It was all going reasonably well yesterday. I led a challenging meeting with some clients which, when I put it that way, sounds really awesome and grown-up. I was feeling pretty good, driving home from the HQ, put on my happiness playlist, was grooving out to a gospel song called "The Storm Is Over Now," ruminating again on this time last year.
This time last year, unbeknownst to me, I was about to get kick in the crotch from my reasonably well-intentioned but damagingly scatterbrained boss at the Rich People Foundation. I had been hired as a temp to be her assistant, and also apparently the assistant to the anal-to-the-point-of-psychosis events manager, and oh, by the way, could I please run around and get everything ready for these two crazy people without leaving the front desk because while I was at it could I be the receptionist and answer and direct fifty calls a day and distribute a bin full of mail every day because we just laid of the person who used to do that.
Nevertheless, plucky little worker that I was, I did my best, because the words temp-to-hire (and by association, salary and benefits and vacation days) had been bandied about... of course, there were hiring protocols to be followed, so would I mind calling the numbers on all these resumes and setting up interviews (and then re-re-scheduling once Flighty McBosslady changed plans at the last minute)... for the very position that I was hoping to get which I had been busting my patootie at for four months.
Until one day as I was distributing Flighty McBosslady's interoffice mail, and distributed a girl's resume to the President, with a post-it on it that said "I'd like to make her an offer." And then later, while filing in the little file room next to her office, I heard her actually make the offer (MY job) to the girl, on speakerphone, office door wide open.
I don't think I can (or at least want to) put into words what that felt like, but I suppose the words betrayal and murderous rage are a start. And pain, and deep injustice.
The next day I scheduled myself into her calendar for ten minutes between meetings, attempted to give her the quietly indignant yet sublimely classy speech I'd been crafting in my head all night, which never come out quite like you imagine them, do they? But, I hope I said enough to preserve a small, stained shred of personal dignity.
Flighty McAssface's response was basically "ooooopppssssssssss". Then she changed the subject to asking me what I "really" want to do in life, you know like in my heart of hearts blah blah chatty now-that-I've-driven-a-garbage-truck-through-your-self-worth-I'll-spend-five-minutes-getting-to-know-you-as-a-person-after-spending-four-months-taking-you-completely-for-granted spread my wings and fly. I sort of wish I'd told her to eat shit and die. But, I kept it civil for better or worse, gave her notice that my last day would be after two big events we were planning were over which frankly was more than they deserved but I feared the wrath of the unstable Events Planner.
On my last day a bouquet of flowers in a glass vase appeared on my desk with a note in Bossy's handwriting "thanking" me for my good work. (Yet another opportunity to invite her to eat shit and die that I passed up.) I remember walking home down Broad Street with the vase in my hands, and it slipped but I caught it, and I was seized with the urge to slam it down onto the sidewalk, hopefully shattering it, and walk on without looking back. I reigned myself in though, and the empty glass vase sits to this day on top of my kitchen cupboards in case I need it one day, like a bag of office supplies a disgruntled worker might steal and hoard, as if a stapler and some cheap pens would somehow make it all the bitter heartache come out equal.
Never mind. It was a year ago, and I'm in a better place now, having more or less worked through the feelings of inadequacy and chumpyness and the homicidal urges the experience engendered, and I have accepted the fact that it wasn't me, it was them.
The point was, I said to myself as I hit the button in the car to repeat "The Storm Is Over Now", that the whole thing is behind me. As Whitney Houston's song goes, I fell down, and I stumbled, but I did not crumble. The point is to keep on moving forward.
Maybe it was the day spent with the clients, who happen to be nuns, but somehow the idea of forgiveness floated into my head. A sign outside of a church said in bold letters "Healing".
I have loved self-help and personal growth type books ever since I was a teenager. I remember being fifteen, maybe sixteen, and reading on subjects like forgiveness and healing, and not really being able to grasp them. The concepts were too abstract, I couldn't really wrap my brain around them. I realize now that at fifteen and sixteen, mercifully, I didn't have anything much to forgive, or to heal. September 11 wouldn't happen until the following year; the various illnesses that would spring up in my family hadn't yet sprung; I was still under the safe awning of my childhood home, blissfully unaware that just beyond the edge of the awning enormous seagulls of bad luck circled, waiting to take gigantic dumps on passersby unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Now, as I reflect on, among other things, MamaBear's surgery-versary, as we call her one year milestone on the other end of illness, and other crappy stuff that happened a year ago, I am better able to understand an idea like forgiveness. Not necessarily practice it, mind you, but understand it.
In the case of MamaBear, there is nobody tangible to forgive. I have to direct my efforts toward forgiving, I don't know, the universe or something. Whatever unknowable forces led to that frightening, painful experience. The fates, or life in general.
In the case of my idiot former boss, and all of the clueless windbags that made my life miserable while I was at the Rich People Foundation, it's harder. Why would I want to give them anything, much less a deep philosophical gift?
Of course, I realize that forgiveness is not for other people, it's for me. It's so that I don't keep accidentally expending energy feeling wounded on account of the actions of someone who, it's pretty evident, is not, nor really ever was, doing any thinking about me.
I know it's about letting go and releasing the past and stepping into the future and taking the next step forward. I know, in my head at least, that life is short and you can't spend it lugging around people who dicked you over, intentionally or not - for one thing, they're not worth it.
Part of me doesn't want to let go. Righteous indignation has it's own special pleasure to it, to feel wronged, to feel like a victim. It hurts so good, the way binging on cheese fries or picking a scab or talking smack on somebody does. It feels fiendishly, secretly, mean-spiritedly under-the-trenchcoat good, like "Ha ha, see world, I know this is bad and WATCH ME do it!"
I guess ultimately it's just a choice you make, or have to keep making. You just have to decide that you don't want to be that kind of person, mired in the past, unable to move forward. It's the decision to count your blessings, for what they're worth, rather than the many diverse and creative ways you've been humped by the dog of injustice over the years.
Why? I don't know why. Maybe clinging to crappy stuff in your past is a shield, in way, an excuse not to turn toward wide open and scary future. I guess what non-forgiving does is prevent you from seeing the present with clear eyes, keeps you from living life as you imagine, as the best version of yourself and so on. Keeps you from being clear and happy and peaceful.
...These were the profound and spiritual thoughts I was having when I noticed flashing lights in the rearview. I got pulled over and ticketed for running a red light (by the way it was a YELLOW, which turned red as I was driving under it, in a section of road where the two poorly timed traffic lights are about a hundred feet apart, by the way, but that's beside the point. Actually I think it was some kind of ticket trap, because I saw three other police cars on the same block, one of which had pulled over a car traveling the opposite direction. The borough trying to line its coffers, perhaps, with the proceeds from questionable tickets. Anyway...)
My first instinct was to be like "WHY! Every time I try to enter some kind of zen-like, life-affirming mental space something happens to completely take the spit out of me. AS SOON as I have a little money in place something drastic and car-related and tripled digit comes up to wreck it all." This was followed by blind, shaking rage at the officer who had pulled me over but couldn't explain what I was supposed to do with the ticket once I got it other than "read the back," while I watched another car run through the exact same yellow-to-red light without being pulled over. Followed by the urge to throw things, which lasted all the way to Spangles' house, where I experienced the urge to take it all out on him.
In a Herculean effort not to hurt his feelings with my misplaced anger, I took myself back out for a teary-eyed, rage-filled walk around the block. It turned into several blocks, while I frantically flipped through the mental rolodex of my hodgepodge accumulation of tips and techniques for dealing with all my feeeeeeeeelings.
There was the technique of just allowing the feeling to inhabit my body, not to fight but let it be "a guest in the house" as Rumi puts it. To really focus in on it, "listen" to it, describe how it feels. (Blackness in the lungs and a flaming scowl-mask, if you're wondering.) The phrase "the only way out is through" floated through my head. Then I thought of Anne Lammott, who has written that "Help me help me help me" and "Thank you thank you thank you" are the two best prayers she knows. I don't know how I feel about prayer, but I figured I would send out a big mental "Help!" to whatever benevolent forces might be out there, just to cover my bases.
The pythons started to deconstrict, and my frantic pace slowed a little. Then I tried examining these thoughts about how EVERY time I do this or that something bad happens, to see if they held water. They didn't really, as I'm sure you're shocked to hear.
By the final block, I realized that giving me the stupid ticket almost definitely was not ruining Officer Assface's evening, so why should it ruin mine. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction.
Then I realized that in all that psychologizing myself I had really worked up an appetite, so I went to go get Spangles. A plate of Ethiopian food and a glass of red wine later, I was like "what ticket?"
So there it stands. And I have the following message for the world at large:
Listen, bad stuff that happens, I don't like your methods, and if that was your idea of a joke I think your sense of humor is a pile of steaming doody. I just want you to know that I refuse to consider this some kind of test. The only test I give an eyelash about it my own evaluation of myself.
So bad luck in the world, and any and every person or force that would conspire to bring me down: you can suck it. I will swing back. I will write long angry updates to my blog. I will find a way to make meaning out of you and weave you into my rich tapestry of human effin' experience, and I will win. I will be happy. I will be content. I will live a good life, I will love people, I will enjoy the snot out of everything that I can, I will continue to grow incensed about injustice, and I will fight, and if I go down, I will go down with my arms swinging. I will not stand by and be a passenger in my own life. I will not let circumstances dictate my frame of mind, I will suck the ever-living bright side and silver lining out of every batch of mouldering lemons that I can, and I will survive, and I will live to tell the tale.
Also, neener neener neener, you're a poopoohead and a buttface, go fly a kite, and I hope you choke. Amen.
Showing posts with label blowholes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blowholes. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
The Secret of My Success: 30% Perspiration, 70% Procrastination
Well, I am on two tight deadlines that are kinda of own making today, so naturally it was a great time to surf blogs and make exorbitantly lengthy comments on blogs I'd never heard of until an hour ago. Still, rather than letting all that hot air go to waste, I thought I would reprint my comments here. This was in response to a question from this guy's reader, who had a job that was not-so-slowly destroying his soul and wanted advice. Now this is a topic I know a thing or two about. Below, my response.
::::::::::::::
I am another one who has been there. Last year I took a job I knew I would hate, because everything kept saying how awful the job market was, etc. I was, predictably, miserable. Coincidentally (or not!) I also developed a chronic inflammatory disease that has been linked to stress and which has been very expensive and time-consuming but thank god is treatable.
All I can offer is what helped me:
1. See a counselor, stat! Even if you don’t want to, you don’t think you need to, you can’t afford it…whatever. Just go. Does the crappy job have benefits? Find out if they include mental heath. If not, go anyway. Someone will work with you. Make it work. The Psychology Today web site has a good finder tool for therapists.
2. Lean on your peeps. I leaned hard on my boyfriend, my friends, my parents, my cousins. I mean I was a *mess*. But it’s true what they say, you find out who your friends are. If you don’t have a strong support network, see item 1. But have the guts to ask for help.
3. “One is not got out of the cave, one comes out of it.” I think Simone de Beauvoir said that. The only person who can save you is you. I think the fact that Mark wrote this email is a good sign that he’s workin’ on it.
4. Brainstorming your options. OK, so the traditional “send resume, wait for call” approach is not working right now. What else could you do? Leave no stone unturned. Could you move in temporarily with family or friends to save money? Have a roommate move in with you? Move somewhere where you don’t need a car? Give up cable? Do you have a skill or knowledge set that other people would pay to have access to that you could advertise on craigslist? For me, even thinking of really heinous options was oddly refreshing. Thinking about how much of a personal failure it would feel like to move back in with my parents was kind of motivating. There is always a choice, and there is more than one. Thinking that the only two choices are “be miserable or lose everything” is just false.
4. Taking care of yourself. Getting enough sleep, trying to eat right, trying to get some exercise. I realize when your job totally sucks you dry and when you’re really in pain, it’s hard to do anything but numb out with food/alcohol/TV etc. Maybe think of one thing you could do that would bring you some energy, or just some fun. I hate to admit it, but all that cliche touchy feely stress management stuff kinda helps – going for walks, taking a bath, calling a friend, writing in a “journal.”
5. Hear yourself: the job is literally killing you. It’s literally sucking the life force out of you. Save your own life, man! It is really risky and really scary to jump out of a burning plane. So you have to pick – scary jump with uncertain outcome? Or certain death by burning plane?
5b. That said, you don’t *have* to jump tomorrow. As tempting as it is to drop it like a hot potato (and I’m not convinced that’s *not* the best idea), you could also start small. Start plotting your escape. Add one good thing to your life each week. Or take one bad thing away.
6. You gotta believe. I know all too well how hopeless and impossible it seems when you’re in the middle of it. You just have to go on faith that a better future awaits and that better possibilities await. It really doesn’t seem that way when all you can see is the reality in front of you. But it really is true, i’m telling you. When you ARE in the right place (or at least headed there), you can tell.
7. Recognizing that it’s the work of a lifetime to find out your life’s work. Mark has a really good start because he already knows that what he’s doing… ain’t it. Cross that one off the list. Every person has something that they can give to the world – sometimes it’s hard to recognize because it’s right in front of you, a passion or a talent that seems like no big deal because it’s such a part of you that you don’t notice it. But to put it another way, the longer Mark stays in this wrong job the longer he is depriving the world of what he has to offer. If you can’t do it for you, do it for the rest of us who need what you got!
My life isn’t perfect or anything now, but it’s waaaay better than it was. I still look back on that time and cringe. If there’s any use for it it’s the ability to tell people “no, seriously, just get out. it IS possible.” Changing my life around felt less like a magic wand wave and more like crawling out of deep well using only my fingernails, but at least I was going somewhere.
Even just from his comments, you can see Mark has a lot going for him – he is articulate, apparently well-educated, good vocabulary. I’m sayin’, times are tough. No one’s saying it isn’t hard. It’s easy to get discouraged. But you gotta fight for your life, the good life, the one your soul is rebelling against not having. In some ways, this is bigger than you. Obey!
::::::::::::::
I am another one who has been there. Last year I took a job I knew I would hate, because everything kept saying how awful the job market was, etc. I was, predictably, miserable. Coincidentally (or not!) I also developed a chronic inflammatory disease that has been linked to stress and which has been very expensive and time-consuming but thank god is treatable.
All I can offer is what helped me:
1. See a counselor, stat! Even if you don’t want to, you don’t think you need to, you can’t afford it…whatever. Just go. Does the crappy job have benefits? Find out if they include mental heath. If not, go anyway. Someone will work with you. Make it work. The Psychology Today web site has a good finder tool for therapists.
2. Lean on your peeps. I leaned hard on my boyfriend, my friends, my parents, my cousins. I mean I was a *mess*. But it’s true what they say, you find out who your friends are. If you don’t have a strong support network, see item 1. But have the guts to ask for help.
3. “One is not got out of the cave, one comes out of it.” I think Simone de Beauvoir said that. The only person who can save you is you. I think the fact that Mark wrote this email is a good sign that he’s workin’ on it.
4. Brainstorming your options. OK, so the traditional “send resume, wait for call” approach is not working right now. What else could you do? Leave no stone unturned. Could you move in temporarily with family or friends to save money? Have a roommate move in with you? Move somewhere where you don’t need a car? Give up cable? Do you have a skill or knowledge set that other people would pay to have access to that you could advertise on craigslist? For me, even thinking of really heinous options was oddly refreshing. Thinking about how much of a personal failure it would feel like to move back in with my parents was kind of motivating. There is always a choice, and there is more than one. Thinking that the only two choices are “be miserable or lose everything” is just false.
4. Taking care of yourself. Getting enough sleep, trying to eat right, trying to get some exercise. I realize when your job totally sucks you dry and when you’re really in pain, it’s hard to do anything but numb out with food/alcohol/TV etc. Maybe think of one thing you could do that would bring you some energy, or just some fun. I hate to admit it, but all that cliche touchy feely stress management stuff kinda helps – going for walks, taking a bath, calling a friend, writing in a “journal.”
5. Hear yourself: the job is literally killing you. It’s literally sucking the life force out of you. Save your own life, man! It is really risky and really scary to jump out of a burning plane. So you have to pick – scary jump with uncertain outcome? Or certain death by burning plane?
5b. That said, you don’t *have* to jump tomorrow. As tempting as it is to drop it like a hot potato (and I’m not convinced that’s *not* the best idea), you could also start small. Start plotting your escape. Add one good thing to your life each week. Or take one bad thing away.
6. You gotta believe. I know all too well how hopeless and impossible it seems when you’re in the middle of it. You just have to go on faith that a better future awaits and that better possibilities await. It really doesn’t seem that way when all you can see is the reality in front of you. But it really is true, i’m telling you. When you ARE in the right place (or at least headed there), you can tell.
7. Recognizing that it’s the work of a lifetime to find out your life’s work. Mark has a really good start because he already knows that what he’s doing… ain’t it. Cross that one off the list. Every person has something that they can give to the world – sometimes it’s hard to recognize because it’s right in front of you, a passion or a talent that seems like no big deal because it’s such a part of you that you don’t notice it. But to put it another way, the longer Mark stays in this wrong job the longer he is depriving the world of what he has to offer. If you can’t do it for you, do it for the rest of us who need what you got!
My life isn’t perfect or anything now, but it’s waaaay better than it was. I still look back on that time and cringe. If there’s any use for it it’s the ability to tell people “no, seriously, just get out. it IS possible.” Changing my life around felt less like a magic wand wave and more like crawling out of deep well using only my fingernails, but at least I was going somewhere.
Even just from his comments, you can see Mark has a lot going for him – he is articulate, apparently well-educated, good vocabulary. I’m sayin’, times are tough. No one’s saying it isn’t hard. It’s easy to get discouraged. But you gotta fight for your life, the good life, the one your soul is rebelling against not having. In some ways, this is bigger than you. Obey!
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Creation Myth
About eight months ago, something happened that is so uncommon for me as to make it truly remarkable: I didn't want to eat.
I didn't want to because eating, or more precisely, digestion, caused excruciating pain and some other very unpleasant results. I remember looking at a salad someone at work had brought for lunch and thinking "Aw helllll no!", and starting in on my saltines. My business casual clothes started hanging off of me, but I couldn't enjoy the rapid weight loss because I was scurrying to bathroom every ten minutes like clockwork, doubled over.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was in the throes of what was eventually diagnosed as ulcerative colitis, which is when your colon freaks out for reasons that are not entirely clear to medical science. Another thing that is pretty clear in hindsight but which seemed to escape me at the time, was that I was acutely miserable, and not just because of the problems with the ole' poopshoot.
I was going through what you might call a Bad Time. I was working at a disheartening job, after a bout of unemployment, after having been un-hired in a somewhat unclassy way from a job I'd been working at for five months as a temp-to-hire (minus, apparently, the -to-hire part.) On top of that, each parent, my father one month and my mother the next, had to undergo major operations for life-threatening diseases. Louise, the cat I'd taken in during college and then adopted out to my aunt in order to give her a better life, passed on. On top of that, one day I came home to my apartment and as I opened the door the entire dropped ceiling collapsed. And on top of that, or perhaps because of all that, I had the mysterious gut-pain and concurrent frightening bowel movements, and an insurance plan that was chosen based on the gamble that I would not, in fact, ever get sick.
Things are better now, although I don't feel completely over it. Lo, though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, and made it to the other side, the memory is still very sharp. But that, in a way, is why I'm here.
Later, a wise friend of mine would remark on the symbolism of having developed a problem in my gut. Literally and figuratively, I was having a hard time digesting everything. I think it was my body telling me that something was very not right, in a way that I couldn't ignore or stuff down or push past like the trooper I am. The tummy trouble is caused by my immune system attacking - responding to the threat of enemies, only there's nothing there but me. I have come to think of it as a very effective early warning system. For me there is still a direct correlation between stressors and gastrointestinal shenanigans, and there may always be. But, as I explained to my mom, in a way this is good because often when my worries get carried away and I get too wound up on the cares of the day, my body gives me what feels like a swift punch in the stomach, and it is often (sometimes) enough to make me stop. Give myself a time out, take my temperature, take a breather, take a nap.
I think of the recent unpleasantness as a turning point for me. It forced me to step back and take a good hard look at myself. What was I enduring all that misery for? A job I didn't like? A world that had become very small and very scary? A life that was so much less than I had the one I had imagined, back when I had let myself imagine anything at all.
One day, when I was balled up on the couch crying, I had enough sense to ask my friend Jo to come over to keep me company. (It's true what they say, that when adversity strikes, you find out who your friends are.) She gently suggested that perhaps now might be a time to look into seeing a counselor. And I did. One thing I am proud of about myself is that even when the world was very very dark and it felt like my back was totally against the wall, I didn't give up on the belief that things could improve. I took my shell-shocked, hopeless, depressed little self to a social worker, in the hope that she could point me to something - ideas, strategies, pharmaceuticals, whatever - that would help life be better. And, slowly, it was. It is.
I have proclaimed this year to be a year of rest and, although I sometimes cringe at the word, healing. I will nurture the fragile broken-winged bird back to life. I have decided that the events of the past are ones that I will use to make me into an awesomer person. I'm still working on exactly how, but well, for starters there's:
-learning your own inner strength, which C---- and I agree is a pretty anti-climactic consolation prize, one that we would give up freely given the choice between that and a life free of pain, suffering and loss. But there you go.
-for another thing, having more compassion for people who are going through a hard time. (And at the same time, oddly, as I have observed with others before, less compassion. "Oh, earthquake victims experiencing some of the most devastating devastation ever? That sucks. Too bad my heart is too stone cold to feel anything more than a passing twinge of regret at this." I will work on this. Eventually.)
-finding out that there are people in your life who completely and totally have your back
- Seething anger with the healthcare and health insurance industries in America.
So anyway, like I said I'm still working on the specifics as to how my hardships will be transformed into a heartwarming and inspirational tale of survival and redemption. Readers are encouraged to write in with suggestions.
But what does any of this have to do with hunger?
Well, for one, I am pleased to report that I get hungry again. Physical hunger, yet another thing to file under the category of "Don't Know What You've Got 'Til it's Gone." (I must also differentiate between hunger and what I felt while undergoing steroid treatment for the colitis. In addition to a chemically induced wit and a remarkable joie de vivre, the steroids made me feel kind of like I was a giant piece of briskly-moving machinery used to clear-cut the rainforest, except that the rainforest was bags of carbs.)
Back when I spent a third of every hour on the toilet clutching myself and groaning, I went through a phase of elaborate bargaining with God or Allah or Jim Henson Creator of All that is Seen and Unseen, or whomEVER, I wasn't in a position to be choosy. I swore that if I lived to eat without pain once again I would do a better job. I would eat real food and go to farmer's markets and make sauces that need to simmer for three days, and stop eating cheese that comes in squeezable form from a foil packet. (I have somewhat made good on this promise, in the sense that I now watch a lot of Food Network while eating squeezable cheeses.)
But the point is, I never knew what a gift it was to be hungry until I wasn't, the same way that it's just not possible to understand what it means to be grateful for your health until you've been sick. There was a tipping point to my illness - and I remember it distinctly, I was balled up on Jo's front stoop on a summer evening unable to enjoy a cocktail - when I realized that I was no longer living. And that is something you don't fuck around with. Jo walked me to the ER that very evening: the first step in a long, infuriating, humiliating, expensive journey toward living again.
Paying hundreds of dollars for medications, having a laproscopic camera shoved up your butt, racking up a five-digit medical bill, crying and pleading with the non-native English speakers answering your insurance company's customer service number, blimping up like a Thanksgiving Day float from corticosteroids, filling a days-of-the-week pill box that's bigger than your Grandpa's was: it makes you think. It makes you think, wow, it is unconscionable that insurance executives are filling their swimming pools with the profits off of my human suffering.
But it also makes you think, what exactly am I fighting for here? A low-paying job that makes me crazy? The chance to come home exhausted and stare numbly at the TV? Two weeks a year plus weekends of reprieve from the drudgery? If you've been wishing there was a pill you could take that would help you get your career choices in perspective, I'm here to tell you, there is and it's called OsmoPrep.
I quit the job. I decided life's too short and suffering is too much of a certainty to voluntarily bang my head against a wall repeatedly for what has been called, to quote from a brilliant film, minor duckets.
Of course, then you are left with the daunting task of discovering what it is, if the rat race is so all-fired unbearable, you really want to do. Which brings me back to hunger. This time I'm not talking about physical hunger, although one might still feel this hunger in the body. Call it desire, longing, yearning, whatever. I think I've had this hunger since I was what, eleven? It's big, amorphous, unspecific. It's probably the kind of thing that gets easily channeled into materialism, the idea that with this next sofa, this next pair of boots or teeth-whiteners I'll finally have It, whatever It is. It's a hunger which for many years I thought would be sated by having a boyfriend who adores me, but in fact I've had a great one for a year so far and...I'm still hungry. Now I think that when I move to a nicer apartment, get a car or a dog, maybe then I'll have everything I want. I imagine hunger like this is what makes people want to be celebrities, get rich quick, star in reality shows.
It's an uncomfortable feeling, in a way. Often I'm able to make enough noise in my head, or become so flummoxed by problems and distractions, that I forget it's even there. But at times when I get halfway clear in my mind, there it is again, and it seems it's never stopped, like a whining or a dull roar, a convection current. Not like a calling or a whisper or anything so articulate. It's just like...an engine rumbling. And it wants something. But what?
I have arrived at the theory that this hunger is not, in fact, bad. Not something to be run from or squashed or stuffed full of high-fructose snacks. Perhaps this hunger, this longing or wanting or what have you, is the feeling of being alive. It's what leads us to desire and seek and move forward in life. Move toward, hopefully, more than away from. It makes me think of the Wupatki Pueblo blowhole. It's this hole, right, naturally occuring in the ground, which for vaguely mysterious geologic reasons, is always blowing a refreshing stream of air up from deep within the earth. I understand the Pueblos ascribed great spiritual significance to it. So - the desire is the rushing air, right, and the idea is not to dig down to find its origin, or try to follow it up to where it dissipates, but just to stand above it and be like, "My, this is rather exhilarating, isn't it." It doesn't lead to anywhere specific. Its source is too deep to fathom. It's just like, there. But not ignorable. Worthy of wonder and symbolizing great cosmic mysteries.
That sort of gets at what I'm getting at. But it will never be gotten at fully, because if it were completely wrapped up tight and understood, what point would there be to keep writing, keep reading, keep waking up in the morning to find out what crazy kooky thing will happen next? Some people might call it a spiritual calling, or the God-shaped hole in the heart, or the creative urge, or the life force, or whatever. And that's cool. It's probably all of those things. I think I'm most comfortable calling it a hunger for meaning, and maybe some other stuff too.
One place to which I have followed this inexplicable hunger is the Celebrant Institute, where I'm learning how to plan and officiate at non-denominational wedding ceremonies. The wedding part was kind of an odd choice for me because generally I'm not like, huge on the whole idea of marriage. It seems like nowadays when fifty per cent of the population is divorced and people get married three and four and seven times, how much does a wedding really mean? This was something I really struggled with, until I had an epiphany: I don't really need to know! I'm going to be an officiant, not some kind of all-knowing marriage guru. Rather than coming to couples as if I have all the answers, I can let them teach me a thing or two about what love means, how it looks, from whence within the majesty of the human heart it comes.
So those two things, in a nutshell, is where the idea for this blog comes from. I want to talk about the impulse to do, well, anything really - the hunger. And I want to record what I learn about this thing we call love, four short letters that belie its breadth and depth and all around bigness. So there you have it: hunger, and love. Love and hunger.
I didn't want to because eating, or more precisely, digestion, caused excruciating pain and some other very unpleasant results. I remember looking at a salad someone at work had brought for lunch and thinking "Aw helllll no!", and starting in on my saltines. My business casual clothes started hanging off of me, but I couldn't enjoy the rapid weight loss because I was scurrying to bathroom every ten minutes like clockwork, doubled over.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was in the throes of what was eventually diagnosed as ulcerative colitis, which is when your colon freaks out for reasons that are not entirely clear to medical science. Another thing that is pretty clear in hindsight but which seemed to escape me at the time, was that I was acutely miserable, and not just because of the problems with the ole' poopshoot.
I was going through what you might call a Bad Time. I was working at a disheartening job, after a bout of unemployment, after having been un-hired in a somewhat unclassy way from a job I'd been working at for five months as a temp-to-hire (minus, apparently, the -to-hire part.) On top of that, each parent, my father one month and my mother the next, had to undergo major operations for life-threatening diseases. Louise, the cat I'd taken in during college and then adopted out to my aunt in order to give her a better life, passed on. On top of that, one day I came home to my apartment and as I opened the door the entire dropped ceiling collapsed. And on top of that, or perhaps because of all that, I had the mysterious gut-pain and concurrent frightening bowel movements, and an insurance plan that was chosen based on the gamble that I would not, in fact, ever get sick.
Things are better now, although I don't feel completely over it. Lo, though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, and made it to the other side, the memory is still very sharp. But that, in a way, is why I'm here.
Later, a wise friend of mine would remark on the symbolism of having developed a problem in my gut. Literally and figuratively, I was having a hard time digesting everything. I think it was my body telling me that something was very not right, in a way that I couldn't ignore or stuff down or push past like the trooper I am. The tummy trouble is caused by my immune system attacking - responding to the threat of enemies, only there's nothing there but me. I have come to think of it as a very effective early warning system. For me there is still a direct correlation between stressors and gastrointestinal shenanigans, and there may always be. But, as I explained to my mom, in a way this is good because often when my worries get carried away and I get too wound up on the cares of the day, my body gives me what feels like a swift punch in the stomach, and it is often (sometimes) enough to make me stop. Give myself a time out, take my temperature, take a breather, take a nap.
I think of the recent unpleasantness as a turning point for me. It forced me to step back and take a good hard look at myself. What was I enduring all that misery for? A job I didn't like? A world that had become very small and very scary? A life that was so much less than I had the one I had imagined, back when I had let myself imagine anything at all.
One day, when I was balled up on the couch crying, I had enough sense to ask my friend Jo to come over to keep me company. (It's true what they say, that when adversity strikes, you find out who your friends are.) She gently suggested that perhaps now might be a time to look into seeing a counselor. And I did. One thing I am proud of about myself is that even when the world was very very dark and it felt like my back was totally against the wall, I didn't give up on the belief that things could improve. I took my shell-shocked, hopeless, depressed little self to a social worker, in the hope that she could point me to something - ideas, strategies, pharmaceuticals, whatever - that would help life be better. And, slowly, it was. It is.
I have proclaimed this year to be a year of rest and, although I sometimes cringe at the word, healing. I will nurture the fragile broken-winged bird back to life. I have decided that the events of the past are ones that I will use to make me into an awesomer person. I'm still working on exactly how, but well, for starters there's:
-learning your own inner strength, which C---- and I agree is a pretty anti-climactic consolation prize, one that we would give up freely given the choice between that and a life free of pain, suffering and loss. But there you go.
-for another thing, having more compassion for people who are going through a hard time. (And at the same time, oddly, as I have observed with others before, less compassion. "Oh, earthquake victims experiencing some of the most devastating devastation ever? That sucks. Too bad my heart is too stone cold to feel anything more than a passing twinge of regret at this." I will work on this. Eventually.)
-finding out that there are people in your life who completely and totally have your back
- Seething anger with the healthcare and health insurance industries in America.
So anyway, like I said I'm still working on the specifics as to how my hardships will be transformed into a heartwarming and inspirational tale of survival and redemption. Readers are encouraged to write in with suggestions.
But what does any of this have to do with hunger?
Well, for one, I am pleased to report that I get hungry again. Physical hunger, yet another thing to file under the category of "Don't Know What You've Got 'Til it's Gone." (I must also differentiate between hunger and what I felt while undergoing steroid treatment for the colitis. In addition to a chemically induced wit and a remarkable joie de vivre, the steroids made me feel kind of like I was a giant piece of briskly-moving machinery used to clear-cut the rainforest, except that the rainforest was bags of carbs.)
Back when I spent a third of every hour on the toilet clutching myself and groaning, I went through a phase of elaborate bargaining with God or Allah or Jim Henson Creator of All that is Seen and Unseen, or whomEVER, I wasn't in a position to be choosy. I swore that if I lived to eat without pain once again I would do a better job. I would eat real food and go to farmer's markets and make sauces that need to simmer for three days, and stop eating cheese that comes in squeezable form from a foil packet. (I have somewhat made good on this promise, in the sense that I now watch a lot of Food Network while eating squeezable cheeses.)
But the point is, I never knew what a gift it was to be hungry until I wasn't, the same way that it's just not possible to understand what it means to be grateful for your health until you've been sick. There was a tipping point to my illness - and I remember it distinctly, I was balled up on Jo's front stoop on a summer evening unable to enjoy a cocktail - when I realized that I was no longer living. And that is something you don't fuck around with. Jo walked me to the ER that very evening: the first step in a long, infuriating, humiliating, expensive journey toward living again.
Paying hundreds of dollars for medications, having a laproscopic camera shoved up your butt, racking up a five-digit medical bill, crying and pleading with the non-native English speakers answering your insurance company's customer service number, blimping up like a Thanksgiving Day float from corticosteroids, filling a days-of-the-week pill box that's bigger than your Grandpa's was: it makes you think. It makes you think, wow, it is unconscionable that insurance executives are filling their swimming pools with the profits off of my human suffering.
But it also makes you think, what exactly am I fighting for here? A low-paying job that makes me crazy? The chance to come home exhausted and stare numbly at the TV? Two weeks a year plus weekends of reprieve from the drudgery? If you've been wishing there was a pill you could take that would help you get your career choices in perspective, I'm here to tell you, there is and it's called OsmoPrep.
I quit the job. I decided life's too short and suffering is too much of a certainty to voluntarily bang my head against a wall repeatedly for what has been called, to quote from a brilliant film, minor duckets.
Of course, then you are left with the daunting task of discovering what it is, if the rat race is so all-fired unbearable, you really want to do. Which brings me back to hunger. This time I'm not talking about physical hunger, although one might still feel this hunger in the body. Call it desire, longing, yearning, whatever. I think I've had this hunger since I was what, eleven? It's big, amorphous, unspecific. It's probably the kind of thing that gets easily channeled into materialism, the idea that with this next sofa, this next pair of boots or teeth-whiteners I'll finally have It, whatever It is. It's a hunger which for many years I thought would be sated by having a boyfriend who adores me, but in fact I've had a great one for a year so far and...I'm still hungry. Now I think that when I move to a nicer apartment, get a car or a dog, maybe then I'll have everything I want. I imagine hunger like this is what makes people want to be celebrities, get rich quick, star in reality shows.
It's an uncomfortable feeling, in a way. Often I'm able to make enough noise in my head, or become so flummoxed by problems and distractions, that I forget it's even there. But at times when I get halfway clear in my mind, there it is again, and it seems it's never stopped, like a whining or a dull roar, a convection current. Not like a calling or a whisper or anything so articulate. It's just like...an engine rumbling. And it wants something. But what?
I have arrived at the theory that this hunger is not, in fact, bad. Not something to be run from or squashed or stuffed full of high-fructose snacks. Perhaps this hunger, this longing or wanting or what have you, is the feeling of being alive. It's what leads us to desire and seek and move forward in life. Move toward, hopefully, more than away from. It makes me think of the Wupatki Pueblo blowhole. It's this hole, right, naturally occuring in the ground, which for vaguely mysterious geologic reasons, is always blowing a refreshing stream of air up from deep within the earth. I understand the Pueblos ascribed great spiritual significance to it. So - the desire is the rushing air, right, and the idea is not to dig down to find its origin, or try to follow it up to where it dissipates, but just to stand above it and be like, "My, this is rather exhilarating, isn't it." It doesn't lead to anywhere specific. Its source is too deep to fathom. It's just like, there. But not ignorable. Worthy of wonder and symbolizing great cosmic mysteries.
That sort of gets at what I'm getting at. But it will never be gotten at fully, because if it were completely wrapped up tight and understood, what point would there be to keep writing, keep reading, keep waking up in the morning to find out what crazy kooky thing will happen next? Some people might call it a spiritual calling, or the God-shaped hole in the heart, or the creative urge, or the life force, or whatever. And that's cool. It's probably all of those things. I think I'm most comfortable calling it a hunger for meaning, and maybe some other stuff too.
One place to which I have followed this inexplicable hunger is the Celebrant Institute, where I'm learning how to plan and officiate at non-denominational wedding ceremonies. The wedding part was kind of an odd choice for me because generally I'm not like, huge on the whole idea of marriage. It seems like nowadays when fifty per cent of the population is divorced and people get married three and four and seven times, how much does a wedding really mean? This was something I really struggled with, until I had an epiphany: I don't really need to know! I'm going to be an officiant, not some kind of all-knowing marriage guru. Rather than coming to couples as if I have all the answers, I can let them teach me a thing or two about what love means, how it looks, from whence within the majesty of the human heart it comes.
So those two things, in a nutshell, is where the idea for this blog comes from. I want to talk about the impulse to do, well, anything really - the hunger. And I want to record what I learn about this thing we call love, four short letters that belie its breadth and depth and all around bigness. So there you have it: hunger, and love. Love and hunger.
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