So Who Needs Mental Health?

When I had started this blog, I had anticipated writing about the realities of facing facts about a marriage that had long outlived its potential, and deciding to separate and divorce, including the personal struggles involved. The upside of the journey has been reconnecting with the things I love, like writing. Somewhere along the line, I started getting sidetracked.

One thing was that the man I was divorcing was reading the blog. I had attached a “visit my blog” tagline to my outgoing email, without anticipating that outcome. There’s no law against him reading my blog, but a discussion ensued about fair and unfair representation. The experience left me even more sensitive about what I’m blogging than I had been already. I had never set out to “bash” anyone in such a public forum, but felt like I needed to censor myself. I have had the same fears about the repercussions for being completely honest that I had before the separation and divorce. Obviously, I am determined to get past that.

In addition to considering the ex-husband’s potential reactions, I have gone through another loss, one which I still can’t share. If I can’t evaluate with any objectivity what’s appropriate to share from an experience because I am too close to it, then it is too soon to try. After a few months, it is still too difficult. It’s a situation that touches all the issues I have been working out in recent years, learning when I can trust myself; knowing that I am enough, regardless of what happens with other people; trusting that I am more than my mistakes – even if I have botched something important to me, I am not hopeless; there’s even the wild and crazy hope that at some point, there will be more joy in this life, that the sum of my choices isn’t an endless treadmill.

Flops are part of life's menu and I'm never a girl to miss out on a course. -- Rosalind Russell

While processing all of the above, I have been making the effort to cultivate my joy, in writing, in spending time with good friends and with my family, in feeding my creative spirit with plays and live music and art. Lately, I feel more and more that there is no time in my life to do anything other than to work and to parent. My second child, the one who has Asperger’s Syndrome, is having a particularly hard time getting adjusted this school year. This morning I had to go pick him up from school. That’s the second time in a week. Part of me thinks it’s time to buckle down and just commit for a while to work and to focus on my kids, and not even think about anything else. But I have tried that tunneled vision of living, and know that it’s a fairly direct path to a breakdown.

Through the past year, what I see again and again is that I have learned, finally, what doesn’t work. Denial and self-delusion, beating myself up, consenting to be a hostage to someone else’s expectations… those are all the old ways that don’t work.

It’s good to know what doesn’t work. That’s good information. But it is so difficult to be facing each day, still needing to learn the things that do work. At the same time, some days I am so raw I feel like I am walking around with the top layers of skin flayed. Every day that comes to an end without a fatal puncture to the thin skin I’ve got left seems like a miracle, or a sham. Maybe I am losing it, have lost it, but no one’s caught on.

One thing I know is that over the past few weeks, I have not been blogging, nor have I been doing much other writing. For the most part I have felt nothing but tired. There’s not much to say about that. Underneath the tired has been a lot of stuff I would rather not put out there, the sadness and a daily effort to reclaim hope. But not writing brings me inevitably to feeling completely out of control.

Today, after leaving to pick up my son from school, I have to scurry through a few hours of work before leaving early to take him to an appointment at the Children’s Hospital. It’s a scheduled appointment to reevaluate meds for him, in the effort to help him get back on track at school. It is already an insane sort of day. Despite the time crunch, I had to write. If I didn’t, I would not be able to focus on anything at all. Before I can work, I need to write. That’s one of the things that will work, if I can just remember it, every day.

I would like to learn, or to remember, how to live. -- Annie Dillard

Exposure

After posting last night, I was thinking that it's no wonder I don't have a loyal troop of readers. Yesterday's writing was not insightfully witty or funny or comforting, or even well written. I wondered if I should have posted at all. When we met for lunch this week, one of my friends cringed at the idea of having one's thoughts posted on the Internet, especially when a few years down the road those thoughts might change significantly. But, I pointed out, if I write at all, that is something I have to accept.

When I find that someone else has expressed things that I feel myself, it is both comforting and encouraging. Wow, I think, I am not completely crazy after all, or if I am, I am no more crazy than a lot of other people. I can live with that.

By your stumbling the world is perfected. -- Sri Aurobindo

My friend Suzy has told me, with regard to divorce and rebuilding life, "after this everything else will seem easy." There are times when I repeat that to myself like a mantra. I have faith that it is true, I just haven't reached the "after" part yet. I am still in it. If I write about divorce five or ten years from now, I won't remember it as it really happened. The recounting would sound like a smooth progression of discovering this and realizing that and voila, life got better. Reality is much messier.

The rebuilding is really renovating; it's like having your only bathroom torn up in stages. It is not so fun or convenient to have the room's interiors exposed and only partly functional while you still have to make use of it. Without a thorough overhaul, the faucet will still drip and the inner walls will continue to rot and mold. Likewise, if I'm realizing that somewhere along the line I picked up the idea that sex is something that happens to you, or that it is okay to be put down then those false premises have to come to the surface. Then they can be taken apart and replaced with parts that work. In the meantime, things are going to be a bit messy for me. The only alternative is to keep having the same experience, the same relationship that I have had in the past, and I would really prefer not to do that.

What is uncomfortable to me right now is how much I unintentionally expose about myself when I am writing stories. I am even more transparent when writing fiction than when I am blogging. At least I have some control when I write here. I have sufficient courage to spell out the things I am ready to share, but at the moment, not quite enough to risk more exposure than that.

Doing it Longer

Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. -- F.P. Jones

When my first child was six or seven months old, I can remember one afternoon of trying to get him to sleep for his nap. That little snugglebunny was never a good sleeper, though in all other ways an excellent baby. I would try everything, shifting him from my shoulder to my cradled arms to laying him on his belly over my forearms and still he continued to wiggle and fuss. On this occasion, I was closer than I had ever been to shaking him. I was trying to relax, knowing that my tension wasn’t going to help him to relax. My eyes were stinging with tears I was too frustrated to cry. I kept swinging him gently from side to side while I tried to calm myself down.

After a few more minutes, I realized the Bunny (still his family nickname, ten years later) had fallen asleep. Oh! I thought. What had seemed to work, and proved afterward to work more often than anything else, was that I had continued the same thing but longer. The changing from this position to that, from the swing to my arms, had been preventing him from fussing through his distraction to the point where he could sleep.

That memory surfaced recently, as I have been considering changing jobs. I don’t love the job I have now, though in this economy I am grateful that I have a fairly secure job. I work with terrific people, and the company exists to provide services to people with disabilities, so I can be proud of that. The work itself is far from what I’d like to be doing, and a better salary would be a great thing.

In this case, I am remembering the experiences of having the same frustrations in the past, and changing from one desk job to another. None of them got me much closer to doing what I really want to do, which is primarily to write. Public speaking and even some form of counseling or life coaching might be great along with it, but the real thing is to write. Changing jobs might bring in a little more money but would most of all distract me from writing for some time. I have enough experience to recognize a pattern before I make the same mistake again. It hasn’t been a mistake in the past, really, just part of the experience that helps me to know now what is not going to work.

Right now I need to fuss through the uncomfortable period of writing and working my paid job. There’s not a lot of time, and I feel somewhat guilty for the (paid) time I spend at work that I am actually writing. But if I keep doing what I’m doing, and keep looking for ways to do it better – through classes, writers group, continuing to blog though I find it embarrassing and, of course, lots of reading – instead of changing everything else around me, eventually I am going to get where I want to be. Which would be writing.

Oh.

The Point?

Sometimes when I read over a post, I wonder why I am writing at all. The words ramble around a topic or two, or three, and there is clearly a wariness about revealing too much. It is too hard to forget, sometimes, about people that I know may be reading. What will they think? Is this offensive? What kind of backlash will there be? I'm a turtle, poking my head out and taking one tentative step forward.

On the other hand, some posts are still rambling but are pretty darned close to the way I actually think. That can frighten me. I am not so much worried about exposing myself, but about alienating myself from my friends by exposing too much of them in the process.

The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal. -- Elia Kazan

I suppose there are worse venues for developing discernment. You are all guinea pigs, really. Feel free to comment if you have any wisdom to offer on the subject. But, really, thanks for being here.

Progression

One of the unpleasant things about today was just the sense of generalized internal pain - I said to someone that it was like having an emotional flu. Everything just hurt and it seems that anything one can do to dull it is unhealthy. I almost miss the days when I would come home and have a few glasses of wine, and block it all out. The point now seems to be that it's necessary, if I'm going to come through things the way I want to, to let things hurt until they get better. It sucks. Every trivial frustration is hard manage in that frame of mind.

Some of it goes back to pulling out the notebook (after too long a lapse, I admit) and getting to the real stuff, the stuff that hurts. I'm not looking forward to getting back into it, to shaping the experience into something with form and purpose. I can hardly bear to go through it - who could possibly want to read it? It's the real stuff, though, that makes a story, or a poem. And the stuff I hate to look at, is a lot like the stuff nobody wants to deal with themselves. It always a discovery and a comfort to find that we are all going through the same kinds of stuff. If we could remember that, I bet we'd spend a lot less time and energy trying to hide it.

Every true poem or painting, every measure of true music is paid for with life, with suffering and blood. -- Herman Hesse

With the writing, I've also noticed that I'm progressing from just hurting to feeling angry. It's not any more comfortable, but it does seem to be moving toward resolution.

Where were we?

A couple weeks ago, when the boys were away at camp, one of my friends came over to hang out. We sat on my sofa and were talking about the mystery of all the time that went into our relationships, into the mirage that nothing was wrong. "Where was I all those years?" she has asked herself, and to some degree, I have wondered the same thing.

There was a time a couple of years back, when I was so frustrated with trying to do the right thing, to be a good wife, to figure out what else I needed to do better to make things work. It was impossible, and I had reached the point of being angry. Angry with myself, and angry with God, because I felt compelled to keep trying to make the marriage commitment work but God was not helping. At least that's what I felt at the time.

My friend Barb pointed me then to the words of Joel "I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten." (Joel 2:25). There's so much poetry in the Old Testament; I suspect sometimes that it was first my love of the the language that drew me into Scripture. Notice it's not only labor and sustenance that have been consumed, but the years, the incalculable quantity of life that was taken.

Yesterday there were actually moments when I stopped to be conscious of being in the present, without daydreaming or worrying, and it didn't hurt. It was amazing. Today, the pain is back in full force but it's okay. There will be more of those moments, I am sure of it. Somehow I have joy at the same time that I am aware of hurting. Last night I took the advice of my counselor, Hero, and "wrote from the pain," something that we usually avoid by instinct. When we do it, though, write or paint or make music, whatever the channel is for us, from a place that we want to avoid, that is completely the right choice. It is the source of my hope for redemption of the years that were lost, not just starting over with nothing, but turning the loss itself to a purpose.

Pain is filtered in a poem until it becomes in the end, finally, pleasure.
-- Mark Strand

Writing Calls

I want to offer an apology for last night's blog. When I sat down and started typing, I completely lost my train of thought. So many different hurts and discoveries were bubbling to the surface, and while I don't mind exposing myself to some degree, it was too much and too fast to be able to process and decide what was worth sharing. The result seemed to me to be like the pointless rambling of an annoying drunk.

For several weeks, I have been so occupied in clawing my way through each day (yes, at times it really has felt that way, like scaling a bald rock face) that I have neglected writing, which is counterproductive. It bottles up in me until it hurts more than anything else, and I ask myself, why do I DO this? I should know better by now.

Then I sit down, as I did Friday at lunch, with my notebook and a pen, and start to scratch the surface. What results is something like being responsible for a toddler, and realizing suddenly that the child should have been fed a couple of hours ago, so now he's hungry, tired, and miserable, and it is necessary to work on each of those things separately but at once.

Poems are coming at me from every direction, and story ideas, and impressions that I need to get down, because they will have a purpose in something, some time. Meanwhile, I still need to clean enough that there's a clear path for the fridge to be delivered today, and I am taking the kids to swim with my mom this afternoon - things I'd rather forget, and go hole up somewhere with my notebook. Damn! Real life & writing, at odds again. Who said that "Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia" -? I'll have to look it up and report back. [note: I checked. It was E.L. Doctorow]

Give me a pen, that I may become somebody in the future.
-- Sudanese song, quoted in "The Sudan," Vanity Fair
magazine, July 1993

Correction, in quoting M. Atwood

I'd misquoted Margaret Atwood in a recent post. This passage is the last paragraph of Ch. 33 in her novel, Alias Grace.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn't story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind [...]. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

The trick I need to master, is in going from confusion to confusion (there has been very little but that for several years), to be able to tell one story while in the middle of another one.

Incidentally, when reading Margaret Atwood I find every paragraph, sometimes each individual sentence to be a discovery. I have realized that I'm holding my breath, waiting to see what the next page will bring not in terms of the story but in terms of how she reveals it. It was how she wrote, for example, Oryx and Crake, that I loved, though I found the story creepy and disturbing. It gave me nightmares about climate change, before it became a topic in the media.

A Good Hurt

I've been stuck in a low spot for several days, and avoided blogging. I decided that nobody needed to be brought down with me. I'm back now; and it helps that the sun was shining on my way in to the office today. That didn't happen once last week.

When you are once sure what your real interest is, everything goes down before it like grass under a roller - all other interests, both your own and other people's.
--Miss DeVine, Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

Two extremely intelligent, well-educated women were talking in this scene about knowing what is one's "proper job." For some, it might be science or a craft, or art. For others, it can be another person. For many of us, we struggle to be sure we know what our proper job is, doubting even that we have a proper job. If we just stop and observe what we take the most care to do right, that will point us in the right direction. Where our genuine interest lies, we cannot, will not make do with meager effort, or with fudging the truth (Miss DeVine suggests it will be the one thing you cannot lie about).

This morning I had an email response from an online journal to which I had submitted two poems. Neither of the poems was accepted; I had in fact submitted rather sooner after writing them than I usually do. It normally takes months for me to draft a poem, work with it, leave it alone, revisit it, then go through the last two steps a few more times. The poetry editor took the time to write nearly a full page of editorial comment. While I am generally too easily discouraged by criticism, I found the editor's remarks to be stimulating, even on the rebound from a week of depression. I can't wait to get to work on the poems.

Writing is the thing for me, though for many years I doubted that. My need for encouragement and praise goes "down like grass under the roller" in the drive to write well. Writing the truth, in any context, will inevitably cause problems with the people in our lives, but I need to write my truth, not without respect for other people but without being controlled by their interests. More often than not, the result is some degree of isolation. The need to protect myself from exposure succumbed to the promise of writing better if I write openly in a blog. The costs of doing the job well are no deterrent when the job is the right one.

Learning Process

Life is like playing a violin solo in public, and learning the instrument as one goes on. --Samuel Butler

This quote from Samuel Butler has been popping up in my mind, because it is exactly how I feel about blogging. I opened this blog nearly a year ago. A friend pointed out to me in February that I hadn't done anything with it. "I don't know WHAT to do with it," I complained. I think I was actually whining. Like most things in life, it has required that I jump in and figure it out as I go along. I hate that. I have issues with doing things wrong.

It seemed first of all monumentally egotistic to think anyone would want to read my rambling thoughts, and I didn't have a single, specific passion that I wanted to make my focus. Then I decided that, since no one was reading it anyway, I might as well just write and let it develop; then, if one particular thing kept coming up as a theme, I could always start over with a new blog on that subject. One result has been that the writing is getting better, slowly.

Reading other blogs has helped, since there are as many types of blogs out there as one could imagine (see Blogs I Follow on my profile page for some that I like). One I just discovered and love, is http://www.schmutzie.com/. Schmutzie was recently the "BlogHer of the Week," (see http://www.blogher.com/). She writes with a unique voice, and inspires me to trust my own voice to develop.

Now, I know there are a few people who read my posts. That's fun, but at the same time I feel rather like a nude art model, except the exposure is all from the neck up: I expose how I think. I feel the same way every time I read a poem in public, or email it to friends for comment. It is very, very much about exposure, which can be uncomfortable, but it is worth it when the result is a connection, when someone else completely takes in the experience, and shares in it for that moment, feeling it is his or her own experience that I have put into words.

I still wonder, with all the blogs that are out there, what place could mine have? If nothing else, it is my quiet space to develop the habit and craft of writing. Some friends who have read it come back to check for updates. One told me that he didn't understand a word I had written, but I think I have that effect on some people, even when I'm speaking to them. Best case scenario is that the writing itself keeps getting better, and that I have more of those, "a-HA!" moments, when I think, "this is something I can write about." Just maybe, I could someday be a BlogHer of the Week!

How exciting...writing to be used

I just found out that Women in Transition, Inc. (http://www.womenintransitioninc.org/) will be using something I wrote, in a letter going out to about 4,000 people. The piece was about how I wound up seeking help from Women in Transition, and what it has done for me.

Women in Transition works to empower women, and especially helps women in abusive and/or controlling relationships, and/or in relationships that involve substance abuse. Their tagline is "Empowering Women to Change Their Lives since 1971." If you know of anyone who might benefit from talking with someone at WiT in Philadelphia, please direct her to the website or to the LifeLine 215-751-1111. In other cities, similar services can be located through the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, at http://www.ncadv.org/, or call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.

If my writing is not yet actually generating pay for me, I am still excited to think that it might help an organization like this one! Best of all, by supporting WiT in a small way, I could be part of the services continuing so that another woman might benefit from them.