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A New Lens on Life

Sometimes the numb sneaks up on me and settles in under my awareness leaving disconnection, isolation, and feelinglessness in place of life. I trudge on through days or weeks (sometimes years) without knowing I’m disconnected from deep emotion. Then suddenly it passes and I am flooded with the disconnected emotion returning. Like a couple of days ago when I found myself wanting to cry when I should have been relieved.

Yesterday I took a new (to me) camera lens out for a test spin. As so often happens, focusing on something else which requires me to be completely present and in the world let my subconscious work. As I wandered about learning just how shallow of a depth of field an 85mm f/1.8 camera lens has, things started to shift into place.

Earlier this year, in the middle of realizing we were going to need to move across the country, I found out I likely have thyroid cancer. Apparently, there hasn’t been enough trauma in my life, so the universe added the big “C” to my story.

It started simply enough in January at my annual physical. My doctor felt something on one lobe of my thyroid, and so out of an abundance of caution she sent me to have an ultrasound. It came back suspicious. Which prompted an FNA (Fine Needle Aspiration) biopsy. Which came back as very suspicious. A sample was sent for further testing, which came back as likely cancer… but not completely positive. I was for a few moments, very appropiately freaked out, but soon slid into numbness as it became too much. Dysfunctional coping skills learned in childhood to live with repeated trauma resurfaced to help me avoid feeling this too.

The next step is a Surgical Biopsy, which is a misnomer since it means actually taking out that half of the thyroid. So while my life is turning over, I consult with a surgeon and set a date for surgery in Atlanta after we are set to move to Chicago. It’s the only real step I can take, so blind and numb, I accept it. Then a few weeks later after we switch our move destination to California. I manage to wrangle a consult with a surgeon in the Bay Area.

The day after our one-way trip to SFO, I meet my new surgeon. We set August 14th as my new surgery date. Already overloaded with the move, there is only a twinge of feeling. Then nothing.

The surgery came and went, along with my whole thyroid since a rapid pathology check during the surgery finally confirmed cancer. So my “surgical biopsy” became a Thyroidectomy. Post surgical pathology confirmed good margins all around the spots of cancer, but also that it has spread to an adjacent lymph node.

That bit in a lymph node raised my risk. So, I was sent for a RAI (RadioActive Iodine) scan to check for further spread and assess for the need of RAI therapy. The 90 minutes I spent having to lie perfectly still in that machine while sensors looked for gamma rays emitted by the I-123 absorbed by any thyroid remnants and possible spots of cancer gave me a chance to use another of my childhood survival skills – disconnecting from the current moment by dissociation. The followup consult with the nuclear medicine doctor brought good news. Besides the expected thyroid remnants, there was nothing. No further spread.

I should have been relieved, joyous, happy; a weight lifted off my shoulders. Instead for the last two days, all I’ve felt is scared. All I’ve wanted to do is cry. I can feel it just under the surface, ready to spill forth, but it hasn’t yet. I’m not quite unstuck from numb.

Walking around yesterday with my new camera lens, I was getting frustrated at taking so many out of focus shots. As I fiddled and adjusted, I found that a higher f-stop gave me clear subjects. Then I discovered things further away were in better focus even when the lens was wide open. By the end of my walk I was getting several keepers. I wasn’t creating art yet, but I was figuring out how with extra care and attention I could create beauty with this lens.

Later in the evening as I was sorting photos and discarding (so, so many) bad ones, I could more clearly see on the larger display of my computer what had been happening. Taking photos with the lens wide open at a distance of about 6 feet, the depth of field (the range of what is in focus) is only about 1.5 inches. Everything closer or further away than that thin slice of space 6 feet away is fuzzy –out of focus. A breeze moving a flower back and forth pushes the bloom out of the small range which is in focus. One petal might be sharp, but the rest of them would be blurry.

I nailed the focus in this shot… on the leaf just below the flower and the petal closest to it.

This lens, as glorious as it is, has a very narrow window of tolerance for focus. So it appears do I.

Faced with something overwhelming, such as cancer, and then topped with the possibility of metastasis, I flew out of my narrow window of tolerance for feeling emotion. I dropped right back to my long-practiced coping mechanism of numb. Getting diagnosed with cancer is a traumatic event. It leaves no control over what will happen. It leads to pain, to suffering, and possibly even to death. These experiences are literally the very things which cause PTSD. A traumatic childhood set me up to deal with future trauma reflexively in the way I always had.

So here I am with a new lens on my life. I have to handle things very carefully. I can still create art, make a life worth living, and feel my feelings, but it takes great attention and skill when even the slightest breeze can blow me out the window into numb.

Golden Dream

For over a year my life has been frozen. I’ve been wading through a world trying to not only erase who I am but drive me into the shadows. Every day seemed to bring a new effort to shrink my existence and take away my rights, Being a childhood trauma survivor, the effect is multiplied, pushing me back into anxiety, fear, and disconnection. I’ve been wandering through life mildly triggered and disconnected, once again questioning whether I can have a meaningful life in this world which feels so unsafe.

There are three typical reactions to a traumatic situation. The first two, fight or flight are colloquial knowledge. The third, the freeze , is less well known outside of the psychological and mental health professions. It can be a precursor to fight or flight as the body prepares to take one action or the other. It can also be a defense mechanism in and of itself, like the snow hare who freezes against the backdrop of the white, drift covered forest floor when the arctic fox trots by. As a trauma survivor, I often get caught in a freeze like that hare when there is no clear path to safety.

As a queer woman in The South married to another queer woman, we stood out. As a married girl couple holding hands or kissing or just being together we were intensely visible even in our small queer friendly town. At first it was validating to be seen, but as the culture war on queer folk turned to a legislative attacks being seen made us a visible target.

Don’t Say Gay,Drag Bans, Bathroom Bills, and other laws passed around us in Florida, Alabama, and Tennessee. I disconnected from knowing more.

I had grown up in hot, humid central Florida, where Disney World visits were just part of life. Every major holiday, visit by a family member, or significant life event seemed to call for a trip to Disney. The joyful escape into a world of fantasy had become woven into the fabric of my life. As an adult I continued to find joy in its embrace, first with my son, then later with my wife. But suddenly Florida was a culture-warrior on the front lines of battle. The state of my long adopted hometown was feeling less safe. My days got fuzzier. I vacillated between compulsively checking the news and actively avoiding it in competing efforts to be informed and to avoid obsessive immersion.

Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World just before Enchantment, my happy place.

Then on a trip to Disney World we stopped for gas in Gainesville, FL. As I stood pumping gas into the car, my wife opened the passenger door and held out a bag. “Hey, Babe – could you put this in the trash can for me?” with synchronized precision, three other customers around us all turned and stared at me, at us. It had suddenly become personal and intensely uncomfortable. We flew to Orlando on our next trip.

Just wishing things would get better, that the world would come to its senses, seemed hopeless. So, filled with helplessness and unsure of a path forward, I slipped into a traumatic freeze. Falling back into the coping skills I’d learned as a child, unable to protect myself or run away from what was happening, I became stuck – frozen. My home, my career, my life was in a place which was becoming increasingly unsafe and unwelcoming. Suddenly, intrusive memories from my past were coming up unbidden again. I was going backwards. I struggled to enjoy or even live my life because I felt unsafe most of the time. My little progressive book loving town no longer felt safe enough anymore.

Then early this year, my own state joined in legislative culture war with 14 anti-LGBT bills during the legislative session and a ban on DEI in higher education where my day job is. Sure the ban was disguised as protecting academic freedom, but shortly after it was enacted anything with diversity in the title was canceled or cut. Somehow the threat getting so close, right on my own doorstep, helped get me unstuck. I caught up to where my wife had been for a while. It was time to leave before things got worse, before something bad happened to us, before we got trapped and couldn’t go.

Even though I had been stuck over the preceding year, we’d managed to explore places we could move to. Travel helped keep my mind from falling into the darkest places, so we checked out Albuquerque, Denver, Albany NY, Southern California, and Chicago. They all had their charms and challenges, but Chicago seemed to fit us best. It was the city of my young childhood and my beloved Cubbies. I’d always loved it. The towering skyscrapers, the expansive lake, affordable homes, great restaurants, and lots of culture just felt right. So as the need for action unfroze me some, we started planning a move by looking at houses and jobs. It seemed destiny was showing us a path forward, and things were working out. We were going to the Windy City and the safety of its warm midwestern charm.

The Windy City is alive.

And yet, fate still wasn’t done with me, I just didn’t know it. We flew to Chicago for a long weekend and picked the suburb we were going to live in. We met the Realtor we were going to buy through. We explored and got comfortable. Out of the blue, I got a call for an interview in San Francisco…then a followup interview.

Months earlier on a lark, I’d submitted an application to a university in San Francisco — my favorite city on earth. It was someplace I’d always wanted to live, but believed to be forever out of reach. So I never expected my application would amount to anything or that we could actually make a move across the country to one of the highest cost of living regions in America. It was a pleasant fantasy, an effort to escape my fear and pain.

An offer arrived for that university job in San Francisco. After we’d decided to move to Chicago, after we had made plans, told people, gotten comfortable with the idea, and even bought new winter coats. Now the truly unexpected was in front of me.

This offer seemed good enough that we could make it work. My wife’s company even had an office nearby. There would be no frigid, snowy winters. I’d evolved from being stuck, to a hopeful path to Chicago, to having choices. These were not just the choices of desperation, but between things I truly wanted. We decided to follow our dream. After having only visited San Francisco twice in her life, for a total of 5 days, my wife took a leap and jumped aboard for the ride. We would move to the bay area and follow my golden dream.

Six weeks later with all of our belongings in six suitcases and a couple of moving containers plus our car on a transport truck, we left The South on a one-way flight to SFO. That was three months ago at the beginning of this endlessly sunny California summer. Those five-and-a-half hours in the air shifted my life completely from where I was. Here nobody notices the queer girl couple, we are simply part of the cultural tapestry. We see ourselves reflected in many others. The laws work to protect our rights instead of the opposite. As I find my place in our chosen home, it has started to sink in. I am safe here.

Today I sit in a coffee shop with my laptop able to write for the first time in almost a year. I am finally thawing enough in California’s golden sun to find my voice again, to be present in the world. I am alive again. I never want to lose the freedom I have found here.

Writing Roadblock

Over the last several months I’ve found myself stuck whenever I try to work on a few of the short memoir pieces I’ve started. It’s a repeating pattern. An idea, then great first line hook, a couple of paragraphs which flow out easily onto the page, and then a long slow coast to stuckness, followed by lament. My in-progress folder is now littered with a quartet of these.

Then suddenly in the middle of this writing roadblock, a complete flash piece pours out. I tweak it, get feedback, revise a bit and it’s ready for its next stage. All while the others still languish unfinished. Hoping the energy from completing something (anything!) will energize my efforts, I turn back to one of the languishers. Fizzle.

I think I missed this sign when starting on the road to make sense of traumatic experiences through memoir.

My work in therapy has also been at something of a standstill since the pandemic started. First being disconnected from a safe place ground work to a halt. Then working though every day challenges and finding a path forward for life in this changed world took over my sessions. When bits and pieces of traumatic memories come up from time to time, they are only worked with until they can be packaged and put on a shelf safely for later. Whenever that might be.

Earlier this week I was digging into a memory about a reflections book I’d used a decade ago. I was trying to make sense of what had happened to it, where it had gone. When my memory failed I turned to my journal. Sure enough I found the answer of when I’d used it and with prompting recalled why I’d stopped. Once I’d solved that puzzle I continued on to skim through a bunch of old entries, finding myself coalescing around the summer when memories of my childhood trauma started flooding back to me.

Field of Blue FLowers
So much was fuzzy during that summer of forgotten memories. I could only focus on one at a time, but each and every one got their moment in the sun before fading into the background.

My writing from that time brought back the mad, headlong rush to get down everything I was remembering – before I forgot it all again. In rereading, I found memories I’d forgotten again, and felt the bite of re-remembering horrors I’d not wanted to know. Now though, I can turn the page and move on, the memories contained for the time being in those pages. However the next next (likely disquieting) memory is just a page or two later. As I read through those raw memories of unprocessed trauma I experienced that summer, something tugged at a corner of my mind. I couldn’t quite see it, but I knew it was there just beneath the surface.

A few days later I recounted this experience to my therapist from the safety of the couch in her plant and book lined office. As so often happens in therapy for me, talking about my experiences allows the lines connecting parts of my past to take on sharp relief, becoming suddenly visible. In a moment I saw my writing roadblock in a new way – why some pieces sat unfinished, untouchable, and why others were essentially completed in a single sitting.

Every piece I’d finished was about my experiences since I’d started therapy, since I’d taken control of my life and started working to live in the light of the present. The others? They were all from the shadows of the past, the before times. They were filled with the raw emotions and and unexplained experiences which pulled me to write about my childhood, to find meaning. This pull was also my downfall. I was writing about unprocessed traumatic events which pushed me out of my window of tolerance and straight into the floundering fields of numbness.

Window
Staying in my window of tolerance means working with things one drop at a time.

To write about my childhood experiences, I am going to have to do work in therapy with them. The memories I want to make sense of need to be processed, bit and piece at a time in a safe place. Some can be processed on the page, perhaps in my journal, and eventually as memoir, but much of my work will be done on that couch. I will explore with someone to guide me, to help pull me back, to give perspective. What I am writing about will guide my work processing trauma, and the work in therapy will help me to write. Interweaving the two means having a way finder to help me see the roadblocks, to point the path to through or around so I can make progress in both healing and writing. Because I now see for me, healing and writing are one and the same.

My road ahead is full of twists and turns to work through and around writing roadblocks- there is no map, but I have a guide.