister terrified me more than I had thought I had the capacity to be terrified.  It was a terror that completely swamped my capacity for reasoning: I think this is what people mean when they say "scared out of your mind."

I called her the day I got the postcard, crying hysterically and frightened literally beyond words, and she couldn't understand my reaction any more than I could explain it at the time.  I was beyond reason, and that's the only language she understands. 

When we were both home for Christmas that year, and (as usual) a fight between us had become all the fights that had ever been between us all at once, she told me pointblank that she thought I had over-dramatized Ben's death.

Even ten years later, the impact-- the violent collision of her words against me-- makes me flinch.  And though we've come a long way in our relationship, I don't think I will forgive her for that.  I also don't think I have any desire to do so, and I think that's okay.

When I think about the progress I've made towards becoming the most adult version of myself I can manage, one of the things I'm most proud of is being able to articulate the things I wasn't able to before.  For instance, and importantly, I think the first thing I should've said to my sister was that she should waste no time in fucking off, as she had no idea what the hell she was talking about.  She had never lost anyone before, much less at as young an age and as violently as Ben had been killed.  Her judgment, outside of being unbelievably cruel, was also completely uninformed. Hence: fuck off.  Immediately if not sooner.

Recently, I wrote about my fantasy of traveling back in time to comfort my younger self in times of grief or pain.  In this case, when I imagine going back to myself, I wrap myself protectively in my own, older arms before turning on my sister and really letting her have it with an additional ten years' worth of honed expressive abilities. 

This is all well and good-- the anger, the articulation, the perspective-- but none of this is by any means resolved.

Last week, I found out that a friend from college had been killed in a car accident.  Again: she did not die, she was killed.  As when Ben died, I could not understand how everyone on earth did not feel it the moment she was taken.  Surely the molecules and atoms and photons should've simply stopped-- appalled that someone so energetic and charismatic and intensely loving as this woman was just suddenly gone. 

As I thought about her-- the texture of her voice, what it felt like to be in a room with her (it felt incredible, by the way)-- a horrible, familiar doubt came to me:

Am I over-dramatizing this?

Am I making it about myself?  Is my reaction proportionate to our level of closeness?  Is my reaction attention-seeking?

To put it bluntly, questions like these really fucking suck, whether they originate externally or internally. 

This may sound strange, but I wish I could just grieve, and not ask myself these questions (proportionate grief-- seriously?).  After all, in terms of a life lost, such questions are neither here nor there.

Because my friend was amazing.  She lit up any room that was lucky enough to have her in it.  I found out this week through memories shared that she made a habit of flirting with her friends in good faith-- I had thought for years I was just flattering myself and imagining it.  I have to tell you, I'm straight, but that woman's flirting was one of the most delightfully flustering and gratifying experiences I have ever had.  She was vibrant and hilarious and so intensely, purposefully herself that you couldn't help but be more sure of yourself in her presence.  I hadn't seen her in a couple of years, but I had this blithe certainty that when we saw each other again, we'd do a hollering tackle-hug by way of greeting.

And the fact that she is no longer on this earth makes me want to scream.

Maybe at a certain level it is possible to over-dramatize or make a loss about yourself.  But when you lose someone you love, someone who indisputably raised the awesome quotient of the world for the time that he or she was in it, you have to let yourself have that loss.  There's no proportion or formula: that's the thing about love.

Obviously, this is still something I'm working on, and when my thoughts turn to self-doubt, I'm trying to turn them back to the friend who was effectively the cure for self-doubt and unhappiness. 

Because ultimately what's most important and absolutely beyond any judgment is as simple as the fact that I-- we, the world-- may have lost her, but goddamn, it is a fine, fine thing to have loved her. 

Old Breaks

I don't really believe in time travel in the practical sense.  In spite of how much science fiction I consume, through screen or literature, and in spite of my persistent agreement with Hamlet that "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," time travel falls outside of even my own credulity.

That doesn't stop me from thinking about it, though.

If you can believe it, this came up in therapy recently.

One of the defining traumas of my life occurred one day towards the end of my eighth grade year of middle school.  My father had been commuting to his new job in California since January, and our house in Illinois had been on the market for five months.  I had been a hostage to an undefined, impending uprooting for about half a year, during which time I had finally found the kind of friends who made leaving seem especially cruel.  I had felt simultaneously obligated to hold together my mother in my father's absence, as well as my own remarkable impression of a high functioning human at school.  I don't remember the exact catalyst, but that morning in the late spring, I broke. 

Looking back, of course, I recognize several things, undiagnosed depression being one of them, deeply seated anxiety being another.  Yet another is that I had learned from a very early age not to make a fuss.  We were a good family.  We didn't have problems.  My exemplary grades and virtually spotless behavior were part of the deal and regrettably unexceptional.  So as everything fell apart around me, I felt as though I had to hold it together.  I didn't know at that point that sometimes holding it together is the worst thing you can do for yourself.

Standing outside of school that morning, I felt something heavy settle on my chest.  It was as though my brain were submerged in dark, murky water: everything was muted, echoing, translucently shadowed.  When we were let into the school, I made my way to the office of the counselor, to whom I'd been talking for several months.  I sat down and, though I don't remember the details clearly, I communicated my desire to hurt myself.  From valedictorian to self-harm in ten seconds flat: I didn't know how to be anything in between, and it never occurred to me that sadly those two things didn't have to be mutually exclusive.

The irony was that such a statement of intent to self-harm immediately kicked off a series of events that ended up doing more harm than good; of course these procedures are in place for a reason, but still.  The counselor had a legal obligation to hand me off to the school's social worker, whom I hated.  I had asked that my close friend Ross come to the office, and he came in on high alert, tall and blue-eyed and remarkably composed under the circumstances.  When they told me he couldn't come in with me to the social worker's office, I flatly stated that if Ross wasn't with me, I wasn't going. 

I remember that moment as being the first time my anger had ever really gotten traction in reality, and Ross sat beside me in the social worker's office.

Of course the school had to call my parents.  That morning, my mother was driving my father to the airport, because he was flying to Japan for a business  conference.  My mother told the school they would pick me up on their way.  This meant, of course, hauling me out of my friend's protective grasp and planting me in the backseat of a minivan.  I'll never know what exactly the school told my parents, but in short order, we were on our way to O'Hare. 

I remember spilling Diet Coke down the front of my shirt in the car.  Isn't it funny the things you remember?

When we got to the airport, it suddenly became apparent that my dad had left his laptop at home, so my mother went tearing back to the suburbs to get it, leaving me with my dad at the airport.  Back then, you could go through security even without a ticket, and I remember sitting in the dilapidated terminal seats with my dad, who had no idea what to do with me.

Until his cellphone rang: my mother had been in an automobile accident.

Here's where the time travel comes in.  I want to step through a portal, or push a button, or hail a TARDIS, and go back to that moment.  I imagine stepping out of the vortex (or police call box) and sitting down next to myself.  I want to put my arms around my younger shoulders and lean my head against hers.  And most importantly, I want to tell her how sorry I am.  It goes something like this:

"I'm sorry that you're in the middle of the worst pain you have known yet in your life and that no one seems to understand or even really notice.  I'm sorry that what you don't know is that your mom is fine, but the accident will effectively erase your part in this day from your parents' minds and memories.  I'm sorry that in a year or so, when you bring it up with your dad, asking him if he remembers the day you had your breakdown, he'll answer with uncharacteristic cruelty, "Oh, I'm sorry, the day your mother was in a car crash?"  As though your asking was appalling. I'm sorry you will have to hear that.  I'm sorry your mom will shrilly remember only her own emotional injury that day-- that your dad got on a plane the day after her crash and left her.  I'm sorry you're not in that equation.  I'm sorry you haven't articulated yet that emotionally, someone always has to 'win' in our family-- that there can be only one hurt that gets the attention, and that yours did not win that day, or any of the days that followed.  I'm so sorry.

"I'm sorry that you just don't have the tools, but you should know that your not having them is not your fault.  You haven't learned to own your rage, to hone it, as I learned in my early twenties, and you haven't learned how to manage pain, communicate it, use it, and calm it as I only have in the last couple of years.  I'm sorry you have no language to give to this dark, ugly pain that is very real.  I'm sorry that the worst moment of your life so far is about to be forgotten.

But I promise you this: I won't forget it."

This is not the only instance in my life that I would like to revisit-- not to do anything differently, but simply to comfort a younger version of myself, to acknowledge the situation and bear compassionate witness.  My sister, thinking she sounded wise but actually sounding cruel, told me once that I remember every wrong that has ever been done to me.  What I didn't have the words to tell her then was that I have to remember, because nobody else bloody does.

Sometimes, when I'm hashing out the oddly mundane details of these fantasies, I wonder what my past self would think of my current self.  The acne has certainly cleared, thank God and benzoyl peroxide, and the braces are gone.  I like to think that I'm comfortable in my own skin and that I wear it with greater confidence-- I hope this would show somehow (though, of course, that could just be wishful thinking).  At the very least, I imagine she would be impressed with my tall black boots and my refined command of eyeliner.  But these details are kind of beside the point.

As traumas go, I realize in the grand scheme of things mine is not so enormous.  Nevertheless, it felt that way, and it overwhelmed me.  I've revisited that moment so many times, especially in therapy, as a sort of archetypal break, one that is difficult to address in writing.  But I wanted to, and I think I've just realized why: because now, after fifteen years, I am bigger than that hurt.  There was a time when I was not, when it was like an eclipse; even when it was done, it still flickered in my consciousness. 

I joke with my therapist that when I enjoy moments of enlightenment, I say that I feel it in my "therapy" (this is kind of like another version of having it in your "feels," as a friend of mine would phrase it).  My therapist thinks it is a funny turn of phrase, but she observed once: "I don't think that's all your therapy.  I think you're just growing up."

It's the thing I've been trying to do for most of my life: to grow up.  What we realize, though, is that we're never done, there's no finish line, and there's certainly no prize.  We do the best with what we have and keep on truckin'. 

I guess, though, that at least I've made some progress if one of the things that I have is an increased ability to handle large, unwieldy pain more skillfully-- or at least, the ability to discern when, where, and with whom it is most effective to lose my shit.  I also have the knowledge that sometimes it is absolutely essential to lose your shit: to be a mess, to raise the red flag, to not hold it together and to reserve the right to fall the fuck apart.  To let people know that under no circumstances am I at this minute even remotely okay.  And that that's okay.

I wish I could give some of that hard-earned wisdom to that fourteen-year-old at O'Hare.  When I think about it, I find myself rubbing my arms, as though that self-comfort will transcend fifteen years.  I wish it could.  But, if I believe as I think I do, that I really have absorbed all of my former selves, like rings in a tree, maybe it does do some good.  Maybe somewhere inside of me there's a fourteen-year-old with Diet Coke down the front of her shirt who will take that comfort how it's meant.

Because this is the one, truest instance in which someone really does know how she feels.