Defending My Disease

While I was reading The Washington Post Book Review one Saturday afternoon in 2000, my hands started to tingle.. “Hm . . . weird" I thought, "isn’t that a symptom of a heart attack?” My inner judge piped up: “Only you, Jan, would think you were having a heart attack because you feel a little tingling . . . you're only forty-two."
*****
I had just completed my first of year of teaching after a hiatus of staying home with my kids through their pre-school years. At a graduation party that afternoon, I had eaten rich stuff -- buttery hors d’oeuvres and chocolate cake. Maybe I had overdone it.
When I heard the EMT folks at the door, I decided I had to get down the stairs by myself. I got out to the hallway and, feeling weak, started to crawl to the landing. At the landing, I sat down and descended the staircase by sitting, pulling myself forward, and sitting again.
“I’ll be all right,” I said to my children and managed a smile as I was wheeled out on the stretcher.
Lying in the back of the ambulance, I tried to figure out the driver’s route by counting the lights and paying attention to the swerves the vehicle made, and I thought to myself, “This is so stupid. I’m probably having a panic attack . .”
At the hospital, outfitted with a nitrogen patch, I started to feel better. Someone brought me a heated blanket. “This is like a spa,” I thought and fell asleep. The next morning I learned that I had had a heart attack, or what would have been a heart attack if I hadn’t gotten oxygen so quickly
In the hospital bed that afternoon I told myself, "You don't have to get up at any time tomorrow. You don't have to think about anything. All you're supposed to do is rest." I was tired, but I was happy. When I’d been this tired before, I knew that I would be expected to get up the next day and grade papers, drive my kids to lessons, fix supper, fold laundry. In the hospital, all anyone expected me to do was rest, eat, and submit to thermometers, needles, and tests.
The concern of family and friends, and even people we hardly knew, began to come in waves of kindness. People brought meals and sent flowers; they scooped up our children for whole afternoons; they did our grocery shopping, brought magazines, walked our dog . . .
Months later, as I recuperated, sometimes I thought, “Wow, in those years when the kids were so little and I was struggling with depression, I really could have used the lasagnas and casseroles, the cards and flowers and phone calls, the offers to baby sit.”
*****
Until recently, a depressive outlook seemed natural and normal to me. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t depressed to some degree. Guilt motivated me. I thought self-effacement was attractive. Expecting the worst was my world view. I had interests -- reading, swimming, and singing -- but pleasing people and winning others’ affection was what really mattered.
I had been in therapy before I got married, and I started seeing a therapist again when I was pregnant with my second child. She began to train me to examine my negative and sweeping assumptions (“He never listens to me,” “Everyone thinks I’m too sensitive”). She gently suggested that I consider trying an antidepressant. I resisted, but I finally followed her advice. I had gotten to the point where I was thinking, all the time, of leaving my husband and children. I owed it to them to at least try the medication before I took such drastic action.
The difference pre- and post-medication was dramatic. Willpower or insightful talks with a therapist could not have effected this healing. I had been in therapy with three different people for five years before I tried medication, and the results had been unsatisfying. My vision was impaired by negativity and self-loathing. The sky might be blue, but I saw gray. A stranger might smile, and I assumed she was mocking me. “You look tired” might be an expression of concern, yet I heard it as a disparagement of my appearance. The medication enabled me to exchange the pair of old, dark eyeglasses for a new pair, through which I saw life with more clarity. I could see that good, as well as bad, was a part of reality. Kindness could be as real as cruelty. Joy could be as real and true as sorrow. During the time I was considering trying the medication, I asked a spiritual mentor for advice. She told me that she herself was taking anti-depressants, and then she said, “The crucifixion is only half the story. There was a resurrection, too, you know."
Because of the stigma of depression, I haven’t let people know that I suffer from it or that I’m on medication. I’ve heard too many people talk glibly about prozac as if it were a happy pill or the flavor of the month. A man I admired once said something like “Now we use chemicals as another form of dulling the pain, another form of denial.” So, I was the kind of person who didn't want to face reality? The problem was that I was too willing to face negative realities, and I was in denial about the reality of good things in my life. Before I used anti-depressants, I exaggerated dangers and slights. I was in denial about the reality that life isn’t just about pain.
The condition of depression isn’t recognized as warranting the same kind of help that a heart condition does. For a long time, I hardly believed myself that depression was a life-threatening disease. It took me years to justify seeking out therapy and then five more years to justify taking anti-depressants. On some level I thought it was my fault that I was depressed, or at least, it was my fault that I couldn’t pull myself out of the hole.
Not for a minute have I thought that I don’t need my beta blockers, ace inhibitors or cholesterol pills. No one expects me to just push through the heart weakness. The medications are there, and they make me better, less at risk for another heart attack. The anti-depressants make me better, but I have wondered if using them is a weakness in character.
Everyone knew about my hospitalization for a heart condition and, once they found out about it, they responded. Far fewer people knew I was depressed, but they, like me, didn’t treat it as a disease. It was, at best, a personality trait, at worst, a character flaw or failure of will.
When I had my heart attack, I didn’t feel the need to justify. No one judged me. Everyone accepted my fatigue. All the support and affection I could have wanted was provided. What’s more, I felt entitled to it. The heart condition was rewarded. The depression was hidden, and I felt judged whenever someone minimized the reality or effect of depression. Going back to work after my heart crisis was viewed as heroic, but the real heroism had been getting up every day when I was in the throes of self-disgust and pessimism.
The fear of judgment made me hide my depression and kept me from getting the help that I needed. After the close call with my heart, I saw how supportive people want to be. But people don’t always understand depression, and it can make them uncomfortable. They don’t know what to do to help, so they tend to say or do nothing. The silence reinforces the shame.
Many people have outed themselves as sufferers of depression or mental illness since I had that heart attack: Alma Powell, Jane Pauley, and William Styron were pioneers. There is still, though, some deep rooted belief that depression isn't quite a legitimate illness. Many years ago, I offered to talk about my experience with depression at an assembly at the school where I worked.
But I backed out.

Stealth Cool

I am claiming coinage of this expression before anyone else can.

I just used it in a facebook status. I wrote that to teach Abercrombie & Fitch a lesson about targeting an audience of young, skinny, rich buyers -- and thereby reinforcing a whole bunch of awful prejudices in our culture -- a bunch of us middle-aged women should go to A & F stores and look frumpy and hang out and hum "Peter, Paul, and Mary" songs. A friend commented and said, "And Mamas and Papas songs." But.

"The Mamas and the Papas" are stealth cool. That is, they are so cool that most people don't really know it. They fly, in their coolness, below the radar. I mean, really. Consider "Dream a Little Dream of Me," "I Call Your Name," "Creeque Alley."

With my penchant for lists, I might start a list of Stealth Cool things:

1. A beach shack on the WEST end of Long Island (as opposed to the Hamptons), aka, Oak Island
2. rotary phones
3. hand written, USPS delivered thank you notes
4. Hoboken
5. politeness
6. a body without any piercings

Now this is a post just BEGGING FOR COMMENTS. Add to the list....

Lists. Goals. Ugh.

I love to make lists.

It is three in the morning and I have just rearranged my blog. I have been attending to neglected responsibilities since my formal work at school ended two weeks ago: visiting my elderly, feisty mother in North Carolina, registering my scandalously long unregistered car, and having a routine medical procedure that shall go unnamed and kept me up all night so that I napped this afternoon and can't sleep now.

It's satisfying to have a list of goals that you can really, fully accomplish. You might not make your mother completely happy while you're there, but you can get to Winston-Salem and back; you can eventually leave the Registry of Motor Vehicles with Massachusetts license plates; you can emerge from the medical center with a piece of paper that says you got that screening you were supposed to get.

Unlike the list of goals I made at the beginning of the school year: to return papers more quickly; not to lose my temper; to be on time for class. The problem with those goals are that they aren't one time things. I have to achieve them over and over again. I'm bound to slip up. Failure is inevitable.

And then there are the goals that depend on other people. The vague goal to teach someone. Really? How do I ever cross that one off the list? " Teach my students." I'm counting on my memory working; I'm counting on developing a good rapport with a variety of kids; I'm counting on their brains working (their ability to read, to listen, to remember); I'm counting on them doing their homework; I'm counting on them listening.

Finally there are the two goals that cancel each other out: Care deeply. And -- Don't care so much. The thing that makes me a good teacher, when I am a good teacher, is the thing that makes me unhappy as a teacher. I invest a lot -- for whatever reasons, not all of them noble. I get frustrated when my students aren't invested or when others (students, parents, administrators, the world) don't appreciate my investment. Frustrated, unhappy teachers are not usually effective. But I don't know how to do a really good job without caring, and I don't know how to care without taking things personally. It's a pretty personal world.

"Live with contradictions" might need to be on the list. And it might never get crossed off.

What Romeo and Juliet Can Teach Me about The Boston Marathon Bombings

As someone who has been teaching high school English for over twenty years, I have taught Romeo and Juliet many times. I happen to be teaching it right now at a small school five miles away from the Boston Marathon finish line. Last weekend my eleventh grade students were supposed to be reading Act four, scene three.
Romeo and Juliet is helping me understand how an enlightened society might react to events like those that took place in Boston last week.

When we started the play I introduced my students to six lines that I wanted them to memorize by the end of our study:
For naught so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good but, strained from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime by action dignified. (2.3.17-22)

It is a snatch of Friar Lawrence’s soliloquy just before Romeo tells him that he has fallen in love with Juliet. The friar is gathering herbs and musing on the presence of good and evil, on and in the earth and in plants and flowers. Like most priests in his time, he is one of the learned and scientific. He knows that, depending on their use, some plants and flowers can be medicinal or poisonous. He believes that there’s nothing so bad that it can’t produce something good, and there’s nothing so good that it can’t be twisted to a destructive use.

He is not talking only about weeds.

As people rejoice over the death of one young man and the capture of another, I am relieved that the Tsarnaeva brothers are no longer able to do harm, I grieve for their victims, and I trust our system to bring Dzhokhar to justice. I also imagine them sitting in classrooms not far from my own a few years ago. I see those young men as plants that were distilled into poison instead of medicine. They were strained from their fair use and stumbled on abuse.

I think of the incredible horror of the spray of nails and ball bearings on a beautiful Monday afternoon, and I try to see some action dignifying that horror. I see the flowering of some special good in marathon runners who ran to hospitals to donate blood and in first responders who dove into the danger to rescue others. There’s nothing so evil that it doesn’t reveal some human grace. Look for the helpers, Mister Rogers told us.

In Shakespeare’s tragedies, as in this one, there are many victims and no winners. His stage is full of dead and maimed bodies, weeping parents and friends. There is usually one sane voice to point out the pointlessness of violence. In Romeo and Juliet, the prince, who has lost two relatives, says: “All are punished.” No one wins.

Every time I teach Romeo and Juliet, someone asks me, “What was the feud between the Montagues and Capulets about?” It’s important that Shakespeare doesn’t tell us. Early in the play, the prince chastises the noble families for engaging in “three civil brawls bred of an airy word.” The brawls start over -- nothing.
If you look at the language in the fatal duel between Mercutio and Tybalt, you will see lots of anger. Romeo tries to break the cycle of vengeance, but both Mercutio and Tybalt are too worried about saving face, too drunk on the feeling of “Get him!” Mercutio calls Romeo’s peace-making overtures to Tybalt “calm, dishonourable, vile submission.” And, after Romeo kills Tybalt to show that he is, after all, a loyal (patriotic), brave Montague, he cries, “Oh, I am Fortune’s Fool!”

The feuds of this world – between families, countries, ideologues -- keep running on vengeance and anger. They carry the same tone of the Montague-Capulet enmity: “Get him! Destroy the ones who hurt and humiliated us!” Some of the language in the media in response to the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarvaeva is a lot like Mercutio and Tybalt’s. It is that tone, that compulsion to have the last word and to save face that contributes to the death of Mercutio, Tybalt, and eventually Romeo and Juliet.

The play ends with this speech by the prince. A lamentation, it promises justice, but it conveys no desire for more violence.
A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head:
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

I wish there were a Prince Escales, who would stand before us, strike the right note, and say “All are punished.”