Wisdom, Poetic and Free

I read the poetry of the late Tony Hoagland as much for moments of its profundity as for its simple grace, wry humor and beautiful imagery. I find more truth and clarity about the difficulties and joys of life in his work than in any promoted self-help book. His work is more proverbial than the Bible to me, more philosophical than Nietzsche, more lyrical than Petrarch (sorry, Petrarch), more visual than Monet. I go to it any time I need to feel better and am never disappointed in what it returns.

I hate the phrase “Everything happens for a reason.” I think it’s something we tell ourselves when bad things happen to try to make ourselves feel better, to try to make meaning out of difficult experiences. But I don’t believe it. Most of the time bad things happen because they just happen, without explanation, without reason, without divinity -- or -- because there are nefarious people in the world with the power to do nefarious things. There’s nothing wrong with meaning-making when trying to cope with terrible things, but personally this idea that bad things have to have a deeper meaning or ultimately lead to a positive outcome has never rung true for me. 

This is an excerpt from Hoagland’s poem ‘Self-Improvement’ which I carry around in my head. Weirdly, it provides me with more calm and comfort than the empty cliche “Everything happens for a reason” because it acknowledges the hard truth of suffering and doesn’t try to ameliorate it. It allows suffering to just be. And sitting in that space, while desperately uncomfortable, is liberating.

Often we ask ourselves to make absolute sense out of what just happens, and in this way, what we are practicing

is suffering, which everybody practices, but strangely few of us grow graceful in.

***

Do yourself a favor and go buy all of his books. They will make your life better. I especially recommend ‘Donkey Gospel’ and ‘What Narcissism Means to Me.’ 

Spinning

I haven't been sleeping well lately. The mania in my brain keeps me awake through the entire night, until I see the color of dawn and hear the first faint chirps of the morning birds. I am tired, so tired, the gray matter of my brain heavy and sunken, pulling my body with it, physically ill and exhausted. I’m in agony. I just want to sleep, and I plead desperately with the mania to stop. I rhythmically count numbers, recite nursery rhymes, map visualizations of dream relaxation spots, employ all the techniques I’ve been taught to calm the mind and quiet the madness, but the mania won’t quit.

I imagine the mania in my brain to be a lady pedaling furiously on a stationary bike, hard and constant and fast, without ceasing, because that is her job. That is her only job. If she would step off the bike, she would cease to exist. And the mania must keep itself alive, so it just keeps spinning.

All Hail Naomi

I’m constantly impressed, and heartened, by Gen Z-ers’ willingness to be open about their mental health and advocate for their own needs. I’m hopeful it signals a sea change in how we as a society approach -- and accept! -- mental health as a legitimate health concern. 

Example Numero Uno: Naomi Osaka choosing to drop out of the French Open because she felt it was a detriment to her mental health. She’s a young phenom with all eyes on her and she was courageous enough to say This is what I need in spite of almost assured negativity in response to her decision. In an infuriating move, the French Open fined her $15,000 for dropping out. (If she had dropped out for any physical health reason, no such fine would have been applied. Urrrgh.) But happily, and unsurprisingly, she received a wellspring of positive support from fellow professional athletes who talked about their struggles with mental health while facing the pressure of constantly having to perform at 100%.

What impresses me most is that ultimately Osaka chose not to do it privately. She certainly had the right. On such a public stage, there were undoubtedly to be questions and speculation about her decision, and instead of evading them she confronted them head-on by telling the truth. I’m not sure I would have had the courage to do the same. Get it, girl.

And then there’s this kid.

Nick Asante successfully lobbied his school board in Montgomery County, Md., to have taking a mental health day qualify as a legitimate excuse for a sick day.

Asante reminds me of me in high school: a high-achieving leader with a resume full of impressive activities and notable accomplishments. A “superstar kid,” as the columnist says. And, like myself, Asante says he’s “super critical” of himself and not inclined to take a mental health day. But when the pandemic changed life as we know it, he realized how important and necessary it is to take time to focus on mental health. 

And it wasn’t only him. He heard from classmates in abundance about their need for time to deal with struggling with their mental health. 

A difference of twenty years shows that, for young people at least, awareness and discussion about mental health is becoming the norm. When I was in high school things like depression and mental health simply weren’t talked about. There was no awareness of it, no vocabulary for it. The extent of my knowledge of depression came from that Zoloft commercial with the sad-looking oval face. Even as I myself was dealing with depression’s symptoms, I had no way to name it. 

So, Brava, Naomi. Bravo, Nick. As long as there are people like these two working for mental health parity and acceptance, we are headed in the right direction.

Things My Manic Brain Thinks About at 3 A.M., Pt. 2

That time in my high school freshman history class when the essay questions on the final exam was ‘What was the most influential decade of the 20th Century?’ and I didn’t want to write something obvious like a war decade so I chose the 1950s and then after the exam I felt like it was a weak answer but now I stick by it. The 50s saw the rise of the suburban middle class as the result of a booming post-war economy and by extension the development of ‘the American teenager,’ the latter half of which would become the generation to fight, and protest, the war in Vietnam. The 50s saw the positioning of America as the new superpower as Europe dealt with recovering from the war and the solidification of a hegemonic cultural influence that continues to to this day. Television became the main cultural medium, shaping via the screen the image of what 'The American Dream’ was supposed to look like. America staked its political identity on being anti-Communist, and the 1950s were the pivot of America from an isolationist hesitancy to be involved in world politics to a Protectors-Of-Freedom bravado that shapes global politics to this day. But I’m pretty sure my teacher didn’t even read my answer and just gave me an A because he knew I had studied for the test and he wanted to save himself from more work.

To the Class of 2021

Thank you for the privilege of being a part of this very important and momentous occasion in your lives. I’ll keep my comments brief because, let’s be honest, you’re not going to remember anything I say ten years from now. Some of you aren’t going to remember anything I say tomorrow. Some of you aren’t even paying attention right now, which is totally fine. I can’t tell you a single thing any of my commencement speakers said in my graduation ceremonies, so I’m under no illusion my words will change anyone’s life tonight. I simply want to share one piece of truth I’ve managed to glean through my years of managing what they told me would be ‘adulthood.’ I can summarize it in three words:

YOU. WILL. STRUGGLE.

I know that’s a Debbie Downer of a statement when I’m supposed to be feeding you positive platitudes about your future, but I say it because it’s something I wish someone had told me when I was young and staring down expectations of the future to ‘be successful.’ Nobody wants to talk about failure when we are a success-oriented culture, but everyone will struggle, and yes, fail at some thing some time in their lives. Really, multiple things at multiple times. Anyone who tells you differently is lying (and my guess is they’re lying because they’re afraid of looking weak in telling the truth).

When I sat at graduation, at the top of my class with all my honors cords and GPA distinction, many people breezily told me there was no doubt I would be successful. And I had ambitious goals. I wanted all the markers of what we’re told measure success: a string of academic abbreviations after my name, a salary where I’d need two hands to count the digits, the cover of a major national magazine, and a list of awards so long it would take up most of my obituary when the time came . . . And then real life laughed at my ignorance and threw me more curve balls than Sandy Koufax and Satchel Paige.

What I didn’t know when I sat in the seats where you’re sitting is that I have bipolar disorder. It took me seven years to finish college, and I had to take classes at four different institutions to do so. (My transcripts, plural, look like alphabet soup.) During this time I suffered two major breakdowns following traumatic events in my life. After I graduated and entered the professional world, I lost job after job moving to city after city trying to get control of my life until finally, at the age of 30, I moved back home to live with my parents. Talk about feeling like a failure.

The worst part was the heaviness of shame I carried around, believing that I had somehow done something wrong to cause my own defeat through a lack of will and fault of character. And I suffered in silence, too afraid of what others would think of me if I admitted how embarrassed and ashamed I felt. Which brings me to the second piece of advice I have for you:

TALK. ABOUT. IT.

To throw out the requisite commencement-speech-quote-by-a-famous-person, the author Viet Thanh Nguyen writes in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Sympathizer, “While pain is universal, it is also utterly private. We cannot know whether our pain is like anybody else’s until we talk about it.” (To be clear, he’s not talking about mental health in this passage of the book, but I find the words quite profound so I’m taking poetic license here.) 

When you talk about your struggles, you free yourself from the burden of carrying the weight of shame. You open up space for other people to talk about theirs and suddenly you realize you’re not the only one. You take away the paralyzing fear that others will discover ‘the worst thing about you’ and move towards a state of self-acceptance that engenders strength and power. You realize that life is not set up in terms of pass or fail; it’s a continuum where success is measured in relative terms that you create.

Speaking for myself, I learned that life was not going to be about academic and professional success for me. I had to learn to apply the same diligence, determination and focus I used in studying for tests into taking care of myself. In certain things I would have to work twice as hard to maintain success in what some people simply took for granted. I learned to create a more flexible model of achievement for myself in order to keep moving forward. 

Success isn’t about how much money you make or how much power you wield or how many accolades you have hanging on your wall. Those things are nice and worth celebrating if achieved earnestly, but they don’t mean much if there’s no life force behind them. 

Success is about doing better than yesterday. It’s about finding work that has meaning and makes a contribution to the world even if it doesn’t come with a cool title. It’s about loving people. It’s about accepting setbacks and failure as part of the process. It’s about constantly learning, adapting, growing.

So have fun tonight. Celebrate your win. Know that you can be successful in life, it just may come in different forms than you originally expect. And talk about your struggles. You’re not alone in them.

‘Don’t Assume They Know’

My friend Shawn sends out weekly emails with words of encouragement as part of his job as a church pastor. (I’m not religious, but churches are a big part of the community where I live.) I appreciate his effort at contributing something positive to the world, so I remain on the email list even if the subject matter doesn’t always apply to me. Today’s email, however, I found profoundly moving in a plain-spoken way, so I asked for Shawn’s permission to share his words on this blog.

“As a Dad of two girls I try my best to make sure they know how much they are loved and how special they are. There is this country song I found awhile back that I play in the car sometimes called "The Prettiest Girl in the World.” There are a few lines in the song that go: ‘She second guesses her dresses Worries about imperfections When she looks in the mirror I wish she'd see what I see It's hard to believe That the prettiest girl in the world Needs to hear somebody loves her As much at her worst as I do at her best In my wildest dreams I'd never've guessed I'd be the one holdin' the prettiest girl in the world.’ When I hear these lyrics I think of my 7-year-old daughter the most. She definitely worries about different things. She can be "picky" and like things "just right".....(maybe she gets that from her Daddy haha?) But in my daughters I see what they don’t. I see how good they are, strong, brave, smart, beautiful..... The list goes on and on. And each day, before bed, I try to give them affirmations by telling them “You are so strong, so brave, so smart, so beautiful.” Because I want them to know I believe in them. That I am their biggest fan! In our daily lives we are around many people that we love and care for. Spouses, children, significant others, friends, even co-workers. Life is hard and we all struggle with feeling our best. We get busy and we assume people know how we view them. But do they? I think it is important to give those kind words of affirmation to others. Tell other that you believe in them. Tell them they do a good job. Tell them "I appreciate you". Tell them they are a good provider... a good mother...a good father...a good friend. Tell them they are smart. Tell them they are loved. These are all things we want to hear. These simple words of affirmation each day can change their lives and their self image. Don't assume they know. Actually saying the words can make a huge impact.”

Baby Bird

I see the small dead baby bird and I can’t stop crying. I cry for the life lost, a life barely begun, for something so small and innocent. The image springs loose tears that have been building for a long time; a gate has been opened that cannot now be shut. 

I cry for myself, for how lost I am, for how unprotected, for how strained, for how young and scared. I cry because I can’t get angry, not yet, because I don’t know I’m allowed to get angry. I cry because everything that once gave me security is now gone, my family, my father, my mother. I am in a place where I feel I don’t fit in, where I have no close friends, and now the one thing I thought I would have has been proven to be an illusion, an illusion cruelly destroyed by indifference and selfishness. 

I cry because I don’t know what else to do, how to fix all of this, my life that has become a mess, foreign to me, not my own. I cry because I don’t have any help. I have no one to help me, no one to talk to. I can no longer pretend I’m okay. I can no longer carry on the farce that my life is happy, that I am happy. I can no longer live for other people who tell me I should be or do X, Y, Z in order to be a good person, a good student, a good daughter, a good. I can no longer carry expectation, its weight, its demands. I can no longer carry hope with me, hope that things will get better, hope that what I want to work out will. The last bit of hope I had is gone -- evaporated? was killed? was taken?

I cry because I don’t have the words. I cannot speak. I study and use language for a living and yet I cannot put into terms, simple or profound, the despair and emptiness and grief that resides within me. I cry because babies cry, because that’s the only way they know how to convey to the world they need something. I cry because I need. Love, acceptance, reassurance, security, safety, affirmation. I cry because I need to hear that none of this is my fault, that I carry weight and responsibility that are not mine. I cry because I am still a child, forced to carry the consequences of decisions that were not my own, of things I did not choose. I am still a child. I am still small. I am still scared.

A List of the Medications I Have Taken in the Last 15 Years, In No Particular Order

Lexapro Pristiq Lithium Seroquel Cymbalta Lunesta Ambien Lamictal Propranolol Buspirone Effexor Celexa Trazadone Clonazepam Lorazepam Sonata Zoloft Rispiradone Abilify Geodon Latuda Doxepin

Cold Coffee

Yes, I am that woman who asks the counter girls at Panera to brew a whole new urn of coffee if the small cup I get is merely lukewarm. If there’s anything my mother taught me that’s stuck with me throughout my life, it’s this: you have to advocate for yourself.

The first time I applied for Medicaid I was denied by the caseworker because my doctor, who had filled out every page of the application with detailed responses about my illness, had simply missed checking the box that stated “This person has a disability.” That’s it. I sat across from the woman as she showed this to me and felt a rage erupt in my chest that I rarely experience. OF ALL THE STUPIDEST GODDAMN THINGS. I slammed my binder full of evidentiary paperwork shut and blew through the building’s doors. 

In the parking lot I called my mom, agitated and furious. She simply said to me, “Go back in there and ask to talk to her supervisor. Show her the paperwork.”

So I walked back in and demanded to see the supervisor. I laid in front of her all the paperwork I had collected, and after looking over my application, she looked at the caseworker with a dumbfounded expression that clearly implied “Um, duh. This girl qualifies for Medicaid.”

Score one for me, thanks to my mom.

I’m not the most assertive person. I’m afraid of confrontation of any kind. But advocating for myself has become a kind of hard-won superpower. I know when a change is needed, and I’m no longer afraid to speak up to make it happen.

I’ve made moves with providers when I felt the provider wasn’t giving me the care I deserved or wasn’t the right fit to address my needs. I don’t merely accept a doctor’s words when it comes to medication; I ask about benefits versus side effects. I’m willing to try different meds, but if they don’t make me feel better, or they make me feel worse, I tell the doc to find something different. If circumstances at work are making it harder to maintain equilibrium, I tell my bosses I need a change. When it comes to getting what I need to take care of my illness, I don’t give up and I don’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Because if I’m not going to drink cold coffee, I’m sure as hell not going to settle for inferior medical care.

Mr. R’s World

It’s easy to complain. Everybody has something to complain about. It takes work to be positive, but you have to make your own positivity.

I attended the funeral of a family friend last week, Mr. R. I sat in a back pew of a church sanctuary filled with people who admired this man, whose lives he touched in ways profound and simple. It was the kind of funeral where people laugh more than they cry, which is exactly what Mr. R wanted.

Mr. R passed from ALS after a four-year battle with the disease. From the day of his diagnosis to the day of his passing, he handled the challenges of his illness with characteristic humor and disarmingly brave honesty.  He didn’t talk about the fact of his impending death in euphemisms; he faced head-on the reality that it was a terminal illness. (He quipped early on to his sister-in-law: “I’m not dying. I’m just living faster.”) In fact, every single person who spoke a tribute about Mr. R commented on just how positive he remained through the course of his illness. It was not something he would have chosen, one person said, but it was something he used to make his life better.

Walking out of the church after the funeral, I thought to myself Well, damn. I need to work harder at this positivity thing.

The most remarkable and inspiring thing about Mr. R’s approach to his situation -- a situation in which no one would have blamed him for feeling defeated and pessimistic -- was that he used it as a framework to appreciate his life. The last time I saw him he talked about recognizing the simple pleasure in the sensation of eating. He was in a fully mechanized wheelchair with a bi-pap machine connected to his nose -- something he called his Teletubby mask -- laboring to pull air into his lungs, and he talked about how much he loved the sensation of chocolate candy in his mouth. (A man after my own heart, he had a sweet tooth.) 

When I volunteered as a youth group leader at church, at every meeting I would make the kids go around the table and say one positive thing going on in their lives. The kids hated this. They wanted to complain. The things they wanted to complain about always came to their minds first. Each time my answer would be: It’s easy to be negative. It’s easy to complain. Everybody has something to complain about. It takes work to be positive, but you have to make your own positivity. Sometimes I’d get an eye roll, but most times the kids came up with original, often amusing, answers when they really thought about it. If I were leading the group now, I’d simply say: Mr. R died from ALS and he made his own positivity. You have no room to complain.

Contemplating all of this the other day, I realized I haven’t been exercising my own advice. I admit I sulk with the best of them when it comes to thinking about all the ways my life hasn’t turned out the way I wanted it to because of my bipolar. So in the spirit of living in Mr. R’s world, I’ve made a deliberate attempt to think of ways in which struggling with bipolar disorder has improved my life. What bipolar has -- I never thought I’d say this -- given me.

I no longer have to be perfect. I no longer have to be the superlative of anything in order to be happy or feel accepted by others. I don’t have the time or energy anymore -- ha! -- to keep up the facade of perfection. I have too many other things to concern myself with, like what baked goods are on special at Aldi’s or how to cut my bangs in between hair appointments so I don’t look like Jim Carrey in ‘Dumb and Dumber.’ Discarding the cumbersome need to be perfect all the time, I feel liberated to be my authentic self, warts and farts and all. As it turns out, I like that version of myself better anyway.

I have a sincere and profound empathy for others. I’ve always been a sensitive person able to relate to other people, but I find myself acknowledging other people’s pain in more authentic ways now. I no longer judge people when I hear about their failures or hardships. I don’t try to make those grieving feel better by telling them worn out platitudes; I just hug. I understand that pain is what shapes us (joy is what colors us), and I seek to share only compassion when I see the grooves and lines of someone’s hardship. 

I get to slow down. I have to be very careful about how much stress I put on my plate. The slightest bit of over-activity or one too many demands can easily disrupt my homeostasis and tip my scales towards dysfunction. For a long time I felt embarrassed about not being able to work full-time and not having a resume as long as others’ when it came to ‘being involved’ (as if somehow that’s a measure of a person’s worth). Now I like that my days are slower and filled with only the basics. I like not needing a LinkedIn page. I give myself permission to do the things I enjoy: taking time to read, or write, or watch birds in my backyard and play with my dogs. 

If life is all in how you look at it, Mr. R gave me some perspective. I raise a Reese’s Cup in his honor.

Four Good Days

Thank you, Glenn Close. Sincerely, thank you. For using your celebrity and voice to amplify the issue of combating stigma surrounding mental illness. For taking a deeply personal family experience and making it public. For supporting youth in their experiences navigating the challenges of mental health (something I desperately wish I’d had as a teenager). For advocating for increased funding for mental illness across the board. Save for a misguided but well-intentioned t-shirt campaign, your organization and your message are doing good in the world. 

Ms. Close’s newest film, ‘Four Good Days,’ tackles the subject of drug addiction - more precisely, the incredibly difficult process of recovery from drug addiction. She plays the mother of a young woman (Mila Kunis) beginning her journey of recovery with her first four days. 

Unsurprisingly, and so welcomed, Ms. Close is using the opening of this film as an opportunity to bring awareness to addiction recovery and positive mental health by creating the Four Good Days challenge in line with Mental Health Awareness Month. The campaign lays out the premise very simply: “Habits are built in small moments. Lifelong change starts one day at a time.”

The challenge is to create a personal goal and then spend four days dedicated to making the changes needed to reach that goal. Support from the campaign comes in the form of daily encouragement emails, journal prompts, mindfulness and more. Counter to my typical curmudgeonly feelings about internet/social media awareness campaigns (changing your Twitter avatar to a colored ribbon doesn’t count as activism if you do nothing else), I signed up. So this is my goal:

I commit to four good days in waking up early to create a routine that allows me to make the most of my days and better manage my depression.

Most people won’t understand how hard this is for me. It’s a topic for another post. But maybe this little push, spurred by a famous person I’ve never met, is enough to get me started. We’ll see.

*****

Info on the Four Good Days challenge can be found here: https://impact.fourgooddays.com/four-good-days-challenge/

The campaign presents a great explanation of why language matters in the reduction of stigma and some helpful examples of how to change the words we use here: https://impact.fourgooddays.com/reducing-stigma/

You can read an interview Ms. Close gave to CNN as part of their “CNN Heroes” series about her mission to end the stigma around mental illness here.

What I Can Say/What I Can’t Say: Bipolar Edition

One of the fun conundrums I get to face as someone with a mental illness is navigating polite conversation around the realities of my life. 

Where did you go to school? What I Can Say: Oh, I graduated from Pitt. What I Can’t Say: It took me seven years and taking classes at four different schools in order to graduate from college. I started at a private liberal arts school which I hated and from which I had to take time off after my first breakdown. I decided to transfer to the University of Pittsburgh, which I loved. But while at Pitt I got so depressed I had to come home for a year and had to take classes at two local colleges in order to keep up with credits. I eventually returned to Pitt where I somehow managed to graduate with honors.

What did you study? Can Say: Italian Language and Literature Can’t Say: I wanted to double major in History and Italian with a minor in Linguistics or Art History, but it was hard enough to maintain even a minimum course load and I didn’t have the ability to manage much more than that. I was accepted into a graduate program for Italian but I wound up never attending because my life completely fell apart after graduation and by the time I managed to pull it together it was too late to attend.

What do you do? Can Say: I’m interested in serving people with disabilities or who face housing and food insecurity. Can’t Say: Having bipolar disorder makes it really hard for me to keep a job. When my cycles of depression and irregular sleep begin, it’s almost impossible to make sure I can get up for work every day. It’s hard to focus and the more stress I bear, the more exhausted I become and the more easily I become depressed. At that point, when I can barely get out of bed to eat or shower, the priority of maintaining a job flies out the window. 

Do you have a boyfriend? Can Say: Better a dog than a boyfriend, haha. Can’t Say: How am I supposed to tell a guy I’m interested in that I have a major mental illness? Saying ‘Hey, by the way, I have bipolar disorder’ isn’t exactly something you reveal on a first date. Or a third. Or a fifth. And if I did build enough confidence to tell someone about my life -- about all the medications and hospitalizations and lost jobs and traumatic episodes -- the fear of him rejecting me would assuredly keep me from doing it. And if somehow that didn’t scare him off, actually allowing him to see me in a state of complete decompensation feels impossible. Too much vulnerability. Too much shame. I don’t even let my parents see me when I’m like that. So no, the dating field is too fraught with explosive landmines to merit a venture into being that exposed.

Do you have kids? Can Say: Nope. I think it’s an eventuality, but I’m not in a rush. Can’t Say: I’m scared to death of being a bad mother. What if I neglect them because I’m too depressed? What if the stress causes me to break down? I know people have trauma as young kids from having mothers who were depressed and didn’t attend to them. How will I explain to them what happens to Mommy when she goes into her room and doesn’t leave for three days? I don’t want my children to have to deal with the stress mental illness causes when I can’t deal with it myself sometimes. Worst of all, what if I pass the mental illness gene to them? I don’t want them to have to go through what I’ve gone through. 

Do you live by yourself? Can Say: I live with my parents. It’s cheaper and it’s better than having a roommate who I don’t like. Can’t Say: I live with my parents because it isn’t safe for me to live by myself and I make no money so I can’t afford to live anywhere else at the moment. My parents are great, but I deeply miss my independence. And no matter how old you are, when you live with your parents you still don’t feel like a complete adult. So I live where I have to live, but I would give anything to live on my own again.

Where do you see yourself in five years? Can Say: I’d like to see where the future takes me. Can’t Say: Not being hospitalized for five years straight is a pretty good goal.

To be fair, all of us have some version of answers to these questions playing in our heads. Polite conversation isn’t about really getting to know someone. It’s about forming an impression of someone based on what we believe are socially acceptable norms and then (silently) locating that person in our social schema based on the information they share. Being honest in such superficial situations would be a radical and liberating act -- one I hope someday I won’t be so afraid to commit -- but it comes at the price of awkwardness, discomfort and possible humiliation. And for now at least that’s not a price I’m willing to pay.

While pain is universal, it is also utterly private. We cannot know whether our pain is like anybody else’s pain until we talk about it.

                                                                   -- Viet Thanh Nguyen                                                                       “The Sympathizer”

[I must clarify, with apologies to Mr. Nguyen, that I present these words out of the context in which he uses them in the novel.  The original passage does not talk about the importance of mental health -- far from it. So I don’t want to be mistaken for misquoting the author. I simply felt so strongly about the profound insight the words offer as they stand alone that I wanted to share them as such.] 

[[You can purchase “The Sympathizer” here. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 so, you know, for some light reading, it’s pretty good.]]

Dear J --

9/20/20

I know this letter is unsolicited, not a response to anything you’ve written, but if you’ll indulge me I have some thoughts I’ve been wanting to share with someone for a long time.

J, I’m not good at losing people. I’m so terrified that people will leave me that I desperately try to hold on to them, far past the point when other people move on, past when it’s no longer healthy and it’s to my own detriment. It’s why I’m so insecure in my relationships with other people. I’m afraid I’m going to do or say something that will make them not want to be my friend anymore, not love me anymore.

It’s been 17 years and I’m only now understanding the depth of damage my parents’ divorce had on me. I was 16 when it started, and you’re still very much a kid at that age, even though I didn’t understand that then. I was the oldest still in the house and felt it was my responsibility to keep everything together for my younger siblings while everything around us was falling apart. My parents were so destructive -- would have explosive arguments in front of us, would put me in the middle of their own fights. I couldn’t stand being in my mom’s house while she was going through her own anger and grief, so I chose to live with my dad, but then she did and said some deeply hurtful things to me that left scars that still remain. And then my dad, for all the support I thought he was giving me, told me over the phone the day after I moved into my freshman dorm that he had move to another state to take a new job. Just like that. He gave me no indication he was planning to leave, even though I knew it took months to find a new position for what he does. He knew he was going to leave the whole time and never told me. He just left. Checked out. ‘I don’t want to deal with this anymore.’ See ya. Bye.

My life was a story of complete instability for a long time, so many things falling apart at different points despite my best efforts to keep them together and keep moving forward. (Add to it a burgeoning mental illness I didn’t know I had.) I walked without a steady foundation underneath my feet, not even a safety net, and I now understand that the whole toxic maelstrom was a trauma in my life.

Three and a half years ago PTSD burned through my brain like a fireball. I remember the exact moment it opened up. I was walking through a neighborhood in the city where I went to college, a neighborhood through which I’ve walked a thousand times, and all of a sudden I felt this oppressive anxiety. My lungs were constricted and I couldn’t breathe. It felt like a thousand needles were poking at my lungs just underneath my skin. It stayed that way the whole night. When I finally got to bed, I collapsed face-down on the bed and started crying deep, guttural sobs. I remained that way for 20 minutes before I finally choked up enough to get myself a glass of water. But this is the thing that’s so strange to me now: I wasn’t crying about my parents.

How do I explain? The psyche is a complicated thing.

***

The only relationship I’ve ever had was in college with a guy named ___. He was my first boyfriend, and our relationship meant a great deal to me. He was older than me, already out of college and working. It wasn’t that great of a relationship, honestly, although I didn’t know enough to know that at the time. He was patronizing and dominant; he was very good at making me feel very small. But I was with him because he provided the feeling of security I desperately needed in my life. (He was literally the physical embodiment of security, short and stocky, a wrestler; you couldn’t knock him over with a dump truck if you tried.) 

At the beginning of our relationship ___ told me he was looking to move to another city. He had interviewed for a new position, and a few weeks after we started dating he found out he got it. He would be leaving in six months. Truly naive, I didn’t see this as a problem, and I spent the next six months playing the role of supportive girlfriend and cheerleader. I sincerely believed our relationship would last, that we’d have a future together, and all we had to do was wait out my senior year until I could move there to be with him. ___ didn’t feel the same way I did and had no such intentions to stay together, but he never told me the truth about this, about how he felt, about what he didn’t want. Before, during and after our entire relationship, he was never once honest with me about his feelings.

When the day came for him to move, once again I was being left behind by a man whom I loved and depended on. I simply couldn’t lose ‘him’ again, so I held on as tightly as I could. The next eight months depleted me of every spindle of energy, emotion and spirit I had. For what I’m sure was a result of his own emotional mechanisms, he could not end our connection. We were not officially together but we were still in touch, and I desperately wanted things to work out, so I held on. 

Despite all the little things he said and did that hurt me, I convinced myself that if I just held on tightly enough for the both of us, things would work out. But my self and my condition steadily deteriorated to something well beyond mere depression. I wasn’t sleeping or eating. I wasn’t going out to see friends. I was spending my days entirely in bed, my nights mindlessly watching television eating whatever food came from a bag that I didn’t have to cook. I lost enough weight that my usually tight skinny jeans were falling off my hip bones. I couldn’t get out of my apartment enough to attend classes which, by the end of the semester, I had abandoned anyway. My life had, once again, completely fallen apart.

Shortly after the new year ___ told me he had met a new girl who he was now dating and said, quote, “I don’t think we should talk anymore.” It felt like someone had shot me in the chest with a bullet. All I could respond was “You broke my heart.” Three days later I woke up with the worst case of the flu I’ve ever had, the sickest I’ve ever been. I could no longer take care of myself. A week later I was headed home on a Greyhound bus. I had withdrawn from school, left my apartment, left my friends, left a city I loved, completely broken and a shell of myself. My spirit had died.

***

I didn’t remember any of this for a long time. If you’d asked me the details about my experience with ___, I could have told you we dated and that it ended because he moved, but I couldn’t have told you anything else. My brain had packed everything about the experience into a box and tucked it away far in the recesses of my mind in order to survive and keep going. It was too painful to remember them. But then, eight years later, that day in the city when I had the anxiety attack, I realized it was brought on by a memory I had of ___ and I in that part of the city when we dated. The memory itself was benign, but for whatever reason it was enough to release the dam waters of pain and memory, and I drowned in them. (Terribly overwrought metaphor. My apologies.)

For three years I spent every. single. day. with pain in my chest -- sometimes heavy and suffocating, sometimes an anxious tightness and pulling, sometimes an acute squeezing. I would have fierce, violent adrenaline attacks that would erupt into punching and hitting and screaming into pillows or blankets or anything I could find that I knew wouldn’t hurt myself. Then I would collapse in exhausted fits of sobs on the floor or the bed. I would become irritated by the tiniest things: high-pitched noises, too-bright lights, dog barks that would startle me, being unable to open a jelly jar and throwing it across the room. The worst of all of them was an inability to escape reminders of him in every single facet of my life, however benign and mundane: shopping trips to Target, watching the Super Bowl, pumping gas into my car. I put ___ into the context of whatever medium was in front of me: movie plots, books, songs, other people’s stories, anything. I saw a vacuum commercial on TV one night and immediately wondered what kind of vacuum ___ owned. I couldn’t escape it, and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop any of these things. It was torture, and I was miserable, but no matter how much I tried, I found no relief.

***

In my first therapy session, when I realized that I needed to see someone about my PTSD, my therapist told me that most relationship problems have something to do with our parents. My therapist said both our individual relationships with them and their relationship with each other models for us what a relationship is supposed to look like. My reaction was “What. That has nothing to do with this.” All my PTSD symptoms were about my relationship with ___. But with the help of therapy and through a lot of fucking hard work, I now understand that the original trauma in my life was my parents’ divorce, losing my family (which was my safe space) as I had known it, and losing my dad. It was so foundational in my life that I couldn’t even see it; I was walking through the trees without realizing the entire forest was on fire. Only by reliving the secondary trauma of losing ___ did all of this come into focus. (The psyche is a complicated thing.)

Mercifully, after three years that felt like a lifetime, my symptoms waned to a slight whisper of existence, and now I am left with the task of rebuilding myself. I grieve the lost time and opportunity my traumatic experiences cost me, the things I would have been able to accomplish if I had had a secure and safe foundation upon which to build my life. I miss my family as it used to be -- whole -- which I will never have again even as I have new iterations of one. I miss my dad. His leaving left a hole in my life, one I’ve spent every day since trying to fill but will never be able to because no one can take the place of one’s dad. His departure left me believing I’m not worth keeping, that no man will be ever be there for me when things get tough, and that I’m not worth fighting for.

***

This letter is much longer than I intended it to be. Thank you sincerely for reading it. I don’t expect you to know what to say in response; most people don’t. Knowing that you read it means enough.

I don’t know what this means, J, but do you remember how I said I spent every day for three years feeling constant pain in my chest? When I saw your face, before I could even register a thought, I felt a full, warm sensation in my chest, in the exact spot where I always felt the pain. It happened so quickly, so instantaneously, I could not have manufactured it. It came from somewhere other than my brain.

The spirit makes imprints on the body we’re not always conscious of. So I don’t know what it means, but it was the first time in a long time I felt something other than pain in my chest. And not just not-pain, but something good, something whole and secure. People leave imprints. Maybe that’s why I decided to tell you all this stuff.

Duke & Duchess

Wealth and privilege do not make you immune to mental health struggles.

There were plenty of opinions and reactions circling around the world to the bombing of the royal family that was the Prince Harry and Meghan Markle interview with Oprah last week. The overwhelming majority of the discussion was supportive of the couple (Can it, Piers Morgan) and their break with an institution that has become so calcified in its own tradition and mores that it couldn’t manage to make room for a new member who would have provided their brand with some much-needed relatability. 

While I didn’t read every headline or listen to all the morning show banter, it seems to me that among all the rightful indignation surrounding the royal family’s disgraceful handling of the race ‘issue’ (foremost that they allowed there to be one at all) and empathy for Meghan’s pregnancy difficulties, people failed to mention one simple truth that underlies Harry and Meghan’s entire experience: wealth and privilege do not make you immune to mental health struggles.

I was quietly shocked, like the rest of the world, when Meghan revealed her inner despair and struggle with suicidal thoughts at the height of her pregnancy. I thought Oh, girl... I was saddened when she talked about going to a public event and pretending to be okay on the very day she broke down and shared with Harry her worst inner thoughts. I thought Yep, I know that... I was outrageously shocked when she said she went to the human resources department within the institution asking for help to enter inpatient treatment and they told her they couldn’t help her because she wasn’t a paid employee. Staring at the TV screen, I did the Oprah face: WHAT?!

I responded so viscerally to Meghan’s confessions because I’ve been where she’s been. Actively seeking help from those who are supposed to help you only to be told “We can’t do anything.” Feeling obligated to put on a happy face at a public event while everything inside is falling apart. Breaking down to someone and feeling so completely vulnerable and scared that you don’t even know what to do next.

Harry, for his part, has long been an advocate for speaking openly and honestly about mental health, for which I’ve always admired him. The heartbreaking image of him walking behind his mother’s casket at the age of 13 following the horrific circumstances of her death was broadcast to the entire world. The depth of trauma lasts a lifetime, and he’s had to shoulder that while growing up and living his life in the public spotlight. That cannot be easy. To use his influence in such a visible position to normalize the conversation about mental health -- and to know he’s genuine about it based on his own conversations -- is laudable and brave.

So I was a little perturbed at Oprah when she asked him about his unhappiness in his life while she feigned skepticism at the thought that he could even be unhappy living as a prince in a palace with everything paid and done for him. I know what she was trying to do, but I didn’t appreciate it. Everyone should be allowed room to be a full human being, to struggle with the same doubts and fears and failures we all have, regardless of his external circumstances. Oprah, of all people -- the woman who has built an entire gilded empire espousing the value of living an authentic life -- should know this. Undermining it for the sake of a jaw drop was uncouth and beneath her. Heavy is the head, Oprah. Heavy is the head.

I came away from the interview reinforced that you could never pay me enough to be a royal, with one’s life on constant display, unable to be vulnerable about any given subject, always expected to be happy and placating. If the institution focused more on allowing its members to be authentic human beings instead of cardboard cutouts of manufactured perfection, maybe Harry and Meghan, and by extension the entire royal family, could have avoided this whole mess. For now it seems they’ve found some peace and quiet in California and are focusing on being the kind of celebrities we relish here in America -- people who are famous simply because they’re famous.

A Body At Rest Stays At Rest

I am in the ruttiest of ruts at the moment. My usual discipline for eating healthy and exercising è scappata... has fled -- I’m not even trying to put vegetables into my body at the moment. I don’t get much done during the day apart from showering and the occasional load of laundry. I’m not interested in paying much attention to reading or writing. I can’t even muster enough interest to watch the new season of The Crown. And, of course, my irregular sleeping patterns have returned. It’s depression but not quite, more a persistent lethargy and absence of motivation without the despairing thoughts of hopelessness (although they don’t feel too far off).

It started a month ago when I had to quarantine for Covid-19. For the safety of my parents who are both high risk, I stayed in my small bedroom for two weeks straight, leaving only to use the bathroom across the hall. In the beginning I thought I’d be able to manage the disruption to my regular routine. I had a whole plan: I found short workouts I could do in limited space with only a set of 5 lb. weights. I had a writing schedule worked out with page counts for every day. I even thought I could tackle the beginning of reading the 900-page novel I had been saving for my winter read.

Dreams, my friends. Dreams. None of that happened. It was too easy to just lay in bed.

Once I fall into the rut it’s like walking in the grooves of a tire track. It’s difficult to give myself the push I need to get over the ledge and back to high ground. It’s a weird chicken/egg situation: part habitual, part low-mood induced. I need some kinetic catalyst to get me moving again. But what? What can I find to inspire me? What can I find to encourage me? When all of the usual motivations don’t work, where do I go to return to myself?

Lucky

Kindness, at its most fundamental, is a form of human connection.

In 2014 I spent five weeks at a psychiatric hospital outside of Washington DC after a fantastically catastrophic display of all the plates I was trying to spin crashing down at once. It was at this hospital stay that I was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and I had to remain so long only because the doctors needed to make sure the lithium medication they started was at safe levels in my bloodstream before they could discharge me. 

It was a weird little sort of summer camp. I met lots of different people, sometimes interesting, sometimes not, but none any more abnormal than people you’d meet on the street. I did a lot of coloring and crafts. I became a master of Connect Four. I was introduced to new kinds of group activities like Music Therapy with Tad!, this old hippie dude who brought his guitar and sang the songs we requested, whether he knew them or not. Once a week there was Movie Night where we’d vote on a DVD from the unit’s limited collection of Disney films -- three of the five weeks it was Babe, although I always voted for Angels in the Outfield. And every day, twice a day, we had group check-ins where we’d share what we were struggling with and try to find some kind of encouragement for the day.

It was at this hospital that summer that I witnessed the kindest act of humanity I have personally ever seen.

Kevin* came into the unit on involuntary admission. Like many of the men I’ve met in such places, his depression was masked by anger, and his anger caused a confrontation with the police that was enough to land him in the hospital in lieu of jail time. In group Kevin never shared much. We got a few things out of him: He had been in the military. He had some family issues. He didn’t think he needed to be in the hospital but it was better than jail. 

About a week later, one morning at group Kevin raised his hand and said he wanted to be the first one to speak. He began talking about his 8-year-old yellow lab, Lucky, and for the first time since his arrival I saw Kevin’s face lighten and smile. He talked about how he got Lucky after his military discharge since he wouldn’t be on deployments anymore. Lucky lived with him through a divorce, several relocations and job changes, a few court hearings. He played with Lucky every day at the park and Lucky slept with him in his bed at night. They were best friends and constant companions. Lucky was the most important thing in his life.

Then Kevin’s smile twisted and his face crumpled. He was clearly in anguish. He told us that friends who were taking care of Lucky while he was in the hospital called to tell him Lucky had been taken to the emergency vet because he hadn’t been eating. The vet found a tumor in Lucky’s abdomen that was inoperable. Kevin spoke with them and made the decision to put Lucky down to spare him more pain. It would have to be done in the next three days though, well before Kevin would be discharged from the hospital. Kevin wiped tears streaming down his cheeks with his bare fingers until someone passed him a box of tissues. He wasn’t going to get to say goodbye to his dog.

Two days later, while everyone was hanging out in the common room waiting for dinner, two med techs came to get Kevin and led him out of the unit. Curious about what was happening a group of us coagulated at a window in the hallway facing the interior courtyard of the hospital grounds. In the middle of the grass we saw Lucky, sitting on his hind legs with his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth, waiting patiently on a leash. Then we saw Kevin enter the courtyard from the entrance on the left. 

As soon as Kevin appeared Lucky jumped on all fours and began to bark, pulling on the leash until his handler finally let him go. Kevin and Lucky bounded for each other, with Kevin reaching his dog first, falling on his knees to look Lucky in the eyes while Lucky licked his face in giant strokes with his big tongue. Kevin kept giving Lucky full bear hugs and the two of them rolled around on the ground playing. Watching Kevin and Lucky, I had to wipe a few small tears from my eyes -- Kevin was getting to say goodbye to his dog. 

Eventually a unit nurse came into the hallway and shooed the group of us from the window, saying something about giving the guy some privacy. Kevin told us later at dinner that one of the unit techs, a chill guy named Kareem* who everyone liked, had spoken to the hospital higher ups and arranged for Kevin to see his dog one last time. 

When you’re in the hospital, even though you’re being taken care of, there’s a lot you miss about the outside world and a lot you’re isolated from. I don’t know if Kareem was a dog lover himself, but he understood that what Kevin needed in that moment was more than just medicine and therapy. Kindness, at its most fundamental, is a form of human connection. It’s a way of saying ‘I see you.’ And when you’re struggling to keep your head above water, when you find yourself in a place like a psych hospital, being seen reminds you that you matter, that what you love matters. I don’t know if Kareem understood this explicitly, but I did. 

*not his real name