My good friend who listens to me lament about my conflicted and difficult relationship with my oldest son suggested I read What Do You Really Want for Your Children?  by William Dyer.   She has found this book to be an important touchstone in reminding her of what she wants to focus on as a parent and what her goals are for her own two children.   I began reading the Introduction and found a simplified version of William Glasser’s Reality Therapy described:

                “As a professional counselor I always knew precisely what formula it took to get people to change.  First, I would get people to identify what it was that they were doing which could be labeled self-defeating, to simply identify the behaviors that were not working for them.  Second, I would attempt to get them to see the payoffs, or the “neurotic dividends,” for these self-destructive behaviors.  Finally, we would attempt to come up with intelligent, practical, and implementable behaviors to help them change…”

First, identify what it is that you may be doing in a given area of child rearing.  Then look at your payoffs for continuing to treat your children this way.  Finally, find out how to use new techniques that just  might bring about your desired result.”

It resonated with me because  I had just discovered Choice Theory while preparing a graduate level professional development course for a group of teachers at a high school in my state.  We were to address the topic  “Engaging Reluctant Writers,” so I turned to books that talked about Activating the Desire to Learn (Bob Sullo) and The Classroom of Choice:  Giving Students What They Need and Getting What You Want (Jonathan Erwin).  Both relied on Glasser’s basic premise that “All Behavior is Purposeful.”  We are NOT reactive beings, according to this theory; rather, we have learned behaviors over the course of our lifetimes that we use to achieve a purpose, usually in trying to meet one of our five basic needs:  Survival (Safety and Security), Love and Belonging, Power (Competence, Effective Cooperation, Achievement), Freedom, and Fun/Joy.   Sullo explains that our basic needs “lead us to create a unique, idealized world that motivates us…  Everything we place in our internal world relates to one or more of the basic needs…it is precisely because this person, activity, belief or value is need-satisfying that it becomes part of our internal world.”  Sullo then goes on to point out the problems with our construction of our need-satisfying world, and thus our choice of behaviors:  1) our perception of reality is affected by what sensory information we actually take in from the external world; 2) we then filter that information to conform to our pre-existing model of “reality.”  This is in essence because we try to make sense of everything around us—it meets our survival need and is hardwired into our brains; 3) we then assign positive or negative value to our perception of reality based on whether it satisfies our need at that moment.  This last step is usually subconscious, and often we assume our own perception is accurate and real. 

Sullo then goes on to say that the only way to engender change in behavior is to guide oneself (or be guided by a skilled teacher or therapist or even a good friend who asks challenging questions, as my friend does):  “I will change my behavior only when I come to the conclusion that the world I perceive is substantially different from the world I want.” 

So often, too often, I am unhappy with the quality of the relationship that I have with my oldest son.  Erwin encapsulates Glasser’s approach to counseling with Choice Theory in 5 questions that are useful to use to evaluate purposeful behavior (and remember that in Choice Theory all behavior is purposeful!) in order to arrive at behavior that is more effective and responsible (i.e. behavior that better meets your own needs while not impinging on the needs of others):

1)      What do you want in regard to______?

2)      What are you currently doing regarding _________?

3)      Is what you are doing getting you what you want?

4)      Are you willing to try something different?

5)      What is something that might work better for you?

A great activity in Erwin’s book invites teachers to create individual needs profiles of their students, and a “class” needs profile, in order to better understand and thus motivate students to learn.  In the course I developed, I thought it made sense for teachers to also undertake this exercise, because we so often create a classroom that is needs-satisfying for us, and view student behavior that does not meet our needs as negative.  I invited all of the participants, and myself, to write about which needs we thought were most important to us as teachers.

I spent a great deal of time writing about survival, my most important need.  Actually, survival is probably everyone’s most important need, but many people feel much safer and more secure on a daily basis and therefore invest less time and energy in behaviors devoted to meeting survival needs.  Moreover, for many people, fewer things, people,  events challenge or upset their sense of survival.  These people tend to rest easier in the world, to flow and roll better, to have higher self-confidence and a strong sense of core stability than I do. 

In order for me to feel safe,  I need to impose a great deal of order and control over my environment, including the people in it.  I like rules, and lots of them, that are clear cut and rarely negotiable.  I like to be in charge, especially in charge of children for whom I am the naturally assigned leader and rule-maker and enforcer.  When I am learning a new task, I am often highly stressed and need the pace to be very slow and deliberate.  I like to write everything down and then file it in my organized filing system.  I hate to cook without first cleaning the kitchen, or to go to sleep while there are still clean clothes on the bed that need to be folded and put away.   Often, the first way I learn to deal with a new situation is the only way I will ever use; I do not search out improvements or efficiencies when doing tasks such as housecleaning, budgeting money, planning agendas or lesson-plans.  I am absorbed in details, like punctuality, try to micromanage situations and other people.  When I am stressed to the extreme, I often choose activities that are almost obsessive-compulsive in their nature:  playing solitaire over and over and over and over; playing Boggle against myself for hours; rocking on my hands and needs while banging my head against a wall as a young child before bedtime to the extent that I eventually made a hole in the plaster (and drove my sister in the adjoining bedroom crazy!), and most recently, ripping up the asphalt in the driveway by hand. 

Writing about fun and joy was, by contrast, painful for me.  Things that I enjoy include being intellectually stimulated in my work:  designing lessons and units and courses that are creative, innovative, and that tie together historical trends and events in new ways.   I love to read the newspaper and discuss current events or, in my current life in the absence of lots of adult colleagues, I write long letters to the editor.  I enjoy feeling impassioned and empowered, feeling righteous anger about social justice issues, and ranting about them to practically anyone who will listen—captive audiences like workmen and school secretaries are my usual audiences these days.  I love to work on projects that I think will make even small differences for the disenfranchised and invisible in our schools:  poor kids, children of color, Muslims and other religious “minorities,”  kids who live in non-traditional families, immigrants, and what I call “regionalism:”  the orientation of many curriculum units and materials on a very tradition-bound view of history and life in the United States that reflects a strong New England bias. 

Yet what I consider to be fun and joyful and for me deeply personally fulfilling is not readily recognizable as such by most people.  I come across as very intense, super-smart, intimidating, needing to dominate and prevail in conversations that quickly become one-woman speeches.   I have a great deal of difficulty relaxing, doing nothing, and giving myself permission for down time.  Interestingly, as a classroom teacher I have successful developed a teaching persona that enjoys joking and laughing, that is upbeat and friendly with students, that emanates love, caring and concern.  I am good at create a “Loving and Belonging” environment for students as well as a learning environment that they enjoy.  I noticed this yesterday while leading my son’s 2^nd grade cub scout troop, how easy it is for me to become the fun-loving camp counselor personality when I am in group settings with kids. 

Yet in my own family, I am the parent who is so in need of structure that I often not only cannot initiate play and fun with my own children, nor participate in it when my husband is playing with them, but often try to squelch it when it conflicts with bedtime, meals, getting housework done, or following family rules.  It is as if my husband and I, who both need to learn from each other how to be more like the other, have instead become more polarized in the arenas in which we already have a marked preference.  I am definitely not the fun parent, and although I resent this role, it is in reality self-imposed.    Perhaps if I truly believed and could trust that my husband would respect our basic family routines for mealtime, bedtime, getting ready for school and getting off the bus, I could let go, but I don’t see him stepping up and filling that role.  Often we are not even on the same page about what I think we have “agreed on” as being non-negotiable or as optimal for the kids:  consequences for hitting or other hurtful behavior, and when the kids need to eat and get ready for bed. 

When I recently explained to my sister that my husband was not good at time management, she responded, “I like to phrase it this way in my relationship:  my wife and I have different relationships to time.”  Something shifted for me then, and I realized that I had been seeing my husband’s style and approach to family “schedules,” which are internalized and paramount in my mind to our children’s mental and physical well-being, as careless and clearly inferior to mine, rather than as different.  Through the lens of Choice Theory, he was choosing behaviors that were needs-satisfying for him in playing with the kids and getting them revved up or distracted from what they needed to be focused on to get ready for school or bed,  and in his internal ideal world it was also best for them; whereas his behavior was NOT meeting my own idealized internal world of punctuality and order. 

Both our family therapist and our marriage counselor have been challenging me lately on my belief that rules, schedules, routine and order are in fact what are best for the kids.  Clearly, I see that these things help me feel more safe and secure in when under stress; after my husband’s bypass surgery, we reinstituted family meetings where we listed issues, made new rules and consequences, and then tried to follow them for a week.  Although I wrote them down, I was the only one who regularly referred to them; my husband did not, and only my oldest child can even read.  And the fact that rules and consequences were negotiated and could change each week didn’t help the kids or my husband keep track of what the bottom line was for not hurting, being kind and gentle, staying safe, listening and cooperating.  When our family therapist heard that we were trying to deal with five issues at a meeting, that the kids couldn’t focus that long, and that the process was actually confusing everyone about being on the same page, she said, “Simplify.”  And when she and my marriage counselor heard my list of rules and concerns about my oldest son’s consumption of video games and junk food, and all the restrictions and guidelines I had put in place, they both said, “When are you going to let go?”  In back to back sessions one Tuesday, it was as if I was hanging off the edge of a tall building, holding on white-knuckled and afraid of dropping into the abyss, and they came and stamped and stamped on my fingers until finally, finally, I let go.  I had been given permission, and by people who I knew understood me and also valued children’s best interests.  They would not give me advice that would irreparably damage my son.  I had to trust.  I let go, at least a tiny bit, and I didn’t plunge into darkness and fear.  Nor did my son.  We have survived, and he is definitely happier out from under the microscope and with the thumbscrews off—as any child would be.

And yet I am still unable to stop myself from doing some of the other basic things I know he needs that somehow, somehow, do not meet my own deep needs when he is upset.  I am a very verbal person, and very extroverted, whereas he needs solitude and quiet when he is upset.  My sister once told me that growing up in our family, she constantly felt like her emotional space was being violated, because when she was upset, our analytical mother would ask over and over, “What’s wrong?  How are you feeling?  How can we fix it?”  and offer useless advice like punching a pillow when you were mad at someone.  My sister was never able to just have her feelings, to just be in them.   I am that same analytical mother, trying to figure out what is wrong with my son, trying to fix him somehow so that he will be “perfect”—polite, respectful, cooperative, and yet also his own wonderful, creative and unique self.  I can’t parent well and get both results:  I can’t put him in a straitjacket  and try to change what I perceive is wrong with him and love and accept him unconditionally and allow him to just be and become his own self.   Every counselor and occupational therapist who has ever worked with my oldest son and me has said the same thing, that I must talk less, respect his need for space and privacy more, no matter how counterintuitive this seems to me, no  matter how much it runs against my own nature, my own perception of what a person needs when they are upset or sad.   I have gotten angry more than once over this advice, this observation; therapists are asking me to change something that is so fundamental to who I am.  They are in essence telling me that I cannot parent my oldest son in the way that he needs and be myself.   And I have despaired more than once that he was given the wrong mother, not only someone who didn’t meet his emotional needs at the outset, but someone who couldn’t, who wouldn’t, change herself—or at least her behavior– in order to do so. 

And yet Choice Theory offers the hope that I don’t have to sacrifice myself in order to be a better mother to my oldest.  All I have to do is recognize that the behaviors I cling to are dysfunctional in that they drive my son away from me when what I want most is to be able to give him a feeling of safety, comfort and reassurance, and try new behaviors that may work better.  I will get my need for Love and Belonging met, instead of experiencing over and over his rejection of me.  I will get my need for Power met as I feel more competent as his mother, better able to meet his needs, instead of feeling the wretched failure I so often do.  And I may even be able meet my need for Survival by letting go.  All of those rules and regulations that keep me safe also produce a great deal of stress for me and for my family, and it becomes a self-feeding monster as I then create more structure, rigidity and rules to deal with that stress. 

Although I know and have known for a long time that the ways I meet my Survival instinct are in many ways dysfunctional,  they still have the power to resurge and take over my thinking, embedding themselves as rational and logical, and resisting with anger and stubbornness any attempts to dislodge them.  They are well armored by defense mechanisms on every side.  Of all the needs I have, and of all the behaviors I have developed over the years to meet those needs, my survival behaviors are far and away the most consuming, and the most damaging, in my life.  They brought me almost to the point of self-destruction more than once in my 20s, and now they are creating a child who is also a perfectionist who feels unsafe and out-of-control in an unsafe and out-of-control world.  For his sake, for my love of him, when I cannot find the self-love, I must strive to change, to unlearn the old ways and practice new ones until they become my second nature.

I am searching for a job, or more accurately a new and sustainable career path, for my re-entry into the workforce next year.  The things I am most skilled at doing, and have been doing my entire working life, all require that I receive feedback of some kind or another, and right now it is as if a megaphone has been attached to any perceived negative responses to my efforts, drowning out  my ability to hear positives or maintain a balanced sense of self-integrity.

I can use my rational mind to invoke all that I know about diverse learning styles when I am doing professional development with teachers.  I know that in that classroom of adults, just as in any classroom, there is a spectrum of needs and comfort levels.  Some will want structure, while others will rebel against it. Some want more time to discuss with colleagues, some want more time to reflect privately about what they have experienced and how they might apply it, and some simply want the consultants to show them a strategy or two—a “trick” or a silver bullet—that they can use right away in their classrooms that will somehow fix what is not working for their low-achieving students.   Some are willing to be polite to the consultant , others to be fully supportive since they are used to be playing the role of  “good students” themselves, and others to be reluctant learners, hostile to outsiders, needing to feel as if they are smarter than anyone in the room—typical adolescent behavior from burned-out professionals. 

I find it ironic that in a writing-based workshop, so many teachers themselves do not value the writing process.  They either do not know about or do not benefit from “writing to learn”—exploring thoughts, ideas, and applications of the work we have done together—the demonstrations of teaching strategies, the small group and full group brainstorms and discussions– even though writing to learn is one of the fundamental ideas that I bring to them as a consultant:  using writing as a tool for their students both to improve their writing and to improve their mastery of content.  Teachers can also use writing-to-learn as a means of formative assessment to find out what students understand and can do and what they still need to practice.  AND IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE GRADED!  Teachers don’t even have to read every student’s writing:  they can read 5 excerpts at random, or pick 5 of their lowest achieving students, or pick a representative range of students based on previous achievement, to see what they may need to modify in order to appropriately challenge each student, or at least to make sure that those students who are not yet competent can get the additional instruction and practice they need. 

At one workshop, the very first thing I asked teachers to do was a free-write on whether we as educators wanted students to think of themselves as writers.  I was astonished at the number of teachers who said, “No.”  Do we want students to think of themselves as learners?  How, then, do we want them to think of themselves in terms of their ability to express what they have learned?  Writing is the most common way throughout their educational career that they will be asked to demonstrate what they know.  And because so many of the students in public schools are not “all about the grade,” we need to show them other reasons why becoming effective writers is important, why writing is a lifetime skill, an important asset outside the world of high school (and college).  Even for those students whose jobs or daily lives will not entail writing, we want them to know and be able to use writing as a tool for organizing their thoughts and communicating effectively with others when they need to.  We also know that teaching students to be good writers in high school also teaches them higher-order thinking skills like analysis, interpretation, and critical reasoning that they need to use as consumers of information throughout their adult lives. 

Another great irony is how many teachers are themselves uncomfortable with writing and lack confidence in their own ability to write.  Our State Standards require that every educator be responsible for providing students with opportunities to learn how to read, write, use oral communication and reasoning skills effectively.  Yet by high school—the level that I teach—we as educators are departmentalized and loaded down with content-heavy curriculum, and reading and writing skills are left to the prerogative of English (and sometimes Social Studies and upper level Foreign Language) teachers.  Many teachers have commented in my workshops about how little they use writing in their own adult lives, even within school.  Some teachers have challenged me when I require every session to begin with a free-write and end with time for reflective writing.  That is not how they teach, and not how they experienced writing being used when they were students.  How we can have meaningful discussions about authentic audience and real-world writing when we, the primary assigners of writing, have so little experience and opportunity to practice what we teach?  No wonder so many of the college-prep students are still cranking out traditional essays with little personal investment, while the other students are not even being assigned much writing, let alone expected to meet the same standards of quality.  Even as we bemoan our students’ lack of effective writing skills, we are not creating assignments that show them (and us) the relevance of writing to the larger world and to the student-authors themselves. 

I know all of this with my rational head, but my bruised ego and sieve of an emotional filter is having a hard time coping right now with consulting—normally a job I love, in which I have been able to dismiss the negative participants as basically unhappy people who are bringing that kind of energy into the sessions regardless of me or what I do.  I have been flung backward into a time that parallels my early teaching career, when every day ended full of self-doubt and frustration at the impossibility of “pleasing all of the people all of the time. “   I no longer expect to be able to do this—as I’ve said, I now understand a great deal more about diversity of learners in the classroom, as well as diversity of teachers—early adopters, resisters, and everyone in-between—in any school.  But I am left with such exhaustion and feelings of failure after a session despite knowing this that I’m wondering whether this is a job I really want to do. 

And then I think about all the other, non-teaching related jobs I might like to try:  rock landscaping, an organic landscaping business with native species, shade gardens, and other specialty niches; a recycle reclamation business for building and home decorating materials that normally wind up in the landfill; a Fair Trade store; my historical walking tours business; teaching fitness classes to seniors; designing work-based wellness programs for businesses with employee-insurance plans.   None of these are totally free of negative feedback.  And if the major stumbling block for me is how thin my skin has gotten, and how much perfectionism has resurrected itself in my life over the past few months, then perhaps my marriage counselor is correct in saying that I need to commit to weekly sessions. 

I groaned when he said this, protested, said: no more talk therapy—I’m already too self-reflective, too analytical.  Our child/family therapist said something similar to me about my conflicted relationship with my oldest son:  “You are constantly analyzing and analyzing him, aren’t you?”  And I replied, “Yes, because I feel as if something is wrong there, and I want to figure out what it is, and fix it, and find a way to deal with it better than I am.”  And, of course, because I recognize so much in him that I suffered as a child:   the perfectionism, the difficulty with losing in competition, the unwillingness to do anything unless I was already the best without practice.  I don’t want him to suffer in the same ways, and yet my own need to be a perfect mother has already helped to reinforce all sorts of tendencies in him that exacerbate his negative self-esteem, his fear of risk-taking, his acting out in the family—and perhaps most importantly, his marked preference for my non-judgemental husband over myself.   I need to let go of the need to control and micromanage and analyze and understand everything—an illusion anyway, though one that helps me to feel safe if straitjacketed.  It is damaging my relationships within my family and stultifying my ability to imagine my future; and it is impairing my job performance now, on the few consulting gigs that I have throughout this school year. 

So yes, Irish, I will come back so that you can fix my broken self, even though I am angry at you for noticing how broken I am.

It’s almost as if the entire 1950′s through 1990′s never happened for some folks here.  When they left high school, colored people were called colored people (thank you to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for reclaiming that phrase in his wonderful book), and “Negro,” “Afro-American,” “African-American,” “Black” (as in Black Pride and Black Power, and the ongoing capitalization of Black by some writers who prefer to use that term), and now “person of color” never made it this far north, where sightings of non-white-skinned people are rare, far away from the urban centers of America.  And it is true that for some of the oldest generation in this state, there were no paved roads and no radios.  I know one man who learned of Pearl Harbor the next day when he walked to school from his family’s farm. 

These people aren’t necessarily racist, just ignorant and isolated.  To me, they represent a project to be tackled, one person at a time…

I compare it to the alcoholism debate I heard recently on NPR—is alcoholism a disease, or is it a matter of choice?  The most persuasive answer is that it is a mixture of both—the alcoholic can choose to put him or herself into situations where drinking is more likely to happen, and of course, once the he or she chooses has the first drink, probably will become a full-blown alcoholic again in short order—less than six months, by some accountings.    But sometimes, so many barriers to making the right choices are put in our way, and so few options seem available to us except to take that drink, and so few supports are (or seem to be) available, that it is almost as if God has intervened—interfered is more like it—and it no longer seems or feels like a matter of our own choosing:  we are just there, drink in hand, regressed to the least functional , most destructive coping strategy we have for dealing with the stressors in our life. 

William Glasser and his disciples have explicated a great deal about the basic human needs in Choice Theory, presenting the five needs as more or less parallel:  Survival, Love and Belonging, Power (Achievement, Competence, and Successful Cooperation/Teamwork), Freedom, and Fun/Joy.  When I have used Choice Theory to help teachers (and myself) understand how better to understand individual students’ learning profiles and be able to differentiate instruction for them more appropriately, I always depict Survival as a horizontal bar along the bottom, with the other four needs represented by vertical bars resting on top.  Each of us has a different profile, so each bar is a different height (or in the case of Survival, a different length); moreover, our profiles are not fixed, but change throughout our lives, during different developmental stages, in response to different environments, and in response to different events.

In general, and all my life, I have had a very long Survival bar.  What this means for me is that I have a very high need for safety and security.  I am a highly risk-averse person, which has manifested itself in many ways throughout my life—as a child, focusing only on things at which I felt confident I could excel; being afraid of bike riding, skiing, and other downhill or fast moving sports;  and as an adult, saving aggressively for retirement and later, for my kids’ college education, by maxing out contributions to my 404(b), Roth IRA, ESA, and 529 plans. 

It also means that I take a great deal of comfort in having lots of rules and guidelines.  I am susceptible to advice and self-improvement books.  As a teenager, I read Seventeen religiously and made a notebook to better follow all the advice so that I could optimize my popularity and attractiveness.  As an adult, I’ve made similar clipping notebooks from health and fitness magazines.  As a third grader, I made three hundred New Year’s resolutions.  When I lived on my own through my late twenties, I had a budget so itemized it included the coffee that I bought in the faculty cafeteria every day. 

This is the underlying predisposition I bring into any new situation or environment.  Then, as in the Exodus story, God intervenes.  Life adds stressors, or challenges, or just change.  Sometimes, like an alcoholic, I remember early enough to keep my options expanded, my support network on high alert, and to stay away from the trouble spots.  Since I met my husband when I turned 30, he has in fact been my rock in this effort.  He is the opposite of a perfectionist, although he is also a very driven, high-achieving person.  He functions on what he and I call flow.  Rules, structure, schedules, agendas, to-do lists that are written down, all are against his basic temperament, and are definitely NOT part of his learned coping mechanisms as a child.  When confronted with conflicting choices, he makes the one that feels right in that moment, not necessarily the one that conforms to pre-set rules or agreements that I think we have made.  He is excellent at reading situations and body language, and thrives in environments in which there are always multiple options.  That’s why he needs to be the boss at work, I think—so that he has the most latitude in dealing with change.  When I am very stressed, or he is, our styles clash, but I have learned through marital counseling and a book called Getting the Love You Need that he offers me exactly what I need in order to become a more whole person.  His coping style of flow and options is the very one that was repressed in me early on, that was denied me by my own family of origin.  I learned to fear and devalue it when in fact it needs to be a balanced part of my core, my repertoire of approaches to life.  In part, I fell in love with my husband because some part of me sensed that he would be my life teacher in this quest.

The plagues of Egypt came to our family in August, 2009.  My husband went to the local hospital—drove himself there, in fact, after sitting down at his desk and eating a salad, because, as he rightly pointed out, who knew how long it would be before he would get to eat again?  He was experiencing tightness in his shoulder and arm all the way down to a tingling numbness in his hand.  I wasn’t in the least worried when I got the news:  this was the third time in about as many years that he had gone to the ER with what turned out to be stress-related issues, and he had told me the night before how stressful his day had been.  I was surprised that the cardiologist on duty in the ER that day decided to keep him overnight; that hadn’t happened before.  The problems was that while his heart and lungs checked out fine, his blood pressure was unusually high, and the doctor decided to keep him for further testing. 

I packed the kids in the car that afternoon to go have dinner with papa at the hospital:  they loved getting food at the cafeteria, and I joked with the nurse that I was going to get my husband a double espresso.  The next day, all the tests were normal, with no explanation for the elevated BP.  At that point, my husband wanted to come home.  The cardiologist said he could not keep my husband at the hospital, but he wanted to do one more test.  Later, my husband said the only thing that made him stay was thinking about being the father of our three children, which was also what had motivated him to check into the ER in the first place.  We found out that the insurance company tried to deny the test, since there was only a 1 in 100 chance it would show anything wrong.  But in fact it did show something wrong, seriously wrong, with my husband’s heart:  the lower half seemed not to be responding. 

He was immediately scheduled for an angiogram at a much larger hospital, and three days later, fully conscious and during the procedure, the cardiovascular team informed him that he had extensive blockage around his heart and would need quadruple bypass surgery.  I was staying at our friends’ farm nearby with the kids, and when he called, I immediately did what any supportive, worried wife would do:  I ran to get my work-out gear and reduce some stress before driving to the hospital.  My husband’s friend, who happened to be there for chemo treatment, got my friend on the phone and said, “Tell RockQuarry to get here now.  Her husband needs her.” 

As soon as my husband stated that he wanted the surgery (believe it or not, it is optional, even though he probably would have dropped dead of a heart attack within ten years had he not received it), we spent the day consulting with surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, doctors’ assistants.  We scheduled the surgery for three days hence;  I arranged for child care, for my father to come and stay with me during the course of the surgery and recovery, I emailed friends and family to alert them to the situation.  In a word, I was coping, and well, mainly because I think I was still in shock, and stayed in shock, for days.

For about two weeks after the surgery, I seemed to be doing okay.  School started, and I got the kids squared away.  I managed my husband’s medications, scheduled doctors’ and nurses’ visits, arranged for supplemental child care where needed, and provided for all our transportation needs since my husband was not allowed to drive until his sternum grew back together.  I told the organization I was consulting for that I couldn’t do any new projects.  But the third week saw me fall apart.  My parents went back to their home state to take care of doctors’ appointments of their own.  The director of the consulting organization called me to ask me to step down from the course I was currently still teaching.  My co-teacher sent me an angry email claiming I had disrespected her professionalism, that I was being too controlling, and that, unlike me, she had learned to let go of the need to control so would not fight me for it.  The school where I was working also asked that I be removed from the course, and requested that I not lead an in-service that was planned for later in the year.  I was devastated.  I hadn’t gotten negative feedback about me teaching and consulting in years; I was in essence being fired; and my main support—my parents, who best understood me and my coping style—were gone. 

It was at about this time that God hardened my heart, as he had done to Pharaoh’s.  I forgot to breathe, to exercise, to remember how to flow.  I was yelling more at the kids; they all began to bite each other out of their own frustration and stress (talk about regression), and I knew it was time to call in the professionals.  I scheduled appointments for our marriage counselor and a child/family counselor we had met with one in the past.  The school was doing a great job keeping my oldest son together while he was there, but once he came home, I couldn’t manage his interactions with his younger brothers. 

It’s amazing how long one’s heart can stay closed up like a walnut even in the face of overwhelming evidence that what one is doing to survive doesn’t feel very good.  It wasn’t until back-to-back sessions, first when I met with our therapist, then with the counselor, that the first cracks even appeared.  The week before, after our first couple’s only meeting with the child/family counselor, I had completely fallen apart in the car, raging about all the ways in which I was feeling judged and attacked for my coping strategies, for being ME.  It seemed that every time we approached the troublesome relationship I have with my oldest son, I was advised to change:  to use fewer words, to give him his space, not to label him as a bully or aggressive or violent even though he hurt me or his brothers and  threw things, and seemed to have no impulse control, nor kinesthetic awareness, nor the ability to listen and follow directions.  And a week later, I was told to let go—of the need to control him, of the need to control everything around me, of the need to control myself.  My therapist and I actually got in an argument because he insisted that I would not get better until I allowed myself to eat chocolate—and I was on the cusp of beginning a new exercise and diet program to match my husband’s own need for a pre-diabetic, cardio-healthy diet and the directive to shed excess pounds.  My therapist demanded to know what my favorite chocolate was, and I refused even to talk about it.  I hadn’t sulked and refused to speak to a therapist while in session in at least twenty years.  From there, my husband and I met at the family counselor’s office and I sat, furious, arms folded and legs crossed, while she said what she said every session:  “What if this is just the way he is?  What if all you have to do is accept and love him?”

It took another three days before that tiny crack finally broke open.  That weekend, I finally was able to let go and flow again.  It was a huge relief.  I began smiling  more.  I created a system that empowered my oldest son to get ready for school, and get ready for bed, without my having to “meddle” (as he puts it).  I delivered a successful in-service session at the school that had wanted to switch presenters.  I decided to go to bed with the kids every night, meditating myself to sleep, so that I could get up early to write.  And what was I going to write?  This blog.  Though no one has read it, it is important to me to write it.  My therapist had told me in the session in which we argued about chocolate that he wanted to start seeing me once a week because my perfectionism had come back with such a vengeance, and in a form unlike any I had seen since my twenties, that he felt I had “work” to do.  The last thing I wanted was talk therapy.  If anything, I am too analytical and self-reflective.  I decided to do that “work” here, in this blog, and save therapy for the things I find too hard to do myself:  find self-acceptance, work out hard places between my husband and me, learn to trust in unconditional love—something  my therapist and husband both believe exists, and which I do not.  Here, I can be as me as I want to be:  rigid, structured, controlling.  No one to judge me or tell me to change. 

My hope is that maybe someone will read an entry and find a bit of themselves reflected or described here and feel less alone.  Not validated nor affirmed in being dysfunctional (my therapist says we are all fucked up, after all, and we all fuck up our children—and he says this in his charming Irish accent), but just connected again in a way that all that structure, all those rules, all that rigidity, work against by creating walls, barriers, blockages if you will, more pervasive and severe even than those that the doctors found around my husband’s heart.

My doc think that they are actually panic attacks.  Shortness of breath, deep deep sleep from which I cannot wake up, no matter how urgently my bladder is telling my lizard brain to do so.  Sometimes I wake up drenched in sweat.  My husband or kids tell me I moan in my sleep.  When I wake up, my leg muscles often feel tight, like they’ve been clenched all night.

The themes recur:  trying to run, run away from some danger, or run somewhere urgently, but I cannot make my legs pump, I sometimes cannot make them move and am crawling or dragging my legs in my dream.  I often experience the loss and grief of a breakup with a real-life boyfriend from long ago, from adolescence.  I’ve read that the loves we have as teenagers imprint themselves into our brain in a totally different way than adult, mature love relationships do.  In my dreams, I revisit these relationships, often within the context of elements of my current life—I’m married, perhaps, or I have one or more of my actual children, or I am well into my 40’s. 

And in my dreams these people are still leaving me, just as they did in real life years ago, and the grief is as intense and devastating as it was then.  I remember how, when my most significant on-again, off-again boyfriend from the time I was 18 to 29 told me he was getting married, I lay down on the floor and cried for three days.  Once, I called an ex whom I had been engaged to throughout the majority of my 20’s a year after our  break-up.  It was midnight, and I was crying and in despair, planning to beg him to reconsider.   I got his answering machine, and the next day he left a return message thanking me for remembering his birthday (I had had the sense not to bare my soul to an answering machine that might be listened to in less than private circumstances).   I had completely forgotten that it was his birthday when I called—all I knew was my own pain and desperation at being alone and unloved.  Lately, perhaps because of the constant references to the war now that Obama is figuring out what to do about Afghanistan, an old flame from high school and part of college who went to West Point has been making appearances. 

Frequently in my dreams, these old loves refuse to talk to me or even look at me.  I often don’t even see their faces, but in that way that you just KNOW who someone is in a dream, I know who they are.  And I am often unashamedly begging them to love me again, to forgive me for my lying, my infidelities, my inability to fulfill a promise of being the projection of the person I created for them to love.   For in meeting my own need to be loved—and perhaps more importantly to feel lovable—I invented personae that I believed would meet their own needs—an unsustainable charade, of course, particularly as I juggled all the people-pleasing selves that I develop, and they began to overlap as my insecurities pushed me deeper and deeper into multiple simultaneous relationships in order to get the affirmation I needed and could not give to myself.  These dreams are full of feelings of not being able to hold it all together, and even the illusion of the relationships  I have created falling apart. 

The day after these dreams, I am as exhausted as if I did not sleep at all.  By evening I have developed a condition I call “fuzz-face” because of the humming and buzzing that seems to envelop my brain and filter everything I see and hear.  I reach for coffee to get back some sort of edge to my reality, only to be so hyped up by dinner time that I am revving as high as a manic state.  The psychopharmacologist once called all this a “bounce-back” effect.  My brain, by now so acclimated to its ten pills a night, breaks through when its defenses are at their lowest, during sleep, and reverts back to organizing all those random electrical impulses that cause dreams into the reality I lived in for the first thirty or so years of my life.

You become familiar with the  parking lots

At hotels and strip malls and roadside pull-offs:

The raw edge where pavement and civilization

Abruptly end, and overgrown woodlots survive.

Sometimes you will see vestiges of earlier human occupation:

Tumbledown wooden buildings, old stone walls,

Remnants of fencing, crumbling concrete structures.

Then the next layer of artifacts,

From this more recent cycle of land use:

Fast food containers, to-go coffee cups and empty plastic bottles,

Illegally dumped garbage half-burst from black plastic bags.

Your dog will be fascinated by the smells of all of these objects,

And smells whose source you cannot see:

The scents of all the dogs whose owners have ever walked them

Along the same dividing line

Between wilderness and domesticity.

But if you are like me

And a part of your soul cannot feel complete until

You have been outdoors each day:

Watched the sunrise, the pattern of fallen leaves on the ground,

The reaching of bare tree branches against the sky,

Then even as you lament the carelessness with which humans

Treat our wild places, both inside and out,

You and your dog will both feel a bit as if

You have been restored to some semblance of wholeness

There on the verge where the asphalt

Finally ends.

They rarely remember to lift the seat, those jerks,

But poorly aim their penises at the seat,

The floor, the wall, and even on their feet.

So tracking pee, throughout the house they go

Socks slightly damp and slightly smelling so;

They seem to notice not the trail they lay

Of male pheromones lingering where’er they stray

It seems that only my mother’s nose can sense

The time has come once more to clean, so hence

With bleach and sponge I scrub and scrub again

Try animal deodorizing chemicals in vain

‘Til grout ‘tween tiles and under toilets is white

Yet still the odor lingers as if in spite.

I’ve taught the menfolk in my care to wipe

Their careless spills and drips with just a swipe

Of toilet paper, yet this does not erase

The foul aroma that confronts my face

Whene’er I open bathroom door to pee

Or perhaps to gain a moment of privacy–

For mothering three boys requires love

Discipline, patience, and above

All else an ability NOT to smell

That reek that seems to emanate from hell.

I had gone to my Tenth college reunion– a disaster.  My husband-to-be came with me, and his beloved golden retriever, and we hung out at my old eating club with some friends, but no one we saw seemed happy.  People who had gotten married were already divorced (as I was), and everyone I knew who hadn’t gone to law school straight out of college had become lawyers by then, driven mainly by the crash of 1988 the fall after we graduated, or dissatisfaction with their jobs, or with the tacit pressure I think we all felt, both from families and by virtue of being alums of a prestigious Ivy League college, that we were supposed to go to law school at some point if we weren’t able to make a ton of money on Wall Street, successfully start up and then sell a business, or become engineers or doctors by the age of 30.  Law school—the fall-back position of failure, of not knowing what to do next or how to be happy or fulfilled in our lives. 

My skeazy college boyfriend left me his hotel room number in case I was interested in an adulterous fling (he was still married, at that point, to his first wife, but had already cheated on her with me during  a visit several years earlier to the East Coast).  And our dog couldn’t handle the fireworks celebrations that night; we ended up cowering with her in the basement bathroom of a building on campus far away from the revelries.  As a finishing touch, as we were heading back to the car to drive home, a rowdie group of undergrads on a golf cart drove by and snatched my jacket from my hand; my husband had to chase them down to retrieve it as I watched, disbelieving that they would actually steal it.  All the deep conversations I had imagined having with people I liked—interesting, thoughtful, intelligent, creative people—never happened. 

I had recently moved to a rural state where few people went to expensive private schools, and I worked in a profession dominated by—if statistics are to be believed—the lowest half of SAT scorers who even attend college.  My husband-to-be, who never attended c ollege,  made three times the income I did in his line of work.  For the next decade, my prestigious diploma , fraught with all those  concomitant expectations  of success being defined as being at the top of one’s field, or being a entrepreneur, stopped mattering.  I was able to thrive where I had planted myself, away from cities, status-mongers, and strangers whose first question at social gatherings would often be, “So, what do you do?”

But ten years and three kids later, I wanted to go back.  I had grown up in a family that not only expected me to attend college, but made it my entitlement.  Six months after I had been born, my parents searched for a house in a town that reflected their own values:  one of three towns in the entire United States that at that point had voluntarily desegregated its schools.  There was a strong emphasis on progressive educational philosophy, which meant I attended “open classrooms” and was only “ability grouped” for specific subjects throughout elementary school; the rest of the time, all us kids worked and played together in heterogeneous cooperation.  Of course, the reality wasn’t quite that ideal:  as the smartest kid in a mixed group, I often not only did the work for the group but was resented and ridiculed for it.  The fact that my family didn’t really value emotional intelligence and friendships meant I had few resources for connecting to the other kids.    And, as I have mentioned in previous posts, the surest path to parental attention and approval was academic or creative achievement. 

My family’s house was in the less affluent section of town, meaning my parents could afford it if they cut back in certain areas, so I grew up drinking powdered milk and going on family camping trips during summer vacations when other kids in my town got sent to camp.  And because of my parents’ (and particularly my father’s) anxiety about debt and money, they made it a priority to save enough to send both my sister and me to whatever college we chose without incurring debt.  The dull brown carpet that was in the house when we moved in stayed for the next 18 years of my life.  Furniture didn’t get replaced, nor windows nor siding—I remember waking up to a freezing house on winter mornings until my dad turned on the thermostat after he woke up and the furnace kicked in.  But the expectation that I would attend the best of colleges was backed with a full financial guarantee.

 Once I had children, I wanted to pass that same sense of entitlement on to them.  I wanted them to feel that no matter where they were or what they chose to do with their lives, that they had a right to be there—that they belonged there as surely as anyone else.   My father had started this process with me as soon as his own Ivy League alma mater began admitting women when I was four years old, taking me to football games and telling me that even if I become a waitress when I grew up, he still thought that the value of a strong liberal arts education was worth it as an end in and of itself in the ways that it would enrich my life.  He himself had been transformed by his four years of college—the dialogues with professors, the stimulating intellectual ideas, and the exposure to liberal thinking.  Reading “Cry, the Beloved Country” changed his life, and the fact that he went on to become a college professor was a direct result not only of the foundation laid for him at college but also the cultural immersion he received in living a life of the mind.   He wanted the same for my sister and me, and now, I wanted it—at least as am option–for my children.

I already knew how easy it was to feel like an outsider at an elite university.  When I arrived as a first year (we were called “freshmen” back then), I had never seen so many blonde people in one place in my life, except when visiting my cousins in Wisconsin.  And although my college boasted that 60% of the students were on financial aid, and two-thirds had attended public high schools, it drew heavily on the one or two wealthiest suburbs from each major city:  Ladue, MO, Shaker Heights, OH, Evanston, IL, Greenwich, CT, Scarsdale, NY.  My own roommates hailed from a public high school in Princeton NJ and two very small, very elite private schools, one outside Boston, the other outside Chicago.  Here  I was, a white, middle-class, Protestant girl with no financial aid package, feeling like a fish out of water.  I wanted to make sure my children didn’t experience the same thing when and if their time came, that they would not limit their choices or be self-conscious or doubt if they belonged.

For my kids this will be vastly more complex than it was for me.  My husband and I adopted all three. Two are brown-skinned, and one paler than my Irish-Dutch husband.  Ethnically, they represent a mix of Jamaican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Irish, English, Algonquin, African-American, and Caucasian.   Bringing them to an Ivy League campus for a Twentieth reunion is a great way to introduce young children to such a place—it is full of kids and families, people are friendlier, and there is a common subject of conversation that is  not about status or careers or what tony zip codes people live in now, but about our children.  Amazingly, there was no one-upmanship, no discussion of French pre-schools, admissions to elite kindergartens, the problem of finding a decent au pair, although I’m sure I could have found those conversations had I sought them out, but in general, all the people I had been drawn to when I first gone to college were exactly the people I wanted to talk to as parents and thirty-somethings. 

 I reconnected with many good friends from freshman and sophomore year, but I didn’t see my roommate from sophomore and junior year, so I looked her up and called, out of the blue.  In this day of Facebook, I suppose that was an unusual, and even risky, way to track down an old friend with whom I had felt I had burned many bridges during my worst episodes in college.  Her husband answered, and was a bit taken aback, I think, when I said she needed to get herself down to campus for reunions; she was actually visiting her parents in Antigua because her mom was sick.  Her parents had emigrated to the Bronx, raised six kids, and sent them all through New York City public schools, where each became the valedictorian of his or her graduating class and then proceeded on to elite colleges of the Northeast before becoming doctors, lawyers, or PhDs.  The parents’ work done, they retired back to their home island in the Caribbean. 

Although my roommate and grown up in a majority-minority city and attended inner city schools, she moved comfortably through the social world of our college, blessed with great people skills, a buoyant personality, and a ready laugh.  Although she went to parties at the university-owned club for minority students, she had a white roommate, and most of the friends she socialized with were white suburbanites like myself.  It wasn’t until we began talking again, twenty years later, that we were able to discuss what it had been like for her as a woman of color at college.  I remember shortly after we reconnected reading an article about Michelle Obama’s college days and saying to myself—now I understand a little about my roommate’s experiences that I couldn’t possibly have gotten at the time.  She hid it well.  She thrived.  But all the racist slights, the prejudices, the “does-she-deserve-to-be-here-or-is-it-just-affirmative-action” bias were all part of her college experience. 

She and  I both become mothers at about the same time, and both work at non-glamorous, non-high-paying, non-high-status social service jobs.  According to the reports in our alumni magazine on what our peers are doing, we are both abject failures.   The first time our husbands met, they laughed at how my roommate and I both react to receiving the monthly publication.  We would turn to the Class section, read a few blurbs about how so-and-so is now head of pediatrics at such-and-such a hospital, and someone else just sold her business to a multinational conglomerate, and several old friends had met up in Hong Kong or the Swiss Alps for a few days, and our self-esteem would plummet and take days to recover.    They both said they were tempted to throw out the periodical as soon as it was delivered, and they both questioned us on why we insisted on this ego-deflating ritual each month, especially since our own values and what we wanted for ourselves and our children were no longer mirrored by our alma mater.  As my roommate said, long ago where she had gone to college had stopped being a part of who she was.  I realized the same was true for me when I met my husband and moved away from the city I had lived near all my life.

The more time I spent talking to and eventually spending time with my former roommate and her family, the more I was able to weave that four-year period back into my automythography in a more positive way.  For years, the narrative I told myself focused on the social negatives, particularly the cliquely exclusiveness that thrived in an institution that was already overweening in its exclusivity.  We were constantly told we were the best and the brightest, and that we were the future leaders of the world.  Within this context, social organizations that allowed people to avoid dealing with people too different from themselves  thrived despite the admission’s and housing offices’s best efforts to get us to live together in a meaningful way.  Where the university tried to quash social segregation, it sprouted up again, usually under the official radar like a fungus.   Like my father, I too had received a phenomenal education in college, and flourished under the attention of world-class, name-brand professors; but I vowed that I would never send my children there because I remained so appalled by the social sorting and hierarchies that continued to exist  there.  And in truth, I had had little success in finding my own social niche, migrating from group to group each year—if not more often—and pouring far more effort into befriending people I thought were the ones I wanted to be friends with than I received in return.   For years, I regretted not attending a much smaller liberal arts college that would have required people to know one another simply by virtue of the fact that there would be fewer undergrads. 

My twentieth reunion opened the door to reconnecting with friends and acquaintances and brand-new faces without all that social baggage of being a socially insecure adolescent trying to invent her adult self.  And the social cliques which limited our interactions years ago were largely missing from a one-weekend event in which I self-sorted with others who had also brought children.  Most importantly,  my roommate and I have developed a friendship completely removed from our attendance at the same college twenty years ago.  Yet when I need to, I can talk to her about issues of race, discrimination, and our children in a way that would simply not be possible had I not known her for so many years, and if we did not have a common point of reference from our very early adult lives.   She talks more openly now about being a woman of color than I ever heard her talk about in college—and I am more willing to ask, and to listen.  The pressure to conform to an Ivy League mold has largely vanished, and thus our friendship now is far more honest than it was then.   

I think there are few times in my life when I have been able to issue a face-to-face blanket apology for the horrible ways I treated people during the worst spikes of bipolar illness.  Even more profoundly, to be forgiven, and to find someone who knew me then and still embraces me as I am now, is like having a weight lifted from an entire segment of my life—and a formative one at that– that for many years was simply too painful to look at, as I cringed when a positive memory would quickly call up many more negative ones.   Yet one more reason why I have shifted my sense of purpose—from being the best in whatever my field—to sharing my journey through hypomania as widely as possible with the hope of helping someone else.

Unfortunately for me, I was not at a particularly academically high-achieving public high school:  it was a very large, very suburban middle-class school with tremendous diversity ethnically and even to some extent socioeconomically.  Of my graduating class of 440 students, only one of us each when to the “top 3” Ivy League schools.  And, of course, being smart was not a revered quality on the road to popularity anyway.  The popular girls dominated cheerleading and yearbook (so they could remove all the pre-nose-job photos before publication), and the popular boys were athletes.  I didn’t want to be associated with the nerdy, geeky kids in my honors track classes, even though at such a large school, there were enough of us to form our own subculture, insulated from the pressures of stereotypical popularity depicted in teen high school movies.  At the time, I just thought they were boring, and embarrassingly immature.  Now, with the intervening years of accrued reflection and self-knowledge, I also know that I didn’t want to be in that social circle because for me, it would inevitably mean competing to be best—i.e. smartest, with the best grades– and I would rather drop out altogether than risk it and fail—and anything less than first place was failure. 

How did such extreme thinking come to dominate my belief system?  This is the baggage packed in that suitcase I keep toting around.  I grew up in a family that prized intellectualism above all else—two parents who were college professors, and an older sister who was also blessed with prodigious brain power.  So the first rivalry for attention and approval came early on in terms of academic achievement—my life’s version of Cain and Abel.   My sister hated that I dogged her footsteps, for in whatever endeavor that she got getting parental accolades, I would pursue it too.   I saw that as a path, and maybe the ONLY path, to parental love, approval and even attention.   And because my sister and I had such overlapping talents, I was able to achieve, and even eclipse, her accomplishments in many areas.  Eventually she stopped competing rather than risk losing, dropping out of any activities that I was in, trying to convince my parents to let her attend an alternative high school program for two years before they finally agreed that it wouldn’t damage her prospects of getting into a top tier college, and then leaving that college within a year to plant trees in Northern Maine for a paper company. 

Meanwhile, her withdrawal meant that I thrived as the “good daughter,” fulfilling parental expectations of academic achievement, falling in with a high school crowd who were the school government leaders (not just the smart, nerdy honors students) that included a mentor who had been one of my sister’s best friends growing up.  I went from being the top student in my 10^th grade math class to one of the lowest achieving, much to the frustration and consternation of my math teacher, but I was following a well-worn path that so many other adolescent girls had made for me without me realizing it at the time.  The next year, settled in with “normal” kids and repeating exactly what I had learned before, felt like a relief. 

I also came to be the ruling clique of the literary magazine that was part of our magnet school grant—a more or less failed attempt to integrate our school through extracurricular arts programs (eventually, after I graduated, my high school would be investigated by the Justice Department for de facto and de jure segregation policies in the four-tier academic tracking system it used, by which only one or two brown-skinned students were ever in my heavily Jewish honors classes, in a town whose Jewish population as a whole stood at 25 percent, and few white kids were in the lowest tracks, populated by recent refugees from the nearby city system in a town that was officially one-third African-American.)  By the end of 10^th grade, my sister would sneeringly refer to me as “little Miss High School.”

I was able to coast on my intelligence, my ability to learn without working hard, my ability to write well.  Anything that didn’t allow me to achieve easy victory in these areas, I dropped.  I survived the recurring bouts of depression that had begun to cycle through my life every two years beginning in eighth grade by manipulating teenage boys into crushes in which they would take care of my emotional needs for love and affirmation.  Eventually, I was never without a relationship, even ones I didn’t want to be in with people I didn’t care for that much, just to ward off darkness and maintain my sense of social standing.  One of my worst moments in 10^th grade came when the boy I had been competing for with the #2 ranked girl from my junior high school (I had been ranked #1, she informed me) convinced him that he had to choose between us, and being both inexperienced at female mind-games and easily pushed, he chose her.  I was so devastated I called home in tears and begged my mother to pick me up at school, which she did, but when she found out I had missed my last class of the day, she was furious.  The relationships began to overlap as well.  In my senior year, a “boyfriend” I had cultivated during a week-long program in Washington D.C. came to visit, and I told my home-town boyfriend at the time to keep his distance so that I would be able to hold onto this long distance prize (ironically, all three of us suffered from fairly severe periodic depression—but of course, that was the one way I could feel powerful, successful, and most importantly “normal”—by surrounding myself with others who were broken and needed me more than I needed them).

By then, I had been plagued for years with the sense that there was, indeed, something deeply wrong with me.  And the shame that I would be exposed—even though at the time I had no idea that mental illness was at the heart of so much of my underlying patterns of behavior and thought—was overwhelming.  At that point, all I knew was that trying to be perfect—in the way that I of course defined it, based on the values I had learned—was the best way to ward off these feelings and keep myself safe, and the repeated cycle of failure and depression were a powerful undertow that eventually, in my 20’s, almost pulled me under.