Because I would analyze the worm out of the wormwood, and because I
really do see this as Getting In The Way of My Life, I'm ready to do
some hard thinking-through. See if any of this sounds familiar to
you--and if so, are there any ways I can outwit myself?
which means....
which means....
oooops. Out of the running: that resonates. Clangs, in fact, and
starts me thinking about what it was that I used to like about going
out:
That's pretty much gone for me now. I'm just not really interested,
and I don't have the goods to venture on the stage as a leading lady
any more. So what I'm left with when I go out is--what? And is this a
good or a bad thing?
This is what makes mental illness such a will ‘o' the wisp within the medical profession. And what makes it so frightening to those of us who view it from near or from afar. Michael Greenberg, a widely published writer who lives in New York, has had the near and up front view. When his daughter, Sally, was fifteen, she, seemingly without warning, suffered a psychotic break, or as Greenberg puts it, she was "struck mad." The official diagnosis ultimately was bipolar disorder, manic depression as it used to be known. Hurry Down Sunshine is Greenberg's retelling of that break. It is unique in that it focuses not on Sally so much as on her family, on what mental illness looks like from the other side of the dinner table.
That this memoir is well-written goes without saying; Greenberg's publications include the Times Literary Supplement, The Village Voice, and The Threepenny Review. What fascinated me about it, however, were not the stylistic qualities nor the psychiatric specifics. Rather, this memoir brought front and center the ways and means in which we all will go to avoid reality. Even when mania is blaring in our faces, there is a human propensity for explaining it away.
How we do that is, it seems to me, a function of our cultural bias. One of the courses I had to take when I was doing my Master's in Psychology was called "Human Diversity." There I learned that our ideas of what psychological health and illness are vary from community to community. This is fascinating when we're talking about the ways in which non-Western cultures name mental illness. In Southeast Asia, for example, there is a condition called koro, in which the sufferer believes his penis is shrinking and disappearing into his stomach. In Mexico, they have susto, a soul loss disorder caused by a sudden shock. So crucial is understanding the cultural vagaries of mental illness that the DSM-IV lists these other such culturally specific mental illnesses as diagnostically important.
However, what Hurry Down Sunshine reveals is the cultural biases within the Western world. How we approach-and deny-mental illness is a function of our particular world view. How important is it to us that behavior be consistent and explainable? Is there a god or a spirit or a something-else-inside that guides us? What guilts follow us through our life and how do we assuage them? These are all things that affect how we-and Sally's family-view her breakdown.
The Greenbergs are, in the main, of that particular genre of New Yorkers who are intellectual, spiritual, and burdened with questions about the meaning of meaning. Woody Allen has done the type very well, but Hurry Down Sunshine is real life, not film script and as such, it begs to be taken seriously. Thus Sally's mother smuggling a homeopathic remedy called "Skullcap" into the locked psych ward and measuring drops of it into her daughter's mouth is not some out-of-touch New Age weirdo, no matter how easy it would be to explain her away as such. Rather, she is a tortured mother who only has her own belief systems to draw on to help her daughter. And Greenberg himself, who has, by his own admission, "a high intolerance for aberrance"-was this what enabled him to miss his daughter's impending psychosis, or is it what gave him the grit to remain with her throughout her ordeal?
That I had these and other such thoughts as I was reading Hurry Down Sunshine is testament to how adept Greenberg is at drawing the reader into the their world. We all, characters in the memoir and reader, are constantly asking: why did this happen? Who was at fault? How can we avoid it in the future? What Greenberg has so ably portrayed and evoked is our intense discomfort with mental illness. When faced with it, we are driven to explain, to blame, to conjure cures and might-have-beens. What we're driven to do, actually, is to make sense of senselessness. An impossible task, that, but one we all face at one time or another, even if it's just with the babbling fellow we see down the street.
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"I'll
admit it. I envy the mommybloggers. Twenty years ago . . . I would have
found those sites a lifeline, a very Godsend. But, despite the obvious
fact that theirs are among the most powerful and prolific voices on the
Web, the Mommys don't speak to or for me. I have different issues now,
and I'd like to talk about them and hear others talk as well."
Cecelia finishes by putting a call out:
"If
you are a woman of a certain age (and doesn't that sound better than
middle-aged?) and know of blogs that talk comprehensively about this
wonderful, frustrating stage of life, please let me know."
Almost four weeks later, we're still talking and the topic is getting
stronger and stronger. I'm going to link at the end to all the women
who have (thus far) taken part in the conversation, but in this post, I
want to highlight a few voices, as well as my own experience.
I've
been blogging for, I dunno, four years now (see how the memory goes!)
and for much of that time I've felt like I am swimming upstream.
Or--here's another metaphor--battering on a door, saying 'Let me in. Hear me. Speak to me.' The
problem isn't ageism. There are blogs out there that speak eloquently
to and for the Elders. BlogHer has a subcategory just for them and Denise, who's the Community Manager at Blogher,
point to that site." However, I am not an Elder. My interests have
nothing to do with issues of getting old and infirm and living on a
fixed income.
My interests are more in line with Tanis, who doesn't have a blog yet (but should!):
"I'm
looking for an arena to be heard and to listen. A place to discuss
teenagers, new relationships and a not so new body, a busy career or
lack of one. Self discovery, confidence, what to wear, family dynamics,
alone time and what comes next in life."
I too want to see
myself on BlogHer. I brought it up last year at BlogHer '07, and I was
told that someone was going to be doing it. But someone isn't. Debra
Roby of A Stitch in Time
says that's because it's too broad a topic. Middle-aged women don't
blog about their issues "any more than young bloggers specifically blog
about what it's like to be a college student, or a quarterlifer." Well
actually, Debra, young bloggers do blog about exactly that.
My
sense is that the reason we midlifers aren't seen and focused on as a
viable community within BlogHer is that the powers that be, the
decision-makers of BlogHer aren't in our demographic. That's somewhere down the line, when I get older, but definitely not now, is what I imagine them saying. Now I'm about getting and doing and being and making and--wow! there's the whole world out there to conquer.
A
good part of that conquering the world is making BlogHer a respected
entity, building it into a viable player within the world of commerce.
The Mommybloggers are at the top of the mountain, an acknowledged force
to be reckoned with in terms of business, and an advertiser's dream. So
in selling BlogHer, it's probably easier to sell them. Except--we, the
midlife women, are a big, big piece of the advertising pie as well.
We're the ones with discretionary income; we're the bigger spenders. So
says Marti Barletta, who's known as the "First Lady of marketing to
women" in her book PrimeTime Women: How to Win the Hearts, Minds, and Business of Boomer Big Spenders. This
was the pitch that I made last summer after BlogHer, and this was the
pitch that I guess was a dead ball. But I'm at it again.
As is Gena, from Out On The Stoop, issued a challenge to someone to "whip up a sample post and show folks what's needed." Karen from MidLife's A Trip, took her up on it. You can read her post as part of the comments here.
She said something in one of her comments that really resonated with
me. "I'm usually one of the oldest on the sites I visit--not a mommy
blogger yet not an elderblogger either. It's kind of like being the
middle child in a family--sometimes you feel like you don't quite fit
in."
That's how I've felt. I'm not done being and becoming. I'm
not finished have adventures, going places, trying and failing and
trying again and, then, succeeding. In short, I'm not done living, and
I want my site, my BlogHer to reflect that.
Here are some other midlife women who feel the same:
Carol at A Different Nest
Jill at Writes Like She Talks
Pundit Mom
Ladybeams
Anali at Analis First Amendment
JanMBSC
Rhonda at Recipe Carousel
Tara at The Princess and The Pea
Diary of a Midlife Crisis
Musing
Tiddlytwinks
Pamela Jeanne at Coming2Terms
Granny Sue
I
can't tell you the exact age range of these women. Some are in their
40s, some 50s, some 60s. I can't tell you what all they write about
either. There is no essential MidLife Woman, just as there is no
essential Mommyblogger. What I can tell you is that they're looking for
something they're not getting right now, a voice, and if not at
BlogHer, then where?
This is a post about what happens when you want to travel and your better half doesn't because:
]]>This is a post about what happens when you want to travel and your better half doesn't because:
So
what do you do? I'm asking this for a reason; specifically because I've
answered #1. I'm mate-less and I've got wanderlust. But I'm also
somewhat trepidatious about the whole single woman traveling alone
thing. I'm going to start researching (that's what we ever-grad
students do) the topic. Will you help, please.
Send along any
sites, stories, suggestions about traveling alone when you're a
mid-life woman. That last modifier is the important one. I know what
it's like to travel alone when one's in one's twenties and thirties.
I've done it and had the requisite adventures. And I'm sure that there
are various tours for elders that are gentle and protected. But for
those of us who are between those two poles, what can we expect? what
should we look out for? where should we go--and how?
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1. I’m not a bandwagon jumper. I have, in fact, something of an antipathy to bandwagons. But I’m aware of that and thus when a bandwagon approaches, I try to be very clear on where my reasoning is sound and where it is not.
]]>1. I’m not a bandwagon jumper. I have, in fact, something of an antipathy to bandwagons. But I’m aware of that and thus when a bandwagon approaches, I try to be very clear on where my reasoning is sound and where it is not.
2. I have a visceral feeling, call it an urge actually, that his campaign intentions will come to naught, and he will leave our country worse off than it is. The last time I felt this way was in 2000. I felt sure that George W Bush would spell disaster for the United States. It was just such a visceral feeling, a knowing in my bones, as I have now, and I feel helpless again to be able to do anything to prevent my fellow countrymen from slipping down that slope again. Oh, and the time before that that I had it: when Richard Nixon got the presidency.
3. What is that slope? It’s the Feel Good Hill. We so want to feel good about ourselves that we throw our arms around the candidate that is most able to make us feel good. That’s what it was all about in ’00 when masses voted for George W. because he was just one of us, a regular guy that you’d want to knock back a couple of brews with. Never mind that he was not a regular guy, but a scion of the oligarchy whose candidacy, as was his bio, had been fashioned from the whole cloth. And in ’04, Dean was the Pied Piper, until he screamed. The ability to make us feel good is not a criteria that the concept of an informed electorate includes. Our democracy was created with the assumption that we, the people, would use our native intelligence and common education to make choices based on reason, not emotion.
4. Obama’s candidacy is almost as engineered as Bush’s was. The Presidential whispers started back at the last nominating convention when he gave that stirring speech. The whispers had little to do with his experience, because at that point (and still), he’d had little. No, the whispers had to do with the fact that he is an excellent orator. He could bring people together, urge them on, make them feel good. And God knows, the Democratic party needed that, so the powers that be, or the powers that wanna be, revved up their engines and here we are today with a candidate about whom the strongest thing people can say is that “he’ll bring us together.”
5. To do what, I want to know? True, he may increase the number of registered Democrats, but after election day, then what? How exactly will that translate to national and international policy? How will his “bringing us together” impact on his ability to make the hard decisions that are the fact of governing?
6. I’m appalled by the nostalgia that is fomenting Obama’s campaign. I want to say to all the people that think Camelot-Redux is just around the corner: How many of you were actually there then? How many of you are doing more than yearning after newsreel highlights and reconstituted memories? I was there then. The Bay of Pigs was no Hallmark moment, no matter how gloriously it’s portrayed today. It was a scary time and the fact that John F. Kennedy was a seasoned legislator who had actually been to war is probably what made all the difference. I would argue that for all Barack Obama is a good man of integrity and intelligence, he hasn’t the experience and therefore the ability to lead our country in the international arena where we are so very, very vulnerable.
Please, please, please, people: put your hearts aside and use your heads. Obama may make you feel good; Clinton will make you safe.
]]>Tell me what you think!
By Jane
byjane.blogspot.com
Tell me what you think!
By Jane
byjane.blogspot.com