rest in peace

My friend Lillian Robinson died about ten days ago. My best friend died. The person on this earth I owe the most to after my mother, the person who had more to do with the formation of my consciousness as an adult than anyone else, who taught me such Yiddish and Yinglish phrases – those flying buttresses to expressiveness and sanity – as I know, who taught me the usefulness of class analysis and reinforced the usefulness of looking things up, who was on the short list of people who challenged me to be the best poet I could be, the person who gave me my best approximation of the experience of parenthood, who may have saved me in some sense by suggesting I go back to school, and then helped make it possible to do so – those I suppose are as close as I can come for now to describing her place in my life.

I was able to visit Lillian for about ten days when she was in palliative care and knew herself to be terminal, and to reconnect with her family, including her son (I lived with Lillian and Alex for five years as the other adult in the household after the breakup of her marriage to Alex’s father, and with Lillian for a few months after that before I resettled in the Bay Area). Since her death I’ve been helping her family – my second family – with making announcements to her wide network, and with memorial activities. This is the first moment I’ve taken to reflect in writing – almost the first moment I’ve taken to reflect – on what her loss means to me. And beyond the bare bones that I’ve given you above, I don’t know what to say.

You will find on Lillian’s memorial page a number of links to appreciations of her life, as well as to photos showing some of her vitality and to a video from her last recorded public appearance, which suggests some of her strengths as explainer and exhorter, as analyst, activist, and teacher. I suppose I will be able to write more one of these days, but for now I just wanted to let those of you fortunate enough to have known her have this brief summary of what she meant to me, and to give the rest of you a brief introduction to an extraordinary and all too short life.

Little children, love one another.

M.

and now a word from our sponsor: Anxiety Management

Dear Friends,

Here’s a post I made on another board. It occurred to me as I was writing it that it serves the purpose of the note that I said I might post here about the shift in focus of this blog. It’s also a way of reintroducing that foundational theme, since I’m sure I’ll have occasion to visit it again from time to time.

All the best to all of you,
M.
————————————————————-
Dear J,

Have any of us known paralyzing anxiety? I have. I do still, although it’s much more manageable once one learns to recognize it for what it is rather than for any of the many disguises it can take.

You are lucky – yes, that is a considered judgment – to recognize the anxiety, to know at least some of its sources, and to be working with a therapist you describe as “gifted” on furthering your recognition and management.

I have spoken twice of management because this is not, in my experience, something that goes away, is outgrown, or gets cured or fixed. I hasten to add that, paradoxically if you like, paying focused attention to it as appropriate frees one to go on living without being in thrall to it.

I’ve found it helpful lately to think of my anxiety (or neurosis, as it was known in my youth) as a given, like being male, American, Caucasian, or having been raised Catholic. There’s nothing I can do to change those facts, or in the case of the anxiety to change the facts that caused or precipitated it, but I can place those facts in a larger context and go on living my life without it being overdetermined by any of them (all of which create some tension in my life about who I am and want to be).

Realizing there was a new way of looking at my givens was part of my decision to abandon the first focus of the blog that I had begun as an adjunct to my current therapy – which is going well, thanks for asking. ;^) (The older, anxiety-specific posts run from February through May).

None of this is meant to minimize the reality of your childhood hardships, J, much less the bravery and underlying good heart and good judgment that kept you sane and functioning in a crazy-making situation. The task now – or the series of tasks – is to continue to honor and respect that courage and good heart, and even your childhood choices, as you come to terms with the fact of those choices and their consequences no longer being suited to the kind of life you want and need to live.

As always, you know how to reach me if you’d like to discuss these things further. I’m not sure it works, but I think I’ve enabled comments in my blog, so you’re welcome to try to respond there if you’re so moved.

Love,
M.

change

For various reasons, about some of which I may have more to say later, I have changed the title and focus of this blog. I’ll now be using it as a distribution point for news, commentary, and who knows what else to interested friends.

All the best to all of you,
M.

cat body language

OK, my cat got skunked last night.

I noticed when he came in for breakfast this morning that he wanted a little more attention than usual. My housemate noticed that he’d been skunked.

I then noticed that Slick (the cat) had that sort of tentative, as-if-puzzled air about him that cats sometimes get.

Slick is largely an outdoor cat, especially in fine weather but even during our relatively mild winters. So while I thought about where and how to give him the traditional tomato-juice bath, I figured he could hang out outside where the sun and air and whatever he might try (rolling in the grass, etc.) would do some good in the mean time. He did seem to want to stay outside mostly, as he normally would in this weather, and just popped in a couple of times for a bite.

Finally around mid-afternoon I went to get something out of the garage, and there was Slick, sitting and waiting at the back door. He came in. He went out again. He looked up at me. Then he flopped over on his back onto the concrete and started wriggling, as if trying to scrape off the stink – all the while keeping eye contact with me.

Well, whether or not you anthropomorphize that into a request for help, it seemed like a good opportunity for intervention. Sure enough, when I went and got the spaghetti sauce, he let me slather it on him and rub it in. He kept walking in small circles away from me and back, the way cats sometimes will when you’re petting or combing them, some half-dozen times till I’d covered him pretty well, including his face (keeping clear of the eyes). He then walked some three or four feet away and started licking (cleaning) himself.

I hadn’t wanted to freak him out by introducing water into this process prematurely, but this seemed like a good occasion for a rinse. I set the garden hose to approximate a gentle rain, since he seems not to mind rain, but he got wind of my intentions too soon and scampered off.

Since then, he’s been back for two more treatments, and I’ve subsitituted a body-temperature washcloth for the hose, thinking it would approximate his mother’s tongue. He resisted a bit the first time, but seemed quite complacent about the second.

edit 6/20/05: It just struck me today that we are at the height of flea season, I haven’t given Slick his prophylactic treatment for months, and I haven’t seen him scratch for weeks. So perhaps there was some benefit.

edit 2007/10/02: About a year ago, Slick and I had to go through another negotiation over giving him a daily antibiotic, orally by eyedropper, for a couple of weeks. I never learned the trick the vet showed me for inducing a mouth-opening reflex. After several attempts with mixed and at least once spectacularly unhappy results, it seemed me that Slick needed to know two things: that he was firmly supported, and that he was blocked from escape. Blocking him – looming over him on the counter with my arms poised to catch him if he leapt in either direction – was adequate to keep him still, and left both of us calmer than trying to physically restrain him. Thus stalemated, he would clamp his jaw shut until the very last second before I was ready to force the dropper between his lips, then he would lift his upper lip just enough for me to squirt in the medicine. He certainly ran away as soon as the ordeal was over, but if I followed him into the room where he had gone, not looking for him but sitting in a chair, he would reappear, jump into my lap (something he rarely does), and sit there for a while, as if to let me know that we were still OK.

I haven’t seen it, but a housemate reports that Slick now hangs out peaceably in the back yard with our resident skunks and ‘possums.

1957-2004: 47 years in review

This record was undertaken as an adjunct to the “talk therapy” I’m taking part in through my HMO. I’m running about 5 months behind here. The following is a document I prepared for my shrink (licensed clinical social worker), summarizing insights up to last January in our work together (about 4 months’ worth, meeting approximately monthly). It’s as clear-sighted and honest as I’ve ever been, in writing at least, and perhaps at all, about my failings.

———-Massing 1/18/05———-

current fantasies:
Gainful and rewarding employment will fall out of the sky.
Accomplishment requires little or no effort
(the elves will finish my work at night).
A fulfilling social life may be found on the Internet.
I can lose or maintain weight without careful attention to how much I eat or exercise.

established strategies:
1/ Delay work I’ve committed to as long as possible.
2/ Throw something together at the last minute or later with the help of sleeplessness and adrenaline.
3/ Rely on a combination of personal charm and appeals to pity to make up for the work’s deficiencies.

[This next item requires a bit of backstory. In brief, I was presented with a dilemma when I was somewhere between six and eight years old. My instinctive response to that dilemma - an impractical but inventive flight of imagination - seemed to solve it in the short term but helped form the pattern sketched above. My therapist has suggested that on the one hand I saved my life - i.e., I fled into fantasy as a way of avoiding going truly crazy - and on the other I've come to rely too much on the child's method of "solving" adult problems and dealing with adult responsibilities. So we have been trying to sort out what the (hypothetical) child "needs" today, as well as my practical needs as a functioning adult.]

obligations to my [seven]-year-old savior:
Take care of him, and stop expecting him to take care of me.
Honor him for saving my life; retire him from that responsibility [amended at my therapist's suggestion to sharing that responsibility with him].
Stop calling him/me names.
Stop presenting him with responsibilities as ugly and unfair as [that old] dilemma.

Strategies for fulfilling obligations:
Plan.
Schedule.
Work.
Allow for both up- and down-time, but be clear about which is which.

panic, the body, and the mind

Posted by mf on the original home for this blog:

I’ve never had [a panic attack], though i know of one time where i was badly overcome by a situation and needed to get away from where I was (in a lecture) – interestingly, that was what prompted me to go back to my martial arts training (which I’d stopped for a few years) and I’ve never looked back since.

Confidence, regular training and learning about your body does wonders.

Thanks, M! You’ve touched on an area I’ve been ignoring here, probably because I’ve been ignoring it (or at least giving it short shrift) in my life for too long (about a year).

You’re absolutely right about how paying attention to, taking care of and challenging the body can clear away a lot of the mental debris. That’s one more thing I need to build back into my life, and I know I’ll be glad when I’ve done it, for the many payoffs.

By the way, this is something that was sort of stolen from me in childhood. I was a bookish kid, and for whatever reason I really didn’t get swept up in neighborhood pickup games of whatever sport. So I never learned a lot of common athletic skills, and to this day I swear I never had a physical education “teacher” (through secondary school) who actually took responsibility for teaching me any of those skills. It was all about running drills, or learning to play on the fly from my contemptuous (or at best condescending) classmates; in high school, half-subliminal gender policing was the only addition to the “curriculum”.

So I’ve been pleased at being able to reclaim physical training as a curative and as a joy in myself. And to all those lazy “teachers” who ignored my training back in the day: Eat my jockstrap!

B^p ,
M.

am I who I say I am?

An online acquaintance started a discussion thread asking:
Are you who you say you are? Do you create a persona just for online? Do you act this way in the real world or use the anonymity found here to act contrary to your normal behaviour?

…and here’s my response:
I strive for “what you see is what you get”, both online and in real life. I’m probably more patient and tolerant online than in RL, because of the small delay built into responding in writing. (As a “real” writer, I’m practically incapable of just writing stream-of-consciousness and hitting “send”, and I’m rather puzzled that anyone can regularly do that, as many claim.)

I’m only recently becoming aware of the various (largely transparent or translucent) masks I wear in different social situations. I’m also trying to improve the way I respond to people, situations, and new information. So where is the “real” me in all this? Well, finding that authenticity is an ongoing process for me.

Thanks for raising the question!

Best to all,
M.

a personal note to friends (in the context of the previous two posts)

I’m still working on the balance between personal and more general focus here, but feel obliged to insert a brief note to friends.

Am I suicidal? No. Have I ever been? No, not really. I’m not a teenager. I can imagine a satisfactory and even rewarding life in which I don’t live up to my own expectations or those of others. In fact, that has mostly been the story of my life since I was a teenager.

Do I understand “struggle[s] with an almost paralyzing inability to get [one]self started on projects”? Yes. They are the chief conflict of my life today. Do I “stave off anxiety and feelings of failure by escaping into fantasy”? Me voilà. I live here.

edit 2007-10-02: “Here” in the last sentence refers to the online community where this was originally posted, which was at the time of writing a vivid illustration of my Internet addiction.

examining my stance

I’ve resisted blogging. I don’t think the dailiness of my life is that interesting. I don’t read blogs and don’t expect my friends to. But I’m in a process now. I need some clarity. And for me as for so many (perhaps not enough) clarity comes from writing.

Why “nervous” [the original title of this blog]? It’s what I am. The clinical name for it now is anxious; the name I grew up with, and find most useful when I need to explain myself – something I need to do fairly often – is neurotic. “Nervous” neatly dovetails the everyday meaning of anxious and the etymological meaning of neurotic. Oh, and I like the faint echo of how my condition might have been described around the turn of the last century – as a “nervous complaint.”

My condition. Hmmm. Conditions can be transitory or permanent. Time will tell. It’s a good bet that I’ve been nervous – neurotic, anxious – for a good fifty years (some of them better than others, of course, ba-dum-BUM!). And now that I’ve been diagnosed – officially within the last year – I know a little more about things I habitually do and don’t do, that may or not make sense. I know a little more about what and how I think, and how that influences how I feel, and in turn what and how I think, and so how I react to people and to situations. For everyone’s sake, I would like to minimize “explosively” as one of those ways of reacting. “Snidely” and “condescendingly” have largely lived out their usefulness, too, I think. “Kindly” is something I’m working on, and in some ways have a pretty good start on.

Rather than a “condition”, I usually think or talk about a “stance” – a starting point – my baseline likely reaction to just about any phenomenon I encounter. There might be many layers of socialization and intention over that baseline that get me through each day, but every once in a while the baseline – to switch metaphors – acts as a faultline, and something slips and grinds below me, and before you know it I’m ass over teakettle.

Weird to face this. Because the stance is that of someone who always expects the rug to be pulled out from under him. And it’s only by recognizing that that expectation has become a dependency, and that I am my own likeliest rug-puller, that I have any hope of calming down and just getting on with it, as the rest of the world does every day.

That’s close enough to the truth for now.

Best to all,
M.