Never Walked In High Heels

The girl next to me was crying so hard that snot was coming out of her nose. I didn’t know it was possible to be next to someone who was sobbing so hard and yet feel absolutely nothing. Our director and leader of the course, I felt, had manipulated us all into this dramatic situation. For weeks she had been going on and on about how terrifying an impending environmental crisis would be, and that the government and news outlets had yet to report the “real” event that they knew was approaching. She warned the class that it would upset us all, therefore she would not tell us and then today after lunch she decided that she would tell us if we would vote unanimously that that is what we wanted to hear. I really didn’t care, but being the last person to vote out loud I said that I wouldn’t mind hearing it either. Within five minutes the girl next to me was in tears out of full, unadulterated fear about our impending doom which of course to her, would come in the next decade.

She was in one of those situations where she was afraid of not knowing the truth and yet horrified to learn about it. And so, she would remark later, she went home terrified, analyzing how her life would change should the economy collapse and clean water become impossible to find. She was shaking as she packed up her books, got on the tube and went to lie down in her own bed at home. Of course, on this particular day the sun was shining and the birds were singing. There was nothing to fear. That is how panic works. The nature of panic comes at its finest when there is nothing, absolutely nothing to be afraid of. It comes in and paralyzes us all so that even the daily tasks of getting out of bed in the morning become mountains to climb.

When panic comes into play we all stop thinking, which of course is the absolute worst thing possible to do. It is the equivalent of taking our hands off the wheel when we run across a patch of black ice while driving down the motorway. We stop thinking. We go into what is commonly known as “survival mode.”

Of course in our society today there are entire industries built on keeping panic alive within the population. One needs only to look towards journalism to see this, the health industry, the safety industry, the insurance industry. All of these different services are in and of themselves good. But they have figured out that if they keep people running around attempting to prevent one disaster after the next by constantly feeding them such a constant source of panic, its better for their industry in general. Who would not want to keep their family and loved one’s safe? Who would want to, after a disaster say, I should have bought X and Y and then all of our lives could have been saved. But its the equivalent of having one of those extremely draining friends who always need a crisis to be dealing with in order to make life interesting and so they flit, creating crises, squabbles, panic from one person to the next in order to ensure their survival and to keep themselves dependent on other people.

Inevitably, when we listen to the news broadcasts, the insurance commercial, read the health & safety pamphlets, we all fall for it. As if this world were at one time blissful and perfect, now needs us to be alert to all the dangers out there. The world was never without danger, there has always been some disaster looming on the horizon and sometimes unfortunately coming straight to our front door. Perhaps I can say this because in my own life, I have never known it to be anything else. In my own life I could see that once one battle is fought, another one will come, so forth and so on.

There finally came a time for me that I had been scared for so long, afraid of what school administrators might do next, what discrimination I would next encounter, what friend would get the next form of meningitis that able bodied people were not susceptible to. Eventually the panic wore off and I became immune. Realizing that this life, as uncomfortable as it often was, is what my life is going to be like. I might as well get used to that fact instead of succumbing to panic and not allowing anyone else to feed such paralysis.

It is the nature of panic to put blinders on. Permitting only a limited and self-centered view of the world. It is impractical, and more often than not succumbing to panic works its way into allowing room for a crisis to take over. Perhaps it is because I am a person of faith that I have generally accepted from day one, that the world will end. That is how my parents taught me, and so ironically, when we talk about the end of the world in classrooms and in debates, I feel nothing. Simply…happy that someday it will all be gone and perhaps there will be nothing or perhaps there will be something better to take its place. But that better option will never come, the improvements will never be seen and the joy we all long for will never be created if we succumb to panic.

“Don’t you dare let them get you down.” I am disappointed again and as always, armies of defense come to my aid whenever I am in danger of being defeated. Mostly I am thankful. These people who believe in me for some strange reason tell me to keep going and not focus on my defeats, but inevitably I do and inevitably these are the times I wish I felt absolutely nothing. I wish I were incapable of feeling. “Chin up” they say, “Don’t let them hurt you” and they encourage me to develop a thick skin as well as a resilience and resistance to those preventing me from chasing my dreams.

I have met people who have lost the ability to be hurt and I do admire them. I once met an actor with a severe birth defect who, after being rejected for years from different drama schools and training schemes, finally built his own as well as his own theatre company specifically for disabled people, both within the artist and production side as well as a disabled only audience. He is thought by many to be a great success and someone whom I should aspire to be. But when I met him I immediately saw that he is someone I could not hold up as a role model because of all of his rejection resulted in his attempts to shield himself and grow a strong exoskeleton. His anger not only is illustrated of his resilience, but also succumbed to bordering on hatefulness towards able bodied people. His is a story of frustration and having nothing but an uphill battle unaided by his extreme ideals and, this is the part that seems inevitable, resentment.

That protective layer of course stops the pain to some degree and inevitably rejection after rejection for years on end often causes all humility to go out the window. But in the case of a creative person, such is an extremely bad idea.

One of my all time favorite quotes by C.S Lewis is “I do not doubt that whatever misery God permits will be for our good, unless by rebellious will, we convert it to evil.” As difficult as such a philosophy may be to swallow, he does have an interesting point that our rejections and the injustices we face ultimately are in our hands to decide whether or not it can be used for our benefit or it will only be used to cause ourselves harm. What we do with such rejection, whether or not it makes us feel self-righteous or change our tactics makes us want to pack in and go home or simply fight all the more harder. It’s ultimately our decision.

Last night I was asked to a meeting for a particular program that I have been trying to get into for years. It was a FAQ session and at one point I raised my hand and asked what someone waiting to get into the program, hoping and willing to wait, should do during that time in which patience seems such and impossible virtue. The man at the front smiled and said, “Enjoy the journey.” To be honest I’m not enjoying the journey of years of rejection. After years of the same philosophy over and over, I don’t think it’s possible to enjoy it and I can’t help but feel a little smug when he looked me in the eye knowing about my years of frustration and, close range, delivered his thoughts. But I am learning on the journey. Learning about myself, humility, perseverance, the willingness to go on, the dedication it takes to accomplish my dream, and above all else I am doing my best to learn how to remain open to the pain. If I do not accept pain and if I turn away from it, it will only hinder my ability as an artist.

Self defense is ultimately a reflex. It’s in our nature to defend ourselves and not turn the other cheek in order to grow from rejection or even the red lights we get on the way to the destinations we know we belong. One has to allow learning from the pains and aches. This means having to feel at peace while scared of failure. Perhaps it is the greatest among us who fail, some such as Thomas Edison, we learn about because after his failures, came successes and perhaps there have been other great people who were at the top of their game that we never even hear of. But I do know that the greatest among us never fall victim to impatience or bitterness. They choose, often in defiance, when the entire world begs them not to, to keep their heart open avoid resentment, bitterness, and sarcasm. And in hardened places of the heart, they open themselves up for even more pain knowing that in the end it will heal over strangely and beautifully.

Her eyebrows furrowed as she looked at the road. Clutching the wheel of the car, she said in an almost commanding voice, “Sooner or later something good has to happen to you.” It was one of those conversations which can pretty much only come about during a long car ride when you have no other distractions and no one else keeping you company except for the person sitting next to you. The honesty of such a conversation comes from not being able to look at each other for fear of losing sight of what’s ahead of you and yet being so close that you can still touch. I could feel her frustration as I explained the situation I was in. Her knuckles had gone white from it; that much I could see even out of the corner of my eye and I did not want to take my eyes off the road either.

I’m not sure if the attitude is American or universal but there is no doubt a common misconception that life somehow owes us good times. We are entitled to continuously good turns, and if these are not constant, something must be wrong and someone; either ourselves, God, or some unknown entity must somehow be at fault. This outlook on life is, when anyone starts to think about it, difficult if not impossible to justify. Why do we assume that anything in life is necessarily owed to us, much less something so wonderful and so consistent that it can hardly operate in reality?

My father, for better or worse, considers himself to be a stoic in the most particular sense. As a teenage girl, living with the likes of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius in my own household gave way to a somewhat petulant adolescence. As I get older I find increasingly more and more problems with the stoic philosophy overall. More often than not it leads to an individual lying to himself , presuming that everything is functioning when it is not. Or worse yet, justifying oppression at the insistence that an individual be satisfied no matter what his state. But from my end, such philosophers do make a very valid point. Life is only bearable when an individual consciously decides to make the best of a situation out of choice, even when the entire circumstance is less than desirable. More often than not misery, as well as happiness, can be a willful decision rather than a representation of current circumstances.

Examining the modern world and how it chooses to communicate via mass media advertisements and even entertainment presents that life should be problem free and if something does go wrong it is either somebody’s else’s fault or representative of some great injustice. The rough times and continuous problems are inevitable, but without acknowledging that times are difficult and putting forth the stubborn effort to make the best of a situation, one of two outlooks occurs. The first is that of being overly rosy and sanguine, insisting that everything is behaving exactly as it ought to even when the world around you is constantly falling apart so that denial and consistent lies to ones self serves the ideals of any individual. The second is to look at difficulties in life as not only inevitable but impossible to avoid and create an overly cynical outlook; insisting that such injustice and inequality, difficult times, and distress is how the world ultimately works and there is no hope for betterment. One outlook presents itself as naivety which leads to disappointment; the other is disappointment which ultimately leads to despair. Neither are particularly functional.

It is a perhaps a counter evolutionary effort which causes an individual to see difficulties not only as being flawed and unjustified now, but at the same time keep the willingness to see beyond one’s present state to a better future. The enormous amount of energy needed to sustain such hope and almost absurd belief can only be classified as the willingness to grab life with both hands and not only make the best of what an individual is given to him but also see himself at a place in a specific point in history in which progress is inevitable. This is of course a tall order for any man in today’s age to subscribe to. More often than not we choose the overly optimistic approach, insisting that nothing is wrong in the first place or steeping ourselves in sarcasm and cynicism, insisting that not only do we not deserve our lot in life but that there is nothing that can be done which leads to any sort of peace, rest, and contentment in one’s own life.

My friend on the one hand is correct, something wonderful will happen again in either her life or my own. There is no doubt about it. As of right now, when things are less than ideal, I am willing to look a situation full in the face and label it as the disappointment that it is. But it is up to me to deem it as cruel, bad, or hopeless. We want to deny the fact but much of life, even the situations which we consider joyful of brilliant is difficulty and discomfort. The rest of life are the good things I bring to myself by choosing to see life for what it is in it’s present state, and also insisting on dwelling in the possibility of what life could be.

It is perhaps one of the oldest and in many ways overly used cliché stories that has ever been written, despite the fact that it is the foundation of so many peoples’ faith. But let’s take it out of context for a moment. A man; a leader whom many individuals had their heart set on becoming king and bringing in vast amounts of freedom for their oppressed people was killed on a Friday afternoon. Of course, that Sunday morning that was soon to follow, his tomb was empty and he had risen from the dead. We pass over the events of Friday and immediately go into Sunday without wondering at all what Saturday could have possibly been like. Nobody was happy come Saturday. Could you imagine the man who you thought would be your freeing king suddenly arrested and executed in the most horrific way possible. You are known to be one of his followers and so if they go looking for more trouble makers, you are the first in line. On that particular Saturday, everyone was in hiding. They met in attics, behind locked doors, secret areas where shadows lurked in hopes that they would never be found out. It was a mixture of terror, disappointment, and rejection which filled the hearts of people who lost their beloved leader on that Saturday; and they had no idea what Sunday would bring.

To say we live in a Saturday world to a modern audience sounds great. It sounds as if there is a world full of cartoons and waffles for breakfast, waking up late and mom asking what we will do to entertain ourselves for the rest of the day. A Saturday world sounds nothing short of heaven, but this is because we know that Sunday follows Saturday, as obvious as that statement may sound, and after Sunday comes the work week where everything is back to normal. But really, even in our own lives, do we have that guarantee? Do we have a promise that Sundays and Mondays will necessarily follow Saturdays and that life will continue as it ought to if we are in a particularly good place in our lives? Do we have a guarantee when we are suffering that this will be the end of our trials and if we pass the test once we will never be expected to pass it again? Just because someone was cured from cancer several years ago, should he expect not to be tested in the future by some other disease which may also risk his life? For a world that demands biological explanation and dismisses faith and assumption as grave mistakes, we are dependant on both of these characteristics to keep our world going.

If we look around and examine the world in front of us, we quickly see that nothing is as it should be. There is an ongoing outrage brought on by pain and death and destruction that reminds us, even if we aren’t religious, this world is nowhere near perfect; we are nowhere near where we yearn to be. Saturdays when I was in college, were not particularly the enjoyable morning which I had earlier in my childhood with cartoons and loved ones to play with. Saturdays were actually the loneliest days of the week. My friends had been out partying the night before only to spend their days off in bed with hangovers trying to fight their nausea and keep down food. Relief from the classes of that week finally came with the isolation in one’s room.

To live in a Saturday world means that we are forced by one form or another to be patient. There is so much about our own futures that is undiscovered and will go unknown until we are facing the edge of them. We are, as Thornton Wilder put it in his play Our Town, “Straining away to make something itself. This strain is so bad that every sixteen hours or so, all of us lay down for a rest.” As much as we may want to look to hitch a ride and look at the end of the movie to know if the hero’s struggle was completely worthwhile, we are unable to do so. So we wait on Saturdays; a day when nothing really improves and no work gets done, paralyzed in the world that promises so much and has so much about it that is yet to be desired. We wait for the Sunday morning to find out whether or not the promises we hoped for were worth the wait we have invested; we watch the sky in hopeful expectation.

When I told my mom that I would never go back to the UK, she immediately said I would. As I’m on a boat going home, curving around the Thames, those five years seemed to have never happened. A lifetime has passed and I am doing exactly what I swore I wouldn’t do.

The first time I was in London, I constantly felt as though I was drowning. Going deeper and deeper it was clear that I was not in charge. My assistants were, and I would never be able to take the reigns away from them. From before we even left home in Chicago, the tensions were clear, and as we crossed passport control, I kept saying to myself over and over, “tomorrow I’ll wake up and everything will be better. Everything will be as it should be.” That summer we would spend three months based in England but also going to various places in Europe as I was completing my research for a thesis. My memories of those that time can be best summed up in two words: fear and hunger. Outside of that I don’t remember going to the Eifel Tower, or the first time I saw Big Ben. I don’t particularly remember the Swiss Alps or being in a bathhouse in Budapest. Fear because one of the assistants was constantly threatening that my chair would go into the river if things didn’t go his way. And since every major European city has a river, it was a constant danger. And hunger, because the assistants saw the fact that I needed help getting food as a way to maintain a level of control. Sometimes it wasn’t ok to eat anything. When they felt like it, it was, but the food was minimal.

How I ever got a combination between these two assistants, I don’t know, but after I had returned from my journey, several people commented that they knew these individuals better than I did and they immediately thought of it as a bad idea. Why didn’t they say anything before? I will never know. But before I left people encouraged me that these two would be good at keeping a schedule and help me with research. We did indeed keep our complex schedule keeping interviews and seeing resources at an alarming rate. By the end of the summer we had been in no less than 12 countries, and it had all gone exactly as I planned back at the university when I was setting up logistics. It was just that none of it felt the way I had planned it to feel. Several times my assistants told me that I should never leave the United States again because it was so difficult for me to travel and they had to do so much of the work. Six months later I finally had a doctor tell me that what I was facing during that summer was abuse.

When the psychiatrist gave me a diagnosis, I immediately asked if he was sure. “I thought that’s what they gave war veterans after being in horrific situations. I’ve been in nothing of the kind. Just a trip to Europe that didn’t go the way I thought it ought to.” He said to me, “But you were in a horrific situation.” It would take me several years to realize that he was right, that my once insulated world was shattered. It was almost as if I had a demarcation between childhood and adult life. And sometimes, despite the amount of grace for forgiveness I have sought, and successfully obtained, I still wish I could go back to before that world was shattered.

So, at home, I swore to my family I would never return to the UK. Without thinking, my mother made her response.

The promises we make ourselves when we are in pain are some of the most dangerous oaths we can ever commit to. These promises inevitably shut down our world and shrink life. On one level it makes sense. We are hurting. And who does not cower in the closet when they know there is a monster outside that is two big for them? Mom knew that my oath was quite literally taking the world and shrinking it down to places I would go and places I would not go. When I called her up exactly nine months later telling her that I had gotten an internship that I could not pass up, and I was excited to be moving back to the UK, she wasn’t surprised in the least. Sooner or later she always knew that I would find the strength somehow to re-open what I had locked away and refused to explore.

The boat culls around Canary Wharf and is headed towards home. The geometric skyline looks completely mythical and fierce in its proportions compared to the rest of London. I am lucky that, despite my diagnosis, I don’t get many flashbacks, and when I do, I can usually control them. I am headed home and I can see my dock from Canary Wharf as the boat approaches. It’s a Tuesday night which means there is Quiz Night at the pub with people I know and trust. Tomorrow I have and audition followed by a concert with a friend at Saint Martins. It seems impossible that a city in which I felt so much terror could grow within three years to be my home and is now a place for joy.

And I shudder to think what would happen if I kept the promises I made to myself while I was in pain.

The sun streams into my bedroom window as it rises. Given that its high summer right now, this means that I get woken up by full sunlight at about 5:30 each morning by a blaze of heat and light. The world is ready to go. Boats blaze past, stopping just underneath my window to pick up passengers. Canary Wharf is in constant motion already. And the computer’s email box dings with emails from the USA… friends back there getting ready to turn in are sending final messages for the day. It keeps moving.

Recently I’ve been waking up exhausted.

It’s not the type of exhaustion that comes from lack of sleep. I get eight hours and my eyes don’t want to shut anymore. It’s on the inside, something like inertia that is on a 24 hour cycle and the only reason why I get up is because there is nothing else to do. That and the sun is now burning my eyes like eggs.

The best way I can describe it is fatigue. Its the type that comes when there’s an innate conflict in one’s philosophy which can’t easily be solved. We say to others ‘do what I say, not what I do’ with the realization suddenly that we know neither what we say nor what we’re doing half the time.  Of course, to make matters  worse, we all have these contradictions. You can’t get away from them as long as you’re alive. The best you can do is take a cue from Walt Whitman when he says “do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.” And then you try to push on.

Times like these I can’t debate or even discuss much. I don’t know what I think and really don’t have the energy to debate on sandy ground. I try to listen to what I hear and think it through when I can. These times are for digestion and opportunities to be fed as I am one to starve myself most often. 

I remember once when I was at college I remarked that I found the need to sleep very annoying. My friend turned to me and said “we need to rest so we don’t make idols of ourselves.” And in our strain to make demigods of feeble men we have to lay down every 16 hours or so just to reiterate that the world keeps going without us. It’s like a plant, force anything to grow all the time and the result is something floppy and lanky.

And so, I do get up. I don’t jump out of bed and start making phone calls but I do brush my teeth.  I know I need to do that, and wash my face. I go through all the things even though the list seems so much shorter today. And I know above all else, I must get up if for no other reason than to get out of the sun for a bit.

            During my twentieth year, I had gotten the remarkable ability to lose time.  I could sit in my dorm room and watch the wall hoping that nothing would happen. And then my roommate would come in and ask me down to dinner, forcing me to look at my wall clock and see that over four hours of my life had gone missing. Sometimes I would find myself in a bathtub full of water staring at my razor blade  at 3:30 in the morning, having no idea how  I got there. It was like little green men had come and taken me, the essence of who I was, and left a shell which was too stupid to know to stop. And because I kept going through the motions, everyone thought I was fine.

            By the time four months slipped away from me (according to the calendar) I was gone. Everything that was characteristic about me had vanished. I couldn’t even recognize my own body in a mirror. I had a diagnosis, which frankly may as well been in Japanese. I knew what it was called, I had read about it during AP Psychology in high school.  I knew the literary context of it from English classes. I knew back then it only developed in extreme circumstances, back when I was eighteen I knew that I would never get it. Now I knew that logic was wrong. I knew all these facts, I just didn’t know what to do about it.

            I ‘snapped out of it’ next to find myself lying down on the back pew at our campus church. I heard singing. I heard bongos.  I pieced together that I was at our Thursday  night worship service. It was Thursday. Huh, who knew? I stayed there staring up at the ceiling, too heavy to move. People walked out by me. Suddenly my friend Ashley came into my vision.

            “I need you to pose nude for me this weekend.”

            “What?”

            “I need you to pose nude for me this weekend. I’ve asked nearly every other one of my friends and nobody has the balls to do it. I have a painting due next week. So now I’m telling you. I need you to pose nude for me this weekend.” I don’t know what I was expecting Ashley to say, maybe ‘you look tired’ or ‘I’m worried about you.’ All I know is this wasn’t how most people climbed out of the depths of despair. But I agreed.

            For most women, the idea off stripping of all clothes and letting someone sit there with an easel and study you is horrifying. Not for me.  Body image is, unbelievably, one of the few struggles I have never had to deal with. Maybe it comes from the fact that my body is utterly uncooperative anyway. As a movement teacher in drama school once told me: “You can just tell, your brain says ‘do it’ and your body says ‘fuck you.’”

            All of which was probably just as well at this point. I have no recollection of that Friday and when I ‘snapped out of it’ again I was lying on my side, Ashley readjusting my hair over my bare shoulder, my arm straining to reach the edge of sunlight. She looked at me with the eyes of an artist, selecting what to paint and highlight as a metaphysical recreation.  Her eyes shifted back and forth from the canvas to my skin with the level of observation like a scientist. Her brown hair fell into her eyes every few minutes when she forgot herself.

            To let someone paint you, see you without obstacles and barriers and then interpret it for an audience, means they know everything. Not simply every scar or mole, but she knows you from observation and study, much like a scientist would know his subject. And yet she deems you a worthy subject to reproduce. As I stared up at the ceiling, feeling the ruffles of the cloth underneath me, I felt at rest. For the first time in months I didn’t have to explain or excuse anything. She just spoke quietly about her own thoughts and reactions so I could gather my own.

            It takes being naked and having nothing sometimes to regain something. That day I got the smallest part of myself and my pride back. This is me. I need nothing else. I am lovely. It’s okay to be naked and have no excuses. Within this feeble state you will be made perfect.

            And I sat there, naked, aware of every moment. I still haven’t forgotten a second of those three hours in November.

It has now been five summers since I first came to London. In 2004, I was here working on an undergraduate thesis, and I swore I would never come back. By the end of those eight weeks my life had forever changed, and I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In many ways, it was a loss of innocence. If you ask me what happened, I can honestly say I don’t remember much. It was a nine week long black-out in my life, which happens to be recorded in my journal. Something that I never open. I remember sitting in the doctor’s office when I was diagnosed and thinking, “I’m a twenty year-old young woman in private school, and they are giving me the same diagnosis as men returning from war.”

Nine months later, I was making plans to move to London permanently. 

The sun hits the Thames so fiercely in the summer that sometimes it acts as a flashbulb trigger between here and yesterday. Oddly enough, I don’t mind. It serves as a reminder of where I’ve come from and where I’m going. And if you’re on the right path, you shouldn’t be ashamed to remember either.

I love summer in London more than any other city I’ve ever lived in. I think it’s because everyone loves summer here. There’s always that first day that you look around and notice that all of the women are wearing dresses that catch the breeze just so. You walk outside and are warmed by the sun, and it’s like winter never even existed. Months of grey skies disappear within a relatively few days of sunshine. It’s like you can breath again.  We all know the rain will return, the biting cold will seem worse next year, and that being so far up North means that the nights will swallow our days. But life is always best lived when you can be present in the moment no matter what the conditions. 

Last week I went down to the docks to see the sunlight flash on the Thames. There are a few days when I want to see it, to remind myself that London can be a harsh mistress. Other days, I know full well that living here is really hard. But on those days, the ones where the sun is shinning for the first time in weeks, and you know you have months of summer left, it makes surviving the winter worth it all.