light – Jaime Alexis Stathis

“Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale.”

Last week a video went around of Ash Beckham’s TEDx talk about how she responds to kids who want to know if she’s a boy or if she’s a girl. She explains that it’s confusing because her hair is short and she wears boys’ clothes, but that she is, in fact, a girl. She breaks it down: “You know how sometimes you like to wear a pink dress and sometimes you like to wear your comfy jammies? I’m more of a comfy jammies kind of girl….”

If you missed that video, here it is: Coming Out of Your Closet.

Ash’s talk wasn’t about gender, pink dresses, or jammies. It wasn’t even about homophobia or about coming out of “the” closet. It’s about the fact that we all have closets, but “We are bigger than our closets and a closet is no place for a person to truly live.”

She says that a closet is really just a hard conversation, and that we can’t compare our “hard” with anyone else’s. “Hard is not relative. Hard is hard.” In my case right now, hard is taking care of my grandmother who suffers from both hoarding and dementia, and for some people hard is the fact that I’m talking about it.

My honesty’s been met with minimal resistance, though I know that vulnerability and honesty make some people uncomfortable. But I also know this: other people’s discomfort has nothing to do with me. I’ve done a lot of work learning how to accept and own my truth, and though it was hard I’m coasting down the other side of a life spent minimizing my truth for the sake of other people’s happiness, which is basically an Acela train to frustration and unhappiness. That way of living does nothing to foster authentic connection between people.

Over the years I’ve also learned a few things about truth in writing, with my favorite being that “The more intimate and personal the detail, the more universal the story becomes.” {That’s me quoting myself. I wrote that when I was just starting to become a braver writer, and the blog post it came from is here: WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES.

Laura Munson (a writing mentor and role model of mine) is a courageous writer who wrote a book about her marriage falling apart and her reaction to it. Before she had a book she published an essay in the New York Times’ Modern Love column, and you can read that here: “Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear.”

Laura told me (as she will anyone who asks her) that a person can write about anything if she writes with compassion. It’s true. I wrote with compassion about my experiences taking care of and cleaning up after my grandmother, and I was rewarded with an overwhelmingly positive response. People wrote to me and said, “Me too.” They wrote and asked, “Why didn’t you ask for help?” “When can I come?” and “How can I help?” I didn’t have any good answers except that asking for help is scary, it makes us vulnerable, and we worry about meeting resistance.

Friends wrote and called to make sure I’m okay, to offer respite, and to commend me for both my willingness to do this hard work and my grit in talking about it. Some readers forwarded my post to friends and family who work with the elderly as nurses and therapists, and then those people reached out and offered their support. Some of these people were strangers until suddenly they weren’t, and I wept with gratitude for those hands and hearts extended in my direction. It was intense, but it felt good to allow people in to my world. I was validated and shored up by people who might not even know me if they passed me on the street.

Other folks were less thrilled. Some asked my mother if she’s mad at me for flinging open our closet doors, but she wasn’t. My mother is the person most worried about the contents of my memoir-in-progress, yet when she’s been questioned about my two recent blog posts she did something incredible: she defended me. My mother acknowledged that she’d be the first person to call me out if I’d written anything that wasn’t true, but that I’d written only the truth and that she was proud. If you know my mother you know that she adores me but doesn’t let me get away with much.

There’s a built in liability befriending a writer (in particular a nonfiction writer), but for some people there’s an overlap that is not a choice, and that’s with family. A family member called my mother to express his anger over my sharing of our family’s stories. He couldn’t believe that my mother wasn’t mad and was even more dumbfounded that she wasn’t trying to stop me. Some of the stories I told are old ones but I told them not as a rant, but as reference points to my present situation. My present situation caring for my grandmother and the ensuing story does not happen to be this angry person’s story. As far as I can see his hand has not stretched out in my direction.

I listened patiently as my mother recounted the hard conversation she had where I was pummeled for telling the truth, a truth that is also hers. She’s glad I’m telling the story because she knows how lonely it can be inside a closet, but for my mother there was an additional element to the hard conversation and her hackles went up: someone was attacking her baby.

I’ve hit the pause button on my life to help my family of three, and although I wouldn’t have it any other way it’s not without sacrifice. Unfortunately the angry family member failed to recognize either my benevolence or my hard work. He made my grandmother’s story about him and criticized my content for one reason: my truth made him uncomfortable.

My mother brought up as an analogy Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, a Pulitzer Prize winning tragicomic memoir (um…thanks, mom….) that is basically required reading for Irish-American New Yorkers. Of course he’d read it, but didn’t see the connection, and said to my mother, “That’s different; that book is about his family.” My mother said, “Yes. And?….”

He responded, “The difference is that Jaime is writing about my family.”

Oh. My. God.

“It’s her family too,” my mother said, because after that what else is there?

In Angela’s Ashes McCourt wrote, “Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale.” Certainly there were plenty of people who opposed his truth telling, but it didn’t stop the book from being crazy successful and widely received by those who also believe that closets are no place to live. McCourt had fairly late in life success, but taught writing and gave his students the best advice: that they are their own best material.

Our stories do not exist alone, and they intersect with the stories of the people whose lives coexist with ours either as a result of biology or through choice. In my recent “brave post” I mention my mother minimally (it’s really a story about my grandmother) and the only thing that could be considered a slight toward my mother is when I mention that I summon the courage she lacks. But what I said is true and she knows it. Any shame she might have for not being strong enough to do this on her own pales in comparison to her gratitude for my strength to put into motion a plan where there previously existed only a downward spiral. My mother has never been in denial about my grandmother’s illnesses, she just wasn’t able to step back and see the way through (and eventually out of) it.

Even if my mother denied my truth, would that make my observations of my experience off limits? (If you say yes you can private message me and so we can talk about it. Or we can talk about it here. Your call.) It’s just like what Ash Beckham says about hard: we can’t compare our hard to someone else’s hard just as we can’t compare our truth to someone else’s. It just depends on which side of the fence you’re on, and I happen to be on the dirty side.

I like the dirty side of the fence just as much as I abhor living in a closet. I know that mental illness can be an uphill battle, and I also know that not talking about mental illness doesn’t make it go away. I’ve done some research in books and in real life (too much, probably), and I’m 100% certain that not talking about it makes it worse. Silence can be deadly. If you don’t believe me ask anyone who’s lost someone to suicide, depression, addiction, or a combination. Ask someone if silence helped when they worried about whether a loved one was going to use or while they waited for someone to show up alive after they’d disappeared. In silence.

After my blog post last week a few people shared an article with me that was published in Slate. The title is “Nobody Brings Dinner When Your Daughter is an Addict.” It’s amazing. Please read it.

Sure it’s hard for people to ask how it’s going with my grandmother, but the brave ones do, and many tell me about their struggles. One friend wrote about her fear of talking about her family’s mental illness and thanked me for my honesty. She said, “I hope someone is bringing you dinner,” which is just as good as someone actually doing it and the perfect antidote to the stones being thrown by people who aren’t offering anything but fear dressed in a thin veil of judgment.

I’m not wavering on my position to tell the truth nor have I even considered backpedaling out of it. Here’s why: for all the people who aren’t hearing what I have to say there’s a hundred who are, and that number has the potential to grow exponentially as one says to another, “Read this; It might help.”

I’m not delusional in thinking the sharing of my story can change the world, but I know that real change happens one person at a time and that I’ve helped more than a few. One said that enabling is a “lonely place to live,” and another told me about her experience with family mental illness and “trying to minimizing the consequences of her behavior and picking up the pieces of her actions.”

What we’re saying to each other is “We’re in this together; I’ve got your back,” and this more than counterbalances the haters. Dr. Brené Brown says, “Don’t try to win over the haters; you are not a jackass whisperer.”

Brené Brown’s been on my hotlist for a couple of years, and in her now famous TED talk on shame she said this:

If we’re going to find our way back to each other, we have to understand and know empathy, because empathy’s the antidote to shame. If you put shame in a Petri dish it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can’t survive. The two most powerful words when we’re in struggle: me too.

She also said,

“If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive….“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”

If that’s not gorgeous i don’t know what is.

Closet’s are not as safe as people think. Sounds, words and thoughts can creep in there, and those dark places aren’t as hermetically sealed from the light as the closet-dwellers believe them to be. I don’t know what makes people think closets are safe. It could be shame, guilt or some other emotion masquerading as anger.

Denial is the first stage of grief, and it’s followed by anger. We circle through denial, anger, bargaining and depression until we eventually reach the blissful place of acceptance. Sometimes a person gets to acceptance then takes another lap through the list because life isn’t always (or ever) as easy as having a checklist. The path to acceptance isn’t always (or ever) linear.

Truth challenges. It stretches. It pushes limits of comfort and safety. I know that some family members aren’t angry, but are instead sad about what I’ve written about my grandmother. It is sad, but sadness can’t erase reality. You know what helps? Yeah: empathy.

My mother and I are in this together and we’re in deep. The best part—because I’m a silver-lining kind of girl—is that my mother and I are cooperating and working together in a way we never have before. We’re living under one roof and barely fighting because we have something bigger to deal with than the pettier stuff that’s ruled us for too long. The woman who’s been most afraid of my truth is actually embracing it, and that’s a beautiful thing in the midst of a messy situation. But here’s the thing: I wish it wasn’t necessary for my mother to defend me.

There’s a very good chance that the (closet-living) people who need to be reading this aren’t. Maybe they’ve written me off, maybe they don’t care, or maybe my presence hasn’t even reached their closets’ radar. I have no control over that, just as they have no control over what I write. I also have no control over any debriefings my mother might receive over my actions, but if anyone has a problem with me it would behoove them to talk to me about it directly otherwise it just might get my Irish up.

The “angry relative” interrogated my mother, and asked her if I’d interviewed my grandmother and then wrote about what she’d told me in confidence. It was nothing like that. My grandmother and I have conversations like we’ve always had, and like a lot of the best conversations they happen spontaneously. My grandmother’s concept of time and reality is altered now, but occasionally she’s able to really be in the present and I cherish those moments.

Maybe it was sitting in a kitchen where generations of our family’s women have prepped and cooked meals. Maybe the cup of tea steaming in front of her triggered something. Maybe the act of peeling of an orange sparked a memory. It’s impossible to know what triggers my grandmother’s reminiscing at this point, though I know that when she’s ready to talk I’m ready to listen.

We value our time together, and when it’s just the two of us she opens up more than in a group because in a group she tends to space out. It could be because she can’t hear everything or because she can’t keep up with the pace. When it’s just the two of us in a quiet room talking directly to each other our hearts engage with each other’s more specifically.

Our conversations and sharing make her happy, and the other night after our good, honest talk she made up a little song and sang it to me, “I’m so happy I could dance all night.” We danced a little then I helped her into some cozy pajamas, because it’s life’s simple acts that are the most challenging to her these days. I poured her a glass of milk, got her into her recliner with a blanket and turned on the television. My Mimi is definitely a comfy jammies kind of girl.

Check the Weather

Most of you reading this know that I’ve spent the past eleven weeks mostly alone. I socialize, on average, twice a week for a couple of hours, though I’ve had a couple of runs of five days where it’s been just me, Lucky and writing. {Note for the future: that’s too many days alone for this girl. I find myself easier to be around when i’m bouncing off people.}

I live ten miles from a cell phone signal, so on the days when I haven’t left the cabin I’ve often not had a conversation with anyone (besides the dog) unless I’ve gone to the post office. The post office is the only constant in San Cristobal, and is just a mile up the road. The first night I was here I was told there’s a bit of cell service (though not for me) at the post office, but couldn’t find it because it doesn’t look federal, and is more or less a lean-to attached to the postmaster’s house. And I confess: I’ve occasionally jotted off a postcard just to have a reason to go there and exchange a few words with Miss Winda Medina.

Last week there was a welcome shift, and I got to do a bunch of talking when my dear friend Emily visited from Missoula for five dreamy days. During that time we drove a lot because the spaces between pin dots on the map are large in these parts, but in all that windshield time not once did we listen to music. Not the radio, not a CD, not even the song I couldn’t stop listening to before she got here.

Let me be clear: We talked almost constantly, but didn’t make noise just to fill space. We welcomed silence, contemplation and awe, but a few breaths later we’d be breaking it down and expressing our thoughts out loud before they’d fully formed in our heads.

We got deep into breaking it all down. I love the way so many conversations started with, “I’m asking you this because I know you’ll tell me the truth…” I can’t think of a worthwhile topic we didn’t touch down on, but in the end our conversation hopping left with us dozens of unfinished thoughts.

When we weren’t talking we were eating. In the beginning we forgot to take before pictures of the beautiful food, so ended up with only clean plate club photos like this one:

Before we cleaned the Weiner schnitzel right off the plate we had the coldest ski day I’ve had here. It’s easy to believe March would be warmer than January and February, but it’s not. The winds kick in and make March feel like the coldest month of the winter. No joke. I’ll pass on sharing the photo of our frozen faces. Oh, what the hell. Here it is:

The next day we explored town, but it was too cold to walk much so we drove back roads and swooned over the light that hits the earth a little differently in these parts. Even when the sun is diffused through clouds there’s an illumination that makes a person feel there’s a gaggle of assistants with flash diffusers, reflective umbrellas, monolights, and strobe lights. We rushed out of and back into the car for this one:

Cold weather can be a blessing, because if we’d be able to be outside we would have, but instead we scored at a consignment shop. Emily got a blazer she’d been searching for forever and I got a vintage Italian merino dress and coat set. Ok, truth: I also got a couple of muumuus and a lime green pair of Dr. Scholl’s. Hello, Florida! {Emily says I really rock a muumuu, and I say she should wear short shorts year-round. This is friend love. Clearly.}

Then we had one of the best meals of our lives at El Meze. Mussels, collards and bacon, melt in your mouth pork belly……each bite better than the last. This is where we embarked on a serious run of fabulous meals. Ok, I should back up to mention that our waiter at El Meze was both Michael-Franti-hot and sweet. Worth noting.

We asked at El Meze for a brunch recommendation, and were told to go to Aceq, but found out they’re no longer serving brunch. We did our due diligence and even though we didn’t like the name—Dragonfly Café—we agreed that hippies make good coffee and baked goods, and a wait is usually a good sign.

We sat outside in the sun and wind (yes it was cold) and drank coffee while we waited, then we were seated in the coveted window-seat nook. Reward for our patience? Possibly. We lounged in that heavily pillowed, sun drenched slice of heaven while we drank mad cups of coffee and ate a ridiculously good breakfast based around homegrown eggs. Lucky, lucky girls.

After brunch we hiked down to where the Red River meets the Rio Grande and relaxed in the sun on a rock in the middle of the river. We talked about a lot of things with the water rushing around us, but one of them was that some people will never get to experience being on a rock in the middle of the river and wouldn’t even think to put it on the option list. {sigh} People: it’s an option. EVERYTHING is an option.

We’d left a message on the answering machine regarding a dinner reservation at Aceq, but it’s complicated when you don’t have cell service and as soon as you leave town there’s no way to get a call back confirming or denying anything. I know: It’s all so backwards, and it’s been interesting living “old fashioned” this winter.

We’d already made reservations in town, but Emily said, “Let’s drive over to Aceq and see how it looks and if we like what we see we’ll find out if we can get in.” We hit cell service on the outskirts of Arroyo Seco, right before we reached Aceq, and at 5:55 the message was, “Hi Jaime, We’ll have your table for two ready at 6:00.” Obvi it was meant to be.

{Note on “obvi.” At some point in the midst of all this eating, talking and adventuring we managed to watched the entire first season of Girls. The girls say obvi.}

We don’t know how it happened, but Aceq managed to beat El Meze. We had brussels sprouts, spicy lamb ribs, and the best friend chicken either of us have ever had. Our socks were blown right off. Yes, we talked through the meal, but mostly to say, “Oh . My. God. This is the best thing I’ve ever tasted.” No photo will do the décor or farm-to-table food justice, but I’m not kidding foodies: put ACEQ RESTAURANT on your bucket list. (I’ve already been back!)

All that eating, walking, and getting deep into the marrow of life inspired us, though it’s hard not to be inspired by all of the artists who’ve called New Mexico home. Our highlight was the Georgia O’Keefe museum in Santa Fe, but we popped in quickly to the Mabel Dodge Luhan house which offers “supportive solitude for creative reflection.

The lineup of artists who were guests of Mabel is unbelievable (Georgia O’Keeffe, D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, Martha Graham and Carl Jung, etc.) and the spark and motivation set into those walls oozes right out. Of course, it could have been the light. Seriously, the house is on a hill and the sun was setting and light streamed through impossibly large windows that are positioned in such a way that just screams: someone really knew what they were doing when they built this place….

A workshop was going on, and the group was finishing their dinner but didn’t mind us poking around. Emily and I had flashes of thoughts and dreams for the future and it can be best summed up by this story of a friend of mine.

Years ago a guy I knew kept having run-ins with the law. I don’t know exactly what kind of trouble he was getting into, but he kept finding himself wearing the orange suit, sitting in front of the guy in the black suit. One day he said to himself, “I want to be the guy in the black suit.” And just like that he decided to go to law school.

{Translation: We can read the books and attend the conferences, but we can also write the books and teach the conferences. A plan was hatched….Because it was so unpredictably cold here, but intermittently sunny, we checked the weather a lot. So much it became a slogan for the visit. I think CHECK THE WEATHER will be a great name for a collaborative book and/or a workshop. There’s so many things you can check the weather for in addition to actual weather….}

Writing is serious business and it’s hard. It requires solitude, but it’s not the one person job I once thought it was. I’m lucky to have people in my life who empathize with this, but Emily’s a writer too, and she knows the struggle in a more intimate way. Thank goodness for friends like Em…. I’m grateful she was here to experience the remote cabin where I’ve been living with it’s terrible water pressure, it’s washboard access road, and it’s incredible silence.

She really gets it. She’s aware of how hard it was for me sequester myself away for a winter of writing. The choice to go was hard, the decision to stay almost harder. She knows what it’s like to face the blank page, the shitty first drafts, and the compulsion to do this this thing that can lift you up as deftly as it squashes you.

We spent her last day and night in Santa Fe and the Georgia O’Keefe museum was the first thing we did and our favorite. We were lucky enough to be there during Annie Leibovitz’s “Pilgrimage” exhibit in addition to getting to view O’Keefe’s paintings. We walked through the museum with our arms linked around each others, but before we did that we sat and watched two short films. One was an overview of O’Keefe’s life, and the other about her homes in New Mexico.

I loved everything about the museum, but the highlight was—no joke—the videos, which I realize sounds silly, but I loved seeing her face and body in action, hearing her voice, and doing the math.

Yeah, the math. Emily and I did a lot of math in that theatre, and mouthed numbers to each other with eyebrows raised and hearts light. O’Keefe and Stieglitz didn’t get married until she was thirty-seven, she spend her first summer in Taos when she was forty-two, and she didn’t move to Ghost Ranch until she was forty-seven. We also discovered that the art she did when she was younger was Not. Very. Good. But as she got older and traveled more it got (obviously) a lot better. Still-lifes and lighthouses did not bring out the best in Miss Georgia. Sun bleached bones and impossibly blue sky and flowers on a huge scale did.

So we did that math and it confirmed what we already knew: there’s plenty of time. So we can sink our teeth into that. While we check the weather.

I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do. – Georgia O’Keefe

The Places That Scare You

The skies have cleared in Missoula and I’ve been running again. It feels so good. I went on a few runs in the particulate thickened air, and didn’t realize how bad it felt—how hard it was to keep moving and breathing—until I had a taste of clarity.

The skies gradually and intermittently cleared, but we basically went from smoke to snow in a single day after breaking a record of forty-two precipitation free days. And as I always say: strike while the iron is hot.

My body hurt from a month of inactivity, and I went from a month of maxing out with three slow walk-jog miles to running five. I tallied those miles in the woods, with my phone in my pocket to count the miles, but my headphones left behind. How nice, right? The woods….the solitude…the longish run…the meditation of feet hitting dirt and breath going in and out.

My motives were not pure, though, and my sedentary-too-long body could have used a little Katy Perry pick-me-up. Except that it wasn’t on the menu. The fact is I’m terribly scared of being in the thick trees alone. I prefer the open hillsides where you can see for miles, and the only wildlife hazards are harmless snakes crossing the trail and making sure the dogs don’t chase white-tails.

{Image by Blake Nicolazzo}

I think it’s good to go to the places that scare you, especially if they aren’t very scary, but sometimes even if (and because) they are. American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron wrote: “A further sign of health is that we don’t become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it’s time to stop struggling and look directly at what’s threatening us. ”

Look directly. What an idea.

I am not scared when I’m in the woods with friends, and most of that is attributed to the fact that when I’m with even one friend we yack it up so consistently that we’re not liable to startle a bear, and are far more likely to scare the wildlife than be scared by them. All bets are off when I’m alone in the thick trees. I hear things so little, so big, so not even there.

Birds flushing out of the brush or a chipmunk snapping a twig can freeze my blood when I’m alone. The hairs on my body stand up and my muscles lurch to a stop. What happens next is that I’m embarrassed. There is nothing to be afraid of. Birds and chipmunks? Really? “Pull it together,” I tell myself. Then there are the facts: these woods are home to bears, wolves, and mountain lions. There are things to be afraid of, but not so much so that I can’t put one foot in front of the other.

There’s another aspect to this madness. I forget to carry bear spray. Always. Actually, I forget to buy it, which is just downright silly because there are plenty of things, like these Frye boots, that I would never “forget” to buy. I also forget to put a bell on Lucky so the jingle can frighten off bears and so I know, when I hear the cracking, rustling sounds that lead to my bristling, that it’s just the dog exploring.

We humans seem to avoid doing the things that we know will help us. Ok, I can’t speak for you, but I know this human often makes things more punishing than they need to be.

Sometimes a perspective shift is all that is needed. Instead of seeing the shadows you can see the sunlight. Illumination makes everything less scary. Go ahead, shine a light into all the dark corners.

What about when you can’t see? There is a sweet, tree lined country lane that bends a hundred yards ahead of you. Instead of fearing what is around the corner, you can rest assured that there’s no way to know what’s on the other side unless you go there. You can stall out, or you can go.

The places that scare you can be external—woods, public speaking, pages of a book, standing up on a surfboard with your rash guard hiked above your belly—or they can be of a far graver version: they can be internal. (For what it’s worth you can shine light into those dark corners too…)

A hill rises before you. It’s a mile long and you’re not sure you can make it up the grade. You might have to walk and would that be so bad? You think it might be “that bad,” but what would be worse: going and having to walk, or not going and not knowing?

You can focus on what you might not achieve, or you can take it one step at a time, or until your favorite song is over, or until you reach that fence or that tree, or maybe, god willing, the top. The thing is: you will not know unless you try.

Today: go to a place that scares you.