O Juniper, Where Art Thou?

Well, then can I walk beside you?
I have come to lose the smog
And I feel myself a cog in somethin' turning
And maybe it's the time of year

But then maybe it's the time of man
And I don't know who I am
But life is for learning

We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

- Joni (of course)

I’ve been working with an eighth grader recently on some essays about Homer’s The Odyssey.  My student is a bit of a rigid thinker and sometimes it’s hard for him to think metaphorically about Odysseus’ behavior. To him, it’s an entertaining book of stories about Greek gods and people getting eaten by monsters. I’ve tried to convince him that there are also morals to be found in the book – that there’s a reason we’ve been telling this same, long story around campfires for almost 3000 years (if we’re counting from the start of the Trojan War that is). Throughout the book we see the once bold Odysseus gain humility and self-control. We see him shed the arrogance of his war victories and embrace the importance of loyalty and compassion for his men. And most importantly, we see a man, beaten down by some pretty vindictive gods learn to persevere through intelligence and strength. And for the first time in my 12 years of teaching, I’m kind of identifying with the guy.

After I got super-duper-call-the-cops sick in late 2002, I focused all my attention on getting better – and rightly so. 2003 was spent largely inpatient. 2004 was spent in outpatient programs with maybe 5 hours of tutoring sprinkled in per week. In 2005 I spent most of my days going to a variety of therapy sessions and tutored maybe 10 hours each week. For the next 2 years, I gradually cut back on the therapy and gradually increased my tutoring to 20-30 hours a week. But as difficult as that period was, I felt like I was on a course. I was in treatment and, while the tutoring was fulfilling, most of my efforts went to rebuilding my self. If you’d asked me where that course was heading I couldn’t have told you – and at times that frustrated me – but it was enough to have this big renovation “project.”

And then in 2007 we moved back east and it became evident that I needed to move into the mind I had renovated – whether it had a certificate of occupancy or not. (I still went to therapy of course, but it was limited to the standard hour a week.) My husband’s job was all-consuming and I wanted to pick up the slack. I took over the management of our personal lives and then we bought a house and I took over the management of that too. Which is not to say that my husband never helped – he’s spent hours painting and sanding and dealing with the Comcast guy. But in general, these were weekend projects for him. I’ve taken care of the rest. And I wanted to. For me they seemed like a continuation of my renovation project. I’d regained sanity, now it was time to regain adult stability. I wanted to be entrusted with these things and demonstrate just how much I could be a functioning member of society.

The same went for work. My part-time tutoring gig quickly became a full time job. And never content to just have a “job,” I dove headfirst into the education field and, slowly but surely, built a career. I recently finished my graduate courses and was accepted into the professional society in my area of specialty. The change has been subtle but noticeable: I’m going to more and more conferences, collaborating with more professionals as a peer, taking on higher-order responsibilities, and just well, sounding more like I actually know what I’m talking about.

So out in California I successfully battled the Lotus Eaters, the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis. Hell, I even went to Hades and back. But during these last 8.5 years back east, I’ve felt like I’ve been stranded on Kalypso’s island (though technically Odysseus was there for 7 years so… well, I guess that’s why HE gets the epic poem). I’ve been going through the requirements of adult stability, keeping our lives in order, building a career, and generally wondering where the hell it was I was supposed to be going in the first place. All my focus was spent on the day-to-day. As I wrote back in 2011 when my then-therapist decided I now merited an OCD diagnosis:

“That whole crazy thing tends to make nice things like husbands and jobs and car keys disappear. Maybe I should try getting - and then keeping - my shit together. But to do that, I’ll have to hold on tight. Really dig my nails in deep and keep everything under perfect lock and key. Measure it out to the nearest microgram. And worry. Don’t forget a heaping spoonful of worry. That’ll help the medicine go down.”

And sure, by keeping my focus on maintaining stability, I managed to do just that. And I’m proud of that. I’m proud I still have my marriage, of my newly minted career, of my resilient brain. Hell – I’m even proud of my sobriety. It’s all really super exhausting and a bit boring but I truly am proud of it all. The people who know me these days know me as reliable and dutiful and some have even suggested I’m risk-averse and too passive and may have a bit of a stick up my ass. To which I’d argue, hey, you should’ve seen me when I WASN’T all of those things. You’d be looking for the nearest stick to shove up my ass, believe you me.

But like my buddy Odysseus, I need to get off the island eventually. Living here is tiring and who knows, maybe partly the source of my issues with anxiety and chronic fatigue. I need to chart a course home. I need to remember who the hell I am and get back to actually living. There are so many things that I don’t say or do in my daily life. Parts of myself have lain fallow for too long: my connections with nature, creativity, music, passion, spontaneity, and well, just having opinions. Were these lost years? I doubt it. I think the narrative arc is just a complicated one – not unlike the Odyssey, come to think of it. I just need to get back in my boat and keep sailing – not to Ithaka – but to myself.

Nothing works. Including doing nothing.

So re: the last post - we’re not moving. People offering endowed chairs should probably check their rulebooks first so they don’t have to rescind their offer after the fact. Because it’s really unprofessional when you have to do that. And also shitty.

So back to focusing on the positive about where we’re at and trying to maintain relationships with friends in the 10 minutes they have each year when they’re not parenting. 

But that’s not why I’m posting today.

On Thursday, I was looking for an old document on my computer and happened upon an email from an old friend of mine I lived with in a residential step-down psychiatric program in California back in 2003 & 2004. She and I were both borderlines (though mine had a dash of narcissism while hers had a sprinkling of schizoaffective). Nonetheless, and despite both being rather impossible people, we had that common language that you only find in people who share your diagnosis: that, “hey you can actually follow my train of thought!” Through mostly thick and occasionally thin, we had each other’s backs. I got in trouble for saying the things she wanted to say and vice versa. We’d stayed in touch via Facebook since I moved back east but that was about it. I should Google her, I thought - see what she’s up to these days. 

Her name popped up immediately.

As a commenter on a news story.

About the residential program we used to live at.

About a police shooting there on Christmas night.

About a client who was shot.

A client was delusional and wielding a butter knife.

A client who died from his wounds.

As I read through the comments, I encountered the usual pro-police, anti-police debate. I saw the arguments for and (mostly against) having such a facility in a residential area. I read that some people in the neighborhood didn’t mind having neighbors who were in recovery – recognizing that there are families everywhere dealing with the same issues. Others felt very threatened and mentioned distances to local schools and parks. I read that a man had set himself on fire in the backyard about 10 years ago – a fact I hadn’t known but now realize my psychiatrist had vaguely alluded to at one point.

I saw the clients called “inmates” and “parolees.” And who knows… perhaps they are. I myself arrived there on bail, after having been arrested a month earlier, my court case still pending. 18 months later, police escorted me from the house one night when I was in a particularly bad place and needed someone with a little more authority to make sure that I was safe. I remember the police coming and going every couple of weeks. They clearly didn’t like coming to the house just as much as we didn’t like seeing them. But usually, when they were called, we were grateful they’d come. But I doubt anyone ever saw THIS coming.

-           -           -

I’ve been working with yet another new therapist this fall (long story) and a lot of the work we’ve been doing has been on how surprisingly traumatized I’ve been by my experiences in the mental health system. I mean, I know… I shouldn’t really be surprised, but when you become suicidal at age 8 in a dysfunctional family, you just tend to assume that most of your issues are family-of-origin-related. But it’s led me to think a lot lately about is the feedback loop that is the life of the seriously mentally ill. You get sick for one reason or another (often environmental), and then the treatment environment itself is as equally traumatizing. It’s hard to pull apart what part is YOUR reaction to your environment and what part is your environment’s reaction to YOU. I have a good friend who’s become very active in the blacklivesmatter movement this year and it’s hard not to see parallels when police arrive on scene and 19 seconds later someone’s dead.

I’ve just finished the graduate program I embarked upon in the spring of ’14 when the whole surrogacy situation went belly-up. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about the newfound time I’ll have on my hands (and of course it’s New Years when one tends to think about priorities). And I keep thinking about how my life feels like it’s missing some pretty big requirements these days: peers, creativity, physical health.

But this latest fatality was a bit of a wake up call. I want to find a way to get back into mental health advocacy. As my husband and finally achieve some measure of increasing security, I believe it’s incumbent upon me to speak for those who don’t. I don’t have answers. I don’t know any model that works. All I know is that doing nothing isn’t saving any lives.

Have fun out there in the wilderness, loners

The other day, a former colleague of mine stopped by the office to say hello. Her son had been accepted to Harvard the week before and we all chatted happily with her, congratulating his accomplishment. I’d tutored the boy a few years earlier when he’d been stuck in the hospital, receiving chemotherapy for leukemia. Those sessions had always stuck with me; I remember how rattled I felt walking around the pediatric oncology unit, looking at the sick kids and frightened parents. It struck me as the worst thing that could happen to a person.

Apparently I was wrong. She said that applying her son to college and waiting to hear from Harvard had been harder than helping him recover from leukemia. “At least with cancer you have something you can fight against and smart doctors who tell you what to do. With college, your whole life is in the hands of idiots.”

I wanted to punch her. I know it was a flippant remark and probably not really indicative of how she feels – the stress of waiting for the acceptance still fresh in her memory. But I honestly couldn’t think of any statement I’d heard in a long time that so crystallized everything that’s wrong with this high-pressure, fast-paced part of the world I’ve been living and working in for the last 8 years. No matter what, you should want your child to live more than you should want him to get into Harvard.

Jokingly, I told her what a friend of ours had told my husband when he got his current, fancy-sounding job. I told her she had to help him “keep it real.” Forget that, she laughed! “I say get a few gentleman’s C’s and you’ll be set for life.” Um. Ok. I guess if anyone deserves to have a good time in college and not worry about grades, it’s probably this kid. But still… way to miss the point mom.

My husband and I are in the process of *seriously* considering moving. His fancy-sounding job has gone well but he’s had to work in an environment of egomaniacal, status-obsessed colleagues who are frankly anything but collegial. They don’t share. They don't say hello. They’re resistant to change in a way that makes me think that the word hidebound was coined here. My husband tends to do pretty cutting-edge stuff and while they’d like to keep him around as a curiosity, they’re not sure they want any more like him – so forget about any institution-level infrastructure or support. Have fun out there in the wilderness, loner.

My job has been both wonderful and terrible in ways that I still try to wrap my head around on a daily basis. Imagine a rich and stimulating environment where you get to help exactly the population of clients you enjoy working with while simultaneously having access to amazing on-the-job training and resources. A job where you get to bring your dog and there’s a chef who comes twice a week to make staff lunch and you get to really help people. And then imagine that there is absolutely no ability for advancement and no matter how much you learn, you will always be just an employee and take home 25% of what they bill for your time.

And all of this would be fine I guess, if we had some kind of rich life or community outside of work but nope. Middle-aged people do NOT socialize with a childless adult couple. I joined the board of a non-profit in town to meet people and that’s been a moderate success but all the people I’ve met have been well-meaning seniors or people my own age who don’t have time to socialize because… they have kids. We’ve met some people through my husband’s job but they don’t have time to socialize because… they have kids. And the people at my office are all generally younger or… well, they have kids. As for old friends – that hasn’t panned out either. One friend regularly visits her brother who lives a mile from my office but we haven’t seen each other in years. (I know, she’s busy. She has kids.) One friend lives 2 hours away and we’ve visited twice. I do have one high school friend who doesn’t have kids and lives nearby and that’s been great – but she’s one person. And my best friend… well, let’s just say I texted her last week to say Happy Easter and I’ve yet to hear back. Her hands aren’t just full, they’re overflowing: dying wife, problems at work, sick kids. Not her fault.

It’s no one’s FAULT. We’re just isolated. We live in a rural area and don’t have a religion or kids so this is what we get. I thought maybe my parents would come visit (albeit a mixed blessing) since they have friends in the area, but my mom comes for about 36 hours every 18 months when there's a Garden Club meeting nearby. Right now they're in Dubai. Good for them. But it just can’t be like this forever. I mean, there are only so many films on Netflix left that we haven’t watched. So we’re seriously thinking about moving. I’d miss our pretty house in its beautiful setting. I’d miss sitting on the porch on summer evenings and watching the birds play in the long grass of the marsh, smelling the salt breeze and waiting for the lightning bugs to emerge. 

But the rest... I'm not sure anyone would notice or care that we'd gone.

Once in Royal David's City

I'm not crazy. It's Christmas Eve.

It's the one night when we all act a little nicer.

We...we smile a little easier. We...we...share a little more.

For a couple of hours we are the people we always hoped we would be.

Bill Murray

So I skipped our company Christmas party last night. It’s been a difficult fall since my last post. I’ve been really struggling with mood regulation. I seem to fluctuate hourly between why-bother depression and everyone-sucks anger.

In September I had so much work I barely had enough time to breathe. My online classes restarted at the same time as my seniors applied to college and I wound up working every waking minute. Not the greatest choice but it’s what I committed to.

In October my father had another difficult surgery and again, I flew out and took a bath in the toxic atmosphere that is my parents. Honestly, the best metaphor I can think of is a sheep being dipped in insecticide. Being with them is like being dunked in poison. Not so great for the mood either.

In November I got a rude awakening at work. After setting some boundaries and saying no to a project, a colleague called me out and said that she had some major problems with me. I’m pretty open about the fact that I have a disability and that we’ve had a really rough year personally with the whole surrogacy situation. But my colleague said that my disclosures made our boss hesitant to treat me as brusquely as she treats others and that it made my colleague feel like the only way to be treated well was to spill her guts too. I admitted that this could be the case and apologized if my actions had affected her negatively. That didn’t work.

She then said I was a hypocrite because my preferential treatment at work made me seem two-faced when I’d voiced frustrations in the past. I couldn’t fault anyone for incompetence because those people weren’t getting my special favors. When I approached the partners and asked if it was true, I was told that it wasn’t but it was a complaint they’d heard before and from another senior colleague.

Of course, this all happened about 6 hours before I’d planned on taking a few days off to rest and regroup so suffice it to say, this completely derailed that plan. Instead, I spent my long weekend visiting friends and asking, could I really be THAT clueless? Ultimately, I decided that I just didn’t have any allies at work and that my openness was at the very least, divisive.

Shortly before and after this we celebrated my best friend’s birthday and Thanksgiving at her house and both visits brought reminders of how truly and profoundly shattered I am about the whole no-baby-because-friend-is-dying situation. By early December, I felt like 2014 had been one long beating. I felt drained and sad and honestly, a bit hopeless.

My 40^th birthday is coming up and it’s inevitable that on such an occasion, one takes stock. And when I look back at the last 40 years I see pain upon ceaseless work upon bad luck. I don’t know if this is what life is like for other people but I’m not really enjoying it. I’m more… surviving it. I try to count my blessings. I DO. I have a wonderful partner. I have the luck of intelligence and socio-economic privilege. I’ve had remarkable experiences and opportunities. I know I’m living better than most people on this planet. But underlying all that is 40 years of illness that drains the color from these things. And that’s real.

So instead of going to the company party last night and pretending that I have any meaningful connection with the people there, I stayed home and tried not to feel sorry for myself. It wasn’t easy; there were some real woe-is-me moments. And then my husband took the remote control and kept putting on holiday movie after holiday movie until slowly, the spirit of the season started to get the better of me. Around midnight, we watched the end of the movie “Scrooged” and as I listened to Bill Murray’s drunken rant about Christmas Eve, I realized. Um, hey, that’s my birthday and that’s kind of describing… me.

I’m well known for being an over-sharing softie. I’m sensitive in all the good and bad ways that word connotes and I’m not saying it’s some gift – it’s just how I’m built. And it gets me in TROUBLE. I get easily frustrated when I see people around me struggling or failing and I have a hard time holding my tongue. Some probably wouldn't think of that as “nice.” I want people to be better, to do better to, as Murray says, to be “the people we always hoped we would be.” Because I know that every morning I wake up and I try to do that and it’s frankly exhausting. And I don’t think I’m going to be able to stop anytime soon. I’ve tried the whole saying “no” thing this fall and it’s gotten some surprisingly negative results.

Maybe being born on Christmas Eve imbued me with some crazy, elf-like kindness and tendency to share too much of myself. Maybe it’s just Christmas Eve. Maybe I’m not crazy.

Stick a fork in us

Yeah we’re done. No more surrogacy. I’m not going to try to carry one of the embryos. And no, we’re not pursuing adoption – international or otherwise.

I’m sure many people in our lives will question this decision. But believe me: it was arrived at through much deliberation and the overwhelming gut feeling that this is the right – nay, only – reasonable choice for us at this point.

I could go into all the reasons for our decision but they all boil down to the desire to limit risk. Our lives are actually pretty full and trying further reproductive interventions and/or raising a child is more than we're willing to take on now.

How do I feel? Well, as my students would say, I have all the feels:

Grief: this blows.

If we’d been successful when we started trying to have a kid, we’d have a 7 year old right now. I like 7 year olds. They’re lovely.

Contempt: this blows.

20-20 hindsight is a bitch. I often wish had the last year of my life back and had never wasted all this hope on a fruitless process.

Anger: this blows.

We’ve had an absurd amount of disappointments at this point. Not fair. Everyone else who’s had it easier can suck it.

Fear: this blows.

We are so isolated. We barely have any family and now we’ll have no kids and our closest friends are dealing with terminal cancer.

Optimism: this might not blow.

We can travel and spend money and time on ourselves and won’t have to deal with more sadness and disappointment.

Love: this might not blow.

I have a wonderful husband who I adore and get to focus all my love and attention on. I know I have his unconditional support.

Acceptance: this might not blow.

I have a fascinating new career that I can now fully devote myself to that helps people and makes me feel fulfilled.

Surprise: this still blows.

Realizing I no longer want something I thought I always wanted makes me feel hypocritical and lazy. After everything we’ve been through, kids seem too hard. We’re exhausted. And THAT’S why we’re done.