I want to be friends with my body

My body and I have never been friends. For as long as I can remember, the point of a mirror and a scale were to find fault and reasons to criticize myself. My medical charts reporting the various failures of my various systems, same thing.

But my recent colonoscopy and labs are clear: my body is healthy. HEALTHY. For the first time in years. Which unfortunately is more complicated for me than I'd like it to be.

With the healing of my gut has come weight gain. This started happening right away, when I stopped expelling all of my food. (Duh.) With the encouragement of my therapist, I have very intentionally not stepped on a scale at home since March of 2022. At the doctor's office when I must be weighed, I turn around on the scale so I don't see the number.

And then yesterday my doctor messed up and I saw that stupid, stupid number on the scale that gives me such a complex. Friends, I am embarrassed to admit that I freaked the FUCK out. I thought I'd made *so* much progress in separating my worth from my weight and perhaps I have, but to see the number there, quite different from what it was at my lowest, was a challenge. I cried. At home I stood naked in the mirror and berated myself.

I'm ashamed that I would do this to me. My body has worked so hard to claw back to health, after years of being sick and weakened. I want to be grateful. I AM grateful. I am working very hard to remember that my lowest scale number was a representation not of some more virtuous self, but a self who got so sad and depressed that for a while she didn't eat, a self who spent so much time running to the bathroom after meals because of a gut that rejected food, a self who was dizzy almost every time she stood up.

I am stronger now. I'm also more substantial, in every sense of the word. I would like to make peace with that. I want to be friends with this vessel I live in, which carries me from place to place, which brings me pleasure and allows me to love and work and create.

I'm not there yet. I think I am currently at "wary detente, with potential for improved relations." Maybe when it comes to my body I'll always pendulum between fear and Fuck It, and back again, always wanting the middle and never quite getting there-- but still, always trying.

And maybe I can make peace with that, too.

On grieving the living

Life challenges seem to be thrown at me in patterns. Themes. Waves. Whatever it is shows up and then it's EVERYWHERE. It's in my clinical work and something I'm reading and in my personal experiences. It is exposure. It is immersion. It's entirely possible that the pattern only exists because of me. The technical term for this is priming effect-- you see a thing and your subconsicous is then ready to notice it again. And yet. I think it's equally probable that something bigger than myself is trying to show me something, repeatedly, so that I learn and grow. My recent thing is grief, but not necessarily death grief. I'm talking the grief you feel when you lose a person who is still alive. It's been everywhere, all around me, every day this week and last and maybe even longer. Many days I've turned my wet eyes up toward the sky and said, "okay, I hear you. I HEAR YOU. What am I supposed to be learning?" Here are my takeaways so far: *Grief is inevitable as I age, as me and those around me grow and change. In this way, pain is an artifact of time. It's okay to hurt. I'm not alone in this experience.

* I can miss a person SO SO much and want more than anything to get back to a way we used to be together. And sometimes that's not possible. Sometimes a person is so different that I may never get to interact again with who they used to be. It's a gutpunch but that doesn't make it less true. I can grieve for the past while moving toward acceptance of my present.

* Conversely, people in my life may miss previous versions of me, old Allisons who will never again return. They might have preferred the me I was at 15 or 20 or 25 or 30 or 35. But I can't build a life around being who others want me to be. I can't be everyone's type. I can grieve those who choose to distance from me without shaming myself for changing.

* I can't save people. It's not my job to "bring them back to who they really are," because that may not be a thing, and even if it were, I'm not that powerful or important. I will grieve those who change in a way that I believe to be destructive without taking responsibility for their wellbeing. Is there probably more here for me to learn? Yeah. That's what life is, I suppose-- an extended opportunity to learn hurt and pivot, learn hurt and pivot, rinse and repeat. So if you're grieving the living-- you're not alone. This is human. And I see you.

I wanted to die, and now I don't

5/26/22

My heart is sick with the loss of life at Uvalde Elementary School this week. In working with clients and speaking with friends, many of us feel lost. Many of us feel we belong to a broken society, one we can neither tolerate nor change. The psychologist in me fears the siren song of suicide will be calling for some.

And that's what finally steeled me enough to post this. Please, if you're on the fence about taking your life, read on. There is hope.

–Allison

**

Content warning: suicidal ideation

1/22/2022

I promised myself I would write this post if I made it to 1/1/2022. And then the day came. Grateful as I was, I no longer wanted to keep my promise. It was too hard. Too much. Maybe unnecessary, given how far I’d come.

On the morning of 1/2/2022, I logged into Instagram this was the post I opened to.

(poem by Sean Thomas Dougherty)

The Universe is forever calling me out. I’m heeding the call, even if it did take me twenty more days to build my moxie. I expect it will take me even more to get the courage to post, if I ever do.

So…(deep breath)...here we go. 

In the Fall of 2020, just sixteen-ish short months ago, I wanted to die. And I strongly considered making that happen. This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever admitted, especially publicly, but even to myself. 

If you are family, friend, or client reading this, I want you to know: none of this was your fault. Please keep trusting me with your lives and hurts in the ways you do. Please also honor that I can be a person who struggles but who still has room to care for others. 

It is important for you to know that I don’t want to die anymore. But I want to explain to you how it all came to be and how it came to pass.

Some context about the state of my life in the beginning of 2020: I was married to someone who loved me just the way I was and tried really hard to take care of me and our family. I had two kids who I genuinely thought were amazing human beings. I had a job that helped others, and I was pretty good at it. I had loving family and friends. You can see how this does not sound like the recipe for someone who ends up in serious suicidal ideation. Here’s your first important lesson: Depression does not operate on logical channels. You can throw your best, most compelling evidence in the face of depression, and it will say, “Fuck you, I’ll do what I want, thanks.”

Here’s the rest of the story: Well, it was 2020. On March 10 my life was operating normally, and by March 20 it was completely upside-down. In a weekend I moved my entire private counseling practice to telehealth, essentially saying goodbye to the routines and structure that had been as reliable to me as the sun coming up in the morning. All the while, my colleagues and I battled to be compensated for provision of therapy via telehealth.

And I was providing more services than ever before, as the need for mental health services swelled in the wake of our world’s crisis. I opened my schedule to longer hours and more clients, because the need was so great. My people were hurting. Everyone was scared. And while I was happy to be a helper and to feel some agency in an out-of-control time, being immersed in my own fears many hours a day (because my clients and I were living the same trauma and having similar responses), was really, really hard.

I also however felt that I didn’t have a choice but to work my ass off because at any minute, I could get COVID and then everything would fall apart. I needed to save enough money to make sure my family would be okay if I got sick, or in the worst case, died. My head was a constant push-and-pull. “You need to rest.” “You can’t rest.”

At the same this was happening, my entire social structure shifted. Since I was working from home, I no longer regularly saw my office colleagues—who I love. No weekly volleyball league. No weekend visits to my parents’. No Sunday dinners with my husband’s family. My connection to both my hometown friends and my neighborhood friends was severed. I didn’t see many of these folks standing on the same side of history I was very firmly on, both in terms of pandemic response and other historical events we were living, such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2020 election. In hindsight, the cracks in my connections with those communities were always there, it’s just that 2020 blasted them wide open.

My social media demonstrated to me that as an immunosuppressed person living in a life-threatening time, my needs for safety came in as a very late second to the Personal Freedom of the healthy.

I have never felt so unwanted in my life, as I did that Fall. I felt like a throwaway human being.

But I kept going. I got into a new routine. Work, document, write. Drink too much coffee. Take long walks. Eat what we started calling “supper with weird vibes” with my husband and kids. Cry and miss my family like crazy and wonder if anything was ever going to get better. Was everyone going to die? Was I going to die? Rinse and repeat.        

In August of 2020 I got the ultimate kick in the teeth and was diagnosed with a latent tuberculosis infection. (No, I have no idea how/where I contracted it.) This wouldn’t have been a big deal, if not for the fact that the treatment for TB interfered with my antidepressant medication, which at that point was already my lifeline. I started the TB meds in early October and almost immediately felt the downward shift in my mood. But the tricky thing about depression, which is your second important lesson: Depression can become ego-syntonic, which means that it doesn’t feel like something happening to you, it feels like it IS you. So, I knew I felt like shit, but I also was convinced that I simply was shit.

The Crohn’s Disease that I always have but only periodically battle also kicked into high gear. I couldn’t keep food in me, when I had an appetite at all. My joints seared almost constantly. I was on and off of steroids like most people are on and off of health kicks.

All the time—all of the time—I feared getting COVID. I had no idea what it would do to me, on top of what I already had going on with my body. Being around people scared me. Everything and everyone became a threat. And this, from someone who absolutely loves people, so much so that I have committed my life to being a helper.

By late October I was a mess. Nightly, I’d take long walks in which all I could do was cry. Cry, until I couldn’t breathe anymore. Cry outside, because I sure as hell didn’t want my kids seeing or hearing me. I already felt intensely guilty for making their lives even harder than they needed to be. They gave up all social contact outside of our home, largely due to me being at-risk. So, hell no to letting them see me suffer. Hell no to making them hurt any more than I’d already hurt them.

It was around this time that I started thinking maybe I should die--on my own terms. There was sick appeal in just taking the bull by the horns and doing it myself, rather than waiting for COVID to kill me first. I think I craved control over my life in a time in which I had very little.

There was a part of me that knew that death was not what I really wanted. After all, this whole thing had started with me being scared to die and leave my family behind. But I was also in such pain, both physical and emotional, and I didn’t know how to make it stop. I felt like I’d tried everything: I was taking meds, I was in therapy and physical therapy, I tried to utilize the small support network I had left. And nothing helped. Here is your third lesson: Suicide is rarely about wanting to die. It is very much about wanting pain to stop.

I poignantly remember the sunset on October 28, 2020. My birthday. It was a fire in the sky; oranges, pinks, purples and blues. I cried because it was so beautiful. And I cried because I wanted to stick around to see more like it, but I worried I wouldn’t be able to muster the strength to keep fighting through the pain.

By mid-November I had myself convinced my death could ultimately could be easier on the people around me than if I stayed. Rationally, I knew it would really damage my family, friends, and clients if I killed myself, but in a throwback to your first lesson: Depression gives zero shits about what is rational. Depression blew right past rationality and told me I was a burden, and they’d all be better off without me. Depression is a whisperer of the worst kinds of lies.

One night while on one of my many November walks, I couldn’t get my brain to slow down. Everything hurt: my knees, my hips, my stomach. Sadness, it also hurts—do you know the feeling? That ache in your chest, the one that grabs your sternum and squeezes until you can hardly breathe? That one. My brain was scrambling, frantic, grasping for anything, anything I could do to help. I came up empty at every turn. Again, I started thinking about ending my life, but this time it was new. Previously I’d thought about ways to die as if they were all on a Rolodex. I’d look at one briefly, and my brain would dismiss it for whatever reason, and then we’d flip to another idea until finally we’d dismissed them all. But on this night, the Rolodex stopped on one specific thing and I really thought about it. It seemed somewhat reasonable. I could picture it. And also, I could imagine the end of pain.

And I knew this wasn’t good.

Though it was incredibly difficult, I told the four people who really needed to know: my therapist, the doctor who handles my depression meds, my husband, and my best friend. I did not give specifics. I simply said, “I landed on a plan for killing myself and that scares me.” Each of them, in their own way, helped me to move through that. Ultimately the healing was up to me, but telling them was one of the better choices I made. Fourth lesson: Depression flourishes in the dark, like black mold. Shining a light on it and letting others see is the first step to sending it into retreat.

My therapist convinced me to ask people around me for affirmation that they love me, which is something I had (and continue to have) a hard time doing. My husband was great at this. So was my best friend. By this point in my downward spiral I had myself convinced that my parents didn’t like me. I thought I’d driven even them away, by virtue of being me. One night I texted, “Mom, do you like me? I know you and Dad love me, but do you like me?” She was taken aback that I’d asked, but she confirmed that she and dad like and love me and are proud of me. This helped immeasurably in terms of separating out “depression thoughts” from “helpful thoughts” and I only wish I’d have talked to my parents sooner. I ended up letting a few other family members in on how bad my depression was. I’m not good at asking for care, but being cared for was exactly what I needed.

I wish I could tell you there was a breakthrough, or some moment, where things just got better with all of this. It wasn’t quite like that. It was more like: I held on. Every day, one day at a time, I chose to stick around. I chose to have hope that someday I would really want to live again. I chose to believe that the pain would end. My support system helped, and also, so did my work. Even in my depths of despair and hopelessness, engaging with my clients brought me meaning and a purpose beyond myself for getting up in the morning.

I also started doing what I call the One Good Thing intervention. I’d plan one good thing to look forward to for every single day. I’m not going to lie: a lot of times, it was coffee-related. But there were also things like: I will drive across town just to listen to music in the car, I will sit with my friend on her porch, I will let myself quickly walk into my favorite coffee shop for a to-go latte, I will give myself two hours to write fiction, I will take Evie out for carryout bagels, I will eat pizza and watch a Marvel show with my family. One good thing per day helped more than I could have imagined it would.

Here is a list of other things that helped, some of which were in my control and some not: therapy, increasing the dosage of my antidepressant, getting vaccinated for COVID-19 (which decreased my constant sense of fear and gave back some access to my communities), allowing myself to see fewer clients per week, physical therapy (which played a role in decreasing physical pain), acupuncture, and completing TB treatment, which cleared the way for my medications to work better again. I understand that immense privilege in my life is part of what helped me to heal, because I have access to services that many don’t.

Now it’s January 2022, and so many things have changed. My health has dramatically improved due to a new Crohn’s Disease medication. It is stunning how much less depressed a person can feel when they’re not in chronic pain and when they’re getting proper nutrition. I think I’ve hit a better work-life balance (a perpetual struggle). I feel somewhat more connected to people and communities, though I also feel the acute lack of this as compared to my pre-pandemic life. There is a big, big good thing that’s going to happen for me in 2023 that I still can’t share with the world, but soon I’ll be talking about it so much you’ll wish I’d shut up. In sum, I’m in the headspace of realizing I have a lot to look forward to, and many reasons to stay alive. There are so many things I still want to see and experience and be before I go. There is joy in living. So much joy. 

And yet. It’s likely depression may come for me again, somewhere down the road. Fifth and final lesson: Depression can be chronic—and mine is. With proper treatment, environmental fixes and self-care I will have periods of remission, and I hope as hell some of them are long remissions. But just as with Crohn’s disease, depression is likely to flare on me again someday. I accept that these are my odds.

Equally, however, I embrace my present, in which I want to live.

And the present is all we ever get.

This is my plea to anyone on the fence about suicide who managed to make it all the way to end of this long, long post: consider hanging on. Consider that you do not know how your life is going to turn out, and maybe you could stick around and see. Consider that the pain won’t always be as bad as it is today. I can only ask that you consider. I’m very, very grateful that I did.

**

If you are considering suicide, there are people who can help. https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/ is a great place to start—there are online chat and phone options available to you.

Here is a place to search for a therapist: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists

**

Addendum, 5/26/22

This is my second plea. Recent current events may have left you reeling and despairing, maybe hopeless. I know. Me too. But if you are among those who care enough about people and society to be bothered, please stick around. Fight with me. We need your voice. 

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead

And the Second Shot Was Hope

2/19/2021

Today I had the privilege of receiving my second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. As such, I arrived at Lincoln’s Pinnacle Bank Arena masked up, cheerful, and a little overwhelmed. I’m not used to being in big groups of people anymore. Being an immune-suppressed person living through a pandemic has changed both how I live and who I am.  

Short lines, long lines. Organization and disorganization. “Moderna or Pfizer?” again and again. Checklists on sanitized clipboards. A flash of cold on my deltoid, and a poke, and then a band-aid. My vaccination card--who knew a tiny piece of paper could be so precious?--handed back to me.

During my post-vaccine wait time, I sat on a metal chair in the back, the seat nearest the windows. My fifteen minutes passed. I stood and walked through the rows of chairs, eyes straight ahead. In the before times, I used to make eye contact with others. I used to smile and make small talk. I don’t do that these days. I was aware of how very alone I felt, even amongst so many people.

Someone caught the sleeve of my coat. I admittedly flinched and jerked back, on instinct. Because we don’t touch each other anymore, you see.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said an old man in a dark green jacket. His scant hair was as white as the N-95 mask strapped across his face. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It’s okay.” My hyperactivated body said it wasn’t, but my heart said it was. His brown eyes, all I could see on his face, were kind.

“I just wanted to tell you—you look so much like my wife.”

“Oh.” I paused. In the before times, I would’ve instinctively known how to be, how to act. How to make this person feel comfortable, even though he was the one to reach out to me. That’s just what I do.

Did. That’s what I did, before.

“Thank you,” I finally went with.

“She had big brown eyes and dark hair, like yours. I know I can’t see the rest of you—the damn masks—but you are like her. A beauty.”

“That’s very kind of you to say.”

Here, his eyes crinkled. Not a happy crinkle. “She died last year.”

And my own eyes must have given something away—did they dart back to the shot clinic?

“Oh, no, it wasn’t the virus. It was just her time. We’re old,” he said.

“I’m sorry about your wife,” I said. “You must miss her.”

“I do.” He shifted in his seat, pulling his baggy pant legs down further on his thin legs. “Anyway, I just couldn’t let you go without saying hello.”

“Well, hello,” I said, smiling under my mask. I might have reached out to shake his hand, if we did those things now.

“You have a good day, miss.”

And I opened my mouth to say, “you too,” but he wasn’t finished. And I’m glad he wasn’t finished.

“I hope you get to grow old, like my wife did. Maybe this shot will help you.”

It’s funny—when I think about times I’ve been very moved, I think about hour-long client sessions, entire books, meaningful conversations with friends. And now, I will always think about how these two sentences managed to melt my heart, one so long frozen with fear and isolation. 

For nearly a year, I’ve felt like I’ve been fighting for my right to live. As I’ve watched many people around me making no adjustments to their daily lives, I realized they didn’t care whether I lived or got sick or died—or, they may say they did, but were unwilling to make the sacrifices that backed up that statement. I’ve stopped feeling like other humans are inherently good. I’m not the self I was in the before, the self who believed in the power of others and who thought love would always, always win. I’ll probably never be her again.

And yet, when the stranger said to me, “I hope you live,” I cracked a little, and felt some of my old self seeping in through those jagged breaks. There was something special, something transformative, about this other human saying in real time, right to my face: I want life for you.

Maybe I’ll never be as hopeful or as willing to count on others as I was in the before. But maybe, also, there is still goodness in the world.

With tears in my eyes I said, “Thank you. You have no idea how much that means to me,” and me and the man said our goodbyes.

I showed up today for a COVID-19 vaccination, a serum that will reprogram my immune system to act differently in the face of the virus.

And I left with a different kind of instillation. Love and restored belief in serendipity and the most powerful, the most dangerous of the things, hope – those flow in my veins now, too.

I wonder which shot will help me more.

The Pandemic Pull

It’s a confusing time to be alive, amiright? I honest-to-God feel like I’m living in some kind of macabre TV show, a Groundhog Day/The Good Place/The Walking Dead mashup.

Every day brings a new challenge, usually in the form of an ethical or moral conundrum. We don’t want the economy to collapse, so we want to open up—but if we open up too soon, we may amp the spread of virus and overwhelm our healthcare systems. We yearn to see our family and friends, but wouldn’t be able to live with ourselves if we unknowingly carried COVID-19 to anyone we love. We want to support our local food places by ordering take-out, but are we bringing virus home on the food containers?

The very hardest thing for me lately, though, has been the polarity of my emotional responses. They are, in layman’s terms, “all over the fucking place.” Those who know me well know I’ve never exactly been a “medium emotion” kind of gal—I tend to have big feels. But this? The reactions that are coming with this pandemic bullshit? I’ve never felt so drawn and quartered, so pulled in very different emotional directions all at once:

I am in love with humanity for the sacrifices many have made to protect people at risk. I am disgusted with the many who continue to act in ways that puts their entitlement, shortsightedness, and lack of empathy on display. I am so grateful to be able to work: for the sense of agency and usefulness, the structure, the income. I am exhausted with the weight of others’ despair, anxiety, and grief. I want to be as connected as I can to my family and my world. I want to be alone as much as possible. I want to swallow the news cycle whole. I want to never hear the words “uncertain times” again. I am doing enough. I am never enough.

(I honestly get tired just reading that paragraph.)

If I were my client, I'd say to me, “You don’t have to choose. You don’t have to be either happy or sad, you can be both. People are neither entirely good nor bad, they’re both. Let it all in. Make room—I know you can. Let all the feelings make you bigger, so that you have more space in you the next time something is hard.”

And yet. Suggesting to anyone that they can hold all of these pandemic feels at once—the rage and the compassion, and sorrow and the hope, the restlessness and the acceptance—it’s a big ask. It’s so much holding. It’s exhausting. And I’m feeling it.

And I wonder if you are, too. 

Annals of a therapist during COVID-19: Day 1

3/26/2020

I’d intended, since I went into social isolation about twelve days ago, to write a few blog posts. Funny, uplifting stories and perspectives was the goal, because I think now more than ever, we need the ability to find joy and laughter.

And I might still do that. All bets are off.

But I haven’t yet been able to access that part of me that can pop off a funny anecdote like it’s nothing. The inside of my head is usually a ticker tape parade, colorful and chaotic and overwhelming, and often joyous. Now, though, it’s more like a funeral procession. My brain mechanics feel rusty and worn, slow and heavy, like maybe one of the gears fell out altogether and the others are having to compensate, but aren’t quite up to snuff. Like maybe the whole machine is about to go kaput.

The era of COVID-19 isn’t easy for anyone, so I’m not trying to say my mental distress is special. It’s not. I’m floundering in a completely foreign situation just like everyone around me is. Problem is, I’ve got people looking to me for help, too. I’m still a therapist, even if the world is upside down and inside out. Especially because the world is upside down and inside out.

It’s been a weird road, these past two weeks. The week leading up to Friday the 13^th of March, I was still in a state of heavy denial. The virus was just another flu. I was going to Jamaica on March 21, as planned for over a year. Over that week, I started the process of acknowledging and grieving what my losses were shaping up to be. And on Saturday the 14^th, I woke up and was like “waiiiit holy shit, hold the phone, what are you doing?” It was a strange experience, like all of these new and very real thoughts had infiltrated me and I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t been there all along. I accepted the reality and gravity of Coronavirus in a new way, and grasped my responsibility in flattening the curve. I cancelled my vacation. I got a telehealth platform set up for my practice. I emailed every client to tell them there would be changes in my service delivery. I created consent documentation and consulted consulted consulted. Between Saturday and Monday, I transformed my practice completely. It was exhausting, but exhilarating. I love learning, and I had to—and fast.

Fueled by caffeine, novelty, and optimism, I marched into last week. I saw twenty clients over telehealth, and the process went beautifully. No tech issues, and the whole videoconferencing thing felt a lot less interpersonally weird than I thought it might be. It felt empowering to be able to offer hope and guidance in bleak times. I ended the week with a sense of relief that I could still be a steady presence for my clients, put some good into the world, and also bring in some income for my family.

Enter this week. Now, I was supposed to be on vacation this week, so I opted to keep my caseload light. I scheduled nine people. I had hoped for a restorative week, filled with mostly reading and junk TV and personal stay-at-home projects. It has turned out to be a week of battling with insurance companies, intense client stress, and coming to grips with the mortality of my world. It has turned out to be a week of increasingly horrifying news, a week where I had conflict with family and friends about what “social distance” means in terms of how to enact it successfully, a week of fear and frustration and almost constant anger and anxiety. I’m trudging into Friday feeling like I’ve been steamrolled.

Today I held the sadness of a senior who will likely not celebrate the end of her high school career elbow-to-elbow with her friends. I held the desperation of a refugee who is running out of food with no apparent means of getting more, and whose children have fallen ill, possibly with Coronavirus. I held the anxiety of a pregnant mother who is unsure her partner will get to be in the delivery room with her when she labors. I witnessed the fear of my colleagues as we wonder if and how we will be reimbursed fairly for the important services we provide to others, in the age of telehealth, and I went to bat with and for them in the ways that I could.

Today I had my first panic attack in years.

Because the trauma of my clients is different than mine, but the same. I hold for them the very things I fear myself. Scarcity, financial ruin, loss, and death.

I assume tomorrow, if operating on a better night’s sleep, I will wake with a sunnier disposition. Optimism is my default, to the extent to which clients have described sessions with me as “hope infusions.”

But euthymic mood notwithstanding, I have no delusions of the next few weeks being easy. On me, on anyone. I think we’re in for some real shit, people.

And I guess until my funny bone kicks back in, I’m going to document it.

Kringle and Credit: To the woman who came before us

Every year, I make the Kringle, and I think of the woman who made it before me.

A woman I never met, but wish I had. Her name was Paula Haar, and she was my husband’s grandmother. A mother of five, a piano teacher, a talented organist, a lover of people, these things I know she was. I know these things through the stories her family still tells. Though she’s been gone for many years, she remains woven into the tapestry of people she brought into creation.

Every year, I think of her as I work the soft dough with butter-greasy hands, and I think: am I doing this right? Did her dough crack, too, just there, if she rolled it too thin? Did she, too, wonder if that was enough pecans in the filling, or too much?

Every year, I consider her legacy. Without Paula Haar, there’d have been no Margaret, my beloved mother-in-law. There’d have been no Jeb, and no story between he and I. There’d have been no Evie, no Jonah. Paula was responsible for the making not just of Kringle at Christmastime, but for an entire collection of some of my favorite people in this world.

How do you express gratitude to someone, simply for having lived?

I guess this is my way. I bake the Kringle, thinking of her rolling the dough, filling the pastries, years before I was even conceived.

Thank you and Merry Christmas, Grandma Haar

On being bad at birthdays

I’m going have a moment of honesty, here: I’m bad at birthdays. Really bad. I’m not at all an “I’m growing older with grace and appreciation” kind of gal. I’m more of a duck-and-cover, avoid the truth, “point me to your best anti-wrinkle cream” kind of gal. Though I’m certainly invested in developing the poise and gratitude toward aging that others around me seem to embody, I’m not there yet. I’ve never, ever been a natural at accepting myself as I am.   

And yet. When I stop to pause, when I look beyond the number and the achy joints and the new-and-already-deep eleven lines between my eyes, some of the changes that these past years have brought, I would not give back, not for anything. One point of development has been finding better ways to balance empathy with self-respect and assertiveness; in other words, I’m less likely to sacrifice my beliefs or needs to stay in others’ good graces; more likely to stick to my principles and have a dialogue or conflict about them if needed. Simultaneously, I’m more invested than ever in making the world better and kinder, one small action at a time. 

Maybe most importantly, I’m starting to own and honor what I am and accept what I’m not. I am moody. I am caring. I can be flaky and inconsistent despite having good intentions. My working memory isn’t good, so I will tell you the same story that I told you yesterday—but hopefully, it still makes you laugh. I am not a great hostess, but I am an okay bearer of random gifts and food. I have limits, physically and emotionally, and some of them are new. And finally, finally, I am accepting that I am not everyone’s type, and this is utterly okay, and in fact good. Being selective with who I pour my effort into is adaptive, both for me and for others—yet importantly, I can be kind and gracious to people even if we aren’t destined to be BFF. 

I am a writer. I am an activist. 

I am human. 

I’m 36. 

And if the price of the knowledge I now have at 36 was growing another year older, then so be it. Slowly, slowly I will learn to make peace with this process.

But I probably won’t be there by 37.

Penning privilege: What I learned from SCBWI 2018

When I attend conferences, my goal is to learn and retain one important thing. Just one, because at conferences, we take in data with indiscriminate abandon, and even with pages upon pages of notes and hours of excited post-lecture discourse with bright peers, who can keep more than one big takeaway? The conference I just attended (SCBWI, LA, 2018) was focused on writing kidlit, so I figured I leave with something to do with craft, or sales, or networking.

I did learn writing things. They’re in my notes.

What I will retain, however, is an expanded sense of my privilege, as a writer, and as a person.

As a counseling psychologist I’ve spent years in the study of it, in the awareness-building of it, in the talking to my clients and peers about it. And still, there are those life moments where I see the world through a different lens and come into contact with the extent of what I don't know. This weekend was one of those times. 

I became aware of my class privilege, as well as my lack of it, while chatting with conference colleagues about travel. We swapped thoughts on places we’d been and where we want to go. One woman shared which European destinations worked best for her young family, during their yearly summer two-week vacations.  Another shared which hotel pillows she preferred, and which beds, and which had the best toilet paper. I was swapping info and learning info, because my family can afford to travel a modest amount, but at the same time I was thinking about how neither of my parents had even been on an airplane until they were in their thirties. Our family vacations growing up were spending three days in nearby Kansas City or Des Moines, baseball games and museums and Dairy Queens, a far cry from the Isle of Capri or Edinburgh. 

My mom is as much a bookworm as I and had always spoken of writing a book, but in looking back, when would she have had time to pen the next American classic? Between 12-hour shifts working the floor at the county hospital? Or maybe in the one-hour time slot between suppertime and running off to my sporting events?  My mother would not have had the privilege of writing, not like I do, with my career and my spouse’s career and the way my life is set up. I’m so aware that there are many people in the world like my mother, those who have words inside of them that could be beautiful novels, but who do not the privileges of time and resources for writing. And yet, while I can afford time to write, and I can take my kids on trips in a way my parents couldn’t, and I had the means to come to this conference this year, I do not have the privilege of this conference fee and travel expense being a drop in the bucket, a one-off, something I can count on doing every year, as it seemed to be to so many people I talked to.

I became more aware of my racial privilege, in a city with far more racial and ethnic diversity than what is typically seen in my home city of Lincoln, Nebraska. It was unlikely anyone was going to doubt my motives because of the color of my skin. I was aware that, as a writer, I do and will come under less scrutiny than my peers of color. As Malinda Lo, one of the conference presenters, spoke of, the difficulty level I start with as a White woman is relatively easy, especially compared with those from marginalized groups, whose default might be "medium" or even "hard." I also thought more about my writing and became increasingly invested in the idea of not letting my manuscripts reflect “default race” as White.

And then there was this new-old thing going on, that has to do with both privilege and oppression. I was aware of the slide of eyes down the bends and curves of my body; men, in a way that made no pretense of hiding sexual interest; women, in barely-veiled disapproval of something hard to pinpoint: my body, my clothes, the way I carry myself? I must note here, too, that this didn’t happen with every person I encountered by any means, not even most. But when it did, I felt it, right in the scarred-over places of my patchwork heart. As an overweight, overachieving, straight-A straight laced teen I would have reveled in the appraisal, even the “bad” attention, because it was still attention. Even ten years ago, when I was still adjusting to a new type of body and a new type of interaction with the world, I had loud internal monologue when out in public, one that screamed, “I have a body! I am not just a brain on legs! Please, please, do you see me?”

And now it’s different. Though sometimes I still feel like girl who at age ten wore women’s size 18 clothing pulled off the racks of Wal-Mart because that’s what fit and that’s what we could afford, I’m more adjusted to this size 8 self, used to the way my body feels, the way the world treats me. By the third day of this conference, though, I started feeling when someone’s eyes crawled over my body. I felt sad. What hurt is that the dip between my breasts and the cleft between my legs was apparently a much bigger deal than the space between my ears.

I had the urge to run up to my room and change clothes, put something “more modest” on. Something that would make me invisible, or at least, no longer an object. But the feminist within me rallied, pushed back, “But why?” I was wearing my favorite dress, the one I call “my happy frock,” because I wore it when I went to Hamilton and the fabric is woven with all of my favorite colors, and it is breathable and cool and L.A. is hot. Why would I swap out my happiest clothing for less-comfortable camouflage?

I left the dress on, but I stopped looking people in the eye. Carefully, carefully I kept my eyes facing forward, or at the ground, or on my phone. Even though I didn’t let myself go incognito, shame still led me to shrink down, back down, not be myself, the self that would look people on the street in the eye and smile.

In this body of gained and lost weight I have gained and lost privilege, yet overall, the objectification of me has merely shifted. As an overweight youth, I was a funny, maybe tragic aberration, and now, I’m a sexual commodity.  

As I sit here in the Los Angeles International Airport, at a charging station in my simple black peasant midi dress that I purchased for $25 at Old Navy, I think of the privilege that brought me here. I have the means and support to be across the country from home, taking time away from work and my family. I have a laptop that I’m plunking away on. I sip on a Dunkin Donuts iced latte and snack on M&Ms, because I could buy these things and because no one will judge someone my size for putting junk in my body. People do not clutch their purses closer when I come near, because I’m White and not seen as inherently criminal.

And the man sitting across the table from me cannot stop looking at my chest. I’ve got my eyes dropped to my laptop, because I need to need to need to need to need to finish this post, but also, I don’t want to look at his bushy eyebrows, red-alcoholic nose, frizzled hair. I don’t want to see him. But I know he’s there. Maybe before I leave, I’ll get brave and shoot him a return look, one that lets him know that I disapprove. A look worthy of Minerva McGonagall herself. But maybe I won’t, because I’m here alone and he’s bigger than me and I am, after all, a woman.

I’m coming home from this conference with more than I thought I’d leave with. A suitcase of new books, a notebook full of plot ideas, a bulleted list of things to discuss with my agent, a handful of writerly contacts to keep in touch with, a deepened understanding and relationship with my dear critique partner, and this, my one big takeaway thought, the one I’ll retain without help or review: I have privilege. I lack privilege.

And my fervent hope is that this post helps you to think more holistically about your own.

The gift of closure

Every day, life hands you a gift. Rarely, it hands you a Very Big Gift.

Sometimes that Very Big Gift comes in the form of unexpected closure.

We all want closure, right? Many of my clients are very explicit in their desire for it. One client described the loose ends in her life as constituting her very own Circle of Hell, a fiery inferno of What Ifs, I should’ve saids, ‘I wish’es, if onlys.

It’s human to crave the end of something distressful, and also to believe that we must see the end of that something to truly heal and move on. We as a society tend to like symmetry, and full circles, and clean cuts.

Yet, we live in world that’s inherently asymmetrical, the circles more like wavy ovals and rarely all the way closed, and the cuts jagged, hard to stitch up. The world we live in is messy. And despite our best efforts, we as people are messy.

It is for these reasons that I, more often than not, end up in a tough love position when my clients tell me that they need this thing to move on in their life. They need that apology. They need that validation. They need to be heard, or seen, or noticed. Need, need, need, they say, and I smile, and nod, and then say, “no, you don’t.”

You see, it’s a matter of want. We want those edges sewn up. We want to know we’ve said all we could, or that we were understood, or that there are no hard feelings. We want to apologize or be apologized to. We want the mess cleaned up, swept up, stowed away.

But we don’t need it. And in fact, I think it’s the believing that we need something from someone, in order to move on, that keeps people sunk into distress, despair, and with bad habits on repeat. When we rely on the reactions of someone else to determine our healing, we put the key to our contentment into someone else’s pocket.

Closure in the form of an interaction with another person, a certain thing you want to say or want said to you, is certainly something you can crave, yearn for, and seek out. And sometimes, if you’re really, very lucky, you just might get it. But hear this: You Are Not Entitled to It. If you get it, consider it a gift. Consider it an ultimate win.

Nine times out of ten, people don’t get closure in the form of an interaction with another person. They get it from somewhere inside of them. They learn to think about the situation in a different way. They accept that there are things that will never get to be said, or heard, or felt. They accept their lack of power in de-cluttering all of the chaos in the very messy world, and they find ways to move on with their lives. It can be done.

My life is just as messy as anyone else’s; maybe a little more so. That being said, I’ve got some broken circles hanging out limbo, swinging from branches, taunting me with their lack of completion. One of these broken circles, in particular, was not only broken, but also on fire. It has kept me up at night. I’ve cried about it, raged about it. It comes up in my dreams and I wake drenched with cold sweat and cursing my pockmarked and hypersensitive heart. And because I thought it was the best thing to do, I worked very hard at making peace this thing, internally. My gut told me that it wasn’t fair to involve the other person who held the missing link in my incomplete circle—because my circle was my burden to carry, not theirs.

I made progress. I left the circle hanging up in the branches, scorched and ashy, but no longer burning. I became able to tolerate its brokenness. I accepted it as it was.

Then I happened to run into the person who had the power to complete that tattered circle. And because I am both very lucky and also because there is goodness in the world, the person gifted me with closure. I said some stuff I’d wanted to say. I got some questions answered that had weighed on me. I felt heard and forgiven and valued, and I hope the other person did, too.

To be clear: I didn’t deserve this interaction. I didn’t earn it. I wasn’t entitled to it. It just happened. It was a gift.

I’ve still got a lot of broken circles hanging out in my branches—unfinished business and unanswered questions and points of grief and loss. It’s pretty human to have a few. And I know with a certainty that runs bone deep that many of my circles will never be closed; they’ll always be missing a piece, or bent beyond recognition, or crafted with a dotted line.

But I’ve gotta tell you: I am grateful, grateful, grateful to have one less now.

Half my life

I recently turned 35. I’ve been with my husband, Jeb, for 17.5 years. Do the math: I’ve been with this man half my life.

Yet not even the knowledge that comes with time can stop me from sometimes being plagued with doubt. I often worry whether we’re doing marriage “the right way.” I don’t know about you, but I do this thing where I look at other couples and assume they have it all figured out, everything in their life is perfect and wonderful. I go so far as to let others’ lives play out like movies in my mind. Other couples, watching every TV show together, spending all night talking. Agreeing on every single opinion about every single thing in life, ever. Skipping through dewy meadows in their perfectly pressed clothes and clean shoes, then going home to their pristine houses. (Y’all are killing it, in my imagination.)

I wonder if people do that with me and Jeb. We have an exceptionally well-documented life via social media, due to Jeb being a photographer and also knowing a lot of photographers. A quick perusal of either of our Facebook  accounts reveals lots of pretty pics of us, all made up. Tons of snaps of our kids being awesome. Photos from tropical vacations, and warm, cozy holidays. Our social media screams “We’re happy! SO FREAKING HAPPY!”

And that’s about half of the truth. A lot of the time, we are happy, content, doing fine.  

And a lot of the time, we’ve struggled.

Getting married is easy. You find someone you love. You think, yeah, I could spend my life with this person. You have a celebration and your friends and family all show up and everyone cries. The world is your oyster; everything is possible.

It’s staying married that’s hard.

If you’d have asked me at twenty-three, which is how old I was when I got married, I’d have predicted that over the years, I’d change very little—I knew who I was, what I wanted, the road I was headed down. I had it all figured out.

Except I didn’t and I didn’t have enough foresight to see that I didn’t.

People can change a hell of a lot over time, and I think it’s possible that Jeb and I changed more than most. I pursued many years of higher education, and due to that, was exposed to ideas and people and adversity and growth and culture in a way that molded me, shaped me, carved me into a different person. As for Jeb, he left his job as a public school educator and became a full-time photographer/creative. He learned that he needs to be making things, thinking outside of the box, and not answering to a hierarchy to feel fulfilled through his work.

We also became parents of two kiddos in a span of twenty months, so as we were stretching and learning and developing our singular identities, we were also immersed in the task of keeping tiny humans alive.

The years marched on. I got my PhD and started a private practice. The kids started school. We went to family celebrations. We hung out with friends. We did date nights sometimes. We traveled. We pursued individual hobbies and interests. We built a house and moved to a lovely new neighborhood.

And then one day in our thirties we woke up and realized we had no idea who the other was. I won’t speak for his side of it, but my personal awakening came with the question: Why are we together? We had different groups of friends. We didn’t read the same books, or necessarily gravitate to the same kinds of media, or have any hobbies in common. I loved Jeb, but I didn’t know why I was with him anymore.

At about the same time I was grappling with these serious questions about my marriage, I became depressed— so depressed I couldn’t even see straight. It seemed like every decision I’d ever made in my life was wrong. I questioned my entire existence as a human being: where I’d come from, what I was doing now, where I was going. It was hell. And Jeb got angry and withdrew. He didn’t know what to do with me; didn’t understand what I was trying to say when I talked about my questions, about my doubts, about what wasn’t working for me in our marriage. In hindsight, he was depressed, too, but men sometimes look different when they’re depressed. (Google Masked Male depression for more on that.)

And we fought. Good Lord, did we fight. There were tears and storming out and many nights spent sleeping apart. I spent the night of our 11^th wedding anniversary at my parent’s house, that’s how bad it was.

We contemplated separation. We ate meals together with our kids and had our best “everything is fine” faces on, even as I researched apartments, always late at night, or at the office, while I wept my way through my fifth box of Kleenex.  

But in the chaos, something miraculous happened. We fought for each other. Even through all the squabbling and miscommunicating and passive-aggression, we kept coming back to the same point: we wanted to try. We wanted our family. We wanted to see if we could find each other again.

So we tried. We went to therapy together, and went to therapy individually. First, we bent. I started trying harder to listen to him when he was sharing something he was excited about, even when I was exhausted from listening to people all day, and even if what he was saying didn’t interest me. He started greeting me when I came in the door after work, and went out of his way to tell me all the ways he appreciates me. Essentially, we slowly figured out the ways we had been failing each other and made the others’ emotional needs a priority again. We made a few big shifts, but mostly, we made a million little changes.

And after awhile, we had bent so much that we softened; the rigid edges of us melting. I let him back into the places in my spirit that had long been steeled against him. Though he isn’t and will never again be the man I married, he became a man I wanted to stay married to.

I don’t think that Jeb’s my soulmate. This is because I don’t believe in soulmates, this idea that you can meet someone and POOF, love happens and it’s forever and you don’t have to do anything to make it work. I used to buy into this stuff, and sometimes that wily belief wants to come weaseling back in—mostly when Jeb and I are struggling. I think, during those rough times: “Oh, if only I’d found my soulmate and married him, then I wouldn’t be going through any of this arguing or pain or doubt.” But you know what? I call bullshit. What I really believe in is two people fighting for each other and choosing each other again and again and again, every day. I can’t think of any better definition of love than that.

I didn’t write this for some kind of “atta girl.” I’m not aiming for you all to see me as a paragon of morality, because believe you me, the level of fuck uppery that I’ve reached during these years of growth and struggle has been unreal. I also fully anticipate that I will in some way, at some point, mess something up again.  Our struggle isn't over. It's not a thing that ends. I think marriage/partnership is less like a straight line with some kind of destination that a couple can arrive at, and more like a circle with little pit stops along the path, some happy, some sad, some totally fucked up. And round and round the circle you go, hopefully learning how to navigate the rough times as you know yourself and your partner better.

I also didn’t write this to shame those of you who have divorced or ended long term partnerships. I don’t think every relationship can be saved, or should be.  

I wrote this for the folks like me, who are sitting there comparing their imperfect relationship to everyone else’s “perfect” one, lurking and hiding in secret shame. If your marriage is messy, if there’s some stain on it that you wish wasn’t there but is, if you’ve hurt your partner or been hurt, if you’ve wondered if you made the “right” choice in a partner—you’re not alone. You’re more normal than you think. The more I talk to people who I’m real with, and who are real with me, the more I realize that every long term romantic relationship has problems. It’s what we do with the problem that matters.

As for me, I’m going to keep trying with Jeb for as long as it makes sense to try. Being with him for half of my life hasn’t been nearly long enough.  

Photo: Sarah Gudeman   http://www.sarahgudeman.com

Dust

8/13/17

Sometimes I write bittersweet things. Is there anything more beautiful than that edge between joy and pain? Here's a little snippet from a work-in-progress novel. 

***

It’s been months.

Days pass where I hardly think of you at all.

Days pass where I am buried and smothering in you.

I don’t know which is better.

There was a time that I wanted every trace of you away from me, because the shards you left sticking out of my skin were bleeding and painful. I picked you out with tweezers. I threw the bits and pieces of you into the air and watched them soar.

And now I bleed less but I remember less. I can hardly remember the way that your chocolate eyes crinkled and your hair grayed—just a little—at the temples. Your face is all blurry, like a moonlight lake reflection of you, not Actual You. I’m not sure what your voice sounds like anymore.

Sounded like.

Remember when you started talking about me in the past tense? I do remember that.

I’m not sorry that I met you. Months ago, when I was bleeding, I was sorry. But now I can see that if I wouldn’t have known you, there are so many other things I wouldn’t have known, some of them so precious to me that I wouldn’t be willing to give them back, not for anything. Not even if I could.

And so even though maybe you ruined my life a little bit, I have no choice but to welcome in my grudging gratitude for you.

I don’t know what to wish for you. When I think of you, you’re smiling. Happy. Looking at your new lover like she is made of magic, your light reflected in her eyes. On my very best days, I think of this and send you warmth, and kindness, and “I’m so glad, I want this for you, you deserve happiness” -type intentions.

And on my lesser days, I wish thoughts of me would steal over you and soak into your body like heavy August damp.

Maybe in years, when so many days have passed that I’ve lost track, and the memories are faded and yellow and brittle with age, this will all mean nothing.

But even then, in some recess of my heart you will stay. You held yourself out to me with cupped hands, and I drank you in. You’ll be with me even as memories turn to dust and scatter in the wind.

I suppose I hope you are being you. Wherever you are. 

To the friends who saw Me and liked me anyway

On one of the last days of my undergraduate career, one of my best friends wrote this in my graduation card. “When I met you, I didn’t like you. I was a fool.”

Youch.

But it only took me about thirty seconds to completely understand what she meant. Why she’d felt that way. 

You see, I wasn’t the easiest person to get to know, in my younger years. It was weird: I was SO excited to go to college. I’d thought I would reinvent myself, create a new identity. I was all outward confidence and gusto, and if anyone would have asked, I’d have told them I was planning to take UNL by the balls.

Yet I didn’t know myself at all. There was all of this stuff happening on the inside of me that I couldn’t see.

I entered my freshman year convinced that I’d already made all the close friends I was ever going to make, EVER. I thought that only people who’d known me my whole life, since the beginning, would really care for me. In other words, I didn’t see myself as likable. It was more like I saw people as tolerating me—and not because they wanted to, but because they’d had to.

That (unconscious) attitude followed me around UNL for my first two years. I was closed off, reserved. I didn’t put much time or effort into making new friends. I poured every ounce of energy into academics, the one thing I knew I did well. I’m pretty sure I came off as a quieter, less spirited Hermione—the 11-year old Hermione living in the 19-year old me. (I even had really poofy hair. Hermione central!)

Yet even though I had no idea how to find it or build it, there was a big and growing part of me that craved community. Belongingness. So I applied to be a Resident Assistant for UNL. I’m forever grateful to the late (and wonderful) Sheryl Haug, the woman who chose me to be a part of her staff at Cather Hall. She saw something in me and gave me a chance. Without her, I’d probably still be Grangering it up, able to tackle serious math theorems but unable to make friends. 

I got a chance to meet my future fellow coworkers the Spring of my sophomore year. I had super unchecked anxiety at the meet-up, and this came out of me as rigidity. Shut-down mode. And it didn’t matter, because these people weren’t going to like me much, anyway.

Though not a lot of real info got over my walls during that first encounter, there was this one guy who stood out, who I thought about long after the day had passed. He was everything I wasn’t yet everything I was. He was blunt, sarcastic, uninhibited. I was none of those things. Yet he also seemed to love Moulin Rouge and kids and music—like me. He scared the bejesus out of me and I dreaded seeing him in the fall. And, because life is life, he was the very first person I saw when I rolled up to move into Cather Hall the following August. We saw each other, and he—who wears all of his emotions on his face—gave me a lackluster hi, obviously not thrilled to see me. And I spoke through my teeth to my dad, “I don’t think I’m going to get along with that one.”

Our whole staff went on a retreat together, immediately, the same day we all moved in. It was a weekend full of ice breakers, trust falls, ropes courses-- you know, all that bonding crap. But I'll be damned if it didn't work. I let down my guard and started to let people see who I actually was. And they didn’t hate me. And that guy, the one who scared the shit out of me? He quickly became one of the best friends I ever had. (His name is Brett Hall and he is a stand up guy.)

My RA staff friends became lifelines to the self I wanted to be. I didn’t want to be stiff and scared of my own shadow. I wanted to be fun and silly and brave. I wanted to laugh a lot. I wanted to believe that I was a likable person, even if I’m not everyone’s type. These friends taught me that I could be...well, me.  And they brought me Razzles and ate Thanksgiving dinner in my room with me and drug me to Tarentino movies I'd never go to otherwise and drank Parrot Bay with me and bitched about hall government with me and hugged me when my great-grandma died and covered my socials for me when I was too depressed to handle them. They were always there. (Literally. I lived, worked, ate, and went to class with these people.)

For a long time I’ve known what these guys did for me. I’ve talked about it in graduate school classes, and with my clients. I even pseudo-used this life experience as inspiration for my dissertation, which focused on social adjustment to college for rural students. I don’t know if I ever really thanked them, though.

So, to all of my Cather Staff peeps: thank you, thank you, for seeing all of my weird quirks and liking me anyway. I don’t know where I’d be today if it hadn’t been for you.

You will all be my friends 4 Life.