Notes on My Life

Being at Home

Dec 21st, 2022

Well, It’s midnight twelve and I can’t sleep. Considering the amount of meds I’m on since having a minor ‘intervention’ on my neck yesterday, I’m quite surprised I’m awake, though I guess the fact that I’ve done nothing but lie around all day means I’m not actually tired from doing anything. So here I am, in hopes that if I empty my head maybe I’ll be able to rest my mind and body.

What’s it like to feel invisible in your own home? I have felt this way a lot in the past year, feeling not heard or listened to by my husband or kids. A nagging mom, a broken record of a wife, evidently, as I’ve been told, complaining about absolutely everything. The horrible ironic thing is, I think he’s felt, well he’s told me as much, that he’s invisible in a way, too. He’s said that there is no space for him in this house, not one room, not one place that is just his. So I’ve tried to make more space for him. Tried to be nicer, complain less. Tried to let him know that I wasn’t saying it was his fault that I didn’t like the things I didn’t like. I’ve also developed a great sense of gratitude in the past year, which has helped me tremendously. I remind myself often that everything I now have was once a wish, a dream, and a prayer. I’ve also learned to separate my feelings in order to identify them and understand them. Gratefulness and anxiety can exist at the same time, as can sadness, stress, and sensitivity. I’ve been learning to understand myself more, to give myself grace, to break through these old patterns of being that have guided me, and not too well if I’m being honest, for seemingly my whole life.

I feel like I had most things figured out when I was a very small child. I had a good sense of myself, what I liked, how the world worked, or at least how it should do. I guess that could be described as a strong moral compass. I was sensitive to the world around me and felt it all very deeply – beauty, joy, and even sadness from such a young age. I felt my place in the world, both physically and spiritually. I was happy, content. What happens to us as we grow up that ruins this perfect harmony that we experience as children? I think for me it was when I had to interact with other people. I grew up in the country, the first child in my family. It was just me and my parents, a cat and a dog, mostly my mom with me all the time, and weekends and summers at Gramma’s. When I was 4, I believe, we moved to a house on a dairy farm, so we were surrounded by animals. I loved it. There were always big fields to play in, long roads to drive on in our big yellow truck, and kittens and calves in the barn. There were a few dogs, one of which we took with us when we left to live on the land that my dad bought. Once in a while a cow would get out and wander onto our lawn, which was funny. There was a horse or two, one had to be put down when he got tangled up for too long in the electric fence. I remember farmer Don was sad. I was too.

I never quite have understood my peers. I remember playing at a friend’s house. Her name was Treasure. I remember thinking why in the world would anyone name a child Treasure? That’s a thing, not a person. So I think I played there once, with all her pretty, girly things that weren’t of much interest to me.

Now here I am, still trying to figure out how to interact with my peers. Only now, my best peer is my long-suffering husband of 12 years, who is sick of living with me but wanting to stay with me, for the good of the family and through much convincing on my part. And here I am, trying to come to terms with myself in a loving way and accept that I may, in fact, be a terribly difficult person to live with. I’m not beating myself up for this, quite the opposite in fact. I am trying to learn to accept myself for exactly who I am, to love myself unconditionally, as I am. Only then can I not judge myself for being difficult, and once I’m freed from my own judgement, I can actually work to improve my behaviour. I can feel the separation, in a healthy way, between me and my husband. I am here and he is there. We are not the unified entity that I thought we were supposed to be, not one fused identity but two people, trying to not be broken, living together in a family with three offspring that we have biologically and environmentally created. This family is a living breathing network of people, emotions, psyches, behaviours, memories, habits, and histories. So many histories, wounds, traumas big and small, misunderstandings, and pain. I see this in myself and in my husband, and today I do so with more empathy than I did yesterday or last week.

Today I can see it too with his mother visiting us. Over the years, many things that have happened in my presence, which I took as something against me personally, I now realise had nothing to do with me at all. I naively thought, thirteen years ago or so, that I had stumbled across a perfect family, in meeting his, with excellent manners and a certain way of doing things. But now I understand that like attracts like because this is what we know, this is what feels familiar. When we have learned to pretend it’s ok, we find others that have learned to do this too. Even if it appears different on the surface, our bodies feel it, our unconscious knows, and we find those that have similar patterns, whether they are good for us or not.

So tonight in my kitchen things looked different to me. I could see her busy nervousness in a way I hadn’t before. It had nothing to do with me. It was just another pattern, a comfortable, familiar pattern that likely doesn’t even feel good to her but she just doesn’t know how to just be or do differently. This piqued a new sense of empathy for her, so I was able to speak to her a bit about me, ask questions a bit about her, and not feel like her strangeness was even strange, but just a nervous habit. Perhaps her behaviour patterns, her nervous business, her inability to really listen to what is being said, perhaps this all comes from her having felt invisible for so long in her own life, her own marriage and family, for now I know from speaking with my husband, that he felt this way as a child at home, too. She was who he learned it from, most likely because she felt this way herself.

So for this holiday season, I will continue to be immensely grateful, for I have now just what I wanted last year, a husband at home and learning to relax in his own space, a house filled with family, and a Christmas of just us five. I hope that in being more of myself, I might show others around me that they can be more of themselves, too.
Ascension Pains

Dec 19th, 2022

What kind of lessons have I learned lately? What an apropos question. I am sitting down to write tonight to ruminate on how I’ve been feeling lately. Suddenly,I feel very self-conscious about writing, as it occurs to me that someone else might actually ready it. There are people out there, peeking into the corners of my mind, and my self, right along with me. I guess that’s ok, though. It’s kind of nice, even. A few years, or even just months ago, it might have felt more daunting to think about than it does now. Now, it’s just kind of a passing feeling of fright, even excitement, that someone else is here with me. Now it feels more like having a small alliance of kindred spirits, like how there are always those animal friends in Disney princess movies. If you’re reading this, you might think of yourself as one of those helpful little singing birds in Cinderella, or an inanimate object brought to life like the candlestick with the funny nose in Beauty and the Beast, or Olaf in Frozen.

So here I am, sitting down to write, with a stiff wrist and a dizzy head. This weekend has been tricky. I did a little too much bustling around on Saturday morning and set something off in my head. I felt it come on late morning – overwhelmed, over-stimulated, and then very, very tired. I had to get out though, to run an errand or just get out and get a change of scenery.

It’s that time of year now, a week before Christmas, when I start to realise that all of those ideas I’ve had swimming around in my head for a month actually need to happen now or they will not happen before Christmas. All of a sudden, it’s now or next year. This year though, I think I’m taking it in stride in part because of my sobriety. Trying to have a bit more faith in divine timing, too, because why not. It seems to be working actually, in big and little ways.

Yesterday my reason for going out was to get mulled wine and non-wine at Ikea. Paired that with lunch with the kids and another stop to get some recipe ingredients and suddenly I felt very productive. Husband even took the kids and let me alone to do some shopping, so in my daze-y state, I wandered around the store a bit. I ended up forgetting the mulled wine altogether but I did stumble upon a fully decorated, floor model, 2 meter tree for 5€ and then totally amused my self by carting it home after cramming it into the back of the car. Now, this might seem gratuitous; we already have a fully decorated tree at home. Here’s the thing – since I’ve lived on my own, or perhaps even since I was a little girl, I dreamed about having a kids tree, or a basement tree, when I had a house and a family of my own. Now, because of this timing, this off-day, this forgetting of why I was supposed to be there in the first place and just wandering around, I’ve made this lifelong dream come true, and for only 5€. I didn’t even have to decorate it. It was just all finished, waiting for me to show up and take it home.

Maybe this is the way forward. Maybe I have to accept this new way of functioning. Maybe the dizziness, blankness, ringing is all just telling me to stop, to be in my body, and succumb to a new flow of all of the energy that makes me, me. What if this ringing that I hear in my ears is my body’s alert system that is sounding the alarm that all is just not right. That’s what it feels like when it’s a bad day. On a good day, it’s hard to even remember what the bad days feel like, or maybe I just imagined it. Usually I’m just enjoying feeling more normal, honestly. But on the bad days, the writing helps, as it’s the only way to make sense of my thoughts. Maybe the lesson here is just to keep it simple and lower the bar whenever at all possible – listen to myself, be gentle, do something, even if it’s a small list, and even if I forget something on it.

I have noticed a new symptom, just in the past few days. My hearing is at once getting worse while also getting more sensitive. The other day, I heard the frequency of my laptop. Now, as I sit in my living room by the fireplace, I can hear the cinders singing in the fire, the hot hot heat reaching a humid spot in the wood. For a moment, the ringing in my ears subsides a bit, as my brain tunes into the other sounds, and then it returns. This is also why I’ve taken to listening to classical again while I work, as it takes away the ringing.

So what is this strange sensitivity? I also notice myself different around others, too. I don’t fall into the same patterns of conversation as before. I am more my self, which can sometimes feel awkward, as though I am at once participating and also observing – observing that I am different that before with others, and also participating in a way that feels more true, with that same flinching excitement and fear, which is also accompanied shortly thereafter by a reassuring, self-mothering reaction when I tell myself that actually, it’s ok to feel a little uncomfortable, the ease will come with practice.

My friend Betty and I talk a lot about integration. Well, mostly she reassures me that this is what I’m doing now, that I’ve been doing it, and that I’m doing amazing, sweetie. Before even that, before I even knew what would come after those first few trips back to the US, she lovingly helped me to understand that integration was what I needed to do to feel better in myself. Betty and I met on my first trip back to the US in 10 years, when I went back to see my mother and support her during her first cancer treatment, in July of 2021. She met me during, and helped me through a very intense, transitional time of my life, by being my friend. The idea of hibernation was planted by her in my head, as that was her plan for this winter, as well.

I’m hibernating to allow for the integration of all that I’ve learned in the past year and a half about my self and my relationships with other people, how I interact in the world. This real work takes time, there is no way to rush it. My body is telling me this right now – loud and clear. In the past 18 month I’ve learned more about who I am than in the last 18 years. I have also ironically and painfully learned to accept that I have, in fact, known all along and seemed to have, for most of my life and at least since adolescence, ignored my self to some extent.

Now my task is to integrate all of these parts of my self and to learn to love them, love me, for who I am. I must learn to turn to the outside all of those learned judgements and cruelties I once pulled onto and let into myself. I must push them away, reject them, so that I may just be in my own body, living there with acceptance and love for myself, above all else, because everything else good comes from me being good in and with myself. Does that mean I have to tell all of my secrets? No, but it does mean that I have to be okay with them. I have to look at them in myself and continue to unpack them with the delicacy and love of a best friend. I can also protect my heart, from being broken, like a mother to an innocent child, not yet aware of the world beyond their loving bond.

People say that everything happens for a reason. Do they mean it; do you? Because if this is true, then maybe this is all happening for a reason – to make me slow down and relearn how to be in my body. To be me. Maybe I fell and split my head open right at my third eye, as a few friends have pointed out, so that I would literally split open my consciousness and be forced to see with a spiritual vision. Maybe it’s not just growing but ascension pains. And why not?
Fed Up

Dec 9th, 2022

I remember my high school history teacher, I hated him, he was such an obnoxious pig, a total misogynist. I feel bad even saying that now, as I don’t have it in me anymore to hate anyone. I know it hurts me more than it hurts them, and hate is a cancer. It was 1991, and this man was that type that was ‘old fashioned’, meaning that he was overtly sexist, and probably covertly racist, in a time when a person in his position, an American History teacher slash football coach, could easily get away with both. I didn’t learn anything from him except that a man could get away with acting like a total asshole if he was one hundred percent committed to it. He barked and bellowed like an angry bulldog, one that gruffed too much, sick of being underfoot, trying to get attention through intimidation. I didn’t learn a bit about American History from him but I did learn a lot about stereotypical American masculinity; my god, what a dreadful thing, to grow up a boy in America. I struggled so much in his class, it was one of the first, for this was not a place for critical thinking, only memorisation and regurgitation of names, dates, and places that to me seemed abstract. History seemed only to exist as a timeline, with no relevance to a midwestern life or even to the events of the recent past of my self or my parents. The only thing that I clearly remember from this year was during one lecture, I have no idea what it was about, he said this – that they were sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Now, I have no recollection even who ‘they’ were, this they that he was referring too. It’s just this idea, of being totally fed up to the point that there is nothing left to lose. Sick and tired of being sick and tired. He was probably talking about some uprising, some pivotal change in history that caused some group somewhere to collectively say enough is enough, probably led by a few brave souls that stepped forward first to take the initial risk. This is how uprisings happen, there is always that tipping point in a cultural context that sparks the fire that burns it all down. I do wonder what he was talking about, and who knows, perhaps someday maybe the fog will clear enough that I will remember. I think so often of that phrase, though, as it seems to me so universal.

I’m fed up, too. Fed up of not being able to finish anything. Fed up to not be able to concentrate on anything. I’m sick and tired of masking, pretending, using avoidance and escape techniques to get through the day, every day, only to collapse into a ball of fried nerves at the end of the day, or even after just an evening of solo parenting, having yelled at my kids to just please be quiet. I’m sick and tired of doing a job that I’m not good at, of stay at home mom who is trying to launch a consulting business but can’t afford to hire help as her husband doesn’t see the need for it and he controls the money. So I’ve been stuck in a non-stop loop of activities that demand all of my executive functioning to complete – driving the kids, running the errands, shopping for groceries, cooking the food, doing the laundry, buying the clothes, cleaning the house – leaving nothing left for anything else that I need to do to move my working life forward. Forget about actually enjoying my life, most of my down time it seems I am simply recovering from these relentless tasks. Strangely though, these tasks also make it easier for me to hide from the problem too, as if I focus on them, I don’t have to sit down to try to move my work forward. If I focus on the mother load, I don’t have to fail in this other area, as this is the area is where I struggle the most.

I have ADHD. I’ve known that I’ve had it so long that it used to be called ADD or ADHD – Attention Deficit Disorder with or without hyperactivity. I have know this since high school, but at this time there was no medication for it, or if there was it was rarely prescribed. I have never been officially diagnosed, or maybe I was and I just don’t remember. It was just such a part of me that I even used to kind of joke about it. But now, it is no joke. I think it is my core problem, really. It’s only a problem now because it has become unmanageable and I need help. I need help to manage my ADHD and I am living in a country that doesn’t even recognise that it exists. I am married to a man that highly doubts that it exists, who thinks that Americans essentially dramatise everything, make excuses for everything, and medicate anything that causes them the slightest discomfort or inconvenience. He thinks I should just ‘do some sport’ and complete one task before moving on to the next one. In the face of these challenges I am trying to be compassionate towards my husband and patient with my doctor to get the help that I need to get control over my life and get the help I need. Honestly, the fact that it’s not easy to get a prescription for ADHD medication has probably helped, if not to fix the problem, to at least get clarity on what is the root cause of my dysfunctional behavior.

In primary school and middle school I was a straight-A student. I had no academic difficulties in school until I arrived in high school. I remember loving to learn, even diagramming sentences. I loved this structural approach, where every word had its place and reason for being in it. My first real challenge was high school French, which I dropped after one semester. I couldn’t learn it because I couldn’t study. Every other subject before, I learned easily and quickly. With French, I remember being totally stumped. I couldn’t comprehend another language without understanding the entire structure of the grammar and how it compared and contrasted to English. I wanted to know the etymology of every word. It didn’t occur to me that I needed to simply sit down and study and memorise the work, as I had never had to do this before in any other subject. I never had to work to get good grades, I simply understood what ever was being presented and so I remembered it. The problem with having to actually study was not that I was lazy or didn’t want to, it was that studying something that wasn’t one hundred percent interesting to me was nearly impossible. I couldn’t retain information, I had to read things over and over as my mind would endlessly wander. I literally couldn’t focus. I could read a page and retain nothing. My eyes would jump around the page. I remember trying to read out loud in hopes that hearing the information would help me to remember but it didn’t. It was so hard, so painful to feel this way. I can remember the feeling clearly, even now it gives me anxiety.

Slowly, and quietly, I gave up. I stopped doing the work, little by little, and just squeaked through to pass my courses. I’d pull out a good enough grade on an exam at the end of the semester, or write a paper, slap-dash as they say, and just get by. The teachers knew I was smart, and maybe they even liked my ability to speak up, or speak out, to contradict where the others wouldn’t. I was smart enough to know where the line was and I would respectfully disagree, at least. Maybe they passed me out of laziness, or for being a pretty blonde white girl, knowing that if I failed they’d have to engage with my parents or the school administration, so they would pass me through to be the next teacher’s problem. Finally there were assignments I just didn’t do, such as my proposed final English paper on Homer’s Odyssey, a book that I borrowed from the library but never even opened, one of so many over the years. I now have a library of books that I haven’t even opened. I joke that I have them for my retirement, but I think it’s more than that. I have a real trouble focusing in on what it is I actually want to do, whether in the large or small tasks. Professionally I am just now figuring it out. I hate to admit that I committed to my (very expensive) graduate degree practically on a whim. Same to my marriage, if I’m being honest. For these life-altering choices I engaged the same mechanics of decision-making that thought it was a reasonable idea to do a 10 page paper on The Odyssey and then not even open the book. I let the paper deadline pass, probably skipped school that day, and then never spoke of it again. My teacher let it slide, and I slipped through to graduate.

As I write this, I feel a strange, familiar sense rise up in my heart. I think I’ve been using this strategy to get by since my high school years. I still use it today, but now I have the excuse of motherhood. The trap really, as there is always something that can be or needs to be done for the kids and the family, that keeps me from reading the book, or working on my business strategy, or prospecting new clients. But really, what am I avoiding, and why? Is it failure? I know that by trying I will at least succeed in small amounts. I think what I am avoiding is the terrible difficulty, the same difficulty that I see my son try to surmount as he reads the sounds of syllables in his first attempt at reading. Some days, with much encouragement, he gets through them with only a few inversions of sounds, but others, nothing he reads makes any sense to him and my heart breaks for him, not only because I see his frustration and the anger he directs at himself, but because I know exactly what that feels like.

Even now, I do anything I can to avoid the fear of feeling that way, of having to read something five times before it makes sense, of feeling like I’m stupid and that there is something wrong with me. So instead, today, I will try to mother myself as I do to him, to encourage myself, be kind with myself, to take breaks when I really need to and then to come back to it, to finish the work that needs to be done. But just like for him, I will continue to search for answers, to stick up for my self to my doctor, in a country that doesn’t recognise ADHD, to say that actually, I do know myself well enough to self-diagnose and I need all the help that I can get. The risk of not addressing the core problem is just too high. I am not going to fail this time because I am no longer afraid of trying. I am afraid of continuing to fail because I am not dealing with the core problem. I am no longer self-medicating with alcohol and cannabis and I want some real help to solve this. It is not enough to be expected to be sober to solve the problem if the problem is what I was trying to solve with those substances to begin with. I will not end my days as a mother who lost herself in her kids and hid behind a learning disability, or disorder, or whatever this is. I must finally figure this out and become the person I am meant to be.
The Unfinished House

Dec 8th, 2022

One of the main reasons I decided to get sober was to figure out the real source of my difficulties. What a funny thing to say, really. As I write it, I realise that how I’ve expressed how I feel is by translating a common French casual way to express, vaguely, that something is wrong in your life. It’s the way you would say that things have been hard lately, without going into any detail, to someone who you don’t know very well, to which they would respond with a generic recognition of what’s been said without asking for any further explanation. This type of interaction is quintessentially French. It’s at once expressive and impersonal, formal and revealing. There is a social recognised boundary which is not crossed by either party in the exchange. Et voilà.

To say ‘my difficulties’ feels like the ultimate euphemism. What I am trying to discover, to realise, is how the very core of my being functions, to understand the mechanics of my unique operating system. Please don’t mistake this for delusions of grandeur, I’m not saying that I’m exceptional, no, this is not about ego. I am at a point of recognising and accepting that my experience with and in the world may not be like most other people. Yes, there are many similarities, human emotions, concerns, troubles and the like that I share with everyone else. What I am interested in understanding is how the brain I was born with is similar or different to most others, and how my upbringing effected my personal, social, and intellectual development. How the way that I think, learn, process, and experience things began and has changed throughout my life. How did experiences and substances effect me, both positively and negatively?

I thought about reincarnation when I was about 4 years old. I remember figuring out what happens after we die is that our spirits continue on. To me this made perfect sense. I was present in a body, when I closed my eyes I was still there, in the blackness, so when I would die, I would still be there too, in the blackness, until I could open my eyes again, somewhere else, in some other body.

Also, when I would fall asleep at night, at the same age, I would close my eyes and press against my eye lids to make colors in the blackness. I would focus on these colors until they would start to move and it would feel like I was flying through the blackness along trails of dots and lines of colors.

Even now, as I sit to work, I am drawn to distraction by everything that is not what I need to focus on. So, what is this urge? Is it my brain, or is it my self – my inability to focus or my total avoidance of tasks at hand? It is so difficult to separate the two, especially at my age, seeing as my behavioral patterns are so very well worn in. This makes it hard to differentiate, as whatever mechanisms that do exist are not only the result of my innate chemistry but are deep neuro pathways, the result of years of repetition, experiences, traumas large and small, a variety of interpersonal relationships, and both a complicated self-view and world-view.

Also, I have my coping mechanisms. Now it seems I am left with coffee and food. I just had coffee and left-over lemon buttercream cake for breakfast. Not at all healthy, but a sensory reward of a warm, rich, liquid bitterness paired with a tangy, sweet confection of no less than three different textures. Seems that sensory seeking is something I’ve always done, in one way or another. Where is the line between normal and abnormal? I don’t know, but I’m sure that I’ve made a habit of crossing it, over and over again with any sense that I could stimulate.

I have so many coping strategies, and have only started to realise the scope of them and how I’ve gotten away with them for so long. You see, many and most of them are positive for myself and those around me. Take cleaning and arranging for example. This is a complicated one for me, as it is deeply tied to my childhood experiences. I grew up with two parents that didn’t really know how to clean and organise. Or maybe they did, and they never had the time or focus to do so. Whatever the reason, our house was always messy. Not an everyday type of messy, resulting from the tornado of busy children who love getting into things, but the kind of messy that is never resolved. Boxes that never quite get unpacked, projects that are put aside for later, in a house that was built from nothing but never finished. We would eat on just half of the table as the rest is full of unsorted piles of papers and mail, and the kitchen bar is the same. Piles and piles of laundry on an unfinished bathroom floor and the toilet mounted on plywood where tile was meant to be. Why anyone would choose to install a textured linoleum kitchen floor, with tiny little crevices to capture countryside dirt was beyond me, but I would scrub it nonetheless to have it clean, occasionally. I was baffled by my parents’ disregard for the state of our home, and embarrassed, ashamed that that was how we lived.

So I cleaned as much as I could since as long as I can remember and I decorated in my head. I finished things that were left indefinitely unfinished, imagined how much nicer the wooden plank floors would be if they were just given the attention they needed, to be sanded and stained. I would imagine this over and over again. I would trim the bare windows, finish the stairs so they closed at the back, so I’d not have to imagine a monster underneath grabbing my ankles as I bounded down the stairs. I still remember the one step that was loose and would pinch my foot if I landed wrong, sometimes now I dream of it and the pain is amplified. I would have definitely finished that step, just tightened the two boards so that they wouldn’t pinch tender feet. I didn’t much keep a diary when I was small but I remember once writing about how I had decorated the living space downstairs, all in wicker furniture from Pier One Imports. To me, it was the perfect compliment to the nature outside, our house was tucked back in the woods on an idyllic piece of land that had been cleared before we moved there. My father designed and built the house with only a little bit of help but at some point, he seemed to just give up, and it was left as is. My mother never mastered how to organise and hated to clean, so the house was just a terrible mess, most of the time, and I was left to imagine just how beautiful it could have been had anyone with the power to do so would have paid attention to it. What a horrible metaphor for how I felt, too.

I could write so much more but now I must work, as I feel like if I continue I will have to go on forever until it is all out. So for now I will leave this too, unfinished.
Doing Nothing

Dec 3rd, 2022

Oh, what a luxury it seems, to do nothing all day. The flip side of this though, is feeling like there is everything to be done and doing nothing about any of it. Lately I’ve had a throbbing head that is most noticeable when it’s silent, which is only when I lie down to sleep at night, and in the days when I’m home alone. It’s a physical and audial throbbing, accompanied by ringing in my ears as well. In short, it’s maddening. It’s distracting, it’s overwhelming, it’s tiring. It’s at the very front of my awareness and I just want it to go away. I’ve been looking for answers as to why it has come about, seemingly after the accident this past May, when it was first accompanied with terrible pain and headaches so bad that I didn’t really notice the noise. In retrospect, I realised that the throbbing started then, it was simply eclipsed by the urgency and intensity of the pain. Now that the pain has for the most part subsided, this bizarre and relentless symptom has, quite simply, begun to take over my life. It has sucked out of me any remaining motivation to be productive. I realised an unfortunate truth just the other day, which seems obvious now, that even if I figure out what is causing these symptoms, that doesn’t mean that I can do anything that will make them go away. If they are the result of what I suspect, a gradual damage to the audial nerves in my brain caused by the accident in May, there may not be anything to be done about them, or at least no quick fix. I may be looking at adjusting my expectations of how I live my life, with a slight disability even, including hearing loss and thought impairment. What a strange thing to imagine.

I am quite happy to be writing, as it give such clarity to my thoughts. More than ever before, lately I have trouble thinking about things, trouble clarifying my thoughts into action plans, for example. Simple things like what I need to do in the day, a basic sequence of events, seem elusive, and difficult to imagine. I’m forgetting words, names of common things such as a pot, or the name of a good friend. It’s like the words are there, but they are at a distance, through a fog, and I can see it’s there but can’t quite make it out. This is perhaps the best use I can think of for the french word apercevoir… to begin to perceive.

I have finally seen a doctor yesterday for this malady and have at last some reassurance. After being told by so many others that my symptoms cannot be related, that nothing is showing up as damaged, that what I have all makes sense as a whiplash syndrome, as the english-speaking french specialist told me. What a relief. I am not dying, or even worse, losing my mind. This is all a normal response to an unfortunate event. Thank god. Even the feeling of having less tolerance for simple things like loud music, background noise, light, stimulation, this is all normal, and can be treated. It will probably be many months before I am feeling better through therapy, and it will likely take a lot of work on my part, but I welcome this challenge.

I have recently realised that I have spent a lot of time feeling like things have been done to me. This accident is a real example of that, inarguably, someone hit me from behind while I was stopped at a red light. I had my foot on the brake and was tense with my hands on the wheel when someone smashed the bumper right behind me. I then got out of the car, walked towards the vehicule, a small older black SUV with dark windows, maybe an Izuzu, with Oregon plates, and as I was looking down, fidgeting with my phone to get the camera up, he took off and turned right down an alley and disappeared. Honestly, I was initially pretty pissed off as I couldn’t believe that he did that, that he would hurt someone and then just take off, but later I didn’t really care, as my sister pointed out that he probably had more to lose that I did in that accident, so fair enough. Seeing as it was on the street in Eureka, Humboldt County, CA, he could have very well had a truck full of marijuana and no insurance. A simple car accident could have ruined his life.

I ask myself now, is Izuzu even a word? At this point, I’m just working with my strange brain as best I could, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but that is the word and the graphic of the word that popped into my head, so I’m going with it.

Back to my recent realisation, when I realised that no matter what the diagnosis of this, or anything else, there was not going to be a magic pill to fix it. I was finally in a situation that was so physically, mentally, and emotionally intolerable that the lesson couldn’t be more clear. If I wanted to get out of this mess, I was going to have to put all of my efforts towards fixing it. And thank god I have the opportunity to do so. It’s not cancer, or a missing limb, or MS, or something else really feeling insurmountable. No matter how hard the bad days are, I’m still doing really OK. On the bad days, I need to sleep. On the good days, I’m fine, I can work, and then sleep. I am very lucky to have work that will allow me to work on my schedule and in bursts of concentrated work. I am so lucky, so blessed, so thankful that this is my chance to learn this lesson. I just have to remember this on the hard days. That’s the tricky bit about depression, about anything that effects your spirit, your soul. It tricks you into thinking about all the bad things. Its inertia wants to drag you down into the darkness, the negativity. This state of doing nothing, can in be enjoyed for what it is? It seems a kind of meditation, can I be alone with myself, with my thoughts, with my body and just enjoy the luxury of doing nothing? Can I be grateful for the opportunity, the privilege, the chance to enjoy being still? Resting, like a giant tree in winter, who knows that spring again will come and that this time must be cold and still and slow, so that in the spring he will have the strength to continue to grow and blossom again. Can I meet this challenge of slowly getting up more and rebuilding a healthy rhythm? I must, this injury, its resulting symptoms, and this diagnosis have shown me that I must, as there is no other way to for me to recover. There is no chemo, no targeted therapy, nothing. No shortcuts, no magic pills, there is only me and my will, and my messy bun and messy brain. No one is coming to save me, no mother, no father, no husband will take care of me the way I want, so desperately, to be taken care of. No this time I must look deep into myself, with love and empathy, and tell myself that I am worthy of the work, love, care, and discipline that it will take to be better. I can do it, I must do it, and I will be ok.
Dry Drunk

Nov 29th, 2022

I’m fairly new to the concepts of AA, but not to alcoholism and its dynamics. My grandfathers were both alcoholics, each of their own kind. One at least, as I know, died from the disease. My parents grew up in alcoholic households and never took the steps to recover themselves, therefore I also grew up in an alcoholic family.

My father’s death was related to alcohol, too. His was a grand, triumphant self-destruction. Once an obese man, he had been addicted to food and self-punishment a result of having been violently abused by an alcoholic father, a life-time soldier, a captain in the Air Force, damaged by the trauma of war and destruction. After a radical surgery, a gastric bypass botched by a doctor who was later disbarred, he lost the ability to self-medicate with food, so he turned to alcohol. His drunkenness was quick and severe, as his stomach was so small and his internal mechanisms so drastically damaged by the surgery. There were other complications too, but when a man is hospitalised and immediately upon release returns again to drinking, it’s hard not to consider alcohol as the culprit. Every case, every person, every demise, is different.

So here I am, two months sober and wondering what happens next. Bits of AA speak come into my head, such as ‘working the program’ and ‘dry drunk’. I spent my first weekend, this past weekend, not drinking with friends who were drinking. Turns out I still felt funny the next morning, just without the physical hangover. I felt a bit insecure, not sure what to say, not sure really how to interact and realised, yet again, that it is not just the alcohol that is the problem, it is me. I’m the problem. My mind, my past experiences, my patterns, my insecurity, my self-loathing, my wounded spirit in every cell of my body is the problem. The alcohol was just there to mask it all. To make it easy to throw myself forward, over it all, past it all, but it all remained. So now, I’m left with it all just there, a dry drunk.

I too, use food, as my father did, for many reasons other than sustainence. I use it to numb, to distract, to feel something good, a fleeting pleasure with that rush of sugar dopamine. Some days I eat as much sugar as I can, until I fell sick, and then later I eat some more. It is addictive, and I have an addictive personality. I use it to punish myself, knowing that it will harm my appearance, add to my hips, my waist, and lately even my chin. I use it to hide, to not have the perfect body that my conscious self so desires. I have been told I use it for protection, which I also believe, as so much of the judgement of a woman originates from the judgement of her body. I know that I also use it in attempt to silence myself, as a full mouth can’t scream or protest. It’s a terrible cycle of control and the relinquishing of it, something I saw my father do as well as he battled with food for many years.

Mind mechanics, some are learned, some inherited, I wasn’t sure of the difference really until watching my children, and learning from them that there are some things, many things, that you are just born with. It’s up to us as parents to help them to figure out how to harness these powers, and to help them to find the good in all of their differences, so that they might find their place in the outside world. My mind mechanics seek stimulation, always, perhaps it’s natural curiosity, having been left to my own devices, happily, as a child, with not too much scheduling and lots of time to wonder. I have also a pervasive sense of melancholy, sensitivity, and thoughtfulness, perhaps innate or perhaps cultivated in order to survive the things that I’ve seen, the feelings I’ve absorbed that now live in my cells. Perhaps I’ve had to seek out stimulation so as to not simply be sucked down into darkness.

This beautiful melancholy – I remember a winter sunset, it was 4:15 in the afternoon, which was evening. Early winter, outside the house, I stood by the shed, in Alhambra. The cold was biting, I could see my breath, the leaves had fallen, my face moved slowly as it was already freezing into cold, slow motion. I can smell the leaves decaying slowly, smell the frost itself. Nothing bad happened, not to worry. I was simply struck to my bones, to my cold toes, by the beautiful desolateness of the early winter, early evening sunset which would fall in mere minutes. This time of year was the beginning of the death of the earth, entering into its hibernation, crying out, not wanting to go, the sun setting in a full horizontal display of rays of blue and orange and purple, reassuring itself that the warmth would come again soon, after a long, hard winter but first the winter would triumph over her, dragging Persephone once again into the underworld, feeling Hades’s silent, cruel scream, delighting in the sadness and pain of her mother, in the cold winter air.

Perhaps it is this, this dark sensitivity. I must have been born with it, a gift if it is viewed that way. I see it as such, although it is hard sometimes. It is the same as the tragedy of an Italian opera, of perhaps every Italian opera, the raw, captivating beauty of tragedy, of pain, of a minor key, of a tenor’s vibrato. But combine this dark sensitivity with real sadness and you can end up with a depression you might never get out of. In any good opera, there is tragedy, but there is overwhelming love and passion as well. This is what makes any tragedy sustainable for the audience. This is what makes a story that can last for centuries, because the elements are all there; agony, ecstasy, love, hate, jealously, betrayal, life, and death. These are usually resolved somehow but rarely with happiness; this is the sole realm of Disney. The resolution, however tragic, finally arrives in the third act.

Imagine a childhood with no resolution, of seeing nothing but sadness around you, misery. Knowing, even at that tender age, say 8, 9, or 10, that your parents are not happy. They barely speak, and once you start to notice, you can’t unsee it. So you wait, hope, and pray for the resolution that never comes. This was what I saw. There were no major events, no terrible tragedies, just a constant low-level vibration of misery. This and the strangeness of how we lived. At this time, I began to have that outside world awareness that how we lived was not the same as other families that I saw in the tiny towns around us. We were not ‘normal’. My mother did not dress as other mothers did, and my father couldn’t speak to others as other fathers did. He was happy in the garden, at the lumber store or building something, or at the many auctions we would go to together to hunt for treasures. She wore muddy garden boots to pick me up at school, to my horror. Had they been happy, it might have made a difference. This strangeness might not have bothered me so much. The two elements together – strangeness and misery – were simply too much for a little girl to take. A natural loner, prone to sensing the beautiful tragedy in everything, this feeling of hatred towards my parents, my family, and thus towards myself, defined me from a very early age.

So here I am, almost 40 years later, trying to release this misery that I have carried with me for so long, and now knowing that it won’t release itself. Merely stopping drinking, stopping smoking isn’t enough. I must ‘work the program’, understand the 12 steps, take a long hard look at who I am today and unpack the millions of tiny boxes stuffed into my head to figure out how the hell I got here. I know it’s all the same story, because it’s my story, it’s me. It’s one long conversation with myself, and with the other people in my life that I am lucky enough to have. I know that it is just one long twisty, turny path that I’ve taken to get here. I know I started using drink and drugs to escape, to numb, to feel something good. Was I ever truly addicted? I don’t yet know. I know why I did it all, I just need to pull it all out of my forgotten memories and finally learn from it all, so that one day I can tell the story of how I came out the other side.
Incredible Dreams

Nov 28th, 2022

Two months sober today, and I’ve woken up at 1:35 in the afternoon. Well, woke up the 2nd or 3rd time. First was to get the kids up for school, second was at 11:30. This time though, I woke myself with the decisive, concerted effort of all of the strength that you can summon after you realise, somehow, that the incredibility of what you are living is because it is, in fact, a dream. This particular one was wonderful but I was still becoming somewhat bored, as I realised that however fantastic it was, it was far from the end, or from resolution, and that I probably needed to get out of bed. How could I be this tired? I guess, yes, I have semi-accepted this drive to hibernate but am still resisting out of capitalist guilt, or the fear of the unending pestering from my husband to be productive. Or maybe I should have just put that out of office on as I meant to do last Friday, but was too occupied by stress packing for a weekend away with friends. So here, I am, almost 2pm, firmly in my pyjamas and winter polar socks, under a cover in the guest room next to a snoring cat.

The dream itself was wonderful, I was co-staring in a two-woman show in a community theater, a show that I had written as well. My co-star is still a bit unclear, her signature costume color was red, where as mine was gold. It was a bit circusy, a bit burlesque… my costume was a gold sequined and quite structured bodice, with some wonderful hot pants that went with it, firm tights below, etc. The show was semi-autobiographical, or at least was an interpretation of my story, my feelings. How strange, even ironic, as isn’t this what all dreams are? I guess my subconscious was just playful enough to actually make this a theater piece. It was a musical, as one would hope the story of one’s life would be. There was someone there in the audience, watching this rehearsal, that I was wanting to impress, a song was for him. I wanted him to see me, hear me sing it. Was he my husband? I had just had a new idea to complete the story arc, but now it escapes me. I think it was more of a feeling than an idea, now that I try to remember, and now I am dealing in words, so it escapes me.

We were preparing for the show, days before, and there was to be a charity auction as well before and during the show. I was also practicing a speech about the auction, and this time I was in my body, standing at the front of the stage, explaining the charity items and matched contributions by our sponsor or something. As it were, I was running the show. I also would explain that the production was sustainable, as everything was reused, donated, etc. I remember wondering if we had contacted Ikea as a sponsor. Then I walked through the old building , that old theater smell of wood and cleaning products and old paint. There were many doors, and behind a surprising number of them were bathrooms, which I found odd. One took me outside finally, to a small wild urban plot, the kind between buildings, a place where I thought it might be nice to put a party tent. It led also to the stage door, where there was old blacktop with weeds coming up through, like a place where you’d go outside to smoke. This is when I woke up.

So now I am sitting here and wondering why I am so very tired. Is this normal? is this ok? or do I have some terrible, undiagnosed illness like cancer, my worst fear, or a mild traumatic brain injury from this minor accident that occurred so many months ago? Is it depression, life crisis, or just surrendering to the natural flow and heaviness of winter and if so, what explains the ringing and rushing in my ears? I am in it, and will have to wait to know, this is the hard part, knowing that you do not know, and will it even matter when I do? When I first started to write, to type, the letters in many of the words were all jumbled, like the timing of my fingers had been off. Is this a sign of something serious, just tiredness, or a side-effect of my anti-depressant? So many questions and no answers, this ruthless subjectivity of living inside a body.

Perhaps this is just part of my awakening, being in my body again, feeling it’s tiredness, one that sometimes, even more so lately, refuses to react even to the copious amounts of coffee that I drink to wake it up. I want to be in my body for the first time in a long time, and honestly I wonder if I have arrived too late. Having the feeling that something is wrong is a funny predicament, as if anything is discovered, through the relentless searching I seem to be doing, then this feeling is confirmed as intuition, as having known something was wrong. If nothing is confirmed, I was just being thorough, or wanting something to be wrong, or looking for an excuse to take action. Either way, it’s a strange place to be in, and it seems to be speaking to my pervasive desire to somehow make time stop, to just be for awhile, to feel like I will not be left behind by the outside world, which quite frankly, isn’t something that attractive at the moment, anyway. Maybe this is fine, why not? Who says we have to spend life always participating? Even the word ‘spend’, like you spend money and then it’s gone. Why not keep it, save it, so that you might have it to give to your children, to buy the house of your dreams in a beautiful location, to afford to rest when you need to rest, to pay for the truly special experiences you want to have. Why can’t we look at life the same way? Maybe the idea of stepping back is a way to save our own lives so that we might know how we want to spend them later.

Part of my intense last year or so has been going through the archives of my past, literally, by going through things from my youth and my family history at my mother’s house. I have had the gift of looking back with such a long time that has passed, as I unpack boxes that have been untouched for up to 20 years. I haven’t gone home, as some adult children do, and seen the shrines to my childhood. My mother has never had this ability, to have the few, important pieces left behind arranged in a way that show remembrance, even reverie. No, she didn’t have that skill set at all, so instead she kept it all, and squirrelled it away in hopes that one of us would come along and sort it out, and we did, finally, after so many years. Luckily, it’s been when she’s still alive, so that she might also see how it can be done, after so many years of chaos.

Now here I am, two months sober, wondering just how many boxes I will have to unpack before I start to really understand my own story, how many dream will I have to try to remember, and how many daytime naps until I feel rested. I wonder when will I be able to look back on this time as part of the story, as part of the past who has made me who I am, on that day.
Motherhood is Hard

Nov 25th, 2022

It’s much talked about these days, but I still wonder if anyone outside the motherhood really understands. My cousin, Sonya, is at least 10 years older than me. I don’t remember the difference exactly, as I established her as ‘much older’ when I was a child, when even months felt like a huge difference in age. Another cousin was two whole months older, and I was very jealous of her seniority and perceived wisdom from age. Well, Sonya used to answer my long, well-constructed emails immediately and with only few brief, lumpy sentences, which I took as disinterest and lack of care on her part. Now, years later, I know why – because she had three small kids at home at the time and the only way to get anything completed was to do it immediately and with a slightly, permanently distracted brain, or risk never returning to it again. I myself now have three kids, a first-born girl and a set of miracle twin boys, and only now that they are in primary school have I been able to start to answer the occasional email. One well-thought out professional email every day or two is a major accomplishment.

Unfortunately, the isolation of early motherhood (not childhood, because motherhood is also a particular growth period that should be recognised) fit me all too well as I do prefer to be alone, somewhat on the periphery of life. This isolation was compounded by our move to France from England, with me only speaking a few words of French at the time, with a very attached and active 18-month-old in tow. If you don’t have children, ‘attached’ is often code for ‘never leaves my side’, ‘is very demanding’, or in our case, ‘refuses to sleep by herself and/or wakes up several times a night until she’s 7′. Hence, the parents’ brains begin to melt into mush from sleep deprivation until they finally decide/accept that this is just the way it is and that sleep, no matter where it happens, is the most important thing in the world and the habitude of musical beds begins.

Before this realisation, there were times when I slept on the floor of my daughter’s room to get her to stay in her bed, often with one hand on her tummy while I lay next to her on the floor. Not fun. The pink princess bed did not help, as we thought it might, as honestly it was a bit of a bribe to get her to love her room, which she did, just not for sleeping. Occasionally she would thrash about in her sleep and then hit her head on the tall sides, which we’d hoped would help her to feel cocooned, and then wake herself up, being startled by pain. Then there was the horror phase, not for her but for us, when she would wake up quietly and arrive at the side of my bed and just stand there, silently, waiting for me to wake up and then scare the living daylights out of me. Near heart attack every night. Perhaps needless to say, this adrenaline rush would often make it pretty hard to fall back asleep, feeling like I was stuck in some groundhog day of a Japanese horror film. This still happens some nights, but the floors of the house we now live in make a bit of sound when little feet cross them in the night, so at least we now have a bit of a warning when someone is about to arrive. That pitter patter fills one’s heart with fear and dread, not that particular joy that you’ve been told about. That joy only happens in the daytime, and often after a lot of coffee.

It’s now been 9 years since I have slept through the night, counting the end of the first pregnancy. Add to the kids the delight of early menopause and I have a multitude of reasons not to sleep well. By the grace of god, a few years ago I hit some sort of equilibrium, a new normal, where I miraculously didn’t need that much sleep anymore. Maybe it was my ‘advanced maternal age’ as you see old folks getting up earlier and earlier, or maybe it was just conditioning, my body finally accepting that it was just this way now and just surrendering to it. But that god, I acclimated, and by chance and with the help of a lot of coffee, I got used to it. Now, as long as every couple of weeks I can take a big nap in the middle of the day and recharge, it is ok.

There is already writing on the concept of the ‘I don’t know how she does it’ and even a lightly entertaining film about the idea staring an overworked SJP as the main character. I say lightly, because literally any film or series that attempts to talk about the difficulty and demands of modern motherhood is welcome, if not for the most basic reason that one needs to feel seen. This is a major theme of contemporary thought – people need to see themselves reflected in contemporary media and due great part to recent social criticism and more women in positions of power, influence, and finance in entertainment, there are now more realistic examples of motherhood in media. There are still some pretty terrible ones as well, hello American Housewife, you’re not helping anyone…

Here I am, about to say it though, I don’t know how they do it. How does a mother work full-time, raise kids, and stay sane? I’ve chosen a very different path, and here is the part where I’m supposed to say how great it is and how happy I’ve made my choice but spoiler alert, I’m not going to say quite that. Motherhood has been the hardest, most challenging, most isolating, most life-changing experience I’ve ever had. Would I change a single thing if i had the chance to do it all again? Fuck yeah I would, and I’d like to have a conversation with those women who say they wouldn’t, as to me there are like these miracle fantasy creatures that I am in awe of and would like to know their secrets. I do know from some of the more open moms at school that prayer, and a lot of it, sometimes (weekly) in a group. It’s just one more way to know that we are all in this together, experiencing the same types of difficulties, and praying, literally, for patience.

Now, I have been extremely fortunate in my situation. I left the US in 2010 to marry my dreamboat of a husband, a Frenchy that I met in Washington, DC at the start of 2009 and married at the end of 2010. At the beginning of 2010, while spending 2 weeks together in France, we decided to get married and move to London, a place that was a little bit foreign and a little bit familiar to both of us. It was the perfect compromise and would be our first home together.

We decided to try to have a baby in April 2013 and by the end of May I realised I was pregnant. Surprise, it worked! Being American, at the first doc visit I expected to be poked, prodded, and tested to confirm the pregnancy. Instead, the doctor asked me the date of my last period and then sent me off with a packet and a date to go and see a midwife. I was like whaaaaaat? No wand in the vagina? Ok fine. This continued, no docs, no wands, no poking, just 2 ultrasounds planned for the whole 9 months, until I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes, and then I did see a lovely team of docs and midwives. If I hadn’t had this risk arrive in my pregnancy, I never would have seen a doctor, as in England they don’t view it as necessary. Birth is not medicalised, it is thought of as a natural state which, unless routine tests show risks that need monitoring, required zero medical intervention. This includes getting poked and prodded in the vag – this never happened until one bossy midwife in the hospital insisted on checking my dilation, an intervention which did briefly stop my labor. But more on that later. My point is here that I was one, very lucky to live in an area in England with a good hospital system, as there is what they call the ‘post-code lottery’ there. Two, it was all free. All of it. The only thing we had to pay for during the entire pregnancy, and after, was the parking at the hospital. Well that and the childbirth classes, they were private and through the NCT, the National Childbirth Trust. There are some free ones at the hospital, too, but the NCT is your guaranteed ‘in’ to having a baby group, aka mom friends, after your baby is born. You then spend your 6 months of government mandated, paid maternity leave meeting up at least once a week for coffee and sharing notes, questions, concerns, and cuteness, and figuring out how to become a mom, together. If you desire, you can extend this leave to a full-year and your job must be legally held for you. So, as I said, very fortunate.

France was good, too, but much more medicalised. Tests monthly, more scans, and lots of vaginal prodding. But I was also pregnant with twins at a very advanced maternal age, so that may have had something to do with it. I had weekly, and then bi-weekly, home midwife monitoring visits, and weekly physical therapy, and finally a planned cesarean. My twinnies were born 6 weeks early and spent their 3 first weeks of their little lives in the NICU. Again, all of this was free, except for the parking. Had I needed help getting pregnant, including IVF, this would have been free, too. Meanwhile in America, families are being bankrupted and premature babies reaching their lifetime insurance payout coverage while in the NICU. Then the support comes. France actually gives you money when you have a baby. If I remember correctly, it’s about 1600€ per child. Then they give you money monthly, at least 300€, and heavily subsidise the creche, or day care, which can cost as little as 1.62€ per hour. Here moms typically go back to work after 3 months, but you can ‘borrow’ time against your retirement age if you so wish to stay at home longer, and you can take more time off for a medical reason such as post-partum depression. Also, home care is subsidised, and we were blessed with a helper that was qualified to either do housework or watch the babies and their big sister, as needed. She was called Laurance and was an absolute angel. I could’t have made it through those first 3 years without her. Again, we have been very fortunate.

Nevertheless, even with all this fortune and luck to be in countries where motherhood is supported, it is oh so very hard to become, and be, a mother. My god, was I unprepared. As has already been said so many times, there is the mother you think you will be before you have kids and the mother that you actually are when you have them. But for now, I want to talk about me as a mother, not the mother I am to my kids. I’ll try to explain the difference.

Motherhood changes you, in any and all aspects. I think before it happened, I didn’t really think about these changes very much, or perhaps at all. I always knew I wanted to be a mother, and I had the opportunity before I did become a mother, and decided to wait until I could become a mother in a traditional setting of mother, father, marriage, etc. But I never thought really how it would change everything and no one ever told me, anything. My friend Jessica became a mother right after I moved to London, where she’d been living for several years already since leaving Chicago. She did not take to it like a fish to water, and her transition to motherhood was also severely effected by her MS coming back with a vengeance and leading to terrible post-partum depression. I tried to support her as best I could, and didn’t think the same thing would happen to me. I deeply admired her commitment to the rigorous and demanding schedule that her baby required. I saw how her traumatic birth experience scarred her deeply. Her hospital was shut down just a few years later.

The changes that I experienced started with the pregnancy and continue to this day. The process is one of getting to know yourself all over again, perhaps more than ever before. Before there were no consequences, really. There was liberty, freedom, choice… now there are schedules, duty, responsibility that never even seems to take a pause. It starts with your body, from the very beginning, even before day one with the pregnancy. I remember being on a photo shoot as product director, in thick maternity leggings, an oversized tunic and furry vest. I thought my vagina had a bit of a funny smell in the loo as it had a few times before, and then I realised, to my horror, that I had, in fact, peed myself a little bit. I thought this only happened after you gave birth, and only if you jump or sneeze yet here I was, not even 8 months in, smelling of pee in the loo of a posh rented studio in Maida Vale. Fuck me. So I doused myself in the Dyptique 34 perfume in my purse hoping it would blend as well with the nuance of urine as vetiver blends with sweat in the summer.

Alas, time calls for now, and I must continue this extended explanation another day, as I must pack for a weekend away with friends who, thankfully, all now have husbands and kids of their own and will finally understand this all in their own ways.
La Fatigue

Nov 19th, 2022

It’s Friday night and finally everyone is in bed, myself included. Lately it’s only when I slow down that the pain arrives, which is usually at night. I am terrified that it is an indicator of something serious. Secretly, a small part of me hopes that it is, so that at least then I will have a reason for feeling this way. Somewhere recently I heard, or read, about the idea of suffering. It was definitely in a church context, though I can’t remember where, when, or in what language it was. Perhaps it was in French, but when was the last time I was in a French mass? It will come to me. The idea was that suffering is a part of life. We can’t be naïve and think it’s exceptional, that we are the only ones hurting, that it is unfair. On the contrary, it is a normal, common, even essential part of life that we must accept. It sounds so simple and obvious now but when I heard this it was a realisation. How could I have not known? How did I go this long in my life thinking that my unhappiness was somehow exceptional, that everyone else was walking around with either most things going well or most things going terribly and here I was, wondering selfishly, why my life hadn’t been better, easier, more perfect? Where had I even gotten the idea that it was going to be like that in the first place?

In recent months, since the accident, I have had a really strange new problem of remembering things. I mean, I’ve never had what I imagine is a normal memory of events, conversations, or linear things. What I have I can only describe as impressionistic, if that is even a word. For example, I just had a random visualisation of what I imagined someone else was doing the summer I lived in Copenhagen for a school program. It was twelve years ago, and I was extremely anxious all the time as I had put everything I owned in storage and left the US in May, in time to arrive in London for the wedding of my dear friend Jessica on the 24th of May, 2010. I was in Copenhagen, after a stint in Paris learning art restoration, and I was not coping very well. I had left DC without refilling my anxiety medicine prescription, a fine example of me not prioritising my mental health or taking care of myself. I found myself in a new, strange, and wonderful place which I loved, but I was so crippled with anxiety that I couldn’t truly enjoy it. One of my coping mechanisms, besides junk food and alcohol, and collecting textiles, was being really sarcastic and bitchy about everything, and yelling ay my boyfriend on the phone about practically anything.

I had never really been very good at communicating with new people, unless they were as weird as me or really friendly. It strange to write that, to look back and read it and wonder, what does that even mean, to say that I’m weird? How have I come to identify that way? At what point did I recognise that I was functioning in a different way than others?

Another thing I remember about that summer was how odd and out of place I felt. I don’t know what I expected, maybe some sort of repeat of art school where most people I met in classes were very low key, when no one was very loud or colourful, which is an ironic thing to say about art students. I found that before, in every making-based environment I’d been in before, everyone was just there to do the work, talk about the work, and generally connect through the dialogue about that work. The dynamic of this summer felt very different. I remember it felt immature, not serious, yet it was an intensive design program. Egos were huge and cliques emerged almost immediately. I wasn’t interested in trying to one-up anyone and had no strength to try to fit in. I was 34 and tired from my life and the losses that I had endured in the years just before. I had thrown myself into a new life to try to recover from them instead of perishing in a hell of grief and loneliness. Maybe it was just me projecting but I am fairly certain that I am good at reading interpersonal dynamics and I found it all quite strange. I found myself on the outside and not particularly liked. This was an odd, uncomfortable, and difficult feeling for me as since I’d learned to like myself. Since my mid 20s or so, I discovered I was likeable to others. It was depressing to suddenly find myself unlikable again. In retrospect, I think I was deeply anxious about the instability I had created for myself, as my plan was to not return to the states, but to marry Cyrille and remain with him in London and build a life together.

So this memory that I mentioned, the one that drifted in and out of my head whilst writing this, was an imagined scene of a friend from this program, a very nice girl Indian named Anita from Canada, biking around Copenhagen with a group of girls, having a great time, being free to travel throughout the city with the wind in their hair and having the best summer ever. See, we were told we should rent bikes at the beginning of the season. For some reason, probably not being able to make a decision or commitment because of anxiety, I didn’t, even through this is the way to get around the city. I instead took the bus – no fun. So anyway, this memory was a completely imaginary, and it made me so sad. Sad that I couldn’t even participate, that I was left out, and that I’d done it to myself. Again, I hadn’t taken care of myself, and was suffering because of it. Probably because I didn’t think I deserved it, and then didn’t think I deserved to have friends, on top of that.

Although this imaginary memory from 12 years ago is clear, in both vision and feeling, I find myself losing grip on real thoughts and memories now. I’m losing words for everyday things like when I was cooking and was trying to find a smaller… something… I looked around the kitchen in our weekend gîte to see the thing that was too big so that with it I could also find the word… pot. Only on seeing it could I remember what it was called. Then a few days later, I couldn’t say the name of a close friend. When I tried to say it out loud it came out Justin instead of Julien. When I am working, and by working I mean thinking, I just get lost and forget what it is I’m doing and I’m just blank, not distracted, just void. It’s like there is a plastic tent that has cordoned off a work space so that you don’t inhale the construction dust, and I just can’t find the opening to get though it to find my thoughts on the other side.
On Hibernation

Nov 14th, 2022

Hibernation seems to be a recurring theme of late. I just now, at bedtime, looked up the orange ladybug to see if it stings, to reassure my twins that the tiny clusters of them in the corners of their bedroom ceiling do not, indeed, pose a threat to them at night. Turns out that they do occasionally bite, although they are not typically strong enough to pierce human skin. They are also considered a symbol of good luck, as all ladybugs are, and can also serve as a reminder of your strength, if you like. These little creatures are not in nests, as the boys call them, but are in fact hibernating inside for the winter. How sweet, I think, that they are cosied up in this room in their perfect climate, which oscillates between the humid Champagne weather and the cosy warmth from the fireplace below, as the heat radiates through the wall from the chimney as it passes through the boys’ room on it’s way to the roof.

My dear friend Betty first suggested hibernation back in early September when I was yet again visiting Humboldt from France. This visit was one that was finally as much for me as it was for my mother, as I needed to go there to try to be still for awhile in a place where no one would ask me for anything, where I could just be, if even for a few days, after the summer’s emergency visit had taken such a toll on me, as it was then, when on top of everything else, I’d been struck down by a new form of motion sickness, panic, and severe vertigo while managing everything else. This strange malady had continued on my return home to France, where I couldn’t find my balance, feeling like I was always on a stormy sailboat, finally falling and splitting my forehead open on the corner of a bookcase in the dark whilst getting into bed. A couple friends later said, only half-jokingly, that I’d split open my third eye, meaning I’d literally burst myself open and into my next level of awareness.

When Betty was talking about how she was preparing for her third winter in the hills above Trinidad, in that one valley where the elk are, she told me that she was considering a bit of a self-imposed hibernation for the upcoming season, one in which she would focus on just being and taking good care of herself by eating well, sleeping early, and doing just enough remote work to get by. Her plan was to leave her encampment only to exercise and see Scott, a therapist who is officially a chiropractor but is best described as an energy healer who does body work. I visited him once and can attest that what he does is very special, and if you are looking to go on a healing journey inside yourself, he’s your guy. She wasn’t sure what else she should do next, so was deciding to simply focus on herself. It’s a simple decision that may seem radical to some, but you see, Betty has been living a life that many could only imagine. During the pandemic, she left everything she’d known before, moved across the country in an RV onto land that she’d purchased after visiting Humboldt. Her first winter she had to learn to survive on her own, and it was hard. Her second was a bit easier as she had done it once before, but still the mere logistics of survival took their toll. For her third, well, she was looking forward to enjoying in in the best way possible. She now knows how to get through it, and is taking the chance to slow down and enjoy a bit, to congratulate herself on an accomplishment that many people will never know. She may enjoy it this time, as she knows what to expect and that she can handle the surprises that will of course come up. She’s not adding anything else, she’s just going to get through while taking the best care of herself. So thanks to Betty, this idea of hibernation has been in my head for awhile now.

Today while mindlessly scrolling, I stumbled across a New York Times article on the same topic. I sent it to Betty, but haven’t myself yet read it, and honestly I don’t know if I will get around to it. The intro spoke about mindless scrolling, ironically, and mentioned something about taking the chance to hibernate, which I have been thinking about more and more as of late. You see, recently I’ve been experimenting with sobriety. I had my last drink on the 28th of September, on my flight home from that same trip. Well, my last 4 drinks. I took advantage of the free and quite decent red wine and in order to make myself pass out and to insure that I’d sleep for a good portion of the flight. It worked, but I felt pretty terrible when I work up, as I had done for the last few times I drank. During this trip I had several friends, including Betty who herself was coming up on 9 months of not drinking, suggest that I should give it a try. Considering that loved ones were telling me this, I felt obliged to take their recommendations on board and give it a try. Honestly, I was quite touched that I had people that actually cared enough to say something and express their concern, about me. The fact that I was almost surprised that I had loved ones at all is something to unpack a little further into this.

So here I am, November 14th, a month and a half since my last drink. I’m not sure if I’m exactly sober, as I am taking xanax and lexapro as prescribed by a psychiatrist and per my request. I have also consumed small doses of edible cannabis on a few occasions but have decided not to continue this, at least for now. I am interested in seeing where this journey leads me, and for now, it’s bringing me to consider how a sort of hibernation might benefit me, too. Oh and I quit smoking cigarettes too, on the same day. It’s amazing the power that a deliberate decision has. I guess that my problem lies more so in making the decision than following through on it.

I grew up in rural southern Illinois, in a house that was built by my father. Winters there were harsh and beautiful, and our property had a drive, not a road. The difference is a road is cleared by the county and a drive, well, it’s up to you to sort that out yourself. So my dad had a tractor, one that he cursed on occasion, as I remember. This love, hate, and necessary relationship is common in the country, as I remember. This tractor had a snow plow attachment that he would use to clear the drive when snow had stopped, or sometimes during, and often after winds would create drifts, sometime days after the original snowstorm. Part of this snow ritual was the forced hibernation, which I totally enjoyed. In our small house, which in England would have been described as four-up-four-down but was also quite an interesting open plan, we had 2 wood-burning stoves on the lower level, one just for heat on the left side of the big picture window and one that was a double-oven and stove-top cooking stove to the right. It was a wonderful machine, and was our father’s favorite place to cook, bake, and keep himself occupied during winter mornings, afternoons, and nights. The other stove, I remember that if it was tended properly, the cinders would last till early morning when you could simply add another log to start the day. Both stoves were well designed and well installed. They kept the house full of heat and provided the best atmosphere for our imposed family hibernation.

This time of year is busy for our family now, with 3 birthdays, our wedding anniversary, Thanksgiving (which is all up to me to make a fuss over, seeing as my husband is French), and finally Christmas. I am starting to work again after almost 9 years off whilst having children. The world is a tumultuous place, with terrible news from seemingly everywhere, on every subject. All I want to do is the absolute bare minimum, so that I can do it well. I’m fed up to feel like I’m doing everything halfway and not good enough. I find myself not caring anymore about the perfect this or that. I just want to go to bed early, work enough to stay afloat, love my husband, kids, mother, and sister, focus on my health, both physical and mental, and say no to everything else. I want to hear my quiet thoughts, thoughts which can only rise to the surface if there is enough silence for them to speak up and be heard. I want to finally get enough rest that I’m not tired all day, every day. I want to forget about all of the bad news, if only for a little while, so that I can come out stronger for having listened to myself for a while.

In short, it seems, I just want to hibernate.