one young professional’s thoughts on writing, disability, queerness, justice work, and generally trying to figure out how this whole “real life” thing works
(I should say: the irony of writing that post title while listening to my kiddo wail over the baby monitor is not lost on me. File that under things that do not spark joy.)
For the first time in my adult life, I’m finding myself “between jobs,” which is capitalist code for “lost one job and haven’t found a new one yet so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” It’s not a comfortable place to be, not just as a “person vaguely brainwashed by society” but also as a type-A person who in general thrives in busy-ness, but I am very, very fortunate to be financially secure enough to not need to metaphorically sprint to the first opportunity that comes my way. Which is a very lucky thing, but it’s also very weird, because my partner is encouraging me to “figure out what will make me happy.” Which kind of makes my brain go full blue-screen.
oh to be a queer bard trying to get my bff to run away with me to the coast
I have thoughts about the kind of work that makes me happy. I can’t imagine myself leaving the nonprofit sphere; I need to be doing something with meaning, something that works towards building a better, more just, more flourishing world. I need to be able to work on a team; I don’t thrive in isolation. I like to feel like I’m making an impact. I enjoy strategy and long-term projects over one-off tasks. I don’t enjoy rapid-response, but I do like feeling like my work is important and serves a critical purpose. I like being able to be creative, and to have opportunities to learn. I like to continuously grow and develop, both in my own skills and as a person who is working in justice and education spaces.
Beyond that? I have no idea.
One thing I do know, though, is that since becoming a parent, I’ve been focused so much on work and family that I haven’t let myself concentrate on the things that I enjoy, and that make me happy. I carved out some time to write over the past few months, but it’s been more like crossing things off a to-do list than letting myself fully embrace the projects I most enjoy. While I have the space, I’m working (ha?) on figuring out what non-“career” things make me happy enough to spend my time on them. A lot of that is writing-related, but some of it is about the things that just sort of fall by the wayside with family and work and general keeping-up-of-a-household: reading, discovering new music, connecting with friends, playing with the dogs, figuring out ways to move my body that don’t feel painful.
So this is, for lack of a better word, an accountability post. Or a manifestation post. Call it whatever makes sense. I’m figuring out what makes me smile.
Or, to be more specific: 39 weeks + one day in, 39 weeks + one day out.
Kiddo turns nine months old tomorrow, and to be honest, I’m still not quite over the way he came into the world. Before he was born, I talked a really big game about how I really only had three “goals” for giving birth: alive me, alive baby, and to give birth in a hospital with medical professionals and not on any form of transportation (there were a lot of “oh god what if I have this baby on Metro North” nightmares). To give my past self some credit, I think I really did believe that as long as I hit those marks everything else would be “icing,” but I also really, really underestimated just how much that “icing”–in this case, to do everything I could to have an intervention-free birth–actually meant to me.
Instead, I pretty much ended up playing intervention bingo, and crossing out just about everything on the card. I was originally hoping that I could use this post to tell my birth story in some kind of concrete, organized way (narratives! so helpful!) but in all honesty, I really don’t remember a lot of it. And I know that’s a mental defense mechanism that comes after pretty much every birth, even the best ones, because otherwise no one would ever have more than one kid, but it’s not really that I don’t remember what it felt like or what the experience was, but that I really, genuinely, don’t remember what happened. I have a few very vivid memories–taking a shower and trying to keep my hep lock dry, experiencing an absolutely excruciating contraction and trying not to throw up because then it would be obvious that I snuck real food after I was “supposed” to, an absolutely incredible nurse helping me move into a cervix-opening position at about…I don’t know, 30 hours in?
Other than that? Pretty much crickets. We’ve got a few pictures, and I have the family group chat as a vague reference of when things were happening.
The biggest thing I remember, nine months later, is feeling like I had absolutely no control. From my induction being presented as a “must” rather than a “could” (due to kiddo’s anticipated weight being almost 10 pounds – he ended up being under 9), to my water being broken because I wasn’t “progressing fast enough,” to going for a c-section at 9.5cm dilated because I “clearly wasn’t going to get the rest of the way there,” there was never a time when I felt like I was being asked, just told. And while I realize now that I was pretty much being steamrolled the few times I did try to ask questions or get myself more time, at the time, I was so incredibly tired and in pain and overwhelmed that I convinced myself it would just be easier to avoid conflict. It wasn’t until I was in my first session with my postpartum depression psychiatrist and she highlighted the lack of agency that was a trend across each step of the process that I was able to remember that I realized just how little say I had about everything that was happening.
(Also, I have to give a shout-out to my doula, because what few memories I do have often include her at least trying to go to bat for me. I’m also not intending to shovel blame on the medical staff. I fully think this was an intent vs impact thing, and they all had my best wishes at heart. It’s not their fault I have a trauma history and feeling a loss of control was a huge trigger that honestly even I didn’t know I had.)
I’d like to say that I’m getting to the point where my PPD and trauma symptoms are improving and that I’m coming to terms with how things went, but honestly, I really can’t. Nine months out, I still feel an overwhelming sadness not just when I think about kiddo’s birth, but also when I see others’ birth photos or hear their stories. I still have nightmares fairly often, and I constantly blame myself for the way my labor progressed (or didn’t progress), for not standing up for myself, for needing–or even accepting–medical interventions. I feel incredibly guilty when I feel envious of others’ experiences, and convince myself that that envy is “proof” that I’m not a good person and therefore “deserved” a negative birth experience. My psychiatrist, to her credit, is great at calling me out on that one in particular, but oof.
Almost exactly nine months out, the one thing I am getting better at is recognizing the moments when I start spiraling, and replacing them with thoughts of gratitude–for my healthy, happy, ridiculous baby, for my incredible partner who has shown more understanding and compassion through this journey than I could ever have expected, for my mental health team who keeps me safe as I continue to process and heal.
I don’t have a clean or clear place to end this. Things still feel very messy and difficult, which I think is the nature of any kind of birth and parenting adventure. But this felt like a milestone–not just in parenting, but also in surviving some of the worst depression days of my life. I’ll be taking things one day at a time for the foreseeable future, but at least, I think, I can stop counting in weeks.
Content warning: this blog post contains explicit reference to depression and suicide.
So: today is my thirtieth birthday!
Despite, oh, every piece of popular media ever, thirty is…really not old. If we were Hobbits (ugh, if only), a thirty-year-old wouldn’t even be an adult yet! (Speaking as a newly thirty-year-old, I’m pretty sure we shouldn’t be, but that’s a whole different blog post, kids.) Google will hit you over the head with lists of things you should do, buy, know, etc before you turn thirty, and heaven help you if you image search “turning 30”–I went in looking for satire, and all I found was misery and way more “everything hurts and life is over and why are there so many baby showers” memes than could ever hope to be funny.
Turning thirty is treated like the end of an era of freedom or some kind of benchmark by which things Should Have Been Achieved, personal or professional. I personally think “30 [x kind of people] Under 30” lists should be outlawed, and their Jewish community cousins “36 [x kind of Jews] Under 36” lists are on thin ice. I’m not saying they’re exclusively toxic, and there’s of course something to be said for celebrating achievements of young professionals, but they absolutely do promote a culture of “youth is fleeting, look what these people did with theirs, so what the hell is the matter with you?” This is, I think, even more of an issue in the queer community, where so many of us spend our twenties doing what straight people do in their teens, aka experimenting with romance, identity, and relationships, all of which is hard to do when you’re closeted, isolated, or just removed from queer culture and community. The point is: culturally, at least in the US, turning thirty isn’t something people tend to look forward to, even with the newer trend of “thirty is the new twenty” branding.
So, you’ve got the “oh god, I’m thirty, life is over/I have failed at XYZ/does my back just hurt all the time now???/etc” crowd. We love and support them and have many hopes that they grab some therapy. This isn’t a blog post about thirty not being an ending-milestone.
This is a blog post about turning thirty and not feeling like you didn’t achieve everything you wanted to do by age thirty because, frankly…you didn’t think you’d be around.
baby me! so cute! so colorful! so horrifically depressed!
Back in 2019, Anna Borges (formerly of Buzzfeed, now a senior editor at SELF) wrote an article for Outline with a headline that punched me right in the proverbial face: “I am not always very attached to being alive.” And ooh, kids, it only got deeper from there.
It’s been a long time since that statement felt anything but mundane. In middle school and high school, there were the morbid poems, the self-harm, the overwhelming emotions that everyone dutifully labeled teen angst. In college, there were nights when I drank too much and the protective barriers keeping my depression at bay faded to nothing and the thought came to me unbidden, as seductive as it was scary. I want to die. Eventually, I finally stumbled my way into treatment. After that, I celebrated each birthday with surprise because each age I hit was one I assumed I wouldn’t reach.
At 27, I’ve settled into a comfortable coexistence with my suicidality. We’ve made peace, or at least a temporary accord negotiated by therapy and medication. It’s still hard sometimes, but not as hard as you might think. What makes it harder is being unable to talk about it freely: the weightiness of the confession, the impossibility of explaining that it both is and isn’t as serious as it sounds. I don’t always want to be alive. Yes, I mean it. No, you shouldn’t be afraid for me. No, I’m not in danger of killing myself right now. Yes, I really mean it.
This article was right up there with Hamilton’s “I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory” in “shit that exposes every single one of my nerves and puts them right on display.” In a culture that talks about suicide and suicidality as acute, urgent issues requiring rapid response, the acknowledgment that sometimes it’s chronic and quiet and actually quite boring was took something off my shoulders in a way that I never expected to find.
It’s hard to explain to people, unless you know they’ve been in a similar position, that you’re not excited for your birthday because you’re still not in the habit of planning to reach them. It’s even harder to explain that around milestone birthdays–it doesn’t make your mother happy when your response to “is this what you thought you’d be doing at thirty?” is “I thought I’d have been dead for several years already, actually!!!!”
pictured: a tiny and adorable ice cream cone! not pictured: dutifully re-writing a crisis plan because That’s What You’re Supposed To Do, even when you’re not sure what constitutes a “crisis” because you’re always just Like This. (but how cute was my hair, though?)
It’s something you get used to carrying around, though not necessarily something you get used to talking about. Every time I’ve started with a new therapist, it’s taken me months to get to the point where I can trust them enough to talk about this quiet lack of life-attachment without fear of an immediate grab for a crisis check or questionnaire when the answers are always the same: no, I haven’t hurt myself; no, I don’t have any plans to kill myself; no, I do not wish I was dead. There’s a difference between wishing oneself dead and just not particularly wanting to be alive, and while there are some days–much less frequent now–when I do have more active thoughts about transitioning from one state to the other, most of the time, it’s just a low, constant buzz. Borges compares it to living in water: “Not as sea creatures do, native and equipped with feathery gills to dissolve oxygen for my bloodstream, but alone, with an expanse of water at all sides. Some days are unremarkable, floating under clear skies and smooth waters; other days are tumultuous storms you don’t know you’ll survive, but you’re always, always in the ocean.”
Like most of the people in this metaphorical boat, I have my flotation devices, the little things that keep me above water: a pre-ordered book, a season finale, an upcoming breakfast date with a friend. The big things–my dogs, my partners, now my son–are…too big. People point to loved ones when you talk about suicide as if to say, “look at these people who love you!”, not knowing (or not caring) that when you’re in that headspace, all you can think is that those people who love you are at best misguided for doing so, at worst better off without you dragging them down. At the darkest point of my postpartum depression this winter, curled up in bed and sobbing at the idea of pumping yet again for my baby who couldn’t nurse, all I could think was how much better his life would have been if I had died giving birth to him, and he had some other parent who could feed and care for him without sobbing. (Let’s pour one out for Zoloft, kids, because that was a turning point evening, but look how many people love you! was not a thing I would have been receptive to hearing that night.)
We do what we can. We set small things to look forward to: the next tattoo, a new coffee mug, a recipe we want to try. Twice a year, when I start a new planner and halfway through it, I make myself think long-term: I set bigger goals, for a year, three years, five years, a lifetime away. I don’t often look at them once I’ve written them down, but it’s comforting to know that they’re there–that a few times a year, for the length of a five-minute timer, I was able to look at the length of a life, and imagine myself living it.
birthday wishes are not a thing i make.
So here I am, turning thirty. Unexpectedly. If I were feeling uncharitable I’d spend this time thinking about all the things I haven’t done that I might have liked to or hoped to, but while there are many, I’m going to give myself the space to…not. To be proud of the things I’ve done, not just this year but in the last thirty. I’ve helped my sister grow up. I’ve adopted two dogs. I’ve raised tens of thousands of dollars for nonprofits. I’ve fallen in love (and in love again!). I’ve written things that have made people laugh and cry and feel seen and learn new things about themselves. I’ve grown an entire human being from scratch.
I’ve survived, and survived, and survived some more. I’m still here.
And–dare I say it–I think I’ll be here next year, too.
Let’s get this out of the way: being a birth-giving parent who identifies as nonbinary is weird. Birth culture is getting away from being totally woman-focused in more intersectional spaces and communities where there are larger queer and trans populations, but on the whole, everything is pastel and pink and “mom” this and “woman power” that and “a woman’s body was made to do this!” this and “you got this, mama!!!!” that. As someone who went back and forth about whether I even wanted to be called anything in the “mama” family (I did settle on being “mommy,” but there are still days where I have major imposter syndrome about it, going back and forth between “do I feel woman enough to be called ‘mommy'” and “if I’m okay with being called ‘mommy’ does that make me a bad enby???”; 0/10 identity crisis, don’t love it.)
I had a birth experience that I think about as “really not what I wanted” on good days and “actually kind of traumatic” on bad days. I went from wanting an intervention-free birth to an induction that led to pretty much every intervention in the book and ended with an urgent (not emergency, but probably 10 minutes from “we’re doing this” to “in surgery”) c-section.
it turned out okay, but JFC. i’m gonna be telling this kid about this 37-hour shitshow until his bar mitzvah.
Because his birth was such an Experience (literally the nicest way I can put it without spiraling), I was super determined to nurse this kid. It felt like if I could just breast/chestfeed, then it would make up for not having the birth experience I wanted. Unfortunately, R was born with a tongue-tie and couldn’t latch correctly, which led to me having bleeding nipples and him wailing because he wasn’t eating enough and was hungry. Okay, fine, I said, we’ll supplement with formula in the hospital, and when my milk came in properly I’d pump, and then we’d get the tongue-tie sorted and he’d be able to nurse. No problem. No problem!!!
(Was the PPD setting in? Sure was!)
I spent the next several weeks exclusively pumping and bottle-feeding R. Even after we resolved the tongue-tie, he had a difficult time nursing, and would refuse to latch. I ended up with what I ultimately realized was thrush (DO NOT GOOGLE, you will be sad) and was in horrible pain every time I pumped, to the point where I started spiraling into anxiety attacks almost an hour before each pumping session because I knew how much it would hurt. My OBGYN told me at my follow-up that I could stop pumping/nursing if I wanted to, but I insisted on continuing. I told her it was about the money (formula! so expensive!) but really, I felt like I had failed at birth and was failing at parenting, and if I failed at giving him nourishment, too, then really I shouldn’t even be his parent at all.
nothing says “i’m managing my post-partum depression just fine, thanks!!!” like crying while pumping and holding your baby and hoping your spouse doesn’t come home and catch you spiraling!!!!!!!
All this came to a head on a Friday night when my sister was coming to visit, and I was due to pump. I couldn’t make myself do it, and I told my husband that he could go pick her up from the train but I didn’t want to see anyone, I needed to just sit in bed and cry. And that’s exactly what I did: I sat there with my pump and I cried. I tried to hand-express and fail, I tried using the hand pump and couldn’t get it to work, and I knew I’d have to use my actual pump, and I knew it was going to hurt so so much, and all I could do was sob. My husband came in and checked on me a few times, and finally cracked–said enough was enough, to stop for the night, we could give the baby frozen milk, and in the morning we were calling my psychiatrist for an eval to get me back on meds. I still don’t know if he knew I was spiraling to the point of suicidal ideation, but he knew we couldn’t go on the way we were, and he was right.
I wish I could say that this was the changing point, that getting an appointment with a postpartum psychiatrist and getting on new antidepressants and restarting therapy was what finally got this nursing thing back on track. It was a turning point in some ways, in that I realized what I was doing wasn’t sustainable, that I wasn’t taking care of myself, that I was putting all my value as a parent into this because in my mind I had totally devalued my birth. You don’t realize just how deeply anti-cesarean culture can be internalized until you’re calling yourself a failure as a parent for not having a vaginal birth and convincing yourself that the only way to “make up for it” (because obviously it’s something you have to make up for!!!) is to give your baby exclusively breast milk so that they know you love them, because obviously your lack of vaginal birthing is representation of your failure to love them appropriately.
Depression is a treat, right?
But really, there was a moment–and I really, really wish I had made better note of it, because those early weeks were such an absolute blur–where he just…figured things out. We’d been working on getting him to nurse with a nipple shield, and he was slowly getting the hang of it, and then there was a session when the nipple shield slipped and he pushed it away and latched onto the nipple and then he just…clicked with it. I don’t remember what time of day it was, or where I was sitting, or how long into that nursing session we were when it happened, but I remember I started to cry tears of absolute, exhausted joy.
With the exception of expressed milk bottle feedings from his dad (and later solid foods), R went from never nursing to nursing exclusively. For the first time since he was born, I felt like I was finally succeeding at something. My nipples healed (a baby is gentler than a pump flange! who knew!) and suddenly feeding him no longer involved panic-attack-inducing pain. There was closeness and calm and cuddles instead of tears and struggles balancing a bottle and pump tubing when I had to simultaneously bottle feed him and pump for the next feeding. I finally understood what people meant when they talked about nursing being something that felt emotionally good.
late night feeding: still exhausting, but less painful, and not making bottles!
For the first time in years, I was grateful for my breasts. I’ve had a large chest since I was twelve, and even without the dysphoria, have dealt with the general patriarchal grossness of a full bust since seventh grade. The back pain kicked in in high school, and by college I was dreaming of the days when I could get reduction surgery. When I realized that part of my icky feelings around my chest came from actually-not-loving-the-whole-female-presenting thing in general and that the size of my chest would make things like binding difficult and not super effective, I felt even worse. I’ve been up front with my spouse for years about wanting to get a reduction someday (to his sadness, but he’s supportive) but have always had, in the back of my mind, the thought that I should wait until after I’m done nursing children.
Even though I got married young, marriage was never something I grew up thinking was a definite my life, but I always knew I wanted to have children and be a parent, and I knew I wanted to nurse. The desire to nurse my hypothetical children was the biggest thing keeping me from asking for surgery, and in those weeks of pumping misery, I found my dysphoria–which I don’t always have–spiraling on top of my existing postpartum mental health crash. When the nursing clicked, though, all of a sudden these source of heaviness and sexual harassment and physical pain and presentation complications became a source of nourishment, and closeness, and victory over weeks of misery and exhaustion. They’re not just big rocks strapped to my chest and messing up my ability to be androgynous and visibly queer, they’re the parts of my body that let me calm R down when he’s upset, and soothe him when he gets out of the bath and whining about not playing in the water anymore, and give him a sense of routine as soon as he wakes up from his naps or first thing in the morning.
I’m still not a huge fan of my breasts (and I’m still planning to make them way smaller someday). But I think we’ve gotten to a good place. It was a fight to get here, a total uphill battle with some stumbles and falls that got really scary, but I’m proud of where I am and what I can do. Our 3 a.m. nursing sessions are a representation of hard work and determination, and the way I’ve leaned into what these parts of my body can do and embraced the way they look and feel and present doesn’t make me bad at being nonbinary, because there’s no right way to be nonbinary or look nonbinary or act nonbinary. I’m currently presenting more femme than I’m used to and spending a lot of my time doing a thing associated with femininity, and none of that takes away from who I am: a queer, nonbinary nursing parent.
It’s National Breastfeeding Month. The #nationalbreastfeedingmonth tags on instagram and twitter are full of mother and woman and mama and motherhood language, and representations of/shoutouts to chestfeeding and queer/trans parents are few and far between. I’m not one for putting deeply personal stories out into the world, but this one felt important. This is a shout-out to to my fellow breastfeeding/chestfeeding/nursing nonbinary parents, to chestfeeding and nursing fathers, to people who use chestfeeding over breastfeeding, who feel excluded from conversations about nursing and from the language of postpartum support groups and who get folded into motherhood buckets even when that’s not the word you use for yourself. This is our month, too. I see you.
So, blogging. Blogging for real. Stretching those writing muscles. Really and truly making a commitment to write, like, all the time. No, really!
That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
I digress.
Last year, Pride already felt different than it did in previous years. There was a lot more emphasis on activism–the Reclaim Pride Coalition in NYC launched the first Queer Liberation March and Rally as an alternative to the usual (very corporate) parade, and the lineup of speakers and representatives was genuinely amazing (so amazing that my Pride buddy and I hung out in the rain to listen and learn!). The queer community has been heading towards something of a shift for awhile in terms of a split between “gay pride” and “queer liberation”–one being very capitalist and corporate and one being often explicitly revolutionary, not just in terms of Pride month but also in terms of political ideology and priorities.
This year, obviously, things would be different even if we weren’t looking at a transformational political movement. COVID-19 has meant that we were always going to be looking at a very different Pride experience. But it has really seemed like the queer community zeroed in on this moment to see it as a way of mobilizing the queer world to take actions that are explicitly anti-racist and anti-capitalist, which honestly seems like the best possible outcome, sad as it is to not have a weekend of drinking and confetti and Big Gay Ice Cream in the West Village next to Stonewall.
On a personal level, this was a very different Pride for me. Last year during Pride month, I was newly pregnant, and trying to figure out what being a queer, nonbinary parent was going to look like for me. This year, I am a queer, nonbinary parent–and I still have no idea.
There are no real manuals on how to be a perfect parent in general (I mean, there are millions, but that kind of renders them all a little “eh”), and certainly no manuals on how to be a perfect queer parent. In addition to all the usual anxieties (is he eating enough? sleeping enough? is he happy? why is his head peeling like that? WHY ARE YOU PUTTING THAT IN YOUR MOUTH????), there’s a new level of “am I doing this in the Right Queer Way”–questions like, “am I letting down the nonbinary community because I’m okay being ‘mommy’ and not a gender-neutral parent name?” and “is it okay that my presentation is more feminine right now because it’s what’s comfortable while I’m nursing?” and “I love putting this baby in pink but am I putting him in Too Much Pink and now people are judging me?”
FUN.
This is all to say that: just like Pride is getting back to its roots as a riot, I’m trying to get back to my roots of knowing that being a queer, nonbinary, disabled parent is in and of itself revolutionary. I don’t owe it to anyone to do that in a certain way–I don’t owe anyone androgyny, I don’t owe anyone gender nonconformity, I don’t owe anyone a certain way of raising this kid, other than the kid himself. It’s enough for me to know that this is who I am and how I identify, and I’ll instill that in my kid in ways that are right for me. This year, that’s meant no pride parades (or protests, unfortunately – thanks, ongoing health risks!), but plenty of donations to QPOC organizations, reading as many queer baby books to this baby as I can find (we’re big fans of Peanut Goes for the Gold!), and telling this kid every day that I love him, that I’m happy to be his parent, and that I will love him to pieces no matter who he grows up to be (even if he’s a *gasp* heterosexual), and I’ll do my best to model what it looks like to be yourself, just as hard as you can, every day.
This is one of my favorite parts of the Jewish year.
The Jewish new year is about renewal and beginnings in a way
that the secular new year isn’t. Part of that comes from the idea that Rosh
Hashanah observes not just the renewal of the calendar but also a celebration
of the birth of the world (happy birthday, world!). There’s an inherent belief,
in the liturgy and the practices, that we are renewing more than ourselves–we
also have a duty to examine the ways we connect to the world and renew (or,
more often, return to) a practice of connecting to that world in a meaningful way.
I spend a lot of time in the weeks leading up to Rosh
Hashanah wishing that I was more intentional about that kind of reconnection during
times when Jewish practice doesn’t literally put it onto my calendar (Elul: a
solid bro). It’s so, so easy to get caught up in life. And as much as I’d
love to be the kind of person who makes time for reflection and meaningful work
every day, or even every week, I’m not–and I’m not likely to become that
person in the next ten days.
Some of that is, honestly, barrier-focused. I like to think
of myself as an optimist when it comes to the greater world, but in my own micro-universe,
I fall into pits of this is too much, this is too hard, I can’t do more than
what I’m doing now. It’s a mentality that’s designed for surviving, not thriving–about
getting through the day to day, not about looking at what you want to do and
what you want to be and then doing, becoming.
(And I should say, too, because this is a season of
gratitude–I am so, so lucky that my surviving is not a literal thing,
except on the very worst of depression days. I have enough income, I have a job
that I enjoy, I have amazing partners who love and support me and carry me when
I can’t carry myself.
My surviving is getting up in the morning and making
it through the day in one physical/mental/emotional piece, and I am absurdly
lucky to be able to say that.)
My mind and my body, together, are my narrow place. They’re
where I feel the most constriction, the most limitation, the most struggle. As
much as I try to make them my allies, to treat them gently, to meet them with
understanding and compassion no matter how much they fight me, but I succeed
maybe thirty percent of the time. The other seventy, we either hit a stalemate–not
growing, but not shrinking, either–or the narrow place gets even smaller,
until there isn’t enough light coming in to find the way out.
Today’s Torah portion is Bereishit (Genesis) 21:1-34. There’s
a point in the reading I always connect to, when Hagar is alone in the desert,
out of water for herself and her baby. She puts her baby down, and walks two
bowshots away to sit down, so that she doesn’t have to hear him cry. HaShem
hears her, and comes to her, and opens her eyes–and she sees a well of water,
and she and her baby survive.
In the commentary in the machzor I used today, this aliyah
came with commentary from Rabbi Reena Spicehandler. I was in a NO PHONES
ALLOWED, Y’ALL, SERIOUSLY, WE MEAN IT service so I couldn’t take a screenshot,
but the gist of Rabbi Spicehandler’s commentary is this: The text doesn’t say
that a well appeared in front of Hagar, but rather that she was suddenly
able to see it. When we are trapped in a place where all we experience is fear,
or despair, or hopelessness, we aren’t able to see the possibilities or
openings around us–whether that’s a new opportunity or a literal life-saving
spring of water. We can only see those possibilities when we open our eyes to
them, or, sometimes, when someone opens our eyes for us.
This season, Rabbi Spicehandler suggests, should be one of
reorienting ourselves to a place where we are able to see possibilities around
us again. It’s about stepping back from the place of fear and despair and
opening up to everything around us that we can reach for–resources, yes, but
also actions; goals and dreams and all of the potential of who we could be, if
we can see what’s out there.
It’s a perspective of sweetness, and I think there’s a
reason why that resonates so deeply. Honey is traditionally eaten on Rosh
Hashanah, accompanied by prayers for a sweet new year: not a good new year,
which is vague and placating; not an exciting new year, which has too
much room for interpretation–a sweet year, with moments to be savored, in which
we can take delight, in which we feel sparks of divinity and blessing.
And it takes work, to get into that place where sweetness
can be tasted in the midst of daily life, which can be so bitter in so many
ways. To reorient ourselves towards sweetness is really to do the thing that I
know I’m terrible at: to take each moment intentionally and look for the places
where I can find something to savor. To reach for.
So if I’m setting an intention at all this year–which, in a
year where I know there will be a million changes coming, personal and
professional and everything in between, I’m not sure that I am–it’s this: to
practice that reorientation, as often as I can. To look for sweetness in the
moments when I know it’s hardest to find it: when I’m in pain, when my thoughts
are full of broken glass, when the world feels too narrow around me.
To look, whenever I can, for the well in the desert.
(l’shana tova u’metukah, everyone. may it be a sweet, happy
new year.)
me: i am totally going to update my blog regularly! my mental health: are you, tho? me:
So anyway, that’s obviously going well.
It’s been a long, difficult few months. There’s a lot of health stuff going on (that I hope to be able to write about soon), and I have been more exhausted than I’ve been in a REALLY long time. Which has made doing all the things I like to do on a regular basis – especially writing – feel absolutely impossible.
But: finally, there is good news!
After three years at my current communications and fundraising job, where I love my co-workers but have been super burned out by my actual work, and a job search that feels like it’s lasted for most of the last year and a half (the job market is…………..not great, y’all), I have officially gotten a new job. Today is my last day of Current Job, and after that I have TWO WEEKS OFF before starting my new position on August 15!
For the first time in my career, I’m changing jobs without also uprooting my entire life to relocate to a new home or city, and I have to say, it is a totally different feeling. The last time I changed positions, I didn’t take any time off – I left Job 1 on a Friday, and started Job 2 on Monday – and spent the first three weeks of my new job sleeping on an air mattress in my siblings-in-law’s apartment in Brooklyn while Husband found us a new apartment and wrapped things up in MA. Living the aunt life was nice, but I definitely felt frazzled, and readjusting to a different commute less than a month into the job once we moved into our own apartment didn’t make things any easier.
This time, though, life is staying fairly consistent! We bought our house almost exactly a year ago, and we don’t have any moves on the horizon (thank goodness). I get to sleep in my same bed, go home to the same bright yellow living room and nice green plants, and most importantly, NOT spend the next two weeks packing, relocating, and lowkey panicking about things getting done. Instead, my funemployment days are booked for friend time, coffee dates, and (FINGERS CROSSED) actually getting some writing done. That novel isn’t going to revise itself, no matter how much I’d like it to using the power of my hopes and dreams.
It’s almost surprising to me how NOT anxious I am about this transition. I gave three weeks notice to my current job, so there’s been plenty of time to panic, but it’s been…remarkably okay. There’s been a ton to do (the “How To Do My Job” document that I left for my successor is forty-one pages long) and I’ve had to do a lot of emotional stewardship of my coworkers (folks have…a lot of feelings), but I haven’t had any of my usual OH GOOD AN ERA IS COMING TO AN END AND NEW THINGS WILL HAPPEN SOON, WHAT DO I DO??? breakdowns. I’m tempted to attribute that to the whole “not relocating my whole life” gig making this feel easier, but then again, it could just be the calm before the Anxiety Storm. We’ll see!
In the meantime, we’re thinking positive. There are books to read, closets to organize, dogs to cuddle, and things to write. And then: on to the next part of my journey!
We can’t ever really know what goes on in another person’s head, but I’ve always thought it was a common experience to feel that everyone else’s heads work about the same way ours do. We don’t necessarily think they think the same thoughts that we do, but there’s something comforting in the idea that everyone’s thoughts at least function about the same way.
Except, apparently, what I pictured to be a universal experience of thinking–and by “thinking” I of course mean “a constant inner monologue of thoughts, ideas, self-regulation, rehearsed conversations, maladaptive daydreams, and conversational self-soothing”–is apparently not universal after all. The idea that there are people casually going about their days without an endless barrage of internal chitchat didn’t quite make me second-guess everything I’ve ever thought about the general human condition, but it was close.
My brain is a loud place. It always has been: I remember being very small and lying awake at night because the inside of my brain wouldn’t stop talking. It ran through every action I took throughout the day, it ran through worst-case scenarios of what might happen to my family or friends while I was asleep, it ran through alternative endings to the stories I heard or books I read, mostly, it just ran. At some point it shifted into something that oscillates between an undercurrent of uncontrolled chatter to an active conversation I have with myself. It’s writing stories in my head, giving a mental pep talk to manage my overstimulation when I walk through Grand Central Station, it’s counting the stairs while I leave the subway.
This kind of active internal monologue is apparently more common in people who have something going on with their brains: folks with ADHD, people with mood disorders or other mental health conditions that manifest with intrusive thoughts, people with dysmorphic disorders and psychotic disorders, etc. This isn’t to say that having a conscious sense of inner speech means you have something that needs to be diagnosed, but it can be a symptom, especially if/when your inner speech becomes disruptive to your functioning.
There are ways to quiet your mind down. Meditation is evidently the gold standard here, though not the right choice for many people (myself included, much to my therapist’s frustration) – there is evidence that people experiencing acute symptoms of PTSD as well as some other disorders should avoid meditation as a practice until their mind is a safer place to be. For me, the issue is a personality one – meditation is the kind of thing that won’t work unless you buy into it, and while it’s lovely for other people, I have too much of my own baggage around it to turn off my resistance and actually try to make it work. (Am I shooting myself in the foot? Maybe, but it’s my foot, so, whatever.)
So in the meantime, my brain is loud.
I spend a lot of time hanging out with my brain. Part of having active inner speech is having a measure of control over what that speech is and “says,” and I’ve spent years tuning mine to be less dysfunctional and more adaptive: I can’t quiet it down, but if it’s going to be there, I should at least know what tracks to put it on so that it doesn’t cause too much distress. The voices of my intrusive thoughts are still there and still louder than I’d like them to be, but I’ve gotten adept at quite literally telling them to hush, turning a one-sided whisper into a two-sided dialogue, me versus them–a mental version of the average thought-challenging worksheets therapists use in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I still write stories in my head and daydream constantly, but it’s just as often an active decision to turn my thoughts from something maladaptive and intrusive and into something creative and interesting as it is a casual wandering spaciness. Some of those stories even end up written down (though they never unfold as brilliantly in a Word document as they do in my head), so maybe it’s not even a waste of time.
Still, I wonder what I’m missing out on by not having that naturally quiet mind, or by not having the sort of passive or mostly sensory/kinetic inner speech that others describe. What is it like? Do those people look out a window and simply see the scenery, without a running commentary? Can they sit on the train and close their eyes and simply drift, rather than planning out the next scene in their novel in their heads? Do they taste food and just taste it, without a monologue of thoughts and beliefs about food and chemicals and body size and who even knows what else?
Or, I can’t help but wonder–is it lonely?
I’ve heard inner speech described as having an imaginary friend that is also part of your own self (although maybe all imaginary friends are). I’m not quite sure if that’s been my experience, but I don’t know how to imagine what it would feel like if my mind went suddenly silent. Would it feel like losing a friend? Would it be like when you’re listening to loud music for too long and you pause it, and your ears echo with the tinny aftershocks of sound?
The idea of it makes me shudder, but maybe that’s because I’m too used to noise to ever be quite comfortable with silence. I like the idea of quiet, but for me, quiet is the absence of unsafe or anxious thoughts, not the absence of my inner voice altogether. The sound that remains in those moments is the spinning wheel of creativity, the soothing murmurs of encouragement, the amused commentary on whatever I happen to be seeing or feeling or doing.
Maybe a quiet mind is just a mind at rest, and maybe rest, for me, is a mind at an easy murmur and not an anxious roar. Not silent, never silent.
My original goal for this week was to write another “real” blog post, but honestly, it’s just been One Of Those Weeks, and it wasn’t going to happen. So a self-care post it is! I’m trying to be kinder to myself about understanding my limits and recognizing where I can push and where I can’t.
April has been…rough. My mental health hasn’t been in a great place, and while I was really proud of myself for finishing the first draft of my novel and excited about starting revisions, I found myself suddenly really daunted and overwhelmed by the actual process–cue overwhelming anxiety! And imposter syndrome! Fun. Add to that a few chronic pain conditions that always get worse in the spring as the weather constantly shifts from warm to cold and wet to dry, and you have one cranky camper.
But you know what is going well? THE AMOUNT OF ADORABLE DOG CUDDLES IN MY LIFE. LET’S ROUND SOME OF THOSE UP, SHALL WE?
if April is being a challenging mess for you, what’s getting you through it? alternatively: drop your dog pictures in the comments! i’m *always* here for more dog pictures.
I thought about diving straight into the content on this post, but given what that content is, it seems only reasonable to talk a little frankly about why it’s been over a month since I posted the intro to what was going to be a “weekly” blog series, and I haven’t done any follow-up posts yet.
Imposter (or impostor, and I know I’m going to mess this one up, so let’s just get it out of the way now and say both spellings are valid, let’s be kind to ourselves, shall we? Good, go team) syndrome is a hell of a thing. When I laid out the intro post to this What We Call Writer’s Block series, I felt really good about it! People write about all of these different topics all the time, but I was excited to take some time to give my perspective on it, and to combine my therapeutic background with my creative background in a non-clinical space.
And predictably, a day and a half after I posted it, and just
before I was planning to start this post on imposter syndrome…imposter syndrome
set in. What was I thinking, setting myself as some kind of expert on dealing
with The Tough Stuff And How It Relates To Writing And Writer’s Block? Why would
people want to read what I had to say on the matter anyway? You’ve got less
than a hundred blog followers for goodness sake, Shelly, get it together, come
on.
But the thoughts were there, convincing me that I wasn’t the
person who should be writing about this, and so, for the last month, I haven’t.
And, because it was easier than listening to the part of me that felt insecure
and raw and, frankly, icky, I told myself that I was hitting a wall of writer’s
block, that I’d feel better about writing this piece when I had more time and
energy, and I’d just wait around until I had a break.
There’s an Alanis Morissette irony gif for this, I’m sure.
In the interest of full disclosure, I did wait around
until I had more time and energy (who’s on their first vacation since January
2018? this kid!) but my feelings of imposter syndrome around this topic haven’t
faded. I’m powering through, because that’s what this series is about. It’s not
a great feeling, and I’m not convinced that this will be my greatest piece of
writing, but as we’ll talk about later, I’m readjusting my definition of
success on this and that’s okay.
So let’s dive in.
Just to get definitions off the table: imposter syndrome refers to the pattern of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in which people doubt their accomplishments and have a “persistent, often internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud.” (Psychology Today) It’s important to note the use of the word “syndrome” here (a characteristic combination of symptoms, emotions, or behaviors), rather than “disorder”–imposter syndrome is not a psychological disorder recognized on its own by the DSM, which is not to say that it doesn’t still cause significant distress: imposter syndrome can contribute to “stress, anxiety, low self-confidence, shame, and in some cases, even depression.” (Psychology Today)
In creative fields, imposter syndrome seems to run rampant, and it’s easy to think about the reasons why. Depending on the creative spaces you inhabit on or offline, it may even be a regular conversation–research suggests that imposter syndrome hits marginalized groups harder and with more frequency (New York Times), and diverse creative spaces, even on larger platforms like Twitter, are regularly full of threads discussing experiences of feeling out of place amongst peers, even after achieving significant career milestones.
Unlike business or STEM fields, creative fields tend to lack
an objective measure of “quality” beyond a certain entry point of proficiency (and
I’m sure I could say more about the gatekeeping implied here, but we don’t have
all day). The value applied to a piece of work even from year to year can
vary immensely, and while we know our work will be consumed when we put it out
into the world, we also know it will be critiqued and compared, even to our own
past work. For writing, critique at most stages of the process is beneficial,
but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t come with its anxiety-inducing sweats, whether
you’re in a creative writing workshop in college or waiting for reviews on your
third published novel.
Another potential reason to consider why imposter syndrome among marginalized creative writers is the frequent devaluing of their work. Literary canons are based primarily on the work of dead white men, and authors of color, queer writers, disabled and neurodivergent writers, and those at the intersections of those marginalizations often have to work twice as hard for half the recognition as cis, straight, white, able-bodied and neurotypical writers. This is not to say that writing and publishing is an easy game for anyone, but there are certainly people playing on lower difficulty settings.
When the professional spaces that critically evaluate work exclude
you not just by function but by design (by the overwhelming whiteness,
straightness, abled-ness in traditional publishing and media), it is all the
more difficult to feel that you are not imposing and to recognize your worth. Social
media, indie publishing, and internet networking is creating avenues to find
connections and support without going through traditional gatekeepers, but that
doesn’t take the barriers away, or solve the problems at the systemic level.
Looking at this, it can be easy to see how imposter syndrome
can make writing difficult. When we feel that our voice isn’t worth listening
to and it’s just a matter of time before our readers realize that and give up
on us, writing can quickly become impossible tasks. If we are self-deprecating
about our writing and believe it will never be good enough to go anywhere, then
we can easily find ourselves slogging through our drafts, not finishing
projects even if we loved them when we began them. If our first book was a
success but we are terrified that the next one will fail and we’ll be exposed
as never knowing what we were doing in the first place, we might be too paralyzed
to start the second.
So: what are some strategies to approaching imposter
syndrome-induced writer’s block?
Identify the thoughts that come with your feelings, and counter each thought individually rather than collectively.
“I’ve never been published anywhere before and my voice isn’t important compared to all the other people who are talking about [XYZ topic], and as soon as my agent realizes that they’re going to drop me from their client list” is really a number of separate statements, and each one can be countered in different ways, probably from different people in your life who believe in you.
By slowing down your inner narrative, you can build yourself a collection of positive thoughts to counter the negative ones. (You can do this in general with thoughts associated with negative emotions! It’s super helpful.)
Be open: write about what you’re feeling.
It might not be the project you meant to work on, but almost every creative person will experience impostor syndrome at one time or another. More of us have been open about it in the last few years, especially on social media. By adding your voice to the conversation, you help to continue the movement to reduce the stigma around being anything other than constantly confident and perfect in the creative world.
At the same time, you get to reduce the pressure of keeping your thoughts and feelings bottled up in your head. Win-win.
Re-adjust your definition of failure and success.
Imposter syndrome can be paralyzing, particularly because it traps us in our thoughts of failure and success. We are either currently succeeding and terrified that we will be “exposed” as unworthy of success (and therefore become failures), or we are not succeeding and therefore worried we will remain failures, never recognized for whatever status we feel we deserve. By reframing “failure” and “success,” we can reduce the fear around failure and make “success” more achievable.
With success: it can be helpful to go from “big picture” to “small picture,” and break goals down into smaller and smaller objectives until they stop feeling insurmountable and start to feel achievable. A very real, very obvious example: I went from “write a perfect essay on imposter syndrome” to “write SOMETHING and post it on Sunday,” and honestly? I said it in the first paragraph and I’ll say it again, it turned off the anxiety enough to make me write. (I also turned off Twitter. Which…helped a bunch.)
(Maybe also, in general, turn off Twitter.)
Reframing failure is generally a bigger challenge, and a bigger process. Most of us have beliefs around failure that we hold deeply to our cores, and those cause knee-jerk negative thoughts and feelings that can freeze us in place. When we think about failing at something–a job, a published piece, a book–the negativity that comes up in us can be overwhelming. It can be helpful to consider thinking about failure not as something static that you did or you have or even that you are (I failed, I have failed, I am a failure), but as a process, not an end destination. Failure is something that happens, but it is not a stopping point. To look at your beliefs and thoughts around failure and think about restructuring them, you can journaling (right before bed and first thing in the morning, when your brain is sleepy and not self-editing, are great times to get your unfiltered thoughts!), recording your thoughts, or, if you’re feeling cozy, talking through things with a friend or writing partner.
Imposter syndrome is a pain, and most creatives get stuck
with it at one time or another–or if you’re really lucky, your whole
career! It’s not, however, a writing death sentence. Treat yourself tenderly,
and let yourself take up space. Whatever else your thoughts might tell you: it
is your space, for your words, for your stories. You deserve it.
In my next post, which goodness willing I’ll manage to get up before another month goes by, we’ll be talking about envy! If you’d like to share any stories about how jealousy or envy has made writing difficult for you, fill out this google form, or send me an email at humanlivinghumanly@gmail.com.
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Human Living Human[e]ly 