An Instict To Fight

two books and a midlife languishing

Always, I’ve had a feeling to push back. Against myself and people. This caused me a lot of trouble and others some pain, but it also made the best parts of me able to flourish and rise to the top, it keeps me intensely loyal and close to my morals, and it might have saved my life. I think in my worst days, young and completely lost and suffering deeply, I might have killed myself if I didn’t have that unearned part of myself, though it came and went in intensity. More than a feeling, an instinct to fight is biology and spirit. It’s the hum of cells that will go down fighting before they die. It is Refaat Alareer writing ‘If I Must Die’ before being murdered in Gaza. It’s the dirty tiger pup separated from its mother and surrounded by hyenas in the plains, growling and scratching. It is the toddler with a fistful of her own hair. It is the bird wings over the Midwest, frigid and exhausted, slicing through the wind. It is Pussy Riot playing public songs of resistence in Russia, knowing they’d be arrested, possibly jailed for years. It is silence, it is a scream. It is sometimes stupid and sometimes glorious. It looks and sounds and feels a thousand ways, but the core is resistance and insistence.

I resist this force upon me. I insist on these forces.

WINGS TO FLY by the great Frida Kahlo

Acedia is derived from the Greek word for absence of care, or “akedia”. In Corey Keyes book, Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World that Wears Us Down, he writes about what languishing looks like, a generalized overview of why various groups of people might experience it ( such as age groups, culture, etc. ) and some specific and broad ideas to ‘feel alive again.’

I’m languishing, and it’s not because I’m not doing anything. At top of mind: I’m working part-time at Barnes, I’m writing, I’m parenting three adult children and one 14-year-old still at home ( and animals! ), I’ve enrolled in school to get a psych. degree, I lift weights, run, stretch and dance, I spend time with my family and friends. However, like many of us, the chaotic ( and it’s chaotic evil not neutral or good iykyk ) and increasingly scary ( not unprecedented but no less scary for that ) nature of humanity on this planet, climate change, the threat of another pandemic on top of the still prevalent Covid virus- it has all landed squarely on the shoulders of each of our lives, already full of their own volatility, pains, fears, challenges.

With the extra weight of worsening world conditions during a time of - and this time the word is fitting- unprecedented lack of communal support, on top of America’s worsening physical health- which means and is equal to saying, mental health- due to environmental toxins and nutritional deficits and lifestyle, we are experiencing the beginning of a flood of mental and spiritual crisis. It’s not us. We aren’t particularly fucked up or particularly bad people. We are more than our circumstances and our environments, but we are not above them.

I’m never above anything, I laugh as I write, and I am proud of this, proud of my muck-in-the-mud personality that has always been there and will always be, even as my body, much embattled by lifelong chronic ill health and PTSD, craves and often screams for comfort and ease. When I write ‘never above anything’ what that means to me is that I encounter life on life’s terms. As you were, the Captain tells the soldier, and this could sum up the way I meet the world: I want to meet people as they actually are, regardless of if I enjoy it or not. And I want to be seen as I actually am; in fact, when I have gone in any real measure away from this, succumbing to some pressure or another, I tend to have a panic attack or feel so deeply dishonest that I go too far in the other direction. It reminds me of when my then Mother In Law said at the dinner table, out of nowhere, “ How is your cousin? You know, the one who never speaks to you all and is a lesbian? “ We all laughed so hard for so long. It was funny because there was no plan to make me uncomfortable or to slam lesbians ( laughing!) , but just my MIL asking what seemed to her a perfectly reasonable question that showed interest in my life. She showed up as she was, without ill intent.

Right now, not being above my circumstances means that I am recently turned fifty, in mother fucking perimenopause, involved in the longest separation/divorce process to ever exist, sexless by choice because I still live with my ex ( he on top floor, my daughter and I on bottom ) because we cannot afford two apartments, gutted ( this word is overused; I mean to use it here, it is fitting ) and still stunned by the response of my community to the genocide in Gaza, swimming in a recently evolved family change that is enormous and scary and not something I can write about publically, broker than usual primarily because of the increased SDGE bills ( specific to CA and to my town ) and our owed taxes from last year of 10K ( we must get divorced this year so that our incomes can be detangled, as he makes a decent income and I do not, and our claiming marriage probably hurts us both ) and of course, surrounded by the damage that Orange is already doing in my community.

I’m writing my school district to ask what they are doing about ICE at schools, about the fact that my daughter has lifelong friends who have disappeared from school as of two weeks ago, because I know the answer is nothing, because I have looked into it. So I’m going to write, to ask, and then suggest and try to lead, even though I have no idea how to do any of this. The numbness I carry too often this year can be caved in by thinking of the face of M, Ever’s friend since TK, a little girl I helped often with her work as I volunteered over the years, who hasn’t been to school for a week and a half.

Those are the set of circumstances I chose to write out, not the only circumstances, but these are the ones I identify as crushing the ever-loving life out me. I think the middle-aged crisis for me has much less to do with the traditional ‘ what’s the meaning or purpose of my life ‘ because I have chosen, since my pregnancy at 19, to live in what is meaningful and purposeful to me, but instead, my crisis is hormones and magnitude.

The magnitude of the challenges humanity is facing. The life-altering hormones in my body, instead of surging forward and back like a soothing and powerful tide, are now ricocheting between manic gales of surging waves and tides so barren and pulled back that the sand is scorched and listless.

The most painful and freakish experience for me is nothingness of any kind. To feel little is such a foreign state for me that I then feel chronically anxious. I feel much relief when the tsunami hits; I feel integrated and whole again, even though that wholeness includes a lot of pain. It is languishing that terrifies me, and which I am experiencing in this way- any kind of protracted time- for the first time in my adult life. I am taking biodentical hormones. I’m working out. I’m eating great. I’m taking supplements. I’ve pulled back on caffeine. I’m also smoking cigarettes and my sleep cycle is totally fucked. I won’t sacrifice real progress for a smooth surface and I can’t offer a smooth surface without a shit-eating grin on my face. It’s going to be a while before I’m integrated again. These times are splintering. If I don’t let the splinters work their way out, I’ll just be a smooth surface until the end of my days, as alone as a shark in the shallow end.

Prentis Hemphill was a therapist in Los Angeles when Trayvon Martin was murdered. They participated in what would become the LA chapter of Black Lives Matter and worked there for two years as healing justice director. Their book is What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World, and it’s worth your time. I’m in process of reading it closely now after doing a speed read. In the book’s prologue, they wrote something that stood out to me like a neon sign:

Over time, I have come to understand that social transformation (the push for more just systems and policies) and personal transformation (healing our own trauma and reshaping our relationships) have to happen together. Not one of the other, but both. We neglect ourselves or our growth in our rush to change what is external. When we do, we fracture and succumb to what we are unwilling to face.