"Many Theresas (of Avila) have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unswept into oblivion."
I have already received the warning signs that I am not becoming a Theresa.
My body has begun to fail me again this semester, long dormant auto-immune conditions revisiting. I know my body lacks subtlety, and while I often doubt I have a mystical or insightful bone, I know I can always count on a forced course-correction if I go too far afield from what I am supposed to be doing. For me, sickness comes as a warning. And it becomes louder when I do not listen.
If the body is a metaphor, this is mine: you are shutting yourself down. You are sabotaging yourself.
This is an old lesson. I almost dropped out of graduate school in my second year, because three auto-immune conditions in, and a fourth emerging, I was asleep 20 hours a day. I imagined a red and blue army inside of me, fighting battles to the death in something like the green country side of England. Mourning lost soldiers, celebrating battles won, with no awareness whatsoever, that really they were committing a slow and collective suicide. For every enemy they killed, the actually lost one of their own. A man from the other side went down, and a supply truck to the allies was lost in a ditch.
Realizing there were no answers in the places I had been looking, I needed to find new places.
In the end, I didn't drop out of graduate school. I soon was sleeping a respectable 12 and then 10 hours a day with the support of acupuncture and homeopathy and an entirely new diet. About six months later, in the span of a week, I separated from my old therapist, boyfriend, and Sociology advisor. Ropes no longer cut my wrists, and my body stopped attacking itself. I changed what I was doing in the world, and my body quieted into health.
So with a return of my new test results, after five years of blessed good health, and the familiar fatigue of a war within, I now see these signs as more benign than I once did. First of all, my body is more resilient. Second of all, I have seen this before. Not only did I see it coming, I know the basic steps to treat myself. I know where to get support. I know I will miss bread again dearly.
For a while.
But more importantly, I understand that my body is asking for recognition of something I am denying. And the sooner I hear the message and respond, the sooner I can go back to indulging in the occasional slice of pizza.
As I became sicker over the last months, my sleep became lighter, and I stopped dreaming. But this last week I had a particularly vivid dream. I had adopted a mouse, and placed it on my bookshelf. It stayed patiently on the top shelf, a perfectly behaved little mouse waiting for food and water and a hello. But I kept forgetting about it, possibly only remembering I'd adopted a mouse when I walked past and realized I hadn't given it food or water for days. Miraculously, it did not die. It sometimes became emaciated, it certainly responded with joy when I returned, but it never left the bookshelf, no matter how much I neglected it. I felt immense guilt, as Bandit jumped around my feet. I put so much energy into caring for him, but I was completely mistreating this mouse. Why did I adopt this mouse, I wondered, if I wasn't even going to take care of it? Or remember it existed?
Yet at the same time, the mouse felt terribly important.
When I woke up, I began to ask myself what the mouse represented. What I had been neglecting. What was supposed to be on my bookshelf that I kept forgetting. It was clear that whatever the mouse was, it was going to wait patiently until I noticed it, and despite any terrible amount of neglect, it had no intention of going away or giving up on me.
Of course, I know precisely what goes on a bookshelf.
And what I neglect.
All the same, I have never felt like my inner guidance system was terribly strong. When I moved to the Christine Center, I remember the sisters commenting on how I was always smiling so much. And I didn't really notice it, except that I felt like going there was so completely aligned with what I wanted for myself. I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I was really living, doing the scariest thing ever, just because. It was right. For me. Then. I was walking around grinning, because I was so proud of myself for actually showing up.
And yet? My impulse to go felt half-baked, somewhat tentative, and I wasn't entirely sure it would accomplish anything at all. It wasn't until I had arrived that I fully sensed its rightness. So I have dreams, I suppose, but I doubt and wonder and waver and question and recycle old thoughts.
But I do know. My reasons for neglecting things. Not so secret.
After my brother died, I became the poster child for not finishing things. My dissertation, to this day, remains unpublished. The data my team collected in the year before I left UW remains unanalyzed. Not a single project that I was a part of initiating at UNC was ever completed. These things were not purely a result of my own disenfranchisement with life. All kinds of situational factors played a role, and affected entire teams of researchers.
But still.
Somehow I was able to write a dissertation in under two months, yet two years later, I remain convinced of my inability to finish anything.
Sure, we can quibble about "finishing." In academia, projects are notoriously iterative. Articles are revised dozens of times across their lifetimes. Grants are rarely funded on the first attempt. Even something accepted for publication must be built on by future research.
But if we define finishing something as getting it out the door and finding it a home, however imperfect it might be: I have come to believe in my heart that I cannot finish things.
As a result, writing a book is a hopeless endeavor. I look at documents filled with sixty or eighty pages of text, and I think "I will have to start this over again." I look at old data and think "Yes, but it's so unlikely I'd be able to turn this into something that would actually get published." And I sit on my hands. I make small steps forward, but under the crippling weight of the belief that this is Sisyphean. And in some ways it is, it always is. Sure. So I focus on the process, I focus on how I spend my days, I tell myself small steps forward will eventually add up. But I also know in my heart that I am lying through my teeth to myself. Because look at my evidence. Two and a half years without publications! Which is nothing to say of the number of half-completed baby blankets and scarves that have been half crocheted, sewn and abandoned, to be lugged to my next apartment as painful reminders of my wonderful ability to start things only to let them hang around my neck for years to come.
I rarely acknowledge that in one of those years, I was a broken shell. And in another, I was gluing pieces together. And really I have only recently returned to the land of the semi-living. Instead I focus on what I "should have been able to do."
And then. This week. My director sat me down, and began discussing backup plans. He is concerned I will not get a job. He thinks I need more time, largely because, I have little to show for the time I have been given. Unlike at my last job where I felt my director looked on me with pity, this one has no idea why I managed to do nothing with two years of my life.
But I know.
I left the meeting at first feeling dejected.
Isn't that what we all fear on the job market? That no one will want us because we are not yet good enough?
But then I became angry.
How dare he give up on me so soon. Doesn't he know? Who I am? How I am? That if I set my mind to something, I am fully capable of doing it? That it is absurd to hold a sociologist to medical publication standards? That I am brilliant, and just need the time and space to prove myself and that I am an amazing asset to his team and he is lucky to have me, and he has no idea what an Ace he has in his pocket.
When I discovered later that day that nearly exactly the study I had been proposing for two years to study the effect of mindfulness on racism had successfully been completed by researchers at another university? Despite all of the people telling me I was crazy? All of the side-eyes? All of the false starts? Then I became livid.
Those voices were loud. But they were not right. And I remembered I could have listened to my own voice instead.
And look at the world around us! We need some practical solutions for the racism eating away at our country since yesterday.
In that anger, the Sisyphean act was dropped.
I thought of all of the times someone, especially an academic, told me what I could not accomplish. Even back to undergrad, when one said my senior honors thesis was a four-year project. Academics work hard, but also in strange time-space vortexes where tasks expand to fit the time allotted, and the time allotted is usually infinite.
I finished completely on time, six months later. Without his help.
I thought about all of those asshole, shitty messages, and how in the past I heard them and raised my chin defiantly. "We'll see." And I'd walk out of meetings discouraged, but even more determined. (Except for the times when I curled up and gave up, which also sometimes happened, but less frequently).
The blessing of a background in business is that I have also worked in places that work on a different space-time continuum where all things can be done instantly, or worst case, by close of business.
I'm pretty sure there's a middle way in there somewhere.
In the real world I have been obsessively trapping and killing mice in my home since moving in. The choice of a mouse in my dream is no accident, of course. A mouse I do not kill, but adopt? And take in? And choose as a pet? But why? I have been treating all the rest like vermin.
If that mouse is an idea, or is a project, this one is going to hang around, in its rightful place, waiting for nourishment.
Stupidly. Because apparently it might die of starvation.
Still, I suspect it is time to acknowledge it. To know it.
And now I am faced with my paralysis in literal form. After two months of throat issues, colds, thyroid problems, obviously the issue is one of my need to say something. As I said, my body is terribly literal and not at all creative about illness. Obviously if I do not make the radical changes I need to make, my body will continue beating itself up until I can't do anything at all but listen. For twenty hours a day in my bed. (Which is both painful and terribly, terribly boring). I know this. I know how I reacted after my meeting with my director. I know I have called myself out. And yet this belief that I cannot carry things through to their finish is dear to me. I have cherished it. Nursed it through good times and bad. Allowed it to shape my choices and my actions. I have lived and breathed it. Defying it? Seems dangerous. Likely to fail. And much more difficult than sleeping in or numbing myself out at the end of the day with a Netflix binge.
So for today, I am grieving this old dear friend. And not entirely convinced that she can be buried. My throat closes when I even think of defying her. To actually dare to finish something makes me want to find the nearest blanket, claim bandit, and a fetal position.
But then I read about all of the Saint Theresas who never become fully themselves.
And my heart breaks. Because that is not the road I want to be walking.
Throat and heart issues combined seem like a lot to take on together.
So perhaps it is time to pray that Saint Theresa might guide me, at least through this month. I have a dear friend I must lay to rest. And a space on my bookshelf that is becoming covered in mouse shit.
Surely, I can do better than that.
Even if I must do it from under a blanket.
Namaste.
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