Therapy, part 2: seeds of growth

This is part 2 of 2. You can read the first half of this journey here.

Photo by Kate Ter Haar

On my first visit, I walked into my therapist's office sheepishly holding a filled-in PHQ-9, a commonly used depression screening. There had been a really bad week or two, but the last few days, things seemed more okay, so when I'd filled out the screening, I answered most of the questions from my okay state. Which meant: Did I really belong here? Would she give me a funny why are you here look?

I was lucky. She was kind and warm and immediately saw what I needed, saw what a long time coming this appointment had been. And she saw what seems obvious now, but what I couldn't see for a long time--that to want help is to need it. That regardless of PHQ-9 or diagnoses or medical coding, there was something deeper than I could control that was disrupting my life and relationships, preventing me from peace. And that was worth attending to.

From that day forward, she met me where I was, and that was enough.

She actually never told me how she diagnosed me. The diagnosis is not the point. Most of the time, I don’t think I meet the DSM criteria for depression or dysthymia. Or maybe I’m right on the line. If you read part 1, you might have noticed that the fog that has hit me so many times is not quite strong enough to get me flat on my back, or keep me there. You might notice that in seventh grade during the hurricane, apathy gave way to writing. You might notice that friends have at times been able to draw me out, that changing circumstances gave me hope at desperate times. 

Whatever semblance of depression or mood disorder I do have is still hard for me to claim, not because I'm ashamed but because I feel selfish to claim it. As I write all of this, part of me is apprehensive of overdramatization, knowing that my own mental health is mild compared with the struggles of many, and has certainly never been life-threatening.

But this is not about comparison. Each person's path to healing is her own. For me, the truth is that being functional, that having relatively mild and episodic symptoms, that being "less depressed" than others, that having no trauma to speak of—all these things have become excuses I make to myself for trudging on alone, for pretending I'm okay. In the end, no matter how well I can do the work and cook the dinner, no matter how many people fare better or worse than me, there is more wholeness and abundant life waiting if I am brave enough to get help.

*

Therapy, for me, has primarily been a journey in learning how to embrace and accept my feelings, rather than adding layer on layer of rationalization, apology, over-analysis, guilt, or control. It is important to say that to embrace or accept the feelings is not the same as embracing the injustices or sins that cause them. It is simply to be aware that to be alive can be sad and painful at times, and it is only human to let myself feel those things.

So I've been learning to lean in and explore the sadness, the pain, the loneliness.

There are times in my life that have been really, genuinely sad: My grandma died after a hard and beautiful year in and out of hospital and rehab. I’d poured my heart into being with her that year. As the weeks and months after her death passed by, I let myself cry. I did not put a timetable on my grief. I said no to social engagements when it seemed like they’d take too much energy. I was gentle and kind to myself in my grief. I somehow knew that there was nothing more I could have done for her. I knew that the grief was legitimate, real, something that had to be walked through.

More often, though, this is not how I respond to personal distress. If I feel lonely, I wonder about the ways it might be my fault. If I feel nostalgic about a distancing relationship, I think of how I might have tried more. If I feel anxious or angry, I push through and try to ignore it, until it builds up. That is, I’m usually not the best at being gentle and kind to myself.

The times I'm most upset look very similar. Sadness or failure rolls into self-shaming, and picks up speed as it heads down the hill. And then something or someone strikes that tender chord in me and suddenly I am shaking, crying the tears that are enough to make your chest quiver as you strive to catch your breath. I am thinking, I am not good enough. What if I am never good enough?

*

The first week of therapy, my therapist intuited much of this, I think. So she gave me a Self-Compassion Test. I failed. Okay, there’s no failure in therapy. I scored low.

Self-compassion, my therapist explained as I began to balk at any kind of self-care, self-love language (isn’t it against my religion to be selfish? am I good enough to deserve self-love?), is not about making excuses for yourself or trying to lower your standards. Self-compassion means that when you feel sad, you treat that sadness the way you would a friend’s sadness. You sit with it and listen to it and give it a pat on the shoulder; you don’t berate it. And after giving it plenty of time, you move on.

In other words, it is much more like the patience gave myself during that time of grief.

One week, as an exercise, my therapist gave me a sheet of paper called Loneliness. She asked me to act out my typical responses to loneliness. I can punch my loneliness square in the center, I can cower from it, I can crumple it in a ball and eat it, I can put it behind my back and pretend it’s not there, I can hang it in front of my face to further distance me from the world.

These are all the things I tend to do to complicate and increase my loneliness.

On the other hand, my therapist suggested, I can say to the lonely part of me, “You are doing the best you can.” I can pat it gently and let it stay at the table. I can fold it carefully and put it in my pocket, a persistent teacher in empathy and life in the world.

*

As I've slowly and fitfully learned to be more gentle with myself, I think it is even more slowly cascading out to the way I think about and treat others.

For example, as I look back on all the years and all the times I didn't get help, I see that I often and almost sub-consciously blamed my friends for my sadness. I have at times resented others for contributing to my isolation, or felt that if only I had more close friends, I would have been all right. The truth, of course, is that I have damn good friends in all the places I've lived, friends who have made me tea and picked me raspberries and called on my birthday and invited me to brunch or to live with them. The truth is that I have lived for the last five years with my best friend.

When I am sad and lonely, there is more going on beneath the surface, and it has not much at all to do with what deeper level of communion I desire or with adjusting to a new life phase or with moving from south to north or urban to rural or Africa to America. And it has everything to do with that kernel of thought I first remember thinking on a hotel bed in Colorado at thirteen, that I often don't like the me I inhabit, and that I have never known how to ask for help.

I see now that most of my life, help has only been a few moments away. And perhaps the more I grow, the more I will be able to extend compassion not only to my own feelings but to the many wonderful people in my life who are, just like me, not quite perfect but still ever so full of love and sincere effort.

All of this is progress, but all of it is slow. And it is really hard. There are so many times in therapy I've felt more like moving back instead of moving forward. I've had to entertain new ways of thinking that feel silly or sacrilegious . I've had to work harder than it seems one should have to work, often wondering if there is really hope for me after all since I will inevitably grow tired of the work, wondering if my previous sad but functional equilibrium is preferable to digging through so many layers of strange and awkward and painful. Even now I wonder with regularity, What if I never change? 

Perhaps I won't, or only a little. I've seen enough of humanity to know most of us move the needle only the tiniest bit throughout our lives. I will likely always wrestle with accepting grace, granting myself grace, believing deep down that God is grace.

But I know I'm gaining wisdom and perspective that will give me fuel for the wrestling.

*

This is what it has looked like for me, so far. I’m not fixed, and I still don’t think I’ll ever be good enough. I’m thankful now more than ever that God does not see me the way I see myself. And I’m thankful that the last few years have taught me to ask for help. Because as hard as it has been to stare down my weakness, it’s so much better than sitting alone in the dark.

Dear friends, I don’t think everyone needs therapy, but I do think we all need help sometimes. Whatever that looks like for you, I hope you will step into it when you need it, and keep reminding me to do the same.

Therapy, part 1: the times I didn't ask for help

Photo by Kristaps Bergfelds

I first recall the heaviness beginning to descend upon me fiercely the summer before eighth grade, on vacation in the Rockies with my parents and brother. The family reunion had been over for a couple days, and now the four of us were spending some time in the national parks. It was afternoon. We had come back from our hike, and dinner was not for another hour, and it all felt so underwhelming, so disappointing, so empty. I didn’t like the vacation or the food or the expectations or the loneliness or the ennui of summer, and most of all I didn’t like the me I inhabited.

A month later, a few weeks into school, the excitement of new classes and new friends and new activities beginning to wear off again, a hurricane rolled through Maryland that left us home from school for two days. Soccer was cancelled. Piano lessons were cancelled. And I lay in my bed for hours, writing in my journal and crying and feeling myself left alone with my thoughts far too long. The melodramatic short story I wrote in that hurricane, about a woman lost in a rainstorm, determined to carry on, is surely one of the great masterpieces of adolescent angst.

*

As long as I had been aware of my parents as real humans, I had begun to know the story of my dad’s depression, starting in childhood and most severe in his early thirties. I had come to know it as a story of the past, for it seemed, both in the way he spoke of it and in my own experience of my father’s humor, joy, and energy, that it was completely healed.

What happened next—years later, it seems—was that one day as I was talking to my father, he said something I’ve never forgotten. He said that because of his own and his mother’s history of depression, he had been concerned that my brother or I might inherit this propensity. He had watched us closely since we were small and had discerned, to his delight, that we had not inherited this curse. Though certainly I did not suffer in the severe way he had as a child, his statement clanged a dissonance inside me. It didn’t feel true to my experience. 

Funny—that is how I remember it happening. But going through emails, I discovered recently that this is what really happened:

It was midway through college, I was at a break in a relationship and in the midst of a total re-evaluation of all I thought I knew. My faith in God, that solid rock that had brought me through every previous challenge, was now a one-handed grip on a fraying rope. I told my dad, and he sent me an email in which he asked, “Might you be depressed? Though I watched you closely as a kid and you never seemed to have inherited my cyclical major depression, I know mental health can affect one’s life and faith. It’s okay if you’re depressed, and it’s okay to get help.”

Funny how we hear the things we want to hear. Then, I wanted a quick fix for loneliness and doubts, not a lifelong journey with mental health. Now, I wanted to remember this story as a long history of voices telling me I was fine, I didn’t need help. Turns out it was my own voice all along. I have always been the one telling me I didn’t need help.

*

Later on in college, when that relationship ended for the final time, after friendships had become even more fraught and anger had replaced disbelief as the mode of my faith, I noted the quantity of my tears and the changes in my usually robust appetite, and I wondered if I should see a counselor. The google search “am I depressed” turned up myriad online quizzes and evaluations, and some said I might be mildly to moderately depressed, and some said I was fine. Some days I thought I was depressed, and some days I thought I was fine.

At the end of most every quiz, after all the questions about appetite and sleep and hopelessness and self-harm, there was a question worded something like this: “Have any of the above symptoms affected your ability to carry out the activities of your life?” And I would look at my grades and my work and my unchanged outward appearance, and I would check “No.”

I think part of me wanted to get help, find someone to talk to, explore the idea of therapy. But the other part told me that it was self-indulgent to go to a counselor when (according to the internet) I wasn’t even depressed.

Besides, I was still pulling up my pants every morning. And I had learned that to be functional is to be okay. I didn’t yet understand that in mental health, there is more than functional. There is healing and growing and maybe even some version of whole.

But functional has a power over me, and for several more years after that it wielded its scepter: I lived in Tanzania for a year, the year of gulping teary fits, thoughtless peanut-butter gobbling, the feeling of being utterly alone. But of course that was just what it was like to live abroad, right? And it went away when I sang with the girls in the evenings. I moved back to Maryland and there were months of desperate phone calls to college friends. But of course that was just reverse culture shock and learning to be an adult, right? And it went away when I found the new friends and the garden and the laughter.

*

Finally, I met my match. In 2012 in the course of one week I went from single to married, city to country, community to isolation, employed to unemployed. It was too much all at once, I suppose. My mother-in-law had bought us an expansive, welcoming brown couch as a wedding gift, and it opened each afternoon to swallow me. I would binge on Netflix and chocolate chips and watch the afternoon fade, too apathetic to get up and turn on the lights. And all of the things from before—the desperate phone calls to friends, the feeling of being utterly alone, the teary fits, the weariness of being me—they all came back at once and threatened to undo me.

They certainly undid some of me. But even as I found a functionality in Cherokee—a job, a way of writing and running to get by—I felt in my own self that this was different. This thing was deeper than just adjusting to marriage and a rural place that was hesitant to accept me. I waited, as weeks turned to months and beyond, hoping for a ritual or a garden or a new friend to rescue me out of it. When they did not come I blamed my own failure, a failure to be outgoing enough to make people love me or spiritual enough to conquer the dark.

We moved to Durham, and I started anew, and I hoped those feelings would depart with new routines and new friends and new purpose. And although slowly built a network of people I desperately love and trust, yet still I would leave the library each day angry at myself for not trying harder. Still I would end up at home feeling sad and lonely, unable to focus or even get off the couch. I would panic as I looked ahead to a weekend without social plans.

My second summer in Durham, I interned as a chaplain, an experience full of  meaning and friendship. And then one day in a group meeting, pressed to explain my emotions, everything all seemed to collapse around me and I found myself crying under a table, begging to be left alone, my mind repeating over and over "I just want to not be me. I just want to not be me."

And I finally admitted to myself that it was time to ask for help.

---
Want to know what happened next? You can read part 2 here.

When you dare to be happy

Photo by David McSpadden

At Dayspring last Friday night, we entered the Great Silence after dinner, around 9pm. We kept it until 10am Sunday morning. In between, we could walk the lovely grounds, journal, read, pray, sit, eat, sleep, anything as we felt led. But we could not speak.

*

Me and silence, 2000 to present:

For a time, music was my silence, my retreat, my freedom. No words needed to explain myself, no people to explain myself to. Just me and eighty-eight keys in a small soundproof room, playing it out.

During a day of silence last fall, I breathed for the first time in a month. Then, I scribbled anger and disappointment at myself, all over my journal.

I am the awfulest person in the world at getting up in the morning. But just before dawn (especially in early spring) is my most favorite time to be silent, alone, alert.

Once on a technology fast, I experienced road rage such as I have never experienced before, until I pulled over to the side of the road to eat a peanut butter sandwich and make growling noises--yes I am that insane--since I couldn't turn on the radio to tune it out.

Silence is boring. Silence is edifying. Silence is restorative. Silence is terrifying. I crave silence and run to escape it all at once. In silence, I see God. I see beauty. I also see myself.

*

I came to Dayspring expecting something. Something angry, and difficult, and cathartic. Something with tears and a rehashing of old disappointments warring within me and (just maybe) a profound new insight that would change everything. I came in expecting that the silence would be, at its core, hard work.

So, anticipating the hours ahead, my first task when silence began was to read over every journal entry I've written since I started divinity school. It only took about 20 minutes. There weren't many, The entries there were consisted of wrangling and wrestling and anxiety and questions. Questions about how to approach my vocation, my marriage, my spiritual life, my relationships. How to process the painful things in my past.

God, I know I can't handle all of it this weekend, so please guide me to what it is you want me to wrestle with.

In the morning morning, after a deliciously fresh breakfast and a run through forested country roads, I was lying flat on my back, stretched out in the cool hallway when it struck me, clear as day, clear as the title of the weekend's program: "The Gift of Divine Time."

This weekend is not for you to wrestle. Having named the questions and anxieties last night is enough. Now, let go--not in avoidance or denial but in trust--and commend all into the hands of the Spirit. Now, simply enjoy. This silence is for you a gift.

*

Something shifts, and I am in the present.

It is a gift that I am here. The sun and the woman in the rocking chair next to me on the porch and the rain and the bed and the fresh food--all is gift.

It is a gift that I am asleep by ten.

It is a gift that I am here in community without needing to explain myself, to worry over my words. I confess I may enjoy people more when we can simply be together, no words.

It is a gift when the storm hits Saturday night, and I am sitting on the porch looking out at the lightning and the rain that has blurred my vision of the horizon and the wind that is making the trees sway violently. I startle when the first tree branch falls, but then I grin, glee splattered over my face as the wind blows the rain under the porch and against my skin. I stare down the storm until it passes, and retire for the evening.


It is a gift that I am running on these rolling hills just before breakfast. I don't want to turn around, I want to keep going, but I know my knees and I know my lack of fitness and further I know that there is more gift--scrambled eggs, fresh fruit, a cinnamon raisin bagel--all waiting for me back at the lodge.

It is a gift that I am for the first time walking a prayer labyrinth, like an interior pilgrimage toward God, and it is a gift that the spider on the porch is spinning her web, slowly, deliberately, in concentric circles, like a labyrinth.

I take in all the gifts, and somehow in taking in the gifts I feel all that is un-gift begin to unclench in me. It is not gone. There is work yet to do. But it is unraveling, and I think maybe it has even been instructive. I think maybe I am learning from this silence to be present in each step of the journey, to trust that I, even with all my noise and junk and wandering--am on a path with God.

It is a gift that I am sitting before the lily pond where the geese go for rest, and I am reading over and over Mary Oliver's "Morning Poem" (look it up) and she is telling me that notwithstanding my sometimes-leaden spirit there is "somewhere deep within you/ a beast shouting that the earth/ is exactly what it wanted" and she is challenging me to dare to be happy, to accept this as gift, to love the earth and the community and the place God has given me.

For this moment, at least, I wholeheartedly do.

*
(An appendix)

Labyrinth
You will have entered, perhaps, with joy.
On a sure path to the center.
You will wind and double back enough times you feel
you might have returned to the place you started,
as though moving backwards.
This only means you are in the thick of it.
Then one day, having relaxed into the rhythm of your steps,
perhaps without noticing it--
you will find yourself there.

Where? A rock, on which is laid a feather, a stone,
some broken pottery.
It is not, perhaps, what you expected to find here.
You find yourself looking outward, at all that impelled you.
From the rock, it appears beautiful.
You want to run to it.

Wait.
Close your eyes, breathe in gratitude.
For waves of green. For each bird
chronicling your journey.
Each stone leading your path.

Then, a moment after it has been too long,
you will begin the slow journey out, which is
perhaps the most important part.
And when having made your final turn,
you find in your pocket the tiny shard
of pottery, you will understand that you
must turn toward the center
again.

A fool's heart

It is my first day of divinity school, and I have decided I need music in my life. I bike over to the music building and ask an undergrad where the practice rooms are. They are gloriously empty, and I find a beautiful Yamaha and sit down to practice for my choir audition tomorrow. I play through a book of spirituals, trying to pick one that sounds good with my voice range, one that my rusty vocal chords can handle.

I flip to Deep River and blink at the high A on the page, but decide to give it a try anyway. I play the intro and begin. It is a beautiful song, and when I reach the climax-- "that promised land where all is peace" -- I nail the high A. I sing it again, and again, and again, and I am in love with singing, and I am convinced this will be my place of refuge over the next three years. The practice room will be a prayer chapel, a place of worship, a break from heavy words and ideas.

In the afternoon I go back to run through one more time, but the practice rooms are full. Several undergrads wait in the hall. I decide to go home.

I get dinner in the oven and my roommates are gone and John is outside studying on the back porch. I find a the starting pitch on Youtube, and begin my song. I am happy, I am happy, and then I get to that climax again, the one I nailed six times in a row this morning, and I splat. I try again, and that gravelly crackly thing is in the way and I can't sing it anymore. It's not as though it's out of my range; there is a beautiful high A on the other side of the gravel--I know because I heard it this morning. But tonight, there is something in the way. I try ten times, probably, but I can't find a way to hit it consistently like I was this morning. This piece will have to go. I'll sing the safe piece for the audition instead, the one that sounds good enough, I hope. And then I will just cross my fingers that in the "warm-up" part of the audition, I can fake my way through the high notes.

"You sounded amazing," John says when he comes inside, but I am grouchy. He must think I'm being a perfectionist. He must not have heard it through the glass.

So I sing for him, demonstrate for him for the first time what it sounds like when that thing is in my voice, in my way.

He gets it. He agrees I should sing the safe song.

*

This isn't about an audition, though.

This, my friends, is about vulnerability and failure and longing. In this moment, it all comes back to me. This pattern started at age sixteen, and all through college I sang through and around it, some months thinking maybe I'd finally overcome that thing and could sing freely again. Clearly, I never quite have. This is the shape of my musical life. This is the tender piece of my heart which will always produce a tear. This is about when the object of joy and refuge and beauty becomes an object of frustration and inadequacy.

This is about the question, "Do I want to risk it all again? Do I even want to sing if it will dredge up all these emotions again?"

But I have a fool's heart, a longing for that snippet of beauty from this morning, apparently at any cost. So of course the answer is yes. I want to risk it. I want to sing.

And I will find a place to do it whether I make this choir or not.

//
(If you're interested, here's the back story on my saga with singing and failing and splatting high notes.)

For the girl in the brewery

Photo by Ken Douglas

I wanted to say that I am happy for you, and proud of you.

You must be fourteen or fifteen. There in the bar, surrounded by college kids and young adults and your parents, you were so clearly you. The weather had just turned warm, and your wore your spring cotton dress over leggings. You didn't look out of place in a bar. You walked back and forth across the room like the ground was familiar under your sandals. You didn't overdo it either. There was no attention-seeking, just a face full of laughter. You twirled and danced and leapt as the music changed. You moved with friends, or with the music, or on your own.

You just looked yourself; you just looked free.

*

I was a tiny bit jealous.

I wish I would have been a little more like you when I was your age.

Don't get me wrong, I am mostly happy with who I was. I had a purpose--study hard and love people. I had good friends who are still my friends. I was bathed in love.

I'm glad my clothes weren't stylish by the standards of any clique. I'm glad some of them were hand-me-downs, because it gave me a heart trained on simplicity. I'm glad I was a little lonely, because it gave me eyes to look for the lonely ones. I'm glad I was always thinking, analyzing, considering, because it gave me patience and thoughtfulness and depth. I am even glad that it took me longer than most to grow into the rhythmic motions of my body (though that was not without cost) because I made friends while standing on various walls, because my mind and spirit were grounded in an firm identity by the time I learned to dance.

But looking at you, I see that I missed something, too. Something of joy, something of spontaneity and freedom.

In a world where so many girls your age are not comfortable in their own skin, you made me wistful, and glad.

So keep laughing freely, friend. Keep twirling.

Social media and me

Photo by Jason Howie

These last few months, I have learned more than I ever wanted to about the blogosphere and how it works and how writers and can market themselves effectively. I have gotten tied up at times in trying to make some inroads in a blogger community, trying harder than I should to publicize my posts all over different blogs and linkups and social media, itching to get noticed on Twitter, where I am notoriously incompetent. I never seem to be able to tweet something clever enough. I can’t respond quickly enough to engage others' twitter conversations. I feel helpless as I write more and more and watch the page views plummet lower. Maybe I peaked in my first month blogging.

There is a kind of freedom when I realize it: you don't fit in, you have never fit in. 

Somewhere along the way I forgot the fact that part of my identity has always been in landing among the outsiders, the never-quite-home, the misfits. It has been a lonely strand of my whole life. It has also given me empathy and understanding—it has also enabled me to reflect on my identity and my place and to find my people and love them dearly.

I’m not sure why I expected to fit in among all these hip, talented, quick-quipping writers on the internet. I was never good at the captivating of crowds or the quick responses to conversation in the high school morning locker routine. As a counselor at Christian summer camp—and these were, I thought, my people—I couldn't keep up with the dining hall banter and the enthusiasm.

But it was okay, I was there for my kids, the ten kids in my cabin that week, and I loved them dearly, just as I have always loved all the other wonderful souls who stuck around long enough to give me a chance. I have always been lucky enough to find and connect with my people, and I am writing now much more for myself and my people than for the chance of making it as a writer.

I am sure the other people on the internet are lovely people. I am sure many of the people who appear to me to be getting lots of publicity and popularity, to be great at marketing themselves and networking on social media—I am sure many of them feel the same way I do. And I do value the few connections I’ve made here and there that have turned into real conversation, and mutual admiration.

Freedom comes in accepting that I’m not here for recognition. I’m not here to get a lot of re-tweets from other writers who want to be re-tweeted, too. I don’t want to write for them, I want to keep writing for me, writing for you, who click on my entries every now and again and maybe even on occasion see something you can relate to.

Here we are, you and me, and I hope we are both learning to love the place where we are right now, not the place it seems like we should be. I hope we are both learning that we can be ourselves. We don’t have to market ourselves to be loved.

Aiming at perfection

I am so proud today to share with you this lovely story written by my dear friend. She has chosen to remain anonymous, but I think you will agree with me that that the telling is brave, heartbreakingly beautiful, and ultimately redemptive. She is going to be an amazing doctor, a true healer.

Photo  by Amanda Munoz

Although encouraged in every way to succeed from infancy, I somehow initially escaped the illusion that one could “have it all.” When the neighborhood boys started teasing me about being fat, the choice was easy—I would give up on my body and would instead be really smart. I was already succeeding in school. What I liked most about math and science was that I was the best student at both subjects. While the “fat girl” taunting continued daily, it ended at the school bus stop. The school was sacred ground, and I was safe and confident when I was studying. 

I set my goals and I reached them.  I was first in my class, and I got the highest scholarship to college.  I continued to study math and science and decided to be a doctor.  At that point I think it was still the challenge that drew me to medicine. If I could perfect one domain of my life, I would work on my brain—partially because I despised my own body. 

Somewhere along the quest, I lost the security of the classroom as the challenges grew. I couldn’t rely on my confidence in my brain any longer and I turned my intense self-criticism on my appearance. That’s when I developed an eating disorder.

I was 20 years old when I started running. I began weighing myself daily. Initially, I thought I would be happy with a size 10, down from a size 14. With the same intensity I have always had for perfection, I passed that goal in 3 weeks, losing 20 pounds. And I was happier; I was healthier. 

With my small successes, I started needing to be perfect, not average. Once I set my eyes on perfection, I could no longer settle for less.  It was all-consuming. I embarked on a dieting routine that I still struggle with 8 years later. While I finished college and got into medical school, suddenly the dreams I was previously passionate about became less important—becoming a doctor, saving the world, being perfect.

Without noticing it, I dropped down to 114 pounds; my nadir BMI was less than 17. At that point I would still have described myself as “pudgy,” and I still wanted my bones to be more defined.  I could no longer sleep at night—I awoke after only a few hours of sleep due to my depression and because my joints hurt with no soft tissue to cushion them. I lost hunger cues and was nauseated; I would go more than a week without a bowel movement. I went 4 years without a menstrual period. I was unaware that both my mind and my body were in so much pain. 

I struggled through the worst of the eating disorder because I had friends and family who saw the whole person in me—a whole person who continued to exist although at times broken. My dream to learn medicine continued, and they encouraged me. I redirected my efforts to studying medicine and the intricacies of the human body. I labored over books of images of the ideal human body with rippling muscles; I studied the perfect principles of physiology. 

Then I met patients—and I immediately realized that no individual comes close to the perfected images.  We are each plagued by rashes, fractures, obesity, mental health disorders, and infections. I have learned about the body, heart, and brain in medical school. The whole person is greater than the sum of its pieces; there is an element to the human that will never be found in my textbooks. My journey ultimately has made me accept that no amount of perfection in body or mind will ever make me happy. I finally realized that no matter what the number on the scale read, I would still feel blemished—because I am blemished. We all are blemished. 

Becoming a doctor is an odd choice for someone who spent the first 22 years of my life despising my body. I have spent the last 21 years studying to prepare for my graduation this May. I still think medicine is my vocation. I come alive when a patient brings me into her life and allows me to see how she ails. It still shocks me that patients allow me—as a student—to perform a physical exam. It is an honor to try to alleviate their pain and to carry their burden.

I don’t think people can fit a mold or are entitled to “have it all.”  But I do not have to choose between my mind and my body. In order to be happy and to fulfill my role as a physician, I have found that I have to love and honor both my mind and my body.

This post is a part of my Women’s History Month project, “Honoring Women’s Stories.” You can read more about the project and see other women’s stories here.

Seeing her beautiful

On this day, I have been given an invitation. Today I open a box in my memory, dig through the clutter, and find her somewhere in the corner. I find the girl I once was, bring her out into the light. She is like a precious stone, and in the light I turn her and turn her, noting the shimmer and sparkle on each side, the light reflected in different hues, complex and deep and lovely.

I am not accustomed to seeing her this way. I rather think of her as scuffed up, gaudy, trying too hard, awkward, showy. But this month I honor myself too, and I try to see her beautiful.

Photo by TVZ Design

*

At age five, she came home from school and pronounced, “There is a writing contest and I am going to win.” She shoveled in her spaghetti at the dinner table and assured her parents, “I am the best on my soccer team.” She sang solos at church and at school without a waver in her voice.

She became student council president in sixth grade. By this time she was beginning to notice other girls getting big-chested, getting boyfriends, shaving their legs. Hers legs were still hairy and her clothes were still hand-me-downs. Her social confidence was beginning to fade. But she didn’t let it stop her. She ran for president, and she won.

That Christmas, she received from her grandmother a small wooden gavel, which was inscribed, “President Katie.” It was reason enough to declare, for the rest of that year, that she was going to be the first woman president of the United States.

I cannot deny that she has a bit of ego, a love for power. But today I look beyond it and see more in her. I see the confidence and joy and courage that comes from being loved, and being unafraid. I see independence and creativity and unselfconsciousness about sharing her gifts.

*

She lay on the floor next to a stack of Sweet Valley Twins books, with her ear pressed to the small clock radio and the volume way down. It was past her bedtime, but she had to catch the “Hot 9 at 9” which she recorded in her book almost every night, to stay up with the latest music.

Lately, though, she liked country music, the sad twangy love songs about loneliness. They were great for belting in the shower. To cover this embarrassing musical interest, she made up white lies about the CDs she was receiving for Christmas, insisting there was some Backstreet Boys and Will Smith among them.

On her school notebooks she had scribbled, “I <3 Lance Bass” in unnaturally floofy letters. When she wrote notes to stick into the vents in her friends’ lockers, she wrote her “e’s” like backwards threes because she’d noticed other girls doing it that way.

I usually see that girl and wince at how hard she tried, for how very long, to fit into a crowd. Today I notice also her longing to be relevant, her ability to observe and adapt to a culture, the real connections that she forged. I notice that some of the floofy-lettered notes were about God, some were attempts to reconcile friends, and some were written to the unpopular, overweight girl in her homeroom.

*

It was lunchtime at the high school, and she was sitting at the table, slowly picking each item out of her lunchbox, as the usual dialogue played out in her head.

- Fold your hands and pray, you can do it.

- No, it will only make them uncomfortable.

- Don’t be ashamed of your faith.

- They are going to think I’m so weird. They don’t understand.

She was in the school library at seven-thirty, showered and changed after morning swim practice. She sat with her friends at the table, studying. The Bible was in her backpack, and she willed herself to take it out—a bold witness, a display of unashamed faith. If only it was easier to be a Christian in this world. One day she drummed up her courage, and took it out of the backpack, and opened it, there on the table in full view. But of course she didn’t read it, only glanced around for ten minutes at all the other students in the library, sure they must be watching, waiting to pounce.

I know better now, that it’s not a war, that we are all really on the same side, trying to figure life out, trying to find grace in this world. The girl I was then thought this was a battle, and she wasn’t prepared to fight it. I am glad she wasn’t prepared, because maybe then she’d still be fighting, fighting when it is better to sing, and hold hands. Looking at her now, I see that despite her fears, she was singing and holding hands, and she must have done something right, because girls from that time are still some of her closest friends.

*

Today I turn her and turn her in the light. I see her and love her.

And I see also this: gratitude for the processes that formed her. For the love and opportunities that made her fearless and confident; for the family that encouraged her to notice the unpopular girl in homeroom and the hungry people in the world; for the loneliness that gave her compassion and cultivated her spirit. There are many girls who never get that love, who are never told they could be president, or who never believe it.

She is one lucky girl.

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This post was written with inspiration from the Story Sessions prompt for international women’s day. This was a fun one to write about. You can find more stories like this or write your own over at the link-up by clicking here.

Visit my “Honoring Women’s stories” project for more stories of different women.

Dream of a daughter

Photo by Robert Howington

The other night I had a dream. In the dream I gave birth to a beautiful daughter, and she was whisked away by family members and friends who wanted to hold her, and in all the rush I forgot to give her a name.

Next thing I knew, I was holding her in the lobby at church. It was time to go in to the service, but everyone was stopping to say hello to my daughter. I heard them call her Katie, and I thought vaguely that something was wrong, that I hadn’t meant to name her after myself, that I had meant to name her Carrie or perhaps Elise. But the name had stuck, and as I looked at her, she was the spitting image of me as a child—crazy curly ringlets, blue eyes, a bright face. It was as though before this moment I hadn’t really seen her or felt the impact of her presence. But now, looking at her, I loved her in a way I had never loved anyone before. I adored the beauty of her face, the music of her laughter, the warmth and lightness of her body in my arms.

I brought her in to the bright sanctuary, and by this time she had gotten heavier; she had grown into a toddler, perhaps two years old. She was good and smart and fun to talk to, and as the hymn began she danced along.  In the middle of the song she told me she was thirsty. So we left the service and walked back into the kitchen, and I searched through cupboards for a cup I could use to give her a drink. All I could find in the cupboards were construction paper cups, like a child’s art project, and some extremely nice ceramic pottery cups that were labeled for sale. I kept searching but some kitchen ladies were standing in the way, and I couldn’t find anything else.

As I waited for them to move from in front of the cupboards she chatted and giggled with the kitchen ladies, thinking I love her so much, I have never felt anything like this before. I will make sure she has everything she needs, and I will never let anything come between us. I wanted to rush home or wherever John was and tell him how much I loved our daughter.

I caved and pulled out a lovely ceramic mug, and gave her a drink, and as we were walking back to the service, I woke up.

*

Very rarely do I have a dream that leaves me with such intense joy. Perhaps once every couple of years, I wake up with this kind of contentment, love, an awe or longing for beauty that remains even in the waking world.

I opened my eyes, and Sunday morning light was streaming gently in, and I stared at the ceiling, going back over the beautiful moments of the dream.

My first thought was that I already love my future daughter, that much, that this dream was some kind of foretaste of the intensity of a mother’s love.

But I don’t know for sure if I will ever have a daughter. Certainly not anytime soon.

This baby girl was named Katie and looked exactly like me.

Perhaps it wasn’t a dream about my future motherhood.

Perhaps it was a tiny glimpse of what my mother felt, and still feels, for me. Why her face is radiant in the just-home-from-the-hospital pictures. Why she still reads every blog entry and memorizes every friend’s name and visits no matter where I live.

Or perhaps it is a glimpse of another Divine Parent’s unconditional love for me. Adoring, protecting, rejoicing, aching for me to be safe and good and whole.

Could a dream have somehow given me a way to see myself from the outside? Could I really be so beautiful and beloved? Could I? Could you?

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Linking up again with Kirsten Oliphant and others this week on the theme of “love.”