Ambition

My fairy-tale-princess origin story: the first daughter after three rambunctious boys, my dad rushed out and bought the frilliest dress he could find. A beginning that promised fabulous success and blessings.

I grew up with an ambition to exceed expectations. A burning desire to do the best, be the best, and a deep fear that I couldn’t keep up.

With three older and stronger brothers, I couldn’t keep up. Like Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, the other reindeer wouldn’t let me join in any reindeer games. At most I could play nurse to their soldiers, sitting in the medic tent (beneath a large lilac bush) while they fought with guns and nerves of steel. I threw ‘like a girl’ and could never play in their baseball games.

At school I found something I was good at. More than academics, it was pleasing grownups. I wasn’t the strongest nor well-coordinated, but I was the most attuned to adult expectations in the classroom. I strove, incessantly, to live up to them.

But, I wasn't always the best. I remember boasting with bravado to my junior-high friends that if I couldn’t get an A, I wanted an F. I'd always gotten As, I declared.

But one day I found a cache of old report cards in my dad's desk. My fourth-grade report card had all Bs and Cs. I was horrified. My self-image tarnished, I strove ever harder to pile on the As and bury that shameful past.

Speed Scrabble

 I’ve always enjoyed the board game Scrabble, though sometimes I’ve become impatient at its slow pace and drawn-out finish. Nowadays, Jim and I (and some of our kids when they visit) play ‘Speed Scrabble.’ Like the board game, each player initially receives seven lettered tiles. Instead of creating one large crossword on a board, each player creates an individual crossword in front of them. Every time any player uses all their available tiles, everyone picks another tile until they are gone. Then the first person to complete their crossword using all their tiles wins.

The last few weeks of working on my memoir have been stressful. Initially, I was weaving a tapestry of my personal narrative. Then I read Bill Stride’s memoir of schizophrenia, Voices Inside Me and realized I needed the recollections of people around me to balance my own distorted perceptions. In my manic mind, everything I thought and did was completely rational, until I was injected with a powerful anti-psychotic, slept for a day and a half, and woke up in a sane mind and shattered heart.

I imagined weaving these recollections into my story, intermingled with my memories for a richer, fuller tapestry.

But the two interviews I’m processing this month point in totally new directions. It’s overwhelming. How can I pull apart this tapestry I’ve woven and start fresh?

Then this morning I thought of Speed Scrabble. In that game, it doesn’t matter at all whether you have ever created words with all your tiles in any of the turns. Only the last round matters, finishing a crossword using all of the tiles in front of you.

Sometimes when I play, I create a beautiful, elegant, long word (maybe even with an X, J, or even Q) and build my crossword around its perfection. Then comes a crisis point where I simply can’t fit more tiles onto the existing structure. With great reluctance, I dismantle my work and start fresh. But it’s not like ripping a tapestry apart or knocking a house down. It’s just playing around with the tiles, experimenting with new combination of letters to form a complete crossword structure.

Realizing that this morning helped me over the latest panic. I don’t have to destroy what I’ve made. I just need to play around with the pieces and discover new connections.

Self-care and smarts

 I’m working steadily on my memoir of my experiences with manic depression (bipolar to those of you under age 40. Have I told you how much I hate the term bipolar?)

Swimming in the memories, processing them in new ways, listening to interviews of Jim, my kids and siblings and in-laws, I’m struck with many things.

One is my ‘recovery’ after my third manic episode in 2003. After seven years of faithful, consistent lithium-taking, I stopped, without benefit of medical advice. No, that’s not accurate: after leaving a voice message at the clinic declaring my decision, I received a reply voicemail, telling me, begging me, to take the medication. I blew off the communication with predictable (though not to me) and disastrous results: a psychotic break and a slow and painful return to the land of the sane.

While in the hospital, I listened carefully in the group therapy sessions and took active part, motivated to glean any wisdom the psychiatric profession had to offer. The sunroom where we met had a miniature greenhouse. I asked permission to take cuttings and brought home three: a variety of Saintpauli (African violet) I’d never seen, with small pointed leaves and delicate lavender flowers, a tradescantia zebrina with dusky purple-and-silver striped leaves, and a purple passion plant. (Note the color theme.)

I brought the plants home as a reminder to take care of myself.

Over the years, as the plants got woody, overgrown, and unmanageable, I would pinch off ends with my fingers, place them in a glass of water on the windowsill, wait for roots, and plant the new slips.

Now, 19 years later (the psychotic break was in January 2003), one variety remains: I have three clay pots of purple passion plants.

But when did my striving for self-care supersede my ambition to remain mentally sharp and smart?

My four surviving siblings graciously agreed to be interviewed for my memoir. There were three things they all mentioned as notable: how big an influence for good our brother Michael was on our family culture and on each of us individually, what a big deal my epic cross-country trip was, and how smart I was as a kid.

I was driven to succeed in academics. I desperately wanted to please my research-chemist father. I took Advanced Placement classes in high school and earned a semester’s worth of college credits at Bryn Mawr College, one of the selective Seven Sisters.

But for years I have struggled to remember things I read when I have the bandwidth to read at all. I’ve taken to listening to audiobooks, which helps, but retention is poor. After a few months I don’t remember what I’ve heard.

No one would call me smart now, not at the level, the caliber, of my early, promising years.

I’m not whining (I hope), just trying to get the facts down. Fact: as attested to by each of my surviving siblings, I was the smart one in the family. Fact, I did very well at an academically competitive college. Fact, I’m nowhere near at that level now. When I started taking psychiatric medications, I noticed a dulling, a dimming of my intellect.

When did self-care overtake smart? When smart was no longer an option. I made no conscious decision to give up, but as the years have passed, so has my intellectual sharpness and edge. So it is. 

What will you be when you grow up?

Recently I attended a Relief Society class at church on the story of our lives. The teacher told how her dream as a young woman was to sing on Broadway and drive a pink Cadillac. Now she sings to her two toddlers in a tiny apartment and drives a Toyota.

 

She asked what we had thought we’d be when we grew up. For me, I wanted to be a nun. I explained that they were the rock stars of my childhood in parochial school, at least to me. And they were good role models: smart (they were schoolteachers and knew a lot more than me) and articulate.

I’m still adjusting to being 65. It’s just a number, I say to myself, rather unconvincingly. You’re as young as you feel has no comfort in it: I’m not feeling very young tonight. But I did do my Nerd Fitness workout today. It's okay to feel a little weary at 10 p.m.