A Letter to My Students

I've been teaching a class to highschoolers on newswriting the past few weeks. The final assignment is a column -- a chance for the kids to shine and leave us all with some thoughts to remember them by.

I promised them that I would go, too.

Here's what I'll have to say. We'll see if they like it.

A Letter To My Students

When I was a senior in high school my English teacher gave me an incredible gift. Actually, she gave it to our entire class, in the days leading up to our graduation, and now I am passing this gift onto you.

Her endowment came in just a few simple words and they went like this.

Dear students, she said, you are being told that these are the best days of your life, and this is such a great lie. These are not the best days of your life. Most decidedly not. Not even close.

I remember receiving her declaration like a lifeline, my lungs expanding like balloons beneath the walls of my chest. I had gone through my high school years fearing that I had missed out somehow, that the good things had passed me by because I was not terribly popular, pithy, pretty or rich. I didn’t wear the right clothes. I rode the bus to school. I liked to read too much. My elbows were too bony. My shirts never fit quite right. I tried too hard. I knew that I was missing out.

Our school presented a musical my senior year – if I remember right it was Grease – and the excitement of the performances stuffed up the hallways of my high school in the days leading up to opening night. I wanted to go and see. No one invited me to go along with them. I asked my mom to the Saturday night show, and we went. When we arrived at the auditorium, some of the other kids talked and laughed and made jokes with me. It was fun. My mom said I could go and sit with them if I wanted to, that she’d be fine sitting alone. But I knew I had to sit with her. No one had asked me over to the chairs next to them.

And so I feared with all my heart that the best days of my life were such a terrible bust. Then came Mrs. Coehlo’s wonderful words. These are not the best days of your life, she said. She promised. She promised and I believed. Whether or not you’re the lead in Grease or the skinny girl sitting next to your mom, it doesn’t matter, because it gets so much better than this.

You must go forward into the great unknown and come to understand that there are love affairs to be had, children to bear, countries to visit, mountains to climb. There are things to study, colleges to go to, people to meet, dreams to behold, songs to learn, friends to cherish, jokes to laugh at, and dances to groove.

You must still go out there and live in your first, very own apartment, with the leaky faucet and without the dishwasher so that you can grow mold on your cheese and fur on your tomatoes and slime on your turkey. You must feel so proud of this accomplishment. You must promise yourself to eat healthy and immediately fall off the wagon and survive on Dominoes Pizza for a week. You must hurt sometimes, because hurt – if you let it – can become an incredibly instructive and you will watch as your ennui blossoms into possibility and you flourish. You must simply trust me on this point. Someday you will know exactly what I mean.

You must get your first job, your first true love, your first broken heart, your first taste of justice, and your first whiff of the amazing expanse of whatever you know to be grace. You must become your own friend, and when you do this, you will have accomplished an incredible feat. You must learn to recognize what this feels like, because you will probably have to do it again, and again, and again. We humans like to turn on ourselves, and the knives we throw in our own backs cut hard and deep.

You must learn to do this less. You need your own companionship so much.

You will go forward and you will remember these days, some of you more fondly than others. Remember this, too, though. You can tell a lot about a person in their later years by how much their adolescence still means to them. Life is a journey toward what is ahead. And so –

Take risks, but make them smart ones. Don’t get yourself killed doing dumb things, like drinking and driving, taking too many drugs, having reckless sex, or just being stupid with guns. Know that whatever happens to you and however hard you fall, you can get up, somehow. Bear in mind that getting up is easier if somebody extends a hand in help. Be a hand for somebody else. Hope. Always hope. Don’t worry so much about looking foolish. Remember it’s always better to learn than to know. Laugh. Dance. Be.

After all, the music, the moment? You know that you own it.

On Birthdays, Bright Sides, and Dog Shit

Yesterday was my birthday. It was a good day; I received many cards and wishes encouraging me forward into new beginnings, new starts, promises of days to come. I smiled. I agreed. I hoped. When it came time to blow the candles out, I forgot to make a wish. It's probably better that way.

The things I would have wished for, for me, for you, for us. Huh. What an extraordinary year it was, so much learning, living, loving, grieving, giving things up, giving things in, reaching for the bar, another start, falling flat on my face. One thing that hasn't come very clear as I've made my sporadic postings in this blog is how important I think it is to find the funny in every moment of the hell and the folly because, really, all of this shit can be very, very funny, and if you choose not to laugh, it's just all despair all the time.

For instance: a few weeks ago some most excellent pals of mine lent me their super-licious yellow lab to keep me company while my sweet boy was gone away for too, too long on a business trip. One Sunday morning, I took the old fellow out for a walk around the block so he could complete his morning tasks. Of course, the showoff preferred a performance. He decided to leave his remains in the yard of a home with a toddler, while the youngster watched us through the screen door, greeting us happily, good morning! His dad scooted over, I waved sheepishly and said, oh, hey, sorry about all this.

Don't worry he said; I bent down and picked up my grandstanding dog's leftovers on the lawn. Case closed, right? No big deal. Wrong.

I had the dog shit in my right hand, holding it in the enviro-friendly blue bag. The next step was to simply turn the bag inside out, so as to tie it up neatly and carry it away. Easy-peasy. Except the goddamn bag had holes on both sides. Out came the shit, ricocheted off of my pajama leg and went splat right back onto the sidewalk. And there I was, with two choices. 1. Decide that I was about to enjoy more or less the worst and most humiliating day of my life or 2. Figure that once you've had a pile of dog shit ricochet off of your leg and splat down irretrievably on the sidewalk, in front of an audience, it really can't get much worse. I did my best with option two. I made a half-hearted attempt to clean up the mess, actually waved again at the happy family behind the screen door, and tarried along on my way. What the fuck.

There's so much dog shit out there ricocheting off of us all the time. We try to clean up the way we talk about it so that maybe we can somehow talk ourselves out of admitting that it really is as bad as we fear it might be. If you read what I just wrote, you can see what I mean. At first I talked around my problem, the dog had tasks, remains, leftovers. But this is baloney. The dog needed to dump. And the worst part about caring for animals is that we get to clean it up.

We get to clean up the shit. So much shit.

Back to my birthday. Well wishes galore. People imploring my future to smile more brightly on me than have the past few years. I wanted to drop to my knees and insist it to be true. I don't know if it will be. I think it might be. I hope and I pray.

Minimally, I know this: even as I'm not sure about so much of what I believe, there are a few things that I cling to quite tightly, things that pull me through when I start to drown. I believe in hope. I believe in goodness. I believe that most people mean well. I believe in second chances, and maybe even thirds and fourths. I believe in saying I'm sorry and meaning it with all my heart. I believe in mountain hikes. I believe in drinking from streams. I believe in reading books. I believe in poetry. I believe in music.

And I believe the hummingbird at my window just might be the best sight I see all day, until my sweet love comes home from work and walks right through our door.

I believe all of these things, and for right now these things are enough to keep me moving forward through all of the shit I still must find a way to either clean up or else gracefully learn to endure.

Endo, Acupuncture and Leaning Into It

I've started acupuncture. So far, I've had two treatments and I'm not sure what to say about it except to say I'm encouraged and I like it very much. My accupuncturist is an old high school friend of mine and I think that helps -- I know she's not the "out there" type who will start ringing sterotypical chimes or chanting in some random way without warning. The description that I just gave is incredibly unfair to acupuncturists and proponents of Chinese medicine everywhere. Everywhere. I know this because of what I've experienced in my two go-rounds with the needles. Oriental medicine outdoes western medicine in its wholistic approach a thousand to one. Thank the heavens for humility and an authentic desire to listen.

Most amazing, incredible and, frankly, scary is my healer's insistence that I learn to lean into my pain. I call her my healer for I am not sure what else to call her, but I think that she would say that I must heal myself. She can administer my treatments, but I must do the work. But I don't want to call her my treater, and I don't want to call her my acupuncturist, and she is in a role beyond that of my friend when I am on her table so, for now, I shall call her my healer. I will assume that we both know what I mean and that you, my reader, do, too, even if I still have hepatic endometriosis at the end, if that ever comes. I very well might. I don't care. Centimeters of incremental improvement are enough, as is the incredible encouragement that comes from feeling heard and taken seriously.

But then there is the leaning into the pain. The pain. Yikes. When she says to lean into the pain, she means so much more than the hepatic endometriosis. There is no need to lean into that physical pain, it simply exists. Instead, she means, I am learning to mean, to lean into the direction that pain is meaning for me to take. What is that pain saying to me, to tell me about me? Where does it come from? Why is it here? What can it teach me? This pain as a gift -- a gift! -- to allow me to open to me, to my past, to the things that have sunk me below the surface of my life's water until I began to forget to breathe, held it all so tight that everything had nowhere to go except that one place where it had to live and learn to scream, my liver. Lean into that girl, lean into that.

Holy shit show. Holy shit.

Anger, sadness, grief, the sadness and hardness on myself. All the I didn't mean to's, should haves, could haves, would haves, twists and turns of fate.

Endometriosis is a bummer and a pain and a travesty to the hilt. I have also been telling people of late that it is an amazingly transcendent experience. Life's regularly scheduled programing -- the hurts that we all go through and the fun stuff, as well -- suddenly seem so much more manageable after these past few months (three months tomorrow) of getting through this. I find that when I laugh, I laugh harder. When I look forward, I really can hardly wait. I don't know how this story ends. I don't even know if it does. I surely hope this acupuncture is going to help. Lots of studies about acupuncture and endometriosis say it will. Yay.

I don't know how this story will end. But like I've said before, this is not it. Not for me. And whatever is your it, not for you either.

Hey you
Check out the view
Winding down the 1
Me and the miss
Sharin' bliss
And soakin' up the sun
And I feel like I've been resurrected
In my lifetime
I have never felt protected
And loved like I do
When I am here with you
Only You

And I know you've got something to believe in
Down deep inside your desperate soul
Hey friend don't you stop believin'
In the dreams that you had
The dreams that we all had
~Shawn Mullins, Beneath the Velvet Sun, 2000

Tragic Optimism

I haven't posted for awhile, and I'm not sure why. It's been a strange few weeks. In some senses I feel stronger -- physically, emotionally, maybe even spiritually. But in other ways I feel more hollow than ever. I recently read the book, Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl, and it was good. Good in the sense that it has helped me to conceptualize anew some of my thoughts about my journey. Frankl's premise is that one finds purpose in life through finding meaning, and most of us find meaning in one of three ways: work, love, or suffering. In each case, it is up to us to assign the meaning -- in essence, to find the way out. It is a very future oriented approach, especially with regard to suffering. You hold the shards of glass in your hands, and you decide what to make with them now.

At first it is a very empowering idea. Frankl writes as a survivor of four concentration camps, and his account of his suffering is very profound and impossible to argue with. I would not trade places with him. His depth of trauma adds ineffable validity to his book and his brain child, "logotherapy," logo" from the Greek for "meaning." But the reader has to do the work to find the meaning in Frankl's suffering. He doesn't do that within the pages of his tome. He writes his story from a psychoanalytic point of view, and then he writes of his therapeutic approach. As a reader I sensed his forgiving and humble soul, and I admired him for that. But there is no, "why?" there. Included at the back of the book is the written text of a lecture he gave which is titled, "Tragic Optimism." The words tragic optimism resonate. He rejects the philosophical schools (of which I have studied much) of nihilism and insists that life must have meaning. But what is the meaning of 6 million Jews dead while he survived? He doesn't even begin to answer. He acknowledges that his survival was due in marginal part to his optimism and will, but much more so to luck. He urges that a grain of hopeful sand in a mountain despair is enough. I am not so sure.

Tragic Optimism. What a fucking cool two words. I wish that I had been the one to have written that. I feel it. I feel it deep inside. This -- whatever is this -- this is not over, this is not the end of the story. I am still more than hepatic endometriosis. My boy and I went out to watch our first baseball game of the season together on Sunday, and as we stood in the concessions line, we watched a dad holding his son in the line ahead of us. We didn't come into our endo diagnosis craving a child. We came into it horrifically, through pain in my upper abdominal region, and then through ultrasouds and endoscopes and lapraroscopes and MRIs. Infertility was never on our mind, and the possibility of not being able to conceive feels a bit like a fender bender after a three-car pileup. At least it feels like that right now. But as we watched the dad and his son, I felt my sadness meet my joy and something in that became hopeful. There is still life ahead.

There is a song that came into my life just when I needed it most, from just the right person which is part of its gift to me. The lyrics go like this:

Now you can call it the devil, call it the big lie
Whatever it is, it ruins almost everything we try
It's the sins of the fathers, and it's the choices we make
It's people screaming without making a sound
From prison cells in paradise, while we're chained to our mistakes

Well, I don't know when and I don't know how
I don't know how much it's going to cost you
Probably everything
But I know you will go free

You can't see the jailer, you can't see the bars
You can't turn your head around fast enough
But it's everywhere you are
It's all around you
Everywhere you walk, these prison walls surround you

But in the midst of all of this darkness
Yeah, in the middle of this night
I see the truth cut through this curtain like a laser
Like a pure and holy light

I know I can't touch you now
And I don't want to speak too soon
When we get sprung from out of these cages, baby,
God knows what we might do

But I don't know when, and I don't how
I don't know if you'll be leaving alone or if you'll be leaving with me
But I know
You will go free...
~Tonio K. "You Will Go Free" from Romeo Unchained 1986.