Dear John,
On break ups, illness, The Artist’s Way, exhaustion, and the cost of growth at any cost.
It 2:01 AM. T is sleeping, Aoife is sleeping, and I am fumbling plastic alone in the dark—fighting with an Aleve bottle under the bathroom's sole closet light, an arrow of fire shooting through my hipbone, radiating down into my knee. As I bend over the sink basin, I feel the deep cavern of my pelvis and in its cradle—its crucible: a softer crushing.
At the doctor’s office the next day, I explain to my tanned, muscled, beach-blonde provider that I am seven months postpartum and everywhere my bones touch hurt.
I tell her my femur and clavicle and ulna and radius feel somehow adrift. I tell her my reflux is back and terrible, that I am incredibly fatigued. I tell her I feel as though I could sleep forever, like Judy Garland in a field of poppies, snow of pure arsenic raining down around me until I am covered in the poison and deep in my dreaming.
She looks at my December labs, tells me while my thyroid was not abnormal, my reading, which should be between a 2 and 4, was exceptionally high, perhaps even precariously poised. My body on a possible brink.
She orders a new blood draw, hands me printed orders.
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The video makes its rounds in my immediate circles. In it, one particular student protest, one particular arrest. In it, a former chair of Dartmouth’s Jewish Studies is taken by a line of uniformed men in black vests and face shields, thrown to the ground by two khaki-clad officers. The video would have passed by me unnoticed had it not been for Baker-Berry, my alma mater’s library. The library’s clock tower: a great needle puncturing the violet-black sky, popping its great balloon.
The encampment I later learn was small, the protest—considered peaceful and in the middle of the College’s green and with the demand of divestment. Yet, it is something our current president would call ‘disorderly.’
Order: c. 1200, ordren: "give order to, to arrange in a row or rank”; from the 1540s, meaning “to give commands for or to, instruct authoritatively.” Disorder: being the opposite. Disorderly: an adverb used to attribute disorder to people and things.
The perfect, pristine green: a thing perturbed, disturbed, in disarray.
Dartmouth’s students and faculty standing in solidarity with Gaza: misaligned, deviating, deviant.
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I am asked to write a letter for a workshop on epistolary or letter writing.
I decide quickly—without deep thought—that I want to write to John.
John was someone I met before I started to write again, before I moved to Oregon and then the Keys. Before I became a mother. I met him through my primary care physician at the start of my sickness. He: someone dealing with a similar constellation of symptoms, set of diagnoses.
I would call John a lucky sufferer—if there can be such a thing. He had a steady job (or significant support) with money for the right doctors—even traveling to London for a pyloric sphincter reconstruction after a failed pyloroplasty. He was also highly educated—generally and about his conditions. It’s because of this—his wanting to know, his needing to know—that makes me feel he’d be a person reconnecting with.
As I begin to write him, I can’t help but smile wryly. The irony of starting a letter with Dear John, the writing a non-breakup letter peddling in brokenness: not lost on me.
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I learn in The Artist’s Way that an artist needs media, images, events to refer to be successful, a "well-stocked pond" to succeed.
The rules of stocking said, figurative pond are this:
1. Must be once a week. If less frequent, the restocking will be too slow, the pond unusable.
2. The stocking needs to last at least two hours—and must be done alone. It is not a 25-minute activity you sandwich between to dos, while holding your baby or playing with your baby or tending your baby’s crying and feeding and sleeping.
3. The activity must not do with chores. You can/could/should/will go to the movies or stroll a butterfly conservatory or stare intensely at a painting in a museum or visit the ocean or peruse a dollar store or, if you can, an estate sale—fingering another person’s valuables for your personal use: cocktail rings and city crests and vintage door knobs and needlepoint cat bags and gumball dispensers and Santa mugs and pavilion style chairs. Though assigned, this should be play.
4. The play needs to be completed alone so that you don’t have to consider anyone’s desires, wants, basic needs—except your own. Read (again): absolutely no babies.
5. If you don't do steps 1-4, your pond will be depleted.
6. If you do steps 1-4 and work too intently, your pond will be depleted.
7. If you do steps 1-4 and work too intently and take care of a baby and your pond is depleted, you will be depleted.
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I push Aoife’s carriage down Truman, then across Windsor—curling around the southern half of the island’s above-ground cemetery. As we walk, the sun is high, the sky spotted with clouds, and I snap photo after photo. An orange cone pilfered and left in a dirt drive, tiny white petals showering its feet. A coral creeper—its pink heart-shaped flowers and green vines clambering over a wrought-iron gate then a man-made arch and then a screened in porch—waving hallucinogenic in the sun. A green can of Presidente shimmering against white stucco. Two doves on a wire—canoodling. A rain cloud welling around the great blue.
When I get home and set down to rewind the film, I hold my breath—the last batch of film ruined by my inability to rewind, or else, a broken camera. I lift up the crank, press the rewind button, then turn the crank in the way the arrow signals, but there is no catch—pull, tension. I try again, then again, then breathe out—defeated.
With Aoife asleep in the stroller—beet red and sweaty, I go into my closet and pop the back of the camera open but can’t see a thing. I step back into my bedroom, see the film naked, bathing in the bright Caribbean light. I tease it out with my poorly cut nails like a ribbon. The world of the last two hours curled in my palm—ruined.
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As I write my letter to John, the genocide continues to unfold in Gaza. I read about children dying in field hospitals, doctors found buried in their scrubs, patients found with catheters still attached to their bodies, and my writing slowly curdles, turns to musings about this country.
This country: one determined to grow at all costs, which includes handicapping others for its gain. A country built on breaking, then saving, because saving pays. Those that need saving having needs: salves and tinctures and food and homes and home comforts and creature comforts and hope and real and figurative armor, and depending from whom or what those needing saving are being saved—real and figurative arms.
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The mourning dove is steeped in the sun on our houses’s side porch. My mom worried about it.
She saw it yesterday evening, and it’s still there this morning—Saturday.
She thinks she should call the Key West Wildlife Center, which rescues injured frigatebirds, dehydrated American Redstarts, Purple Gallinules trafficked through the local hotel rooms. Still, before she makes the call, she calls on T to have a look.
Misinterpreting her worry, T assures her, If it’s sick, it will fall off and die, as he turns back into our bedroom to monitor Aoife asleep in her crib.
My mom looks to me, questioningly.
I shrug, tell her to call anyway—just to be safe, now feeling emotionally involved in the dove’s fate—or at least not wanting to be responsible for its demise.
As she calls the Center, I creak open our bedroom door, peek in on nap time. There, Aoife is stomach-up in her crib, looking not unlike a fallen bird. A handful of MAM binkies—one white and with golden stars, one pink with tiny hearts, one opaque with a mama owl and baby owl—fall around her like scattered leaves.
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Things that have been googled:
Six months postpartum pain, six months postpartum, fatigue, hashimoto’s, thyroid, hyperthyroid, hypothyroid, thyroiditis, postpartum + sudden onset, postpartum hormones, hormonal dip, low milk supply, dying milk supply, beer + breastfeeding, brewer’s yeast, oatmeal cookies, fenugreek, exclusive pumping, power pumping, coconut water, bone broth, protein shakes, Body Armor, oxytocin, oxytocin + breastfeeding, how oxytocin works, oxytocin + relaxin, peak relaxin, joints, joint pain, rheumatoid arthritis + pregnancy, rheumatoid arthritis + heredity, genetic predisposition, Native Americans + arthritis prevalence, what causes bones to ache, what causes bones to rattle, why do I feel like the Fisher Price maraca my baby throws against her playmat, round Ikea tables, electrical socket covers, postpartum + fatigue, postpartum + fatigue, postpartum + fatigue, cost of a babysitter, cost of daycare, cost of living, side gigs, gig economy, pay of an Ai trainer, what is an Ai trainer, cheap furniture, low-cost mattresses, how much more do I need to buy
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My psychiatrist takes a piece of wide ruled lined paper from her three-ring notebook, rips it until it bears teeth. Using a royal blue pen, she breaks it up into four quadrants, asks me to consider dividing myself into four parts daily. Mood 1-10, Anxiety 1-10, Somatic 1-10, Thoughts 1-10.
I look down at the paper—knowing I will not use this rubric.
I say I am tired.
I say I am depleted.
I think I have overfished my pond.
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As part of my Morning Pages—a daily writing task that is part of The Artist’s Way, I list recent wobbles in reality. Seeming trembles in logic, worrisome omens.
The hallucinogenic flowers, the sun catching their every angle, corner, crevice.
The light in our bedroom dimming on its own accord, then brightening on also its own accord as I changed Aoife in the middle of the night.
Me walking into the house only to find one of our three fans in the great room is turned off, its light turned on. The other two still spinning darkly.
The mourning dove, unmoving in the heat.
The sound of something dropping near my bedside in the night. Aoife crying, me picking her up, rocking her, then putting her back down to sleep. Me kneeling on floorboards, feeling with my roughened hands to find nothing.
A smell. A wisp of perfume orchid-like, with a hint of acetone. First near the closet, then over our bed. The air frayed and fraying.
My film.
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Oftentimes in branding we ask: what is the problem this company/solution/device is trying to solve. The more successful companies (success = money-making, valuable) solve for really big problems, or else problems that has never been considered— cornering a market.
The most successful company, however, would have the power of create problems that don’t exist, then solve for them.
If this hypothetical company had a hypothetical strategy?
Find a way to keep the sick alive for as long as possible, then sell them therapies not cures.
Or: dangle sickness in front of the well, then sell them all the ways to not get sick.
Or: sell solutions that fracture peoples’ days, keep them busy across apps and accounts and phones till they become fractals of fractals, then sell them things that promise to make them more of themselves across their many different selves.
Or: create noise—a real cacophony of opinion. Give everyone a voice and a soapbox, then confuse people with forms and facts and make some facts out to be fiction, using this to spread a narrative of falsity. Then: sell Truth.
Or: destabilize entire peoples and places, regions—so you alone can build them up or break them down. And, then, when you do break them down, also be the one to step in and save them—building piers to aid in aid delivery. Make a body into a skeleton then reclothe that skeleton, all while saying it is in your likeness so your stakeholders agree to the dissolving of identities. To the making of bones.
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I sit with Aoife on the mat, cornering her electric bee so she can grasp its plastic, antennae and lift it toward her, make the base of the toy—a cloud—spin wildly around, flashing its pinks, oranges, greens and blues. When she frees the bee and the cloud whirls, I shake my two hands in the air (applause), let out an attenuated, “Yay!”
As I perform an extended celebration, my eyes graze the Stories moving soundlessly across my phone, my phone on my lap—one catching my eye. A friend’s photo of a nightclub, confetti raining down.
Shortly after, when my mom—also on the mat—makes an explosion sound and moves her eyes and hands wide to surprise Aoife—make her laugh, I can’t unsee confetti glitter-bombing the air.
Bits of paper, ripped apart and floating. Like insulation from a bombed building. Like aid loosened from a plane.
I think: Does this count toward my pond?
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Dear John,
The last time you wrote you said if we wished to meet for a cup of chamomile tea in San Francisco, you would be more than delighted.
I think now how at the time we met we were so carefully navigating our failing stomachs, afraid to say we can’t eat, or don’t eat, or only eat a little. Tea being only water touched.
I remember in an earlier email I offered up the option of Cafe Prague on Battery for an iced tea (I wonder if it’s still there?) or Samovar Tea Lounge in the Yerba Buena Gardens. In the end, the two of us–broken at our middles–settling on a park, conversing over air.
I wonder: How are you now? Where are you now?
I know our Julie moved on, moved somewhere north—possibly Santa Rosa. Timid and new to her field, and yet always there to listen to our journeys, try to ease our pain in any way she could. To her, we must have been people who were less like people and more like dying animals, visiting her weekly–trying to grasp at anything to keep us steady, still, in our skin.
I remember how she offered it all to me, and likely to you: surgeons, GI psychologists, naturopaths, cognitive behavioral therapists, benzodiazepines, Tramadol, things to step outside ourselves–if only for a little.
I wonder now what you thought of me when you saw me coming toward you on the bench, at that very low point of my life. Navigating the unknown, terrified. I see in my own response to you before we met that first–and last—time, I included identifying features: “I will be in a red Patagonia jacket and brown culotte pants (blonde).” I remember that red jacket that coated my ribs, those brown pants (now out of style) that swallowed me whole. I was hipbones more than girl. Nonexistent ankles. Sad eyes.
Perhaps when you saw me you saw the watery look of someone dying slowly—a person looking at the window but only seeing a reflection of a reflection of the glass, or perhaps you saw anger—betrayal by the world and its promises, or perhaps fear and desperation.
Maybe, though, it was just innocence—a recently ill “well” person, unable to reconcile what Susan Sontag calls the “night side of life”—naive as to what might lie ahead. Or, maybe in me—and my red jacket and my cropped brown pants—you saw a little of you.
You. I want to thank you.
Many times I was offered a pyloroplasty, but each time I couldn't let myself say yes, couldn’t let the doctors cut my stomach open–let my food fall out from me. It stuck with me, what you said–about your dumping syndrome, your posterior vagus nerve damage, you're becoming a “GI paraplegic” (this term reverberating in my mind to this day). You: unable to leave bed, the frequent sugar imbalances, passing out after almost every meal. I may not have heard your voice each time the surgery came up as a way to control my gastroparesis, but somewhere a semblance of that voice hovered next to me in those brightly lit rooms, run over by the men in white.
(As I think back, to those lights, those men, so many terrible and terrifying memories rise up. The anesthesiologist’s latex gloves pressing down on my windpipe, cutting off my breathing while I was still wide awake. The GI doctor who didn’t describe the procedure before she proceeded–forcing a bit in my mouth, choking me while under mild sedation. The male nurse with too-big Mickey Mouse hands trying over and over to “find” a vein. Later, my hand swelling into a blue bloom–no, or too little, pressure applied.)
It’s funny how when you enter the kingdom of the sick, you never quite leave, and yet people assume–with years, if you haven’t passed, it has passed. By you, over you, through, out of and away from you.
It’s also funny how the mind–with time–negotiates the days, weeks, turns them into months and years—until you realize you are somehow here, still. Time eroding more than moving…And, how strange it is to learn from those around us what kind of illness is socially acceptable. Acceptance: contingent on severity. Illness being socially acceptable only if acute, terminal, severe, visible. Not if chronic, long-term, ongoing. Not if “mild” by medical standards, making you sick but not sick enough. Not if spoken of too much. Or, too often.
As a person who once cried for too long in doorways, I realize others don’t like you crying, or you standing for too long in doorways.
I don’t know about you, but it took me many years to learn, too, what I needed then was not poorly equipped doctors or partial solutions I bought into—that one cognitive behavioral scientist in in the Inner Sunset who said she couldn’t help me because I was actually sick; those guided meditations on the grass near the Ferry Building, at the San Francisco Zen Center; the group acupuncture sessions on the pilling La-Z-Boy chairs after work mere blocks from the Panhandle; every kind of herb in every kind of capsule expedited to my apartment on Grove St. each week. No. What I needed was to process my grief, because I was deep in it, in mourning. I was letting go of my working body, my working notion of ‘self.’ My life–real, perceived, projected.
Years later, I would come to Tonken’s model for grief, and it made me realize that yes–I was truly grieving, passing through various stages–denial, anger, bargaining, looping among and between them. Grief non-linear and non-ending.
If you come to the theory online–which I’m sure you have or will in time, there is often a visual accompanying it. At the top, grief as outsiders see it: time depicted as three equally sized jars in a line, grief as a dark ball—shrinking in each subsequent jar—dissolving over time. This visualization: countered by another visualization. The same ball-sized mass staying the same ball-sized mass. The jars the masses sit in growing taller and taller like Alice outside Wonderland. The masses: unchanging grief. The jars: life as it is. Growing up and out and around it.
And, my living around my grief? My going on, growing on? What does it look like?
The year after we spoke, I thought if I die and never write, I will not have lived. And, so I decided to live. I went back to school and refound words, learning how much I love to make meaning of the quotidian, the unexceptional, and also how much I love to escape into the surreal–essays and poems taking away the pain, the heaviness of my vocal chords, the burning of my chest, the swelling my belly takes like a parachute, a jellyfish, a balloon. And, sometimes, taking me simply away. I am also married—to my partner T who was my partner when we met—and am a mom. And, like many moms with health issues, sweet relief was had with the innumerable hormonal changes that happen when a woman becomes a mother. My symptoms that disappeared for a short while, however, are back, and I again go to bed with the familiar ache in my side, wake to the familiar taste of bile in my mouth. Am, again, sad.
And, with this sadness returns the fear.
I often look at my baby and think, “I already miss you” and wonder how much longer I have and cry. My disease being untreated for nearly a decade. It is hard to not have a terminal diagnosis, to be told that ‘statistically’ I should be fine, but knowing anecdotally I may not be and that I remain sick and unhelped and in pain.
My greatest fear? That I will one day have to be one of those moms that records her voice for her baby, makes VHS tapes to say hello, writes emails to an empty Gmail account to give her advice, express my unending love—faceless.
Several years ago I listened to a podcast about a woman in the 1970s who lived in the Bronx and was awoken by a female voice singing her Irish ballads. The voice so prominent, the woman looked to turn off a record player–to find there was none or, else, it wasn’t playing, on. Tests were ordered, and it was found that the woman had either suffered a stroke or, else, a small tumor was pressing against the part of her brain associated with music, causing her to have what could only be described as musical epilepsy. And, so, the unknown woman? The singing? The ballads? Her mother. Her mother’s voice. Her mother’s songs. The mother who she had lost when she was just five years old, whose lullabies she had never known.
I think about this woman often, the ballads, the voice. And, of the tea we never had.
I wonder if we met now, if we would go into Samovar and sit, if you could order more than hot water or loose-leaf tea–you being so careful, diligent. I know I would order something, despite the constant burning, pain, fear.
I also wonder what we might talk about. I think then, so deep inside myself, illness was my identity–and possibly yours. But, now, ten years later, in a country where I recognize illness as the norm, wellness the aberration—a country set on keeping people sick, countries damaged, living fractured, a country that wants the world so broken so it can play savior again and again, perpetually fixing what it alone breaks, I see things differently, act differently. I maintain myself as whole, operate with a wholeness. Despite the overwhelming sadness in me. Despite the daily pain.
And, so as I leave you, I play in my head with the many expected sign offs I can send–best wishes, talk soon, hope to hear, be well, health & happiness. But all ring false. Instead, I hear the warmth of another writer, think of our formal correspondences, her farewells. The feeling: most fitting here. All goodness.
John - I wish you all of it & only goodness, whatever that is and can mean for you, wherever you are.