gravespinning
Thursday 4 March 2010 | someone left a cookie
1. So yesterday I was waitlisted at the only PhD program to which I could, apparently, be arsed to apply. It was my only application largely because I feel so ongoingly guilty about trying to beg/borrow/steal/win yet more writing time—as a recovering Protestant, clearly I should quit receiving and give back more than I presently do. A la même fois, I also fell in love with teaching lit last year, and I thought I might have a better crack at doing that (at the college level) with a doctorate. So I expressed my ambivalence over my own wanton literary desires by self-sabotagingly applying to just one program. Go me!
(I also didn’t apply to more programs because the Brujo doesn’t want to live in the cities/states in which the programs appear. Or anyway that’s what I told myself.)
Anyway this particular PhD program found funding for six slots and they ranked me number seven! Hey, I’m lovin’ it! It feels good to be number seven! So good that I want to celebrate! Listen to Iron Maiden baby with me, woo-ooo-ooo….
So here’s this—a consolation prize from a sly Mlle Bovary, who knows me but too well.
Really, where to begin? So much to say, so few words. Genuinely speechless. A mosquito, my libido. My favorite part is probably the bubbleheaded “sports” commentary. Or maybe it’s Scott’s AUTHENTIC FLANNEL SHIRT.
2. Wandering around the house this morning after a largely sleepless night, boiling the steel-cut oats, making the rooibos chai, quietly ausfreaked in my own personal low-affect way, it becomes even more evident that I was kind of hoping I’d get to have one aspect of my life be determined. But I don’t get that. My current job/program ends in early May when I graduate; the Brujo’s and my lease is up June 31; and I don’t know if we’re staying together. And of course in the back of my head I was hoping that even if he and I were totally up in the air (stop-motion, bullet-time, freeze-frame) that something else would be for sure. That I would know where to move to next.
Nothing’s for sure; if four monastic practice periods and a gaggle of sesshins didn’t teach me anything else I hope they (plus sitting at Maman’s sickbed, plus my general lifelong choices of indigence and transience and serial monogamy) have taught me that: Nothing’s for fucking sure.
And, as I put grade B maple syrup on my oats (from a refrigerator, run by electric power which I did nothing to help produce) nothing would be sure even if I *had* been number six instead of number seven. I remind myself of this, maturely and sanely. Maybe I would have been MISERABLE in the PhD program. Maybe I will experience great JOY in finding a job where I can be useful, even if it’s not the job I think I want. If I can’t teach what I want, to whom I want, I can teach other things to other people.
And I can be a community-college adjunct again or be a high-school teacher or be a whatever, and still write. Other people have done it, do it. I’m not special and delicate; I won’t fucking break. (She groused at herself, and stirred in the maple syrup.)
3. 
So one of the side benefits of cyberstalking the Monk all these years has been that I’ve had my fucking consciousness raised. Can you believe it?! What a blow.
Anyway he’s continued and extended his work with the homeless and every time I read one of his articles I actually goddamn LEARN something. One of the things I’ve been noticing in myself is the tendency to give people I see in public adjectival tags, mentally or verbally, in later descriptions of events: “There was this homeless guy on the light rail last night”—in much the same way that, a decade ago, I might have said, “I was talking to this black girl after class,” or, “This gay guy was telling me about his new job.” So now I’m stubbornly seeking to eradicate the gratitutous, irrelevant modifier: “There was a guy on the light rail last night singing about Jesus.” Is his housing status important to the story? No. The story is really a story about someone who’s mentally interesting. Would I say, “There was a crazy guy on the light rail”? I might. But only if it were part of the story. What’s part of the story? What needs to be part of the story?
I don’t know, and I don’t have to know. I just try stuff to see what happens. I still ignore the people I denominate “homeless”—as a woman I give men in public a wide berth anyway, whether they’re in neckties or cardboard. No eye contact, closed body language. As I get older and our culture erases my sexual availability, maybe I can experiment more with being more open to strangers. I’d like to be that way, like a nun, like a caring open nun.
One thing I do know even as a closed-off, cowardly person is that there are words on this page that bother me, and words that confuse me. Which sounds about right, for a cultural reaction to/definition of mental illness. And this is me saying I’m bothered and confused—and I’ve sat with some of these people, and had workshops with them, and I’ve heard that fucking Kisagotami story about ten squillion times (plus I revised/wrote my own version of it for the Dying Book). I’m lay-ordained in this lineage; and, stuff still bothers me.
I’ve also known about Daigu Knight for quite a while (though I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him); but these words in particular unsettled me, which words aren’t his: “He manages his extreme mental and emotional states with Zen and small amounts of one psychiatric medication.” Just SMALL amounts. They’re really just very SMALL. When you click to read the whole article about Daigu, you learn further that “with a regular zazen practice, 12 step work and Christian contemplative prayer he has been able to get off all other psychiatric medications and reduce the one he is currently on.” It’s only ONE! One is good. One is okay. More than one…that’s bad. That’s really bad. That shows how unholy and out-of-control you are…how bad you are at Zen and spiritual practice! (I know, that’s not what it says. But…that’s kind of what it says.)
Don’t get me started / where do I start. I’m dealing with pretty much the same speechlessness that one encounters with “Nirvana on Ice,” really. Here, you know what—for now I’ll just let Andrew Solomon do the talking for me.
Since I am writing a book about depression, I am often asked in social situations to describe my own experiences, and I usually end by saying that I am on medication.
“Still?” people ask. “But you seem fine!” To which I invariably reply that I seem fine because I am fine, and that I am fine in part because of medication.
“So how long do you expect to go on taking this stuff?” people ask. When I say that I will be on medication indefinitely, people who have dealt calmly and sympathetically with the news of suicide attempts, catatonia, missed years of work, significant loss of body weight, and so on stare at me with alarm.
“But it’s really bad to be on medicine that way,” they say. “Surely now you are strong enough to be able to phase out some of these drugs!” If you say to them that this is like phasing the carburetor out of your car or the buttresses out of Notre Dame, they laugh.
“So maybe you’ll stay on a really low maintenance dose?” they ask. You explain that the level of medication you take was chosen because it normalizes the systems that can go haywire, and that a low dose of medication would be like removing half of your carburetor. You add that you have experienced almost no side effects from the medication you are taking, and that there is no evidence of negative effects of long-term medication. You say that you really don’t want to get sick again. But wellness is still, in this area, associated not with achieving control of your problem, but with discontinuation of medication.
“Well, I sure hope you get off it sometime soon,” they say.
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Footnote: that I seem to do the same adjectival thing with students/”high-school kids” AKA young people, though I go ahead and use nouns with them: “I overheard these students talking on the light rail, and OMG do you know what they said?!” Is their age important? Only in that it renders them acceptable targets for ridicule/scrutiny in my mind.
I’ve been snobby for years about calling my college students “students” instead of “kids” (the more so because sometimes they’re, you know, in their 50s and 60s). Now this. Lest you think I’m being too scrupulous, try it yourself. Next time you find yourself amused at what some teenagers or children are doing/saying, trying referring to them in your head as people. Just people. To me, it feels revelatory, and opens up closed spaces.