I remember scraping ice off the car windows before school in the winter, my breath clouding in front of me in small, cottony bursts. It was a slow process, and my younger sister would watch from inside as the world shifted from an opaque blindness to bright visibility in jagged streaks. The steady whir of the “de-frost” mechanism coupled with the scratch of the tool was simultaneously shocking and soothing, and even once I’d finished visibility was a patchwork of clear glass edged in ice.
I am beginning to “de-frost” my brain right now, and it is terrifying, and humbling, and full of messiness and struggle and little rushes of joy. It isn’t linear at all; no blinking arrow is pointing me in the direction of blue skies and clarity. It isn’t relieving either; in fact, much of the time things feel tight and strained, like I’ve inhaled and forgotten to exhale.
But I am Awake.
Because all of this is maddeningly simple in some respects: I’ve been afraid to feel. All of the behaviors, all of the attempts-at the core these were reactions to emotional overwhelm, panic at sadness and anxiety that seemed so large in the moment that I couldn’t possibly contain them, that something had been stretched so thin it had to snap.
I’ve known this for a while; one of the first things they teach you in eating disorder treatment is how restricting or purging compensate for discomfort; they numb you, allow you to function in the world without being present.
What I’ve only recently realized, though, is that this fog extends beyond the “scary” emotions, the sadness and anger and fear. I’ve been living without the joy and the wonder too.
Because you can’t pick and choose which feelings you want to extinguish. You can’t put out the flames of sorrow unless you also reduce happiness into a smoldering pile. It’s all part of being human, and I’ve been a ghost of one for many years. Without emotions you’re hushed, in a stagnant and silent place where you can’t grow, where change can never happen.
My intention for this new year is to continue to learn how to be fully Awake. To let my brain de-frost and thaw from the freeze it’s been in for so long, and to be open to whatever feelings come with it, though the process is as haphazard as the scraping of ice-glazed car windows. Because even though I’m still frightened of letting the sorrows tear me apart, I am much more frightened of never allowing the joys to put me back together.
The day bus and the night bus are different. In the sunlight, people board brief-cased and fresh. We have a purpose, or the air of one, a destination in mind as we check our watches with a practiced flick of the head and sigh into our Smart Phones.
In the shadows, riders come and go unseen and silent. We move with a weight, the stench of exhaustion heavy on our sloped shoulders. Defeat is a passenger on the night bus, and Poverty, and Loneliness.
The bus itself is an entirely separate creature in the dark. Like the fluorescent fish that haunt the ocean’s unlit trenches, the bus brings streaks of dazzling glow to the sullied and tired corners of the city. It lures the drunk and tired with light that bursts forth, effulgent amidst dingy brick buildings and parked cars. Alleyways that remain mired in gloom even in the noon sun are suddenly exposed by headlamps, and people crawl forth like termites from the woodwork, scuttling towards the blaze and quiet community of fellow riders.
I realized, recently, that even when I’m riding next to Defeat, musty and crumpled, I’m sitting three seats away from Hope, too. I can catch an eye-glimmer from Glee, who is wearing a sunshine-yellow suit and whose jolly-nosed red shoes seem to be tap dancing under the bench. It might be me who is Sorrow, walking in the trenches of my well-trained Brain, until I look up and see Joy bouncing down the aisle with an alligator-grabber from the Zoo gift shop and the wide smear of a chocolate grin.
At a time when it is scary and uncomfortable for me to Come As I Am, the bus community reminds me that sometimes it is okay. Evenings right now are especially challenging, as the fatigue of the day wears through my protective coat, and I long to be alone and held all at once. So as dusk settles in, the bus pulls blazingly, blindingly up to my downtown stop, and my fellow termites and I scurry on board, join this tiny subsection of the Human Community with all its Emotions and Thoughts. And in a strange way, I am held by this sea of people, even as they are all alone in their own heads. We are alone, and yet forced to connect for a split second when we stand to allow someone else to sit, united when we hear the giggle of a child. Whoever I sit next to, whether it’s Shame or Frustration or Happiness, I get to hold a little piece of it for a short time, even if they don’t know it. And I get to give up a little piece of Who I Am, in the moment, too. In a strange way I am struggling to articulate, we strangers on the bus share the Weight of being Human until we get off at our stop.
It is imperfectly perfect, this Coming As We Are, this showing up as Human. I’m going to keep trying it, with Faith that good things come-on the night bus, on the day bus, and beyond.
I was a fabulous teacher. If you’re thinking it sounds self-centered for me to state that, don’t worry-I’m thinking that too, and saying it anyways. I was a fabulous teacher. I was a fabulous teacher because I would have done the job for no money at all (and it’s a sad truth that many teachers would say the same and many make so little that it is virtually true). I was fabulous because many of the traits that make me Me are traits found in Fabulous Teachers I’ve worked with or had. Fabulous Teaching traits, and traits that I have when I am in my Sarahness. They are are these: I listen, and I allow people to come as they are. What makes it Truly Fabulous, though, is that those are two traits children naturally possess, in a way that is so beautifully raw because they aren’t aware that they possess them.
You might be thinking I’m crazy (and I don’t use that word lightly!); anyone who has taught preschool, or had a child, or known a 3 year-old, would have good evidence to say kids can’t listen to save their lives (and I don’t use that phrase lightly, either!). You need only watch 1 minute of a typical circle time to have concrete behavioral examples of how challenging it can be for young children to listen to each other. But what I know to be true is that it isn’t challenging at all, it just has to be worth it.
Humans, little and big, young and old, make change only when they are personally invested. The layers of that investment might be thick; someone’s reason to change might be that changing will ease the suffering of those they care about, thus easing their own suffering. “I’m not going to binge today because I know that when I binge, people I love worry more, and it helps me when I help others not worry.” Or the layers might be thinner, more obvious: “I feel less physical discomfort when I eat one cookie instead of three, so I’m only going to eat one right now.”
We call children under a certain age “ego-centric” because they are; they can’t imagine that the way they experience the world isn’t the way everyone else does. It’s something we try to teach out of them. But, ultimately, all humans are ego-centric, regardless of age. We all act only when it is worth it, on some level, to do so. We all struggle to see outside our own lens of experience. The problem is, we “adults” add layers of shame and guilt and fear onto this-we tell ourselves we should be able to step into someone else’s shoes, that acting for selfish reasons is selfish, and that selfish is bad. But ultimately, we are all always acting for selfish reasons, no matter what. Children just aren’t afraid to be blatantly selfish, until we show them that they should be. We do this out of love and a desire to protect them, but what we really do is protect them from being their True Selves, give them the message that showing up as you are is not always okay, especially if “as you are” is Intensely Intense.
I stumbled upon this clip from an old Sesame Street show the other day, and I think it is brilliant. It is brilliant because I remember watching it as a kid and seeing it as entertainment, and wanting to find some paperclips after the end of the episode. And it is brilliant because when I watch it now, I see something totally different. I see a little boy who is listening intently, and picking up cues, and becoming more and more confused because the experience he is having doesn’t match other experiences he’s had. People don’t usually express Sadness, Anger, and Happiness all within a 1 minute, 25 second span (when they do, we label it disordered). He, at the age of three, knows this, because he is unable to do what the puppet is asking him to do-show on his face what it looks like to be genuinely Sad or Angry or Happy. Because he’s not any of those things, he’s totally, legitimately, confused.
John John does, in this brief clip, what I know kids to be innately capable of, when given the chance and motivated by their own desires: He listens, and he allows space for this puppet to come exactly as he is-Sad, Angry, Happy. He does this naturally, despite his own confusion. He teaches me more about emotion regulation and non-judgment than the adult human behind the puppet.
So, in my cyclical, long-threaded way, I’m back to this: I was a fabulous teacher. Because I didn’t teach at all. Because I recognized, early on, that kids are the true teachers. I got the privilege of observing them closely, of watching and listening and describing their journey as they made messes, literally and figuratively, and figured out entirely on their own how to clean them up. And because I got to do that, I also got to listen to them, when they needed it, and to always make sure to tell them that it is okay to come as you are. In telling them that, I was telling myself. My human selfishness was that, in telling an intensely sad child that it is okay to cry and be intensely sad, I was telling myself that, too. In writing these words I’m telling myself that right now. And isn’t that what fabulous teaching is all about?
I go to therapy in an uprise downtown, an oddly angled, metallic expanse that always seems to be on the verge of blasting off. It has multiple stories, an eccentric amalgam of all kinds of business offices and insurance companies. I enter on the ground floor through round-robin glass doors, the kind that simultaneously delighted and terrified me as a child (what if you get stuck going around and around forever?), and am greeted by few plush armchairs and a couch seated beside an electric fireplace, a kind of corporate-cozy gathering space with a Starbucks in the corner and a hushed feeling in the walls.
I love this entryway, because besides the possibility of caffeine, it offers a mixing-pot of people. There are young men with spiked hair, square tortoise-shell glasses, and rolled-up pant legs, who rode their bikes in to work at tech start-ups. There are secretaries, almost always in a gaggle, and woman in power-suits and heels who move just a tad too fast because they are perpetually busy and important, and they have to walk that much faster than the men just to prove it.
And then there’s the patients. It’s often easy to spot them, for they fold into their sterotype just as easily as the people I described above. They are the ones without a badge, with a slight hesitance in their step, who have the uncomfortable look in their eyes that comes when you feel slightly out of context. They are often the ones who stop and sit in the fake sitting room, take a breath to ground themselves, to remember who they are amidst a sea of rushing workers.
There’s the woman with her stone-washed jeans pulled up above her belly-button, who sits next to her rolling suitcase and talks just a little too loud and a little too much to anyone who will take the time to listen (she is the kindest person I’ve encountered yet). There are kids being dragged along by harried parents, reluctantly attending family therapy sessions or getting ADD medicine refilled. There are students, and salesmen, and teachers, all unified by the noun patient, and a destination: floor E.
I’m brazenly labeling all of these people because, as I said before, I am one of them. I’m a patient on G, and have been a patient for years, and I’m fairly certain that I betray this every time I walk into that building with my wide-eyed determination to look like I belong. It’s only recently, however, that I’ve also begun to work on floor J, at a company that is part of the very same system that provides my behavioral health services.
When I take the elevator up, it is a smaller sub-set of that larger melting-pot. And when I get off on E, it feels less intense, less chaotic. It’s even more obvious who is who here: patients are in the waiting room, or checking in at the front desk, providers have IDs and calm, reassuring voices. I know my role here. I am A Patient. I’ve actually been told many times, verbatim, that I am a “good” one.
Because I know my role, I also know what I could get away with. That sounds terrible, but it’s true. If I were to scream and throw things, sob in the hallway, allow myself to break down in the bathroom, it would be okay. People would notice, people would react-some with fear, some with annoyance, some with amazement or embarrassment. I would certainly be approached by a provider, who would use some kind of step-by-step protocol to calm me down (I say this with compassion and the beginnings of a new understanding after working on J; I have never been a mental health provider and have no doubt it is incredibly hard, and that no one goes into that profession some kind of care and drive to help people), but it would not be outside the realm of normal. On the floor E, acting crazy is normal.
That’s extreme, the throwing things; it’s not likely I would ever do that, despite my Intense Intensity. But I did find myself in tears last week, and the only place I knew to go was the bathroom on E. Because crying on J, were I work, would be unacceptable. I’m already out of place there; I come to the office on time, I dress according to the company code, I can sit in meetings and listen and understand much of what is said. My badge grants me access to all that, opens that door to that world of research and education and people who have power. It doesn’t fool anyone, though, especially me. I can wear my badge on J, in the elevator, even in the lobby or on the bus. And people look at me differently; sometimes I even feel more capable, more in control. But wearing it or not, it’s hard to shake the label of patient. It’s what I’ve known for so long, feel like it’s in my blood, my bones, my brain chemistry. I think I’m learning that broken is one of the hardest things to let go. Who am I when I’m on floor E? And who am I on floor J? It’s the same person, at least I’m trying to be. And still, I go to E to cry…
And so this week I look to the quote above my writing desk from Ghandi: “In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” If crying on the floor where I work because of stigma and insensitivity in a meeting results in people continuing to see me as only a patient, listen to my ideas as only a consumer, that isn’t the kind of world I want to live in. I want to shake the norm that allowing space for emotions is crazy, weak, patient-like. Because it’s human. Yesterday I cried on floor E and floor J, tried to push aside the shame that has held my feelings back, tried to show up in the truth of my Intense Intensity, my Sarahness.
It’s a decision (is crying a decision?) that has me shaking, literally, with fear each day I buzz myself into the office, every time the elevator doors open and I don’t know if a co-worker will enter, or a fellow member of my DBT group, or the psychiatrist who read me my diagnoses one after the other until I felt like a lab-rat. I hope that, some day, all of those people might feel it is okay to cry, or dance, or admit to feeling afraid, whether it’s on in a workplace, a clinic, an elevator, a lobby. Because it isn’t us or them, it’s we. I live the we every day. And the more we all practice showing up as human, the more understanding we might have of each other, the more normal crazy might become, the more our tears and our joys will overlay our hard hearts.
"Still, a great deal of light falls on everything" 