Tag: Mental Health
Life is Trauma
Many mental health disorders are fueled by a general mindset that in the absence of particular textbook traumas in our lives, we ought to be happy. No bashing on happiness here, but I find it disconcerting that we hold ourselves to being happy for the privilege of being, as if that makes sense at all.
Birth itself is a traumatic experience. Luckily we forget it, but we all go through that trauma to start. Can you imagine what kind of PTSD we would have if we were able to remember the day we were born? Evicted from the comfort of darkness and the only home we’ve ever known, squeezing through a tight space and being forced out into the light, our shoulders nearly dislocating. We enter a world that is filled with wonder and a million opportunities to break our hearts.
In the best case, we grow attached to those who love us and we love them back, and one day their heart stops beating and they are gone. We create stories about heaven and god to try to provide comfort, but even believers face the trauma of mortality.
Besides death, though, life is a story of loss. Time plays tricks on the mind, but overall life isn’t that long. And as we grow we must mourn the loss of ourselves over and over. Once 30 we are set in our ways, generally responsible for consistency and not looked to as creators. By 30, our lives, at least the part of our lives where the world was ahead of us, is largely behind us. Our bodies start to remind us that despite telling ourselves we will live well beyond 100 we are fast approaching the middle of the part of our life where we still have mobility and our minds. As our grandparents and parents age and pass, we see those we remember as youthful or at least middle aged now hidden behind wrinkles and grey hair and walking with support of various devices. Aging is no longer the story of our elders. It is the story of us. When did this happen?
Ones 30s are an odd time where we either ignore our mortality until suddenly we are 40, or we fixate on it and try desperately to close all loose ends of building the adult life we thought we wanted as doors start to close. As a woman, at 36, I feel this biologically. The need to procreate is fueled both by the strange desire to have kids and knowing my time to build a family, as least one of my own DNA, is almost up. I have a strange impulse to have 3 children, although it is unlikely at my age with one, but hopefully possible. My husband is happy with one and thinks I’m mad to consider more than two. I have a plan playing in my mind — if I have one more at 37 and still feel strongly about 3, I can have my last at 39 or 40.
10 years ago I would have said I would never have a child at 39 or 40 but I failed to do the math of waiting to have my first child until 34. And with infertility challenges I wasn’t sure I could have a baby, so I tried not to fixate on it too much. And then, with some medication and luck, I had my first. A rather traumatic 74 hour induction (really the last 24 hours was the worst of it), my son was immediately taken from me after birth because he wasn’t breathing. Thirty six hours later he figured it out and we got him back. He lived.
And now he’s growing fast and has somehow gone from a blob to a real human being with thoughts and feelings in two years. I see him, and despite all the trauma of life, despite my general melancholy, despite moments where I look at him and think how fragile he is, how I have brought him into a world where only death is certain and where viruses and climate change and race and wealth inequality make for a world that is uglier than a two year old can grasp, I find these tiny little moments of happiness in my heart. Zaps of light in a world clouded with darkness. I am reminded of my purpose—not a purpose of myself but of building a family. For my child and future children. To try to make their life better than mind, within the little control I have.
Still, the weight of past trauma and future trauma weighs on me. The ideal outcome is that my children outlive me and remain healthy for their lives. I can’t control this, though I can try to protect them, support their mental health, teach them to be wisely cautious while not limiting their opportunities. Giving them room to chase their dreams when dreaming is still on the roadmap. And, I don’t know, the potential trauma weighs on me. Especially in these times. Where every decision is a calculated risk, or at least there is a heightened awareness of this. My son lives in a bubble. He has no friends, or at least none he can play with in person. His mom now works from home so mom and dad are always there to soothe him when he is scared or bored or lonely. It is a nice little bubble, but a deceiving one. I like it because we dangerous as the world is, it feels safe. Small. Controlled.
In my small apartment there is not a home but there are walls and a roof and a front door and that’s our world. We go out for walks on a few familiar routes. We drive to grandma’s house. It’s as if we live in an old tv show with limited settings where all the action happens. I still remember the rest of the heart big world. How less then a year ago I was experiencing a wild manic episode while in London for work, and spent a day after our conference ended wandering the cobblestone streets of the city at night, singing to myself under my breath. I wasn’t in a good place then, mentally. I felt completely out of control and afraid of myself. My mind was in full-on self destructive mode. It was as if with the world so big and life moving so fast, without control of it, I needed to crumble. I’m ashamed by things I thought and occasionally said. I am not that person now. And partially this lockdown has helped me continue drifting back to earth. The shrinking of my world. Focusing on what matters. Giving up on making things constantly different and dramatic and intense to combat the reality of walls closing in. Breathing too deeply in a room slowly losing all of its oxygen. FOMO.
And then there is the quiet. The days which are known in their repetition. No longer even getting out of bed. Just hours of working until the day is through and trying to have energy to play with my son after that and the sleep. These days they slip away. But here they are. The trauma floats outside my door. Potential traumas of all the many things that can go wrong at any moment dance in my view — earthquakes, fires, illnesses, accidents, choking, gun violence, and all that. Immediate threats and future ones. The fall of democracy. The overheating of our planet. All the many things that can and likely will go wrong in my lifetime and my children’s lifetimes. Coronavirus. ACM. The diseases here that are real now. The news stories that make me glad to be able to close our door and lock ourselves inside our humble abode and shelter in place instead of facing the reality of a great big world with so many unknowns.
I know this won’t last forever. In this time I aim to build this family that my body tells me I want. I hope to convince my husband of it too. And to raise children who hopefully aren’t as anxious as I am with even more kindness in their hearts. And I’ll try my best to ignore the trauma of the world, the passing of time. For all of the things out of my control, the many, many things, I must focus on what I can control, and let the rest go in acceptance that there will be horror and there will be tragedy. But I ought not to waste the moments in between failing to live in a comedy with joy, somehow. Simple joys. I hope to find that. To stop living for the passing of time. And to start living within the little time there is left, however long that may be.
In Trying to Stay Above the Surface
Option 1: ignore the time and space continuum and try to let it all blur into ad nauseum and add nausea and try to be a mom wife employee best of all worlds and keep it all spinning so fast you get lost in it until it never was and you’re slid 6 feet under because that’s how fast it goes and in those last moments you realize regret and wonder could there have been another way or are you always you and any way would have been no better and so you take your last breath and again let your life pass before your eyes just as it always has.
Option 2: Stop and feel everything, the good, the bad, all of it. Try to embrace each moment of these fast fleeting days. Each discovery your son makes. The excitement in his eyes conquering a new skill. Remember the good more then the bad. There was good, wasn’t there? You’re so negative. Surely there was good. Long days and nights of a youth that went on and on. Looking forward to things—there was a time when you did that also. You can do it again, perhaps. If only you stop expecting the moon and start embracing the flickering overhead lights that life offers. They’re still light and if you squint enough and/or drink enough maybe they too will look lunarly lovely. Won’t they? If only you could see the glass not only half full but imagine a few more inches of liquid there. Why waste all the little time there is lost in the time that was?
It is almost July. Time is no longer relevant. Moments are everything. Days and weeks and months and years and decades are, well, they bookend the moments many or few, they remind us of the lack of forever in forever as does the skin that crepes slowly on our hands and crows that line around our eyes and pigment that escapes our worn and weary hair leaving nothing but silver white. And so I ponder the options and question my free will and in all that thought another year goes by and I wish I made faster choices or something but I’m just here trying my best to stay above water and I guess that’s worth something I mean I guess that’s worth everything even if it doesn’t mean I am satisfied or content or happy or in some state of acceptance or anything. It is just is, as it is, as it always was.
50lbs.
This evening, I put on clothing only to be worn in my house, and took a picture of myself in the mirror to examine my weight loss progress. Looking straight into the mirror I felt saddened by the folds of skin and fat still hanging around my 2 years postpartum belly. That will need surgery to fix, I thought, turning around to see if any other angle was more flattering.
There were a few good angles in there. A few moments when I thought maybe my body could be remotely acceptable again. Not exactly now, but I’m starting to see parts of my body come back. I can’t say I ever loved any part of myself—but as I lose weight I feel less embarrassed about what I had let myself become.
I’m still 19lbs overweight, and beyond that I think I’d be the best with another 20-30 removed. I said I wasn’t going to focus on a goal, but if I can sustain a long a week weightloss, I should be able to hit my goal in a year. If I can increase that to two pounds a week, which would be ideal, then it can be done in 6 months.
I imagine what I might look like then. November 2020. Right before my 37th birthday. For a moment feeling good about myself, if possible. For myself. I don’t want to do this for anyone else because that’s entirely useless. I’m tired of caring what other people think. This is for my health. It has to be achievable. I got to 140 before my wedding, so what is 30lbs more? Even 120 would be amazing. 125. Once I’m in that range I’ll feel better.
And even though it’s not ideal to obsess about anything I need something healthy to fixate on right now. Something that involves no one but me, myself, and I. A clear objective and path to get there. Alone. With the only reward being how I feel. Maybe I’ll learn what it’s like to have confidence. I don’t know. It seems like a fairly healthy obsession for the next year. A distraction. A much needed healthy distraction.
Trace.
Imagine pupils tracing flesh, noticing. Just, noticing. The way your mouth curls when you smile. The simple sway of your hips. imagine being watched. Noticed.
Imagine being invisible. It happens with time. Happens. Imagine not being seen. Traced. Noticed. Imagined. You wonder.
Remember being traced. Eyes noticing. And you think all that’s left to notice you is the stars and trees in silhouette against the night. You wonder. What it’s like to feel slightly less invisible. You wonder and imagine and your mind plays tricks on you and drives you towards the deep end. There where everything erupts inside out. So you don’t go there. You don’t go where you might be seen. Noticed.
I remember as a child my parents taught me my worth was in my beauty and my lack of worth was in my lack there of. I made funny faces and never believed I could be beautiful. And if I couldn’t be beautiful, nothing I could be mattered at all. And I’ve spent my life longing to be noticed. Traced. Seen. The light that follows the curves of my body, that funnels into the darkness between my lips. Perhaps that’s what we all want. To be called beautiful. Not even with words. But a look. From someone who notices everything but still happens to take the time to notice you. And you wonder. As you age. Are you permanently invisible? Maybe you are. Maybe it’s better that way.
Alone.
I think everyone understands now a little of what I’ve felt through my life. This sense of social isolation. Of the world around you existing and yet there you are, miles away from it, despite it all going on right there in front of you.
I’m trying to get over the loneliness I’ve always felt. I’m not sure the kinds of connections I crave are at all realistic. Those deep, intimate connections where you can be authentically you down to the feelings that don’t make sense in spoken form, but they’re true nonetheless. Those emotions that can only be communicated in art because they exist between sounds and sometimes not in brushstrokes but in the white space. In the way one’s body curves while dancing or otherwise embracing.
And only people who feel this deeply understand it. This perpetual loneliness. Burnt out by social interaction yet craving company as when our only company is our own mind we can get lost in it, tangled in our thoughts. In our childhood rooms wondering what is it that the rest of the world knows that we don’t. How does happiness seem so simple for some, yet so elusive for others?
And—why does knowing people still feel like not knowing them at all? Why is it I long to understand the inner workings of a few, very few select people whose minds are museums of every possible emotion layered with ever-growing curiosities kept safe in permanent collection.
I stand across the street from said museum and study its Corinthian columns. Protective and strong. My mind wanders inside, exploring its many floors and exhibits. The surrealism. Modern art. Photography and film. History and bones. The living and the once lived and the might live one day. The never lived but more alive than anything that ever has. The science and stories and symphony of the stars.
Perhaps it’s just I am void of my own intrigue. My memory nonexistent I am not fact but fiction. I exist in the moment deep in my gut. I exist in a thousand possibilities of the future and regrets of the past. The loneliness hangs there, iced with the blue green flame of well below frozen. In the clay that I am seeking to take form, awaiting sculptors to knead me. To bake me in their kilns to harden me into the form of their liking. To submit to sculptor. To be hardened to further fragility, yet safe, trusting, saddened by sentient solitude no more.
Want.
There seems to be a cliff dropping down to a gorge so deep it’s impossible to know how deep between reality and another reality that seems to be on the other side of it. And, in this time of coronavirus, my side of the gorge is shifting backwards, not forwards. It becomes particularly enticing to make a running leap despite knowing that there is no way the laws of physics would allow me to safely land on the other side.
Maybe it’s time to leap. I’m getting older by the second and making so little progress. I asked earlier if progress is really productive and yet I want to keep moving in some direction, ideally forward. I guess it’s just as a woman of great dreams my heart is saddened by moving away from the edge of the cliff and resolving never to even consider leaping again. To avoid falling, certainly, to the victim of my wild imagination, my constant hunger for something greater than or other than this side.
I should have leapt sooner. If I fell, I’d have fallen, but now it’s too late to try. Life is no longer about chasing that reality across the chasm it’s about sinking into routine and silence and hoping to save for the down payment on a house you will be outbid on anyway so why bother?
See, I’m an escape artist. A master of disguise so masterful I don’t even recognize myself when I look in the mirror anymore. So it goes. I long to be reminded of who I am or once was, but don’t we all. For all the years of our youth we spent preparing to become ourselves in adulthood the cruel joke is that we actually were ourselves all along and ran out of time to pursue whatever it is we really wanted. So instead we are stuck, toes tight around the edge of our cliff and looking out into what is now all but an impossible leap to the other side which we can’t see anyway.
That doesn’t keep me from imagining what is feels like to be there, rolling in fresh soil, burying my toes deep, curled against the softness of how I assume it all might be, that other maybe, a thousand million miles away, instead of the actual exactly, the here and now and tomorrow that can be easily estimated and played out well in advance. At some point the desire for suspense and surprise becomes too strong. At some point she turns towards her demise and starts to sprint ahead towards that impossible leap.
Jolt.
She dipped her toe in the shallow pool of water and lurched back. She already knew it would scald her, momentarily, but her toes couldn’t resist the test. The jolts of awareness that break up the monotony of the day. Yet another day. Placing her right foot into the tub, forcing herself to keep it there, liquid fire tormenting her ankle and calf. But this time she didn’t budge. She slowly sank into the cloudy bath of mineral salts and the grey reflection of a nondescript ceiling tinged beige in the light.
The water consumed her. At first, through a sudden sting that felt as if she might be being burned alive, and then softer, a warmth which swallowed her deeper. Her toes danced under the still-running faucet, still pouring its liquid flame. Right when she could no longer take its heat she ran her toes firmly against the bathtub knob, pressing into its curved edges, barely gripping it to push it quickly towards its opposite offering. Liquid ice shocked her toes and ankles and calves as she still felt existent heat burning her torso, lying there somewhere under the slipping current resulting from her mere existence.
A bottle of red wine, some blend, opened two nights prior, sat taunting on the counter, along with a wine glass she brought to this very occasion to pour into it the blood red juice of calm into a soul hectic. She failed to remember to drink it, or pour it for that matter. It sat there next to the small heater. A heater which, as her gaze softened on the bottle, turned on suddenly and reminded her of the silence seconds before, which she hadn’t even noticed, with her racing mind always exponentially louder than any sound or taste or touch which dare not to cause clear distraction.
She thought to herself how she needs the sound, the heat, the water scalding, to wrap around her so tightly that for a single moment she gets lost in it. Lost in forgetting whoever it is she is now or was yesterday or who she might be tomorrow, but instead she just pretends to be a creature, any creature, prey and hunter, with the vulnerability of sculpted glass and the strength of unpolished granite.
Bottles floated beside her like dead bodies lost in some battle, left to rot. Bouncing up and down against her flesh, smooth and plastic, as they were. The casualties of sharing a tub with a child. Not at that very moment, but the day prior, without time or resources to purge its victims out on the open battlefield of parenthood.
The water around her too soon turned lukewarm, another victim of reality reflected. She romanticized sinking further into it, her chin and lips swallowed by simple water still. Those pools which are far deeper, intoxicating with their virtue, as vultures make offerings of vice, and so she sinks into it, the lukewarm, the cacophony of a thousand endings, the stories painted in the embrace of tub water displaced into a delicate dance, the same element against her, she reasons, that churns violently about the sea.
Lockdown Day 24: Devs, Plagues, and Capitalism
The future and the past, told to us in stories since we were children, have merged here and now, in the present. The past: tales of plagues and great suffering, great depressions. The future: artificial intelligence taking away jobs, the wealthy only further consolidating their wealth, while everyone else aggressively treads water and slowly–or quickly–sinks.
A “great depression” hit me yesterday–and not an economic one. One far greater than the typical extisentialist dread. Because meaninglessness doesn’t hold a candle to the curse of humanity: our survivalist and tribe mentality, rooted in our biology, traps us in a constant state of moving backwards when we should be moving forward. Often it’s like we’re on a train, looking out the window, when another passes quickly the other way, and it seems like we’re moving forwards, but actually we’re still drifting to a stop, or at standstill.
Living with a mind that likes to solve problems by putting together different variations of multiple ideas or experiences, the depression comes when I acknowledge that solving for humanity’s achilles heel is much like trying to divide zero by zero. Don’t get me wrong–there are many beautiful, caring individuals who are today risking their lives to help others. There are beautiful parts to humanity as well. But as far as the general sense of progress towards a greater existence, it simply feels as if we’re constantly on that train, moving backwards without noticing.
It may not behoove me in my mental state to watch near-term speculative science fiction, but my husband’s childlike enthusiasm for a Fx series called Devs (and his semi-joking threat to part ways with me if I don’t watch it) led me to watching episode one, and by the end, I was hooked. Its writing is clumsy at times–poignant points are made a bit too perfunctory–but the overall concept is well worth exploring. Inspired by the double slit experiment, the show explores the dark side of quantum mechanics, in giving humans the power to recreate the past and see into the future. It primarily asks us to question the absoluteness of free will, and it seems the physics of it are close enough to possibly possible that it lets ones imagination run free–and/or not free at all (as all our actions and thoughts are on a “tram line,” as the lead character so brilliantly played by Nick Offerman (yes, that Nick Offerman) tells us.) And the show itself is smartly set sometime between now and the next few years, with a might-as-well-be present day San Francisco as its backdrop. It could certainly be present time, with the quantum mechanics work occurring in a lab somewhere on some tech campus, without anyone knowing what was being discovered that could overnight throw our society and way of existing on its head.
Much like Coronavirus has.
There will always be unavoidable threats that face us. A giant meteor could veer a little too close to our solar system and continue its way into our atmosphere and land at such force that civilization is virtually wiped out. An alien species could attack us. The sun could (will) eventually die, as every star does. We derive comfort from progress, our great human “innovation,” yet if there is anything this crisis has–should tech us–it is that we are practically defenseless against these greater threats. The greater the threat, the more incogitable the threat. Instead of moving forward, we’re buried, suffocated, by fake news and conspiracy theorists who vehemently hate science and seek to destroy true progress for the sake of their own comfort thinking they know everything because they read an article somewhere that told them so.
I have little faith in society and thus not the most faith in democracy. I’m not sure the ideal way of managing a massive collective of people, but democracy (and especially whatever version of it we have in America that isn’t actually democracy at all), is fundamentally flawed, as it trusts that the people in a society actually know what’s best for them. It also, at least in the case of American democracy, enables the wealthy to manipulate and gain influence quickly.
Yesterday, Bernie dropped out. I’m not sure his way would, long-term, solve everything. But certainly a system which focuses on making sure every one of its citizens has access to healthcare and a high education is a start. People don’t want to believe that, though, because they’re afraid of being forced to do anything, even if it is in their best interest.
In the conversations and debates I have with friends who are centrists, I find a battle against the belief that progress is good. I sit here, locked in my 800 square foot apartment, wondering why we blindly trust that progress is a good thing. It can be. Certainly vaccines have saved many from horrible illness and death. Our electric cars will reduce emissions and at least minimally slow climate change. But much “progress” is actually regress. Our advancements… do not always advance us.
Even for the positive progress and innovation in the world, why must this type of progress only come from the desire to be wealthy and/or powerful?
I like nice things. I do. I enjoy gourmet meals and wearing overpriced jeans that fit just right and traveling the world in relative comfort. I also like the security that comes with money. No, not money–but wealth. Not “super wealth,” but enough wealth to not have to worry. Wealth that grows enough that you don’t have to think about it wealth. I’m certainly privileged to even imagine a world where that is possible, and lucky to have fallen into a career that, unlike all the things I thought I’d be doing when I was in college, actually pays a livable wage and then some. But, then I wonder, is this world where striving for security–striving for not having to worry about being unable to pay healthcare bills and put a roof over my family’s heads–is a world that shows us any progress at all.
Or are we all really just shifting slowly backwards on that train, lost in the great illusion of progress as “pro?”
Today is the Day I Grew Up.
It seems with every passing year, there are a few stretches of 24 hours where I mutter that to myself under my breath, or allow its veribage float and flutter maniacally in my mind for a brief while, only to be forced out by reconciling my desire to not be old with not actually being old. There was the day I graduated high school, then, the day an airplane–then another–hit the Twin Towers and I watched a city that was once my urban backyard crumble with a vulnerability I never mentally allowed it to have…
…there was the day I got my first real job, the day I got my first solo apartment, and the day I moved back in with roommates. The days of frantic calls from home and hospitals leading up to the day my father died. The traumatic birth of my son, when I lie on a hospital bed, seconds after giving birth, trying to tell myself my son died, just to prepare myself for the absolute worst after the doctors took him from me and tried to get him to breathe on his own (it took over 36 hours for that to happen.) The day my son first called me mommy and not “dada!” (well, it was more like “mommy mommy mommy.”) The day I saw my first (ok, eighth) grey hair and decided I wouldn’t pluck it from my head.
But none of those experiences aged me so permanently as living through an–actual–global pandemic. With so many humans having to life through horrific wars, this pandemic, which kills under 1% of its victims in most regions, is a “baby war.” Even those who feel the impacts of it more acutely, in job losses or crippling illness, are still unlikely to die from it. More will know someone who passes from the disease when all is said and done, but for a horrible pandemic, it, well, it could be a lot more horrible.
Still–as a mother, as a 36 year old woman less than four years away from turning 40–as a worker who is trying to balance working from home without childcare and still being a mother and still having some semblance of sanity AND managing burning waves of anxiety that rip me apart from my inside until I’m left hollow and shaken–I feel–old. I feel my age. I feel those 36 years of knowing exactly what all this is. Of watching people ignoring health official recommendations. Of seeing how in our wealthy country we somehow do not have the proper protections for our vulnerable healthcare workers and EMTs on the front lines. Of watching democracy fall apart because people would rather believe whatever it is they want to believe based on what makes them feel safe, rather than think for themselves. Of watching foreign powers infiltrate our social media and deliver a constant feed of Fake News to further terrorize our democracy into a shadow of its former self.
I grew up, because I know too much, and pay too much attention to all of it. I envy those who find comfort in conspiracy theories and/or religion. I see my life ahead of me, however long that is, of a clear next phase of my reality. I’m not a “young–carefree–mom.” I’m a mother who worries and wonders what will come of our country and our world. It’s not just this pandemic. The pandemic brought to the forefront what is already going on and shone a bright light on rapidly rising inequality and wealth distribution. It shows those of us who care to look that our nation is fractured, possibly past the point of return, though it will take a while for it to crumble. It is, perhaps, the beginning of the fall of the American empire–which is maybe not a horrible thing for the history books, but not so great as a citizen. I question what that means and look to foreign political leaders who are using this situation to consolidate power and take on authoritarian rule overnight.
Growing up means seeing what’s there. The cracks. Seeing all of the cracks in the foundation of our society and being forced to accept that there is nothing to do to avoid its collapse. And, as history tells us, societies must collapse and be reborn in some other model. And here I sit, just a 36 year old woman, a mother, an employee, a half-decent friend, a someone, a no one, just watching the fantastical stability of society slowly, quickly, and again slowly combust, right before my very eyes.
Today is the day I grew up. And this time, I’m aging at full speed, with society etching worry lines into my forehead, and painting dark circles of sleepless nights under my eyes.
life with interest 
