Resilience

Things come and go in waves, I am a big believer of that.  When I was a young lady my friend Anne gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten.  We were walking down Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, I’m sure I was wearing my birkenstocks.  And I was crying because my 3 year ridiculous relationship was over.  And she said: Beca, you gotta ride the waves. When they’re big, float on top of them.  When they’re small, swim around and try out the water.  Well, more than 10 years later I am still doing that.

I am writing a research paper now on my topic of choice and it’s not surprising that I chose resilience.  Resilience is the ability to bounce back after trauma and tragedy.  And although I can’t tell my professor that riding the waves is my operational definition  of resilience, it is.

Right now I am testing my resilience, or better said, life is.  Life is sending me some great big waves and I am trying to ride them.  I am trying to remember to rest between them and trying to feel the sun on my face when they pass.  I’m not sure how I’m doing and the truth is that not knowing scares me.  I’m scared of the darkness that I’ve come to know inside of myself in the last few years.  I’m scared of finding myself in that again and not finding a way out.  I spent a lot of years pretending that I understood sadness, and I didn’t.  But now I do.  And I wonder if life is about learning to be friends with the things we run away from.  And I’ve run away from sadness for a long time.  I’ve covered it up with red cowboy boots and singing and drinking and carousing and smiling, but mostly by being angry.  But now, it has come to visit and set up shop in my life and is demanding my attention.  And I have no choice anymore, I have to get to know this long-forgotten friend.

I remember when a friend in junior high lost her mom and I was talking to her about that and she said one of her friends had told her: “I really understand how you must feel to lose your mom.  I lost my dog and I was so sad”.  I remember being shocked at how insensitive this was.  But it taught me a good lesson.  When someone is in pain, stop talking about yourself.  Stop comparing.  Stop giving advice.  Stop it.  Stop trying to make it better because it just isn’t.  I remember when my favorite student in LA lost his father.  His dad died drunk on the street corner and no one really knew what happened.  This little guy was a sensitive, sweet, very quiet boy and he came to me afterschool and just looked at me.  We went to my classroom and he just cried and cried and I held his hand.  I didn’t have anything to say.  And I have learned over the last decade or so how to be with people when they are in pain, when they are sad, when they are being broken in half.  I’m not perfect at it, but I try to be present and try my best.  I’ve fallen a lot and there are people that I have failed, but I still try.  And my job now, as a nurse, is to do this.  Be with people when they are sick and frail and scared.

And what’s funny about these current big waves in my life is that I am being asked to lend the same patience and presence to myself and my experience.  I am being asked to hold my own hand and listen to my own words and let my own sadness have a home.  And that feels much harder.  I am hoping that, if the studies are right, the better I get at riding these waves the better life outcomes I will have.  And I’ll hold on to research to get me through the night.  It’s not much, but right now, it’s what I have and what I need.

Humility is not a dirty word

There are some lessons in life that are easy to get: don’t touch a hot stove, look before you cross the street, two rabbit ears tie your shoe.  And there are some lessons that are much trickier.  Humility is one of them.  I have been thinking about humility lately for a lot of reasons.  Mostly because it’s just come up a lot. I once heard someone tell this story about this guy he hated who kept saying “I’m just so humble, I’m really really humble”.  I think there’s probably some universal rule that saying you’re humble means, unequivocally, that you’re not.

So let’s make this clear: I am not humble.  There’s nothing humble about me.  I wear red cowboy boots, I talk too much, I was born with one of the loudest voices known to man,  I am a consummate know-it-all.  In short, I’m a big, messy human being.  That being said, I have learned this year some of the nuances of humility and I am humbled by my own humanity.

Humility is quickly becoming my new best friend, my best lesson, my best teacher.  And it is not something I once thought of highly.  I thought of humility like a prissy, scared 10th grade girl who wouldn’t eat in the lunch room.  It was weakness. And being from the Northeast, I hate weakness. Humility was admitting you were wrong, and I am almost never wrong.  Humility was, in short, way too messy for a neat and tough chica like myself.  Well not anymore.  Now it is like the older aunt I never had who loves me and sees me in all my ugliness and loves me more for that than what I do well.  It is the new voice in my head that says: be quiet and listen better.  It is the new way I walk around thinking: you are not the best or the worst, you are just you, a simple human being.

I have learned to love humility because I have been humbled.  I am humbled by how hard it is to take care of myself, how deep the hurt I have felt has cut me, how easily I can laugh now, how much I have been loved by the people in my life, how kindly I have been accepted and treated by those I have harmed, how openly this new profession has received me.  I am humbled at the gifts that come into my life without reason.  And I am humbled by the fact that at the end of the day, I am never alone because I have a power much, much greater than myself holding me softly in its hands.  I am humbled.  I am not humble.  I doubt I ever will be.  But I am grateful to know now that I can turn myself over to this simple act of surrender.

Ohhhh….oprah

I have an interesting relationship with the great mother Oprah.  I hate her.  I love her.  I reject her.  I revile her.  I worship her.  In other words,  a pretty typical mother-daughter relationship.  And aren’t all Americans Oprah’s little children? haha! If that disgusted you, you have some SERIOUS mommy issues.  Well tonight, Oprah told me what I should do with my life and it came in the form of a magazine quiz.

Magazine quizzes are so great I can barely even talk about them.  They are so full of promise.  Yes! This quiz will tell me what to do! And they are usually so dumb they put FB quizzes to shame, but this one was actually interesting.  So the basics are this: you take this quiz, rate the statements and then add them up.  There are seven different “styles” and then you find out what you were MEANT TO DO! I mean this is a hellaciously serious quiz.  This is not a quiz that tells you what “dating style” you have, this is a quiz that tells you your fucking destiny! Screw meditation, India, therapy, 12-step groups and an entire section of border’s books: all you need is this quiz and you will know your true destiny.

And yes, it was that good.  So go take it.  You know you are dying to.  It’s okay.  Here’s how you do it without letting anyone know.  Go to a store, hopefully not your local deli, somewhere in a different neighborhood.  Find the Oprah magazine and take the quiz on a separate piece of paper that you can casually drop in a garbage corner.  And then shazaam! You will know your destiny.

So what is my destiny? Well, wouldn’t you like to know! I was very surprised and a little disgusted to be honest.  And yes it was that bad.  I have spent my life in school learning, then I became a teacher and loved the bells that rang and told me what to do, now I am a nurse and just want to follow protocols.   And the truth is that now I don’t really want to work hard at all.  I really just want to lie around on my bed in my sunny bedroom and think about how going to the gym and the post office is enough for one day’s long work.  I justify this to hard working people by saying nonchalantly: well, I’ve been working since I was 14! I’m tired! Well I used to work SO hard, so many hours! This little fight of who works the hardest is really just the New England way of making justified excuses for being relatively unproductive and unhappy.  And now since I live in SF I don’t have to do that and I can embrace my inner sloth and lie around my room all day and feel really happy.  People ask me about my “future” and I stare at them blankly.  Not so blankly that they think I am a fascistly lazy hipster, but so that they think I might not speak English.

So what is my destiny? Oprah told me from my scores that this is the only thing I am “meant to do”.  And it makes me sick because I do not see myself this way at all.  I am meant to “strive to be creative”.  Creative? Creative? What The Hell Oprah? Couldn’t you have given me something a little better and in line with the life I already live? Jesus.  Now I have to drop out of Nursing school and go study art? Oh man.  Or maybe I can turn this into a search for the most creative way to be lazy.  Ya, I think that will work.  And maybe I’ll think about how to do that tomorrow.  Or maybe not. I think it’s going to be sunny and my room will miss me if I do too much.

The summer ends

I have always liked transitions and anniversaries.  And many of the biggest ones happen in September.  September has always been a time to say goodbye and hello to things.  But it has been decades since I had a summer like this one.  This was a summer of childhood.  Not because there was nothing to do and nowhere to go, but because there was no actual reason for doing much of anything.  Since I was young, I have worked somewhere in the summer.  Summer was a time to be productive, to make money and maybe to go to the beach. But,  I never liked going to the beach too much anyway since you had to wear a bathing suit.  So long ago I decided summer was a time for productivity and long shirts.  I have, luckily, gotten over both of these beliefs.

This summer began on the East Coast.  It was a trip that involved a lot of rain and endings.  It was good to close chapters and that happened in the best and most complete way possible.  I made amends to people I had hurt this year.  Probably not totally, but it was a beginning.  I saw old family and a new niece.  I said goodbye to the East Coast with great relief.  And my summer began.

To be honest, I didn’t do much this summer.  It was easy and simple.  I worked on an annoying project that pushed me to the edge of Acrobat pro insanity, but showed me that my old life and profession is done.  I hung out in the neighborhood a lot.  And I slept deep and dreamless, sweet sleep every night.  I read great books.  I woke up when I wanted.  I exercised and ran stairs a lot.  I made lots of plans with friends.  I didn’t stay up too late.  I studied for my nursing exam and passed it.  I moved.  I swam at nude beaches.  And I swayed in time.  Literally, swayed in the sweetness of free time.

I remember being young, very young, and looking at the summer as a never ending time that held endless openings and no plans.  And then, as I grew up, no plans became lots of plans and plans and plans.  This year taught me a lot of things, and one thing it taught me was to never respect plans or pretend to make them.  This summer I got a chance to never make big plans.  I got the chance to do and go and be anything at anytime I wanted.  And this wasn’t necessarily because I didn’t have plans or didn’t do anything, it was more a feeling of total and complete freedom and quiet.

How lucky was I? I recognize it.  And now as September ends and October rolls into the year, I know my freedom is starting to shift.  I am back in school, I will be looking for a job.  The schedules are starting to fill up.  But I am so grateful to know again what it feels like to be free from plans and drama.  I am so grateful to be okay and to be held in the hands of such a sweet universe.

Life is good

This weekend I had the good fortune of moving, again.  And I feel really, infinitely grateful to the good universe for what it has gifted me and how I am taken care of.  My friend moved out of her bedroom in a house of 3 other women and I moved in.  I have a scholarship that will pay my rent and a house that is two blocks from school.  It is right next to the Golden Gate park, 5 minutes from yoga, two blocks from the gym, library, and school.  I have spent the last year hiking my big hill and living quietly alone and now I will be thrown into communal living.  And I am excited.  For two reasons: 1) It feels very non-commital. 2) I am finally living in SF.

As a sagitarrius, I really do not like commitment.  I have spent a lot of time perfecting the art of “seeming” committed to things without really committing.  I love my freedom more than my new red cowboy boots and it’s definitely got me into some trouble.  But living in this new way feels amazing.  This house is in constant motion with four active people in and out all day.  There is a chore wheel.  There are rules.  And there are utensils and dishes that are not mine.  There is all this stuff in this house that is mine to use, but isn’t mine to keep. And for some reason this is really soothing.  As I packed up my house I looked at my two big suitcases and thought: how the hell did I get two suitcases of clothes.  Who needs all this? And then I remembered the 30 boxes of stuff in my grandma’s attic full of stuff that I don’t need either.  I remember traveling for a few months and the best part was living with only one backpack full of things.  And this house now is like my bigger backpack.  I have my room.  And that’s it.  But I have everything I need.  I don’t know how it gets better than that.

I also feel that I have finally landed in this crazy city.  I spent the last year losing my mind and breaking my heart in half just to see if I could fit it back together.  And that was, inevitably, a very isolating and lonely experience.  But now I am here and out.  I live next to “circus school” and am going  to sign up for the trampoline and conditioning classes with a screaming russian circus artist.  I am going to take Afro-Peruvian dance classes and guitar lessons.  In short, I am going to figure out what I like to do.  I am going to find some joy and try to cultivate it in the same way I have so expertly cultivated control and misery in the past.  I think it’s time for something different.

And to welcome me in my new home, I was surrounded by love.  Oakland crew rolled through, barrio crew rolled through.  And it was so good and sweet to sit around my new big kitchen table (which isn’t mine, but I can use it!) and laugh and talk.  It was a good welcome.  A sweet beautiful welcome.

So..life is good.  And for tonight I am thankful and happy.

A foggy night

Tonight, after the first sun in more than a week, the dense summer fog of the bay blew over my house.  And also my heart.  I’ve taken to recognizing this shift inside of me as something transient.  It is one day, but it is quite a day.  It has taken the shape of destruction and deep sadness in the past.  It has caused great rips inside of my heart.  And it is only recently that those cuts are starting to close.  And tonight I am hoping that this feeling, this pull on the scars I carry inside, is nothing more than a part of healing.  Sometimes I worry that I have had my heart broken too much.  That things have hurt too much.  And sometimes I think there might not be an end and that I should close what I have left of feelings off of the world.  And then I realize how small-minded and childish that response is.  There are disappointments and joys everyday, enough to do all of us in in a minute.  And I wonder if growing up means becoming present.  I have learned and learn everyday that looking to the future or some plan for support and comfort is nothing more than an invitation to pain and disappointment.  The only real joy I have ever found is living in the very present moment.  And I never understood before that this is the only option, the only way for me to live without shutting down.

I was thinking last night about how there is great luxury in believing in love.  It is a luxury that we don’t understand until it’s gone.  It is like hurting your left foot.  You are limping and in pain and then inevitably you think: oh my god, I never knew how much I used my left foot, how important it is.  And belief in love is like that.  It is a comforting, soft, lovely luxury.  And I never knew how lucky I was to have it until it was gone.  And although I’m not sure what to do with that, I hope that as things move forward in my life and shift, I will find a new way to appreciate love and trust in my life.  And maybe it will just be with myself and a few excellent companeros y hermanas.  I would be lucky to have even that.

So I read this book “Shantaram” over and over again and come back to this quote.  I leave it to you on this foggy night:

“For this is what we do.  Put one foot forward and then the other.  Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more.  Think.  Act. Feel.  Add out little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world.  Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night.  Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day.  With love: the passionate search for a truth other than our own.  With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved.  For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on.  God help us.  God forgive us.  We live on.”

Love is everything

It’s been quite some time since I wrote.  In brief, everything’s changed.  Everything is good.  Tonight I decided to share something that I’ve been thinking about a lot: love.

Honestly, I think this whole year has been an experiment in how much I could commit to love.  Good, real love.  And part of that is finding out what that looks and feels like.  And that only comes from experience.  I have had  a lot of wonderful teachers this year: relationships, mistakes, patients, friends.  Lots of opportunities for me to decide whether love really is everything or not.  And I know now, more than ever, that it is.  I once heard someone say, “I pray because I believe in love”.  And I think that is so true.  Prayer is nothing more than a great love letter to God, for what we want or need or hope for or worry about.  And it is with love that God always answers.  Even if that love is dressed up as a big ass-kicking.

This year I have had my ass kicked.  I have been dragged to some places I really didn’t want to go.  I have willingly jumped head-first into a lot of abysses.  I have found my way out of darkness only to turn around and head back in without my flashlight.  And through all of this, through all of these moments, there has been love at the center.

Lately, in the last few weeks since coming home to SF, I have had the opportunity to settle.  And it feels like settling.  I am home.  I am calm.  I can breath again.  And it feels like a blessing.  But calm always creates space for reflection and I have been reflecting.  I have been thinking about my commitment to joy and love.  And this year has taught me that this commitment is never about signing some long term contract with the universe.  It is in the small, minute minutes of the day.  For me love has come in ordering soup and joking with the man behind the counter.  It has been in talking to Sam, the old Egyptian market man who hugs me every time I see him and tells me that he will take me to see the pyramids.  It has come in the moments when I stop on the street to feel the sun on my face.  Love is at the center of my napping in the park.  In the hug my yoga teacher gave me after he kicked my ass on the mat.  And what is great about our human experience is that we can choose to see our dark experiences in a certain light.  That is the gift of perspective.  And I see that my moments of darkness this year were also filled with love.  When I walked around the streets of my neighborhood fighting and smoking, love was at the center because it was propelling me to find myself and know myself more deeply.  When I couldn’t stop crying for 2 months, that was also love trying to move things out of me so that it had more room in my life.

Of course, theoretical love is always easier to think about than the love you have to find in close relationships.  But I’m working on that.  And I think I am learning more and more everyday about that.  But this kind of love only comes from life lessons, and I hope I have a lot more life ahead of me to figure that out.

An ode to no radios

This weekend was memorial day and faced with no barbeques and no plans and worse, no sun, I wasn’t sure what it would come to.  It was weird, but there were some beautiful moments.  Here is a story of one of them.

Miss Meadow is my partner in crime and adventure and this weekend we decided that we would have an adventure.  And she is a perfect partner.  We had no idea what we were going to do, or where we were going to go, but we had a car and snacks and got to cruising.  Meadow’s fancy car was a standard and she let me drive and it had a sweet sound system, only it didn’t have a radio that worked.  We had no speakers, no music, and we made a great day of it.

We took off across the Golden Gate and looked at the gray sky begin to disappear in the mountains of Marin.  We drove through the country and went to find clam chowder in Bodega Bay.  We talked and talked and talked and caught up as only the two of us can do.  We arrived at the clam chowder and decided to eat in the restaurant instead of the shack next door.  Not a good idea.  The clam chowder was weird.  The restaurant was a 1970’s throwback and all the waiters had on hawaiian shirts which made no sense.  We both got kind of sick from the food and felt weird.  We made our way back through the country and stopped to get some tea.  There was a rock band playing on a flatbread truck and three weird ladies dancing on the side of the road.  We went to the cafe and bought tea from some Salvadorenos who were blasting “Oye Mi Canto” reggaeton steeze.

By the 7th hour of this trip even Meadow and I didn’t have anything left to say.  We started singing.  First silly songs from childhood, then 80’s songs, then anything we could think of.  We screamed the songs, we sang them badly and loudly and we laughed our asses off all the way home.  Then we ran out of songs and played a game that a 3 year old taught Meadow: you be _____ and I’ll be _____.  So we started: You be a narcissist, I’ll be depressed.  You be Australian, I’ll be from New York.  And we laughed at the outcome of our strange conversations.

By then we’d made our way back to Oakland and to a dinner at her friend’s house.  Then we had a little sleepover and just chilled.  It was a sweet sweet time. And I think: how many people in the world are there that you can talk and sing with no radio in one small car for 9 hours straight? Now that is a true friend.

W.T.F

Okay, before you read this know that this post will be graphic and terrifying.  Don’t read it if you have a history of fainting in junior high health class.

Yesterday I had officially the most harrowing experience of nursing school.  Here is the story:

I am in Labor and Delivery this quarter and working at a big hospital in San Francisco.  LND is supposed to be a great experience because it is the one rotation where patients aren’t sick, they are pregnant. I was looking forward to seeing some births, since I’ve never seen one in my life.  I thought it would be a beautiful way to end my nursing school experience.  I was so wrong.

Since I got on the floor, all I have seen are sick moms and sick babies.  There is a mom on our floor who is carrying twins, has been on bed rest for a month and now has to deal with one dead child and another one without a brain or bladder.  And both babies are still inside of her.  I’ve seem mom’s dealing with awful things and I don’t know how our species is still around.

Yesterday I took care of a mom who was post-date and was induced.  She was hoping for a natural birth, but as the day progressed, it was obvious that she needed a c-section.  That’s okay.  C-sections are normal and I’ve seen them before.  They tend to be a little barbaric, but everything usually goes well.  Not for this mom.

She went into the OR and since I’d taken care of her all day, so did I.  I held her hand as they put her anathesia in and brought her husband in.  All was going fine.  I was helping out with simple things because there weren’t a lot of nurses available to be in the procedure.  They started cutting her open and it took a really long time.  They were having a hard time finding her uterus.  The residents stuck their hand up her open abdominal cavity looking for the head of the baby and the uterus.  Finally they cut open her uterus and pulled out the head and the baby was still in its dreamlike uterine coma.  And then they couldn’t pull the rest of the baby out.  The lowered the table and restled with the rest of the baby.  And this isn’t good.  They finally had to cut her open further and they pulled it out.  The little baby was fine and started screaming and was healthy.  But the mom wasn’t.  The baby got whisked out and they started working on the mom.  Her bleeding wasn’t stopping and her uterus wasn’t going down.  They gave her more drugs for pain and she started throwing up.  There I was, watching as her stomach spasmed with nausea, the resident was just holding her uterus in her hands on her abdomen and she was bleeding all over the place.  I wanted to help because there was so much to do so I took the duty of picking up and counting the bloody rags they use during the procedure.  They throw them in a bucket and then you have to put them in little individual pockets so that you can easily keep track of and count them.  This is because in the past, these rags have been left inside of patients.  This job consists of picking up the rags and putting them in the pocket.  You get covered in blood.  At one point, a very bloody rag was thrown in and it was saturated with her blood.  I looked at the scrub nurse who is in charge of maintaining the sterile field and said: Umm, what do I do with this? And she said: wring it out.  WRING IN OUT? So I did, and I felt her warm blood fall all over my hands.  It was something I will never ever forget.  Ever.

Her bleeding wouldn’t stop, so they decided to insert this balloon into her uterus to inflate and stop the bleeding.  The resident took the package and started READING THE DIRECTIONS for how to use this contraption.  WHAT? Yes, reading the directions.  So things progress and the only other nurse is underneath the table getting ready to inflate the balloon with sterile water.  My job is to fill up the syringe and hand it to her and maintain the sterile field.  Since I am the only person outside of the sterile field, the resident looks at me and says: Hey can you open the directions for me and find which tube needs to be filled?  So I go get the directions and open them.  The resident comes over my shoulder and says: There should be a picture? Where is the picture? I start flipping through the directions and all there is are german, dutch, spanish, french, japanese, korean, and russian directions. No pictures.  So I open up to the English and read the directions to her and find out which tube should be filled.  So we fill the balloon and I go back to mopping up the blood on the floor and counting rags.  They finally got the bleed under control and closed her up.  They gave her a ton of blood and then sent her to the ICU to be monitored.

At one point, the mom looked at me and her dula and said: Am I going to be okay? How the hell do I answer that? I just stood there and prayed and said: be strong mamita.  hold on for your baby.  hold on.

I left the hospital with drops of her blood still on me and on my shoes.  I called my mom and cried.  Then Lauren and Raluca were awesome and we went out to eat and they let me freak out.  We ate Thai food and had this crazy psychic, arthritic waitress who told me that I worked too much and that I was always doing something with my hands and I thought too much and I was too sensitive.

What a crazy day.  Really homies, WTF?

A world without music

Today I did the unthinkable.  I left my ipod somewhere in the nursing school. It is safe and sound, but I have been left without music.  I walked across the park today with no music.  I smoked outside with no music.  And I realized how much I have not been hearing.  Today, I heard the soft, foggy rain hit the leaves in the park and heard the wind in the trees.  And oddly, I feel calmer.  I feel strangely calm without the music.

This is not to say things will stay this way.  But I remember coming home from traveling and knowing not to squander battery power.  You couldn’t just walk somewhere and listen to music.  You needed your battery for the 13 hour bus ride to drown out the snoring locos in the back seat. So I learned to walk and sit and breath without constant distraction.  And maybe this is why I left my ipod at school.  I needed to be reminded that there are infinite songs inside of me that I need silence to hear.  And maybe it’s a reminder that there have been too many distractions for me for too long.  It’s time to center down and quiet down and calm down and just be.

But I miss the beats.  I won’t exist for too long this way.