Fall With Grace

Stories of life – recovery, addiction, medicine, living, dying, and all the things in between.

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A bleeding heart dressed up in human skin, perseverance, and tears.

  • The Lie (part 2)

    I don’t know that I can convey strongly enough the power of two sentences to affect every aspect of my life, forever. “No one will ever love you if you’re fat. You’ll have to settle for the first man willing to kiss you.” My dad said it to me. I was eleven, about to turn twelve. I don’t think there is a cell in my body that wasn’t immediately engraved with those words. Thirty years later, they still live deep within the darkest parts of me.

    He’d told me in the car. We had a long drive home. I remember it, the tight feeling in my throat, choking on silent tears. Tears always enraged him.  I turned my body away from him, leaning towards the window, watching myself silently cry in the passenger side window mirror, tear after tear running down my double chin.

    We were moving that summer, I’d be starting junior high in a new school. My great aunt bought me a pair of chunky heel boots to wear on my first day. I was very hopeful that my boots would be so cool, no one would notice that I was fat. They noticed.

    I was living a pretty miserable existence. At home, I had a father who often hated me for my weight, and freely told me so.  School was horrible, as junior high usually is. The only happiness in my life I found in food. Looking back, it’s pretty clear that was a first sign of addiction in my behavior. I could eat and change how I feel. As you might imagine, this became a vicious cycle, the more I ate, the more weight I gained, the more bullied and degraded I was, the more I would eat.

    My dad never let me forget my weight. He’d talk about it to others, to my mom, his priest, random people at the coffee shop. He sent me to a nutritionist (alone, at age 12). He bribed me. He punished me. Nothing worked, it only made it worse. Around the time I turned 15 I ended up in foster care.

    My foster mom was a heavy lady, as was most her family. I stopped thinking about my weight when I was there. I ate freely. No one shamed me for my body. I gained more and more weight. I stopped going to school when I couldn’t fit on the bus without turning sideways and pivoting around the seats. I’m not sure what I weighed when I went into foster care, but I know about six months after I left, I weighed more than 350 pounds. The pediatrician office didn’t have a scale higher than that, so I don’t know how much more I weighed, just something above 350.

    That was maybe nine months before my dad died. I overheard him talking to someone towards the end. About me, about my weight, how he worried it would destroy the rest of my life. His concern was real, he wasn’t trying to be mean. He truly believed the worst possible thing I could be was fat. He offered me money to lose weight shortly before he died. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know how.

    Once my dad died, I lost weight rapidly. Unintentionally. I suppose grief kickstarted it. Then I got a summer job working for the city, doing a lot of physical labor. I often walked 2 miles there each day, and walked back about half the time. I moved more that summer than I perhaps had over my entire life. The weight just fell off. I lost about 100 pounds over six months. I made friends. I bought clothes as I slimmed down. It had been years since I could shop at normal stores, most didn’t carry sizes beyond XL. I wanted to lose more and more. I started to buy phentermine supplements to lose weight. I stopped eating many things. If I slipped and ate something bad, I’d make myself throw up. I never became thin really, I was still chubby, maybe that’s why no one noticed.

    I got my first boyfriend around that point. I got a job bartending, where I was essentially hired based on what I looked like. It seemed that the more weight I lost, the more people liked me. Even people I had known for years acted differently towards me. People who loved me seemed to love me more. It seemed like my dad was right, no one loved me when I was fat, no one even liked me. But everyone liked me when I lost weight.

    I spent the next few years eating less and less, but drinking more and more. My food addiction had seamlessly transitioned to full blown alcoholism almost overnight. As I drank more and more, I found that people, especially men people, liked me even more when we were drinking. I didn’t see it at the time, but I’d discovered validation through sex. It felt like proof that my Dad was wrong, that I was worth loving.

    I spent about 3 years drinking. Now when I commit to something, I am all in, and drinking was no different. I drank every day, all day, pretty much from the beginning. I was a bike messenger back then, the culture supported day drinking. I would drink with the guys all day long. The more I drank, the more impressed they were. I went home with one or the other of them often. If they had a girlfriend or wife, it just meant a bigger challenge. My thinking was so fucked up I actually thought that these men cheated on their partners because I was special, so if their partner was attractive, it was basically the biggest compliment possible to me, because it meant they liked me better.

    It sounds obscene now, as I write it. But it’s a pretty good example of exactly what those two sentences did to me. There are two distinct beliefs that formed in my mind that day in the car. First, that in order to be worth loving, I must be thin, and if I wasn’t loved, it was some personal defect, probably my weight, responsible. The other point was more subtle. In the words you’ll have to settle for the first man willing to kiss you, I heard the whole goal of life was to get a man to love me, and that if a man didn’t love me, there was no purpose.

    When I quit drinking, I lost weight, in part just from bloating going down. I was also living at treatment and not allowed to work. I had no money, so I had to walk everywhere. Also, I had no money, and foodstamps don’t buy that much food.  I still had an unhealthy preoccupation with my weight, slipping in and out of criteria for an eating disorder. I never became underweight. I stopped sleeping around for validation, and instead clung to a single man for validation.

    In the almost 20 years since that time, of course I knew my dad was wrong. Of course I knew that I was loved for who I am, not what I look like, that he was taking out his own insecurities on me, etc.  I got an undergrad degree in psychology even. I knew with my entire rational brain that my thinking was disordered and the information I was given by him was wrong. Nonetheless, I couldn’t really believe it. If the scare went up, I panicked. When that relationship ended, I started going to the gym. I started dating for the first time. I chose man after man who didn’t have the capacity to value anything except my body, wondering why my body wasn’t enough to make them love me.  

    Over all those years, I couldn’t see how those words were still hurting me, still directing my behaviors, particularly with food and men. I had done counseling, all the 12 step groups, CBT, nothing helped. At some point I sort of made peace with the fact that on some cellular level, I believe those words to be true, such that they cannot be removed from me. I accepted it.

    Then I got pregnant. Unexpectedly. I had for years wanted a baby, but at thirty-seven, I had given up hope of it, written it off as another thing meant for other people, not me. I was happy, overall. I wanted a baby for years, but I had never really considered what pregnancy meant, since I didn’t think it would happen to me. What it meant was I gained weight. A lot. Quickly. And Early. The only thing that made nausea better in the first trimester was eating. So I ate all the time. And I enjoyed it. I hadn’t eaten liberally since childhood. I gained about 30 pounds in just the first trimester. I was beside myself with terror. I was literally having panic attacks as I moved up in size. With a lot of support, I made it through, seventy pounds heavier, with a beautify baby girl.

    Shortly after we got home, my partner said something about getting to the gym, that he’s sure I’d have no trouble losing weight, or something along those lines. I set the first boundary I have maybe ever set with a man- “You are not to bring up my weight. Ever.” I was right to set the boundary, but he thought I was crazy. Over time the relationship deteriorated and became downright toxic, but I will say this for him- he never again commented on my weight.

    Now I sit three years later. It took over two years to start losing weight. It took leaving that relationship. Developing arthritis in my hip. Being the overweight mom of a moving non stop toddler. I have lost most of my pregnancy weight. It’s different this time. I don’t think about my size, or what I am eating most the time. I don’t think about what men think at all at this point, I’ve proven to myself now is not the time for men.  I’d like to say it’s different because I am smarter. Because I found god. Because I’m more active. All of that may help, but I can actually pinpoint the moment it changed.

    My daughter is in daycare. I know little of child development, but it seems social constructs are a pretty big deal around age two to three. My daughter came home one day and was crying and throwing a fit over her shirt. What about her shirt, who knows. Eventually she said that her stomach was too big in the shirt. At age two. TWO. I don’t know what gave her the awareness of it. It was tight, she was growing non stop. I told her that her belly was perfect. I kissed it. I meant it.

    Later that night, I sat watching her sleep. Thinking about how perfect and amazing she is. Wondering why she is already questioning that. Emotion filled my chest as I sat there. I could hear the little girl inside me crying in that car, so many years ago. I thought about my dad, wondered how he could look at me and see anything other than a perfect little being, as I feel when I look at my daughter. I could feel the pain of my twelve-year-old self, silently asking a car mirror, why me, what is wrong with me? I could finally hear my own cry, I could give voice to that twelve-year old’s silent tears. I sat in the dark that night crying and alternatively comforting myself. Finally telling myself all the words some grown up long ago should have said to me. You’re perfect. I love you. You’re enough.

  • The Lie (part I)

    Something that not many people know about me now is that I was a fat kid. Pictures suggest I started gaining weight around the time I was eight, shortly after my dad got out of prison, kidnapped my brothers and myself, and brought us to a domestic violence shelter, leaving my Mom. As I write that, it becomes pretty apparent that perhaps this contributed to my weight gain, food was the only comforting and familiar part of my life at that time.

    I was in 3rd grade. It was the last day of school in third grade that my dad first commented on my weight. I remember that day because we got McDonalds and orange Hi-C on the last day. I was very worried I’d miss it, because I had a dental appointment that morning. I remember that we were driving to the school, and I was probably rattling on about the happy meal I might miss, as an eight-year-old does. I remember him speaking sharply and suddenly, meanly, “You don’t need that. You’re the only third grader I know that looks like you’re pregnant.”

    I remember my eyes welling with tears, that tightening in my throat as I fought not to make a sound. Crying would only make him madder. I remember looking at my belly, seeing the road pass by under my feet. The truck’s floorboard on the passenger side had rusted out, so you had to be careful not to drop anything down there, and as a kid, it was pretty cool to watch the road, so I didn’t mind. I remember looking at my belly, wondering what he saw that I didn’t see. I didn’t look pregnant to me, did I? He dropped me off just after, and I lined up for the assembly. I remember looking at other little girls, at their bodies and thinking, well if only I had a body like hers, with my face, then I’d be pretty. I always did like my face at least.

    In fourth grade I started getting teased about my weight, at home just as much as school. My dad taught my borther phrases- “Fatty fatty two by four, couldn’t fit through the kitchen door!” and  “Hey hey hey… here comes fat albert.” The more simplistic options- fatty, fat cow, eat the whole house why don’t you. I’d go to school and stand in a corner and cry during every recess. Eventually I started to pretend I liked to stand there by myself, that I was in that corner intentionally, that I didn’t want to be with the other kids, who care’s if they didn’t want to be with me?

    For fifth grade, we’d moved to mid-Wisconsin. I remember liking it there. Making friends for the first time. Learning to love to read. Writing my first research paper. I was still fat, but I didn’t think about it near as much for a little while. But all good things must come to an end, and at the end of 6th grade, we moved back to northern Wisconsin, the border of upper Michigan.

    I will never forget the day it happened. In every man who has ever touched me and left, I hear those words loud and clear, no one will ever love you. We were in the middle of moving, in the summer. I had  very long hair, past my waist. During the moving and the sweating, my hair had developed a gigantic knot. So big that we couldn’t get it out. My dad brought me to the local hair shop and they were able to get it out, though I did lose several inches of hair.

    He had been waiting for me to get done outside in the car. I was feeling good about my haircut, in just a few weeks we’d be starting at a new school. I had picked my first day outfit already, and now my hair looked good. I was just shy of 12 years old, and these things mattered.

    I got in the car, a burgundy 1967 buick riviera. He didn’t start it. He just stayed there. I looked at him. He was staring ahead. His head dropped down. He said to me, “Keva, if you don’t do something about your weight, no man is ever going to love you. You’ll have to settle for the first man willing to touch you.”

    What does one say to that? I certainly believed it. I knew he believed it, it was hard for him to love me because I was fat. The words echoed through the silence in that car until the car roared alive and we began the drive home. I remember looking at myself, watching myself cry in the passenger mirror, the double chin that formed as I looked down to hide my tears. I couldn’t say anything, and those words have impacted nearly everything I have done since.

  • It’s a Wonderful World…

    Ba-humbug. It’s that time of year again, Christmas. It’s a strange holiday. It’s stressful, it deepens loneliness, it brings about conflict among families, but it’s beautiful, it’s fun, and you get stuff. Growing up, Jesus and Church were involved, but not in a way my brain has ever been able to reconcile- how does Santa play into the savior being born? I didn’t get it then and I don’t now.

    That’s not really what comes to mind when I think about Christmas as a kid though. What I remember is one scene, vividly. The stairwell of my house was just off the foyer, with other parts of the house off to the right or directly forward, past the stairs. I remember sitting on those stairs, hanging large ornaments and garland. The ornaments were a peach color and a mint green, both with a pearlescent sheen. I was doing this decorating when my dad’s hospice nurse arrived.

    Sandy would come once a week. This week she sat with my dad a while. I could hear him telling stories in the dining room, where he’d lived with his hospital bed and bedside commode since my birthday,  a few weeks earlier. The last time he had left the house was my birthday, to bring me to a friends, a break from caregiving. I had just turned seventeen. That was the last time I’d left the house too.

    I sat on the stairs eavesdropping. I couldn’t hear much, but the parts I heard fascinated me. They were stories I’d never heard. About growing up. California. Women he’d loved. Things he’d regretted. I didn’t know it then, but it was clear he knew his time was coming. I’ve witnessed that moment dozens of times myself. When the dying find audience in a stranger, passing along the parts of themselves that their loved ones just don’t know. But they want to honor those unknown, forgotten parts as they say goodbye to themselves, detaching from the here.  It’s a beautiful thing. But I didn’t know that then.

    I sat there, knowing that something big was happening, but not understanding what. Hanging my decorations. I helped my dad stand to come see. We didn’t get a tree that year. So I decorated the hall, the stairs. Because by god, something must be decorated. I see now what I couldn’t see then; my young heart was terrified by the big heavy presence of death approaching, but I couldn’t name it. I just knew desperately that I wanted something, anything, to be normal.

    My memories after that are a jumble. I remember asking a friend to go rent us Julia Roberts movies- any and all. My Dad couldn’t get enough of Julia Roberts in his last weeks. I think he hoped her smile could give him back some life. So we watched movie after movie. The last was America’s Sweethearts. My dad fell asleep before the end.

    The next day was his birthday, January nineth. I don’t know if he knew it was his birthday. My mom had come by and cleaned him up, bathed him, changed him. She left my brothers with me when she left. Chad and Cody were 14 and 12 at the time. I remember my dad asking us to play music, something he could dance to. To my disbelief and horror, he got up to dance.

    I’d not seen his emaciated body before. He stayed in bed. I would rub his legs, but they were huge, swollen from the tumors invading his liver and blocking bloodflow. When he stood, I saw his spine, every bend and bump. I saw his thighs and arms, a thinness beyond my understanding. Now I know, there’s a word for it, cachexia. But I didn’t know that then.

    There was his half naked body, rising as if from the dead, and swing dancing! He was talking to himself, or someone we couldn’t see. He kept trying to get me to dance, calling me by some other person’s name. I was terrified. I called the hospice nurse. She suggested I allow them to bring him to the hospital.

    I allowed them to bring him. By the time the ambulance came, he’d collapsed on his bed, too weak to rise again. Naively, I thought this hospital trip would be like all the rest, he’d go, they would give him some medicine and he’d come home. I knew he was dying, but he wanted to die at home. If I had known then what I know now, we would have stayed home.

    But I was seventeen, and I didn’t know. When they loaded him on the stretcher, he looked at me, said the words “pot, money” while raising his hand signifying money. I didn’t know these would be the last words I heard from him. I didn’t know it would be the last time I saw his eyes open. I didn’t know a lot.

    My brothers and I got a ride to the hospital. They put him in a large room and told us we could stay the night. I didn’t want to. I didn’t know. I said I’d come back in the morning with my brothers. I went home and found my dad’s money and weed, as instructed. I smoked more weed that night than I thought possible. I smoked and smoked and smoked trying to stop feeling enough to be able to go to sleep. I slept a few hours and we got a ride to the hospital from a friend of mine. We stopped to get breakfast at burger king. I didn’t know.

    We got to the hospital, my mom and stepdad were waiting. They planned to have my stepdad and brothers go out to start working on cleaning the house. My brothers said bye. My dad wasn’t awake anymore. My mom called one of my dad’s ex wives, held the phone to his head and she said goodbye, one last time. One of the hospice workers was there. She was going to leave, so I took the opportunity to walk out with her. I didn’t know. We got outside and she asked if she could have one of my cigarettes. She’d quit years ago, but needed one today. So we smoked and cried and were silent together.  I. Didn’t. Know.

    I finished my cigarette and went back in. I stopped at the gift shop. I bought a picture frame that had decorative acorns on it. I didn’t know. I got in the elevator. I turned left, past the cafeteria. I heard my Mom, “Where is she, where did she go?” and all at once, I KNEW.

    I turned around and tried to get back in the elevator. My mom and the nurse saw me. They came. They held me back from the elevator. They told me it was over. He died. My dad was dead. The world imploded around me, but somehow still looked the same. I slid to the ground. The nurse held me up. She told me to go in, to say goodbye. She told me he could still hear me.

    I went. Louis Armstrong, It’s a Wonderful World, was playing on the CD player I bought. My dad loved music. His eyes were partially open, fixed. The blue was clouded, muted, the life gone out. His jaw hung open slightly, thrust forward and to the side, as it does. Death’s grin.

    I threw myself over him. I held him. I wept. I cried out for him. I held his hand, and I said to him, I love you more. Over the last month, every day I’d say I love you, he’d say I love you more, and I would look away, embarrassed by this man giving me affection after years of alienation and anger. I said it to him, over and over, tears and snot running down my face and onto his hospital gown. I love you more. I swear I felt him squeeze my hand, just a little, one last time. And then he was gone. And I knew. Somewhere, the song went on, it’s a wonderful world.

  • Reclaiming Emotion: Transforming Trauma into Strength

    I have a very fragmented memory when it comes to my childhood. I remember very specific scenes vividly, but if you asked me what happened before or after, I couldn’t tell you. If you asked me what my home was like, I couldn’t really tell you, I have only glimpses and partial answers. That’s how your brain works, it hides the things that are just too painful to process so that you can survive.

    As I have grown older, more memories have popped up- at times welcomed and at others bitterly uninvited. That’s how trauma works, in bursts, in misunderstood reactions, in unspoken fears so deep you don’t even name them to yourself. Then one day, something happens. It could be a sound, a smell, a person, a sight. You have an inexplicable reaction to something that externally appears to be a rather benign stimulus. Sometimes there is an associated memory, and you conscientiously recall something and link it to the current stimuli. More often, you don’t. At least, that has been my experience.

    I remember clearly the first time a flashback ever happened and it was identifiable as abnormal to me. The first little glimpse I had into understanding myself. I was in early recovery after unraveling into an endless bottle of liquor for years. I don’t remember how far in I was, but it seems like it was probably around three months. The pink cloud that so often comes with significant change was wearing thin, reality was settling about me. My own mind was calming, my heart softening. And that’s when it happened.

    I was living in the treatment building. It was a different setup, where everyone had their own rooms, but not showers or kitchens. You did however get your own toilet and sink, a pretty big deal in the land of drug and alcohol housing. The apartment was a tiny single room occupancy unit, there was a small closet across from the sink, and next to the hanging clothes within the closet sat the toilet.

    For those who may not know, coffee, as much and as often as possible, is the cornerstone of early recovery. As a result, I peed constantly. I had used my bathroom hundreds of times. When I arrived in treatment, I had a messenger bag and the clothes on my back. Over time and through charity, my little closet rack had filled, and by three months in, I had a full rack next to my toilet. I was in there doing my business, and a lightweight scarf had moved with the air conditioner starting up. It brushed my cheek and neck on my right-hand side. Something about that sensation at that moment made me collapse into tears.

    Not just any tears either. The hyperventilating, snot everywhere, soul being ripped in two type of tears, and I had no idea why. I thought I was losing my damn mind. Why on earth did a scarf brushing me cause me to have a complete emotional collapse?

    I talked with my counselor. She suggested it could be trauma related. I completely dismissed this; I didn’t have a flashback. There was nothing happening that reminded me of anything at all. If it had been PTSD, I would have had a sight or sound remind me of something bad that had happened and feel like the event was happening now. That was what I knew a flashback to be. It was clearly not a flashback, it caused no recall of anything, I had no idea why it happened. But I knew it wasn’t PTSD, and at twenty-three years old and three months sober, clearly, I was right.

    That night, alone in my room, I went to the toilet and set. I looked at the scarf and tried to remember something. I tried to brush the scarf against my face in whatever way had triggered my reaction. If it happened once, it should happen again my logical brain demanded. It didn’t. As I sat there thinking, trying to remember something, the most unexpected memory came to me. It was my foster mom. Not any specific memory, just her. There was nothing about the scarf or the sensation that I could tie it to. I thought I had just gotten off track in trying to focus on the scarf and ended up thinking about Janice. I let my mind wander though, thinking of her. It had been years since I had lived with her, about seven.

    I was thinking about that time in my life. Going into foster care. Later, coming out of foster care unexpectedly and heartbreakingly. Suddenly I was thinking of that day. I was required to go to therapy and it was my therapy day. I’m not sure why but Janice couldn’t bring me. Her daughter, Penny was going out with her friends, and they’d be coming to pick her up. The plan was that they would drop me off. It was not much different than any other day really, they’d given me rides before. Little did I know what was coming.

    I walked into the familiar room, expecting to see my counselor, Shawn. I did see Shawn, at his desk like usual. Across from him sat my father. I had last seen my father at my brother’s baseball game about two months prior. When I saw him, he almost immediately said to me, “Jesus, are you getting fatter?” My foster mom did the right thing, she said the visit was over, and we drove away. I was a sobbing puddle in the seat next to her.

    I was getting fatter. I think my weight had climbed to around 340 lbs at that point. I knew it. I hated it. But even more, I knew my father hated it and hated me for it. He’s voiced it loudly since I was eight years old. But he had never said it in front of people. It hurt so much more with an audience.

    So that was the last time I had seen this man now abruptly in front of me. I panicked; I did not know what was going on but I felt trapped. I looked between the two men sitting there and saw that knowing look adults give to each other over the outcries of children who just don’t know better. I was told to sit down. I was informed that my time in foster care was ending, that Janice had packed my things and I would not return there that night.

    My little sixteen-year-old heart was shattered. I had loved Janice. I had trusted in Janice’s love for me. After the day with my dad at the baseball game, she had picked me up and held me. She told me she loved me and I believed her. And I had not believed anyone had ever loved me.

    But I wasn’t in her arms, and she didn’t want to love me anymore. It was more nuanced than that I know, but that is the only thing my young and aching self could take in- another person didn’t love me. I vaguely heard something about an upcoming surgery as being a reason.

    Then they told me that my dad would allow me to return home, that he needed to have someone home in order to enroll in home care with hospice. He had lung cancer. He was trying to get a lung transplant, but the cancer had spread already. So it was terminal. Hospice required someone to be in the home 24/7, so I was offered that option. Or I could go to my mom’s. If I did not choose any of these, I could temporarily go to an emergency foster and then a group home, likely downstate.

    I felt cornered. My biggest priority was to remain near my friends, so I had to choose between mom or dad. For a variety of reasons, I ended up choosing my dad. And that was how I left foster care. At least as I remember it. Trauma is a funny thing, it distorts things, but that is the way I recall it.

    I hadn’t thought about that day in years. Maybe since right after it happened. From that time, my father’s illness progressed, I had officially dropped out of school, and my mind was filled with watching my father die. I don’t know that I ever thought about that day again. But I had carried it with me, clearly. Achingly, painfully buried like a splinter deep in your foot, too far in to work it’s way out, and far to painful to go in address. So you walk on it, until it worsens, until the pain is great enough that it outweighs the fear of action. Or you die. But one way or another, that splinter is coming to surface, it can only remain buried so long.

    Trauma is like that. I had been in holding in so much pain from that day. Pain that I didn’t have capacity or tools or time to process. Once my dad died, then there was new pain. Turns out I couldn’t process that one either, then there was alcohol. Eventually, alcohol became it’s own brand of pain, until I was nothing more than a ball of pain floating deep in a pool of with reserve and tears.  

    I still have no clue why that scarf provoked such a flashback and it would be many years before I believed it was a flashback, but I’ll save that story for another day. There was no scarf in my memory. No one in that memory brushed my face. But the pain that I felt on that scarf touching me was the same pain I felt when that memory flooded upon me.

    I would not have imagined it back then, but those experiences that once traumatized me have also gifted me something. Someone recently asked what makes me so intense. I’ve heard that word before, but I never fully understood what people meant by it. Usually it’s framed as a criticism, one of the same my father used to throw at me. Too emotional. Too much. The world will eat you alive.

    But this time, it wasn’t an insult. It was said as though it were a good thing. And I realized for the first time that someone could see me and like my intensity.

    A few days or weeks later, with that idea still echoing, I went to work. I’m a PA. In a hospital. That day, I had a new patient, someone who was dying. Someone whose family needed support and guidance in that transition.

    I walked into the room and met the patient; I met their loved ones. I pulled up a chair and sat with them, explaining what was happening and what would happen next. There was no awkwardness, no hesitation. There is never an elephant in the room with me. I don’t get nervous talking about pain, loss, or grief. I don’t pretend to have the right words. I am not afraid to sit in uncertainly and silence, because I have lived in them, repeatedly.

    I sat with that family for an hour and grieved with them. I heard their stories. I shared their tears. I guided them through a moment that no one is ever ready for — because I have been there before. I know the pain of illness and of loss. My trauma gave me that. Processing it allowed me to use it.

    I see now that trauma has made my heart bigger. It carved out space for me to fully feel — deeply, freely, and without shame. I know how to feel the feelings. I know how to laugh until I cry. I can cry until I laugh. I fall in love easily. I break easily. And I grow anyway. I’ve learned how to sit with discomfort, both my own and other people, without flinching. People call that intensity. But when you walk around with a heart that’s been made to feel, it’s simply who you are.

    And it’s a gift. One I never could have learned any other way.

  • Sisu

    Sisu is a word I grew up with, deep in the Northwoods of Michigan. I grew up in the Upper Peninsula. Most people don’t know there even is an upper peninsula, it’s that isolated. The town’s heyday was back in the 1920s, when the land was still rich with iron ore and mines needed miners to fill them. Most the miners were immigrants from Finland, first or second generation. Everyone I knew was Finnish.

    Sisu is a Finnish word. The classic definition is this:

    A uniquely Finnish concept, describing extraordinary determination, courage, and resolute perseverance in the face of adversity. It is the ability to sustain an action against the odds, to continue even after strength and hope have been exhausted.

    I remember visiting my mom on weekends. Sitting at her kitchen table, looking at this weird sign, it was a blue board with white blocks placed upon it. The white blocks stood up from the background, and the background itself spelled the word SISU, with the white blocks arranged to surround the letters. If that sounds difficult to picture, it is. I don’t think I would have ever figured out what it said if my mom hadn’t shown me. I asked her what it meant, and she told me it meant family.

    I was probably in my early twenties when I found out the actual definition. It was somewhere in the 2000s, in the early days of social media. I saw a little inspirational quote about it on Facebook. I read and reread the definition. It was defined as a noun. A thing, tangible. Not a family. A part of a person’s character, of who they are. Strength, but beyond that. I was drawn to this word. It illustrated something in me I didn’t have the confidence to name. It would be almost 20 years before I could really see why this word had such a pull for me.

    I knew on some level why. I was Finnish. And I had perseverance. By that point in my life, I’d had more life experience than anyone my age, perhaps more than many people ever have. While that might sound like a flex, it’s not. I hadn’t gone through anything because I was brave, because I was special, or because I was motivated. No, I went through things because it was the life I was given, and I had no other choice. And I suppose, that’s where sisu comes from.

    I had survived neglect, poverty, abuse, instability, abandonment, and trauma as many of us do. I’d survived by turning off, drinking night and day until I couldn’t feel any more, as many of us do. Eventually, my survival skills had become liabilities, and it became painfully clear that alcohol would bring me to death if something didn’t change. I quit, almost against my own will, but I did. I’d gone from homeless to housed. I’d gone from high school dropout to college student. I’d changed, I’d survived myself. I’d survived my childhood. I’d survived the bleak future that had seemed assured since as long as I remember.

    When I graduated college, I was accepted to grad school. A physician assistant program. I felt like a fraud. I was the girl who used to smoke and drink in the girls locker room instead of going to class… at age 13. By 15, I had dropped out. Now I was going to college? To one of the top programs in the country? To learn medicine? I felt like I had run a really successful con, and I was terrified. Terrified I didn’t belong there, that everyone would know, that someone, somewhere had made a mistake.

    It was around that time I remembered sisu. When I officially graduated undergrad, right before starting grad school, my dear friend Bob wanted to give me a gift. Something I would always have. Bob had been like a dad to me over the years. We decided on a tattoo. I wanted something that would mean something to me, as well as remind me of him. I chose sisu. It’s a small script. I had it put on the inside of my left wrist. The script faces me, so that it’s readable from my perspective. I chose that spot to remind me I had already overcome the hardest thing I would ever have to overcome, and I had excelled. I was sisu.

    Looking back now, I think, wow- how cute. I thought that was it, that it would be smooth sailing from there. I’d peaked at the ripe old age of 25, my battles were won. How young I was. I want to pat my own little head and say “Bless your heart.” I wasn’t entirely wrong though. By that time, I had most certainly had two distinct moments that tested me, which allowed me to show up with my sisu.

    The first was my dad. I’ll spare you the details, but it was a complex relationship with a difficult, authoritative man, and I was a willful, inquisitive little girl. That combo doesn’t bode well. Despite our checkered past, when he died shortly after I turned 17, I was broken. He’d raised me since I was 7 or so. I’d run away and gone to foster care at times, but he was home. He’d been sick for years, but cancer was another sick altogether. My feelings were anything but easy. I’d watched him die, as his caretaker in that last year. He’d become kinder as he approached death, and it made it much harder to lose him. My grief was mixed with rage. Rage over how he’d treated me. The ways he’d damaged me. But also that he’d left. That he wasn’t coming back. He may not yell and hit me again, but he’d also not be there to give me a hug and tell me he loved me.

    It broke me. I remember moving to my mom’s. The first three months all I remember was laying in my room and crying. As the snow melted, I started to walk. I’d walk for hours on backroads going nowhere, until I was too tired to think or feel. When I had walked far enough, I would have this overwhelming urge to lay on the ground, and just melt into the earth. I felt certain that I could not tolerate the pain for another moment. The only humane thing would be for the earth to swallow me whole, I could not continue any further. No matter how far I walked, no matter how weak I might be, the earth stubbornly refused to accept my sacrifice. So I kept going. When I was certain I could not breathe another breath, I did. I had to. It was sisu.

    The second was the alcohol. It had helped me “cope” enough that I survived the loss of my dad. And then it took everything from me. I was sick, I’d had a major health problem and nearly died. I missed work. Bike messengers didn’t have paid vacations. I probably would have been okay if I’d stopped drinking then, but I am no quitter. So I kept drinking. I stopped working. So I stopped having a place to live. I did a lot of walking then too. I had to. I’d walk to steal alcohol. I’d walk to sell that to make enough to go to the bar. I’d spend it at the bar so that I could find a place to sleep. It was a pretty miserable existence, but I saw no other way. When I tried not to drink I became very sick. But worse, my feelings would return, and I didn’t have the courage to survive them.

    Eventually, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I would drink, pass out, wake up after about 4 hours with signs of withdrawal already showing. I’d cry and drink until I passed out again. Over and over. That’s it. That was life. I found my way to a detox, and from there to treatment. I only made it about 30 days that time. I still needed to make sure there wasn’t some way to make the alcohol work. There wasn’t. The next trip to detox, I returned defeated. I had no hope of a better life, alcohol had been

    the first thing to bring me joy. Without it, I was prepared to life a miserable and painful existence until I died.

    Of course, that didn’t happen. My sisu showed up for me. It carried me to meeting after meeting. Day after day it walked me away from my bars and the corner store, into the fellowships. Until one day, I saw, life had changed. It wasn’t the abysmal experience I believed it to be. It wasn’t pain free, but it was different pain. Normal pain.

    I saw that I had some agency in my life, that I could chose to deal with the pain I was dealt and make use of it, or I could give myself to it, allow it to swallow me entirely, until it really did kill me. I saw that pain wasn’t my destiny, it was just my past. It was a past that was unfair perhaps, but also it gave me a distinct advantage- sisu. I could, and would, survive anything. I knew it then, though perhaps not so fully.

    I’d love to say from that point on life was great. That trauma and grief didn’t flavor some aspect of almost everything I’ve done. The fact is, some hurts are bigger than others. Some you need to repeat, time after time until you understand. Life will always give you what you need to learn, until you learn it. I’ve lived out the same hurtful dynamics, over and over again, until the pain was great enough. Until I thought it couldn’t go on. That I couldn’t go on. But I did and I do, time and time again. That’s where sisu is built. Those moments, not the bad ones, the everyday pain, but those times where you have tried all the things, you have done all you can, and you can do no more. Then you do. That’s sisu.

    I still feel like a fraud most the time. I worry about belonging, and the fact that I don’t. I’m not like the colleagues I work with. I’m not like the people I grew up with. I’m not like the person I was. I’m not the person people assume I must be. I’m different. I have sisu.