Kales and Fails

I’ve been pregnant five times. Three times, I had babies, and twice I had abortions because the pregnancies weren’t viable. 

My body didn’t get it. The people around me didn’t know. I had hope one day and the next day I just felt wretched, swallowing vomit on the subway and wishing my boobs didn’t hurt. 

I’d been trying to feed myself because even though my body disgusted me and mostly, then, I threw up everything I let myself eat, I’d been trying to believe I deserved a bagel in the morning, another at lunch, now that I was eating for two. After the ultrasounds where I learned there wasn’t a baby — just my stupid fat body that never got anything right — I started vomiting with an intensity I hadn’t experienced in years, puking my throat raw in subway bathrooms and trash cans, showing up for work and pretending to be okay because what else do you do. Programs still need to be run, patients cared for. The first and truest rule I learned growing up — no one has time for your shit, Amanda — was never truer than it was then. 

I just needed this to be over, because I didn’t know what came next, but it would be something different than this. I had wanted those imagined babies, and I was grieving them now that I had just, you know, decaying products of conception lodged in the parts of my body I’d always suspected of being somehow shameful. Now I knew they were, because that’s the feeling I remember most clearly: shame. This was the only good thing I felt I’d ever done; I’d believed for a minute that although I had always suspected I was ruined and unlovable, something worth loving might come from me, somehow. 

I felt stupid for believing that now. But I thought, if I can get this out of me, maybe there’ll be room for something besides this immense failure. 

It’s not important to this story why I feel this way about my body, or why I turned on myself so violently in the wake of my lost pregnancies that every single morning I woke up, remembered I had a dead baby in my body, and started eating and throwing up so ferociously that by the end of the day I could barely remember my way home from work. 

What is important is this: that I know a lot of people, and I knew a lot of people then, and none of them — not my husband or my doctor or the strangers who ultimately performed my abortions and cared for me when I woke up — none of them knew how impossible it felt for me to have these pregnancies in my body, and how the only reason it was possible was because I was throwing up over and over again, on the way to work, in the bathroom at my job, over and over again when I got home. The morning of surgery, I was supposed to have been NPO to prevent aspirating under anesthesia. I woke up, ate a box of pop tarts, threw them up, and lied to the nurse who prepped me so I could still have my d&c. 

No one knew any of this. No one knew, or needed me to prove, how ill equipped I was to be dealing with a miscarriage or how badly I needed an abortion or how badly I was hurting myself in order to get through the day. I didn’t have to prove anything or find the words to convince anyone that my abortion was “necessary”. I did not want to continue this pregnancy, which in my case entailed watchfully waiting to see if I eventually passed clumps of dead fetal tissue in my bathroom or got septic and had it removed in a hospital or collapsed on the street from a cardiac arrhythmia, and from the moment I said that to my doctor, no one asked me anything else. 

Instead, I was treated like the most important thing, the only consideration, was my well being. This is a basic act of humanity that I attempt to extend to each of my patients now. What would be best for you? 

In my entire life, the best example of where I learned this was from the caregivers who scheduled, arranged, and performed my abortions. 

It’s less important to me that people can understand what it feels like to be carrying a pregnancy in your body and want it out, or the various horrible situations that might lead a woman to schedule an abortion, than it is for people to understand what it’s like to feel like your life had been made into something you hated, something you didn’t want to live, and then to wake up and realize it’s been handed back to you. 

For a person for whom pregnancy is not desired, or for whom a particular pregnancy is no longer possible, abortion can feel like hope. That hope is worth fighting for. 

We have to keep fighting, not because what’s happening right now is so horrible (although it is; if you’re confused on this point, it obviously can’t be said enough that people are going to die as a result of forcing them to carry unwanted pregnancies). 

We have to keep fighting because access to abortion is a fundamental good. 

It’s not an unfortunate reality; it’s one of the best things to come out of the twentieth century. I love that no one has to have a baby they don’t want the way I love that SSRIs and corrective lenses allow me to work and drive and not hurt myself over things I can’t control. 

I haven’t written anything public in months, partially because who cares what I think, and partially because I have been engaged in recovering from an eating disorder in a pandemic. I suppose in a perfect world, I would have a more age-appropriate problem, although of course that’s bullshit and a growing number of women over thirty are seeking treatment for eating disorders — because if you haven’t noticed, our world hasn’t become noticeably less hateful towards women or less certain of its right to patrol the bodies of anyone it thinks it can market self-respect to.

The thing is, in the course of therapy I spend a lot of time talking about painful and confusing things that happened to me when I was a kid, and that I don’t want to get into in a public forum. But this same painful detritus has prepared me for a moment where you have to find a way to deal with things that are far from okay, to believe the world is good while also resisting the pressure to agree that the world is fine and what is being done to you is fine.

It’s not fine that people of color are being targeted and that a certain segment of hateful garbage people have taken Trump’s power as a validation of their working thesis that white supremacy and totalitarianism are okay.

It’s not fine that we’ve collectively decided that a response to a pandemic that  relies on our willingness to disregard the lives of those disproportionately dying — the poor, those without access to health care, the disabled and chronically ill, the elderly, people of color — is okay. Remember when Rose was all, don’t you get it mom, half the people on this ship are going to die, and Billy Zane is all, Not the better half? Because that’s the Trump response to the pandemic and it is not okay and if you are like me and love people who lost family members to that exact mindset and still voted for this guy, damn, I am sorry, because I know that is a hard and confusing feeling.

But it is possible to love someone deeply and also be quietly gritting your teeth through the pain of their incomprehensible and shitty actions. I can’t tell you exactly how to manage the particulars of your cognitive dissonance -- how to protect yourself and not let this evil take your dad or brother or grandma from you too. But I know it can be done, because I have been working through how to do just that in the context of deeply personal, far-from-okay behavior on the part of a family member I loved very much.

It’s not fucking okay that your body, if you are ether trans or are assigned female, is not considered your own. That we’re okay both with legislating it as though it were the ideological playground of a bunch of people whose religion is a sham — because yes, if you claim to follow someone whose entire project was about healing and caring for others and you want to take people’s kids away and lose them, want to take people’s health care away and let them die, your religion is fake and you are lying to yourself  —I don’t expect or ask or want anyone to accept that.

But I do want you to believe what I have to make myself believe every day when I think about some of the things that went wrong in my life, so I can refrain from physically hurting myself over them, which is how I managed  the fallout for twenty five years: it is not your fault that this person did this fucked up thing. The inability of others to treat you respectfully, like a human, is not a reflection on your humanity or on your value. The inability to see the inherent dignity and value in another human being is a critical flaw in the nature of the unable, not a reflection of those they are looking at.

You are fine, and valuable, and your skin or your gender or your body or your nationality is not the problem. You should not be afraid for your life and safety. You should not be dying of covid. You should not be forced to carry a child you don’t want or to go without basic necessities or to watch your child die in the streets. 

It is unfortunate that we had been so eager to give our dads and colleagues the benefit of the doubt, to make excuses and believe that if we gave them another chance, we’d see that they didn’t really mean it. But all this means is that we overestimated them. It does not mean that their working thesis —  that some people matter and others don’t — is actually correct. It doesn’t mean that any of it — the sexual assault, the dead grandmas, the lost children, the racism, the stupid cruelty, the violence, the vitriolic hatred of things like love or hope or sacrifice as weakness — is okay. It just means he, the guy whose side they are still on even though he is hurting you, got away with it. It just means you can’t earn your way into being loved well or valued by others. Take it from someone who has been revisiting this very issue in therapy for this entire dumpster fire of a year.

My weekend was great, thanks! I ran ten miles each morning, and running is the closest I get to approximating what it feels like to have properly firing neurons. I listened to two loves of my life, Jon Lovett and Stacy Abrams (about whom I will write more another time, but don’t wait for that;  go give her project to resist voter suppression your money here). I read books to the literal piles of humans I have made, dizzy with the sheer acreage of their cheeks. I had a conversation with my autistic preschooler about Ariel — the first proper conversation my daughter has ever initiated with me.

So, I’m doing okay right now, thanks for not asking while I proceed to say some stuff.

I’m saying this not because my voice is the one that needs to be uplifted in a conversation about  either fat-shaming or ectopic pregnancies, but because I went to bed thinking about the distressing common thread between the current weird preoccupation of other seemingly uninvolved parties with the two phenomena. And because, while I think James Cordon, God among men, gets this, and I know that other survivors of miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, and the million other situations in which abortion has been a Godsend — as in, the best option or only tenable option for a specific human being at a specific point in time —I’m just thinking that maybe the people who need to hear it, literally cannot hear it enough, or from enough people, until they have plunked their toned, tailored-suit-wearing man asses into some comfortable seats, ones from which it is somewhat labor-intensive to emerge, and sat a round or two out.

The first is this: you, fat-shamer, and you, pro-lifer who, surprisingly, is willing to “let God decide” if a college student with a fertilized egg threatening to rupture her fallopian tube and kill her should live or not — since the role your God presumably had in supplying the skill and technology to save her life wasn’t a clear enough sign of His will, and despite the fact that God apparently can’t be trusted to supply Her children with appropriate sexual and gender identities — you get a single body and that is your body. And that body, and control of that body, are just going to need to be enough.

Look: there’s no reason to believe that someone who is insulting people over their weight has any strategic goal related to either health or weight loss. To claim otherwise, to walk back your antagonistic bullshit with a sanctimonious “but I’m concerned for [their] health!” : this a is mindbogglingly bad-faith argument. Because the human being you are shaming, or, honestly, any person acquainted with how people feel when you’re shitty to them, will point out that humiliating people and promoting discrimination against them doesn’t effectively motivate them to change their behavior, let alone the physical body they inhabit, and you will say — what, that it should?

At that point, it will become clear that what you, the fat-shamer, want, is for these people to change their bodies in response to your comments about whether or not they can see their penises or get laid or give you an erection; that, basically, what you are doing is doubling down on a system in which if you are a woman, you should feel embarrassed and subhuman if your body is an inadequately hot commodity for the consumption of this unnamed but all-important (male) consumer. (You, right? It’s you to whom we’re trying to make our bodies presentable?)

And if you, the fat-shamed, are a man, your worth is still determined by men, this time the ones who supposedly know how successful you are at getting women to have sex with you based on their opinions of your body, and who have decided that this is the metric by which your worth is established. (Side note: straight guys who know so much about what women want, I’m guessing you don’t want to rethink your premise that your estimation of other guys’ bodies is the one that matters when determining what women find attractive, but it would behoove you to do so. If there were one thing women don’t like (there’s not!), it would be straight guys mansplaining our sexuality to us).

Basically, what fat shaming is about in your sixties (because that is how old Bill Mayer is, friends!) is what fat shaming is about in sixth grade. It’s just one more way that a certain group of people, a group  with relatively more power than others and a deep fear of losing it, maintain that power by saying: I am going to tell you what matters, and I am going to tell you whether or not you have that thing that matters, and I am going to make it so painful for you to not have it that you will remake your body to get me off your back, because it is weirdly important to me to exert this control over you.

My furtive eighth grade crush got fat shamed in middle school, and he was pretty fat. But, you know, so did I, and I’ve never had a medical doctor express concern for my weight. Discouragingly, it barely registered with them when I was losing my hair and hadn’t had a period in a year. But other helpful randos, from grandmas to girls in my gymnastics class, started calling me fat at age four, and the only way I was able to stop them was to self-regulate so effectively that by the time I went to college, I was throwing up when I “lost control” and chewed too many pieces of Juicy Fruit.

That’s the goal of fat-shaming, fat-shamers: someone who has accepted your right to tell them who they are and what their worth so unreservedly that she can graduate Phi Beta Kappa on the one hand, but still believe that she is “too fat to sit down” on her graduation night. And — as one person with a running leitmotif I like to call “pathological need for control” running through my adolescence and early adulthood to another —- can I suggest you slow your roll and take a look in your own goddamn mirror?

I can’t speak to why a person might experience exerting control over the bodies of other people as catharsis, why what they need to self regulate is to make someone else feel worthless. I can only imagine that this bullshit behavior comes from the same sense of existential dread that makes two missed days at the gym feel like that a night in one of those sky cells on Game of Thrones to me. But I can be compassionate towards you and also take a hard pass when it comes to “tolerating” your “opinions” about the value of people around you, or your right to patrol the size of their bodies or to determine that they need to be harassed into having a body you like better. Your feeling about thigh gaps or whatever is your deal, but the fact that you think other people should be treated badly or should endanger their health in an effort to make their bodies acceptable to you is also, 100%, your deal, and not the problem or the responsibility of the people in those bodies. Take your body and do whatever you want with it, but shut the mouth part of it first.  

Similarly: I’m not going to explain to anyone why a fertilized egg in one’s fallopian tube is 1. not a viable pregnancy and 2. not something to “watchfully wait" over. “Watchful waiting” is appropriate when the risks of intervention are significant, or the benefits unclear, or both. In the very few cases in which this might be what a doctor would advise, that decision is made though a cost-benefit analysis with the mother, because the mother is the patient being treated. There is no “child’s life” to consider because, as with any pregnancy, but maybe especially an entirely nonviable one, there is no child yet.

If you are anything but shocked by the idea that someone should be expected to “wait and see” if their medically treatable and potentially fatal medical condition will kill them or not because of how another person, living in another body, feels about the situation, then you don’t give a shit about life. Not the life of that woman, which you are endangering. Not the lives of any existing children she has or partner she has or parents or students or siblings or friends. What you are saying, again, is that you decide what this woman’s life is worth — and your expectation is that she accept that when it comes down to it, your random feelings about her body both define the value of that body and should be factored into the clinical decision making of her medical provider.

As with our fat-shamers above, I’m just wondering where it came from, this idea that you’re entitled to control the bodies of other human beings, and the weirdly aggressive efforts to do so.

Are you ok, Representative? It seems to me you are not.

It doesn’t even matter that an ectopic pregnancy is not viable. Because pro-life arguments are about “preserving life” the way fat-shaming is about “promoting health”: that is to say, they’re not about that at all. It’s about being unwilling to either take responsibility for working out whatever damage you have, or to acknowledge that the way you are choosing to work that damage out is by violently exerting control over the bodies and lives of others.

Forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy she doesn’t want is violent whether that pregnancy is only somewhat likely, as it is in the case of a viable pregnancy carried in a country with the highest material mortality rate in the developed world, or pretty effing likely, as in the case where the pregnancy is lodged in a tube that will not accomodate it. When you legally compel another human being to risk her life carrying a pregnancy in her body because of how you feel, that is violent.

I want to have compassion for you, person who sees no better option than hurting other people to deal with whatever it is life has handed you. I’m something of a poster child for irrational or detractive ways of dealing with the parts of the world I don’t like: see above, where a teenage permutation of me was vomiting gum bile. But I also feel like we don’t serve anyone by looking the other way while they evade the responsibly we all have to handle our own shit.

Zane and I drove across Pennsylvania this weekend. It was good, and it was also hard, because I haven’t been in Pittsburgh since I left college and it reminded me of the fabulously wasted opportunities that lie in heaps between my college graduation (guys, remember when I was on a fellowship to get my PhD?) and my no-doctorate-having, dentally-challenged, busted-looking, marginally-employed current self.

Also, there were billboards about Jesus every forty feet.

Guys?

Stop putting up these Jesus billboards. Their net value add to the state of Pennsylvania — a state that needs all the help it can get, existentially speaking; no one is hanging Confederate flags in a former Union state because life is going so well for them — is negative.

I would suggest to you that Pennsylvania doesn’t need any more fear or dread. I would suggest that there are a lot of Golden Corrals here, a lot of unnecessary firearms, a lot of beer being sold before four p.m. I’m saying there’s a town that is burning underground and has been for almost a hundred years and people are still living around it, are riding their dirt bikes over it on the weekend, and that I know this because I took my children there for a family outing. We don’t need any signs about hell while we are operating motor vehicles in this state.

Uninvited, on the way back, I saw a very small, lower down billboard, and it read, in red letters on white: Make America Great Again….

With Islam.

And I am not converting to Islam, but for a moment I wanted to, so deeply do I love that billboard, you guys.

The Muslims of central PA, sick of these aggressive Jesus boards — I like to imagine — were like, we have two hundred dollars and it is on.

Anyway.

Being solidly mid-thirties feels like the world is ending because we live in a culture that recognizes a money-making opportunity in cultivating fear of an entirely unavoidable, universal phenomenon like aging, and because those same billboard-making assholes got to me when I was seven and twelve and seventeen (where the billboards there when I was in college? They feel like they may have been, but honestly, they are so in keeping with my teenage understanding of what the world was, that I didn’t notice).

Anyhow, I seem to have skipped over the part of my life I was led to believe I was going to reach one day, the Sweet-Vally-High, Chasing-Amy part, where I would be adored and tall and my actions would make sense to myself, to those around me, and landed in this weird adult space as exactly the same person I actually was at twelve, at seventeen. Still without any of the things I expected to accrue or the feelings I thought those things would give me.

And that is why I am actually so glad I went to college and spent four years not blazing a path to medical school as I had intended, and reading Faulkner and Conrad instead.

Which is not to say that I don’t also feel sad about the role my self-doubt and anxiety played in me not accomplishing what I’d hoped to as a kid, but which is to say that what I needed and had not been prepared for, when I was singing about Jesus and praying that every single thing I felt and thought would be “cleansed” and my insides, stripped of who I was, left whiter than snow, was not so much a career path that might justify my existence, but a way of getting through the many, many three am’s of which life is full.

What I’m saying is that Jessica Wakefield was actually boring and you weren’t meant to be a product, or a “character” marketable enough to sustain a series of YA novels or a religious movement. You’re the MAGA: Islam! billboard, friend, and I am looking out for you, cozy among the poorly managed vegetation along 76-S. I am so excited that you are here. Life isn’t what you thought, either, but that’s a statement about life, not a statement about you.

It’s okay if aging scares you. But be scared of losing things you are and have and that you actually value. Don’t be scared because of things you thought you’d be that actually never fit right or mattered much anyway. The entire basis of those novels were about two sisters so alike that no one could tell them apart. Think about that.

Sorry for how I haven’t been writing a lot. There’s the banal and crushing drama of human life in this tiny privileged corner of time and space in which I Iive, where things like planning and eating meals feel intractably difficult and I am despondent about my eyebrows and teeth at least twice a week. And then, of course, there’s the complete existential meltdown I can see just over the horizon of my navel when I unfix my gaze from it

— fun fact: did you know that Google defines the navel as “rounded knotty depression in the center of a person's belly?” And did you know that that is the most glitteringly true response to the question “How are you?” that I have ever heard? —  

a giant abyss of children lost and scared in cages, of moms without their kids, of husbands, sons, fathers caged like cattle, like still shots lifted from 1941 and brought to life while fucking Mike Pence lets his mask slip and reveals absolutely nothing because the mask is his face, because he’s basically, I guess, no longer human, and maybe we aren’t either, right, because each of these men is a person and yet here I am, pulling out my hair over my boss’s accusatory emails and wondering why I only get half a right eyebrow now.

Friends, how have you been?

I know this, though. Entirely apart from my lurking fear that we are slouching towards a new, low-key kind of genocide and we’re too busy transforming our faces into old people faces on Facebook to intervene, I had a more personally immediate crisis in my life last week. And I went around feeling quietly panicked and shitty and remembering all the other times I have felt this way and trying to be my best self, while every good thing I did felt more inauthentic because of my creeping suspicion that I am actually a toxic person, a Mike Pence in cute tights, playing at being human.

It may be beneficial for all of us to occasionally have these moments in which we can’t say for sure that we are better than Mike Pence, or than anyone else. Maybe all the time we spend reassuring ourselves of our value at the expense of other people

(even those who appear to be full on goddamn sociopaths who look straight at human suffering and then turn their dead clown eyes on reporters and say they didn’t see it)

is a distraction from finding true things about ourselves. The way, maybe, a person might have believed that if she just never ate more than fifteen hundred calories, she would be a certain kind of person: valued, safe, certain.

When I was very sad and lost this week, the first thought I had that didn’t feel painful and cancerous was this: that I can be kind.

I found myself thinking that right after I said to a friend that every good thing I’d tried to believe about myself suddenly seemed untrue, seemed to have been untrue all along, and I felt embarrassed for ever having believed those things.

But I did believe, even then, that I could be kind.

I think if Mike Pence could be kind to one person — actually kind, not cooperative or diplomatic or accommodating — it might stop being so possible to look at these human men as though they are something other than himself. The way I have found, as a nurse, that I can go into work willing myself out of existence and then, with each effort at loving another human being who is also feeling like shit, who maybe is also not acting so awesome, either, I find it a little harder to look over the border crisis that my own inner life has become and take a Mike Pence stance.

The distance between the mind-blowing fuckery going on right now and anything approaching an acceptable way for our country to operate is crippling. And I hate myself sometimes because I feel like I’m freaking out over it when it’s not me locked up or taken from my kids, so being kind to myself seems offensively beside the point.

But I don’t think it’s optional; I don’t think you can be cruel to yourself and effectively love other people, just like I don’t think Mike Pence is feeling a lot of lovingkindness towards himself these days. Does anyone looking at that man think they are seeing a happy person?

So friends: everything’s shit, but we can be kind.  And I think we can literally start with any human being, rather than fighting over who “deserves” our kindness most, rather than insisting that we have to earn our own kindness, or that kindness to ourselves somehow interrupts, rather than facilitating, kindness to others.

There’s a lot of things I want to write about Pride, but I can’t find the words, because honestly, while I think everyone should feel celebrated during Pride — even cisgendered white bisexuals with husbands and children, who never managed to fully hate ourselves for how we were (though high fives to the brave Seventh Adventists and homecoming courts for trying!) — really what we all need to pay attention to this month is trans women of color, and how we just can’t seem to stop murdering them.

Muhlaysia Booker was alive a month ago. Muhlaysia Booker was twenty three years old. She had all the things you and I have — a history, a family, friends — all things that the fetuses for whose sake we are collectively stripping women of their autonomy don’t have, not to belabor the point. 

She had a story, probably a difficult one, and she had courage, or she wouldn’t have survived and fought to live life on her own terms, and the struggle to do so, to live on one’s own terms, is supposedly something we admire.

And yet she died facedown in a street somewhere far from the people who loved her.

And yet her last moments were ones in which she was subjected to violent assault because (1) who she was triggered enough hate that someone felt entitled to murder her and (2) we’ve decided, collectively, that while we will literally redefine half the population of Alabama as something less than citizens with rights to their own bodies, we can’t summon up an unambivalent rejection of straight-up murder.

I want to rock Pride, because I’ll be honest, self-love is a goddamn uphill slog for me right now. All of it — my sexuality, my personality, my appearance, my clothes — none of them were ever right, growing up, and Pride, for me, is a month all about talking back to the eye-rolling Beckies who dominated my adolescence and never seem to step wholly off.

But I think we need to be celebrating Pride, at least in part, by recognizing that we can’t start and stop by loving ourselves -- especially those of us who enjoy significant amounts of privilege because of all the ways our bodies and identifies do conform to the expectations of others. 

Bisexual erasure is real, and I don’t think anyone has the right to write off your sexuality because it seems somehow closer to straightness than their own. But we also need to love queer and trans people who are getting killed in the streets by the same country (and we are all part of this country; it’s not just Trump’s problem) that just can’t seem to decide under which circumstances abortion is murder.

Hint: none. But also, you know what definitely is murder?

This

and this

and this.

And even “our” guys — our Bob Caseys and Chrissy Houlihans, or whoever your Democratic representatives are — need to hear from us about the importance of keeping this issue as visible as the antiabortion wack jobs keep their Lacanian baby signifiers.

Look, inexplicably, of all the things Ben Carson could be doing, he roused from his nap long enough to propose taking protections away from transgendered and nonbinary homeless human beings. Why? I don’t know, and I’m certainly not going to connect it to the very same religion that had no time for the repeated sexualized intrusions onto the bodies of its Sabbath School attendees, but plenty of time to predict that their “same sex attractions” were a sign of the End Times. (Christians, have you thought that your religion might be more warmly embraced if you toned down that recurring leitmotif of fucking things up for everyone?)

The point is, friends, write to Bob and Chrissy and Horrible Pat and everyone else who represents you, and tell them that you do not want the government rolling back protections against one of the most vulnerable populations in your country. You know, the population that is being killed in the goddamn streets.

Be proud of who you are because being LGBTQ+ is great and you are fabulous, and also because speaking out when your government is collectively not addressing actual murder, as in the intentional killing of living human beings, is even better.

Addendum:

(When you write to Chrissy and Bob and Horrible Pat, you can specifically make them aware of Virginia Representative Jennifer Wexton’s Ensuring Equal Access to Shelter Act, which is designed to prevent this ruling from putting trans women at increased risk of sexual assault and murder by forcing them to be housed with men (which is what this bill does and which is tenable only if you imagine an endgame in which the threat of violent sexual and physical assault will magically make someone cisgender, because apparently violence is the answer, sometimes?)

Here’s another article that details the underlying reasoning, such as it is, underlying this move by Carson (apparently, the idea is that by restricting the right of a given rando to determine for herself the gender of another human being, the federal government is taking away the rando’s right (to override the self-determination of others) And here’s an account that clarifies exactly how this specific proposal increases the risk that trans women -- who, say it with me, are already facing an epidemic of violence -- face when they attempt to secure safe housing. 

Here’s the Transequity Action Center, which gives some context to this as part of an ongoing movement against trans people and also a place where you can send money to support ongoing efforts to fight these efforts. 

Finally, you can comment on the HUD proposal by filing a discrimination complaint (although this is clearly not the intent of the complaint form, it is one way to reach them, and to make the point that this is their agency openly endorsing the discrimination they are supposedly charged with preventing, or you can directly comment on this ruling here (not to bury the lead, but DO IT)!

Friend, do you call yourself ugly? Or is it just me?

I had an eating disorder for two decades, from before I got my braces put on — from when I barely had all my grown up teeth, honestly — to, well, roughly the time I got pregnant with my first son.

For the entirely of that time, I went around telling people I was fat. I did this like I would have told them I was in nursing school, or had grown up Seventh Day Adventist, or that I had a brother.

Actual fat people, and also all the not fat people who weighed more than me (often, but not always, this was most people): I am sorry. I was kind of a a-hole.

Disconcertingly, though, as I’ve just made myself stop saying that — mostly — I’ve gotten a little closer to the truth of how I feel about myself. So now I go around telling myself, and those around me, as a matter of course, that I am ugly.

I do this by way of explanation or humor: this thing happened to me, and I understand that it happened because I am ugly. Or, the nice thing about being ugly is that I don’t have to deal with [x]. 

And, of course, I do it so I don’t ever forget. Because possibly the most basic lessons I learned growing up is to not believe people who tell you good things about yourself, that those people are secretly laughing at you or feeling sorry for you. That if you believe you are beautiful and worthy, if you believe anyone wants you around, you are doing something wrong and you’re going to be punished. These punishments can range from the Trauma-Rama column in YM to the more deep humiliations of, say, childhood sexual abuse, but they will come, because you deserve them, and your sense of security hinges on a view in which the world is a giant Excel spreadsheet and things are fair and easily manipulated - although strangely, very rarely or never by you.

It’s a somewhat unconventional, but unassailable, power move: I will define myself on my own terms, even if those terms are kind of a bummer. It is, honestly, a fairly comprehensible response to a set of circumstances in which the strength of others — say, Christ — is supposedly “made perfect in [your] weakness”, but also weaknesses, are routinely attributed to you, whether you agree or not, and then identified as both personal failings and as justification for other people’s hurtful behavior.

And after a couple of decades, feeling like you’re not good enough stops being so painful, right? A more solid essential truth of life is that life is happiest for people when we can escape the trap of self, and what better way to avoid that trap by making yourself an extremely  unpleasant thing to think about or look at directly?

But here’s the thing — and gentle reader, if you think I am talking to you here, I probably am. (And if you don’t, then guys, Jonathon Van Ness is reading my blog!)

Stop calling yourself ugly. Not because you’re truly gorg - you absolutely could be, but I’m not here to die on that hill today. But because what kind of Flowers in the Attic mom or sibling or friend goes around evaluating the physical appearance of the people they love?

It’s a weird thing to say, guys! Are my kids literally more attractive than the children of other people? Likely no. But when I say my kids are the most mindblowingly perfect creatures on the planet, I’m actually  just saying that I love them, because whose mom is in any kind of a position to make an aesthetic argument about someone she has lost entire nights of sleep over, whose shit she has tenderly washed out of her own hair?

When you call someone you love beautiful, it’s like a code, but instead of being meanspirited and making people around you uncomfortable, you’re saying a totally normal thing (possibly you are also re-inscribing the stipulated connection between worthiness as a human and value as an aesthetic object, but let’s all walk before we run here, ok?)

Look, I don’t know whether you’re beautiful or not, or what that even means, but I do know that you don’t owe it to anyone to hurt yourself with mean code words.

If you have a better filter than I do, and manage not to work your negative feelings about your appearance into conversation, but you hang out with them in your downtime: stop that, too. Because even if you don’t go around saying mean things about yourself out loud, your belief that they are true is keeping you afraid.

Look, there are ways of being invulnerable that don’t involve desensitizing yourself to painful “truths”. To the degree that you think you have to do this — to the degree that other people’s possibly negative opinions of you pose a threat — you’re still doing all this extra work to accomodate the expectation that you entertain what they say to you.

Stop making yourself invulnerable to other people by laying waste to your mind-castle, friends, and start channeling your inner Nancy Pelosi. These people are staff, flunkies of the pointless and meanspirited. Do you engage with staff? You do not.

Everyone gets exactly one opinion and, imagining a world in which your estimation of yourself was more positive than someone else’s, you’re under no obligation to “face facts” as defined by that person. People who try to force you to accept their shitty thoughts and feelings as your personal reality are holding up, not a mirror, but their own weirdly private selfie. They are not a useful source of information about who you are. 

You are the speaker of your own goddamn house. They are Kelly Ann Conways, yapping with hungry eyes in the hopes that some random piece of mouth-garbage they spit out will hit somewhere and stick. (Guys, remember when Kelly Ann insulted Michelle Obama? Of course not, because no one cares about Kelly Ann and her garbage opinions).

Second thing: I don’t know the degree to which other people feel like they have to normalize painful beliefs about themselves to feel invulnerable. But judging by the odds that a stranger or acquaintance will lash out at obstacles or negative feedback or poor deli service or undocumented immigration in a given day, I will guess that I am not the only one who’s been doing this.

So, you know, be kind. People need your negative feedback much less often than you think. Most people aren’t being dicks to you because they just feel too great about themselves.

Every single person you know is getting older, and there is only one Beyonce, friends. I can think of few situations in which affirming the worth of these around you is a poor move, and to the degree that it makes you feel vulnerable, remind yourself that you’re telling that person something about them, not you.

Today, friends, picture a world where you don’t have to talk shit about yourself and you also don’t have to talk shit about anyone else, however distressing their attitude or work ethic or politics seem to you. Could there be a bigger get out of jail free card?

My Macmo, my oldest kid, is seven now, and his teeth are falling out at a rate that feels less like a rite of passage and more like a weird omen, something out of a surreal lucid dream or an episode of what I imagine Black Mirror would be like, had it come out when I was young and watched TV besides Peppa Pig . 

More disconcertingly, one prominent tooth got knocked out prematurely (by my child’s own knee. Because of genetics.). It’s grown-up replacement isn’t overly eager to join the party in his mouth. I had a boyfriend (fiancé; I was once engaged to) a man whose diet consisted almost entirely of refined carbohydrates and meat products: an intentional choice because, he explained, he found it anxiety provoking, how long it took to eat lettuce. You just have to keep chewing it, he told me once, with that precious expression grown adult men make when they have never wondered whether the thing they are saying is cute or psychotic. So sure, that guy was obviously bad news but his approach is not without its plus side if you actually don’t have any teeth.

Anyway, Mac’s not worried about it. 

What he’s worried about, though, is sleeping in his bed at night. His brother and sister, one and four years old, respectively, have age-appropriate meltdowns over bedtime, but their little bodies are too weak to sustain the drama their spirits are willing, even eager, to initiate around six each night. Eventually they collapse in such tortured postures that one can hear Ice Cube intone solemnly, “The victim didn’t go down without a fight”.

Mac’s night terrors are more existential. There are bad guys and they are going to get him. He seems to believe that these bad guys won’t get him if he’s sleeping in bed with his dad and me, which is heartbreaking. 

I promise I won’t let anything hurt him because it’s a thing you say, because I’d like him to believe it, and because if I tried to explain how things actually are, neither of us would be able to sleep. Baby, why would a bad guy come after you here when your school is right down the street?

The world has always been scary. I think we all feel scared-er now because for awhile we hit this groove where we thought we all agreed we wanted things to be better: we wanted people to be equal, kids to be safe, cancer to be cured, babies fed. And now the inmates are running the asylum and the people in charge of important things like who gets to kill children seem to actively wish those around them ill. The president of the United States spent Memorial Day weekend weighing which war criminals to pardon. One of these inspiring true stories stabbed an injured fifteen year old to death while medics were attending to him; another picked off civilians like Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List. The most appealing of the men up for pardon is the one pissing on corpses. This, friends, is our new culture of life.

Here is the little force field I am building around myself and my babies today, though:

It’s really easy for us to be part of the bad side, because the bad guys look a lot like us (us meaning me and my son, here), but we can try every day to do a little better, starting with listening to the people being hurt.

Sometimes the people hurting others are really loud and powerful, but that’s not the same thing as being strong. Less than a week after Alabama resoundingly concluded that women’s lives are expendable, Senator Kamala Harris reintroduced a bill to find out how we can keep black mothers and babies from dying so much. (An, if I may,  let’s insert a sidebar noting that if you are a voter and a potential canvasser and donor and volunteer, you actually have the ability to decide whether or not someone is “electable”). 

There are heroes everywhere. There are heroes who are quietly doing wonderful things, and then there are heroes who are keeping the world good and who don’t get attention in proportion to what they do because of the color of their skin. Two I found just last week are Awesomely Luvvvie, whose blog is fun and joyful and smart and important, and also a huge force of black women running for office and supporters of these women, remaking the world while everyone sits rapt, wondering what our President and his cavalcade of sloppily drawn cartoon villains will do next. (Let me help you: it will be something stupid and awful and you won’t get any of these moments back, so feel free to sit a round or two out. You won’t miss anything). 

Guys, sorry if I’m just having little trouble moving past the degree to which those white guys we invest with power have committed to using that power to distinguish between real people, whose bodies are theirs, and me, whose body is up for public debate.

I got about two and a half hours of sleep Monday night — I just get so pumped about borough code, you guys! — and spent most of yesterday oversharing about my uterus. I do not even care who you are or how small the talk you aim to make, I will talk to you about my uterus and the degree to which it determines my legal status as a human being. I will literally tell you that your not voting is putting me at risk of sepsis, guys, and I don’t even care these days, so you may want to just hone your skills at smiling and waving.

I am also cognizant  of the fact that it took this particular white lady this particular assault on my humanity to get quite this focused. Not the breathtakingly cruel and equally myopic approach to undocumented Latin American immigrants. Not the fact that black people are just flat-out murdered by police and then blamed for it. Not even the fact that people might slaughter my seven year old in his classroom before I figure out how to approach his completely random adult dental pattern.

I guess I’m that bitch who they were talking about when they came for literally everyone else and then no one is left when they come for me. Slow clap for us, white ladies!

So that’s, you know, not great.

I don’t know how one is “fair to oneself” in this particular context. But let’s say you are a cis white woman who passes as straight and who, maybe, could have done better, but who is also trying to live out what you believe in the context of an occasionally crippling mood disorder and a pack of kids, with their own ICD10s and cheeks and fast-approaching need for orthodontia. How would one simultaneously maintain focus on this one just flat-out devastating thing that seems posed to codify one’s status as less than a human being, while also acknowledging that this is not actually a fundamental change in direction from the trend of dehumanization of others based on demographics like rage, gender, nationality, economic status?

I mean, all of us have to keep talking about this move to give the state control of female bodies, especially those of us who have a better vocabulary for it than for some of the other horrible things the going on. I can talk to my neighbors or my gas station attendant about the fact that their vote is a potentially life-or-death decision that they get to make for me and my daughter. (Guys, it was 8:21 am), And they can see me, and they don’t really think I deserve to die if I get pregnant and miscarry again, so that may mean something to them.

It’s a lot harder to have those conversations about issues that affect other people, but not me, in ways that don’t just sound like I’m trying to be woke. I can tell you about how it feels to me as a white mom, to see Trayvon Martin’s mom running for office and to image that being the deeply unsatisfying “happy ending” for me, if my child were murdered and then blamed for his own death. 

But one, how systemic racism feels to me is laughably beside the point. And, two, I don’t know anything about that, really, because no one is going to murder my child over his skin color. In fact, my kid benefits from the same system that endangers black and brown kids. And I don’t think I’ve ever been able to communicate that effectively to anyone, because that’s a way more complicated message than, please tell your elected officials I am a human being, ovaries notwithstanding.

So, we need to do way better — those of us who are white ladies and men — at simultaneously not backing down from these explicit and terrifying new goings-on and also working out how to push back against the older and equally terrifying, but less personally threatening, horrible shit.

It’s equally distressing that entire states have decided that a basic aspect of humanity is no longer something they want to extend to people like me and that that has been the consensus among Americans about black people and undocumented people and poor people and trans people basically forever.

I don’t know how to  effectively respond to the active dehumanization of groups I’m not part of, and it’s a problem that I’ve been on the planet for three and a half decades and this hasn’t come up before, or hasn’t bothered me long enough for me to find a solution. Maybe you don’t either (if you do, I mean, get at me).

But what won’t work is taking the intensity with which I’m responding to the dehumanization of people like me and assuming this makes this trend fundamentally different from the equally violent and terrifying trends that affect groups of human beings to which I don’t belong.

Ladies, not only is it really this bad, but it’s been this bad for a long time while we were, I don’t know, watching Game of Thrones? But that show’s over now, and we’ve got to figure this out. Not just the uterus stuff but all of the stuff.

I’ve had two abortions. I grieved each time, because I wanted those babies, but the pregnancies weren’t viable — one pertinent detail I haven’t heard discussed in the context of any of these “hearbeat” bills is that the fetal cardiac activity, which many people including the medical community have pointed out is not the same thing as a heartbeat like you or I or your average abortion seeker has, is that this activity will just stop, sometimes, and this is what happened to me.

It was a horrible experience. I’m definitely not pro-miscarriage. If I could have those babies and also the babies I have now and the life I have now, I’d choose that.

But that wasn’t the choice I got. The choice I got was wait and see if my body would expel the tissue on its own or if I’d get sick and need the abortion and possibly treatment for infection, or maybe get sicker and become infertile or die.

  Every time I think about abortion, I think about that choice, and I am deeply grateful, because I started to heal from that loss when I woke up in the clinics’ recovery rooms — one in Brooklyn, one in Midtown — to nurses who cared for me as if my body still mattered, even if it was no longer “carrying life”. As it it was, in fact, carrying a life -- mine -- and as if that life mattered. 

Pro-choice people, maybe you’ve told people how you’re “not pro abortion”. Maybe it’s important to you to make that distinction. It’s not important to me, just as the distinction between my abortions, which occurred in the absence of a detectable fetal “heartbeat”, and elective abortions in which having a baby seems equally impossible regardless of the pregnancy’s physiological viability, is unimportant.

To me, what is important is that within the constraints of my own body and life, I was given a choice and treated with dignity. I wasn’t expected to suffer or risk illness, infertility, or death, or to prolong my own grief, or to prove that my life and not just my well-being were in danger, in order to get the medical care that my doctor prescribed for me.

I am absolutely pro-abortion in cases where abortion is the better of two choices a woman faces. In my own imagination, I can come up with dozens of reasons right now in which that might be true. And originally I thought I’d make a list, because maybe people don’t understand all the situations in which abortion is the clearly better choice, the one that causes the least suffering and promotes the best outcomes and autonomy for the person in question, that person being the human being who is pregnant. The one you would want for yourself.

But I am not going to make that list. Because when I think about my tendency to want to justify abortions — mine or anyone else’s — my voice in my head sounds the same to me as when I try to explain why I didn’t try harder to fight off the man who sexually assaulted me. How bad did the alternative have to be for me to call it assault? Does it count if I was only afraid he was going to hurt me? Does it make the story less sympathetic if I admit that my most clear memory — apart from the very quiet and sudden realization, coming around with his hands on my body, is that no one in the entire world knew where I was or who I was with, myself included — was my fear that he’d fuck up my teeth and I couldn’t afford to fix them?

Your right to your body is absolute. There is no need for extenuating circumstances to prove that you “deserve” to say no. Not to pregnancy. Not to sex. Your body — strange as it must seem to those of us who wake every day to tweets and news clips from men with feels about it —is wholly yours.

To the degree that some of us aren’t willing to “go quite that far”: I submit that those “of us” who expect women to have a Good Reason to want an abortion will never find our reasons good enough. Not every woman with a missed miscarriage dies of a septic abortion, after all; and surely there exists some rape victim capable of piecing together her life in the context of raising her rapists’ child.

The only question that matters here is this: do you believe that human beings are entitled to decide what happens to their bodies or do you believe something else?

                                                                                                                                I just like the name, guys!

In all fairness, apart from my brain’s insistence on hoovering up its own serotonin like your mom on a rage-clean, and the cacophonous affirmation of Southern congresspeople that woman aren’t people as such, things were possibly not so bad? Would it help to know that my personal life was heavy on birthday parties and awkwardly positive work feedback (is there another kind of those of us explicitly taught to experience positive self regard as a threat to our eternal salvation?) That my daughter got a new Elsa costume for her birthday?

If not, here’s some things to bear in mind as we head into a weekend and get ready to do it all again next week. (Guys, who can even wait to see what these wacky misogynists will come up with next?)

Desperate women (and, maybe men?) are throwing money at heroes like those running The Yellowhammer Fund and other non-profits devoted to helping women access health care so they don’t have to be desperate. (Not that any of us suspect that the compelling image driving these “pro-life” movements is one, not of a adorable  baby, but of these uppity women who thought they belonged in the Senate, calling men on their propensity to rape people and destroy our planet and turn in shoddy homework assignments, appropriately reminded of what we are and where we belong. Not that desperation is the retro look boys suddenly remembered they like in a girl). Friends, just imagine a world in which women could just get care for their bodies without having to perform a little shame shuffle to do it. Like what your mind camera is showing you? Give to Yellowhammer Fund and help make it happen.

Naturally, of course, already pulling it together, the Elizabeth Warren of the nonprofit world, Planned Parenthood, is leading the charge to shut down this whole business of dehumanizing women up in Ohio (guys, remember when we were all upset about Ohio last week, back before Georgia and Alabama all said, hold my drink?) Guys, there are Planned Parenthoods everywhere and they will gladly take your money and your time and your likes as well. It’s exhausting, but at the very least, take three minutes and practice your go-to shutdown the next time your, I don’t know, dad or cashier at the gas station or whoever tries to start up that noise about Planned Parenthood selling baby parts. Something like, “They don’t do that, but they do provide critical health services in a country that has decided to completely abandon anyone with a uterus to die of preventable cancer!” Big smile, thumbs up, collect your change.

Finally, a perennial favorite of mine — guys, do I ever not want to talk about repairing obstetric fistula? — the Fistula Foundation has added a program serving Rohingya women to their mission. In case you missed is in all the open and unapologetic corruption and dismantling of basic human rights here in our country, there’s some more genocide going down over in Myanmar, and unsurprisingly, this makes it hard for a girl to get actual care to deliver her baby without incurring debilitating complications such as obstetric fistula. So, while some people choose life in the sense that they force kiddos to carry their uncles’ rape babies, other people do so by surgically correcting the fistulas that are a part of childbirth for a lot of women. And you can give them money, too!

Hot take, kind of, only not really:

A society in which one category of people can be forced to carry and deliver children by another category will never be an equitable society.

I don’t “love abortion”, but I resoundingly and without question support the right to abortion. It used to upset me and to be honest, now that I have worked in health care, It doesn’t, really, because the thing is that fetuses are not people, yet, but women are.

The narrative being sold here, as old as Aristotle, is this idea that the man really makes the baby and the woman is just an incubator; that really, asking her to carry a child she doesn’t want is simply asking her to not interrupt this guy’s soulsemen, doing its thing. (Except not, of course, because no one is attempting to outlaw vasectomies or masturbation or blow jobs, all of which also effectively stop baby material from actualizing itself.)

Tellingly, the obligation to see this baby thing through starts only when the ball is in the woman’s court. It’s part of a tradition in which nothing is too hard or too much to ask someone else to do, especially when that person has a vagina or presents as a woman. Go ask your closest three ladies to name something they consistently do because men in their personal or professional lives “can’t (seem to) do” it. Come back when they take a breath. I’ll not wait.

This re-imagining of developmental embryology vis-a-vis the fourth century BCE both minimizes the role women play in bringing a fetus to term and disingenuously downplays the host of risks pregnancy poses.

A pregnant woman with a psychiatric or physical condition may just have found the medication that keeps her from decompensating, and it is likely to be one not yet established safe in pregnancy.

A pregnant woman may just have found the courage to leave her abusive partner; now she’s tied to someone who also has a claim to her child, and is less likely to qualify for shelters in many cases.

A pregnant woman may work, and love, a job that she cannot physically do while she is pregnant.

She may have one on many medical conditions, such as lupus, MS, or diabetes, in which pregnancy will likely make her sicker.

She may just not want to be vomiting to the point where she has to be hospitalized. She may not have a job that will give her time off when she’s too sick to work. She may have children to support.

She may have body dysmorphia that will let her get through the day now, but not after a fifty pound weight gain. She may be anorexic and unable to gain the weight she needs to have a healthy pregnancy.

She may, thanks to a history of sexual assault — one  that can now include the actual rape leading to a conception — experience pregnancy and obstetrical care as  delay reminders of her trauma.

She may not be able to afford it.

She may just not fucking want to be pregnant.

Without question, these points are inevitably met with, She should have thought of that, then.

And here we are: at this deeply held belief that ultimately, women who have sex should be willing to accept the “consequences” of sex, as defined, in this case and all the cases, by men.

Setting aside the fact that sex in the best of circumstances is often only quasi-consensual (I don’t want this, but I don’t want to fight over it either); setting aside that fact that even a rape exemption would presumably require women to “prove” they were “really raped”; and setting aside the fact that such an exemption is conspicuously absent from Alabama’s law:

If half of our population is subject to enforced pregnancy as a result of sexual activity and half is not, then those two halves are not equal.

If you can force me to stay with you because we have sex, I get pregnant, and I am either legally obligated to or financially dependent on you, then we are not equal.

If abusers can entrap their victims by forcing them to carry children for them, then we are not equal.

If you and I have sex, and the consequences could leave me, but not you, impoverished, disabled, or dead, then we are not equal.

If you get to decide the condition of my body, the opportunities I have, whether or not I can afford to feed my existing children — whether I was out and out forced to fuck you, whether I just kind of went along with it because men who want sex are often completely exhausting and the women fully convinced of their right to say no, full stop, are few and far between, or whether I was fully DTF but not so much down to lose my job and risk my life having your damn baby,

then

we

are

not

equal.

Those monsters who voted this bill in yesterday, and that sociopath who signed it into law, knew exactly what they were voting on, because there is no way to legally require someone to carry a fetus in her body and also uphold that woman’s humanity.

Look, everyone, either you believe that I am a human being with the same rights as you or you goddamn don’t. We are not talking about “life” here, especially when the babies you want me to carry can just bleed out on their kindergarten floor once they are here and you will repeatedly fail to intervene.

We are talking about whether you think women’s body’s and lives are theirs, or yours.

My life: is it mine or is it yours?

If there were somehow a way to believe that women are equal and also support the Republican party, or to be a pro-life Democrat, or to be “pro-life” in your mind before, allow me to gently, but firmly, take that right off the table for you now.

Right now, any action that is not wholly in the camp of supporting and advancing pro-choice candidates and activists and agencies — regardless of how much your ass loves the little babies; go sell that to someone who hasn’t spent the past eighteen months watching refugee kids caged and sold like cattle — is advancing the cause of people who genuinely do not care if people like me live or die, but who sure as hell want us afraid of what they can do to us.

I’ll still try to reign my face in when I see you at Walmart, because of Jesus and Buddha and Martin Luther King. But I’ve got nothing to do with pretending we can “each have our opinions” about who owns my body or whether I “should be punished” for having a uterus.

My older son, Mac, made me a picture last fall – or, I don’t know, he made it, and I loved it so much I claimed it and pinned it to my wall at work, where I can stare blankly at it as my life is measured out in spoonfuls of the “just end it all jazz” central to insurance companies’ cost containment strategies. The illustration features a emo/vegan dinosaur about to be chomped by meat-eating dinosaurs. The relative proportions of the unfortunate larger dinosaur and the tiny predators that surround him are not unlike those of myself and my own little carnivores, so  I look at this tenderly as I wait on hold and think, if I gouge out my eyes with this HIghmark pen, I will no longer be able to look at this picture.

I like my life when I am doing either big things or small things with great love. Changing wounds, inserting Foleys, helping people walk or poop or eat. I feel alive and human when I do these things and it is why I became a nurse. And I also enjoy challenging, cerebral things: writing papers, envisioning and implementing change, taking ownership of projects and completing them. 

Probably most people prefer those things to, say, waiting on hold with insurance companies. Waiting on hold with insurance companies deeply unpleasant for anyone,  and particularly difficult for someone with a mental health diagnosis that features both a crippling need to keep it moving and vicious intrusive thoughts that intensify in the echo chamber of Just Kill Yourself FM.

So Rilke, as any erstwhile pretentious undergraduate knows, once said, “You must change your life”. (I mean, I’m just hazarding a guess that the guy said it more than once, and let’s all take a minute to thank the universe for how we never wen ton a fist date with Rilke). And boy, as any of those near and dear to me, or even passingly acquainted with me, could tell you, am I here for that.  

But must we,  though?

I’ve been thinking a lot of changing my life in the form of changing my job, and not just thinking, but actively applying to other jobs, which led to an extremely uncomfortable interaction between my boss, who found a word doc with a cover letter on my computer while I was out yesterday, and myself, who honestly had assumed that everyone knew I was unhappy and was eager to see me go anyway, because I am actually four years old and believe my feelings have destructive and magical powers.

So that was very awkward and I chased it with a generous shot of yelling at my children on the way to Sitter Service, where I left them without any extra diapers for an hour while I bad-mouthed their dad for working late and went to a community meeting that I chaired with limited success until finally, after the fourth random addendum about an item not on the agenda, I announced that we were done for the month. Could I have picked up every discontented peer and constituent and placed them in their rooms to settle  down, I would have, but unfortunately Mac is the only one of my foes I am capable of vanquishing in this way.

I don’t know if this feeling is unique to recovering addicts or if everyone experiences these periods in which life just feels like a pair of ill-fitting paints that are actually encasing your entire body and out of which you must climb now or you will take out every last motherfucking one of whoever is around you, like Honeybunny at the end of Pulp Fiction. But this is life right now. And while I can describe the problem for you, reader, in case you don’t have enough of your own problems, or, I don’t know, are in the mood for some solid-ass schadenfreude, I have no actual insight about this week, apart from this: 

Some days, the bad times are just actual. I’m not conquering the world this week; I can literally barely stand to keep living in it.  Here we are.

Of course, I want a Meaningful Life for you, and for me, and for everyone. I want for all of us to do the Big Things our college valedictorians and reference-suppliers and various well wishers promised we would. (I found a text from a former boss assuring me of this exact bright future for me, and it nearly brought me to tears in my car. Happy Monday!)

But some days, maybe some of us are reacting with uncalled-for ferocity to this culturally constructed FOMO, this dread that our lives are all slipping away and all the Big Important Things we are Meant to Do are not getting done. It’s a little bit me, but not only me: we worship this image of changing, of Doing the Thing, of Living our Dreams, in a way that can make the things that actually comprise most people’s lives – our kids and partners and neighbors – seem inconsequential, and our lives seem like something to be embarrassed about.

Look, guys, I can offer you this: don’t be embarrassed about your life. The vocabulary you use to “motivate yourself” to do better, the efforts to make yourself higher achieving and more gritty, is the same vocabulary you use trying on swimsuits in shitty lighting. You may feel less petty beating yourself up for your resume, but being mean is being mean, and it is not more effective at making you cool or edgy now than it was on your middle school bus. And the world is full of people willing to take on the work of shitting all over you; if you don’t have an actual mean girl in your life right now, just give it a couple of weeks. 

But for the love of God, spend those weeks thinking about Game of Thrones or Elizabeth Warren’s twitter feed or literally anything besides how where you are in life lines up where where you thought you would be when you were seventeen and everything seemed easy because you had never had to itemize your taxes or apply for a mortgage or respond to a plumbing emergency.

I’m not saying that Mother’s Day is a ruse. For long-suffering moms, maybe, Mother’s Day is really important. I’m not one of them; I can’t afford to be these days. I’m tired of fucking around with my own mental and physical health, and child watch is there for a reason, so if mommy can’t get her behind out of bed at 4 to go to the gym before the babies wake up, it’s YMCA night. 

Other moms, moms who sacrifice endlessly and don’t have time to wash their hair, may feel differently, and I think Mother’s Day is more for them than for my ass. Also, my husband likes to cook and clean but finds reading to our kids tedious, so I basically handle all the good stuff, plus diapers, and every day is Mother’s Day for me.

But also, Mother’s Day feels kind of like bullshit, now, when we have an 11-year-old rape victim newly prohibited from getting an abortion in a country where she is statistically more likely to die from delivering it than she is almost anywhere else; where we straight-up lose thousands of children, or sell them to American people, and blame their moms for illegally attempting to save them from drug lords and starvation; where if you are Black you are three to four times more likely to die in childbirth than a white woman and rather than address that, our public officials are insisting that they read somewhere that an ectopic pregnancy can be surgically re-routed into the uterus, so, you know, enjoying bleeding to death, ladies, because that guy’s bill just passed!

Here’s the thing. If Mother’s Day can just be a day where those of us with moms who did more good than harm, moms we should maybe be calling more, take those moms out to brunch (or, if you’re me, donate to their local rape crisis center in their honor, speaking of long-suffering moms), then great. We should celebrate the people we love, and if a day helps us do that, that’s fine.

But if Mother’s Day is just another way to 1. build up one group of women at the expense of those women who choose not to be moms, or who can’t have children, or who find motherhood painful while 2. acting as though “celebrating” moms is some sort of consolation price for losing any say in whether or not we become mothers, in a world in which pregnancy and childbirth are increasingly dangerous and economically untenable, then maybe fewer Facebook memes and more question-asking. Do we want a free dessert at Ruby Tuesday’s, or do we want a little less “celebration” at the expense of other women and

a little more affirmation of our humanity in the form of, say, not being forced to risk our lives to grow a child we don’t want and can’t care for or that we know cannot live;

an actual response to the public health crisis that is our maternal mortality rates, one, and the mind-boggling disparity between those rates for women of color and white women, two;

an economic system that does not actively punish pregnancy and motherhood, one in which being pregnant doesn’t pose an economic threat and motherhood isn’t a well-established source of disparity between workers.

Non-moms, whether you chose to pour your energy and love into other people and other dreams, or whether you weren’t given that choice and have built equally valid and meaningful lives with the choices you had: I get that nothing I’m doing is better than what you’re doing. Motherhood is not “the most important job in the world”. It’s a thing some of us choose to do, and it’s super important and rewarding and also not any more so than writing or saving animals or caring for the elderly or being a bomb-ass friend.

And, for what it’s worth, for women who want to be moms and haven’t been able to, I was there once and it was harder than anything I’ve done as a mom, so someone should be sending you some goddamn flowers.

I saw a nutritionist this week and I am eating all the time now, kind of, which is stressful. But I’m also dreaming.

The night before last I dreamed about my grandfather. He’d be in his nineties now, had he not quietly and swiftly died of cancer ten years ago. I’d been married less than a year when the tumors started coming back, and I don’t know how long they were there, nestled like puzzle pieces in his kidneys, my mom said. He was the kind of person who easily could have gone on many walks, many grocery trips — he never drove in the time that I knew him; my mom or a friend always took him to the store for his canned condensed milk, his white bread and off brand granola — and then one day gently mentioned, maybe be accident, the savage pain that had settled in his body.  

I didn’t want to come home the first time they called; I was wrapped up in my sexy New York life. I remember uncharacteristically bingeing on pork chops in a Vietnamese place near the Chinatown bus (the pork was uncharacteristic, not so much the bingeing). I may also have been drunk; I think part of the reason I didn’t want to leave was I was harboring a secret, thrilling crush on a coworker, one of my drinking friends that night, and I was young enough to believe that if I stayed petty enough, with my boys and my pork, I could keep away anything truly awful since word on the street is the Lord never gives us more than we can bear.

This means different things to different people, though. My grandfather died. And it was confusing and horrible, and I was deeply grateful that it as closely approximated a “good death” as a death can: set up in my teenage bedroom, surrounded by people who loved him, cradling his cat. When I came to see him — he had a stroke shortly after his surgery and he couldn’t say much — he asked after my cat, Julius, who he’d only met once. One of his sparse last words was, I think, intractable.

I was on my way to work when he died and I remember the platform clearly, where I stood when my dad told me about it. I remember that in the days afterward I felt more absolutely misunderstood and untethered than I had at any other point in my life. Everyone seemed like enemies and I felt as though I’d been physically disfigured by my grief. I wanted a mask, like Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky.  

My husband was the closest to helpful, although this was the first of a recurring series of incidents in which I felt something very deep and raw and shameful and he was innocently baffled at what my deal was. His grandparents had all died already, and of course, had done so without any of the weird incestuous undertones and long period of alienation that characterized my own relationship with my grandfather.

But anyway. I dreamed about my grandfather yesterday: that he had never died of cancer and waited instead to die in my dreams ten years later, of a heart attack. And I would like to tell you about him: his faded accent, his collection of magazines with photos of English castles, his reserve and his ability to apologize. He hadn’t been raised to talk about how he felt. Instead, he would speak at length about history. He would read you passages from what he was reading. He would mail a magazine clipping, spend money he didn’t have on gifts, on meals out.

He did this more purposefully when I was a teenager, angry and disgusted with myself for how sordid my childhood around him seemed in retrospect, reluctant to come around to his small corner apartment. In my mind, then, there were only two choices: if I was all right with his weird “preferences”, then all the childhood cuddles and time spent curled up reading with him, the safe spaces I’d found as a seven and eight and thirteen year old, were gross and dirty, and so was I. What was wrong with me?

I didn’t know then that loving someone who does something wrong doesn’t implicate you. I thought loving my grandfather, eating the lunches he bought me, driving him to the store, listening to him read, meant an endorsement of his low-key sexual abuse of the various women who had been girls in my family. So at the time they called to tell me he was dying, I’d been keeping a polite distance, an appropriately British distance, for several years.

I think about my grandfather more now than I did for those last few years of his life. I’m still angry sometimes. Often. Because what I want is a childhood where a wonderful old man read to me and watched me do my gymnastic routines and cared about my burgeoning political ideology and wasn’t also a little bit of a creep. I want this like I want the glow of being lit with tequila and not the foreboding sense of doom the next day; the way I want to love my life and my children and my world without the accompanying horrible knowledge that it’s all going away, maybe all at once or maybe little by little, but definitely with a lot of horrible pain for someone.

And I am aware that I’m twenty-five years removed from the age at which I learned what was going on with my grandpa, a lesson I took to mean that if someone seems to think I am wonderful — beautiful, studious and dear, as he called me once as a nine year old — they probably suffer from a deeply shameful form of pathology; that, in a slightly sassier take, one would have to be sick to want me.

So this is not intended to suggest that the necessary outcome of being violated or injured by someone you love is to forgive them, to fight for a memory of them that sets aside those injuries as no longer defining. For me, three decades out, the good things about my grandfather and I outweigh the shitty things; this is demonstrably untrue for many, probably most, children whose special people hurt them.

But for some of us, it is possible to deeply love someone who hurt you, and while you are not obligated to “get over it” accordingly to any particular timeframe —including, say, an approaching election in which other people who were not violated by that person “cannot afford” to lose him or her — it is also wholly okay to let go of the gross shameful part of what you remember about them and remember instead how deeply and quietly happy that person was able to be. Their love for bunnies and cats. The patience with which they listened to your stories, entered into your pretend play, read your nine-year-old novel about AIDS victims (yup). The card they sent, weeks before their death, in which they said nothing about their own pain or fear, but instead: I love you. Follow your dreams. (Your was underlined).

I wish I had kept that letter. I have very few items from my grandfather now. I don’t even remember throwing them out — if  I got rid of his stuff out of anger or shame or if I just lost them. But as it turns out, I have a lot of things he gave me, including, you know, vast pockets of my own inner life, that I’d hated so much and ignored so insistently that I forgot about them. And it turns out you can have those good things without signing on for or accepting all the other shitty things.

It may feel like someone, a brother or friend or dad, took all those things from you — made these huge pieces of yourself intolerable, so offensive you’d prefer to cut them off and throw them away. It may feel that way for decades whiles you just do the best you can, locking those things in their own forbidden room like Blackbeard. It may be that for a long time it hurts less to just imagine those things are gone forever than to have to see them or think about them at all. 

Happy Friday!

Maybe yesterday, you threw a protracted low-key temper tantrum for the duration of a rush-hour trip to Wilmington, day care pick-up, and dinner out, but New Zealand’s over there planting a billion trees to fight climate change.

Maybe you thought washing down dinner with tequila would help and now you feel like That Mom, but you can clean the air by covering your room in tiny, adorable plants.

Maybe the tequila distracted you from finishing your dinner or sleeping through the night, and you have regrets, but people are still blogging and fifteen of them are blogging about how to save our planet.

Maybe your moment of revelatory catharsis revealed that this disarray you’re feeling is another example of what Anne Lamott refers to as an inside job, not to be fixed by leaving your outside job, but her new book is here for you, and it is a benediction.

So here’s a story:

I went to a job interview and I sat for waiting long enough to rue, not just the fact that I’d forgotten to bring either of my two camisoles and was trying to pass off one of my running tanks  (they’re not the same thing, guys!) as professional wear under a suit more expensive than my wedding dress, but also: the fact that I’d come to the interview, the decision to leave my equally bewailed-over previous job for my current one, and several key life choices spanning from roughly the mid-nineties to now.

Why am I even here, I furiously texted my husband, who is almost never the right person to ask questions about my disastrous professional life, given that he’s held the same job for the past decade and manages to do it better from two hundred miles away than I’ve really done just about anything ever. Pro-tip, fellow dysfuncties: if you marry up, you need to find someone besides your partner to rage-text when your best laid-plans turn out to be fatally flawed from inception.

But the interviewer finally came out and I turned it on and strung together a story that seemed fairly compelling to me. It was like a date someone else would have, since I don’t make eye contact on dates: she nodded at the right places, I sounded smart and ambitious and full of ideas, not at all like the source of the suspicious gym smell that I optimistically chalked up to my anxiety. She looked me in the eye when I finished and told me, “I’m very impressed”.

Then, of course, she said that they were actually hiring for a floor nurse position, not the management position for which I had applied, but she would pass my resume along and “the team” would be in touch for a second interview.

And friends, like that sweet dumb boy who seems to feature prominently in every teen movie ever, I believed her for like a solid five days of no calls.

Well, okay. My twin useless braingoblins offered up two equally unhelpful narratives:

First, she saw through me and I am shit and the house always wins. You’re not just a nothing person, you’re a nothing person with the perverse ability to project intelligence and ability you don’t have, which is why people find you uncomfortable to be around.

Two, you are where (White) Jesus wants you and you’re doing something taboo and suspect, wanting more, and who do you think you are?

But here’s a third idea. It’s just, you know, this little project I’ve been messing around with, a few notes on my mind guitar. You can listen if you want; it’s no big deal:

The inability to draw inference from the things you experience — to read the room — is one kind of misstep. But the insistence on doing so in every circumstance is another.

This lady didn’t have a job for me, and that is why no one has called to offer me a job, and that is exactly what I know about this situation. She doesn’t know me in any deep way; we talked for about twelve minutes, two or three of which I spent wondering if my shirt smelled and whether or not this recurrent theme of “we-just-filled-that-job, how-about-this-much-less-appealing job” is actually some sort of professional version of cat fishing. Is it that hard to find floor nurses in long term care? (Yes, it absolutely is).

But. When I was telling this story, the person I was talking about did feel like me, more than the garbage person just pretending to be capable I was talking about before. I’d suggest a third option, an alternative to the grim “facts” asking to be faced above:

There is no actual connection between being a valuable person and getting what you want.

Growing up, expressing frustration or disappointment with my circumstances was a sign of a poor character, but identifying personal failings was a sign of humility. So you could never say: I don’t how the people around me are acting, but you can always say,  I hate myself for being such a bad daughter/friend/student/Christian that people that all I deserve is this lousy treatment.  

But I didn’t start out believing that I was bad and the things I didn’t like were my fault. I just started out not liking them.

You’re not going to solve a problem if you have to keep pretending that what’s bothering you is this whole different problem.

Today, try just saying, I don’t like this, instead of, I don’t like me because of this. Maybe it’s less that you feel bad about yourself around your friend or your boss or you wife. Maybe you just flat-out don’t like the way they are treating you, or the food in the cafeteria, or the way their fake cami stinks up your office. That is an opinion, and you are allowed to have it, and they are allowed to dislike that you have it, and at no point do you need to run back to this language of what you do or don’t deserve or whether the fault is theirs or yours.

You don’t have to earn the treatment you want from others. You don’t have to be a better wife or son or mom or friend or employee to be treated in a way you find respectful and validating. No matter what shortcomings you feel, or are told, that you have, you have a choice, all day every day: stay or leave a given situation.

And if you decide to stay, because maybe it’ll get better or maybe the next thing would be worse, you still don’t have to like it. Maybe it’s important for somebody else’s story that your dislike of what they’re doing is a manifestation of some personal failing of yours. That’s fine; that’s their story. Think of it like The Bachelor or Lost: deeply resonant for some, apparently, and wholly extraneous to you.