Another One Of Those Days

I am tired, so tired, of days like this. I wake to cloudy mind, achy body, and mental confusion. Picture the floor of a child’s playroom, toys scattered everywhere, the kid in the middle overwhelmed with sensory input. At her feet is a substantial pile of wooden alphabet blocks. She likes the feel and shape, but does not understand what they are for or what the symbols mean. Pretty colors! Fa-la-la, I sit and look at the blocks, pick one up occasionally, then put it down, “What is this for?”

I sip Peet’s coffee, take a shotglass full of empty tummy pills, and watch “The West Wing.” After an hour or two of that, I push all the toys away from me to clear a spot on the floor large enough to nap on. Too tired to get up and find a chair or my bed, I sleep where I stand, err, sit. What is this? Lyme die-off or a Babesia surge? Or even worse, a viral surge indicated by a cold sore on my upper lip. Damn viruses, the result of playing patty cake, sand boxes, slumber parties, and kissing boys; they are the medical dragon our generation cannot slay.

It is an absolutely beautiful day outside: 80°, sunny, low humidity, light breeze, aaahhhh. I should be out by the pool, soaking up the Sun, or better yet: in the left field bleachers at Wrigley watching the Cubs and A’s, drinking gluten-free beer and talking smack to a Bay Area friend on a cell phone. Instead, I am half-asleep, watching the game on TV, lying atop my bed while wearing sweats because I am cold. There are so few beautiful days like this in a year, and even fewer with the Cubs playing at home. “They have the power and they have the speed to be the best in the National league, so (I cannot) come on down to Wrigley Field.”[1] My Die-hard Cubbie blue heart aches.

I hate this, I hate this, I hate this! It has been six – SIX! – six years since I collapsed from exhaustion and disorder. I do what the doc tells me. I swallow fists full of pills, inject massive amounts of penicillin into my gluteus maximus, suffer alternating bouts of its diarrhea and constipation side effects, and watch age creep across my visage. Day after day goes by while I pray that tomorrow dawns as the day I rejoin the human race. Only a saint could be asked to have this much patience. How can God ask so much of me?

This day will never come again! It is another lost opportunity to pursue something I love and enjoy life to the fullest; life is slipping away and I am powerless to plug the drain. One day the opportunity to attend Cubs games will cease. Independence is not a life-long guarantee, and by all accounts my life is more than half over.

Could I have prevented this day by being more diligent with meds, sleep, meditation, or some combination thereto? What in the hell am I doing wrong to warrant losing so many of my days to fumbling ineptitude? How do I stop this horrendous waste of my life? Why can’t – or doesn’t – God send the answer to my travails? Is there some spiritual lesson I cannot discern? Despite years of study and accrued wisdom, could the path to health perchance be found in a lesser-known mystic’s tale?

I cringe every time the phone rings for it is most likely a debt collection agency or the IRS searching for nonextant pennies. Thank the Goddess for caller ID; I can find friend from fiend and then some. When I wake, I feel the anxiety of no job. Yet when I feel as I do today, I am grateful for my soft bed and rent-free roof over my and the kitties’ heads, for today it is impossible for me to earn my keep – and I accept that, along with the accompanying frustration and anger.

The guilt from sitting at home and watching TV is profound, for I have never been so unable to right my ship. It is as if I am out in the middle of San Francisco Bay, sailing a single-handed Laser in deep water between Alcatraz and Richmond. My mast and sail awash, continually overcome by wave after wave of salt water, render me crippled and profoundly handicapped. I cannot stand aright, no matter how many times I try or how great a strength I muster. Intelligence, intuition and independence, tools I was adamantly assured would get me through anything in life, are useless to me now. The only thing keeping me alive is the PFD my doctor reminded me to don as I left her office.

There have been over a thousand of these useless, wasted, unproductive days. My greatest fear is that there may be thousands more. Whenever will I get my life back? If never, how will I stand it? Moreover and most importantly, what grim choices will I be forced to make if that day never arrives.

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[1] Lyrics from “Go Cubs Go” by Steve Goodman.

Thanks, Popeye

Crazy, erotic, and academic dreams all night. I kept waking up (no doubt from the double cocoa brownies I ate far too late in the evening) with bizarre, titillating images rolling in my mind’s eye. I awoke this morning with paragraphs forming, and reading themselves aloud to me. If I were a visual artist, I would have leapt out of bed, thrown on my robe, and dashed to the studio to frenetically put paint to canvas.

The academic dreams were very pronounced. I was back in college, it was the beginning of the semester, and my books and schedule were gone. I had no idea what, when and where my classes were, and even after tearing apart my room naught could be found. I was anxious, worried and dead out scared. I had to be somewhere that very morning and was unable to know where! Why did someone steal these from my room, the very night before the semester commenced? What had I done to deserve this?

WHAM. Actual college “footage” rolls through my mind: Working as a lifeguard at the pool, wandering campus in a fog, nestling in to the branches of my favorite tree at the footbridge overlooking the creek near Reinhardt Alumnae House, hiding from the world.

Hiding – that is the key. I would go there in times of great distress, for no one ever walked past there but for mealtimes. It was great, blood-curdling anxiety that drew me there, as if it was the last refuge on Earth from an overwhelming world. I remember the fear and anguish I shared with God, and my journal, while listening to the water and birds around me. Words cannot illiterate inner turmoil such as this.

How I wish I could go back in time and find myself in that tree! I could tell that scared undergraduate that the punishing world around her was not real – that is was all a construct of her mind. Depression and anxiety makes us see through thick, distorted lenses all too darkly. The mental illness I fight to this day was undiagnosed and untreated 31 years ago.

The thief in last night’s dream was not a person – it was illness. Mental illness, clinical depression, to be exact. I now see the message these dreams have been trying to communicate for all these years: my “life” was stolen from me. It was not my fault. I did nothing to create or cause it.

Why didn’t anyone at Mills understand? Why was I ridiculed by faculty, and punished for being mentally ill? Was there NO ONE on a small, nay intimate, college campus who could see the truth of my affliction and reach out to me? Was my “cover,” a strong, I-can-do-it-myself demeanor so convincing that even the psychologists in the student health center were fooled?

Hell no. I almost did not graduate from high school because of a serious onslaught of unipolar depression. They knew this, and yet offered no tangible aid. WHY? Why in the name of God did they leave me out on the end of the gangplank to fail and drown? Semester after semester I would start out all gangbusters, excited about the classes and studying accordingly. Yet, as the weeks wore on I would miss a class here and there, and then out of fear of being behind not return until I was “caught up.” That, of course, rarely happened, and the fear and anxiety grew steadily. In fact, I would even take substitute lifeguard shifts at the pool when I ought to have been in class as an escape from the terror. How could something as benign as missing one class evolve into a true, fight or flight response such as this?

The difference between this morning’s dream, and all the other college dreams over the years, is that I saw something new, brand spankin’ new, in the chaos of looking for the stolen registration papers and class schedule: It was not a fear of failure riddling my conscious, but a fear of accomplishment.

Everyone on the planet experiences fear of failure at one time or another (I present the 2007 and 2008 Chicago Cubs as evidence) so that is an old story not worthy of blog space. However, realizing that I was afraid to achieve is rocking my world this morning. From what I can feel and perceive so far, it takes root in all the sexist, misogynist bullshit I grew up in: I could be pretty OR smart, but not both, for boys do not like smart girls. (Unbelievably, a “man” said this to me, not six months ago, at a Lake Forest bar…) “You’re fat, ugly and stupid” my Mother would say (talk about projection!) and my Father would laugh at my superior grades in science and math because, “girls aren’t good in science and math – it’s a well-known fact.”

Walking the child of alcoholics’ tightrope, I desperately attempted to appease them both. I became overweight by about 20 pounds, rendering me less attractive than my insecure former model Mother, and surrounded myself with vastly intelligent, yet far “uglier” (to use my Father’s exact word) girlfriends. Believing I was so beneath any boys’ eye, I kept to a self-esteem worthy of dirt. Yet the world saw me otherwise, overwhelmingly otherwise – in fact, the opposite – and I scrambled (unconsciously) hysterically, dousing the kudos and male attention with dung to keep to my parents’ views of my identity, for fear of losing their already scant approval, and non-extant affection.

Therefore, it comes as no surprise that at 17 I could no longer keep the game afloat. For while visiting Oberlin College (sorry Mills, you were not my first choice…) over a cold, grey, God-forsaken February weekend, the captain of the football team bought me dinner, and said he hoped I’d be accepted because he’d really like to get to know me.

WHAM. That shot from a canon shattered my fortress and sliced the tightrope in half, hurling me into an abyss. Here was a handsome, smart, accomplished older boy saying he liked me. No games, no B.S.; it was genuine and significant and I could not escape its power – or message: I was pretty, I was smart, and boys LIKED me. With that realized, I knew my Mother would never love me again. One night she screamed at my Father, “Tell her to shut up, I can’t take it anymore!”

Over the next three months, I spiraled into what we now call unipolar (clinical) depression. I could not function, cried for hours at the drop of a hat, stayed in bed, refused to go out, go to school, or talk to friends on the phone, listened over and over to Simon & Garfunkel’s “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme” album in my dark room, and repeatedly asked God, through painful, plentiful tears, “WHY?” The song repeated:

“I don’t know what is real, I can’t touch what I feel, and I hide behind the shield of my illusion. So, I’ll continue to continue, to pretend, that life will never end, and flowers never bend with the rainfall.”

Then, when the mental and physical pain became so great I could no longer bear it, I thought of suicide.(For those of you unaware, it truly, physically feels like a painful massive weight bearing down upon the chest, inhibiting heartbeat and breathing.) My cat, angel that she was, convinced me otherwise. She stared at me as I contemplated throwing myself to the ground from our third floor kitchen balcony, with eyes that said, “Don’t leave me.” She knew. Here was someone that loved me, and would miss me! The thought of hurting her was too much to bear, so I stepped back inside. I truly believed that no other soul on the planet cared whether I lived or died.

Oh to have attended college, and graduate school, at a time when psychotropic drugs were available to me! For it was not until my mid-30s that SSRI’s, like Prozac, entered my life. It was only then that I began to have a life, MY life, not a life run by unbalanced brain chemicals and autoimmune disorders like PMDD. The drugs presented me with an observer consciousness from whence I could see and feel the swarms of emotions and crippling fears playing polo in my mind, with my head as the ball. WHAP.

All those antagonists are still I my brain, as Lyme and Bartonella reminded me; when the bacteria took over my central nervous system even the more effective drugs like Effexor and Lexapro proved weak in their stead. Fears, crippling behaviors, and bad words flung from my mouth. How precarious is the mental balance!

“I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam” says Popeye. He is correct, for we cannot biochemically be what we are not. I am angry, sad, and full of grief for my stolen – not lost – academic years. How I wish I could repeat the dream armed with psychotropic meds and a full understanding of my mental measure! Yet I cannot – none of us can. All we can do is live forward, embracing opportunities we discover.

So thanks, Popeye, for helping me accept my birthright, and allowing me the reality of grief: 31 years ago, there was nothing else I could do.

Happy Birthday, Joe

Yesterday (May 20^th) was my ex-husband’s 50th birthday. This knowledge struck me quite resoundingly when I looked at the calendar while watching the Cubs game. “Happy Birthday, Joe,” I whispered into the great void.

I have not seen him since we were in our 30’s. Being in my company always seemed to pain him, so I stayed away and grossly limited conversation. In fact, our last discourse was sixteen years ago, just a few days prior to my Father’s death. I phoned to let him know the impending gloom, for my Father was quite fond of him, and visa versa – “Tiger” and “Coach" were their nicknames for each other. We exchanged a handful of answering messages in the few years following. That is all.

It is alarming to think I have been alone for all these years. Looking back, measuring my days by another’s life, makes it somehow more acute a realization. I know not whether he is with another, has found love, or if he has come to terms with the uber-Christian constraints of intimacy that drove a spoke through, and finished off, our relationship. I hope he has a partner, male or female, with whom to share his life, and season tickets to AT&T Park. He is a gentle soul, not meant to forage boldly alone in the world like I, one who sways with the swish of sword against the battery of life’s events. His parents, especially his minister father, dictated almost all his directions. Marrying me was not in the portfolio of goals for their middle child.

Alas, if he is 50 than I am but a shy 18 months away from my own ascension to that esteemed club. In my family that is no worthy admittance, for my paternal grandfather died at 46 of heart disease, and on my maternal grandfather’s side all the Santos died in their 50’s and 60’s of cancer. Only great-aunt Betty reached the magical number 70, only to die of cancer a few months afterward. Such DNA I would never wish upon another.

Regardless of genetic inheritance, human hearts can love, and thrive, through adversity. It is our nurture, not our nature, which most confuses us in our sexuality and choice of mate. If we could be but honest and true to our hearts, and unafraid of parental repercussion, what could we truly strive to create, and who could we unconditionally love?

So happiest of birthdays, Joe. May the Giants win the West (but not the Pennant!) and may this but be the midpoint of all your earthly days. Live long and prosper, good sir. You are most deserving of all life can bestow upon a soul so warm.

A Rabbi and a Realtor walk into a Starbucks...

Saturday at Starbucks. Mostly adults, as it's too cold for kids to be outside. There's a Realtor meeting clients to review houses to visit, two buddies talking football, and three girlfriends catching up. My bangs are way too short, and the saggy, dark bags under my eyes are huge; I look like a freak. Nails look great, though. Color: OPI's "Kreme de la Kremlin." (But of course!) Concentrate on the page, don't look up, for no one else in the place has bags under their eyes; old, young, male, female - doesn't matter.

Car outside has a UC Berkeley license plate holder (Go Bears!) and for a quick second I flashed back to college, journaling at Sufficient Grounds on Durant with Korie Beth and Karen. There was another cafe we frequented, with fantastic salads and homemade breads, further down Telegraph, just across from Cody's Books. Wonder if any of our prior hotbeds of creativity are still around? Then as now, we could write for hours, milking one cup of coffee for all it's worth, and occasionally taking three steps across the breezeway to splurge at Yogurt Park and perchance super-splurge on a topping - carob chips.

All those small, narrow-ruled spiral notebooks I filled in the 1980's are in storage pods in Bensenville, along with my hopes and quashed desires. Korie Beth and I have an agreement that whoever dies first, the other edits and publishes her journals. The way she writes, magically and prolifically, I doubt I'd be able to complete the task before I expire. But I'd damn well try.

I feel guilty for dreaming and desiring a future when I should be focusing on the here and now. Perhaps I should go to storage and get out everything of value I can sell: musical instruments; golf clubs; artwork; needlepoint; ice skates; fine china; kitchen appliances. The resultant ca$h would probably not be worth the effort, but it would be a true facing of my Bag Lady fears, a complete surrender to these damn diseases, allowing them to strip my soul.

Is one truly alive if one is chronically ill? There is a possibility I may never get well. How will life be if that happens? For those of us with invisible illnesses, we feel as though we're living on the fringe. We can't completely embrace life like a kick-off and run down the sideline full throttle a la Devin Hester because we are on the eternal I.R. list, members of the team of life who look the part of a major leaguer but can never suit up. We appear to be in playing condition, but our insides say otherwise.

I awake every morning ready to fight whatever disease or life throws at me. I don't recall ever waking up ready to play or celebrate; from the moment my feet hit the floor every day I'm on defense. Bet Donald Trump doesn't wake up that way. I bet he opens his eyes and thinks whether to pass or run, or if a draw play will stymie his opponents long enough for him to score. His weltanschauung is not one of confrontation; it's all get up and go: "What can I create/deal today? How can I achieve a higher profit? What exciting thing does life have for me to discover today?" My usual morning thought is, "What pain or trauma will life throw at me today? How can I keep my head above water and make it through until tomorrow?" At bedtime there is a deep sense of relief that I survived (not thrived) another struggle, tinged with worry and anticipation about the morning hence. That is, in true essence, the life of an alcoholic's child. I can see it so clearly, plainly. My daily outlook at 48 was formed when I was 8, or even younger.

When the yelling stopped at night, usually by 10pm, my body would finally exhale. For the next eight hours I'd have peace and quiet, but unfortunately I'd be asleep for most of it. At 15, when we moved from the roomy house to the "intimate" condo, I was unable to function and my grades fell; at 17 I succumbed to clinical depression and wanted to die.If I had jumped off the balcony and broken my neck, my parents would have been off the hook, for with me dead they would never be held accountable for how their drinking inflicted my psychological injuries.

Dad knew ("Oh sweetheart, what have we done to you?") but he never turned the light toward himself. Like him, I carry a great deal of fear of the unknown inside my soul. What could be so horrible in there? What am I, and Dad, and God knows how many past generations of our family suppressing? Is this learned behavior with no bases? A protestant work ethic, existential angst screaming our worthlessness? I refuse to believe that God has so little a purpose, or no purpose, for the Soul. Or for life.

If all life, animal, vegetable and mineral, is precious to a greater entity - as all my studies lead me to believe - then I cannot hold that thought and higher mind are worthless. If there is a source of unconditional love, wisdom, and existential truth, it cannot be inaccessible or remote. It must be present and purposeful in every life, every person, every tree, every squirrel. The web of life, interdependency, quantum physics, molecular sharing of atomic substructures, whatever one chooses to call it - is a direct source to the essence of life.

We make Gods in our image, deify beings to rule over us, so when we fuck up we can utter, "I'm not worthy" and be let off the hook: mea culpa, hail Mary. What if we take the great gamble, and say there is no higher being, judgement, or need for accountability in regards to an afterlife? What if "God" is pure spirit or essence? Then we are solely accountable for our trespasses: nothing will forgive us and make things all better. The Catholic Church, and truthfully most organized religion, hands out band-aids for guilt. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) has the right idea, that we must personally atone to the person/s we harm; we must set the Universal Spirit back in balance by action. If you break it, you buy it. Damage something and you must fix it, it's the same for porcelain as for people.

So what does all this have to do with chronic, invisible illness? I may not understand why I'm alive, or if my presence on the planet means squat to anyone. However, the fact that I'm here and bleed means that I am in the web of life and part of the Essential Balance. I might be a teeny-tiny cog in the huge clock-like workings, but without me the clock won't run. All others, ALL others, are cogs as well. All gifts are equal to the great spirit, whether we think them worthy or not.

That's why I can't believe in a Supreme Deity who/that judges and convicts souls. For good to exist, evil must as well. I want (need?) to believe that there is a purpose to physical existence, and that all the mental and physiologic illness has a means of resolution. If it doesn't suffering could become too pronounced, and horrible, to endure. Belief in a Higher Essence/ Spirit/ Being/ Source without divine status is both empowering and frightening, because I alone am responsible for me, and there is no other who/that can fix things. My choices have consequence, both good and bad. Unlike the Children of Israel wandering in the wilderness millennia ago, God is not feeding me manna, pointing my way with a pillar of fire, giving me supernatural signs, or ultimately showing me the destination of my life. Everything, plus and minus, falls to me, like it or not.

Constant scribblings on this topic over many, many years are my trial and error to craft an articulable message. Early on my personal struggles focused on the psychological, for even as a pre-teen I felt a different reality in my heart than that dictated by the Christian (Protestant) Church. Today, putting it down on paper in terms a theologian or philosopher can understand is daunting; how does one account for 5,000 years of religious ideas, and arrive at an understandable, contemporary conclusion?

Chronic and invisible illnesses are the overriding roadblock to the completion of my message: when I get close at least one of the cylinders in the carburetor of my brain fails. Full to the brink with antibiotics, antidepressants, bacteria and parasites, the fuel of life in my mind and veins becomes too polluted to ignite, and it feels as if life has turned to sludge. I may be a late model, in disrepair and backfiring loudly, but the spark is still in me - the fact that I'm alive is proof. As long as the spark is within, there is possibility.

By whose standards should I gauge my life: Donald Trump's or Harold Kushner's, the Realtor's or the Rabbi's? In the end, will my life be judged a failure because I didn't use my spark to raise a building in Chicago's Loop with my name on it? Or will it be a success because in the face of adversity I thrived and kept my spark alive?

Cherchez Les Femmes! On Olympic Women's Hockey

Most of the girls on the bench could be my daughter. They are fearless: checking, scoring and stickhandling with aplomb. How I wish I could be one of them! 37 or so years ago I wanted to play hockey. Figure skating was too girlie and cute for me. Each time I asked, the parental powers laughed at me and said, "Girls don't play hockey! Don't be stupid."

Why the hell not? I thought. Girls rule. Girls can do anything. My parents, misogynists both, thought something was wrong with me. I was told the same thing when I wanted to play the trumpet. They retorted, "Girls don't play the trumpet. Why don't you play the flute like Julie? That's a nice instrument for a girl." BLECH.

Now I am vindicated: Girls play hockey on the world stage at an Olympic level. Women trumpeters play in symphony orchestras and professional bands all around the world. Women are senators, CEO's, and sergeants who refuse to let the glass ceiling hold them back. I revel in their achievements and praise their efforts, but still, a twinge of envy remains.

It was my generation that paved the way for this team. We kept saying NO! when told women can't do "men's work." We took the ridicule and derisive laughter from the ignorant and prejudiced teachers and parents, accepted being ostracized by our peers and suffered through many dateless Saturday nights. We knew it was worth it, and that we were correct in our convictions, and we stood strong. Yet, as I approach 50, I feel time running out. I want, at least, a taste, a nibble of what these Olympians have. Women have made such great inroads, as evidenced by these ladies on Vancouver ice. Yet there is still so much to do. My life's duty is tiring.

In Illinois, women make 72 cents for every dollar a man makes; elsewhere in the world the difference is far greater. What must men, and most women in places like Saudi Arabia, think of this show on ice? Abomination, sin, and sacrilege come to mind. Women's liberation/rights go hand in hand with religious differences as the bases for Arab contempt of America and the West. It is such a sad, wide divide.

If China, the land of foot binding and female servitude, can change to the point where they field an Olympic caliber women's hockey team, the rest of the world can as well. A couple of players on Team China have pink tape on their sticks! How's that for an integration of strong + feminine.

My talents lie in the boardroom, not the locker room. To be honest, I've never been a jock; God just didn't make me that way. But a girl can dream, can't she? Dream of living in a world where a woman doesn't have to choose between being pretty and being smart, where she never has to dumb herself down in order to get a date. Men, most especially here in the God-forsaken Midwest, are unremarkable and unevolved. (Far too many women are as well...) It frustrates and angers me, because after all this time, why don't they get it?

These Olympians have ponytails dangling out the back of their helmets, and long hair flying flying behind them. These are true women! Not women pretending to be men. In the late 1970's and early 1980's, we (the working women of the professional set) wore suits, oxford shirts and floppy ties to make us look like feminized men; in order to play their game we had to look like them. It wasn't until the 1990's "Working Girl" mantra of, "I have a mind for business and bod for sin" could be spoken. These cold athletic combatants have never known a world without Title IX; I just missed it. In my day, women were rare members of graduate schools, especially medicine and religion. Today, women outnumber men in both.

What I wouldn't give to skate a while in their boots! To experience life with fewer restrictions and expectations based on my reproductive organs; to play a "man's game" while wearing diamond studs or pearls in my ears, as these lovely ladies do, would be a great, big, loud raspberry at the people in my life who said I couldn't or shouldn't because I was a girl.

To be correct, I'd bet big money that not one player or coach in this game calls hockey a "Man's game." My generation fought (fights) hard to rid the world of these stereotypes. This is a lady's game. They wear jewelry under their helmets and faceshields, and revel in their sexuality and athletic prowess. They amaze me, and fill my heart with pride for not only being a woman, but an American woman. We have come a long way, baby.

The rest of the journey to equality will come easier than the achievements behind us. Each generation takes the task and marches it forward. The most difficult leg was in my grandmother's day, when women were disenfranchised and forced to attend "finishing schools" where their education was an afterthought. Truly, it is equal access to higher education that is the quintessential liberator.

So that is where I now take my fight, to help young women get the knowledge they need to carry the torch once I, and my sisters, no longer can.