Crying in Public

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here, and for good reason, but I’ll get into that. I’m not going to promise consistency or declare that I’M BACK! because I just really don’t know. Life is hard – for me, for you, for everyone, especially the past few years. We don’t really owe each other explanations, do we? That’s something I’ve learned – or, rather, something that I’ve known for a long time but that I’m only now finally starting to feel: I don’t always need to reply to emails or texts or messages promptly. There are so many demands on my time, and only I know what I’m capable of. Consideration is nice, but I don’t owe anyone an apology if life takes me away from my devices longer might seem polite. I’m trying to stop saying “I’m sorry for my late reply,” (this article made me feel so empowered in this regard, check it out) so I definitely don’t need to say I’m sorry for failing to update a blog that no one was counting on anyway. I feel like sharing here again, though, so let me start with an update and a brief explanation.

First, the name. This blog used to be called “Memento Mori.” I liked that name! It felt like it captured what I was up to most of the time as a writer and artist: excavating the past, digging through memory, turning artifacts around in my hand and my mind’s eye to see what they could teach me, what was overlooked. I’m still doing that – in life, as an artist, and as a person – and that’ll still be what this blog is about. But I’ve been coping with some new stuff, too, and I want to talk about it. I have been crying in public.

The worst time was this past summer. I attended a weeklong writing conference in Bemidji, in northern Minnesota. It was my first time going that far up north. It was early June, so I was warned by family members who knew the area better that it would probably be cold. I wasn’t worried about that, cold I can usually deal with, cold would have worked nicely with what I had planned for that week. My family has two cars, one of which – a Nissan Sentra that broke down on us in Oklahoma City on our move from California to Minnesota – has no working AC. I didn’t want to leave my husband and two kids stranded in St Paul, which does get hot already in June, without AC, so my plan was to take the Sentra, and drive with the windows down if it got warmed. But as the day approached the forecast for Bemidji steadily into the high 90s. I left early in the morning from St Paul to beat the afternoon heat. I kept my windows down for the entirety of the four-hour drive. I made good time. Still, when I arrived in Bemidji just after noon, it was already over 100 degrees and I was in trouble. I checked into my dorm room, closed the curtains, stripped off my clothes, and pointed my box fan at my face while I lay on my bed in the dark, but it was too late. My body had already absorbed too much heat. The next day the conference officially started, another very hot day. I stayed in AC as much as possible, but I had to walk to the panels, to my workshop, back to the dorms, and to the dining hall. That night, I woke up at 3 am to excruciating muscle spasms that wouldn’t let up. I didn’t get back to sleep for hours, and I missed most of the next morning’s first panel, which was being led by my workshop instructor. I was still in so much pain, and at the end of the presentation, as I started to walk up to my instructor to apologize for my tardiness, an acquaintance spotted me and asked if I was okay. I was in pain, I was a little embarrassed at being late, and I was exhausted. I wasn’t sad. Really, sadness didn’t make up any part of how I was feeling. But at that moment, I started crying. Visibly, publicly, with tears streaming down my face. It was completely out of proportion to my feelings, but I couldn’t stop. For almost an hour, as quietly as I could manage, I cried.

I have a condition called pseudobulbar affect, which is defined in my Google search results as “pathological laughter and crying.” It sure sounds serious, but it’s really the least of my worries. I haven’t always been like this. I don’t cry easily or often. I didn’t even cry when I found out my own father died (but that’s a much longer story). It’s probably a combination of my inherent temperament – an introvert, I’m used to internalizing thoughts and feelings before expressing them outwardly – and the more dysfunctional aspects of my upbringing. You aren’t going to see me cry unless you’re already very close. I want to protect myself, but I also don’t want to burden others unnecessarily, and I learned to be emotionally self-sufficient by necessity. Or, at least, I used to be that way.

This wasn’t the first time something like that happened. The year before, I traveled to Portland for a writing workshop with Lydia Yuknavich and the wonderful staff at Corporeal Writing. The workshop spanned several days, and I loved almost every minute of it. The whole experience was a tremendous gift: I was fortunate that year to be named a 2021 McKnight Artist Fellow, and part of that generous award was reimbursement of expenses related to professional development – traveling to attend a workshop like that wouldn’t have otherwise been possible. I took the Empire Builder train from St Paul to Portland. It took two days, and I had a coach seat so I slept with my seat reclined and ate out of the cafe car the entire time – definitely nothing fancy, but I spent as much time as I could in the observation lounge looking out the window at the changing scenery – the plains of North Dakota, canola fields in bright yellow bloom, giving way to hills and foothills and eventually climbing through the Rocky Mountains in Montana. The sun went down on the second night somewhere in western Montana, and I woke up at dawn the next morning on the Washington side of the Colombia River.

Williston, North Dakota from the train

This was the first time I had been to Portland since I moved with my husband and two-month-old daughter in 2015, and I was as excited to be back as I was about the workshop. It was still morning when the train pulled into Union Station in Portland’s Old Town. I had one suitcase, a backpack, and a hotel room that wouldn’t be ready until later that afternoon. No problem, I thought. I knew this city well, and I felt comfortable getting around. I made a reservation on a luggage storage app so I could spend the morning sightseeing. The dropoff location was a little bit of a walk – the north end of the Pearl District, so I had to walk across Old Town and through the Pearl, but I didn’t think anything of it when I made the plan – I used to walk everywhere when I lived there. It was summer, though. July in Portland. Very hot as soon as I stepped outside the train station. I kept to the shade, but it got to me. By the time I got to the dropoff location, I was very unwell. I had vertigo and felt like I would fall over if I wasn’t careful. My balance was off and I took every step with caution. Instead of a glorious day of sightseeing, I found the closest restaurant and stayed much longer than the waiter seemed to appreciate, drinking glass after glass of ice water and soaking up the air conditioning until I felt a bit closer to normal. I had a great time in Portland over those days. I loved the workshop and felt inspired, I spent my time to myself walking around my old neighborhood and visiting my favorite spots. I’d inevitably get overheated and find some air-conditioned spot to hide out in, and I’d return to my hotel room at the end of the day completely spent. I felt okay at the workshop itself until the last day. On that final day all of the workshop participants were invited to read their work. The AC in the building was loud, so the staff decided to turn it off. The temperature started to rise in the room, and I started getting shaky, dizzy, and lightheaded. I wasn’t sad, but I felt all of a sudden like I would cry, so I excused myself to the bathroom. Once there, I ran cold water over my wrists and just sobbed, for what felt like a very long time. I didn’t come out until I had control over myself – I couldn’t will myself to stop crying, I found. It just had to happen on its own. It was the first time anything like that had ever happened to me.No one saw me crying that time, but I’m sure they noticed my prolonged absence. I felt humiliated.

See, the pseudobulbar affect is part of something bigger. I have multiple sclerosis. Or, rather, I’m 99% sure I have multiple sclerosis, and I’ve paid thousands of dollars and been subjected to multiple painful tests by three different neurologists over the past two and a half years trying to get a conclusive diagnosis – that is a much longer story, involving lots of medical gaslighting, and I’ll be talking more about that. I’ve had symptoms on and off for more than a decade, but things started getting really bad in the summer of 2020, including weakness, tremors, vertigo, fatigue, painful muscle spasms and spasticity, temporary vision loss, numbness and tingling, nerve pain. Lots of pain, really. That initial flareup calmed down after a couple of months, but all of the symptoms have remained, just at a lower intensity. Heat, cold, exercise, fatigue, and stress trigger them. The biggest one is muscle spasticity, which feels like extremely painful cramping, sometimes all over my body, but especially around my ribs and shoulders. Some days it hurts all the time, to a degree that is incapacitating, and I am someone with a very high pain threshold. Sometimes I have a hard time walking or moving and sometimes I shake visibly, but most of the time, all of my symptoms are invisible. Except for the crying – let me get back to the crying.

Pseudobulbar affect is a funny name. Pseudo means false. In this case, pseudo refers to the fact that the condition mimics a “bulbar” lesion on the medulla oblongata, but over the course of this illness, I’ve struggled so much with the idea of falseness, fraud, and fakery. I’ve been treated like I’m faking it, not just by doctors, but by people who are supposed to care about me. I’ve questioned myself – I still do. Doctors and friends seemed to think it was in my head, maybe they were right? Especially when the symptoms disappear for a little while for no apparent reason. I think, were they even there to begin with? Was it as bad as I thought? My second neurologist told me she couldn’t treat me for anxiety since that seemed to her to be the only thing that was wrong with me. I don’t suffer from anxiety. I did have – still have – six lesions on my parietal lobe that I can see clearly on the same MRI scan she was looking at, but even with that physical proof, I still considered the possibility that she was right, that it was all in my head. Nothing is visible when I look in the mirror, or when anyone looks at me. But then, I cry.

I haven’t mentioned the crying to my current neurologist. He is the first doctor to prescribe me medication for my pain, to delay another flare-up, and to slow my disease progression. He hasn’t so far gaslit me, but he also doesn’t seem terribly interested in hearing about my symptoms. Until I have a new lesion, he shrugs his shoulders as if to say what can I do? I go out of my way to seem sane and reasonable to him. I’m terrified he’ll agree with the first two doctors and say it’s all in my head, and withdraw treatment. Pathological crying seems like it could undermine me. Pseudobulbar affect is also called emotional incontinence, emotional lability, forced crying, pathological emotionality, and emotional dysregulation.

In The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin described people who seem to suffer from some form of this condition: “The insane notoriously give way to all their emotions with little or no restraint … nothing is more characteristic of simple melancholia, even in the male sex, than a tendency to weep on the slightest occasions, or from no cause. They also weep disproportionately on the occurrence of any real cause of grief. The length of time during which some patients weep is astonishing, as well as the amount of tears which they shed. One melancholic girl wept for a whole day, and afterwards confessed to Dr. Browne, that it was because she remembered that she had once shaved off her eyebrows to promote their growth. Many patients in the asylum sit for a long time rocking themselves backwards and forwards; “and if spoken to, they stop their movements, purse up their eyes, depress the corners of the mouth, and burst out crying.” In some of these cases, the being spoken to or kindly greeted appears to suggest some fanciful and sorrowful notion; but in other cases an effort of any kind excites weeping independently of any sorrowful idea. Patients suffering from acute mania likewise have paroxysms of violent crying or blubbering, in the midst of their incoherent ravings. We must not, however, lay too much stress on the copious shedding of tears by the insane, as being due to the lack of all restraint; for certain brain-diseases, as hemiplegia, brain-wasting, and senile decay, have a special tendency to induce weeping. “‘

The crying comes from the damage to my central nervous system. It shouldn’t undermine me, but it does. It comes most when I push too far, when I ignore the pain, weakness, and fatigue that tells me I need to rest. I don’t want to miss out, so I pretend there’s nothing wrong with me. I attended every panel and class during the writing conference, participated in social gatherings, chatted, and smiled, and when I was finally able to be alone, I collapsed into bed, immediately. I didn’t look ill so I tried not to act ill, either. Then the crying came, and the jig was up. I didn’t want to cry, it didn’t match how I was feeling, but part of it was a relief. The only way to explain myself was to finally admit that I was sick, that I was in pain. For the first time, I told my teacher and my workshop cohort that I had MS.

Suddenly, this invisible weight that I had been carrying by myself was visible to everyone. Not everyone was helpful. Suddenly, the stoicism and strength I was working so hard to project dropped away, and I seemed weak, emotional, and dramatic. An older woman in my workshop said “I have rheumatoid arthritis and I have never cried!” She almost seemed angry. Someone else, trying to be kind, told me about the chronic pain they used to have that turned out to be a food allergy, and reassured me my own condition would improve once I found out what allergy was triggering it. They meant well. More people were kind. My teacher checked in with me and made sure I was okay. Later that night, I went for a walk with a new friend from my workshop, and my leg went numb when I tried to stand up after sitting on a dock on Lake Bemidji. She already knew, so I was able to simply ask for help getting up, and she held my hand as I walked back off the dock so I didn’t fall in the water. It was still embarrassing, but it was okay.

I guess the bottom line to all of this is that there’s something to be said for vulnerability and visibility. There are so many articles in MS spaces about when and whether someone should disclose their diagnosis to others, and they usually falls on the side of not disclosing. Like this article: “In many other cases, however, such a disclosure might be ill-advised. Most people know very little about MS. Employers and co-workers may even think that it is a terminal condition. Many don’t know that with good treatment, functional loss over time may be minimal or even zero. Uninformed people in your work environment, due to prejudice, may begin to view you as less competent. You may even miss promotions–or worse–based on this prejudice. Though this may be illegal, you may find it hard to prove. In any case, what you want are strong, supportive relationships with co-workers and supervisors, not a potential legal claim.” Or this one: “Unless someone starts talking about something MS related, there is no need for me to tell them about my MS. If someone is a close friend or becoming a close friend and you have developed trust, it might be a good idea to share your diagnosis. If you find yourself avoiding a friend because of your MS, you should probably decide whether you want to confide in your friend and pursue your friendship on a deeper level.  Some people might misread your distance as not wanting to be friends as opposed to you just keeping your MS private.  At a certain point, however, that privacy can negatively affect a relationship.” To me, it seems like the only reason, then, to keep it to myself is to either preempt the ablism of others or to spare others’ discomfort. I am not particularly interested in either of those things.

So I want to talk about it. I’ll be talking about it more about it here. I’ll also be talking more about all of the other things. I hope it’s useful to someone out there. In the meantime, enjoy the picture below of my actual brain – even if it does make me cry sometimes, it’s still a good one!

Holidays, Loss, and Near Death Experiences

My favorite cousin recently lost his grandma, just days before Christmas. There’s no right time to lose a loved one, but the holidays have got to be the worst one. He was at one moment expecting his grandma to be a part of his family’s Christmas celebration, then his father told him the bad news, and suddenly, in a moment, everything changed. I talked to him on the phone, and the rawness of his feeling, the depth of his love for her and his sadness over her loss touched me. He said she was the best grandma in the world, and I believe him. He said that he wished she could just appear in his room and tell him she loved him, just once more. We never know when the last time we’ll see a loved one will be, and no matter how nice our goodbye is, it’s never sufficient.

I’ve had a lot of loss in my life, and from a young age, and I sometimes worry that I’m hardened to it. It must be a common feeling to those of us who lost close family or friends as children. I lost my father when I was just 10 years old.

As a child, I remember being very worried about death. At four or five, I would lie awake worrying about it, running through all the scenarios I could think of for how it could happen, and what would come next. Even worse than dying myself, it seemed, was the possibility of losing my parents. I seemed to me impossible that they could die, and I could go on living. I would imagine how they might die, who would take care of me and my siblings, what their bodies would be like, who would take care of their bodies, where we would live, on and on and on, until I would go into my parents’ room and wake my mother up. She was always patient about it. She would explain that she wasn’t going to die, that my father wasn’t going to die, that they would be there for a very long time, to take care of me and my siblings for as long as we needed them. Then she would tuck me back in bed. Even though I knew that she was lying to protect me, that she couldn’t promise never to die, I’d allow myself to believe her anyway, and finally, fall asleep.

All that worrying didn’t do me any good. When it really came time to lose someone, I was not prepared.

When my father died, it still seemed an impossibility that I could lose him forever, seemed impossible that he would never return, seemed impossible that I could just keep on living anyway. Everything in my life suddenly shifted and was made foreign by his absence. You wake up in the morning and you forget. Then, with a jolt, you remember. You’ll never see that person again, they have been erased completely, and it’s like you suddenly exist in a parallel universe right next to the universe you thought you lived in, identical in every way with the exception of that one person. In grief, your life becomes a wheel that rotates around a spoke that is an absence. Everything is heavy with absence and missing. He died in June, but even six months later, our first Christmas without him was hard.

A few years went by, and then I lost my grandfather. A few more years, and then my mother. The thing that had once seemed so impossible, that I could lose the central people in my life, became commonplace. I started to live more comfortably in that parallel universe where I would either lose everyone I ever loved, or they would lose me, and I realized that everyone I ever knew lived there with me and that it’s always been that way. And somehow, that shift has become reassuring. There hasn’t been a decision that I’ve made in my life since the death of my mother more than ten years ago that hasn’t revolved around the fact that I will die someday, that there is no stability I can ever gain, no success, that will prevent that. It has made me braver, has made me prioritize self-fulfillment over safety, and I’m glad for that. But I also sometimes wonder if it’s also made me a little too hard, a little too tough.

My maternal grandmother Elaine Mary Rene McCarthy Quinn, passed away February 10 at the age of 79

This spring I lost my grandma, the grandma I share with my favorite cousin. I probably wouldn’t have met him yet if she hadn’t gotten sick. He lives in Florida with his father – my uncle – and his mother, and the nursing home where she spent most of her last days is near their home. I went to visit her there for a few days when it was clear that she was near the end. She had dementia, and a fall sped the progression of her illness. When I was with her she was rarely lucid, only spoke a handful of words, and was in a great deal of pain from a broken hip and bed sores, but there were moments when she was really present with me, and I’m so glad I had that time to share with her. I stayed with my uncle and got to know my cousin better. He’s 12 years old, and already one of the most amazing people I have ever met. Really funny, smart, and a lot of fun to be around. Most importantly, he’s one of the most open-hearted and warm people I’ve ever known.

Talking to him today about his grandma, I realized that, as tough as I sometimes feel I need to be, the feelings are all still there for the people I have lost, and I’m glad. The times I’ve felt numb have always been harder than the times I’ve really felt grief. Sometimes there’s just too much to feel all at once time. It comes out, even if it’s years later.

A lot of people I care about have lost loved ones this year, or in the past few years, and I’m thinking about them right now. My oldest friend lost her grandmother. My ex-teacher, mentor and friend lost her mother. Another very close friend has an uncle who is very ill. It doesn’t matter if the loss was a week ago, a month ago, or years ago. It stays with you, especially this time of year. The thought just pops into your head unbidden. I might be making Christmas cookies, wrapping presents, watching Charlie Brown Christmas, and the thoughts come: My mother is dead, I’ll never see her again. My father is dead, I’ll never see him again. My grandfather, my other grandfather, my grandmother. On and on. And even though I’m not four years old anymore, climbing into my mother’s bed to be reassured about mortality, the enormity of those losses, and the impossibility of these absences, is still hard for me to wrap my head around.

For all of us who have these thoughts this time of year, for my friends and family and even strangers who might be hurting, I wanted to share a passage from my grandfather, Dick Quinn’s, book Left for Dead that makes me feel a little better. In it, he describes a near-death experience that he had following a heart attack. This happened years before I was born, but I remember that he talked about it frequently – to me and my siblings, to other family, even to radio and talk show hosts when he was interviewed about his books. I was always a little embarrassed for him, worried that people wouldn’t take him seriously, but I’m glad he told this story so often, because it’s a comfort to me, now, to read it. Here it is below. I hope it makes someone out there feel a little bit better too, and I hope you’ll let yourselves feel whatever you need to feel at this difficult time of year.

Looking Forward to Someday

If you’re going to watch TV all day, you might as well do it while wearing your space helmet.

My oldest, Paisley, had a cold over the weekend. Saturday night she woke me up around 2 am, crying and coughing. I went in myself, which isn’t good enough these days – she prefers her Daddy right now – but I did my best to get her calmed down. She said her stomach hurt. It’s something we hear a lot – she has anxiety (not officially diagnosed, but it’s very obvious), and tummy aches are a frequent complaint when she’s feeling overwhelmed or scared. My tummy feels like a stone, she says, using a line from one of her favorite books, Ernie Gets Lost, to communicate her big feelings. Sometimes she says her knee hurts, sometimes it’s her “down knee”, or ankle. It’s a tricky call to make, as a mother of a child whose anxiety manifests as various vague ailments that are mostly imagined. Sometimes it’s real, and sometimes it’s not, and I have to psychically divine the difference.

Last night, I had the feeling that her stomach ache was real. She asked for medicine and I told her I didn’t have anything for it. I got her settled and came back to bed to listen to the monitor.

Sure enough, not ten minutes passed before she cried again. She had thrown up, which started a nearly two-hour marathon of getting her cleaned up, changing out bedding, getting her back to bed and then the whole cycle repeating again until she had emptied what was left in her stomach. Poor thing.

One of the times Shaun had to clean up her hair, and he tried to make it quick by using the shower nozzle. But her only experience of showers is from the in-between time when we moved here, and we were stuck in an Airbnb out in the suburbs of White Bear Lake, a basement apartment that had no bathtub, only a small shower. They hated it. We would put off bathing the girls as long as we possibly could because of how loud their screaming was, how extreme their terror was. Seeing the shower nozzle must have brought Paisley right back there, because she screamed like that again, backing into a corner of the tub. And Marlow, hearing her sister wailing in such apparent agony, got scared for her too, so she started screaming, even louder, her eyes and mouth open with such worry and fear that it made me a little scared too. When I could hear Paisley start to calm down I held Marlow’s hand and we walked over to the bathroom so that we could see that Paisley was alright. And Paisley was just standing in the tub, naked and shivering, her little arms wrapped around her body, the look on her face so scared and sad and lost. It’s moments like this that it hits me how hard parenting two little people really is sometimes.

The next day, Shaun and I took turns taking naps to make up for the long night – it was past 4 am when I finally got to sleep and they woke up at 6. We watched a lot of TV – Christmas movies and Toy Story. We read a lot of books, too, but the screen time was definitely well beyond the AAP’s recommendation for their age group. It was actually really nice, and I don’t feel too bad about it at all. It was a break and a much-needed one.

The past few weeks have been rough with these girls. Marlow is rocketing towards two with all the bad temper and big feelings that go along with that milestone. Some days just seem like constant crying and screaming from her over some perceived slight – one of us looks at her wrong, Paisley takes a toy away, I don’t understand what she’s trying to say, the list goes on. And of course it sets Paisley off, and then before too long, we end up with both of them screaming. The noise gets to be more than I can handle, but I have to handle it anyway.

Luckily Shaun’s there. We give each other breaks, trade-off to preserve our sanity. One of us goes for a walk to the grocery store while the other stays, or the coffee shop, or just to bed to take a nap. I miss carefree time with him when we could have a complete conversation without being interrupted, or leave the house together without a plan in place. We used to go on long walks at night, just us, with no agenda. We’d just set out to see what we’d encounter.

We’ve both been homesick for Portland lately, where we lived for four years right up until Paisley was born and we both graduated from Portland State, all simultaneously. It’s easy to get caught up in nostalgia, but I catch myself in it and wonder, are we nostalgic for the place, or for our lives together before we had children. It’s most likely the latter. There’s no way to get back to that life, even if we moved back to the same place that we lived it.

And I wouldn’t really want to go back to our life pre-child. But it’s been hard. What I need is a vision of what our lives will be like when they’re a little older, when some of their rough edges have been smoothed out a little. That could replace the idealized memory of our past before they were in our lives. I tell myself: Someday they’ll be potty trained. Someday they’ll be able to wipe their own noses. Someday they’ll go to school. Someday they’ll be able to modulate the volume of their voices. Someday we’ll live in a house and not an apartment and there will be quiet corners I can hide in for a minute. Someday they’ll be able to dress themselves and they won’t cry when I put on coats, hats, gloves or mittens.

In the meantime, I’m looking for signs that someday is, in fact, coming. Paisley likes to learn new skills in secret and them surprise me with them. I can’t directly teach her anything, she likes her learning to be a private thing, which is frustrating. But lately, she’s been helping more, and showing off new things she’s figured out how to do: clear her own plate from the table, and sometimes Marlow’s too, throw trash in the trashcan, put on and take off her own shoes. Some of these things are way behind where she should be at 3.5 years old, because so far almost all of her gross motor development has been delayed, probably due to her sensory processing trouble. But she’s still making progress, and that’s hopeful. She’ll be able to do more things for herself, someday. And Marlow is learning new words and speaking in longer and more complex sentences than ever. She can talk about her feelings (I don’t like it! Marlow is scared!) and the feelings of other people (Paisley is sad! Don’t worry Paisley!) She (sometimes) gives up toys willingly if her sister wants to play with them, and when she hears Paisley crying she finds her favorite doll (a crocheted David Bowie doll she calls Ziggy) and brings him to her.

They are both so smart and sweet and empathetic and hilarious. They love each other and have a lot of fun playing when they aren’t fighting. It’s not hard to imagine that things will feel a lot calmer, and more enjoyable, with just a few more years, when their self-regulation skills can catch up a little with their very intense emotions and interests. Someday is coming soon, and I’m looking forward to it.

Remembering My Strange Inner Child

I found this video the other day. It’s one of the many videotapes that my brother saved out of my mom’s/stepdad’s garage in San Clemente, some of which were mildewing and breaking and stuck together in their cassettes, which meant that when I got them and started digitizing them I worked in a panic, as fast as I could go. It seemed like each day that went by would bring irreparable damage, lost memories and lost moments, so I rushed. I borrowed a VHS player from a friend and kept the tapes running into my laptop for hours on end. The tapes jammed constantly, so I unscrewed the top of the VCR to more quickly hear the jam, stop the playback, and gently unwind the tape from around the machine’s innards. There were several hours of home videos, and with the exception of a few highlights that I’ve shared on social media for my family to see, they’ve mostly just sat on a hard drive, unwatched, for years.

That’s where this one was waiting. I was in sixth grade, and it was History Day at our school, which was an event where students were broken up into groups to come up with dramatic presentations illustrating something historic. I remember it was very open-ended – any era of history was fair game. We were required to do some minimum amount of research in the library, there was a time limit, and other than that anything goes. I think it was supposed to be fun, though. I didn’t understand that part at the time. Watching it now, as an adult and parent, I realize the adults in the audience were expecting cute, naive, fun little skits from cute, lighthearted children. My group clearly missed the mark there. Our opening – a time of fear, a time of hope, a time of death, a time of faith, the Holocaust – was probably not the tone they had in mind, and it was all my fault. This presentation was conceived, researched, and written almost entirely by me.

I remember working on this with these girls. These girls, they didn’t choose to have me in their group. No one did. I was probably the least popular kid in my class, and these were the most popular girls. My teacher probably forced them to include me as some well-meaning lesson to them about being cliquish, meaning having to work with me was a soft kind of punishment. These girls didn’t like me, at all. But I came to our meetings with an idea, and they didn’t, so somehow, I ended up directing this whole thing.

A little about me at this time: My father had just died six months before, a fact that everyone in the school knew because all the teachers told them while my siblings and I were away for the funeral, so when I got back to my classroom, one of the meanest popular girls told me “I know we’re supposed to be nice to you because your dad died, but we don’t like you.” In sixth grade I started going by my mom’s maiden name, Quinn, but the year before my name was Bork, and the mean kids would call me, naturally and unoriginally, Heather Dork. There was one sandy-haired boy, in particular, that would torment me – John. He was one of those boys, rich and born to privilege, who exudes such self-confidence and entitlement that you think he might actually have something to offer. Everyone liked him. I wanted to be liked by him. When I changed my name to Quinn, he would catch himself in the middle of calling me Heather Dork, and self-correct, with a sneer, “I mean Heather Quinn.” One day he was sitting behind me in class, repeating my name: Heather Quinn, Heather Quinn, Heather Quinn, and poking me with a pencil in the shoulder each time. I kept saying Quit it! Quit it! Quit it! until I finally turned around and scribbled all over his khaki shorts with the orange marker that I happened to be holding. That’s about the time I realized that the old saying that boys only pick on girls that they like was either untrue or irrelevant.

I wanted to be liked. I would fantasize that somehow I would magically transform myself into one of the popular kids, like overnight or something. Before getting on the school bus, I would silently repeat to myself a mantra: Try to be cool today. Try to be normal. But it turned out I had no idea what normal or cool looked like, and I don’t think I know to this day. All I know is that it didn’t look like me at 11 years old. At 11, I was obsessed with minerals, the solar system, ancient Rome, and Egypt. I wanted to be an archeologist or a particle physicist or an actress. I was terrible at small talk, but if I thought someone even remotely shared an interest, I could talk forever. I didn’t fit in with the girls and preferred playing with the neighborhood boys.

When I learned about the Holocaust in school, I was devastated. I thought about it a lot, pondered what could make people do such evil to other human beings. I worried about all the people who went along with it because they were just following orders, and I thought a lot, and worried, about whether I would have been one of the people standing by, allowing others to be hurt, or hurting them myself if I was placed in that situation. It kept me up at night, and when I did sleep, I had nightmares heavy with the images I saw in photographs of the victims. In college, I read Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt and it brought all of those feelings back, feelings I was too young to properly process at the time.

“Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet–and this is its horror–it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.” -Hannah Arendt

So when I was put in a group of four popular girls and told to create a performance about history, this was the idea I brought them. I spent many hours in the library and found narratives of children in the Holocaust, both letters and diaries written by children while in hiding and memoirs written by survivors after the fact. One of the books I found was I Am a Star: Child of the Holocaust by Inge Auerbacher, who was sent to the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia in 1942 when she was just seven years old. The book mixes her poetry with memories, and I was deeply moved as I read it.

I somehow convinced the four girls in my group to take on the idea of dramatizing the experiences of children in the Holocaust, through their own poems and letters. I wanted minimalism – no props or sets aside from stools or costumes aside from our matching white shirts and black pants. I was interested in mime at the time, so I came up with some very basic choreography – four of us mimed knocking in unison when a fifth recited a poem about Nazis banging on the door, we stood in a line with our backs turned to represent a wall – to dramatize the poems we recited. I remember making these girls rehearse until it was flawless, and directing them to tone down their hammy, melodramatic readings, to varying success. I have no idea how I managed to lead these girls, but it worked. It turned out pretty good. We didn’t win, for sixth grade, it was pretty good.

I still remember some of the poem I recited for my part. It’s from I Am a Star.

An acorn gives life to a thousand trees,
Many tiny raindrops form the greatest seas.
Nothing is impossible; if only we try,
The smallest trees can reach the sky.

We may differ in thoughts and ideas,
Each mother cries some salty tears.
If flowers can grow in desert sand,
Hate can turn to love in any land.
All wars must cease,
There will be peace.

Pick a rose with its thorn,
A world of peace for each newborn.
Let’s share the milk and honey today,
Where there is will, there is a way.

Beat each sword into a plowshare,
We must search our hearts and care.
Together we can survive and win,
The time is now; let us begin.
All wars must cease,
There will be peace.

After my second daughter was born I was in therapy for a short time for severe postpartum depression. My therapist did guided meditations with me, and in one I was supposed to picture myself as a child, bring my inner child alive in my head, and then say what she was feeling. The overwhelming feeling was shame. As a child I frequently felt like I was too much all the time – too sensitive, too emotional, too intense. I cried too easily, got obsessed too easily, was scared and anxious too often. This too-muchness, I couldn’t tone it down no matter how much I tried. I was also, at the same time, not enough: not brave enough, not outgoing enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough. The list goes on and on. This hasn’t changed, by the way. But I wonder if I would have felt like I was too much and too little if it weren’t from all the other voices – from my parents, teachers, other children – telling me that I was. What could I have been if the message I got from the world was that I was just enough, instead of too much or too little?

As a parent of two very emotionally intense children, I’ve found it useful to look back at who I was as a child, so that I can better empathize with them and hopefully provide better support than I had growing up. I’ve read a lot about intensity, and I’ve found a word for this feeling of being “too much”: overexcitability (a term coined by the Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski as part of his Theory of Positive Disintegration, which is worth looking at). And it’s not something wrong as much a different way of being wired and of perceiving the world that is central to a sensitive person’s experience of life. As one of my favorite bloggers and thinkers on this subject, Paula Prober, calls this a Rainforest Mind: “The rainforest. Your jungle mind. Overflowing with intense, lush, teeming life. Noisy. Dense. Diverse. Vibrant. Abundant. Sensitive. Resource-full. Majestic. Flamboyant. Rotting. Always in flux. Providing support for all beings on the planet.” I like that idea: not too much, just rich and lush.

“Rediscover who you were before you tamped yourself down. Before you had to hide your light. Before you learned that you were too much.

Find ways to be that person again. You don’t have to do it all at once or to radically redesign your life. And you certainly shouldn’t let go of your healthy boundaries or your needs for quiet spaces. But decide to take back your voice, your body, your power, and your flamboyant majestic-ness. Either in your parenting, or teaching, or writing, or art forms, or speaking, or thinking, or activism, or spirituality, or loving. Or all of the above.” Paula Prober

Before I tamped myself down, I was a strange child who was obsessed with rocks, astronomy, and the Holocaust. I cried when I saw or learned about other people suffering and I wanted to make the world a better place. I didn’t know how to be “cool” or “normal” and cool normal kids didn’t like me very much. But that’s okay. I also did a pretty good job at History Day. That’s who I was. And that’s still who I am. And maybe that’s just enough.

Revision, Nostalgia, the Kuhreihen and the Voyager Recordings

After just one post, I’ve been gone for an awfully long time. A lot has happened in my life, mainly a move with my husband and two young children from California to Minnesota, there’s all the fallout surrounding that which we’re still dealing with. I’ll probably write about that too. I’m still processing it, six months later. So that’s by way of an apology, to myself, really, for not keeping up with this practice, and for not living up to my own expectations. I don’t think I’ve let anyone else down, aside from me. I hope I’ll be able to forgive myself.

Lately, I’ve been working on revising an old essay that I wrote for my MFA thesis about nostalgia. Some revisions come fairly easy. This one, though, is looking like it’s going to be a complete rewrite. It’s a tough essay, dealing with a lot of personal loss. It centers around a collection of family documents I’ve been carrying with me, move after move (San Diego to Portland to San Diego and now Minneapolis), that include letters, tape recordings, photographs and videotapes of people who aren’t living anymore. Each time I move I have to open up the boxes and sort them, and it brings me right back to that time. It’s raw and painful, especially now, after moving back to the place where my loved ones were from. In the last draft of this essay, I can see myself on the page doing my best to dodge those feelings, to not let myself be truly vulnerable. It’s time to do that really hard work now.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

So I’m thinking, and reading, about nostalgia. The word for the feeling was first coined by the Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer in his 1688 dissertation. It is a combination of the Greek words nostos, or journey home, and algos, or pain. It’s a construction similar to other medical terms like cephalgia (headache), myalgia (muscle pain), or neuralgia (nerve pain). These words are like maps pointing out the location of the pain: it hurts here, with a big red arrow. Nostalgia, then, hurts in the journey home. We make that journey (To what home? Is it a question of where? Or when?) in our minds, again and again. We rehearse it, we dwell in it, sometimes to the point of ecstasy or insanity.

Hofer’s nostalgia was a serious medical malady, fatal if taken to its extreme. He attended a fellow student at Basel. The patient – a young man, like Hofer – was sick and lonely, suffering from anxiety, fatigue, fever, and other ailments. When nothing could be done, he was sent home, presumably to die, in a litter. He made a complete recovery as soon as he was on his way.

Hofer was himself a student. At the time of his dissertation, he was only 19 years old. I wonder, was he far from home too? Was his interest in this newly identified disease a reflection of his own homesickness? Were his studies a way to distance himself from his own melancholy? I can’t find much information on Hofer himself, but I like to think that the term he invented reveals as much about him as it does his patients.

Hofer provided a name for nostalgia and was the first to categorize it as a pathological condition, but the concept was older than that. The Swiss at this time were thought to be more disposed in general to homesickness, or mal du Suisse, than anyone. Many young Swiss men worked as mercenaries in foreign armies. The young men, far from home, became sick with missing their home. It was so bad that a particular kind of music, the Kuhrehein – a traditional, simple melody played on the horn by Alpine cattle herdsmen – was banned from their camps because of the severe nostalgia it would produce.

Thinking about the Kuhrehein reminded me of a poem by Rumi that I recently read:

Remembered Music
’Tis said, the pipe and lute that charm our ears
Derive their melody from rolling spheres;
But Faith, o’erpassing speculation’s bound,
Can see what sweetens every jangled sound.

We, who are parts of Adam, heard with him
The song of angels and of seraphim.
Our memory, though dull and sad, retains
Some echo still of those unearthly strains.

Oh, music is the meat of all who love,
Music uplifts the soul to realms above.
The ashes glow, the latent fires increase:
We listen and are fed with joy and peace.

The Kuhrehein or other songs of our homeland (and by home I think I mean, also, the past more than a place) cannot be endured for the severe longing for home that they produce. There is a more fundamental home than that, according to Rumi, where the music we heard was the rolling of the planets in their orbits. The place we were at before we existed. Rumi is full of longing and homesickness for that home and reading him, I am too. I’m hurting in the journey home.

On that note, I wanted to end this post with the ultimate Kuhrehein, the actual music of the spheres. Sort of. The Voyager space probes recorded space noise – plasma fields, electromagnetic radiation, the solar winds – from around the solar system on its epic journey into interstellar space. The result, when converted to actual audio, is a series of hypnotic and oddly soothing ambient noise. This is the same mission that carried the Golden Record with representative Earth noises and music out of our solar system, so it seems fitting that it also deliver new sounds back to our planet. NASA released a series of albums called The Symphonies of the Planets based around these recordings, and they are delightful. Below are some of those sounds

 

Memento Mori: what this is and who I am

I’ve had this name, “Memento Mori,” reserved for a blog for a long time, and I think this is finally time I get started using it. Memento Mori is the title of an essay I wrote a few years back, an essay about photography as a way to preserve moments that are destined to come to an end. I took the phrase from Susan Sontag’s On Photography. She says “to take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.” This, according to Sontag, damns photography as a medium.

But being a writer as well as a photographer, I can’t see how writing is any different. They both participate in another person’s or thing’s mortality. They both have the capacity to be exploitative, they both seem to be about this often unexpressed anxiety that the moment might go by unnoticed, and be gone forever if we miss the chance to document it.

Sontag is correct that taking a photograph (just as, I believe, writing and creating art) can be a violent, or, at the very least, aggressive, act. In the hands of the underrepresented, the disenfranchised, the underprivileged, it can also be a powerful weapon. It can be a tool to say “look at this that you don’t want to see, feel this that you don’t want to feel, hear my voice that you don’t want to hear.” Or, as my favorite writer Joan Didion says, “In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions —with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”

I’m a writer and a photographer. I’m also a mother to two small children, which means that I don’t have time or space to do writing and photography often enough. So I’m going to use this space as a place to share some thoughts and photos, more than anything else just to get myself in the habit of creating something on a regular basis. The writing and photography I do tends to involve a lot of research and editing and tends to be a “work in progress” for a very long time. I don’t often feel the satisfaction of having something “finished.” This will be a space of quick first drafts for me, a place to embrace imperfection, just to help me hold myself accountable and to keep my momentum going. If anyone is interested in reading it, fantastic, and thanks! If not, I’m not too concerned.

For the sake of doing something with them, I’d like to share some photos I took a few months back on a road trip along Route 66. I shot these with my Baoca, a wonderful little toy film camera I found years ago in a thrift store. For a long time, whether I was shooting film or digital, I always wanted crisp, in focus, perfectly exposed photographs. Shooting on my Baoca (just like shooting on a Diana or Holga), my goals are very different. I have no control over focusing, I have no control over exposure. Things will not be sharp, there will be strange and unpredictable light leaks and lens flares, there will be shots that simply don’t work. I have to relinquish control. Giving up control, surrendering has been a lesson I’ve needed above all else lately. As a mother to two young children, I can only carve out so much time for my writing and my photography. I have to accept that things will be left half-done, and sometimes, that they will never be completed at all. I need to find the mental and emotional space where that is alright, and where failure and imperfection is a part of the process.

I’d like to write a little about my drive through the Mojave along Route 66. In the meantime, here are some pictures – soft and poorly exposed and imperfect, but hopefully, capturing a feeling that perfection cannot.