musings

There are many ways to hide from your life

I’ve been thinking an awful lot about achievement, and the Race to Nowhere, and the ways we hide from our lives.  Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how complicated it gets when the ways you hide from your life are applauded by the world.  For me this has mostly been true: whether it’s running or studying with a fierce concentration or following the tide of popular sentiment down a path that might have been the wrong one.

This is a kind of hiding in plain sight, right?  None of your behaviors speak of anything being wrong.  In fact, they are celebrated.  For me, the pinnacle of this was at Exeter.  I’ve been very frank that my two years at Exeter were difficult for me.  I think late adolescence is an emotional and awkward time for most people, and some extenuating circumstances made mine especially challenging.  My parents were across an ocean (and in this pre-cell day, we spoke once a week on the payphone in the basement of my dorm).  My heart was broken at the very beginning of senior year when the first relationship of my life exploded in front of me (and in a hurtful, and public, way, no less).

What did I do?  I ran and I studied.  That is it.  I ran for an hour every single day, mostly in the woods out behind the gymnasium (across the bridge that appears in A Separate Peace), but when it was really freezing I’d run laps around the track suspended above the cage.    My senior year GPA was 10.8 (out of Exeter’s characteristically-unusual GPA scale of 11).  I read and I wrote and I studied and I went to bed every single night well before 10.  I didn’t have many close friends.  I didn’t have another boyfriend.  I didn’t ever break any rules, didn’t experiment with drinking or smoking, as so many boarding school denizens do.

It was a fraught time.  I was a liminal creature (Peggy Orenstein ascended even further in my pantheon of favorites when she used this, one of my favorite words, in Cinderella Ate My Daughter).  I was moving from girlhood to adulthood, and I was doing it mostly all by myself.  In this dark time, one I remember as still and ever-moving at the same time, I had one firm guide: James Valhouli, my English teacher, the first person to believe I had something of value to say.

But all of my coping mechanisms, things that I understand now were ways of avoiding actually engaging with my life, looked like success from the outside.  I was profoundly unhappy, but I don’t think anyone who didn’t know me well could tell.  I don’t know what the conclusion of this is, necessarily, but I do know that it points to a truth I’ve often referred to here: outsides and insides are not always congruent, and we ought to be slower to judge others based on the external indicators they display.  It also reminds me that there are many, many ways to hide from our lives, to numb ourselves to the things that hurt, and we would be well-served to approach all others with compassion.  They, too, are likely grappling with demons, even if we cannot see the struggle.

Off balance

(clouds, with otherworldly light)

Do you know that feeling when you read a blog and you think: wow!  This is a better-articulated, more-thoughtful, totally amazing version of every single thing I think about, every single day?  And then you think: my God I wish this person lived nearby.  I want to be her friend!  Well, I do.  And Walking On My Hands is one of those blogs.  Pam is, as her tagline says, learning to live with grace.  I really can’t recommend her blog highly enough.

Last night I had terrible, terrible insomnia.  Whit woke up at 12:30 to go to the bathroom, and the click of his bedroom door when he went back to bed woke me up.  Thursday for me began at 12:30, because I never went back to sleep.  I lay in bed for a while, went upstairs and lay on the couch for a while, watched Gossip Girl, and read Pam’s post.  And then I thought about it for the rest of the night.  The sentence I can’t forget is this:

There are about a zillion ways to hide from your own life, and I have done every one.

The identification with those words was so intense I felt like someone had knocked the wind out of me.  This is what I was doing, all those years when I was in such a frantic hurry that I never actually noticed the right-now of my life.  This is what I was doing when I wasted whole chunks of time mourning something or someone who was already gone.  This is what I was doing when I ignored that whisper inside of me that said hey, maybe this isn’t what you want, and instead hurtled towards the accolades that felt so good to receive.  This is what I was doing when I ate emotionally in the years after college.  This is what I was doing when I ran and ran and ran in the ice-cold winter woods at Exeter, an hour a day, tears often streaming, then frozen, on my cheeks.

Pam’s words fell on fertile soil: the me who is up in the middle of the night with insomnia, suffering from a kind of spiritual indigestion, is even more porous usual.  I couldn’t settle into sleep from my day on Wednesday.  All day I was just off balance, literally and figuratively.  I slipped several times during the day, twice during my early morning run (I caught myself both times) and once, wearing work clothes, in the middle of Back Bay after an interview (I completely wiped out).

Whit cried when I took him to school because these days I drop him off rather than waiting to take him up to his classroom.  I do this because there are about four parking spots in a one-mile radius of school and I don’t feel right hogging one of them for the 30 minutes we used to sit together.  But, still.  In the afternoon Grace pulled me aside, in tears, and listed a litany of all the little things I do that fail and hurt her.

I was keenly aware of my shortcomings as a mother.

I felt overwhelmed by my job.  The demands are coming fast and furious right now, as we enter an annual period of concentrated effort.  My calendar for the next couple of weeks suddenly felt chokingly busy, including a day trip to San Francisco.

My cheeks burned with the prickly heat of not being very good at my job.  Certainly, of doing a poor job balancing it.

I felt the guilty pressure of my nascent book manuscript sitting, untended, on my desktop.  I haven’t had the time to look at it, to really spend time diving into its pages, and that truth hangs over me like a storm cloud, its grayness shading every frame of my day.

My commitment to writing, and to this project in particular, felt perilously close to slipping away.

And so I spent Wednesday afternoon and evening in a funk.  I was tearful and frustrated.  At dinner with two dear friends I was distracted and quiet.  At home with Matt I was short and snappy.  I couldn’t sleep, and when I finally did it wasn’t for long.  I started this post thinking: I still avoid my life.  Isn’t that what I was doing by being pissy, and not really engaged, and wakeful?  I don’t know, though.  Maybe that IS being present to my life.  Even when it’s difficult, and full of obstacles, and feels empty of joy.

Even in the midst of my dense crankiness, however, I read an essay by my friend Katherine and found myself crying, moved.  I realize that the heart of me, that raw, tender place full of shadows and startling blazes of light, is so much closer to the surface now.  Even when it is temporarily occluded by the frustrations of a bad day, it’s never totally lost from sight.  This is what Pam is talking about, I think, when she speaks of not avoiding her life.  Isn’t that heart, in fact, my life?

the Proust questionnaire

I feel like this picture – a little bit distracted – I am sorry

I’ve fallen back on questionnaires before, when inspiration fails me.  This is the Vanity Fair Proust questionnaire, which I always love.  I’m not alone: they recently published a book of them.  I particularly enjoy thinking about my favorite characters in fiction and who my heroes and heroines are.  I’d love to hear any of your answers to these questions – just link to them in the comments!

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Insomnia. Lonely, full of ghosts, and I panic about being tired the next day (preemptive anxiety being a specialty of mine).

Where would you like to live?
Cambridge is pretty good. Other candidates include on campus at Princeton and Palo Alto.

What is your idea of earthly happiness?
Empty hours, in bed alone with a book and my laptop.  Watching my sleeping children.  A glass of white wine on the rocks on my parents’ back porch in Marion with friends at the end of a long day in the sun.

To what faults do you feel most indulgent?
The faults of people unsure of their own strength and of their own path.

Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?
The Velveteen Rabbit, many of Raymond Carver’s stoic, hardworking heroes, Phineas in A Separate Peace, Harry Potter, Albus Dumbledore, the butler in The Remains of the Day.

Who are your favorite characters in history?
Joan of Arc, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Georgia O’Keeffe, MLK Jr, June Carter Cash

Who are your favorite heroines in real life?
Oprah, Ina May Gaskin, Anne Lamott, anyone engaged in the struggle to live authentically

Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?
Mamah Cheney (Loving Frank), Charity Lang (Crossing to Safety), Lyra (His Dark Materials), Eve (Paradise Lost), Mrs Ramsay (To the Lighthouse), Irina (Three Sisters)

Your favorite painter?
Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, Georgia O’Keeffe

Your favorite musician?
James Taylor

The qualities you most admire in a man?
Intelligence, strength, and humility. And the ineffable (and rare) ability to make me feel safe.

The qualities you most admire in a woman?
A sense of humor. Not taking her life too seriously. Fearless intelligence, even when it is contrarian. Physical courage & risktaking.

Your favorite virtue?
Patience.  Courage.  Constancy.

Your favorite occupation?
Definitely TBD. Am hopeful I will someday know!  Midwifery, writing, surgery, retailer, magazine editor, and headhunter have all been things I’ve considered.

Who would you have liked to be?
Pretty much anyone more centered and confident than I am!

Achievement is not a bad thing

I have been thinking a lot about The Race to Nowhere, and what I wrote about it, and about the thoughtful comments that people made.  My sister, the younger-and-wiser Hilary, and I have been going back and forth in email about it too.  She is the only person on the planet who shared with me the overwhelmingly rich and challenging terroir of our childhood and uniquely qualified to discuss those days and to hold up a mirror to me.  She is also a deeply thoughtful person and an educator, so I am particularly interested in her view on this subject.

And she said something that really struck me.  With regard to The Race to Nowhere, she averred that she did not like the way that “achievement has become anathema.”  And I agree.  Fully.  In fact when I read the comments on my post last week, I found myself with an uneasy feeling in my stomach, that creeping sensation of not having adequately or articulately conveyed what I really feel.  I’m worried I left out a big piece of my view.

And so here I will try again.  I think achievement is terrific.  I have written time and time again of how important it is for a child to feel the feel mastery.  Of a skill, a place, of themselves.  I will never forget the glow in Grace’s eyes when she rode a two-wheeler alone, the light in Whit’s face when he swam a lap of the pool solo, the sheer, palpable delight Grace felt when she began reading chapter books.  These accomplishments are immensely self-esteem building, and I would never, ever suggest that they are a bad thing.

In my life this theme reached a crescendo at Phillips Exeter Academy, where I went for 11th and 12th grade.  Frankly, my years there were relatively unhappy, for a constellation of personal reasons.  Despite this, even while I was there I felt a deep respect, almost a reverence, for the place, an awareness that I was somewhere unique.  The further I get from Exeter the more crystalline my appreciation of the place becomes.  As the years have passed, and since I’ve had my own children, I’ve come to understand why.

It feels rare, these days, that an institution that deals with children says as baldly as Exeter does: we have high standards.  And we know you can meet them.  I’m not entirely sure why that’s a threatened stance in education today, but as far as I can see it is.  And Exeter unflinchingly does that.  I’ve never been somewhere that so fiercely believed in the potential of its students: we won’t lower the standards, the voices seem to whisper, because we know you can do it.

And they do.  It’s powerful, being believed in.

Nowhere I’ve been to school before or since has even remotely touched the education I received at Exeter.  Exeter pushed me and defied me and never, once, for a single second, gave up on me.  And you know what?  I could do it.  It is the first place that I began to believe that I might have something to say.

I think the problems begin when one’s identity becomes entirely intertwined with achievement.  This is what happened to me; I entirely lost the voice of my soul, which was a whisper, because the voice of the world telling me what to do, and applauding me when I did it, was so deafening.  Of course the risk of this is high when you begin achieving, because the world’s adulation feels good.  At least if you are a pleaser like myself.

But never let me miscommunicate my lack of commitment to the idea of excellence in general, and of achievement in specific.  I hope to raise children who are tuned in enough to their inner voices to discover what it is that makes their hearts soar, and full of energy and passion enough to go after those goals with everything they have.

Pain engraves a deeper memory

I’ve been steering my life from my bed for three days now, with this nasty high-fever-flu-yuck.  It feels right to repost what I wrote a year ago today, when I was beginning the book that would change my life: Dani Shapiro‘s Devotion.

Incidentally, Glenda pointed out that my post last week about Rodin’s Cathedral was an echo of Albert Steiglitz’s portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe’s hands.  That portrait was the frontispiece of my college thesis, which was about Anne Sexton.  And Dani writes, in the pages of Devotion, about Anne Sexton.

Around and around we go, dancing with the same themes over and over again, welcoming new voices and bidding farewell to others … oh I am so fortunate to be a part of this dance.

Pain Engraves a Deeper Memory

I can’t put Devotion down. Run, don’t walk, to buy it. To say I’m obsessed is an understatement. I feel as though Dani Shapiro is speaking straight from my heart, albeit far more elegantly and eloquently than I ever could.  I’m about 2/3 of the way through and I have underlined at least a big chunk of most of the pages.  I love Dani’s voice, she writes about the same things that are utterly preoccupying me right now, and I just don’t even have words yet for the way this story is touching me.  I am sure this will be the first of many posts about this book.

But one passage in particular is on my mind today.  I’ve been thinking for weeks that I needed to write about how this is my blog.  Not my life.  Not my spirit.  I get a fair number of inquiries, from people in person and through email, people I know personally and people I don’t, asking if I am okay.  These people mean well, I’m sure of it.  And I am often taken aback by the question because I am more than okay.  I am well.  I realize that people are responding to what they read here, and I know this is a public forum and that of course I choose what I write and publish.

This is what I read in Devotion that brought this recent issue to mind:

“The poet Anne Sexton was once asked why she wrote almost exclusively about dark and difficult subjects: Pain engraves a deeper memory was her response.”

I love Anne Sexton, wrote my thesis in college on her, and any mention of her makes me feel instantly connected.  I’m surprised, actually, that I had never heard this sentence.  “I look for uncomplicated hymns, but love has none,” is one of my favorite quotations of both hers and all time.  This one goes on that list.  I think there is power and truth in those five words.

Yes.  I have long responded to those who, from their experience on this blog, express concern that I seem gloomy and sad that that isn’t true – it’s just that I find in the more complicated thoughts more fertile ground for exploration.  The grayer parts of my heart and head are where the interesting stuff to write about is, at least to my mind.  I am not particularly interested in reading anyone writing about how fantastic and perfect their life is, least of all me.  And, while my life is absolutely, inarguably rich and full and tremendously blessed, it’s not true that I experience every day as unmitigated sunshine.  I don’t.

I’ve written before about how I “incline towards melancholy.”  There’s no question about that.  But I also firmly believe that this tendency to feel things deeply also allows me to experience a surpassing joy that might not be available to me without the darkness.  I still don’t know if this connection is about capacity or contrast; I’m not sure it matters.  I think I lean towards capacity, though: because of the deep scars that pain has engraved into my spirit, there is a deep repository for joy, when it comes, to fill.

The introspection on this blog is definitely part of my personality, and there is nothing inauthentic here.  But the blog is also not a comprehensive representation of my life; far from it.  I understand the confusion that occurs there and know that it comes from a place of support and love.  I guess I just felt compelled to say, in the echoing voices of two of my literary idols, that my choice of topics is just because pain engraves a deeper memory.