anger management

Little Women was one of my favorite books in the world when I was a child and young woman — actually, until a few years ago when I reread it for the first time in a long time.  I think I will always love my memory of it as a part of my life, but it’s true that you never step into the same river twice, or read a book the same way again.

I still have my mom’s copy from when she was little; it has a dull, dove-grey and blue patterned cover and the pages are soft with being read.  My mom and I, and my daughter, loved Meg, Amy, and Beth; like all writers, I probably loved Jo the most.  My favorite scenes were when the girls and Marmee sat in the living room, knitting for the soldiers and talking by the fire.  The intrusion of Mr. March and others was my least favorite part.  Go back to the war!

Marmee is perfect.  So it was shocking to me (and I definitely hadn’t remembered) that Louisa May Alcott has the most gentle mother in literature say, “I am angry nearly every day of my life, but I have learned not to show it; and I still try to hope not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do it.”

What has reading that line probably twenty-five times during my childhood and adolescence done to me?  If Marmee feels angry every day of her life, and never shows it, what hope is there for a lumpy, hostile 14-year-old growing up in 1983?  It’s not comforting that I have that in common with Marmee.  It’s frightening.  I don’t think I like the idea that beneath her sweet, calm exterior, Marmee is seething with rage.  Obviously, I can work on not showing it, and maybe someday I can work up to the ultimate goal of not feeling it.  I know this is not very healthy, but it still seems like a good goal for a very angry person to have.

Thinking back on my life, I realize that during college I turned my anger inward in self-destructive ways (another essay).

As a young mother, there were times when I desperately wanted to be alone.  I wrote in my journal about my frustration and inadequacy because I wasn’t always the calm and caring kind of mom that I wanted to be.  Later I realized that most of my mom friends also had moments when they just needed to lock the bathroom door or sit in the car and scream, but right then the intensity of the feeling was frightening.

When I reflected on this issue during my thirties I wrote, 

“I can remember a lot of times when I witnessed someone being mad at someone else.  But I don’t remember being angry.  Last night I asked my husband to think of a time I was mad at him and he reminded me that three days ago I got all pissy because I was talking to him about my day and he walked out of the room to call his Great Aunt Eva in Florida.  To me, this does not qualify as anger.  This house would be burned to the ground if I had really gotten angry.”

So I guess I’ve always been afraid of my own anger, and secretly admired those who expressed their anger openly, no matter how inappropriate it might be.

From my teaching journal:

“I have this student named Ken who has a lot of issues.  One day I have a pass for him to go up to guidance for the anger management group and when I give it to him he starts yelling, “I don’t want to go that fucking anger management class!”  I have to laugh and I kind of love Ken briefly at that moment because it’s all out there with him; no trying to hope not to feel it.

At school on Friday, a kid starts punching the door of Ralph’s classroom while he’s teaching.  The kid is just walking by in the hall.  Apparently he got in a fight with his girlfriend earlier.  After dealing with the kid, Ralph sees that there is blood all over the door from the kid’s hand.  He has to call a custodian to come and clean it up.

In the faculty room, we like to say that those kind of kids made “bad choices” because it makes us feel superior.  Marmee would agree that it’s a bad choice to act on your anger — swearing, hitting, blustering, bleeding.  We adults like to speculate about full moons and the relative proximity of vacation week.  We blame it on the parents (those of us who aren’t parents).”

I used to be proud of the fact that I didn’t let my anger out into the world, that people described me as low-maintenance.  But that gets exhausting.  Something happened when I turned forty.  

And the house did burn down, a little.  Things got uncomfortably hot.

  

Now when I look into the future, I see myself through the charred doorframe, laughing and smoking a cigarette.  

On a lighter note...

I too much love this tiny colander for washing berries that I got at the King Arthur Store.  Lenny laughed at it but there is something really wonderful about it - I can't put my finger on it.

I never used to like poetry with any kind of structure, but as I've gotten older I'm appreciating form more

midlife sonnet

i used to dream of quiet soft grey days

where I could sleep and never think about

a clock or shopping list or bills to pay — 

life was a river twisting, twining out

and now I sit in this deep dove-blue chair

imagining that I am back in time:

watch myself whirling around everywhere

while drops of stillness cool my fiery mind

if i could see her now, my younger eyes

would never let the tide go out again

without a shudder and a grateful sigh

rain pouring through my hands as it did then

the future is still coming, beckoning

waves slow and leave their simple reckoning

It's hard to write about this but it's basically all I write about.

I’ve written about this before, in poems and essays and letters, and even an occasional paper several years ago, but the past few months brought me back to this topic.  Again.  Again again.

I’m back in it so I felt the need to send this letter from the trenches, I guess.  Actually not in the trenches, having just escaped.  I’m kind of catching my breath on a pile of dirt from which I can see something besides darkness.  I refuse to use a war metaphor for this.  I’m still searching for the right metaphor for this.

When I write about my depression, it’s always somewhat from a distance, because I don’t write when I’m depressed.  Well, I do write, of course, but it’s not very coherent— I feel like my mind is trying so hard not to implode and let the dark rush in that I don’t have time for stuff like legible handwriting or complete sentences.    

And, obviously,  I’m a very high functioning mentally ill person.  So people sometimes are surprised to hear that I have been hospitalized for my depression, that it started when I was a teenager, and that I consider it an integral part of who I am.  It’s a chronic disease that I’ve had all my life and will have until I die.  (Unless someone finds a cure!)

I’m not depressed now and I don’t want you to feel sorry for me.  But I realize that people like me who have been given so many gifts in life have a responsibility to speak up and tell the story.  Not the story of my depression — that would be pretty boring and depressing — but the other story, about my wonderful life.  I have a job that I love and I’m passionate about, two amazing kids, great husband, family and friends and the financial resources to sit around writing essays like this.  People with mental illnesses are all around us, looking fine and fighting such a hard battle.  Maybe you are a person with a mental illness, or maybe you know someone who has one.  It’s easy for me to be open about this and have a good attitude because I have all kinds of support — tenure, health care and medicine and all kinds of other things that a white woman my age with a college education in America gets to have.  I need to write this because here I am — a happy sad crazy girl woman who loves life today, and is so grateful for it, but knows that at any time this happiness could go away and I will just have to slog through it and try to not be depressed.  Now, when I have the energy to write and think clearly I feel like I need to say this to the world:  hold each others’ hands.  Listen to each others’ stories.  Be warriors for kindness and peace.  It isn’t just about mental illness, although that’s the topic that I have special knowledge of.  It’s about really looking at the people around you with soft eyes and trying to make things better because we all are fighting the same hard war, just different battles with different names.

I do feel as I always have, that when I communicate (in any way), I’m somewhere else and I’m sending dispatches from that place.  The place is usually pretty ok.  It’s better than a demilitarized zone.  I’ve returned home again.   For now.  So I guess it the war metaphor wasn’t too bad — or at least it’s somewhat better than the snake metaphor I came up with when I wrote about this topic five years ago.  And I still have hope — that even though I will face depression again, I might come up with an even better metaphor - and essay — out of that.  

"Darkness"

Night.  My daughter's eyes.  Ink.  That pool of water that I stepped in last night in the rain, in my red leather shoes.  Warm and cold, nothing.  Everything.  The abyss looking back at you.   What's behind the door you should not open, pouring out of the phone you should not answer, the back of the mirror you should just leave on the wall where it is.

I miss you.

It’s dark.

Corey

This essay is a few years old, but if anything we are closer now.  I'm hoping to visit him someday when we go to New Orleans.  I have an essay he wrote that I will type up and share soon.

I have a friend named Corey Adams.  We’ve never met face-to-face.  I know him only through his words.  We will probably never encounter each other in person, but I’ve shared with him some of my most personal thoughts and feelings.  Although we are both citizens of the United States, we live in different worlds.  He is smart, a good writer, sensitive, and intellectually curious.  We are around the same age.  We’ve known each other for about seven years, but it feels much longer. I usually call him by his nickname, Sno, but most of the time he is called by his number, 357624.  He is a prisoner in Angola Prison, in Angola, Louisiana, and he will be there for the rest of his life.

Corey and I got to know each other through a letter writing ministry sponsored by my Unitarian Universalist church.  As part of our social justice work, some of us write to prisoners, just to let them know that someone in the outside world cares about them.  I feel strongly that our criminal justice system is racist and unjust, so this letter writing project is something I’ve done for a long time.  However, Corey is the first prisoner that I’ve connected with on a deeper level.  I think it’s because of a lot of things — that we both are writers, share similar sensitivities, and maybe simply that we are of the same generation.  We both agree that our friendship was meant to happen.

It’s kind of weird that a forty something white woman from Connecticut and an African American man in the Deep South have so much in common, but Corey and I always have something to talk about in our letters.  We both love our siblings and worry about them.  His brother, Horatio, is also in Angola Prison.  My sister, Mika, works too hard and doesn’t take care of herself.  We talk about our childhoods, the dogs we had and the people we remember.  We talk about the choices we’ve made in our lives and deep philosophical stuff and also what we’ve had for dinner. We celebrate joys and sorrows like friends do.

But of course there are many differences in our lives.

He grew up in foster care, a victim of abuse and violence from early on, while I had a loving mom and a pretty idyllic Midwestern childhood.  He dropped out of school in 7th grade and I received an Ivy League education.  He and I both made a lot of stupid mistakes in our younger years, but he didn’t have anyone to help him when he got in trouble, and he didn’t have one thousandth of the choices I did.  Which is why he ended up selling drugs on the street while I got married, became a teacher, and had kids.   One night Corey got into a fight, and someone else had a knife, and someone got killed.  He admits that he was selling drugs and that he hit someone, but that was it.  And at the end of all the arrests, trials, and confessions, he was found guilty of second degree murder,  So he will live the rest of his life in a cell.  This is not fair or just.  The line separating Corey and Megumi doesn’t seem that long, but it hangs over a huge chasm between us because he has never felt safe in his life, ever, and I have always been safe, even when I didn’t think I was. 

This is how it is.  He continues to work on his appeal, and I keep sending him books and letters.  He’s writing a book about his life, which I am editing, and we hope to publish it someday.  What’s funny is that between the two of us, he is so much more optimistic.  He is always saying things like, “relax, stop being so tense “ and telling me to get more sleep and stop worrying.  I don’t know what the future will hold for our friendship;  I imagine us writing to each other when we’re old and gray, still talking about the same things.  I get frustrated sometimes and feel guilty because I can’t do more to help him, but he reminds me that we hold each other up.  He is one of the important people in my life, and I cherish this friendship built on words and paper and trust. 

10 things I noticed after being (mostly) alone for 10 days

1.   Coffee makes my stomach hurt.

2.   People talk a lot.

3.   One comfy t-shirt can be worn for much longer than you'd think.

4.   Listening is hard.  Deep listening is something I want to think about. 

5.   You can use a candle to start a fire when the wood is really wet.

6.   Olivia Benson is a goddess.

7.   There is a secret to surviving really hot weather without air conditioning.

8.   I love being with myself.

9.   Always leave some space open for a new thought.

10.

small realization leads to momentarily horrifying conclusion

The other day I was listening to NPR and I kept noticing this verbal tic I've been hearing lately.  People were beginning every response to a question with an unnecessary "So...."
It nearly drove me batty.  Then I realized that spending all that time thinking about it (not to mention using the word "batty") made me soundI like a crazy old English teacher.
Then I realized that I AM ONE.

(Later, I realized that there are a lot worse things to be.  After all, grumbling about the Oxford Comma has practically gone mainstream now [BTW:  I completely disagree with Vampire Weekend about this issue] so maybe I am kind of cool. Streams of thought like this one are how I maintain my highly unrealistic view of myself.)

day 4 of my retreat

I am sitting here in my cosy little cabin in Woodstock, Vermont.  I am so happy here.  I brought tons of books and paper and notebooks and I've been eating good food and just being by myself.  The silence (and the sound of the brook outside) is healing me.  (OK, I also did binge watch Law and Order: SVU for a while, but I think I got that out of my system.)

It's raining today and I've been working on going through all the crazy notes I wrote to myself at the end of the school year that seemed important at the time but are kind of like those things you write in the middle of the night when you get a great idea.  Very few of them are actually rational things I might actually do.  Still it's kind of fun seeing what was going on in my mind just a week or so ago.  At the end of this year I realized how exhausted I was from teaching and I'm starting to think that I'm getting too old for this.  Not in a bad way, just wondering what the next thing is going to be.  

My midlife crisis

Sorry, I accidentally published this draft from a long time ago.  I am not that great with technology but I think I'll just leave it here.

I've been writing in my journal a lot but I figured why not write here instead.  It feels slightly less self-centered.  I am having a midlife crisis and it is so typical that I can't discuss it.  What the hell?  I guess the bonus feature is that I'm a person with mental illness, so the craziness is even crazier.  I have been at home for the last three days sitting around and reading old journals and writing and watching Law & Order and not eating correctly.  Here are some things I have eaten:  cinnamon roll, Easter bunny ears, oatmeal cookies from Ikea, Sweetarts.  Did I mention that I have diabetes?  Obviously I have food issues but I sort of feel like they take a back seat to my craziness.  It's hard to describe.  I have always felt kind of like a space person who is pretending to be human and it's like my systems got all messed up.  My brain isn't working the way I want it to and I can't figure things out and I don't care sometimes.  The not caring is the scariest part because caring about stuff is sort of who I think I am.  And everyone keeps telling me to take care of myself and put the oxygen mask on myself first and all that stuff and I don't know how to do that.  So I'm taking deep breaths and walks (ok, one walk) and petting the cat and just wondering.  What is my life supposed to be about?  If I get an answer I'll let you know, interwebs.

My messy life.

Please note:  this was an occasional paper that I wrote to share with my students, so you have to imagine me saying it out loud.  It sounds better that way.

OP

I am a mess.  I mean, my house is a mess, my desk is a mess, and I’ve begun storing stuff on the floor in here (my classroom) because I don’t have anywhere to put it.  I think that some of this is due to my lack of organizational skills.  This is in spite of reading every book on organizing and thinking about it almost constantly, in spite of purchasing all kinds of storage boxes and drawers and such, and in spite of looking at websites of organized people, online discussions, and really doing everything you could do without actually doing the thing.  It’s an advanced form of procrastination in which I am quite skilled.  I am an intelligent person.  I know what I need to do, and it does not involve poring over the catalog from The Container Store.

Sometimes I tell myself that all this clutter shows I am a creative person and that others find it quite charming.  There’s a book called A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder - How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and on-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place and of course I love it because it focuses on how a lot of important discoveries (like penicillin) happened because of stuff sitting around on a messy desk.  However, I cannot sustain this belief when I realize that sometimes I don’t create things because I can’t find the supplies I need or because I don’t have the empty space that is necessary for me to get started.  (Side note: that may be why I have a million notebooks with the first ten pages filled in.)  

I know deep in my heart that the real problem is I just have too much stuff.  That’s one of the main reasons it’s disorganized.  I must simplify.  I love the idea of a minimalist life.  It also actually fits in with my Zen philosophy of non- attachment.  There isn’t any thing in my life that I’m especially attached to.  When we had a house fire years ago it caused me to think about what I would save (luckily we didn’t lose everything) and I came to the conclusion that my journals and photographs are the only things that can’t be replaced and even those, if I lost them, would be a weird relief in a way because they are sitting there waiting for me to reread and write about or put in albums or scan or something and sending out these vibes of why-aren’t-you-dealing-with-me constantly.

One of my all time favorite organizational books is  The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up which is a wonderful Japanese method of simplifying that involves taking each object, holding it, and deciding if it brings joy to you.  If it doesn’t bring joy, get rid of it.  It sounds like a beautiful process and I’ve actually tried it a little and it totally works. But I don’t have the stamina to follow through on anything larger than my underwear drawer.  Either I like having stuff too much (consumerism) or I am just lazy (bad character).  I know that being judgmental and mean to myself doesn’t help, but honestly it has become a real problem, especially since I started having memory issues (a different OP).  Sometimes I use the excuse that I am “collecting” things as part of a “collection,” but that just doesn’t fly for most of it (socks, books I will never read, glasses that I can’t see out of anymore, and ironically, empty boxes that I am saving for future organizational needs).

I admire people who seem to have this figured out, like Mrs. Kochiss and my sister.  I wonder if they actually just have a secret stash of junk but I don’t think so.  And frankly, I would be satisfied if my junk fit into a secret stash anyway instead of bursting out of closets and filing cabinets in the real world.  (Parenthetical aside: There is one area in which I finally figured out how to deal with the overwhelming amount of ideas, to dos, and appointments that I have  — it’s my bullet journal and I would be happy to explain it to you if you’d like because I am inordinately proud of having a system that works in some aspect of my life.)

I’ve had a quote by Flaubert on my desk all year (I periodically unearth it when I’m doing a massive frustrated paper rearrangement): “Be regular and orderly in your life like a Bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.”  I know from experience that I think more clearly and do better work if my space is cleared.   I have a room at our house that is my writing/art room with all my supplies, cool stuff, etc. and the state of that room directly reflects the state of my mind.  Right now it looks like an episode of Hoarders.  Literally.  (Remember I am an English teacher so I don’t use this word lightly.) I have to write on the living room couch or the kitchen table which is not ideal because people walk in and out and ask me questions to things they should know for themselves, like “Do we have milk” and “Why did (insert name of someone not me) steal my phone charger and where is it?”

I guess it’s lucky I’m a writer so a good portion of my hoard is in words online.  Although I worry about the intangible nature of that and am constantly fighting the urge to print everything, just in case.  

Writing this essay was harder for me than writing about my mental illness, my relationship with my absent father, and my dog dying.  I don’t know why.  I guess because this is something I’m embarrassed about, not something that happened to me.  I am completely responsible for this ongoing condition that has an obvious solution.  I’ve spent countless money, time, and energy thinking about it (and writing about it) my whole life.  

I have planned a retreat for myself right after school gets out — I’m going to stay at a tiny house that I rented in Vermont, completely alone, for 10 days.  During this time, I hope to get a lot of reading and writing done, but I also want to meditate on what is most important to me in life and how I can simplify my dependence on things and actually make that happen.  Not just through good intentions but a realistic plan that I’m committed to.  If I figure this out, I will let you know.  In fact, I will write an essay and probably a book about it.  But after 47 years of inability to tame this monster (I have photographic evidence that even as a baby I found being surrounded by junk comforting) it’s one of the few things I can’t figure out no matter how much I try.  And not being able to figure something out even when I try really hard is among the top five things I hate (which is another occasional paper, but just in case you’re interested includes the taste of mushrooms, people who use the term “snail mail” or say anything derogatory about the U.S. Postal Service, and writing conclusions.  Obviously).  It’s never-ending.  It’s part of who I am.  But that doesn’t mean that in the second half of my life I will give up fighting it.  Just thinking about dying in a pile of books, office supplies and half finished knitting projects makes me know that I need to continue my battle.  Cue theme from Rocky and montage of scenes where I am unloading boxes at Goodwill, standing with my arms on my hips looking at an empty room, a clipboard with things checked off, etc.