The title isn’t fair. I don’t know anything about mongols (except aren’t a lot of people related to Ghengis Khan… and wasn’t he a mongol?) or lepers (except for that episode of x-files with the leper colony); I am probably using these words in incorrect and insensitive ways. Here is what I mean to say, in duller terms: Christmas makes me feel disgusting, alone, and malformed in new, (but frighteningly familiar) ways every year. Christmas makes me hate myself, and yet, I love the holiday and start daydreaming about reindeer and elves when wal-mart puts their decorations up (midnight, november 1st).
There are so many parts of this season that I love. I can listen to Christmas-themed songs ten times longer without going crazy than anyone else I know. I know every word to ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ . I can sing four different parts of the Hallelujah Chorus (not in any recognizable key, but whatever). I watch the Charlie Brown Christmas Special every season and the part where Linus stops everything and recites from the bible for behold, i bring you tidings of great joy makes me cry every year (even this year when I watched it by myself in three parts on youtube). I want to rub myself in pine-scented everything. I like thinking about peace on earth and goodwill toward men and frankincense and myrrh. I am perpetually dreaming of a white Christmas just like the ones I used to know. I think red and green go great together. I own a pair of socks with santa clauses on them that say ‘I believe’ (part of my collection of christmas themed socks that I wear all year long). I actually baked a buche de noel yesterday.
What’s my point?
I’m jewish. I reek of monotheism. My relationship to the items listed above is tenuous and largely fucked up. I hate that I love these things. I hate that there are not Chanuky equivalents. It is December 26th; there are a lot of things I hate right now.
It is so hard to think about my experience in the context of other non-christian folks, because it is a complete cliche, it is old hat. The jew who loves christmas, the jew with the very complicated relationship to christmas, the jew who is easily stirred into fiery diatribes about the shittiness and/or greatness of this time of year. It is so hard to know that there is this archetype of the self-hating jew. It is not exactly comforting to know that there are so many people that feel exactly the same way that I do about your big bad holiday, and it is hard to sit here and type this and know that if I was a really good writer, I would figure out what makes my feelings unique or additive to the larger conversation of christianty and religion and blah blah blah or at LEAST interesting to read about.
In some ways I think it was a lot easier to be fourteen and certain that my feelings (regarding life and religion, but mostly second base) were special and new and something NO ONE ELSE HAD EVER FELT BEFORE AS I WAS FEELING THEM AT THAT VERY MINUTE. The originality of my thoughts weighed heavily on my tiny, tiny little soul. If only I opened my mouth and spoke of my woes, my listeners would turn to dust, they would be so profoundly moved. This made me sad.
How many autobiographies have I read by famouser folks who write about the days they discovered how much they actually hated parts of themselves? Folks who went to church and ate communion wafers and got saved instead of being some other religion or no religion at all. The easiest parallel to draw is stories of famouser black folks who liked things that white girls liked, dressed like white girls, called each other the n word, et cet er uh. How many times have I heard this story? I can turn my head forty five degrees to the right and look at the top row of books in my bookshelf and see half a dozen books about this kind of relationship to oneself.
The part where the the protagonist slowly (or not slowly) realizes that their whole sense of self is fucked up, that everything they know about themselves and the world is even more fucked up, and that they have no idea how to untangle any of this shit. Self-hatred! I know this story! I am this story! So many people are this story!
I know these things about myself and I have done the triage and the reading and the thinking and the singing and all the other gerunds that go into being strong and proud about who i am. And yet, I wind up here on december 26th every year in the same place, like christmas is my psycho-ex-girlfriend who just rolled in through town with the sole purpose of undermining my whole sense of self and place (not that i have an ex like this; I don’t. I have five exes, all of whom are generally silent and far away–for better or worse– except for one, who is just lovely and thinks my self is great. however, it seems that lots of my friends have crazy exes who occasionally pop up for no other reason than to ruin their shit).
I am so proud to be jewish so much of the time, but it is so hard to sustain these feelings all the time. Today I was at massage therapy (I get free massage therapy now to help my back heal from donating bone marrow) and my massage therapist (his name is colin, he is actually also my neighbor, and he makes me feel very glad about being alternatively sexualized, because if i liked the menz i would be extremely hot and bothered in his presence) and I were doing active stretching. I was laying down on a pad on the floor and he held my left foot in his hands as he stood above me, and he said push against me. And then he began to move my leg in different ways and I was supposed to resist the entire time. Over and over again I would lose track of pushing, I was working so hard on breathing or holding my hips just right or trying to deal with the fact that I am in pain and there is a strange man I just met holding my foot. And he would say keep pushing, keep resisting, and then I would remember “oh yeah” and I would totally give it to him for a good minute, digging my heel into his palms, feeling the stretch go deeper and harder into my scar tissue that we’re working on breaking up, but I would drift away again in all that concentrating, and then I would find him reminding me yet again to push against him. This is what it is like to be proud about being jewish, especially when you have so many other things to concentrate on loving at the same time.
Nobody thinks about Jews during easter. Folks are too busy buying bonnets and eating deviled eggs to care about what the Jews are doing with themselves during the day. It also helps that it is Sunday, and most things are closed anyway, because that’s the day Christians decided to celebrate not doing anything. Christians seem to think Easter is kind of crazy anyway. Nobody wants to know if I have any plans for Easter.
Everyone wants to know what Jews are up to on Christmas. What are you doing? Are you going anywhere? Will you be with your family? Will you be alone? Do you give gifts? When is Chanuka? How do you spell Chanuka? Will you go out for Chinese food and go to the movies? You jews are so funny. So we made a tradition out of obstinately venturing out of our homes and into the cold, suburban night to the only businesses that were open on your holiday. This kind of nonchalant, yet flamboyant defiance is one of the many features of Jewish culture that warms my ever-tepid heart. You aren’t doing anything? I wish you didn’t have to be alone. Do you want to come to church or christmas dinner with my family? See you next year.
All year long I go to Shabbat (okay, sometimes I go to shabbat) and I sing all the prayers and listen to the sermon and I like it. I eat foods with yiddish names that I am proud to make and share with my friends. I find meaning and community and myself in being Jewish, and I like it that way. But I can’t find a way to answer these questions and face this holiday with poise and dignity.
There is the wanting. The coveting of a tree, lights, presents, red and green things. Family. I want to be included in plans, traditions. I want to be at home with my parents and my brother and my sister. There is the learning. Memorizing song after song, all of the stories, all of the different ways we can extrapolate the meanings of your holiday. You don’t know Dominic the Christmas Donkey? Let me play it for you. There is the feeling of something missing, and the defiance of insisting that there should not be. There is the sting of my ‘Happy Chanuka’ to your jolly Merry Christmas and the laughter that follows because you think I am being pc or ironic. There is the shame in thinking that I am perpetually making a big deal out of nothing, that I am punching the air, that nothing is wrong, that I am more than a man/christian hating fag– I hate joy and fun and good cheer and cannot see the forest for the christmas trees. Whatever that means.
Christmas is so full of love, and people appreciating things like their families and their good fortune if they have it, and there is so much potential in this holiday, it is so hard not to love it. It is so difficult to want and not want, to not know if my desires are based in something as silly as another religion’s one holiday or if they are real or true or something as comforting as objective reality. How can I not love this? How can I not want this? Who am I without this?
Sometimes I think about what it is like to be a jew in a place like israel at christmastime. I have no idea what it is like over there; I’ve never been. Do they think about christmas? Do folks walk down the street, looking at the chanukiyot blazing in window after window, and feel like something has been omitted? I cannot even begin to imagine what this is like. This is the essence of religious privilege. Self-loathing, no-fun, over-analyzing, extra-complainy, bitchy over privileged first world middle class white girl needs something to base an identity around needs some kind of struggle in order to feel something, yes, yes, and yes. happy new year.
This is the last chapter in my I-donated-bone-marrow-for-a-stranger saga. If you’re behind the times, here are parts one and two. In brief: I was an anonymous donor for the National Marrow Donor Program. I donated a liter of bone marrow to a stranger(via the NMDP registry). I had surgery on August 11th– four holes were drilled in my hip bones and the bone marrow was removed with a hollow needle by the fine folks at the University of Washington Medical Center. This is the last part in the story of my donation process. When we last left our hero, I had had a post-surgery blood transfusion a few hours following the surgery (after I crashed while attempting to go to the bathroom). I had finally been moved to a private room. One might have been able to argue that I was beginning to feel alive again.
This is, as always, a first draft.
I’m having a really hard time writing this last bit.
Today is exactly four months since the surgery. I wonder if Linda is still alive. I tell people that I don’t think about her, but I do.
The first two parts of this story were written almost immediately afterwards, when all I could do was stare into space, bob my head, and write. I wrote them before healing got old and life got hard and I was homeless and jobless. I didn’t take great notes while all of this was going on and now the details from the two weeks I spent actively healing are fuzzy and mixed up and I’m starting to forget which parts were important and which parts are extraneous.
I had started to write this last bit as a narrative, but it appears as fragments instead because that is all that is left in my head. This is what I haven’t yet forgotten.
*
I have gotten up and out of my gurney (with help from Maria or a nurse) to pee (by myself!) twice now, and with the exception of Maria/the nurse’s forearm that I have used to pull myself up, I have slowly, scarily, painfully stuttered my way over to the toilet alone. I have sat down on the toilet and peed by myself, wiped myself, and walked back to my bed by myself (Maria still has to put me back in the bed).
I say a silent prayer each time I make it to the toilet that I don’t have to poop, because I don’t have the energy for the voluntary muscle contractions that pooping necessitates.
*
The migraines are inhumane. Nobody told me about the migraines. For five days I spend hours and hours in one position or another, trying to not move my head or focus on anything or whimpering to no one in particular because the pain in my head is so, so terrible.
Its the anasthesia. You’re dehydrated. You’re recovering from trauma. You need more sleep. You might be leaking CSF. We have no idea.
Lying absolutely still is the only thing that makes them better. If I stop trying to exist, I feel better. My brain is screaming at me to rehydrate, to sleep more, to stop being in pain. Lying down, sitting up, night, day, inside or not. I spend an entire week wanting to gnaw my own face off or worrying about when the migraine will come back (an even better, more fucked up state to be in). As the week progresses and my thoughts become more lucid and my body less weak, the migraines become more and more frustrating. I cry six times.
*
The painkillers are wearing off and I am in more pain but I am more alive and Maria tells me that the receptionist is cute and I say back “the one with the glasses?”. It feels like I am coming back from the dead.
*
My friend Shann comes to visit me that night in my hospital room. I am sort of functioning and talking. It feels like a party. Shann is the first person I get to tell about what happened to me today. It is thrilling and horrifying.
When I want to drink out of my cup of apple juice, Maria holds it under my chin and puts the straw in my mouth for me. I have too many wires sticking out of my arms to grab anything. Shann laughs. We all laugh. This is ridiculous.
*
I crave foods I know I hate. I order orange sherbert off the hospital food menu.
Maria pretends to be me and calls for hospital food room service, except she orders a chicken sandwich and they know that I’m a vegetarian. She tells the operator that she forgot and then orders tuna.
*
I am in Maria’s bed. I have been at her house for three days now, and I don’t need the percocet for the back pain anymore. I wonder if percocet works on migraines. I take a pill while a friend is visiting me. Twenty minutes later the percocet kicks in and now I’m floating in space– with a migraine. My friend leaves because I can’t make conversation anymore. Percocet does not work for migraines. I drool on myself and stare at Maria’s computer for the next three hours.
*
When they discharge me I am wheeled out by a high school volunteer and Maria runs off to get the car; I am alone. I am beginning to feel used, like the donor folks got what they wanted from me and now they don’t really care what happens to me. This is what I imagine the day after prom feels like for some girls.
*
I am homeless. I have been homeless since August 1st. I knew I would be homeless a month ago; this is not a surprise. Everything I own is in the backseat of my Honda Civic, which is parked in Maria’s driveway. Before the surgery I stayed in friends’ guest rooms and couches. I plan to recover at Maria’s; there is a spare room for me that Maria has set up with a lamp and tea and pillows and blankets. My first night there I take a percocet and an anti-nausea that also causes severe drowsiness and I sleep for seventeen hours.
*
When my surgeon visits me the morning after the surgery he offers to change my dressings. Maria doesn’t have to leave, I tell him, and he is confused, but follows my lead. She watches him remove the gigantic swathes of white tape and bandages covering my backside, and he explains to the both of us what is going on as he cleans my wounds (four) and repackages them for my ride home. There might be oozing for the next couple of days. Don’t worry, unless it gets worse. Or turns green. Or red. The bruising is not so bad, but it will get worse, and it will be there for awhile. Don’t take the bandages off for a day. Be careful in the shower.
*
I am not allowed to take my first shower until another day has passed. I am not allowed to shower alone. I am too weak to stand up unsupervised. Because there is not enough blood in me and the heat of the shower can bring my blood to all my wrong parts, away from the parts that allow me to stand up. The surgeon and the nurses tell me that someone has to stay with me in the bathroom for at least the first shower.
*
I can’t stop moaning. The water is scalding and I am in ecstasy as I stand there on my own two feet and wash off the hospital and the surgery and the bits of flour and sugar in my hair because I worked all night prior to the surgery at the bakery and haven’t showered since. The tiles in Maria’s shower are maroon and orange and the fixtures are made of wood. I feel like I am a street urchin being cleaned off inside the house of a princess. Maria helps me dry off and change into clean pajamas afterwards. We pretend it isn’t weird, but I am no longer as high as I was when I let the nurses wipe me.
*
A week later I can barely go up and down the stairs by myself (but I can do them myself, unsupervised). One stair at a time. One foot and then the next. Pain pain pain. I am stiff like plywood, like a dead body. Maria is getting tired of taking care of me; she needs to go back to work and her life. I need someone to buy me some groceries and do my laundry. We hadn’t anticipated this. I cry on Maria’s back porch. We hug it out. Maria goes to the store and comes home with two bunches of swiss chard and peanut butter and black beans so I can build up my iron. She does my laundry too.
*
I have a panic attack in the middle of the night.
Actually, I have a panic attack that lasts a day and a half, culminating in me losing feeling in all of my limbs. I am terrified.
Why I have a panic attack: I have no idea what I am supposed to be feeling. Am I healing correctly? What is this discharge? How high is my temperature? Why won’t my headache go away? Why is my heart beating so fast? Am I peeing too much or not enough? Where is my body and why isn’t it working and what is happening to me? What is a normal recovering from surgery feeling and what is a complication? How high can my temperature get before things are complicated?
I feel like I am six years old and lost in the Macy’s, only this is inside me, and my mother isn’t anywhere, and it feels like I am dying. This space that I know and love, this space that is my only home is so, so completely fucked up and I have no idea how to deal.
I don’t know that panic attacks can cause one’s limbs to go numb. It starts in my left hand; tingles for hours and hours that start to aggravate the rest of me. I ignore it until it spreads to my arm, and then my right hand and arm, and then to my feet and my legs. I think I am having a stroke. I can’t sleep. I beg Maria to sleep in my bed with me, but I have been at her house for a week now and she just can’t give me any more support. Not tonight.
I fall asleep for a few hours and when I wake up, I can’t move my legs. I panic more. I am dizzy. I am terrified. Each panic related symptom makes me panic more. What is wrong with me? Something is clearly wrong with me. Do you think something is wrong with me? What do you think I should do? My throat is numb. Can I breathe? I don’t remember. Let me check.
I wait until 7 in the morning. It is Saturday or Sunday. The sun rises early. Thank god for August. My body is tingling and numb and I call a cab to take me to Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, where I did all of my bloodwork. I meet with a doctor who runs a bunch of tests and right away can see that I am dehydrated and preliminary tests show that my calcium levels are low. No one else knows what could be wrong with me. Maybe I need another blood transfusion? We need to wait for the tests to come back. I ask them to check my blood pressure and heart rate again. Do they feel right? When the nurse tells me that they’re both normal, I almost want her to check again.
Strange. They put an IV in me and rehydrate me and put calcium in me. I am there all day with IVs in me. The hospital setting eases some of my fear; if I crash, I think, well then at least they’ll have what they need to fix me. This is a safe place, I try to tell myself. I call everyone I know to say hi and let them know that I’m okay but that I’m back in the hospital. There is rowing on tv.
They send me home and tell me that they’ll call me when the tests come back. I call another cab to take me back to Maria’s. I finally speak to my mother, whom I haven’t spoken with in a few days, since I was just out of surgery. What are you eating for dinner tonight? she asks. I realize how alone I am, and then I am crying and crying and crying in the backseat of this cab, on my cell phone. Doubly rude. I tell my mother that I want her to come out here and get a hotel room for me to recover in and she is in New York City with friends for the weekend and she cries because she can’t figure out how to get on a plane before early next week. The cab driver asks me if I have cancer.
My surgeon calls me that night to tell me that the kind of calcium I was low on is ionized calcium, or something like that. This is not the kind of calcium that builds bones, but the kind of calcium you lose when your body is producing a panic response. Prolonged panic response = great loss of ionized calcium = numbness in the hands and feet. I am certifiably out of my mind.
*
I call my mother and tell her not to come and we cry some more. I drive to Shann’s house by myself, even though I am still a little dizzy and I walk slow and I am still mostly exhausted, eight days later. The apple tree at Shann’s house is blooming, and her housemate is having a party. I walk around and talk to people and realize that if I can avoid going crazy, that I really am getting back to normal. I go from zero to sixty in three hours.
I walk to a friend’s house later that week, four blocks, by myself, to an ice cream and tea party in the Central District. I walk slow, like Gary Sinese in the end of Forrest Gump, but I am fine. I tell people it feels like I was kicked in the back a few days ago and that’s all. I grab a homemade ice cream sandwich and start to play cards with a friend and then I realize that everyone is staring at me with a million questions. Everyone wants to know about what happened. Everyone wants to be friends with the girl who cured cancer.
I take another bite of my ice cream and show them my scars.
I have to be at work in exactly five minutes. It is 6:50 am. I will be late. I am also writing this from a University computer whose ‘enter’ key doesn’t work. Whatever. Two nights ago while at a post-Salon of Shame pommes frites binge with a friend, I ran into a woman I had a one night stand with sometime this spring or summer. I forget. Not the point. Friend at I happened to be at Cafe Presse, where the tables are six inches apart, and they literally sat me almost on top of Eleanor, who I literally had to fake it to get away from six months prior. We laughed, she soon left with her ugly man date, and I proceeded to gorge on my fries, not thinking of it until yesterday, when I ran into THREE MORE people I never, ever wanted to see in public. 1. A former student of mine from the job skills training program I worked for last year. A reminder: I am currently a barista on a college campus. I realized she was my student as I was making her a chai latte. Who needs job skills now, bitch, was the general feeling I got from her. 2. The mother of the little boy I nanny ran into me while I was making drinks roughly three hours later. She looked shocked and embarassed. And yet, I was the one in the apron. I guess this is what happens when you are a fancy pants lawyer? 3. None of this really matters, because I took Nicky, the boy I nanny for, out to dinner last night. We went to a pizza place in Wallingford that I like that gives kids lots of things to play with (including pizza dough! Five year old heaven is a restaurant with pizza dough!), but I won’t be going back there because MY THERAPIST WAS OUR WAITRESS. I would be inclined to type ‘apocalyptic fail’ here if I could do so without thinking a kitten somewhere wasn’t having its ears ripped off, but I can’t, so I won’t. It was awk to the ward. I was hot and bothered and not in the good way. No literary devices. No run-ons. No jokes. I have to go to work. WILL THE UNIVERSE PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE?
just a more edited version of a story about me joining the women’s rugby team as an undergrad for the ‘we are oberlin: these are our stories’ section of oberlin’s website.
I came to Oberlin uninterested in sports. I had been the editor of the literary magazine at my high school; I played euphonium in the band. I didn’t discover the Women’s Rugby Club until the fall of my sophomore year (and not because I realize I had great physical gifts to share); I met a junior I badly wanted to impress. She was a member of the team and she casually joked one day that I should come to a practice. I clearly missed the joke, and I joined the team thinking I would show her how tough I was (sophomore year did not involve enough thinking).
I had no idea what I was getting into: when I walked onto the pitch for that first practice I was wearing sneakers I bought the day before, cheap knockoffs from a discount store. Furthermore, earlier that week I ran a mile for the first time ever just to see if I could actually do it (I told myself that if I couldn’t, then I wouldn’t play rugby. I ran seven laps around the track in Phillips and collapsed, with tears of joy, near the water fountain– eleven and a half minutes after I started).
I barely made it through the warm-up run. During the three laps the team took around the pitch, I was sure that everyone was staring at me, huffing and puffing, trying not to die. I spent the entire practice attempting to catch my breath, barely keeping up. On top of that, I quickly discovered that I couldn’t catch, kick, or tackle. I’d had this idea that because it was a sport I had never heard of that maybe I would be good at it. I wasn’t. It was awful.
The last five minutes of that practice were spent on a drill called Know Your Field, a grueling set of sprints. Upon discovering just how many times we were about to sprint back and forth across the pitch, I asked the captain if, it being my first practice and all, I had to run with them. She looked me up and down, raised one eyebrow and said “You don’t have to do anything” as she jogged to the touch line with the rest of the team, leaving me alone on the sidelines. Everyone looked ragged, ready to get off the pitch and go eat dinner. We had been running formations and tackling each other for the past two hours. It was almost sunset. They had homework. They needed to ice. They were tired. And yet, everyone was lined up together. No one complained. Everyone was ready to run, without hesitation.
These were, I realized while I stood apart from them, the strongest and craziest women I had ever met. I had to be one of them. I didn’t know if I had it in me, but I couldn’t leave without trying.
I jogged over; no one looked at me. At the whistle, with everyone else, I ran the sprints. In my already dilapidated tennis shoes I ran so hard I thought my lungs would burst inside my chest. I was so far behind that the captain (after she finished her sprints) jogged out to where I was and ran the last couple of sprints by my side as the entire team stood at the end of the pitch, cheering me on. When I finally finished the last sprint and crawled over the line, she helped me stand up straight and catch my breath, and then she told me that I could come back on Wednesday. She told me I was tough and amazing. “You worked really hard today”, she said, “that was really great”.
I was a Rhino for three years. After years of dreading high school gym class and happily self-identifying as a geek, I threw myself into fitness. I did it for rugby, and for my team. I ran three times a week. I learned how to bench press, how to squat. I practiced footwork: I ran entire laps backwards or in grapevines around the track. It wasn’t like the Rocky movies, though: I was still the slowest Rhino. I was not a gifted athlete, but I knew that, and I accepted it; by the end of my first season I could run the warm-up without wanting to throw up. That was accomplishment enough.
Rather than impressing a lady, rugby became about building strength, stamina, and technical skill. Rugby was an exercise in embracing my own shortcomings and failures. Rugby taught me how to honor and learn from my mistakes. Rugby helped me learn to laugh at myself in ways that were honest and joyful. Rugby taught me how to value myself as I was, as a person who consistently tried her best.
Rugby turned me into the person I always wanted to be, and was desperately afraid I might never become. Rugby gave me back the voice I had lost to adolescence and boyfriends in high school. In one of my first games I found myself breaking through a weak tackle, screaming “it’s MY ball” and throwing a girl off me. I had no idea who I was becoming, but I was loud, strong, and confident; I liked it.
Rugby gave me back a body I never knew existed. I learned my own strength. As a high school junior I did six push-ups during the National Physical Fitness test. That’s right: six. After a year of rugby, I was doing a set of fifty-five push-ups three times a week. For the first time in my life I had muscles. I had energy. I could literally move myself.
Rugby gave me the strength and the mental clarity to take the problems in my life apart, sit quietly with them, and then attack them. I told myself that if I could scrum down, I could do anything. I became someone strong, hardworking, resilient. I became a teammate, and eventually a captain. I knew who I was; I liked it.
I don’t know who I would have become had I never found the women’s rugby club. Sometimes I wonder how could I ever have become myself without this game and these people. Rugby pushed me harder than I had ever been before; I learned how far I could go without (literally) vomiting. Rugby taught me how to keep going, how to work hard with no guarantee of payoff or outside recognition. Rugby taught me how to deliver the hit, get up and run off to the next play. Rugby taught me how to take a hit, get up, and run off to the next play. Rugby showed me who I was at my very best, and then taught me how to accept only that version of myself.
I say in passing sometimes, in polite conversations with new friends or acquaintances, that I used to play rugby. “Oh yeah?”, they say, “Cool. That’s tough”. I smile, and in my head I relive my first scrum or the first time I threw a girl out of bounds and into the sidelines. The time I tackled a woman twice my size and she fell on my face and they put tampons up my nose to stop the bleeding. The memories are shockingly vivid. “Yeah,” I nod, “I am pretty tough”.
I am forever indebted.
