Media Gulch likes to cosplay as Rome:
And the Community Music Center as, I don’t even know, some kind of solarpunk Utopia:
Jules is making new friends, as is her wont:
Good coffee has made it to a sunny courtyard near my office in Palo Alto:
Alice and I share a fondness for sunbeams:
It’s my favorite time of the year, and I’m glad that it’s here.
Trauma can be shockingly sudden and obvious, or it can be subtle, ongoing, and difficult to name.
Instead of travel, I prefer to think of healing from trauma as growth, like a tree becoming taller and wider and more intricately itself every year.
You are not limited to one physical place like a tree, but you do have only one history. You can reach your roots into different parts of it and change how you perceive your history over time, finding pockets of nourishing compost in both your own and your ancestors’ stories.
Mirror neurons in our brains echo the expressions and body language of the people around us, recreating their emotions in our bodies. Our nervous systems automatically align with nearby nervous systems. This effect is strongest in infants and children and occurs in adults as well, especially sensitive ones. For example, if your mother was often anxious, you may struggle with unquenchable anxiety.
Shame is learned. As infants and small children, we expressed ourselves freely without worrying about what others thought. As we received negative responses from others, we learned to filter our behavior to be more acceptable in their eyes.
We want to banish our fiercest patterns, but we have to learn to live with them instead. When we name and study our experiences, we get clawed less when patterns recur. As they become tamer, we may even come to grudgingly appreciate them.
Bodies are usually delighted to reconnect and do not hold grudges.
1. I spent most of the week in Chicago, a city I love for no reason other than that J and I once spent a very happy weekend there. The light over the lake and the severely beautiful architecture always bring back how giddy I felt then, gazing at the Chagall stained glass in the Art Institute, laughing because we had both noticed that the lake sounds like the sea but doesn’t smell right.
2. Despite which, I barely slept the two nights I spent in my (stunning, lake-view) hotel room. By the second night, with my throat raw and my dreams shallow and repetitive, I realized I had caught J’s cold, which he in turn picked up from Julia. I sat through a presentation on Thursday morning with cerebrospinal fluid leaking out of my nose. The plane landing in SFO almost made the left side of my face collapse into a neutron star.
3. This morning when Claire made her customary plea to be allowed to stay home from school, for some reason I agreed, and I’m glad I did. By ten she was feverish. It was a gorgeous dry sunny San Francisco spring day, with all the nasturtiums and roses already in bloom, but the loveliness was largely wasted on us. We ventured out only briefly, for coffee and soup and cold medicine. Claire has spent most of the day asleep on the couch, I on my bed, attended by our faithful kitten doctors.
4. I tried several times to expand on my winter soldier post with a description of how 1980s Australian patriarchy worked, but remembering the microaggressions is painful, and trying to convey their emotional weight is difficult. Pinned down in words, they are dry and seem manageable. It is only the accumulation of hundreds and thousands of them over the years that buries and suffocates you in the end.
5. Turns out I would rather remember the micro-non-aggressions, the people who startled me by saying exactly the opposite of what I had come to expect them to say. Gregan saying Well you are a nice person, why wouldn’t I like you. Professor Brown saying You were one of the most highly qualified candidates, we are glad to have you. Alex saying That must have been difficult. Grant, most of all, saying lots of things I still cherish, but mostly just scooping me up into the sunshine of his solar system, showing me a way to be happy that I had never thought of before. Four cheers for non-toxic masculinity.
Moments, too, where I cried because the pain stopped; like the first time I heard Mary Lambert’s “She Keeps Me Warm” and read that Mary is an out lesbian Christian. Well, why not? This one is fresh in my mind because Skud mentioned the other day that she’d met a member of the Sydney Anglican liberal resistance, and I thought, what a glorious thing to be. But then I realized that I was always a member of the resistance, even when I didn’t know it.
I want so many things back that I can’t ever have, not only Mum and Dad but being young again and in a world so full of possibilities (the twilight sky above Dublin such a rich and light-filled blue, Bjork in her own before-time singing “I don’t know my future after this weekend, and I don’t want to.”) Most of all I wish I could have been in less distress so that I could have been kinder and more kickass. But I did make it out alive and here I am, with my cats and my children and my J, our sunny little village in the city, our found family, perspective, time to read and think and make sense of what happened so that maybe one day I can write about it without jumping all over the place like this, without having to glance quickly into it and then just as quickly look away.
Underlying the various forms of heartrending pain and diverse complaints with which they come to therapy is the same fundamental question—Shall I choose to die, or shall I choose to live? They come to therapy to help themselves answer that question, and I will get nowhere if I try to answer the question for them, or even delay its consideration. The rest of therapy never begins for a survivor of trauma until that ruthlessly basic question has been answered.
And is there something that makes it okay in the end? Is there something that makes it worth it, being so tired, going through all this?
…viewed in cold objectivity, we are shell-shocked as an entire species.
The goal, put simply, is to enable oneself to live substantially in the present. The task is life-affirming, and also a kind and generous thing to do for the people one loves.
…nothing defines unified personhood so solidly as the courage of strong commitment to personal responsibility.
So I did a podcast! I can’t bear the sound of my own voice but if you can, you may endure it here. I hasten to add that Sumana and Brendan are delightful and so are their voices. Like most of the people I know, they were bewildered by how completely I succumbed to Captain America fandom last summer, and wished to inquire further.
I’ve complained often, most recently in the context of Pym, about how never I or characters resembling me show up in fiction. This was a feature, not a bug, for many years. Books were windows, not mirrors. But representation is important, and eventually the lack of representation of genderqueer financiers who grew up on mining asteroids started to get to me.
Of course, when I eventually encountered myself in fiction, it was as a traumatized amnesiac supersoldier, so go figure. I mean that literally: I had to go and figure this out. It took me months to unpack why it was Bucky – and not even really MCU Bucky (lovely and brilliant as Seb Stan is) but the Bucky of chapter 2 of part 2 of Feather’s epic novel Your Blue Eyed Boys, Bucky sitting on a roof panicking because something good has happened, because he has made a human connection. (I misremembered in the podcast: this scene takes place after he hooks up with Steve.) What, exactly, about this did I recognize?
The full answer is beyond the scope of this blog but the short answer is trauma. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, a period that future rachaeologists may term my Nightmare Phase, I ran away all the time: I panicked, I fled, I lost my fucking shit. I did not know why. I thought I was just broken. Spoiler! I was, but not innately. I was a product of a society that had no better use for me than to try (and fail) to wipe my personality and shape me into a weapon.
Back then I did not have the names I have now for my child-abusing church or my rape factory of an undergraduate university. I fell for the cover story, which was that Australia was egalitarian and a worker’s paradise. It took me a long time to notice the blindingly fucking obvious, which is that Australia is ruled by cruel and complacent old money undertaking wholesale environmental destruction, and that every institution depends on the unpaid labor if not outright exploitation of women and people of colour.
This is the point at which Liz always likes to jump in and say, that’s not just Australia. Which is true. But my metal arm has the Southern Cross where Bucky’s has just one red star.
Anyway so, I have spent the last nine months or so reading up on why some people (Spoiler! Me.) have crippling anxiety and are hypervigilant and kind of agoraphobic and don’t know when they are hungry or tired or whether things hurt. Trauma is not the defining fact of my life by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a model with explanatory power, like how for example people lying to children about important things makes me feel dead inside.
Still, as Salome always reminds me, mine is a very mild case and even the things that happened to people I love were not the worst things, and have proved to be largely survivable. The only real gift of suffering is compassion, and I hope that the fucked-up things that happened will make me more patient, more empathetic, less apt to judge, more able and willing to listen.
The name winter soldier comes first from Thomas Paine’s These are the times that try men’s souls, and second from the investigations into war crimes in Vietnam, instigated by the veterans themselves. To be a winter soldier is to own the shitty things that you have done and to believe in a better world even when that seems impossible. In this sense, Steve is a winter soldier too. He’s the America I want to believe in: the supersoldier who remembers how it felt to be skinny, the superpower that remembers what it meant to be a colony. I am the mining asteroid and I am the weapon. But that’s not all I am.
‘Survival is an achievement’
‘Impairment and suffering that follow trauma do not preclude concurrently restorative and successful adjustment’
Appreciating and acknowledging survivors’ abilities, and developing programs from a strengths perspective, helps survivors change their self-perception. It encourages them to talk openly about their wounds, gain insight into how these wounds affect their present lives, and make a decision to heal them. This approach uses the resiliency of the human spirit to recover and heal from the most severe forms of dehumanization and degradation.
‘A sense of control over life and the ability to continue to make decisions, both long and short-term plans, are the best predictors of emotional well-being among older adults’
Old people should be grateful for affection. The sudden disturbing thought occurred to Vivian that no one had liked Nai Nai very much because she’d never submitted to being looked after.
“Yi Yi,” said Vivian. “She didn’t talk to you because in Nai Nai’s eyes you are perfect already.” As she said this, she realized it was true. Wei Yi — awkward, furious and objectionable in every way — was Nai Nai’s ideal grandchild. There was no need to monitor or reprimand such a perfect heir.
She put her soft hand on Ah Lee’s arm and stroked it. Love came up the arm and melted Ah Lee’s thorny teenaged heart.
While they are equally cute and dear to me, my cat Alice appears in pictures as an inkblot with eyes, whereas my cat Thimble is photogenic as hell. I’m just sayin’.
I get the impression my sister would prefer it if i did not have tragic song lyrics at the top of my blog for weeks at a time. So here are some pictures of Alviso Slough.
I drove over after a work thing to see if looking at a ghost town would have any effect on my profound grief for my father. And it did.
Alviso was a bustling port town until the Bay silted up and the wetlands reclaimed the fishermen’s houses and the cannery. Now ducks nest here, and coots turn upside down in the water, only ten minutes from the Superfund site that is Silicon Valley Ground Zero. It was rush hour, but there was some freakin’ insane birdsong going on.
Places like Alviso, and the Exclusion Zones around Chernobyl and Fukushima, are comforting to me. They remind me that even after everyone I know and all humans and even the mammals and birds are dead and gone, there will still be rocks and water and sky.
I still can’t really write about Dad (although as Mary wonderfully pointed out, he’s been a hero of this blog all along.) So I will write about my sister instead, shown here adoring ponehs.
She and I weren’t especially close growing up, which I get. There are six years between us, I was irksomely hero-worshippy and she had her own complex shit going on. I do still remember a note she wrote me when I was 19 and went to Tasmania for six weeks on an archaeological dig, saying: “I always knew you were going to have great adventures.” When I got accepted to Trinity she gave me a blue plaid Onkaparinga blanket to keep me warm in the Irish winters. It’s still my go-to for snuggling on the couch in San Francisco. I bought another like it to keep me warm in Barraba, and she has it on her bed when I’m not there.
But our timing was sort of perpetually off. Our lives diverged. She was pregnant when I came home from Dublin, and she had her babies while I got my first job, my first apartment and my first car. She moved to Brisbane around the time I moved to San Francisco and our parents set off in their Winnebago to live the nomad life. Our brother Alain shared her house and helped raise her kids while our brother Iain and I made the annual schlep to Burning Man.
When Mum and Dad settled in Barraba, Sarah packed up her whole family and moved there, with the tacit understanding that she would become their caregiver as they aged. Dad was diagnosed in January of 2013; Mum in August of 2013; Mum died in February 2014 and Dad, of course, four weeks ago. It’s been a brutal couple of years for all of us, but the burden fell disproportionately on her. She and I reverted, hard, to stereotype. I was the out-of-town career woman who flew in to deal with bureaucracy and demand answers from doctors. She was the one who dealt with everything else, day after day after long, crushing day.
She did it with such patience and strength, I can’t even tell you. Sarah was Mum’s best friend and constant companion. She maintained Dad safely in his home and independent long after anyone else thought it was possible to do so. Small wonder that even when he had forgotten the rest of us, Dad’s eyes still lit up whenever she walked into the room. It was her stubborn advocacy that earned them both a merciful death in palliative care with their pain humanely managed. Sarah alone was with both our parents when they took their last breaths.
I couldn’t have done it. I am awed by her unstinting love and grace throughout. Fortunately there are compensatory upsides to going through Hell side by side with another person. I was on the phone the other day laughing my head off, and afterwards Jeremy said: “Was that your sister? I thought you were talking to Salome.” Funnily enough I had said to Salome a few days earlier: “I used to call her because she was my sister. Now I call her because I want to talk to her.” And then I started to cry, but from happiness for a change (as well as because I cry at the drop of a hat these days.) It has all been a fucking ordeal, but Sarah has been magnificent. I’m so proud of her and grateful to know her.
And, as it happens, she is turning 50 today. Why don’t you all go do something awesome that she would do: tolerate a pesky little sibling, lift some weights, swim a kilometre, snorgle a kitteh, devour a book, teach a child to read, manage an art festival, play the ukulele, be an amazing friend, donate to cancer or dementia research. As for me I will raise a glass to the greatest woman I know. Happy birthday, Sarah.
“Sometimes holding all the blackness they feel is the only thing you can do. That’s not nothing. And sometimes it is enough.”
I question my intuition rigorously and routinely, but I rely upon it nonetheless.
Don’t just do something, stand there.
If I am to abide with these patients, then I must accompany them to that place among the rocks, to the sweating wall. I must face with them the uncertainty of what lies beyond. I must stand at the edge with them and peer over into the fathomless depths. If I tell my patients, as I do, that this life can be a tolerable one, that they can face their fears and their traumas, their visions and voices, their misery, then I must look at what I am asking them to endure and I must look at it full in the face.
How do we do it? How do we bear the unbearable realities of our human lives? Someday I will die and leave Deborah, and our son, and our daughter. Or someday each of them will die and leave me. How do we reckon with this inconceivable a loss?
I just had two weeks off work with the family and absolutely nothing planned, which hasn’t happened in about seven years. It was awesome. I found out what I’m like these days when I’m not working long hours, caregiving and/or stressed out of my goddamn mind.
Quite a lot more relaxed and funnier, it turns out. More patient with the kids. I ride as much as I can, go to the pool, go to yoga classes and museums, see films, eat panettone and peppermint bark, drink Bailey’s and New Zealand sauvignon blanc. I go to friend’s houses and I spend long afternoons at home, reading or messing around on Tumblr. I make much of my cats.
I’m bored out of my mind now and more than ready to get back to work on Monday. Solid result.
Me: trying to find the perfect version of o holy night, so far it’s a tie between sufjan stevens and tracy chapman
story of my life
Her: Oh no it’s not! It’s the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I listen twice a day. I sit quietly and cry. It’s sublime. Truly.
Me: fall on your knees, o hear the angel voices
is pretty much everything right now
Her: It’s funny you’d be listening to that. I mean, I’ve seriously been listening in silent meditation twice a day for about two weeks. And in my head I hear that line all day.
What are the odds, really?
Your competence gives you a secure sense of identity.
By age eighty-five, working memory and judgment are sufficiently impaired that 40 percent of us have textbook dementia.
More than half of the very old now live without a spouse and we have fewer children than ever before, yet we give virtually no thought to how we will live out our later years alone.
People with serious illness have priorities besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys find that their top concerns include avoiding suffering, strengthening relationships with family and friends, being mentally aware, not being a burden on others, and achieving a sense that their life is complete.
…those who saw a palliative care specialist stopped chemotherapy sooner, entered hospice far earlier, experienced less suffering at the end of their lives—and they lived 25 percent longer. In other words, our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality. If end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve…
The patient and the family opted for hospice. They had more than a month together before he died. Later, the father thanked the doctor. That last month, he said, the family simply focused on being together, and it proved to be the most meaningful time they’d ever spent.
No one ever really has control. Physics and biology and accident ultimately have their way in our lives. But the point is that we are not helpless either. Courage is the strength to recognize both realities. We have room to act, to shape our stories, though as time goes on it is within narrower and narrower confines.
I needed something from the world I didn’t know how to ask for. I needed people—Dave, a doctor, anyone—to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible.
The insistence upon an external agent of damage implies an imagining of the self as a unified entity, a collection of physical, mental, spiritual components all serving the good of some Gestalt whole—the being itself. When really, the self—at least, as I’ve experienced mine—is much more discordant and self-sabotaging, neither fully integrated nor consistently serving its own good.
“That’s so generous,” she said to me when I gave it to her—and of course I’d been hoping she would say that. I wanted to do nice things for everyone out of a sense of preemptive guilt
The great shame of your privilege is a hot blush the whole time. The truth of this place is infinite and irreducible, and self-reflexive anguish might feel like the only thing you can offer in return. It might be hard to hear anything above the clattering machinery of your guilt. Try to listen anyway.
A cry for attention is positioned as the ultimate crime, clutching or trivial—as if “attention” were inherently a selfish thing to want.
Just south of the Lions Park out of Manilla, NSW, someone has painted a bearded face on a tree.
It’s the first of eight such faces (that we know of), all taking advantage of the contours of the burls. The second one, named Toby by my nephew though it looks more like Gromit, is my favorite.
Before this trip to Barraba I tried to describe to myself the difference between my father’s town of a thousand souls and my own beloved city of San Francisco, population 800k but arguably way fewer souls. There are the giveaway jokes: Barraba used to have an asbestos mine, and just missed out on a new abattoir. In New York, everyone’s writing a novel; in LA, they’re working on a screenplay; in SF, they’re building an app.
That second joke gave me a clue. I love the density of narrative in cities, the plaques on London’s Georgian houses, the ghost of the railroad through the Mission, the undergrounded waterways. I thought for a while that Barraba is relatively empty of stories, until I remembered with a stab of sorrow that it used to be full of them, but that my ancestors tried to kill all the people that knew them.
Barraba is in Gamilaraay country. One story I do know is that of the Myall Creek Massacre.
I’ve spent enough time in Barraba to have made good friends and learned a little of their stories. Pam has a great one about her husband Ted riding across a flooded creek to be with her when she had a baby; she remembers the sight of him galloping up to the house, surrounded by a halo of flies. Jane’s family owns a property called Wiry, which I had assumed was an Aboriginal name. Turns out it was part of the land grants to returned soliders, and because it’s a relatively hilly and inaccessible property, the recipient grumbled “Wouldn’t it root ya.” More giveaway jokes.
Jane asked me flat out what all seven of you remaining blog readers have probably been wondering: “Are you neglecting the blog because the stuff you’re thinking about is too intense and sad?” Yup. But something really terrific has happened. A researcher has become interested in Dad’s blog, which was critical to his diagnosis of semantic dementia. We have 17 years’ worth of his written records as his condition developed – more than five times the length of the next longest case study. Joanna believes we can extract psycholinguistic markers of the changes to his vocabulary that may help scientists to develop more sensitive diagnostic tests.
As part of collating the material for Joanna, I read a few of Dad’s earliest blog entries. He had a decent line in giveaway jokes of his own:
Tue 10 Feb 1998
Got away late from Sydney. Lasted on the road until 6 o’clock at which time we found ourselves in Gunning, between Goulburn and Gundagai.
Gunning is a town of a thousand souls and very few outstanding features.
Death is the eater of meaning. It swallows up whole universes, erases stories from the landscape.
The work of grief is to make sense of loss. We have to make new narratives to mark the place of those that are gone.
We have to find the faces in the forest.
So we went to see what all the fuss was about.
The first night, we stayed at the Wawona.
The absolute highlight of which was this handsome fellow vogueing in the shrubbery.
Next morning, brunch at the Ahwahnee.
Then El Capitan, or as I like to call him, Steve.
We stormed around the Merced River for a bit, which was painfully scenic.
Then I don’t even know, a meadow and some rocks and stuff.
A waterfall of excruciating beauty.
Tea back at the Ahwahnee with a mama mule deer and her twin fawns.
Pinot grigio on our balcony at the Yosemite Lodge, with our own personal mountain.
And our own personal sunset.
Glacier Point on the way home, for one last overdose on grandeur.
Buh-bye rocks and stuff!
I guess I would characterize all the fuss as “not wholly unjustified”.
We chose the most beautiful morning imaginable.
Even @karlthefog had come out to Alcatraz.
The flock of kites in prison made me think of my Dad.
The Lego portraits made me think of playing with my brother as children.
Each portrait is of a prisoner of conscience.
I was ashamed at how few of the names I knew.
It’s a powerfully angry and compassionate body of work.
We are all one family.
I woke at dawn, beset by bird life: galahs, cockatoos, King parrots, rainbow lorikeets, magpies and currawongs all yelling their fool heads off just outside my window.
I’m staying with Jane. She and Darcy and the twins live in one of the lovely old Federation brick houses on the hill above the river. Her spare room is vast, with a high ceiling and a glowing wooden floor and nothing in it but a shelf and a bed, and it opens onto an east-facing verandah. It is so exactly the quiet refuge that I need that when I saw it I was struck dumb. No idea how I can ever thank Jane and her family.
Quiet, that is, except at dawn, with the birds.
I sat on the verandah and glared at the birds and called Jeremy as the sun rose. When Darcy and Jane came out for coffee their dog Chicken came too. She’s a Scottish staghound but she looks a little like the Anatolian shepherds I saw in Turkey and a little like a wolf. She’s bigger than I am. I cleared off the sofa I was sitting on and Chicken kissed me and put her arms around me and her hairy cheek against my face.
“She was bred as a pig dog,” Jane explained. “She could track the pigs and hold the pigs at bay, but she just didn’t want to kill them. They even gave her some piglets -”
“To tear apart?”
“Yeah that was the idea, but she played with them instead. When I heard that, I knew she was the dog for me.”
How do people get through this without animals? Sarah picked me up and I went to Henry Street to snuggle with the creatures there: four dogs (Jake, Peppa, Jess and Toby) and three cats (Oskie, Missy, Tiz). I always thought it would be me with the menagerie.
When we got to the hospital Mum demanded mahjongg. Big had forgotten the rules but not so much that he didn’t win the third game, after Sarah won the first and Mum won the second.
preoccupations
