Notes from the burn scar
Maybe I'm just terrible at newsletters. My expectations for myself are always so high with this kind of thing--I imagine that I'll be writing little updates every month, or even every week, and 'build an audience,' whatever that means. Sell more copies of my little book. Monetize it. Whatever.
I would like to be writing more often, but I've been so burned out for the last year and a half that generating new words, fiction or nonfiction, has been a struggle. And in the last six weeks my life has fallen apart.
"People struggle with hard truths because they don't know what's next," my therapist told me. "It's extremely painful to be be available to hard truths."
I'm one of those people who works herself into the ground when she feels like she needs to. It's funny, because I've always self-identified as a lazy person, which I think is the classic dichotomy of the overachiever--you exhaust yourself doing as much as you possibly can, and then lie in bed, too numb to do anything but stare at the wall, berating yourself for not being able to do more. There came a point earlier this year, in that dark decomposition period where winter has worn herself out but spring hasn't woken up yet, when I would sit down at my day job computer and just... stare at the screen. I couldn't write, I couldn't plan, I could barely create a to-do ticket in our issue tracker. I would try to focus on a task, or switch to a different one, hoping that it would be easier, or even possible, for me to complete. But my mind, usually the nimble instrument of all my best and worst designs, was still, the clockwork gears frozen, the ability to process and plan and think gone limp, the way a gazelle goes limp in the jaws of a lion.
After a couple of weeks of this, going through the motions of work with increasing fear and anxiety that something was really wrong with me, I called my doctor. I described the problem to her as knowing that my brain was a mile-long driveway, but I could only drive down a quarter mile of it before my car died. Eventually, a few tests and evaluations later, I was prescribed what is always prescribed for burnout--rest, and time away from the thing that's burned you out. Oh, and a medication to control my blood pressure, which was newly in the "you could have a stroke today" range.
I wish that had been it. Rest, a daily pill (round, pink, charmingly scored), a tale of eventual recovery.
When I was living in Santa Barbara, the Zaca Lake fire consumed the hills behind my apartment building. At the time, it was the fourth largest wildfire in California history. The news coverage of wildfires always emphasizes the most bombastic parts--the walls of flame, the advancing burn line, the satellite maps with overlaid evacuation zones. It's harder to capture the emotional experience of living in proximity to fire; the dread of sunset, when the dark sky behind the hill lights with a sinister orange, the flames licking up over the horizon, the inches of pale ash that rain down on your car overnight so you have to drag the windshield wipers over the dry glass and run the cabin fan on recirculate. No one wore masks back then. We didn't know we should. It's amazing the harm you can expose yourself to thoughtlessly when it's happening for the first time.
When a wildfire moves over the high desert, it leaves behind a shroud of black earth. Charred trees and crisp sagebrush. The air is quiet because the animals burned or ran away. The insects cooked. Birds alter their flight paths to avoid the heated air. You can categorize most plants as "regrowers" or "reseeders." The oak trees come back after a wildfire, if they're old enough--they regrow, spinning up little second selves from much deeper, well-resourced roots. The sagebrush dies, its only chance at resurrection the seemingly infinite seeds spread by other members of its species during their lives. Same with the piñon pines, their pinecones bursting open as the heat cooks them. Everything gets a return. They are fire-adapted.
The other plants come back too. The fire leaves a thick layer of ash, and when the rainy season starts, the soil gets infused with potassium and phosphorus. All the little annuals love that stuff. Flowers bloom. Insects arrive. Biodiversity takes over and suddenly the burn scar is awash with more different species of plants and animals than lived there before the fire. Mesopredators come to eat the buffet of lizards and rodents. Apex predators come to eat the mesopredators. Life abounds.
That's the part that we humans love to skip to, when we write books and tell stories about widespread destruction. Life, we emphasize, finds a way, and throw in a Jeff Goldblum GIF for good measure. But once wildfire has swept through the area where you lived, you're not at that part yet. You return to find everything you cared about turned to ash. All that's left is the burn scar, and its resultant propensity for flash floods and mudslides and thunderstorms. It takes at least a season for some plant to start coming back.
I was driving to Southern California when Rachel called me. She lives in the UK and was calling in the middle of her night, because she felt like it. Her call was love: my good friends know that when I'm going through it, I tend to retreat from the world, to isolate myself. The real ones know to keep calling and eventually I'll pick up.
"I felt like I was underwater," she said, recounting a traumatic experience of her own. "Like I was going through the motions of life. Everyone else acted like the world was normal, but I knew I wasn't supposed to be here. I kept waiting to break the surface, for reality to reassert itself."
That didn't ever happen. She just learned to breathe underwater.
"I keep feeling like I should have done more," I said.
"I get that," she said. "But he had every opportunity. There are people who have to succumb to addiction. Poverty or immigration status or housing insecurity or language barriers--they can make it impossible to get clear enough to get your life stable. Some people can't recover. But he has so many chances. He has so many opportunities. You can't do this for him."
"By chronically centering others," my therapist said "there's a failure to center yourself, and it sets up a reliance on other people to restore you."
Later that week, in my journal, I wrote I can survive this abandonment, even if it feels like a cleaver through my chest.
On the first weekend of Pride, I floated on my back in a 92-degree pool of mineral water. Music played on underwater speakers and when I tipped my ears under the water, I floated in a warm infinity like I was on the back of an enormous sea creature. The sun was blinding where it winked through the palm trees. I felt weightless. Later, I lay down naked in a concrete tub and a woman covered me in warm mud.
"This is mineral water mixed with volcanic ash," she said. The weight laid an even mantle across my chest and stomach, pleasantly creepy, simultaneously like being cradled and being buried alive. I thought of all the tiny bodies suspended in the mud suspending my body, plants and animals and microorganisms from before recorded time. Volcanic ash is a form of graveyard dirt. I imagined myself decaying. I came out filthy, slicked with dark ash.
I showered. Mud came from everywhere. I sat in a white cast iron bathtub in a room with other people in their own bathtubs, simultaneously intimate and isolated. I had nothing to do but feel the twined strands of love and hope anchored in my chest. I set to work uprooting them. Later in my journal I would write Hope is a barbed wire wrapped around the heart.
Freshly out of the bath, I was led to a dry sauna. "Five to seven minutes," the woman said, indicating a timer on the sauna's inside wall. So I sat behind the frosted glass door, the first real privacy I'd had in an hour of being naked and wet around a dozen strangers, and I cried for five to seven minutes. I cried because I wished I'd done more, that I'd been able to offer help in a way he would be able to accept. I wished I'd been able to do it correctly, that I had been enough to get sober for.
Back in March, I got a key tattooed on my right forearm, the teeth aligning with the angle of my hand as I take someone else's, as I open a door. Keys are a sacred symbol to Chiron, the god of healers and permanent wounds. Every opening is a threshold. Wounds are doors. In the last six weeks, I've been pushed to a door I didn't want to open, and now I choose to walk through it.
Anyway, I'm getting divorced.