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 . . ."