Yeau Claire

No sense in quarantining the TP

When I left Lehigh on March 20th, 2020, just before they sealed it up like a giant stone Tupperware, none of us knew how long we’d be gone before things got back to normal. It was my first full-time academic job, as a VAP the year after I’d earned my PhD there. Closing the door on Drown 303 felt like a change, like the end of something, like the beginning of something, like a surreal suspended animation or like I’d walked out into the spring air of an alternate universe—but I didn’t imaging I’d never be back.

Leaving my beloved home on the north side for an academic conference the following summer felt much the same. I packed, blithely told my kitties I’d be back soon, printed out the paper I was giving, and headed up in the general direction of the Mass Pike. It was there that I got an unexpected phone call offering  me a multi-year position eleven hundred miles away—with a catch. I needed to be there in a month.

Thirty-seven days. That’s how long I had to pull up the roots that had been growing for a decade, find a place to live, fly out for three days to attend in-person training and sign a lease, and transplant myself and everything I owned. But the truth of the matter is, I’d been uprooted several times in the intervening fifteen months, even while mostly locked in my cherished 650 square feet of sunny, pre-war space: unimaginable life changes for my beloved that still weigh on me, a failed contract renewal due to Covid, eight and a half months of increasingly debilitating symptoms that took seven infusions (that nearly damn killed me, thank you very much Affordable Care Act for forcing me to use a drug it turns out I'm deathly allergic to) and a surgery that ended up being not nearly as simple as anyone expected. The loss, again, this time irrevocably so, of a dearest, precious friend with whom I had finally been able to make amends, due to things beyond either of our control. An incredibly hard year of online adjuncting, half of it at a school I still haven’t set foot on the campus of. I’m still not entirely sure where it is beyond the exit sign off 22. Five weeks of filling in for parental leave at Lehigh after the Dean managed to screw me with my pants on one last time.

So moving to Wisconsin never felt like a choice. It has always felt, in some ways, like a desperate loss, despite how happy I am here in the larger sense of fulfillment. It still feels like an amputation, a bewildering exodus by night. A flight from something. I still don’t know what. I'm still mourning the old life that I'm just now starting to accept would never have returned even if I had stayed there. 

 

 

I can't believe I get to work here.

 But it's full spring here, finally. I haven't been down to the river since my sister came to visit me in October, when I took this picture, but finals start next week and I have many many riverine plans (not to mention a deep-seated call that I now recognize as not just the Chippewa but also Anishinaabewi-gichigami, Lake Superior), and I'm slowly starting to put down roots here, even if they're mostly just herbs in the window boxes. Part of the joy of my presence here is tempered by the knowledge that I'll be here less than five years. And I think that's part of the problem too. That I forgot that, on top of everything else that's happened in the past two years, my very presence in Doodlehem was always supposed to be impermanent. 

And so I continue in this liminal, limerent space, in this not-quite-reality that I know will end, because everything around me the past two years has pointed towards that in a way that it never has before. And at nearly fifty, I'm not sure how I should feel about that. While Covid cases continue to rise, a recent email from university administration characterized the pandemic as "distracting." Students continue to be exposed but no longer mask. My partner and I continue to be in the holding pattern brought on by both our situations. I plant annuals in the garden, because I know I'll have to dig up anything perennial I want to take with me. I continue to agitate and protest and advocate for BIPOC folks in my community because my students are freaked out and my colleagues and friends are furious, and it matters deeply, and I love them so much--but I also subconsciously know that at some point I'll have to quantify that for my academic future, which is something that feels both totally gross and absolutely necessary. 

I'd stay if you'd have me, but I know that's not how this works.

Watch Out for the Key Change at the End of the Second Verse

I feel like I'm supposed to be having some sort of socially relevant commentary about 2020, and y'all. I just can't. Life with a chronic illness means I have very little energy for extraneous things like thinking when things are going well, and I feel like I've been in a low-level flare ever since *gestures vaguely at universe* all of this started thirty seconds into what was supposed to be spring break but turned into an extended dance remix of never seeing my beloved students again and mostly being locked in my apartment. Which fortunately I adore. Because gurrl.

 It's also made my response time weaker than I'd like about the racial injustice we are (maybe) finally beginning to address as a nation. Tiny Doodlehem has so far had two protests and a community prayer service in front of City Hall, with a third protest planned for next week. Fortunately the Plaza is two easily walkable blocks from my home, so I've been able to participate at the fringes. Which, frankly, is my place right now as a white woman. Both days were also unbearably hot, so putting my white female body on the line for these protestors happened in a different way than most people might imagine, and involved days of rest after both events. Police presence so far has been substantial and visible, but largely benign, relatively speaking. Mostly directing traffic, but definitely there.

There's also been some really difficult conversations taking place at my place of (prior? current? It's hard to say. More on that as it becomes available) employ, led by our actually quite remarkable Chief of Campus Police. The retired City Chief and a former Marine until he was injured, he seems to be having a come to Jesus moment, none too soon. But the university itself has a long way to go to even be benignly un-racist, let alone anti-racist. Meanwhile, they're eager to have students return to campus in the fall, confident that they'll all wash their hands and wear masks and take their temperatures diligently. These are students I can't even convince to stay out of class when they have an upper respiratory infection, no matter how many emails I send them that say pretty much, "Y'all fixna kill me by doing that. Please cease." Most of my department's classrooms are very small, and located in a basement. I do not see this going well for vulnerable populations OH WAIT A MINUTE THAT'S ME.

And all of this at a place I'm not even sure is going to hire me again in three months, and if they do it will be as an adjunct, which means financial and academic precarity and oh yeah, no health coverage.

I'm not saying this to bitch. I'm saying this to take a long, hard look at where we are right now as a community, and where I am as a white woman with a (slightly dysfunctional) body, and how all of these things intersect with an eye towards what has to change.

Into the Great Oh God Now What

I've just submitted final grades at the end of another semester, and after I hit submit on my Hamilton class (another post entirely because omg) I realised I'm seriously feeling a little adrift here. This semester was in many ways like every other semester--I didn't give them as much in-class writing time as I wish I could, multmodal "unpapers" alternately knocked the socks off me (I'm looking at you, "Burr Book." You go, Glen Chlo-Chlo) and bored me halfway to tears (how many PowerPoints can one woman take?)--but in many ways it was also way, way different.

This semester, I finished my dissertation and I'll be awarded my doctoral degree this weekend. I ran another cycle through the job market--rinse and repeat--and have had some interesting results, which I am not currently at liberty to share (more on that soon).

But this has been my life for eight years. It has been everything. When Robin died, when shit went to hell and back with M and my mental health....through all of it, school was my constant. More than that, my dissertation was what I had, even in the moments when I thought I had nothing else. To suddenly not have that—even because I’ve seen it through to completion and am about to move on to something bigger, whatever that turns out to be—it’s a little disorienting, it turns out.

I mean, it's not going anywhere. I've written what I hope is a hell of a project, and there are next steps to be taken for sure, but just for a minute, sitting here in my gorgeous blue ikat armchair, gazing at my kitties curled into weird shapes on the couch--seriously, dude, who sleeps like that?--I had a moment of panic, that vertigo that comes at the edges of things, when one is deciding to jump to see if they will fly.

And this time, maybe I will.

Advent

Learning to manage life with a chronic illness means I have to let go of the housekeeping guilt. I didn't vacuum, but I did the dishes and unloaded the dishwasher. I didn't get to Wegman's, but I got the presents wrapped and my bag packed to head to Alien Boy's and then my folxen. I didn't get to travel to see my aunt in New York, so I could have a chance of making it to midnight mass (not to mention my mother was making noises about the weather, even in my Subaru). It's a challenge to not feel disappointed at what I didn't do, what I could have done, what I think I should have done. I didn't even muster up the energy to revive the Sarah HB Mostly Annual Christmas Tree Extravaganza for what may well be my last year in Bethlehem.

But it will be Christmas just the same. The candles will be lit in my parents' windows, the hymns will be sung. The snow may or may not fall; it may be slush. We may burn the first waffle again this year--some traditions always hold. But the Christ child will come: whether you believe in the story or not, a reminder of what really matters.

And that I have, in abundance.

Who's the Turkey Now?

It was Thanksgiving in Three Feathers a few days ago, which meant not only the usual hilarity about a misplaced grand piano (apparently my mother, my two sisters, and I are the only people on the planet ever to have read Home Sweet Homicide, because this joke makes precisely zero sense to the rest of the populace), it also meant that my mother had bought several boxes of Advent candles. I am forty-five damn years old, and I have never once bought my own Advent candles. The two years I lived in Spokane, my mother actually mailed them to me from 2600 miles away. Because, you know...moms.

I pointed this out when my dad called the week before Thanksgiving to find out if I had recently acquired any orphans who would be joining us for dinner (don't laugh, it's happened. More often than not, actually. One year the orphan was trapped at work because an NPR party don't stop, so I brought Thanksgiving to him, but that's another story entirely). Before ringing off, he added, "Oh, and Mother has bought you Advent candles."

What? Of course she has. It would only be news if she hadn't. Between this and Home Sweet Homicide, sometimes I wonder how my dad puts up with us. Then I remember that for five years he and I had a standing date Thursday nights to take out the trash and hold hands on the walk back--our driveway is quite long, so it's enough of a walk to catch up on stuff--and that every time I visit them to this day, I still try to arrange it on a Thursday. When I realised somewhat belatedly that Thanksgiving was a Thursday yet again this year (how does that always happen? And how do I always manage to be surprised by it?) I actually said, "Ooo, it's trash night!"

So yeah. Maybe he's in with the right crowd.

That crowd, however, had a bit of a malfunction this year surrounding the Advent candles. When my mom found my set and tucked them into my briefcase, there were four of us in the room, not counting the turkey. Among the four of us there are five master's degrees, one juris doctor, and fully 9/10 of a Ph.D.

I mention this because it wasn't until two days later than anybody noticed that for the past eight years my Advent wreath gets stored at my parents' house. Which meant it was still in the attic when I left Thursday night, laden with candles and three different kinds of leftover pie.

Every year Solstice manages to forget how fire works.
Also, how the dining room table works, which is by not having cats on it.

You're Welcome

As I take a breather between pie crusts I am thinking about the way Thanksgiving is in my family. We take our Robert Frost and our Dorothy Day very seriously in these parts.

I think about my senior year in high school when Betsy's family left for Long Island before we got back from marching band, and as we sat down to eat the doorbell rang and there was Betsy holding out a bouquet of flowers she'd stopped at ShopRite for because she didn't want to show up empty handed. "Hi, I'm Betsy. Sara said it was okay to come over?"

And I'm reminded of the first Thanksgiving I ever hosted (my second Thanksgiving away from home; Daryl and I went to Brodsky's our first year) and suddenly calling Meg's mom and saying "Jane, how do you actually cook a turkey?" And five minutes before dinner, Kary and Georgia showed up with a Mrs Smith's pumpkin pie and some whipped cream and said, "We decided we wanted to have Thanksgiving after all, is it okay?"

And the one and only Thanksgiving I was married, when we had Thanksgiving on a Saturday because that's what you do when you're a chef, and all four of our parents and at least a couple of our siblings and some waitstaff from his restaurant and of course Robin showed up and it was a madhouse but it was our madhouse, and Robin just took over everything that my husband wasn't doing without asking if it was okay because he was Robin.

And I think of the night a few years ago when I loaded up my parents' cooler with leftovers to bring to the station for Alien Boy and the desk guard on duty and as I was leaving I heard my dad tell my mom, "I put in the rest of the apple pie to make sure there was enough, was that ok?" and my mom answering, "Good because I was worried that just the pumpkin wouldn't be enough." It was okay. It was more than okay.

It will always be okay. That's what it means, that phrase. It's not a formality when someone says thanks. It's what this house has always stood for, and will always stand for, no matter who occupies it.

You are welcome.

It Seemed Worth Mentioning

I've been pretty open recently about my struggles with depression and self-harm. This afternoon I had to fill out the NCHA survey--and remind me to tell you how funny it is to fill that form out as a 45-year-old. All of the sexual health questions are geared toward people half my age, and don't take into account that my partner is in his fifties. All of the alcohol-related questions are geared toward assessing binge drinking and hazing-type behaviours--and while I greatly appreciate this at a university that saw four students brought to the ER last semester for alcohol poisoning, I can't adequately convey in my answers the part where mostly when I drink, it's with my parents. At the dinner table. Or occasionally to celebrate someone's retirement. We are dealing with a whole different set of relationship issues, here, fellas.

Anyway, that's not the point. The point is this. I thought some of you might like to know.

Meet Me in STL (a brief interlude)

Scene: Lambert St. Louis International Airport.

I’m finishing up some research on my layover when a man in his late fifties sits next to me at the charging station and starts a random chatty conversation. I have never understood why men in their late middle age want to talk to me. Like, can you not see I am nose-deep in Henry David Thoreau?

Anyway, he peppers me with friendly questions while we charge our iPhones on a power strip of dubious electrical safety. There's a steady patter: am I headed home, was I here on business, oh wow Nashville, so what was I doing, oh he’s an engineer so he wouldn't know about any of that but his daughter’s favourite class in high school is English, that’s really neat. I’m not really in the mood, but by this point it's impossible to follow what old Henry is saying (though really, what else is new) so what the hell. Besides which, having just recently finished boneless wings and a pretty decent craft beer, I'm feeling fairly amiable. (Also, this may have some bearing on my critical inability to follow Thoreau's train of thought. You'd think it'd actually help.)

Talk turns to his older son, in the Navy. He’s in IT, somehow; I can’t really follow because I don’t speak IT, but I ask where he’s stationed out of. The man pulls his baseball cap out of his carry-on and proudly shows me the embroidered USS Iwo Jima emblazoned on the front. I suppress a grin and tell him that by coincidence my cousin is also on the Iwo. We marvel a bit, the man and I, at how small the world sometimes is, and he wonders aloud if his son knows my cousin. By this point I am laughing. Hard. I tell him yeah, I’m pretty sure he does. The man is not convinced, because it’s a fairly decent sized ship, and what does my cousin do?

Well, er, he’s the captain.

So there’s a pretty good chance your kid has at least heard of him.

Unexpectedly Inconvenient Ways In Which My Body Would Like to Remind Me I Am Still In Recovery, Mid-November Edition

Some of this I genuinely did not see coming.

•  Grading 40 papers by hand instead of online. Who even knew I moved my shoulder that much when I wrote? It’s a puzzle.

•  Pulling up my pants. (And don’t even talk to me about tights.) Down, on the other hand, is no problem whatsoever. Make of that what you will. 

•  Talking on the phone. Sorry I missed your call, but I only have one arm that reliably goes up past 90 degrees, and I was already using it for something. 

• Feline affection. Solstice is a head-butter and a climber, and his favourite safe space is draped over my left shoulder. This dates back to kittenhood, when he was cute and wee and could nestle in the crook of my neck. Now that he’s approximately the size (not to mention shape) of a walrus, it’s somewhat less graceful under the best of circumstances.

Happier times

• Trying to get out of this fucking bra. 

• Flailing academic gestures, all sorts. If you’ve ever spoken to me in person, this needs no further commentary. 

• Backing into parking spaces. Backing out of parking spaces. Backwards in general remains somewhat of a mystery in my life. 

•  Can I carry this full cup of coffee all the way back to Drown without stopping to switch hands? Possibly yes, probably no. (Bonus points for catching that reference.) But I am definitely letting you open that door. 

• Hair. Anything relating to hair. Combing hair. Washing hair. Styling hair. The fact that hair manages to exist so far away from my current range of motion.

Seriously. How did that get over there?

• Pillowcases. Pillowcases are far harder than I imagined. I was prepared for fitted sheets. I was not prepared for pillowcases. And yet, I agreed to this lunacy, so here we are.

I Can Write This Dissertation With One Hand Tied Behind My Back

Which turns out to be a good thing.

Meanwhile, our fearless (ha! it's called acting chops) heroine has in fact run out of non-surgical options for her dominant shoulder and is looking down the teeny-tiny barrel of arthroscopic surgery in ten days. I made the mistake of googling--seriously, I know this, the first advice I always give to sick or injured people is NEVER GOOGLE--and discovered that per my diagnosis they are removing sections of not one but two bones in the joint.

Swell.

So on top of having 40 papers to grade every four weeks, umpteen job applications to submit that all have different requirements for the writing sample, and a partner who has once again been eaten by the Blair Witch (it's ok, we know where she works), I now have to do all of this with one arm. It's going to take me forever to do things like brush my teeth, forget empty the cat box.

Which reminds me, actually. I'm off to go do just that, then grade some of that pile of papers.

I cannot convey to you the level of suckitude this week has contained. And that's not even getting into the real troubles, like several hundred maimed people in Las Vegas or the fact that Tom Petty died twice on Monday.

Bitey Bird is not pleased.

Once More for the Guy in the Hot Dog Costume

If you're friends with me on Facebook (which, let's face it, you probably are, because how else do you know this blog exists?), you'll notice a pair of posts today addressing my ongoing depression. In the most recent one, I told you not to be worried, and I want to reiterate that. I'm not in any danger. Much like my anxiety and exhaustion--which are probably part and parcel of one big happy thing called my brain--it's not anything I haven't been walking around with for the past four years or so, so if you've seen me since, say, that one time Matt Nelson dressed up as a bass-playing hot dog, it's about like that, only the horrific anxiety attacks have mostly stopped.

 

Like you, I have many questions.

 Yes, it's for the most part rooted in Robin's death, which I learned later that week had occurred this same night, while I was in Ohio dealing with this bullshit. As a result, I dealt with this bullshit badly, and a whole lot of other things also didn't go as well as they might have if I had had at least a matching set of wits about me. In the last four years, I've lost relationships because of my grief behaviour (and other people's reactions to it), some of them dear friends and comrades of many years' standing whose (additional) loss I'm still grieving.

In the past four years, I've also learned how to navigate some of my changing limitations. I'm getting okay at saying no and not feeling guilty about it all the time. I'm getting better at asking for help. I'm getting better at opening up about my actual struggle, not just the frantically hilarious theatrics that I sometimes turn it into. I'm getting a lot better at forgiving people. I'm getting a little better at forgiving myself.

So it's not all loss.

This afternoon, my dad called to ask how my shoulder was feeling. (Answer: still about 90% terrible, which is what you'd expect when you've just had a corticosteroid injection in it for rotator cuff tendonitis but can't do anything one-handed and you live alone on the second floor and there are things like, you know, groceries and the vacuum cleaner to deal with.) I ignored him because I was in the middle of ignoring an appointment with my therapist.

Let me back up for a minute. I love my therapist. I mean, I love her. She also happens to be a Buudhist monk, and I genuinely enjoy my time with her and often actively look forward to hanging out spilling my guts all over her office. So when I'm too flattened to get out of bed in time to shower and see her, it's not necessarily the best of signs.

And this isn't the first time it's happened pretty recently either.

So anyway, when I called my dad back, I cheerily told him that yes my shoulder still felt like it's being sporked to death, no I haven't been to the DMV yet, and oh by the way I was going to go in to see about getting my antidepressant prescription increased on Monday morning.

As you can imagine, that went over well.

 It's taken me so long to ask about this (because believe me, Alien Boy has tried to convince me that all of this sleep is depression talking) in part because there are so many damn moving parts to my metabolism right now, between middle age and an endocrine cancer and perimenopause and fucking grad school because did I mention OH MY GOD PEOPLE--anyway, this doesn't feel like the same as any other depression I've ever had, because in the middle of it I'm also content. Much of my life is great. So I figured this couldn't possibly be depression. Because I don't hate everything.

But.

Several of you, over on Facebook, have commented that it helps to talk. And it does. Immensely. It's why I have a therapist I usually manage to get to. It's how I'm functional the seventy percent of the time I'm functional (that, and coffee). My dad expressed a similar worry: "Counseling isn't helping?"

Yes, dad. Counseling helps. It helps immensely. But it can't replace whatever neurotransmitters aren't happening. Sometimes it just doesn't help enough. It doesn't mean therapy isn't working, or I'm not working my ass off at it, or anything else other than sometimes it's physically impossible to spatula myself out of bed for days at a time and nothing else has worked, so maybe it's time to try this. Kind of like how I tried ignoring my shoulder pain for two months, which went about as well as you can imagine, then tried a cortisone shot and a feeble attempt at rest, and next week I'm going to have to sort out the "what's next" of that as well (more enforced rest? Another injection? An MRI?? I have no idea. That's why they make orthopods). Nobody would dream of blaming me that the injection didn't work, or the NSAIDs. And I don't think people are meaning to blame me for this either, but sometimes helpful advice makes me wonder what planet I've apparently been on, that I now speak such a different language from everyone I love.

I know exactly what planet it is, though. It's Planet Dead Guy Who Was My Whole Life, and I'm not back yet. It's been four years, and I'm not over it yet. I live here now, so I guess I'd better start unpacking.

Another Exhaustive List

I don't want to come in here and constantly bitch and apologise about the fact that I'm never fucking around. I want to love this as much as I used to. I do love this as much as I used to. But.

Grief is exhausting. Seriously, I was not prepared for how long it would take all my energy just to exist every day, for how hard it would be not to collapse in a slithering wailing heap of bones Robin is dead in front of everyone. My diss advisor. My writing partner. My students. My friends. The mirror. People at the grocery store. Sometimes out of the blue I will be shopping in the cookie aisle at Shop-Rite (as one does), and the goddamn Pepperidge Farm Chesapeake Farmhouse cookies with the dark chocolate and the pecans will attack me from the side and I'll be crying my eyes out before I know it, because we used to wolf them down by the little white sleeve watching 60 Minutes or whatever. Mostly I'm better about this, but everything is still harder than it was.

Grad school is exhausting. I'm pretty sure I don't need to explain that, but just in case I do: OH MY GOD PEOPLE. This whole semester has pretty much been me hanging on by my fingernails, catching up just enough to keep from losing my shit entirely, and waiting for this week to finally arrive when all I have to do is grade finals and calculate grades--oh, and write an entire syllabus for English 1 for the fall, and a course description for the spring catalog for the lit class I have to finish designing that now has to have seven people in it in order to run, and oh hey yeah, how about that dissertation because you're totally fucking on the job market starting last August?

Also, it has been medically exhausting to be me for various reasons every since they decided it would be a good idea to take my gallbladder out before it exploded (which it apparently promptly did, all over the little pan they put it in once they took it out of my abdomen, which is equal parts funny and horrifying and also ew), and apparently now harbouring a case of IBS, which is exactly as unpleasant as everybody says it is. And because I'm in my mid-forties--and can we talk about that for a minute, because how did that happen all of a sudden--and have survived an endocrine cancer, every single hormone in my body has recently begun going haywire all at once, the finer details of which I will spare you, but suffice it to say that I have had no fewer than six gynecological appointments since my spontaneous ten-hour trip to the ER in mid-February and am now on a first-name basis with my uterus. (Actually, it's the fibroids that have names. I call them Snap, Crackle, and Pop. Though "pop" is more accurately a description of the hemorrhagic ovarian cyst that got me sent to the ER in the first place. But I digress.)

It was a long winter. And I'm still trying to get to the bottom of the endless fatigue.

But this guy.

This guy. He is everything. He has been through so much, and he is still so alive and fighting so hard to return to the living, and I could not be more amazed and in awe of him. Twenty years later, we are able to open up to each other with trust in a way that I didn't think was possible, and if this is to be my entire life I will clutch it with both hands and bless it, because it contains him.

Face the Strange

Horrifying to see how long it's been since I've posted. Lots has changed, lots hasn't.

What's changed (since you might not notice all of it)?

My last name has changed. Again. I reverted back to my maiden name effective this past Christmas. Don't tell the DMV yet, I haven't even gotten to the Social Security office.

My email address is changing for the first time in 18 years, so that's a little freaky and will take some adjusting for everyone. Goodbye, Earthlink, you've been lovely, but you're charging me for a service you can't provide and that's dumb.

I'm finally ditching Verizon's crappy sub-sub-sub-DSL because my neighbourhood isn't even wired for FiOS, too (related to email change, above).

My hair has been some very interesting shades of blue the past 18 months, some of which were entirely by accident.

Alien Boy. Well. That's changing, but it's also still the same. It's complicated. But what in life isn't?

What's the same?

My dissertation is still driving me crazy in a very good way. It's also eating all of my time, which is why I haven't posted in forever.

Robin is still dead. It still sucks just as hard as it ever did, but it doesn't always shock me as much when I realise it.

Solstice the cat is still the derpiest derp in derpville. He's now my only kitty, the others all having gone to the land where cats go (aka the field out behind my parents' chicken coop, under several inches of dirt and a very large rock to keep from being dug up). We're adjusting okay.

I'm still behind in my grading. Some things are constant. This is one of them.

There Is Only One Path

About three years ago, I had an otherwise random dream on what I assumed at the time was a random night. Presumably this dream had a plot, inasmuch as dreams ever do (mine are very often Edward Gorey-esque affairs with roast chickens on velvet cushions, cartoon dogs piloting flying handlebar mustaches, or what-have-you) but what I remember from this dream was waking with a very clear image of a tattoo. I've had two tattoos since my mid-twenties. One means a lot to me spiritually and metaphorically; the other is a random lizard on the small of my left hip. I frequently forget I have that one since, you know, I'm so rarely standing behind myself while I'm naked. I remember thinking I wouldn't ever get another one. I didn't want it to become a habit, something that I just did the way I occasionally pierced my ear or my navel
--that last is something, by the way, I'd advise against doing within twenty-four months of cancer surgery and multiple doses of radiation. It helps to have an immune system if you're going to be poking bits of metal into the soft parts of your body. Just a lesson from someone who didn't think that through at the time. As Dooce says, be ye not so stupid.

Anyway, back to the dream-tattoo. It was just a simple word, in a simple font. In a basic American Typewriter-type font, in black, was the single word:

love

on the inside of my right wrist. In true annoying dream fashion, the "o" had been turned into a red heart. (Because, really? Apparently my dream-self is kitschy? Gag.)

When I woke up, I thought I had been having a dream about 9/11, which was the next day. Then, on making my morning rounds of teh interwebz, I learned it was World Suicide Prevention Day. Apparently this is a thing on 10 September every year, and I hadn't known it. And I found this out that September tenth via a tweet from the fine folks at To Write Love on Her Arms, otherwise known as TWLOHA. It's an organisation I've heard of but not really had a whole lot of interaction with, though I hold its founder, Jamie Tworkowski, in high esteem by reputation.

It's possible my subconscious knew the significance of the date, and it's certain that somewhere in the back of my mind I had the name of the organisation filed away--but that the dream happened when it did has stuck with me since.  I've known since putting the pieces together that I was in for one last tattoo. But I wanted to wait until I was certain that the design was what it was supposed to be (since, you know, this is a permanent thing I'm sticking on a much more visible part of my body than my butt or my ankle).

Over the years I toyed with some design elements, textual phrases, fonts. Nothing seemed right. I had just about decided on a design--a particular phrase written in a research notebook for me by a beloved friend while I wasn't looking, in his handwriting--when (as previously recorded) the, erm, excreta hit the overhead air circulation device with said beloved friend, not to mention said friend's unwitting embroilment in a certain, shall we say, "tattoo snafu" and, long story short, such a design became inadvisable.

A few weeks ago, it dawned on me. What better way to write love on my own arms than to use the words and the hand of a man who loved me better than I loved myself in those darkest days? And what better place to mark this love than Nashville, a place that is struggling to teach me so much about love these days, in all its widest and most illogical forms, whenever I'll give in and let it?

Yesterday, the first night of Hanukkah, a night when I was always guaranteed to talk to Robin even though it was often only a text or email conversation, I scarred myself one final time, with his words in his own handwriting.

(the tattoo is straight; it's my arm that's crooked here)

Remarkably, without meaning to, the tattoo artist (a friend of my hosts') aligned the design perfectly with the, uh, existing real estate, so that the first downstroke of the "t" emerges directly out of one of the deepest and most traced over scars. Even more remarkably, I'm not ashamed to look down at my arm anymore. The scars from the cutting are still there. In fact, while the tattoo is healing they're even more visible, I think. Maybe they always will be. But for the first time, that's ok. Because for the first time, the love is visible too.

Maybe it's always been there. Maybe, as usual, I just needed him to point it out to me so that I could see it.

Wherein the Levels of My Geekdom Are Finally Exposed

Though you may think you do, many of you do not fully understand the depths of my geekery. About 15 years ago, I bought a ten-buck Diplomat fountain pen that rapidly became my favourite writing instrument, replacing the four-buck Shaeffer.

About four or five years ago it began gumming up hopelessly. No amount of cleaning or injecting or laying on of hands could solve it. No amount of searching could replace it. And I wasn't about to send a ten-dollar pen to the Fountain Pen Hospital in NYC (though I have sent my Waterman there, with good results).

My writing has suffered. Landfills have suffered (I've been using disposable fountain pens).

I JUST FOUND A REPLACEMENT ONLINE. It's now a $25 fountain pen. I bought two.

Through actual, literal tears. That's the geek part.

RR Marine Corps Marathon 2014, Code Name: Embrace the Suck

I've known since about mid-August that this race was going to suck. And the way I knew that was by looking at my training schedule. Of course, that would have involved having to actually look at my training schedule, which is something I more or less denied all existence of.

If you've been playing along at home, you know I've had a very rough year. The roughest. In some ways, it was more difficult than the year I got divorced--possibly because I was trying to do it on my own. Or maybe because I thought I was supposed to be invincible about it, or something. But anyway, this isn't that post. This is a post about how I know better than to ever, ever run a marathon when my training is spotty and my longest run to date has been eleven miles. And how I did it anyway, because I'm an idiot. A stubborn, stubborn idiot.

My reasons for doing this were manyfold, but mostly they involved pride. That, and a teeny tiny thing called that MCM Runner's Club. Five marathon finishes and you're guaranteed entry for life. With the institution last year of the lottery entry, this is sort of a huge deal to those of us who are preternaturally attached to this race.

So. Anyway. Back to The Suck.

Woke up late Friday morning, because, you know, my sleep schedule has been a complete clusterfuck for about the past eighteen months, thank you very much grief and anxiety, and still hadn't packed. And the reason I hadn't packed is because I didn't have any clean underwear. Or socks. I did, in fact, have clean race kit, which was unexpected; I'd thought that was down there in the bottom of the laundry basket, but it wasn't. Which just goes to show how long it had been since I'd run. So I did a load of only the laundry I'd need for the race, ignoring the rest of the mountain of jeans and towels and sheets, ran the dishwasher, cleaned the litter box, and generally made things bearable in the home aspect of life so there wouldn't be a mutiny while I was gone. By that time, it was almost 4:00. Ugh.

The drive down was mostly uneventful in the traditional sense, but I was pretty emotional, remembering the last time I drove down for this race. Things were very, very different then and I couldn't help but remember the rambling phone conversation that lasted all three and a half hours of my drive in 2012. By the time I hit the exit for BWI, I realised I was more completely and honestly in love than I had been in....well. A long time. So. By the time I got to the hotel, where the festivities--by which I mean beer--had started without me, I needed to detour to my room for a few minutes for a good stormy cry.

That taken care of, I went downstairs to hang with the running family: Gunz and Nita and Carl and Holly and Moo and the ever-elusive JW. Beer was had, and chips were had, and birthday cake was had (Carl's son turned 22, which I still can't figure out because wasn't he just like 16 last week?) and then ultimately bourbon was had because Nita. Gunz finally showed his punk ass around 11:00, which took the onus off me of being last bitch in (thanks for taking one for the team, dude).

Saturday we hit the expo first thing, though the line for security was already the snake that ate its own tail. Mostly we were there for packet pickup, though Nita needed a phone armband because she was waiting for a phone call from her daughter in basic (that never came, because of course, because Air Force) and I wanted to hit the Mizuno booth. Which.....wasn't there. Sadness. Lunch. Naps. Dinner was a hoot, as we were joined by Len, Jeremiah, and Flex--BIG FLEXY LOVE--and Flex is always a joy to be around. His enthusiasm and humour are infectious. Big. Flexy. Love. Seriously. That man. That smile. Those dance moves.

Sunday, turns out, I wasn't the only one who heard the alarm, rolled over, and thought, Do I really want to do this? I could totally stay in bed. We were all on the NTP this summer. Nobody was ready for this. Nita herself hadn't run long except Mega a month ago, and Gunz had taken a bad fall there and pulled himself off course at Mile 20, worried he'd broken his wrist and damaged both knees worse than the Marine Corps had. And Len's training had paralleled mine in distance and regularity, but at least he has the excuse of being my mother's age with a very ill wife and a bum hip. So I had company in The Suck.

First Len and I couldn't find each other at the start line, because we were staying in different hotels and I was herding cats with the group in the hotel lobby. We hooked up just in time to start with the....um, I think we were with the 4:30 pace group, which is sort of hilarious but also gave us a good cushion to beat the bridge. The first two or three miles were trying to get into a rhythm, visiting European trees, warming up, and talking about Len's underwear. What? We're runners. When you've just veered off into the shrubbery to pee next to each other, the next obvious topic of conversation is the advantages and disadvantages of your particular choice of skivvies in this operation. (The part where usually he's all, "It's a secret passage--to my penis!" and I'm trying not to blurt out, "Wait, you wear underwear?")

By about Mile 6 I was finally warmed up and feeling sort of ok. The fact that Mile 6 is entirely downhill totally helped. That was sadly short-lived, though. My back has been tight since about January, due to how much sitting on my ass writing a dissertation consists of. Mile 7 brought that tightness to new levels of Suck. Seriously, everything that wasn't my abs was cramping by the time we got down out of Rock Creek Park. Len wasn't doing much better.

At Mile 11 Len made the painful but ultimately wise choice to pull the rip cord. He promised to meet me again at the bridge. So there I was, on Hains Point, alone, devastated, discouraged, sore, tired, and oh great. Mile 12. The Blue Mile. The Blue Mile is lined with pictures of military members killed in action. Hundreds of them. And friends and family members holding full-sized American flags with black name stripes on them.

Mile 12 is where I lost my shit.

At Mile 14 I passed Groundpounder Matt Jaffe and his crew. He was starting to look pretty grim, but still encouraging. Promised him the next mile. Sadly, the next mile brought hamstring cramping badly enough that I was worried about a tear, so I stopped at medical and had them wrap it.

Off Hains Point I ran into Len! He toddled with me a little--I was doing mostly walking at that point--and said he'd see me at the bridge. More walking. Midway through Mile 16 I passed Matt Jaffe again. His team was trying to get him to sit down long enough to massage a trouble point. With the vehemence of a man who's run this marathon 38 years in a row, he barked out the strongest NO! I ever want to hear as I passed. (I found out the day after the race that the pace car had passed him on the bridge and forced him onto the bus. My heart absolutely breaks for him.)

Near the Capitol I ran into Amanda Sullivan, crutching her way to awesomeness. I've chatted with her online and her enthusiasm and joy astound me. She's the only person I've ever seen straighten up from puking after Mile 20 with a smile on her face and say, "Man, that bridge isn't playing. Phew!" and then keep on her rhythm with that same smile.

Quick chat with Len on the bridge (which basically consisted of me flopping against his ribcage and groaning, "I hurt like a motherfucker," and him handing me his squashed baby Snickers bars that he'd been saving for hard times such as this.)

More trudging. Six point two miles of it. The only bright spot was when a total stranger handed me an entire can of Coors Light heading into Crystal City. A cold Coors Light. Normally I wouldn't touch the stuff, but in the mood I was in, and the way my lower half felt, it was seriously the best thing I've ever tasted in my life. Glug.

And then I was at Mile 26 and I am good goddamned if I'm gonna hit that hill walking. When you've been on the course roughly seven hours, apparently this makes Marines very happy. I made about 30 new friends charging up that hill. Which is good because I very nearly needed them to peel me off the pavement after I crossed the finish line.

So I have a new official PW for any marathon I've ever completed. And I mostly don't care because I knew it was going to be The Suck. I was hoping it would stay in the six hour range but meh. Sometimes you just have to embrace The Suck.

I expect The Suck and I to announce our engagement any day now.

Silence

I want you to hear me
I want you to find me

Over the years, I've talked pretty freely about my depression. But until now I've never talked about anxiety. Because until just a few weeks ago, I wasn't quite able to name it as a component of the way my life apparently functions. I know. You're shocked. Me? Anxious? The woman so high-strung she could solve the fossil fuel crisis if only you could find an extension cord long enough to plug her in? In some ways over the years it's gotten better, although people who know me now in my forties are probably appalled to learn that I've actually unwound a few good turns in the past twenty years.

So why now? Well, in some ways—possibly because my depression is so much better managed that it doesn't mask everything else I'm also already feeling—it's also gotten worse.

First. This is not a cry for help. I am not currently in crisis, nor am I in any way suicidal. I promise (you know who you are). Regardless. Several forces have recently converged, leading me to the decision to blog about this. And in true FireCat fashion, I fought it every step of the way. Some of it is my means of processing this. But the hard part of it is the understanding that removing the stigma of mental illness includes removing the judgement I have against myself for being this way. And that maybe, just maybe, it will come to include forgiving myself for being my own worst enemy when I needed love the most, especially my own.

Folks, I have to name it. So here goes. On and off over the years, in order to try to tame my unruly emotions, I have been a cutter. It's not a daily thing, or even a monthly thing. It's a crisis management thing. And it sucks, and I don't like it. Sometimes I go years without even thinking about it. At the worst of times, over a period of maybe a few weeks or so I will contemplate it as often as I suspect smokers think about their next butt, and spend most of my emotional, and physical, energy trying to talk myself either into or out of it, just to make the urge go away. And it's only recently that I've come to accept that at my very lowest points, I may always have that urge, just the way an addict does, and it's not the urge that defines me but what I do in response to it.

A few people—the five or six closest to me—already know this about me, because they have lived through it with me. Some of them get fairly banal text updates because they are on my first line of defense, because I love them and trust them enough that I've promised to tell them if I'm even thinking about it. These are also, by and large, the people who will respond to Yeah hi, sorry I couldn't talk, I was in line at the grocery store, I needed cat food, and oh yeah I've been feeling really triggered today. How did class go? with Kitties thank you. Class was boring. I know, because they really do know me well enough (and talk to me often enough) that they usually know that something has triggered me before I am able to name it. Some of them have called me in the middle of the night and stayed with me on speakerphone while I stood at my kitchen counter drinking increasingly tepid tea and cried my heart out with anxiety and self-loathing until I agreed to put away first the bigger knife, then the smaller one, and until finally I left the kitchen altogether.

And so we have learned. The same man who fifteen years ago screamed at me in anger that even then I knew masked fear before he called 911 and had me admitted was recently able to have a rational and helpful, if somewhat emotionally misspelled, text conversation about whether I'd taken my antidepressant and other potential coping strategies—without either of us losing our shit. It was one of the best conversations I can ever recall having, even though it was painful and frightening for us both.

The other reason, ironically, that I've realised for a few weeks now that I need to write publicly about this, is that I have finally started to understand—less than a month ago at that kitchen counter in the midst of that anguish I wouldn't wish on anybody, even myself—what lies behind that urge. And what lies behind that urge is silence. There is no way to hurt me more deeply than to tell me my voice does not matter and to try to prevent me from being heard. I've heard the psychology about wanting a physical pain that matches what a cutter is feeling emotionally, a pain that "makes sense." As I wrote several years ago now, that's why my response to getting divorced was to decide to train for a marathon. But it never entirely settled right, that reason for my most personal, most intimate desire for self-harm when the urges came. I didn't even make the connection the night eight years ago I wrote a letter to my husband in my journal and then dropped it into his lap while the blood ran down my arm.

Oh god. I'm really telling you all this.

But two and a half weeks ago before my phone rang, I realised that as I made three quick motions across my arm with the blade, I wasn't just crying with voiceless pain. I was speaking out loud. I love you. I am angry. You hurt me. These words were spoken aloud to someone who refused to hear them, someone who did everything he could to keep from hearing them. Who might never hear them. Who probably knows them deep down and feels as awful about them as I do, which is probably why he tried so hard to avoid hearing them from me. But I'm not saying them here to blame this person. I'm only saying them because there are words I need to learn to speak out loud. With my voice, not my body. Without using them as a weapon against my own sweet self.

Someday maybe I will learn that the truth doesn't have to cut to the bone.

The Year That My Life Forgot

Still here, still making my way through grief. Longest. Year. Ever. As I write this it's almost four in the morning and Missouri is burning. Again. For more than a week now. Sometimes I wonder how much more we, collectively, can take. How much grief can a human heart hold before it bursts?

There's much I can't say. I am still keeping a secret for someone, one I have known for years I would carry to both our graves. It's the only form of love I have left to give. I know this is cryptic; I'm sorry. I'm not in danger, and I'm not in despair. I'm just exhausted and philosophical. Also, my feet are cold. It's August, and I've got both quilts on the bed and wool socks on. What gives?

And seriously, the Anne Sexton tweets are killing me. Ugh.

Fly Away Home

I live in a neighbourhood of Doodlehem that is generally considered pretty safe--especially for something on this side of the river, since it's uphill, technically across the county line and its own municipality--but to get home from campus there's no avoiding the student ghetto (because, really, who doesn't love a college town slumlord?) and some very decidedly working-class residential neighbourhoods. I've been warned by my students, bless their hearts, not to walk down certain streets because "they're not safe"--which, in their insular little sometimes-unwittingly-racist minds, simply means "not white." As someone who's lived many years in and around New York City, their mindset makes me batshit crazy. The city residents I encounter daily on my walking commute to campus are friendlier than the average undergrad. Kids have come up to me and wished me happy mother's day even though I don't have kids, guys with dreadlocks have slowed down a half-block so they could share their umbrella with me, and the caretaker of the Latino church on the corner is always looking out for me to ply me with wilted flowers from the scraggly strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb, as long as there's not too much dog shit there that day.

I really like my neighbourhood.

Today I came across a group of three kids on the sidewalk. Their one Razor scooter lay upturned on the concrete. The girl, who was maybe eleven, and the older boy huddled on their haunches around the younger boy--six at most--who was sitting with his palm upturned and tears threatening to brim over. The focus of all three kids was a small red bead of colour in the younger boy's hand. Thinking he had fallen and cut himself, I stopped short of the stop sign and rolled down my window to enquire if they needed help.

I had stumbled upon a ladybug funeral. They had found this tiny red dot of a bug earlier that morning and had decided to keep her as a pet, but in the sad ladybug way things sometimes go, she had not survived. These three--who were of a race and ethnicity I am continually warned against in this town--were reciting ladybug prayers before burying her under a leaf they'd plucked from a neighbour's tree.

They were kids. They aren't in anyone's gang. They aren't shooting rockets at each other across an arbitrary political border bitterly contested for sixty years. They aren't shooting missiles at passenger planes. On this particular day, they aren't even shooting water pistols at each other, though it might not be a bad day for that sort of thing.

Just kids, trying hard to understand why the world is the way it is, and loving something completely unlike them, so much that it hurts. 

Climbing Out, or Learning to Swim

I am doing one or the other. Have patience. I am still here, re-learning how to live, discovering how to navigate since the north star fell from my sky.

Bear with me. I'll be back soon. It was a hell of a winter, but spring returns.

In the meantime, say hello to Pip the Cat, Who Lives Upstairs. Pip is doing a pretty good job of expressing non-verbally how it's been going the past couple of months here in Doodlehem.