A story about breaking through.

July 8, 2017

I know that it’s not permanent. I know that there are way worse injuries than broken ankles, and that even broken ankles are often way worse than mine. I know this. People break bones all the time. Children break bones all the time. But maybe it’s easier for children. They get neon casts for the other kids to sign. They have to worry about missing out on basketball games, but they don’t have to wonder whether their coworkers secretly consider them lazy for being less productive this month; whether everyone else on the sidewalk resents them for their sluggish pace; whether the forced inactivity will cause them to get fat, and why it even matters if they get fat, why they care, why they’re so shallow, why, why am I making this such a big deal?

Why: because we are a culture that praises efficiency at every turn. We place virtue on productivity. One is supposed to be able to do all the things, all the time, without breaking a sweat (except when dressed in sleek athleisure apparel — an entire subset of the fashion industry we’ve created explicitly to equate fitness with luxury), in order to be a valued member of adult society.

I am an adult. Leave me alone. I can do this myself. I can get my own coffee and open my own door and tie my own shoe. No, wait, I can’t. I can’t, actually. Help. I am an adult? Help!

…

When you’re adjusting to a new physical handicap, the whole world splits into two sorts of people: kind, generous saints and self-involved jerks. There is no more in-between. One passerby will run ahead to grab a door for you, and then another, sitting on the bench next to it, will just stare at you struggling to get back out, pushing into the handle with your shoulder and trying to prop it with the edge of your crutch. Some will say, “It’s totally fine, take your time,” while others will rush right past you, silent as you politely spew out sorries, avoiding looking you in the face.

A lot of people can’t bear witnessing other people’s fallibility, I’m realizing. Like it might be contagious.

But have I ever paused to seriously consider how it feels to live every day in a disabled body? How many times in the past have I been one of the self-involved jerks?

It’s not actually that simple, obviously — the split between saints and jerks. We all have our own inner turmoil that we project onto other people in problematic but human ways. (“Problematic” and “human” are synonyms.) While I was hopping up the stairs to the entrance of the local gym last week, a guy on his way out stopped to watch me from the top of the platform, asking, “Can you do that? You sure you can do that?” It was at least my fifth visit there since the injury to use the one or two machines that don’t require legwork when I need a break from lifting weights at home. So, yes, I could do this, I was sure. But I wondered what made him think I couldn’t, why he didn’t phrase it differently, whether he realized that his attempt at caring came off more like doubt and distrust. (“Ugh, typical Dad,” his kids might have said if they’d seen the interaction transpire.)

In the grocery store recently, I kept crossing paths with a woman and her young daughter who skittered perilously around my crutches in pursuit of graham crackers and Cheez-Its. (“Mom? Can we get the white cheddar ones? Mom? Mom?”) The woman must have apologized to me three times for the girl’s utter lack of awareness of my vulnerable state, for the fact that she could have knocked me sideways without thinking twice, her skirt flouncing around the little pink spools of her giddy legs. (Small children never know where their bodies end and the world begins. Mothers always know.)

Later, I was sitting outside a coffeeshop when a different kid actually stopped in her tracks on the sidewalk to frown at me, her eyes shifting back and forth from my face to my leg in its boot. Like my impairment made her angry. Like my mere existence was rude. I smiled and mouthed “hi,” as if I owed it to her to charm her with saccharine geniality to accommodate for my malady. I cringed afterwards, realizing how some people must spend their whole lives this way, apologizing for the apparent inconvenience they cause just by showing up in their own skin and the alleged audacity of daring to exhibit their imperfections in public.

Keah Brown explains this beautifully — how we perpetuate a belief that “disabled people are too much work, are burdens, and that we don’t like ourselves or our bodies.” She writes that disability is not the “worst possible thing,” though we tend to treat it that way. “I spent most of my adolescent and teenage years hating my body and myself,” Keah explains, in large part because of popular culture’s treatment of disability — not because of her disability itself.

There are so many ways we conflate difference with disaster.

There is a man who always sits in the same spot at the pedestrian entrance of the parking lot in town — an amputee in a wheelchair. He asks for spare change, but he also makes it his mission to say hello and wish a good day to everyone walking by. So many people must ignore and avoid him, but he lets each person know that they’re seen and therefore, that they matter. When I left the coffeeshop and hobbled past on my crutches, he called after me, “Feel better!”

And I will feel better. I will get my leg back. He will never get his leg back. I am one of the self-involved jerks, it turns out.

…

In a distant, detached way, I’ve always feared the loss of a limb. When I was diagnosed with type one diabetes at age 12 and taught to take on the complex roster of responsibilities that an average person’s pancreas handles automatically on its own, the main warning I was given, or at least the one that stuck, was the one that sounded most tangibly apocalyptic: If you don’t maintain good blood sugar control, you’re at high risk for amputation.

You don’t want to be left with just one leg, do you? Steer clear of the birthday cake and bagels. (Those were not any doctor’s exact words, but nearly. Those were the words I accumulated over the years.)

This is not easy advice for any 12-year-old to swallow, and so, she rebels against it. I rebelled against it. I decided it was stupid, because that was easier than calling it scary. I ate all the carbs I wanted, and I pretended I was invincible. My illness is invisible, so I could pretend not to see it; my body does not look “different,” so I could pretend it was the same as everyone else’s.

I got clumsy in college. Twice, I tripped badly and sprained my left ankle — the same one that’s now broken. During my junior year, I started having panic attacks, the first of which began while I was ambling nonchalantly down the make-up aisle at Rite-Aid. My vision starting swirling, and I struggled to breathe, and I dragged myself into the bathroom and shut the door and coiled on the floor by the toilet and called my mother and said, “Help, I think I’m dying!!!” This happened several times in several different scenarios as every cell of muscle and tendon and blood and bone inside me shrieked for my attention, knowing I’d ignored its subtler signals for years.

I finally adopted the doctors’ guidance — with a little too much gusto, though. I shunned the birthday cake and the bagels, but also everything else soft and sweet and joyful. Even the healthiest foods had to be measured with perfect accuracy to prevent overindulgence. I ate inside the lines, and I let the lines shrink smaller and smaller, just trying to get my body to quiet down. But that tactic, too, got old. My body shushed and shrunk to a whisper of itself, but my brain was so loud. My limbs carried a dull but perpetual soreness.

Our bodies are not built to sustain extremes, but they can handle harsh conditions for a long time. Somehow, our bodies always handle it, all the affliction that they don’t deserve. The aches and pains are just how they talk back to make their work known. The hurt is how they ask us for mercy.

…

I still don’t have all of the answers. There are still ways I fool myself to get what I want, instead of what I need. (I jog a little too far, or I eat four times as much dark chocolate in one sitting as actually feels good, or I get up and out into the fresh air a little later than I intend to.)

But if there is such a thing as balance, I’ve been living somewhere near it, fumbling my way towards it, trying to heed my body’s hints. I have studied its cravings and learned to exercise and eat in proper proportions, to be good, but not too good, precisely so that this doesn’t happen, so that I can avoid incapacitation. That’s the point, right? That’s why wellness has become such a popular trend with an almost religious ideology wrapped around it — it extends a veiled promise of eternal life.

As if running and broccoli could be elixirs to prevent slips and trips and accidents, which are all small symbols of mortality. As if proper proportions are stable markers, and balance isn’t an ever-wobbling illusion.

In the wiser corners of my brain, I know that no perfect dose of running and broccoli could prevent this sort of sudden casualty or even thwart slow-developing ailments, like the nerve damage that precedes an amputation, with any guarantee. But. I still feel angry some days lately, like my body’s misbehaviors are injustices I don’t deserve. Hopping on one leg for weeks doesn’t feel like balance at all; it feels like teetering. Weren’t we supposed to be past all of this by now? the less-wise corners of my brain want to know. As if.

…

I just finished reading Roxane Gay’s new book, Hunger. It’s a memoir that describes the harrowing sexual assault she endured at age 12 and her experience as a fat person — a fat black woman — in this world, with the two truths inextricably linked to each other. In a chapter towards the end, she tells a story of breaking her ankle and how it helped her learn to heal from her deeper wounds. “I was broken,” she writes, “and then I broke my ankle and was forced to face a lot of things I had long ignored. I was forced to face my body and its frailty.”

Gay explains, “I have always worried that I am not strong. Strong people don’t find themselves in the vulnerable situations I find myself in. Strong people don’t make the mistakes I make. This is some nonsense I have cooked up over the years, notions I would disabuse anyone else of but somehow still carry myself. When I worry I’m not strong, I become very invested in appearing invulnerable, unbreakable, stone-cold, a fortress, self-sustaining. I worry that I need to keep up this appearance even when I cannot.”

That I need to keep up this appearance even when I cannot. Even when I cannot. I cannot. What a strange game of dress-up we adults are all playing, trying to act the part of a superhuman — glimmering and shatterproof, and eternally good.

“I was broken and then I broke some more, and I am not yet healed but have started believing I will be,” she writes. Maybe that’s the best resolution we can get — believing we will be. And not recoiling from our broken bits so much in the meantime. Using the shards as small blocks to build character.

…

I know that it’s not permanent. I know that there are way worse injuries than broken ankles, and that even broken ankles are often way worse than mine. I know this. But. No human ego likes to have its plans crushed and discarded, to have crucial pieces of its assumed identity plucked away, to sit inside and squirm while everybody else, out there, seems to be going somewhere; to be reminded of its frangibility and impermanence, and to be forced to face all of its other open wounds.

Some days, this whole situation feels defeating in a way that’s not so much rational as it is corporeal, like there’s a kind of sadness rising up from the split of the fibula, the brokenness of the bone spilling into the rest of my limbs. I sit on my plastic stool in the shower with my left leg out on the tile to keep the boot dry, and I watch the hot water rolling down the soft, thick folds of stomach sandwiched with thigh, and I sob. Or, in line at CVS, I lean onto my right crutch while using my left hand to insert an insulin syringe in my stomach — something I can usually manage discretely, but now, these crutches attract attention, like a shiny frame around my body with a sign that reads, “Exhibit A: Mortal” — and I think, this is too much sickness, too much brokenness at once. I want to be digging dirt or harvesting strawberries or running, so badly that it stings, and I wonder if I’m going to forget myself, unlearn the shape of my normal daily life, lose the joy I’d finally finagled as my own, and plummet straight back down the mountain of optimum health, just as I thought I’d been nearing the unattainable top. (As the Greek mythology goes, Sisyphus cheats death with his sly trickery, and he is then punished by being forced to push a boulder up a hill for all time, never to reach the summit without the boulder rolling right back down.)

But most of the time, I am okay, actually. This could be so much worse. My body can handle it. I can handle it. I was never not broken anyway. I can still be who I am — adamantly optimistic, curious, persistent, can-do to a fault. When you break, you discover the parts of you that are unbreakable.

I lift weights on a yoga mat on the floor, and I hop up the stairs to the gym. I take slow but sweaty “walks” on my crutches. I start doing some of the things I always say I want to do but don’t have time for, like learning to make vegan cheese and devouring a daunting pile of books. Like this, writing here. Friends deliver sunflowers and rainbow-striped candles and soaps and cards, and family members carry hot mugs of tea to my seat on the couch (among other kind favors), and I am grateful. This could be so much worse that it’s silly. This is so far from the worst thing.

I think some of us get a little closer to our fragility than others. Some people spend years thinking they’re stone until they learn, with a shock, that they’re actually glass. Other people know they’re glass all along. Maybe it’s better that way. Maybe they carry their lives more gently, more kindly, more delicately, seeing the societal obsession with sleek, self-absorbed productivity and perfection for the sham that it is. Maybe they know better than to act like they don’t have cracks. Brokenness can be a breakthrough.

A story about a movement.

February 8, 2017

This is not a big deal, he said. It’s all a hilarious spectacle. “Nothing bad is actually going to happen.”

It was the day Trump took his oath, and I was trying to swallow my breakfast. I crossed my legs under the table and twiddled the silver spoon between my fingers, staring down at the frozen blueberries — leftovers saved from last spring’s harvest at the farm — floating in their muddled pool of coconut milk.

Besides, he said, towering over the kitchen counter with hands punching marble, “He won fair and square. Fair and square.” He said the problem with liberals is that they focus too little on logical facts and instead overreact, forgoing economics and practicalities for their lofty ideals. They are far too emotional.

Are we? I’m the daughter of two psychotherapists. As a kid, whenever I came home from school with a gripe about a classmate who had copied my crayon drawing or hurled an unfair insult or otherwise transgressed my perception of good morals or manners in some small, childlike way, my parents always offered the same response: she or he is just “insecure.” I never knew the true definition of the term, but I took it to mean that beneath every offense, there’s a heartache, however conscious or unconscious; that every person’s inner life warrants acknowledgment and respect; that untangling the world’s knots of conflicts begins by compassionately considering the emotional experiences of any adversary. Emotions explain and expand understanding; they elucidate the true logic.

I’m sorry you’re upset, sweetie. But remember, he didn’t mean badly. He’s just insecure.

My mom and dad insisted that I voice my own feelings, too, even as I repeatedly resisted, wanting to be an independent individual without the mushy gushy mess of self-revelation. At age 12 or so, I recall curling up like a bug in my seat in the back of the car with my frowning face towards the splotched window, sad or jealous or pissed about something but insisting that I didn’t want to talk about it.

“Just because you like discussing your feelings, doesn’t mean I do. I’m not like you.” Not true. We have to talk about what hurts. To discount one’s emotions is to deny one’s humanity, to lose touch with what makes humans humane, to reveal sharpness, sourness, or bitterness instead of softness and warmth.

I looked up from my blueberries, which were staining violet swirls in the soupy bowl. “I disagree,” I said. I don’t think that those perturbed by Trump’s presidency are “too emotional.” I don’t think that cold, keen economics can solve societal puzzles in tidy mathematical equations. I don’t think it’s ever wrong to take morals and ethics as seriously as detached rationality. (As if any of Trump’s actions have been “rational” at all, rather than based in emotion, in insecurity. As if any supposed solution that leaves no space for empathy, generosity, or basic morality could ever be “rational.” As if emotions weren’t what earned his votes. )

Think about the people who have specific reasons to feel threatened in ways that you might not, I told him. Consider the father who lost his six-year-old to gun violence. Consider the daughter who spoke up about her sexual assault after years of scared secrecy, only to be shushed. Consider the mother who moved her family across the border from Mexico and works tirelessly so that her children can obtain the education she never had, and the one whose kid’s future depends on federal funding for students with learning disabilities. Consider the son who held his boyfriend’s hand in public for the first time when gay marriage was ruled legal. Consider the brothers and sisters and friends of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling and so many other black Americans shot dead by police in 2016. Consider how they must ache. They are not “too emotional.” Just insecure, too. Just hurt. Just scared. Just trying to find a way to move through it.

By “too emotional,” what he meant was, too empathetic. Too sensitive. Too easily moved, instead of steady, unshakeable, fixed on success and stability at any cost.

…

The word “emotion” dates back to the 1570s, signifying “a (social) moving, stirring, agitation.” The root of it means “to move out.”

An emotion is a bundle of energy that’s intended for active expression. When suppressed, it’s like a wriggling bug under the clobbering thumb of alleged reason. It does not disappear. It only squirms and screams louder. It demands to “move out.” To be made public. To exhaust itself through some form of release. (This is how sadness displays itself as rage; how fear displays itself as fury; how insecurity displays itself as violence.)

The Women’s March was launched because one woman was upset on election day, and she spoke up about it in a Facebook post. Her expression of emotion — her energetic “moving out” — became a mass movement, spreading its ripples around the globe.

Two steps forward, one step back. One step back, two steps forward. In response to one mammoth step back, led by our new government, millions of people showed up and stepped up and stepped forward, all around the globe. One step back, millions of steps forward, steps forward, steps forward, steps forward in literal marching strides. A moving out. A moving through.

The steps back have felt so backwards, like reversals of progress, but that’s not just the dissenting perspective — they’re actually intended to feel that way. Our new president has positioned his entire campaign on a turnaround. Let’s make this country “great again,” he says. Let’s return to how it was. (You know that ugly and oppressive sound a monster truck makes as it reverses in blind jolts? That’s all I can hear in my head when he speaks — BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP.)

As novelist Zadie Smith writes, this sort of nostalgia “only makes sense if the rights and privileges you are accorded currently were accorded to you back then, too. If some white men are more sentimental about history than anyone else right now it’s no big surprise: their rights and privileges stretch a long way back.” Wistfulness for a bygone era is “entirely unavailable to a [black woman] like me, for in that period I could not vote, marry my husband, have my children, work in the university I work in, or live in my neighborhood. Time travel is a discretionary art: a pleasure trip for some and a horror story for others.”

Every vision of what it means to thrive — including one based in “practical economics”— is inherently emotional. We all search desperately for a forgotten feeling of comfort and security, because we’re wired to try to survive. The pursuit becomes a dragging back, a pushing forward, a jerking back, a reaching forward, a tug of war between progress and regression, which look like opposites from opposite sides, each one wrenched by a different version of angst.

…

I caught myself biting my nails last night — an old habit from sixth grade that only rears its head when I’m anxious. I’m confused at times, too. Overwhelmed. I am frustrated, annoyed, irritated in the most selfish ways — I’m supposed to be learning about farming, savoring sweet blueberries, tanning my shoulders in the sun, growing forward, not retreating to my room to read about the president’s latest acts of brutal bigotry. (Two steps forward, one step back.) In moments, I feel depressed, as we all do.

The word “depress” has its roots in the early 14th century, in the Old French depresser and the Latin depressare: “to put down by force; to press down.” The emotional definition of “depress” — “to deject, to make gloomy” — only arose in the 1620s.

That’s what he wants, isn’t it? (He, the president. He, the chief strategist. He, the man at the blueberry farm who barely let me get a word in, though I know he didn’t mean badly. He, The Man, the patriarchy that judges sentimentality as feminine, flimsy, and weak.) He wants to push us down.

In some ways, in some moments, it works. I don’t generally believe in writer’s block, but for months, I have struggled to write, because I can’t seem to find the right words; anything unrelated to politics seems petty. My creativity feels squashed and suppressed under that clobbering thumb of supposed reason that says, “Stay serious. Too much is at stake.”

But I have had enough of succumbing to silence, surrendering to dismay I think I’m supposed to feel. What we need, right now, is not the staunch, stale, stalwart stillness of “rational” argument that puts things in their places and pins them down there. What we need is more movement — more movement for this movement. Creativity, curiosity, joy, learning, love, adventure — these are the slippery, shape-shifting, ever-energetic things that move people.

…

In one of her best “Dear Sugar” columns, Cheryl Strayed offers this line about the many years of shitty confusions and “useless” meanderings everyone must endure before they someday add up to something: “These things are your becoming.” That’s how I feel about this political horror we’re all confronting now, together: this is our becoming. This is our learning to lose and to rally, to hurt and to heal. We young people, especially, are just getting started — we are only at the beginning, only learning the edges of wounds older than we are, far deeper than we can reach with our tiny arms, more complex than we can yet fathom.

We will spend the rest of our lives fighting for what we believe is right — in the public arena and in our homes; with our partners who stray or simply abandon their sticky plates in the sink one too many times; with our friends when they forget our birthdays or seem to flounder in their own small worlds; with our parents, as they grow too old and weary to buy their own groceries or tie their own shoes. It will be hard. We will falter and fumble and lose as we scrawl our own maps onwards, marked out in perpetual overlaps of two steps forward and one step back. We will move through it, but only as we speak up about how it all feels, and why, so we can figure out how to fix it. We have to talk about what hurts so that we can heal.

Two steps back. One step forward. Tread softly, but with strength.

A story about light in the dark.

January 11, 2017

A man comes down with the flu. He’s the sort of man who swims laps at the gym before work, who remembers to back up his computer on a weekly basis, who displays his kids’ crayon masterpieces in frames on his desk. He is used to being in control. But thanks to the flu, he is forced to surrender the second half of a day when he had intended to Get Important Stuff Done. At lunchtime, he crawls home in his car and retreats to his bedroom, demanding to be left alone.

I imagine him contorted under the covers with the curtains drawn, sniffling and writhing in the dark, and sputtering through the garbles of congestion, Everything is shit. (Pan to millions of fellow Americans entertaining the same sullen notions, each sickened by 2016 in their own ways.)

There’s a tiny, timid knock on the door that evening. It creaks open — his small son stands in the sliver of light that leaks in from the hallway. Daddy? From the bed, a groan. I just came to hurt with you.

The boy climbs up onto the mattress and curls into the mess: father and son, recumbent and quiet, small tangles of warmth within the awful. A slit of a sunbeam slips between the drapes, just enough to illuminate a wrist bone, a pink fingernail, a slow rising and falling of both chests.

…

This is not my story. It’s an embellished version of one I heard in a sermon at Washington National Cathedral on December 23rd. The ailing man (now recovered) is the reverend’s friend who had recently recounted his son’s comforting offering, marveling at how the moment had provided such simple but transcendental solace.

I invented the details, but not the fact of the disease (and the dis-ease), the bedroom withdrawal, or the boy’s words. I just came to hurt with you.

We are not a church-going family. We attended the Cathedral’s Christmas-themed service for the carols — for the warmth, for the nostalgic ritual, and for the enchantment. However subliminally, we went to be told, I am here to hurt with you, or just to soothe the year’s hurt in a space built on faith that everything is not shit.

…

During an average holiday season, it doesn’t feel so necessary to collect proof that everything is not shit. Most years, it’s probably not normal for a Christmas sermon to be more bittersweet than joyful, but that was the theme of the whole thing: life is dark these days, and you must find the light, for yourself and for the people around you.

Brene Brown writes, “The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it.” An addition: neither does the light destroy the dark, except in a small and unsustainable moment of pure blaze. The two forces dance in and out of one another, rendering each other’s existence at the edges. Light splatters dapples and shapes shadow puppets, while dark creates the cavern to contain a flicker or glow.

To bring something to light is to make it known. To darken is to shade — to show nuance that might be otherwise invisible.

…

In my oldest memories of Christmas, I turn off the lamps in the living room and turn on the bulbs of fake candles in the windows. I am dressed in slippery sock feet and a nightgown with white lace trim and pink satin ribbons, and I spin pirouettes around the wooden floors, cradling a tiny wooden nutcracker. Go away, Mom and Dad. I am Clara. Do not ruin it.

Our decorated fir tree stands in the corner, and I crawl back behind it. The string lights and ornaments cast rainbows around the dark walls of this makeshift cave, where I try to keep still and keep quiet, lest I break a bauble and shatter the magic.

One night, one year, I hear a muffled jingle of bells that can only be explained by approaching reindeer, can’t it? A year or two later, I contemplate the practical viability of Santa. I have come to understand the bigness of the world, and the mythical figure no longer seems to fit its harsh realities. Still, I search for evidence to validate fable over fact.

When I catch my mom at my pillow, playing Tooth Fairy, I become more convinced of the unsavory truth. I ask her for confirmation: Is it all made up? Santa, too? When she answers, my faith in folklore consequently collapses. I remember being bitter and wishing she’d lied to me. The magical explanation, however unsustainable, felt better.

Don’t tell your sister yet, my parents request. Let’s not ruin it for her. She still believes.

…

In December 2002, a traumatic trip to the ER culminates in my diagnosis with type one diabetes. The next day, I’m rolled from the intensive care unit to a private room in the hospital, where family friends deliver a three-foot-tall Christmas tree. I do not want to be photographed with the phony Santa who is making his way up and down the halls, thank you very much. I know how horrible my hair looks. Besides, the scent of antiseptic soap corrodes any possibility of holiday charm.

In the following weeks, I’m forced to memorize the estimated carbohydrate counts in common foods: 30 in two slices of bread, 15 in a small apple, 40 in one cup of rice. The nutritionist quizzes me, holding up a rubber bagel and a fluorescent fake banana from her side of the table in the doctor’s office. I am 12 years old and terrified and angry and confused.

For whatever foods I can’t memorize, I use a pocket-sized book of nutrition information. We keep a copy in the kitchen cabinet, and my mom carries another in her purse. We flip through its shiny pages at restaurants, anxiously searching for “mashed potatoes” or “burrito” before I am allowed to eat.

Every meal requires a syringe in the stomach or arm or butt with a specific dose of medicine: the sum of carbohydrates multiplied by an insulin ratio, which differs depending on the time of day and depending how active I’ve been and will be later, among other factors. I have always been good at math, but my life has never been at stake like this before. Accounting for certain foods, like pizza and birthday cake — the beloved centerpieces of most childhood rituals, each gooey and glorious circle ceremoniously sliced and shared evenly among the group — proves especially tricky. The doctors urge me to avoid these things whenever possible, along with Halloween candy, pasta, ice cream, and whatever else tops the typical 12-year-old’s list of favorites.

The doctors also tell me that if I don’t master all of this guesswork-based arithmetic, I could face amputations, heart disease, and blindness by my 20’s or 30’s, which seem so soon and so distant at the same time.

I am 12 years old and terrified and angry and confused. In my journal, I scribble an entry about how terrified and angry and confused I am. It’s not so much the physical side effects that scare me — it’s more the metaphysical whimsy I want to protect. I want to keep my daydreams. I want my unique identity in tact. I want independence, but also to fit in with the other 12-year-olds who don’t seem as terrified and angry and confused as I am. I want joy and triumph and magic within the banal constrictions of bodily illness — that is, without the honest everyday reminder that I’m thoroughly mortal.

If cheerless math and malady eclipse all of life’s lightness, what’s the point? I wrangle with this question for the remainder of my childhood and young adulthood, scrounging perpetually for evidence — preserved in writing, drawings, and photographs — that everything is not shit. That there’s transcendental goodness muddled in the dull brutality of reality. That there will always be communion in the shadows — to hurt is to be mortal is to be human, together. The depth is worth its darkness.

…

It’s December 2016, and I’m sitting at the sunlit wooden counter, eating a bowl of sautéed kale, tatsoi, and sweet potatoes for lunch. Before I head home for Christmas, I’m spending 10 days back at Shannon Farm, the first place I apprenticed four months ago when I was just beginning my traveling exploration into organic agriculture.

In September, when the weather was juicy with sweat and summer bugs and when the world still swelled with zestful (if tenuous) promise, I helped prepare what was going to be a winter garden. My host, V, taught me to till the beds with bare hands, to push the red markers onto every other prong of the rake, to draw the shallow grooves in the dirt, and to fill those trenches (in slow pinches, like pretending to scatter fairy dust) with the tiny brown beads of soon-to-be kale, the teensy tatsoi, and the brown teardrops of spinach.

You want good seed-to-soil contact, V had explained as we patted the seeds into their muddy blankets. No air pockets. The tiny kernels would need a warm, dark nestle to survive and to sprout.

And sprout, they did. Now, the frills of leafy jade have grown into a miniature jungle, safely cloaked from winter’s chill with row covers and a high tunnel. (Farmers use this sort of temporary greenhouse system to elevate the temperature by a few significant degrees, so tender leaves can continue to flourish. The simple technology blocks out the frost while capturing and containing sunlight, which naturally converts to warmth.) When I peek underneath the thin cloth, the smell of lush, crowded life is almost sickeningly fresh — a shock to the numbed nose. The purple pansies and giddy greens seem so blissfully unaware of what’s happening beyond their warm bubble: the opposite of abundance. A grim crumble.

The rest of the garden has turned to brown. The tiny red tomatoes that I previously popped onto my tongue like candy are nowhere to be found; neither are the throngs of flowers, the clustered fiestas of jalapeño peppers, the luffa squashes hanging plump from their vines. In September, I weeded the patch of sweet potatoes, memorizing the heart shapes of the leaves while the amber knobs secretly swelled underground. By December, those potatoes have been uprooted and moved indoors to cure in a dry drawer.

In fact, it seems like all of life’s vivacity has been shifted from outside to in. To heat the house whose doors and windows were once tossed open for cooling, a fire burns in the wood stove, embers popping. Twinkling strands of lights coil up around the banisters of the stairs and deck the tree that stands propped in the family room. Distant family and friends, newly reunited for the holiday season, assemble for boisterous group games of Catan. And here I am, too, welcomed back into Shannon Farm’s cozy fold. Both the farm and I are changed but the same, both grown up in ways that might resemble destruction from a peripheral view.

V has dried the crop of luffa squashes, so we peel them and slice them into discs to set into homemade soaps we plan to give as Christmas presents. While we microwave and stir and tint the glycerine, I tell her about where I’ve been and what I’ve done this autumn — about planting hundreds of garlic cloves, about rotating herds of sheep from pasture to pasture, about learning the amusing social hierarchies of goats. When I was last here, we cringed through the first presidential debate, shaking our heads at the television screen and protesting in disbelief, trying to trust that the sick joke would end in due time; now, hopelessly dismayed and disempowered, we agonize together, scavenging for the positive moral in this realized dystopian horror story. We scatter rose petals into the soap molds.

Later, I toss the sliced sweet potatoes and tatsoi and kale into a hot pan and serve up the mix for a quick lunch. As always, the syringe in the stomach comes first. A bruise blooms. But the meal that follows is transcendent. It’s just food, just vegetables, but ones I planted myself, with help. It’s a wink of true magic in the shadows of the menial; proof that something crisp, bright, and nourishing can come from humble seeds nestled in the mud, as long as they’re sowed with support and fostered with adequate sunlight. There, the moral. At least everything is not shit.

…

But a lot of it is. America aches in all places. The sacred mythology of American democracy feels as if it has collapsed. (Was it all made up? There never was liberty and justice for all, was there?)

The President of the United States is an impossibly legendary figure whose shape is always shifting. The title inflicts too much patriotism, too much power, too much responsibility for one mortal man to unfailingly bear, though perhaps a woman might have been better prepared to take its oxymoronic double standards. We yearn for a leader who might set us free and protect us at once, who might carry us into a better future with 240 years of old baggage in tow, who might transform and stabilize at the same time and somehow do it with both strength and a smile. The romanticized illusion has always been futile. Now, the fable feels feebler than ever.

Our collective shadow side, brought to light, threatens to swallow fifty states whole.

…

“The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it.” Darkness illuminates. It clarifies. Its depths contain glimmers: kindness, camaraderie, communion, quiet growth beneath the surface. The dark is the place to probe for what’s otherwise unseen.

…

The hero of the story is not the strong father, but the small child. I just came to hurt with you. I wonder how the littler me — the one in the nightgown and sock feet — would have reacted to Trump. Would this reality have crushed her? Would she not have noticed the ache, too entranced by her innocent faith in goodness?

She wouldn’t have had patience for an attitude of somber surrender, I don’t think. She wouldn’t have tolerated worried frowning. She would have grabbed at my hand, pointed at the Christmas tree that’s now well past its prime as the month of January ticks closer to inauguration. Look. The lights are still lit. Don’t you see them? Come, dance. In my mind, her tiny white socks flit across carpet and floor. Her feet flicker in the shadows.

A story about loss and redemption.

November 21, 2016

At the beginning of September, I set off on a new adventure: I’m traveling around the country over the coming months, living and volunteering on a variety of small-scale organic farms through WWOOF. This essay is about my most recent stop: a family farm in Bulls Gap, Tennessee.

One of the pigs went into labor within the first hour of my arrival at my latest farmstay in Tennessee, which belongs to a married couple (husband J and wife W) with two sons and two daughters between the ages of three and eight. The sow laid on her side, panting, while we watched from outside the fence.

A tiny, speckled piglet slipped out and wriggled blindly in the hay, and then another. I squirmed and squealed, just like the pink-eared baby animals. This was delight. This was wonder. This was the blissful naïveté of optimistic glee that infused those days before the presidential election, when it seemed like the whole country was on the cusp of exhilarating newness — nervous, but so very hopeful.

The kids were enthused but easily distractible, already familiar with the bloody births (and deaths) of livestock after residing on the farm for a year and a half. They were interested in the process, but more inquisitive than enchanted. Children always seem so blithely curious about these things, as if still too close to their own births and too far from their own deaths to view either margin of life as loaded with formidable magic. They come riddled with pure questions, unweighted by adult anxiety.

The birthing process soon took a turn for the worse. We had predicted ten piglets based on the number of the mom’s teats and expected them to arrive about ten minutes apart, but twenty minutes passed after the second piglet, and then thirty, and then forty. As the first two attempted to nurse, the sow growled and snapped at them aggressively, shoving them away. Each time, I leapt, battling the urge to jump the fence, to nuzzle the piglets myself, to interject.

“Come on, mama,” we kept pleading from outside. “I don’t understand.” “I don’t understand.” “I don’t understand.”

“Why?” asked the kids repeatedly, losing patience. “We don’t know,” replied the adults, at a loss for answers. “No, oh, no!” we all said, over and over, losing hope.

We were wrestling for control as it slipped like sand through our fingers. Our words would change nothing, but they were, at least, expressions of emotional energy, converted and released — the jerks, tugs and yanks of empathy, worry, and unease. They were the reverberating echoes of our shared human pain, passed from one person to the next while we communally watched the natural but hideous catastrophe unfold, powerless to stop it, simply wishing the outcome were different. So quickly, delight had cracked and crumbled into defeat.

I’ll save you the gory details, but the sow ultimately bore four babies. By the following afternoon, only one tiny-hoofed tot remained alive. It was the second of the four, recognizable by its pattern. By coincidence, it was also the only one that the children had given a name.

“Let’s call that one Lucky,” they had said, almost immediately after it emerged, when things still looked good, but not long before they gave up waiting and abandoned the scene. “See, you can recognize it because of the black spot around its eye, see?”

Lucky. Yes. I saw. In the days that followed, watching was just about the only thing I could do, unsure whether to smile or cringe at the piglet’s vulnerable stumbles and sniffs around the pen. I watched and I witnessed as — by what seemed like a miracle — he survived.

[Read more…]

A story about standing your ground.

October 22, 2016

At the beginning of September, I set off on a new adventure: I’m traveling around the country over the coming months, living and volunteering on a variety of small-scale organic farms through WWOOF. This essay is about my second stop: a small vegetable farm in Liberty, Kentucky.

The way I assimilate anywhere is by walking. Wandering on a treasure hunt without a map is how I pad my own path home, pocketing whimsies along the way: tiny wildflowers, snapshots of sunlight. But the first time I tried to traipse around my neighborhood in Liberty, Kentucky, the local dogs didn’t like it.

Some simply barked from their front lawns or cowered and growled from a few feet away, like they knew I was an outsider, and my mere presence was a threat. A pack of three loose ones came chasing after me, including a large pitbull that leaped up with its paws at my shoulders and bit at my forearms and calves.

I tried to speak smoothly and sweetly — “Okay, okay, I’m leaving, okay, okay, okay, oww, okay” — and eventually pried myself away, heading back from the direction I came, heart racing. Was the beast being playful or menacing? Regardless, there were teeth involved. On my phone, I Googled, “what to do in case of aggressive dog attack.”

Use a stern but gentle tone of voice, said Google, so I’d done that right. Avoid eye contact. Put something between you and the animal, like a large branch. Back away slowly, rather than turning your back.

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