Flying on the raggedy edge

I have felt recently like a latch on a door that has withstood the elements, friction, pressure, and probably a kick or two, before finally giving way and letting go of everything trapped behind it. The proverbial skeletons in my mental closet are scattered around the entry way, and try as I might to cram them back in, there are stray bones everywhere. It's not pretty. 

And it is so frustrating. I have been in control of my brain for years now. I faced down so many challenges, so much pressure, so many crises, and all manner of other assorted crap, and come through it just fine. Coping skills solidly in place, I was starting to feel invincible. 

But...apparently not. About halfway through 2020 I noticed a little crack. A little break in that dam where some anxiety was leaking through. (Be honest, if you weren't anxious in 2020, you were in a coma, right?) But it was enough that I wasn't coping well with it. I had to work through the pandemic, but unlike doctors, nurses, and other essential workers, nobody was buying us coffee. We just showed up to work with the most vulnerable and marginalized people in our community and kept on going. And going. So I saw my doctor and I said, "Hey, I'm doing all the things that usually help me manage this, and it's not being managed. Can I get some help?" and she got me a prescription, and a few months later I got myself together and took the last of my prescription, and I was fine. 

Then, my oldest kid, started high school. This has not gone well. I suppose it could be worse, but it hasn't been great. And I've had to grapple with a whole different set of issues. Issues I do not feel equipped to handle. And issues that feel eerily similar to the ones I had when I was in high school. 

Let me tell you, I did not know it was possible to feel this afraid of what might happen as I have lately. The idea that my child might experience anything similar to what I did as a teen, and might end up needing the same kinds of care and intervention, has shaken me to my absolute core. I go to sleep every night terrified that by morning they could be gone. I walk around constantly thinking of what else I can do, how else can I help, what additional support to they need? How did we get to this point? Where did I fail? 

Because make no mistake, the responsibility for this mess lands squarely on my shoulders. Either genetically or through failures of parenting, I just know, without question, that I am responsible. And if I am this bad at parenting, well it kind of throws my whole view of myself into question. 

I also know though, that my brain is unreliable. I'm not starting over from scratch here. I've walked these shadowed and bony places in my brain many times before, and I know I can't always trust what I find. But I just can't shake this feeling that I have failed, that I have fundamentally failed, to live up to the obligations of parenting and by extension, everything else. 

I keep waiting for someone to come along and just confirm for me what a mess I am, and maybe take my kids away, because I don't feel fit to care for them. I know they're fed, and clean, and loved, and dressed, and housed, and all those other things, but can't someone see that I am defective in some way? I am broken on the inside somewhere, and I have been lying to myself for years and decades and maybe my whole life, that I am okay. Maybe I don't actually know what okay is. And I desperately just want to crawl into a hole and hide from everything. 

But I'm not. I'm at work. I go home. I hug my family. I feed them dinner. I do laundry. I shop. I made someone laugh this morning. I put on my functioning human suit and I go through all the motions. I send emails. I answer the phone. I ignore the rattle of bones in my head whispering "failure, failure, failure" and I paste a smile on, and I pretend I am okay. 

And I am exhausted by it. I feel that I am a catastrophe away from collapsing amongst the bones in my foyer and just weeping until I dissolve and take up residence as a skeleton in someone else's closet. I probably won't, but sometimes it's tempting.

The Danger of the "Other"

 This morning I was listening to Tom Morello's "One Man Revolution" radio show, and he was talking about an incident when he was a kid where the KKK had left a noose on his garage. It frightened him for a long time. This story was part of the larger narrative of the show which was centered around Juneteenth. Towards the end, he played the song "Fuck Tha Police" by NWA, which I have heard before, but I guess I hadn't really listened to the words. Today I did. I was struck by the anger at being constantly "othered" by police, and the infuriating relevance of the message these many years later. 

I can't blame them for their anger. I can't fault them for their mistrust of this system that continues, even now, to hold them apart from society and prevent them from being fully included. That targets their safety, their lives, their communities. The amount of generational trauma that we as a society continue to inflict because we fear an "other" is disgusting. And despite the many good, honest, ethical, compassionate cops that I know, fuck the police as a racist, unjust system that targets anyone it deems as "other" and especially those who are not white men. 

I have had a few conversations recently about an ongoing crisis within the United Methodist Church. The debate rages on about the inclusion of LGBTQIA persons in the life and ministry of the UMC. Some of us argue that by failing to ordain people who are LGBTQIA, or to marry them, that we are excluding them and sending the message that they are not welcomed into our congregations. Well, maybe their volunteer hours or their money, but not their full persons. Others argue that they are perfectly welcome to attend, they just can't participate in these areas because, you know, sin, or something. And really, this is just the church "othering" someone. Looking with suspicion and mistrust on a group of people, and deciding to exclude them from full participation in the life of the church. However you want to parse it semantically, the result is the same. 

So I cannot blame people who are LGBTQIA, or those who support them, from leaving churches (not just the UMC) in droves. And what responsibility do we, as individuals, bear for continuing to prop up a system that others and dehumanizes these persons? There are many sins we can lay at the feet of religion, but the fact remains, religion does not exist without us, and these sins are ours. The othering, whether done by us or not, is tolerated by us, and therefore propagated by us. So I cannot blame any who look with suspicion, and hostility, on my faith or any other. 

I have never ending conversations about those who find themselves without a home, who are suffering from chronic, debilitating mental and/or physical illnesses. Those who are often "othered" in some other way, in addition to the serious crime of being poor and without housing. It is so easy to scapegoat these people. To look at them and see a threat, to see danger. The fact that they are often already viewed as "other" because of their race, their sexual identity or orientation, their lack of wealth, well...clearly they deserve this. They must. They are dangerous "others" and we need to make sure we hold them down, and never let them forget that they do not belong and their suffering is their own fault. 

This is the danger of "other." The dominant culture will discard, abuse, shame, dehumanize, and destroy anything it perceives as a threat, as other than itself. And the rest of us are all others in this system. We are all inches away from exclusion, from persecution, from the violence that is a feature of the system, not a flaw in it. These systems were designed to protect the power of one group to the detriment and degradation of all others. And it works by constantly giving us an "other" to scapegoat. Someone to point at and blame for the ills of society. Thugs, degenerates, lowlifes, crazies, druggies, whores, criminals, perverts. If we keep looking at the others, if we keep pointing our anger and rage at those who are different, then this unjust, broken, violent system continues. 

I don't want to be part of a society that says leaving a noose on a child's house is okay, or that we will take your time and money but you aren't really welcome here, or you deserve all of your misery because you are poor and sick. I am disgusted by the notion that wealth somehow indicates the value of a person, that skin color means anything beyond how much melanin you produce, that your sexual orientation or identity has anything to do with how worthy of love and acceptance you are. I am angry, and sick at heart, and utterly fed up. 

Who am I?

 I've been thinking recently about identity. What it means, what mine is, how do we know ourselves.

I was watching Moana with my daughter and there is a moment toward the end where Moana is having a crisis of faith in herself and her calling. She gets some good advice, and then she begins to identify the parts of herself that are foundational to who she is. She loves her island, she loves the sea, her role in her family and her community, she lists the struggles and challenges she has already faced and overcome. She draws these together and identifies herself by all of them. 

I was also having a conversation recently with a friend and it also got me thinking. How did I arrive at my identity? That intimate self-knowledge and awareness. Who even am I? How do I know? I wish I could say that I had a beautiful musical montage and awakening to self and at the end was confidently able to declare to the universe, "I am Leia!" but not so much. 

This is, as best I can tell, what really happened. For many years, I wrapped my identity in my pain, my trauma, and my anger. It drove me until it broke me. And then, sitting there in the shattered pieces of who I thought I was, I found a piece of myself that I didn't hate. I found compassion for someone else. 

Compassion was my first step, my first building block. But who am I? I am a girl who loves to write. So I write. I write a lot. I write my pain, and anger, and shame, and guilt, and somehow it helps. So I have compassion and writing. I find that I love my family, this weird bunch of people with funny edges that seem to fit mine. So now, family is important and necessary, and I'm adding people to it because family isn't just what you are born into. 

Over the years I have added empathy, a love of fantasy novels, the joy of cooking. I love making people laugh. I love singing (in choir, no karaoke solos for me!). Knit these all together, and it gives you a picture of me. 

But still...are these things me? I am, and am not, all of these things. I am, and am not, any label that I might choose or have ascribed to me. The person sitting here, writing all of this, thinking these thoughts, is me, but I seem to be on an endless quest to discover exactly who this person is and how they fit into the world. 

And at the end of the day, what is me except a lot of fat sitting in salt water with electricity running through it?