Ice dance

My baby nephew Stephen Andrew Henry died seven weeks ago today, after ten weeks of life.  I have been fighting the urge to use words to reconcile myself to his death because his death is irreconcilable.  Writing about it feels futile, as does everything else.  Words are become powerless.

“It’s all one,” said Keats.  “We keep on breathing.”  Or we don’t.  Keats didn’t, at 26.

My nephew didn’t, at 71 days.

Someday I won’t anymore, you won’t.  It’s not just the knowledge of the surety of death that this has brought home to me, but how asinine are most of my pursuits.  I want to hold on to that crystal clarity I found in the days following his death, the purity of love I felt then, in honor of him.

My intention to live only with hope from that moment on.

But it infects everything I do and write now, how God allows bad things to happen to good people, how the problem of evil is the only problem that matters, how death is a living breathing presence behind each of our backs.  And that makes all my inanity seem less important, all the ephemeral photographs of a New England summer.

“A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted.”

All that’s left is an empty shape, an outline, a blank space, and if we heal then that ragged hole will be gone too and we’ll have nothing left of him.  But words are the only weapon I have with which to fight the darkness.

Art Spiegelman, Maus

One too many mornings

A big part of me doesn’t believe, still, that “depression” exists.  According to the New Yorker:

There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it…  There is suspicion that the pharmaceutical industry is cooking the studies that prove that antidepressant drugs are safe and effective, and that the industry’s direct-to-consumer advertising is encouraging people to demand pills to cure conditions that are not diseases (like shyness) or to get through ordinary life problems (like being laid off).

Louis Menand’s article, a review of Gary Greenberg’s book, “Manufacturing Depression,” continues:

Greenberg basically regards the pathologizing of melancholy and despair, and the invention of pills designed to relieve people of those feelings, as a vast capitalist conspiracy to paste a big smiley face over a world that we have good reason to feel sick about. The aim of the conspiracy is to convince us that it’s all in our heads, or, specifically, in our brains—that our unhappiness is a chemical problem, not an existential one. Greenberg is critical of psychopharmacology, but he is even more critical of cognitive-behavioral therapy, or C.B.T., a form of talk therapy that helps patients build coping strategies, and does not rely on medication. He calls C.B.T. “a method of indoctrination into the pieties of American optimism, an ideology as much as a medical treatment."

In other words, “depression is not a mental illness. It’s a sane response to a crazy world.”

According to Wikipedia:

The term "depression" is used in a number of different ways. It is often used to mean major depressive disorder but may refer to other mood disorders or simply to a low mood…  The diagnosis of major depressive disorder is based on the patient's self-reported experiences, behavior reported by relatives or friends, and a mental status examination. There is no laboratory test for major depression.

Essentially, it doesn’t exist, right?  But then there are days I wake up when I am unable to move.  Not literally, of course—I can roll over in bed, wiggle my fingers—but I don’t.  I lie there and I don’t move.  I think of all of the reasons I should move, or the things I could do that’d make me feel better, but I don’t do them.  I can’t bring myself to.  I rehearse a list of things I know to do, things I know help—heat, light, reading, baking, sitting in the sun, yoga, taking a long hot bath or a shower, going to a cafe or a library—but all of them, even the thought of them, even the first step towards them, feels like dust in my mouth.  I can’t move.  I don’t even pee when I need to pee because it requires too much energy to move to the bathroom.

In an earlier New Yorker article, “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” Andrew Solomon writes about his experience with his depression:  “My vision began to close.  It was like trying to watch TV through terrible static, where you can’t distinguish faces, where nothing has edges.  The air, too, seemed thick and resistant, as though it were full of mushed-up bread.”

I know that feeling.  For me the air feels resistant like mud, or like trying to swim against a current.  Motivation is a central problem.  I can think of a lot of things that make me feel better (writing, sunlight, a walk) but it is impossible to motivate myself to do them.  Or it’s possible but I can never do it.  Or I can do it sometimes, just not when I’m in the darkness.  In the hole, the bottomless pit, that Townes Van Zandt sings about above, so effortlessly.  The old lady catches me.

“Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me?” asks the Psalmist.

When I’m in the pit, pulling myself out is like trying to find pull myself from quicksand, use my own body as leverage.  It’s impossible to find any purchase.

Of course I can get out of bed.  It is possible.  It is not impossible.  And yet I don’t.  I lie in bed for hours—literally—not moving, thinking about doing something and not doing it.  Some days I can.  Some days I get up and take arms against the sea of troubles, even when it feels like moving through molasses.  Like swimming while drowning in a sea of mud.  Other days it is impossible.

In the wake of Robin Williams’s death, everyone is talking about depression, but not many people are saying anything useful.  Several times I’ve heard commentators say:  “just so we’re clear, ‘depression’ is a mental illness, not ordinary sadness or ‘feeling blue.’”  And I think:  oh, so what I have is just ordinary sadness.  Even when I’m not feeling sad at all.  Even when I’m feeling nothing inside but darkness, and heat and pain inside my head without actually experiencing heat or pain.

I’m sure Robin Williams and David Foster Wallace and everyone all thought they had ordinary sadness right up till the end.  How can we tell the difference when we’re in the middle of it?

Even Solomon writes, as he recovers, with the help of a vast pharmacopeia:  “I have felt blue sometimes, and on some days I have chosen not to work on this difficult subject…”  But how does he tell the difference?

I find it challenging to talk about, not because I feel guilty or ashamed, but because I don’t believe it exists.  I do feel guilty about my coping mechanisms—computer games and television and food—all things that other people assist me in feeling guilty about.  I feel guilty about my presence on the planet, about myself as a waste of space.  I feel “all the typical symptoms—hatred, anguish, guilt, self-loathing.”  But I don’t feel ashamed of the presence of the miasma itself because I don’t believe in it.

It’s also difficult to talk about because there’s nothing anyone can do to help.  Antidepressants don’t work.  Talking to other people just spreads the disease, if it exists.  Depression is contagious.  Why should I drag anyone down inside the pit with me?  I hate reaching out for help because then I have to admit that the only thing inside is an echo because all that exists in there is a big black hole and I can’t tell anyone without dragging them down too.

I’ve been feeling this way for twenty years, if not longer.  I wept the night before I turned ten because I realized my childhood was over.  Oh, wait—I was just feeling blue, right?  Even as a child, I felt something like nostalgia, a deep eternal grief at the passage of time.  I remember learning the word “melancholy,” and the idea that someone could be a “melancholic.”  I remember thinking, oh, so that’s what I am.  I developed obsessions that I treasured close to my chest, and when I shared them, carefully, and was rejected, I plunged into despair.  I lay in bed crying, before the age of eleven, telling my mother and sister that I had people who loved me, but no one who liked me.  How could they?  I remember listening to Puff the Magic Dragon and weeping:  Jackie Paper came no more!  Therein lay the essence of life’s tragedy!

Some days I wake up okay.  Other days I wake up unable to move.  Everyone blames negative thoughts, as proponents of CBT, and the power of positive thinking, believers in the pieties of American optimism, do:  change your thinking, change your life.

Andrew Solomon writes:

Once upon a time, depression was generally seen as a purely psychological disturbance;  these days, people are likely to think of it as a tidy biological syndrome.  In fact, it’s hard to make sense of the distinction.  Most depressive disorders are now thought to involve a mixture of reactive and internal factors;  depression is seldom a simple genetic disease or a simple response to external troubles.  Resolving the biological and psychological understanding of depression is as difficult as reconciling predestination and free will.  If you remember the beginning of this paragraph well enough to make sense of the end of it, that is a chemical process;  love, faith, and despair all have chemical manifestations, and chemistry can make you feel things.  Treatments have to accommodate this binary structure—the interplay between vulnerability and external events.

Vulnerability need not be genetic.  Ellen Frank says, "Experiences in childhood can scar the brain and leave on vulnerable to depression."  As with asthma, predisposition and environment conspire.  Syndrome and symptom cause each other:  loneliness is depressing, but depression causes loneliness.

For me, negative thinking is merely a symptom.  If I feel like things are hopeless I find a reason for why things are hopeless and I can find plenty.  But the hopeless feeling comes before the negative thoughts.  Sometimes the negative thinking catches me in a cycle and drags me deeper into the hole, but it’s almost worse when I feel nothing but emptiness and just like there’s nothing inside, not even negative thoughts.  And I can’t convince myself to do anything.

Since I was a child I’ve felt like suicide is a brave move, a way of using actual physical weapons against the sea of troubles, as Hamlet is the first to suggest.  “The ultimate hallmark of depression,” an “obsession with suicide.”  I think of those who have—Kurt Cobain, Elliott Smith, David Foster Wallace, Aaron Swartz, Vincent Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf—as secret brothers and sisters.  On bad days I pore over their Wikipedia pages.  Those who had the courage to tell the truth to an empty, hopeless world.

Solomon:

…the particular kind of depression I had undergone has a higher morbidity rate than heart disease or any cancer.  According to a recent study by researchers at Harvard and the World Health Organization, only respiratory infections, diarrhea, and newborn infections cost more years of useful life than major depression.  It is projected that by the year 2020 depression could claim more years than war and AIDS put together.  Ant its incidence is rising fast.  Between six and ten per cent of all Americans now living are battling some form of this illness;  one study indicates that nearly fifty per cent have experienced at least one psychiatric disorder in their lifetime.  Treatments are proliferating, but only twenty-eight per cent of all people who have a major depression seek help from a specialist;  fifteen per cent of hospitalized patients succeed in killing themselves.

Watching Robin Williams movies helps.  It’s odd to me how many of them deal intimately and sensitively with depression and suicide. My favorite movie as a teenager, and maybe still, is "Dead Poets Society," and I was powerfully affected by two of his other movies, not as well known:  "What Dreams May Come" and "World’s Greatest Dad."

In “World’s Greatest Dad” Robin’s character writes a suicide note and then gets to see what happens afterward—in some ways, it’s a suicide’s watching of his own funeral, a fantasy wish fulfillment.  He says, presciently and half-sarcastic:  “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”  But what if the problem’s not so temporary? 

In “What Dreams May Come” we get to see what happens after a suicide, too.  But this time from the other perspective.  From below the ground.

“What Dreams May Come” was horribly reviewed when it came out and still has a 44% rating on Metacritic.  I beg to differ with the reviewers.  Many parts of it terrified and entranced me when I originally saw it—joyful jumps through big messy wet swaths of color in heaven, walking on the disembodied faces of those in purgatory who don’t realize they’re there.  Since Robin’s suicide, I can’t stop thinking about the part when he dives down from heaven into hell, through an increasingly creepy and macabre dreamscape, where finally, at its very bottom, he finds his wife, who committed suicide.  She’s been sent to hell not because of her suicide but because of her own tendency to create “nightmare” worlds, the same tendency that led her to suicide to begin with.  She’s all alone, in darkness, living in a twisted version of their house, visibly tortured by her surroundings.

That part stays with me.  Because it’s what depression is.  When I’m there, I’m all alone, and nothing anyone could say could help or change anything.  Suicide and depression are really the same thing, because depression is already hell.

Jane Kenyon, a depressive and a poet, writes:  “Unholy ghost, you are certain to come again… and turn me into someone who can’t take the trouble to speak;  someone who can’t sleep, or who does nothing but sleep;  can’t read, or call for an appointment for help.  There is nothing I can do against your coming.”

In “Brothers Karamazov” Dostoevsky posits that heaven and hell are now, determined only by our frame of reference.  We are not condemned to hell in some future time;  if we are condemned to hell, we live there now.  The same with heaven.  Christ Jesus said:  “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.”  Here, now.

Dostoevsky:

“That life is heaven,” he said to me suddenly, “that I have long been thinking about;” and all at once he added, “I think of nothing else indeed…  Heaven,” he went on, “lies hidden within all of us—here it lies hidden in me now… we are all responsible to all for all, apart from our own sins, you were quite right in thinking that, and it is wonderful how you could comprehend it in all its significance at once. And in very truth, so soon as men understand that, the Kingdom of Heaven will be for them not a dream, but a living reality.”

Spoken by a character who committed murder, a murder he’s been hiding:  “I know it will be heaven for me, heaven, the moment I confess. Fourteen years I've been in hell.”

And here are words spoken by Father Zosima a prophet, a poet, a priest—someone who echoes both Christ and Buddha for me:

My brother asked the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending…  I ponder, “What is hell?” I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love...  there are some fearful ones who have given themselves over to Satan and his proud spirit entirely. For such, hell is voluntary and ever consuming; they are tortured by their own choice. For they have cursed themselves, cursing God and life.

Those "fearful ones" stay with me. “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but a Spirit of love, of power, and of a strong mind.”  2 Timothy 1:7

I love that trinity.  Love, power, and a strong mind.  If I can have love and power and a strong mind, then I live already in the kingdom of heaven.  If I fear, then I live in an ever-consuming and voluntary hell.

But I fear so much, all of the time.  As Solomon writes:  "It’s possible to distinguish between anxiety and depression, but according to... a leading expert on anxiety, 'they’re fraternal twins.'"

A quote from Tina Berger:

I often explain it this way. If you go and visit a Western-trained psychologist for seemingly inexplicable anxiety, he or she will most likely ask you about your life and your job and your family of origin. You may receive a diagnosis and plan of treatment. The treatment will likely involve relaxation and stress reduction, perhaps some additional talk therapy to address past emotional wounding, and you may be referred to a psychiatrist for medical treatment with anti-anxiety medication. You may or may not find the source of your anxiety. Whatever the recommended course of treatment, unexplained anxiety is generally seen as a pathology here in the West. If you have anxiety and you can’t source it to an immediate and direct problem in your life, the general assumption is: something is wrong with you.

An ecopsychology-based perspective takes a much bigger picture view of anxiety, considering questions like, “How sane is it, to have no anxiety as such beautiful species of plants and animals disappear from the planet one by one?” “How sane is it to have no anxiety when we know children are dying unnecessarily from starvation in many parts of the world?” “How sane is it that we work such long hours to continue acquiring so many things that we will throw away in less than a year?”

How sane am I?  Not very.

One last Solomon quote:

At a cocktail party in London, I saw an acquaintance and mentioned to her that I was writing this article. 

"I had terrible depression,’ she said. 

I asked her what she had done about it.  

"I didn’t like the idea of medication,’ she said.  "My problem was stress-related.  So I decided to eliminate all the stresses in my life."  She counted off on her fingers.  "I quit my job," she said.  "I broke up with my boyfriend and never really looked for another one.  I gave up my roommate and moved to a smaller place.  I stopped going to parties that run late.  I dropped most of my friends.  I gave up, pretty much, on makeup and clothes."  I was looking at her in bewilderment.  "It may sound bad, but I’m much less afraid than before," she went on, and she looked proud.  "I’m in perfect health, really, and I did it without pills."

Someone who was standing in our group grabbed her by the arm. 

"That’s completely crazy.  That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.  You must be crazy to be doing that to your life," he said. 

Is it crazy to avoid the behaviors that make you crazy?

Jane Kenyon writes, of emerging from a devastating depression:  “With the wonder and bitterness of someone pardoned for a crime she did not commit I come back to marriage and friends…  to my desk, books, and chair.”  She writes, of ordinary contentment:  “What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment?  How I love the small, swiftly beating heart of the bird singing in the great maples;  its bright, unequivocal eye.”

So I make plans for a half-suicidal foray across the Atlantic.  Or I make sense of the world through art, as Townes van Zandt, the patron singer of depressives, did.  He also drank himself to death aged 53. Ernest Hemingway, with his shotgun, beat him by nine years.  Robin Williams beat him by ten.

Pa-Auk-Taw-Ya, Burma (Myanmar)

The nun in front of me -- blurred because I probably shouldn't have taken this photograph

My journey has led me to a meditation center, one of the largest in Burma, where I intended to stay six days but am being tempted to stay longer, despite the relative torture of vipassana meditation.  I thought my background in yoga would better prepare me for this excruciating practice, but it turns out they are almost diametrically opposed.  Yoga taught me to listen to my body by using my breath, to focus on my breath and that use that to attune to and move my body.  Vipassana is a different sort of meditation practice completely, a way of focusing exclusively on the breath in order to forget about the body completely.

I am studying here as a Christian, understanding the benefits of learning meditation.  As “Vipassana Meditation:  An Introduction” explains:

“Although Vipassana has been preserved in the Buddhist tradition, it contains nothing of a sectarian nature, and can be accepted and applied by people of any background.  Vipassana courses are open to anyone sincerely wishing to learn the technique, irrespective of race, caste, faith, or nationality.  Hindus, Jains, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, as well as members of other religions have all successfully practiced Vipassana.”

The Psalmist speaks about meditation a lot, but it seems something Christians have completely abandoned.  It's unfortunate that Christians must come to Buddhists to learn meditation instead of the other way around, but I find many things about the way both faiths are practiced unfortunate. 

Also I am here to learn more about Buddhism.  But the more I learn the more I understand how thoroughly a Christian I am.  Both Christians and Buddhists can accurately call themselves Dhammists.  Dhamma is the essence of what Buddha taught, the “Way” or the “Path.”  Christians were originally called “Followers of the Way,” and Buddhists were originally called Dhammists, as Buddha preferred.

He was also an atheist who forbade his disciples to make graven images of him, or any representations of the Dhamma wheel.  Of course, they immediately begin making statues of him upon his death, and now Dhamma wheels in concrete line the walls of every Buddhist temple.  In that, and in many other ways, the followers failed to listen to the teacher.

Some modern theorists believe Buddha isn't a religious figure at all, but a psychologist, an anachronistic proponent of cognitive-behavioral techniques. Desire causes suffering, because we cling to the object of desire.  Detachment brings peace by preventing us from feeling the strong dug of desire.  Detachment can be taught, using meditation techniques.

These ideas I agree with, but I do not agree with those modern theorists.  There's a tendency in the west to idealize and water down eastern religion, to think of it as somehow more sacred and pure than our western Christianity, sullied by sex scandal and televangelists, but those who expound these beliefs as some kind of wishy-washy spirituality don't understand them.

So, as a corrective--Buddha's First Noble Truth of Suffering:
There are three kinds of suffering.
1.  The suffering of physical and mental pain.  Suffering that arises with birth, aging, and death, with sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair.
2.  The suffering connected with change—due to clinging, even pleasant mental and physical feelings become a cause for suffering when they cease;  “separation from the pleasant is suffering.”
3.  The suffering within the aggregates of materiality and mentality—each aggregate is constantly arising and passing away, never the same from one moment to the next.  From the smallest particle and most rudimentary form of consciousness to vast universes and entire realms of existence, all mental and physical phenomena are subject to the inexorable law of impermanence.  This suffering is going on and around us all of the time.

In conclusion:  pain is suffering.  Change is suffering.  Impermanence is suffering.  Even happiness, or joy, are defilements, causes of suffering, because they are impermanent;  they change, cease, and fade, thus causing suffering. Everything is suffering.

It turns out Buddhist nuns are just as judgmental as Catholic ones.  That Buddhists are as unwilling to listen to their spiritual leader as Christians are.  They sully their temples with money and earn merit by doing good deeds, intended to prevent them from going to hell (the lowest level of reincarnated life) and provide them access to a better after-life (perhaps, if they have very good kamma, the realm of devas).  Buddhist nuns eye me askance as I walk to meditation.  Heaven forbid that I wear mid-calf-length yoga pants to meditation, which might actually allow me to better meditate.  No.  I must wear an ankle-length longyi, no bright colors, forbidding my long shanks from opening wide, causing my knees and hips to cramp in pain.

As in most practiced Christianity, appearance is far more important than truth. 

But Jesus' followers don't listen to Him much, either.  “Sell all you have and give to the poor.”  “Give to everyone who asks.”  “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.”  “The Son of Man has come eating and drinking... a friend of sinners.”  “Do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink.”

Because Christ came to overturn the law.  The Ten Commandments are not the essence of Christianity.  They're the essence of Jewish law, the law that Christ overturned, in favor of grace.  “Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial.”

I am an ecumenalist in that I believe that Christians have a lot to learn from Buddhists and Buddhists to Christians, but I don't think anyone can learn anything if the spiritual truth at the heart of faith is converted into a list of rules.  Don't dance, drink, or chew, as the Baptists used to say, or go with girls that do.  Buddhist monks and nuns have a full list of 227 rules they have to follow, a list that seems to be expanding, from five precepts to nine, Eightfold Path and Threefold Training, each subdivided into additional stages including additional rules and imperfections.  These include prohibitions against things like alcohol, drugs, and sex, of course, but also against eating any kind of meat, dancing, singing, music, all forms of entertainment, adornment, cosmetics, and "high and large (luxurious) beds."

It’s interesting that Jesus’ first miracle was changing water into wine, and for no especially important reason other than someone’s wedding.  Other than a communal celebration, which involved food and alcohol consumption as part of a celebratory ritual.  Or perhaps for no more important reason than for us to wonder why he chose this transformation as his first miracle.   It’s an anti-gnostic miracle, one that celebrates and includes the fleshly material world and its desires, rather than shunning it.

Also interesting that he build an entire sacrament around the sharing of food and wine, flesh and blood, also—the living proof of a violent sacrifice.  Thus negating three of the five Buddhist doctrines:  the consumption of meat, the consumption of alcohol, violence.

Not that I accept all of these parts of Christianity without equivocation, either.  But what I react against so strongly in both Christianity and Buddhism is judgment, especially towards things of the world.  People don’t understand gnosticism that much, but what I love about the church is how it’s established gnosticism as a heresy—saying that Christ embraces both the physical and the spiritual world.   It's as if Jesus is speaking to and rejecting the asceticism of the Jewish Sabbath--because he is coming to build not just a new heaven but a new earth.

"What Buddha teaches is dukka (suffering), and the escape from dukka."  And maybe this is where I wonder if the ways are going the same direction.  Because I believe what Jesus taught is grace, grace at the center of all things.  I believe meditation can allow us access to that grace, the light at the center of all things.

Probably Christians and Buddhists will both be angry at me at my twisting of their doctrine.  But I can't help it.  Isn't that the job of each of us:   working out our salvation, wrestling with our angel?

She's weeping

I'm up at 2:30 in the morning, tapping on my computer keys in a darkened room while my dog snores beside me. I found out today (or yesterday, if you're counting) that the credit cards I had stolen from my wallet in DC, and which I immediately cancelled, were used to clear out my checking account. If you're reading this, you bastard, I hope you know how much your actions have the power to hurt other people. I traveled to this conference to learn how to help people, how to bring money and education and health care to the vulnerable ones who need it most, and I'm repaid with scorn.

It's not a lot of money to most people, maybe. But two months' salary for me, and now I'm again left scrabbling, bootless, on a graveled cliff leading down to a ravine. Yes, I know generally these things get worked out. I hope and believe it will be--but in the meantime, how much time? How many hours spent on hold? How many calls to faceless bureaucrats? How much anxiety and stress and dependence on the kindness of strangers?

Another season, another disaster. I've canceled my last two bank accounts for fraud of exactly this sort--an online database hacked, a credit-card number stolen. It feels like life is this endless wrestle for simple boredom, for peace--for the storms to calm and for clear sailing across a pleasant patch of sea. There's always a sense of blaming the victim. Could I have done more? Of course. I could have backed up my hard drive in triplicate. I could have kept my purse closer. I could have set up a third bank account exclusively for this trip and only carried that card with me, in a money pocket hugging my skin.

But in truth, my only crime was eating lunch at a crowded tourist destination, for flashing my fancy computer in public and making someone believe I had more money than I do. I'm supposed to be blogging with answers to questions, rather than with questions themselves. But sometimes I don't have answers. Maybe never.

This, too, is a part of travel, if this is meant to be a travel blog. All travel involves risk. And not just literal travel but figurative--we're all journeying through life. It'd be easier, sure, to barricade ourselves inside of our houses and never step outdoors. Is the reward worth the risk? Often I believe yes. Some days I believe no.

Tonight, Mr. Rochester lost his eyesight. But he gets his Jane Eyre back. There's a time for weeping and a time for laughing. It'll cycle back around, I know, the meek shall inherit the earth, and it's just money, after all. But it feels like an endless battle, when the yoke is supposedly easy, and the burden allegedly light.

Don’t you want to feel your skin on my skin?

I feel alone right now, and broken. I walked away from my Chattanooga life a week ago and already I feel like I have made a bad choice. I walked away from my life there, and for what? For faith and a vague promise of redemption?

God said: all things work together for good for them that love Him and are called according to his purpose. He said: worship in Spirit and in truth. But I feel lost. I’m letting go of things, and it’s almost as if I’m letting go of too many things and now I’m left alone, driftless. I have cast off, and now I am being cast off myself.

How can I go through life alone? I see my sister’s life, her challenges and the things she has given up, the compromises she has been forced to make, but at least she has a life partner that she can count on, children who receive her love willingly. What do I have? Only the language and not the kiss.

“The fear I've known, that I might reap the praise of strangers, and end up on my own.”

It’s this constant fear that somehow there’s something wrong with me, that I came out wrong. I have to be in some way twisted, if I’m forced to drive away everyone who ever loved me, to pursue some high-minded ideal that isn’t real the way people are real. I feel abandoned, even though I’m the one changing, shifting my life, my boundaries, my space. Conflict about my life choices, from people in my life whom I love, makes me question Christ’s plan for my life. How can I believe that God loves me if the people He brings into my life don’t treat me with love?

I guess it’s a matter of letting go of the people who don’t treat me with love and drawing close to my heart those who do. God brings people into my life who care about me, but sometimes it’s difficult to pay attention to those people, to let go of those whose approval I desperately crave, whose approval I will never get. I have to have faith in Christ, that He is bringing change into my life for a reason, even if I have to journey alone. I also have to have faith that the things that happened in the past happened for a reason.

Clearly, I had an intense experience of surrender at my sister’s church this morning. I’m trying desperately to hold my life with an open hand, to hold it open to God’s will, but I keep wanting to close my fists.

It just hurts so bad. Change is brutal. Painful. Like I’m shedding another layer of skin.

Just like a faucet that leaks

Sunset in Wisconsin

It’s another one of those days when I don’t know what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. Why am I crafting my day into words, explaining to strangers how I occupied my time? I’m grateful for this place, the space that I’ve carve out for myself to create, but I don’t feel like I deserve it. I still feel like a vampire, living off other people’s good graces, their gifts, their leavings.

I am truly grateful for the thing that have been given to me, and I try to accept them in the spirit in which they’re offered, but the nagging voice at the back of my head says: when are you going to start pulling your own weight? Earning your own living? When are you going to give up on these juvenile dreams? When are you going to get a real job? When are you going to come of age?

The whole time I was in California, I drove around in other people’s cars, rather than bothering to rent one myself. I spent more on hotel rooms than anything, but even then I spent most of the time being the guest of others, availing myself of hospitality rather than paying my own way. I drove cross-country with my brother partly as a fun adventure, but mainly as a cost-saving tool—that way I could add wear and tear to his vehicle, not mine, and piggy-back on the fossil fuels he was already burning. Even the hiking trip was just a way to avoid paying for another week of lodging.

Maybe it’s being back here, my adventure for the summer mainly over, and realizing that I still don’t have a place of my own. The land decision hangs over my head. As the stock market dwindles, so does the cash I have to plunk down on acreage. I want a home, but at this point it just feels like another abstract goal to mark down on a list.

The real business of researching, contacting realtors, calling about listings, driving around country roads to find another disappointing piece of dirt, and then starting from scratch again is exhausting and heart-breaking. Worse yet, it takes time away from the writing work that I have put at the top of my list. But can I write with a good conscience until I have a carved out my own space in the world? And how can I carve out my own space until I stop doubting myself, and forge ahead, doing what I believe in?

My California host has a son, a 24-year-old jazz drummer living in New York City, an excellent career choice which I endorse heartily. His story did make me take a step back and wonder to myself which career path is harder: aspiring writer, or aspiring Brooklyn musician? Maybe I should put fashion model, movie star, and astronaut on that list, too. I’d never question the dreams of anyone else. I want my nieces to be able to pursue any ambition they have. But when it’s me, by myself, bashing my head again and again against these same doubts, these same obstacles, it’s tough to not throw it all to the wind.

Here's a link to his band's music: Sister Sparrow and the Dirty Birds. Go help an artist out and spend some cash.

Independence Day

Holy mother of God, is that poison oak right there? How could I not have seen it? What the hell was I thinking? Beautiful picture, though. Was it worth it? No.

At the dining room table today, after spending all night last night on the red-eye from California back to Marion, Massachusetts. Someone’s snoring loudly in the next room, and behind that is the noise of the television, back on after I’ve had a wee break from it, some talk show making fun of a size-twenty woman who smothers people for a living. I hate it. Back into the world of female objectification and life by proxy.

Anthony Bourdain was my choice earlier in the day, and maybe I just succumbed to the lure of cable because of the three hours of sleep I had last night. Even those Travel Channel shows with their excellent writing drive me crazy, though. The shots of the Caribbean? I want to be there, on Secret. Jamaica? I want to be the one buying jerk chicken from a guy on the street corner. I don’t like living vicariously through other people. It’s such a contrast from the actual living I’ve spent the last week doing.

I also need to get my hands on some antihistamine, and stat. I have poison oak pus oozing through my jeans. Awesome, right? When I was dodging all of the poky plants in California, I neglected to remember the other ways that coastal plants have of attacking. Actually, I didn’t forget about the noxious poison oak at all. I remembered very, very clearly from the debacle of the bicycle trip along the coast in 2005. I kept my eyes wide open for it at all times. I even did extensive research before I left, to remind myself of what it looked like. But still, somehow, I must have forgotten, because I am vastly in need of prednisone.

On the plus side, I had a great Fourth, despite my exhaustion, sleeplessness, and uncontrollable itch. My ticket back here was extremely cheap—if you’re looking to fly to California, try the red-eye on a national holiday—and I was able to spend the day in the sun and at a friend’s vast barbecue, complete with mini-sliders, crab puffs, and a giant pallet bonfire. I haven’t been back up to Marion for more than a year, and it’s great to see everyone here, to remember the things that are amazing about New England, things like lobster bisque and authentic chowder made from real quahogs and swimming in the Atlantic in July. Not to mention the land-purchase options.

I have an option up here, potentially, for a free house in Calais, Maine. It’s an old house, from the 1800s, in need of repair, but along the coast. It belongs to a friend of a friend that doesn’t want to pay taxes anymore, and houses in similar condition go for only $10,000 anyway, but on this one I’d only need to pay the closing costs. My main point of doubt is: winter. Can I deal with it again? Is all the seafood and the ocean worth it? I can’t decide.

Abel

In this life, it can be as hard to find validation as a single woman choosing not to have children, then it can be to find validation as a married woman choosing to be a homemaker. I know that fact, of course, but I don’t always realize it consciously. My cousin and I have been having long conversations about the role of women in our culture, and she has expressed the belief that our society’s prevailing attitude is “feministic,” where I am usually of the opinion, as all of you well know, that it is “misogynistic.”

About validation: it’s one of these things that I know isn’t necessary, but it doesn’t make it any easier to live without. I want affirmation and celebration of the choices I’m making, even if my conscious mind knows that expectation is entirely unrealistic. As time passes, as people question my choices, I realize that validation is something that’s never going to happen. Trying to redefine marriage, for instance. Or femininity. Or success.

I’m feeling melancholy today. Maybe it’s the BP oil spill, which makes me want to spew profanity at a rate equal to the spewing well. Maybe it’s my email, which refuses to work, even after hours of effort, and I know I should just give up and switch addresses or programs or something, but at this point I’ve wasted so much time on it I don’t want all of it to be in vain. Maybe it’s just feeling so completely out of step with all of the women in my life, almost all of whom, every last one, are pregnant. And I am not. And don’t want to be.

I’m realizing, though, that this being out of step isn’t going to get better. It’s just going to get worse. Every year that passes, my life and theirs will diverge farther and farther from each other. The center cannot hold.

Roses

Leaf on a log

I read this quote about romance novels the other day, on one of the blogs I wander around every so often: "It’s a 50-plus-year-old industry comprised mostly of women writers operating their own businesses and producing a genre about women’s self-actualization, pursuit of autonomy, and acquisition of sexual agency for an audience made mostly of women, who buy over $1.4 billion dollars worth of books a year."

Even though I'm not a huge fan, it's an interesting take on that world. It's a good example of how something that is looked down upon, derided, can take on another appearance when looked at from another angle.

I have been trying to look at my life from different angles. It’s so easy to get caught up in the slow, steady pace of one day into the next, one month to the next, one season to the next. And the next thing you know, you’re fifty. Or eighty. Or 110.

When I tell the story of my life, I tell it in these huge sweeping plotlines, with arcs and major decisions, inciting incidents. But I almost never knew what the turning points were when I made them. Strike that: I never knew what the turning points were when I made them. Could I be on the cusp of one right now? I have no earthly idea.

I used to think that any single day of any single person’s life could be used as the plot of a major Dostoevsky-type epic novel. You know, Bloomsday. The whole Joyce thing. What if that’s not true either? What if a lot days are just filled with boring television-show watching, procrastination, staving off time’s arrow and the slow process of decay for another 24 hours? Does each day really have enough heroic moments to form an epic plotline?

I’m less sure of that now. Maybe there really are singular days that are ends of eras. Fin. Curtain. How do we know when those days are when we’re living them? We absolutely don't.

Sailing past Bimini Island, I knew that the year before Hemingway’s bar, The Compleat Angler, had burned to the ground with all of its memorabilia. I couldn’t help but think of it as the end of the era. I was on the cusp of a new one. Everything was new: entering that blue water, crossing the Gulf Stream, embarking on a new and perilous adventure. But each change in angles, each end, though a beginning, also meant a terrifying break with the past. I’m scared to break with the past. Not so scared, perhaps, that I end up cradling my aging body in front of the television for the next twenty years. But sometimes I do that for days on end, afraid to push myself out of my current snake skin, into one that’s fresh, new, raw, painful, terrifying.

Bridgewater, Maine

It was 48 degrees here this morning, at the end of May. I’m still wearing a heavy sweater around the house, and a coat when I go outside. Traveling here from Chattanooga took a total of eighteen hours, on--let me recount: a twenty-minute car ride to the shuttle, a two-hour shuttle ride to the airport in Atlanta, a three-hour plane ride to Boston, a four-hour wait in the Boston airport, a three-hour bus ride to Portland, another three-hour bus ride to Bangor, and then, finally, a two-hour ride north into Aroostook County. Bridgewater is a roadside stop you have to request specifically from the driver or he forgets. We drove by and I saw the Subaru, which desperately needs a name, sitting cozily by the side of the road waiting for me.

The crazy thing about the trip is that as soon as I took off from the airport in Atlanta, I was heading north, unrelentingly north, and I just kept going north. Boston is infamous for being cold in winter, colder than Chicago, farther north than New York, but then I got on a bus in Boston and I kept going north. For eight hours. When my parents and I drove up to Chicago to see my sister’s new baby (congrats, Erica!!!), they were shocked to see redbud and tulips still in full bloom. In Chattanooga, by the time we got back, the azalea blooms had already wilted and the roses were in full flower. Here, I doubt they’ve even had daffodils.

Karl shaved his head, my first big surprise, but the second is spring. I don’t think I’ve ever been on Snow Road when there wasn’t actually snow on the road. Sure, it’s a little chilly for us warm-blooded types, but I keep thinking about the things I could grow here. I spent all morning reading about asparagus. Karl’s talked about building a greenhouse for years. Sam, Karl’s dad, has tomatoes sprouting. Shadow, the wolf-dog, is thrilled to see me, and has been trained by Karl to sit respectably while I scratch through his shedding winter coat. No walk yet, as long as it persists in raining.

It is almost inconceivable to me how soon I will be in the Bahamas. I’m beginning to revert to my childhood daydreams when I was on the verge of flying back to boarding school: maybe the airport will blow up. Maybe the islands will sink into the ocean. Maybe I’ll have a mental breakdown. Anything to make me not have to go.

Am I whining again? Sorry. But I don’t want to go. I don’t. I haven’t, since February, and I’ve been trying to convince myself that I do. The point remains, though, that it’s not what I want to do, but it is what I have to do, and the only reason I don’t want to go is because it’s the hardest thing that I’ve ever had to do in my life, and that includes the Chicago marathon and the Appalachian Trail. And I have to do it alone. That’s the hard part.

Still no hotel reservation in Nassau, still no one picking me up at the airport on Crooked, still no ride to the boat, and no internet access in northern Maine. The phones barely work up here. The silence, though, is extraordinary. And there is a neighborhood moose, it is fabled, who likes to hang out in the beaver pond. Canada geese are nesting nearby, with eggs set to hatch. The grackles eat the bugs in the lawn, and the ruby-throated hummingbirds stop by every morning for breakfast.

I could see myself settling into a routine here--walking with Shadow, hiking with Karl, setting the school bus up as a writing studio with a wood stove and spending the mornings in there, aping Thoreau. If nothing else, the County is probably the best place in the entire nation for surviving on an aspiring writer’s income. There’s no need for a day job up here--you can live off the wood you cut, scarred potatoes left behind by the reaper in neighboring fields, a deer shot once or twice a season, and the occasional partridge or rabbit.

I've been reading the blog of a high school friend who has lives in a really remote village in Alaska, and there are similarities between life there and here. It’s mainly a feeling of living a life apart from the rest of the country, unconnected to the cities and the politics and even the television that belongs to everyone else. I’ve always wanted to live in Alaska, mainly because I crave the idea of true wilderness. But the problem with Alaska is the same problem as here: the brutal, unforgiving winter. Could I really make it? I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to try. Many things, including twenty-degree below winters, seem idyllic from afar.

That wilderness exists in the Bahamas, too, and there’s the same ability to live off the land. Could my entire life really be decided by something as boring as weather? How pedantic.

Boston, Massachusetts

I've put off posting this blog entry for too long, without quite knowing how to begin or having the courage to say in words what has turned out to be true. On Christmas Eve, I took Karl to the emergency room in Chattanooga with a severe headache. It had come on when he arrived, and was accompanied by fever, exhaustion, vomiting, and a complete lack of appetite. It turned out to be a kind of rare fungal meningitis.

He was released three days later and we decided to postpone our return tickets to the Bahamas in order to return to Massachusetts where we have health insurance and doctors. On the way back up he had a relapse. He's been now in the hospital here almost a week with no end in sight. Even once he's released, the doctors say he'll need a two-month course of hardcore anti-fungal drugs.

Obviously, my first concern is Karl's health and the second Secret. That being said, I dream every night of her. One recurring dream ends with three of us, who I don't know, plunging into crystal blue water, laughing, swimming to where I can see Secret nestled securely in an empty bay. I wake up in horror and fear, and gather my shreds of courage around me like a blanket.

I turned thirty this week. Everyone remembered--my family sent exquisite packages, Sally gave a card, and Karl, at one in the morning, reached over from his hospital bed to hold my hand where I lay on my cot next to him and said, "Happy birthday Melissa." I couldn't ask for a better present than that. Still, I feel like everything I love and have worked so hard for has been taken away. I was so close to grasping the dream, to holding it tightly in my hand, and its dissolved in my fingers.

It's at times like these that I'm glad I didn't name this journal "The Voyages of the Good Ship Secret" or some other such inane thing. I named it Casting Off for good reason. I can only believe that this is happening because I haven't cast off enough, haven't sacrificed enough, because God knew I need more things stripped away: my pride, my ambition, my sin.

I can only believe that I'm being punished for something. But maybe that's just New England at this time of year bringing out the worst in me. Perhaps there is simply too much Indian blood and too many whale bones scattered among the foundations of these cities. I've started dutifully taking St. John's Wort to combat my Seasonal Affective Disorder, but I'm not sure it's working. I keep wondering if it's named such after St. John of the Cross's dark night of the soul.

Why? I keep asking myself. Why now? Why here? What can it mean? Does it mean anything? Or does nothing mean anything and it's all a great big magician's trick? The cloth is whisked away and ta-da! Everything's disappeared. God as the great malevolent illusionist.

Have I traded all my hope for a lie? I can't believe that, so I don't. I'm writing late at night, alone. I don't know if these thoughts are fit for public consumption. It could be so much worse. I should be grateful, not angry. Karl's condition is completely treatable. He's only weak, not dying.

One of Karl's friends, on our drive up to the hospital, told me a story of another friend of his who's been diagnosed with bone cancer. His ribs are dissolving. The doctors say there's no point in even giving him chemotherapy until the pain gets too bad. It's only a matter of time for him.

By comparison, my complaints seem insignificant and selfish. Things could be so much worse. We have families and friends who love and support us. We have each other. We have our memories of the last four years. And we have hope. Or I try to have hope. I fight to have hope that one day that'll be me diving into the water to chase Secret again.

At church on Sunday, I kept breaking into tears every time the priest said, "Grant us thy peace." Grant me thy peace, Lord. As impossible as it is to imagine.

I remember the words of Keats: "Fled is that vision. Do I wake or sleep?"

And I cling to the words of the ancient Christian mystic, Dame Julian of Norwich, who says, "All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well."