Sorcha's Scribblings

Typepad's Question of the Day

((Disclaimer: I never really thought I would answer one of these questions, but this one made me think quite a bit, so I suppose it's only fair to record the answer . . . ))

If you could go back in time and undo one mistake from your past, what mistake would you undo?
Submitted by Los Angeles Style Salope.

This question is really about regrets, and for the most part, I choose not to indulge regrets. Things I did that I would not do now, choices I would not make again, decisions I would reconsider . . . all those things and the consequences of them are a large part of why I can sit here and say stuff like "things I did that I would not do now" and so on.

As a result, I generally don't have much to do with thinking "if only I could go back there with the knowledge I have now". After all, if the knowledge I have now is so valuable (and it mostly is), I'm okay with whatever I had to do to get it.

There is one exception. In 1978, I met someone who said to me within the first hour or so of our acquaintance, "I and X person over there are really going to hurt you. We are going to be manipulative, passive-aggressive, and dishonest in ways you cannot imagine. I don't think you understand just what we are going to be able to do, and it's going to hurt a lot." Seriously. That's pretty much a direct quote. I was struck by the certainty, so I wrote it down in my journal. I also didn't believe one single word of it.

I should have.

There are times when it's not a good idea to accept someone at their own valuation, but this was not one of them. Realistically, who describes themselves this way who is not, at base, the person she is describing? The thing I did not know, that I wish I had known, was that regardless of all the havoc she was willing to wreak in other people's lives, she valued her view of herself as an honest person, so she told the truth about who she was.

Nine years later, when I was standing in the detritus of a relationship, and sucking up more emotional pain than I had understood was possible, I said, as so many people do in such situations, "How could you do this to another person?"

She said, "But I warned you! I told you exactly who I am." These words reminded me that I had written down something she'd said at the beginning, so I went and dug out that old journal. And sure enough, she had warned me.

I wish I'd listened and believed. It's the closest I ever got to real evil, and it's a lot closer than I wish I had gotten.

The most interesting thing about this is I am not at all convinced it matters what I might have done differently. What I wish I could undo was the failure to believe what I was told.

Blast from the past

So I was surfing the web this morning. I ran across something that made me think about parts of my childhood in ways I hadn't done in years. Normally, if I wanted to write about it, I'd post the link right here, but this piece of writing did not work well when I did that. (Skip to the end of this entryif you can't restrain your curiosity as to what tickled my memory.)

When I was a kid, I lived with my family in a 3 BR suburban ranch house not too far from San Francisco, on the Berkeley side of the Bay. The neighborhood was filled with what I now recognize as young families, mostly white, but a variety of ehtinicities, creeds and religions. Most of the families had fathers who worked and mothers who stayed home and took care of the house and the kids and the day-to-day business of keeping the familieis running. For the occasional mom who was a school teacher, there was always a neighbor who was happy to earn a little extra money by watching the teacher's kids after school until the teacher got home. (This was important -- in my elementary school, there were 13 teachers and 12 of them were women, most married.)

Our parents had all been born and raised in the depression, mostly on farms in various parts of the country. (Well, okay, there was the guy across the street who walked from Russia to Palestine during WWII in search of a better life, on his way to a nursery business in Berkeley, CA. But most of them were children of the depression.) Our fathers were professionals (like my dad, who spent 30+ years as an engineer for a major oil company) or small businessmen (like the guy down the street who sold industrial strength vacuum cleaners and was the first on the block to put a swimming pool in the backyard).

My parents had some friends outside the neighborhood, and they also socialized with our neighbors. Bridge games, dinner parties, summer barbeques, that kind of thing. Barbeques included beer. Dinner parties included a couple bottles of California wine (just coming into its own). And my mother's bridge game for some reason invloved cheap red wine and doughnuts (don't ask me, I think it sounds like a gross combination).

Then there was that family up the street. The mom was a little younger and a lot more glamorous than the other moms. The dad was a little younger and a lot brasher than the other dads. For a long while after they moved into the biggest hour in the neighborhood (FOUR bedrooms! and a HUGE yard, into which her father immediately had built a GIANT swimming pool), they also had no kids. Then they adopted twin boys and immediately followed this up with a son and daughter obtained the more usual way. (In fairness to these people, who I am not treating all that well in this article, I don't think they ever treated their adopted children differently than their biological children.)

The wife continued on her merry way once her children were on the scene. She always struck me as a very loving but not paticularly involved mother. She was involved in different volunteer groups than the other moms (who were mostly PTA, AAUW, League of Women Voters, church committees, and so on, whereas she was involved in more groups that had a social aspect; I don't think Junior League, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were, after all).

The father was "in real estate", which I think meant that he was trying to prove he could earn as much money as his father-in-law, who provided not only the swimming pool, but a station wagon and a pair of matching Corvettes, as well as a summer place in Lake Tahoe. He'd gone to Stanford and his big expense was a giant party he threw for his old frat buddies every other year when the Cal-Stanford game was at Cal. The high point of this for us kids on the block was when the chartered bus showed up to take them all to the game.

They returned neighborly hospitality with cocktail parties and pool parties, at which the liquor flowed. One time when the liquor had been flowing for awhile, some guest asked one of the twins how old his mom was, and he said "29" (which was the honest to goodness truth) and the guests all laughed uproariously at how well she'd trained her kids. She was outraged, because it was true.

When I got to be about 13 or 14, I started babysitting for them. They were my best source of income for years, even though they paid the lowest rates. The thing is, they partied a lot. I ususally sat for them both Friday and Saturday nights, and they often stayed out until 2am.

They didn't have a lot of common sense. I recall one time, after the kids were fed and in bed, that a drunken man knocked on the door and said that the mom had sent him over to "get the place ready for an after party". I was pretty freaked and called my mom to come and stay with me, as more and more drunken people showed up. My mom was pretty mad, too, as I was about 13 or so. But I think it wasn't until her own daughter was a young teenager that this woman understood why sending drunks to your house and expecting the 13-year-old babysitter to just let them in the house didn't make sense.

I stopped babysitting for them after one rainy evening when the father drove me home (because it was rainy and very late). I was a pretty niave 15-year-old, but even I knew he was hitting on me. And whatever he saw in my face caused him to say, "You're a young girl -- what red-blooded man wouldn't?"

Anyway, I turned 16 and better money-making opportunities came along, and I was just as glad. Because that? freaked me totally out.

Nowadays, we'd say that it proved he had no good sense of boundaries, and I guess that's true. I mean, if you hit on the teenaged daughter of your neighbor, then you lack sense.

Anyway, I grew up an went off to college, and these people got a divorce. I'm unclear on the details of what happened next, but it either involved the results of a prenup, or a very good lawyer that her father hired for her. but the wife ended up getting the house, the cars, custody of the kids, alimony, and child support. (Some of that was only to be expected, given the tenor of the times.)

The next thing I heard was that the mom of this family, who I will always remember best in her bikini, insisting, correctly, that she was so 29 years old, had been murdered. Brutally murdered. Two thugs kidnapped her from her house and drove her in her own car to the Berkeley hills, where they stabbed her to death, in return for a payment of $2500. The money was paid by her ex-husband, and all three (the thugs and the ex-husband) were convicted and sentenced to death.

He died on San Quentin's death row, maintaining his innocence to the end, and attempting to sell insurance from his prison cell.

So what brought on this collection of memories of the guy I once knew who died on death row? Just a timeline. (Search on "Carlene" if you want to see the entry that stopped me in my tracks.)

He was sleazy, and lacked bounadries. She was perfectly nice, and lacked common sense. Today, I can't stop thinking about their children. For me, this is a footnote in the story of my life. For them, it must be the central fact of their own stories.

Today, I feel lucky that what's unfair about my life is the pain, and not that my father had my mother brutally murdered.

This is about pain

This is actually about chronic pain. I twisted my ankle the other day, and so had some acute pain. I could tell when I came down on it hard in the wrong position that it was going to hurt for a couple days, maybe a week, and it did.

While that was going on, I had the usual chronic pain, and I realized a few things in an articulatable (is that even a word?) way that hadn't quite congealed in my mind coherently before.

The difference between chronic pain and acute pain is that you know the acute pain is going to end. Before I acquired this raft of chronic pain, I had the usual encounters with acute pain. The occasional broken bone. A dental procedure gone really really REALLY wrong. A dislocated elbow. The usual bruises and abrasions that life heaps on the clumsy. And some of it hurt. A lot. But I always experienced it as a thing I was going through, that would end. And there's at least an order of magnitude difference between pain that you know is a passing thing and pain that is here to stay.

First off, doctors are quite willing to provide analgesics of good power to address acute pain. Sprain your ankle? Here's some opiate or other to soothe away the spikes of hurting. Develop bone spurs in that same ankle, which produce the same amount of pain on an hourly basis? Have you tried Aleve? To get medication for chronic pain, meds that have to be titrated against your pain and that you will take for the rest of your life? You have to be persistent and not too demanding all at once, a dance I don't really understand. I even see why; when you are put on oxy-contin, for example, and you take it for awhile, you become "non-opioid-niave", which even I know means that your body is becoming accustomed to the opium. In other words, it's a controlled addiction. Which has to be carefully managed forever, because once you go there, stopping is hard (putting aside even the terror of unmedicating the pain).

So the first problem you have when your pain is chronic is getting it treated. But there are at least two other things that happen. One is what I'll call "masking". Near as I can tell, my mind is only able to cope with some fixed amount of pain before I start screaming and going noisily mad. Instead of breaking down crying in public, what my mind does is pay attention to what hurts the most. If you don't have chronic pain, this must sound like a win. Because it really does mean that say your leg muscles hurt a LOT and your knees hurt a bit and your elbows are twinging. That LOT on the legs means you won't really notice the knees or the elbows. The downside of this is that when you treat the leg pain (which I can do mostly directly by making the muscles relax via chemical means, so that they stop spasming and hurting), it doesn't bring relief. Because now that my legs aren't in a LOT of pain anymore, the pain from my knees and my elbows rushes into my brain's pain center and there I am, still experiencing an unacceptable amount of pain.

The other thing that happens is what I've taken to thinking of as "the burden of unfelt pain". Pain relief doesn't really do as much for you as you might hope. Unlike the kind of pain relief you can ingest when you are in acute pain, when it's fine that you are woozy or not entirely capable of doing your job (because you are lying at home with your foot elevated anyway), if you want to live your life, chronic pain has to be treated "just barely". On the few occasions when the medication I was taking actually controlled the pain properly (and it never lasts, blast it!), I was astonished and disappointed to discover that I could still sense the pain there, not hurting me, but still burdening me, weighing me down. It's like a pack full of rocks that I carry around, even when it doesn't hurt. It's not going anywhere. The best I can hope for is that I don't have to feel the agony for today, and for a few tomorrows.

I hope to live several more decades, and I think that's where the weight of it comes from, mostly. (Perhaps some of it also comes from the weight of all the pain experienced up until now. Or some combination of those things.) Every single day of those decades, I am going to either hurt or be taking toxic drugs to avoid hurting, or most likely, both. It doesn't get better. It isn't temporary. It isn't going away.

I look back on my life before I started to hurt, and I can't even remember anymore what it was like not be intimately acquainted with pain. Sometimes I resent that younger self, for not even valuing her good fortune. I used to be able to walk without it hurting. I used to be able to sit in a chair without the pain for company. I used to be able to roll over in the night without being awakened by how much that hurt.

Doctors and psychologists and other people who ought to know tell me that pain changes who you are. I suppose there is something they know about what it does to the brain or something, but I don't need to know what part of my brain grew or shrank, or what happened to my neural pathways. I know what happened to me: my world got constricted by the pain until some days that is all there is.

Some days, I choke on the pain and find myself almost unable to breathe from the anger. Why the hell did this happen to me? Why can't it be fixed? Why can't this seemingly chronic pain magically turn into acute pain, that I can suffer through and then be done with? Fiddle with this, twiddle with that, make some progress, then pull a muscle and watch it all unravel. So even on good days, when I don't hurt all that much, pain is my companion, because I am waiting for it to ambush me again.

Don't get me started on the decades of doctors visits to people who never examined me, or watched me move, but just told me to go take some over the counter pain killer I had already told them doesn't touch the pain. Don't get me started. Because I will have to tell you how crazy that made me feel, how resigned to hurting more and moving less. I guess it's another entry, for some day when I actually believe the apparent current good fortune of having found a doctor who both takes me seriously and is willing to work at this until it's livable. For right now, I'm almost afraid to hope.

And why do I live a life where a "good day" is one where I "don't hurt all that much"?

The most important thing about pain is that it isn't fair.

Slowly Making My Way Back To The Land Of The Living

Depression sucks. Pain sucks. Put those two things together with being a serious introvert, and you have a recipe for someone to try to dig a hole and never, ever come out. But then one day, it just stopped being okay to live this way.

The writing helped, even though none of it was here. I wrote large swathes of two novels, neither of them remotely publishable, but both interesting explorations of things (ideas or characters) that I could make myself care about. My writing had, thankfully, an audience, so even though writing itself is essentially solitary (and thus seemingly plays into the shove everyone away part of depression), I had actual interaction with real human beings about what I was writing, and real feedback on what worked and what didn't. And that made it just slightly more than an exercise in mental masturbation. At the time, I think "just slightly more" was probably all I could handle.

I feel like I'm swimming in cold molasses, but at least I'm moving, for the first time in almost 2 years. They say that the hardet part of any journey is the first step. I bet that's a lie, but it's nevertheless a hard thing to take that first step.

I wonder what one does afterwards to make sure that the time spent doing what I did for the last couple years is not totally wasted?

This is about depression

This is about depression. It's about all the things I did not know about this disease. It's about how being mildly depressed for most of my adult life did nothing to prepare me for the overwhelming, physically painful experience of being deeply depressed.

This is about isolation, and how being depressed made me crave it. In some ways, many months were about nothing more or less than a mindless drive to be totally alone. If you'd asked me why, I'd have told you that I did not want to be alone, that I was not actively acting to drive some people away and to hide from others. But I'd only have been repeating the lies this disease told me.

This is about survival, about endless days strung one after another where my biggest accomplishment was living through this day to be able to sink into the only good experience I allowed myself, and sleep for a few hours. It's about the days when a day was too long, and survival was measured in hours or minutes, not full turns of the planet.

This is about stealing from myself, about taking everything I valued and trashing it, for the pure sensation of doing something. It's about clinging to the mistaken belief that my actions were coherent and meaningful, when in fact they were random and pruposely meaningless.

This is about how depression magnifies physical pain and creates new pain where there hadn't been any before, about how when it hurts to move or breathe or talk, then I move, breathe. and talk less.

This is about how depression uses my own weapons against me, about how it takes my childhood training that when someone pokes me, the right response is to get smaller and take up less space, and uses it to compress me until I nearly cease to exist.

This is about bleakness that never quite crosses over into despair, because it knows that if I felt despair, I would seek help. It's about turning my boundaries into weapons by staying within them all the time, while slowly eating away at my soul.

This is about waking up one morning and realizing that there is very little left in my life that I actually value, about having driven away or discarded most of the things that gave my life meaning.

This is about how in the end, my inability not to write might be the only thing that saves me. Because I can go a long time without eating, sleeping, or talking to another person. But I can't go a long time without writing. And when I write, I am outside myself, the one place depression can't let me go.

Because this is about how depression is fighting for control of the organism, and it wins when there is nothing left to do but consume myself on the way to a sad, silent end.

I'm still writing, so I haven't lost yet.

Spring colds

I woke up this morning all sniffly and sneezy. Since the trees are busting out all over, at first I thought it was hay fever. But I'm also achy and sort of feverish so I conclude it's a spring cold. Which I hate more than a cold any other time of year. It makes me feel just sick enough that I look with narrowed eyes at the gorgeous day outside, but not sick enough that I can justify crawling back into bed and sleeping.

I guess I need to eat more fresh vegetables or something...

Can't get this out of my mind . . .

This piece has been on my mind a great deal lately. Written by Holly Near, it tugs at my heart and my soul.

I have torn open my soul, worked to a sweat, wept with humiliation, struggled with confusion, battled with apathy and disillusion, confronted my beliefs again and again until I thought I would drown in sorrow and yet, here I am, on the dawn of a new millennium, profoundly informed by all life and love. I am ready to take the next step. Yet this time, I am filled with calm and grace, I feel less fear than ever before, I have learned compassion in spite of myself, I do talk to the trees and listen to the wind, and I am waiting for instructions.

It's part of a longer piece, which you can find here.

A request for the soon-to-be-ex-lovers of my friends

So if you are a person who is breaking up with a friend of mine, could you do me a favor? Or actually several favors, but they all come down to the same huge giant favor: tell the truth.

Now, I am not talking about a whole-truth-damn-regardless-of-utility-and-who-cares-who-gets-hurt approach to the break-up. Now is not the time to list all the petty annoyances from five years ago that you couldn't be bothered to mention at the time. But there are some truths you should tell, and I just want to let you know what they are, because it will make my role as the friend whose shoulder is being cried on a lot easier. (And, I believe, following these simple guidelines will make it easier for you to live with yourself, too.)

Things not to say, when you really mean something else

• "I'd love for us to be friends"

  Don't say this unless you mean it and are willing to do the hard work together to change the relationship from its current state into an actual friendship.

• "I'm not ready for us to be friends, but I will do X thing for you by Y date, before I disappear."

  Even if you have never ever kept a promise to my friend in the whole time you have known him, please, I beg you, keep this one. I never, ever want to listen to wails of "But she promised she'd do it!!" ever again.

• "Of course there is no one else"

  It's a small world. Only say this if it's true. You're already rejecting someone you once cared enough about to try to create a connection. Don't add insult to injury by flat-out lying. (This goes for any feel-good lies you might be contemplating. Just don't.)

Things you can do that would help

• Show some compassion. Unless this is the one miraculous situation where both of you simultaneously came to the conclusion that the relationship is dead-ended, your news is not good news. Accepting that your soon-to-be-ex is going to be in some pain from this, and being willing to deal with it is the adult way to handle the fact that you are moving on.


• Refuse to drag it out. If it's over, you need to say that, and clearly. Don't hold out hope that it's temporary, or not a real breakup. (And see the previous request -- you can be truthful and compassionate at the same time. Or at least, if you can't then you aren't grown-up enough to be having romantic relationships with other people.)


• Leave your mutual friends out of it. Sure, your best friend and your ex's best friend are going to hear all about it, but it's really okay for the rest of us not to choose sides. Let your friends decide who, if anyone, they will still socialize with.


• Don't put your own desire for this to be easy ahead of the truth. Again, this is a person you once cared at least a little bit about. Try to balance your need to move on with a commitment to truth and fairness. It's gonna suck for your ex, and maybe for you. That's the risk both of you took when you started seeing each other. Deal with it, and live with your fair share of the discomfort of the ending.

One final request for people still in relationships

If some phrase keeps coming out of your mouth that is just begging for an additional clause starting with the word "but", and you never allow yourself to say the second half of the sentence, please do me (and yourself) a favor. Go lock yourself in the bathroom, look yourself in the eye using the mirror, and say the whole damn sentence out loud. Then listen to what you are saying.

For example: "I never want to run you off, I hope you know that." If you've said that to someone 10 times, you probably need to hear yourself say "I never want to run you off, I hope you know that, but I am going to do it anyway." Even if you never acknowledge the truth out loud, it's what you are going to do. How much better to have said it months ago, the first time the half-truth came out of your mouth. Better for you, better for him, and better for his friends.

Does conditioning ever really go away?

When I was growing up in the late 50s and 60s, one thing I learned, as did many little girls around me, was to value myself based on how valued I was by others. I was really good at it, as if I had an innate talent for being a people-pleaser. I basked in the approval of adults, and was insanely good at getting that approval (good grades, polite kid, doing what I was told the first time, and so on).

I wasn't as good at getting the approval of my peers, and (of course) after awhile, I wanted that more than the approval of the adults around me. I spent a good part of my life feeling alienated, as if I could never be quite sure that the people around me really liked me and wanted me (as opposed to tolerating me for humanitarian reasons or something). And as long as I wasn't sure I was wanted, I used that to beat myself up, sure that without being wanted and approved of by the rest of you then I wasn't a worthwhile human being.

I'd spend hours scrutinizing every interaction, hoping that I could find the key to being liked and valued by the rest of you, so that I could like and value myself. And that worked about as well as you might think it would: not at all.

Eventually, I realized that every time someone was preoccupied or in a bad mood, it wasn't actually a referendum on my worth as a human being. Over time, I learned (mostly) to stop being so concerned with what groups of people I hardly knew thought about me, and start worrying about how to be the kind of person I wanted to be. It was hard work to learn that, because that conditioning that says that everyone else is more important than I am, and their whims come before my deepest needs, is really powerful conditioning.

When I think about it, I realize that teaching little girls to show up that way in the world was a good way to create self-sacrificing wives and mothers who would live a life of service to their families and communities. If you can build a person who confuses her need for love and affection with a need for approval, you've got yourself someone who won't rock any boats. Rocking boats makes people unhappy and (possibly) rejecting. And being rejected by someone means not being a good person.

I don't object to living in service to people; in fact, I think it's a good idea (especially if one of the people I am serving is myself). But there's a healthier place for that kind of life to come from than a desperate craving to be approved of by other people, and it's that healthier place that I try so hard to cultivate in my life now.

Every once in awhile, though, I find myself back in that sticky, horrible place where someone else's actions trigger my feeling rejected and worthless. And I hate that. I'm not talking about direct rejection here, or something someone did that was about me at all. I'm talking about an almost automatic response on my part to someone just living his life, a response that takes it as a comment on my worth.

It's a feeling I recognize because I lived with it for so many years, as my default response to the world. Now when I feel it, I want to cry, deep, wracking sobs of sadness. For the immediate feeling of rejection and worthlessness. For the years I spent thinking I have no value unless the rest of you think I do. For the little girl I was who believed she couldn't belong unless she bought her place by being who the rest of the world wanted me to be. And for myself, because no matter how hard I try, there is residual goo from being raised a white middle class girl in the years I was growing up.

I'm in the middle of a bout of it now. My intellect says that this is crazy stuff, that I know better than to react like this. But my spirit feels beaten down and my heart is breaking.

I'd like to know what the statute of limitations on this conditioning is, because I really never want to feel like this again.

Cricadian rhythms

Now that I have nothing I have to do at any specific time of day, most days, I am watching my sleep migrate around the clock. Seems to me that a comfortable schedule for me means that I go to bed about ninety minutes later on a given day than I did the previous day. In other words, my circadian rhythm is 25.5 hours long. This means my sleep schedule, left to itself, precesses around the 24-hour clock.

Idly wondering whether the real difference between morning and night people is the length of their internal circadian rhythms.

At the same time, I find myself sleeping about 9 or 10 hours a night -- feels great never to be exhausted or even feeling slightly tired, but it's not realistic to think i can sleep that much on a regular basis forever.

So I'm also idly recalling one summer when I was in graduate school in Eugene, many years ago. My work, school, and research schedules were such that I fell into the habit of sleeping 4 hours from 4am until 8am every morning. I'd get up, ride my bike over to campus, teach, have office hours, grade papers, and attend my own classes. Then I'd go home and sleep again from 4pm until 8pm. I'd then get up again and do my homework, my research/writing, and my home-maintenance tasks (including cooking -- it was summer and heating the house up in the middle of the night was far preferable to doing it during the day).

It's the only sleep schedule I have ever had where 8 hours a day felt like enough, for an extended period of time, and where I did not struggle to keep the schedule consistent. I really was ready for sleep every time it was 4 o'clock, and I usually woke up just before the alarm went off at 8. I felt ready to get up. I didn't find myself wanting to stay up later, or sleep longer, either. Somehow, this schedule made my sleep needs/wants align pretty well with the 24-hour-clock we use.

Idly wondering how that worked, really. And wishing there were a way to set up a life where I could have a similar sleep schedule forever.