this is not advice

Learning to Let Go and Live

April 13, 2019 By Carrie Lamanna

color photo of a woman's feet. She si wearing pink ballet flats and there is a white fluffy dandelion in the foreground.

I’ve been in hiding. From my friends, my family, my clients, and my readers—so essentially from my life. I tried to do too much (too much for me) and it broke me. This has been a pattern my whole life. I look around and see how productive other people seem to be and I convince myself I should be doing at least as much, probably more. But I’m also a perfectionist, and that’s led me down a path to true, diagnosable disfunction. In the beginning I just looked like your standard, type-A overachiever—dean’s list, grad school, tenure track academic job, husband, kids, house. I made sure my life checked all the right boxes, but behind the scenes I was a wreck. Lots of crying, panic attacks, feelings of worthlessness. When your standards for success are god-like perfection on one side of the bar and total failure on the other, you always end up a failure. In my mind, I could never be perfect so maybe it was best for me to just give up.

Recently, I started working with a therapist who specializes in anxiety and OCD. I have known for years that anxiety was an issue for me, but I had begun to suspect that my responses to that anxiety had escalated into OCD territory. When I went into my first session part of me was convinced I was overreacting, that I didn’t have OCD, that I just needed to light some candles and spend more time meditating. I mean, it’s not like I spent all day washing my hands or something, and that’s what all the people with OCD on TV do, so clearly I was fine. After one session it was clear that I was most definitely not fine. My brain turns everything—cooking dinner, weeding the garden, organizing a bookshelf—into a project with a complex, multi-step set of procedures that must be followed exactly or its not “right,” and if its not right something terrible will happen. What terrible thing? I don’t know, but I’m sure as fuck not going to risk finding out, and this is why a task that should take thirty minutes takes me three hours.

I know I’m lucky that I’m what our culture calls “high-functioning.” I can leave the house, take care of my kids, run the scout troops I volunteered for, but the effort I have to spend to make everyday life happen means I’m overwhelmed and exhausted all the time. I’ve been told it’s painful to watch me fold laundry because of the way I smooth the wrinkles out of every spot and make sure every towel or shirt is the same size and shape so they fit evenly in the closet. Nothing is simple or enjoyable. Everything poses a threat and must be neutralized through precise order and control.

I read an article in the NYT about a week ago that said procrastination is not about laziness or lack of motivation, but the inability to regulate negative emotions. In short, we procrastinate whenever the task produces negative, anxiety-producing feelings. In order to ease the anxiety, we do something else that makes us feel confident, productive, calm, etc. Worried your boss will criticize the report you have to write? Clean the kitchen instead. OCD is that same behavior, but all the time with almost everything, and the task being avoided is life and all its uncertainty. I can’t really be in control of everything and insure nothing ever goes wrong, so my brain tricks me into thinking that if I can just fold all the towels according to my absurd set of rules, I am actually in control of the universe. Problem is, that anxiety relief is always temporary. The anxiety returns until you write the damn report and face your boss’s criticism. However, when it’s the uncertainty of all of life that causes the anxiety, you are stuck in an endless procrastination loop. In my case, I can never really control everything—people will get sick, accidents will happen—and the fear that produces is just too great, so I am stuck folding the towels forever in order to calm myself.

I am telling you all this not because I am looking for sympathy or forgiveness for not following through on my responsibilities, but because it is a pattern so many of us repeat over and over even if it doesn’t rise to the level of a mental illness. And we need to talk about it. In the beginning, I thought if I could get straight As, earn Ph.D., land the right job, everyone would love me and I’d be happy. When that didn’t work I doubled-down on my perfectionism and applied it to every area of my life. Did you know you can take a shower incorrectly by washing your body parts in the wrong order? Not really, but I’m working on explaining that to my brain.

I’m barely working and haven’t been writing at all, but I’m trying to change both of those things. Even though I’m flat broke, I’m prioritizing the writing. I need to get some of this out of my head before I can take on more paid work. Maybe that’s backwards according to our culture’s capitalist standards, but that’s the way it is for me. Getting better requires me to develop new criteria for measuring success. My brain thinks the list of criteria for everything is 100 items long. I have to reduce that list and let my brain scream an cry until it learns that the world won’t end if I throw the towels into the closet half folded. I have to figure out that life in all its messiness and uncertainty is worth living.

It’s ridiculous that I can’t do the simplest things without tricking myself, but maybe that’s how it always is. We have to trick ourselves into living. We get stuck at the base of Maslow’s pyramid desperate for sleep, food, safety, and love. We spend our days working for food and shelter. Then at night we go home and clean bathrooms, fold laundry, and make dinner, all to collapse into bed, and if we’re lucky there’s someone there to curl up with as we lay our exhausted body down for a few short hours. But that’s not living. That’s existing. And trying to do all those things perfectly sure as hell won’t turn our endless quest for security into a life where art, creativity, and beauty are possible.

Anxiety is a dirty little liar that will steal your life

May 15, 2017 By Carrie Lamanna

Here’s the dirty little secret about anxiety. It creates your fears and then pretends to keep you safe from them. Like an abusive partner, anxiety says you are a loser, that no one really likes you or loves you, that nobody’s really your friend, that everyone is using you, pretending to like you. Everyone, of course, except your anxiety. Anxiety says it will protect you because it is the only one who really knows you, cares for you, loves you.

At first you try not to believe your anxiety when it tells you to skip the party, cancel that lunch date, ignore that job opportunity because it will only end badly. So you go to the party but spend most of the time in the bathroom or standing in the corner intently scanning the books on the shelf and hoping no one will notice you. You apply for the job, but tell yourself you don’t really want it. You have lunch with your friend, but when she asks how things are going, you say everything is great and blather on about the weather, the food, that new TV show. It’s safer that way. People can’t hurt you if they can’t get close. But then, anxiety moves closer. It fills the void like carbon monoxide, tucks you in, lulls you to sleep, and then smothers you with the blanket. It’s banal until it’s deadly.

At least, that’s how it is for me. Sometimes I don’t leave the house for days. I cocoon myself in projects that justify my solitude. I clean and organize the kitchen cupboards, the bedroom closet, or my desk. In springtime, I consume myself with weeding and pruning the garden. I am desperate to be alone, just me and my anxiety that whispers, “I will protect you.” Even the prospect of making a simple phone call can send me fleeing to a pile of rubble in the back of the closet, which in my mind, must be organized right now. That phone call will have to wait.

When I was young, my favorite part of swimming lessons was learning to dive. Most of the kids were afraid to plunge into the water headfirst. They would stand at the edge of the diving board and balk at the last second, which often led to bellyflops, coughing, and flailing arms. I longed to break the water with my outstretched arms, to make way for my head to enter, and for water to fill up my ears. The indoor pool was so noisy. The echoing voices of parents and kids, instructors shouting in order to be heard, and the constant shrill blast of their whistles. All of it went away the moment I entered the water. I learned to dive so deep I would touch the bottom with the palms of my hands, right myself and then push off the floor with my feet to return to the surface. And every time I wondered how long could stay under without drowning? How long could I shut out the world? Would anyone notice if I failed to resurface? Would I want them to?

My anxiety has been on the verge of bubbling over for months now. I’ve used the spring cleaning and gardening tasks, real and imagined, as a means to stay safe from real human interaction including ones I’ve deliberately sought out. The result is that I am heading off to my annual writing retreat with no writing to share. Every time I sat down to work on my submission, anxiety told me it was safer to do the laundry or organize the bookshelves. The thing you have to know to understand the nonsensicalness of this is that this writing group is comprised of the kindest, most supportive and generous readers and human beings a writer could ask for. So who or what was my anxiety protecting me from? Where was it conjuring up this fear from? As I asked myself these questions, I found myself going back to a quote from Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers:

A part of you is refusing to write, and if that part of you is so strong that it is calling the shots, you had better start listening to it. Find out why it refuses. That ‘it’ is you.

“That ‘it’ is you.” The kindness I know from these writers exposed my anxiety for the fraud it is. My anxiety was keeping me safe from myself, from the part of me that experienced past hurts and makes me fear future ones. My anxiety convinced me I not only had to hide from the world but also from myself. Deep down it’s not the sharing that keeps me from writing, but the opening up to myself about the hurt that is necessary for the writing to happen in the first place. My anxiety has been calling the shots for years, keeping me from family, friends, and myself. It’s the shadow surrogate of all who have injured me, pushing me deeper and deeper underwater, drowning me in the false security that I can out-swim the hurt with silence.

This is painful to write, but it’s the pain of sucking in air after rising up from the depths. The only alternative to the pain is death. Next week I will arrive at my retreat where the pool is not deep enough for diving and a porch full of friends watch over you while you swim. It is my chance to keep writing, keep breathing, and trusting that there are people who won’t let you drown.

What my students taught me about Baltimore and the importance of listening

April 30, 2015 By Carrie Lamanna

So I just saw another meme urging me to beware my attitude because “the primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but thoughts about it.” I totally get this from the Buddhist perspective, so no letters please, but it is thrown about so much on the Internet that it has started to grate on me. And after watching the events in Baltimore this week and the nonstop, uninformed opinion spouting about it, that grating feels like a massive open wound because I’m pretty damn sure the primary cause of unhappiness in West Baltimore is most definitely the situation. And that is the only thing I know because as Janelle Hanchett says so much better than I ever could, I don’t know shit about Baltimore.

Look, I don’t have anything eloquent to say on this issue. All I can think about every time this kind of thing happens (and it happens with maddening regularity) is that we are incapable of understanding people in crisis. And by we, I mean the white middle and upper classes. And by people in crisis, I don’t mean the earthquake victims in Nepal. They are definitely people in crisis, but white folks in America are quite good at empathizing with those in crisis on distant shores. (And yes, I know there is no shore in Nepal. It’s an expression. Stay with me, folks.) The people in crisis we can’t readily empathize with are those in our own country who are the victims of income inequality and structural racism.

I won’t try to prove my point with statistics or a history lesson. I’ll leave that side of the argument to those smarter and better informed than I. Instead I’ll do what I do best and tell a story.

When I was a PhD student at the University of Illinois, I taught basic writing. These are courses for underprepared freshmen, and at Illinois this population was comprised of Black and Hispanic students from Chicago and white farm kids from small towns downstate. This was an interesting mix of students, and I adored them. But class discussions were not always easy.
In general, the white students were quiet and passive. I don’t know for sure, but I interpreted their quietude as a mixture of small town respect for authority and discomfort with the multiracial classroom environment. They were always on time. They followed directions. What teacher doesn’t love that.

My Chicago students were not quiet. They were were boisterous, sometimes loud, and they questioned things I said. They weren’t taking anything this white lady said at face value. They made me up my game. They made me proud.

I can say two things that were true about both groups: they worked hard because they wanted to learn, and they didn’t talk to one another even though they were in the same room together three days a week.

I tried to get the students to interact more. I assigned them to work in mixed groups, but as soon as the activity was over they went back to their segregated seats. I cold called on the quiet white students to force them into the class discussion, but got short, utilitarian answers and crossed arms. Then one day when we were discussing racial and economic inequality in the American education system, I tried my tactic again. After many minutes of lively and insightful discussion from the Chicago side of the room, I said, “Let’s take a minute to get the perspective of some of the students who haven’t spoken yet today.” We all sat silently for what seemed like an eternity, but was more like 60 seconds (which is a really loooooong time to sit in group silence). Finally one of the downstate students spoke up.

He turned not to me but to the Black and Brown side of the room. “I want to talk. I want to give my opinion, but I don’t want to offend anyone either. I just don’t know how to talk to you all because this class is the first time I’ve ever been in the same room with people who aren’t white.”

The other students on his side of the room nodded in agreement. The Chicago students sat quietly for a moment and then one replied. “If you want to know what’s offensive, you’ve got to ask. Just ask us. We’ll tell you. If you sit there, not saying anything, we assume you don’t like us or that you’re racist. We don’t get to talk with white people much either.”

I was stunned. Then overcome with emotion. I almost cried.

After that, discussion was more integrated and interactive. The classroom became a space for them to learn about each other’s lives. And it was a necessary space because when class was over, the white students and students of color went their separate ways again. Our classroom was an alternative space, a space where they could safely ask question of one another that could not be asked on the university quad or in the dormitories. I take no credit for this. The students’ bravery and honesty that day created the space. Instead, I learned from them. I didn’t know anything about life on the south side of Chicago or life growing up on a farm in central Illinois.

Things don’t always go as well when race becomes a classroom issue. I had a white student in another class at a different school who quietly held extremely racist views and was so disturbed by being in class with people of color he wrote his educational policy paper about why we should reinstate formal school segregation. I was not able to help this student engage or reconsider his views, and I wonder where he is now and what he’s saying and posting on Facebook about Baltimore. And I worry.

But I am also heartened by the students in my majority white rhetorical theory class who engaged thoughtfully with critical race theory and the work of Patricia Williams, and who opened up in class about their own previously unexamined racism. And I was honored that two students in the same class shared their painful stories of racism with us: a biracial student who grew up watching his father try to maintain his dignity in the face of racism while the student was able to hide from it by passing as white, and a white woman from an all white town who struggles daily to shield her biracial daughter from the stares and dirty looks they get when they go to the grocery store.

What I have learned from all these students is that racial politics in this country is complex and difficult, and we don’t stand a chance if we aren’t willing to listen and to tell our stories. And right now I want to listen, need to listen. This post is the first thing I have said publicly about the events in Baltimore, and it comes after a week of listening. And now I will go back to listening, and I hope that if you are white like me you will listen to the stories of Black America with me. Start here, and then when you are ready for more, go here. It’s the least we can do, and maybe the most important thing right now.

A photo posted by KLUB KID VINTAGE Est. 2009 (@ramdasha) on Apr 29, 2015 at 9:50pm PDT

What fucking up Easter taught me about patriarchy

April 8, 2015 By Carrie Lamanna

So I’ll just start with the conclusion: I fucked up Easter. No, really. I don’t mean I forgot to buy candy for the Easter baskets or that I burned the ham.

No, folks. I mean I fucked up.

As in I went to Easter mass, stood in the aisle in the middle of a jam-packed church and yelled at an usher.

Yup. I fucked up in the most spectacular way possible. And if you aren’t finished judging my totally judge-worthy behavior, and want to know why a supposedly grown adult woman would yell at a church usher on Easter Sunday, read on.

I thought I had finally gotten it right. The baskets were filled with candy, books, and toys. The kids were dressed in Instagram-worthy outfits complete with jaunty hats. We had a nice, simple family breakfast and all managed to get out the door and to the church twenty minutes early for the 11:30 mass. Twenty. minutes. early. That is bona fide Easter miracle. We walked into the church, and not seeing an available usher we started looking for a seat on our own. And surely we would find one because I had earned it (twenty minutes early, people!). We wandered through the whole church and could not find four seats anywhere close together. An usher passed us without offering help. No one offered to move over and make room. The same usher passed us again. Others threw coats and purses in empty spots saying they were saved for someone. I was getting visibly agitated as I realized we were going to be relegated to the overflow mass in the school gym, sitting on folding chairs underneath a basketball hoop. The usher passed me again, and this time I ran after him.

“Excuse me. We’ve been all through the church looking for seats. Should we just go to the gym?”

“Yes. That’s your best bet.”

“OK. Because we’ve been looking for seats, and you passed us three times, three times, and never offered to help. You just walked right past us.”

And I stormed out of the sanctuary with everyone staring at me. My thought process that precipitated this crazy outburst? I can’t not get a seat. Don’t you see? I worked hard. I did everything right this time. I earned that seat. If I don’t get a seat, it means that doing everything right counts for nothing. That this world is not fair and just. That I am not in control. That there are no rules. Or worse, that I don’t know what the rules are and no one is telling me.

I have spent my whole life laboring in the misguided belief that if I could do everything right, if I could figure out all of life’s rules and follow them, nothing bad would ever happen. No one in my life would ever be sad, or get sick, or die. I know this is crazy, but I keep operating on this belief and every so often it results in yelling at church ushers. Well, this was pretty epic. Before this my worst public outburst was yelling at the barista in the campus library. Still bad behavior, but not “acting like a spoiled toddler in church” bad behavior.

After months of therapy, I know the personal roots of my neurosis, so that’s progress. The trick is learning new ways of quieting the anxiety so I don’t go into the spiral of scrubbing the bathroom floor with a toothbrush and then throw a tantrum when my cleaning efforts don’t result in well-behaved kids. (A PhD in rhetoric and I can’t recognize a faulty cause and effect claim.) It’s about getting comfortable with uncertainty. It’s about knowing that even if I fold all the towels just so and stack them in the closet so they look like a spread in Martha Stewart Living, someone I love might still get cancer or lose their job or just simply have a bad day. It’s about knowing that and being able to live with it. But our cultural messages don’t support me. The culture tells me that folding the towels right and getting those kids dressed up and to the church on time should mean something. And after my Easter morning outburst, I needed to find out why I kept getting told that lie.

So, this is the part of the story where I’m supposed to tell you that we went to the mass in the gym and was moved by the homily or something accidentally meaningful that my kid said. Sorry folks, but I’m still to much of a mental mess for that neat of a narrative. We did go to the mass in the gym, but immediately upon sitting down, the two-year old demanded to nurse and the five-year old kept dropping her toys all over the floor and yelping every time it happened. The husband managed to get one child settled in with her toys while I nursed the other. Then said two-year old noticed the basketball hoop, leapt out of my arms, ran over to it, and demanded to play ball. I managed to get him back to our seats somehow. I can’t remember, but there must have been kicking and screaming involved. Mass began. The two-year old started to fuss and then wail because he wanted his sister’s doll, which she was not about to give him. The husband took him out to the hallway and then outside to the school courtyard where, unbeknownst to me, they were locked out of the school and trapped in the courtyard. The five-year old then began hanging on me and begging to go home. By the end of mass, the husband managed to get someone’s attention through a window and returned to the gym. We collected our scattered toys and jaunty hats, and headed to the church side garden to take the happy family photo you see here.

Through all the chaos, I managed to catch one part of the pastor’s homily. Something about a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ The Wreck of the Deutschland: “Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.” Not really my style of poetry, but I was interested in the connection the pastor was making between this line and our need to let go and be open to God’s wisdom. It sounded promising, so I made a mental note to look up the poem later. Turns out it’s is about the drowning of five German nuns exiled from Prussia in 1875 because of Otto von Bismarck was having some feud with the Pope, and of course, it’s a metaphor for Christ’s death and resurrection because Easter. Whatever. I just can’t get excited about the minor squabbles of German history and make them into some sort of religious message. What gets lost in this poem are the five nuns—the women who lost their their lives in a shipwreck because two men were fighting over control of Prussia. (Yes, I know that’s a gross oversimplification of the history. But yet it isn’t.) The lives of these women mattered more than the weird intertwining of nationalism and religion that dominates the poem.

And then I escaped to Instagram where I found this post by Glennon Doyle Melton of Momastery.

The Two Most Holy Messages of Christianity: 1. HE IS BORN. 2. HE IS RISEN. BOTH MESSAGES DELIVERED BY ANGELS TO WOMEN. THE WOMEN ARE THE FIRST TO KNOW AND BELIEVE. We always are. We are holy rascals. We are the hearers and believers and deliverers of miraculous news. We believe MIRACULOUS NONSENSE. We deliver it to the men and children. Our faith in nonsense heals the world. There should be a woman at the front door of every church and another on every pulpit as the first to announce to every congregation: HE IS RISEN! Alongside sisters all over the world today and on the shoulders of our ancient sisters (MARY MAGDALENE, Joanna, Mary of James and the others) who this morning visited the tomb and found nothing: I proclaim: THE TOMB IS EMPTY! HE IS RISEN! And so YOU- YES YOU- LISTEN! That tomb you visit everyday- that place of hopelessness – your pain, your failure, your addiction, that long lost love, your past- THERE IS NOTHING THERE! STOP VISITING! WHY DO YOU LOOK FOR THE LIVING AMONG THE DEAD??? YOU HAVE RISEN!! YOU ARE A BRAND NEW THING! LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE!!! I cannot handle the joy and hope and truth and message of this day. I’ll be asleep by 3pm. EEEAAAASSSSSTTTEEEEERR!!!!

A photo posted by Glennon Melton (@momastery) on Apr 5, 2015 at 9:23am PDT

Now, I’m never that showy about my faith (just writing this post is making me queasy), but whenever someone as righteous as Glennon can be the the public face of Christianity instead of those asshats in Indiana, I’ll take it. As soon as I read it, I remembered. Of course, the women! Mary Magdalene. Magdelene—The Seven Devils by Marie Howe. That was the poem I needed. A meditation on what those devils were that Jesus cast out of her.

Ok the first was that I was so busy.
The second that I might make the wrong choice,
because I had decided to take that plane that day,
that flight, before noon, so as to arrive early
and, I shouldn’t have wanted that.
The third was that if I walked past the certain place on the street
the house would blow up.
The fourth was that I was made of guts and blood with a thin layer
of skin lightly thrown over the whole thing.

The fifth was that the dead seemed more alive to me than the living

The sixth — if I touched my right arm I had to touch my left arm, and if I
touched the left arm a little harder than I’d first touched the right then I  had
to retouch the left and then touch the right again so it would be even.

The seventh — I knew I was breathing the expelled breath of everything that
was alive and I couldn’t stand it

This is just a snippet of Howe’s brilliant poem. I know there is academic debate about whether Mary Magdalene is the same Mary of the Mary and Martha gospel story in Luke, but I like to think they are one and the same, that Mary’s “devils” were not the sexual ones so often assigned to women, but ones of trying so hard to do right, to be perfect, that she made herself crazy, unable to engage in the human interactions that really matter. This is what she is freed from, and why when Jesus visits her and her sister Martha, Mary sits with Jesus, talking with him, while Martha scurries about the house cleaning and cooking. Martha is still trying to get everything right, to follow all the rules of womanhood. If you know the story, you know that Martha gets angry and asks Jesus to order Mary to help her, to which Jesus says,

Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.

There is no right thing to do, no material perfection to attain. There is only the command to be here now. I guess this is ultimately what I am trying to get at, that women have some power to throw aside this patriarchal bullshit. So often we hold ourselves hostage to these rules we think are out there because we want so desperately to feel some sense of power and control over our lives. We think if the laundry is done and folded just right and our body is the right size and shape and our children are excelling in the right activities that we can somehow earn our right to be here. That is the trick the patriarchal devils play on us. They make us believe we are fundamentally unworthy and at fault. If we had done things right there wouldn’t have been an abuser or an alcoholic parent or a partner that left us. I like to think Jesus called bullshit on that.

The corollary is that we can’t cast out these devils alone. For me the message of Easter is that God wants to help us without any conditions other than be. here. now. He gives that message to Mary. He tells Martha not to shame her sister, but to join her. The ultimate commandment is to love one another, and even if Jesus and God are not your thing, I hope you will be with me on this much: if we want to cast out our devils we must have compassion for ourselves and for all the other women who are struggling. Black, white, or brown; rich or poor; gay or straight; co-sleeping or sleep training; breast or bottle; and, all the other shit (significant and insignificant) that we allow to divide us—we need to stop that madness and support one another.

At the moment I lost my cool in the middle of that crowded church I felt completely and utterly alone. If another woman had stopped me and said “I know. It’s hard. You got them all dressed up and here on time. You done good, and you don’t have to do anything more.” I think I would have been OK. But it didn’t happen. And it rarely ever does. We stay in our cocoons, pretend we don’t see these little moments of daily struggle. I am as guilty as anyone, but I want that to change. If I can show more compassion for others, maybe I can learn to have that same compassion for myself and stop wasting so much time folding the fucking towels.

For my part, I’m going back to my roots and gathering inspiration from the counter cultural women of my Catholic faith: from medieval mystic Margery Kempe, who freed herself from the strictures of middle-class marriage, preached the gospels, wrote the first autobiography in English, and had sex with Jesus (no joke. read her book.) to the Nuns on The Bus, who fight for social justice across the U.S., and Sister Helen Prejean, who never tires in her fight against capital punishment. These are women who call bullshit on society’s way of doing business. Women fighting the good fight. More of this please.

I’m not a nun. I’m not Gloria Steinem or Angela Davis either. But I can break the cycle of patriarchal bullshit in small ways, by reaching out to the women I see every day and letting them know that they can put down the makeup brush, the mop, the spatula, the baby carrier, and the boardroom notepad—whatever perfection they are seeking—and reach out for that human support we all need so much so that we don’t feel alone in the crowd.