I feel a very unusual sensation — if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.

-Benjamin Disraeli

When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.

-Willie Nelson

According to some of my Facebook friends, November is an unofficial month of gratitude, where each day a participating person is supposed to name the blessings in his or her life.  I’ve been hunting around on the Internet for the origin of this and can’t find it, so if anyone can point me to the source or a link that explains it, please do!

On a related note, last night at the monthly parenting group I attend by Betsy Brown Braun, we talked about the upcoming holiday season and how to find less materialistic ways to give to our families and make the season more meaningful.  Betsy had a number of suggestions, including making one of the kids’ presents a gift certificate to give to a charity of their choice or to Heifer International or World Visions.  Other charities like Mazon or Feeding America or organizations like the local Meals on Wheels are good choices, but those that allow kids to help other kids can foster empathy and make the giving feel more personal.  The point of it all, when it came to our kids and the holidays, was to take the excessive focus off the material goods and sensory comforts that give us pleasure for fleeting moments as we consume them.  Because, Betsy told us, gratitude is enhanced by verbal expressions of thanks, as when she encouraged us to have our kids lead up to Thanksgiving by naming what they appreciate in their own lives.  And gratitude is enhanced by doing things for other people in need.

With that in mind, I’m trying to find my gratitude this year.  Don’t get me wrong.  There’s nothing wrong in my life that a few more hours of sleep each night and getting my 250-page manuscript out of my office won’t solve.  I’ve had an eventful, productive year.  None of my loved ones is deathly ill.  We know where our next meal is coming from, and we can make our mortgage payments.  I’m just tired, overworked, and sick of first- and second-draft writerly limbo.  I’m wrung out from caring too much about the recent presidential election and wish I had more help with my non-writerly responsibilities.  But I can’t help feeling like I’m missing the forest for the trees (I wish there was a non-cliched way to say that).  There have been times in my life, even in the recent years I was in mourning for my father, when I have felt buoyed by hope and gratitude at the holidays — if only the black comedic gratitude of knowing that my far-from-fun natal family has provided me with years of writing material.  So far, this is not one of those kinds of holiday seasons.

Having finished the first draft of my book, “The Rag and Bone Man,” this summer at VCCA was an incredible achievement.  Most of my frustration lies in now not having the unfettered time to finesse it well enough to send out to anyone else to read.  I won’t sport with your intelligence to enumerate the reasons I don’t have time to write.  But two of them are running and screaming with laughter through the house right now, since their school in on a series of “minimum days” for what seems like eternity during November.

So, with one week to go until Thanksgiving (and then the onslaught of Hanukah, Christmas, and New Years, with family visits and school vacations and the never-ending parade of office and school and family celebrations), I am trying to brace myself with a strong dose of authentic gratitude.  It’s always bittersweet because this is also the season, 12 years ago, when my father died.  His death, after decades of living in poverty with schizophrenia, was also what propelled me to write “The Rag and Bone Man.”  This morning before school the kids and I filled out a gift form for Meals on Wheels, and I plan to take Betsy up on some of her suggestions for family charity.  (I’d like to make it more of a family habit throughout the year, not just at the holidays.)

And as for the teeth-gnashing over the second draft of the manuscript?  Having just now written about the frustration, I already feel a little less ungrateful.

Last week, the Associated Press and other news outlets reported that racial attitudes have gotten worse, not better, since the United States elected its first African American president four years ago in 2008.  Those who admitted to having anti-African American feelings rose from 48% in 2008 to 51% in 2012.  If the researchers included implicit racist beliefs, the proportion rose from 49% in 2008 to 56% in 2012.  Anti-Hispanic attitudes surveyed in 2011 were reported at 52% (57% by the implicit racism criteria).  This is disheartening.  My social science-trained spouse believes that this is a suspect conclusion; he suggested that more people surveyed were willing to admit to racist attitudes than the people surveyed during the last presidential election.  I hope he is right.

The survey brought to mind not the small minority of white supremacists in America, or members of what the Southern Poverty Law Center refer to as the Patriot Movement, but what I imagine is the wide middle swath of people who wouldn’t dream of burning a cross on anyone’s front yard, or putting a  group of people in a concentration camp, but nonetheless harbor ideas that diverge significantly from the idea of Ebony and Ivory living together in perfect harmony.  Families like the one I grew up in.

My grandfather, a man whose memory I still revere for the selfless love he showed me as he helped raise me, was born in 1907 and brought up in a Swedish American home in Nebraska.  He moved to Wisconsin in the 1930s.  Most of my memories of him are happy ones — planting trees together on his farm, milling around his modest home while he made dinner at 5 pm on the dot for our family, listening as he hummed along to country songs by singers like Anne Murray.  But along with those are memories of him talking at the television as the NBC news broadcast images of Billy Carter and men with covered heads and dark glasses.

“Damned A-rabs!” he’d shout over the traditional, delicious meat-and-potatoes meal he’d just cooked, saying that whatever Billy Carter was doing, it was un-American — as un-American as whatever the hell “Hanoi” Jane Fonda had been doing in Vietnam a couple of decades earlier.  Just behind my grandpa, on the shelf that held little colored vases my grandma collected, was a certificate from the John Birch Society thanking him for his membership.  (Over the years as I have revisited my childhood dining room in my imagination, I have wanted to excise this – telling myself that I was mixing up “Birch” with the American Tree Farm certificate that stood nearby.  But alas, no; both pieces of paper were there, congratulating my grandpa for his patronage.)

My grandmother was born in 1908 in to a mixed European, mostly German-American Nebraska family.  I remember her as an outspoken, often overbearing woman with an impeccable coif, an ever-present cigarette — a tough-talking yet loving grandma.  When she watched the news over dinner with us, if there was a news story about dysentery in a foreign country, or teenage girls getting married, or one tribal group wiping out another, she would declare over the background sounds of Tom Brokaw and David Brinkley that she “thanked God in heaven that I was born White and American!”  Other times, when describing trips she had taken to big cities or people she had met in her life, she told us that “Black people have a different smell.”

You would think that having biracial grandchildren sitting there listening to this would have made my grandparents self-conscious.  You’d be wrong.  To them, they were simply stating the truth; and Black people were 100% different from Chinese people, who were only somewhat different from White people.  Their love for us, the products of my Caucasian mother’s brief marriage to my Chinese father, was separate from their ideas that their culture was the best.  (Of course, this also has to do with the benevolent racist assumptions of being Asian — my grandparents and many others believed that my brother and I were hard-wired for industriousness, love of the traditional family unit, and math.)

My mother didn’t say anything as outrageous as this when she was raising my brother and me.  But we grew up in an overwhelmingly Caucasian place, and it was hard to avoid the default settings of the implicit racism the overwhelming sea of Whiteness bred in us — where having “a Black friend” was supposed to be shorthand for “there’s no way I could be a racist!”  Etc.  I could tell stories about how she claims that if the perfect man happened into her life and was Black, she claims she would date/marry him, or about how she speaks warmly to the naturalized American citizen from Latin America who babysits my children and yet is adamant that illegal immigration from south of the border is a scourge and a danger to “our way of life.”

But I can’t quite bring myself to go there.  In an election year filled with racial and cultural innuendo (who is “one of us,” who is not), this all cuts too close to the bone for me.

I don’t claim to be fully evolved when it comes to racism.  I think of it as a journey rather than a destination.

I’m posting a link to the recent Tumblr post I wrote for the soon-to-be-released book Dancing at the Shame Prom.  The book is a compilation of personal essays by some well-known writers and is coming out on September 11, 2012.  I am planning to buy it!  (To be clear: I’m not one of the authors of the book.)

The post that I wrote is an excerpt from my manuscript for “The Rag and Bone Man,” the memoir I’m working on.  Thank you for reading.

http://dancingattheshameprom.tumblr.com/post/30531155307/the-three-amigos

The following reminiscence is brought to you by my upcoming anniversary.  I’ve just finished writing a draft of a memoir, including some drama from 1997, and remembering that it was (for me, in the end) a very good year:

The artists’ residency is nearing the end.  With horses and panoramic views outside my writing studio window, I have almost forgotten the fabric of the daily grind in Los Angeles.  Soon enough the sound of traffic, which I will tell myself is soothing white noise, will greet me each day instead of the whinnying of horses and the buzz of cicadas and crickets.  I remember what day it is because I’ve remained a little too connected to the outside world, checking my email and texts frequently (but less so that I do at home, I hope).  With young children and a husband at home, it’s hard to pretend for very long that my life is anything other than elsewhere.  But my 15-year wedding anniversary is coming up later this week, and with a reminder from the news that yesterday (8/31) was the 15th anniversary of Princess Diana’ death, I am being pulled back into the stream of my life 15 years ago in Los Angeles

On the night that Princess Diana later died, my fiancé was on his way out to a bachelor party that his mostly single male friends had organized.  Because we were in our mid-20s and were Los Angeles transplants, the boys were keen on going full-cliché when it came to the bachelor party.  So they rented a limo, with all the accompanying libations, and proceeded on a tour of Hollywood’s finest (and probably some of the worst) “gentlemen’s clubs” and strip joints.  Cell phones were not common in those days, so I had to wait until the next day to hear all of the grubby details from my fiancé.  But apparently (and I believe him), the other “boys” were a lot more interested in the evenings’ proceedings that he was.

My friend Sarah had made the arrangements for my bachelorette party on the same night.  If this were a movie and you could track the two parties’ movements on a map, you might see that we began in the same part of town, Hollywood, but that the paths diverged after dinner.  The boys stayed in Hollywood, where most of what could be called “gentlemen’s clubs” are located.  The girls began in Hollywood, where we had too many margaritas at a Mexican restaurant in Los Feliz and tried to buy Brad Pitt a drink.  But the cocktail waitress shut us down, saying (rightly) that if she sent him a drink from a bunch of gigging girls, he would stop frequenting their establishment.  (This was so long ago that it was actually in the immediate post-Gwyneth, pre-Jennifer period!  He was technically available!)  We soon headed to West Hollywood, where the men who actually enjoy dancing are.

When the news broke that Princess Diana had died, we were in the midst of a thumping gay club in West Hollywood.  Anyone out in LA that night, indeed anywhere with a television, knew that she was in grave condition and not expected to live after her horrible car accident.  The music stopped, and the DJ announced her death.  All of us, the sweaty mass of gay men and the gussied-up girls who surround them, plus my mother – singular in the club in her conservative dress and her shock at the sexually explicit videos on the ubiquitous TVs, paused for a moment of silence.  Then, as if to honor the fallen princess, we all resumed dancing again.  If anything the dancing became more primal and intense to pay tribute to her glamorous memory, the beautiful girl bound by duty in a loveless marriage.

Later that week Mother Teresa would die, and many upstanding people would rightly complain that Diana’s death was overshadowing the loss of an authentically saintly woman.  The mature, right-thinking part of me agreed.  But it was the story of the luckless princess that stayed with me as, one week later, I wore my own tiara and married for love.

I’m at a writers colony in Virginia, all the way across the country from where I live.  I literally had to take planes, trains, and automobiles to get here.  I knew it would be an odyssey, hot and awkward with my giant purse, computer bag, and 50-pound suitcase (exactly 50 pounds, weirdly enough and unplanned, so that I didn’t have to pay extra baggage fees on the plane), schlepping through airports and train stations.  The train portion of the trip was the Amtrak from Union Station in Washington, DC, to Lynchburg, Virginia.

When I arrived at Union Station from Dulles Airport, I smiled at the sight of the grand, sculpted white building.  I’m a fan of Washington, DC.  Traveling there is one of the things that brings out the American patriot in me.  The first time I’d seen Union Station, in fact the first time I ever traveled to a big city without a parent, was more than 25 summers ago, when I was 16.  My brother, age 12, and I traveled by train from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to Washington, DC, so that we could visit our cousins in Manassas, Virginia, and I could tour Georgetown University.  I was semi-obsessed with Georgetown, not for its foreign service school or its sports or any other actual quality the school possessed, but because of the 80′s movie “St. Elmo’s Fire.”  (I freely admit to applying dingbat analytical skills to my college selection process.  I’m a little better at big decisions these days.)

My mom couldn’t come with us, and I’m guessing that the added cost of another Amtrak ticket and the difficulty getting time off from work, plus knowing that I was a fairly mature and trustworthy teenager, allowed her to send my brother and me on the train without an adult.  Being without her allowed me to go into the smoking cabin, buy a pack of long, granny-ish brown cigarettes (some regional brand but not the More’s I’d become attached to) and smoke with the elderly African American ladies with impunity.

My brother and I, inexperienced travelers, packed too much stuff to comfortably carry, and my mom also had the bright idea to send a large paper grocery bag full of green bell peppers with us.  My grandfather’s garden had a bumper crop of peppers that summer, and she wanted us to present the bounty of a Wisconsin summer to my Chinese cousins in Manassas.  We carried the big brown bag with us when we switched trains in Chicago and throughout the path that traced I-80 East and then veered into the South.  My mom had packed us too much food, and as we neared our destination, we resorted to eating contests to try to finish all of the ham sandwiches and bananas before we they were spoiled and mashed beyond recognition.  When we arrived in D.C., we were probably a little rank smelling from the sweaty 24-hour trip.  We hauled our suitcases and the bag of peppers off the train and tumbled into Union Station.  The bag was torn from all of the schlepping and stuffing it into the overhead compartment.  My cousin Lu-Chen met us at the station, and as we hauled our stuff through the bustling station, the paper bag ripped and spilled green bell peppers in all directions.  Embarrassed but also frugal, all three of us ran after the peppers, most of which we found and were salvageable, and my cousin loaded his arms with peppers as steered us to his car outside.

This vignetted played in my mind two days ago as a taxi brought me once more to Union Station.  I hadn’t been there since my Amtrak trip in the late 1980s.  Just in case there were no dinner options, I’d taken the precaution of buying a Chipotle burrito bowl and water at the airport and carried it with me to eat on the train.  As I stepped out of the cab and into traffic, hauling my three big bags and the brown take-out bag.  The bag, wet from the water condensation, dropped onto the ground as taxis whizzed by all around me.  The contents just barely stayed in their foil and cardboard container.  I cradled my salvaged dinner as I scooted out of the taxi stand and marveled at the synchronicity of dropping brown paper packages bursting with food in summer at Union Station.

The Hipstamatic app on my phone really does nothing to soothe my overdeveloped sense of pathos and tragedy.  Neither does that beautiful, damnable song “We Are Young” by the appropriately named band, Fun.

I’m going to a writers colony exactly one month from today, something I waited and worked hard to apply for.  Several years ago, when my older child was two years old, I began an application to this same writers retreat.  In retrospect the timing would not have worked out well because I was just finished nursing her and found out I was pregnant again.  So, had I been accepted, I would have spent part of the summer sweating in Virginia and about to deliver a baby with toddler in her terrible twos at home.  But I chose to withdraw my application and often kicked myself over the years as the book I’ve been writing on and off for nine years stalled and stopped.  I had intermittent freelance paid work as a writer and was grateful for it, but none of it helped me finish my book.  I took writing classes and joined writers groups when I could find the time and good companions and teachers.  Sometimes in the course of the classes and groups I would stumble upon a Big Idea that would help my book.  In the last couple of years I have kept my book alive by performing in writers and storytelling venues like Expressing Motherhood, Spark Off Rose, and the Moth.  But all in all, my writing process for the last near-decade has been the equivalent of Slow Food.  Only I think even Slow Food purists would find my process maddeningly slow, like being hungry for apple pie and then deciding I must first grow an apple tree.

So now I’m finally off to be a writing fellow at VCCA.  A part of me is thrilled and feels like I’m getting away with something!  But another part of me is worried that I won’t produce good work, worried that my home and family will go to hell in a hand basket, and sad that I’m missing a month of my children’s lives.  They are now nine and half and six and a half years old.  My husband is supportive and able, and my mother will be helping him while I’m gone.  This is a Hipstamatic picture I snapped of them at the beach in Los Angeles on Fathers Day.  The moment I saw it, I knew that Hipstamatic is made for artsy saps like me at moments like this.  Like that mournful, danceable party song, “We Are Young,” it taps into the sense of small moments — like kids frolicking in the waves, or youngsters declaring that they would carry a tired friend or lover home from a bar — becoming faded, water-stained memories before you can take your next breath.  That’s me to a T, even before the impending artists fellowship, sucking the marrow out of every little thing of beauty, like a high-functioning mourner suffering from never-ending hypomania whenever I find a Perfect Moment.

This goes back to my overdeveloped sense of pathos and tragedy, and it’s one of the important reasons I have to finish my book and deal with the fact that the best thing to do is to go away and think and write.  My manuscript, “The Rag and Bone Man,” is about the effect my father (and mother) had on my life.  I can’t put it into an easy nutshell (or I would have already sold it).  But it concerns loss and death and disease and dysfunction and disappointment and loving people anyway and trying to find meaning and beauty and repair things and make the best of what you have left.  (Or, to paraphrase my husband when he convinced me to have children in the first place, “Don’t you want to do better than the shit you were given?”)

Yes, but that’s a tall order.

e

Last month I learned how to ski in Canada, at the same place where 12 years earlier I learned to snowboard.  In those days, at 30, I suspected I was too old to learn how to do something like ski or snowboard.  Still, I put on my helmet and hoped no one would guess my age.  I hated how hard it was.  Early on, I likened my hard falls to “cement enemas,” but I was committed to learning.  Snowboarding was a welcome change from my graduate school work: it allowed me to be worked over by a snow-covered mountain rather than an academic committee.

A year later my father died, and snowboarding became a “Fight Club” of one that was more solace to me than all of the kind sentiments offered by my friends and acquaintances.

This is a version of something I wrote for a writing class in 2004.  Enjoy.

Fall is here, and my thoughts turn to strengthening my abs.  While many think of spring as a time to seek the elusive six-pack for swimsuit season, a chill in the air reminds me that I’m about to reacquaint myself with my boots and snowboard, the nonexistent six-pack nowhere to be seen under layers of fleece and waterproof Gore-Tex.

I don’t come from an athletic family.  It’s more than a little sadomasochistic that, with my non-jock history, I’m embarking on snowboarding at this late date.  The “sado” part is that I’ve coerced my husband along for the painful, expensive ride.  His family, more cerebral and even more sedentary than mine, has an unofficial motto: “Why stand when you can sit?  Why sit when you can lie down?”  He has taken up the more dignified sport of skiing, and he’s none too happy with pain and the black toenails that tell him that he’s rented the wrong boots.

Our parents disapprove when we tell them the weekends we’ll be away skiing.  Just as when we adopted our first dog several years ago, they act as though we might not be licensed operators of our own lives.  They rattle off stories of broken limbs, fruitless search teams, decomposed bodies, and amputated feet.  After we tell them we’ve already booked our flights, my mother or his father will say, “Oh well, then.  Have a good time.”

Flying from LAX to Reno/Tahoe should be easy enough.  But ever since I’ve had a baby, the schlep with the snowboard, suitcase, stroller, and toddler supplies, has become an almost prohibitive hassle.  Lugging it all reminds me of the discomforts to come: my back leg cramping with the hop-slide movements forward in the lift line; the packed and overpriced cafeteria selling prefab cocoa and greasy chili; and the labor of hobbling off the slopes, parking the board, and removing layers, just to go to  the bathroom.

Last winter my trials began right off the bat, when I drove in a blizzard through Donner Pass at night in a rented minivan with my laughing baby, our babysitter, and her preteen child.  They gritted their teeth as we skidded along the highway despite my slow speed and the chains on the tires.  I put on a show of bravado to reassure them and myself that we would not die in this stupid manner.  Many hours later, past midnight, we arrived at the rented cabin.  The babysitter and I spent the next two hours digging out the driveway and hauling our bags and the sleeping children into the house.

The hoards of Californians rushing the gondola at 8 am are another challenge.  And then, after traveling up the lift with total strangers, I actually have to ride the mountain.  Writing all of this down, it’s hard to believe that I do this voluntarily, when a part of me has more in common with the spouses and friends who spend the day at the lodge, drinking beer and shooting the breeze with anyone who happens to sit on the next bar stool.

What I actually enjoy about snowboarding takes a few runs to experience: the flow and enforced in-the-moment feeling.  If I allow myself to begin thinking about messy and complicated things, say, my doctoral dissertation, I fall.  I have to use my reptilian brain: eyes on the snow and on the boarders and skiers around me; and my mind on the immediate challenge of whether to go over or around the small mogul a few feet in front of me, whether to take the green run or try that blue one that peels off at the bottom of this hill.

During my second year, just after my father died, snowboarding became my own “Fight Club” of one.  My dad and I had not been close; his severe mental illness had been the unwelcome third parent in my upbringing.  After a week at his funeral in Taiwan, mourning him and the happy relationship we would never have, I returned to school in and the relentless, incongruous sun of January in Los Angeles.

Soon after I went snowboarding, hoping that, for one weekend, external pain and icy solace could displace sorrow.  At the top of each black diamond run I dared, I saw the expanse of frosted, ancient fir trees and the deep, pure lake below, surrounded by mountains.

There’s no place on earth like this, I thought.

I glided down, falling-leaf style, the mark of a beginner.  In my mind, there was no past and no future, only riding down the mountain.

Last week I was lucky enough to tell a story at The Moth ”Marriage” show in Santa Monica.  I’m not someone who moved to Los Angeles to be an actor, although I love my actor and comedian friends and go to as many of their shows as I can.  I don’t really want to be on stage at all, but I don’t want to be afraid of it either — which is why I recently took a great stage class called The Comedian’s Way, taught by the talented team that produces Los Angeles’ Un-Cabaret.  When friends asked if I was an aspiring stand-up comic or actress/actor (depending on how PC they were; maybe we should just agree to call them actrons), I kept having to say no.

What I finally figured out was that it was like being a runner and deciding to take a yoga or strength class to improve my game.  Provided I finish, I will have to read aloud from the book at bookstores and other events.  I just wanted to try something new, ostensibly to help prevent me from “choking” onstage.  In the writers/spoken word stage shows that I’ve participated in so far, Expressing Motherhood and Spark Off Rose, I had step outside my comfort zone to craft a compelling version of true events that happened in my life.  I also had to work at mastering my nerves and LEARN TO PROJECT!  Or at least not mumble and speed up.  People in the audience have reacted with kindness and interest to the parts of the story that I told onstage, and like a treat thrown at a dog to reward training, the praise encouraged me to continue the work.

As a writer working on a book, I am throwing the long pass.  I’m not really shy, but the way that I “choke” onstage is to wax boring — to suck the drama out of the story and flatten it out into the most linear, “normal-sounding” story I can.  It’s one by-product of many years of working on being the opposite of my parents, both hysteric types in their own way (one schizophrenic, the other just a crier).  And, as I discussed with my ex-actor husband, once one has succeeded in drumming the dramatic impulse out, it’s very hard to summon again when you need it.

I love listening to shows like The Moth, This American Life, KCRW’s Unfictional, and any of the new independent producer projects that air on public radio these days.  I also love going to Los Angeles nonfiction/spoken work shows like Tasty Words, Don’t Tell My Mother, and the many others that have sprung up all over Los Angeles in recent years.  While there are plenty of actors and writers telling interesting stories, there are other types of people too.  I am convinced that the impulse to tell a story in front of a room full of strangers is a force for good.  At worst it’s a modern-day prayer meeting of narcissistic truth addicts and seekers.  At best it’s something like learning cursive or how to build a fire from scratch or mastering foreplay, a long-form art that slows us down and humanizes us as we connect with another human being and occasionally feel less alone as a result.

I chose a story to tell for The Moth about the longest two weeks of my life, in the spring 15 years ago, a few months before I was married, when my father dropped in on my boyfriend and me and brought many trash bags full of his belongings into my apartment.  When I was selected out of the pile of names at the show, I was prepared but still very shaky about telling it to a room of what looked to be 200 strangers.

The story began as a tale of a mentally ill anti-Semitic Chinese man, who happened to be my father, coming to live with my Jewish boyfriend and me.  It ended up focusing on the caution of people my age when settling down to marry, waiting to find out all about the would-be spouse, only to find that there’s more “baggage” to discover.

Once I finished, I was relieved that my scores were respectable and that I’d done it.  (In the week leading up to it, my husband kept referring to it as “The Goblet of Fire” – a nerdy but apt Harry Potter reference.  Another friend and mentor referred to it as “popping the cherry,” another apt comparison.)

What I’ve come to realize is that the athletic cross-training raison d’être for learning to tell a story onstage is pretty right-on.  In honing my story for the possibility of being selected at the Moth, I learned to edit in a new way.  I pared down the plot that needed to be told within the time limits, while still trying to throw in enough detail to establish character and introduce stakes.  I didn’t tell a “perfect” story by any means.  But I did it, and I’m a lot less intimidated than I was before I subjected myself to it.

This week I am starting a class and working on a deadline.  So far in 2012 I’ve been meeting all my deadlines, but I don’t want to gloat lest I start missing them!  Instead of a new post, I am re-posting the following entry from June 3, 2011.  Thank you for reading, friends.

A New Yorker article by Rachel Aviv (“God Knows Where I Am”) came out in the last week that has affected me deeply.

It’s an account of a woman who was diagnosed with bipolar and schizoaffective disorder. Part of the nature of her illness was that she didn’t accept the diagnosis. She didn’t take her prescribed medications unless she was in an institution where she was compelled to. She had committed a number of petty crimes and bizarre behaviors that landed her in jail and a mental institution. But she was described as otherwise likable and often lucid.

I would have found the article fascinating (and depressing) even if I didn’t have a personal interest in this subject. It’s a circular situation, a true conundrum, when an illness manifests as a refusal to accept that you are ill. These were the types of questions that kept me from really understanding my college courses in philosophy, hanging just at the edge of my reasoning abilities. But the real reason that this is such a difficult topic is that my father’s story was similar.

My father was out of touch with reality for most of my memory. He only went to a psychiatrist once, forced by a court order during my parents’ divorce. On that brief visit, he received a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. His symptoms included delusions of grandeur, auditory hallucinations, and paranoia. He had these symptoms for the rest of his life and never took medication or (to my knowledge) ever saw a physician.

My father’s story did not play out as tragically as the mentally ill woman from the New Yorker article. He lived a marginal existence in Chicago for over 20 years and then rejoined his family in Taiwan for the last few years of his life. But the fact that he refused treatment made dealing with him a constant exercise in frustration, and in effect, his illness steered our family history during my brother’s and my childhood and young adulthood.

The article brings up difficult legal and ethical questions about how to treat the mentally ill. During my father’s lifetime, I was not willing or able to take drastic measures to curtail his freedom. Because he was able to hold down a series of jobs, he maintained financial independence. He died ten years ago, around the age of 60. And since he’s been gone for a while, I’m able to see the trajectory of his life and try to put it into some kind of narrative framework to understand, past tense. But I have no idea what I would do if he was still a force to be reckoned with in my life.