memoir

Marking Time

~ storm257 ~ 1 Comment

Another year. Today, like last year on this date, I reflect on where I have been and where I am now.

Last year, however, I was in California facing the real possibility that a person I love and admire would lose her life to cancer. It felt completely unfair, because disease does not care about fairness, and that piece of her experience, discussed in private moments, over tea and toast with Marmite, that part of us that wants there to be reason and rationale for the horrible things that occur, struck me then, and now, as the element of my own path with depression (oh, and life generally) with which I struggle.

Deep gratitude to my family, my partner, and most of all my friends, who have listened and helped me through the darkest moments, or the times when I was stuck in a loop of pointless thinking, unable to get out of my own way, unable to release worries that cannot serve me. Deep gratitude to my therapist, who has seen me through times when I could not articulate complete thoughts, through blind rage, tears that do not stop, and sees me now, as we move into a new place where I may actually find some understanding, not of my reactions to various things (we work on that all the damn time), but what is at the root.

What I know about myself is that I do believe there are reasons for most things in our lives. I don’t mean in a transcendent sense, though perhaps that too, but in that sense that we all have things we choose not to or cannot face, and those experiences, relationships, or memories, do impact how we live. Maybe you are someone for whom this does not apply, however, I’ve yet to meet someone with that much clarity or unity to their life. We’re all imperfect and life gives us some scary shit to bear. Leonard Cohen said it best, ” There is a crack, a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything), / That’s how the light gets in” I feel I am ready to look at those cracks a bit closer and maybe find where they begin.

This last year has held so much change and letting go. I am not living the life I thought I would be; I’ve had to accept that some things will not be. I have pushed boundaries for myself. I have been intolerant and patient. I have been angry and have felt my heart open in unexpected and welcome ways. I have faced moments when my mood has dictated my actions and others where I have exercised control. Most importantly, I have felt all of these things and faced my life with strength that I did not possess two years ago.

This is me today:

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Is it me?

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It has been a year since I sat on the couch (most of the day, everyday), a pattern broken only by  the arrival of a mental health worker coming to make sure that, while I waited to be assigned a therapist, I didn’t harm myself.

It has been a year since I felt too shattered to be humiliated by the acquiescence of this ritual; the surrender in waiting for something that I was only receiving now because I had been deemed too sick to be left to my own devices, but not quite sick enough for an in-patient program. I had tried to avoid being in that place, where I was not advocating for myself because I no longer saw the value in that fight. I had tried and not succeeded for many months. For better or worse, these daily check-ins with my Diversions counselor were moving me toward something I was not able to do on my own. The value of this is not lost to me.

In this year I have worked to let go of many things. I have fought my way out from the hole where depression put me. I have battled against the snares and dark seduction of believing I would lose.

In this year, I have accepted, sometimes bitterly, that medication does help, that I am more productive, that I do not feel paralyzed as I did. I have accepted that many of my feelings of powerlessness and alienation are directly related to my “mood” and not my character.

This latter part is a daily struggle.

I ask myself, “Is it me?” I search my memory for a time when there was something definitive, when I truly knew what I wanted, what I am capable of, could answer questions about desires and dreams. I’ve lost a good deal of memory over the years. Sometimes it is hard to recall who I once was, before I felt like this. Sometimes it is difficult to believe I every felt another way. So that’s the me part.

Today my therapist asked me if I think perhaps that I feel so lost, so incapable of finding purpose, something I want to do with myself, not because this is always who I’ve been but due to depression. It is hard to know, if there is a line, where that line can be drawn.

I know because I have had this conversation with other people who suffer depression that this is a common question. There are many of us who try to find the place where we begin, authentically, and where disease ends. Sometimes it is impossibly unclear. Sometimes it feels that there is no separation.

I don’t have any answers. I can only look at where I am today and know that this is a better place than where I was last year. Being here is better, and I have brought myself here.

Try to celebrate the small victories when possible. This is me today: FullSizeRender(11).jpg

Things that are hard

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One of the reasons some people, myself included, disdain medication has to do with diminished capacity. Feeling less, thinking less, understanding less. It is likely true that medication doesn’t actually do any of these things – but when one has become accustom to a sustained experience of fear or sadness or rage, which paralyzes and makes the possibility of other emotions – gentler ones – rare or impossible – feeling indistinct emotions, mild unhappiness for example, feels like feeling nothing at all.

And if, like me, one has spent her or his creative life producing out the dark places, where thoughts are often racing, colorful, and frightening,  it is very difficult to make anything when medicated. The stillness in my brain mirrored in my hands. In part, I have begun to ask fewer questions. This isn’t entirely unwelcome. Many of the queries my brain likes to make when I am depressed are not answerable, and not in interesting ways. Asking unanswerable questions can make one pretty miserable – and crazy – both of which I already have covered, thanks.

Medication blocks the loop which functions inside my brain to cause hours or even days of fruitless questions and self-doubt. Medication slows down the descent into meaninglessness which, especially this time of year, threatens to drag me down. But medication does not cure depression. And, medication does not destroy the capacities I have worked to grow. I can still write, I can still make things, I can still question the trajectory of my life. Those last things are hard to know.

For those of us who find value in our lives through what we make, or think, or write – it is hard to be convinced that we can do those things when we are working toward being well. It is exceedingly difficult to do what you have not practiced. And while logic would dictate that practice is a healthy part of the getting well process – it is hard and can feel artificial.

I’ve tried several medications in the last month – one failure, one I refused to take, and one that seems to be helping. This is the first time I’ve written anything aside from lecture notes and cover letters. And it’s hard. And maybe good. I’ll keep trying.

This is me today: 2 15. jpg.jpg

Recognition

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I’d asked her to hang out for a few minutes to talk. She had bolted the first time, but seemed willing to wait for me to talk with some other students, for which I was thankful.

Normally a thoughtful student, she’d stopped participating in discussions and had neglected homework as well as a paper, which was now a couple weeks overdue. I’m not strict about deadlines (obviously), but I try to make sure my students are aware that I do expect updates on their progress, if not actual assignments turned in, or some idea of when I might expect to see writing.

She was clearly nervous, which I anticipated. After apologizing, she hinted that things are home were standing in the way of her completing the work for her classes. She left this statement hanging in the air between us, so I pressed a little.

“Are you alright? Can I help to clarify what is expected for the essay you are still missing? Can I help at all?”

The deep breath and barely suppressed tears were too familiar.

“I’m having a hard time. I have bi-polar depression…” A searching glance assessing me for judgment. I held her eyes. I nodded.

“I understand how hard it is to be unwell. Overwhelming.”

Surprise and then release. “Yes. Being a full-time student is a lot. I thought I could handle it…I wasn’t sure how to tell you.”

“I know how difficult finding a balance can be, but you are an insightful person and I know you are trying. If you need more time, I can work with you.” It isn’t more than I would say to any other student, but, at the same time, this was much more.

We talked for several minutes. She thanked me for understanding, for not misunderstanding her struggle, for offering to help and accommodating her needs. Without giving more information than the situation allowed, I was able to let her see that what she described was not strange to me; her struggle was familiar, and more than that, not in any way a reason for her to feel she should give up being the smart, thoughtful person she clearly is, regardless of what she feels presently. She was relieved and I, I was elated.

The mirror we can provide for those around us, learning to articulate what it is like to live with mental illness, is powerful. At twenty-three, I do not know that I could have been as honest as my student, but at thirty-eight, I no longer have any confusion about the necessity of clarity. We cannot live in the shadows, though illness makes us feel we should. Life wants us to be brave and ask for acknowledgement, even when what we request is compassion. Perhaps, especially then. The way out of feeling buried by the loneliness and invisibility that mental illness creates in our lives is through moments of recognition. “I see you. You are not alone.”

If there is one gift I am granted by disease, which otherwise causes me exhaustion and confusion, it is this ability to see this shared need, and speak in order to break through. If I can do this once, and experience the power contained within this recognition, I can nurture a light which offers comfort. And I can do this again. That’s hope.

This is me just after talking to my student yesterday:

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Deadline

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Sometimes it is necessary to set a deadline in life. We spend a good deal of time anticipating “the moment” when we will be ready for something to happen: new work, new space to live, children, love. We expect, perhaps foolishly, that when that arbitrary time arrives we will be ready. For example, when I was in my early twenties, I thought that by the time I was in my late twenties I would be ready to have children. Never mind that my romantic relationships had been less than healthy, or that I was still quite clueless about what I wanted to do for work, I felt that twenty-six seemed like a perfect age to become a mother. Fortunately for me and my maybe baby, nothing lined up to make that a reality.  I was ending a damaging relationship that had dragged on several years too long, beginning graduate school, and moving to a new city. More than that, I was starting to change the way I viewed my life and I was reasonably happy with those changes. The happiness factor, turns out, was the essential part of transforming the right time into the not quite yet time.

It has been more than ten years since I was that young woman and I realize I could stand to take a lesson from her. She called off an engagement because her gut told her it was the right thing to do. She applied to a graduate program at a school she had always longed to attend because her gut told her it was the right thing to do. She moved to a city she had loved from the first moment she visited because…well, you see where this is going. In the space of one year, she transformed her life, which had not been a happy one for some time, into doing and being something she felt proud of and safe within. She took a risk that her body did not reject and that her mind and heart responded to with joy and excitement. She was smart back then and I am proud of her now.

When I made the decision to move from Maine to New Jersey it was the hardest decision I have made since I was twenty-six. No joke. I have moved cross-country in the intervening years, been diagnosed with depression and attended therapy, left all of my closest friends on the west coast, been alone in a life I never expected to have in Maine, but the several months leading up to moving from Maine to New Jersey were harder than any of that. What made this decision so hard was that I tried to let my heart lead and chose to pay less attention to my gut. Sometimes what our guts say feels like fear and does not feel particularly trust-worthy. Sometimes we want to believe that we’ve had so much to fear, been hurt so many times, that our gut is just reacting to all that baggage. I think that may be a mistake; guts care less about our history than we think. And hearts are hopeful in ways both endearing and dangerous. Sometimes we end up with our guts in a knot because of all the acrobatics they have been doing trying to get us to listen. This is problematic for anyone, but coupled with depression brain, it can be downright sickening.

I am making a promise to my twenty-six year old self and to my gut. I am setting a deadline. You are going to hear about this probably more than you’d like in the next two months, because aside from the friends I talk to on the phone and through social media, you are what I’ve got for a daily companion. Which is perhaps better than nothing. I am trying to see the good in being here. I am trying to remember what it is that made me think moving here would be something I could feel good about. I am trying to find a way to be proud of myself again. I am trying.

Sights and Smells

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Denuded

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie begins Americanah with the following line:

Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly. (Americanah, page 3)

I’ve only just begun this novel, the second that I have read from Adichie, and now several chapters in, it is this line that sticks with me. The smells of places become part of the identity formed in our memory. I remember my childhood as the working waterfront smell – fishing boats and low tide with undertones of fried food. My maternal grandmother as Ciara perfume and my Poppi as apple pipe tobacco. The air in both Tacoma and in Portland, Oregon was damp and often heavy to breathe with rich, plant smells. My home in Portland smelled of Chandrika soap and compost.

I have found myself revisiting these truths of memory and finding they are equally present for seasonal changes. My awareness of this awakened when I moved back to Maine in 2010, where each season has a distinctive aroma, particularly if one lives somewhere rural. I returned to Maine in April of that year, which is widely known as “mud season.” The long awaited thaw has (hopefully) begun, trees take on a fuzziness, not quite budding yet, snow relinquishes control of the  Earth, causing flooding and, as the name implies, treacherous, calamitous, mud. That oozing dirt has a life and odor of its own, and it is in this chaos, which will yield to crocuses and ferns, that Spring finds its nose.

I was itching to dig in the dirt, having just returned from years of living without a garden of my own, and I found this smell intoxicating and was baffled by this. How could I not have known that this is the smell of Spring? The answer I came to embrace is that Oregon and Washington have this smell nearly year round. The Northwest is in an almost perpetual state of decay and rebirth; there is hardly a freeze from which to revive.

And so it was – Summer is goldenrod and honeysuckle, Autumn rotting leaves and burning leaves and Winter wood stoves and air cold enough to have no smell whatsoever.  Note: people in all seasons have their own odors and in Maine these are not unlike the seasonal smells, particularly in rural places.

I have been thinking about this a good deal since beginning Americanah and realized today, while walking around a reservoir about half an hour from my new home, that part of my feelings of disorientation here have to do with how confusing New Jersey smells.

The loop around the reservoir is about four miles, mostly loose gravel trails, with an occasional foot bridge. There are remnants of the forest which preexisted the reservoir, Great Grey Herons and several varieties of duck make their homes. People fish and ride trail bikes. The trails are, for the most part, separated from the roads running all around the parameter by trees which in Summer probably do lend some weight to an illusion of wildness. But the smells are telling.

In the two hours we walked, I was struck that the leaves have not rotted enough to have a detectable smell, the air while dry and cool, does not carry hints of any late blooming plants, and even the water was mostly without odor. I was also aware that I was really trying to smell something natural in this place which, unlike most of the places I have been since moving here, is attempting to be something other than a suburban wild space. And perhaps this space is convincing for some; I know I have been ruined by Maine.

More confusing to my senses were the various smells coming from fellow walkers, runners and bikers. One expects to smell sweat and the occasional overly concerned perfume or cologne wearing exerciser, those are found everywhere. Instead, I was hit with Febreze like smells and detergent, smells far too sanitized to reveal that inside of them were human bodies. Feeling the sweat drying coldly under my own arms, the vague fragrance of my shampoo released as my hair grew damp with perspiration, I felt suddenly foreign. I do not like to “smell of nothing,” I never have. Moreover, I like people to smell like people. Or, at the very least, I like people to smell like what they eat, their work, or their homes. And it is this last thought which struck me. The striving for impossibly clean – not work, not food, not sweat, not dirtiness -smell may be what I find difficult. I have lived always in another kind of place, where people are less concerned, where cars are not all new, where there is no right outfit to workout in, where bodies smell like bodies and rot like rot. I know that much of America is not like this reality I have lived. Or, at least, I am beginning to know. It is strange to be thirty-seven and to feel that there is this other America that I have not lived. Much is familiar, but just as much is so very strange. I can walk here and sit by this reservoir and recognize the signs of life I enjoy – the trees, the changing and falling leaves, bird songs and the mad dash of squirrels and chipmunks – I can do this but I will still smell the difference and it will not feel correct. For now, I long for the sure signs of Autumn that Maine reveals so effortlessly. For now, I will search them out and hope for them in whatever small and perfect ways they may exist. I know I will find something I recognize, even in fleeting moments, if not, in my recent and still potent memories.

Naming

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“Is that your mom?” J, the friendliest of The Girl’s new school pals whispers to her while I stand two feet away, waiting for one of the classroom assistants to usher their giggling, jumping, push and shove 2nd grade line into the building. I pretend not to hear, picking dog hair from my sweatshirt.
“No! That’s Sarah. She’s just my dad’s girlfriend.”
It’s the just I want to talk about.
I grew up with my parents. Both of them. Together. This was rare among my friends, though not as rare as it might be today. I was about The Girl’s age, which is seven, when I realized my best friend’s parents, who had three kids together, were not married. I remember how baffling that was for me. How could they have children, be called “Mom and Dad” if they were not married? I grew up Catholic with rather traditional ideas about family and this realization – that marriage wasn’t what created children, but something more mysterious – opened up the world to me in interesting and important ways.
I think it was the beginning of a greater realization for me that names and naming are important. We differentiate our friends and best friends, acquaintances, great and great-great grandparents, cousins, brothers and sisters, half-brothers and step-sisters – we use these terms because they hold a place for a particular person in the larger narrative of our lives. Sometimes names bring us better understanding of those relationships; sometimes naming makes it easier to understand relationships that are not easy to join to the already seemingly complete story of our families. I think this is particularly true for children, which is why I cut The Girl and myself at seven some slack for being limited to just naming.
My own process of understanding larger concepts of family and friendship became more complicated when I was a young adult. I attended college in the Northwest and stayed in that area of the country through my early thirties. My entire family is in the Northeast. I spent holidays with friends, I have nieces and nephews who are not my blood kin, I have at least one young woman in my life who considers me her second Mama. Love is the building of long lasting relationships with people outside of the traditional family and love is complicated. Even my relationships with my siblings has travelled a path of transition; I know my sister in ways that are far more rich and meaningful than the label “sister” implied when we were young. The richness and reward of complicated relationship understanding is the point of maturity, I think. But hearing that just from The Girl still stung.
When I first moved to New Jersey, maybe the first weekend I was here, we took the kids to the beach. The water was, well into October, still warmer than the bays of Maine ever get in the summer. The Boy and his father were triumphantly battling their way through the waves, while The Girl and I hung back on shore. The power of the water here surprised me. A strong swimmer and life long lover of all things Oceanic, I wanted to feel courageous in the face of an undertow that continually knocked me on my ass. I wanted to swim out past the breakers, but I was also aware that The Girl was feeling apprehensive about the water. She, like me, has never lived in New Jersey. She, like me, was born in Maine. These crashing waves, deceptively powerful and sometimes taller than they seem, were making two otherwise brave Mainer girls move with caution. We were finding ways to amuse ourselves, playing chicken with the waves as they broke, burying our feet in the wet sand, laughing and chasing each other along the shore. At one point, she turned to me, wrapped her arms around my waist and with joy nearing ecstasy cried: “I love you!” It took my breath. It takes my breath now in recollection.
We are at a beginning, trying to sort through what we know in each of our lives. I have been loved before, but not like this. I have had many names, with or without a just to differentiate them from another. So perhaps the sting I felt initially is just a piece of this new love and not a limitation.
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Most days I spend an hour walking my dogs on the beach that is less than a mile from the apartment I have shared with my partner and his children for the last month and ten days. I fill my pockets with scallop shells and fish bones, sea glass and drift wood, pottery shards and the occasional sand dollar. I drift along the sand sometimes present, the ease or difficulty of movement registering with greater weight on the days my thoughts are thick and harder to hold back from erupting as tears or anguished utterance. When I am not burdened in this way, I notice the sea, the colors of which – greens, blues and some grey a shade I would call smoke – are unlike the sea I know – obsidian and moss and cobalt – the more northern Atlantic bays of my youth and last four years. These colors surprise me and are pleasant, though they do not move me to wonder what lies beneath that way I have always done anywhere along the unforgiving, ancient fingers of Maine’s coastline.

Nothing is strange to me and yet nothing is known. The comfort in this life is that I can walk the beach everyday and look into the sand when I cannot face the sea. I can search for small perfections that were formally the main protection for bivalves, who, while not helpless, were more limited in their means of survival than I. And perhaps it is their simplicity that I admire most. The shells I find are either intact or not and there is but one choice; I am only interested in their wholeness. At present I have twenty complete shells, ranging in size from less than a quarter inch to just over two inches and from a pale salmon color to coal. I like the reds and blacks the most. I appreciate that they fan and layer in a predicable manner, their delicacy, and that, among the varieties of shells which wash up in the tides here in New Jersey, they are somewhat rare. I like that it requires focus to see them and to determine whether they are whole before I wipe away the sand and place them gently in my pocket. I like that some days there are no whole shells, just ridges and deceivers with hair thin splits or holes drilled by predators. I like that some days, there are no scallop shells and I go home with salt brine on my glasses, tired dogs and empty pockets.

There have been many transitions in my life, each difficult in its own way, requiring me to understand myself in new and often painful ways. As I grow older, change is harder to face because what must change has become more solidly a part of who I know myself to be. Three times, I have found myself beach walking and collecting. This pattern did not occur to me until I moved here to become something I have never been – a partner and part of a family. This is also the first place I have lived not by choice, but because I cannot choose to live without the love that has brought me here. This is harder than anything I have ever done and I want to write it out because I want to remember I have done something this hard.

This is a personal voyage, but my insights may invite discussion. I am hopeful that this will happen.