Planted

My phone died two days ago.  I’m not sure what happened to it, it just ran out of power while I was listening to my “Bore You to Sleep” podcast two nights ago and it won’t charge now.  It’s not a new phone but it’s not an old phone.  I cleaned the lint out of the charger hole and tried varying charger/outlet combinations.  It’s a mystery, albeit an uninteresting one.  Teddy, from the aforementioned podcast, could read this in his calming monotone voice and you’d all nod off.  But without that electric rectangle bursting with all the information compiled so far in the world, the numbers of all my favorite people, pictures and videos of the same, I’m just kind of stuck with myself.  I’m thinking.   

I feel like I’m in the 90's.  My partner and I are using email, me on my laptop and him on his phone, to communicate throughout the day for all the normal things, i.e. how is your day going, when will you be home, can you get cat food on the way?  And I have made sure to message my step-daughter, let her know what was going on, and tell her to call her dad’s phone if she needs me.  But I’m not sending the other little texts I usually would.  I’m not catching up with Sarah, asking if her symptoms are better, seeing if that date later this month still works for brunch.  My mother-in-law hasn’t sent me any Trump-mocking memes, I haven’t recorded any videos of my cats for Kayci. I could log onto my laptop to open the awkward, rarely used desktop version of Instagram and check the videos Saundra and Umi have certainly sent me but it feels like work.  Even googling isn’t worth it.  I didn’t bother looking up Matthew Broderick’s acting methods last night when I saw his cameo on Only Murders In The Building.  I just kept watching the show and let the art wash over me.  

I have errands I could run, such as picking up said catfood so my partner doesn’t have to, or of course going to the store to figure out what the hell is wrong with my phone.  But the car has been acting funny and it would be a much bigger deal to break down sans cell.  I don’t have a card or cash on me because I’ve been using apple pay, and I wouldn’t be able to buy myself a little treat for running errands with my dead black brick.  I should be writing my book, but I’m not.  So I’ve been slowly deleting old emails.  I started with 13,000+ to go through yesterday morning and I am currently at 8,418 to go.  There’s something poetic about this simple email purge on a lazy Thursday afternoon.  I’m sanitizing my soul as I clean the electronic detritus of my life out of my inbox.

My life has been especially ridiculous for about six months now, but generally difficult for a few years.  Much of it I can’t tell you; it’s other people’s trauma.  An anonymous synopsis would be: two people in my life have serious mental health conditions, one more serious than the other.  The closer of these people, the one with the more mild problem, has gotten treatment and is doing very well, though I’m still healing from the damage.  The second is fully in denial of their illnesses and continues to barrel through our lives like a raging, rabid bull, causing my therapist to gift me last year with the shiny brand new diagnosis of post-traumatic-stress disorder.  

But some of it I can tell you.  My father got diagnosed with dementia.  He’s had the symptoms for a few years but it’s really scary to have it confirmed since the scan, and I’m no longer able to tell myself that he’s just not sleeping well and that’s why he couldn't remember the name of Stephanie, my cousin’s wife of 15+ years, at the BBQ last summer.   The day I found out, I calmly told my dad I loved him and asked if there was anything he needed.  He said no, he was good, he doesn’t expect anything major to happen any time soon and he’s going to be around for a long time.  I told him I agreed, then hung up.   I called my partner, who didn’t answer; he was at the pharmacy, picking up some of my many prescription medications.  I texted him, “Turn around right now, and come home.  Bring wine.”  He doesn’t drink, and I normally would not ask him to buy booze for me, so he called me back immediately to meet an incoherent wall of wailing and hyperventilation.  He was back home in ten minutes and we were sitting outside in the last of the October warmth, deep howls of grief coming from so far down my gut they could have been shoved out by my soul itself.  Jim just stood there, chain smoking, impotently trying to help, but all he could say was, “Drink some more wine baby, we’ve got four bottles.”

I moved.  That’s mostly a good thing but there’s stress there too.  My partner’s grandmother died last year, which was also traumatic and sad and awful, though she lived well into her 80's.  Her daughter, my partner’s aunt, was living alone for most of that year in her five bedroom, two story house, extravagant Seattle property taxes looming over her in her grief. We all knew she needed company, but didn’t know what to do about it.  When I realized I couldn’t work anymore, it just made sense: We took over the downstairs, turning it into a little apartment, and Jim’s aunt charges us enough to help with the taxes and upkeep but not so much we can’t afford it on just Jim’s income.  She’s the sweetest little lady, and I am so thankful our move necessitated us becoming friends.  She’s a grandmother, too, so her kiddos are over a lot, helping Jim and me with the emptiness we feel 10 months a year when my step-daughter is with her biological mother.  She makes fresh chocolate chip cookies at least once a week and gets upset with me if I don’t have at least a couple each batch.  We took some cuttings from both of our favorite houseplants, and she and I, and the kids, are watching them happily churn out new roots in the glasses of water by the kitchen window, almost ready to be planted into dirt this spring.  Jim watches the Seahawks and Mariners games with her and he has someone in the house to eat meat with.  She, and this house, are good for us.  But my awful cats peed on her couch and I was mortified.  I worry constantly that I’m not keeping the house clean enough for her, though she never complains.  Jim is too busy to help unpack and I’m too sick, so the boxes from October are still half full, filling up the poor woman’s laundry room and carport.  Even though overall I love the house and I love the company, I am stressed and worried and at times full of shame.  

My health hasn’t been good for a year or two and I’m starting to get really burned out and bitter.  It’s not cancer.  I’m not dying.   I’m just very unwell.  I have a series of conditions all stemming from one gnarled, putrid root: chronic sleep deprivation.  I have absolutely uncontrollable, constant, extreme insomnia.  The secondary chronic sleep deprivation has caused a racing heart, or tachycardia, which took months to figure out how to control. I would just be sitting there watching TV, and my heart rate would be 160, so I wasn’t able to run anymore, and I had strict instructions from my doctor to stay away from the gym.  Even small exertions, like walking through an airport to see my step-daughter off at the end of her summer visit, were strictly verboten.  She told me it was ok, but she was clearly heartbroken.  We cried, I apologized, and she told me there was no need to do so, just like the ever mature, tiny adult she is.   

The sleep deprivation also contributed significantly to me getting type two diabetes at 33, rather than in my late 50’s as my grandmothers and mother got it.  My diabetes was, of course, also particularly difficult to control.  Sleep deprivation affects every system of the body.  I get sick all the time.   I’ve had Covid twice, my memory fails me regularly and some days I have a hard time following things like a long story or the plot of a TV show.  I’m utterly fatigued of canceling plans, of asking for help from my partner when I’m too tired to drive or clean or cook.

I quit my job in July because of all these symptoms and that’s hard and sad.  I loved my job and other jobs I’d had or planned to consider next.  They paid well and were interesting. I was a psychologist who supported people with intellectual disabilities (ID).  I got to use my education about brains and human behavior to help fix the lives of people who were adults but also kids who, as a group, were overwhelmingly adorable, kind and funny.  It was the perfect job!   I was just too tired.  And too sick.  I couldn't keep waking up every morning at 6am for five days a week.  The sleep deprivation was always tolerable on Monday; I was peppy and sharp after a weekend of naps even if the night before I’d only gotten three hours.  Tuesday I would still be alright, yawning a lot but a few cups of coffee and I was fine.  Wednesday was a coin toss but by Thursday I was completely phoning it in, too tired to do anything but basic tasks.  I’d  have set aside “easy” things for later in the week.  I’d attend the meetings I had to, edit documents I’d already written, passively observe staff and clients on the houses, simple things my exhausted brain could still do.  But I didn’t have the intellectual finesse it takes to truly figure out why a client was doing any number of bizarre things (also known as my entire job) nor could I write nor speak articulately. By the end of the week, I’d have maybe 15 hours of sleep total since Monday and I often drove far too exhausted to be safe on the way home Fridays.  

To answer the questions I always get: 

1) Yes, I have talked to my doctor; the condition has been monitored by my medical team for a decade and a half.  

2) Yes I have tried melatonin; I currently take 20mgs every night.  

3) Yes I have tried other medications; I take trazadone every night as well and have a prescription for Ambien.  

4) Yes I have tried marijuana,  

5) meditation, 

6) limiting caffeine 

7) cutting out caffeine entirely 

8) limiting/cutting out alcohol 

9) sleep hygiene tips from the internet 

10) lavender 

11) hot baths, 

12) for some reason my mom has asked my like 17 times if I eat chocolate before bed because did you know it has trace amounts of caffeine, and yes I did know that and no I don’t often have chocolate before bed but I have cut it out for a while entirely anyway just in case, etc.  

Many of these things help some but even combining all of them at times has still only led to an hour or two of actual sleep; my body just doesn’t sleep.

I tried a part time office job.  Nothing related to psychology, just secretary work for a local law office.  But no matter how much I scaled back my schedule, four days of six hours, then three days of five, I was still falling asleep at my desk, or on one memorable day, the toilet in the office bathroom.   I transitioned to work as a court visitor, interviewing people who wanted guardianship over family members with intellectual disabilities or dementia, making sure they weren’t taking advantage of the individual under their care. My work as a psychologist for folks with dementia and ID helped with this; I was able to communicate more easily with the clients with these conditions than the lawyers who also did my job, and I knew a lot of the relevant medical terminology that they also wouldn’t have had a reason to know.    I only worked part time, taking on a couple clients at once, because I could, modestly, charge $175 an hour, far less than others did for the same work.  If anything was going to allow me to make a living and still get enough sleep, this would have been it.  But alas, I was struggling even with just the couple of clients I was trying to support, and I ended up not applying to be on the registry the following year.  

It felt like giving up.  I was officially out of the workforce.  We could barely afford rent, we were behind on child support.  I’d have lost my car if it wasn’t recently paid off.  I felt defeated.  Rest, rest, rest, that’s all I do now.  Keep your heart from racing, keep your stress levels down, sleep when you can.  No more helping people, no more using that dusty master’s degree.  

I stare at my partner, who works from home some days.  I tell him, “You know I think you do this because of a deep seated need to….”  Annoyance blooms on his face, and I cut myself off, as he goes into a place inside himself that other people who live with out-of-work psychologists must also go, where he can gather himself, remind himself that murder is illegal and he wouldn't enjoy prison, then say, “Thanks Baby, but I don’t really want to talk about that right now.  Maybe you can analyze me later.”  No one needs a literal armchair psychologist to live with them and explain everything they do.  But I can’t help myself.  Sit, relax, don’t contribute-that’s not me.  

I’ve been too sad to deal with old emails.   Once I stop feeling bad about not working, I feel bad about being broke.  Then I get through that, and remember my dad is sick.  Then I get through that and worry about my kid.  What happens to your inbox when you don’t delete old things is that when the new messages come in, it feels silly and overwhelming to deal with them.  Who cares?  Just add it to the pile of shit you’ll sort through one day.  One day, when you have a purpose again, and you can get through the spam and the coupons and the invites to 5ks you’re too sick for now, just to get to emails reminding you you used to be important but you’re not now.  I almost quit, and go lay in bed again, surely not able to sleep but at least I’ll be horizontal.  Then, among cold emails from attorneys, saying, “Thanks for letting me know.  We’ll have the court appoint a new visitor,” there’s one email from the sister of a client.  She says she heard I was leaving for health reasons, and is sad to hear it.  She hopes I am well again soon.  

This woman exchanged maybe three emails with me and attended a zoom call I was on.  She had no particular reason to reach out to me, except for the vague notion that maybe at some point I, a person who had once helped her brother through dutifully being an asshole to a lawyer, would see her email and feel good.  

And it worked.  I did feel good.  I spent a moment thinking of her brother, a man in a hospital, who had had a bad accident and needed support.  A man I helped, whose sister is thankful.  And I saw that good in the world and I thought,  I can get a little writing done before I go back to bed. 

So I started to write about deleting old emails. And here we all are. 

We just finished the holiday season.  I’ve been able to see my kid once each month since October, which has been a big deal.  She lives most of the year in Texas with her biological mother and the grief of having her that far away is immeasurably hard for myself, as well as of course my partner.  I’ve only known her since she was ten, but when she’s away from us it feels to me like one of my limbs is missing.  Judging from the look she gives me when I say that to her, she thinks that's a little dramatic.  But it’s true.  We spent every last dime we had, getting to Texas twice this fall and getting her to Seattle twice as well.  When she is here, or I am there, I feel like a different person.  I am no longer missing an arm or a foot or leg or whatever it is I’m missing when my kid is ten states away.  Our last trip to Texas, we were swimming in the hotel pool the first day we were there.  She had something she wanted to talk to me about, I was sure.  As soon as her dad left to go have a cigarette, all these huge teenage revelations began pouring out of her.  We talked for hours.  My partner kept asking if he could come back in and she’d say, “Um, we are not done talking.  So…..”  I told him there was a bench in the hall he could sit on.  He sighed, took his roomkey and phone charger, and dutifully gave us space.  I always say I would prefer her never to need me.  I want her to be independent and happy all the time.  But you can’t help that it feels good to be needed sometimes.  

She wasn’t here for Christmas this year.  I was in a horrible mood that whole day, I almost didn’t celebrate at all.  My partner was in a wretched mood as well, but did his best to support me.  Eventually we made it down to my dad’s house.  

My dad seems to be embracing his diagnosis well.  When we arrived that day, he seemed full of light, and full of life.  It’s like, the worst thing that could happen-happened.  He got a big scary diagnosis, information about one of those big questions that looms over our lives every day that no one wants to talk about: how is it that I will go?  But now, boom!  He has the answer, or at least a good guess.  But my dad is here, right now, and he is mostly well.  

My sisters and I all slept over at my dad’s house Christmas night.  My partner and my dad, neither of whom drink, and my mom watched the one little kid who’d stayed.  My sisters and I stayed in the back bedroom, we drank wine, and talked.  We talked like we hadn’t talked for years.  It’s not that we dislike each other in any way, we just live in different cities and hadn’t all been in the same room, childless(ish) for this long in a while.  We talked about men, we talked about sex, we talked about queerness.  We talked about our kids, we talked about how much we love our brother even when he was pissing us off.  We talked about our parents.   We discussed our current partners, their habits, bad and good, mental labor and our ever failing bladders. Our mom came in for a bit and we grilled her about some things we didn’t understand about our childhood.  “Mom, what was up that day we walked all the way to Centralia it was awful!”  (For the record, her response was that she thinks walking is fun, and she wanted to share the experience with us; we had just assumed she was trying to kill us.) My sisters validated my work decisions.   They told me it was what I had to do and they were proud of me.   They talked about how much they love my best friend, how good and kind they find her.  We talked about our parents, and how much better we understood them as we aged.  We went over my anonymous traumas, and they added the fire of their rage to my own.  They validated my parenting decisions and talked about how much they adored my kid.    We laughed a lot, we peed a little. 

My dad helped us set up for bed that night on the couch.  We sent him around the house to fetch us snacks and drinks.  He got us all waters for our side tables, found the remote for us, and extra blankets.  He said we were being very high maintenance, but you could feel the pure, unadulterated joy radiating off of him because his grown children needed him still, if only for a moment.  He had just had a lovely Christmas day with many of his grandkids and all of his children there, eating and laughing, gifting one another kindly but not lavishly.  He spent the later evening with his ex-wife, his best friend, watching his kind and intelligent son-in-law make friendship bracelets with his four year old granddaughter, while his daughters whooped and hollered and gossiped and laughed from the back bedroom.  Then he got his three daughters to bed like they were little kids again.  I am very lucky, to have such wonderful women as my sisters and a father who is never happier than when we are laughing together and needing him.   

I don’t work outside of the home, but I’m writing.  It might never pay the bills, but it also might.  My blog gets some traction, and I am working on promoting it in more places.  My novel is off to a pretty cool start- just the topic is fascinating all on its own.  It’s a fictionalized account of the life of my great uncle who was a savant accountant for the mob, and kept all the books in his head so they couldn't be stolen.  Even better, the best source I have on Great Uncle Marty is his nephew, my father, whom he helped raise.  And no one likes talking about old memories of their favorite uncle than a man in his 60's who just got diagnosed with dementia.  Those memories exist at a premium right now, and he’s all too happy to have his daughter come by and say, “Dad I need more help with my novel, can I come over tonight and talk?”

So I go, today, through my emails.  A little over 8.000 to go.  My therapist, my friends, my family, even my workaholic mother who refuses to take sick days herself, all have said the same thing: You can’t keep working yourself into oblivion; your body has told you to stop, you must rest.  I was holding onto these electronic messages, refusing to give up that season of my life, the part where I was important, where I helped people.   As I delete these emails, this buildup of shit, from the last four months, I feel the sensation of being planted somewhere, in the space that was just cleaned out, this basement apartment in Seattle.  I’ve got room now to put down some seeds.  Seeds for flowers I hope may begin budding in the spring.   I have the space to sort through notices for writing conventions I might go to in next fall, if I save carefully. I delete notices about overdue bills, from the time when I had quit but we hadn’t moved yet and I just couldn’t afford them.  I make room for new notices, ones we can afford now, on careful payment plans, thanks to my lovely aunt-in-law and the beautiful, albeit box-ridden, home we now share.

I want to plant seeds of radical acceptance, of my life and of myself.  Things will happen.  Bodies will malfunction, bills will come due.  But all the while, I have some magnificent people supporting me.  My partner will be there to make dinner when I’m too tired, my sisters will gossip with me, my brother will tell me to get my tires checked.  My kid will be kind and beautiful and wonderful.  She needs me a lot right now, as she navigates the hell that is 8th grade.  She will grow and need me less and less every year, but hopefully won’t ever stop needing me entirely.  Perhaps one day, when she’s married, she will come over with her children or her seven dogs.  And she and my sister’s children will hang out and they will gossip.  They will laugh and drink wine, and call me in to ask what the hell I was thinking that one day I did something weird.  And I’ll tuck them in, and set some aspirin next to their water.  I will happily find them as many spare blankets as they want, make sure their pillows are perfect.  I’ll tell them stories of the family members who passed before they were born or while they were young, of their great-grandma Barbara, and their Great Aunt JJ.  And it won’t matter that one day I left a job because I was sick.  The bills I’m behind on will all be caught up, my published novels will rest under dust on the bookshelf, or the new sleep therapies that helped me return to psychology will fill my bathroom, or both!  My story will make a little more sense, my purpose will be a little more clear.  These problems have solutions, and I am smart and capable.  I don’t have to be done right now, I’m just getting planted.   The cats might come upstairs and pee, but it’s not the end of the world.  I may not have a job, but my partner can still afford Amazon Prime so the Nature’s Miracle will be here Tuesday and we’ll go from there.