how is the heaviness today?

Hello my dear friend,

As prolific and verbose as I am, I have not yet mastered the art of communicating my needs and my emotions in real time, and I apologize for the many ways that I will act very differently -- and not very well-- as a friend in this season. Hopefully this little mental escapade I am on will be a gentle and quick journey, but I am not that hopeful, nor am I one to make empty promises, or promises that I know wil have a small likelihood of success. I ask that you give me patience as I withdraw and kindness in my impatience.

I am not a champion orator, so I fill time and space with this prose of empty verbal bubbles: long shadows cast by the objects that prevent the sun from touching every corner of my mind. Something recently triggered a crack, and with no shortness of breath, I will try to convey what this darkness looks and feels like, illustrate where this thread traces back, and paint the contours of the rain cloud hovering above my brain in the next several pages, done both for your sake and, of course, my own. 

When I was sick last year, I sifted through the milieu of anger, hurt, and frustration through my writing, and I hope that by doing the same these next few weeks, I can take a blunt crayon and draw for us a picture of how my head spins. I am not asking for you to do anything - at least, not right now; but perhaps it is because I grew up in theater that I am asking for an audience. Afterall, what is theatre but a stained glass reflection of life, meant for us to understand ourselves and others in a new way?  Perhaps that is all this is. Perhaps this is the quite familiar, quite quintessentially human cry to be seen and heard. Perhaps I just want another excuse to write. Regardless, a pen in my hands is much better than a blade, and I would rather pay in histrionics than sacrificed meals and nail-sized half moon scars on my arms and hands.

Much much love,

Jess <3

How is the heaviness today?

I have this friend from college. She’s now a leading psychology researcher at UCLA who helps organize community justice in her freetime. Well, I suppose not all her free time. If it were all her free time, she would not know how to distinguish between bird calls, and every few weeks I wouldn’t get a little buzz buzz on my phone to let me know that Michelle has sent a picture of some yellow-tummied warbler or blue-beaked duck or heron or some bird of the sort. To me, all birds are just government spies -- with the exception of the ones Michelle sends to me. 

Before all this, though, we were in college together, and she was known for her “chameleon wave” (because there’s an old Vine of a chameleon trying to grab water from a running faucet, and that was exactly what Michelle looked like whenever she would greet us with a “hello, bebeeee”). And when she would talk to you, it would feel like she’s laying down kindle for a fire.

At some point in our conversations, she would ask questions like how is your soul doing? Her genuinity would quite simply ask for honesty, so very rarely did I deign her with anything short of the truth, and replying with a “it’s fine - how is yours?” would have been a disservice and disgrace to our friendship. When things got really bad - and stayed really bad - she would ask, how is the heaviness today? 

We were kids, not even twenty yet, trying to sort through the heaviness of death and grief. We didn’t have the vocabulary that we have now to explain the deep and visceral pain of losing a loved one to suicide, and our young minds could not understand the dichotomies of having lived so long that we hold memories from over 10 years ago, the sobering realization that this age is much too young, and that somehow, we are expected to live so much longer. There is life, and there is death.

It weighed on us like pennies in our pockets.

Michelle handled it much better than I did. She took her grief and her pain and turned it into a Fulbright scholarship. But I could not find good in it. It seemed like the heaviness brought me further and further down until I was at the bottom of the ocean.

How is the heaviness today? Which one? I had a mental map of the empty classrooms I could cry in while I pleaded with my friend to walk away from the top of a building and to please see the therapist I set her up with, and I carried scissors wherever I went so I could cut through all the plastic she might wrap her head in. When I went home that summer, it was my job to take the pill bottles from her hands, hide the knives, break the locks on her room, the bathroom.

Which one? Maybe this one is my stained blanket, when I would wake up next to a rarely and barely clothed body. I don’t remember. I did not want this. I wanted to say no. But I was so, so tired, and after all, he thought he was helping me. He’s generous, not even asking for anything in return. It’s my fault anyway, I didn’t say no. Don’t I know how sinful it is? I didn’t want this. But my brother said… I don’t remember, but this isn’t the first time. I don’t remember. I did not want this. I wanted to say no. I didn’t want this. But I was so tired. I don’t remember. I was so tired. I did not want this.

Which one? When, in my grief, I ran myself into a bone so broken my doctor was preparing me for surgery. If I don’t run, I can’t have dinner. If I don’t run, I can’t get the miles in. I just need to get the miles in, but every step hurts so much. I know this puts the whole future of my running career at risk, but I have to. I have to. I have to.

It’s been eight years since those dark rooms, and still Michelle and I ask each other how the heaviness is. There have been dark rooms since, too: sometimes the heaviness is generational trauma and loving our immigrant parents, or it’s academic advisors who take advantage of us, or stalking ex-partners, or wrestling with Christianity in a modern world, or tumors promised to my body and the newest edition of Disease of the Year. Other times it’s the Asian food we take back with us, cooked by our aunties or from our favorite childhood restaurant, and exclamations of “your niece is that big already?” when we share pictures and videos of the babies-turned-toddlers that are somehow almost in the first grade. Always it is the wonderful and terrible responsibility of existence.

My first rule at game nights: stir up as much chaos as possible. For Happy Hour this week, my team went out for drinks and board games at the Rayback. We sat at this long table, where the only way to be heard over the music and all the chatter was to yell. This worked particularly well when it came to playing my favorite type of game: deception. Accusations went flying, voices were raised, fingers were pointed, and your seniority didn’t matter here because absolutely no one was safe.

My second rule: either keep your hands moving or sit on them, but do not, by any means, let your hands come together. I don’t know if I decided that this would be my tell or if it always has been, but I know that when I’m nervous I start to wring my hands.

Last year, I asked my friend to drive me to my first blood infusion appointment. To make a long story short, and a medical diagnosis easy to explain, I simply did not have enough blood. The appointment was by his house, and I had no idea how I would respond -- or if this would even work; so I asked if he could pick me up drop me off, sit with me in the waiting room, and then let me crash at his house for a bit while I recovered enough to be able to drive home.

I remember that day I wrung my hands so aggressively my wrists started to turn red, and my friend had to take my hand in his just to break them apart. I then turned his thumb knuckle red by rubbing it too hard. I couldn’t help it, but he didn’t let go.

It started back in college. My sophomore year, I started wearing long sleeves to class. I used to be a tank top kind of girl, but you only need to run out of class with long red streaks down your forearms so many times before you throw on some sleeves to keep you from breaking skin.

There was something about the pressure and the prickliness of my nails on my own skin that felt right. The red streaks, the crescent shaped indents on my hands and my legs. You could say I thought I deserved the pain, or that I was doing it for the attention (please, anyone, look at me, notice how much pain I’m in, help me, help me, help me). When I bring up giving my art scalpels to my roommate for safe keeping and buying already chopped fruits and vegetables to keep me away from knives to my therapist, she tells me that all this is my brain’s way of telling me that I’m in danger. She describes it like touching a hot stove: as soon as you touch it, your hand recoils so you don’t get burned. She says my brain is sort of looking for a hot stove to touch so that I can recoil. 

I don’t get it, and it doesn’t make sense, I know. None of it does. Of course I don’t want to hurt myself - it hurts! But against all my logic and reasoning, there’s a part of my brain (or maybe it’s just me) telling me to do it; and what’s worse is that every time I pinch myself just hard enough, a part of me is released, and I feel a bit better.

I try to wring my hands instead. There’s a particularly soft spot I like: the translucent skin connecting my thumb and my pointer finger, and the vein that runs down to the bone on the inside of my wrist. I would never dare to cut there; the danger is too high. So I take my thumb and stroke it until I find the next thing to do with my hands.

In elementary school, people would always ask if my brother and I were twins. I always loved this question. We didn’t share a womb, but with less than a year between us, we were attached at the hip…

Then in high school, when I would be up to my ears studying and I would rub my temples as if that would help make the material stick better in my brain, the sound of our piano would break through the fogginess. As one note twinkled to the next, I would feel myself gravitating towards familiar lyrics as my brother and I tore through sheet music - he on the piano, I on vocals.

When I would lean over his shoulder to turn the page, he would complain about the stink of my breath, but his fingers wouldn’t leave the piano. It was magic, watching his fingers, quick and nimble as they traversed the mountains and valleys of chords and rhythm. My voice would run along side, hitting most of the notes but certainly not all; (and my brother always had the decency to not point out whenever my voice cracked).

One more song, we would say, knowing full well one more song from this particular score would mean we would be playing through both acts. But homework could wait a little longer.

As far as soul mates go, I believed my brother was one of mine. I thought it would always be us, walking home from church, on those early morning runs before class, competing for the top score in the class; and no one, absolutely no one, was allowed to bully him. I was more than happy to get in my fair share of sticky situations if it meant they would stop bothering him.

When I look back a year ago, four, eight, part of me wonders how real any of it was. I think about those dark rooms, and in my memory they are like snow globes: I see a girl, huddled in the corner, wanting the world to slow down, and all I want to do is hold her and not tell her anything, and when the snow globe shakes I feel her collapse into me, like it’s the first time she’s ever cried like this -- like she’s seen and not supposed to be fixed. Her breath heaves with the heartbeat of her life right now, and it is fast and shallow - gasps that make me wonder if she’s drowning. She certainly feels like she is. 

None of it seems real, or, at least, it seems as real as a movie. I look much the same, just younger, I guess. Tan skin, black hair, brown eyes rimmed with something darker. I don’t smoke or drink, not much anyways. I’m wearing running shorts I’ve had since high school and some t-shirt I either thrifted or got from the rummage bin somewhere. I don’t remember if it smells like anything. I can see myself walking across campus one day, on the cobble stones that connect one side of classes to another, and the sky says it must either be sunrise or sunset, because the blues and pinks canvas behind all the thousands of stupid trees on campus. I don’t actually think they’re stupid. I have a midterm coming up. Maybe physics. I think it was physics. I don’t quite remember where my feet took me, but suddenly it’s dark outside, and I have my phone pressed up to my ear again. It’s the same pleading, the same thought to just keep her talking, if she’s talking she’s still alive. The call must end at some point, because I am back in my bed, next to a boy I do not care about, whom I do not want in my bed, who invited himself in because he didn’t believe me when I said I didn’t want this. It will make you feel better. He said at some point. I didn’t know how to respond, I was so tired. We deserve this after such a hard day. I didn’t want this.

I close my eyes, and when I wake up, I do not remember any of it.

There’s a certain type of grief that sits in your stomach and tells you that you do not need food, you need love. You let the raw gnawing become a dull ache eventually so that you barely notice it, and when your body feels heavy and your head cloudy, you can blame it on the catabolism of your body and not the vicious teeth of Grief insisting on your attention. I thought it was just Sadness at first. Or Exhaustion. I’ve called her Anger sometimes, too, although that name never felt right. But it’s always been her. Been Grief.

Lately I’ve been staying in the shower for as long as it takes for my hands to turn like prunes. Once they look like prunes, I turn off the shower and start running a bath. For $6.99 you can buy 5 pounds of lavender scented Epsom salt from Target, and it says on the instructions that you should put 2 cups in for every bath that you draw, but I normally just put in one.

Lately I’ve been putting my laptop by my bed before I go to sleep so that when I wake up in the morning, all I have to do is turn over and wiggle my mouse pad to let my boss know that I am at work. I don’t leave my bed till almost half past one.

Lately, if I do make it out of bed, I make sure to keep myself busy: coaching cross country, then straight to bible study on Mondays, my own track practice and rock climbing on Tuesdays, choir rehearsal on Wednesdays -- something every day of the week, because 1) it’s the only way to keep myself distracted, and 2) if I go to bed exhausted I might (a) be too tired to have another panic attack this week and (b) stand a chance at sleeping through the night. Cut to my alart nine hours laters, and the only way I can clear the muddle of my brain in the mornings is to move, move, move. I’ll feel better if I run. I know it.

Lately too I’ve been neglecting my cleaning schedule. Usually I like to do a deep clean of the house on Wednesday evenings, where I mop the floor, wipe down the counters and make sure everything is disinfected, and then on Sundays I take to the bathrooms and scrub down every last inch, with an old toothbrush to get the corners. But lately I haven’t been doing that, and instead my hands feel like they can’t get clean so I run them under the sink sometimes for five minutes at a time, or I’ll go to bed thinking that my hands are dirty, even if I haven’t touched anything since I last showered. Then when it gets really bad, I’ll go back-and-forth between the bathroom and my desk up to 12 times an hour trying to wash my hands. 

Lately I’ve been brushing my teeth more. It helps me feel like I’m awake, and if I do it enough, my mouth might finally feel clean and I’ll get that awful taste out of it. Twice in the morning, a couple times in the afternoon, three times at night. It feels silly to be brushing my teeth so much at work, but if I don’t, I don’t know, something bad will happen, or I won’t be able to concentrate because my mouth will feel so dirty; so I walk down and brush on the fourth floor instead. 

Lately I’ve been worrying that I’m standing too close to the person in front of me on the escalator, but if I move now then I’ll be too close to the person behind me; but one step doesn’t seem like enough and two feels excessive, oh thank god we’re off now.

Lately I’ve been less convinced that my friend was right when he said that you can breathe through anything. I think he meant it for moments like diving into a cold plunge or making it a tough workout; but lately I find myself holding my breath and clenching my jaw, only to take a few deep breaths and tell myself, “you can do it, Jess. You can do anything.” I don’t think the breathing is working, because when I look away from the mirror, I am back underwater, looking up through a garbled lens.

Lately I have been trying to build myself a home, and in my house there is room to dance, and the kitchen sink is always clear of dishes. 

Lately I’ve been tending to my garden, and oh, the seeds have been in the ground all winter, just you wait until the spring. I’ve planted my beans next to my squash, next to my corn, and my three little sisters will grow and nurture each other for years to come.