Healing

A Cascade of Bad Choices

Several alarming news stories have run in The Salt Lake Tribune over the past several days. They all have ties to Utah and involve children. I can’t be more specific without being censored by Facebook. Two of the stories are linked in my feed if people want to read them. There’s a paywall, but you can get an idea of the subject matter by reading the parts of the stories that are visible.

Each story is horrific on its own, but together, they’re overwhelming. I cried most of yesterday morning. It was too difficult to process this news, especially given what’s happened and appears to still be happening in my own family, so I engaged in several forms of avoidance, including employing maladaptive coping skills that threw my metabolism off and undercut the work I’ve done following a ketogenic diet for mental health, doing intermittent fasting, exercising, getting the right nutrients, and maintaining healthy biomarkers.

I’m writing about this because I can see how something that’s upsetting can cause someone (in this case me) to do one thing that throws something off, which in turn throws something else off, which in turn throws something else off. Then maybe more bad decision-making gets thrown into the mix as things start to slip, and pretty soon a little movement in the ground turns into a mudslide that swallows an entire house, trees, retaining walls, and more.

Yes, the upsetting thing is upsetting, but the behaviors that follow and aggregate are what drive the mind and body into a state of disequilibrium that prevents a person (still me) from finding ways to sit with and work through what’s upsetting to whatever extend they (again, me) are able to.

Here’s what went down yesterday. Upset about the news stories, I developed a sudden craving for brownies. It was an all-encompassing desire. I went to Lin’s, where they sell Num Bars, which are ketogenic. They didn’t have them. (Turns out, the Utah-based company went out of business.) In my desperation, I got no-bake chocolate cookies instead. (This is when the whole ageism incident happened with the cashier, which added to my distress.)

I came home and ate the whole container of cookies, thereby consuming four times my typical amount of carbs, and none of those carbs were good ones. My body can’t tolerate carbs anywhere north of 50 net grams per day. (I have data from my cardiologist and endocrinologist that supports this assertion. It’s not just a thing I’m saying to be dramatic.)

The rest of the day, I made terrible choices or simply didn’t do what I should have done for my health. I failed to take my supplements. I didn’t drink water. I didn’t do my intermittent fast. I didn’t eat enough protein or, really, anything healthy for the rest of the day. I didn’t lift weights, something I do regularly for my metabolic health. I didn’t exercise. I didn’t meditate. I wasn’t mindful.

In short, one bad choice became more than one dozen bad choices.

Here’s the thing: I was terrified of having nightmares last night based on those news stories. I’ve already had several nightmares involving my family in the past couple of weeks, one of which was incredibly difficult to process. So I sabotaged my sleep before I even went to bed. I’m not surprised that I woke up at 3:46 a.m. this morning and had trouble falling asleep again or that my sleep was especially restless according to my Fitbit or that my sleep score was ten points lower than usual.

What I am surprised about is how difficult recovering is for me. I have a seven-day intervention I do when I need to really focus on my metabolic health. I told myself I’d start that intervention today. I didn’t. Instead, I stayed in bed most of the day. I just now made my way to my computer. My food choices today aren’t great but they aren’t stellar, either. My digestion is hosed, again, just after I got it back on track. I haven’t exercised. It was a struggle just to get dressed, to make the bed, and to make my way to the living room, where I stopped for a long while and watched reruns of “The Conners” as I mustered the strength to get to my computer. I haven’t bathed. My hair is weird. I didn’t even have it in me to put on lotion.

And it’s cold and the days are short, which makes getting on track that much harder.

This all illustrates how a single genuinely upsetting thing can lead to a systemic issue and why it’s so important that we recognize these kinds of patterns. I know I’ve been talking about me, but I’m not the only one who experiences this kind of domino effect under stress. Many of us do, perhaps most of us.

Right now, I’m trying to do things that will help my body recover. I’m starting with water. That seems doable. Then I have to process these stories about children without doing more harm to myself. I don’t know how to do that. Process the stories, I mean. How does one come to terms with the kinds of things discussed in this type of reporting, things happening here in Utah, across the country, and around the world? I want all living beings to be free from suffering and the causes of suffering, but we’re often the cause, and children should never suffer the way too many of us make them suffer.

How to Survive in My Father’s World

  1. Write poems.

  2. Hydrate. Eat. Sleep. Exercise. Meditate.

  3. Love yourself. Love your body. Trust yourself. Trust your body.

  4. Put yourself in the world and know that you belong there. The world is bigger than people with power.

  5. Find the exits. Know the exit routes. Plan your exit. Then enter.

  6. See clearly, even what you don’t want to see. Bear witness. Take notes. Synthesize. Learn. Speak. Sing. Recite. Remember.

  7. Write more poems. Stronger this time, more sure-handed, until metal strikes against metal.

  8. Pay attention but do not seek attention. Turn your attention into a Mobuis strip that moves inward, then outward, then inward again with no beginning and no end.

  9. Read people’s bodies more than their words, unless they’re poets, then read their bodies and words together.

  10. Call bullshit bullshit unless it’s meant to be bullshit, then let it be what it is without calling it out. We need a little bullshit, now more than ever.

  11. Read poems. Learn to move in and out of their white space. Listen and respond, listen and respond. Breathe through the lines. Inhale poems, exhale poems.

  12. Believe in poems and their power. Don’t give up on poems.

  13. Write more poems. Softer this time. Less heavy-handed, until the weft of each poem is as strong as churro wool.

  14. Fawn if needed for survival but only for survival. Try not to freeze or flee. Remove the “r” from fright and fight if that’s the only available option.

  15. Be ready to run. If needed, run. But circle back. Never leave. Draw an arc around the threat from a safe distance. Make that arc smaller every day. Remember: You belong.

  16. Know when you’re with someone who’s hostile. Know that anyone can be hostile.

  17. Be hostile if needed. Be loving as much as possible.

  18. If you don’t write poems, instead do whatever you love, whatever keeps you alive.

  19. Write poems.

Morning Prayer September 16, 2024

Trees don’t move in the wind. They’re moved by the wind, the way we all react to unseen forces, unseen faces, unseen lives, and unseen lies. But I digress. This isn’t about deleting and inserting letters to stumble on real or imagined connections. It’s about how, wherever I’m standing, I want to be standing somewhere else. A foot over, a mile, a state, a bioregion.

There, where I saw my first Blackburnian warbler. There, where I learned the name scissor-tailed flycatcher. There, the mud. There, the sand. There, the untidy rows of cows. There, tidy rows of roses a girl could hide in if it weren’t for the thorns.

I’m trying to stand still for ten minutes every morning while I watch the sun rise and listen to birds. Yesterday, a western screech owl. Today, a pyrrhuloxia, as in red or tawny, not as in pile of wood for burning the dead.

I’m trying not to think about how the northern cardinal should be the one named pyrrhuloxia, not the pyrrhuloxia, or about how that must mean the person who named the pyrrhuloxia had never seen a cardinal, or about how the person who named the pyrrhuloxia must have felt the first time they saw a cardinal after having named the pyrrhuloxia pyrrhuloxia.

I’m trying not to think, which is always the biggest impediment to not thinking. I just want to stand for ten minutes with my feet planted, my body unstirred, like palo verde trees on a calm morning after hard rain. I want to be here, with these birds and these trees and these cactuses in this desert. I want to feel safe enough to remain still for ten minutes. I’ve seen cottontail rabbits do as much, though their mouths were working incessantly because they move their jaws up to one hundred twenty times per minute when they chew. That’s twice my average resting heart rate but nowhere near the four thousand times a hummingbird’s wings beat per minute.

I’m trying not to think about facts and comparisons. This more than that. That less than this. Living beings are not just math, so I’m trying not to tilt my head and scan for rabbits or add up my heartbeats as they batter my chest or make a futile attempt to count the wingbeats of the Costa’s hummingbird who’s zipping past me.

I’m trying not to worry about Valley Fever and global warming and poisonous toads and communities in crisis and birds falling from the sky from avian influenza and assassination attempts and wildlife without habitat and unseen lies and unseen lives and unseen faces and unseen forces and my father and my family and my childhood. That’s what lies in stillness. All of that and more.

So I count. I compare. I slot things into more than that, less than this. I learn facts. I look around. I take in. I fill my head with details. And I move. I have a head full of analysis, a body full of terror, and the trauma to justify both.

Those last three things on my list are the crux of the matter: my father and my family and my childhood. They’re the real, lived dangers that tie me to the rest of the dangers in the world, the rest of the heartbreaks in the world, the rest of the injustices in the world. The broken wing. The dry lake. The toxic dust. The highway. The swimming pool. The bedroom.

My father didn’t have any guns. He’d had enough of them in Korea. We had an empty gun case built into a wall at our lake house. I wanted to fill it with flowers. He wouldn’t let me. It had to be empty, a sign for anyone who saw it that he meant them no harm.

My father was the weapon. He ultimately turned himself on himself but not until he destroyed everyone else. I mean us. I mean his family. I say his as if we belonged to him. Belonged as in were owned by, not as in were members of. He owned us all. Kin from the Old English cynn, which sounds like sin. To kin, to sin, to skin, again. Buckskin and doeskin and firing pins and deadly sins. No win, no wins, no whining, no whinneys.

I stood still for five minutes this morning. Five minutes in which I didn’t keep vigil, in which I watched the sun rise and listened to the birds. It’s not ten yet. I’ll keep trying for ten.

May we all be free from suffering for ten minutes today.

Good morning.

Two Sleeps

Before the Industrial Revolution, people slept in two shifts. The first was from early evening until sometime in the middle of the night. The second was from early morning until it was time to get up and start the day’s work. The waking period in the middle of the night wasn’t just for reading or sitting by the fire. People played cards, canoodled, had little get-togethers, and more. It was dark and cool and simply a good time to be awake. A romantic time. A playful time. A productive time.

In 2008, when I had one of my bouts of thyrotoxicosis—which made sleep difficult and resulted in severe sleep anxiety—a therapist told me about two-sleeps. She could see my sleep patterns falling into that rhythm and encouraged me to embrace that rather than fighting it. I had charts and graphs and other excessively detailed stuff documenting my personal sleep woes because that’s how I roll. It was a lot, the way my personal wardrobe database, which I maintained for six years, was a lot. (I can be a lot or, as I like to say a lot a lot—think quirky, colorful, dysfunctional.)

Hold up, the therapist said. Maybe, just maybe, instead of being hypervigilant about your sleep, you could try this approach instead. Hers was for sure the better plan. It was hard to let go of my recordkeeping and data management, but I did it at her urging.

The change in perspective and approach got me through those long months until my thyroid function returned to normal. I should note that thyrotoxicosis isn’t like hyperthyroidism in that you can’t treat it. You just have to wait it out. The whole process from thyrotoxicosis (or thyroid storm) to hypothyroidism to a return to a euthyroid state takes about a year.

A long damned year that’s difficult, creatively productive, and hard on a marriage, or at least has been hard on my marriage. It’s not easy to live with someone who has a snack-and-book midden stashed in the bed because they need to eat constantly and must always have reading material ready for those inevitable jolts from sleep. And also a slew of notepads and a handheld recording device so flashes of brilliance can be documented, such as aphorisms that float in on the ether and strange dreams that can’t not be cast in stone or at least scrawled in pencil in feverish, sloppy detail. (Pencil because, while graphite is an inferior writing material, I have a no ink-in-the-bed rule, as should everyone. We have sheets to think about, folks. We don’t need to add fighting ink stains to our list of daily tasks, especially not when we’re thyrotoxic.)

It’s not easy to live with someone who’s in fight or flight for the better part of a year, edgy and jumping at every little sound, balled up at times saying I can’t take it when will I feel normal again, whose OMing her way through moment after excruciating moment, who asks her mother-in-law in Iowa to have a bag packed in case she needs to come take care of her when she’s thirty-six years old and her mother-in-law has better things to do like tending to her gorgeous, gazeboed yard and going to church and keeping her husband from wandering into the back of the garage never to be seen again because he’s finally going to put that classic car together, the one that’s been a tangle of pieces and parts strewn about the property for four decades. In short, someone who’s devolved into a twitchy little miscreant. It wasn’t easy on Jon. I wasn’t easy on Jon. But two-sleeps made a big difference.

I still approach my sleep this way if I wake up in the middle of the night. It’s a two-sleep night, I think. Rather than toss and turn in bed, I get up and do what I do, which is read and write and, sometimes, snack. Tonight, I’m up with GI distress and heartburn because of unfortunate but yummy birthday dinner choices yesterday evening. I came home and crashed, accidentally, at 8:40 p.m. and woke a few minutes ago bloated and nauseated, like a puffer fish that didn’t mean to puff and can’t unpuff and whose innards are on fire.

Is this a good time to write? Who knows. Will I produce anything of value during these waking hours? Based on this journal entry, it doesn’t seem like I will. I just know it’s not a good time to be horizontal. It is a good time to take Pepto Bismol and be vertical. So that’s what I’m doing until my second sleep begins. (Technically, since I’m sitting down, I’m vertical then horizontal then vertical again.)

Metadata paralysis is a real phenomenon, and folks like me live the experience every day. If you see someone with obvious symptoms of metadata paralysis, let them know you care. Take interest in their metadata tree. Say things like, “Good work. What a lovely metadata tree you’re working on. So many branches. I can’t wait to see what it grows into.”

Part two of this essay will be redacted in its entirety because it’s boring. Why? It’s self-indulgent and not self-reflective. The metadata here is value: subset one, possesses; subset two, doesn’t possess.

I’m falling asleep sitting up. Hello, theta waves. Bring on the strange brilliance.

I get it. His name is Jack Tripper and he trips all the time as part of his physical comedy. He also trips out on what others are doing and saying, so he’s also a metaphorical tripper.

Quick on the draw isn’t something anyone’s ever called me with regard to understanding plays on words, but they did call me fast fingers in grade school because I learned to count like lightning on my hands during math drills as a workaround for my dyscalculia and working-memory deficits. I won those drills. Laugh away, children, laugh away. What the world needs is a dyscalculia superhero named Fast Fingers.

Dyscalculia is either part of dyslexia or it’s a separate but similar entity. It depends on what metadata you use, that is, how you organize the information pertaining to each phenomenon.

Dyscalculia. Dyscalculia. Dyscalculia. That looks funny. This calculia. Miss Calculia. That’s Ms. Calculia to you. Dana “Ms. Calculia” Martin. Now there’s a name. A Dana by any other name still can’t count to ten without using her fingers.

They gave me a free dessert because it was my birthday. That’s what happened with dinner. And also a plate of fried everything. That part wasn’t free. I paid for the plate of fried everything. My metadata here is dinner: subset one, fried everything; subset two, dessert.

I didn’t have to eat it. I wanted to eat it. Then I didn’t want to eat it but kept eating it. I’m trying hard to eat. I need to eat. My metadata here is health: subset one, presence; subset two, absence. Or is it life: subset one, congruous with; subset two, incongruous with?

My throat is getting dry. The Pepto Bismol is coagulating, if that’s the right word, near my uvula. One time, a big, hard thing traveled from my sinuses down into my throat. I choked on it for a while, then coughed it into a tissue, thereby saving my own life. It was fossilish and had ridges like the roof of a mouth. This incident (or shall I call it an *indecent*) happened in from of my mother-in-law. The metadata here is mother-in-law: subset one, what not to do in front of; subset two, what I did in front of. Additional metadata is bodies: subset one, amazing; subset two, strange.

As with bodies, also with minds: subset one, amazing; subset two, strange. Or is the main category bodymind: one thing, not two? As in, we mine the bodymind when we should be embodying it. As in, why is the bodying of the bodymind something we mind, whether it’s ours, yours or mine? As in, what’s mine is my bodymind and is not to be mined.

This is a real mindfield. Good night. I’m off for part two of my two-sleeps night. May our collective dreams break the bough, rattle the house, and set free a wee mouse who runs the mazes of our minds. Wouldn’t that be amazing.

The Singing in My Veins

As a survivor of severe childhood trauma, I had a rule that I fastidiously observed until I was well into my twenties: Never own more than you can pack into your car. (This is why I had a futon for years as opposed to a mattress.)

Making sure everything I had could be wedged into my car allowed me to get out of any situation as quickly and as nimbly as possible. I could leave my mother’s house when she got too drunk or too sad or too cruel (or all three). I could leave my boyfriend’s six-pack apartment in Kansas City when he screamed at me moments after we’d moved in together, and he threw me out with nowhere to go. I could leave an unsafe Plaza-adjacent apartment building where men with guns surrounded me one morning in the lobby and told me how pretty I was.

I learned the fit-everything-in-a-car approach to living early in life when I ran with my best friend. She and I ran hard and fast in the day and in the night—especially in the night, in the dark, dark night. We had to run. We had to. But we also knew where to rest, where to hide, and where and how to find safety—often with each other but increasingly on our own as we grew older.

Running is an art. Running is a science. Running is a way to survive. It only looks like flailing to those who’ve never had to run to live, so kindly leave your pathologizing language and frameworks out of this, or I might be forced to say Bless your heart, my words like water moving around a stone so I can continue to speak.

I’m trying to tell you about running, about what we need to live, and about how to get what you need in a car, day or night, wherever you happen to be in the world.

By you, I mean me. By me, I mean anyone.

Once I got my first pieces of antique furniture—a dainty cast-iron bed, a 1920s English flip-top game table, and an Art Nouveau-inspired vanity—I could no longer fit my whole life in my car, but I could still fit what I needed into it.

What did I need when I came to Kansas? When I had to come here quickly because my medical situation was spiraling out of control with no hope or answers or treatment in sight in Southern Utah? When the hate and vitriol and threats against the LGBTQ+ community in general and against me in particular became its own form of disease? When my marriage desperately needed breathing room in the form of space and the clarity space can provide?

I needed the following, all of which fit neatly in my vehicle with room to spare: my books, my poetry collections, my writing notes and research, my professional portfolio, my college papers, my phone, my computer, my monitor, my mouse, my mousepad, pens, pencils, rubber fingers, a fidget spinner, one of my looms, yarn, weaving supplies, binoculars, birding guides, my flute, flute music, a music stand, baskets, a throw blanket, a dream catcher, my favorite kachina doll, my crochet mouse, my dog Hayden’s ashes, a small stereo, CDs, food, water, electrolyte drinks, clothing, coats, jewelry, gloves, shoes, an umbrella, health and beauty stuff, medications, and my medical records (ten binders organized by specialty).

Controlled flight, I call it. I deeply and unwaveringly honor what my body senses and knows long before my brain can interpret those sensings and knowings. I honor what my friend and I learned as children, as well as the way I’ve refined my running over the past half-century. I run now to what I need, when I need it. I run into the future so I can have a future. I run to my people, my land, my past—which is my present and my future all at once because there really is no time, is there?

But there is running. There’s also stopping and breathing after. There’s rest. There’s ease. There’s I made it singing in my veins. I hear it today in the rain.

I made it, my dear friend. I made it. I see you shimmering beside me. I will love you always. Let’s stop and breathe. Breathe with me. Hold my hand.

Lexi the Healer

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring—it was peace.

— Milan Kundera

I dreamed about my dog, Lexi, this morning, as she was pressed against my back, sleeping alongside me. In the dream, I was holding her. We were in a park. She saw an older woman in poor health and began wagging her tail. I carried Lexi over to the woman. She angled her head downward and pressed the top of her muzzle against the woman’s cheek.

The woman began to cry. Lexi intrinsically understood what the woman was feeling. She was there for the woman in a way humans hadn’t been. Tears streamed down the woman’s face and landed on Lexi’s wispy facial hairs.

Others from the park gathered around. In silence, they entered the space Lexi was creating for the woman—a space of loving without words, of existing fully and selflessly with someone in need. A kind of joy emerged, not unbridled happiness, but the deeper joy that suffering makes possible.

I heard a “thump, thump, thump,” as rhythmic as a healthy heartbeat. It was Lexi, not in the dream but beside me in bed. Each morning when she wakes up, her tail starts moving before the rest of her body does. The “thump, thump, thump” was her signature wag. Good morning, Lexi, I responded, as I do each day. Those three words invariably set the rest of her body in motion. She wriggles up to my face, plies me with kisses, then curls up in the space between my shoulder and head while I tickle her tummy and tell her how much I love her.

I had other dreams last night—recurring nightmares whose subjects and plots are so similar they’ve worn ruts in my mind. A house with missing walls, no locks on the doors if there are doors at all. Strangers inside with me. Men, mostly. Sometimes complicit women. More of them coming. More and more, so many they resemble debris-filled floodwaters. Me, half-naked, running. A bare mattress in a basement. No way out.

I only remember the nightmares as I sit down to write this. The dream of Lexi is what got me through the night. The reality of Lexi is what gets me through each day. Lexi and her wagging tail. Lexi curled up beside my head, her soft, disheveled fur tickling my face. Lexi and the space she creates for deep joy within deep suffering. Lexi, the healer. Lexi, my healer.

Today, Lexi and I will sit at the base of the sandstone slope that rises, unreal and dreamlike, behind my home—its strata twisted by profound geological events during a time scale humans can barely fathom. It will be a glorious afternoon. We will do nothing. We will feel peace.

Telling Lexi’s Story

If you meet me when I’m with my dog, Lexi, chances are you’re going to hear her story. The story of how she lived during the first nine months of her life. The story of the woman who bravely stepped in when nobody else would and carried Lexi and her littermate out of a deplorable situation while both she and the dogs shook with fear.

The story of her frail, failing body. Her lack of food, water and shelter. The way she was locked in an outdoor pen with other breeds—some much larger than her and all of them puppies. Lexi was deemed unsellable, so she and her littermate were forgotten, left to fend for themselves when they didn’t even have the freedom to roam in search of shelter and sustenance. Lexi and her littermates were left to die. Some of them did. Around them, dogs barked and wailed. They slept on ground soaked with urine and excrement. The business of selling went on.

Lexi was born into the life of backyard breeding, a practice that’s ubiquitous in the United States. Like many states, the one in which Lexi was bred — by a person who saw dogs as a source of quick cash—provides insufficient legal protection to companion animals. What Lexi went through is not unique or unusual. It’s built into the business model for inhumane breeders whose cramped pens and suffocating buildings litter the country from coast to coast. Slow death and immeasurable suffering are a feature of these businesses, not a bug.

When I try to tell Lexi’s story, trainers almost invariably interrupt me early on to say something like this:

Dogs are resilient. If you hold onto that story, your dog won’t be able to move past it. You need to think about your dog’s future, not what they went through.

Agreed. But I’m not “holding onto” Lexi’s past. If anyone is aware of her resilience, it’s me. I see evidence of it daily, hourly, and minute by minute. What I’m doing is this: Raising awareness wherever I can about the horrific abuse and neglect that occurs in backyard breeding operations and puppy mills. I’m educating those in my community about dog abuse and neglect, as well as the effects of irresponsible breeding and pet overpopulation. Most people don’t know about any of those issues, especially not in sunny Southern Utah, where the scent of yesteryear still permeates the air and, on the surface, everything appears to be good and right and noble, always. Here, the unthinkable isn’t just unthinkable. It’s literally not thought.

Here, the unthinkable isn’t just unthinkable. It’s literally not thought.

Teaching the public through education and outreach programs is essential to getting the message out about dogs like Lexi, but so is giving those stories a face. Lexi is that face. While someone is marveling at how sweet and wonderful Lexi is, I can tell them a story they would never have imagined while all their senses are engaged. The listener can feel Lexi’s fur, gaze into her beautiful eyes, and smell that signature Cheetos odor wafting from her scraggly paws. The listener gets a serotonin boost while learning what Lexi and other dogs have to endure. Engaging the heart and mind together makes the teachable moment that much more powerful.

This is immersive education and storytelling at its finest. The subject is right there. She’s not a statistic or an abstraction. I’m able to make inroads with folks who might otherwise drift into local pet shops that source puppies from unethical breeders when they decide it’s time to add a dog to their family. Those stores’ pretty plexiglass display cases won’t hint at where the puppies came from. Their owners and employees won’t tell the truth. Instead, they’ll spin some yarn that has no veracity.

Lexi has to tell the true story. And because she can’t speak, I have to tell her story for her and with her. So I’ll continue talking about her trauma, as well her resilience and recovery. It doesn’t mean I’m living in the past or locking her into a figurative pen. Quite the opposite. Our stories can free us. They can also free listeners from ignorance, misunderstanding, and a lack of awareness. Lexi’s story is designed to ensure there’s no next Lexi. Mills must stop churning. Backyard breeding operations must close. Neither will do so willingly. Their market—folks like the ones I share Lexi’s story with—needs to dry up. Without demand, there will be no supply.

I’m concerned that some trainers are myopically focused on the client and dog they’re working with. They fail to see the bigger picture. They speak before they listen. How can they not understand the importance of telling stories like Lexi’s? Is it because they work with clients who have purebred dogs? Do they feel pressure from breeders in the community? Do they just not like hearing unpleasant stories? These trainers don’t recognize the implications of discouraging adopters from sharing their dogs’ stories, especially stories of trauma. I wish they’d reconsider shutting folks like me down.

Lexi is part of my family now. That means her story is my story. We walk through this world together, each of us with our own histories of trauma, each on our own healing path. Together, we’ll tell our stories in our own ways as long as we walk this earth.

Baltic Amber

She tells me her name. It’s a faux portmanteau of candle and mandolin. She uses her digital SLR to show me a bufflehead, a common goldeneye, and a scaup. We don’t know one another, but we are the only two people standing on top of Clinton Dam which, at eight hundred seventy-five feet, towers over Clinton Lake. We are here to watch waterfowl. That’s as good a formula for a fast acquaintanceship as any. Bird lovers talk to one another. We’re an endogenous group with overlapping interests that include conservation, education, outdoorsmanship, and a good-hearted love of birds (with a bit of competition thrown into the mix). I’ve seen folks pull up beside one another in popular birding areas to share information on what birds are present and where they are located. “Seen anything interesting” is a common refrain. That’s exactly what the woman on the dam said to me before introducing herself.

It’s supposed to be in the forties, but it isn’t. At this height, the wind cuts right through my layers. It might as well be in the low teens. I don’t feel like a warm-blooded creature. This is how the stones on the side of the dam must feel, losing all their heat to the frigid air and thereby becoming the essence of frigidity. I jump up and down to stay warm. It’s a futile endeavor. My body heat flows into the surrounding air.

Lake Clinton was built under the Flood Control Act of 1962 by damming the Wakarusa River. Funds were allocated the year I was born, just one state to the south, where we’d had a recreational reservoir since 1944. My family adored that bloated watering hole, whose creation necessitated the flooding of four towns. Artifacts from those engorged ghost towns still sit at the bottom of the lake, including marble tombstones that emerged a few years ago during a drought. The creation of Lake Clinton required destruction as well. Ten communities were wiped out with the lake’s development, as well as rich histories, such as underground railroad sites. The Wakarusa River Valley Heritage Museum now operates out of an old milk shed that was once part of Bloomington, one of the towns washed away when the lake was filled. The historic house the shed belonged to was razed by the U.S. Corps of Engineers in 1981 after agreeing to renovate it.

It’s only my third trip here. I made the most recent one yesterday with my partner. Somehow, we managed to miss the turnout on the dam, which is one of the lake’s best spots for watching birds. When I got home, I realized our mistake and decided to come back out on my own. Birding is different alone. There’s something both calming and unsettling about looking for birds without a partner. There’s a kind of intimacy in finding a bird and sharing that experience with the person you love. It’s nice to run into other bird lovers, in part because they are so enthusiastic and in part because it takes the edge off the loneliness that can accompany solo birding. But it’s not the same as being out with my partner. I have more time to think, for one thing, which is both good and bad, depending on the thought.

Off to the right, the woman and I see two American white pelicans. To the left, a great blue heron flies in and lands on the rocky shore. The heron was here yesterday, too. The woman and I talk about how surprising it is to see a heron in such cold weather. My worry is evident in my voice, which cracks from more than the cold. I’m concerned that our unusually warm weather has affected migration timing and that many birds, not just this heron, are now in danger. In a matter of days, the temperature has plunged from the forties and fifties to the single digits, with subzero temperatures on the way. The woman and I talk about how cold we are before drifting back to our respective cars and cranking the heat. She drives away. I am on my own now, again.

I make my way up and over the lake to an area called Bloomington West. It takes longer than I expect. “Alone, alone, alone.” The word pecks at the deadwood in my head. I realize this is the first time I’ve done anything on my own since I experienced a period of great trauma in 2015. After that year, I retreated into what was safe and comfortable—into myself, mostly, and away from other people. I didn’t know a pair of binoculars would send me back out into the world—alone, alone—no less. This open-ended time is terrifying on some levels but also healing. I felt like the earth is putting me back together bone by bone, like a someone preparing a bird skeleton for display at a local nature center.

On the road, a man approaches from behind, fast. I’m going the speed limit, but he wants me to drive faster. Now I am not alone, and I want alone to return. Alone suddenly feels like an empty nest, safe and solitudinous. I worry about being out here at the lake and meandering through the rural areas that surround it. How easy it would be for someone to mess with a woman, with me. I feel old traumas speaking through my body, marks left by the men who have harmed me. Some experts call what I am experiencing the sequelae of trauma. Others call it post-traumatic stress disorder. The language I use is different. My trauma is subjective, not objective. It is visceral, not clinical. Psychologists don’t capture my experience any better than the authors of the DSM. I think about the eyes of the Cooper’s hawk who hunts behind my yard. They are the color of Baltic amber. I imagine my body is made of amber that, over time, has grown around what it has encountered, each occlusion an infraction—something forced, something taken, something threatened, something denied. The body is still there but so is what the body has been through, what it remembers. I have hardened around these memories.

I turn on a street with a funny name: E 251st Diagonal Road. The man is still behind me. I turn again, onto a road that will take me to the shore. The man keeps going straight. “Alone,” I exhale, as if the word were a mantra. I pass a newly tilled field and scare up countless meadowlarks and European starlings. They skim the field’s teased surface. I continue all the way to the lake, past a sign that reads “Road ends in water.” Perfect. A road to no-road feels existential in this moment. At the water’s edge, there’s another sign. This one says parking is not allowed at any time. I see nobody, anywhere. There aren’t even boats on the parts of the lake that haven’t frozen over. I park the car and step onto a wooden loading dock. Its yellow poles are as bright as a red-shouldered hawk’s legs and feet. The rest of the scenery is hazy, as if someone is holding a sheet of onion skin paper between me and the world. At first, I hear nothing. Then, there is noise everywhere—around me, beneath me, near, far. All at once, it sounds like singing and cracking and heavenly voices mixed with ghostly nightmare cries. My heart feels like a heron slipping on a frozen marsh until I place the sounds. It’s the water freezing, the everywhere sound of solidification. Imaging one thousand people bending saws and one hundred sticks cracking all at once. This is what the Sirens must have sounded like. Enchanted to the point of being driven mad, those poor sailors never stood a chance.

Now that I understand what I am hearing, the terror turns to strange beauty. This unsettling and unexpected improvisation has reduced my lexicon to a single word: “Wow.” I say it over and over. I look up from the ice to take in this abandoned corner of the freezing lake and see a tree full of bald eagles. I say wow again. And again. One eagle flies away. Another flies in. I see one in another tree. I see one on the ice. Wow. Part of me wishes my partner was here. Part of me wishes the woman I’d met on the dam was here. I know she would love this. But those parts are easily subverted. In truth, I want this experience all to myself, and I have it all to myself. The eagles. The lake. The haunting ice. And me.

I drive by Bloomington East, past the closed Wakarusa River Valley Heritage Museum, before heading out the way I came in. I stop the car in front of the field where I saw the meadowlarks and schlep into the freshly turned soil, aware that I am trespassing. I watch groups of starlings and meadowlarks skim the surface of the land, first left, then right. Through the binoculars, the birds don’t look real. The starlings are on one plane and the meadowlarks on another, like two paintings on separate sheets of glass with a space between them. I feel like I’m looking at an image in a View-Master. Not 3D, not really. Not the world the way the human eye and mind see and understand it. The binoculars create a beautiful distortion that turns the world into a piece of modern art.

I turn to walk back to the road. I think I see a party limo, but there’s a casket in the back. It’s a white hearse with a dancing neon license plate cover. A trail of cars follows. Ordinary cars. Nothing festive about them. They are the kinds of cars people in rural areas drive, ones that sit high off the ground, get around in all types of terrain and weather, and are always dirty. The occupants of the vehicles look sad and also a little irritated about passing a stranger standing where she has no business standing. Heavy with impatience and shame, I wait in the space that separates the life in the field from the death snaking beside it. The procession passes. I get in my car.

My road does not end in water, not today. I drive back the way I came. Hawks perch in the trees and on power lines along the highway. They give way to rock pigeons, then starlings. I arrive home in time to see a white-breasted nuthatch and a Carolina wren in the yard. It gets darker. Only the northern cardinals remain. Then they leave. Darker still. I see a mourning dove on the edge of the birdbath. Then nothing.

Wings and Air

Leaves from our red oak appliqué the lawn. The fall-blooming plants have lost their flowers, save for two azaleas. Butterflies and moths have been visiting the azaleas since the butterfly bushes started dying back. Above, I see woodpeckers from time to time. They dance up and down the trunks of our sweet gums. I’ve seen a slate-colored junco on two occasions. Both times, he was sneaking over the fence to take a dip in one of our birdbaths.

We have three birdbaths. Before we moved to this house, I never paid attention to birds, at least not close attention. The birdbaths came with the home, a gift of sorts from the previous owner. The birds who visit our yard regularly were also a gift. Shortly after moving here, I decided it was time to do something about my long-held desire to identify the birds I saw. I got my wish when I was given a set of bird flashcards and a pair of binoculars. The View-Master effect of the binoculars made the whole world pop to life. I couldn’t believe such wonder existed right outside my door. I’ve spent countless hours not only watching birds but also examining trees, the sky, squirrels, the texture of all manner of surfaces, the shrubs at the back of the property that lean into each other like old friends, and so on.

One of my favorite birds is the junco. I remember them from when we lived here years ago, before we moved away (and subsequently moved back). They frequented the yard at our first house. I remember that time fondly. My trauma was about half what it is now, though those earlier traumas were closer to me, more deeply imprinted, less smoothed by time, effort and consideration. Now, the most recent traumas are the jagged ones. They jar me from sleep at night and intrude on my waking hours.

I’ve been fighting for a long time, for myself and for others. For the most part, I feel unheard and unseen. I am frustrated by the lack of literacy around trauma, oppression, discrimination, and other issues that profoundly affect people’s health and well-being. I am frustrated that neurotypicality is imposed on all levels and that social constructs are mistaken for truths.

The birds help. Immensely. They don’t give me answers, and that’s the whole point of paying attention to them. They allow me to stay on a little island called here and now, unaffected by what’s happened in my past and unburdened by the extremely difficult work of being heard above the din of prevailing beliefs and values.

In these small slices of time, there is nothing wrong, nothing at all. The world is wings and air, and I am part of it.

The Loneliness of Recovery

I used to think to be not alone meant / never having to walk through the high wheat / or struggle in the water.

— Allison Seay

I am standing in the high wheat. Field with Sheafs, by August Haake (1911–1914), oil on cardboard. Image used in accordance with U.S. public domain laws.

When I was a teenager, my mother’s best friend came over one night after a long absence from the weekly happy hour my mother hosted. When she arrived, the friend was serious, even somber. She stayed just long enough to tell my mother and their mutual friends that she wasn’t coming back to the group because she had quit drinking.

Couldn’t you just come and not drink, someone asked, flummoxed by the surprise announcement.

No, she said. And I can’t be around any of you again, not while you’re still drinking.

She explained that being around people who drank would jeopardize her recovery. She couldn’t be in that physical or psychological space anymore. My mother didn’t understand, or maybe she understood but didn’t accept her friend’s decision. This was, after all, the woman who had been there through everything with my mom. They’d known each other for more than thirty years. This woman even picked out something for my mother to wear to my father’s funeral. I remember her bringing a selection of outfits home for my mother to try on.

Nothing black, my mother had insisted. I hate it when widows wear black at funerals.

Her friend complied. She fanned out half a dozen wool and satin pieces in beryl blue, emerald green, and ruby red—the rich colors of a painted landscape. My mother sat slumped on the edge of her bed, barely present.

Get up and try these on, her friend coaxed.

Her concern for my mother was evident. It was one of those defining moments in a friendship. Through death, they had become even closer—friends for life, or at least that’s what everyone thought at the time.

After her announcement, my mother’s friend rose and walked purposefully through our paneled den, the one with the mirrored wet bar my father built before his death. She reached the thick cedar door and let herself out.

Empty Space

There are many differences between the alcohol recovery model and the mental health recovery movement. Still, situating myself within the recovery movement feels similar to leaving everyone and everything I’ve known, the way my mother’s best friend had to all those years ago. For one thing, there isn’t a recovery-oriented support group in my area. I don’t feel comfortable at local support groups that follow the disease model, suppress or dismiss research that challenges that model, treat the DSM as authoritative, teach people that medications are the best and often only option for managing their assigned illness, accept funding from pharmaceutical companies, and act as mouthpieces for those companies.

I’ve tried to take part in those groups—to create a space for myself and my view there—and I’ve been met with everything from dismissiveness to outright disdain. For me, they are not places where healing can occur. Rather, they are culdesacs that lead to feeling, and learning to be, what Lewis Mehl-Madrona describes as “forever ill.” In Coyote Wisdom, he writes:

On the down side [sic], support groups for particular illnesses sometimes encourage stories that keep people sick and support them in seeing themselves as ill. People who absorb these stories can come to define themselves as forever ill. A healing story needs to challenge their membership in the community of sufferers.

In my experience, label-specific support groups don’t tell healing stories or encourage peers to create those types of stories for themselves. Instead, I’ve heard group leaders refer to their own mental health labels as “awful,” “terrible” and “horrible.” I’ve seen peers internalize that language and mindset. This does an incredible disservice to the community and is, in my opinion, contemptible. I won’t set foot in those groups anymore because of the culture of self-loathing they cultivate.

Recently, I ran into someone from a group I used to attend. Though it was wonderful to see him, I wasn’t sure how to pick up where we left off more than a year ago. My DSM diagnosis has changed since I attended that group, but that information isn’t important because the DSM isn’t an accurate or helpful classification system. Whatever label I do or don’t have is just that: a label. My thyroid disease has also been addressed, but explaining how that affects my well-being is taxing for even the most attentive listener. So a silence opened in the conversation, like a crevasse in brittle ice. I stood on one side, he on the other. I care about him. I also care about myself and need to do what’s best for me, which includes walking purposefully on my own path, the one that leads to healing. Now I understand how space forms between people, like it did between my mother and her best friend.

Hello, Out There?

There are like-minded people in my area, and I’ve had a difficult time connecting with them. Often, when I reach out, I don’t get a response. I know survivors experience frustration, exhaustion, burnout, and a host of other issues related to trying to have their voices heard while also caring for themselves. Nobody in the recovery movement owes me anything, and I don’t want to take time or energy away from their important work. At the same time, it’s hard to go it alone when I know there are others in town who feel the same way as me. I like to imagine us coming together in friendship and shared purpose. (That’s my internal idealist talking. I’m trying to find my internal realist, but so far she’s eluded capture.)

I’ve had difficulty with recovery-oriented online support groups as well. Members seem to spend an inordinate amount of time fighting with one another, suppressing individual voices, and creating caustic environments in other ways. It’s exhausting to take part in those groups. I often come out feeling worse than when I went in. Online groups also tend to share a great deal of misinformation about mental health, most of which goes unchecked. There are perspectives and opinions, certainly, and those should be respected. But sharing inaccurate information doesn’t help anyone.

Whether in person or online, it probably doesn’t help that, in addition to being an idealist, I’m sensitive, introverted, and have a low threshold for interpersonal strife—either experienced or witnessed. Still, I’m here. I want to speak, write, and act in accordance with what I value, which is a model that promotes well-being over ill-being, individual approaches over generalized protocols, and healing over harm.

I’m over here in the high wheat, in the water. I will stay here even if nobody joins me.


Aside: Reaching Across the Crevasse

One way the mental health recovery movement differs from the alcohol recovery model is that there’s really no room for leaving anyone behind. That silence I felt when talking with my friend recently? I decided to try to connect with him to the best of my ability. He’s my people. Everyone with lived experience is my people, and I am their people. I can’t forget that. While I do need to distance myself from the disease model and the “therapeutic” frameworks that fall out of it, I don’t need to distance myself from anyone who’s open to where I am coming from, even if they remain on the other side of the crevasse.

In part, I told my friend that I am looking at well-being as opposed to ill-being these days, and at a mental health model that supports everyone (regardless of DSM label or lack thereof) having the tools and supports to live meaningful lives. I added that I believe we can all heal from trauma, adversity, and distress—which comes in many forms and touches most of our lives in one way or another. Finally, I said that I don’t think the medical system (physical or mental) goes far enough in not just treating illness and ill-being but in showing us ways that we can thrive and experience well-being.

I guess that’s my new elevator pitch, though it’s a little long. I’ll work on it.