Life Wish #15: Feeling on our feet
Hello my friends! As I sit here typing to you, Texas is thawing, I’m hearing more birds than I have in months, and I’m looking at a weather forecast that says it’s gonna be 50 degrees within a matter of days. Spring is almost here and I am holding on!
In the midst of this particular long winter, I’ve been re-reading The Long Winter, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book about the year her town was pummeled by blizzards from October to April, and her family had nothing to eat but wheat bread for which ground they ground the wheat by hand, all day every day, in a coffee grinder, and nothing to burn for warmth but hay, which they twisted into sticks all day every day, so that it could be burned in the stove. Over and over again for seven months.
With painful detail, Laura describes the howls and screeches of the blizzards, the endless undifferentiated days of cold and snow and twisting hay and grinding wheat, the dull feeling of stupidity when your mind can’t find anything to grab onto … and though I’m sitting pretty here with hot running water and Disney+, I feel her.
Why did I reach for this book? I think because I wanted to pick up some tips, like “stories can keep our spirits up” and “getting mad can get our blood moving” and “community can save us” … but what I came away with was not advice but so much compassion for the trauma they were going through. And I kept wondering — what are they gonna do with it?
Since they are 19th-century white people, the answer is not a damn thing. Several times in the book Laura catches herself wanting to express how she’s feeling, and not saying anything, because if she cracks then her younger sisters will crack, too, and then the whole house will crumble, or something?
But not talking about trauma doesn’t make it go away, much as I wish it did.
No, keeping our pain inside just causes it to compound, increasing the density and obscurity of it. I know this from my own life, which started with the loss of my mother and descended into chaos and abuse from there. Since I made it to adulthood and was mostly fine, I figured that meant I was done with it, and went about building a life without looking back. It’s like what happened to me left a massive crater, and I built all around it and over it without ever really acknowledging its existence.
Eventually, life knocked me on my ass and I saw how brittle my construction was, teetering as it was on the edge of a giant hole without being engineered for that. So for me, the last few years have been a process of getting to know my crater, learning its contours, and trying to be honest with myself about how it shaped me, in hopes that what I build next can be resilient and specially designed for the reality of, you know, a giant crater at its center.
And it sounds kinda sad, maybe? To build my whole life around the loss I experienced so long ago. But honestly, it’s been liberating more than anything else, because I get to finally be real about what I went through and how it shaped me — and not see it as weak or attention-seeking, just accurate. This both unburdens me and also helps me connect to other people.
I mean, none of us get out of here unscathed — and when we pretend that we do, well, just look at the last president to see how denial shows up after being compounded for decades. No capacity for connection, for truth, for growth. Only putting all your energy into ignoring that crater. Shiver. It’s no way to live.
Living honestly in this world and adapting to the cards I was dealt gives me confidence that as meteors keep dropping from the sky — as they always do — I will be able to cope. I will be able to see what’s happening, assess it with clarity, and build structures that work with it. I mean it’s not running around a mountaintop singing “The Sound of Music,” but it is valuable.
Sometimes I imagine how my life would have been different had baby Madge been able to talk about what was happening to her with someone who could help. Because in my family, after my mom died, we never really talked about her again — “Mom” disappeared and became a “guardian angel,” glossed over in abstract terms rather than remembered and honored as a living, breathing, dearly missed part of our family.
And I guess I get it — like Laura’s family, my dad didn’t want to open the box of reality and possibly bring the whole house down. But the whole house came down anyway, under a load of addiction and sickness and each of us being isolated in our grief, under the same roof.
So what if we’d tried the other way? What if we’d gotten a chance to feel our feelings, good and bad? To express them, to talk about them with each other, to build whatever came next with full understanding of and respect for the crater that her loss left behind?
I think it’s possible that our lives would be vastly different … healthier, more connected to each other, more honest, more real.
What we’re going through right now — the pandemic plus political upheaval and systemic inequality and accelerating climate change — leaves a mark. There’s no way it couldn’t. We’re right in the middle of so many interlocking circles of loss and grief and fear, and holding it in is not going to help us work with it. We need to talk about what we are going through, with each other and with our mental health professionals and as a society, through art and over meals and in our public discourse.
We all know that nothing is going back to normal. All indications are that chaos and uncertainty and just plain weird shit are gonna keep ramping up. So I’m feeling like I want to get better at feeling on my feet, taking whatever chances I have to work through what I’m walking through, so that I can embrace and design for reality as it is, not what I wish it was.
I have some tools at my disposal for this: my therapist, who I pay specifically so that I can be as big a bummer as I need to be; my friends and loved ones, who I’m trying to be more vulnerable with and also more welcoming of their vulnerability; art — both mine and that of others — which allows me the relief of both expression and escape.
There’s also sweating it out, journaling, singing, yelling into the void, hanging out with plants, protecting my brain from being shattered into a million tiny pieces by Twitter, and many other mechanisms. But they all start with being honest about what I am going through.
My hope is that we can welcome the opportunity to listen to each other, to help each other carry our burdens, and to be helped ourselves when we need it. In this way maybe we can stop suffering in our own little individual bubbles and see that these are actually collective burdens that none of us can or should be forced to carry on our own.
What about you? As we walk through this part of history, how are you handling the upheaval? Where could you use support? And how can we work together to shift the idea of burden from individual to collective?
Love you. Spring is coming!
Madge
Links
Uhhh someone took a million hours to recreate Hamilton inside Animal Crossing, and it’s spectacular. They even got King George’s spit!!
The second edition of The Body Is Not An Apology just came out and made it to the NYTimes bestseller list! If you haven’t read this beautiful book yet, grab a copy and get into it. It’s life-changing stuff.
This is an important and intense read on how we talk about collapse, and if we even should? (It’s a total bummer tbh so read it on a sunny day when you’ve had a good meal.)
At long last I am slowly working my way through Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing and really enjoying it. Here’s a nice talk she gave about it.
It’s very relaxing to me to watch time-lapse videos of plants growing — this is one of my favorite channels for that.
Lately I have been a little bit obsessed with “Hot Ones,” where celebs are interviewed while eating increasingly stupid-hot wings. I’m a total wuss when it comes to hot food but it’s so interesting to me to see the difference in how folks handle discomfort -- you really get to see who they are. To no one’s surprise, Gordon Ramsey gets dickish and aggressive because he can’t admit it’s too much for him, while Drew Barrymore shares how she’s feeling and takes a lot of grounding deep breaths. In general I will say the women handle the discomfort with a lot more grace!