Rabbit Poem for JK

Those are rabbit ears

Sticking straight up, like television antennae

From that pile of meat and intestine on the road

And that is a patch of brown fur

Soft like my sun-warmed cat on a bright morning.

That’s what happens.  One day your body is a miracle

Of function, a machine that turns food into

Ideas, a bundle of engines and pumps and converters connected

By neat rivers of blood carrying oxygen

To cells, which are also machines,

A trillion of them, pumping in symphony,

A masterpiece.

And then another day, it could be any day, just,

Bam, you get smashed

In the street.  One bad day,

Wrong risk taken. The car, the gun, the virus,

The overdose, the heart

That just stops. The perfect thing

Crushed into a mess of sticky unfixableness.

I think someone wrote a poem about this already.

I think someone wrote ten thousand poems

About this. It’s just so

Obvious.  But I can’t help sticking on it.

Blood on fur, organs collapsed, tiny perfect ears.

Do you think someone loved him? Did he have little rabbit

Cousins, who used to hop by his burrow

For some killer carrot cake? Did he use

His little rabbit paw to stamp tiny

Rabbit paintings into the soft mud by the hedge?

Did he ever smack that paw

Against a friend’s face, say, “You need

To get your life together, stop running

In the street, before you get

Yourself killed.”

Not bothering to mention how the other rabbits

Said the same about him, that he scared them

That he had darkness inside him, that he

Sought out drama, danger.  That he was weird.

That the brightness of his anger, the

Fierceness of his pain was easier to set aside

To deal with later, to forget.

When he disappeared, did they say,

“Oh, that’s so sad.  But hardly

Unexpected.”  Were they just a little

Relieved?

I know someone wrote a poem about this already.

I know they wrote a hundred thousand

Poems, but it sticks with me.  No point

Dwelling on it. But I can’t stop

Piecing this stinking garbage pile back

Into a rabbit, gathering the stomach

And intestines and spleen, stringing veins

Like tinsel, puzzling together bits

Of skull and brain.

And last, those ears, sticking

Straight up like antennae, tiny ears striped

Through with tiny veins, tiny blood cells

Carrying the unmeasurable love and suffering of the universe
From ear to brain to heart.

Blank

At a gym where I used to train, the senior students sit on the edge of the boxing ring, passively eying the throngs of regular students jumping rope.  Their gaze pans evenly across the room, never lingering on any one student for more than a second or two.  A regular person might acknowledge someone’s quick footwork as they jumped, might nod approvingly, might wince as a mistimed rope slapped sharply against the tops of the jumper’s bare feet.  But the senior students won’t do any of that.  It is a point of pride for them not to react to anything less than a foot flying towards their head, and even then, only with bored indifference, as though moving out of the way is a bit of a bother.

This is how martial arts people look: the blank face. I’m kind of a connoisseur of it.  I often find myself studying the still expressions of fighters on the side of the ring, training partners and classmates waiting for their friend to fight, teachers in the windows of karate schools, former high-school wrestlers.  They all have some form of it, a slackness of the facial muscles that normally would be showing engagement, interest, reaction.  

The blank face is what allows martial artists to recognize each other in public places.  They are the ones who don’t flinch when the waiter drops a tray of glasses to the floor, who brush past creepy drunk people blocking the sidewalk as though they haven’t quite noticed them, who quietly step out of the way of that guy trying to punch them in the bar, causing him to fly head-first into the wall, who return to their beer as if nothing had happened.

When I earned an English Ph.D., I was taught to have a cool nonchalance towards unfamiliar information.  “Doesn’t Zizek’s analysis of hegemony invalidate your argument?” someone would ask.  The trick was to stay calm, to redirect the question, to say something like, “Well, Zizek’s view of hegemony is useful but hardly an ontology,” to point your accuser to something like Foucault’s analysis of hegemony.  No one must ever know the shameful truth that your knowledge of Zizek was limited to one article about Lacanian psychoanalysis that you read and barely understood during a first-year theory seminar.*

This kind of bullshitting wasn’t an incidental skill one had to pick up to survive; it was an explicit part of our training.  I was told repeatedly by my professors, an insider secret not announced in a lecture but passed from mentor to student during private office visits: “You need to learn to speak on any topic, even if you know very little about it. That’s one of the main skills of an English Ph.D.”  Practicing this skill during oral exams, dissertation defenses, job talks is how students are conditioned to be scholars, unshakeable under the most obscure and unpredictable attacks.

Learning the blank face is something like that. No teacher gives a lesson in it, but they tell you again and again, as you grimace in pain or scowl in frustration: “Don’t react.” It’s partly for the same reason as the literary grandstanding, to avoid showing weakness to one’s opponent.  But mostly, the blank face is not for the purpose of deception. Rather, it’s a technique for staying in the present moment, which we must do when we fight.  A reaction prolongs and memorializes a moment that has already passed.  In a fight, you don’t have time to congratulate or chastise yourself, to gloat or get angry—everything moves too quickly.

Blankness also allows us to focus on a task rather than on the social exchange involved with that task. Normally we spend a lot of energy reacting to those around us, but this performance can actually prevent us from observing and absorbing information, as when we are so focused on our eye contact and firm handshake that we cannot remember the name of the person we’ve just been introduced to.  I used to nod at my teachers even when I didn’t understand the direction, until a teacher told me, “Don’t nod, just do what I say.”

Now I know all about the blank face, but I’m still not always good at it.  I might scowl or smile, depending on my mood, when my teacher tells the class to do something impossible like throw four minutes of roundhouse kicks or do a hundred pushups or lift a forty pound weight over my head.  Sometimes I become angry when I feel a larger sparring partner is using his size against me, and my anger shows.

I could work on not getting angry, at not caring whether I have to do something impossible, but I could also just work on not expressing those emotions on my face.  Just as smiling has been shown to make people feel happier, lack of facial expression can make us more inwardly stoic about our fate. If we can appear equally content to do whatever our instructor tells us, then perhaps we’ll learn to be equally content to do something fun like throw roundhouse kicks or something hard like do pushups or something boring like clean the wrestling mats or something scary like fight that guy over there.  And then, like the stoics, we might be equally content with whatever fate brings to us, sickness or health, companionship or solitude, life and death.

*Regarding the topic of Slavoj Zizek’s thought, Wikipedia warns: “This article may be too technical for most readers to understand.” 

The illustration depicts the blank faces of my three kickboxing teachers at the 2000 San Shou Nationals Tournament.

Hives

“Galaxy Glue, Galaxy Glue,
Life would go to pieces without Galaxy Glue.”
—The Incredible Shrinking Woman


The hives popped up on my toe first, a perfect circle of blisters. You’re allergic to tape, my doctor friend told me, which made sense. The toe had a large cut on the bottom of it, making it uncomfortable to walk and more uncomfortable to kickbox. I’d been taping it every day, with athletic tape, with band-aids, with scotch tape wrapped around the band-aids to hold them in place. Now my body was rebelling against the mystery adhesives I’d been casually strapping against my skin as though I had any idea what they were made of and whether it was bad for me.

I was relieved to hear it was an allergy. Easy, just stop taping it, I told myself. But avoiding tape didn’t seem to help. The hives spread, first to my hands, which they covered entirely so that I looked like I’d been burned. Then all over both of my feet. They were creeping up to my knees and elbows by the time I went to the doctor, who beat them back with two rounds of strong steroid pills.

Make a list of things you have been in contact with during the last forty-eight hours, the medical websites told me. Medicines, clothing, pets, foods. I remember Lily Tomlin in The Incredible Shrinking Woman, the housewife steeped in a cocktail of household chemical products—who could say which had caused her body to shrink away into nothing?

“It’s spreading internally,” the allergist told me. “And once your system is sensitized, anything will set it off. It’s like your body is set on a hair trigger.” And so anything did set it off: detergents, wool, leather, anything scratchy, the friction of a jujitsu gi against my hands. I became one of those allergic people who is scared of everything, who feels like the world is attacking her, though really it’s her own body that is staging the attack.

On good days, the hives lie low, waiting but not acting. They’re like the physical version of panic attacks—always there, threatening to flare up at any moment and ruin everything. Once my skin gets dry, I can feel them hiding on the palms of my hands, agitated little pores looking for a fight. And if I rub them the wrong way, if I touch something they don’t like, they jump to attention, rising up, daring me, just daring me to scratch them.

Scratching them is the worst thing you can do. That’s what allows them to reproduce, sending their little hivey spores through your entire body. Scratching the bumps on my feet will instantly raise the ones on my hands, the chemicals moving through my body at a speed that seems completely disconnected from anything I’ve ever learned about a bloodstream.

Once you start scratching them it’s impossible to stop—or rather, you don’t care if you stop, you don’t want to stop, because the scratching is like heroin and you don’t care who you have to rob or kill to get more. It’s that kind of itch that makes you remember why itch is a euphemism for horniness. Scratching it the best feeling in the world and horrible burning pain all at the same time.

One good thing I’ve learned about hives is that they can kill you, which makes it really easy to get a doctor’s appointment. Every time I told the appointment nurse what was wrong, her first question was, Is your throat swelling shut? Are you having trouble breathing? I learned to cut her off to save time.

“What is this appointment for?”
“I have hives.”
“Okay, ma’am, I need to ask you…”
“My throat isn’t swelling. I’m not having trouble breathing.”
“Great, thanks.”

“Contact dermatitis is serious stuff,” my doctor told me, shaking her head in sympathy over my mangled hands. “You need some pretty aggressive treatment to stop it.”

I wondered what would happen to me if I didn’t have medicine. Would I die of a something as seemingly benign as a skin rash? Or just live the rest of my life looking ever more like Freddy Krueger? What did people do hundreds of years ago, before they had steroids and cortisone? The answer of course, is that they mostly didn’t need them, because they didn’t go around strapping laboratory chemicals against their skin as though they had any idea what they were made from and whether it was bad for them. But when they did need laboratory chemicals, when the chemicals were the only thing that could save them from a deathly allergic reaction, they were out of luck.

Not Sleeping

“He hates wasting time—a category that includes, for him, sleeping.”

–Sam Anderson writing about James Franco

I once heard an interview with an Israeli artist who had just won an international award for her art and activism. She was also the mother of two young children.

“How do you find time to do everything?” the interviewer asked.

The woman laughed carelessly. “Oh, I don’t sleep very much,” she said, as though this fact were amusing. “Four hours a night or so.”

This glib treatment of sleep is part of the mythology of the superheroic, those people who seem to achieve more in a day than is humanly possible. It makes sense. If you want to sleep for eight hours, then you must fit your job, your hobbies and passions, your family and friends and love life, your exercising and cooking and eating and house cleaning and showering and brushing your teeth all into sixteen hours per day.

I am always overcome by guilt when I hear these superheroes boasting about their inhuman feats of wakefulness. That is why you can’t seem to balance work, writing, kickboxing, seeing your friends and family and cleaning your apartment, I scold myself. I’m sleeping too much.

Look at actor James Franco. He did four years of college in two years, attended four graduate programs at once while filming about five movies and publishing a book of short stories—none of this is an exaggeration. He thinks sleep is a waste of time. Just think of all the awesome things I could get done if wasn’t wasting all that time being unconscious.

For most of my life, I too considered sleep to be a waste of time, some need my body was trying to impose upon my mind, as though it didn’t realize that my mind had more important things to be doing. I pulled regular all-nighters starting in middle school, drinking endless cups of microwaved instant coffee, blasting cassette tapes to keep from getting too sleepy or too depressed as I lay awake studying on top of my unmade bedcovers.

In college, I used to haunt the recreation room of my co-op into the early hours of the morning with my textbooks and my electric word processor, writing the endless string of essays that were my lot as an English major. At 3 a.m. I would take a coffee break with the speed freaks and architecture students, the only people who stayed up later than me.

I knew it wasn’t good for me. I had a friend in college who somehow got eight hours of sleep every night, until he started hanging around with me and some other night-owls.

“I feel horrible,” he told me one day. We had stayed up until four studying for our morning classes. “I’ve never felt this depressed. I feel like the whole world is horrible and disgusting.”

“Oh, that’s just because you didn’t sleep enough,” I told him cheerfully. “I always feel like that.”

I remember how my professors never seemed able to comprehend how sleep deprived most of us were, especially in graduate school. After a night seminar, one professor asked us if we were going home to watch the same TV show that she was planning to watch.

Our jaws dropped in disbelief. She thinks we have time to watch TV?

“No, we have to study,” one of us said.

“What, now?” she asked in horror. “It’s nine-thirty!”

Another, crankier professor chastised us for our distraction during the last week of the semester, the week when we all had four twenty-page term papers due.

“What’s wrong with you people? It’s like you’re all on speed,” she said, in a stern voice, not a joking one. From the way she said it, it was clear she did not think this was an actual possibility.

Now I am the clueless professor, relatively well-slept and herding a flock of exhausted students of my own. Lots of the time they can barely keep their eyes open. They lay their heads down on the desk, lifting them only to send frantic text-messages and enjoy their breakfasts of candy and energy drinks.

If you ask them to make a time-management schedule of their week, you’ll see why they’re so tired. Their schedules are packed from morning to night each day. Lots of them work two jobs. These jobs might only total twenty or thirty hours a week—that seems to be a typical amount—but that’s enough to suck up every available hour that they could be studying. They go to school from nine to three, start work at four, get home at ten-thirty at night.

“When will you do your homework?” I ask them.

“At eleven,” they say.

“Do you think that’s actually going to happen?”

They smile grimly. “Probably not.”

Often it doesn’t, and they come to class with their work half-done. But for something important like an essay, they do stay up and work, and they come to my class angry, disgruntled, hating the world like I once did.

It’s my job to cheer these students up and get them to do things. I use my perkiest voice, trying to buoy the room with the helium of my enthusiasm.

Come on, wake up! It’s ten o’clock! That’s not even early!

This semester, though, I signed up to teach too many units. I have classes and meetings all day long. There seems to be enough time in a week to prepare for my classes or grade my papers but not both. I am back to the old student way of life, where there are twelve time-consuming things to do before Thursday and perhaps enough time to do three of them. I’ve been sleeping five or six hours on weeknights. In college, this would have been a good amount of sleep, above average. But now I have much lower tolerance for feeling horrible and hating the world, so it seems like pitifully little, especially as it adds up over the course of the week.

Now I remember what it feels like to be sleep deprived from too much work. It explains the flashes of resentment I see cross my students’ faces when I hand out their writing assignment, as though by giving them what they’re paying for—writing instruction—I am subjecting them to some horrifying injustice. They can’t help it. When someone asks you do to something impossible, it’s hard not to resent them just for a moment, even if you are ninety-five percent sure that you will eventually buck up and do the impossible thing.

These days I am just as resentful as they are. I hand their graded assignments back grudgingly and begin to ramble my way through the lesson I have been up planning since four in the morning. So what if I’m not explaining it very well; I only slept four hours. You can have me coherent and unprepared or prepared and incoherent—your choice. Okay, so I spelled a word wrong on your handout. I’m tired. I’m really, really tired. Screw you guys.

Part of my job is to uphold a system that causes our students to feel this way, not for just one bad semester but every semester. I feel guilty about this all the time.

“How can we expect them to sacrifice sleep and health when we’re not even willing to do it?” I ask one of my colleagues.

“They’re in college, we’re not,” she said. “We paid our dues when we were in college and now we have earned the right to get a full night’s sleep.”

It sounds like the simple logic of hazing, but it’s more than that. We really don’t think they’ll learn everything they need to know unless they have more work than is humanly possible to complete. That’s the logic of education: you need to cram in as much as possible, as much as can be done in eighteen or twenty hours of wakefulness. The future success of America rests on your shoulders, and every hour you sleep is time you could have spent working.

Good Pain/Bad Pain

“This doesn’t hurt,” says my yoga teacher, as we squirm our way into the forward-splits. “You know what hurts? Stepping on a thumbtack. No one ever steps on a thumbtack and says, hmm, interesting.”

He squishes the ball of his foot back and forth against the floorboards, a pensive look on his face.

“Hmm, yes. Maybe I’ll just push this a little further.” He grinds his foot hard into the floor.

“No one says that. If you step on a tack, you say, Ouch! Get this thing outta my foot! That’s how you can tell it’s pain. You want it to stop.”

Any yoga student needs to learn this lesson: the difference between pain and not pain.

But if you think it’s pain, doesn’t that make it pain, you might ask? Isn’t pain nothing more than a perception?

Okay, then, point taken. Any yoga student needs to learn the difference between good pain and bad pain. Good pain is the pain of breaking through things that bind you up and restrict your motion, bunchy muscles and scar tissue. Bad pain is the pain of injury, of debilitating yourself. Good pain makes you better. Bad pain makes you worse.

It’s similar to the difference between sorrow and depression. Sorrow is horrible pain that you don’t really want to go away. I just need this time to be sad, we say. I’m not ready to be cheered up yet. You’re sad about something, and you need the sadness to help you understand that something.

When you’re depressed, you would give anything to stop it, which is why it’s really cruel to tell depressed people to stop wallowing and pull themselves out of it. Your painful emotions aren’t helping you understand anything, because they’re illogical and disconnected from your experiences. It’s odd to even call them emotions or sadness, because those terms indicate a response to something in the world, and depression is a response to nothing. It’s bad pain, pain that tells you something is wrong, pain that is a sign of damage.

If we are too frightened of pain that hurts us, we may shy away from pain that helps us. Dropping your body weight onto your tight hamstrings feels horrible at first, like you are going to rip your muscle in two. This isn’t an irrational fear; stretch too far, too soon, and it might happen. But without pushing the limits of your physical comfort, you’ll never become more flexible and mobile. So you need to learn how to relax with the discomfort, and know when that discomfort crosses the line between helping pain and injuring pain.

As my yoga teacher talks about pain, I look over at a young, attractive South American woman who has worked her way into a pretty nice-looking split. She looks familiar, and then I remember: she used to come to my kickboxing school. For a few months, she was my frequent training partner, often the only other woman in the class. She had never done martial arts before, but she had an appealing enthusiasm for kicking and punching, throwing her full weight into her techniques and laughing happily as her fist smacked against the pads.

The only problem was, she fell in love with someone in the class. I could tell, because she began training with her hair down, her long, brown tresses slapping her face each time she threw a kick. Then one night, when she waved at me from across the room, I didn’t recognize her—she looked like a different girl, with a blanker face, a photoshopped version of herself. Upon closer inspection, it turned out she was wearing a full mask of evening makeup, her cheeks rouged, her eyes shadowed in deep, smoky gray. The next week, she showed up to a wrestling class wearing pearl earrings and a cashmere sweater that felt soft against my cheek as we took turns throwing each other onto the floor.

The day that the object of her affections rejected her advances, she stormed out of the school with the jaunty walk and forced smile of a woman who wouldn’t let a man get her down. “Goodbye!” she exclaimed to me and another student as she passed us, in a voice that held back tears.

The toughness of her exit—the exaggerated spring in her step, the grimness of the smile—made me hope that she would triumph over this pain, that she would be back the next day, or next week, to show her beloved that she was too proud to let him scare her out of a class that she seemed to be enjoying.

But she didn’t come back until a year later, only to repeat the same pattern: more makeup each night, tighter clothing, until two weeks later she left in a huff, this time for good. I never saw her again, until now, when she had appeared in my yoga class.

I could imagine why this girl didn’t want to continue attending a school with someone who had rejected her. I have dated people from my kickboxing school. When we broke up, it was painful to see them in class, to have my private unhappiness infiltrate the space where I usually escaped my problems. The awkward greetings at the beginning of class, watching my ex-boyfriend wrestle with a new female student, waving goodbye on the way out the door as he listened to a message on his cell phone—every interaction was like a sharp little punch in the stomach. But these punches were more like the splits than the thumbtack. They hurt for a minute, but then I got used to it, and really it wasn’t so bad.

Maybe that South American girl could have worked through the pain and continued training. But the very fact that she didn’t shows that martial arts wasn’t the right discipline for her, anyway. Learning to fight is all about expanding your notion of good pain to include things that would normally be seen as bad pain: getting punched in the face, kicked in the stomach, slammed on the floor. It turns out that that the boundaries between these types of pain are blurrier than you’d think. Good pain can cross over into bad when you get a little bruised, or bleed a little, or sprain your ankle. Or those things might be good pain, pain that strengthens us, depending on how much discomfort we are willing to accept. I consider black eyes and broken noses to be too much pain, but I’ve seen people I train with shake them off like a stubbed toe. Maybe a bruised ego or a bruised heart is too much pain to encounter several nights a week. It becomes a question of weighing damage against growth, judging how much you can stretch before you snap.

Going Off the Meds

The first time that I experienced panic attacks, I was seventeen, and I felt like I was living in a horror movie. I would be walking down the street in the middle of the day, when suddenly the light would go all funny. The ominous overture to Carl Orff's Carmina Burana would be playing faintly in the background, except I hadn’t heard Carmina Burana before except in scenes depicting hell in movies. The color of everything would be sickly and wrong and I would feel all the blood in my body drain to my feet, and there would be the presence of some sickly grotesque thing that defied the normal order of the world, some dark thing come from the other side to suck me under.

This feeling would overcome me every few minutes, hundreds of times each day, so that life was rather like creeping my way through the hotel in The Shining, or maybe one of those new homemade-looking horror movies whose advertisements celebrate how “disturbing” they are.

The therapist I saw took me to the psychiatrist to see if he would recommend medication. He shot a dismissive glance at my gaunt figure and tattered thrift-store clothing and said, “If this is still happening in six months, we’ll give you some antidepressants.”

Six months, I remember thinking in horror. If this is still happening in six months, I’ll be dead.

Six months later, the attacks weren’t gone, but through weekly therapy, I was learning to control them, so that I could usually anticipate them and stop them before they got really bad. I learned that I needed to get a full night’s sleep and eat reasonable meals and not wallow in stress or immerse myself in bizarre, alienating music and literature, frustrating lessons, but ones that I suppose my body thought it was high time for me to learn.

Other than sedatives, I don’t think anti-anxiety medication had been developed back then. If it was, I certainly wasn’t offered any. Since that time, I have had several other bad bouts of panic attacks, and I have never been offered any sort of medicine by the psychiatric and medical professionals with whom I have consulted.

From the stories that I’ve heard, that you’ve heard, too, I am an anomaly. Friends, books, TV shows, magazines all tell us that psychotropic drugs are dispensed like corn syrup, an efficient solution to our culture’s wealth of mental disorders that avoids the expense of psychological treatment while providing easy revenue to the drug companies. At times, I have felt cheated—why haven’t they offered me any of these “overprescribed” drugs? Am I not screwed up enough to warrant a healthy dose of that Prozac they’re debating in all the magazines, that Paxil and Zanex that they seem to be prescribing for everyone else I know?

I especially feel cheated when I think of that horribly suffering teenager I once was, and wonder: couldn’t they have given me something? Surely there must have been something, some sedative, some kind of valium or Quaalude or horse tranquilizer that could have calmed down my overactive brain, rather than leaving me to pull myself, with grasping bloody fingers and a year of therapy, up out of that horror movie and into some kind of sane, properly-ordered mental functioning.

On the other hand, when I watch the struggles of the many people I know who have been placed on medication, I feel like I got out easy, relieved and lucky to have not been pulled into a deeper kind of morass—the engulfing cycle of being on medication and getting off of it.

I’ve watched a lot of people try to go off of their medication, and from what I’ve seen, the process of going off of medication for mental illness will in itself make a person mentally ill. I’ve watched some of the closest people in my life shake and cry and wail that they need the medicine, with all the desperation of heroin addicts. I’ve watched people adjust the dosage—just a little more now, now a little less, cut down by half, and if you completely freak out, go back up by a quarter. One friend who struggled with her romantic life went to her primary care physician to get referred to a therapist, and instead got prescribed Prozac; a year later, her struggle was not to maintain a healthy relationship but to get off the Prozac.

Of course, one obvious explanation for the anguish caused by going off medication is that the medication is needed, and that it is the only thing that was preventing the suffering in the first place. Your brain is like any other organ, and if your brain is sick, you may require medicine for the rest of your life, just as you would if you suffered from thyroid or heart disease.

This may be the case for some mentally ill people, but as far as I understand, it is impossible to diagnose conclusively who they are. There is no physical test to diagnose mental illnesses; they are diagnosed by symptom. It is as though I went to the doctor complaining of fatigue and thirst and, based on those complaints, I was assumed to have diabetes and put on a regimen of insulin. If my symptoms abated in a few months, it might be difficult to tell if this was due to the insulin or something else altogether. The only way to tell would be for me to stop taking the insulin, and see if I felt sick again. Except, since my body is accustomed to the insulin, I may feel faint and ill when I stop taking it, and this could be a normal sign of withdrawal, or a deadly symptom of my now-untreated illness, and it may only be my death that provides a conclusive answer.

I don’t mean to insult psychiatry as an imprecise science. I have seen many people I care about treated with drugs that seem to have saved their lives, and I will always be an avid supporter of anybody’s right to stay on a medication that is preventing them from being miserable, numb, non-functional, or delusional. I know firsthand what mental illness can be, and if the path to my own health lay in a pill, I would take it without hesitation.

A few weeks ago, on the second anniversary of the death of David Foster Wallace, I heard several radio programs discussing his life, his writing, and his battle with depression. Wallace had done something that I have seen so many people I care about do: he reached a happy, stable time in his life, and, no longer suffering the symptoms of his depression, he decided to go off of the medicine that he had taken for years.

The people in my life have done this with varying levels of success. A few people I know have actually managed to go cold turkey, and found that the depression they experienced as young adults seemed to have dissipated with maturity. But more often, my friends and family members have found that their depression returned. They may be able to take lower doses of the antidepressants, but can’t seem to go off of them entirely.

David Foster Wallace’s version of this process sends a chill through anyone who takes antidepressants or cares about somebody who does: when he stopped taking his medication, his depression returned full-force, and when he returned to his medicine, it no longer worked, and he committed suicide.

It’s the fear of this very sort of dependence that leads so many people I know to want to get off medication. What if there is some disaster? I don’t want to be unable to function without medicine. Unlike diabetics and other people who have a diagnosable, physiological need for a medication, people with illnesses like anxiety and depression are never sure just how dependant they really are, nor are their doctors. It’s impossible to find out just how dependant you are on antidepressants without risking your life or your sanity.

Now when I watch people I know try to reduce or go off their medicine, I give grudging thanks to that judgmental psychiatrist who did not want to give me medication when I was a teenager. Without a chemical remedy, I had to figure out how to make my own mind healthy. I learned a lot of skills that I have used throughout stressful times in my life, even times when my panic attacks have returned almost as strongly as the first ones I experienced. I have never had to wonder whether I really need a medication, to feel the temptation to turn to it when times are difficult, to try to distinguish anxiety caused by needing medication from anxiety caused by withdrawing from medication. I don’t believe that everyone’s mental health problems can be solved without medicine, but I will be forever grateful to know that mine can, and to have the tools to do it.

The illustration depicts Berkeley's Hate Man. I don't know if he ever went on or off his meds.

Tantrums

I love a good tantrum. There are few things I find so adorable or intriguing than a two-year-old child standing in a line somewhere, at a grocery store or a bank, flying into a screaming, quivering mess of rage. This scene rates up there with a robin lovingly placing a twig into a nest or a spider methodically immobilizing a fruit-fly or a seven-pound Chihuahua trying to pick a fight with an indifferent golden retriever.

It’s one of those moments when we witness nature in all of its beautiful, brutal illogic, and we can really enjoy it because we are only, in this moment, spectators, no more responsible for quieting this unknown child than we are for rescuing a fly from a spider.

Childless people aren’t supposed to think that tantrums are cute. I’ve seen my friends bristle. Can’t they control their child, they sneer? I’d be happy to discipline your son for you, ma’am.

I think I might feel similar annoyance if it were my child, or some child I was responsible for, who was disturbing everyone’s tranquil day at the bank. But if it’s not my job to make the child be quiet, I can really enjoy the beauty of the tantrum, a display of unchecked emotion the likes of which adults pay good money to see in melodramatic tearjerker films and action movies, because we so rarely get to see such a thing in our normal adult lives, and when we do it’s usually not pleasant.

Bored, tired, hungry two-year-olds don’t just cry. They wail. They sob until they shake and hiccup. Their faces crumple in utter, inconsolable anguish.

As adults, the only time we cry like that is when somebody dies or when we have our hearts very badly broken. We never allow ourselves to wail in agony simply because we are tired, because we are hungry, because we feel needs beyond what is possible or plausible or even rational. We tell ourselves that such behavior is self-pitying, self-indulgent, babyish.

I used to have a rule, when I was a teenager, that I was not allowed to cry. It was a rule that I broke a lot at first, but with practice, I got pretty good at complying. I associated crying with self-pity, and I felt that it was very important not to ever feel sorry for myself. Self-pity was a foolish, self-indulgent, wasted emotion. Crying was a sign of weakness and defeat.

As an adult, self-pity has become one of my favorite emotions. I find it sweet and nostalgic, like looking at old photographs of that teenager who was so determined never to feel the emotion that has now ironically come to be equated with her.

Perhaps my love of self-pity comes from the fact that, the older I get, the more convinced I am that my emotions come from my body. You can’t really stop yourself from feeling angry when you are treated unjustly, even if you know your anger is counterproductive, or from grieving when someone dies, even if you know it was the right time for them to go, or from falling in love, even when you know it’s a bad idea. The more I pay attention to it, the more self-pity seems to spring from that same carnal, physical place, that same cocktail of chemicals in the brain and blood. When I notice it, it tends to be a good sign, an effect of pushing myself and of feeling things fully.

For example, when I am working out, self-pity is a sign that I am training hard enough, just to the edge of running myself completely into the ground. I stumble into my kickboxing class, exhausted from the other kickboxing class and the running and weightlifting that I just did, and I think, a thought that is not expressed in words but in some more primal, pre-verbal language: I can’t. I catch clichéd, melodramatic phrases floating through my head, like Morrissey lyrics playing in the back of my brain: Why do I have to do this? Why is my life so hard? I’m so, so tired. I don't think it's possible to be this tired.

Once I become aware of these thoughts, I smile in pleasure. They are like old friends, and I know it’s a privilege to get to be pushed to the place where I feel those things. Their illogic is part of their beauty, because our emotions are so often illogical, and that is what makes us bodies and not just minds. It’s only when we try to align our emotions with logic that we evoke all the bad connotations of self-pity: self-centeredness, self-righteousness, lack of generosity, blame. To enjoy self-pity, we need to accept that we have bodies and emotions that make us feel bad sometimes, and that there is no one at fault for those bad feelings; they’re just a crappy part of being alive.

I had lunch a while ago with my friend Samantha and her two-year-old son. He told her that he didn’t want to eat anything. She ordered him some fruit and yogurt, telling him that if he didn’t want to eat it, she and I would.

When the food came, Sunny sat staring at his beautiful bowl of creamy yogurt and plump, ripe berries.

“Are you going to eat any?” Samantha asked him after twenty minutes had passed and he still had not touched his food.

“No!” he said, shaking his head decisively.

“Not even one little bite?” Samantha asked, holding a tantalizing red raspberry under his nose.

He clamped his mouth tight and shook his head again.

“If you don’t want any, we’re going to eat it,” said Samantha. “Karin, do you want some fruit?”

I grabbed a giant blackberry out of the bowl and put it in my mouth. “Mmm, yummy,” I said, trying to persuade Sunny to share my enthusiasm.

Instead, his face erupted into a rictus of utter despair. Like thunder following lightning, it took just a moment for the uncontrollable sobbing to break.

“What’s wrong?” Samantha asked him, seeming honestly perplexed, as the couple behind her turned to stare. “Why are you crying?”

Sunny was weeping so forcefully that he could barely talk. “Because…now…I can’t have it all!” he wailed.

This illogic is what makes tantrums so beautiful. They express some fundamental part of the human condition, pure want, pure dissatisfaction. When I see children screaming in a store, often their parents aren’t even trying to reason with them or appease them or punish them, because the tantrum has taken on a life of its own, disconnected from its original cause. They aren’t crying because Mom won’t buy them a stuffed animal or a candy bar, or because they have to stand in a boring line instead of going to the park right now. They are crying because the void of want is so vast and gaping that it is impossible to fill. Two-year-olds are realizing, for the first time, that once we get to the point of lamenting that void, it is too late to fill it, and all that is left to do is scream.

Needles

The other day I watched my friend Samantha get a tattoo. She got to talking with the tattoo artist about his clients’ various bad reactions to the tattooing process.

“I had one lady scream so much I had to stop working on her,” he said, guiding what looked like a small electric drill over the lines he had drawn in ink on her arm. His own arms were fully encased with twisting patterns of red and black. “She just kept yelling, ‘Fuck! It hurts so much!’ I was like, sorry, we can’t do this anymore.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” said Samantha. “I’m an acupuncturist.”

“Oh,” he said knowingly. “So you use needles, too.”

“Yeah, and I have a lady just like that,” she said. “Every time she sees me, she says, ‘You are not going to stick a needle right there.’ And I say, ‘Oh yes I am.’ I have to fight her about it every time. It doesn’t seem worth all the trouble.”

“Oh, but I would be like that, too,” said the tattoo artist. “I hate needles.”

Of course we laughed at him.

“I know, it sounds silly,” he said. “My doctor always makes fun of me when I don’t want to get a shot. He says, don’t you work with needles all day long? And I say, yeah, but not hypodermic needles.” He shuddered a little at his own mention of them.

“Yeah, actually, I hate them too,” said Samantha.

“I hate how long they are,” the tattoo artist said. “And what I especially hate is when they put them in sideways and you can see the needle sliding around under your skin.”

It’s a very human thing to be scared of things that puncture our skin. Most of the shots that we get don’t hurt that much—not any more than banging our heads or stubbing our toes, things we don’t live in terror of—but we just don’t like the principle of having things stuck into our flesh, ruining the illusion that our bodies are permanent and coherent manifestations of our souls and not a bunch of malleable matter, just like everything else.

My cat was not scared of shots at all. Whenever she had to get a shot at the vet, I expected her to cry and protest as the needle was inserted, but she would just look slightly nonplussed; her more violent objections were reserved for the rectal thermometer. When I had to give her subcutaneous fluids at the end of her life, I was far more disconcerted by the needle than she was. She would sit calmly once she resigned herself to the fact that I wouldn’t let her move around, which was the only thing bothering her about the procedure.

When I have to get a shot, however, I anticipate it nervously all day. I had to have a tetanus booster a few months ago, and I was sure it was going to be excruciatingly painful. My previous tetanus shot was fourteen years earlier, when I cut my foot on the filthy driveway of my apartment building. The next morning, at the university clinic, the nurse chastised me for not having come in as soon as I cut myself. Then she reopened the wound on my foot and spent five minutes flushing it out with a hypodermic needle the size of a turkey baster.

Then she gave me the tetanus shot. And then she told me that I looked like I was going to faint, and wouldn’t let me leave until I had consumed a packet of saltines and a little can of juice.

Preparing for my recent tetanus shot, I tried to discount this memory—it couldn’t have been as painful as I remember. But when I told a few coworkers that I was going to the hospital for a tetanus shot, they all said, Oh, I hate that one. That one hurts a lot. They rubbed their upper arms and winced as they remembered.

I was pretty shaky by the time I got to the hospital.

“Why are you so bruised?” the nurse asked me as I pulled up my sleeve to expose my arm. I had several purple spots on my upper arm from being grabbed, and a large round bruise on my bicep where someone’s heel had landed as I tried to catch her side kick.

I was tempted to make a joke about my boyfriend beating me, but then I remembered that I was at a hospital. “That’s from kickboxing,” I said.

“Well, be careful,” said the nurse, rubbing alcohol on my upper arm.

“I don’t like needles,” I told him, as he prepared to stick one into my arm, hoping that he would distract me with some conversation.

“Yeah, nobody likes this shot” he said. I felt a prick on my arm, the smallest little pinch.

“That’s it,” he said. “Not so bad, right?”

“Wait,” he added. “Didn’t you just say you’re a kickboxer? And you’re scared of a little needle?” He started laughing.

I did feel pretty stupid, considering the shot didn’t hurt at all. But I feel better knowing that nobody likes shots, not even people who make their living sticking needles into people.

Well, that is, except for the people who like getting things stuck through their bodies: piercing enthusiasts, masochists, those people who get suspended by ropes through their muscles as a hobby. I assume they like having their bodies cut into for the same reason that most people don’t like it, for the same reason people want to go spelunking or climb up the sides of cliffs or fly in airplanes: because you’re really not supposed to.

Being Skinny

For the last few months, I have been having an experience that I gather would be envied by most adult Americans; I have been losing weight without trying to. A few small changes to my diet and exercise regimen have had the inordinate effect of causing me to drop about ten pounds, which is almost eight percent of my former body weight.

This weight loss has exposed me to something else that I wasn’t pursuing: unsolicited approval from casual acquaintances. This is especially true at one of my kickboxing schools, where I have been receiving a number of compliments.

A sweet but slightly unhinged middle-aged woman who takes every chance she gets to try to knock my head off with wide, looping haymaker punches appears behind me as I am warming up and pats me on the shoulder.

“You’ve lost a lot of weight,” she says, smiling, as I turn to face her.

“I suppose,” I mumble back, embarrassed at being complimented for this.

She smiles encouragingly at me. “You look good,” she adds, before heading off to grab a jump rope.

A friendly young kickboxer stops me on my way out of the gym. “You’ve really slimmed down,” he says.

I nod and shrug, not sure how else to respond.

“You’re not psyched about it?” he asks me.

“I wasn’t really trying to lose weight,” I reply.

Now he looks unsure of how to respond. We are clearly speaking different languages.

“Well, you look really fit,” he says finally.

This is a compliment that I can comfortably, even happily accept. “Thanks,” I say.

Of course, I have to appreciate their desire to say nice things about my physique; still, a part of me is tempted to respond with snotty answers:

I just got over pneumonia.
I have cancer.
I have an eating disorder.

After all, it seems to me a bold assumption that a person who has lost weight a) did so intentionally, b) did so in a healthy fashion, and c) is happy about it.

I’ve never felt good about being complimented on my weight, and I don’t compliment other people on theirs. Weight is bound to fluctuate, so the backhanded compliment is always implied: you look good now, but when you gain that weight back you won’t look as good.

The praise that I have been getting communicates to me that I needed to lose weight, which I don’t believe I did. Ten pounds ago, I was far from overweight; I was what most people would call thin, curvy, and athletic in build. I ate an extremely healthy and light diet, my weight was smack-dab in the middle of the “normal” BMI range, and I trained vigorously about fifteen hours per week.

I wasn’t trying to lose weight, nor have I ever tried to lose a significant amount of weight as an adult. The changes in diet and exercise were just to increase my fitness level, adding daily pull-ups, increasing my running speed, cutting some starch out of my diet. These were all things that I have done in the past, for limited periods of time; but for reasons I am not totally sure about, right now seems to have been the perfect time for these changes to stick. I can understand that I look fitter at this weight, but I resent the implicit suggestion that I was significantly less fit, or really less acceptable in any way, at my previous weight.

Perhaps the greatest reason I am not “psyched” is because I don’t feel that I necessarily look better at a lower weight. I have been enjoying looking more muscular and less soft, but I’m not sure this look is what I’d call attractive, at least not in any feminine sort of way. I associate my own skinniness with hard work, self-discipline, and a certain level of deprivation. Ever since I was a teenager, I have noticed that I am sexually validated for being skinny, yet I feel more ascetic and disembodied at my lowest weight. My figure is too spare to be sexy--my chest and hips are smaller, and my clothing floats around me like it's on a clothes hanger.

When I think of the woman and men I find attractive, they generally have a decent portion of body fat covering their nice, limber, hard-earned muscles. Sexuality seems like it should be associated with appetite, with indulgence, not with plain beans and steamed kale.

A friend of mine wrote an article once discussing women’s feelings of inadequacy when they compare themselves to models in fashion magazines. She urged women to think of these “perfect” models as objects of attraction, and to ask themselves: Am I attracted to this skinny, fashionable, painted woman? If not, what kind of women am I attracted to?

My own answer was easy: strong women, physically and mentally, smart women, creative women, women with wicked, clever facial expressions, brave women, women who are as wonderful with a BMI of 27 as they are with a BMI of 18.5.
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Thanks to Sondra Gates for letting me use the drawing of She-Hulk, which she purchased at an auction benefitting breast cancer research. I was especially excited to learn where she got the drawing, since one of my favorite strong, brave, and creative women is currently undergoing treatment for breast cancer, and yet somehow manages to throw crazy scary hooks and roundhouse kicks every week.

Sex Writing

Note: If you have been reading this blog to your small child before bed, you might want to skip this post.

Recently I’ve been enjoying a column about bondage and discipline (otherwise known as BDSM, which stands for some slightly convoluted and contested mash-up of bondage and discipline, dominant and submissive, and sadism and masochism), written by a dominatrix called Mistress Matisse. I found the column through the website of my personal guru, Dan Savage.

I have always enjoyed reading about sexuality, and it has often dawned on me (usually because my friends tend to point it out) that this interest seems incongruous with other parts of my life.

This is what they’re getting at: I am the kind of person whose frequency of having sex correlates directly to me dating or being in a relationship with somebody. And I often go years without dating or being in a relationship. You can finish the syllogism yourself.

So why do I like reading about sexuality so much, when so often the information is not immediately applicable to my life? It’s not because it’s arousing—a lot of writing about sex is strikingly un-sexy, involving a lot of technical details, tips about technique, philosophical discussions of various kinks that the reader may find distinctly not to his or her taste.

The thing I enjoy about sex writing is that it deals with the philosophy of how our bodies interact with our psyches. Sexuality is like food or illness or disability or athletics. It’s difficult to integrate the biological realities of our body with our sense of ourselves as social and intellectual beings.

This conflict between physical and social self is one of my favorite subjects to think about, and sexuality is one of the most entertaining venues through which to consider it. A lot of what is written about sexuality applies to how we understand our own identities. For example, in his advice column, Dan Savage responds to a reader who describes himself as “slightly homophobic,” and who was therefore horrified to have engaged in sexual acts with a male friend during an ecstasy-fueled party that turned into an orgy. Dan Savage responds:

“Studies have shown that homophobia, slight or otherwise, correlates neatly with homosexual urges. Why? Because a guy who has 98.2% hetero desires and just 1.8% heterosexual will, to protect himself from his homosexual urges, cultivate a slight case of homophobia. This slight case of homophobia serves to reassure the 98.2% straight guy that he’s really 100% straight.”

This response, while well-phrased, is common wisdom, but in combination with the question that elicited it, it’s fascinating. The reader is distraught because he committed a number of sexual acts that didn’t fit with his sense of self. Instead of viewing the situation factually—I had a sexual experience with a man; therefore, it seems that, occasionally and under very specialized circumstances, I am attracted to men—his response is mortification, thinking that he has gone crazy and made a horrible mistake.

Savage’s response begs the question: why would somebody who is 98.2% straight need to convince himself that he is 100% straight? I think, among other reasons (like living in a homophobic society), that this points to fear about fluidity of our identities. We spend a lot of time and energy constructing consistent personae, and we often stake quite a bit on those personae: our relationships, our friendships, our jobs, our status. If a straight man is a little bit gay, or a masculine man is a little bit womanly, he feels his sense of who he is, what he likes, what he represents is threatened.

Even if we don’t live in terror of having our sexual or gender identities disturbed, we are scared of losing our identities in other way, often for good reason. A momentary lapse of identity could cost us our jobs—for example, if we decide to forget our identity as employee and scream at our boss. For some people, it could cost us our lives, such as if an otherwise brave and resourceful soldier has a lapse in those qualities.

At the same time, Savage’s response also alludes to how limiting it is to not have any flexibility in one’s identity. Having a rigid identity means that we cannot be empathetic, because we cannot find some part of ourselves that is different from our overriding identities. If I cannot accept the possibility that I have parts of myself that are gay or straight or male or female, how can I understand those who are gay or straight or male or female? How can I understand those who do not fit into these categories so neatly?

I have particularly enjoyed reading Mistress Matisse’s column because of the connection it draws to life beyond the bedroom, the dungeon, or the Folsom Street Fair. And not just because of the ways that we are dominant or submissive in our regular lives, which is a common explanation of how BDSM connects to non-erotic life. What I like about her column, and about much writing about BDSM is that it focuses so explicitly on the physical realities of sexuality, and, by extension, the physical realities of having a body and being human.

Most people presumably have sex assuming or hoping that it will be exciting—i.e. sexy—but BDSM practitioners work actively at creating that excitement. People who are into BDSM have to plan their erotic encounters carefully. They have to buy special equipment and learn techniques for causing intense sensations (a.k.a. pain).

This leads them to think a lot about how bodies work. For example, Mistress Matisse wrote the following (in her personal blog, not her column) about her first time inserting her fist into a man’s rectum:

“It’s tremendously intimate, too. I could feel his heart beating. It’s sort of amazing to feel that and think, Well, yeah - your hand isn’t that far away from it!”

In this situation, Matisse isn’t just having a sexual encounter, but learning more about the capacities of our bodies, and how our bodies and psyches react to extreme circumstances. I don’t foresee a situation in which I will need much of the practical information in this blog post, and yet I learned a lot from it, not the least of which was what it feels like to have your hand fully inside of another person’s body—and isn’t that something worth learning about?

Love, Magic, Logic

“I was reading this thing about love,” said a teenaged girl sitting behind me on a couch in the tea shop. She was telling her friend about a recent break-up, trying to get some perspective and make herself feel better. “It was about how you can’t go looking for love, that love is more a force that just comes into your life through different portals, through your own process of self-discovery.”

“That’s so right,” said her friend.

Their conversation reminded me of an anthropology lecture I watched recently about people who have schizotypal disorder, which is a mild version of schizophrenia. According to the anthropologist, people with this disorder are prone to metamagical thinking. This term, as he explained it, really just meant magical thinking, belief in the reality of unreal things: ghosts, angels, demons, gods, unseen forces, metaphysical realities.

Of course, as the anthropologist acknowledged, you don’t need to be schizotypal to engage in some form of magical thinking. Many of us believe in unprovable phenomena; it’s just that people with healthy brains secretly know that our beliefs are delusional, while the schizos really believe in them.

As humans, when we can’t understand some aspect of our own nature and the nature of the world we live in, we can search for meaning in one of at least two ways: through logical reasoning or through metaphysical beliefs. Logic is sort of agreeable in that it provides provable answers, reproducible outcomes. But since these conclusions can only be based on empirical evidence, they are not very emotionally satisfying.

In other words, the bare facts, what we can prove, can be pretty depressing. The facts about falling in love will tell that girl on the couch that her happiness is contingent on other people and that she can’t control those people. Those people will hurt her, leave her, betray her, or, failing all of that, eventually die, unless she dies first. So she wants to find answers that draw from what she can’t prove: imaginary answers to make her feel better about the grimness of the real. Love is a force; it comes into our lives through portals.

Much of our magical thinking stems from the classical flaw in logic, post hoc ergo propter hoc, after-this-therefore-because-of this. That’s how our superstitions work: “I broke a mirror yesterday and today I got in a car accident; therefore breaking the mirror caused my car accident.”

A lot of magical thinking follows this model:

Five hundred people performed transcendental meditation to end the Vietnam War; two weeks later, U.S. troops began to pull out.

I prayed to Jesus, and he cured my son’s Leukemia.

With this type of thinking, two known facts (I prayed, my son was healed) are connected in an illogical way (my prayer healed my son). But sometimes, our magical thinking is not based on any known facts at all:

We will be rewarded for our good deeds in a future life.

There is a god, and everything happens according to his plan.

Likewise, when we think about love, our magical thinking can follow a post-hoc model of reasoning, where we connect unconnected events:

Someone I know met the person of her dreams after she stopped looking; therefore I must stop looking.

Someone I knew met the person of her dreams after she decided to suck it up and try internet dating; therefore I should try internet dating.

But a lot of what we think is based on absolutely no evidence at all:

If we put it out to the universe that we are looking for love in our lives, the universe will send us what we need.

I will meet somebody when it’s the right time.

All of this reasoning is flawed, but there’s no better way to think about it. As with all the other types of pain that accompany the paradox of being both a mind and a body—death, hunger, illness, loneliness, longing—the cold, bare logic of love is too depressing to view objectively. We need make-believe stories to make us feel okay about our physical drive to mate with other people. No one wants to receive the Hallmark card that tells us the proven facts:

You cannot control whether somebody loves you.
Even if you work your hardest at making your relationship a success,
your partner could leave you, cheat on you, or abuse you.
Even if you have the most wonderful relationship in the world,
your partner could die. Therefore,
it would be prudent to prepare to be alone.
Happy Valentines Day!

It’s just like how we don’t want to tell ourselves: we need to eat other living things to survive, and we need to kill them brutally, and even if we don’t kill animals brutally, they will kill each other brutally; these are the facts of the world. People we love get diseases and get hit by cars and die and the only causal logic to explain it is, “We are mortal, and bad things happen.”

My sister the psychologist once told me that the schizophrenics she worked with didn’t want to take their medicine. “They love their hallucinations,” she told me. “They feel exciting and important.”

We need our delusions, because the facts make sense, but it is a depressing, empty, meaningless kind of sense. We need to believe that there is an order to all this, a meaning, that it is connected by some causal logic. There’s someone out there for me, we tell ourselves. It will happen when the time is right. It’s meant to be.

Thanks Brain for the lecture recommendation.