54. Start at the Beginning – Kate Speer
Each hard thing is a hurdle I jumped and each one reminds me that, yes, I am resilient. I can live through pain, and I am growing— growing— growing— even when my anxious mind tells me otherwise.
There’s a practice I’ve done every day for the last six years. It’s been especially helpful to me as of late. Quarantine—a way of life intended to give us life, to save lives—feels like the exact opposite to me. It reminds me of the years I spent isolated, alone, and on psychiatric disability.
In this practice, I start at the beginning. Starting with the day I was born, I write out every single hard thing I’ve faced and have subsequently overcome. I write out the little things, like falling and skinning my knee at age five as I chased my dog and the time my middle school friend didn’t invite me to the sleepover. I write out the big things, like being bullied for my learning disability, depression in high school, and the psychosis in college that led to 21 psychiatric hospitalizations. I write them all out in different forms: as a list, as prose, or in my current favorite form—a roadmap to right now.
I began this practice to help me move through episodes of post-traumatic stress, but using it as a daily practice helps keep me grounded in my body. Each hard thing is a hurdle I jumped and each one reminds me that, yes, I am resilient. I can live through pain, and I am growing— growing— growing— even when my anxious mind tells me otherwise. Starting at the beginning reminds me that, yes, I will face more hard things—but that I am capable of making it through all of them, even this.
– Kate Speer
Prompt:
Start at the beginning. Catalog all the difficult moments you have survived, from little things to the big things. Write about how you worked your way through adversity, and how even if it doesn’t feel like it, you’re still charting that course forward.
Abby Alten Schwartz
Location: Lansdale, Pennsylvania
About: I try to be an optimistic person and believe our narratives help shape our lives. Rather than list a catalog of hurt, I chose to flip this prompt and list the lessons I have learned from adversity. As I wrote: the value (of these experiences) is not in the injury but in the healing.
Age: 53
Living Through Adversity
Like so many others on these pages, I’ve been open about some very painful moments in my life. I’ve written about things I don’t speak of with the same candor in my real life, aka outside of this very supportive bubble of a community we have created here (again, thank you, @suleikajaouad).
I can see the value in this prompt. I went to Kate Speer’s website and read her story. She is a warrior of a survivor and I applaud her for coming so far and creating a rich and meaningful life despite the hand she was dealt. Or maybe it is because of the hand she was dealt.
I’ve learned that pain is a powerful teacher when we are able to be with it. Like Flynn said in his post, Be Here Now. There is no getting around pain. Try to move through it without processing it, and it will show up later in disguise. No one likes to sit with pain, me included. I also don’t want to catalog a list of painful experiences in my life. The value is not in the injury but in the healing.
That said, I’m going to put my own twist on today’s prompt and instead catalog some of the lessons I have learned from adversity that have served me moving forward.
It’s not always personal. I’ve written about some painful moments in my childhood that stemmed from having a mother who could be insensitive, short-tempered and unkind. As an adult I recognize that she did the best she could. Her behavior was less about her feelings toward her children and more about her own anger and pain. What is it they say about anger? It's pain turned outward. Sadly, her capacity to learn from her pain has been limited.
Knowing that things aren’t always personal doesn’t prevent the hurt. I’ve had to receive this lesson again and again over the years. My old tennis partner decides she wants to be paired with someone else from our team? That really stung. My client invites creative ideas from other team members on a project I was working on? Yeah, that hurt. In both cases there were reasons involved that didn’t include a rejection of me.
I can choose better people. From the neighborhood friend I grew up with who turned on me and bullied me for months to the girls in my dorm with whom I had a falling out. The pain of those experiences and how I moved on taught me that I can choose kinder, better people to have in my life. I’m more discriminating now and less of a pushover.
Life isn’t fair and no one is immune to loss. This was a biggie. It’s an obvious conclusion but one every person has to arrive at themselves.
Do the next right thing. Action cures fear. I am resilient. I’m grouping these together because the first two have always led me to the last. I’ve lived through my child’s diagnosis with a life-threatening genetic disease, and every day since, with ups and downs and moments I thought were the end of the line for us. I’ve experienced the kick-in-the-stomach fear of my freelance workflow reducing to a trickle for reasons outside my control (see above, not always personal) and piece by piece did what was in my power to rebuild my business stronger and more solid than ever. I learned that I am able to hustle and pivot and reinvent myself to survive and thrive. I learned I can count on myself.
I am okay and I will be okay. This message of resilience is worth repeating. We are living in unprecedented times. Certainly generations before us have experienced worse. My mother’s boyfriend Sam survived a concentration camp when he was a boy. His entire family was murdered by Nazis. On a scale of missing normal life to living through the Holocaust, this quarantine is a luxury vacation. That said, it is an adjustment and it is scary and for those who have lost loved ones or are working on the front lines and putting themselves at risk, this is serious stuff. But humans are resilient. This morning I picked up our weekly online grocery order and put everything away—a ridiculous process involving washing and drying the perishables and quarantining the non, disinfecting the table and countertops, much handwashing and other borderline-OCD behavior. But I finished in an hour, including the pickup. Two months ago this process took me more than twice that. I’ve adapted, learned safe shortcuts, and most of all, moved past panic into acceptance. Acceptance is not to be confused with being okay with it. But I have learned to be with it. Or as my wise friend Flynn would say, Be Here Now.
Patrick McDonnell
Location: Montreal, Quebec
About: How I overcame adversity. This is a rewrite, edited version of a previous submission, I would rather you look at this one, please, for consideration of archiving/publication.
Age: 68
The day my life changed forever
I have kept a journal almost all my life, except I didn't use paper, I wrote it in my body, in my mind, turning it over and over, for years, so that I wouldn't forget. I was 6 years old and I lived at 350 Midway Blvd. Novato California. I know this because I just came across my School Savings Account from 1959, total saving 2 dollars and 53 cents. It is where my childhood ended... Forever.
The first journal entry is me and my friend, whose father was a fireman and who was a red headed freckly kind of kid out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Or from one one of those sugary sweet nostalgic reproductions of covered bridge paintings you find in motor hotels as you criss crossed the United States; something we did a lot as a family attached to a military officer. You notice things like that when you keep a mind journal. That and your brother, who was an eagle scout, going out and having his fun with his buddies. Sometimes taking the wood for a construction site to build a fort, then having to take it down again. He was always into something, my brother. I guess he wanted to play the big man, the superior guy; Cain and Abel.
We were playing in the back yard of our house, the safest place in the world, all of us, my red headed friend my brother and I just throwing around dirt to make it break up as it landed. The earth was dry as it often is in California in the summer, after raining all winter, and had left these chunks of dirt tempting to boys. I think it was my brother who had the wise idea that we would fight each other, by hiding behind a hill and he would throw the dirt at us and vice versa. You know where this is going, as anyone who reads a journal does, as you can skip ahead and read the ending, and leave the middle. But it is the middle that is important. Don't forget, it is what is between the pieces of bread, the meat of the subject.
Let me digress, because that is what diaries are for, they are a way of putting things in perspective, even if you don't know why, or how things happen or happened, you at least can get it down on paper, to make some sense of it. Girls keep journals - more than boys - because they have 'feelings' that boys are never suppose to have. We suppress them, because that is what being a 'little man' is about. If you are hurt, you don't cry, if you feel bad, you don't show it, or at least not in front of other boys. That would 'unman' you. Fragility, or openness, is what all women demand of men, who can't open up because they know that vulnerability means weakness means danger.
I can imagine the scene, in my mind's eye, hovering above the golden hills of Novato as if I was a hawk. Here is the North bay, across San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Almost Marion county, almost Stinson's beach, a beautiful place, with a beautiful city by the bay below. But remember the cold currents offshore, where at least once a year a shark attacks and kills someone. Remember that. It can be a cruel place, where 'film noir' novels take place, where people are killed, and a weary detective has to find out the truth. Which is another reason to keep journals, because they sometimes tell the truth, often not. Each one of us can lie as we please, and make ourselves the hero of the story.
My mother was off at the neighbours who had a pool, lallygagging around, as she often was because she was a people person. My father was off duty, drinking as he often did, an alcoholic but one that flew a jet inebriated, and was admired for it. He was a wing commander after all. He had charge of thousands of men who he commanded. I wouldn't call my family dysfunctional, yet. That is what the journal is for, to analyze it to death. To take apart our lives to see them as if they are people in a doll house. Barbie and Ken. They never seem to have kids? I had the brilliant idea of dolls for boys, military dolls, and was laughed at by the girls. Years later they came out with GI Joe.
I have to admit I have some fond memories of California, of a visit to a Twinky factory, where I saw machines that impregnated the dough - at the time I didn't know about such things, or the metaphor. Or a visit to a Nike missile battery, now a state park, near the bridge. We were all vaguely aware of the menace we lived under. Nuclear war, and that my father was in charge of jet interceptors that would go blow them out of the sky - Russian bombers. My dad loved to build things, he even built a 'to scale' replica of the Hamilton Air Force Base, where he served. I liked that a lot. It gave me the sense of being a powerful being looking down on the world.
Return to the facts, the facts are what are important in a journal, though they are only the framework on which we hang our emotions. I am with my friend and across from me throwing dirt clods is my brother who is older. By six years. And he knows I know about him and he wants to get rid of me; Cain and Abel. This is conjecture on my part. Isn't that what a journal allows you to do, to bring your experiences into focus? And he picks up a rock, again a conjecture, and he throws it with all his might at me, my brother.
I put my head up, instead of ducking, or was he waiting for me to raise my head? and I see the end of my life coming at me. Like a meteoroid coming to destroy the world as it hurls at me, getting bigger and bigger until it blocks out the light. And I am blinded.
Silence. Then a scream of pain that tears out my guts, that makes me into an animal. I cry over over "I can't see, I can't see". This I know from reading my medical records now turned brownish over time, mimeographed from the originals. I am being clinical. And I see an ambulance pull up and my mother forces my father to go with me, while she takes care of my distraught brother - why does she stay with him - he has sustained no injury?
As someone with medical knowledge, I now know that I had suffered a blow-out rupture of the retina tearing apart the fovea and most the central vision of my left eye. I know that I had a massive blood clot in my eye, and no doubt looked terrible, but they - the doctors - knew they could do nothing about it, other than give me pain killers, anticoagulants and wait and see. I had a fifty fifty chance of going completely blind and of the possibility dying, I didn't read this in the medical records, but garnered it from what I researched later as an adult.
Isn't it great that you can be so calm when distancing yourself from a traumatic event in a journal, of by writing it over and over, until you can forget the pain, and loneliness of being in a bed tied up hand and foot with my head blocked and my eyes blinded by bandages.
It reads like a fictional novel.
I can understand some of what Suleika went through. A day seems like a hundred days in the hospital. I was in a children's ward in a military hospital where the nurses frowned upon us talking to each other. One day I was well enough to get out of bed; oh what wonder is a young body and its power to heal itself! I made friends with a couple, a girl and a boy, who had leukemia. I didn't know what that meant, a death sentence for them, but I knew it was bad. They seem ethereal, like angels, as they walk around.
I like the smell of alcohol, rubbing alcohol, because it reminds me of my stay in the hospital. It says to me 'I love you'. With all the pain I suffered, I felt loved by the nurses and staff, something I didn't feel at home. I felt afraid at home. I lived with monsters. That is when my childhood ended. When I realized I had to protect myself from these people. The safest place in the world wasn't home.
So there you have it - how and why is a journal important. Usually it stays in the bedroom drawer, or in my head until I put it down on paper and publish it. Then it becomes literature, an abstract thing, to be pawned on by others, who will say they feel for me, or are sorry for my pain. The pain is gone, long gone. The scars remain, but then life leaves scars on all of us, great or small. I have an incredible tolerance for pain, as you can imagine, while I know that other's feel if a pin prick is the end of the world. That is another purpose of a journal. We can vicariously feel other's pain or joy.
Journals can make the concrete abstract and the abstract concrete. As for the other players in my little drama, I never heard a word from them bout how they felt, other than my mother blaming my father. I guess that would take a novel...it was an embarrassing moment in the family history better to be ignored.
It is a catharsis to get it out, and let it be on someone else's mind. In the end, I journal to remember. And to forget.
If you want to know about how children are abused emotionally and physically by their Narcissistic families and how they react later as adults, I recommend the wonderful little book called "The Drama of the Gifted Child, The Search for the True Self" by Alice Miller. It has been revised and republished by Basic Books, in 1997 ISBN no. 0-465-01960-1. She also tells how adults can overcome the damage done by parents and how to avoid inflicting the same trauma on their children.
Penelope Duffy
Location: Rochester, Minnesota
About: The Isolation Journals have been an inspired act of grace for which I'm deeply grateful. I'm the author of The Cartographer of No Man's Land (WW Norton, USA; Penguin Random House, Canada; Myrmidon, UK, 2013) , a novel set in WW I that was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Kate Speer's prompt took me by surprise, and like a gift from beyond myself, inspired me to write the true events depicted in my submission which I could hardly get on the page fast enough. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Age: 72
In this prompt, seeking evidence of her resilience, Kate Speer describes what I can only imagine is years of writing down every adversity she’s ever encountered and how she worked through each of them, scraped knees and all. She begins with birth. Perhaps hers was traumatic. Mine was not. But I’ll start there.
A Story of Threes
The story of my birth is laced with threes. Not one—singular and alone. Not two, with its artificial duality, its true-versus-false, good-versus-evil thinking in a black and white world that does not exist. But three, a more nuanced complexity containing both one and two, and creating something new—a narrative, an ever-changing, never-changing story of beginning, middle, end. Mythical and mundane, sacred and profane—three fates, three furies, three-part harmony, three strikes and you’re out, and of course, the rule of threes—in economics, mathematics, decorating, and even, it turns out, in surviving extremes– three minutes without air, three hours in extreme cold or heat, three days without water. The holy and unholy. Three wishes granted. Three days from crucifixion to resurrection. Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. The Three in One and One in Three.
And also …
The weird sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go about, about,
Thrice to thine and thrice to mine,
And thrice again to make up nine.
Peace, the charm's wound up.
As a young child, long before I encountered Macbeth in school, I used to chant the last three of those lines to my collection of large and small Teddy bears (unimaginatively named Teddy, Brownie, Goldie, and Pinky), whom I enlisted in various games of pretend. And I know exactly why—the rhythm of it, that stress pattern, was mesmerizing. As intended, it took me somewhere beyond myself. A place where I had power in the way that children do when caught up in their fantasy worlds, where there’s a vanishing of the line between the possible and the probable. Peace, the charm’s wound up.
But back to my birth story. Born on March 3rd, 1948, I was the third girl born on the third day of the third month of the year, something everyone in the family, including me, repeated as a type of allegorical allusion, a fairy tale of threes. But the story of my birth begins before birth—as all birth stories do, although I imagine that conception is rarely part of a birth story told to a child, as mine was so often. There was no angel, no virgin birth, though perhaps my mother might have liked that since her childhood dream was to be a nun. Had she become one, I have no doubt she’d have made it to Mother Superior in the blink of an eye. Instead she became a nurse and married my father, a polio patient and soon-to-be theological student, under her care. She had no struggle becoming Protestant when they married (in secret, since she was still living in nurse’s quarters). Theology was of little import to her; hands-on nurturing and strategic planning were her religion. Throughout my growing up, people came to her for her healing hands, and behind the scenes, whether at home or church, in a crisis or calm, she could organize the troops like a field marshal.
As both parents told it—my father lifting his brows with his cat-that-got-the-canary smile, my mother rolling her eyes, but blushing and clearly pleased—I was conceived under the moonlight on the upper balcony of our house on the Anglican Missionary compound in China. It was understood, as I grew to understand such things, that my pre-birth beginning was of great import to them both—not because of who I was or would become, but because my very person, making three from the two above the silvered garden below, symbolized something positive for each of them.
For my father, it meant his wife trusted him enough to let go, be free, as he’d always longed for her to be. He married her for her stability, but craved spontaneity—the type of wild act that she rarely engaged in. Animated, passionate, practical and quick, she had little patience for “such foolishness” as making love outdoors—especially in a place like the Mission compound. And yet she did. “A happy time for us all,” she’d always say of our China years.
For her, it meant she at last trusted my father enough to let go of the disappointment, fear, and disgust she had on discovering his stateside philandering. Fooling around was impossible in the confines of the Mission, where every single thing was eventually known by every single missionary and, eventually, the bishop across the river in HanKou. Perhaps these strictures and the disapproval and dismissal (three strikes and you’re out) that would have followed such a revelation were enough to make both of them relax. My father as well as my mother. His predilections, seemingly beyond his control, for once controlled.
After all, the reason they were a thousand miles up the Yangtze River deep into the heart of central China was not only my father’s longing to make a difference to a people in need—and, following the Japanese occupation laid over centuries of brutal Chinese warlord regimes, the need in China was great—but also the admonition of the clergy counselor, an Episcopalian monk, and the Bishop of Massachusetts. They told him missionary work would be a good change, a chance to pull himself together, and that in any case he must leave his first parish in Lincoln, Massachusetts, without question. Why not join the Anglican mission in WuChang?
Why not indeed? My father loved the idea the minute they mentioned it. They, like so many others before and after, saw in him the paradox that he was—a gentle, often absentminded soul who would carry an insect outside rather than kill it, a man who never raised a hand or his voice in anger, but someone with a substantial ego—a wounded man who you couldn’t help but forgive again and again, someone who understood and bound up the wounds of others, someone who, in addition to being a brilliant intellect and scholar, was a magnetic preacher, a helper, a counselor, beloved by parishioners and able to fill a church with ease, despite his somewhat controversial liberal theology. Tall, blond and good looking, he could regale you with stories, play any instrument, loved to laugh and was not afraid to cry openly. He’d had much to cry about growing up. His gifts were mighty; his sins as well. In Lincoln, he’d slept with the choir director, quite his senior in age and not terribly attractive, and a choir member who may not have yet graduated high school—a woman and a girl who “threw themselves at him” and who remained desirous of a continued relationship, something it seems he hadn’t counted on. On his knees, he confessed his situation to Ma, hoping she’d help him out of it. She sent him to the Bishop.
So in that conception story, I was the healer, the byproduct of forgiveness, the consequence of the loosening of inhibition and imposition of restraint, skating down a beam of moonlight on the broad stone balcony. But the wounds bound up that night would never fully heal, and never fully leave me because in love, there is always pain.
Nine months later, I was born at around 7:30 p.m. (records were not exactly precise), an event my father, unable to tolerate the physical pain of others, was grateful to have missed. He’d been hanging around uncomfortably during the labor when Ma suggested he leave to be with “the girls”—my sisters, six-year-old Polly and five-year-old Patty—at home to have supper, read them a story, put them to bed and then leave them to the care of our Amah. The baby would surely be born by then, Ma told him. And so I was.
I was to be the third “P,” of course. Paul, for St. Paul, with whom my father identified, for he had had his own Damascus experience, not on a road, but on the ridge pole of a barn one night when he was a small boy. Escaping the violent chaos of his house, he saw the world transformed from many to one, the unity of all creation displayed in rippling, pulsing colors, an experience he kept to himself until long after I was born.
Upon his return to the hospital, he discovered that I was not, in fact, the Paul they’d planned. Delighted nonetheless, he fell in love with the serenity and dark wet curls of his nameless third daughter. Ma demanded a name. Flummoxed and set on Paul, but with Polly already taken, my father wracked his brain for biblical “P” names that were not male, and came up with the obscure Penuel, a town east of the Jordan River in the Old Testament, which means both “the face of God” and “he who struggles with God,” since it was thought to be where Jacob wrestled with the angel—if you take the Old Testament literally. Which none of us did. But that is of no import, because Ma dismissed Penuel out of hand. No child of hers would be named for a Biblical town that no one had heard of or for struggles with God, even if it could be shortened to the very acceptable “Penny.”
Dad paced the hospital room, warming his hands at the ash-spewing coal stove in the corner and careful to step over the rope used to tie a chicken under the bed for good luck, should Ma have requested it, which she most certainly did not. The room was filthy enough as it was. At last he came up with Penelope. A nice origin story, he told her, from the Odyssey. Standing for loyalty. Settled. The third P in place. The last one, the baby pea. In future parishes, Polly, Patty and I would be referred to as the three Ps. Sisters three; three peas in a pod.
An hour or so later, happy at the safe birth of his third daughter, he left the ward, to find that not everyone was happy. Word had gone out, and not a few of the Chinese hospital workers lowered their eyes and offered condolences. Not having a son was bad luck. But a third girl in a row, unlucky in the extreme. The burden. The omen . . .
As soon as he stepped outside, he was accosted by a man who materialized from the shadows and made an offer—he could drown me in the Yangtze River that very night. A small sack, some stones. Arrangements could be made. The sooner the better. It had been done often. Very humane. Two other men soon appeared with their own offers. The price varied among the three of them, but all were exorbitant. Bargaining was expected in this, as in all things. Emboldened by his quiet refusal, they trailed my father as he made his way on foot through the darkened streets, pressing their case, competing with one another ever more forcefully. Ma would have smashed them over the head with a stick and kicked them on the ground where they lay. Not for nothing, her beginnings as an immigrant in the tenements of Boston. But Dad was patient and understanding of those with differing ideas—even if the main idea was money, not to mention infanticide. Still, his heart was pounding when finally he reached the safety of the Mission compound.
Another nine months passed, and with them the Communist forces under Mao Zedong reached the borders of WuChang. The State Department had earlier ordered all Americans out. My father and some of the clergy and Episcopalian nuns refused to go. It was agreed by all, though, that for safety, women and children should depart. For the next eighteen months, my mother and sisters and I would refugee in the Church Guest House in Hong Kong, while my father continued to help his students and others associated with the Mission’s ministry, until it was safe for us to return. It turned out it was never safe enough and finally, on a daring thousand-mile escape, my father, one of the last remaining missionaries, came back to us—just three weeks before my mother, sisters and I were to sail home. The Church Guest House physician had diagnosed Polly and Patty with early stage tuberculosis. Worms, which they had, were one thing and expected under the conditions, but tuberculosis quite another. He told Ma to get the children back to the States, and she’d booked three tickets on the U.S.S. President Wilson, which was transporting Americans caught in Hong Kong back home for free.
But prior to Dad’s return and the glorious reunion, during our year and a half as refugees in the Church Guest house, in the midst of all the loss, the news of death and horrors, midst all the sorrow of all those forced to leave, all those waiting it out, hoping to return to friends and their much loved work, I was, according to Ma, picked up, cuddled, and celebrated as a kind of everyone’s child. Over and over, as I wandered in my little Chinese sandals from one lap to another, I was told, I lifted spirits, made people happy—an early and foundational experience, which solidified in the dark hour of chaos a sense of life as good and of being blessed to be part of it.
But, holy and unholy, the threes do not end there. Not yet. Not quite. There’s one more to account for, and that is the city of WuChang itself, place of my birth, a place no one I’ve ever met has ever heard of, and a place that no longer exists. Situated at the confluence of the Yangtze and Han rivers and named for the Wu dynasty, WuChang sat across the Yangtze from the larger cities of Hankou and Hanyang. In 1949, a year after my birth, Mao’s Communist forces, having solidified their hold in the area, decided to make a single city from the three. Taking the Wu from WuChang and the Han from Hanyang and Hankou, they settled on Wuhan.
Peace, the charm’s wound up. Or is it?
In unleashing an uncontainable contagion, Wuhan, three cities in one, has brought suffering on a global scale while simultaneously ripping back the curtain of unsustainable income inequality, unrelenting corruption, injustice, environmental degradation, and all the woes of this amoral, technology-driven, anti-intellectual age of greed—a pandemic, a plague, a damping down in quiet skies, in resting oceans, in silenced cities, and in those cities where fires rage, a reckoning, a three-part narrative one hopes and prays ends not in death, the blackened end of ends, but in a silvered moonbeam of renewal, resurrection, and rebirth.