Field Notes on the Luxury of Being

 

A walk into town always presents a row of magnificent trees lining the sidewalk next to the road in front of the Catholic Church. Spread about twenty paces apart, one freshly cut down, ("Oh no! A sibling lost to weariness!") but close enough to pedestrians inclined to reach out and convene an exchange that only touch itself can explain...the soldiers of our very breath itself stand tall and clipped around the power lines. 

Some of them rebelliously push the sidewalk to cracking but, hey, how else are they going to get noticed? My favorite, for some unknown reason, calls to me often and I have reached out for a pat or sat next to him many times. Except today. It never occurred to me my tree friend could hold me. Embrace me and contain what my skin cannot. Perfectly curved armrest roots exposed, the trunk an angle to beat any chiropractic care, and a mossy seat with a direct link to the dark, still elixir of the earth herself. I sit down and rest. And heal.

I see a someone, (later I know as Stan,) making his way up the incline. He stops, grabs his chest and bends over for air. Having known the terror of a fragile heart myself, I stand up to assess. He walks again. I see his stubbornness on his face and walk towards him the second time he bends. I call out to ask if he needs help. He waves me away. When I get near, he stands and passes me quickly, panting and head high, "I have to get to The Church." I back off and watch him pass and keep my eyes on him as he bends two more times until greeted by another person I assume is meeting him at The Church.

I notice he's carrying a cube shaped tote and wonder what meeting, more important than a cardiac arrest, his pastries needed to attend. I walk on into town and get a haircut.

On my way back, I pop in a local shop selling goods by local artists and enjoy the leisure I've awarded myself for the day to care for and transcend the autumn-ness of my emotional, transitional, karmic realities. And I'm feeling blessed for the privilege of time to slow down. Think. Learn. Feel and listen to what my nerves are predicting and protecting. I give myself the day to keep shields down and senses on full receive.

Talking to my bestie through my headphones on the way, she had heard in real time the exchange as I'd encountered The Leaning Man on a Mission To The Church. She and I are chatting on and off. (Sometimes we're just "together" in silence.) I had expressed that perhaps the appearance of the gap between our generations, created a common bias and had made him reject my concern. No matter. Just an assumption in a long line of daily discernments. Forgotten in minutes. 

I pass my tree friend on my way back home and a shower of acorns fall around me. One even bounces off the ground and pegs a paper bag I carry, leaving a mark. "Agh! Acorns!" I speed up and am shocked I'm not aching from one on the top of my skull. (Sometimes I'm blessed with bird poop, once a large tree branch as a child, and in NYC, someone once spat on my head, the target, and once I was knocked unconscious from the siding that peeled off of a building in a brisk wind. Including the many stitches from my early years, I tend to attract head wounds—literal and metaphorical.) As I escape the shower, I think "Oh my friend really needed me to have asked to have sat in his lap. He's angry." But then another thought occurs: he was trying to get my attention. 

I turn around. Give him a smirk. And walk back to sit on his thrown. I never saw Stan coming.

The moment I'm down and grateful for another horticultural hug, The Man Now Without Pastries, says, "I wanted to thank you for checking on me," and we begin a conversation of care and gratitude and shared cardiological diagnosis. I tell him the next time he needs a break on his walk he should consider my friend's thrown on which I was sitting.

As he leaves, I call out and give him my name. He turns around and tells me he is Stan. My bestie heard the entire event even as I walked away in tears. "If my tree hadn't called me back, I would never have known Stan. Never have known my impetus to "meddle" is sometimes indeed helpful. And I never would have felt so held by everything and everyone around me." 

She tells me "I'm not just blowing wind up your skirt when I tell you you're magic" and I remind her that her love and belief in me over our 30+ year sisterhood is one of the only reasons I even figured out how to receive such beauty and love from my surroundings in the first place. 

I walked home feeling like I mattered. Sometimes loving others helps you love yourself. And sometimes loving yourself comes from letting others love you. Including the trees.

Zombie Zombie Zombie

Still from the documentary Sins of Our Mother

So much going on in the world that’s all of this…I don’t know…waking up? So scary and hard and also, to me, it feels…right…makes sense…even though it’s closer and closer to being a world of systems we don’t recognize…I’m so glad for us…sad for us…rooting for us…terrified for us… But we keep fighting... 

To talk about the hard things though… Justify, protest, debate, them…because that’s the only way we can make change…so here goes…here’s some more…

I was watching this Netflix doc, #SinsOfOurMother, and this man pictured here is the interview that…brought me to my knees. It's the moment where he, as a child, told his mother that her husband had been sexually abusing him and the way he describes what happens next is the inciting incident for the way the documentary builds the narrative around why his mother ended up so mentally unstable she murdered her own children. 

This man is the surviving member of his family and he spent his life, still spends his life, pointing to the day he confessed what happened to him as the reason. Because I’ve gone decades learning about how not to hate myself for what happened to me when I was small and how to survive the shame and guilt, and even though, of course I’m not even remotely alone… I’d just never heard my exact experience from anyone else before. And it…helped…it just does. We collectively know this about the power of story. But when it happens—SEEING someone else survive your similar story and KNOWING you’re not alone (even though logic and all the memes tell you you’re not—you just can’t explain an experience with words and learn the same lessons in your bones like when you FEEL it because you did it.) I’ll be damned for how much it matters to have that mirrored back to you. Validated. 

Believe it or not, it’s way more often than you’d think that the young victim is blamed by the old guard. I had a therapist yell at me once—“Why didn’t you just tell him to stop!? Why didn’t you say anything?!” Well. I told her I did. “Yes but not around the time it was happening?! You said something after it was too late?!l” She was furious with me. Too late for…? Oh! Making it not happen? Yes lady that would have been an amazing super power. I’ll bet you’d feel more comfortable too knowing time travel was real. (Ya I didn’t go back…) I don’t think it’s meant to be cruel. Just meant to try and make sense of it. Or hate the beaten dog because after all, that’s their role in the pack. Defend a dying system. (Or memory?) Keep the control in their purse. ”If only [you/he/she/they] hadn’t [said/worn/looked/smiled] then the [violence/pleasure/disgust] wouldn’t have happened.”  I mean, I suppose. 

We often face complicated child abuse scenarios like the TSA tackles terrorist threats…reactionary Wack-a-Mole and punishment for all. It’s just a bummer and there’s no more snacks on the journey. Sometimes it’s more humane to just throw up your arms and say “sometimes humans are awful” and before we lock away the perps, ask them ”why” until they run out of answers. Maybe we can learn some things. But everyone seems so afraid of what they themselves are capable of, they don’t want to know. You really CAN learn to do anything you set your mind to. Including evil. (You can also become evil by avoiding it. You might not recognize the symptoms. #DonaldTrump) 

It’s so difficult for people to understand why children blame themselves for their parents’ pain and abuse. Because we’re not kids anymore. But If you know you know. You know that it’s just devastating. Including the after shocks. Especially when a child shares ANYTHING they KNOW will make their parents and guardians—their initial means of modeling survival and self worth—hug them a little less tight or, cut them out all together. (i.e. sharing or revealing a stigmatized truth—identity, bullying, obsessions, divergence from what they’ve witnessed) The courage it takes for a child to even speak up in the face of a deathblow to their essence is almost unheard of. Can you imagine a blind and vulnerable day-old baby bird defying the instinct to open it’s mouth when it’s time to feed? It absolutely will NOT survive. It’s suicide. Would you, on your own, enact a solo defiance without planning any resources or support or calling on anyone's expertise, and tell your boss something that you know would not only get you fired, but ostracized? Arrested? Canceled? Killed? Because that’s not only how it feels to do such a thing as a child—it can be a reality. (Conversion camps and hospitals and medications can be as cruel as experimenting on small animals. Because…we have so little answers…whether we like it or not,  that’s exactly what we’re doing. Ask any rape victim how many times they were asked what they were wearing.) 

I always knew my mom was fragile in a sense. Strong in other ways but mostly made of glass. Kind of like I was. We were close to the same emotional age when we met only she could read self help propaganda, smoke, and have dessert any time she wanted. What I didn’t know and never will is that I suspect relative to how SHE grew up, she was actually in a thriving state. Not just surviving. She was probably a thousand times stronger than I give her credit for. She just never really told me. She choked on it I think. If I’d known the truth about her abuses…well…there we go blaming the victims for not speaking up….

My mother was also really beautiful back then. Except her body got heavier and darker muffled by silent trauma and as we both got older, she only seemed beautiful to me on her good days. 

As I watched life happen to her—well, I guess us—she got more and more vulnerable, her bones liquified by shame and addiction. Eventually I had to be the strong one, including walking away from her. She just couldn’t come back from the constant cosmic concussions. I didn’t mind that much in hindsight. I didn’t know any different really. I loved her. She was The Mother. But, as I mentioned, my tools were child’s play—make believe castles and toys. 

So when I told my mother—it was like watching a tree whose trunk was already leaning dangerously out of the ground, roots exposed, carrying the weight of the dying limbs, CRASH to the earth…and instead of laying there as a fallen tree…POOF, it became something else entirely, like a psychedelic fever, the moment it’s expected BOOM was to resound on impact, it made some anachronistic continuous noise instead. Like the sound of echoing sitcom laugh tracks or an amplified pack of malnourished lions eating a mare. Just horror. Pure horror. And the noise is forever there in the background like a haunting tinnitus. 

Because sometimes when you tell them the awful thing, you’re inadvertently their one bullet in the roulette chamber for every time life put the gun at their temple. And you had no idea you were even a part of the weaponization of their sanity. Until the light in their eyes just…goes out. They’re never the same again. Regardless of who’s fault it is that got everyone to that situation…it just is a fact. It was you that pulled the trigger.

I always thought I was alone in this experience. I don’t know why, except I’d never met someone who told me they got it in the same way I did. Maybe no one talks about it. Maybe no one I knew had a mother that was that close to the edge. At least mine didn't join the same cult as his. His chose religion. Mine, medicine. 

I’m so grateful to be years beyond the guilt and shame about all this. Thank goodness. And thank GOD for all of the incredible people who care enough to help each other. Love each other. Share their lessons. So…just in case someone else needed this moment in their heads…I just wanted to share what this man said in this film, because it really is this simple. He explains it, well, obviously way more concisely than I. 

It’s just…this death…this sharp change…this explosion…THIS is why kids think it’s their fault. Because, technically, it is. It’s just they are only doing what kids do…pointing out illogic of how poorly they are protected. It’s their parents and the grown ups around them who need to maintain the blame and shame and the lies and systems that protect the status quo so they don't have to face their part in it all. Kids will say the darnedest truths...

I don’t have answers or ideas here. I just wanted to try to explain how it feels to be a kid who is being abused and desperate enough to face the terror of surviving it and how grateful I was to hear someone who survived that life altering moment. Maybe if we normalize talking about the hard things even more, I don’t know, less bombs? More flowers?

#cptforptsd #pflag #PFLAGProud

Take Up Space

Many of the most important people in my life have I met through a shared passion for the performing arts. People who need people. I hear we're the luckiest.

But I spend a lot of time overcoming the humiliation for wanting my art to be seen and heard. There's no one thing I can point to that caused the shame I battle for a CALLING TO TAKE UP SPACE. Introvert, extrovert, I mean we all have to VERT.

Back in the day, I knew I had some extremes in my anxieties, but there was a particular time, I would just FREEZE. I mean you NEVER stop the scene in a performance. Here we all are driving down the road and I'm a tire that just rolls off. It was disconcerting.

I followed @lukeleonard and his recommendation to audition to work with Joe Chaikin and @nancygabor and @waynemaugans. Life altering. I hadn't really admitted or acknowledged my increasing jitters, but they appeared at the audition, and exponentially during class.

Imposter Syndrome for my membership in the species.

The class became a tribe and a haven. And even though Joe had aphasia towards the end of his life, I never once saw him stop. He had the ability to say things with laser-precise clarity, curiosity, passion, and a deep desire to connect. His presence was overwhelming--alarming. His dialogue would often be a single word. It was all you needed.

I have a tape cassette that I keep on my desk that Joe gave me after a particularly rough day. Joe's art thrived from the humanity of humans. Perfection was the most imperfect thing you could do to your work. He really wanted you to just...bring YOU when you showed up to the story.

On both sides of the tape he wrote one word the label.

Relax.

I'm still not sure I am capable of what that looks like to most, but at that time, I was at a point when I wanted to stop myself forever. Roll my tire into a ditch without so much as a "go on without me!" 

You never know what ONE word can do. I have many I regret. Many I've stuttered. Daily I realize just how grateful I am for all who find ways to help each other share their art, their love, their calling. Thank you to the supporters who say, "KEEP GOING! Don't stop! You can do it! YOU HAVE A LOVE! YOU HAVE A CALLING!! TAKE UP SPACE!!!"

 Ok, Jennifer. Relax.