Screaming at the Supreme Court: A Love Story (Part Five)

            After the conversation with the pro-Franken family, I needed to get away. On the way to finding a spot on the Capitol lawn, we ran into an art project. We were asked to write our thoughts on a popsicle stick (There was some kind of pun involved there, I forget.) to be glued onto a “believe” poster. I wrote “Fuck Al Franken too.” on mine and the young woman whose poster it was frowned at my contribution before placing it on a pile of also-not-fucking-cheerful-enough rape thoughts.

            Even protest art seemed to have betrayed me. It truly felt like there was nowhere to turn, like I would never be a part of anything ever again. This is a normal thing to feel during a panic attack but this was a NATIONAL panic attack, a GLOBAL one, fueled and pushed (I can only see this in retrospect) by all of my enslaved and exploited ancestors and precursors, by ALL of the women (especially the women of color) and girls and femmes and trans people and non-binary folks, all of the non-white non-men who had fought for freedom against colonialism before me. When I’m screaming, I’m screaming for all of us.

            I can see now there were generations, millennia, of pain and fear coming out of me in racked, animal sobs. I honestly didn’t are who saw. I hoped they saw. I hoped that the people around me could hear me but I ‘knew” in the way that a panicky rape survivor knows that no one could hear me, no one could ever hear me again. No matter how disruptive, how livid, how determined, no one in the world would ever be able to hear me.

            Amy’s policy, whenever scared at a protest, is to find a friendly tree, so we did. We sat on the grass and I tried to breathe. I was still starving so she gave me her sandwich. I wondered what she would have to eat and I nagged her about it for the rest of the day.

            I sat in the grass and scream-cried. I asked her if that women from China had really said “me too” to me and Amy said yes, she had. I shriek/bellowed “WHY?” Like a poorly written movie character. WHY does she have to go through this too? WHY do they hate us so much?

            I felt so dissociated and lost that it seemed like we were done with the protest. (Spoiler alert: We were not.) I wondered if we should start making our way to the Hope Diamond, my favorite post-protest reward. Instead, I kept crying, brokenhearted, feral, bereft.

            At a certain point, though, I realized that my crying might be disrupting the MAGA hat couple, who were engaging in performatively “reasonable” conversations with protester after protester. (I try not to hate those who take the Sarah Silverman, let’s-empathize-with-racists tact, but I kind of do hate them. Talk to somebody better!) When the spite started to re-emerge in my heart, I began to feel something like okay.

            Amy and I decided to go back to the protest for fifteen minutes and then call it mischief managed, but then we saw that the whole demonstration was on the move. It was magnificent to see: Mostly women (cis and trans), mostly people of color, mostly clad in black, fists held high. They were marching together for the Capitol steps.

            As Amy and I joined the march, I had an inkling that this was going to be one of the most powerful things I would ever see. I was not wrong.

Thanks Bookstore! And What Comes Next

Yesterday was my last day at the bookstore. It’s hard to overstate the gratitude that I feel for the place—what I took for a straightforward and undemanding job ended up, of course, meaning so much more.

The day back in February when I emailed the OM to see if I could pick up some hours, the email was the only thing I was able to accomplish that day. I was still panicking hard, trying for an hour walk each day, writing down my dreams and not much else. After I sent the email, I was petrified that I would let everyone down, especially Amy, who’d be one of my supervisors.

I was worried that I was so broken that I couldn’t even do my old standby day job, which I love and which has brought me so much comfort over the years. I was still having panics in the grocery store sometimes, feeling unworthy of groceries I knew my former students’ families couldn’t afford. (Once a lunch-party guest, the brightest and most determinedly positive girl in the class, expressed envy of my baby carrots, she said her dad couldn’t afford things like that. I gave her all of my carrots and was never the same again.)

It was hard. For the first few bookstore weeks, I could pretty much only work and sleep. I rode with Amy to work most days, which, like the job itself, ended up making me feel both comforted and trapped. The shadows of school life lurked around with me, I was never sure if I was acting normal or like a mental case.

Sometimes, the young people who worked with me wanted to talk about Important Topics, and I would feel the fear and self-loathing and self-consciousness that precipitates a panic well up and I would have to stop them, but I found their existence so comforting—the wild-haired blogger who declared herself “sick of corporate America” and just stopped showing up, the philosopher who used the phrase “patriarchy as death machine” in casual conversation, they give me hope that everyone’s going to keep fighting evil, even as I move on to cozier ways of doing so.

But what I loved the most, what I’ve always loved the most, is idle work conversation. (This is why Clerks is one of my favorite movies, in spite of my brother’s complaint that nothing happens in it.) (see also: the season three OITNB conversation about the Black-Eyed Peas)

I love the genial, jokey exchanges of near-strangers, the kind that arises from the most exquisite boredom: parsing the intentions of cable radio pop singers, punning on book titles, eventually finding out what creative projects are lurking just beneath nearly everyone’s surface.

And in that spirit, another miraculous thing happened—I got a crush. One day a few weeks ago I was startled to realize that I’d flirted my way through eight hours, with only a break for lunch, and with a mix of embarrassment and exhilaration, I felt a return to myself. Another day went by like that, complete with him recommending an album and me typing while listening to it and settling back to the part of me that has muses, that gets a little giddy and then makes more things. He’s not a viable option, this isn’t that awesome of a story, but just to be off the rails a little, kind of dizzy in the head for someone, it gives me hope that I might still be capable of happily falling when the time comes. Also, it makes me just an eensy bit impatient for that time to happen.

I told someone yesterday during the process of goodbyes that I was broken when I started, and he asked if I was unbroken now. I’ll go with less broken—last week, I wasn’t sure if I had Lyme disease or was sick from all the racism news. I’m better able to engage with the world now, easing back to the Important Topics. It’s still hard to fight the sense of failure and the crippling self-consciousness that got exacerbated in the classroom.

Even though my poetry class is very fruitful and camp seems promising, it’s so hard not to feel like a failure about teaching. Talking to my brother-in-law, a born teacher, over the weekend, it’s hard not to envy the confidence he has with his career, with his place in the world. I envy my friends who all seem so settled, so at home in the world, in their families, in their work.

But playing Mario Kart with my nephew, I wondered aloud why I ended up off road so often. He said “Maybe you’re a…criminal? No, that’s not the word.”

“Outlaw?” I asked, and he heartily agreed.

Outlaw sounds about right. I hate the way that the school system is set up, the way it focuses on data and saps the creativity of teachers and students alike. I feel desperately jealous of my friends who slot so easily into their classrooms, but I have to sympathize with the intensely talented friends who’ve had their love and inspiration sucked right out—that waste isn’t okay with me. It’s not a sacrifice it seems right to make.

Somewhere in my love of connection and my madness for protecting creativity, I hope to find my next line of work. It may be in a nicer school or in homes or I don’t know where. I take comfort in knowing that summer art camp is a job that makes sense, that pays well enough, so maybe that can give me hope for the jobs that follow. My brain is still fragile, but I’m so grateful for the healing that the past four months have brought—thank you, self, for making summer come in February. Thank you, friends, who’ve supported and loved and written with me. Thank you, work, for bringing me back to myself. I’ll do my best with the road less traveled, and I’ll always choose the Kart with good offroad capabilities.

Panic and Progress/Little School Stories One

Last week was such a fruitful one—my poetry class’s book release party produced such a special and heartening collection of poems, I got to go on the local radio station and read from my own poetry book, I even got to visit a friend at her family’s lake house and float around in a paddle boat looking at water lilies and goslings while catching up.

But underneath all the wonderfulness was an inexplicable (okay, actually very explicable) panic. Twice at the bookstore I was working in benign but enclosed spaces and felt the hot dizziness sneak up on me. The music felt too loud and my vision went swimmy. “Sorry I’m a little bit out of it, I panicked in the T-shirt closet” is not the least embarrassing thing I’ve ever said.

I’ve been having bad dreams about school, of the principal observing me and calling me out for mistakes, of having a double class plus a baby to take care of, of having to translate Urdu on the spot. I dreamed of a flying, broken house coming at me with a beautiful black and white drawing (the kind you see on paste-up street art) of Ganesh on the side. All of this means something and nothing. Though life is doing an amazing job of moving me forward on its own, I felt trapped and stuck, blocked in a way I always think I should be able to solve.

I’ve had this sad mentionitis about school, like the “This one time, at band camp?” girl except with failure and trauma. This makes me feel like the conversational angel of doom. The other day at work I kept oversharing, talking to anyone who made the mistake of standing still near me about angry parents and lockdowns. I know it all has to come out, but I honestly don’t want to give those places any more than I already have.

Still, let’s talk about the lockdowns. They came every month or so at the first school, every few weeks at the second. The announcement would come on and we’d be told to lock all of our doors and stay in place until further notice. I never had a door that locked from the inside. I was never actually trained for lockdown procedures, so I’d turn out the light, sit down, and do my best. Sometimes we sat in a row on the floor in the back and played Whisper Down the Lane; sometimes we stayed at desks and just put our heads down. Though we were supposed to be silent, I think, to wait for further instructions, (“So we can stay alive,” I’d tell them.) sometimes it helped to sing the peace song:

“When I breathe in, I breathe in peace,

when I breathe out, I breathe out love.”

(Unitarian hymns are so easily adapted for  the classroom.)

Sometimes the lockdowns were because of gun violence in the surrounding blocks, sometimes just for a kid who was momentarily unaccounted for. You never found out the reason until rumors circulated later in the day, after the threat was over.

In the moment, it never occurred to me to be scared, just to get that deep, eerie calm that grownups sometimes need to have. I took solace in the fact that these were the only times I felt truly justified in just letting them sit and draw. Only now does in occur to me that lockdowns were scary. Those kids, for as much trouble they gave me, were among the most beautiful human beings I’ve ever known. The light shined out of them so purely, so defiantly, so much more miraculously than I can possibly put into words. Despite their harsh circumstances, or because of them, the force of their aliveness was so dazzling that if they had been the proverbial rose-in-concrete, they would have vined the city and the world to its senses.

The horror of being charged with keeping the kids I loved safe in a situation that never would be was one of the many part of my job that was both futile and vital, both deadly and absolutely banal.

As a mark of progress, this is the first easy time I’ve had writing about school—I’ve written maybe ten drafts of blog posts that collapse under the weight of their own sadness, so maybe little stories, a few paragraphs at a time, could be the key.

I think part of the reason this has been a fearful week is that bookstore time is almost over—in many ways, it feels like it already IS over. I’m doing two days a week until camp starts as a way to focus on a couple of projects and get my act together. The part of me that grasps at routine misses the ritual of it, the lunch breaks in the sunny break room or by the fountain, the weight and comfort of organizing my beloved textbooks, my workplace cliché of a coffee cup—Charlie Brown exclaiming “Good grief!”

Good grief indeed. These past few months, though tricky, have been a charmed time. Things have fallen into place through faith rather than effort, or just the effort of singing through the commute or sweeping the terrace for poetry class. I’m sad to let the spring class go even though the summer one starts tomorrow. A big fear in my soup of fears is that I’ll let down the writers who’ve already given me so much.

Reading aloud from my own book of poems brought up so many emotions, too. I’ve got such deep shame for the unrequited loves that defined my life for so long, making it both agonizing and prolific. There was grief over a lost marriage that once seemed so certain. And there was also this: Huh. This is a good book. How did I come up with all this stuff? Will I ever be that productive again?

Returning to art and poetry as the organizing factors of life definitely pulled me out of depression and back to something like my real self, but it also brings with it an enormous amount of vulnerability, one that I can only tackle a little bit at a time. Whereas I have 100% faith in my ability to bring forth good poems from others, my faith in my own work feels Bambi-footed.

Being on stage, both literally and metaphorically, has gotten tangled up in my mind with the everyday humiliations and failures of teaching. The fear of being scrutinized, jeered at, stupid, even hated when I go out on a limb a little is harder to fight than ever before.

I’m frustrated that panic is still holding me back. I see so much possibility in front of me, so many friends and opportunities and gifts. It’s getting harder to take the alone days I still need, that I’ll probably always need. I love the weeks that go by where I feel back to my old self and absolutely hate that I am still so broken. But it is getting easier.