Mind Games

When I was in college, I started to play a game with myself.  When I was walking around campus, I would pretend that suddenly a younger version of myself had been magically transplanted into my current body: she could see out of my eyes, but not change any of my actions.  Temporarily confused, she’d quickly become curious and try to figure out when and where she/I was.  An iteration of it went something like this:

Wait, where am I?  Why is my hair falling in my eyes-- oh, wow, it's short.  That’s new. All right, wearing a dark green coat-- that's cool.  Was that a New Hampshire license plate?  Wait, is that-- holy shit, is that Baker Tower?  AM I AT DARTMOUTH?  I'M AT DARTMOUTH!

On the face of it, the reasoning behind this particular fantasy is abundantly clear: in the weird way that I self-comfort, I was essentially trying to pass a message back to myself through time.  The message was that even though I was miserable in high school, I would get to where I wanted to go.  Now, of course, I realize that the game goes a lot deeper than that, and in some ways speaks to the fact that often in my life, I have trouble living in the present: I always focus on the future, or I imagine my past self in her future, which is my present.  It’s all very convoluted, but it has very little to do with actually focusing on when and where I am from the perspective of who I am now, leaving the past and future in their respective places.

I also have to admit that this isn’t just about my younger self.  I still carry around a lot of that younger baggage.  Playing the game is how I sell myself the idea that my having the thing that I wanted so badly back then makes up for the sadness that came before, and that somehow I'm emotionally in the black, or at least breaking even.

Was I very, very happy in college?  By and large, yes.  Did going to Dartmouth "make up" for being miserable in high school?  I don't know—I’m beginning to doubt it.  Regardless of if or how those two things are linked, they've formed a kind of symbiosis in my mind.

And it didn't stop there.

After I graduated and spent about a year being lost and unemployed, the game became less appealing.  I think once or twice I imagined my Dartmouth self projected into my post-grad self and thinking, Why am I at the Glen Ellyn library?  I was not in a good place for those months, and I was smart enough to know that I should shelve the game for a while.

When I finally got a job in a museum, which had been the goal in college and after, the game came back in a big way.  Graduate school was hit and miss--I was unhappy, but the Colorado scenery was certainly lovely.  Coming home to Boston, and to a different job in the same museum, I felt like I hit a new level: now I was sending retroactive reassurance to my unemployed post-undergrad self and my unemployed post-graduate school self (the latter had shingles-- she needed all the comfort she could get).  Now, walking to work, it went something like this:

All right, I know this walk.  Oh God, please let me be walking to the museum and not another building nearby.  Hold up, are those Frye boots?  NICE.  Huh, I guess my hair grew out a little too.  Okay, there's the museum sign.  Come on turn right, turn right... YES!  Staff entrance!  I'm home!

That was--well, if not "all well and good," then at least no weirder or more harmful than usual. 

Until things kind of went to hell at work.

Yes, this was in fact my dream job, but not since my first job have I been silently crying in the bathroom, bursting out in hives, and lying awake at night under a blanket of anxiety like this.  The short version is that my boss is awful, though that doesn't really cover it.  I've worked for bad bosses before-- crazy bosses, mean bosses, outright offensive bosses.  But this is worse.  There are a lot of reasons why that aren't worth getting into, but suffice to say I have come to realize that the dream job can be made untenable by a nightmare boss.

And so it is that when I walk to work, the game stalls out: yes, I am walking towards my dream job at a museum, but my younger self is very confused by the inescapable pit of dread in my present stomach. 

As we get older, I think we begin to articulate a lot of things that are painful but ultimately really helpful to understand.  Like the fact that you can be absolutely correct that something sucks or is unfair and simultaneously have precisely zero recourse.  That your outrage often has no traction in reality, and the sooner you realize that, the better.  That hurt comes in all scales, and while some are more important and should definitely set the others in perspective, they're all there and shaming yourself for feeling the little ones doesn't help anyone.  That all of the optics can be great, but the reality of something can be awful. 

And that the reality is much, much more important than the optics.

The game itself was always really about the optics.  In those moments when I imagined my younger self inhabiting my body, I never asked myself how happy I was.  I guess I sort of assumed that if I had a check mark in all the boxes of my expectations, I would have to be happy.

Maybe that's why the game is kind of getting old, as I get older.

The other night, I was lying in bed waiting for my boyfriend to come to bed and thought about the game in passing.  My younger self would probably be surprised by the Frank Turner tattoo on my wrist (and I would've had no idea who Frank Turner was) and would be been dying to see the person who I could hear brushing his teeth in the bathroom.

But as much as I value my younger selves and how they've brought me to who I am, what they think of where and who I am now matters less than what I myself think.  What I thought in that moment in bed was that there can be other good jobs, and that my current predicament is disappointing but not inescapable.  More importantly, my when and where in that moment were pretty damn good.  So when my love came to bed, I fell asleep almost immediately, anchored on his shoulder and in my own present self.   

Whodathunk

"We were frightened of being left alone for the rest of our lives. Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at the age of 26, and we were of that disposition."

I had completely forgotten this line from High Fidelity, uttered with dry perfection by John Cusack, until I was searching my inbox and accidentally pulled up an old email conversation with one of my exes.  For a period of time during my first job, he and I had exchanged lengthy emails, often including quotes from songs or movies.  Upon reflection, this may be a sort of truncated, digitalized version of the long, lost mix tape (yes, I remember them-- hell, I even made a few, thank you very much).  I had included this particular quote in one of the email conversations in which I distinctly remember falling more in love with him than I already was: he had admitted doubt and deep seated fear to me, and I loved him all the more for it.  It was an unguarded moment of honesty, and the fact that those were rare should've told me a lot.  Ah well.

Recently finding this email chain seemed oddly apropos, especially in light of some conversations I had with my best friend a few weeks ago when I visited her.  We were talking about our imminent entry into the next decade of our lives, though my entry is a couple of months more imminent than hers, when she made a particularly sharp (and hilarious) jibe about my impending ancientness (har har-- don't quote me). 

"Owch!" I said, recovering from dumbfounded surprise.  I was shocked, not hurt-- she had never ribbed me that hard before about turning 30.  And very shortly, I found out why.

She grinned at me unapologetically.  "I can tease you about it because you're not afraid of dying alone anymore."  I laughed sheepishly as she hollered at me and a perhaps sympathetic universe, "Like I always knew you wouldn't!!"

Later in our visit, when her sainted husband took charge of their two small children so she and I could have dinner for a second time over a weekend (marvelous man, that), she told me something else that meant the world to me: she said that though she'd never met him, she knew my boyfriend was the one for me.  She carefully (and, since she's my best friend, needlessly) clarified that she meant what she was saying in the best way when she said that she'd noticed, since I'd been with him, that I had become the best version of myself: happier, calmer, self-doubt quieted and insecurities significantly assuaged.

This woman has been my other half for more than half of my life, and her quiet and heartfelt endorsement of the man who is becoming my other other half... well, let's say her good opinion is something I hold above almost all else, so her telling me what she did was invaluable to me. 

And yes, for the record, a person can consist of more than two halves, and in the paradoxical way that love tends to defy gravity and mathematics, none of those halves is diminished by the presence of other halves. 

The thing is, for a long time, I truly believed that there might be something wrong with the half that's just me.  When boys and men took an interest, it always seemed to be against their better judgment-- as though there was something fascinating and gratifying about my maelstrom of energy and attention, but that ultimately, it wasn't worth the effort.  I wasn't worth the effort.  I was too much for anybody with good sense: too opinionated, too outgoing, too needy.  Too much.  Too... me. 

In retrospect, it makes me sad to think of the things that we can come to believe about ourselves, even as the people who love us holler and plead that those things are nonsense. 

To be honest, as my exhausting, infuriating, and numbing match.com subscription came to an end last winter, I began to wonder if maybe I should begin to explore other narratives for myself-- ones in which not having a romantic partner was a regrettable fact, but in which I could find other ways to invest my love and make my way.  Maybe love for me would come differently, but would still be meaningful.

When John Cusack says it, yes, it does sound ridiculous to fear dying alone in your twenties.  But I think it's easy to dismiss seemingly silly fears without acknowledging that some of them are fueled by less than silly realities: self-doubt, sadness, loneliness, and discouragement.  It's really hard to have faith that something will happen if it's never happened before.

Maybe that's why I spent a significant amount of time in the first few months of my relationship with my love waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Spoiler alert: it hasn't, and I'm not waiting anymore (I'm too busy being obscenely happy).

What the boy and I had shared, outside of emails and occasionally a bed, was built on bravado and banter, which is exciting but ultimately unsustainable and unsatisfying.  What I share with my love still continues to surprise me: there's an honesty at its core, a bravery that humbles me, and it's still somehow silly and funny and flirty.  Make no mistake, it is still fucking scary to be in love, and it's even scarier when you realize slowly-- and then all at once-- that this is the love that you want for the rest of your life.  This is the love you will fight with, fight for, wash and dry and rip and mend and stretch and be exasperated with and amazed by and treasure and spill coffee on and grow up, into, and together with. 

I don't fear dying alone anymore.  I fear a shit-ton of stuff, but not that.  Because, for lack of a better term, I'm in it to win it.  I'm in it for keeps.  And improbably, insanely, miraculously, so is he. 

There is no moral superiority to those who have found a true love.  I'm not smarter or wiser for being in love-- though I am smart enough to know that what I am is stupid fucking lucky: stupid lucky to have found and been found by this smart, kind, compassionate, hilarious, sexy, goofy, tall, weird, thoughtful, adorable, nerdy, muppety man, who has excellent taste in scotch and makes me happier than I have ever been.  The odds are obscenely high that we wouldn't have found each other.  But we did. 

I still don't really understand it.  To my mind, there was no rhyme or reason why I would meet him when I did, and that we would be perfect for each other in the ways that we are.  Maybe there are greater forces at work-- not fate exactly, but some combination of luck, gravity, and coincidence that happened to pull in the right direction at the right time with the right people.

Which, now that I think about it, is exactly what fate is. 

Will wonders never cease?

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.