Native bees & disarming hostility
I spent Friday morning in Joshua Tree National Park taking photos of native bees with a wonderful editor from the great HeyDay books and a brilliant conservation photographer and community scientist.
When we met up, the photographer, Krystle asked, “You’re into ecology, too?” and I almost closed up.
“Well, I’m into learning and exploring…” I explained and then meandered into a story about inner child work and remembering a second grade science assignment where we were sent into the yard of our school to observe plants on the ground and I had enjoyed it thoroughly but done something wrong, got some sort of not-good grade, and it was the beginning of thinking I was no good at anything science.
I clammed up for a while after that, listening to both of the women identify plants and then bees with certainty and joy, watching them in their elements, if not their happiest places.
I tried to stop the narrative forming in my head: They are so much smarter than me. I sound so dumb.
I would have missed one of my favorites days in years if I hadn’t.
I got diagnosed with complex PTSD in 2018. It happened in the DC office of my long-time therapist. I was laying on her white couch staring at the familiar popcorn ceiling talking about how things were—that I couldn’t see friends, that all I did after work was come home and watch Netflix and talk to Mondaycat, how I no longer cared about helping other people and that it used to feel like fire in my chest when awful things happened at work and now it felt like nothing, that I was impatient, angry, short nearly all he time—and she’d said it sounded like symptoms of complex PTSD. That it had sounded like that, really, for a while.
She was gentle about it. She had been listening to me for six years by then and knew I hated labels, hated medicine, hated when she asked me about childhood because, like I’d told her at least a hundred times, I didn’t remember most of it.
She knew to deliver those words casually to me. She knew I’d hear them and make my own way with it.
That was how we worked together. Rarely did she tell me something direct. Maybe three or four times in our entire six years together did she say something as absolute as what she said that day. (I will always love this therapist, but my god was I in the wrong kind of therapy).
I so badly want to write something scene-y here about how I paused and heard the sounds of busy DC outside and that a car alarm matched my quickening heart beat or that a bird flew onto the windowsill and I watched it in silence for a while, but really I just heard her and went “Oh, that makes sense.”
It was not profound or earth-shattering and it was certainly not therapeutic. It just…was.
I understood working in a public library was a major catalyst for the symptoms and I also vaguely knew that it was my childhood—that’s where a lot of the ‘c’ came in—but I wasn’t too concerned because I was getting out of the library and my childhood had officially ended roughly 15 years earlier.
I took the diagnosis. That’s the best word I can think to use. She said it and I plucked it. Put it in my pocket. And then I didn’t do much else with it. No research, no digging, no ruminating, even. I just heard it and thought, “That makes sense” from the vague things I’d heard and read, and I kept on moving.
That’s how simple I tried to make it. In hindsight, that’s how simple I needed it to be.
I moved to California a month or two after I was diagnosed and I put all of my energy and work into my MFA program and my new life and all was well for a while. Sunshine and proximity to ocean and being pretty decent at what I was learning and teaching and writing each day kept my doing OK going. I was, I pronounced sometimes, “Happier than I’ve ever been!”
And then it caught up to me because of course it did and of course it always had and has. My first spring semester I workshopped a story about my father’s arrest when I was in the eighth grade and no one said anything upsetting, but I went home and smoke a joint and then I smoked a joint every day for the next two and a half years and somewhere in there I developed an eating disorder as well. I spiraled out, I kept spiraling.
The diagnosis was, in many ways, a catalyst for my book. I wrote an op-ed in the LA Times about it. It struck some nerves. It printed in the Sunday Times and it got cited in a bunch of articles and research papers and I thought—I really thought—this was me working through it. Writing about it.
The three things I have wanted most in my life: control, a narrative, and a tidy ending.
You can have those pretty solidly when you write. But you can’t have them, at least not successfully, with much else.
I was profoundly not OK while I was writing Overdue and in the aftermath of it as well. I didn’t see that at the time, but I see it now. The daily work on that particular version of control, narrative, and tidy ending held me together for a while—like so many other goals and achievements have over the years—but not forever.
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