Face It: We are Not Meant for Ourselves

TODAY
I'm a little out of sorts, eyelids drooping, stiff neck aching, shoulders back, fingers attempting something akin to work--writing, web-surfing, and waiting.

It's days like these that I wonder if my bra is too visible through my blouse. I work with other people's children. Will my concealer wear thin, revealing my newest pimple? Will my deodorant continue doing its job? Will I remain alert enough to get me through the day, a day that requires me to use words and be at least semi-literate and intelligent? I wonder if I might be too self-absorbed. Nobody cares about my boobs or my makeup.

I wonder, though, am I the only one who wonders these things?

As a teenager, I was one of those girls who cried while getting ready for school. I wanted my hair to be straighter and my face to be anything other than ugly. Poor me. I wanted to stay home rather than face the other faces--those in the sea of teens who were undoubtedly judging and criticizing. But I went to school. And if I didn't see myself in any mirrors or windows, I was content to forget my face. I did math and wrote essays. I laughed with those who accepted me. I ate too much. I changed into my shorts and T-shirt and practiced hard. My volleyball team was stellar.  And while I was a part of it, I still struggled to be stronger, harder, faster. But every day, I showed up and threw myself into the art of athletics.

We all need something to take our minds off of ourselves.

I can spend hours getting ready. I can pluck my eyebrows and other wayward facial hairs that magically sprout overnight. I can layer my eyeshadows: three colors--base, crease, highlight. And I can even use two complementary colors for the crease. I am crazy like that.

I can blow dry my hair and then twist a flat iron through it to make waves that actually turn out to be more like curls, which I detest. So then I can pull and style, hoping to achieve another kind of magic. Having this kind of time is a blessing and a curse.

And I can notice and attack the dry pieces of skin that flake and sit up on my skin like a never-ending sunburn peel. And I moisturize. This still happens.

And I can change my shirt five times.

And I can lovingly browse my jewelry collection before choosing the silver dangly ones that say "edgy" more than "Boho".

I know how to use up a mirror.

But what about those other days? The days with less time in them. The days with less motivation in them. I get ready in the dark. Am I peeling? Do I look ill on these no or low-makeup days? (I've been told I look sick on days like these). Then again, a student once told me my makeup was like that of a clown's (this, to be sure, is different than telling me I looked like a clown...?)

Am I dressed in unflattering lines and shapes? God forbid!

And yet I survive.

Don't we always survive? Well, except for the one time we won't. But let's not think about that. We have things to do. And if we don't, we'd better find some before we obsess too much. Being self-aware is next to godliness. But being self-absorbed can wreck us.

Having to manage my time makes me productive and useful. I am an active member of society, and while binge-watching The Handmaid's Tale can provide much uncomfortable entertainment (my favorite kind), if it's the only thing in my day other than my face, it makes Leslie a dull girl.

And then she'll have to think about ways to write about it, preferably without referring to herself in the third-person.

Leave the Freak Out of It

           

           I’m a control-freak. I want control. I must have it. But does it mean I am abnormal? The term “freak” carries a stigma the way rice carries the color white. But what if my compelling need to be in control were simply another trait—as common as my brown hair or my pale skin? Or my tendency to laugh when others laugh? Why does the acknowledgement of a preference (being in control) trigger the socially unacceptable aspect (being a freak)? What if the two are mutually exclusive? What if the word “freak” is only a construct of a society taught to conform? And what if I release myself from the “freak”ishness and hold fast to the idea that order trumps chaos for me because of my life experiences and how I have learned to respond to those experiences? I would like to give myself permission to strive for order and let go of demeaning labels. It takes a lot to offend me, but they say the mind is a powerful thing, so come on, mind, move me towards organization gains.

            The truth is, clutter annoys the $*@% out of me. I know I’m not the only one who feels the suffocating effects of too much stuff. And I’m probably not the only one who had a messy childhood. Perhaps being the child of a parent with mental illness is what made me rely on the hope of harmony to survive. However, psychologists agree that our surroundings impact our emotional and mental health. So, if our surroundings are ugly, harsh, chaotic, and undesired, we may be at risk for ugly, harsh, chaotic, and undesired thoughts, including lack of motivation and productivity. I have many friends who tell me they can’t do thoughtful, meaningful work at home if clutter lines their counters because the mess is disruptive and distracting. To these friends, I say, “Thank you.” These people are my people. These people get me.

            So why, if clutter is so utterly annoying do I still have difficulty clearing it from my life? One would think that I would be clutter-free since I detest it so much. But I am so disorganized I can feel the millions of things—receipts and lip glosses and spare change and books and bills to file and God knows what else—jangling in the drawer of my mind.

            My aunt lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, and she had too many things. Her living room and bedroom walls were stacked ceiling-high with cardboard moving boxes filled with her belongings that didn’t fit in the hall cupboards, dresser drawers, kitchen cabinets, or closet. Her apartment was a living space and a storage unit. And she didn’t know the contents of those boxes. My mother had boxes, too. In fact, our belongings spent most of their lifetime in storage. We were in and out of places, living everywhere only temporarily. And my mom, it became more and more clear, had a mental illness that prevented her from holding down a job or a boyfriend or anything requiring responsibility and consistency, for that matter.

            And so I learned to equate boxes of stuff with mental illness. I despise boxes and belongings that have no home. And if I gave my boxes a great big heave-ho, discarding them without looking inside, I might never regret the decision. But. But! I have to look. I have to see everything because my belongings are all I have, and if I let them go, I destroy a part of who I am or who I was or who I might become if I put those belongings to good use.

            I’ve been thinking a lot about the current climate of America. Children are dying at the hands of unstable gunmen. That’s only one of the issues that keep me awake at night. It must be a sad, bereft, and lonely human being that turns a weapon of annihilation on his classmates. And where was the helpline, the support, the hope that might have held this person and his overwhelming boxes of stuff at bay? The factors that trigger these terrorists’ killing mechanisms are likely manifold, but certainly, these troubled individuals started collecting traumas from a very early age. And instead of finding courage in order, they unleashed their pain in a whirlwind of chaos that matched the disorder in their minds.

            I suspect my brain learned an aversion to piles of stuff and chaos when I was young. And my adult brain can’t unlearn it easily, especially since my young brain also learned to fill the void of lack. So my stuff now represents the fact that I am not poor or transient. I have bloomed where I was planted, and my belongings are a sign of all that I’ve attained, received, purchased, and appreciated. I regularly donate unwanted or unused items to the Goodwill. But I still have more than I need and more than I can use. Unless I have yet to understand the secret value of more than thirty bottles of nail polish sitting somewhere other than along the wall of a nail salon.

            Now, I am confronted with the possibility that this fear, this paralysis and clinging to material items with little or no value, must be a mental illness. Does the DSM have a chapter on hoarding? Yes. Am I a hoarder? No. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know, and this is what scares me. 

           “Freak” implies “aberration” or “oddity,” and it implies "crack," "snap," and "go crazy." I think we resorted to labeling at some point in order to discourage people from straying from the norm. Because if there is some element of undesirability or ugliness to our behaviors, we will rationally be deterred from performing those behaviors, right? But what if we don't have the strength of mind to alter our path of self-destruction? What if that road is as hard-wired as the need for sleep? Feeling out of control in some way or another isn’t as uncommon as we might think. 

            I encourage the disuse of the word “freak.” Am I a freak for having a hard time whittling down my belongings or for failing to keep order like the abused wife (played by Julia Roberts) in the thriller Sleeping with the Enemy. On some level, we all feel our mental disabilities knocking on the door of our own awareness. Everyone has a past that’s responsible for their present, and everyone works out their own issues at their own pace. I’m clearing out my home office so I can work more efficiently. I’m finding new homes for files and stacks of things I think I need. And I’m throwing out the messes that do me no good. I have faith that I can decide which is which. Because if I can’t, I may end up buried underneath it all. And buried girls have no use for painted nails.

            I’m too compassionate, I think, when I feel something akin to sympathy for those society likes to call “freaks” or “monsters.” Isn’t there another way? But when I hear that another gunman has lost his or her life as a result of their violence, I thank God. God is my people. He gets me. Or does He? A God that truly gets me wouldn’t have to sacrifice so many innocent lives. He is trying to tell us something. Are these killings just another attempt by the suffocating to discard the clutter? The world is loud, too loud. And for some, the only way to quiet the rage is to hit rock bottom. May we as a society try harder to catch each other before we get there.

           

Excerpt from My Memoir

When I Was Her Daughter:

A Memoir

by Leslie Ferguson

            A knock shook the door. I put my eye to the peephole, and my heart rocked.

            “Leslie, is that you?”

            I opened the door.

            Standing before me was this woman I used to know a very long time ago. I almost reached out to touch her because she might have been a bad dream, or a good one, or the surest indication of my fall from mental stability.   

            It had been more than ten years since I’d last seen her, more than twenty since she’d stood on the opposite side of a door that protected me from her.

            In my youth, I hoped for a scene like this where the person who loved me first in the world showed up for me, transformed into a rehabilitated survivor competent enough to seek me out and initiate a new world for us both—a world that might allow us to put our mutual pasts in a grave and start fresh.  

             “Hello?” I said.

            “Oh, Leslie,” she cried. “I thought I’d never find you.”

            A brown suitcase sat at her feet.

            “How did you get this address?”

            “Aren’t you going to invite me in?” She laughed. “After all these years?” Her voice rattled. She held one hand out towards me as if maybe she also doubted what was real.

             I opened the door wider and stood back to let her in. Could this be my chance to get closure? Or was I making a mistake? Should I move her back, shut the door in her face, call the cops? But what could it hurt? I should at least hear what she had to say.

            I hugged her. Why should I fear her? I was a complete adult now. And I’d had enough therapy to rehabilitate an institution full of broken souls. She couldn’t hurt me anymore. And by the looks of it, I was bigger and stronger; I could fight her off or run past her, out of the apartment, and to my car before she’d make it down the stairs after me. I scanned the counter for my keys just in case.

            “Have a seat,” I said and gestured to the couch. The sun hung low in the sky and sent warmth into the apartment through the slider. “I’ll make us some coffee.” Coffee always calmed me, and holding a mug gave me something to do with my hands—and it provided a buffer between me and her.

            “Ah,” she said as she plopped herself down. “What’s been going on all these years?” She asked the question so casually, anyone might have mistaken us for long-lost girlfriends.

            I gave vague statements about my credentials and victories. I sipped my coffee.

            “What about you?”

            “Oh, you know,” she said. 

            She blinked her ice-blue eyes at me.

            “I know William lives far, but I’m going to visit him. I just need to get the money.”

            I stared at her cheek, her mouth, her jaw, as it moved, shook, spoke such outdated and untimely things. I shook my head.

            She put her mouth on her mug and clamped her teeth down on the rim.

            “Maybe a phone call would be better,” I said.

            “You two will always be my babies.”

            “I know.” I cried the words. I grabbed some Kleenex. Her glossy, bright, blue, almond-shaped eyes flashed—how I used to love those eyes, used to see hope and laughter in them, when light flickered there. I used to see my birthstone in them, opal flecked with sparkle and the colors of the rainbow. But I also learned fear through my mother’s eyes.

            “I’m so sorry. I am. But things can never go back. Nobody can relive the past.”

            She rubbed her left side. I imagined she was relieving the pain from her gunshot wound over thirty years ago. I recalled the time she moved my fingers over her scar with a mother’s determination to teach her children about consequences.

            “Are you okay?”

            “No, Leslie. I haven’t been okay for a very long time.”

            I set my coffee mug on the table and moved closer to hug her. She cried into my hair.

            But that’s not how the story goes.

Stop the Clot

            An acquaintance of mine from college recently died. He had a blood clot and before anyone knew anything was wrong, it was too late, and he was gone. I hadn’t kept in touch with this friend over the years, but he was one friend away in closeness, and I always knew him to be a genuine, kind person. He had recently gotten engaged. He was in his early forties but his life was, in many ways, just beginning.

            His fate hits close to home for me because when I was 22, I developed a blood clot and before my doctor gave me the respect he should have given from the start, I’d identified that something was wrong. My foot and calf had been casted due to a broken metatarsal. I twisted my foot playing basketball a few weeks before college graduation, and the bone just snapped. my foot puffed up like a purple fish, and when I went to the emergency room for x-rays, the break was confirmed. While in my turquoise cast, I continued my daily activities, including my exercise routine in the small, sweaty gym on my university campus. I spent 30 minutes pedaling the wheels on the stationary bike, and I busted out bicep curls and leg extensions. Exercise was a part of my identity—I’d been a competitive athlete for a decade. I couldn’t have stopped working out if I’d wanted to. It was something my body needed, something it craved.

            And so it was with surprise and hesitation (I was so young, so healthy) that my doctor admitted I was right to have persisted. A Doppler of my leg showed I’d developed a blood clot that seemed to have begun in my left ankle before traveling up my leg to my groin. This explained the shocking swelling in my knee and thigh, as my flesh was spilling out over the top of my cast like dough rising in an oven. This explained the pain in my groin and difficulty lifting my leg to walk.

            I’d called my doctor’s office a half dozen times to explain my struggles and concern. Each time, a nurse reminded me to elevate and ice. Ice what, exactly, she didn’t know, since it was my foot that was broken, and the cast made access to the break impossible, and it was my leg from the knee up that suffered excruciating pain. But I was trying my best not to be hysterical or paranoid. And finally, something told me I needed to get mean. Maybe it was sheer instinct or a dream about my own death that crept back into my conscience telling me to demand attention. Maybe it was simply the fact that I’d been an athlete long enough to know all the usual bodily aches and pains and to know that this was something different.

            I was one of the lucky ones. I was diagnosed with DVT (deep vein thrombosis) and was admitted to the hospital. I stayed there a week, on bed rest, with instructions to move as little as possible, lest the clot break free and shoot to my lungs or my heart or my brain. I had an IV in my arm and through it dripped heparin, a liquid blood thinner. I was terrified. Since there was nothing that could be done—no surgery to correct the problem or remove the clot, no procedure to reverse the damage and guarantee vitality—I just had to wait. Every day, my mom drove an hour after work to be with me, nurse me, comfort me. My boyfriend didn’t visit once. My life and my health had seemingly taken a turn that showed me a truth that had lain, until then, beyond my sight. My body was injured—was there something else going on that could be explained by genetics? Having been adopted, I knew little to nothing about my father’s health history. And there had been no evidence that my mother’s health history included a clotting disorder. My ego was bruised—was this what needed to happen to finally show me my boyfriend’s shortcomings? I had long suspected and fought his lukewarm efforts, and now, it seemed, my eyes were wide open.

            But neither of these things was enough to kill me.

            And I was fortunate to be able to continue with this new knowledge. I discovered I had a genetic clotting disorder—one that surprisingly affects 25% of the population of descendants of Northern Europe. This is not a small percentage. And given what we know about the silent, deadly path of blood clots, why wouldn’t we educate people about them? Why wouldn’t our doctors encourage us to be tested for this mutation (and similar others) that can cause the blood to clot abnormally? If we know we are prone to spontaneous hyper clotting, we can prevent it with medication. And, especially in cases where the young are susceptible to the flaws in their heredity, why wouldn’t we want to let science and medicine help us live long, productive lives? 

             In my case, my doctor believed I’d developed a clot from the immobility cause by my injury and subsequent cast. A year later, after stopping the blood thinner, I developed another clot in the same leg. This, too, seemed to be triggered by bodily trauma. I had landed hard after a jump in a volleyball game. The symptoms and pain were familiar, so I wasted no time getting to the hospital. Again, I was admitted and given liquid blood thinners to recanalize the clot. And my mother did some research, even hired a private detective to find my biological father so she could understand how his medical history might have influenced my current disorder. A doctor at UCLA discovered that I have the Factor V Leiden mutation, and that I should continue with a course of blood thinners for the rest of my life. We considered alternate procedures, one of which included surgery to insert a stent in my vena cava through the femoral vein in my thigh. The thought of this bloody mess was hard to stomach, and there were possible complications and life-long considerations about what it would mean to have a piece of metal in my chest.

            Now, it’s been twenty years since that first blood clot. Three years ago, I got another one after a decision to go off the blood thinners, thinking that maybe, after all these years, my body may have healed itself. I had a new doctor and new hope. And after a three-hour dinner with a friend, my former symptoms started up again—tautness, swelling, and pain in my leg and groin. So I went to the hospital. And I was correct in my assumption. I have resigned myself to the truth. I am on blood thinners for life, for real this time, until our medical geniuses discover another treatment to keep me alive. The dangers of being on a blood thinner include internal bleeding, as from an ulcer or some other issue and bleeding out in the event of a car accident or some other extreme trauma. And there is no antidote to the medication I’m on—nothing to reverse the thinning of my blood. I am at greater risk of dying than all of my peers—except the ones who unknowingly have Factor V Leiden, a disorder that can kill if not discovered and treated. While it is true that most people with an inherited predisposition will never develop a blood clot, about 10% will.

            So, let’s not let what happened to my college friend happen to other young, otherwise healthy individuals. Let’s get the word out there that blood clots are something to fear and. If you have Northern European blood, you might not wake up tomorrow. This is not the first I’ve heard of an unnecessary death from an unexpected clot. Awareness saves lives. Please spread the word and talk to your hematologist. There’s a fine line between being paranoid and being proactive. One-hundred percent of the time, I’d rather risk judgment and live than keep quiet and die. It seems like a no-brainer, so now that you know what I know, what risk are you willing to take?

www.stoptheclot.org