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.

Limits in all Dimensions

Chronic fatigue syndrome is all about limits. Exceeding them, testing them, being horrified by how small they are and then learning to live within them. Now I'm finally not pushing my body to go farther than it can, but I'm beginning to realize that I have spiritual as well as physical limitations. Apparently I can't just make over my life in an instant. 

It seems childishly obvious, I know. But I'm the person who moved across country to go to grad school full time when I was too sick to even work 15 hours a week. I have a history of unrealistic expectations of myself. And sadly, being aware of this fact does not now make me immune from it.

The other day I actually made a list of the strategies I am going to implement to turn my life completely around. No more will I be a bored, maudlin invalid! I will transform myself through art! I will go from somebody still mourning my losses and caught up in my own insecurities, somebody who is been afraid for at least 17 years of taking my creativity seriously, to a person maintaining the schedule of a professional writer. I will follow a strict timetable of writing and reading, I will discipline my imagination, I will drink vegetable juice every day and do more yoga, and I will start wearing button-down shirts. Life up until this point, it's sad and undisciplined wasting, will be completely obliterated. Goodbye, old life. Make way for Homo Superior.

I got really excited about this for about two days. I wrote a lot. I made myself. I wore the shirt and I drank the juice, but I couldn't do the yoga because after two days I was completely crashed. I was in way over my head. All my fears and doubts and expectations that I can't possibly meet right now just fell in around my head. It's too bad that my brain has to work suspiciously similarly to my body.

I hate being afraid. I hate being afraid so much that I have made it my personal mission of my adult life to seek out, hunt down, and destroy everything that holds me back. I hate fear and I hate being a coward. Every fear I find I have to run at full speed, sword in each hand, screaming and clad in bear hides like a berserker Viking tripping on mushrooms. It is a bloodsoaked mission of vengeance against all the ways I am weak.

I really have freed myself from a lot of my fears. I used to be terribly shy, really afraid to open my mouth in front of people I didn't know. That had to go. I was afraid of moving to new cities, so I moved to four of them. I was afraid of making art, and I made myself make it. And I loved making it, often. I’ve really won a lot of freedom for myself over the years. But now it's pretty clear my tactics have to change; I just don't have the energy to fight so hard anymore. I'm going to have to figure out how to do this the easy way.

I guess the things that I'm seeking, things that I think will make my life worth living again, are subtle qualities. They are positive things; they aren't just the absence of fear and hate and all the other fucked up things in my brain. They are things like creativity, gentleness, play, forgiveness. Actual and practiced love for myself. I can't intimidate them into working for me like I'm used to. And I can't just decide that I have them and act like I do. Otherwise I'll have anxiety attacks while trying to write short stories, because I don't know what I'm doing and I'm failing and I am NOT having fun, yet I cannot be a person who doesn't know what she's doing or fails or doesn't have fun, and thus I am living in two mutually exclusive realities simultaneously, which is hell on the nerves.

So I'm going to have to live within some psychic limits. I just don't have the spiritual resources right now to do what I want to do. No more running into the jungle to shake out my demons. I think I'm going to let some of those demons just hang out for a while. I'll take embarrassingly tiny steps and lay some groundwork. I'm pretty sure I know how to do this.

Yes, The Olympics are Inspiring

Gabrielle Douglas Enacts the Human Experience

Feeling evil and watching the Olympics with my family, I accidentally did the thing I always try not to do, which is to go on a loud long bitter rant denouncing everything I'm jealous of. "I hate the Olympics. What is the point of the Olympics? All these young, beautiful, healthy people spending their entire lives in the pursuit of a meaningless goal? Fourteen-year-olds flinging themselves around bars, young Asian men with synchronized concussions, people making their bodies hurt when their bodies don't have to hurt. If I was healthy, I wouldn’t waste it like that! I mean, what's the fucking point?" 

My dad, who loves sports, answered my rhetorical question. "It's about being alive," he said simply, and turned back to the TV.

"I guess I just don't know what that's like!" I said, and stalked off into my room, feeling like a stereotype of a stereotype of a stereotype of an embittered invalid and a reverted adult living at home.

The weird thing is that half of the time when I make these out-of-control public rages, what I'm saying is actually the opposite of the truth. Honestly, I'm inspired by the Olympics. It's an appreciation that I've only recently acquired, and only fully recognized as I lay on my bed where I had tearfully flung myself after my teenage outburst. The Evil, i.e., my bitterness and jealousy, would have me not be able to take any joy from the things in the world of bodies I can no longer do. But there’s some good left in me, too, letting me get over it and begin to connect with something that's always been alien and opaque to me: sports and their mysterious meaning.

I've never understood them before. Perhaps there's a joie de vivre about moving your body that I don't have anymore. That's true often enough, but I didn't get sports even when I had a healthy body. Sports always seems so pointless to me. Get sweaty, hurt, lose, all to put a ball in a certain place a number of times. Of course, I've heard the "metaphor for life" theory before, that sports are about teamwork and strategy and hard work paying off, and outlet for warfare and survival in this tragically civilized society. But it wasn't the kind of metaphor I connected with. I am still a teenager; it's jocks versus art kids, and you gotta know where you stand. I always got picked last, never got the ball passed to me, never made friends with any of my teammates, and if you want a metaphor, write a fucking poem. 

Of course, this line of thinking isn't exactly sophisticated. I think it's more symptomatic of my tendency to elevate the intellectual over the physical, a tendency that is by no means the cause of my illness, but has tripped me up over and over again when I try to take care of my body. I'm not good at sports, and I don't understand sports, and if there's one thing I hate it's things I'm not good at and don't understand. I'm still the nerdy kid hanging out in my high school's gifted office, desperately looking down on the popular kids, channeling all my warfare and survival drives into the highest SAT scores and the most nuanced direction of No Exit. My economy didn't value moving your body for the sake of moving your body.

I guess it's the classic lesson learned too late, or scarcity creating value. Now I think it's bizarre to like art and not like sports. They are both about pre-intellectual motivations, about the defeat and glory of being human. Why would the arc of a dancer's leg move me, but not the arc of a perfectly executed spiral pass? Why is one method of contacting and expressing the subconscious better than another? Particularly when the athlete has to be so disciplined and rigorous in the pursuit of her goal, when so many artists (and I'm talking about myself here, obviously, illness aside) are really deep down lazy narcissistic bums? If I had even a fraction of the dedication and perseverance as these athletes, do you know how many novels I would've written by now? Do you know how many, uh… blog posts I would've written by now? And comics I would've drawn? And pugs I would own, and friendships I wouldn't have let slip away?

And so, slowly and very much from the sidelines, I'm beginning to have a genuine appreciation of people moving their bodies competitively for no intellectual reason, and drawing real inspiration from the Olympics. I'm sorry if this sounds like a 90s Nike commercial. Of course I'm ignoring the money, egos, exploitation, drugs, and concussions, but right now I'd rather just buy the Hellenistic Ideal that can't be completely destroyed by being sold so vigorously. And perhaps I can take even more direct inspiration from these athletes, not even filtering it through the language of metaphor. Because our bodies aren't just metaphors. If there's one thing I've learned from illness, it's that sometimes bodies just mean themselves. I can learn to joyfully move my body, for no reason, even now on such a humble scale.

Grendel

Grendel

I know that any good blog needs pictures, and I'm afraid I've been terribly remiss in this. Please accept my apologies, and this picture of my pug, Grendel. Tragically, she was disabled at a young age when she chewed on an electrical cord and brought an iron table down on her leg. Although the healing process was long and painful, she developed an abiding spiritual resilience and sense of humor that in the end made her a better dog.

Late to My Own Funeral

Well, so far it's fun being an angst filled teenager. It's better than being a bitter old woman. I can claim I only want to complain, but I don't really. The shameful truth is that I do want to be happy. Or, in deference to certain philosophers who make sense when they say happiness is impossible, I want to be at peace. The 15-year-old covers her eyes with her hand, and pretends to be with someone else. I totally sympathize, but I'm afraid I have to be sincere at this point. I have to do the one thing I really don't want to do. I have to accept my illness.

In further proof that this year has been one slow revolution around nothing, I keep coming back to acceptance. I've had moments of acceptance in the past. They are beautiful moments.  At the very bottom of your misery, and realize you just have to give up trying to change it. I really believe that something sees that white flag, and comes to help you, even if it's just a part of yourself. These moments are real and cathartic and even dramatic in their own way. I've usually mistook these moments for the real thing. I thought, "Now that's over! Now I won the spiritual acceptance game! Can I get back to my real life now?" And I went back to my primary occupation, which is waiting to get better.

And I keep waiting, and waiting, and all of a sudden my patience wears out, and I can't wait that long anymore. Here comes the 15-year-old: I have to live my life! I want my life to feel like a life again! It's my life, God dammit, my shitty, mundane, disabled real life. And it's not my illness that has made it so small, it's my lack of imagination. Or rather, it's the profusion of imagination in the wrong place.

I can imagine the future easily, that's where I am young and strong and winning everything constantly always. And I can clearly see multiple parallel universes and all the fun and friends I have in them.  It's in this reality right now where I can't imagine doing anything else but lying in my bed reading a book I'm sort of into. Acceptance must mean more than this. You can live with something, but still have it hurt you every day.

This year hasn't been a total wash. I've gotten into some good things. I've read a lot of books . I have tried to let go of the life I used to live, but I haven't replaced it with very much. I've been resting, and I've been grieving, and that is a process to respect. Right after you get hit by a car and you're lying on the pavement semi-conscious and bleeding is not the time to write poetry about it. But now I want the mourning to be over. The life I had is dead. I went to the funeral, saw it in its coffin, but I still persist in pretending it's alive and walking around with it like it's the corpse in "Weekend at Bernie's." I want to put it down, but I'm not exactly sure how. I don't know what to replace it with. The closest I've been able to come to grabbing my disabled life by the balls is writing personal essays about how much I would like to grab my disabled life by the balls. I guess it's a start.

What the Internet Needs is More Complaining

So, maybe I'll start blogging again. After more than a year, a stranger on the Internet reminded me of its existence, and I went back to read what I had been publicly thinking a year ago. I had been housebound for a few months back then, and I was trying to get a handle on the idea that my seven-year-long illness wasn't going away. I was angry and desperate, but I was also sincerely trying to find peace and acceptance. I was also trying to prove that I had it together, that despite physical challenges I, unlike you other Internet sickos, was using my pain as a platform for astronomical spiritual growth and one day I would be healthy and free and look back on that time that I healed myself from CFS by fearless blogging.

Well, needless to say, fuck all that. I'm starting again because a year later, I'm still sick and I haven't come to terms with it. My world has gotten very small and I need more than anything to make it bigger. I didn't want to make my home in the Internet community of the chronically ill, full of desperation and indignation and not-funny black humor, but here I am.

 So read my fearless blog, by which I will heal myself of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome! It is now the angst-filled livejournal that I was too shy to keep in Jr. High. My fifteen-year-old self is Editor-in-Chief, and there is no amount of rage, jealousy, or self-pity that doesn't make her feel more articulate. I don't want to give anyone advice anymore. The idea of being a wise, good invalid makes me nauseous. My goal for this new blog is to be mortified with embarrassment when I read it in a few years. I will tell you all the shit that I am not serenely okay with about being a 29-year-old invalid. I will try to make it interesting, but no promises. I will feel better for having written it, and you, for having read it, might feel much worse. Is it okay, to make people feel bad because I feel bad? Well, you can go outside and take a walk, you healthy motherfucker, I don't pity you. Or, if you're one of us, how could I possibly make you feel worse than you already feel?

Thus absolved, I will continue. Stay tuned for unhappy excavation of my fascinating life.