My Big Night Out

Two related things happened recently. I turned 30, and I went out at night for the first time in two years. It's taken me a while to write about it, because it's taking me a while to recover. I've been taking the time in bed, as usual, to have thoughts about it.

I should say first that yes, it is objectively wonderful that I could leave my house, sit upright in a chair, and hang out in public for over two hours. Back when I was only half-sick, I used to read blogs where people wrote rapturously about their once-yearly nights out, and I couldn't imagine a life like that. I thought if I ever got that bad, I'd want to die. Now that I've crossed that divide, and I know that life with this kind of illness is indeed possible, I am genuinely grateful that I was able to go out on my 30th birthday. I'm 30 years old, and I definitely don't want to die.

I am increasingly able to will myself into a few hours of health, and I choose these hours carefully. Spending my 30th birthday alone and in bed was too disheartening to be an option. My family wanted to take me out somewhere, and I was determined to let them.  I did nothing for days, in preparation. We went to Teller’s, a restaurant I chose because of architecture. It's in a building downtown that used to be an Art Deco bank, the kind of place I could imagine classy gangsters robbing. It has impressive pillars and a three-story ceiling. In a life as claustrophobic as mine, high ceilings mean a lot. I spent much of the night craning my neck up to stare at the great expanse of air and space above me, like a rube encountering a skyscraper. The light was pink and dim, making the artsy waitstaff look even more attractive than usual.

The isolation of illness makes doing normal things, like eating a meal in a restaurant, seem bizarre and surreal. Look at all these people! Strangers! More people than I've seen together in a long time! Many more people fit in a restaurant than in a doctor's waiting room, or my mom' s house. They all look so well-groomed and upwardly mobile. They all seem so natural, eating and talking, like they do it every day. Walking like it's no big deal. They probably have "jobs" and stuff. Some of them are on "dates." It's like looking through the glass at an aquarium.

Except it's not. Sitting in the restaurant also felt perfectly normal, and the normalcy itself added to the weirdness. Two years isn't really that long, and in my mind, I've never really left the world of the healthy. I felt like I was doing an excellent impersonation of a normal human being. I ordered scallops and risotto like a pro, and made small talk like a returning champion. I ate a piece of chocolate cake and got an Oscar and standing ovation.

Relatively late in life, I've discovered a love of occasional light drinking. Everyone around me is very encouraging of this. What I especially love about it is that after half a glass, I feel my body, but I can ignore it. The "occasional" is key. Here I am on my big night out, next to my friend Jonathan, having ordered in my inexperience a sweet, girly cocktail that I had to convince my brother to drink for me. After that, I had a whole glass of white wine, by myself. I stopped drinking at 19, and in my 20s I was either too Buddhist or too afraid of illness to drink alcohol. So hanging out in bars is still novel and exciting. I failed at my first cocktail, but I will persevere. Jonathan offered to show me the bars in Lawrence that the college students don't know about. I was happy to be invited.

Jonathan is one of my few friends in town, and though we don't see each other often, he's been the only guest at several of my birthday parties. I think the awkwardness and the tradition appeal to both of us. He's been a father for most of his 20s, and we have a lot of conversations about how relative age is, and how our lives are constrained in ways that most of our peers’ lives aren't. Our 20s weren't what we expected them to be. I don't know what my expectations were exactly, but I know that this decade has defied them. Sometimes I think I tried to stay a teenager until I abruptly turned 90 years old at the age of 27.

I can be pretty ashamed of my Peter Pan syndrome, but it's also hard to pick a career and “go forward”or whatever it is you're supposed to be doing with your 20s when you're sick all the time. I kept thinking that in a few months I would get better, and be able to commit to something. I thought that for years. I fueled my personal economy on low-hour teaching jobs and grandparents dying. I moved to a lot of different cities, and spent what energy I had on friends and fun, which I considered desperate necessities. I guess I achieved what I set out to achieve; I made really good friends, and we had a lot of fun. Many of the friends are still around. It's easy to look back with regrets, and it's also easy to look back and see every decision you made as absolutely inevitable. I won't say my youth was entirely misspent.

I am much older and wiser now than I was two weeks ago, when I turned 30. Despite being generally glad to be rid of my 20s, many days of crying buffered each side of my birthday. A typical case of 2.5–wave feminism grappling with and losing to three decades of media conditioning. A tally of my material achievements over the last 30 years, coming up short. Unfavorable comparisons. Gravity. Loneliness. Etc.

But I don't feel bad about it anymore. Feeling feelings when you turn 30 is an inevitable stage one has to go through, if everyone older than me is to be believed. It's a chance to look back over my life and let go of everything that doesn't apply to me anymore, which is almost everything. I think about how I haven't done what I wanted to do yet, but I still have as much time as I can remember, and more. There are achievements I can tally if I must; they are mostly invisible, but they are real. I'm always dismissing the invisible, although it encompasses almost everything of value.

Also, unlike most people whose bodies decline as they age, mine is getting stronger. Like that guy, from the movie, based on the short story that F. Scott Fitzgerald apologized for writing: I'm aging backwards. I could go out to dinner a few weeks ago! If current trends continue, who knows what I will be capable of a year from now? Wondrous things, no doubt. There are also wondrous things that I can do now. 30 years old: Totally glad I'm not dead.

Upon Repulsion from Art, or, The Very Meaning of Life Itself

I wish I'd spent more time on this blog ranting about how much I love Michael Nobbs. He's a Welsh artist with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and he runs a website community about CFS and art. It's convenient, since CFS and art are basically all I think about. In a stunning feat of Jungian synchronicity, he and I are doing the same thing right now. We are doing absolutely nothing. We aren't making art, because we don't feel like it. I'm glad I have company in this, because it's terrifying. 

A few weeks ago, making art suddenly stopped being fun. In the midst of my newfound discipline of daily fiction writing, the joy evaporated completely. It wasn't just writing’s periodic spiral into neurotic, self-flagellating insecurity. That's no big deal. I'm well aware of my perfectionism, judgment, and lack of patience with myself. I'm getting better about that, and usually I don't care if I'm writing crap, because it's fun to make stuff up. This was something deeper and bigger and more disturbing. When you've come to rely on that mysterious feeling of creative satisfaction, what do you do when it goes away?

Artists are supposed to be intuitive, so what if your intuition says stop making art? Do you have to obey it? Please, God, say it isn't so. Please, Mysterious Intuitive Creative Force, don't make me stop. I hate stopping. All I ever do is stop. And now, just when I've found something that I like, something that gives me hope, something that makes me feel like less of a useless lump under the covers, the one thing that I can ACTUALLY DO, the one thing that brings ONE SMALL OUNCE OF MEANING to my STUPID INVALID LIFE, you want me to stop?!? You take away all joy from it, and send me back to bed. Fuck you, intuition. But you can’t say “fuck you” to your intuition. I stopped. 

So I’ve been thinking about my life, suddenly devoid of meaning because I now hate making art, and I’ve had some ideas about it. Creativity has always been a fetish for me. I've never been more than a dilettante, but creativity has always been what I care about the most. It's what I've demanded from myself, and what I've demanded from my friends, to be worth my time. I've had wondrous, important, beautiful moments of making art, as well as horrifying and despairing moments. I've been scared of it, and scared of my desire for it, and fear and desire have inflated it to monstrous proportions. It's become something it was never meant to be.

 I've always been desperately searching everywhere for The Thing to Do with My Life. I was so excited at this latest idea, that maybe I could find it in art. Wouldn't that be comforting, if I could just think of myself as an artist, and have that be my identity, my security, my meaning in life? CFS has taken away most of my abilities, and I'd like to say it has taught me to value myself because I am a human being, not because of what I can make or do. But instead of getting off the treadmill, I have readjusted to its smaller proportions.

It's an old formula, and I think it's almost always true. Take something you love, turn it into something you need, and it becomes something you hate. Especially since becoming housebound, I've been looking to art to give my life meaning. But it doesn't, and it can't. Art, as I make it, is tiny, tentative, embryonic, inexpert, bumbling, delicate, and new. It's like a little kid barely out of diapers, and I'm asking it to support my entire life. It can make me happy sometimes, but it can't give my life meaning. It can barely feed itself. It collapses under that kind of pressure.

If I want to be an artist, or a sane human being, I’m going to have to change my entire relationship with art. I'm going to have to stop making impossible demands of it. I think I could just let art be itself, with no greater meaning than being itself. How can I learn to enjoy the abilities I still have, like imagination, without gripping them so hard I choke them to death? How do I untangle my identity from what I can make and do? What does identity even mean, to the sick or the healthy?  I thought illness would make me wise, but I really don't know. I should probably stop trying to answer impossible existential questions about the meaning of life.

In conclusion, an existentialist manifesto about the meaning of life:

Art can't give your life meaning. Writing, music, painting, theater, and dance can't give your life meaning. Friends can't give your life meaning. Jobs can't give your life meaning. Being a daughter or a wife or husband or a parent can't give your life meaning. Political allegiance can't give your life meaning. Sex can't give your life meaning. Loving someone can't give your life meaning. Hating someone can't give your life meaning. Nothing can give your life meaning. It just has meaning. Meaning is just an inborn quality of life. What is that meaning? I don't know, I think it's just meaning. So stop trying so hard to find it, and stop freaking the fuck out.

All Rest and No Play make Jack a Crazy Bitch

Oh, hi Johnny.

Every year about Halloween, I start wondering if the basic components of my personality have changed, and I'm now a person who can watch horror movies. I have lots of pseudo-intellectual excuses for watching The Shining last weekend. I'm interested in the horror movie as modernity’s morality-imparting mythology, Jack Nicholson as our puckish, trickster God, and the subconscious machinations that find supernatural violence entertaining. I just read Stephen King's excellent memoir, "On Writing," which inspired all kinds of deep thoughts about literary snobbery and populist storytelling. I also just wanted to give myself some cheap thrills.

I started watching it Friday night, and I only made it through the first few scenes of bloody elevators and dead sisters when it got too scary and I had to turn it off. Big mistake. There is nothing more frightening than a void for my imagination to fill. I thought about it all night, in between crumbs of Ambien. The next day, in the daylight, I bravely got back in the ring. No Goddamn movie is going to get the best of me at two in the afternoon.

The rest of the film was scary, but not as bad as I imagined. At least the plot resolved. It imparted its cultural messages, both comforting (good triumphs over evil) and dubious (writers are insane, intuitives get axes in the face). The Magical Black Man sacrifices himself for the white protagonists, as usual. The innocent woman and child survive, free-floating evil retreats to its lair, and I attempt to escape fear through intellectual deconstruction. Business as usual, in other words. Nothing to think about late at night. 

Unfortunately, I did think about it late at night. I wish I could say that identified the most with the psychic child, or the courageous wife, but I have to say that Jack Nicholson had a point. Living in an isolated house, unable to leave, interacting only with two other people, trying to sustain yourself on creativity alone: isn't this basically a recipe for insanity? Isn't this a sort of unhealthy and unsustainable way to live? Wouldn't it drive any normal person crazy? And, now that I think about it, does it seem at all familiar? Like anyone else's life that I know? Ummm…uh-oh.

I'm not making out with corpses yet, or chasing children through hedge mazes, but the plot does hit a bit close to home. Sometimes it's hard not to scream, "Give me my fucking life back!" at the empty space between my bed and ceiling. Sometimes it takes effort to calmly hold a teacup and suppress the urge to smash it against the wall. So far only one teacup has become a casualty of my illness. I am mostly fine and okay and even happy with my life as a privileged, rural invalid; then suddenly I am not. Somehow the rage has to be vented, and I understand how good destruction can feel.

But I also think it might be time to change some things, to see if I can circumvent the rage and the destruction that seem to always come back no matter how I express them. I've done some healing over the past few months, and now I am at an awkward stage between extremely sick and really sick. I'm getting a lot better at sitting upright on couches, and I'm a champ at making ten minute meals. It's been almost two years since I've done things like order food in a restaurant, exchange money for an item in real time, or walk down a sidewalk. But if I can sit on a couch at home, I think with a little ingenuity I should be able to sit on a couch in a coffee shop. And how much would I love spending my ten minutes of kitchen energy at a thrift store? Just wearing shoes is exciting at this point. Think of all the adventures I could have in the mundane world outside my home.

Yelling "Give me my fucking life back," makes several false assumptions. Who am I yelling at? Nobody except myself can give me my fucking life back. And do I really not have my life? Or in my stubbornness am I just not accepting the small things I can do because I want everything at the same time? Going back out into the world is intimidating for a lot of reasons. It's going to take humility to accept my limited abilities in the world of people with "normal" abilities. It's going to take a lot of careful energy budgeting, last-minute planning, realism, monitoring, and laughably tiny goals. It's probably not something I can do very often, but I think just getting out a little bit would make my world so much bigger. More time drinking coffee in public is less time drinking whiskey with evil itself.

I write for Recoving Yogi!

This week, I wrote an article about my semester at acupuncture school and resulting loss of faith in acupuncture for a delightfully snarky online yoga journal called Recovering Yogi. Click right here:

http://recoveringyogi.com/confessions-of-an-acupuncture-school-dropout/

A Half-Remembered Irish Folktale

I think my mom read it to me, or maybe a teacher at my Montessori preschool. I associate it with that shadowy period of childhood when reality and imagination blend seamlessly, and images from stories stay in your head and reverberate. There was one from this era about a terrifying nose that detaches itself from its face, and one about a sad country house getting swallowed up by a dark expanding city. And there was this one, about the lazy Irish farm girl and the leprechaun. I've made halfhearted attempts to find it over the years in various collections of Celtic folktales, but I haven't found it yet. If anyone has seen my missing Irish folktale, please let me know! I'd like to know the real story. I'll tell it to you as best as I can, and I'll fill in the parts I don't remember.

The Farm Girl and the Leprechaun

Once, far away on the green Isle of Erin, there lived a young farm girl. She was a farm girl of many qualities, but the most important one for this story is her laziness. She was so lazy that her farm and fields were falling into ruin, and she dreamed of inheriting a large sum of money and emigrating across the water to live in the sunny southwestern United States. It happened one day that she came upon a leprechaun sleeping under the flowers. Now, everyone knows two things about leprechauns: they always have a pot of gold hidden somewhere nearby, and the laws of their fifth dimensional fairyland prevent them from telling lies. She grabbed him and stuffed him in a sack and brought him back to her farmhouse for interrogation.

"Okay, Patty. Where is the loot?" says the farm girl. She has about four feet and one hundred pounds on him, and he cowers in the corner behind the stove.

"I hid it in the barn!" says the leprechaun. "I put it underneath the hay! Don't hurt me!"

"I don't want to have to hurt you," says the farm girl, and she goes out to the barn to look for the pot of gold. She's so lazy that she hasn't been to the barn in weeks. Hay is strewn everywhere in untidy heaps, and dangerous rusty tools stick out of it, threatening tetanus. The poor cow is starving to death. She realizes that she'll have to go about this systematically, so she bails the hay and stacks it neatly in the loft, she gives some of it to the cow and mucks out his stall, she goes through the tools and put them back on their hooks, and even after she's gone through every inch of the barn and made it tidy and spotless, she can't find a pot of gold. 

"You lied to me, you wee fairy bastard," she says to leprechaun. She rolls up her sleeves. She's quite muscular for a lazy person. "You'll pay for this."

"No, stop, I didn't lie!” says the leprechaun." I did hide my pot of gold in the barn. But then I moved it. After I hid it in the barn, I hid it in your kitchen."

"You better be telling the truth this time," says the farm girl, and she goes off to the kitchen to look for it. The kitchen is even worse than the barn. She hasn't done dishes in months, and pots and pans are stacked everywhere in tottering towers held together with moldy mashed potato glue. She boils some water on the stove and gets to work washing dishes, reorganizing cabinets, matching the tops of Tupperware containers to the bottoms of Tupperware containers and removing the science projects from the fridge. In the end, the kitchen looks and smells better than it ever has before. But there was no pot of gold.

"You wee shite, you bloody-arse bastard West Briton!" says the farm girl. "I don't want to hurt you, elf, but in life one is often called to do what one doesn't want to do. Have you ever heard of a Belfast sixpack?"

Indeed, the leprechaun had heard of a Belfast sixpack, but it never came to that. Fairy tales are repetitive; you know where this is going. He didn't lie about hiding the pot of gold in her kitchen, but then he moved it, and he moved it, and he moved it again. He got her to clean out the chicken coop and collect the eggs, he got her to bottle the beer and distill the whiskey, he got her to clean and organize all the weapons and ammunition that were scattered around her living room. In the end, she worked harder than she ever had in her life and did all the things that she should have been doing all along. 

Eventually, the farm girl wises up. She comes down off the roof, which she had just finished re-thatching, and holds her portable drill up to the leprechaun's tiny, white kneecap. "I want to hurt you now, troll," she says. "And when life presents one with the opportunity to do exactly what one wants to do, one must take it as it comes."

"Wait, wait!" says the leprechaun. "I did hide the pot of gold under the roof. But then I moved it."

"Aye, I know you did," says the farm girl. "I'm not falling for that again. Tell me the last place you put it, now, or I'm going to have one more mess to clean up." She conspicuously changes the battery in the drill.

"Alright, don't hurt me!" says the leprechaun, who was finally beginning to get scared. "I'll tell you where it is. I hid in the garden, underneath the spring potatoes. That's the last place I put it, that's where it is right now."

"It better be," says the farm girl.

So she goes out to the garden, where the potatoes are lined up in rows and ready to be harvested before they rot in the ground. She works and works, digging potatoes and filling up her sack until she's almost at the end of the last row. She hasn't found a pot of gold, and she wonders what her chances are of actually finding it. She's dirty and tired, and the leprechaun probably has more tricks up his sleeve. You can't outsmart a leprechaun. "Foock it," she says, and she takes her sack of potatoes and goes back inside, where she drinks a good measure of the whiskey and falls asleep half on, half off the living room couch. 

That night, as the farm girl sleeps among her bountiful harvest , in her pristine farmhouse in its ordered fields, the leprechaun sneaks out. He goes up to the garden where just one potato plant remains. Carefully, he digs it up, and finds his pot of gold underneath, just where he put it. "Hee hee," he laughs, "I said I wasn't lying." He takes his gold and slips back across the diaphanous boundary into the dreamworld of the fairies.

 *               *               *

Okay, maybe that wasn't exactly the story that an adult read to me so long ago, but it's the gist of it. 

Folktales are meant to be retold and repurposed. Its pagan Celtic wisdom has grown more applicable over the years. There is my unending pursuit of good health, a goal that has been as illusory and elusive as the end of a rainbow, and there are the actual things I've gotten done along the way. There are the relationships that I've repaired with my family, there are the addictions that I've given up, the self forgiveness I've cultivated, the art I've made, the art I'm making, the millions of ways this illness has made me face reality and live in reality, in the present moment, where I actually am. These are all really important and positive things that I probably wouldn't have done if I had been given any other choice. 

If I'm a lazy-ass farm girl with a subtle tendency towards violence, pursuing an empty goal, prodded onwards by supernatural beings, at least there are some tangible rewards. Of course, I still want to be healthy again one day, so I don't want to apply the totality of this myth to my problems. I'm not quite ready to give up on health yet. Or maybe there are some illusions I still need to have in order to not give up completely.

Oh, and I know that this story is terribly offensive to all Irish and Irish-Americans. To that I just have to say: Suck it up, Whitey.