beauty, cancer, depression, family, Life in General, Marriage, men, writers, writing

Lost Seasons, Perfect Days.

Today it is raining in slivers of silver and the sky, white and pearly, seems more a tantalizing veil of depth than an opaque discouragement. My husband feels well enough to work a bit in the garage and so, while I have this time and energy, I will tell you the story of this last year, and I will not be afraid.

Not all of what we’ve gone through, just the part that has kept me from writing, from sharing too much, from turning my focus away from life outside our swirling world of doctor’s meetings, medical testing, inconclusive results, surgeries, biopsies, and uncertainly.

I’ll explain that in a moment, but it comes to this; life changes, nothing is certain, and we have had a face-slapping, butt-kicking reminder that all we have is this moment, so we might as well make the best of it.

My husband, Joseph, has congenital heart disease. It’s not his fault, it’s not a result of diet or lack of exercise, he inherited it from his mother’s father. He was told at forty that this is a condition that worsens with every generation. After three different angioplasties, where they go through the main artery in his thigh to place a stent in the blockages in his heart, we were informed that a double-bypass, open-heart surgery was his ‘best option.’ It should buy him anywhere from seven to twelve years.

So we waited, we prepared ourselves, we promised each other that life would be better when he could hike again, work without being winded, build up his strength, lose the weight that was impossible to shed when your metabolism isn’t working well because your heart is only pumping less than 60 percent of what it should be.

For six months we waited, for him to be vaccinated, to be able to get a place in a hospital during a major pandemic, to have all the pre-surgery tests done, and all the while he worsened, until just walking a few yards left him winded and holding his chest.

I won’t go into all the psychological side-effects of going from being a bodily strong man to a person who feels physically vulnerable for the first time in his life.  That’s too big a gaping break in the bridge of emotional damage to cover here, perhaps I will share it another time.

The day of surgery comes, because of covid, I am not allowed in the hospital, so I drop him off at five a.m. at the main door of the hospital in the dark, it is snowing. He hugs me and tells me not to worry, to never be mad at the girls, and then I watch him walk away. I smile and stay brave, but as he disappears into the lobby, I break. Not a hard snap, but a crinkling of everything holding me up, as though a beautiful, smooth piece of parchment paper is rudely crumpled into a small wad and then discarded. That’s all it was holding me up, paper. I weep all the way back to the hotel.

I try to lie down but every time I close my eyes all I can see is the scalpel slicing through the skin and thick, powerful muscle of his chest, the image and sound of his breast bone sawed through and ‘cracked’, as the surgeons so airily explain it, the clamps that pry open his rib cage and hold it up, his heart out of his body lain on his chest.

Several hours later, the surgeon calls to tell me it went well, he’s in recovery and should be coming around in about four hours. I breathe for the first time in what I realize is weeks.

Yet, in less than two hours later I get another call. The conversation goes like this.

“Mrs. Stachura? This is (name withheld) I’m the respiratory technician and I’m looking after your husband today.”

“Thank you so much, how’s he doing?”

“Pretty well, I actually think I’m going to go ahead and take him off the respirator.”

“Okay, great. When do you think he will wake up?”

“Oh,” I hear uncertainty in his voice, “he’s awake now. He’s looking at me gesturing for me to take the tubes out.”

“Then get off the phone and take them out!”

Here’s what I find out later. Not only did Joseph wake up far too soon after the surgery with breathing tubes down his throat, he was tied down to the bed, his hands were Velcro-ed to the bars, it was a nightmare scenario. They had not given him enough anesthesia, and he possibly even woke up during surgery.

Then he spends a week in the hospital alone. The nurses change every twelve hours and they are never the same so he has no real advocate. On the seventh day I am asked to come to the hospital for physical therapy training, to learn how to help him in and out a car, shower, up stairs, etc. When I finally find his room and he sees me, he is so relieved he just starts to weep. All I can do is hold him, ever so cautiously, the way you would cradle a fragile porcelain vase you just glued back together, afraid it will fall apart again, or that you will do it more damage. My husband is a shattered vessel, stitched back together, but not yet solid, not yet whole.

Our good friend Ben, a retired firefighter with the soul of a shaman, insists on meeting us at home to get him settled. Though I had said we’d be fine, of course he knew better. Things were much more difficult that we had imagined. The surgeon’s assistant had told us to buy a recliner because Joseph wouldn’t be able to sleep in a bed, and she was right as well. For two months he slept an hour or two at a time in that chair while I stayed on the sofa next to him. Eventually he convinced me to go sleep in the bedroom, but I kept the door open and woke up whenever I heard him stirring. Even walking to the bathroom was a challenge. Taking a shower was downright scary. I learned about blood pressure, sorted a confusing array of medications, changed wound dressings, and played cheerleader. (Minus the short skirt and kneesocks) It was a full-time, constant-focus occupation. All else fell away, and I didn’t even notice. Spring passed with no visits to see the flowers in meadows, no celebrations.

Other than a trip to console the mother of my daughter’s first love, who was murdered, and get her through everything from cremation to what would have been his twenty-fifth birthday, a trip that came over my husband’s own birthday, but which he would not hear of me not taking, because that’s who he is, more weeks passed with us not really noticing. Pretty soon it was summer, hot, but there were no visits to glorious swimming holes, and I had to hang heavier curtains over the windows so we could watch TV in the daytime, something we never usually do.

Eventually, he could venture out, just a bit, with a pillow strapped to his chest with one of my long scarves. I would say, “Open heart surgery,” to explain quickly when people stared, though my best friend told me I should tell them “I tried to get him to give up the blankie, but he just won’t do it.” I think I’ll try that.

But he wasn’t getting much better, we kept telling ourselves that the doctors only say that he’d feel better in a few weeks because they don’t want to scare you with the truth of how long it really takes to heal and get back to ‘normal.’ But surely, we kept repeating, this was all part of the regular healing process.

Then, six weeks after surgery, at one o’clock in the morning, Joseph woke me up from a dead sleep, and I could see the consternation and confusion on his face. “What the hell is this?” he asked, pointing to two lumps on his collarbones, both the size of my fist.

My first thought was lymph nodes, but they were too low on his chest. They were goose eggs on his collar bones, exactly symmetrical. We called the amazing Ben, who, being used to long shifts with broken sleep, listened to my report of his blood pressure and looked at texted pictures of the area, then told us to go to the ER.

The faces of the doctors were blank. They had no idea. They ran him through every test they could think of−CT scans, ultrasound, blood, urine, they brought in other doctors to look at him, but nothing. No one had ever seen a presentation like this.

So, we went home with no diagnosis and an appointment with his cardiologist. And at the cardiologist’s office we were met with the same confused expressions, more doctors came in from other rooms to say no one had seen this. Shoulders were shrugged, palms were turned upward in expressions of ignorance, No help there, but more tests were scheduled.

Since then it’s been a halting, clumsy dance of tests and fighting for more tests and clearer results, and being told nobody knows, maybe the Mayo clinic?, maybe special doctors in Philadelphia?, maybe this specialist, maybe that hospital. He went through several days of having radioactive substances injected between his fingers and toes then hours in an MRI machine. Joseph is claustrophobic, so though I wasn’t supposed to be allowed in with him, they brought me in to talk him through it.

Joseph would start to panic as a huge flat panel was lowered to within a half inch of his face and he had to hold still for twenty minutes. “Tell me about Venice,” he would plead.

So I would walk him through the streets of Venice from a chair a few feet away, speaking loudly over the machine so that he could hear me, we walked together over rain-glistening cobbles, along familiar canals, I described the costumes of Carnivale in great detail, the Murano chandeliers in the shop windows and hotel lobbies. We wandered the narrow back streets at night, and saw the torches lit and placed in iron holders as we walked backward in time while I showed him the story as it showed itself to me.

We were so filled with hope that this would give us answers, that we would have a plan, something to fight, to deal with, to accept even. But on the morning after those tests in yet another hotel room we got the news.

“No results, everything looks normal with the lymph system.” Joseph was angry, almost desperate, shouting, “Then what is wrong with me?”  I absorbed all I could but even trying to justify the results as something positive I was met with his frustration. I was helpless.

While he called doctors, I went into the kitchenette to hide while I lost it, sitting at a little built-in table in a Victorian hotel, I gave in to disappointment and frustration for the first time. My head down on the table I struggled to sob silently, sucking back the sound, until Joseph came in and told me to go ahead and cry, because I deserved it.

Since then, we’ve been through a myriad of other tests, including repeating that first lymphoscintigraphy twice more. A biopsy of the swellings, a colonoscopy with biopsies to rule out infection, and I can’t even remember what all else. Now we are more cautious with our hope, we’re stingier with expectation. That way the disappointment doesn’t overwhelm us, knocking us on our asses every time, it just laps around our legs, leaving us damp and chilled.

And still , we know nothing, as fall leaves in the wind begin paint the sky.

It’s been six months since the surgery, and he is worse than before the surgery. He’s still wearing a small pillow strapped to his chest to try to relieve the constant pressure that makes him gasp, sometimes cry out in his sleep, and often clutch his chest until the stabbing pain subsides enough to endure again. And now we get new information. If it is Lymphodema, it is not fixable, and it will get worse. When Joseph went to see the wound specialist−after six months he still has a hole in his ankle where they removed twelve inches of artery to use in his chest that hasn’t healed−the doctor noticed swelling in his leg that is dimpling. She told him that it can worsen and the skin can become ‘like bark.’

And now my husband, the man I love and adore, the sexiest man in the universe to me, confesses with a tear on his cheek that he may become a ‘monster.’ That I might be with a man physically disfigured.

I kissed him and told him not to worry about me, my secret fantasy has always been the leaf man, the half-beast of the forest, but I know it’s not just me. How does anyone adjust to such a thing?

With courage of course, with love, with time.

And speaking of time, spring has passed, summer is gone, fall is showing the last of its glory, and still we wait, but I have learned something. I have learned so much, but especially this−how to make even illness and uncertainty fun.

It’s a strange thing to say, to long for, to work at, but having fun and enjoying life is the best way to honor it all. So, we play scrabble for as long as he can sit up. We take very short walks in this place we chose for the breadth of its natural beauty. We drive to see waterfalls. We put on music and sway together. We find the moments to celebrate, to laugh at it all, and to love each other with a new ferocity.

At the end of the day, I am happy. I understand that we are not waiting for some result or even a new plan, we are living now, we can laugh now, we can share secrets and giggle, and make amazing food, and watch the light on the water from our porch.

There isn’t anything better than this anyway. Venice will wait.

Seasons have passed, but in those months, in those weeks, there have been perfect days, better than we have ever shared. We are together, and we will find a way to make even this fun.

Take care of yourselves.

Take care of each other.

Find those precious days.

And write them on your heart.

Shari, November 11th, 2021

cancer, Life in General

An Elk Ate My Brussels Sprouts.

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No, really. I was just bragging to hubby about how smart I was to leave the last few stalks in the garden as it would provide yummy fresh-from-the-earth vegies, when I went to pick some.

Pride comes before the fall. I stood looking at the mess made of all my efforts in confusion. The tops were off every kale plant, the parsley was sheered off at ground level, and the plump little brussels sprout globes were gone from the stalk or badly mangled. ‘What the…?’ I thought. Then I saw the hoofprints. The mesh fencing was still mostly up, but a section had been sort of smushed down to about four feet. Just high enough for an elk or a member of the elephant family of mammals to step over.  That’s when I realized that I probably wouldn’t want to eat the few remaining vegies because they have elk spit all over them.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an elk close up, but they are big, really big. Trying to keep them out of any food source is a bit like trying to scare off a mastodon with a broom. Both the extinct mastodons and very much alive elk are both herbivores and neither have particularly vicious reputations, but it’s probably smarter to just let them stomp quietly along their merry way and clean up the wreckage afterwards.

Sounds like a few relationships I’ve had, and, to be fair, the results of a smattering of my own actions. I admit it. But it’s also a lot like what happens in life.

Last week the best friend my husband and I have made up here, died of cancer. To respect the family’s privacy, I’ll call him Bob and his partner Jodi. We were with Bob through the diagnosis and his first treatments, including spending time in Seattle where he had his bladder removed. Then chemo, and when that failed, they turned to experimental immunotherapy.

It worked, the tumors shrank and he was told that though the cancer wouldn’t leave him, he could expect a good five years of reasonable health by continuing that treatment.

Having been on the board of a cancer charity where I worked closely with City of Hope for many years, I know a little something about what people and their families go through with diagnosis and treatment, and the many uncertainties. So, during conversations at that time, we promised our friend that we would be there for his girlfriend, Jodi,  who had only been with him for a single year before she found herself a full time caregiver, a role for which she was not prepared but stepped up to with grace and courage. Though in many conversations she privately confessed to me that she ‘had not signed on for this.’ I understood, it is a huge thing to give up your life to care for someone, especially someone you have only known a year.

Then the unstoppable pain started in one leg, nothing contained it, not codeine, not morphine, nothing. Bob resisted our suggestions to go back to the doctor and I knew that he was afraid of what they would tell him.

And it’s what they did tell him. Two tumors in his abdomen had grown together, and when that happens, the cancer speeds up. He now had a four by six inch tumor pressing on nerves and they gave him three weeks.

I went into neighbor mode. I cooked meals and delivered them, offered to run errands, sit up with him if necessary, anything I could think of to ease their pain. But in this time of covid, there were limited things I could do, and my husband was still recovering from pneumonia, so I had to keep a certain distance. Sometimes when I came to drop something off, I would wave through the window, and on one memorable afternoon, Jodi came flying out of the house putting on her coat and begged me to just take her for a drive for a few minutes.

I took her to one of my favorite spots and parked under the trees in the rain. She talked, and I let her, joined her, and tried to prepare her for what was to come. She’s been through deathbed scenes before, but it’s different when it’s your one and only, I know that, but not from personal experience. I have done home hospice for relatives and friends, but not a partner, so I could only express sympathy and rub her back as she wept. I hope it helped.

I’ll never forget the sound of soft rain on the roof of the car as the windows steamed and grew foggy from the exhales of my weak words of comfort and her gasps of sorrow. It is hard to die, but it might be harder to watch someone you love die. I don’t know yet. I’ve only done the latter, after I’ve been through the former, I’ll let you know.

My husband and I never did get a chance to say goodbye to our friend. Thankfully, though it’s strange to say, he died fairly quickly, slipping into a coma and then his labored breathing stopping at 12:45 on a Wednesday night. I happened to be  awake when Jodi texted me at 5:45 a.m. asking if I could take his daughter, who had come for the end, to the flyaway bus about an hour away so she could get to Seattle and the airport. After a quick discussion, hubby got dressed and left to drive the daughter all the way to the airport, (about two and a half hours one-way but we couldn’t bear the thought of her having to take a bus just hours after her father’s death) and I went to be with Jodi.

I stayed all that day, helping her clean up, crying, listening, encouraging her to sleep. She tried several times to lie down, but would pop back up again when her brain screamed reality at her. Twice she called for me and when I went in, she asked me with pathetic desperation that tore my heart, “He’s not coming back, is he?” I told her no, he wasn’t, but that he would always be with her.

So I took a chair and sat by the end of her bed, propping my feet up close to hers, and we cried more, and laughed in that sad gurgling way one does when one more onslaught of grief will snap you in half. At one point she looked up at me with alarm in her eyes and asked what was wrong with her. She said she felt like someone was tugging at her right sleeve. I explained that lack of sleep will do strange things to your body’s physical sensations, but I also suggested that it might be him, just patting her arm, letting her know it would be all right, and I told her to watch for signs from him, ways that he might try to contact or comfort her. We discussed things that they shared a love of, eagles and the sea both figured strongly in her heart.

At about five o’clock in the afternoon, she finally fell asleep. I stayed an hour, then decided to head home, leaving a note.

You are loved,

You are supported,

I am a phone call away.

She slept for several hours, but woke before dawn. I joined her a bit later and we spent another day just trying to sort reality and absorb the blow. It’s a feeling of total helplessness and the only remedy is to get through it. By the third day I took her out for a drive  just to get her out of the house. As we drove through a dense part of the national forest, an eagle swooped from a tree and paralleled my car for a hundred yards or so before veering off into the canopy, and we held hands and smiled through the tightness of tears in our throats. Now, a week and a half later, she’s doing much better and I’m helping her look for a new place to live. She does not want to stay in his house without him.

Death is like elk or even mastodons in the garden. One long swoop of a tusk churns up everything we’ve planted, every well plotted future meal and harvest. We don’t expect it, we can’t stop it, but we can listen with awe and gratitude to the bellowing in the distance as the herd retreats, leaving us to clean up, to replant, to reflect on the fragility of our human endeavors. All of us are temporary, they seem to say, that’s okay, it all comes back together in the end.

And yesterday, when I went to see my friend, she told me with a smile that she had woken in the night and heard him calling her name, not sadly, not desperately, just to let her know he was there.

I thought about that moment. His strong, loving voice echoing from the distance far ahead, letting her know the way, so that we she can follow and not get lost, and that there is nothing to fear.

Like a herd of mastodon calling across the Pleistocene marshes, ‘We were here, we too passed this way. Do not be afraid.’

So I will replant my garden, I will love and lose and learn until it is my time to pass through those marshes.

And I will not be afraid.

I miss you, “Bob”.

Shari, January 17th 2021

family, Life in General, mental illness, parenting, therapy

Perfect Lives

Isn’t it interesting how many people have perfect lives? To judge from my relatives’ posts on social media, nothing happens but bringing home trophies, straight A’s and loving family gatherings.

They like smiling and church and friends and their fabulous houses and cars and perfectly behaved children on their perfect, Round Up-poisoned lawns.

I’ll tell you what they don’t like.

Anybody knowing anything real about them. I suppose I don’t mind so much anymore because trying to be ‘perfect’ all but killed me before I figured out what bullshit it was.

I’m usually against bleeding all over social media, but sometimes I cut myself, and something ugly spatters across my computer screen. You might want to fetch a lobster bib to read this.

I recently wrote, very briefly, about having to bite my tongue when my sister went on a rage rampage with her middle finger in my face screaming F U, (but not abbreviated) in front of her nine year old with her 14 year old in the bedroom within hearing. Hell, the whole Northridge mall was within hearing, but I kept my wits with me and my voice down. I didn’t slaughter her with truths that she could not even understand much less hear.

Because what’s the point? She had no idea that she was talking about her own pain. I’ve always known she considers herself morally superior to me, and most everyone else, but I was genuinely shocked at the unhealthy level of suppressed, transferred blame. I don’t know why I should be, I remember the sensation well. She’s not mad at me for leaving my husband, she’s mad at her husband for leaving her, but she doesn’t know that. I wouldn’t have either at the same stage of life. I spent much of my twenties and thirties so unconscious that I was playing drunken bumper cars in the dark, and often I couldn’t even find the ride, but I was definitely in a carnival.

When my mom, who also heard the caterwauling because she was recovering from broken ribs, which was the only reason I was in my sister’s house to start out with, found out that I had mentioned the unflattering event in a blog, she was concerned.

But not about the behavior, about the fact that I had said it out loud, I had brought the ‘perfect’ family image down a notch.

Nobody is supposed to know that our family would actually descend to screaming obscenities at each other, (or one at another in this case) and I’m definitely not supposed to say that the reason for that is buried personal failures that should have been dealt with years earlier.

Because it’s hard to deal with things that you swallowed long ago that are now twisted stuck in your gut.

I imagine what it would be like if it were possible for a surgeon to cut into someone’s repressed pain.

“Scalpel, suction. Bucket!”

Imagine the hissing sound of puncturing that mass, the nasty, festering puss, and the smell!! All that tear and bile-soaked, gangrened, rot. I know, pretty right?

If you think of  it as cleansing out the infection, digging down to the root of the problem makes more sense, like squeezing a huge zit or removing a tumor. Perhaps a strong dose of self-awareness antibiotics could clear that bs right up.

I’d take ‘em.

I suppose, to a certain degree, that’s what I did. I’ve had several therapists in my life, different people who worked for me at different times. Or didn’t. The first, before I knew what therapy was for, was Freudian. He basically sat there with his eyelids closing as though fighting sleep.

The next one was better, she was a woman in her sixties who had lived a great deal of life and believed in sharing it. I remember telling her about a birthday party I had in seventh grade that no one came to and it made her cry. You may have your own list of sad stories but I made my therapist cry. We have a winner!

She got me going on the right path. Taught me to pay attention to what was bringing up my feelings, what was beneath them, and take responsibility for my responses. I saw her for a couple of years, felt good and stopped, then years later when I was ‘happily’ married, I thought, ‘I’ll just go check in on myself.” So I made an appointment, walked in with a smile on my face, sat down and beamed at her.

“How are you?” she asked.

I always come off so strong and in control that it was the first time in years someone had asked me sincerely, “How are you?” and even as I choked out the words, “I’m fine.” I busted out crying.

She gave me that sympathetic, understanding look I remembered so well, handed over the box of Kleenex, and shook her head as she said, “I don’t think you’re fine.”

Clearly I wasn’t, but I had no idea how un-fine I was until I went back. In retrospect, though everything seemed terrific on the surface, frankly, I was unhappy. I was living a life filled with dinner parties, gala events, a handsome, semi-famous husband who appeared to adore me, (mostly when we were out) and working with that therapist again made me realize that 85 percent of my energy went to other people, leaving very little for me. I was holding everyone else up and sinking from the weight.

Denial is a weird and malignant thing. Pretending you’re happy, striving to have all the ‘things’ you should have instead of the peace you truly need, being convinced that if other people admire your life, it must be great and you have no right to feel unhappy, all of these things lead to dangerous self-deception.

And man was I lying to myself.

Then I got the really great therapist. This one made me work, I mean hard. Instead of letting me ‘talk it out’ she would shake her head and call bullshit. She would force me to look backward and inward, she broke my ass down.

There were times I would leave her office and stumble to a nearby park to sink down at the base of a tree and wonder about how horrible a person I was, how ignorant of even my own basic triggers. It was ugly and staggering to look at myself without the kaleidoscope of distraction techniques my sub-conscious had employed to shut my own darkness out. It was friggen’ cold out there.

Then this ruthless, wonderful therapist told me, “Take a trip by yourself, go somewhere that people are more awake where you can take an honest look at yourself.

So I did. I went to Jemez Springs, New Mexico to a remote hotel that was connected to a number of healers and shamans. Over several days I worked with different people. Some traditional therapy sessions, some art therapy, some spirit journeys, and tons of hiking or sitting in a solitude so absolute that sometimes there was not even sound. The desert is very soul cleansing. It was stunning how many of these people told me similar things about myself.

But the biggest break-though came from a woman who was supposed to be just giving me a massage. Turned out she was a very connected spiritual healer, and as she was working on my back, she said, “Wow, you’ve got a lot of city smudge on you, do you want me to cut some of that off? I said of course, that that was why I had come. During this time I was trying to decide if I should leave my husband or keep trying to make it work, something he didn’t understand because for him, everything was fine.

So this woman is still massaging me, but now she’s talking gently too, I occasionally sense her making sweeping movements over my body and occasionally she clapped her hands loudly. As she’s doing this, I’m getting more and more limp. I feel exposed and vulnerable, but not afraid.

Then she asks me about abuse and I start to cry. All my life men have said inappropriate things to me, even as a child, I’ve been touched and taken advantage of, I’ve been groped and pushed into doing things I didn’t want to do, but I’ve never thought of it as anything other than ‘normal’. That’s just how men are, right? As I got older and wiser, I learned to stamp on that boundary, but let me tell you, in the acting world, the boundary line is deeply zig-zagged. I lost roles because I wouldn’t sleep with producers, I was able to flirt my way out of a great many situations with something like, “Wow, if only I wasn’t married…” but let me tell you, successful men have very fragile egos and they take a great deal of handling. Once I had to report a director to a producer, but I already had the job and the producer was a woman so he couldn’t fire me, but needless to say, it was a bit tense on that set! I thought it was no big deal, but as I lay there, all of these dismissed and repressed thoughts surfaced with a chill that turned to shudders as this woman massaged me. Then she began to talk, gently still, ever so gently, all the while she worked the knots in my shoulders and kneaded my hands with a reassuring touch. Finally she asks, “What do you really want?”

I am on my back now and I put my hands over my face and sob. “I don’t want to feel alone,” I weep.

“Give me your hands,” she says. I hold them out and she places her palms against mine. “Tell me again,” she says.

“I don’t want to feel alone anymore.”

“Say it again.” I do, and as I do, she pushes against my palms, I instinctively push back.

“Keep saying it,” she says. I push harder and repeat, “I don’t want to feel alone, I don’t want to feel alone,” until I am straining against her, the hurt and loneliness in my body raking me with waves of pain. One more time, I shout now, “I don’t want to feel alone!!”

She released the pressure, leaned down over me and whispered, “I’m going to do something that might startle you.”

She put her arms around me, held me gently and whispered in my ear. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for all you’ve been through.”

And I disintegrated. Weeping until I had no energy or tears left.

She finished the massage in silence and I stumbled up, got dressed and went back to my room. I barely made it to the bathroom before I began vomiting. Up it came, everything in stomach, all the forgotten bile and hurt hurtling from my body with projectile force.

For four hours I lay on the floor of that bathroom, unable to so much as lift my head. I was so physically weak I did not have the strength or the will to move. Somewhere in those hazy hours it came to me that I had hit the bottom, I had become aware of who I really was, and I realized how unaware and manipulated I was by forces unseen and it crushed me that I had been so blind. I felt like a total failure, a baby soul, a blob of emotional goo.

Eventually though, I roused myself enough to move to the bed, then a chair and by early evening, I felt not only felt better, but pretty damn good. I won’t say I was ready for a hike, but I felt…lighter, cleaner.

I returned to LA and went to see the therapist, I told her about the whole trip and all I had learned, and I finished by telling her that I was devastated to discover how damaged my core self was, that I felt broken.

She smiled at me, a little lazily and said something I will never forget.

“Congratulations,” she grinned. “Now let’s get started.”

In the work that ensued, I admitted the pain of being the odd-one out in a close family, I confronted my disappointment in my mother and father, in the tactics used by my siblings to make themselves feel better, which was primarily mocking others, namely me. I recognized my perfection complex, and my self-destructive spiraling when I ‘wasn’t good enough,’ my competitive nature fueled by the desperate need for my mother’s attention while surrounded by talented siblings. Beauty and winning had always been rewarded, I had been compared to other girls all my life, and it had shaped me.

It took a long, long time, to be free of much of that.

I know that everyone faces troubles and unkindness and ignorance, we all react differently to these things. How you got there isn’t all your fault, but fixing it is all your responsibility. Pretending that you or your family is perfect won’t let the infection out. Denial will just keep growing in darkness until it kills your joy.

Understanding what makes you tick doesn’t make the self-doubt and blame vanish, but it eases it a bit each time I face up to it. I still work on it, all the time, everyday in fact. But at least now I know I’m not alone.

I’m worth working on, and so are you.

It isn’t easy, but man is it worth it.

Wanna’ feel better about yourself?

Look at the worst of you first.

Then whisper to yourself, “I’m so sorry.”

And give you a hug.

Take one from me too.

Shari, March 1st, 2020