Laura Crossett's Blog, page 5

2017

2017 was the year that people started telling you to call your senators. If you had already called them, you should call them again, and again. It was unclear how many times you needed to call them, or whether any number of times would be sufficient. It was possible that you could devote your life to calling them and it would not be enough. And indeed, how could it ever be, when the news kept coming, fast and terrible?

It was the year I began to be afraid to look at news alerts on my phone and yet could not look away from them. It was the year that the question on my psychiatrist’s diagnostic survey about how often you felt something awful might happen no longer seemed as though it belonged on a psychiatric questionnaire. Awful things were happening every day—US citizens were denied entry into their own country; refugees were turned back at the gate, white men gunned down scores of people gathered in public places and marched with burning torches; women seeking legal medical procedures were told by the government that had legalized those procedures that they were no longer available. Who in their right might did not believe that something awful was about to happen?

It was the year when information began to disappear, when data scientists began to save things we had always believed our government would keep secure, when librarians began to wonder if government information was something we could still tell people to rely on.

It was the year I lost my keys and my driver’s license, when cash was stolen twice from my wallet and medication from my home, the year I lost six days of my life to a psychiatric ward and another to an accidental overdose on antipsychotics, the year I went to get an abortion and learned I’d already lost the pregnancy.

It was the year that my mother moved into my house with all her earthly possessions and the year my son started kindergarten and an SSRI.

It was the year my son ripped up books and broke windows, the year I wore long sleeves all summer to hide the bite marks on my arm. It was the year men were everywhere found to have harassed and groped and raped women and when others began to pontificate on the nature of toxic masculinity or argue that the crimes of some men should be overlooked in order to preserve the good work they had done, and I began to wonder if it would be possible to raise a white son not to do these things. It was the year that people yelled a lot and the year that I began to lose my faith in the ability of words to convince people of things.

The other day I found one thing that survived the year: a book called Ant and Bee and the ABC, an English book for “tiny tots” that once belonged to my mother. In it Ant and Bee lose their hats and go looking for them in a place called Lost Things Found in Boxes. There is a box for each letter of the alphabet, and they look in each in turn, looking for their lost hats, but there lost hats are not there. Not in Box J with the jack-in-the-boxes or box E with the elephants; not in box Q with the queens or box L with the lions. Spoiler alert: their hats are in the last box, the box that comes after all of the alphabet, a box called Box Funny Things. In the end, they get their hats back and give them to each other, because Ant’s hat fits Bee better and Bee’s hat fits Ant’s better, and they go on to have many other alphabetical adventures in further books.

My house is still full of unpacked boxes. Perhaps when I unpack them I shall regain some of the things I have lost: for of course the last thing that came out of Pandora’s box was hope.

On Garrison Keillor

There are a lot of Garrison Keillor haters on my Facebook feed. I knew that was true even before he was cut loose by Minnesota Public Radio due to allegations of sexual harassment, but needless to say the past few days have been a Keillor-haters festival. I keep almost posting “I hope all you Keillor haters are happy now,” but I try not to get into arguments on the internet.

Let me be clear: I write this not to excuse his actions nor to doubt them. It is not particularly surprising that a man has made unwanted advances on a woman, particularly a man who has been married and divorced as many times as Keillor has, particularly a man with the kind of status he has achieved. If the past few months have taught us anything, it is that such behavior is the rule, not the exception. That powerful and popular men are now being taken to task for it is amazing and gives me some faint hope that perhaps the men who are not so powerful or so popular but whose actions are every bit as egregious as those of Harvey Weinstein, Louis CK, or Matt Lauer may also see justice, although I have my doubts.

I write here not to defend Keillor’s actions — or really to say much about them at all, except that I strongly suspect MPR has more information than has been made public.

I write instead to defend the work. If you hate Garrison Keillor, you should stop right here, for I doubt anything I say will convince you otherwise. But in dismissing his work you are also dismissing mine, for so much of what I know about writing, about storytelling, about loyalty, about humor, and about love comes from his work.

I heard Garrison Keillor on the radio before I knew what a radio was. When I was very young we lived in a town without a supermarket, so once a week my mother and I drove twenty miles to get groceries and do other errands of the sort one could do in the city. These trips were largely dull for me, for what two or three or four year old enjoys going to the dry cleaner, the grocery store, and the state run liquor store? (The last of these was particularly dull, with its harsh light and its rows upon rows of bottles.) But as we drove back to Mount Vernon, my mother would listen to a man telling stories on the radio. Gradually I began to recognize his voice and to know a bit about the place he talked about and the people who lived there. The first monologue I remember talked about a dentist who had let his teeth go bad to make his patients feel better.

Later we moved to that town with the grocery store (the store I still shop at, in fact), but we still listened to the man on the radio. In grade school my best friend and I acquired — perhaps by stealing them from my mother or grandmother — the first set of tapes of Lake Wobegon monologues, and we listened to them over and over and over, particularly Spring, as “Me and Choir” was our hands-down favorite. Ninety percent of what I know about comic timing comes from that single monologue (for the remaining ten percent, I’ll give credit to “Alice’s Restaurant”).

To this day she and I can quote entire scenes from those stories and cap each other’s quotations. They are a shared language as sacred as any sacred text. In junior high we attended the 4th Annual Farewell Performance in Iowa City. In high school my mother took us to see the short-lived interlude, American Radio Company of the Air, before Keillor came to his senses and brought A Prairie Home Companion back.

In college I met a woman who could quote from A Lutheran’s Guide to the Orchestra while waiting around for orchestra tryouts. She organized a group of us to go down to New York City to see one of the December performances at Town Hall each year. When I got back to the Midwest for break, I’d go visit my old friend in Minneapolis and we’d see the show at its home at the Fitzgerald Theatre in downtown Saint Paul.

There were many years when the show was not as good as it once was, years when l listened largely for the music and years when I cringed at some of the skits (“Ruth Harrison, Reference Librarian,” I’m looking at you). But even then there’d every now and then be a glimmer of some of the magic of “Storm Home” or “Gospel Birds,” some of the sad majesty of “The Royal Family,” some of the family dynamics that make “The Tollefson Boy Goes to College” so perfect and so poignant.

Keillor is at his best in front of a live audience. His books fall flat, even when he reads them out loud — he needs that interaction of talking to people from an empty stage, looking out at them past the bright lights in the dark. Sitting in those audiences is a privilege I’ll never forget; listening (and listening again and again) to the recordings is something that never fails to bring me back to the seasons of my childhood, the way that leaves collaged themselves around you in the fall, the way that snowflakes caught on your mittens in the winter, the way the world seemed open and full of possibility in spring.

Early this week I posted Claire Dederer’s stunning essay “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” Her questions are my questions, and her answers are mine. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

But I do know that if it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will: you will love a man’s work and learn that its creator has done a terrible thing. And then you will have to figure out what to do.

“I don’t defend my conduct. I explain it,” said Oscar Wilde. I cannot defend Keillor. But perhaps I have explained a little about what his work has meant to me.

On the News #52essays2017 no. 20

These days my phone sends me only two kinds of news alerts — reports of mass shootings and reports of new allegations of sexual harassment or assault. (We know a good deal about the effects of media conglomeration on the quality and quantity of news reporting. It would be interesting to study the effects of smart phone news alerts on people’s awareness of current events, but that’s another topic for another hour.) I find these both distressing, of course, but primarily they make me very, very tired.

That The Onion has been able to recycle the same story about mass shootings for years now is a marker of the kind of outrage most of my friends feel about this country’s inability to address the problem of gun violence. I know many fine people who are hard at work on this problem, and I wish them luck but have little faith in the possibility of any change. Any form of restriction on gun ownership or gun type will never fly on the right; stop and frisk (which my former prosecutor friend assures me is an extremely effective tactic for preventing gun violence) will never fly on the left. I am unaware of a third path, unless there is a fundamental shift in human nature. I have not encountered anything new on the subject (see again that recycled Onion story) and think it unlikely that I will, and I am very tired of reading the same things over and over again.

A friend in college once said that I was unshockable, and this may be true, as so far the repeated news alerts about yet another man groping a woman or a girl (or raping her, or masturbating in front of her, or making any sort of unwanted sexual advances) have left me perhaps a little more deflated each time, but not shocked. I am instead very tired — tired of having to read the details of an incident which, if it has not happened to me, has undoubtedly happened to someone I know — and even more tired of reading men’s responses to it.

I do not particularly wish to congratulate or thank men for their apologies, or for their writing about realizing the error of their ways, or for admitting their wrongdoing and pledging to do better, or their musings on what it means to be a man, or their exhortations to other men, or their admissions of the times they participated in locker room talk, or whatever else it is they are posting about in these times (for truthfully, I have stopped reading). No apology is likely to be sufficient to either the woman who was harassed or assaulted, or to those of us who have been similarly harassed or assaulted. I did not think I would ever find myself quoting my driver’s ed teacher, but I am tempted to yell “Don’t be sorry; just don’t do it!” each time I run across another apology.

I don’t mean that the apologies are insincere or that they should not be made — I merely mean that they should not be made with the expectation of absolution or congratulations or even acknowledgment. I am tired and I do not wish to spend my limited energy thanking men for their honesty or congratulating them for their self-awareness or otherwise performing what they now call emotional labor on their behalf.

I think a lot about how I am raising a white son and whether it is possible to do so and create a decent human being in this society.

I think a lot about how the worst sexual assault is never likely to show up as a news alert on my phone, because it happens within families and cannot be spoken of for fear of reprisal or of upsetting the delicate net that holds us together.

I think a lot about how we have heard — or are listening to and reporting on — primarily to the accounts of white women, and whether I would see as many news alerts and social media posts and apologies if the reports were made by women of color, who surely experience such things at an equal if not greater rate.

I think a great deal about the abuse perpetrated upon bisexual and transgender youth and how improbable it is that their stories will ever become mainstream news alerts or popular hashtags.

I think about these things, but I have not had much to say, because, as I have said, I am very tired, and that is why I have not commented on your musings or liked your posts or engaged in your discussions. It is not that I am giving up: I will continue to fight against poverty, hunger, injustice, and oppression, against “hypocrisy, porcous pomposity, greed, lust, vulgarity, cruelty, trickery, sham, and all possible nitwittery.” But I will do so largely outside the echo chamber of news alerts and hashtags and social media posts.

I hope that anyone reading this can find a way to do the same.

An Introduction to Roxane Gay

Each year my library hosts the presentation of the Paul Engle Prize and I write an introduction to the prizewinner. This year’s event is this Thursday, October 12 and we’ll be honoring Alexander Chee. In the meantime, here’s last year’s introduction.

Roxane Gay is a woman who survived girlhood. That’s true of many of us—more than half of us were girls; many girls are survivors. But few of us go on to write about those two things—girlhood and survival—and the tensions between them, and fewer still do so with the grace, wit, and punch of Roxane Gay.

Gay embraces the very things many of us were taught to reject as too girly. Whether she’s writing about the influence of Sweet Valley High or explaining her love of pink, Gay tackles girlhood and its accoutrements head on—not to fight them or deny them but to acknowledge that they are a part of us, that popular culture, as much as anything, has made us who we are.

But Roxane Gay is more than a celebrant of sugar and spice: she is also someone who knows their dark side. She knows, as she puts it in the title of one essay, both the illusion of safety and the safety of illusion, and she is not afraid to break up those illusions and bring us face to face with the things we would rather not see: the lack of characters of color on television. The casual violence toward women we hear all around us. The actual violence perpetrated on women’s bodies and on black bodies.

Girlhood plus survival: from these things, and from her life as the daughter of Haitian immigrants, a professor, a Scrabble player, and more, Roxane Gay has made herself into a writer of breathtaking fiction and thought-provoking essays. Reading her work is like getting a tour of contemporary culture from your smartest friend, the one who seems to have been everywhere and seen everything and who has come back to put it all together for you.

Gay is the author of a collection of stories, Ayiti; a novel, An Untamed State; an essay collection called Bad Feminist; innumerable essays both online and in print; and a Twitter feed that will have you laughing, cheering, and up in arms. Her memoir Hunger is forthcoming this year, and she will be writing Marvel’s World of Wakanda comic along with poet Yona Harvey. She teaches at Purdue University, where she is an associate professor of English.

“Don’t bother coming back to my world,” the narrator of An Untamed State says to her future husband in an argument. It’s a challenge and a dare, one he ends up accepting, and one you should, too. Once you have stepped into Roxane Gay’s world, you will see things you have never seen, and you will be wiser and better for it.

Each year the Paul Engle Award Committee works with artists at M.C. Ginsberg, who design the one-of-a-kind prize. This year, designers Brigitta Stoner and Ji Young Yoon found inspiration in Roxane Gay’s writing. In an artist’s statement about the piece, they write that their efforts “were combined to create a representation of the thoughts in a woman’s mind. We ask ourselves many questions every day, and often there are conflicts between society and the many internal thoughts and feelings females experience daily.” The piece, as with all past Engle Prizes, includes a small charm in the shape of Iowa, with a diamond representing Iowa City.

It is with great pleasure that we now present it to Roxane Gay—woman, survivor, writer, and winner of this year’s Paul Engle Prize.

On Wilderness #52essays2017 no. 19

When my great hero Edward Abbey lived with his family in Hoboken, NJ, he wrote that “we had all the wilderness we needed.” I think he was lying. Notably, he did not remain in Hoboken, NJ (nor with that wife and family — I think she was wife number two, but with five of them I get confused — he’s not my hero in all aspects of his life) but rather went back out west and settled in Utah and Arizona, disappearing often into the desert and coming back to town to write and teach.

I live in Iowa and I have nowhere near the wilderness I need. I can’t track down the source, but I once read that Iowa has less uncultivated land than any other state in the country, and I believe it’s true: everything here that isn’t a city got turned into farmland, most of it now firmly in the hands of Big Agriculture and Monsanto. Much of the country here is very pretty, but it’s not wild.

I have days (and this is clearly one of them) where I think leaving the West was the worst decision I ever made. When I first heard of Meeteetse, Wyoming, I was sitting in a library in Franklin Park, Illinois scrolling through librarian job ads. I looked up Meeteetse on Google maps and saw it there, a tiny speck of a town just miles from the edge of the Shoshone National Forest, and I was sold. It didn’t matter that I was only halfway through library school: I was going to apply for that job. I was going to escape the smog and the traffic. I was going to ride to the ridge where the West commences and gaze and the moon until I lost my senses, and that’s what I did.

I used to lie on my back at night and gaze up at the stars — on a clear night — and most of the nights are clear in the high desert — you could see the Milky Way from my yard. On weekends I’d pack up and head out for the National Forest. Drive thirty minutes, hike a few miles, and then you were in the Washakie Wilderness, 704,274 acres touching three counties where no motorized vehicles were allowed and you could hike for hours or days without seeing another human being. I’d see moose back in there, and bear tracks, and sometimes I’d feel bad for even the impressions my hiking boots made in the land, feeling I should leave it untrammeled for the creatures whose home it was.

That’s the strange thing about wilderness: people don’t really belong there. Humankind’s dominion over nature is so complete that it’s antithetical to our sense of ourselves to say there are places where we should not go, or visit only briefly, places that belong to bears and birds and wolves and lodgepole pines. And of course a lot of people don’t think that, often especially people who live near those places, who resent that people in New York and California have more say over what happens to the land they live by than they do.

People say the West begins at the 100th meridian, or where the rainfall drops to less than ten inches a year. I say it begins where there’s more federal land than there is private property. And it’s there that I face the great paradox of the wilderness: it was saved by people who’d never set foot in it and probably won’t. The people who voted for the Wilderness Act and the Endangered Species Act mostly don’t come from places where there is wilderness or endangered species — there aren’t enough people in most of those places to provide for more than one or two House votes per state, and many of those votes, like many of the people they represent, resent federal wilderness protections. Somehow people convinced those men (and they were mostly men) to save land they’d likely never seen. I am forever grateful to them.

I started this essay by quoting Ed Abbey. I read Abbey long before I ever had a child or before the full brunt of what it means to be female, and especially a mother, came to bear down on me. I have a harder time with Abbey and many of my other heroes (Charles Bowden comes to mind, as does Jack Kerouac) now because their adventures were largely possible because they skipped out on the duties of parenthood, and they are celebrated for it in a way no woman ever would be.

A year or so ago I was trying to do an interview with the author of a wonderful book about Ed Abbey, but I abandoned it because I couldn’t make it stick together. I couldn’t get over my own resentment of someone who was still free to “crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbrush and cactus” until “traces of blood “ began to mark his trail. I don’t get to do that anymore, and it will be many years before I can again. All that is fodder for a very different essay, but I wanted to acknowledge it here as part of the thing I want and can’t have, due not only to geography but also to fate. In the meantime, I keep my topo maps on the top shelf, waiting for the day when it will be time to get them down again.

On Springsteen #52essays2017 no. 18

During the worst of my anxiety this spring, I had a panic attack at every red light. There are seven stoplights between my house and my work, and one of them I go through twice due to daycare dropoff, so there were sixteen times a day when I might start to hyperventilate in my car and wonder if I was going to hit the gas and ram into the car in front of me. The only way I could get through was to count the seconds of each stoplight. I learned that the longest one was a minute; most were only 30 or 45 seconds. Knowing how long I had to stay there made it bearable.

After I got out of the hospital I no longer had that panic at stoplights, but I still had panic in the car, and the only thing that got me through was listening to “Thunder Road” on repeat. As a friend of mine said, there are worse coping mechanisms. In a future essay I’ll talk about why that in particular is such a brilliant song, but for now I want to talk about Springsteen more generally, because his music has helped me out so much in the past few months.

I moved from “Thunder Road” on repeat to Born to Run in its entirety, and then to Darkness on the Edge of Town, and, of late, Tunnel of Love.

I didn’t like Bruce Springsteen when I was a kid, because all I knew about him was that Ronald Reagan used “Born in the USA,” and, like Reagan, I hadn’t actually listened to the lyrics of that song. So I was a Springsteen late bloomer, coming to him only in graduate school, acquiring albums as they showed up at the public library or as I found them as cassettes at Goodwill.

In the summer of 2002, my friend Meg, dead now these five years, spent a month on the psych ward, where I’d visit her every day and bring her coffee (in those years the psych ward wouldn’t serve you caffeinated coffee from the cafeteria, though they’d let you buy Coke and Mountain Dew at 8 pm, but people could bring it in for you). One day she got a pass and we went out to a movie — Minority Report, I think. I had a tape in my car that was Darkness on the Edge of Town on one side and Born in the USA on the other. “This is the all Springsteen all the time car,” I said to her, and she approved, though the Boss himself once gave her a Heineken backstage when she was fourteen, which isn’t the sort of thing a recovering addict normally approves of.

I used to play “Tougher Than the Rest” for my grandmother and tell her it was the most romantic song I’d ever heard. “Well,” she said, “it certainly says I have flaws and you might too.” I think she was still a fan of the songs of her youth, which were a little realistic, to my mind, but we all prefer the music of our youth.

At my tenth high school reunion someone handed my friend Tim a stack of quarters and told him to pick music from the jukebox. “Come with me,” he said, and we started flipping through the albums. I was going to vote for “No Surrender” when we got to Born in the USA (“We learned more from a three minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school”), but he said “I suppose we have to play “Glory Days.” We agreed we had to, even though it was so corny. Thirteen years later I find it less corny, perhaps because I am now a single mother like the one in the song, and my social life consists of a beer now and then after my kid is in bed.

I used to think there was something wrong with loving things that so many other people loved, but I’ve gotten past that as I’ve gotten older, and thus I feel free to love Springsteen with abandon. I’ve listened to “Promised Land” while driving through the Utah desert and argued about the lyrics to “Racing in the Streets” with someone from Pennsylvania/New Jersey. I’ve come to understand that Reagan was as wrong about Springsteen as he was about everything else. I’ve used the phrase brilliant disguise in an essay and made someone think it was mine (I ‘fessed up). I’ve listened to the more recent albums and loved them, too, which is a rarity — most artists don’t have that much staying power.

I measure my love for my son against Janey’s love for hers. I measure the men I meet against the narrator of “Tougher Than the Rest.” I measure patriotism against “Born in the USA” and defiance against “No Surrender.” Whenever I drive fast I hope that the two lanes can take me anywhere, and I’m ready to take that long walk, even if the ride ain’t free.

Swimming #52essays2017 no. 17

When I was a child the locker rooms at the outdoor pool in my town were open to the air so that, we imagined, the occasional balloonist or low flying plane looking down could see us all changing in and out of our swimsuits. I was five or seven or nine and didn’t care or know to care, and neither did the old hippie ladies who walked around stark naked with sagging breasts and mounds of pubic hair. This was the early 80s, so they weren’t very old hippie ladies; they just seemed old to me, and certainly they were older than the teenagers who shrieked and wore bikinis and never seemed to get in the water.

I did not learn to swim until I was seven, at a camp in Maine far away from Iowa, in a cold clear sand bottomed lake, so my early experiences of the pool were just of splashing around in the shallow end. You’d go and put your clothes in a wire basket with a number on it, and they’d give you a pin with the same number that you’d pin to your swimsuit and use to retrieve your belongings when you were done swimming. The walls of the locker rooms were painted cement blocks, and the shower area was just a big communal square.

Later in my childhood the place was remodeled, and they put on a roof, and actual lockers, and some private stalls, but I’m grateful for that early experience of the open air and of seeing everyone’s bodies and knowing from an early age that swimming was not just a pleasure for the fit and thin.

These days I swim laps at the rec center in the city where I work, across the street from the junior high I would have gone to had I lived here in junior high, where one of my high school classmates now teaches. I swam many laps there while I was pregnant, as the water was the only place I felt good. Around seven or eight months the nurse midwives told me to go do handstands in the pool to flip my baby, who was breech. I’ve never known if handstands in the pool actually does anything to flip a baby or if it’s just something you tell pregnant women to do so they can feel they are doing something. At any rate, I’d waddle in my maternity suit under the panicked eye of the teenage lifeguard, who clearly thought I might be about to give birth at any moment. I’d get in the water and feel better again, immediately lithe and strong and all the things I didn’t feel on land. I’d swim down to the shallow end, do a few handstands, swim back, and repeat the whole exercise.

Junior high students all have to complete a swimming PE unit, and they walk across the street and huddle in the locker room, equally self-conscious about their own young bodies and somewhat frightened at the bodies of the rest of us in the locker room, where most of the other women are even older than I am. I used to be self-conscious around them, too, till I thought about the old hippie ladies of my youth and decided I was going to be one of them, too.

I am not a fast or particularly good swimmer. I do a lap of crawl and then a lap of breast stroke and then back to crawl, and most of the time when I swim crawl I don’t bother to kick. I’m not sure, therefore, how much exercise I actually get from swimming, but I think of it less as exercise and more as a meditation. It forces me to regulate my breathing, in and out in time with my arms and legs, and it forces me over the same ground again and again. I don’t wear my glasses when I swim, so all I can make out is the giant black line marking the lane of the pool, and even that is fuzzy and far away. The sounds around me fade away and I’m just a machine that swims back and forth and breathes. I don’t worry that the swimmers around me are faster (they usually are) or that the life guards are fitter (they always are). I just swim.

The pool where I swim now is also used for high school swim meets, and there’s a giant board with the record holders for each stroke and length, or however they divide up the races at swim meets. Until just a summer ago, two of those spots were held by a guy I went to grade school with and am friends with on Facebook now, and it always pleased me to see that his record still stood twenty years later. Last summer, though, his name came down, replaced by a new one. I was there the day a guy was painting over the sign. When I got out of the water I went over to him and said, “Hey, I knew the guy who’s name your painting over.” “Huh,” he said, not caring, because this was just his summer job, and he didn’t want to talk to middle aged women who’d just gotten out of swimming pools.

Now I know none of the names on the board, but I go back again and again, making my own sort of record, knowing that I am proud of my body as it swims, and no one can take that away from me.

Malcolm #52essays2017 no. 16

I often feel awkward, if not outright apologetic, as a white woman who gave her very white son the middle name of Malcolm after Malcolm X.

I am a pacifist at heart, but I am a follower of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. I am a big fan of the Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Program (and for God’s sake, if you’re not familiar with it, stop reading this and go read it now), and I often fantasize about what a Malcolm X-Black Panther alliance could have done, had Malcolm not been assassinated.

My reasons for choosing Malcolm as a middle name go back a long way. They go back to my mother telling me when I was twelve that Malcolm went to Mecca and saw all races getting along and wanted to make that happen everywhere. They go back to hearing Alex Haley speak when I was in high school. They go back to first hearing the Phil Ochs song “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” which starts “I cried when they shot Medgar Evers / Tears rolled down my spine / And I cried when they shot Mr. Kennedy / As though I’d lost a father of mine / But Malcolm X got what was coming / He got what he asked for this time / So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal.” They go back to wishing Malcolm were alive every time an unarmed black man is shot by the police. But most of all they go back to this line from a speech of Malcolm’s I read in graduate school:

We didn’t want anybody telling us about Africa, much less calling us Africans. In hating Africa and in hating the Africans, we ended up hating ourselves, without even realizing it. Because you can’t hate the roots of a tree, and note hate the tree. You can’t hate your origin and not hate yourself. You can’t hate Africa and not hate yourself.

I underlined that passage long before I knew I’d have a son. I underline that passage back when I did hate a lot of where I came from. I still hate some of it, still hate that I had ancestors who were slave owners (even if one of them set his slave free). I still hate that I had ancestors who profited from the labor of enslaved people, even if only directly — because really, if you bought cotton in the United States during the era of slavery, you profited from slave labor. (And really, if you bought it afterward, during the era of sharecropping, you shouldn’t feel that much better about yourself).

Malcolm X gave this speech in Detroit just after his home was bombed. I cannot imagine what that is like — to have your home with your wife and four young children bombed — but I know it is a daily reality for many people.

I can’t pretend to understand the lived experience of African Americans. And I can’t claim not to feel slightly uncomfortable claiming one of their martyrs as one of my heroes.

But he is one of my heroes, and those lines from that speech that I underlined so long ago came back to me when I was pregnant. I didn’t plan to become pregnant, and my son was born out of wedlock in a relationship that many didn’t think well of. But that line came back to me — “You can’t hate your origin and not hate yourself.” I didn’t want my son to hate himself, and so I didn’t want him to hate his origin, and so I gave him the middle name of Malcolm, the man who taught me that.

We all of us have small, personal stories that run alongside the larger historical ones. Sometimes they intersect, and sometimes they cross pollinate. Sometimes you start out admiring someone for the work he did and end up loving him for one small line. Sometimes you want to support a movement and end up selfishly supporting only yourself.

I get very odd looks from white people when I tell them that I gave my son the middle name Malcolm after Malcolm X. I don’t know what kinds of looks I get from people of color because I live in Iowa, a state where 2% of the population is black and something like 26% of the prison population is black. I visit a prison every two weeks, but even the people I see there are mostly white, because I work with the inmates with the highest level of privilege, and most of them are white, and if you don’t think there’s something wrong with that, I don’t think I want to know you.

I think a lot about racial justice and the ways in which I’m not doing enough to achieve it. My son’s middle name reminds me of a lot of things, from my idiosyncratic personal reasons for choosing it to the larger societal struggles it stands for. But most of all it reminds me that I have to try harder.

Fears #52essays2017 no. 15

I’m afraid of listening to new podcasts, even when they come highly recommended. Sometimes I’m even afraid of listening to new episodes of podcasts I love, and so I listen to old ones instead. I’m afraid of the pieces of paper on my desk, and I’m afraid of sorting or organizing them because I might lose one and thus forget the book I’m supposed to order for someone or the phone call I’m supposed to make. Sometimes the piles just sit there for months and months, and then I’m afraid of them because they’ve been there so long and everyone will think I’m crazy if I bring them up now. Of course I am crazy. I have a hospital record to prove it.

I’m afraid during thunderstorms and wish someone would hold me, but I’m not afraid of tornadoes. I’m often terrified to drive but I’m not afraid of flying. I’m not afraid of public speaking but I’m afraid to call my friends.

I’m afraid of making plans for my son because he so often doesn’t like them, and how do I explain to another parent that my kid refuses to play with their kid all of a sudden when they played together so well last week? I’m also afraid of being alone with my child because I don’t know what to do to keep him occupied. I am 41 years old and my brain doesn’t occupy the space of a five year old’s mind very well.

Most of these fears are a daily presence. They form the basis of my self talk and shape my waking hours. When I take enough medication, I’m still afraid but the fears don’t bother me as much, sort of the way they say morphine doesn’t ease the pain; it just makes you not care about it.

It’s hard, because I am, for instance, afraid of feeding my child because there are so few foods he eats and they aren’t consistent, and it’s not feasible to take him out for a stripey grilled cheese sandwich at Panera for every meal. Once I made him a grilled cheese sandwich at home and he rejected it because it didn’t have stripes. Then I found a grill so I could make a striped grilled cheese sandwich and he rejected it because it was only supposed to have stripes on one side. Today he said he’d eat one with no stripes and he did and I nearly died of shock.

I would give almost anything not to be so afraid. My right foot? Maybe. I could limp along on crutches if I weren’t so afraid. But trades don’t work like that. I can’t give up a body part to be rid of part of my mind.

What worries me most is that my son has inherited this trait from me. At night we lie in bed and he asks me questions about all of his fears. He walks in behind me when we go places so he can hide behind my back. He is anxious, but he can’t tell me that, so he throws things and screams and hits. I do my best to help him with early interventions, but I worry he will end up just like me, and I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.

When I was in graduate school my friend said if she could just get migraines like Joan Didion’s migraines then she’d be okay. She could write essays about them. I used to read The White Album and Slouching Toward Bethlehem again and again so I could read about how she’d call her husband to ask for the time because she never remembered to pack a watch, about how afraid she was to ask the assistant district attorney anything and thus relied on observations to tell her stories. If I could have fears like Joan Didion’s fears, I could make them into art.

But in my experience ailments are not art; they are impediments to it. Mental illness may have an association with creativity, but it’s hell to live through for the sake of creativity.

I write about my fears from a position of privilege. I won’t lose my job as a result, and if I lose friends, well, I am not sure they were my friends to begin with. I am likewise lucky in my family, who have not disinherited me yet, for all that I sometimes write about things they might wish I wouldn’t.

The wind is blowing outside my house right now and it’s cold and wet outside, and I’m afraid of another long day indoors tomorrow. I’m afraid that I won’t remember ever what it’s like to be happy or remember any of the things I used to like to do. Right now I’m afraid of even the simplest of matters: I’m afraid to cook an egg because it seems too complicated. I bought peach yogurt in addition to my usual raspberry and lemon and I’m afraid to try it. I’m afraid when I look at the books on my shelves because I know I read most of them at one time but I can’t remember when I had the energy and attention to do such things.

I am afraid, in other words, of living, but life still goes on.

The Psych Ward, Nineteen Years Later #52essays2017 no. 14

Yet why not say what happened? —Robert Lowell

12 April 2017

There’s a paperclip on the floor of my room and I’m oddly thrilled by it — it must be contraband. I’m tempted to leave it there just to see if anyone notices and what they’ll do.

I have my own room here which makes it an improvement over the UI, but I have to share the phone with everyone else on the floor, but it’s a cordless (of course — we might strangle ourselves with a a cord), but at least I can take it to my room, but then I feel bad for hogging the phone. I think it has call waiting, but I was too scared of pressing the buttons to find out.

My Stitch Fix is supposed to arrive Friday and I won’t be able to respond because I’m here. I sort of look forward to the email I’ll send them. Dear Stitch Fix, I couldn’t respond to your latest styling of me because I was on the psych ward. I’m imagining now a whole line of styling tips just for the psych ward. Wear your ankle boots in but then realize you’ll have to exchange them for slippers. How do you accessorize scrubs? So many questions.

My handwriting has really deteriorated. I wonder if I’ll be able to read this later. My hand hurts from writing, too. Out of practice of a side effect of the depression or the drugs, who knows.

I wish I could open a window.

13 April 2017

It is so strange not having the internet. Did I say that last night too? Well, it is still true. There is some internet here — a computer with a web browser — but no internet where you can talk to people. All those sites are blocked. I haven’t tried it yet to see, but I’m sure it’s true. And I can’t think of what else I’d want to do online other than seeing what everyone is up to. What’s going on in the normal world while I’m here.

In half an hour there’s movement group and I guess I’ll go. There’s nothing else to do here but read or write or knit, and I can’t concentrate on reading. I wonder if they’d let me have my laptop to write on. Maybe, but not in my room I’m sure, and I don’t know how easy it would be to write in the dayroom.

Fashion report: today I’m wearing skinny jeans paired with a navy Loft t-shirt and my burgundy Madewell cardigan. And slippers.

I wish my hand didn’t cramp so horribly while writing. Maybe it will get easier if I keep doing it. I can only hope.

Move meant group at 10 and then time to kill and then lunch and then time to kill and then coping skills group, which sounds awful (worksheets! worksheets!

0 and then time to kill and then my friend comes and then Mom and Peter come and then time to kill and then bedtime and that will be another day here.

Mom says more than a day and less than a month is how long I’ll be here. I hope it’s a lot less than a month. This place is comfortable but horrible. Fifteen minutes until movement group.

I brought four books with me and I already finished one — I was rereading The Hero and the Crown. I brought Fire and Hemlock too, and the book discussion book (Station Eleven) and What the Living Do. I was listening to Station Eleven and thought I could do that here while knitting but of course I can’t because it’s on my phone and I can’t have my phone.

It is nice not to be responsible for any email. I wonder how much I’ll have when I get out. I wonder when I’ll get out. I wonder if I’ll be any better. I can’t quite imagine it. I wasn’t better when I left the psych ward last time; I just wanted to leave so I pretended to be better. What if it’s all just pretending? What if everyone out there is just pretending to be well and we’re all in the depths?

It takes a long time to write things by hand. Even writing like this, with little care for how the letters come out.

There’s some gunk in my sweater and I just had it cleaned. There are also several holes in it and I just got it last year, so I guess Madewell isn’t necessarily made well, or maybe I’m just careless with my clothes and go moths. That’s likely, really, if I’m honest with myself.

I should ask Mom to bring me shampoo. My hair is starting to smell.

Seve minutes till movement group. I’m a clockwatcher now.

nighttime

I wasn’t supposed to have the phone in my room and then I got criticized for being on the phone for too long. One of their suggested activities is call a friend, but apparently there are limits. I will have to learn them so I can squeak by just under them. I should call K tonight but I’m afraid to use the phone now so I won’t. I’ll just hide in my room. And with any luck I will sleep.

But the rules, God, the rules are so much like high school. Don’t be where we can’t see you. Fifteen minute checks. Lights you can’t turn off. I’m waiting for them to tell me I can’t block the bathroom light with my chair. Just take that from me, I want to say. You’ve taken everything else.

My friend came to visit and brought me a stack of New Yorkers — I only asked for two. Then Mom and Peter came for a much shorter time — just enough for Peter to do a little Lego. Peter brought me flowers and all his drawings from playhouse. I’m so sad I can’t take care of him.

This narrative is descending rapidly in to journaling, dreaded word. I must do something about that, try to work in a phrase as good as glib martyr.

My Stitch Fix box came. Peter was very proud that he carried it into the house for me. I sort of wish they’d brought it, but there are no decent mirrors here, so it’s sort of beside the point. It’s almost monastic here except that of course they do allow the TV to be on seven hours a day.

I really hope this trazadone helps me sleep. I woke up at four this morning and never did fall back asleep. I’m weary but not tired or sleep.

It takes 55 laps of the hallway to make a mile. 55. I can’t even.

I miss Peter. I even miss the cats. But I have to be here, in this country as far away as health.

16 April 2017, nighttime

I didn’t write at all yesterday — I felt better and I didn’t seem to need it as much. Plus the group here has really coalesced so I’ve been hanging out more. We rated all the psych wards we’ve been on and decided this one is the best despite the lack of phones. Tonight we watched Dirty Dancing.

Yesterday afternoon I got a pass to go out with Mom and Peter and we bought flowers for the garden and new shoes for Peter and I went home and opened my Stitch Fix.

A came to visit today and I made her do some of the puzzle. We’ve been on a puzzle kick but I am terrible at them. Then another friend came and I had a pass so we went for a walk all the way up to the cemetery and then we went to Oasis and I actually ate.

Tomorrow I get to go home.

19 April 2017, on the outside

I got home on Monday afternoon and I’m still not used to it. I’m back to work but just part time, four hours a day, which seems like about all I can handle. People were trading numbers on the ward the last day I was there and I gave mine out but didn’t get any, so I hope some people get in touch. I feel terrible for the people who are still there when so many of us were leaving.

It’s strange and overwhelming being in the outside world. I can do anything I want but I often don’t know what to do. I’m trying to set a goal a day the way the nurse told us to, but I still refuse to say affirmations in the mirror. The classroom in the ward where I had my intake had a whiteboard with a big list of affirmations — Be kind to yourself, I

The social worker made my next appointments with my psychiatrist and my therapist for me, so I don’t have to do that. Mom is going to to stay home from choir tonight to help me with Peter.

Everyone wants to help and I don’t know what to tell them to do. I have to put Peter to bed and get him up (well, really he gets me up) and take him to playhouse. The day to day isn’t really something people can help out with. I wonder if people would take him on the weekends more.

I do feel better than I did when I went in. It’s not a rebirth — you don’t come out to everything shining and new. You come out to your same old messy house and all the same problems you had before. But I’m no longer panicking at stop lights, and I’ll take that. It’s a start.