The 8th Nerve

Most of which happened before I was 10 years old.

Wrist: From a screw sticking out of a swingset.

Top of hand: Shaped like a scratch, probably from tormenting a cat.

Forehead #1: Falling down sometime when I was barely learning to walk.

Forehead #2: Falling headfirst out of a tree. My friend had to lead me home by the hand because blood was getting into my eyes and I couldn’t see.

Finger: The wind suddenly blew hard and the kite went flying, I tried to hold onto the string and got bad, bad string burn before the wind ripped it out of my hands.

Hand: Aforementioned seam ripper stabbing.

Left knee: Falling directly onto hard floor.

Right knee: Running after a boy, falling and skidding across gravel. The worse scar I have. That’s what chasing boys will get you.

Back: Standing up in the bathtub and getting gouged by the faucet in the process.

Elbow: Probably also involving the swingset.

Forearm: Small one from donating blood.

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Jun 5th 2006Everyday life & the Past

Today I took the leftover tile from the doorway entrance project and mixed up adhesive and started putting tile in along the kitchen countertops. The whole process was a lot like spreading frosting on crackers. While I spread adhesive, I started thinking about the movie we watched last night, The March of the Penguins.

Two things in particular fascinated me about this movie. One was the extent to which the behaviors of the penguins are dictated by biological imprint. Somehow, the penguins know when and where to go and what to do every year. The second was my curiousity about the depth of the penguin’s pain- in particular if he or she is not chosen to be a mate or if a chick is lost to death. Could they really feel it as deeply as a human would? The narrator implied that they did. Perhaps they would not need to know language or to have human consciousness to feel deeply. I know that the most painful experiences of my life surpasses any language center or intelligence- it hits you in the guts.

I believe the difference is that penguins do not have defenses like we do. We intellectualize and rationalize and distort and suppress- and ultimately prolong and complicate- our pain, because we do have the capacity. Penguins, however, are faced with the unbearable. They are forced to feel it and survive it.

Then I started thinking about both biological imprint and capacity for pain. Biologically speaking, for continuation of the species, it makes sense that we would be wired to feel agony when we are not chosen and when we lose a mate or child. And things get a lot more complicated with humans because, unlike a penguin, we often try so hard to get around it.

While thinking along this line, I was hit with a memory. The dances of our adolescence and young adulthood are a microcosm of the universal dance of the species. Of choosing and being chosen and an inexplicable bond when the right connection happens. My memory in particular was of the last annual dance I would have with a group of friends. This was of watching a close friend choose a different friend for each slow song. I sat out for each song and by the end of the night when it was clear that I was not picked, not even by my friend, the pain was gut wrenching. Even now, the memory has the power to hit out of the blue and affect me like that still. I felt dumb for being affected like that. Why wasn’t I chosen?

In light of biology, it makes sense that I was affected like that. It makes sense that there are always girls crying in high school bathrooms during every dance. The dances of our adolescence is a cruel set up for the universal dance, the powerful biological need that goes beyond words- to be chosen, even if just for a song. This explains to me not only why being chosen is such a powerful validation, but also why it even hurts so much when we are not chosen by people we don’t even LIKE that much. It doesn’t always matter WHO, it is the act of not being chosen that is unbearable.

No wonder things get complicated in this human dance when we interpret the pain to mean more than it does. I can remember a friend of mine being so puzzled when a guy she wasn’t particularly interested in dumped her- why did it still hurt so much? Did that mean that she liked him more than she thought she did? Why did she want him back? Then we get pulled back toward relationships that are not particularly good. It doesn’t always matter who, it is more about the impact of not being chosen. It is so deeply personal and not personal at the same time.

I do not know why my friend danced with others but never with me, even though we were close for years. Maybe it was not personal, maybe he did not even notice. And maybe my pain was not only personal, it was simply universal, wired to be unbearable.

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Apr 23rd 2006Introspection & the Past

When I got home from work, a box from ProFlowers was waiting for me. I didn’t know who it could possibly be from. I tried opening it from the bottom, which caused the vase to slide out. I turned it around and tried opening it from the top. When I glimpsed the tops of the flowers, I was suddenly hit with one of my earliest memories with uncommon clarity. I was three years old, very sick with a high fever, and my Dad brought me flowers in a vase when he came home from work. I can remember waking up after sleeping for hours, feverish, light as air, and there was a small delicate vase with flowers. I kept the vase for years but somewhere over time it disappeared. I still remember the feel of the small heavy vase and a few small pottery roses the size of pencil erasers glued to the vase.

I believe that was the only time he got me flowers, so until I had the memory just then, it didn’t occur to me that it might be from him. I finally figured out that it was a lot easier to open the box along the side, which was also where the note was, congratulating me on completing my first week of work. The flowers were from my Dad. Thanks Dad.. they’re beautiful and they’re in a perfect vase heavy enough that Casper can’t knock it over!

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Mar 2nd 2006Family & the Past

I had no idea I was so lucky with the job thing when I graduated from college. I found a job within a month. Two years later, thoroughly burned out, I had one interview and immediately got another job. Another year later, after the organization continued collapsing from within due to low morale, low pay and dwindling benefits, I had a new job after two rounds of interviewing. Then I landed an ideal internship. And when I needed a back up job to do in addition to my internship, getting that was no problem either. It seemed that whenever I needed to move on, I could do it.

Now, the number of jobs I have applied to totals: 15. At least. I’m sure there are a few more I forgot about. I am in a strange limbo- overqualified for some and turned down for others because I don’t have my masters yet, even though I have completed over 60 credits, finished all the necessary coursework and internships, and I merely have to complete the last major paper.

I have been careful to avoid the pitfalls, the jobs that drain you of heart and soul, the jobs I did for years before I realized that I don’t even LIKE what I’m doing. I refuse for my life to be about a sense of dread when I wake up in the mornings during the week, stress and enduring, then the foul mood that sets in Sunday evenings when the week ahead of me sets in like the weight of the world. I had positive experiences, rewarding moments, and valuable learning experiences to be sure. This is about the limits of myself as it is about the jobs. Sometimes we get so mired into the routine that we don’t even realize life is like that, and that it doesn’t have to be.

I just want to be energized, challenged, and enjoy what I am doing overall. Doesn’t have to be all the time, just enough.

But if you have higher standards about the work you want to do, I suppose it is easy to end up doing a lot of waiting. The waiting period is an interesting time period, and overall will take up a fraction of my life, but right now, while I’m in it, it feels overwhelming. Like it has filled up my whole life and will never end. Steve keeps reminding me to ENJOY this time while I have it, but it’s hard to hold on to perspective and have faith. My degree is not far off and more opportunities will open up once I have it. I know all that.

There’s always the little voice that whispers What if this never happens? What if you have no choice and must always do what you mostly don’t like, and your life gets used up this way? I have to remember, my energy, fulfillment and integrity is more important, and in the end, things always have a way of working out.

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Nov 29th 2005Everyday life & the Past

Uh oh. This will be one of those entries that I feel compelled to write and then I slay myself with criticism and self-doubt later. How quickly and easily that voice comes up and how vivid those images are, of other people I imagine to be reading this, their eyebrows raised or their eyes rolling. “What’s her problem?” “She makes a big deal out of nothing.”

Even if people did this, it should not matter so much to me. It should not completely dislodge me from my foundation, so quick I am to condemn myself. This is not their voice, this is my inner voice, my internalized voice. And it is so good at trivialization.

Sue Monk Kidd writes, “Trivializing our experience is a very old and shrewd way of controlling ourselves. We do it by censoring our expressions of truth or viewing them as inconsequential. We learned this technique from a culture that has practiced it like an art form.” (p 34). Blogging has been a practice of overcoming this voice for a moment, even though it sometimes comes back with a vengeance after I post the entry.

After the whirlwind vacation week, this week has fallen heavily on me. Coma-like sleep, lack of motivation, and again inexplicable grappling with anger and a weight of conviction that there was no meaning, no purpose. Profound disconnect, a preoccupation with petty things. “We are not who we used to be and not who we will become. We are in the terrain of “unmeaning.” And we are alone in it.” (Kidd, p 95). I even began to fear that if I wasn’t “careful”, I would become seriously depressed. I have never been so acutely aware of a state such as this.

I kept thinking that it was because I needed a job, and once I had that, things would make sense again. But there is also the worry that a job just served to mask and structure. I would go about my responsibilities, my goals, following the instructions of a supervisor to the upmost. Would this just distract me from what was underneath?

I picked up The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd that my mother lent me, and perhaps this book has come at a crucial time. This is an incredibly profound book, and for the first time I began to feel energized again. There is much meaning and purpose here, this journey that this woman undertook, and is undertaking. Despite my energized response, despite the tears rolling down my cheeks at certain passages, strong too was the voice of trivialization. What are these women doing, I would think. If I was partaking what she was describing, I would feel so embarassed, so awkward. Not only did I feel my own embarassment and vulnerability, at the mere thought of it, I could feel most clearly my mother’s as well. We have the same problem.

I was also so aware of what any man would think if he witnessed it- contempt, bemusement, perplexion, trivialization- and it was playing out in my own reactions and inner voice.

But there was another instinctive and stronger response. She is right. She is so right. I have to hang onto this, record it here, before I trivialize it away completely.

I came across a passage that I read with such pain and recognition that I knew that it was marking where I am right now, if I choose to heed it and consciously begin my journey from here. Kidd describes the myth of Ariadne and how she interpreted its metaphors and symbols to the experience of being a woman. After Theseus conquers the Minotaur in the labyrinth and rescues Ariadne from the kingdom, he takes her to another island, Naxos. “He represents Ariadne’s freeing energy or the way out of her sleep.” (Kidd, p 111). There, she wakes up the next morning to find that he abandoned her and sailed away.

Often, like Ariadne, a woman cannot recognize or contact the heroic, freeing energy inside herself. Instead she projects it outward, usually onto a man. The projection- as precarious and havoc wreaking as it may sometimes be- becomes a force that acts to free her.

When a woman projects her liberating energy outward, she is acting unconsciously. If she projects it onto a man, she may be unable to initiate real independent action apart from him. She will be dependent on Theseus, not on herself. She cannot see that Theseus embodies her own unconscious potential and desire for freedom or wholeness. The hard moment will come when she needs to withdraw the projection, break the spell it has over her, and own up to what she is doing. She will have to claim the qualities she saw in these external figures as possibilities in herself.

She will need to take up her own autonomous life. (Kidd, p 111-112)

In my own life, I abandoned Theseus, even though I managed to feel all the while as if it was I who was being abandoned. In light of this, it now makes sense to me. For me, “the hard moment” of overthrowing this particular projection came and went. I suppose I have made progress since then, but in many ways I still feel stranded on the shore of Naxos, lost and bewildered. Intellectually, I recognize that I need to find these resources within and be true to myself, my spirit. But I don’t know it. And I have no idea where to begin or how.

I am beginning to think I should hold off on finding a job, and focus on this instead, despite all the fears and insecurities, financially and otherwise, that this would entail. I must heed what happens to me when a job and structure falls away and not try to fight it or impose another structure over it, distracting me again. I can incorporate this into my research and process of writing my thesis, perhaps this is the most ideal time. Where could, where will, my spirit take me?

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Aug 26th 2005Books & Introspection & the Past

For better or for worse, it seems Silver bay people and experiences have branded themselves forever in my psyche. It takes approximately three days to recover from a visit with everyone. I gradually return back to my life and re-adjust, as if I was carried far downstream and have to swim my way back. The past three days had a feeling of persistent sadness and I kept checking my email repeatedly like something’s missing. Just when I thought I was going to have to resort to eating chocolates on the couch while watching The Big Chill, I begin to feel normal again. I emailed my girlfriends and asked if this was happening to them too. I received responses in record time from all of them, agreeing that recovering from a Silver bay get-together is hard.

I’m not sure what it is. It is not a wish to be younger again, because I am happy to be where I am and would not want to be 18 or 19 again, ever, even if you paid me a million bucks. It is not a wish for another summer at Silver Bay, because I love Steve and Vermont and our house here.

It feels as if it was that particular time in our lives and the place we were all in. Something about it heightened the creation of bonds and attachment between people. Similar to when we were infants forming attachments with our caregivers, perhaps it can happen again nearly as intensely when we first leave home. Or maybe it is a phenomenon that happens when neural synapses are fusing just as fast as they are dying off due to all the alcohol consumption of teens delirious with their newfound freedom. Something like that. It seems that when you form bonds like that, a piece of you is lost when everyone scatters by time and distance.

When everyone comes back together, it is a feeling of powerful, whole energy. Sometimes it is wonderful energy, sometimes it is anxious energy. The complexity of these bonds and what happened in them and to them over the last decade could fill a bookshelf (complexity can fill a bookshelf?).

Yeah, is that healthy? Is this a case of experiencing sensations in a phantom limb that was cut off long ago or is it something real? If I had it my way, I would prefer not to have so much investment that it takes me two or three days to recover from it.. But I simply cannot imagine life without these friends.

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Jul 27th 2005Friends & Silver Bay & the Past

This is the story from beginning to (sort of) the end. When all of my adult teeth came in, I had a significant overbite, which was made more out of alignment by the fact that one of my bottom teeth simply never materialized. It is missing, which perplexed every dentist and orthodontist who examined my mouth.

So the first course of action, when I was about 12, was to wear a device known as the “frankel”. This thing has to be seen to be believed, and I googled it online, and lo and behold:

You could choose the colors. Mine was in rainbow stripes I believe, with glitter. The only good thing about it was that a boy that I had a crush on happened to be the only other 7th grader on the face of the earth who was singled out to be victimized by this cruel device. His was in tiger stripes. I was supposed to wear it all day and night. It made my cheeks puff out like a chipmunk and it was difficult to close my lips around it. The frankel was impossible to talk with and it fell out of my mouth when I tried to wear it during the night. In the ensuing months, I wore it for possibly four whole hours altogether. One time when I went to the orthodontist, they took x-rays. I purposefully put my lower jaw forward so that it looked like my bite was getting better.

But my scheming didn’t work. They decided that they would CEMENT a contraption to the roof of my mouth. It was large, white, plastic and molded to the upper row of teeth and the bottom extended into my mouth, low enough so that my bottom teeth were forced to sit in front of it. I was to wear this for three months. Talking and eating was nearly impossible, though I did find a way. It was a bitch to clean and food was always getting trapped. With this contraption, I made my way through the end of 7th grade and with my family moved to a new town and there I met lots of new kids in the strangest and most self-conscious stage of my life.

Also, my hair was puffy and huge. If my family needs a good laugh, they like to look at pictures and home videos of me during this time period.

Then after that it was a retainer for a while. I went back for a last visit with the orthodontist and he said that the only option really left was having surgery where my jaw would be broken in different places. He said if it was his own daughter, he wouldn’t do it. So it was settled, no more horrible contraptions or braces for me. I was DONE.

I still had an overbite and my teeth were not entirely straight but for the most part it looked ok. However, my upper and lower teeth didn’t fit together well at all. One side of my mouth did fit ok, but on the other side only the points of certain molars touched. My bite could never really settle in one place and seemed to shift around. Whenever I focused my attention on it, it felt so uncomfortable and I felt so frustrated. Then I would try to let it go and not think about it.

A couple years ago, when I was 25, I went to a new dentist who examined my teeth for a check up. He then explained to me, not only in person but also with a follow up SIX PAGE letter, why my mouth was the way it was and how it was causing my teeth to wear down with unconscious shifting and grinding as my mouth constantly tried to fit comfortably and the risk of jaw problems later on. The clincher was when he said something about my teeth not fitting together and being at “home”. I felt a welling of sadness. Dammit, I wanted to be at home in my own mouth.

So I was referred to a great orthodontist and we carried out the plan of having two upper molars removed, and using braces to push everything back. Nearly two years ago, I lay down in the chair- the chair I would get to know well- and they went through this hideous, lengthy process of applying those things to my teeth. I stared at the ceiling in resignation and determination, the kind of resignation and determination you have when you decide to grow out a bad haircut, or bangs, except more intense. I will suffer and endure, but GOD IT BETTER BE WORTH IT.

Yesterday, was the day. THE day. My braces came off in a series of harsh snapping and cracking. Then balloons and confetti floated down from the ceiling all around the chair.. no, not really. That’s what SHOULD happen when you get your braces taken off. Instead, I received a certificate for a free Ben & Jerry’s. That’s the next best thing.

It was worth the money and the enduring and the self-consciousness and tedious cleaning. It was worth nearly two years of having to stop smiling during the course of a meal because more than likely, there is food stuck in the braces, and worrying about that until you can get to a mirror and check. I’m sure you can sympathize, as you likely had braces. You went through this experience also. WHEN YOU WERE TWELVE.

It’s different when you’re in your mid-20s. It feels more conspicious, it makes you wonder how it affects how people see you, personally and professionally. BUT now it’s over! It is worth it to no longer have an iota of self-consciousness about my smile, and most importantly, for my teeth to properly FIT together like they belong. No more discomfort or always shifting my jaw. I still have to wear a retainer for a while, but the worst is over. They’re at home.

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Jul 9th 2005the Past

For the past few days I have been reading, and then practically re-reading My Life so Far by Jane Fonda. Like many of my generation, the only thing I knew about Jane Fonda when I started the book was the fact that my Mom had one of her workout videos in the 80s.

I found it to be powerfully touching and insightful, maybe because I had no expectations when I started the book. I was amazed at how many of the realizations I’ve had in the past year leapt back at me in the pages of the book. So many of the same thoughts and feelings (except, thankfully, an eating disorder) that I thought only belonged to me. Since I was 11 or 12, in my analytical way, I would frequently trace the roots of these experiences to having a hearing loss and how I coped with attempting to pretend to be a hearing person in a hearing world.

For most of my life, my silence, exclusion, feeling unseen and unliked (not disliked, just not liked) always seemed to come back to the fact that I could not hear well enough in crowded hallways and cafeterias and dances and get togethers of my adolescence. I was, and still am in certain situations, completely imprisoned by silence. I chronically compared myself to the girls who were always talking, laughing, and surrounded by friends, and found myself to be painfully inept.

Jane wrote “I didn’t know where the anxiety came from, I just thought that was how life felt for a girl once she hit the you’re-supposed-to-be-feminine age- feeling like an outsider, nose pressed against the windows, hungry to get in, not knowing that it was myself that I was outside of; but then, how could I be inside myself when I had discovered I was not perfect?” (p 83).

Jane wrote about personas, how she borrowed aspects of others’ personalities while inside feeling convinced that she was boring and hoping no one would find out. From this, I begin to think that my hearing loss didn’t so much create this anxious, painful experience as it actually stripped me of a disguise. I did not have the ability to borrow and create myself that most girls, like Jane, had.

Even though many had these feelings of anxiety and exclusion, and many were coping in much more secretive and self-destructive ways, they could cover up in trying on different personas. They could be talkative or flirtatious, a goth or a druggie or whatever else, and through that, be validated (as girls learn to do) through being part of a clique or having a boyfriend. This didn’t necessarily help anything, but the appearance was very deceiving. I could not try on any persona, let alone my own. I endured silently, waiting it out and hoping for when it would get better, and deeper, and more real.

Or until somebody invited me to a party or something. Either way.

Repeatedly, throughout my teenage years, I had dreams with the theme of being in a large clothing store or standing in front of a closet. I would walk around and around, picking out clothes, trying on clothes, trying to find an outfit that felt right, that was me. In my dreams, I never found it. Either I was fruitlessly searching, or to my horror, I ended up in an outfit that was ludricrous and all wrong. Unlike many girls at that developmental age, I could not find different personas or ways to be. I was acutely aware of how imprisoned I was and couldn’t pretend.

Then the words, the same words I used in a recent entry, popped up. “Not taking myself seriously, I gave myself away- to films that weren’t very good and to people I didn’t really care about.” (p 134). I think it is most painful when women give themselves away emotionally to men, because men do not and cannot reciprocate or understand the extent of what is being given to them. The experience then becomes for the woman like that of having an addiction, dependency characterized by extreme highs and lows. Sometimes, consciously or unconsciously, men encourage or need this kind of power trip at the expense of the woman. (Not to be “male bashing” here, this can also happen the other way around.)

I agree with Jane when she writes that feminism is not male-bashing, it is recognizing that both genders are suffering from socialized gender roles. Men also are affected in other ways besides having power or privilege, and suffer for it while being cut off from certain feelings and experiences.

Ultimately we reach a point, in transitions or in therapy, if we stick with it long enough, when we manage to cast aside defenses that no longer serve us and our feelings of hurt, anger, anxiety and confusion. What remains is the work of mourning. Mourning is not simply tears but felt throughout the body.

Mourning entails not only letting go of others or accepting one’s self, past experiences, what was or never was. Mourning is also reconciling the universal ways we have been shaped and hurt by society. Mourning means learning what does not belong to you, and letting go of unresolved issues that is passed on through the generations in the family. I am not my parents or grandparents. I cannot carry, re-enact and fix anything for another, as much I as I would like to.

I am inspired by all the work Jane has done and still does for causes she believes in and to help others. I wonder if I could do that someday. The immediate fear that jumps out at me is that, outside of a quiet room or the writing medium, I will not be comfortable enough with myself and my hearing to lead or to work with groups of people. But that is perhaps an excuse. Maybe I am just afraid. Risks need to be taken in order to find out.

The outfit I have on now is pretty good.

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May 28th 2005Books & Hearing loss & Introspection & the Past

Today I planted vegetables in the garden- corn, carrots, beans, peas, cucumbers, lettuce and spinach. We shall see what comes of it. Yesterday I raked over the plots and pulled out the grass and turned over the dirt. I saw a really gross spider with a white egg sac and was trying to show Steve. As I was staring at it, a big old frog suddenly lunged into my field of vision. I shrieked and clutched Steve’s arm. The frog sat still and blinked at us.

I have been holed up in dorm and apartment and condo living for way too long.

As I worked in the garden and Steve mowed the lawn, the sights and smells brought back old memories. My parents had a long forgotten vegetable garden once and the corn towered over me and blocked the sun. When my father mowed the lawn my brothers and I would run in the newly cut grass and scream when we got too close to the mower and the spray of grass stung our legs like needles. I was close to the earth then and spent countless hours in those yards. My hands were always dirty and I didn’t hestitate to pick up worms or caterpillars. I loved to capture fireflies, butterflies and other insects that caught my interest. I remember a friend of mine in elementary school expressing distaste for having dirt on her hands. I looked at my own in puzzlement. It was the first time that I was conscious of dirt as something that others noticed or disliked.

I have also been hard at work in the other gardens, pulling out all the dead leaves, grass, and stems. As I pull away what doesn’t belong, the shape of the garden begins to emerge, full of tender plants growing underneath the dry dead grass. The afternoon passes in an hour. Raindrops fall on my head. I forget to eat lunch. I no longer flinch or startle at the sight of wiggling worms, grasshoppers, bright green slugs, or beetles. I remember them. The sense of contentment I feel while I’m doing this makes me wonder how I lived for so long without it. I hope I never take it for granted.

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May 11th 2005Everyday life & the Past