depth

Yesterday

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

Yesterday I did a thing that hasn’t been done in years:  I forgot to put my medication in my bag when I left the house.

Those who are close to me know that I take a ton of pills and I am taking them what seems like all the time.  I have five alarms set for medications, and in the middle of a conversation I will haul out my pill container and some water and take drugs, or I will stop walking and lean against a wall somewhere in the city to haul out my pill container and some water and take drugs, or I will haul out my pill container and attempt to create more saliva and swallow drugs without water because I forgot

…

My medication alarm just went off, so I stopped mid-sentence and went to find my pill container and a beverage and took some drugs.  I think you get the picture.

But yesterday, when the alarm went off on the bus, and I silenced it and opened up the zipper pouch on the front of my backpack to get out my pills, they weren’t there.

“No problem”, I think.  I have an emergency backup container in my bag, just in case I forget my medications.  And I unzip the bag and find the inside pocket where the emergency backup drugs are kept.  They aren’t there.

Moments later I realize that the girl across from me on the bus thinks I am a crazed lunatic, as I frantically zip and unzip and search and search and pull out toothbrush and wallet and keys and pens and all sorts of things while I dig for what must be there.  It has to be there.  I have to have pills!

As I see the look that girl is giving me, I slowly breathe in and out, focusing on the moment, and bring myself back to a state of calm.  I put all the things back in the bag, and I accept the horrifying idea that the meds are not with me, and I alight at the stop where I am meeting my friend for our monthly shopping event. He assists me with one big shopping trip each month, because it is very difficult to access fresh foods near my home, and carrying groceries on the bus is challenging and exhausting.  And when I say assists, I mean I point to things I need and he puts them in the cart for me, pushes the cart through the store for me, keeps track of the costs on the calculator so I don’t go over budget, puts all the groceries on the conveyor belt, loads the groceries into the car, drives me home, and carries all the groceries up the stairs and into the kitchen.  If he were religious he would be a saint.

He was a few minutes behind me in arriving at the store, so I started pushing an empty cart through the housewares section, where I knew there was little I could afford to purchase and wouldn’t likely need assistance.  I was basically browsing until he arrived.  And when he did, I told him, with a frightened look on my face, that I had done the dumbest thing ever, and not brought my pills.  In response he did all the normal shopping things for me, and made me sit while he loaded the car, and refused to let me carry anything heavier than some chips and bread up the stairs, because he knew my pain was increasing with every moment away from those drugs.  Did I mention he is saint-like?  He really is.

And he was right to make me sit and not let me overwhelm my body with the tasks it could not and should not attempt.  And he was right that the pain kept increasing by the minute.  It is the worst and most pain I have endured in a long time.  And since I usually live with pain that is probably about a 6 or 8 of 10 daily, that is saying something significant.

But there is another thing, besides the pain, that was significant.  As the pain increased, so did the knowledge that my pain without medication would always be that severe.  The knowledge that I am feeling ten times less pain with proper medication than I otherwise would experience kept entering my mind.  And then I thought about the difference in my life this year as opposed to last year around the same time.  I am SO much better than I was.  I have much less pain, and I have greater strength and range of motion than I had last year.  I have much stronger doses and more pills than before, which often annoys me, but those pills are staving off debilitating disease and helping me to feel more human and more active and more happy and more balanced than I was a year ago.  The contrast between Christy on drugs and Christy without drugs was so stark that it could not be overlooked.

In that moment, I knew how much worse my life could be—how much worse it was, not long ago.  And I became very thankful for those few hours without medication and the lessons they were teaching.

It is difficult, when your life includes chronic suffering, to keep a positive outlook all of the time. It is lonely, and painful, and depressing, and challenging, and anger inducing, and a great loss, and it just makes all of life seem tainted.  The greyness hangs over your every experience, like fog along the water.  You can walk through it, but it doesn’t lift.  The grey is always surrounding you.

But yesterday, I grasped the difference between the grey and the black—the haze instead of total darkness.  And I became grateful for the grey.

That isn’t meant to sound depressing or sad.  It is meant to express that whatever my situation may be, it could likely always be worse.  And that is a good thing for even those who are not suffering, or for those on the brink of death, to remember.  There is always someone experiencing life less comfortably than we are.  We always have something for which we can be grateful.

The same friend that assists me with my shopping gives me a very hard time about beginning to celebrate and decorate for Christmas long before Thanksgiving Day.  And I often tell him that I practice gratitude each day, so I don’t need a special day for it … and I love the heck out of Christmas, because it just makes me think of all the joy and generosity of the season.  But when I practice that gratitude every day it can become a rote practice of naming off things that are always there, and sometimes the depth of gratitude isn’t reached on all of those days.

Yesterday taught me that depth of gratitude.  It showed me how much better life is, even when it is a very difficult life, than I sometimes acknowledge.  It showed me that some pain is better than all the pain.  It let me see how far I have come, instead of focusing on how far I still have to travel on this journey.

It seems odd that pain would offer me joy.  But in some ways the pain I suffer is a gift—opening my eyes to what I might not see if I were flying through life to get to my job and my meetings and my kid’s soccer game.  Pain offers me opportunity to consider other’s sufferings with a broader perspective.  Pain gives me time to think about and to learn and to ponder what I otherwise might not.  Pain sends me the chance to ask for help and to accept the generosity of others, and to let go of the notions that pushing harder and trying harder and working harder will get you to whatever goals you might seek.  Pain puts me in a space where I cannot be in control, so I need to learn to release and to let be.  Pain heals my spirit in some ways, even while it breaks my body, and makes me angry, and causes me to struggle.

It is interesting that I use grey to describe the way that suffering lingers.  I was taught to think in black and white when I was younger.  There was good and there was bad.  Any sort of concept of middle ground was not introduced until I was much older.  And at times I wish that it were simple to see the difference between the good and the bad and to stick to one side or the other.  But life doesn’t work that way.

I am reminded of a bit of Harry Potter where Sirius tells Harry that we all have some dark and some light in us.  We aren’t just good or just bad, and there aren’t clear categories of black and white.  We are all a sort of mixture of elements, and some things and thoughts and actions about us are less desirable and some are more so, but none of us is completely positive or completely negative.  We are an assemblage of protons, neutrons, and electrons.  We have both positive and negative.  We are meant to be both.  And life is meant to be both.  And mixing white and black gives you grey.

My life is grey.

My choices are grey.  My words are grey.  My intentions are grey.  My feelings are grey.  My actions are grey.

Some of my life is exquisitely perfect, and some of it is as dark as dark can be.  I need to hold and honor and examine and express both dark and light.  We all must, in some sense.  We are all living in the grey.  It is inescapable.

Yesterday, I saw the light in what is dark.  Yesterday I remembered to view things from both the positive and the negative—and sometimes both simultaneously.

Yesterday I embraced the grey.

 

Impression

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

 

I was talking with a friend a while back—one who became a friend after a couple of dates and still occasionally gets a “benefit” or two when I’m in the mood, but who doesn’t want to date me any longer. (Which is fine, because I don’t want to date him now either.)   But I asked him what it is that made him certain he didn’t want to date me, and his response was that we didn’t “click”, or that he wasn’t “feeling it”.

Yesterday I had a lovely lunch with a cousin.  He is the cousin I hold most close and have more than a familial pseudo-connection with in the great web of cousins that spreads out across the country (even though we only see one another once every 8 to 10 years).  We talked about how his punch to my shoulder in our childhood, and my calling him out on doing so and not letting him bully me, was somehow the starting point and the bonding moment that glued us together and kept us loving one another throughout the many years since.

It got me thinking about the ways we judge people.  It got me thinking about first impressions.

I have a friend, whom I love, that I had negative impressions of when we first met.  She was often late to class, and she was always behind on assignments.  She often sat alone in a corner and seemed distant and in her own world.  And later I discovered the reasons she was alone and fighting to keep up with things.  She was suffering one of the deepest and most challenging losses one can suffer, and suffering it without the love and care and attention she deserved at that time. Had I let my first impression be the thing that defined her, and not replaced that with something more or deeper, I would have missed out on a wonderful friendship with a beautiful woman.

I had a co-worker that was convinced I was having an affair of some sort with another co-worker.  She was certain that the treatment I received from him was different from that which others received.  She was right that I had connected with that co-worker in ways that others had not, but her first impression—the one that said him liking me better than some others was akin to romantic interest—was completely unfounded.  We just got along well, because we were both honest and supportive, and we had mutual concern for those whom we served at work.  We were a lot alike, and we developed a lasting friendship.  Now I often claim that I wouldn’t be making it through life without him, but we still have no romantic interest in one another.

One day a friend of an ex-lover was over visiting me.  She mentioned something about being jealous of him and his interactions with me.  I said she ought not have been jealous, because I would have enjoyed a similar relationship with her. This led to a lovely evening of eating and drinking and laughing and kissing and spending wonderful moments together.  Had her first impression not been corrected, we might have missed out on that fun night.  That one night was the extent of our flirtation, but it broke down the false impression of me that she had held for years. She finally discovered the queer side of me.

So, today, I remain fascinated by the ways we frame things, and we create identities and scenarios based solely on first impressions.  Our cognitive biases cause us to connect or disconnect based on one moment or characteristic or idea.  And I can’t help but think that this often causes more harm than good.

I don’t want to be known as who I am in only one moment.

We are more complex than can be demonstrated in one moment, or one interaction, or one day. The whole of our identity and the depth of our own scenarios cannot even be grasped by the self without careful consideration, so we shouldn’t conceive identities for others based on a glance or a short and impersonal first interaction.

I dare bet all that I have that each of us has moments that we are not proud of.  I would also dare bet that the moments we would like to have everyone see as the “real” us are not complete representations of who we are.  I think that none of us wants to be considered only from the point of a first impression.  None of us is wholly what we are in one moment.

I had a good friend who saw me at one of my worst moments.  I rarely break in such a deep fissure sort of way in front of people.  I try to hold those moments in until I am alone with a pillow over my face to muffle the sobs and screams.  But once in a while they slip out while in the company of others.  And this particular time that I broke in front of someone, that relationship was immediately and irreparably harmed.  That moment began to color all the other moments—the “better”, clearer, more comfortable moments.  We still wish one another hellos and happy birthdays and the occasional missing yous, but we aren’t close like we once were.  That brokenness became who I was, and that became too much to deal with.  It is a common occurrence, and I never lay any blame on the other person, because I know my pain is too deep and strong and heavy a burden to bear.  I know that I don’t want it on my own shoulders, so I won’t think less of anyone who doesn’t want it placed upon their shoulders. But I sometimes miss those people.  I sometimes wish I hadn’t broken into pieces then and there.  I wish I hadn’t let that impression be.

But I am all of me.

The false impressions are crap.  Stop making people one thing from one moment.  It isn’t helping any of us.  Let people be complex and diverse and dichotomous and incongruent and broken and good and loving and deep and broad and beautiful.  Let them be all that they are.

Let me be all that I am.

I am the same woman when I connect well with someone as I am when I don’t click with another.  I am the same woman when I break as I am when I look like it is all together.  I am the same woman kissing my male ex-lover as I am making out with his female friend.  I am the same woman when I display strength and wisdom as I am when I fall to my knees and break down in desperate sobs and self-loathing.  I’m not one of those moments, but a compilation of all of those moments.  And there are even more parts of me that I have yet to discover and to share.  There will be many more new impressions to make. And I will continue to become.  I will be more.  Let me be so.

The greatest mistake that we make, when we frame our lives and our interactions, is to believe that a moment makes a lifetime, or that a year makes a decade, or that a decade makes a millennium. We are not a moment.  And the way we frame things needs to include the opportunity for continual reframing.  We must not take a single impression and make it the definitive truth about a person or a situation.  We need to leave room for complexity and deeper understanding and change and discovery.  We need to let people have this space to be all and become more.

So, my musings of this morning leave me in a space where I am working to be open to more and more moments, and to reserve judgment, and to not give my initial impression and interpretation more power or weight than it deserves.  My goal is to be and let be.  My goal is to become and let become.

I want to be known for all of my parts and moments and impressions and connections, and I want to know others in that same way.  And that is difficult, because we are so accustomed to framing things in one way, and we are not accustomed to being open and honest, and we are very accustomed to presenting an image that is pleasing to the rest of society rather than letting the whole of who we are show.  So, being known for all my parts and moments means being exceptionally vulnerable.

Being vulnerable is very difficult, but it is a requirement if I want to be known for all that I am.

I said to my cousin yesterday that I have never “come out” as something because I don’t really have a definitive way of expressing what it is I am coming out as.  But today I realize that I need to come out as proudly broken and queer and brilliant and challenged and disabled and strong and beautiful and angry and calm and loud and insufficient and overflowing and amazing and growing and awakened and stubborn and addicted and stressed and fighting and accepting and loving and good.  I need to proudly wear the banner of all of the things I am.  And doing so is a vulnerable act, but one that I am willing to perform.  Because it is worth claiming and calling out these things if the result is being known in all my complexity.

Be all you can be. (Not necessarily in the army, but just in general.) And let others be all that they are.  That is a beautiful thing.  That is a way of connecting to one another that allows us all to grow and have more interactions and more beautiful interactions and more truth and more love in our lives. And who doesn’t want all of that?

I want all of that … and more.