Welcome to the Winter of Our Discontent. We got our first big snowfall today, and it's the earliest I remember having snow in New York since I moved here. We actually got more than Michigan, as Sally kindly called to point out ("Sucks to be you!" she crowed into my voicemail). I actually like it though. Not as much as I used to, but I still like it. It would be nicer if unaccompanied by the grate and bang of shovels and plows at 3AM, but that's the price of living in the city. At least I didn't have to go out in it today, which was something of a relief, since I've got the Mother of All Colds. I've had it since before Thanksgiving and it's lingering as a Bad Cough and Concrete-Filled Sinuses. My head is so stuffed up that my balance is shot. Thus I'm hacking up a lung and reeling down the street like I'm three sheets to the wind, but without benefit of the usual accompanying anesthesia. Since it's only a cold, I can't even get antibiotics for it. My ears are ringing (and no, it's not from too much aspirin or whatever; I'm not taking any), everything sounds tinny and echoey, and everything tastes wrong, which is just . . . sad, considering how I like food.
I'm kind of surprised I didn't get sick before this, given that my immune system is probably as stressed as I've been. It was the trip to Chicago (which was fun but tiring and smokey) and the solid weekend of work I put in at the letterpress class that finally did me in. I was tired before that, and not sleeping all that well and that was just the last straw, I guess. I can actually pinpoint the moment it started: Sunday morning on the subway on the way to the letterpress class I started to sneeze and couldn't stop. I was out two weeks in bed, hacking and sneezing and have been just barely dragging myself into work since. It's been years since I've been this sick.
As a result, I've decided to hibernate, and just write this year off. There's a lot of stuff I'd like to do, especially this time of year, but it's just not going to happen. I've already missed my Thanksgiving orphan DVD marathon of "Forever Knight" with Jen and the dinner with Bob, and Carlos and probably Rich. Victoria just invited me to go hear the Tallis Scholars, whom I love; MG invited me to the new Judi Dench movie; I haven't been to the Fêtes de Noël in Bryant Park yet; and I've already missed Jordi Savall at the Metropolitan Museum. I'd like to get to the Center for Book Arts Holiday sale tomorrow, too, but that ain't gonna happen either. I've decided, instead, to just hole up for a while, not go out drinking with the pals, not go out at all, and just stay home and putter, finishing off projects, watching DVDs from Netflix, catching up a bit on stuff I haven't been able to do this year, and plotting to gradually ease myself into new projects.
I'm working hard at taking care of myself though. I'm cooking more, buying good food, making use of my cookbooks. I've gone to the dentist, had a physical, got a mammogram and will be scheduling my first colonscopy after the new year (I can hardly wait for that one! Not!).
I've also cut down my hours at work, which was something I was considering even before my boss mentioned it to me. That was not a happy conversation. There seems to be some resentment in the department over me skiving off for two months to settle my parents' affairs (so inconsiderate of them to die 8 months apart like that) and then getting sick. I know my concentration isn't as good as it usually is, but I haven't missed any deadlines, and I turned out a kick-ass newsletter only a month after Dad died, so I'm not exactly slacking. And I'll be damned if I'll feel guilty about not functioning at 100% of my capacity after the last two years of crap I've had to deal with. As I've said before, the only major stressor I haven't had is getting married, thank God for small favors. That really would have put the cap on it and I'd be in a padded room somewhere.
That's not even the part of the conversation that pissed me off though. That part was the boss insisting that I go to therapy, as though there were something pathologically wrong with me. If I were actually depressed and/or not functioning, believe me, I would hie myself to therapy again. I have no desire to be trapped in that grey world again. I know that sometimes it's hard to know what things look like from the outside, but I'm pretty sure that, aside from being physically sick, I'm coping as well as possible. I know that depression has physical manifestations, but the exhaustion I'm feeling right now is from 4 weeks of illness. When I say I have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, that's because I'm not a natural morning person anyway, and most mornings, lately, I just feel like pureed crap before noon. After that, I'm more or less fine, aside from being tired. And that tired is not the tired of depression, I can say from experience.
I'm not as numb as I was, for one thing. The protective layers are slowly peeling away and I'm starting to actually feel the grief now, rather than just knowing it's in there somewhere. I'm sleeping okay, if more than usual, and dreaming about Mom & Dad, which is a good sign, I think, that my emotions are starting to surface. I feel like in a month or so I'll actually really start feeling the loss, which is both horrible and good. Horrible because it'll hurt like hell, and good because it means I'm moving through the process.
This is also part of my impulse to hibernate. For a while, I was making a point of keeping busy and going out with my friends so I wouldn't sit home and brood. I felt restless and a wired and impulsive and strangely frantic. I think I was also trying to hammer at the cocoon of numbness around me, to break something open. I don't like not feeling anything. I don't like the anticipation of the crash and burn and I don't like being cut off from something that's so vital to my writing. It sounds strange to say that I would rather have the pain than the numbness, but I know how to cope with the pain. And the pain is part of growth. Numbness is too close to being dead myself.
Being in Chicago with Paul and Myron and their friends and doing so much laughing was a mix of giving death the big finger and shaking myself up and hopefully out of my emotional stasis. Over the weekend, he took this hilarious picture of me sitting on his couch trying to untangle my strings of cheap pearls and laughing so hard that my eyes have disappeared. I was a bit smashed at the time, which didn't help matters, but it's not a bad metaphor for what I was trying to do with myself that weekend: untangle some of the strangling numbness that was wrapped around me.
I think I also knew in the back of my mind that what I was doing was going to propel me into getting sick (I mean, face it, I ain't no spring chicken any more and I haven't partied like that since my drinking days with Dr. Em ten years ago). It's a little self-destructive, but there's a method to the madness too: being sick gives one legitimate downtime, and if there's one thing I really need, it's downtime. If I were free and clear of the folks' property (and as soon as I am), I would take a short leave of absence and go wander around Europe by myself for a while, thinking and writing and clearing my head. It's been decades since I had a real, go-off-by-myself vacation. I'm long overdue.
But none of what I'm feeling or the way I'm reacting to it is abnormal. Grief is a common process whose elements are well-known and recognized. It's not messing up my life anymore than it has messed up anyone else's and probably less than some. My boss seems to think that going to therapy will somehow "fix" this, maybe hurry the process along. I could get some drugs and be fine! Yay! But you know, there's no workers comp for grief. Even the DSM listing for "Bereavement" acknowledges that most grief doesn't need treatment. Bereavement leave is ordinarily three days, even for immediate family. Compare that to the number of sick days most companies allot.
There's an enormous difference between the chemical imbalance and situational anxiety of depression (which I've also experienced) and the process of grieving. As one article I've read put it, "Grief is a normal yet highly personal response to loss. Neither an illness nor a pathological condition, it is a natural process that, depending on how it is managed and understood, can lead to healing and personal growth." For a while, after Mom died, I found myself arguing with her in my head, waking up at night really furious from dreams in which she'd been cruel to me or Dad and then crying about it. One day I just burst into tears while I was standing by my bed folding up laundry the way she taught me to. When Dad died, all of that stopped. The issues I'd had with her seemed moot, as I told the therapist I was seeing then, at what I decided was our last session. For the moment, I still feel that way. If they rear their ugly heads again, I'll reconsider therapy. But to say I must go now is to suggest that she knows how I should do my grieving, and she doesn't.
One of the drawbacks to the availability of mood altering drugs is that there seems to be a new impulse to avoid the discomforts or inconvenience of painful emotions. I'm not talking about the debilitating effects of depression or bi-polar disorders or panic attacks or paralyzing anxiety, but just the normal bumps in the road that people have experienced since they've had the forebrain to understand what they were experiencing: disappointment, sadness, nervousness, fatigue. It's the opposite of Timothy Leary's "Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out" mantra of self-discovery. It is, as Gretl said to me the other day, "being all white people" about our emotions, i.e., don't display any that might make somebody else uncomfortable.
As the layers are peeling off and I'm starting to cry more, I've caught myself apologizing for it and that's got to stop. I went to the dentist for my bi-annual cleaning last week and had a fraught little episode there. In retrospect, it was a perfectly natural place to have it. My dentists are really kind, empathetic people. When Mom had colon cancer six years ago and I started grinding my teeth in my sleep so hard that my jaws ached, Ruth held my hand when I burst into tears telling her about it. A couple of years later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer herself, and her husband took over her practice. She's been battling it gamely since then, and just lost her own mother a few months ago. I mentioned I'd lost both my parents this year to her husband and then burst into tears again because he was just so darn sympathetic (I'm having a good snivel now, just recounting it), even after all he and Ruth have been through. That kindness is everywhere, and dulling or avoiding or even just rushing through those emotions robs us of the opportunity to care for each other and be cared for.
One of the mistakes I watched my mother make throughout her life was to be a needy, passive victim of her suffering. Whatever happened to her that was painful, she never seemed to learn anything from it, and it never seemed to transform her in anyway. She had been a victim as a child and never got beyond that. I think I must have sensed that even when I was a child and became determined to be self-aware and self-analytical about everything that happened to me. As a fiction writer, I can't afford to be anything but. It's not that I'm looking forward to the misery of grief, but I know that I will learn something about life, about compassion, about empathy, about what being human means and how to go about it as best I can from this experience. Grief is part of this life and by learning to cope with it, I become a better, stronger person.
But right now, what I need is some time to think, some time to write, some time to just open up to the emotions and let them flow through me as they should. I'm curling up in my lovely down covered bed, with my books, to think and write and heal.
The only way out is through.
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