What kills love

04/2014

What kills love? Only this- Neglect

I am going free form tonight, a first for me. It is kind of like going commando only less interesting for others. My writing process is lengthy and labyrinthine. I get phrases, fragments, memories of an idea I have not yet had; and I wait to find out what ties them together. They loiter for days or weeks, sometimes months before I can discern any organization or meaning from them.

I have been too full of fear and sadness to notice the march of future essay ideas. I have been lost. But tonight a quote from author Jeannette Winterson announced it’s presence and demanded to be wrangled with:  “What kills love? Only this- neglect.” [Note to self/attempt to hold myself to the same standards as my students/ I will post the name of the book when I remember it]

My grief-stricken and single-focused mind seized it and tried to put in on my dissolving relationship like a sweater two sizes too big. Of course it fits- and there are a million versions of neglect- but the phrase wanted to be bigger. 

So here I am, no pants on (figuratively, people!) wading through the murky water of criminal neglect.

The original sin, the doorway of the beast, is to forget to love oneself. Scary, terrible shit happens all the time. In calmer times we commit to mindfulness, to walking ourselves through fear with compassion and loving-kindness.  But when your personal earthquake strikes; a disease unravels your nervous system, for instance, or you lose the only person you could not bear to lose; all bets are off.  You are thrown into a primal place, the dark space that lurks under your carefully constructed philosophies. Who has time to meditate, to stay connected to them selves when the water is rising? When the floods come, I do my best to just disappear. I need to save others so that I do not cause a fuss when I too start going under.  

The instinct is so immediate and the personal costs are so great that I am suspicious that something other than altruism drives my many rescue missions.  Perhaps always saving others is a feeble attempt to control reality. I think I am hiding; preserving whatever is left of me by ignoring there is anyone left at all. 

It is a pattern of a lifetime. The siren call of putting myself in front of whatever is hurting someone I love; then limping away empty. Fetal in a cocoon of self-protection, I attempt to float towards the next me.  When I was first diagnosed with MS, I became a superhero. Fighting with all claws out when I witnessed injustice, when people were getting hurt. It was all a great distraction from my own Titanic. I forgot to pay attention to myself. I licked my wounds alone, and never let others see them.  I was fragile and overwhelmed. I still don’t know how to live with this diagnosis; I still don’t know who I am….now.

After the loss of identity, comes neglect of the people and things that could have reminded me of who I am. As the water rises I am too overwhelmed by the probability of drowning to reach for the life vest. Love is neglected by refusing to appear to be drowning to those who would save you. The disappearance is almost complete, even I cannot make out the outlines of me anymore.

Then out of nowhere there are cairns in the abyss. I stub my toes on them, I grope wildly in dark space, until my hand hits another.  And another. And somehow, I am pulling myself home. Making peace with what is gone, no longer resisting the current. There is a path, or maybe just a vague sense of the surface. Strewn with stack-stoned flags from other realities about the enduring nature of connection, compassion, life itself.

I am starting to see them. My vision is blurry and my muscles are weak. Just when I start to go under again I find a cairn and hang on. I am hanging on with my last ounce of strength. There are people I love who can be rescued only by my continued efforts to surface. Maybe this is some essential truth about love itself; the rescue has to be your own. When the cabin is losing pressure, you do have to put on your damn air-mask before assisting anyone else. I wish I had paid attention to the thousands of times I've heard that from flight attendants: "If the cabin loses pressure, the air masks will drop. Secure your mask before assisting others." The air masks will drop!  There will be enough air for everybody.

 I will myself to be visible, I will my self into the future. I know the first step is to love myself enough to let you see that I am drowning. Here is the battle cry I have choked on all these years:

It hurts. I am scared and treading water. I exist. I don’t recognize my body, I am not certain of who I am anymore under the weight of a decade of loss. I resist the comfort of disappearing so as not to bother anyone. I found a cairn and it showed me the most important thing, the thing we all think we won’t forget but do anyway:

I still fucking exist.

So what now?

Gestalt

I have been quiet for years. Too quiet. Not just on my blog, but in my life. I have recently decided to pull up my big girl pants and show up for my life again. Newly divorced, I am stumbling through the work it takes to review, understand, forgive, restructure, reorganize, and fill out the contours of a life. My life. And as much work as it is, it is a nap in a hammock compared to what it took to burn down my life to save myself. Here I am: Charred and gritty, but smiling and grateful.  When I wonder how I ever got so totally lost, I find that I never was. I had left bread crumbs in my writing. Never published, often unfinished or so raw the words were more likely fingernails grasping for crumbling rock, but they are here. Messages to myself all along the way, recording what was happening but never processing it to complete a gestalt. So I am moving backwards in time now, publishing bread crumbs. They may be out of sequence occasionally, but they move back into the past in a roughly linear fashion. They are more than the sum of their parts. I am starting to understand the big picture. It's a process, and these word maps to myself are mine.

The Do-Over

We humans are skilled at screwing things up. I myself am exceptional at it.

Who among us has never needed a second chance? How many chances have we been offered but failed to see?

Maybe that is why I love old houses in neighborhoods that have seen better days. When a house sits vacant for too long, it’s spirit wilts. It is a visible wound. At first, you cannot tell that the occupants have fled. The house sits there expectantly, awaiting somebody to return. As the days turn into weeks and the weeks into months, the energy of the home fades before eventually disappearing completely. It is as if the home has stopped waiting to be loved. When too many homes in an area become devoid of the tender ministrations of the people who dwell there, the whole neighborhood empties of hope. No matter that there are people who still live there, who hold on to the sense of place they originally found and then nurtured in their homes. The tipping point is impossible to predict exactly, but one day the whole area begins to display the sense of abandonment evident in a house that has gone too long without love.

We make judgments: This neighborhood is not a good one, it is an investment bound to fail. Love is an investment they we are all too familiar with failing. But one person moves in, able to see the home as whole if only in the delusion of the future. Then a family arrives, with noisy kids and adults consumed with business, trying to keep it all together. One by one the houses perk up. Perhaps they will be the next one chosen, perhaps their do over is just around the corner. And for no reason except that someone needed a house, and a house needed a person the energy of the neighborhood begins to feel light again, begins to feel hopeful.

I too, have succumbed to the sense of abandonment. I too, have forgotten what love feels like. Who was I, when that withered old grapevine looked to me like a vineyard? Who am I now that I can’t even remember what that naïve optimism felt like? It makes a good story, one too often retold. I was in my early twenties, trying to establish a new me after graduate school. My heart had recently been broken and I was careening towards round two. I called my mother from the crumbling porch of a long vacant bungalow where I hoped to find my footing and I gleefully announced that this home had a vineyard! I can remember who I was then because people who love me remind me of that woman now. I was starting over in the shadow of one of love’s crushing blows. I was desperate for a sense of place, desperate for hope, desperate to belong to myself again. I needed to heal and this little old house needed someone who saw past the years of neglect.

Here on the eve of altering the known universe of my children with the news that their family is changing form, I am filled with a gratitude and wonder so immense that I cannot keep the tears from falling. I have been gifted a do over, that most unlikely chance to try again. My family has lived in this old house but I stopped noticing that a dry old vine languishing in the yard holds the potential of renewal. My home has wilted as hope snuck away. I too, have succumbed to hopelessness, to the mistaken belief that there is something missing, that there is not enough love to make us whole.

Overwhelmed with a sense of compassion for my frail little humanity, I like the rest of the species thought I knew my solidity but kept disappearing. I think I am safe on my path but keep falling down and needing to start over again.  This is the lesson in so many incarnations about what happens when love is neglected: Self-love most of all. Forgiveness too: for those I have judged to have wronged me, for my judgments against myself and for the compulsion to judge at all, instead of allowing the plot to unfold. But I have become light as I took time to notice my unbelievably good fortune to be offered another chance.

It is pure Grace is that the do-over is possible: a gift from an infinitely generous universe. We are loved enough to be given the chance to start over--despite our many failures and disappointments. There are people who recognize and remember me before I forgot myself.

This is what love feels like. 

A few years after that phone call to my mom and the discovery of the little house that needed me as I  as much as I needed it, my shriveled, abandoned vine produced abundant red grapes, sweeter because of the years it was dormant. There is no way to repay such a kindness, the full faith of those who love me even as I have forgotten how to love myself; the chance to trade a withered past for fecundity. So I will allow the unfolding; drop the judgments about the years I curled up inside myself. Drop the resentment about not being seen, the narrative about who is to blame. I am already greening, delighted to find out that I have nourishment to offer. It turns out, I am just like that withered vine, maybe we all are. Not gone, just forgotten. Not forgotten, just lost.

Here then, look in my stained and calloused hands. I can offer you grapes, and that will be enough.

Going for gold!

I recently had one of those brutal yet eye-opening experiences of realizing that other people may not perceive me as the adventuresome, radical, freewheeling 22-year-old I was when my self-concept crystallized.  Some 17 years, two kids, and a progressive neurological disease later my self-concept has not evolved. This may sound borderline psychotic to you, but to me this is the height of resilience. Shabam!

Humiliation is a gooey thing and I don't see myself washing off this recent discrepancy between my perception of myself and another's perception of me easily. One day in the distant future it will make a very funny story. At this moment it remains a festering wound. But let's go on.

The 2014 Winter Olympic games have just started. My athletic, patriotic, and well- adjusted older sister has always loved the games. Two years ago, she stood in my living room with tears in her eyes as the summer games opened in Utah. I could only assume an athlete had been killed by a wayward land shark in the opening ceremony;  but no – it was pure American pride and empathy with the realization of the Olympians' dreams. Gheesh.

Which is why it is almost an out of body experience for me to be obsessed with these winter Olympics. You will not be surprised to learn that in high school I was in a fairly marginal social category. Because of my innate inability to care what other people think, this was never a problem for me. It did drive my letter-jacket-wearing sister a little nuts though (being only one year older, she witnessed much of my slinking around the high school with the skaters and freaks- my peeps). This Olympics is different for me because of the inclusion of a number of extreme winter sports such as slopestyle snowboarding and halfpipe freestyle skiing that appeals to my more extreme nature. Watching the qualifiers for women's slopestyle snowboarding, I was feeling sad that I missed my chance at greatness. Although the oldest competitor is 33 years old I convinced myself that at 40 (with zero snowboarding experience) I could take them all – if it were not for this stupid MS.

While attempting to drown my regret, the source of the misunderstanding mentioned earlier was becoming clear via texts (make it stop, please make it stop).  Behaviors I had perceived as indicators of romantic interest were the actions of a well mannered young man, perhaps demonstrating how he would like his mother to be treated.* That is all I am going to tell you right now so let it sink in.

You might imagine I would go for the stereotypical pint of ice cream at this point, but you are drastically underestimating what my mind can do with a challenge.  I could not have predicted it either, but I'm actually a little proud.  My mind issued a clear directive: I was to get into Olympic form.  Only wimps give up their snowboarding dreams (even if they did just develop them in one night of Olympic propaganda). I'm hardly a novice at this whole 'deranged-maniac-who-lives-in-my head-and-will-not-be-denied' situation. I've lived with her -my uniquely insane mind- for my whole life.  So that's right folks; I'm in training.

One could be forgiven for assuming I would sleep off this latest delusion and wake up sane again. But no, there is no time for sanity when you're going for gold. I've already had a protein muffin,  a 15 minute trot on the iGallop and 20 minutes of intense stretching. I downloaded three new fitness apps, ordered new sports video games for the Xbox and took my baseline body measurements. Mindful of the need for balance, I gave my body time to recover with an hour-long nap. Now I'm up, dressed in yoga clothes, and waiting to see what is next on my training schedule. Having already chickened out of my event (slopestyle), I'm sure Shaun White has had a less productive morning.

I'd better get to it since 2018 is only 4 years away. I'm willing to consider sponsorship even this early in my Olympic career. Shout out to potential sponsors: I am currently wearing Nike, Athleta and a bionic leg. Not that I wouldn't sell my individuality for sponsorship from Adidas or Lululemon. 
Call me!

*Minor details obscured to protect the last shreds of my dignity

Back by popular demand (er, Dr.'s orders)

I am not comfortable with vulnerability. [Excuse me while I choke on my laughter and pee in my pants at this small understatement.]

Where was I? Ahem. Indeed, this small but fundamental fact about myself was driven home of late by an unexpected turn of events triggered by my attempts to limit the pain and dysfunction caused by muscle spasticity in my back, torso, leg, arm and hand. No sighs pul-lease, it's only on one side of my body (see what I mean...)

Depending on who you ask I strong-armed (get it??) or politely accepted the plan of my neurologist to give me approximately 60 injections of botox in said areas. I was planning to be pain-free and totally relaxed (not to mention much, much younger- a toddler really) for 3 months for the price of an hour of injections with needles so long and sharp they glint with desperation.

Long story short, stupid idea. I ended up with total right sided paralysis for close to a week followed by extreme (and on-going) weakness. And then I ended up in my therapist's office wondering what these strange and disconcerting emotions were (shame, vulnerability and anger, apparently).  She reminded me that I am not a total stranger to these phantoms (huh?) as she remembered me processing them in my blog back in the day when I used to process. anything. [Sidenote: My kickass and saintly therapist read my blog- I WIN, er won, I guess, since it's been a few years since she had anything new to read].

Despite the fact that it has taken me 2 weeks, a considerable amount of Valium and countless hours searching for my login and password, I'm baa-ack! For what it is worth I'm committed to resuming processing of and communicating about all of the messy shit in my head that apparently grows teeth when I ignore it. Small, sharp kitty teeth laden with flesh-eating bacteria which, when sunken into my flesh, requires a hospital visit and more needles. I'm pretty much done with needles- what choice do I have? Fo real.

P.S. Being the social media hermit that I am, I was unaware until recently that the blogger is supposed to actually respond to the comments left by readers. Like every other form of communication, I read them, responded brilliantly in my head, and did nothing else. Leave me a comment now and I promise to respond. As soon as I get through 2 years of emails, voicemails and texts that have met a similar fate as the comments so generously offered the first time around.