Holy Shit

I've been trying to write about aging. Specifically the way looking older brings not only sadness, shame, and embarrassment, but a profound humiliation, the likes of which I haven't experienced since I had severe acne for years as a young adult, or when many years ago I made a decision to stop the disordered yo-yo dieting that made my life chaotic and my body too thin, and as a result, I became seriously obese.

Oh my~ I need to pause right here. Because I have never put those things together before now, and suddenly I can hardly breathe for the urge to cry. Sometimes writing literally takes my breath away, the way things can be uncovered, discovered, delivered, the way the veil can all of a sudden part, like a curtain in a strong breeze, the puzzle pieces floating perfectly into place. 

I just need a minute to regroup; to bow to the universe; to be with the understanding that is dawning, the deep compassion that has so unexpectedly drifted my way. Seeing these times not just as part of my story, but as painful years of shame, of marginalization, and isolation.

It started over two years ago the morning after I'd had cataract surgery in both eyes. As I removed the post surgery protective goggles and looked at myself in the mirror for the first time, my vision clearer than it had been in a very long time, I was shocked at the face that stared back at me. I leaned in, getting a closer look, then ran my fingertips over the lines and wrinkles and splotches, none of them visible to me before surgery. I broke down and wept uncontrollably.

It is a wall of shame that stops the writing process each time I've tried to write about the full-on aging "crisis" my new vision brought to me. Never mind the incredible upsides; that the world was once again brilliant and colorful, that I could once again drive safely, and I could read maps and my phone and best of all, precious books and, take decent photos again. Not to mention the narcissistic audacity to whine about such trivial things when facing such enormous crises in our country and around the world. When so many people in so many places are suffering, my great fortune was not lost on me even as tears ran in fat rivers down my cheeks. I'm alive! I'm well. I have people I love dearly. I have the freedom and the luxury to write and to make art. I have health insurance, and was able to get surgery for the condition that is the number one cause of blindness in developing nations. The number one cause of blindness~

Shaming myself for feeling ashamed.  

A few days after surgery I was looking for a parking space at the pharmacy and had to stop and wait for a woman who was limping slowly across the road. I park my car and when I walk toward the building, there was the same woman, not far from where I had seen her, leaning against the back of a car. Our eyes meet and I smile and she smiles back at me and it was the most radiant thing. Like the sun suddenly coming from behind a cloud, like my vision after my surgery, her entire being was lit. I could see, as I got closer to her, deep lines and fissures etched into her beautiful face. It wasn't, I realized profoundly, that she was beautiful in spite of the wrinkles, they were truly part of her pure and genuine loveliness; her luminous being.

That meeting shocked and inspired me. I reread parts of Naomi's Wolf's The Beauty Myth, and both embrace and reject her poetic words about aging women's faces: how every detail printed upon them—the precise calligraphy she calls it—are the recordings of her road traveled and of her own unique life and times: this line and that impression a relief of her thoughts, feelings, disappointments, curiosities; her joys and heartbreaks. I log onto Pinterest, search "aging gracefully" (by the way, a term that actually enrages me, as we are even told how we are supposed to age) and to my surprise up pop the most amazing images. Women at all stages of aging, short women, tall women, with gorgeous gray hair and white hair, long hair, and short, colorful clothing, fabulous jewelry and sans jewelry, looking straight into the camera, their amazing faces painted with the stunning detail of their very lives, having the audacity to show up in the world in all of their mind-blowing glory. 

Holy shit. 

Suddenly as I write epiphanies arrive like winged angels. Hit after hit, insights, truths, knowings, bombard me, more puzzle pieces snapping miraculously into place. I've long known the connection between our culture and the difficulty of women's lives, but I see now, with brilliant clear seeing, the bigger association: the results of how women are treated that are directly, profoundly related to the crises we are experiencing in our world and on our planet.

Holy shit. Again.

The room is now flooded with light. These two seemingly unrelated things are so connected, so unbelievably intertwined, so enmeshed, I don't know how it is I have not seen it. I also don't know where to even begin; it's huge and complex and utterly vital.  It's also simple. Women are born into and then live in a man's world; a world created by and for men. Their leaders are men, their deity is a man, their "savior" a man, as are most all people in power; those in power make the rules, and they enforce the rules. He/him/his are the universal (exclusionary) pronouns. Even if we are not religious, the "sin" of Eve, and how she caused the fall from grace, is in our marrow, in the air we breathe; we know well that it was Pandora who opened the proverbial box causing all hell to break loose. 

The beautiful heart and body and earth-centered yin energy of the feminine has been plundered. Its essential life-giving relational, restorative, collaborative, peacemaking, and compassionate soul forced underground. Women's stories have been muted, their beings, especially as they move past their reproductive stage, rendered useless, then invisible. How do you steal a woman's inborn power? You teach her from the cradle on, sometimes subtly, other times overtly, to hate herself, to hate her innate ways of being. You teach her that her emotional life is wrong and bad, her body inferior, but also an object, as long as it looks just so, her mind, how she communicates, subordinate. Her vision of power, which is power used collaboratively for change, for good, rather than power over, is not only flawed, but ridiculous. Her wisdom nonexistent. 

Aging is cultural as well as biological. There are cultures around the world, particularly in the east but also among native earth-based cultures, where people are honored and revered as they age. Their knowledge is esteemed, and they are seen to have much of value to contribute. Women are the wise teachers, the revered crones, silver hair a sign of their wisdom, and wrinkles, like an intricately beaded necklace, the beautiful artwork of their lives. 

One day out of the blue, I lean in. On Pinterest I pin photo after photo on a board I title The Beauty of Aging. It becomes my own testament, my own creed, filled with raw, wild, sedate, gorgeous, proud, wrinkled women, plus quotes like Note to Self: You are not too old and it is not too late, and my personal favorite, A wise woman once said "fuck this shit" and she lived happily ever after. The women, their words light the inner fire that stokes my life. I stop coloring my hair, a personal choice that is not an editorial on what any other woman should do, ever, this dicey aging thing being a very personal journey. Now, with the pandemic I am also growing the length of my hair, something I would never have had the courage to do though I have longed to be one of those women who wear their salt and pepper mane irreverently thrown into some undefinable messy up-do. Who says aging women cannot have long hair? On the other hand, I drag out the makeup I haven't used in years. I buy mascara and relearn how to apply it. I consider ordering designer glasses even though the only correction I now need, thanks to my surgery, is for reading; because it's true that glasses hide a lot more than just the dreaded bags under my eyes. I now fully understand why women get plastic surgery and I'm unbelievably relieved that I don't have the money to even consider that. Though I do try out a little microdermabrasion, and order a host of anti-aging products. 

The inner me, the one that never ages, the one that truly does not feel a day over thirty-five, just doesn't get it. She is dumbfounded every time we stand in front of a mirror, or we happen to catch a glimpse walking by one. Though in society I am disappearing more and more with every gray hair and each new wrinkle, never have I had more to say, or more of an urgency to say it. There is wisdom in me. I know it, but have a great deal of tremulousness embracing it; though I do see now that a quiet transformation has been taking place since that tear-filled morning. Courage, I can see, is suddenly overlying fear. Worthiness is replacing shame, and compassion is beginning to grow, if even just a little bit, in those beautiful fleeting moments, displacing the toxicity of self loathing. Clearly, I am not too old, and clearly it is never too late. 

With Love,

Debby 

French Braid

Quan Yin

Last week I was listening to a tv actor talk on his podcast about falling off the wagon after sixteen years of sobriety. His deep pain, his disappointment, his humility, his sense of responsibility to his twelve step community and the sober community that has grown in the years he has been podcasting were astonishing and so inspiring. But then I listened as he began to talk about his shame, and that's when my heart just truly broke.

I cannot begin to know what it is like to relapse in that way nor to do so publicly. When the gods were handing out addictions, I was apportioned sugar and butter and eating for comfort. Not benign by any stretch, but not mind/personality altering in the way that drugs and alcohol are, and not potentially catastrophic in the short run. Still, from it, I do know what it's like to leave my body and mindlessly reach for a substance, even after long periods of abstinence. Even though I grew up with an alcoholic father, still, I don't know personally what it's like to live with that kind of monkey on my own back. I do know, because of my father, the way that kind of substance abuse destroys people. And by extension, entire families and lives.

So much is known about addiction today. We know its intimate link to pain and suffering, be it physical, emotional, or spiritual, and in a plurality of cases, to trauma and PTSD. My dad was a veteran of both an alcoholic father who beat him and hand-to-hand combat in World War II, in which he was injured. Dr. Gabor Mate, who has worked with drug addicts on the streets of Vancouver for decades, has brought such compassionate understanding to addiction, believing that there is no way that we can begin to understand addiction~any addiction~without asking what it is that the addict is desperate for relief from.

There is an old, wrinkled black and white photo of me taken on Thanksgiving Day when I was eighteen months old. I am in my pretty holiday dress and I have climbed onto a chair and then up onto the dining table, with it's pretty china and tall tapered candles, and I am eating butter with my fingers. It seems far fetched to think I was already anesthetizing myself, and it's possible that I simply loved the taste of butter. But years after that, when I learned that I could push a chair to the counter and reach the peanut butter in the cupboard and eat spoon after spoon of it standing alone in the kitchen, having told my best friend that I needed to go to the bathroom, leaving her alone outside in the playhouse, I'm not so sure.  

Once years ago, on what was an already hard morning, I was stuck in traffic on the Bay Bridge on the way to visit my youngest daughter in the city. Crawling not even at a snail's pace, I could feel myself getting more upset by the minute, feeling the urge alternately to kick and scream, and to break down and sob. I was not even yet to Treasure Island when it hit me that once off the bridge, however long that would be, I would find a place to buy chocolate, even though I had not had sugar in months. That's all I could think about, chocolate, and where in the world I would stop to get it on the way to my daughter's apartment, a route I knew by heart in the congested and confusing big city streets. I still remember spotting the Peet's, where they just happened to carry my favorite chocolate bars back then, finding my way in circles on one-way streets looking for a place to park, standing in line, walking out with two large candy bars in my hand (plus a sugary coffee), then ripping into them once I was back in the car, those first bites soothing all the raw and jagged edges just like I knew they would, until I could breathe again, then hiding the wrappers and picking up my daughter for an early lunch. 

What I didn't know then is that being stuck in traffic, especially on a bridge where there is no escape at all is a big post trauma stress trigger for me; I was a wild animal caught in a trap. That morning was not unique but it stands out in my memory because it was the first time that it was ever so conscious, that I was actually aware that I was in a place of deep pain and at the same time aware that eating a particular kind of food would literally make me feel better; that once I had had the thought, nothing could have deterred me, not getting lost in the city, not being late to pick up my daughter, because there has been, since childhood, a well worn pathway, a deep and abiding groove in my brain connecting pain and food and soothing. 

Embedded in addiction and trauma is shame. There is both intergenerational trauma and intergenerational shame. Like their trauma, I breathed my parent's shame into my body like I did the air around me~just as my beloved daughters breathed in my own. In their ways, both of my parents shamed me but it was my dad, his breath smelling of whiskey and cigarettes, who would get into my face, jabbing his finger so close to my nose I was cross-eyed, and say, in his most disgusted voice, repeating my full name after each incantation, Shame on you, Debby Suoja, shame on you; my poor little 5, 7, 9-year-old frozen in place, utterly alone, annihilated, spirit felled by the monstrous toxicity that is shame; that I am shame. Though that is only one, and definitely not the most powerful of the host of reasons that I know shame and its effects on me, on my relationships, on my ability to thrive, like I know the back of my own hand, though some of those do also involve my father.

When my girls were kids I used to French braid their hair. I would pick up hair from the top of their heads, separate it into three pieces, braid those together and then with my baby finger, pick up more hair and weave it in, first one side, and then the other, weaving and braiding until at the very end, when I put the rubber band in it, and there, in the little tail, it was all one again. That is what trauma, addiction, and shame are like for me. All braided together in a way that I have no idea where one begins and the other ends. 

But I do know this. It is not my fault. It is not my fault anymore than it was my father's fault, or my grandfather's, or my mother's, or the tv actor's, or Hunter Biden's, whose struggle has so pathologically become part of our national narrative, whose losses and traumas are staggering, whose pain is unfathomable. It is not shameful to have found a way when so isolated and in such anguish to soothe one's pain. It is a natural impulse, and kudos to the spirit for doing the best it could. And now, with all of the contemporary knowledge about trauma and about addiction, after so many years and decades of struggle, the door opens not to more shame, but to understanding. And understanding paves the way to love, and love brings us face to face with the Buddhist's Goddess of Compassion, Quan Yin, She Who Hears our Cries, She Who Feels our Wounds. And these three, understanding, love, and compassion become the new strands in the braid, one small plait at a time, weaving the way to wholeness, and to healing.