Profession #53, Why I Do What I Do, part II (San Marcos, Guatemala)

Holy Smokes! Has it really been three months, six months, nine months... A YEAR AND TWO MONTHS since I last posted? That’s time enough for me to have gotten pregnant, had a baby and started on a second!  Making kids is not what I have been up to since last December.  I did, however, help raise a whole herd of them May-August at the ranch in Glen Rose, Texas. 

        I got a good start on a travelogue in late August, but chicken shit that I am, didn't finish it. That feels harsh to say, AND sumthin's gotta give. I continue to torture myself by feeling the call to write and then refusing to do it. In keeping with how I roll, I am going to do something about it. I greet you at this very second from AA flight 2283 in route to Las Piramides (www.laspiramidesdelka.com), a retreat center in Guatemala, where I hope to get a spin on “the issue.” 
   
      When I was there last fall with my LeapNow students, the foundress of the center facilitated a guided meditation that was intended to lead us toward clarity of purpose. After 30 minutes of wandering through a desert landscape that we populated with symbols from our subconscious minds, we were asked to open the box waiting for us at the end of the path. It was to hold a clue to our destinies. Any guesses as to what was in my box? That’s right, a g.d. book…not just any book, but an open book displaying an unfinished text with an abandoned pen resting on the page. “Damn it!” I whispered to myself when I saw it. Is there no escape from this? Why not a monkey wrench or a fishing pole? Something I can get a handle on? Can’t I have a concrete calling in life like study mechanics and fix cars or arrange flowers and decorate graves, you know, something that doesn’t pull your pants down in front of God and everybody. It would be nice if it didn't require a gabazillion hours of sitting still, too. 

            As if that meditation experience wasn’t enough, the following happened just a few days ago:  A new lecturer was added to the itinerary of my last Cuba tour. She was absolutely fabulous….stunning, brilliant, over-the-top. She struck me as a woman who had fulfilled her highest potential.  Afterwards, when I expressed to her how much she inspired me, she said, “We have a belief here in Cuba that for a woman to say that she has lived a full life, she must do three things: raise a kid, plant a tree and WRITE A BOOK.  I have done them all, so I feel complete.”

 If we count the baby goats, I can check off number one. As for number two, I have credit to spare, but number three…that bloody number three….her comment shook a shaker of salt into an open wound.

I’m at my wits’ end with the pull and tug of it, so I’m off to see what thirty days of yoga, metaphysics, meditation and communal living might lend to the cause. I figured another step might be to get back into the swing of my blog, so, to follow you have what I wrote last summer and never posted. Even though it’s not current, it seems important to share. You’ll understand why.          

High Hope Ranch, summer 2015

        What in the world has become of Gigi? Why hasn’t she written? Some of you have asked. I've asked myself many times since posting # 52 last December, which I just reread. "I am the happiest I have ever been," it boasts in closing. 

       “Really?”  I respond now in disbelief. Who the hell wrote that? To where did she disappear? Why did ‘happy’ cease to be an accurate declaration of her reality?

       Truth is, late winter/early spring my whole soul went into a cramp...I'm talking one of those Charley horses that jerks your ass straight up out of the bed in the middle of the night and makes you scream the f-word (or whatever equivalent expletive your filters allow). A dank, dark, wicked mental/emotional space is what I’m talking about. I know the sensation  like the back of my hand, because I’ve been through it so many times and each time it’s over I beg, please, please, please can that, PLEASE, be the last one? 

      Depression remains a colossal mystery to me.  Every time it comes I cycle through the same set of questions: what have I done to bring this on myself?  is it genetic? biological? a chemical imbalance? diet related? conditioning? a character flaw? circumstantial? a punishment from God? None of that? All of that? Some of that? No clear answers. My only recourse is accept that it happens, keep trying to minimize it and work to find some purpose for it, which brings me to the subject of this travelogue, the most recent headline to shatter our hearts: 

“Ex-broadcaster Kills 2 On Air in Virginia Shooting; Takes Own Life” (New York Times August 26, 2015)

          Of course, all atrocities to hit the news impact me negatively, but this one in particular has fouled me to the marrow and lingers. First, it literally “hits home,” given that WDBJ in Roanoke was the station I grew up watching. Second, the rejection Vester Flanagan suffered because he was gay resonates. Third, and most importantly, given the emotional and psychological state in which I have spent most of this summer, I get why he did what he did.

       I do not justify it. I don't condone it. It's not the route I would take to try to alleviate my own suffering, but I understand it. I get what it is to feel on the brink of drastic measures, of doing whatever to make the painful, crazy crap churning through your head, second after second, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, week after week stop. Vester turned his violence outward; I (and millions of others) turn mine (ours) inward.

       It’s like this:  when darkness comes, dismal, obsessive thoughts start cycling through my head and my mind feels like a windshield that’s been smashed with a hammer. Tracing the cracks never leads to anything but desperation, yet I do it compulsively.  Emotionally, nothing matters and simultaneously, every miniscule detail is so important that if I don’t attend to it, the world will end.  And all the while, Gigi has to keep showing up…showing up to work, showing up for people, showing up for commitments, acting like everything is fine. Why has to? Because ninety-eight percent of the people I encounter do not have the emotional tools to allow a person in pain to be authentically present. Mainstream institutions in our society (schools, churches, social organizations, etc) have not trained us in how to stay our ground while holding a loving space for others.  To the contrary, if another’s state of being makes us uncomfortable, we are taught to either judge and reject the person or try to fix him/her.

The only reason I am still here and have not cracked beyond repair (which in my case would have meant suicide and in Vester’s meant murder) is a gifted psychotherapist allowed me to experience unconditional, unwavering acceptance of my authentic state of being. Session after session, I’d show up in all  manner of a mess…mad, sad, furious, self-deprecating, manic, glad, hopeful, desperate…it didn’t matter; each time I, and ALL of my emotions, were met with the same nonjudgemental welcome. All she asked is that I be honest with myself and her about what was really going on inside.  She modeled for me how to witness another’s suffering with compassion and love, and eventually I learned to do it for myself and that is what saved me.  It could have saved Vester and his victims.

A fear is rising in me at this moment that some of you will not believe that mental illness hurts as much as I claim it does.  “How can this be?” you might be thinking. “How can it really be as bad as she says it is when I know that since last December she has led 6 trips to Cuba, worked on the ranch, hosted her girlfriend from Spain, visited family and friends, and apprenticed as a Dream Quest guide. How could she possibly do all that and be in the depths of despair to the degree described?”  All I know to tell you is that I have learned to hold two realities at once. What you don't know is, if a depression is on me, while it seems I am looking you in the eyes and participating in our conversation, another part of me sees myself hanging from the tree out the window behind you, or stepping in front of the car rushing by us or jumping off the balcony where we are having lunch.  Yes, I'm responding to your questions, and I'm smiling and I'm making sense AND simultaneously a clip of a scene that will stop the suffering is playing over and over somewhere in the vicinity.

         So, what is the difference between Vester and me? Why did he act on the scene in his head and I don’t?

Love and Maya Angelou.

        Even though I cannot feel it when I am in a depression, I know that I am very loved. If I can just hang in there until an experience turns me back toward the light, eventually the cramp in my soul will ease and I can begin to crawl out of the hole.  In the instance of this summer, it happened like this:  I was sitting cross-legged in a sand pile in the backyard of the house where I spent the first 18 years of my life.  Smack dab in the middle of assisting Batman in his urgent rescue of Robin (who had been buried alive in a jar of dirt!), my four-year-old nephew pauses a narration of  “Oh No!... K-whash!... Boom!...Hewelp!” to whisper,

"Aunt Gigi, I wuv it when you play wiff me...". 

       He's got no ulterior motive. An unadulterated heart had expressed an appreciation for my being. It was enough. Grace swept down to a sandbox that afternoon to save two buried birds with one little boy.

       As for Maya Angelou…spring semester of my sophomore year of college, my English professor offered extra credit for attending a lecture by some visiting black, female author. I had never heard of her and never would have attended was I not an extra credit whore in those days.  Maya glided out onto the stage in a flowing, angelic dress, paused before the podium, gripped both sides of it, leveled her chin so as to meet the gaze of the audience and belted out in song, "I SHALL NOT BE MOVED." She was reciting a line from her poem “Our Grandmothers,” which is about the resilience of black women. (http://www.ctadams.com/mayaangelou25.html)

Twenty-eight years later I can trace that memory with pinpoint precision to the place where Maya laid out a blanket and broke bread with my soul. When darkness comes and I am tempted to give up, I dredge up that image of Maya and belt out my own version of, "I shall not be moved!" 

        To bring this overdue T-logue to a close, I pose the question, why would I share this intimate, intimate stuff with you? Why would I make myself so incredibly transparent and vulnerable? 

        As I said before, the primary reason is to find a purpose for my suffering. “Be the change you want to see,” said Ghandi. I want to see the Vester Flanagan’s of the world (and we know there are thousands more out there) have the courage to say, “I am in pain, I am in trouble and I need help,” and have it met with, “Thank you for your honesty; thank you for the courage to take responsibility for your own suffering before it leads you to commit acts of harm. Let’s find an unconditionally loving space and the support you need for you to face your demons.”  

And so it.