Never Walked In High Heels

For my birthday this year my neighbors gave me the most amazing orchid. As I look at it on my dining table I can count over twenty blooms facing the world. It’s something pretty and alive greeting me every morning when I come downstairs.

Naturally, when I received it I did what I was raised to do as a child. I wrote each of the parties who chipped in to buy it a separate thank you note. Granted, the fact that I managed to get them all done in a timely manner was an impressive feat for me. But they were done and out by the end of that weekend.

And then I started getting thank yous for the thank you notes.

So I started to ask around, thinking that maybe there was some cultural difference between the US and UK about the writing of thank you notes which I had missed over the past several years. These responses weren’t just a casual ‘thanks,’ they were ‘thank yous’ followed by a recalling of what it was like to receive a letter in a mailbox. They were heartfelt and meant something.

Which depressed me in a way that I wasn’t expecting. When did a common thank you note begin to carry so much weight? Have people just started to settle for thank you texts and emails?

For me the act of writing a thank you note is an exercise of living in and even understanding the moment. It examines something you’ve been given allowing the  understanding of what it adds to your life, be it something graceful for the dining room table, or that box of chocolate you have been looking forward to all day. There are some gifts I get where I sit down and think “what the heck (this is always a weak choice for the replacment of mild expletives, either use them or replace them entirely) am I going to say about this one.” And so I sit it on my desk and look at it.  Then I start to think about the person who gave it to me. Usually by this point I’ve come up with something to fill a 3×5 note card with my terrible quadriplegic handwriting.

It’s another one of those mother myths that I’m learning is actually true. Thank you notes apparently mean a lot to the people who get them. These days they mean more than ever. Mom was right all along.

These notes weren’t even hand written, which is why I find it so surprising that they got a reaction at all. But then I think about the Christmas cards I’ve written the past few years. They too, have caused quite the stir. In a world of text messaging and the iphone, where we all essentially have all our friends in our handbag, people still love getting an envelope in the mail hand addressed to them. And when it comes to a thank you note, people still need to feel appreciated.

Perhaps it is a sign of our highly materialistic nature, that we get something as a gift and don’t seek to understand the greater value of it with our own lives. Maybe we’ve gotten to a state where text messaging as the only form of communication is enough to sustain a relationship. But if finding a personal note in one’s mailbox is surprising I can’t help but wonder what we do expect from our relationships, and how much time we’re willing to have them take.

This summer I spent time with a man who seemed to hold anger and pessimism in his heart above all things. The irony of it was, he was a really lovely young man to be around, good looking, worked hard, and full of new ideas. It was just when you were around him in the quiet times that you found his darkness. One evening he told me how he lived to see revenge thrown upon a man who severely hurt his family in the past and if he let that  desire go, he would doubtless loose all of his drive. To him, no marriage was worth celebrating, women lost their ambitions for babies, and faith outside of oneself is setting yourself up for disappointment.

In short, many of the things which could expand life were to be shunned.

And in a lot of ways, I can’t blame him. My friend had it rough all while he was growing up and beyond. Life is hard and we live in a world that teaches to shun vulnerability, not embrace it. If there is pain and heartache present, it should be avoided  at all possible costs, and few good things can come out of suffering. And if you talk to famine victims or people who have had to suffer their entire lives for the bare necessities it would be hard to speak about maturity through suffering. This is why I could never  subscribe to the stoic philosophy of whatever will be will be. How do you say that to the Holocaust victim without justifying oppression?

What’s strange to me is, I’ve spoken to oppressed and exhausted people from all over the world. Some of them have been tormented  beyond  anything I can imagine, and  yet these men and women are not bitter. I cannot  even call them ‘victims’ in good conscience because they don’t see themselves as such. My friend says there is no mercy for those who have hurt him, and by building such boundaries around himself, he narrows his own life.  These others seek to expand theirs through any combination of love and opportunity possible.

Nobody wants to suffer. But I’m starting to think there is a huge difference between the man who doesn’t want to suffer and the one who thinks he’s entitled never to suffer. The ‘entitled’ man actually shortens his own joys by claiming over and over that x never should have happened to him. And thus my friend holds himself captive by bars that he himself put up, saying all the while that he should never be in prison. He is the willing victim, and he will no longer risk what it takes to find life in existence. Living will hurt more. Death is the only way to exist without pain.

I would watch this man smile or laugh from across the room and often wonder if this expression was forced as much as his cynicism. The latter he would drag up and place around his neck whenever another friend became engaged or was starting their home. With so much resentment towards life’s milestones, what is there left to celebrate? Foolish and painful things occur in all corners of life, but avoiding heartache means avoiding love, shunning tears is denying yourself the ability to weep with joy, and with the refusal for forgiveness comes the inability to allow yourself any room for error. The world is never how it ought to be. By expecting it to be otherwise you focus on what should be, not the beauty that is.  And people who want an alternate reality, I can’t help but wonder if they are holding on so much to their fantasy that no splendor of this world will end their self imposed misery. 

“Once you label me, you negate me”

~ Soren Kirkegaard

There are many moments when I utterly hate every belief I claim to have. Every political classification I fall under seems to be grossly unpopular by everyone else I know. I believe  in God, which in our present times is accounted as being grossly under evolved and  barbaric. I’m from a relatively stable white middleclass family and we all know that’s not cool. In fact, according to some of my friends, this is a prime formula for being sheltered and spoiled while wearing a pink twin set and pearls at my desk job as assistant editor somewhere in the Hamptons.

It seems like the one label that keeps me out of being disliked by my friends, who routinely inform me that they dislike all of the above, is my disability. This is, oddly enough, the one label I’m always trying to loose. It seems to be the one which somehow segregates me from the rest of  the world. I have to go through the disabled entrances, apply for disability arts grants, and get “special services” at school. Because I’m disabled, I’ve been told, I must know what real people are like rather than just what people are like on Martha’s Vineyard. And with these overly judgmental people, it almost makes me wonder if I’m simply their friend because I am disabled rather than because of everything else that I am.

  “How can you claim to be X and Y?” my friends will charge at me. Or my favorite, “of course you feel that way, you’re a white conservative Christian.” They forget, of course, that X and Y are made up of most of the exact same linear structure. They seem to also forget that I come to most of my conclusions because I live my life as Athena Stevens and all that entails, not because I reference everything in my How to be a Proper White Conservative Christian Girl handbook which these friends seem to think I have hidden under my bed. There are a huge amount of issues on which I am very liberal (what do these titles even mean anymore?).  And there are many times when I can barely begin to believe in God.

Of course usually all labeling really hurts me. Is that what he thinks of me? Do I really come across as being that judgmental and snobbish. Am I just another brat to add to the mix? Am I perpetuating the status quo? But I never think, do my “friends” even bother to get to know me? Do they not see me and the plethora of beliefs I hold that run up against everything they claim to despise? Or what about the fact that I really don’t fit into any of the camps you put me in, especially the disability one. Most of the time the parties and organizations I choose to associate myself with look at me funny.

Wiser people than me will ask: why even bother calling such judgmental people your friends? It’s because just as I wouldn’t want to be judged by a single opinion I have, I don’t think its fair to do likewise with anyone else. Being alive is a fluid process and we are all consistently inconsistent. Some days we are X and others we’re Y. Don’t try and label me. The only label I will ever fully fit into is my own name

Recently, two of my friends encouraged me to read the book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. The book, written by Haruki Murakami, details his own experience with long distance running and how it connects to his philosophy of life. Everyone I know loves it. Everyone I know owns a pair of running shoes. It is a very strange thing to hear about something as common as running and have absolutely no frame of reference as to what your friends are talking about.

I, of course, could easily have my equivalents. A road racer for several years, I know fully the feeling of wind in my hair combined with the repulsion of seeing a rotting animal on the side of the road which Murakami describes so poignantly. Or I could write What I talk About When I Talk About Tying my Shoes which would detail the two hours it would take me to complete the act and the Zen like state I force myself to go into so I can avoid chucking my Nike’s into the Thames. At the end of the narrative, I would explain how my ticket to inner peace is a pair of $500 Stuart Weissman’s in black leather and with a three inch heel because they slip on so easily. This, most likely, is not what the author was hoping to inspire.

After reading Murakami’s book I had questions, lots of questions. Questions like: why is running uphill difficult? Why doesn’t anyone run down hill? Doesn’t it hurt your knees? What makes a good pair of running shoes? I even asked one of my guy friends to explain to me what chaffing was. Admittedly I was wholly unprepared for the response. There was suddenly this universe that everyone else knew about which was utterly foreign to me. I was totally lost in spin off conversations about the London Marathon or the hardest places to ran in Southwark. And in between the descriptions of the mud and the knee pain, the panting and the roadkill I kept reiterating my original question: why the hell would this put anyone in a zen-like state?

For Murakami,  running (and life) is about the process and the journey along the run. It’s about meeting the goals you set for yourself rather than being the fastest in the race. And on the one hand, I understand that. As someone who didn’t learn to walk until age ten, seeing the milestones is sweeter than whizzing by them.  Coming to what ought to be childhood rights of passage later means the phase of discovery is unending. I love being twenty five and getting to ask stupid questions that everyone thinks they know the answer to. I loved being a university student and finger painting for the first time. But I am still a very ambitious creature, unwilling to let go of being the fastest in the race when it comes to certain competitions.  Maybe because of this I’m not as well balanced as I would like to pretend. Or maybe its what one friend told me about running, “when there’s a road closed, you better make damn sure you know the detours really well.”

I hadn’t seen my best friend from childhood in just over eleven years when I saw her walk down the aisle. Three weeks earlier I had slung my duffle bag down from college as my mother announced that we would be attending the wedding. This was news to me. The fact that Mary was getting married before she could legally drink was news to me.  If I thought about it long enough, the fact that Mary even still existed would’ve been news as well.

Mary and I grew up together going to zoos and Six Flags Great America. I remember dance was her life and school was mine. We were awkward in the ways that only eight year old girls can be, complete with knobby knees and a palate that could only appreciate the subtleties of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.  When Mary got her ears pierced it meant I could too. We went through puberty together, started to become curious about boys, and planned our hypothetical weddings during ten thousand sleepovers.

The Sunday before school started one August, Mary’s mother told us that the family would be moving away. I saw Mary for the last time three months later.

And so I finished junior high, went through high school and half of college rarely thinking of my childhood friend. Thus, going to Kansas to see a wedding of a friend from half a lifetime ago was less than appealing.

I settled myself into the pew, not knowing why I and my family were even at the wedding in the first place. I literally had no idea who the bride and groom were. When the church doors would open, I didn’t even know what she was going to look like. It was the wedding of absolute strangers.

The beautiful bride was halfway down aisle before I realized my cheeks were wet. Where were these tears coming from? I didn’t know her. I certainly didn’t know him. Yet the tears weren’t forced. It wasn’t that I was at a wedding  so I was supposed to be crying becuase that’s what you are supposed to do when the bride walks. The tears were real. All I could think of was us rehearsing our weddings at ten, and how the things we dreamt about in our Barbie sleeping bags were just beginning to happen.

There is something about the dreams and connections of our childhoods which stay with us. Long before we make the comprises and unexpected commitments we dare to aspire to, even to the point of having a sense of innocent entitlement.  And while often these golden rings slip away from us, sometimes they come back in the most unexpected ways. Mary never was a professional dancer. She went into Math. Somehow I ended up being the performer.

But for once, as I was watching Mary and her husband dance the last dance of the evening, everything seemed familiar.

 “I can’t keep going on like this.”

“That’s what you think.”

- From Waiting for Godot

It was one of those productions that is a guaranteed money maker. Four legendary British actors performing one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century Waiting for Godot. After we left, I found myself discussing the production with my escort. It’s something we thespians do to suck the fun out of any show we see, often if only to make ourselves feel better. Crossing over Trafalgar Square we avoided the traffic while trying to make sense of what we just saw.

“Because that is what life is about really.” We’d come to that point in the conversation where we had reached gross generalizations and bromides. All actors hit this point after seeing a show; when their critique runs out but the conversation’s inertia hasn’t.

The reason (largely) that I don’t let the conversation die is that this is a friend I love being around. Actually that’s only part of the explanation. The fact is I don’t want to go home because I feel stuck. I don’t have the energy to worry that my career’s going nowhere. At home there’s a stack of rejected grant applications waiting for me. Each one has a different reason for rejection that conflicts with all of the others. I’ve gone to bed every night this week wondering if I’ve accomplished anything since college.

“This is my friend Athena,” he begins as he’s introducing me to his friends. “She told me at twenty that she was going to move to London and act. Now she owns her own theater company.” The preface acts as a jolt yanking me back from my spine. I am reminded how he sees me, even on the days that I can’t look past myself. He knows where I’ve come from, and can look back to see that progress is being made.  I just don’t always believe him, or the distance traveled.

The men who wait for Godot together couldn’t survive separated. Even if Godot is as wonderful as the other characters seem to think he is, the day to day grating of life, just the mundane things, is enough to make the waiting in faith impossible. Add to that the stress of striving to make something of life, and you have eighty plus years to carry a burden that is impossible to lift alone.

The friends which make life tolerable, are the ones that know you better than you do yourself.  Moreover, the friends who make this life bearable are the ones that can see more depth in you than you knew you ever had. In the statement: “that’s what you think,” there is packed so much hope for perseverance. They push further, knowing that the ineria must keep going.

Godot never shows up of course. Or at least he doesn’t bother to show up during the two and a half hours we are watching it.  But in a world where the dramatic situation never changes the players do change. They wait. They hold onto hope for just that one day longer than they thought they possible yesterday. Even if the hope is just enough for today, its all you need now.

And in that second when a friend convinces you that you can keep going, perhaps that’s when Godot actually shows up. 

            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.

Up until last summer, I prided myself on never having seen an episode of Sex in the City in my life. But, within the course of a month, I have seen all six seasons and the movie. I blame a combination of my roommate and the inevitable procrastination that comes from having a dissertation due at the end of the year. It’s probably more the fault of the latter. 

I would not want to be like any of the main characters in the show. The obsession with shoes and handbags is something I will never understand. Not walking much means that my shoes last forever, and I just don’t have time to change handbags everyday. I’m just not apt to go through men like water. I won’t let my daughters watch it until… well, ever actually.

But there is something about them that is very lovable. The bond between women who have lived life side by side is unbreakable. I know two young women who can only be described as the Midwestern Sweet Valley Twins. They always have handbags which match their shoes. If I’m in my more opinionated mood, I can’t stand them. But they are always ready to talk to me. They are bright and kind, chattering on and on about everything imaginable while braiding my hair. Hearing their secrets lifts the weight of mine. And whenever I am with them, I feel about as normal as anyone else.

We all want friends like that, people who remind us that we aren’t the only ones going through this madness. Friends make us feel like we can be spontaneous, and girlfriends make us feel like we are all worth while. The brilliance of Sex and the City was that, by watching the friendship of those four women, we became their friends, too. In hearing about problems and ideas, which we thought were only ours, we cannot help but be drawn in. And after a bit, one can’t wait to see what comes in the next episode, just to make sure we’re all ok.

             “Last night I dreamed that I went after It until I was 35. I would see my birthday cake with one more candle on it. Then I turn around and They look at  me and say ‘no.’ Then I see another candle on my cake and I turn around again… When I finally woke myself up I was sobbing. I’ve never done that before. What if I never get It?”

            At this he threw back his head and laughed. That was the only noise he made.

            Jewish women have a tradition of asking to be “a woman who laughs at the future.” It comes from the book of Proverbs in a chapter which reveals what a revered woman looks like. This quality, the older I get, I find particularly hard to swallow. I am a master planner, so much so that I can make Stalin’s five year plan look like shortsightedness. After this dream, I was a combination of enraged and terrified. What if I never reached my goals? What if I just stayed stuck exactly where I was? And where the heck did my friend get off laughing at my perfectly legitimate fears?

            It was the last question momentarily overshadowed the other worries. He knew this was important to me, he could laugh at my worries? How could he just shrug off my nightmares and move on to his next task without saying anything to me? What kind of friend was that?

            “Because I know you. And I know it won’t happen that way.”

            It was a simple statement said while passing through tables and serving drinks. He said it in answer to my explosive challenge to his behavior. He swiftly had me defused. I sat at the bar and sat still for a moment. My friend dismissed my fears so easily. Not by building up some dramatic and inspiring speech where at the end of it the cripple is in tears and feels inspirational, but just as if he could state plain fact and keep walking because the statement took no concentration to say. It won’t happen that way.

            I am, on my worst days, very far from a woman who can laugh at her future. I suppose, for those of us who haven’t gotten there yet, having a friend who can do so is all the more precious. It is not that he recognizes my worries as irrational that is to be treasured; there is nothing more aggravating when you’re actually worried than a friend who says “you’re ridiculous, stop it.” Rather, it is the ability to look at the demon square in the eye and poke its nose that I admire. And after he’s done that, your friend walks back to you and says “you can take him,” because he knows its your demon to fight and not his.

            Perhaps I will be 35 and still fighting this battle I fear. Maybe I’ll never reach  what I want. Make it so. Each time rejection happens I’ll go back to my friend, sometimes with my head hung low. And he will no doubt laugh. He will laugh at the absurd idea that I should ever consider myself defeated. 

            It is a long held tradition that a woman my age should be restless until she finds her match. And I do feel this pull as much as anyone, but recently I’ve been fortunate enough to have a small piece of  this hole filled in the strangest and most arbitrary way imaginable.

             It all started at a pub. All good stories in England start this way as a possible explanation for the most unlikely events.  Without such a preface the events that follow would  seem far fetched, this way it provides an excuse. Anyway, I had visited the S&W for a friend’s birthday and I had seemed to have overstayed my welcome. Not according to the pub, mind you. But whereas at midnight Cinderella’s carriage turned into a pumpkin, here in London the transit system becomes completely inaccessible. I got out of the pub just in time to see the last accessible boat leave the pier. I had just entered my own personal Twilight Zone where nothing is accessible and the world isn’t ready for a young red head in a wheelchair.

Ninety minutes and six phone calls to cab companies later, I was waving from a black cab at the men from the S&W who had found me a ride home. Chivalry was not dead, it had merely gone out for a drink after becoming very bored. It was at that point that I decided to visit the old pub a bit more often.

Over the next few months my roommate and I would visit the S&W two or three times a week. I would get to listen to stories from the men about their day, or join in debates. I would watch them play darts while I would perch on the leather couches and laugh at their insults. The greeting I would get when coming through the door was irreplaceable.

But what the men at the S&W gave me or  rather give me every time I visit the constant reiteration that I am a woman of great value and worthy of respect. For most young women  this particular gap can only be filled with a masculine influence. When a good guy is not readily available often time standards will get lowered just so the loneliness is filled. And to our own fault, sometimes we are so busy looking for an idealized version of romance that we miss the many other facets of love right in front of us. The S&W reminds me to stop looking and start seeing. It is one of the few places in this city where I feel most like myself.

After eleven the pub technically closes. But the owner allows us to stay later so long as we keep buying drinks. I am far from done debating with a gentleman who must be some reincarnation of Hemingway. The chef has locked the bartender in the alcohol cage in some sort of ritualistic joke that never is funny but never gets old. Another game of Killer starts out on the dart board.

And I know, if I wanted it, any one of them would see me safely home.