Food

I'm munching on some dried apples, trying to take the edge off of my appetite while my andouille sausage and spinach stuffed squash bakes away in the oven. I'm making do, making up an recipe with the discrete objects I still have in the freezer/on the kitchen counter from before I went on vacation a week ago. Except the dried apples. Those are my answer to kettle chips, the junk food Kryptonite to my Superman.

I love food. 

My enthusiasm for food and cooking is reflected in my Christmas gifts from the past couple years. Many of them come from Sur la Table, a store I could spend an entire afternoon in happily. There are candy making spoons, tart pans, fancy cake pans, new pots, a marble pastry board, a Kitchenaid, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking (thanks, Mom!)

I love cooking. I love having other people cook for me. I love walking into someone's house in a sundress in late August with a lattice-top peach pie. I love showing my love and appreciation for someone by inviting them into my kitchen when I don my damask apron, crank up Ella Fitzgerald, and make onion soup and coq au vin to make you weep. 

I love eating what other people cook for me. Laughing out loud when I  find out that the impossibly tender and flavorful Dijon chicken and asparagus I'm eating was cooked in the microwave. Tasting a family recipe that someone learned to cook at the elbow of a loved one. Seeing a new cook execute a tricky recipe for the first time.

I love cooking with other cooks and listening to their stories. How the crepe pan belonged to someone's mother and they used to get crepes on Bastille Day. How a meal brought a couple together. How one cook blew up at another and dumped a pan full of olive oil into his soup. 

I love food. 

I fear food. 

I fear food in the way that only a girl who weighs over 110 pounds and has shopped at the Uptown H&M can fear food. 

I worry about the calories in the cream and sugar I add to my afternoon cup of tea. I can't eat a cookie without counting up the calories in my head. Sometimes I have popcorn for dinner because it's objectively awesome and sometimes I have popcorn for dinner because I had a rich or heavy lunch or a late afternoon candy bar. I rarely keep things like kettle chips or ice cream in the house. The least healthy thing you will find here is a bag of popcorn that needs to be popped on the stove (because then I have to decide if I really want it) and hot chocolate that I keep to curb my sweet tooth.  

In quite possibly the worst or best decision I've ever made, I now keep my scale in my kitchen. I weigh myself every single day. When I'm thinking about after-dinner ice cream, I have to walk right past the scale before I can get to the freezer. Possibly unbalanced? Yes. Best weight-maintenance decision I've ever had? Absofuckinglutely.

A few months ago I decided that I was going to start "writing dangerously." The decision was more or less concurrent with my decision to go into therapy and the realization that maybe never telling anyone what was going on in my head was a bad idea. As a result, many of these recent posts have been more confessional than I ever intended for this blog. It's been a complicated process. A) I'm naturally a taciturn person B) I'm worried that my writing is, as a result of dealing with all these feelings, going down the shitter. C) This process has been therapeutic in a way I'll never be able to describe. D) I don't know if I want my writing to be my therapy process.

I'm inclined to these kinds of false dichotomies in my thinking. I can write about my feelings or I can bee a good writer. I can eat this cookie and still have dinner and be a fatty for the rest of my life or I can skip two meals today because I had an afternoon cookie. I can be successful in all aspects of my life by projecting the supremely confident, funny, smart girl that I am 70% of the time or I can admit that I'm sometimes a shrieking void of insecurity and doubt and will die old and alone, without even the cliched cats because I'm allergic to everything fluffy and adorable.

My relationship with food is probably the best (and worst) illustration of this crazy schizophrenic thinking to which I've suddenly become inclined. I would have never noticed it if my shrink hadn't suggested that I track my panic attacks and see what the triggers were. With the exception of all the worries about my loved one's health and the attendant panic that's occurring there, every single panic attack I've had has occurred after I eat.

What. The Actual  Fuck. How did I get to a point in my life where doing something that I used to enjoy, something that is, I don't know, NECESSARY TO CONTINUE LIVING, became something that I've so pathologized that I cannot do it without feeling like I may be dying when I finish? Might this indicate that it may be time to take the scale out of the kitchen? On a bigger level, to quit with the nutty dichotomies in my thinking?

Absofuckinglutely. 

All of You

I am the black sheep of one side of my family.

I'm in my late twenties and unmarried. I don't have kids. I seem to be allergic to serious relationships. When I was talking to a family member about my recent whirl-wind trip to New Orleans I said that I had never been so grateful to be unattached, childless, and without a pet in my entire life.

She rolled her eyes. I gracefully changed the subject to her grandchildren.

In a similar conversation with my younger brother and father I said, a little flippantly, "I can barely even balance my own checkbook, what the hell would I want a boyfriend for?"

My family doesn't miss a beat. "To balance your checkbook."

"My hypothetical family," I reply, "is going to be a two bank account kind of a household."

They roll their eyes. I gracefully change the subject to baseball.

Let's be honest. I've got some relationship hurdles to clear. I'm a recovering Catholic with all the attendant hangups that come with being a recovering repressed Catholic. I'm convinced that anyone who comes home with me that I haven't known for a billion years is secretly a serial killer. I talk about space constantly. My younger brother gave me a USS Enterprise Christmas ornament and I almost cried out of sheer happiness. I can be the worst frickin' culture snob. I sing constantly and completely out of key.

Charming, huh?

Additionally, I've never met a married couple and thought to myself "Yes! That is a totally stable and sane relationship. I WANT THAT RIGHT NOW AND FOREVER." I say this with all due respect to my parents and many of the lovely married couples I've met. Their relationships, while they may be stable or sane or perhaps both, are not what I have in mind for relationships I want to be committed to for the rest of my life.

In addition to the aforementioned problems (as if those weren't enough) I identified another, um, hurdle over the past couple weeks. While I was with my social worker friends last week, I brought up a question that appeared when I registered for online dating. The question was, essentially, "your partner has a minimum wage job and no ambition to ever have a higher paying/more prestigious/world-changing position. Would this bother you?" My answer, shockingly, was "Totally unacceptable."

Some of my friends have really run me through the wringer over this one, indicating that someone's work doesn't necessarily have to do with their ambition and they might be interesting and blah blah blah. All right, I'm not so shallow that I want my hypothetical boyfriend to make tons of money at a soul-crushing job just for the sake of money and power. But I want them to have work that they find interesting and meaningful and, quite frankly, that I can be proud of them for doing.

I asked the question to my social worker friends and praise be to the gods above, they agreed with me. That wasn't entirely unexpected, but it's nice to have independent verification that you aren't a vicious harpy because you expect your signif to be ambitious. My friend Carliene put it best. Women like us are running at top speed most of the time. If you can't have someone who can keep up, you might as well be speaking different languages.

I've spent my entire life as a skeptic of the "one true love" or "love at first sight" kinds of stories. Partially, I suspect, because my parents are utterly forthcoming about how they both kept dating other people after they met. Partially because I'm just a skeptic. I mean, one true loves and love a first sights make for great music and books (Ugh. The Night Circus. *pfffffffffffffft*) but in real life? And if those things aren't real, what's the point in mingling lifestyles and credit scores and DNA?

***

I'm the Grinch of weddings.

Don't get me wrong. I love wedding receptions, provided the music is danceable or I know most of the people in attendance. But that doesn't keep me from mulling over divorce rates while I'm sitting through a Roman Catholic wedding mass or watching the first couple dance to some terrible Tim McGraw song (honestly, people, Ella Fitzgerald has some beautiful love songs.) It sounds and is horrible, but I can't help but think about all of the weddings I've been to where the bride and groom are clearly not suited to one another and wasted their life savings on a huge, expensive, crazy party that they'll look back on and regret.

For the record, it's not every wedding that has me contemplating divorce attorney's rates and how much your credit score drops when you do divorce. It's just some and the thoughts come to mind completely unbidden.

You know what? I'm going to stop justifying this. Just don't invite me to your wedding.

***

A few years ago a friend of mine called to announce that she was engaged.

I started crying over the phone.

I was crying out of happiness.

I love this woman. I love her husband. I love them both so much it makes my heart hurt. Their wedding was one of the happiest, most joy and grace-filled experiences of my life. When my friends get together and we talk about the best wedding we've ever been to, we roundly agree on this one. It was incredible because of the people getting married and the obvious love that they have for one another. But it was equally incredible because of the generosity and love they showed for their friends and family and their friends and family showed for them.

For many years this was an atypical wedding for me. Many of the "celebrations" I attended included bridal freakouts, family drama on the dance floor, weird wedding party dynamics, etc ad nauseam. However, as my Minnesota family--the friends with whom I'm closest and love the most--are slowly getting engaged and planning their weddings, I'm discovering that those weddings, the dramatic, overblown, overly expensive affairs, are the exceptions. The other weddings, the ones that are full of love and respect and joy are becoming (thankfully) more common.

Oddly enough, the more of these weddings that I attend, the more convinced I become that love at first sight and one true love don't actually exist. Or perhaps they do, but they look a lot different than I always imagined. Instead of shared bank accounts and, I don't know, saving one another from huge-unconquerable-on-your-own problems, it's separate banks accounts and sixty hour work weeks and still taking a lot of meaning from your job. But also, curling up together in front of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and learning, day by day, that the one you love is not, in fact, going to kill you in your sleep.

At least, that's what I'm hoping it is.

With a Little Help

The day I received a key to Victoria and Nick's house was one of the happiest days of my life.

 To clarify, their house is the epicenter of my life in Minneapolis. They've let me crash on their guest bed more times than I can count, they never get upset at me when I make a giant mess out of their kitchen, and they don't mind letting me have free run of the house while they go along with their normal weekend plans.

More than anything though, their house is a place where I know I can truly come as I am, regardless of what that might entail.

My social circle when I'm in the city revolves around a six or so block radius around their house and whenever I'm in town we do much the same things. Cook, eat, laugh, drink wine, make inappropriate jokes, and academically parse comic books or kink or writing or history. It's fun and always a relief to be among people I love and trust.

Anyway, about a month ago, Victoria gave me a key to the house and I almost cried. Because she gave the key with the expectation that I would use it to come and go as I wanted. And because her home and this neighborhood in South Minneapolis feel more like home than where I'm living now. It sounds a little overwrought, I know, but receiving this key felt like coming home.

I come from a pretty independent family. We reroof our own houses, fix our own cars, butcher our own venison, and generally handle things one our own. It's been a point of pride for me, as I've grown into adulthood, to learn how to haggle with landlords, work with banks, juggle work and a social life and a nascent spiritual journey without relying on a whole lot of people.

In conjunction with self-reliance, I tend to be a deeply private person. I may write a first-person blog, but I keep Back many of the salient details behind the stories I tell here. Once, after breaking up with someone I had been dating for six-ish months, I lamented the emotional catastrafuck of breakups to a friend and she replied "I didn't even realize you were in a relationship."

Like I said, private.

I feel like the luckiest person in the world. I have interesting, passionate, engaged, stimulating people in my life. I also have people with pretty highly tuned bullshit detectors in my life. In the past few weeks two close friends, both social workers who live out of state, asked how I've been. When I told them I was coping their responses where, essentially, "bullshit, we'll be on the next bus to see you." When they arrived they didn't pull any of their social worker shit on me. We didn't talk about my feelings or my deep-rooted fear of death or my anxiety disorder. I made them dinner. We exchanged lots of hugs. When I had a minor meltdown about (and not about) packing for the holidays, Krista packed my suitcase for me. We told bawdy stories and they straightened my hair. 

It's hard to describe what's been going on for me, emotionally, over the past few weeks. On one side, there's all of this emotionally draining chaos. On the other, there is an incredible network of support and love that I always new existed in theory, but is suddenly here in reality. I feel, I suspect, not unlike a scientist whose experimental data finally proves a hypothesis they've always suspected to be true. The people I love have come through for me in amazing, breath-taking ways. There have been the big things, like a last minute trip to New Orleans, but there have been a lot of very small things that make life just a bit easier too. A packed suitcase. A new Garrison Keillor book. Emails with links to pictures from NASA. Texts that say, simply "I love you." 

A month ago, when Victoria and Nick gave me a key to their house, I realized that home doesn't have to be the place where you grew up or even where you currently reside. My family, my blood relations, taught me self-sufficiency. My other family, the ones who live in El Paso and Boston, Minneapolis and Oklahoma City, are teaching me that while self-sufficiency is appropriate in a lot of circumstances, it's all right to get by with a little help from my friends.

Pineapple

It's the night before my loved one goes in for a cancer biopsy. I am functioning at my absolute lowest level, which is to say hardly functioning at all. I'm drinking tea, playing Tetris, and trying to avoid talking to anyone when my phone rings. It's my best friend of fourteen years and I know why she's calling. She's worried about how I'm dealing. I don't particularly want to talk, but answer to let her know I'm, you know, not crawling into a bottle of bourbon. We chat for a bit and when I get ready to say goodbye, she says "Hang on, I still have something to say to you."

She offers me a free plane ticket to New Orleans. For three days from now.

I turn her down.

I intimated in one of my earlier posts that the past couple months have been chaotic at best. In the interest of full disclosure, I will now say that November-December have been the worst fucking months of my life.

Someone I love has cancer and I am literally just waiting to find out of it's the horrible, contemplate-life-without-them kind of scary or the more easily treatable but still unwelcome kind of scary. I've never been as busy at work as I am right now. I can't get my own mental health shit under control and have had panic attacks on an average of two per day for the past three weeks. I haven't had a full night's sleep since late October. Due to all of the stress and madness going on right now, I can't seem to get physically well. I haven't seen my mom since August and I miss her so much that it's hard to breathe.

Also, have I mentioned that it won't stop snowing in Minnesota?

In a recent email to a friend I described myself using Jane Austen's characters. "In my mind, I'm Elizabeth Bennett. In real life, I'm probably more of a Fanny Price."

Fanny Price, for those of you who aren't Janeites, is the main character of Mansfield Park. She's reserved and deeply, painfully shy. She also happens to be an incredible listener (we introverts tend to be) and as a result the people in her life pour their guts out to her.

Like Fanny, I spend a lot of time listening. I try to avoid giving advice because I never feel like I'm getting the entire story. Additionally, I ate a cookie for breakfast this morning. I have no business giving advice about jobs or weddings or relationships to anyone. So I spend a lot of time listening and making empathetic noises. Chiming in when someone makes an utterly irrational claim and trying to steer them back on the path. It's a nice arrangement. The vast majority of my friends are external processors and are people with a lot of, um, emotions. They get someone to vent to and I get to feel like I'm actually being helpful.

Being the quiet, reasonable, available one has its drawbacks. I seem to find myself as the go-between for breakups more often than I would like. There are people in my life who are so emotional that I find myself absolutely, completely unable to sympathize with them in any meaningful way. As a result, I've become an obsessive call-screener.

To digress, I recognize that my own personal brand of repression and avoidance isn't the best case scenario. However. I don't really do crying unless someone has died or your marriage is heading towards divorce or your dissertation advisory committee has just torpedoed you or you've just watched David Tennant's final episode of Doctor Who.

The final and at present most difficult drawback is that when people are used to confiding in you it can be challenging to create your own emotional space. As I've been struggling to sort out my own emotions surrounding this cancer diagnosis, people are still confiding in me and it's not that I think what they're dealing with, be it a breakup or a fender bender, isn't important. It's that I have zero emotional energy to invest in anyone else right now. It's frustrating because I never developed the ability to say "I don't have time for you right now." I had sort of hoped that saying "I'm waiting to hear if someone close to me is going to have to go in chemo and radiation therapy" would do the trick, but we can all be a little self-involved at times. For God's sake, I write a blog. In first person. I know what it's like to be self-obsessed.

The worst part of all of this is that my reactions to other people have been so skewed. I am viciously angry when someone I've confided it about the details of this illness and the person suffering from it asks me how I'm doing, but when someone else asks to to proofread a graduate school paper or help them write a grant, things that objectively take more time and energy, I'm fine. It isn't rational. None of these emotions are rational. This illness this person is suffering from isn't rational.

When my best friend called with her Oprah moment my immediate, instinctive response was rational. I have a ton of work to do, I'm unlikely to be good company, I can't take Monday off at the last moment, I already made plans with other people for the weekend, Christmas is in just over a week and I have a million and six things to do before I can take off for the holidays, I should be spending hotel money on Christmas presents, etc. I made a rational decision not to take her up on her offer of a free plane ticket.

Shortly before Michelle called I had a long conversation with a very good friend, someone who is, if anything, taking up negative emotional space in my life right now. What I mean is despite living hundreds of miles away, she's helping me deal with all my shit in amazing, supportive ways. She is a very level-headed girl and knows how wrapped up I can get in my own head. She understands how I need facts to deal with anxiety and how I want the world to make sense forever and always. She also saw a loved one through their cancer diagnosis, treatments, and recovery, so she's got a good handle on what I'm feeling. As we were talking I broached the fact that I'm Fanny Price and that I listen to everyone else's problems without talking about my own. And I rambled on for a long time about all of this shitty emotional stuff that's going on and how ill-equipped I feel to deal with it.

When I finally wound down she said something that cut through all of the fear and anger and apprehension I was feeling.

You're now in a universe where 1+3=a pineapple. Rationality can't touch this.  

After I hung up on Michelle I saw my chat box with her flashing in the corner of the screen. I mulled over the second part of that phrase "Rationality can't touch this." She's right, of course. Over the past two months I've started to live in a universe were rationality and rational responses to things are, well, they're still options, but maybe not the best options.

It takes about eighteen minutes of struggling with my inner control freak before I can pick up the phone again.

"I'm an idiot," are the first words out of my mouth.
"I'll see you on Friday. The weather in New Orleans is supposed to be in the low 70s."

If I have to live in a universe where 1+3=a pineapple, where I'm losing control over my emotions and blowing up at people when they try to confide in me, where illness and death and uncertainty are constantly on my mind, I might as well also accept that I'm living in a universe where I'm willing to jump on a plane with my best friend at the drop of a hat.

Dissonance

It's Monday morning and I'm nearly apopleptic with rage.

One of my building neighbors has apparently stolen the communal snow shovel. Stolen the communal snow shovel after only shoveling out the two feet in front of their apartment stoop. After other building neighbor and I shoveled out their sidewalks twice yesterday. As a result of the neighbor absconding with the snow shovel, all of the snow is slowly being tamped down by bootprints, which will ultimately make it harder to remove. Although, in all reality, that's only about half of what has me so enraged.

I'm really salty because I have to wear pants to work today.

Let me backtrack a bit. We had a snowstorm here on Sunday. It was the first one of the season and because I didn't have to leave the house for anything urgent, it was a welcome reason to slow down. I spent the day drinking strong coffee, watching Moonrise Kingdom, listening to Curtis Fuller, and reading.

I've been working on Dracula since about August. I often have one book that I pick up and set down, usually on my Kindle, as I'm reading through other things. Dracula has been nice because I knew enough of the basic plot to be able to have long stretches between reading it without losing the thread of the story. I've really gotten into it over the past couple weeks for some unexpected reasons. As I was reading through parts of it, particularly Dracula's attack on Mina, I got a little, well, flushed. Like, romance novel flushed. I was a little embarrassed by my reaction and texted a friend who had recently finished the book asking if she had a similar experience. She was horrified, I think, and after calling her a repressed Irish Catholic, I moved on.

My friend Kerry introduced me to Dessa, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, and is the one who convinced me to go into therapy. As a result, I roundly consider her the source and fountain of all truth. I also know that she read and loved Dracula, so I talked to her next. When I said something about my reaction and how Bram Stoker couldn't have accounted for 21st century kinks, she set me aright, telling me about coded eroticism in gothic horror. Armed with the knowledge that I wasn't a freak, I immediately indulged my inner lit crit nerd and spent the rest of the afternoon reading essays on eroticism in gothic horror (and cursing the fact that I no longer have easy access to literary journals.) After a few hours of mulling over and ruminating on said coded eroticism I started to have a series of conversations with some very smart, very hip feminists about sexuality, desire, and contemporary coded erotica not only in fiction but in media across the board. 

What I discovered is that a shockingly high number of my bright friends suffer pretty intense cognitive dissonance when it comes to attraction and desire in their own lives. What I mean, of course, by cognitive dissonance is that what we expect to turn our crank doesn't necessarily do the trick. And we all often get caught off guard by what actually triggers desire in us. For example, you're on a date with an objectively gorgeous guy but he doesn't know/care that Thomas Edison did his best to undermine Nikola Tesla's career. There's a part of you that thinks: "Big deal, this guy looks like Ryan Gosling." But there's another, louder part of your brain that shouts, literally shouts at you: "YOU CANNOT TAKE SOMEONE HOME WHO DOESN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT A DOUCHE THOMAS EDISON WAS TO TESLA. HE PROBABLY DOESN'T EVEN HAVE BOOKS IN HIS HOUSE." The cognitive dissonance is the break between what you think you're supposed to want (Ryan Gosling look-alikes) and what you want (science nerds.) Alternately, you read romance novels when you'd really rather be reading not-so-subtle power play in gothic horror.

These are, of course, examples that have never happened to me.

Now, about the pants.

Some context is required. If I am not outside being active or lounging around my house in my sweats, chances are over 95% that I am wearing a dress. I wear them to work. I wear them on first dates. I wear them running errands around town. I'm a dress enthusiast partially because they are oddly practical. Dress, tights, shoes, you're out the door without worrying about how well things match. Practicality is the easy to explain aspect of my sartorial choices. The other is going to require a roundabout explanation.

I have stunningly beautiful friends. Like, get asked if they've ever been considered being a model stunningly beautiful friends. Their thighs don't touch. They have hair that is so straight and shiny it looks like it comes out of a shampoo commercial. They have perfect teeth and tan in the summer and don't bite their nails.

And I've . . . well, I've got angles and lighting that work for me. I've also got a deceptively good sense of humor, I understand affect/effect, I'm well-read and a little brainy, and I like to think I'm on the charmingly crazy side of things rather than the "you don't want to stir that pot of crazy" crazy side of things (ever noticed how many gorgeous people are completely bananas?) And for years I thought that the humor and the high degree of literacy and relative-mental-normalcy were fine. That I didn't have any hangups from spending so much time with good looking people. Then I realized that I had to wear pants to work today and pitched a fit.

Wearing dresses for me started as a way of leveling the playing field, of dealing with my (apparently terrible) self-esteem and jealousy. After awhile it became less about leveling the playing field and more like putting on a suit of armor. If I dressed in a specific way people would respond to me differently. And wearing a pair of jeans or dress pants out made me feel less like a confident, funny, brainy awesome catch and more like the frumpy wallflower who always gets asked "so, tell me about your friend."

Oh, hello cognitive dissonance. Apparently you're not only a part of my sex life but of my self-perception as well.

While we were talking about Dracula and eroticism yesterday a friend said to me that Victorians understood more about sexuality and desire than we give them credit for understanding. The actual physical process of sex was certainly more of mystery than it is to us in 21st century. But their fiction managed to illustrate desire and eroticism in these coded, complex, compelling ways. In the 21st century we understand sex in its mechanics (thanks, internet!) but understand so little of what makes us tick, what informs our desire and our sexuality. As a result, something as idiotic and simple as wearing a pair of corduroys to work on a frigid day can suddenly become loaded and coded in ways we (I) didn't anticipate. What started as a clothing choice suddenly becomes an example of cognitive dissonance in a profound way.

I often tease a friend of mine because she has a deep, intense love for Victorians. On more than one occasion I've admonished her about gender and society, environmentalism  restrictive fashion, etc. during the time period. I'm chagrined to have to tell her that Victorian literature, with all of its sexual subtext and coded eroticism,  has managed to teach me something about not only my self-perception, but about my sex life as well.

Thanks, Bram Stoker.

Fear

I'm on the bus, having just barely caught it after running out of my office half in tears. I'm struggling to hold it together until I can get into my house. I've always prided myself on keeping the me that cries very separate from the me who lives in public.

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

It's like a prayer or a mantra. Words I hang above my desk at work, words that I repeat to myself when I'm in the midst of a panic attack or on rare occasions  like this one, my emotions threaten to overrun in a semi-public place.

I must not fear. 

Fear is the mind-killer. 

It's not a prayer. Or a mantra. Or the beginning of a poem I love. It's the Litany Against Fear from Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic Dune. And in moments of intense anguish, fear, anxiety, it's what pops into my head. It's not entirely unexpected. Dune is one of my all time favorite series, and the Litany itself does not ask for divine intervention or the wisdom to understand what's happening. Instead, it appeals to the intellect:

I must not fear. 

Fear is the mind-killer. 

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.

The idea of it appeals to me. Fear is what shuts down your cognitive functions. Shutting those functions down brings about your annihilation  When you stand face to face with your fear you can acknowledge it and use your intellect to vanquish it.Unsurprising that it appeals to me, right? The intensely cognitive one, who's always trying to think her way out of problems, who increasingly uses facts as a weapon to undermine her anxiety, wants to think her way out of fear. Sometimes I'm so cliched it bothers me.

Anyway, as soon as I step off of the bus, I book it down the block to hurry up and get into my house. After fumbling the keys for minute, I get the door open, get into the house, and sit down at the kitchen table and fall apart.

I've just gotten off the phone with someone I love very much. During the course of the conversation they used one of those disease words. You know, those big, scary disease words. The diseases that have their own foundations, that researchers get funded millions of dollars to cure. The ones that we think could one day be fixed by gene therapy but we don't know, and by the time we figure it out, the people we love will be long dead anyway.

I couldn't hear any of the specifics I was supposed to be getting over the phone because the word just kept reverberating off the insides of my skull. Now I'm sitting at my kitchen table wishing I had heard all the details about treatment options and prognosis and all of the facts that should be helping me through this.

Once, when I was hiking the Tiger Leaping Gorge in China and had to cross a waterfall without a bridge and with a sheer drop to my right, I was pretty scared. I often feel anxious when I'm working on a big project or driving through bad weather. But I have never felt terror like this before. The first line of the Litany Against Fear pops into my head and I try to breathe deeply. I try to calm down and follow my fear. I try to pull those facts about prognosis and treatment options out of the ether.

I wish I could say that it worked. I wish I could say that I calmed down, that I sat my zazen session tonight, that I realized that worrying and fear would do nothing to help out this person. I wish I could say that I looked at websites with facts about the disease and could think optimistically about the future. And at first I thought I would be able to say that. But when I stopped repeating the Litany to myself and stopped breathing deeply, when I came back, so to speak, into my own thoughts at the moment I realized I was shaking. And was about to be comprehensively ill.

My brain has spent twenty-eight years tricking me into thinking that facts, that knowledge, that rationality would save me. That these things alone would be everything that I needed. I could just hide behind a wall of facts and figures, take refuge in knowledge and rationality and use those things to confront my fears. When I confronted my fears, I'd be able to disarm them with all of these things. To a certain extent, that kind of thinking has helped me to face the small fears I've encountered in the past. But tonight my body is telling me that this fear is a little too much for my brain to handle.

The past month and a half has been, frankly, terrible. My professional life has been extremely busy. My family lost someone very dear to us. My grandmother was unwell. I got into a car accident. Now there's this life-altering disease to cope with. These are big, scary things, things for which I am ill-equipped to cope because I want to beat them back with facts. But while the atoms in a loved one's body will continue to exist past their death, losing them is still permanent and horrible. While medical treatments continue to get better and easier to access, they're not always successful and they're no where near affordable enough. My family and friends and support network are incredible, loving people, but they still live hundreds of miles away from me. For the first time, I'm unable to cope with fear armed with facts alone.

After awhile I manage to clean up and warm up. As I put on my sweatpants for a night in front of the television in an attempt to turn my brain off, something that isn't the Litany Against Fear, but still a prayer of sorts, pops into my head. It's a line from my favorite Dylan song, one I've loved for fourteen years:

The only thing I knew how to do was to keep on keepin' on. 

Permitting your fear to pass over you and through you doesn't mean that you don't address it, that you manacle it with facts and rationality and stash it away somewhere. It means feeling it in all of its horrible complexity and then, when it has passed, picking yourself back up and keep on keeping on. 

I am more scared now than I have ever been in my entire life, but I feel like maybe I'm just starting to fully understand the Litany and Dylan lyrics I've been mumbling to myself for years now. 

All the Redemption I Can Offer

My soul is lost, my friend.
Now tell me how I begin again?
-Bruce Springsteen, My City of Ruins

I'm driving too fast for the conditions in the North Country. 

It's that weather that we have here from October until December. When the precipitation is not really rain or even freezing rain and it's not really snow either. It's just a cold, heavy, wet mess. 

Anyway, I'm driving too fast for whatever this weather is. I've gotten into the car when I'm upset, something my daddy told me never to do. I've been listening to Springsteen's My City of Ruins on repeat for the past ten minutes. Driving too fast. In bad weather. Down twisty hilly roads. While I'm upset. 

Before I got into the car my father called me. My grandmother's best friend, a woman I've known for literally my entire life, passed away. Gram, he tells me, is upset but this was not entirely unexpected. 

Death is sneaky. 

Death is particularly sneaky when you're used to squishing down your emotions, used to avoiding them until they come out in OCD symptoms or insomnia or sleepwalking. When we get off the phone, I tell myself I'm alright. That while I have known this person for many years, while she was  like a second grandmother to me, that I'm not sad. We haven't seen one another in a long, long time. I'll be fine.

I keep repeating this mantra to myself while I get into the car and go see friends. While I'm waiting to check out at the grocery store, I realize that I may have left the stove on. That my house may be burning down as I'm standing there. 

You know the rest. I have a slightly delayed anxiety response to negative stimulus. This is what I tell myself as I walk through the weather and get into my car. It's just an anxiety response. Everything is fine. I do some deep breathing and calm down. 

I have, for whatever reason, a deep desire to listen to My City of Ruins, so I pull it up on my phone and pull out of the parking lot. And as I'm driving down the twisty, dark roads through the weather, the bottom falls out. 

It falls out in a weird way. Or maybe, not so weird. I start thinking about raspberries. This woman, my surrogate grandmother, had an amazing raspberry patch. Every summer for years I went into that patch and ate as many raspberries as I could. It was something she always remembered, and she always brought them out to the cabin when we were there. She always brought them for me, the same way she always made me this special Czech cookie I loved. And I realized that not only did I love this woman, but she loved me back. And I'm never going to hear her funny laugh, or have her beat me at Scrabble, or get a birthday card in the mail or a bookmark that she's made by hand again. 

I'm never going to eat raspberries out of her raspberry patch again. 

I start crying right as the road gets particularly dark and twisty. I make it, somehow, to my destination without incident and manage to pull myself together in the car before I head into the house. I make it through the evening, laugh a little bit, watch election results come in, am overjoyed when we defeat the constitutional amendments and reelect President Obama. I say goodnight and go back out to my car and immediately feel guilty for feeling joyful when this person I love has died. I let myself forget for a little while that she's gone and that I'll never see her again.

Death is sneaky.

***
You can hide 'neath your covers
and study your pain.
Make crosses for your lovers
throw roses in the rain. 
Waste your summer prayin' in vain
for a savior to rise from these streets.
-Bruce Springsteen "Thunder Road."

I'm standing in the nosebleeds of the Xcel Center in Minneapolis. I'm a little sweaty from dancing, my eyes are on the massive, hi-def monitor hanging from the ceiling, my hands are in the air, and I'm swaying from side to side. I'm sure from the back I look like a worshiper in a Mega Church. 

I'm in the Xcel Center but I'm also waxing the top of my father's Bronco. I'm back at the cabin running around in the sunshine. I'm helping my father haul wood in the backyard of my childhood home, or lugging tiles down to the basement of my grandmother's old house, or I'm in the kitchen at the cabin, and all the people I love are still gathered around the table playing Scrabble and there's a bowl of raspberries just for me on the hutch.

Don't worry. I haven't gone all new agey on you, and the Xcel Center is not playing host to Mega Church services on Sunday mornings. I'm attending a Springsteen concert, my first, and I'm hearing my favorite song of his live for the very first time.

It's like a religious experience.

Springsteen is in my earliest memories. My father has listened to and loved him since the 70s. My mother loves him as well. My younger brother and I regularly argue about his best songs. My cousins have seen him live. His Greatest Hits albums is the one that I always put on the radio when I'm spending time with my father and our conversation begins to fade. When I hear say, The River, I inadvertently hold my breath. I silence everyone else in the room or the car. I have to hear the song all the way through to the end or I feel like I'm missing something. Springsteen is in my heart and he's in our familial DNA. Even for the members of the family who don't like him, he's a shared part of our life together.

Listening to Springsteen reminds me of my family in the most visceral way possible. It reminds me of all the times Daddy came to pick me up in Central Minnesota and we listened to him on the trip home. His music reminds me of summers at the cabin, when all the people I loved in the world were still alive. His music reminds me of the time my parents called me at 2:00 am after one of his concerts elated by what they had experienced.

But the memories aren't all good ones. I can't listen to Springsteen without thinking about driving to Minneapolis with a good friend after a soul-crushing breakup. I can't hear him without thinking of all the times I've let my parents down, all the casual hurts my family has inflicted on one another throughout our lives together.

It's this whole mess of memories that comes flooding over me when I hear the opening bars of my favorite Springsteen song, Thunder Road. It's this song that gets me acting like I'm a worshiper in a Mega Church, and before I realize it, I'm crying. Like an idiot. I'm standing in front of literally hundreds of other people swaying to a song, singing along, and crying so hard I'm afraid I'm going to give myself the hiccups.

Listening to that song, hearing it live, makes me miss my parents and my brothers and wish that they were with me. It makes me so utterly, pathetically, absurdly, profoundly grateful for the opportunity to be alive and in this place at this moment. It makes me think about all of the people I have loved and who have passed throughout my life. It makes me think of how all the people I love will die someday. How I'll die someday.

And I feel everything. Happiness, gratitude, anger, loneliness, sadness, joy, I feel everything.

And it's wonderful. And horrible. It feels like walking around with my insides turned out, or with a bad burn that hurts to touch. Somewhere in the middle of all of this feeling, I hear the line that makes me love Thunder Road, the line that makes me love Springsteen, really:

Well, I'm no hero, that's understood. 

All the redemption, I can offer, girl,

is beneath this dirty hood.   

In the moment, the line takes on a kind of spiritual significance. This is it, all of these emotions, all of this feeling, this is redemption. Or at least, it's all the redemption that I can count on here, now. I will never eat raspberries with my grandmother's best friend again, just like I will never hear my maternal grandmother play the piano or listen to my grandfather tell my father he should vote Democrat. But I'll continue to go to the cabin and see my family. We'll continue to hurt and love and support one another. All of this feeling, all of these emotions are with me now. And I'm not losing them again.

It's all complicated and painful and joyous in a way I had never anticipated. In this moment, I am confident that no redemption ever promised to me by a confident priest would be any better than this, now.

The concert closes with my younger brother's favorite song and I'm tempted to call him or pay my parents back for their 2:00 am phone call so many years ago. Instead I pull on my winter jacket and wait on the corner, eagerly anticipating my best friend's arrival. When she does pull up, I get into the car equally pleased to see her, riding high off of the evening, and feeling anxious about the snow. After awhile I pause and think about my gram's best friend again. About raspberries. This time though, instead of feeling guilty about getting caught up in my own thoughts and emotions, I smile.

Life, it seems, is rather sneaky too.

Feast

It was a sunny, late August Sunday morning. I sat outside at a cafe in Minneapolis with friends drank coffee and ate brunch. We skipped lightly over subjects after spending the weekend in one another's company. Eventually we settled on what we did on our Sundays when we were growing up. There were a few church-going families in the group, a few families who always cleaned on Sunday mornings, football seemed to play a big role, as did Sunday dinners.

As a child I spent most of my Sunday mornings in church. As a young adult, I spent most of my Sunday mornings trying to avoid church. Sunday Mass was an important part of life in my house, and my parents very rarely missed it. And after Mass we all rested. My folks would watch football, take a nap, putter around the house.

There was always something sacred about Sundays.

I brought up this sense of sacred Sundays with the brunch group. It's hard, I said, to think of ways to instill that sense of sacredness in the family I hope one day to have without church attendance. We kicked around a few ideas, museums, concerts, cultural events. Meals with family whether that's actual blood relations or people like the ones sitting around the table who are as close as family.

I felt better after the conversation. At least, I felt a little better. But I know the gifts that religion gave me, a sense of awe and wonder, a feeling of being loved, and role models. It gave me early lessons in what to value and how to make sense of the world around me. It gave my life meaning, depth, and purpose. That's not to say religion was all rosy. Catholicism also gave me an unrelenting, crippling guilt complex, fear of a punitive God, and tried to impose upon me a sense of values which ran counter to what I observed about the world.

I want all of those good things for my children without the guilt and terror that came along with it.

***

I love Catholic feast days.

There are of course, the big ones, Christmas, Holy Thursday-Easter Sunday, the Marian feast days, the Epiphany. But the ones that I like are the smaller ones, the ones my graduate school friends celebrated because something about that saint's life or death had touched them. It made them think of something they wanted to strive for in their spiritual lives.

My friends tended toward the (relatively) obscure when it came to these saints. I had one friend who loved Saint Maximus the Confessor and (the fake) Saint Urho. Another, a feminist and later ordained female priest, Joan of Arc. Another, Kateri Tekawitha. They also had feast days they hated. One woman in particular would routinely remind us every August 15th about how much she thought the Feast of the Assumption was a "ridiculous feast day" because (as one of her friends put it) "Where does Mary go? I mean, does she just get sucked up into heaven like one of those tubes at drive-thrus at the bank?"

To digress, The Assumption was always one of my favorite feast days until I heard this description. Then it was impossible to attend church with the, shall we say, gravitas demanded of such a high holy day.

Anyway, I could continue. Everyone seemed to have their favorite saint and their favorite story about that saint or least favorite saint and least favorite feast day. Some of those stories and saints were uplifting, others horrifying, others just plain strange.

My friends would celebrate these feast days quietly for the most part. They would read from the works of the man or woman, ask for their intercessions, think about their spiritual lives and development, walk out to see a statue or contemplate an icon. Of course, there were a few feast days that we celebrated boisterously, with big meals and wine or whiskey and raucous stories, but for the most part, these were private devotions.

***

I keep some strange holidays.

Of course I celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas with my family, those aren't the holidays I'm talking about, although God knows those celebrations are strange enough. I'm talking about the ones that I schedule into my calender throughout the year that hold no national or religious celebrations, the ones for which I practice my own traditions. On Lincoln's birthday I make Mary Todd Lincoln's almond cake and reread Lincoln's second inaugural address. On the Fourth of July I reread the Declaration of Independence and The American Crisis. Starting next year, I'll also spend the 4th of July celebrating, somehow, CERN's announcement that they found the Higgs Boson. On the spacecraft Cassini's 15th anniversary of launch, I insisted that everyone I spoke to watch a video of the most moving images from that mission. 

It wasn't until this week, when I was trying to figure out how best represent Radium on a birthday cake for Marie Curie that I realized that I'm keeping feast days. The small things that I do on these days represent my devotion to these people, certainly, but to what they represent in my mind. When I eat almond cake and reread Lincoln's second inaugural address, I think of how I want to emulate his writing and his passion to preserving a strong federal government. When I read those early American documents I admire the courage of the men and women who fought and those who continue to fight for democracy. When I think of the best way to represent radioactivity on a cake, I think of Marie Curie's unwavering dedication to scientific inquiry and the sexism and xenophobia against which she struggled every day. These men and women represent who and what I want to become during my life, the same way Catholic saints inspire my friends in their spiritual lives. 

It may be that when I'm speculating about how to give my children the positive things that religion gave me without giving them all the hang-ups I have, what I'm really saying is that I want to find some way to give my own life meaning, depth, and purpose now that I've chucked Christianity. As I build my calender of secular feast days, I begin to see patterns in the things I celebrate: creativity, curiosity, drive, ambition, and an unrelenting passion to do what's right. These in and of themselves are not unchristian sentiments. Indeed, they are some of the very things that made me celebrate the Catholic feast days I did. 

It could, of course, be that I'm over-compensating. I could be once again intellectualizing the emotions of loss and abandonment I feel at no longer being a practicing Catholic, a member of the Christian community. That could be true. Although, all things considered, eating Mary Todd Lincoln's cake and pondering democracy sure beats sitting in Church wondering if Mary was sucked into heaven just like one of those tubes at the drive-thrus at the bank. 

Saints and Pancakes

"And I want to learn how to love God, and rest in His goodness."

This was a sentiment I heard often while I was studying theology in college. It has a distinctly hands in the air, Praise Jesus feeling about it does it not? Like you can imagine a generically good-looking, earnest young man saying it into the microphone right before he starts into a God Pop power ballad. Wearing jeans. In a Mega Church.

Believe it or not, I didn't hang out with the God Pop power ballad contingent while studying theology, although they were certainly around. The closest my friends in the department got were a few social justice oriented, wanna-be youth minister types, who would listen to the music because "it connects with the youth." My crowd was the intellectual bunch, shocking, I'm sure. But what I found even more shocking was that the Future-Theologians-of-America crowd also shared this sentiment. They still proclaimed a desire to "rest in God."

As far as I could tell "resting in God" meant learning to be content, working to be fully present to life in the moment.

It was, frankly, a sentiment that puzzled me. Both because it was the one thing that my orthopraxis and orthodoxy friends could agree on and because it was just a sentiment I didn't understand. I was rarely concerned with the Here and Now, preferring to think about the Soon to Be and Already Was. I wasn't sure how resting in God--someone so ethereal and disconnected--could make me more present.

***

One of the very few (very few) good things about living hundreds of miles from your friends is that whenever you're in town, there's an excuse for a get-together. When I'm in the North Country I can spend so much time alone that I forget how much I love and enjoy spending time with friends and a few glasses of wine. There is a certain kind of holiness that comes when you share a meal with people you love dearly. And the amount of laughter that I manage to wring from a few days with good friends is unmatched in the rest of my life. 

We always spend a few moments catching up. Hi, how are you's, how's work or law school or your mortgage or whatever. We spent the first hour of my birthday party talking about or 401(k)s. Retirement accounts at a birthday party, I ask you. Four years ago it would have been tequila shots and bawdy jokes. But after the seriousness, after the quick catch-ups with the details of one another's lives, we settle in to talking about movies or comics or books or politics or sex, as you do with people who know and love you. 

Over the weekend I saw some of these friends. They live on the East Coast now, and if we're lucky we see one another once a year. But they kept me sane through my first year of graduate school and I love and care about them as if we were family. We went to a local restaurant  ate pancakes, drank coffee, and caught up. I told them about what was going on in my life. They told me about their lives on the East Coast. The catching-up took less time than I had supposed. Then we talked politics and religion and laughed. Sweet merciful Jesus, did we laugh. 

The entire time we were together I didn't check my cell phone. I didn't think about the pile of work and equally large pile of dishes waiting for me at home. I sat at a table with my friends. I ate pancakes. I drank coffee. I talked about politics and religion.When I got out of the car for goodbye hugs I realized how rejuvenated I felt.

I struggle every single day with mindfulness, with perspective. More than that, I struggle to remind myself that while I am  not perfect, and that it is dangerous to always strive for perfection, I am still worthy of love, respect, and care from other people. I realized that when I'm with this couple, when I'm with good friends in the Cities or Central Minnesota, all of those doubts take a back seat. To pancakes and coffee. Babies and MPR. Dance parties and conversations about comic books. In those moments I am content to be loved and to love the people that I am with.

And that's the damnedest thing about trying to live an authentic, spiritually fulfilled life. I try so damn hard to rest in God by discovering Her through systematic theology and scriptural analysis, meditation and renunciation of a material life. In my off time, I've been toasting to years past with a tequila shot, making dinners, arguing about postmodernism and secularism, all the while discounting these actions as less-than-spiritual because they were things I enjoyed doing.

Much to my chagrin, I am coming to understand (ten years after the fact) that these relationships I've been building slowly are not what I do in my spare time but are part of my spiritual life in and of themselves. These men and women are not Bodhisattvas or Catholic saints. They are good, loving people who open their homes and their families to me. Through these small actions, these little graces, they teach me again and again that resting in God, or mindfulness, or inner peace, or whatever it is that I'm searching for is called, need not be something ethereal, something preached in a Mega Church by a man in blue jeans. It may be as simple as pouring a second cup of coffee, asking about someone's work or children, and sliding a second stack of pancakes onto their plate.

Gifts

Catholicism gave me gifts.

It's an aspect of the religious life I never talked about or even thought about until recently. But that's one of the benefits of being a religious person, is it not? Through prayer you receive a connection with the Almighty. Through Church you participate in a loving, caring, close-knit community.

The biggest gifts the Roman Catholic Church gave me were, in no particular order, the promise of eternal life,  a sense of purpose, and a personal God who could not only number of the stars in the sky but knew me before I had a name.

But, in a way, it was the smaller gifts that meant more. Yeah, yeah, yeah, eternal life and happiness. But immediately to hand was a community of close friends who loved and cared about me. There was the intellectual stimulation that came along with a good fight over doctrine. My parents and I shared a relationship that was based in this faith and transcended all of the hurt that we could do to one another.

And there was an outlet for anxiety.

I do not think that it is a coincidence that my compulsions began to become serious and interfere with my life when they did. One of my favorite graduate school professors used to preach that the liturgical action, Mass, kept Chaos at bay. Through our worship we were, in essence, creating a safer, calmer, more just existence. When he said Chaos he meant, if I understood him, Evil. Capital E Evil.

And he was right. I mean, I'm skeptical about the idea of spiritual warfare, but the liturgical actions of Roman Catholicism did a great deal to keep my own anxiety at bay. To this day, I don't know if it was the repetition  that is a part of Catholic Mass, the feeling of having a community who loved and accepted me, or something else about Catholicism  but something about it helped me cope with the anxiety that was becoming exponentially more crushing. Anxiety, depression, everything I was struggling with was Evil. I was certain of it.

But while I was coping with the anxiety, I was refusing to actually address it in a meaningful way. I was pulling the liturgical actions around me, taking comfort in their repetition and the ability to lose myself and forget about my issues in them. It wasn't enough. As my ability to square my intellect with Catholicism faded, my compulsions become more pronounced and less easy to control. As if losing faith in a personal God wasn't devastating enough, I was also slowly going crazy in the process. When, a year ago, I finally said out loud "I'm relatively certain there is no God" I went to pieces. I slept with the fire-extinguisher next to my bed so that when the house accidentally caught fire because I hadn't turned the stove off, I'd be able to put enough of it out to escape the house. Of course the burners weren't on. I had already checked them upwards of ten times. But giving up God meant giving up a purpose, it meant giving up any illusion of order and control in the universe. And I need that, even if it is an illusion. So the logical thing to do was to substitute a new illusion for the old one.

Constant checking behaviors are a pretty shitty substitute for a God who loves you.

***

Meditation has been bringing me gifts. 

I've refused the big ones. Promises of Enlightenment, of ending suffering, of living each moment in the present, these are all gifts it offers me. Granted, there's hard work involved, it makes no promises of these gifts being easy to earn. I'm not tempted by these promises. Rather, I'm tempted by them, certainly, but I'm not willing to accept them yet. For the time being, I'm content with the smaller things it's offering. A slower heart rate. Deeper breaths. Better sleep. 

I'm struggling quite a bit with meditation. It's a hard enough discipline to try to practice. Additionally, there's the guilt that comes with being an ex-Christian who's reading Buddhist scholars and taking introductions to zazen. The greatest struggle is to keep meditation from becoming a place to hide from my own anxiety, my obsessions and compulsions. There's a delicate balance here between learning to recognize anxious thoughts for what they are, addressing them, and moving beyond them and simply burying my mind underneath a mantra and being present to my breathing. 

***

It troubles me now that I thought of anxiety as Evil, if only for a little while. I suppose it explains why I went so long trying to conquer it on my own, or as "Kelly and God" kind of buddy-cop approach to mental health.  How arrogant, how wrong-headed an approach to getting better. Recently I came across the following passages in one of the Buddhist books I've been (a little guiltily) reading.

Meditation is a process of lightening up, of trusting the basic goodness of what we have and who we are, and of realizing that any wisdom that exists exists in what we already have. Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness  our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion. -The Wisdom of No Escape

In the end, I don't know where meditation and I will end up. It could wind up by the wayside with Catholicism  It may be a place to rest for awhile before moving on to something else. It may be that I accept the gifts meditation is offering me: a slower heart rate, deeper breaths, and better sleep, but also Enlightenment  of a life without suffering, of living in the present. Any of this is possible. But what I'm slowly, painfully learning is that anxiety is not Evil. Illness is not a something to hide from. Religion or spirituality alone are not going to fix me. The hard work of overcoming illness, of fixing myself, is something that I'm going to have to do.

That's a huge responsibility and a terrifying thought. But even if anxiety and OCD are problems for which I have to take responsibility and fix alone, I can do it with the gifts that both Catholicism and meditation have given me. A good night's rest is invaluable to an insomniac. The friends I've made at Catholic college and in graduate school love me in a way I would have never thought possible. The Zen group here in the North Country has provided me with resources I didn't even know existed. These gifts remind me that even though I must do the hard work of putting myself back together myself, I am not alone.

And when you're struggling to pick up the pieces of yourself and somehow put that shattered self-image back together that knowledge, that bit of connection means more than promises of eternal life or Enlightenment ever could.

 

Tornado

Here's a hard learned lesson. Never ask your friends what they would like to see you blog about.

The answers are either a) smartass or b) so off the wall and unlike anything you'd ever want to write about that you wonder if they've ever actually read anything you've written.

Selah.

What saved me this week was half a day in a car and a Neko Case song I adore.

***

I have waited with a glacier's patience. 

-Neko Case

My best friend is looking forward to a date.

Like me, she's using online dating. Also like me, she has some pretty horrifying stories about online dating. When we're together we privately agree that online dating is a wasteland of human sadness. However, we're both homebodies whose immediate social circles are either primarily gay, partnered, or both. Meeting straight single guys in those circumstances is challenging.

She's telling me about the guy and how excited she is about going to meet him and I can't help it, my inbred cynicism bubbles to the surface.

"He's probably some small town asshole."

She laughs and I tell her, "No, seriously. No one who uses online dating, you excepted, is good looking, charismatic, nice, and totally sane. Period. Even I'm only three fourths of that particular equation."

She doesn't miss a beat. "I assume you're missing totally sane?"

***
Stop it! Stop it! 
Stop it! Stop it! 
Stop this madness.
I want you.
-Neko Case

Dating with an anxiety disorder is awful.

I have sort of your normal woman-in-her-late-20s fears about dating: "How does this dress look? What if we have nothing to talk about? What if he's a Fundamentalist Christian? Who should pick up the check? What if he only listens to metal?" 

Then I have the special fears that only come with living with an anxiety disorder: "What if he's actually an H. H. Holmes style serial killer?" 

Seriously. That is the thought that goes through my head every single time I meet someone new for coffee. 

This is to say nothing of the sheer terror that comes with having to (eventually, I've never actually spilled it) admit that I have OCD and that despite being in treatment, I still struggle with it every day. If I'm not actively trying to suppress one of my compulsions I'm having to snap my fingers in front of my face to stop an obsessive thought train, which can be anything from the number of calories I've had in the course of the week to the fear I am actually allergic to cabbage and am about to go into anaphylaxis.

I wish I could say that I'm being a little flippant here, but these are the things that worry me. These and a host of other things. Living inside my head feels like spinning around inside a tornado of negativity, doubt, and anxiety. I'm still trying to figure out how to stop the negative thoughts from whirling around, sucking up other negative thoughts into a death-spiral of doubt and fear. I can't handle this without professional help, why in the hell would I want to land that tornado in someone else's life? 

***

 I miss, I miss,

I miss, I miss,

I miss, I miss,

I miss, I miss,

how you'd sigh yourself to sleep. 

-Neko Case

I've been in love exactly once in my life. 

I wouldn't have called it love then. I would have said infatuation at the time. I would have said a total fucking mistake when we finally broke up and it stuck. But now, with the clarity that only comes after many glasses of bourbon, crying to Patsy Cline's Greatest Hits, and many more years, I can say that I was in love. 

We weren't right for one another. I knew it even then. I was just starting to realize that there might not be something right about the way my brain works. He was the best candidate for delayed adolescence I've ever met. But he made me laugh, which I needed. He was devastatingly good-looking. So much so that my friends commented on it. He could also keep up with me intellectually, which was a gift. He liked Brahms and bluegrass and art. He edited and encouraged my writing. When we finally did split up, it was like losing one of my best friends. I cried so hard I threw up. I gained five pounds. I didn't leave my house except to go to work for weeks. 

What I loved about him--why I can say now, definitively, that I loved him--wasn't his washboard abs or his killer sense of humor. It was because as this fragile thing that was my mental health was slowly coming undone, I allowed myself to crash into him with the full emotional force of everything that was happening. And he understood. At least, he seemed to. He didn't turn away or try to deflect it. Instead he made me feel like, despite everything that was happening, something in me made me the kind of woman who could be loved by a man like him. 

In the end, he wasn't the Adonis I originally made him out to be. He was, however, a storm shelter for a brief time. 

***

This tornado loves you.

-Neko Case

In the end, my best friend's date didn't turn out. I saw her shortly afterward and she shrugged it off. He was good looking, and may have ended up being charismatic, nice, and totally sane. They just didn't click with one another. I admire both her stamina and her optimism. I find trying to keep those things up on my own end exhausting. 

But then again, the alternative is equally exhausting. Being alone and a mess is no easier than being with someone and a mess. 

In the end I think that's what keeps me dating even despite fears of metalheads and serial killers. It's the hope that there's someone who's not just a storm shelter, but an anti-tornado. And he may not have washboard abs or be charismatic, and he's probably not totally sane, but who is? My only real hope is that if he is a little bit crazy, he's also the kind of guy where when we do collide we can both finally stop spinning. 

Love, Knowingness, Bliss

In the category of slightly surreal:

I'm stretched out on my bed after a weirdly emotional reaction to a memory of an argument I had with my father. I have a blackout mask over my eyes so the light from my computer monitor won't distract me from my breathing. I'm listening to a well-known self-help-style guru guide me through the Heart Sutra. I'm trying desperately not to feel like some sort of spiritual hack--a horrible cliche of an ex-Catholic, ex-Christian trying to find some solace in Eastern Traditions. Here I am, a former student of theology in a tradition that prizes intellectual inquiry, a lover of science and proponent of the scientific method, engaging the most new-agey, ridiculous "I'm-spiritual-but-not-religious" activity I can imagine. I'm doing a meditation recommended by my therapist, not by my spiritual director. I can practically feel all my graduate school friends twitching in their sleep for reasons unknown to them

In the category of unsurprising:

I am "intensely cognitive, with a disconnect between my mind and my heart." Alternately, "I need to intellectualize everything with my giant fucking brain." I'll let you guess which words are mine. I've been told repeatedly, irritatingly, constantly, that my being intensely cognitive and prone to intellectualizing the shit out of everything is a coping mechanism, the result of dealing with an over-active and apparently out-sized amygdala dealing with a stoic Midwestern society.

"So what?" Has always been my response. Overly cognitive, I ask you. I search for logic flaws in my emotional reaction to things. If that's a coping mechanism (and I'm not entirely convinced it is) who fucking cares? It's not as if I'm taking drug or drinking or engaging in risky behaviors. Hell, I don't even smoke anymore. I'm still a high-functioning member of society even if it takes me two weeks to process an emotion. Big whoop.

This, I am told, is No Way to Live My Life.

In the category of unfamiliar:

The self-helpy meditation works. I mean, it really works. My breathing and pulse slow waaaaaaay down. I stop crying. When outside thoughts intrude on the mantra of "Love . . . Knowingness . . . Bliss . . . Love" I imagine them as wisps of blue-grey smoke drifting away. At the end of the meditation, I rip off my mask and shut off my computer. I still feel like a religious fraud, but I also drop almost instantly into a deep and dreamless sleep, a new experience for me.

In the morning, I have that gross-morning-after-some-big-mistakes feeling. I'm a little galled by the fact that a SELF-HELP guru's meditation ON SPOTIFY soothe me so completely. Can you get any more prosaic?

In the category of foolishness:

I suspect the universe is laughing at me. I want religion, faith, spiritual attainment to be one way. I want it to be Tenebrae at the Basilica. I want it to be Dante in the original Italian and scored by Mozart. I want it to be meditation in a Tibetan monastery as the sun rises over snow-capped mountains. I want spirituality and fulfillment not to have any relation to my amygdala or pre-frontral cortex or the amount of norepinephrine I produce. That's what I would like. What I suspect, what I know is that faith, for me at least, is not going to be found in front of a German high altar or a Vatican II church. Enlightenment is not going to happen at a Japanese Zen retreat house. Fulfillment will not come by renouncing all that I have and living retired from the hullabaloo of daily life.

Rather, these things are going to come about as the result of getting up every day and forcing myself to eat breakfast. Of going to work and doing my best. Of loving my family and friends and being kind to those around me. And much to my chagrin, what finally integrates my heart and my head, what finally makes me less intensely cognitive, less prone to intellectualizing, will not be dense theological treatises or transcendent moments meditating on the beach. It's quite possible that it will be crawling into bed each night and listening as a self-help-style guru repeats "Love . . . Knowingness . . . Bliss . . . Love . . . Knowingness . . . Bliss . . .Love . . ."

Happy Birthday

I love my birthday.

People who have known me for a long time know how much I love my birthday. Thankfully, the people who have known me for a long time are also tremendously kind, and are willing to indulge me and my borderline obnoxiousness in the weeks running up to the actual date.

I love my birthday for a lot of reasons. Mom and Dad always worked hard to make the day special when I was growing up, so there are good memories associated with it. These days I love any excuse to wear high heels and a dress and drink champagne with my friends. I love taking a whole day to celebrate the sheer improbability of my own existence and the fact that I was born in a place and time where I could make a big deal out of it.

But what I love most about my birthday, what I love even a little more than attention and love and presents and champagne is the chance to pause. I like holidays that give me a chance to reflect and consider where I've been and where I'm going. This year's birthday is no different, although instead of mulling over the past year, I seem to be stuck contemplating a much younger version of myself.

This year I seem to be fixated on my adolescence. It's unsurprising, really. Starting therapy has caused me to reexamine old behaviors. My favorite book from high school has recently been made into a movie and is receiving a lot of press. I've been rereading my old journal for kicks. These are all part of my musings over the past few months, but I think part of the reason I'm so focused on my adolescent self, particularly my eighteen year old self, is simply the passage of ten years.

Eighteen was a big year for me. I had my first boyfriend (the previously mentioned math tutor.) I read The Great Gatsby and The Razor's Edge, and Hamlet for the first time. I had a teacher who, quite literally, changed my life. I got my driver's license and one of my closest friends came to live with my family for a time. I decided I could be a writer. I began to make plans for my life, picking twenty-eight as the logical time by which I could measure how far I had come.

By twenty-eight, I would have had my Ph.D. in Literature from Columbia for two years, completing my degrees straight through. I would be living in Chicago, possibly Milwaukee, teaching for one of the large Jesuit universities and working on publishing my third book of poems. I would be causing a dust-up in the Roman Catholic tradition by becoming a married lady priest. My husband and I would be celebrating our sixth wedding anniversary, and he too would be working on a final manuscript--one of his many novels. Our ten month old would be potty-trained and we'd have plans for another kid around my 29th birthday. Our family pictures would include our golden retriever, Atticus, and like our C.V.'s, would make our friends and family unspeakably jealous.

These achievements had a lot to do with how I pictured my perfect life. They were goals that were achievable with a certain amount of work. They had enough material earmarkers of success so I would know that I achieved something, but required enough spiritual and intellectual hard work to make them worth working toward. Even at eighteen I was entirely preoccupied by the idea of perfection.

I'm still obsessed by the idea of perfection. It's one of the dirty secrets of people with OCD. We ache for perfection and ways to measure progress and as a result can be incredibly hard our ourselves when we don't achieve it. And my late twenties looks like anything except perfection. It looks like paying rent and student loans, working some seventy-hour weeks. Sometimes it looks like eating mac and cheese out of the pot, standing up in the kitchen because I'm too tired to think. It looks like living alone and feeling really fucking lonely sometimes. It looks like going to a therapist to help sort out some of the mental chaos I've been trying to suppress for twenty-eight years. It looks like the occasional OkCupid date and wondering how it is that a smart, funny, articulate girl could end up going out with such weirdos. It's having my heart broken so many times I've actually lost count.

It also means Top 40 dance parties in one friend's basement one weekend and playing with another friend's ten month old baby another. It means discovering that the process of getting a Ph.D. sucks and it's not really what I want to do. It's realizing that while I may not have my life partner yet, I have friends I love, respect, and admire, and that I still sometimes get that giddy, free-fall feeling when you meet someone new and you really click. There's the illusion, which I don't think ever gets any less satisfying, that I've finally managed to figure myself out.

This year I'm going against every instinct and every compulsion I have and not making a list of what I want to accomplish by the time I'm thirty-eight. I want to, desperately. I want to reform my ideas of perfection and set new standards for myself so I can take stock at the end of the next ten years. But as much as I want to set out my rubric for the next decade, I'm not going to do it.  This is, perhaps, the biggest gift that I've received this year, surprisingly one that came as a result of a mental health diagnosis. This life isn't a series of things to crossed off a a to-do list, and that I'm never going to be 100% happy with the life I'm living.

It sounds a little grim, I know, but for the first time in almost-twenty-eight-years, I feel like I can let go of the idea of perfection and finally be me.

Happy birthday. 

Vulcan

"Well," I said, pausing to take a sip of my beer. "I guess I'd have to say I'm part Vulcan."

This one-liner instantly cracked up the charming guy sitting across from me. I was waiting on some friends at a bar and noticed his Kirk vs. Picard shirt. I've been working on Star Trek: The Next Generation for months now and instantly struck up a conversation with the guy. We were chatting about how we would spend our time on the holodecks and the flaws of TNG storytelling. He admitted that he felt a strange affinity for Captain Kirk, mainly because of his unbridled passions. I was a little skeptical and said that I felt I had the most in common with Vulcans. I think he thought I was joking, but his girlfriend arrived and my friends waved me down from the doorway and we part ways before I have a chance to explain.

The truth is the deeper I get into Star Trek the more I feel I have in common with Doctor Spock and Ambassador Sarek than I do with Kirk or Picard. When expressing emotion towards people I care about, I tend to do it in very specific ways. I need things to be perfect. I dislike when people try to manipulate me emotionally. People with unbridled passions make me wildly uncomfortable.

Yet, more than anything, I love and am obsessed by the logical functions of the human brain. I'm deeply proud of my ability to think through problems rationally. As a student, I adored logic puzzles. In college and graduate school, my favorite colleagues were those with well-constructed, rational arguments. Even when I disagreed with their premise, I had a great deal of respect when their arguments were internally consistent. I love the rush that comes when I understand something for the first time. I love games that challenge my mind: crosswords, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, or puzzles. When my brain finds the logical conclusion to a problem I feel an unmatched sense of elation.

Of course, there are those times when my brain fails to use the faculties with which I was gifted. Say, when a guy I really like asks for my opinion on something or a friend denigrates a book I adore. In those situations, my rational brain short-circuits. These responses are limited to a few specific circumstances and once I take some deep breaths I manage to fall back on my intellect and provide or deconstruct an argument piece by piece. It's rare for me to confront a problem I can't think my way out of.

Or at least, that's been the case until recently.

Five years ago if you would have told me that I would eventually find myself seated in front of a psychologist slowly spilling my guts or watching Star Trek, I would have called you crazy.

It turns out that I'm the crazy one. 

"So, Kelly," I find the shrink's professorial air and yellow legal pad oddly calming. "What brings you here today?"

"I haven't used an iron without supervision in five years."

"Oh?"

"And I can't stop checking my stove to see if it's off." I pause. "And I can't straighten my hair. I mean, I am capable of straightening it, but I won't unless there's someone to make sure the straightener is unplugged."

We spend the next twenty or so minutes talking about my weird behaviors, behaviors I have been secretly living with for over ten years now, behaviors I have gone to great lengths to conceal from friends and family because I know there's something slightly off about them. I tell her about how when I'm upset I count to one hundred by twos or fives on the fingers of my right hand, always my right hand, and I get really angry if someone interrupts me and I can't finish. I confess to having to take pictures of my stove top before I leave the house for the weekend so I can make sure it's off even from a distance. I tell her about how in graduate school there were nights when I couldn't get to sleep because I kept getting up to check to make sure the door was locked, even when the rational side of my brain knew it was locked because I had already checked it fifteen times. I tell her about how delaying any of these actions causes a physical anxiety response in me. My heart-rate quickens. I have a hard time breathing. My muscles get so tense I feel like I'm being physically threatened.

Saying all of these things out loud and to someone I just met is an experience so weird it defies explanation. It's intimate and scary and the only time I've ever felt like it was the last time I went to see a priest for confession and started crying in the confessional. Thankfully, I'm nowhere near tears here, but when I'm finished I feel as drained and on edge as if I just ran a half-marathon. I have to clench my fists together both to keep my hands from shaking and to keep from counting to one hundred.

"Well," my doctor says, "you have obsessive-compulsive disorder."


That particular diagnosis isn't entirely unexpected. After all, I'm not an idiot. I knew these behaviors were . . . unusual. But when I thought of OCD, I thought of people who are germ-phobic, who have to carry around hand sanitizer in their purses and have to have their houses in perfect order. My house always looks like a bomb full of paper and books exploded in it and while I'm a regular hand-washer, I've been known to go a few days without bathing while I'm camping. Because those were my perceptions of OCD, I always assumed that I was borderline, that I had some OCD tendencies but I'd be able to use to rational side of my brain to shut them down. Hearing the diagnosis simultaneously produced an "Oh Thank God!" feeling and an "Oh shit, what am I going to do now?" kind of dread.

The elation is pretty self-explanatory. When mental illness has a name, it also has treatment options. Suddenly, staring me in the face was the possibility of a life where I could leave the house without taking a picture of the stove. Where I could iron my clothes the night before I went to work instead of spending a week steaming them out in the bathroom when I take a shower. I had never even bothered to envision a future where these small rituals weren't a part of my daily life, when checking and rechecking, counting and worrying weren't going to eat up hours of my time.

The dread has been growing since I left the psychologist's office. What scares me most is the knowledge that I am broken. Some small thing has gone awry in my brain and has caused these behaviors. Worse than it being broken, it's something I can't fix on my own. My brain can't think its way out of this problem and that's something that has never happened to me before. It's an overwhelming realization and a terrifying one. I've spent years relying on my brain to answer abstract questions about God and my soul, to think through the origins of the universe, to navigate me through complex interpersonal relationships. Now I'm faced with the reality that the equipment I've used to find those solutions is malfunctioning and all of those answers may be incorrect. I'm shocked by how openly emotional I've become, how easy it has been to admit my fears and concerns to the people around me, to ask for help while my mind is churning.

What I've found most surprising about this diagnosis and the ensuing doubt it has created in me is that my logical side, my Vulcan side, keeps leading me back to the emotional. It's as if the logical side of me realizes that it can't fix this problem, that it's emotional difficulty and I need help and that's all right. For the first time in many years, it's ok to admit that I'm an emotional, irrational, certifiably-a-little-bit-crazy human and not a cold-blooded thinking machine.

It seems I have more in common with Captain Kirk than I ever thought.