Tag: Anxiety

A Writer’s Lament

This is my writer’s place of last resort. It is how I hope to find the way back to my voice. So I write.

I will write through a migraine.

I will write even though I do not know what I have to say.

I will write in spite of the toxic air outside my window.

I will write even though it seems as if the world has gone mad.

I will write knowing that people will believe anything if it suits what they already believe.

I will write even though I am afraid that this is the only place I will ever be read.

I will write at peak loneliness when I’ve been communicating nonstop from this little weird virtual island I call my desk.

I will write while asking myself is it worth it?

I will write even though it has all been said before.

I will write even if I don’t see anything changing for the better.

I will write when I may not have the skill or the insight or a goal.

I will write the evidence of my existence.

I will write a momentary spark, a word into the universe.

Because I know you’re out there writing too.

Or painting, or singing, or dancing.

I write because this word, with your dance and their song, is a counterweight to all that weighs on us.

Survival is bereft of meaning.

The meaning is ours to write, to yawp into the universe, in the hope that it echoes back to us.

You are not alone.

Hello my fellow humans. Feeling like absolute shit here. It’s okay. It was bound to happen. The struggle is real, but not insurmountable. I wanted to tell you that I am thinking of you. I am hoping that whatever challenges you are overcoming, swimming, drowning in, that you are not alone and that this is the time when we need to reach out to each other and say Hey, whatcha got goin’ on there? Drop me a note and tell me how you are dealing with floods, fires, viruses, all the other things humans have to deal with…

Here’s a little assessment I wrote on myself:

Anxieties: kid’s illness, menopausal miseries, failure to make progress as a writer, ambivalence about my MFA program, pandemic, wildfire smoke, drought, empty nesting next year.

Current joys: coffee and quiet time in the morning before everyone gets up, surprise cake from a friend, My Dad Wrote a Porno Podcast, Zoom conversations with friends, ripe cherries, naps.

Best Advice I’m Following at the Moment: Take frequent breaks from computer work – rest your eyes and get up and move.

What are your biggest worries?

What has given you great joy/comfort/laughter?

What’s your best advice at the moment for others?

Michelle at The Green Study29 Comments

It Takes a Worried Woman

The Green Study Blogcast: It Takes a Worried Woman

Administrative Notes: I’m learning how to make my blog more accessible and in pursuit of that, I’ll be including a recording at the top of each post. If  you’re a blogger, I’ve listed some resources at the end of this post that can help make your blog more accessible. Also, if you’re new to this blog, I can be profane and sacreligious on occasion. Today might be that day.

I’ve been walking shortly after sunrise about my neighborhood. With the snap of Minnesota cold in the air, I ritually prepare before leaving the house – lotion on my face and chapstick on my lips and layers of hoodie, windbreaker, hat, and gloves. The streets are nearly empty at this time, bringing to mind T.C. Boyle’s “After the Plague”, a post-apocalyptic story with few survivors. The high school parking lot, empty of posturing teenagers in their parents’ cars, is now a popular stopover for southern-bound geese and a raucous hangout for ring-billed gulls. There are always a few people out with their dogs. I have a mask stuffed in my pocket, but it’s pretty easy to cross the street, avoiding unwanted viral particles and awkward interaction. I’ve taken to giving a quick wave and a smile, social niceties streamlined and silent.

Flock of geese flying over bare tree.

The sun, orange and smooth, is climbing by the second, visible through bare tree branches. I settle into a comfortable pace, able to see that there is no one else for a good half mile. My mind disengages from its surroundings and I am in that place where stories emerge. Putting one foot in front of the other and drifting through a fog of random thoughts, I am briefly unworried.

I joke-not-joke about the nesting matryushka dolls of anxiety, one inside another, from one’s most interior worries to the world outside. Like a child dressed by an overprotective parent, the more layers, the less functional one becomes, until you are waddling about, useless and easily toppled. A lot of us talk these days about the paralysis  – the inability to think, write, read, sleep – feeling powerless and uninspired. I’d like to believe that I hit bottom and now I’m emerging from this crisis coma, but it’s more like I’m bouncing lightly across the baseline surface. Each bounce just a little bit higher and slower on the rebound. This is resiliency, a product of circumstance and rarely of character. Persistence and the art of having nowhere else to go.

As I slowly peel off the tentacles of media – the news that feeds on itself, the socialization that really isn’t, the onslaught of red flags and dog whistles and noise, noise, noise, I find two things waiting for me that had been lost: time and space. I sit and stare off more frequently, lost in a mindless meditation, a callback to childhood daydreaming. There is a space between wakefulness and sleep that gets lost in these agitated times, the place where the mind settles down and becomes whimsical, bemused for its own sake. The mental version of swinging on the front porch, hanging a fishing line off the dock, sipping a drink slowly, laying on your back in the grass watching clouds float overhead, staring out a bus window, flopping on the couch in silence making out weird shapes on the textured ceiling. These are times when we create space our minds need to become fanciful, solve a problem, give ourselves a break from whatever reality awaits us at the edges.

Great ideas come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps, then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirrings of life and hope. 

Albert Camus

I think of all the things I do to distract myself from the moment, how I fill every nook and cranny with music, bingewatching, busy-ness. What we do to escape our own thoughts and emotions is an Olympic sport unto itself. I began to ask myself about what I was trying to avoid. Perhaps it was my own imagination, working overtime in predicting logical outcomes of authoritarianism and climate destruction. Or thinking about what if my daughter’s chemo drug doesn’t work. Or the stress I feel when I think about the aging process that seems to be accelerating exponentially. Not to mention the very slim chance, despite our abundance of caution, that one of us gets hit by coronavirus. I’m avoiding fear and in doing so I’m generating corrosive and exhausting anxiety.

There’s a trick to it all and nobody I know likes it. Open the door wide to your fears. Look at them. Feel them. Exaggerate them. Give them their due. I’ve been practicing this, inevitably ending on Well, screw it, the world’s on fire, what am I going to do today? It’s a nihilistic mantra that unfreezes me from anxious paralysis. Allowing myself to pull out each fear and figure out if I have any choice or control over the matter, defuses a lot of anxiety. All that nervous tension from an event that may never happen or is completely inevitable. All that time and space just slipping away.

Beyond the frank stare at our own fears, there must also be tenderness. We are human. To expect ourselves to be consistent and productive during these times, is a rigidity bordering on cruelty.

I keep reading accounts of other people’s quarantines: they’ve written a novel (fuckers), lost weight (bastards), perfected homemade bread (peckerheads), read Wallace or Joyce start to finish and are now waxing on about their artistry (wankers). Fine. Let’s brag up Michelle’s time in quarantine: I’ve taken 4,532 bad pictures of the birds in my backyard. I have a stack of books, all with bookmarks, a sign of starting and not finishing, but still hoping. I now wear a t-shirt to bed from a site called Effin birds that says You Dim Motherfucker, Science is Real. It was not a gift from someone else. I have faked technical difficulties repeatedly during Zoom calls, so that I can disappear and be left alone. I have watched the entire series of The Office at least twice through since February. I’ve made 14 bad vegan dishes and one good curry. Get me an Instagram account stat!

This time is such a strange time and when I imagine it ending, I know I am changed. From the distorted politics to pandemic cooties, it’s hard to imagine that going forward there won’t always be a before and an after. But many of us felt that way about 9/11. Resiliency sometimes comes in the form of forgetfulness, the pull of habit and routine, the exhaustion from worrying all the time. For me, it is simply a desire to not spend my days on this planet distracting myself. I want to look directly at my fears, saying to them: I see you and I understand you, but I must be getting on with things.

My favorite boy-man-elderly gents band.

Resources to make your blog more accessible:

WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation This tool is very easy to use – just plug in your website address and it will show you tips and tools to improve your accessibility.

“10 Ways to Make Your Blog Accessible for People with a Visual Impairment” by Holly at Life of a Blind Girl

“10 Ways to Make Your Site More Accessible” by WordPress

Michelle at The Green Study26 Comments

The Listening Post

The listening post during war was an intelligence gathering station focused on monitoring transmissions. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last month – gathering information. I’ve been reading heavily, eating up news sources left and right, reading in-depth articles. I’ve reached the conclusion that we’re truly screwed as a species. That seems facile. Perhaps I could massage it a bit – we’re in challenging times. Spin it up another notch – it’s a great time for creative thinking.

canstockphoto48358399I’ve circled back to a novel idea that I had a couple of years ago and am now putting my nose to the grindstone and churning out words. The sense of urgency is heightened by the upcoming election. This election is probably the most important election of this American’s lifetime. Not just about who wins or loses, but about the very legitimacy of voting in our American democracy.

The voter suppression tactics, some long in the making (gerrymandering), some that have shown up in the last few years (availability of polling stations), and the more recent, blatant sabotaging of the postal service may break our system. And yes, white people, we’re a little late to this game. People of color have been dealing with voter suppression tactics since 1866.

Anyway, these times right now might be later viewed as the good times. Who knows where we’ll be in a year? Writing must happen now.

28114469I just finished reading Margaret Walker’s Jubilee. It is shocking that this book, written in 1966, did not receive more attention and accolades. The author is a black woman who heavily researched and wrote a semi-fictional historical novel based loosely on her grandmother’s stories. The book, which covers roughly the same period and location as Gone with the Wind, is written from a slave’s perspective. It makes me angry that this masterpiece never once showed up on the recommended reading lists in college or in any other predominantly white literary space.

Like a lot of white liberals right now, I’m knee-deep in books about racism. Many were already on my shelves, because my trek towards deliberate expansive reading began a few years ago. I began reading more works in translation, more works by people who had different lived experiences.

As a white woman, it’s hard not to be depressed by the Karen and Becky tropes. Or the 53% who voted for the load in the White House. Or the ones who are now throwing temper tantrums in stores about masks. I never knew entitlement had created so many whackadoodles. And of course, the Whackadoodle-in-Chief talking about those mythical suburban housewives, of which I could be considered one.

canstockphoto53920997I call him a whackadoodle, but that makes him sound less dangerous than he is. Mostly because I think it’s the enablers that bear my wrath. He’s just an organ grinder monkey.  Set up to perform, to distract, to entertain the slack-jawed masses while our rights are being impinged upon, our votes suppressed, our pockets picked clean.

So here we are, in the middle of a global pandemic, with a jackwagon at the helm. I am angry nearly all the time. But it’s an anger that has become tempered, redirected, and incisive. This might be useful. Or it could just be more negative energy out in the world, I don’t know. I often say that emotion without action is just so much noise. Perhaps I’ve written less publicly because it is already so noisy out there.

Despite, or because of, this constant seething state, I’ve become wildly productive. The paralysis in the early months of the pandemic has worn off a bit. Perhaps I got bored with being in that lethargic state. Maybe I’ve got live free or die zipping about in my head. The people who use that mantra, usually gun-waving anti-maskers (sorry New Hampshire), would be surprised how easily that phrase can be adapted to an entirely different ethos.

My adaptation is that I don’t want to live in a prison of my own anxiety or fear. I’m going to be louder, more political, intolerant of views that compromise the health, dignity, or rights of my fellow humans. For people who prattle on about divisiveness, it’s an easy muzzle for those of us who have often valued civility over justice, manners over standing up for others. I’ve always been relatively quiet and introspective, but the alchemy of anger and age is creating an element of fearlessness. It’s go time.

canstockphoto12869795It’s go time for all my creative urges as well. In addition to taking 5 million pictures of annoyed birds, I’m practicing/working on The Green Study Podcast. It’s not going well. I’d hoped to give it a try for September, but when I listened to the first episode, I realized how incredibly boring I sound. How’s that for self-promotion? Anyway, it’s still in the works and at some point in the future, you’ll be able to briefly listen to and then abruptly mute, the dulcet sounds of my musings. I might rename it The Sleepening.

How are you doing? That’s such a loaded question, isn’t it? What’s your mantra?  What are your days like? What gets you through the day?

Michelle at The Green Study28 Comments

The Art of Napping in a Pandemic and Other Disorganized Thoughts

As my family and I enter our 4th month of quarantine, I have to say we’re doing well. When I say well, I mean that we’re all relatively healthy and we have not murdered each other in our sleep. It’s a small house, but each person has their office/hangout/project space clearly demarcated. We check in with one another briefly throughout the day and then we go back to talking to our friends, work, teachers. The last few weeks have been the longest period of stability our family has had in a great while. No medical emergencies, no dying pets, no late nights dealing with chemo drug side effects, no urgency whatsoever.

2020MrsCardinalI’ve been letting myself unravel. The house is messier and I’ve don’t flip out when two minutes after doing all the dishes, dirty dishes mysteriously appear on the counter tops. Projects lay undisturbed for days. I’ve built myself a fortress of books, all carefully piled off-screen. I’ve spent hours in the yard taking 4,523 pictures of plants and birds and bugs. I’ve taken to manically humming King George’s “You’ll Be Back” from Hamilton when I work. Da da da dat daaaaa dat da da da da ya da.

Writing is a desert. Tumbleweeds blow through where my creative urges used to roam. A swarm of anxieties have stripped the bones clean.

Oddities spring up. I gave myself a buzz cut for the hell of it. I’ve always wanted to try it. I look like a lumpy, silver cantaloupe. It’s unflattering, but feels wonderful.

2020RobinFrenchI’ve gotten back to working out regularly. I have a lot of workout equipment from my taekwondo days. Last week, I dragged out the heavy bag and hung it in the garage. I wrapped my hands, put on gloves, and went to town on the bag. My anxiety levels are much lower this week.

*****

In the middle of all this, unexpected joys lighten the day. My local library finally opened for curbside pickup of requested books. I always have long list of hold requests and due to the pandemic, many of the books requested were from the early part of the year.

I was notified that my first hold had come in: Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney. Argh. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to read one more damned thing about pandemics. The book has been oddly reassuring. All this nuttiness, with the politicization of even the most basic public health measures has happened before.

2020ToadIn 1918, there was a revolt about vaccines, people ignored social distancing, refused to wear masks. It didn’t turn out particularly well for many of them. I feel like somewhere down the line, in the history books that follow, the present day yahoos will be immortalized as idiots and gaslighters. And that is my bittersweet pill to anticipate.

*****

A sense of time has been lost. Days and weeks go by, barely acknowledged. I am reminded of a TV sci-fi episode where the crew is stuck in a time dilation field in space or Groundhog Day with Bill Murray – every day is the same, with only slight variations as we gradually learn to expand our world in this bubble.

*****

2020RedRose2One of my anxieties was that my daughter would be going back to school in the fall. While she is not immunocompromised, she is definitely immuno-curious. With a chemo drug used for rare tumors, there are a lot of unknown factors and she’s picked up two viruses in the last six months. She attends a public high school with 1600 students. Fortunately, she was accepted into a state university program for her junior year and all of the fall courses will be online. I can breathe a little easier.

It is this kind of thing that alternately makes me feel happy and guilty. I know that this pandemic is having an unequal effect on people. I know that the choices we’ve been able to make for our family are not choices that everyone is able to make. I also know that risk assessment is different for everyone. This is, of course, the problem. This pandemic will last longer, the economic impact will be greater, and the enmity we have towards each other will be exacerbated, because it seems like we’re working towards diametrically opposed ends.

*****

2020Coreopsis2I’ve taken to napping in the early afternoon. I lower the shades in the study, put on an audiobook or podcast, lean back in my chair, prop up my feet, and snort myself awake 20 minutes later. It’s lovely. I always said I wasn’t a napper. Now I’m a fully committed one. On my way to these siestas, I listen to David Sedaris read Calypso or the podcast The Stacks (if you’re a book lover, this podcast is fantastic). It amazes me how little it takes to feel those moments of joy. It’s as if you’ve told the world, have yourself a seat, I’ll get back to you in 20. It seems to make life just a little more manageable.

What are you doing during the pandemic?

What helps you deal with anxiety?

What has given you joy?

Michelle at The Green Study29 Comments

Insolent Joy

Today I’m going to be daring. I am, in the middle of a global pandemic, national and local rioting, personal sorrows and tribulations, going to write about joy. The last 8+ years, this blog has been a bit of a chronicle. For much of the last couple of years, I’ve felt like a woman of constant sorrows. It would be an easier place to stay, short term. Over the long term, should I become less practiced at experiencing pleasure, joy, light, it will ruin my health, perhaps my relationships, and will fill me with regret at the time wasted. We do not know what tomorrow brings. There is only today. And today, I’m going to focus on joy.

amenonmememeIt’s a fine balance between refreshing the inner sanctum and recognizing the pain in the world. It is possible to do both. I know I could break and then I’ll be no good to anyone. And I want to be useful in this world, not just a handwringer or an ostrich. I have some basic tenets to keep myself from going off the deep end (and these coincide with how I deal with depression).

Deal with Your Own Reality

SparrowatFeederI should be protesting. I should be volunteering. I should, should, should… I have these thoughts fifty times a day. My reality is that I’m exhausted. My reality is that I have big worries on my plate inside my own house. My reality is that I’m barely figuring out how to help myself, much less anyone else. I need to accept that I have limitations. Once I do that, then I can figure out how to help someone else on terms that I can meet.

And I did.

Help Someone Else

Through Pandemic of Love, an organization that connects people in need with people who can help, I was able to help out a family hit economically by the pandemic. On top of that, they were living in an area where the riots had blown through. They’d just gotten back from cleaning up some of the mess. I asked “What are you most worried about this morning?” and I was able to offer help. The beauty of helping someone is that it is never entirely altruistic. It takes you out of your self, out of your own sorrows.

Look for Beauty

BeeI’m learning photography the hard way. For all these years of gardening, I decided I’d learn how to take pictures. I got the kit. I have the instruction manual. I am awful. Enjoy as I start seeding pictures into the blog. Look for the blurry and slightly blurry plants, ghost birds, off-centered bees, and flowers I can’t remember the names of. Enjoy. I know I will.

I’ve been listening to Traci K. Smith on The Slowdown podcast. I’ll be the first one to admit that I don’t take in as much poetry as I should, considering my love of language. These snippets of living language have been inspiring and comforting. I turn to books that are balm for the soul like Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights or a collection called Poems to Live by in Uncertain Times. I’ve also watched Some Good News (hosted by The Office’s John Krasinski) and listen to the Kind World podcasts. Anything to balance out the onslaught of bad news.

Keeping up with the news, or not.

As glued as I’ve been to the news, I’m focused on learning. So far, I’ve learned that there are more whackadoodle conspiracy theorists posing as normal humans than I first suspected. The fact that they’ve remained hidden as long as they have is suspicious. I think it might have to do with Cornflakes, a confederate battlefield, and pitching signals – especially the right ear tug.

dandelionI’ve met a lot of racists in my life, but I’ve never met someone who belonged to an antifa organization. I’m an organization of one, decidedly against facism. That this president wants me to be designated a terrorist seems right on point for 2020. He’s Tweeting from his bunker, which I imagine to be full of toilet paper, blaring televisions, and blubbering sycophants.

Watching the news, drinking in the feeds, trying to sort the loons from the dimwits, it really can make a reasonable person quite nuts. If you’ve hit the angry, spluttery stage (me about three years ago), time to step back and give yourself a break. Let your brain settle into normalcy, use good judgment, call a friend, take a nap, do a logic puzzle. Then when you return to the news, you’ll realize how absolutely nuts the world is and stagger off the grid for even longer.

In the face of uncertainty and anger…

There is something revolutionary about focusing on solutions, on what we want as a society and doing things that help that. There’s no point in arguing with people who are proud of their accidents of birth – in what country, with a particular skin color, with whatever anatomical arrangement. There’s a lot of weird braggadocio on the internet. That’s how they’ve chosen to see themselves and how they classify others. That’s not your problem.

GaliumEven though we’re being pummeled with political rhetoric, life is not politics. Your minute-to-minute isn’t red or blue. It’s who you are as a rational, compassionate human being. You get to be that. This is why I think of it as insolent joy. It’s defiant. People would like you to be unhappy. They’re unhappy and they can’t think of any other way around that than to ensure that others are miserable as well. You can be impassioned about the world. You can work to make a difference. But you don’t have to be miserable 24/7. No victory will happen with that kind of energy.

Holy cow. I’ve talked myself into being uber-positive. Sometimes people like me make me sick. It’s how I do my pep talks to myself – I write to you. I’ve been in the dumps a long time and the world is not about to lend me a hand out of that. We rescue ourselves, we rescue each other – that’s really all the world has to be.

Michelle at The Green Study31 Comments

Love in Exceptional Times

My 20th wedding anniversary was on April Fool’s Day. This will suffice as an explanation for the rubber chickens, whoopee cushions, and jester hats at our wedding reception. I drew the line when my husband said I should walk down the aisle with a pillow stuffed up my dress. To celebrate two decades of commitment, we quietly acknowledged the date and guilted our teenager into playing card games with us. The day was a tick on the calendar, but had less meaning to us than the days prior.

canstockphoto8378139Despite our efforts to stay quarantined, my daughter had a medical emergency three nights ago. The on-call oncology doctor sent us to the emergency room. We didn’t want to go, knowing that we’d be utilizing resources and making ourselves vulnerable to the coronavirus, but she was in severe pain. Then we made a choice that was unusual for us – my husband would stay at home to lessen exposure and I would take her to the ER.

The night was a blur of watching my brave kid be in constant pain. Six hours of testing and alternating pain meds. I broke for a moment when I asked the nurse where I could get a cup of coffee – in tears, shaken, unmoored. I thought I can’t take this anymore. My texts to my husband throughout the night were straight reporting until the last one. It will be better when you are here.

By morning, she had been admitted to the hospital, which was strangely comforting – we’d spent several weeks there over the last year, so the surroundingcanstockphoto26182548s and routine were familiar. Except for the extra precautions – everyone in masks and gloves – even more critical on the pediatric oncology floor. My husband arrived with overnight bags. He’d fed the cat, straightened up the house, notified his boss. I could feel myself breathe again.

Before he arrived, I thought of the other many long nights that we’d spent in emergency rooms, surgery waiting areas, by hospital beds, and sitting at home, alert to our girl’s every sound and movement. It has been a long year and while I could call it a bad year in terms of everything we’d all gone through, it wasn’t a bad year for our family relationships, our marriage, our time together. Our true fortune is that we know how to take care of each other and we know how to laugh.

canstockphoto0506045I tend to eschew sentimentality. It took me five years to tell my husband I hated heart-shaped anything. And it’s taken him a long time to get used to my distinct lack of interest in celebrations or gifts. There is this idea that anthropologically, humans need ritual and celebration, but I think those events are simply about noticing the moment. If noticing and appreciating the moment is the point, I probably have 50 micro-celebrations a day. The pleasure of birds on the feeder, that damned good cup of coffee in the morning, a wonderful paragraph I’ve read, laughing with a friend or just hanging out with my tribe.

By late morning, my daughter’s pain had dissipated, test results were good, and we were discharged with a plan. Transitioning back to home meant dropping our clothes in the garage, hitting the showers, and disinfecting everything that had been at the hospital. And the re-set on quarantine has begun again.

I thought about love, what it meant in terms of our marriage. For the last few years, while my mother-in-law was struggling with Alzheimer’s and the last year when our daughter went through surgeries to remove tumors, my husband and I learned just how much weight we could bear. We discovered that we could still be tender, even under the worst circumstances. We could still laugh when things were darkest. And we practiced kindness when it would have been so easy to rage.

canstockphoto16583600Perhaps it is not the length of time, but the fact that this commitment ever came to be that still amazes me. I placed a Yahoo singles ad twenty-two years ago, long before the swiping and the algorithms. I was 29, had just moved to Minneapolis, and wanted to get on with a social life. Of the responses, many creepy and weird, I picked his. With no locations mentioned in the metro wide ad, we found out that we lived two miles away from each other. We exchanged emails for two weeks before going on our first date. Thus far, it’s worked out pretty well.

Like character, love shows its nature under duress. The world seems like a very scary place now. Nothing is assured and everything is shifting and changing. The greatest luxury of all is to be kind to ourselves and to one another in the midst of chaos – and to realize that celebration can’t be saved up for singular occasions. When so much suffering is in the world, we are sometimes afraid to let the moments of joy in, to say yes, in the middle of all this, I can have moments of happiness. The gratitude for those gentle moments seems a lot like love.

Michelle at The Green Study31 Comments