mental-health

And On Day 9, She Rested.

Day 2

I woke up here, on this island. I have no history, no identity, just a sense of belonging here only and always, and four incisions bruising on my abdomen. I hear everyone telling me to take it easy, to rest, to not worry. But I don’t worry. There’s no where to go here. The moon was full last night, and made the snowscape bright and reflective like glass. I awoke every three hours to alarms, telling me to take another pain pill. Tylenol, then ibuprofen, then Tylenol. They are the waves on the shoreline, and I am listening to them come in before sleep. At the 3AM, I willed myself to stay awake longer. The moonlight was too bright to close my eyes on, and it was too strange to see the night so bright that real, firm shadows formed on the ground. I spend the following day watching the same shadows from the sun. It was 1 degree in the morning, so cold that the hinges on the inside of the front door were frosted. My mother called. I don’t know how she found me here, or how I knew she was my mother. She said she made gingersnaps, and yesterday pizzelles. “It’s not Christmas til the pizzelles are made,” she said, and I wondered what was Christmas and neither judged nor resonated, only accepted that somewhere off this island, there was Christmas, but it didn’t effect me. Here was only wind that smacked snow to the side of every tree, slathered like white mud, making every tree a birch. I can’t imagine a prettier island, to exist in the center of a wood of cold birches. The winter day is closing its dense, blue eyelid. Here comes sleep, then alarm, sleep, alarm, and I hope for the moon to break up the night.

I love it here. But I get the nagging sense that I will have to leave someday, and it grieves me.

Day 3

There are prints that lead beneath the house in the snow– they look too large to be a squirrel but it’s too hopeful that they belong to a rabbit. I’m pleased to know that there is other life on the island, even if I am still too slow to catch it. I watch icicles like television, the prisms casting color before they frost over like teeth, dripping with hungry thoughts of spring.

Spring is a new idea on the island. I’m grateful it does not come here. I can’t imagine the chaos of vines and leaves whipping themselves around, mussing up the simplicity of a white blanket and footprints and the skeletal tan beech leaves I could count.

Day 4

It’s my fourth day on this island and the strangeness has worn off to normalcy. In fact, it is only strange that I ever believed in a world beyond the snowy sea. Complicated schedules and maps and to do lists have distilled down to baseless things. The only reigning importance is this: nourishment, bowel movements, deep breathing, sleep, and an occasional exploration of the perimeter. I am bodily reduced to these touchstones as before my mind was strengthened to perform complexities which on this island, I cannot fathom. Text messages come in like foreign postcards in the claws of gulls, indecipherable to this small world I inhabit. One ship has perched on shore, but brought no new news, only supplies to further my wait here. I will not starve. I will wait til the waters dry up and the boundaries soften and what happened here will little matter except that I knew only this for a time, and this was my home, and I was content to survive without curiosity and with contentment. The bright white out my window will sear like a memory blanket behind my eyes as I fall asleep and wish for the deep rest I have found here alone.

Day 5

And now time has snapped back into place. The island was an illusion. These things exist, in no particular order of importance and with equal certainty–

Monday
my body
my neighbor’s house
Europe
schools
seasons
music

Also, I have become aware of
schedules.
lists.
tasks.
Monday (again).

The realization is as shocking as it is normal, and I already mourn for day 1, 2, 3, 4 of a floating poet of no consequence who nearly lived a life into oblivion.

The biggest, most prominent awarenesses may be:
– a ticking clock

which leads to:
– irritations
– reality
– change
-clarity
-mournfulness
-regret
-longing

Oh, and look at that. Dashes. I have structured my lists, conditioned from the Before Time. I am not gently unraveling but forcibly conforming. Heart rate, higher. Motivation, momentous. Productivity, impossibly expected.

The island was not an illusion. And I was trying to fight to leave it too soon. My body not ready, my mind pushing forward. All of this time can’t be wasted. I began to panic. I pushed harder, walked longer, wore myself to pain, balled up my will and tried again. I exhausted myself on Day 6, walking outside in -12 degrees for over a mile, collapsing the rest of the day. That night, I told my Someone I had to write a book. I scanned the internet (it existed suddenly on the island), and realized much was expected of me. I should rest so that I could write a song. I should rest so I could write a book. I should rest so I could do more more more more more more more more more more more. I should rest, because rest means I can be better, bigger. There will be something to come of this rest. And if there isn’t, well, perhaps I did not take my rest seriously enough. I began making ridiculous goals. If I couldn’t sit upright to be productive in making books– hard as I’d tried– I would instead read books. An impossible number. I would finish at least one a day. I would consume books to prove that I am filling my well for future creativity. People would look at my online ledger and wonder how– HOW?– could anyone read this many books in such a short amount of time? Then, I made possible but fraught goals. I would do yoga every day. I would practice piano every day til my abdomen hurt. I would complete one mundane task a day. Suddenly my days of rest were so regimented, so riddled with expectation, I wished for the days before I rested so I could rest again.

And that’s when the spiraling began. Because I couldn’t– I physically couldn’t, not even to account for my mental capacity– hold up the weight of these expectations. I’m not even allowed to lift 5 pounds, let alone the hundreds of pounds of self imposed standards. I fell flat. It snowed that day, usually one of my favorite days. But as it piled up outside, I felt the weight pressing down on me. I became bitter, remembering when a snow day meant rest, and now a snow day means fighting the rest. I gave up, at last, and put myself to bed. A two hour nap. When I woke up, I made hot chocolate– with help lifting the maple syrup. I began a puzzle. I justified it as a snow day, but I worried that it would be the same tomorrow, the next day. And I still hadn’t written that novel that was supposed to come from all of this rest. I wished for exhaustion and got it, sleep without rest.

The next day was the same. I now lived on the shoreline of the island, unsure how to leave, unsure how to rest. I would leave. I would leave tomorrow.

I woke up angry, annoyed. I shoved myself into the small boat and pushed myself from the island I loved. Not because I wanted to leave, but because I felt like I had to. I didn’t deserve this place. I’d already overstayed. It was Day 8, for godssake. I couldn’t check out forever. Once out at sea, the waves grew more harsh. My body couldn’t handle it. My thoughts became the thrashing waves, a ship of haze– unrelenting, nonsensical, and from every direction. I became disoriented. I became a ball of defiant energy, a little work force of resistance, of fear, of small brutal efforts. And then I became a mouse at the bottom of a boat, running back and forth.

And then, another boat appeared. Lindsey. She tethered her boat to mine, lobbing over a bag of roasted eggplant tomato soup and fresh squeezed orange juice and a small gift wrapped prettily in orange paper. Then she sat with me in the middle of the sea while I tried to pretend my tears were just the water sloshing around. She’d been here before, in this exact part of the sea. It was a little and a long way to go, she said. She had a map, and showed it to me. I couldn’t make sense of it, but I love to see maps, and it made me feel calm. She stayed very still while I sometimes raged and punched at the water. When she left, I was still drifting, but toward somewhere. I let myself be pushed around as I did the gentlest yoga in the middle of my boat. I let myself think–

Who am I if I am not helping? Contributing? Performing?

I let myself think–

What happens to me when I am reduced to I AM, I AM, I AM.

I let myself think–

People are allowed to be not useful, but I am not allowed to be not useful.

I let my ideologies be pushed around. I thought how I believed somewhere that I would heal better than anyone else. I thought how I was in competition, to be better at getting better faster than anyone else. I thought of the merit of my own body, and then the merit of having a body unable to serve. I remembered a foreign postcard text my friend Dani sent me on Day 2, when she said, “I hate when reality screws up my positive thinking plans. And all that stuff that happens to other people certainly won’t happen to ME. Yep, reality bites.”

And then I thought, I am not special to be here in this floating sea alone and capable. But I am special to be in this floating sea where other people have been floating before and know the place that I am floating.

I thought– what is the lesson?

I thought– this is the lesson.

I thought– because there is no lesson. At last.

Day 9

This morning, I awoke in the world I left before surgery. I thought, “I would like to go to a bookstore soon.” And it seemed strange that I would want to go, but also that I remembered what a bookstore is. How decadently normal. My Someone has set up two bird feeders on a shepherd’s hook in front of my bedroom window, and when he delivered coffee to me in bed, he opened the curtains and I was shocked and amazed to see it. All day I’ve stayed in this room, even though I don’t need to stay in this one space. I’m well enough that I could leave. But I am choosing to stay because so far I have seen chickadee, titmouse, nuthatch, bluejay, and a hairy woodpecker, and I can’t stand to miss a minute. I read a poem this morning that said True creation is always purposeless, without ulterior motive.* It reminded me of an island I used to live on. I read more of the poem and, for the first time in months, I felt the poem touch my heart. True rest is also always purposeless. They have always been attached, twinned, but necessarily separated. Rest and creation cannot see one another, or the spell is broken, and they both disappear. I do not rest to create, or I do not create. I do not create so I may rest, or I will never rest. Today I remember my island, and I rest.

And here, by accident, create.

*”Fugue,” by Hayan Charara from These Trees, Those Leave, This Flower, That Fruit

To Be Small and Alone and Alive

I have been lately in recovery. Or rather, I’ve been in attempt to recover my childhood. Not dredging up memories or sorting family history with the perspective of adulthood. But mining for the pockets of being a kid that made me feel alive. Some call this “childlike wonder.” But I’m not interested in being childlike. I don’t want to diminish the true and real magic of sinking into one’s own imagination in terms of likeness, or in terms of condescension. I am not trying to “act like a kid,” but to be myself. My whole self.

While my Someone was in California last month, I had the house alone for the first time in our three years living in New Hampshire. Our home is a cabin at the end of a dead end street with a thick edge of forest. In the spring, the birds are so loud it’s sometimes difficult to hear one another when we sit on the porch. As summer wrapped, under a moonless sky, I could hear everything. Every shift of leaves under the falling acorns. Every rustle in the woods– a bear? a skunk? a fox? a weasel? (we have them all)– that had me on edge as I tried to play it cool on my porch swing, sipping NA wine and reading a book. Something about the fear, the bumps in the night, took me somewhere else. I texted Annie– “I think something is in the woods?” Intuitively, she Facetimed me right away. We chatted for a good long while, until she said, “Well, do you feel better?” And I did. We hung up and I waited longer, letting the sound of crickets overtake the real-or-imagined bumps in the woods. We had only last week had a bear come and mangle our bird feeders and shepherd’s hooks. I double checked that I had brought the feeders in. I had. And then, I stood up, unplugged the lights, and walked to the front porch steps, and sat down. Above me, the stars were blazing. The dark wrapped me up like a blanket, and I watched as one, two– was that a third?– shooting star passed between the crowns of my trees. I was not afraid of the dark, it turns out. I was afraid to be standing only on the edge of the dark, to be separate, to only stand on the precipice of living rather than saturating myself in the deep of it all.

In Madeleine L’Engle’s book Walking on Water, she writes an entire chapter on the ages we hold within us. When we grow to be fifteen, we still carry our five-year-old self, our fourteen-year-old self, our just-born self. I reference this on occasion, but usually in terms of justifying my joy or explaining my little-“t” trauma. The real point, I think, is that we don’t lose anything by growing older. We don’t lose our ability to imagine, to create, to be fearless and uncritical just by gaining a year and perspective. We are not just allowed, but are necessarily required to call on these younger selves to navigate the world around us. To censor them is to lose ourselves. Which means that to try and recover my child-self– I am not finding something that is lost out in the world, left like a doll on a riverbank– I am simply resting my 39-year-old self and my 38-year-old self all the way back until my 6-year-old self can have the space to move without criticism or restriction. I am not becoming a kid again, I am a kid already. Everyone else can take a nap.

The thing is, when I was a kid, I didn’t think of myself as a kid. Don’t you remember how you bucked and brooded to be left out of adult conversations? To be told you weren’t old enough, that you were too young to understand? I knew in my mighty small heart that I could handle it, that I contained otherworldly knowledge that could not only be trusted, but could be the key to the lock of poor adult judgement. Of course I did– because didn’t I always have to explain to those stupid adults the picture I just drew? The intricacies of story, the Easter eggs planted throughout, the intention behind using yellow instead of red when it was all so obvious to look at? So to be a kid again is not to act with immaturity, but to set forth with utmost confidence, to believe the thing we are born with– that we belong, that we understand, and that we are important.

During my weekend alone, I spent each night on the porch reading. Then I would shut off the lights and look at the stars. I felt the habit growing in me– to look up. It felt like reconnecting. I continued to do so after my Someone returned home. Instead of working until 10, unwinding with a show and calling it a night, I stopped our work at 9:30. Whether he would stop working or not did not deter me. I would sit on the porch, I would be quiet, and I would look at the stars. I lulled my thirties to sleep this way. Then my twenties. And by the time Laurie asked me to come and teach a short bookbinding project for a couple days at the local elementary school, I’d finally found her– the Preteen that would stay up late writing poetry, drawing, and losing time to listening to the same record four times in a row.

The night before my first class, I went to my studio late. I would just put something quick together– a little book for the kids that they would get the point and I could move on and go to bed. But then I remembered what it was like to be a kid. How “kid things” were unappealing. And then I put aside my belief of myself as The Adult Teaching Kids and became a kid. I worked on my little book and 10pm became 11pm. I would miss the porch tonight, but I didn’t mind. There was no music on– just the sound of the crickets outside and of scissors cutting, and of a glue brush swiping across the paper. When it was finished, my Someone had given up and gone to the house, and it was 2AM when I followed.

I cannot remember the last time I fell into a creative portal til 2AM.

I had made a book. But more, I had found something of myself. The class went well the next day, I was still energized from the making. I hardly used the book in the teaching, but it didn’t matter. I am in recovery, and will always be. Because to let my younger selves take the reins is not just an act of discovery or healing, it’s prudent to preserve my well-being. And it’s the living.

This is my little book. It’s about how I felt as a kid to read. Luckily, I am still that kid, and it is also how I feel now.

The Great Experiment

“Love Trump, too?” Chris asked me backstage in the green room. “Trump, too?” he persisted before I had a chance to answer.

“Well, it would appear so,” I responded slowly. It seems I’d pigeonholed myself here. My Someone and I have been performing a song for the last couple of months in front of a myriad of people titled “Love Them, Too,” and the concept is as direct as the title. Mostly, it has highlighted our failings in the department of Loving Thy Neighbor. It has also created a small confession booth following our shows, of audience members approaching us and delivering their list of who in their life is impossible to love. Not with excuse– just as a fact. But the question Chris pushed back to me wasn’t something I hadn’t asked myself. It was a question I didn’t expect from someone else. And I was unprepared to give a definitive answer. What does it mean to love someone? What is my definition of love? What is his?

So, I got quiet, and Chris did, too. And we let that be an answer enough as he picked up his guitar and headed to the stage for his set.

We are one month since the election, and an entire season has passed. I have a whole journal full of my thoughts on the matter that don’t all that much matter. It is not that I am becoming despondent. It is that I am becoming water. It will come as little to no surprise that the results were not what I’d voted for, not what I’d hoped. The morning after Election Day, I did not try to fight reality like the first time. Instead, I asked my Someone for a cup of coffee, of which he promptly made and brought back to bed. And we sat and we watched the leaves dying outside of our bedroom window and we waited. We waited for the news to sink in. We waited for our feelings to settle. We waited for an answer of the next right thing. We waited for the sign that it was time to get out of bed.

And that is when I knew I would become water.

The first time around, I suffered. I checked my newsfeed chronically, I worried aloud with my friends, I posted snarky things on the internet, I called people names.

“I will not suffer this time,” I told my Someone. “We will not suffer this time.”

“Okay,” he agreed.

“Nothing we did worked before, and we can’t do it again. We will get hurt– things will hurt us– but we do not have to suffer.”

“Okay.”

“And if it doesn’t work?” I asked.

“If it doesn’t work, we can go back to staring at our phones and being irrationally angry with everyone,” he said.

My phone dinged. It was Alice. She worried about getting the medication she’d need for the next few years to maintain her health, and to continue her life as a woman.

Then it was fellow musician friends– “Are you okay?”

I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath.

“Instead, I will become water. I will travel quietly and naturally to the lowest places. I will go to the darkest depths and I will wait there. And as I wait, it will erode; and when it erodes, and new path will form and we will all find a new way out.”

“We will become water,” he repeated.

We would become water, and we would begin The Great Experiment: to love our neighbors.

It was time to get out of bed.

This is what I know to be true: that to call someone my enemy is to take away a small part of their humanity. And when I take a small part of their humanity, I care less about what happens to them. When I care less about what happens to them– when my ill-wishes become personally justified– I become a little less human, too.

So why do I do it? Why do I call someone names, or doom scroll for sarcastic memes, or preoccupy my mind with all the reasons that the “other side” is wrong? Or even preoccupy myself with their being “the other side?” Because it makes me right. The second I step from the ledge of fighting for someone to fighting against someone else, I can feel good about myself. Calling someone a Nazi makes me not a Nazi– which, in recent history, should be a sign of virtue. Calling someone an asshole when they cut me off in traffic means that I am a good driver. It feeds my ego. It makes me self righteous. I am justified because I am right. This, too, makes me not only the judge, but also the bringer of justice. I lay on my horn (he deserved it). I call someone a Big Orange Monster (well, it’s true). And how do I feel afterward?

A little empty. But for a second, I was right. And that felt good. So I do it again. Repeat repeat repeat until my ego is thoroughly protected in a bubble of righteous indignation that can neither hear nor see the small destructive path I am creating behind me in the name of justice. Which requires more evidence for the narrative of my rightness. Now, everything I see becomes a dichotomy of are-you-with-me-or-are-you-an-ignorant-traitor.

Don’t get me wrong– anger is good. Anger can bring clarity, and clarity can bring action. Note– action. Not reaction. That I become water and swell in a storm of anger may clear the space I need to see where I will flow next. Eventually, the storm must end. And then, I must reckon with settling again to the lowest places and waiting. Gently eroding, and waiting.

The day after Election Day, we put our feet on our floor to begin The Great Experiment. Fortunately, our friends Rowe & Laurie were coming over for coffee on the porch to help us decide what it meant. The weather was improbably perfect– overcast, gloomy, and a little warm. We talked about becoming water. We talked about not judging our circumstances by this particular moment in time. We practiced saying, “Maybe so.”

“Democracy is crumbling.”

“Maybe so.”

“It’ll work out.”

“Maybe so.”

“I am afraid for my friends.”

“Me, too.”

It was not indifference. It was not denying reality. It was simply not suffering. We told them about The Great Experiment– that we would love our neighbors.

“There is a way we could do it,” Laurie said, ever putting practice to parable, “We can start by drawing a small circle around ourselves and asking– ‘Is everything okay in here?’ and if the answer is ‘yes,’ then we make a bigger circle and ask again. When we get to a circle where someone is not okay, we stop and help and start drawing circles again. It’s what we could do.”

I could imagine it perfectly. I looked around the table. Laurie had lost her mother, Rosy, just a couple days before. Rosy was a cherished part of their home for a couple of years, and a cherished part of Laurie’s entire life. I drew a circle around us and asked myself, “Is everyone okay in here?” I noted the deep grief behind Laurie’s tired face and turned to my Someone, “I think we need another round of lattes for the table.” And so we stayed a little longer to visit until everyone was ready to stand up again.

The remainder of the day I drew circles around us. When a low spot formed in that circle, like water, I flowed that way. I tidied. I walked my dogs. Then, I drew a circle around my property. The gardens needed putting to bed. My Someone and I flowed to them and trimmed the raspberry bushes and the Asiatic Lilies, cut back the Aster, mulched the leaves and placed them on the beds, pushed ginseng seeds down into soil and firmly covered them again. As we pushed down our last seed, the sky opened up and it poured. I watched from the porch as the water fell and traveled to where the seeds were planted, and dribbled low to prepare them for their future growth.

I didn’t tell the water what to do. I didn’t force it. Instead, I repotted my houseplants and let the rain from the eves of the porch water them in their bigger pots. Then I carried them inside, confident the rain would do its job just fine without me watching. I drew another circle and found that everything and everyone in my circle was okay. I drew a bigger circle. Annie was afraid. I flowed to her. Our touring friends were scheduled to play a show in a place that was morally and politically opposed to them– I sat down and breathed deeply and flowed to them over text.

I found that my friends were drawing circles, too, and that I was inside of them. I assured them my oxygen mask was on, and asked if theirs was, too. Janelle wrote– “From the top down, it seems we are in a lot of trouble. So we need to be an encouragement from the ground up.”

Janelle was also becoming water. I was happy to be sitting alongside her, waiting and eroding and making a new path. It’s no small thing to draw a circle around only yourself and to make sure you are okay. Inner peace isn’t just necessary. It becomes contagious.

“Love Trump, too? Trump, too?”

The urgency of Chris’ voice still socks me in the forehead. I flinch when I hear it replayed. I can say this– I am trying. My circle, maybe, has not yet been drawn that wide. But I know this– when I saw the news come in earlier this year that he had been shot in the Pennsylvania town next to mine growing up, a deep, irrepressible phrase bubbled from my mouth–

“Not like this. Not like this. We don’t want this.”

Violence will only beget violence. Hatred with hatred. That was the moment, for the first time, that I realized I was capable of a love much bigger than myself. And that it was much harder, much more work, than being right. So from the bottom up, I am waiting. I am widening my circle to include my mother. Here, I have had to stop and investigate. Everything here does not feel okay. And so I recognize that– though she herself may identify as her political affiliation, it is not who she really is. I remind myself that she is also a person who texts my niece every day before school with three emojis on our family thread that describe what her day will be like. Loving her is no small task, because contrary to popular belief, love is not blind. Love is eyes wide open with a smidge of mirror tucked in. Love is water– it waits, it erodes what is unnecessary slowly, and all the while requiring us to look back at ourselves as we do. And then we draw another circle.