“So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know what work they are accomplishing within you?” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Change of Plan

Of the blog posts I’ve published so far this feels like the most fragmentary one. I haven’t overprepared it, let it rest or ripen. I’m setting down my bare thoughts and feelings in real time, still in the thick of things.

I think it started mid-2019. On a Saturday in May, I barely made it home from the grocery store. The pain grew paralyzing, escalating. I couldn’t understand it. I had back-to-back panic attacks. It wouldn’t stop. My sister and her fiancé drove me to the hospital in the middle of the night. It turns out I had an internal hemorrhage due to a ruptured ovarian cyst. In some cases, you have to undergo an oophorectomy. In rare cases, the bleeding is such that you can die. Luckily, neither of these scenarios happened.

Back to my apartment after a few days, seeing everything as it was before the hospitalization, I burst into tears. The convalescence was hardly relaxing: not only was my body still aching, but I worried about having another panic attack, whenever I’d have that choking feeling again or hear my heart beating real fast in my ear. Also, reminders both tangible (the blood stain under the bandage on my wrist and red wounds on my chest from the medical tests) and in the form of memories (my collapse in the hallway, my hyperventilating, the kind of auditory hallucinations, the cries of pain) made it impossible for me to forget this trauma.

A few months later, as we were strolling home, my dog and I escaped disaster by a hair’s breadth – a meter to be exact. Someone threw a heavy glass table from their balcony just like that, oblivious to passers-by. The last lines from Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me” come to mind: “everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.”

In a sense, not dying was perhaps my biggest accomplishment that year. Little did I know 2020 too would revolve around survival.

Because of the global pandemic, we all had to change our expectations and the plans we’d made at the dawn of 2020. Each of us has had to survive something at one point or another in our lives – losses, disease, hostility, our own destructive thought patterns, what have you. This unprecedented year has most clearly brought its share of difficulties. Some of us have lost loved ones to COVID-19, some have been forced into under- or unemployment, others have fallen ill, yet others have had to deal with all of the above. This health crisis has led us all to introspect and to reinvent ourselves in the face of glaring uncertainty. It has made us realize how quickly things fall apart and how long it takes to recover.

Foggy Mind

We’re about to spend the fourth season of the year under the yoke of the coronavirus. What I’d like to touch upon here though is the internal seasons we go through – the physical, emotional, and mental variations less visible to the casual onlooker yet capable of turning our whole world upside down.

Hormonal imbalance can occur after a pregnancy, for instance, or after any fluctuation, and it can affect your digestive health and all it’s connected with. Sure enough, the health issues that appeared last year coincided with the beginning of another ailment. Beside the abdominal pain and other symptoms, brain fog was quite a challenge.

From the age of 7 until the age of 16, I learned ballet. I was a decent enough ballerina, receiving grades above 80%, coming close to 90% once or twice – a young amateur taking it all too seriously. In my mid-twenties, I took up dancing again for about a year. Yet for many years now, I haven’t practiced it – unless the occasional at-home barre workout counts. I’m rusty: my posture is not what it used to be, and I’d rather not even try to do a split!

We had the same teacher throughout most of that time period in my childhood and adolescence. I found him admirable. Yet having to face a big mirror twice a week and having someone scrutinize your body and gestures can inhibit a growing girl. He would often tell us to pull our stomachs in, watch the way we hold our heads, and the like. One thing he’d say in particular I have carried with me to this day: “Don’t show you struggle. The audience has to think it’s effortless.”

I got used to putting on a front, as it were. But the truth is, our persisting in putting on a front can make us tell people we’re fine when we’re not, make us reluctant to ask for help, make us ignore the signs warning us that our bodies need our care.

If you asked for keywords to describe ballet dancing, I’d say: grace, flexibility, that old adage “practice makes perfect”, and self-discipline.

In high school, when we’d have to work in teams, more often than not, I’d insist on doing all the work. Once a girl lent me her workbook and I corrected all the mistakes in it. While I’m allergic to competition with others, I’ve been in fierce competition with myself for as long as I can remember.

At university, a good friend nicknamed me “Brainy.” I saw the compliment in that, and the sweet affection in her tease, but I was more than a neurotic student, a note-taker, a lecture attendee. Aren’t we all many things? One day I meant to explain to a classmate I wasn’t academic. “Oh please,” he said as a joke, “there’s your picture next to the word ‘academic’ in the dictionary!”

I wanted to share with someone the thoughts running through my head (I have no idea what I’m doing, or why I feel so alone so often. I feel safe just before I go to sleep but hardly ever in the daytime, then you have no pillow to scream into or protective blanket to curl up under. I wish I were little again because people forgive children anything. When deep sadness washes over me, I wish I had never been born. I’m afraid no one will ever really, truly see me or understand me, much less fall and stay in love with me. My emotions feel too big to hold at times, but what if no one cares about those? …) Instead, I kept my nose in my books.

I received both my Bachelor’s and my Master’s degrees magna cum laude. It felt right for it validated what had become my identity somehow. Still, it left me feeling unprepared for the real, grown-up world and wondering, is that all there is to it? During my last university year, the Second Language Acquisition professor asked us one day the reasons for our presence here. A few of us suggested answers, all of which were good, she said. But she added we’re here also because of ourselves. I choked back tears: no-one thought of citing it as a factor.

So, when the brain fog came on, and I found myself battling cognitive dysfunction, forgetfulness, trouble focusing and getting anything done, it’s as if I no longer knew who I was. If I can’t rely on my brain anymore, what’s the purpose of my existence, I thought. Loving myself into healing was one of the hardest tasks the disciplinarian in me ever had to perform.

Too Much ‘It’s Normal’ Is Not Normal

I once talked to my sister about my sorrows and kept adding that it’s normal, that everyone has such bouts. She told me, “too much ‘it’s normal’ is not normal.” What she meant is, I was trying to convince myself that I was okay when I wasn’t. Instead of dealing with my pain, I was burying it, postponing the recovery.

Earlier this year I got help, and started psychotherapy because, besides utter demotivation and confusion, I had persistent low mood.  I later decided to go see a doctor as well, have been seeing a nutritionist since September and made mindfulness a habit.

I also read a book by Giulia Enders about an underrated organ: the gut. To my relief, I could finally connect the dots. This book is both funny and a wealth of information on the gut-brain axis among other things. I learnt that, when one has irritable bowel syndrome, for example, the brain-gut communication is dysfunctional, which can cause feelings of uneasiness or psychological pain.[1] We call our enteric nervous system our second brain as it provides the same chemical complexity as the brain’s. (Ender, p. 161) Not only does the gut have a substantial nervous system, but also it is the vastest sensory organ of the body. It’s an immense matrix that feels our inner life and works at the subconscious level. (Enders, pp. 166-167)

About 80 % of our immune system is located in our gut (Enders, p. 195), and 95% of our own production of serotonin takes place in the intestinal cells. That’s why it’s important that anyone suffering from anxiety or depressed mood keep in mind that an unhealthy gut can cause dark thoughts. (Enders, p. 180) And serotonin contributes not only to good mood but also to the feeling of satiety. Undiagnosed, a long-lasting fructose malabsorption can cause low mood. Studies have shown that glucose-fructose syrup inhibits some chemical messengers in charge of informing the brain that we’re full. Cravings and oversnacking could thus result from fructose malabsorption, especially if you note other symptoms, such as belly aches. (Enders, pp. 87-88)

Our bodies work hard at protecting us. When you think your body is trying to make your life harder, chances are it’s crying for help. All this time, I had been the uncooperative one: rather than work with my body, I had been working against it. Perhaps it seems to you the lockdown shrank the world, made it come to a halt for a while. Yet, as G. Enders suggests, when we happen to think nothing’s going on in our life, we just have to take a closer look: on us and within us, loads of fascinating things are happening. (Enders, p. 190)

Calm within the Storm

Did you know that, when the wind speeds of thunderstorms exceed 300 km/h, the calmest spot can be found at the very center of these strong tropical cyclones? It is said that s/he who looks at the landscape from this calm center will find great beauty.[2] This region of calm weather, light winds, and clear skies, where the barometric pressure is at its lowest, is called the eye of the storm.

We tend to hold on to the calm before the storm or think we have to wait until after the storm to find a semblance of peace. It wouldn’t occur to many of us to rest in the spot right in the middle of our inner and outer storms.

Yet, amid the chaos, turning inward can be salutary. At first, it can feel uncomfortable, even painful. When I told a close friend I’ve found myself weeping throughout a meditation, she said it has happened to her, too. According to self-compassion expert Kristin Neff, it isn’t unusual to find that your pain increases when you start practicing self-compassion: “We call this phenomena backdraft, a firefighting term that describes what happens when a door in a burning house is opened – oxygen goes in and flames rush out. A similar process can occur when we open the door of our hearts – love goes in and old pain comes out. […] ‘When we give ourselves unconditional love, we discover the conditions under which we were unloved.’”

We’re repeatedly told to be and to love ourselves, but how does one go about it? How are you supposed to love a self that has so often made you feel unlovable? What if you don’t feel at home in your own body?

At 15 I weighed a mere 35 kg at some point. It was never a goal. It happened because I was going through a rough patch and had lost all hunger for life. Perhaps my recent decision to take my mental and physical health in hand was, at first, yet another form of self-punitive behavior. I’d developed a complex about my tummy not being as flat as it used to be, about my now blemish-prone skin, this, that. I was set on reshaping my body and getting rid of my imperfections. I wanted to wear a pretty face, even though I didn’t feel pretty.

So many of us grew up believing that presentation and other people’s opinions are important and, to a certain extent, they are. Isn’t it sad though that what often prompts us to improve our own lives is the realization that others might think less of us, if we don’t? We tend to dread the answer to “what will people think?” when we’re not at our best, while giving little regard to whether we like who we’re becoming and are living true to ourselves.

As a health nut, I would educate myself, following well-meaning advice as well as health and wellness bloggers’ guidelines to the letter. My understanding of healthy living was, however, theoretical rather than intimate. Tailoring my approach to health and lowering the volume of all the other voices so I could hear my own has made all the difference. What is healthy for some can be unhealthy for you: if certain foods that most people have no trouble digesting trigger symptoms in you, then the most caring thing you can do for yourself is to avoid or cut down your consumption of such foods for now.

For some time, my body was like a rented place I felt ill at ease in. Then it became an inner cathedral of sorts where I could gather myself. As I moved forward on my healing journey, doing homework and using helpful tools (e.g. giving difficult emotions a shape, a color, observing where they’re lodging), I got more confident in my skin. My hair grew stronger, the mysterious hematomas on my belly disappeared as if by magic, people remarked on a glow and a twinkle in my eye. When you tend to yourself, what you receive in return is the stuff of miracles.  

I realized what I need to weather the storm is ever-present, even during a global pandemic, and it’s somewhat rudimentary: a chosen, restorative solitude – paper and a pen for reading/writing, and my self.

Together Apart

The concept of being together apart became especially relevant in 2020. Loneliness is, as Olivia Laing suggests in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, a “response to structural injustice.” The COVID-19 pandemic, or the way statespersons have managed the health crisis, has struck some as an injustice indeed, and loneliness, an emotion both personal and communal, has plagued a good many people.

And yet we aren’t always nice to ourselves and to others. Who in their right mind would willingly expose themselves to massive rejection, blatant snubs, strategic moves, body-shaming comments, and so forth? Billions of us in fact do that every day on social media. Social media can exacerbate loneliness, but an awful lot of people keep using them, perhaps because our yearning for self-expression and connection is stronger than our self-preservation instinct. “[Being lonely] feels like being hungry,” Laing writes in The Lonely City, “it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body.” Our longing to connect with fellow humans is thus not unlike a biological need.

We’re walking contradictions, aren’t we? We want to be like everybody else. At the same time, we want others to recognize our uniqueness and endearing quirks. When people try our patience, we get away from them only to realize we can’t live without them. Even the loners among us seek a nod of reassurance that they belong somewhere.

I find it soothing to hear someone having a quiet phone conversation while I’m drifting off to sleep. I’m used to having my room neighboring someone else’s, coming from a family of four kids and having lived in apartments. It feels safe to hear another’s voice, even if it’s a barely perceptible whisper. It’s as though an invisible thread were tying you to the rest of the world.

Together we are in a “temporary heaven that so often takes the countenance of hell.” Although emotional numbness might sound tempting when the reality feels hellish, Laing suggests that we stay alert and open “because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.” (Laing, 2016, as cited in Popova, 2016)[3] Those of you who’ve ever had to take antidepressants may relate to the feeling of missing the tears and the catharsis crying may provide. If you can, revel in feeling, for it means you are alive.

Paper Tigers

There are a whole lot of ways to try and prevent catastrophe from befalling us: double-locking our doors, checking appliances and water taps are off, rehearsing speeches in our heads, deciding to take an early train to an important appointment. Often though, things don’t run according to plan. Something we weren’t paying attention to catches us off guard. The speech doesn’t come out right, or you forget it. You miss that train and arrive at the meeting edgy, breathless, late.

In Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Martha Nussbaum quotes Seneca: “You will cease to fear if you cease to hope. Both belong to a mind that is in suspense.” She writes both emotions entail a strong attachment to uncertain outcomes, things outside our control. René Descartes also explores the dynamic relationship between fear and hope in The Passions of the Soul. Hope arises at the idea that something we want to have happen might happen. Fear stems from the idea that what we don’t want to have happen might happen, or that what we want to have happen might not.

Hope and fear are thus like unidentical twins. If we ceased to hope, we’d be rid of fear, but should we relinquish hope? “The Little Match Girl” is pretty dark, but it’s my favorite tale. In the flame of the matches she lights one after the other to warm herself, the little girl sees comforting visions. What strikes me is the ordinariness of the visions she indulges in as she’s about to draw her last breath, and the implication that she dies hopeful. Are the little things in life what sustains us for the most part? What if hopes – even false ones – helped us cope?

Maybe we’re wrong for wanting to keep fear at bay. That’s not to say we shouldn’t protect our house from thieves or make sure the stove isn’t burning itself out. I’m talking about another kind of fear in particular, the fears that stand in the way of your dreams. Aviator Amelia Earhart was quoted as saying, “The fears are paper tigers. […] You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.” Your fears might look like ferocious tigers baring their teeth but, if you take a closer look, you’ll realize they’re not as threatening as they appear to be.

In my darkest hours, I’ve imagined disappearing for good. The world at large would go on, unfazed, so what’s the use of hanging in there, I would think. Now I realize that considering our lives from a macro perspective can give us feelings of insignificance. In relation to the cosmos, we are indeed infinitesimal. Still, inside the big world, there’s a minuscule yet beautiful universe made up of your loved ones, and your impact on them matters. We’re not fools for dreaming big.

It’ll be one of those days again, and you’ll get the blues. You will waste time despite your good intentions and grand designs. If I’ve learned anything at all from the past few months, it’s that overdoing it only makes matters worse. As work piles up, adding items to your to-do list has you fall further behind. If your skin is overreacting to the dozens of products you’ve slathered it with, your best bet is to use one or two trusted, gentle cosmetics, and leave it at that. When everything seems to come down on us, it won’t help to keep pushing. On the contrary, I think we’re better off taking a step back for a bit.

It’s all about balance, isn’t it? Self-deprecation, for instance, is testimony to a certain humility and a healthy self-image, but self-flagellation holds destructive power. Perhaps that is part of the process of getting to know ourselves better: knowing the difference between the two and when things are becoming excessive. We’re in process most of our lives. The moment we reach a goal we’ve been working toward is exhilarating, but also fleeting – hence the importance of finding joy along the road.

When I created this website, I had no experience and a lot of naïveté. It was a steep learning curve. I enjoy maintaining a blog, the technicalities behind it less so. You take the good with the bad. I keep writing because having but one person tell you your words helped them in some way or touched them to the core brings a feeling like no other, and that’s worth all the efforts. You pour your heart into every tiny morsel that comes out, but it’s the end product that others see. It’s a bit of a leap of faith every time. Just like you can’t avoid the accidents of life, you can’t anticipate people’s responses to your work. You don’t even know if anyone is going to read your piece.

It might sound peculiar for this year has been limiting enough in many ways, but I want less: I want to make peace with the far-from-perfect, the scarce, the incomplete. I’ve come to accept that I’m not up to the challenge of writing must-read long articles. They may work if you’re a big name or an authority on the subject, but I’m neither of those. From now on I hope to write shorter posts and explore but one aspect of a given issue (we’ll see – I hope, and I’m scared). The more I research a topic, the more I realize how little I know about it. I can’t cover it all, even if I try. When adding information turns into a compulsion, writing starts to feel like an assignment, and it shows: one loses the reader together with a piece of their love for writing. I guess some answers we can’t find out by chasing them. Rather, they reveal themselves to us as we go along.

Christmas Trees

I was a first-year university student when I experienced romantic grief for the first time. It was Christmastime, the January exams around the corner. I remember feeling sick to my stomach, hyperventilate-crying and trembling. It hurt, in the way heartbreak does. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t the end of the world, that it was just the end of the world as I knew it.

My mother sat with my anguish, and the wise words she said have stayed with me ever since: “Sweetheart, if I could, I would see to it that you never suffer. But, you see, it’s like teaching a baby how to walk: you have to let go of her hand. Otherwise, the baby doesn’t know that it hurts to fall.” She had let me embark on my first-ever solo trip to another continent, possibly knowing that it’d be an initiatory journey full of formative moments of pure bliss and despair, as well as of memorable encounters and goodbyes.

As we get older, we learn that, whatever obstacles come our way, we can try to overcome – trying is half the battle, isn’t it? – and that, when we stumble along the way, we can pick ourselves up. We learn that, no matter how many times a heart gets broken, it doesn’t ever stop feeling.

I can weep over a careless word choice, a tone too harsh, a glance too stern. Raw emotions aren’t convenient but – though I’ve considered it a deep personal flaw many times in my life – I don’t want to lose my sensitivity. It makes me care about other people: the thought of causing anyone pain is painful to me. It causes me to feel sorry for Christmas trees – and entertain strange thoughts.

After Christmas, they’re lying on the sidewalk in all their fragile splendor. Some folding their thorny arms out of shame, others stretching them out as a last-ditch attempt to earn love. Within a short time frame, they’re uprooted, given pride of place in the living room, adorned, undressed, thrown out, stomped on. I suppose they were not happy to begin with, their cheerfulness an artifice. Can you experience pain if you’ve never known its opposite? Can you feel the pain of something that is supposed to feel none?

I once wrote to a friend I felt sorry for Christmas trees. He sent me this page. I was ecstatic! I couldn’t believe Brautigan – someone who died before I was even born – had felt this way, too! I love these lines in particular:

I saw a Christmas tree abandoned next to a fire hydrant. The tree had been stripped of its decorations and lay there sadly like a dead soldier after losing a battle. A week before it had been a kind of hero. Then I saw another Christmas tree with a car half-parked on it. […] The tree was certainly a long way from a child’s loving attention. […] Those sad and abandoned Christmas trees really got on my conscience. They had provided what they could for that assassinated Christmas and now they were just being tossed out to lie there in the streets like bums.

The narrator calls a friend at 1 a.m.: “‘I want you to photograph them just like dead soldiers,’ […] ‘Don’t touch or pose them. Just photograph them the way they fell.’” The friend agrees, and the rest I invite you to discover.

A quick-to-cry (and -laugh!) vulnerability can’t make for an easy life. It can, however, make for a beautiful life. If you notice beauty in subtleties and let yourself be taken with it, the smallest things can be life-enhancing.

Whatever your idea of merrymaking and however you decide to close this chapter – you may choose to give your all to the end-of year festivities, or you may choose not to – I wish you to enjoy the journey toward Christmas and away from it as much as the celebration itself.

“If I think behind me, I might break. / If I think forward, I lose now,” Joy Harjo writes in “Fall Song”. On today’s to-do list, I haven’t crossed off “lessive” yet. Then again, it’s December 20 – the day before the official start of winter and a unique bead on the “necklace of days.” I heard Joni Mitchell’s “River” the other day, and now I can’t get it out of my head. I feel like going for a walk with my headphones on – which I haven’t done in ages. Time is running out, so laundry can wait.

I will let sad music serenade my ears. Let the soles of my ankle boots kiss the earth still damp from yesterday’s rain, one step after the other. Drink in the glorious colors of fall before the season bows out, and makes way for winter.

Thank you for reading

With kindness and affection,

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[1] Giulia Enders, Le charme discret de l’intestin : Tout sur un organe mal aimé, trans. Isabelle Liber (Arles : Actes Sud, 2015), 170.

[2] Ilios Kotsou, Éloge de la lucidité : Se libérer des illusions qui empêchent d’être heureux (Paris : Robert Laffont, 2014), p. 161.

[3] Cited in Maria Popova, “The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone.” Brain Pickings. https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/07/11/the-lonely-city-olivia-laing/ (accessed December 20, 2020).