The Heart of a Gamer

“Even if we come from different sides of the world, speak different languages, even if we have different tastes in games, every one of us here today is identical in the most important way: each one of us has the heart of a gamer.”

–Satoru Iwata

I was never allowed to play video games growing up, but my brother was, so, you know, I always found a way. I didn’t have many friends, I spent most of my time doing homework and studying, but video games really were the perfect escape. I could hit the power button, pick up my controller, and instantly I was somewhere new.

I won’t say it never got me into trouble, or that I spent time playing games when I should have been concentrating on other things, but I really don’t think I’d even be alive without them. It was the perfect medicine to combat my low self-esteem, my anxiety and my depression. I truly lived in a completely different world from the “real” one.

So when I read this morning the Nintendo president and CEO Satoru Iwata had passed away at the young age of 55, I was truly saddened. As a member of the HAL Laboratories team he helped to create some of my favourite games growing up such as anything with Kirby and the Mother series.

“On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.”

–Satoru Iwata

It was always obvious to me the Mr. Iwata wasn’t just the president of Nintendo, but that he lived and breathed these games just like gamers around the world did. I felt his passion for games whenever I heard him talk about Nintendo’s progress. I believed he went home and enjoyed these games just like I did.

He brought Nintendo through good times and bad. He made difficult choices, such as refusing to lay off workers and allow branding of popular characters, even though it would result in more profit for Nintendo.

Thank you Mr. Iwata for all your hard work and for giving me a life to live and enjoy outside of the real world. Maybe it wasn’t healthy, but it was what I needed at the time. You work was beautiful to me and I hope you can rest in peace.

Recharge

I need to start packing. I’m behind at work. People are upset that I won’t come hang out with them.

It’s okay. It’s okay to be behind. It’s okay to take some time for yourself: everyone needs to sometimes so others should understand.

You need time to sleep and time to relax. The weight of the world is not on your shoulders. You can let that email wait until tomorrow. You have more than a month to pack your things to move. Everything will be okay as long as you take some time to recharge.

You don’t always have to be moving and working. You won’t be able to keep up. You did a lot of good work today, so take the rest you need and deserve. Pick up where you left off tomorrow.

It’s okay to not be perfect. Either way, you’re still a better person than you were yesterday.

Overly Traumatic

“In my biology class, we’d talked about the definition of life: to be classified as a living creature, a thing needs to eat, breathe, reproduce, and grow. Dogs do, rocks don’t, trees do, plastic doesn’t. Fire, by that definition, is vibrantly alive. It eats everything from wood to flesh, excreting the waste as ash, and it breathes air just like a human, taking in oxygen and emitting carbon. Fire grows, and as it spreads, it creates new fires that spread out and make new fires of their own. Fire drinks gasoline and excretes cinders, it fights for territory, it loves and hates. Sometimes when I watch people trudging through their daily routines, I think that fire is more alive than we are–brighter, hotter, more sure of itself and where it wants to go. Fire doesn’t settle; fire doesn’t tolerate; fire doesn’t ‘get by.’
Fire does.
Fire is.”

–Dan Wells, I Am Not A Serial Killer

I was driving home from work today and as I turned into my driveway, I caught a whiff of smoke. Suddenly it was January 2014. The sky was black with night, the moon hidden and my hands were glued in a death grip to my steering wheel as I pulled into the deli market down the street from my apartment. It was one of the coldest nights of the winter, but I didn’t notice the chill biting my skin as I turned toward my road, my sight obstructed by a fog of red flashing lights and smoke.

I think I jogged. I don’t remember getting from my car to the other side of the road. I remember navigating blindly through a crowd of people I didn’t recognize, through a shield of red mist, past people whispering and pointing. I remember hearing a young girl ask her mother “Are the people who live there homeless now? Where will they go?”

I needed to know the answers. I walked toward the building, the white siding stained black with smoke, watching firefighters investigate the charred remains of our downstairs neighbor’s apartment, observing the flashes of headlamps in my own apartment. I could see straight through her apartment to the backyard, it was completely black. They piled her possessions into our driveway. They were unidentifiable.

“There was a grease fire.”

“It spread so fast.”

“We have your cats.”

“Do you have a place to stay tonight? Should we call the Red Cross?”

“I made a mistake and now everything’s just gone.”

When I think back now, I can barely remember what happened, but that scent of smoke as I drove was as effective as a perfectly functioning time machine to transport me back to the moment when I stood outside of my old apartment waiting for the answers to the little girl’s questions, waiting to find my boyfriend among all the people, waiting to know if my cats were alive, waiting to know if I had anything left.

I was suddenly homeless, but my boyfriend and my cats were alive. Later that night we were allowed into the apartment to survey the damage. Most of our stuff survived. Most of our stuff was permanently stained with smoke. We had one week to move it all out.

My neighbor was nowhere near as fortunate. She lost her cat and everything she owned. Even her car was temporarily taken out of use by the fire. It had no mercy at all. Her boyfriend and she quickly abandoned any effort to fight the fire. It was useless, the fire was too powerful, it was wild and free and ready to take whatever it could.

I wasn’t there to see the fire, though someone showed me a video that a firefighter put on Facebook. For the most part, the fire was mostly a mild inconvenience for us: forcing us to move from our first home, an apartment we loved, within a week of the fire in the coldest part of the year. Yet, even over a year and a half later, triggers still bring me back to that day.

My phone vibrates on the counter and suddenly I’m talking to my now-fiancé as he explains “There was a fire, I’m okay and [our neighbor’s] okay. I couldn’t get the cats out, but I tried to keep them in the room farthest away from the fire. But it was bad.”

I see the red flashing lights and I’m wandering down an icy street in January, searching for someone familiar in a sea of spectators. I catch the scent of smoke and I’m standing outside the old apartment building waiting to know if I’m homeless, if my cats are alive, and wondering if I even have a place to go. I’m packing up my things, the windows are open despite the -20˚F chill, gently and pointlessly trying to wipe the brown stains off of photos and papers. I touch the blackened keys of the piano that my fiancé got me for Christmas that year and I’m desperately scrubbing them, while blinking away my tears.

Some people tell me I have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, but it makes me feel ashamed. I didn’t lose anything. I was the lucky one.

A medical professional who evaluated me suggested the fire may have something to do with my chronic pain. The fire occurred about two months before my pain started, on a week where I said I was ready to move on and leave it all behind. Is the pain a manifestation of the guilt I feel from that night? Maybe, in a way, I’m still standing outside of my old home waiting for answers in the cold, hoping that it never really happened at all. But if I never move from that spot, I will never have any answers at all.

I lost my first home to a fire. Maybe I didn’t lose my cats and I didn’t lose any objects, but I lost my peace of mind and I lost the place where I felt comfortable and safe. I lost a place that I loved. Maybe I don’t have to feel ashamed and guilty that I mourn that loss. Maybe I can’t move on until I do.

Regardless, I am still a better person today than I was yesterday.

Searching Endlessly for Someone Wonderful

“I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.”

–Anna Quindlen, Living Out Loud

Today, NPR published an article titled “The Writing Assignment That Changes Lives”. Basically, it’s a writing program or curriculum that is designed to help students identify for their future goals, but also their current strengths and weaknesses. It’s already well known that writing can stimulate mental health and combat mental illness. In a world where there is so much pressure on students to decide what they want to do with their lives and succeed without ever failing, perhaps writing is an excellent tool for students to make those decisions: decide what they want out of life and how they’re going to achieve it.

I’m certain I’ve done similar writing exercises, but I think the problem with them is that we never update them. Things rarely ever go as planned and it might make us depressed to look back at our plan and discover how little we accomplished. Or it can be a great opportunity to evaluate why things didn’t go as planned and how we can adapt to get back on track. Such a writing exercise is called “Future Authoring”. There is also “Past Authoring”, a close example of which is contained in my post “Secrets of the Heart”, where you discuss a past experience that still evokes negative emotion in an attempt to draw information from it.

The idea behind “Future Authoring” is that you are the author of your own adventure. In any good story, our protagonist is dynamic. They are always working towards the resolution of the story regardless of setbacks and obstacles. You want to be the protagonist who takes matters into their own hand, not one who waits for deus ex machina to save them or allows themselves to be swept wherever the current takes them. But a protagonist can only move forward if they’re aware of where they are going. A “Future Authoring” exercise helps us obtain that information.

If you asked me in my sophomore year of high school where I would be at my current age (26), I would probably say I’d have my PhD in organic chemistry (ah, so young, so naïve). In junior year, I’d be acting as a history teacher and writer. Senior year, I was going to be a chemistry teacher. My freshmen year of college, I was going to have my PhD in chemistry… again. Sophomore year I was swept into the currents of uncertainty and bashed into the rocks a few times. To be honest, I put little thought into where I was going and was just trying to survive and it showed. It stayed that way until my junior year when I got into research and, once again, resolved to get my PhD in chemistry. But then in my senior year, I fell in love with medical biology. It felt so wrong, but oh, so right. So, if you asked me then, I was working towards my MD/PhD (dream big, kid, dream big). That was until self-doubt took its toll as I continued to finish my degree in my fifth year (long story for another day) and I lost my resolve for a bit.

It wasn’t until my year after graduation, when I finally, FINALLY, was able to find a job that I found my passion again. The transition from all these goals was so difficult for me because I was just floating from one thing to the next without ever evaluating what I truly wanted and what would make me happy. Writing it out wouldn’t get me there alone, but I’m sure it would have helped.

At the end of this summer I’ll finally be transitioning into that PhD program I always dreamed of, but it’s in Cell and Molecular Biology instead of Chemistry. It will be a difficult road no matter what and so I think before I head into the program, I might try this exercise to evaluate my goals further and to know what I’m working towards.

About two years ago now, a friend of mine who was in medical school came to visit me while I was working a late night in the lab. I proudly showed him everything and explained all the projects I was working on and everything I hoped I could accomplish. His response? “Is this really what you want to do for the rest of your life?” I was a bit surprised by the brazen and not-at-all subtle insinuation that my chosen career was lowly. Knowing him well, it wasn’t all that surprising, but I didn’t expect him to think so little of a career in research. I pretty much just said “Yes” knowing that it wasn’t worth the argument. He replied “Well, I thought about doing research for some time, but I decided I actually wanted to do something with my life.”

I was too stunned to respond, but as I said, it really wasn’t worth the argument. He was never going to see my side of the story. No, I will never directly interact with patients. I will never directly guide them towards a better lifestyle. I will never cavalierly pull a life back from the brink of death in an emergency situation. I could never be good at such things. First of all, I’m not much of a people person (of course, clearly, neither is my friend) and I just don’t have the patience to constantly deal with patients. I barely survived waitressing. Second, I’m pretty squeamish. I just got over a longstanding fear of blood and I still struggle with needles. I almost pass out when someone talks about eye injuries and I can’t stand to watch someone get injured during an athletic event. Could I get over those things someday? Yea, sure. Do I want to be a doctor badly enough to put the time and effort into doing it. Nope, not even a little bit.

It’s not to say I don’t think being a doctor isn’t a noble career. I absolutely believe most doctors do good things and save lives. But the career doesn’t sing to me the way research does. The idea of being a doctor doesn’t get me out of bed in the morning. Tomorrow I’ll get out of my bed for my students, because even though I’m not saving the lives of patients, I am training students in the area of problem solving and they may be students who go on to save the lives of patients. In addition, I’m working towards solving problems that could save the lives of patients. I’m not naïve enough (at least not anymore) to believe I’ll cure cancer or any other disease that effects the lives of people every year, but I will contribute to the body of literature on those diseases. I could bring these fields one step closer to saving millions of lives, even if I never directly save one myself.

That’s enough for me. It’s more than enough. The idea of filling in the puzzle with pieces I have to create myself and jury-rig pieces from the information I ascertain for others really sings to me. It fills me with energy, it keeps me up at night, it gets me up in the morning. I love working with students: watching them grow from not holding a pipet properly to troubleshooting experiments they designed themselves. I love guiding them on their career path, helping them find resources, recommending them to others, reading drafts of their personal statements, even though it means they’re moving on from my lab. It means they’re moving on to something better. They’re taking whatever skills they learned and making the world a better place. That sings to me too and no one can take that away from me.

I can’t say I’ve never had doubts, but I always end up quashing them. More than anything, I can’t see myself doing anything else with my life. I believe I was destined for this job and I believe I will succeed at it.

I may not have taken a linear path. I will be what they call “a non-traditional student” simply because I “chose” (let’s be real, I wouldn’t have gotten in; not being humble, I really wouldn’t have) to wait a few additional years before applying to graduate school. Some of my friends from my class are already close to graduating from their programs. This was the path I needed to take to succeed. I needed to fail in college. I needed to learn it was okay to fail. I needed to re-evaluate what I wanted from myself and learn that it wasn’t realistic or necessary to be perfect. I may not have done things the way I envisioned, I may not have always handled obstacles in an efficient way, but here I stand, ready to finally tackle the goal I’ve been aiming at for almost a decade. I may have arrived late to the battle, but at least I’m not running from it.

But the goal, isn’t just to be a PhD student. I can’t make it through a graduate program, an extension of my education towards a career, without knowing what my career will be. Looking back at my previous goals, I was never far off the mark. I’m going to be a professor. I’ve always wanted to teach, I was just wrong about the age group (oh so very wrong). I can teach, run my lab, train students. It’s my dream job and it’s everything I want out of life.

The outlook for graduate students going into tenure track positions is dismal. I’m writing here and now that I do not care. It will not sway me. If I have to spend extra years as a post-doc, so be it. If I have to take another job, while I try to become a professor, I will. But the endgame is professorship. Professorship or bust.

Most definitely, I am a better person today than I was yesterday.

No Winter

“If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.”

–Anne Bradstreet, Meditations Divine and Moral

It’s been almost a year and a half since I last went running. It’s funny how in the weeks leading up to my “injury”, I was searching for excuses not to run. Maybe it was too cold or too icy or maybe I was too busy or too tired, but I could work around all of those things. At the end of the day, the only thing stopping me from running was myself.

And no one was forcing me to run, I did it because I wanted to. And yet, it seemed like such a chore, such a hassle. In times of injury, I longed for the day I could start running again, but when it was there for me to exploit at my convenience, I cast it aside as a task, no better than paying the bills.

One and a half years. That’s the longest it’s ever been. I chastise my past self for its foolishness. You could’ve been running every day. You enjoyed it. Maybe I could be stronger, maybe this never would have happened. How could you not appreciate such a gift?

Because it doesn’t seem like a gift at the time. It seems like something we could do anytime and why should we do it now, when we could do it tomorrow?

I find myself struggling with writing the same way. I dabble every so often, but then I find the excuses. Why today, I could just write for extra long tomorrow? Because I won’t. The future seems full of endless possibilities which is why we imagine a future in which we accomplish our goals even if we put forth no effort today. But if that’s true, there’s also a future where I can’t write at all. So take advantage current self, so your future self doesn’t have to hate you.

Today I am a better person than I was yesterday.

Sentenced to Solitary Confinement

“Of course it is a pity that so much of all creative work is so closely related to the personality of the one who does it.

It is sad and embarrassing and unattractive that those emotions that stir him deeply enough to demand expression, and to charge their expression with some measure of light and power, are nearly all rooted, however changed in their surface, in the particular and sometimes peculiar concerns of the artist himself, that special world, the passions and images of it that each of us weaves about him from birth to death, a web of monstrous complexity, spun forth at a speed that is incalculable to a length beyond measure, from the spider-mouth of his own singular perceptions.

It is a lonely idea, a lonely condition, so terrifying to think of that we usually don’t. And so we talk to each other, write and wire each other, call each other short and long distance across land and sea, clasp hands with each other at meeting and at parting, fight each other and even destroy each other because of this always somewhat thwarted effort to break through walls to each other. As a character in a play once said, “We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins.”

Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.”

–Tennessee Williams, “Person to Person”

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember and for as long as I’ve been writing, I’ve been writing about myself. Not so much in the sense I am now, but as I create the tale of my protagonist and send her through obstacles and challenges, I soon find myself looking up at me from the pages. Writing is like staring into a mirror, critiquing every flaw, every emotional outburst, every mistake.

We write what we know and we know nothing better than we know ourselves. But what happens is we hide away the things we don’t like. When we look at ourselves in the mirror, we see ourselves physically: our beauty and our flaws. When we write ourselves onto the pages of a story, we may critique our physique, but we tease apart our personality, evaluate how we make decisions, how we act towards someone we don’t like, how we handle failure and rejection. It takes a special sort of self-awareness to truly know these things about ourselves and appreciate them and accept them.

When Tanja is looking up at me, waiting for me to walk her through the loss of her friend, I realize I am asking myself how I handled it. Did I handle it “the right way”? Was there a better way? Can I handle it?

It’s easy to shut the book on the story, on your fictional account of yourself, it’s easier to not ask the questions, partly because you can never know the answers.

Mostly, when you look yourself in the mirror, do you see someone you can love and appreciate? Will your critique of yourself drag you into depression and anxiety?

When I tell people about my struggles as an undergraduate, the first question is usually if I regret it. I never knew how to answer. I didn’t want to say that I did, sometimes I thought how things would be if I did things differently; some things would probably be much easier.

But to regret the way I handled things would be to admit that I regret the person I am today. Every mistake I made, every poor decision, led me to where I am right now. If I changed the way I did things, I don’t believe I would be the same person and I don’t even believe I would be a good person. I struggled and it allows me to appreciate that sometimes we all struggle and you shouldn’t judge someone for it. A version of myself that made it through college without hardship would be a judgmental, critical person that I don’t even want to know. My adversity has awarded me empathy and I know that empathy will be invaluable when I become a college professor myself.

Sometimes, no matter how much we reach out to others, there are battles we can only fight within our self. Appreciation of self, letting go of regret and doubt, these are only things we can determine for ourselves. It is never an easy conclusion to come to, so be supportive of others still finding their way.

Today I am a better person than I was yesterday.

Secrets of the Heart

“Teccam explains there are two types of secrets. There are secrets of the mouth and secrets of the heart.

Most secrets are secrets of the mouth. Gossip shared and small scandals whispered. There secrets long to be let loose upon the world. A secret of the mouth is like a stone in your boot. At first you’re barely aware of it. Then it grows irritating, then intolerable. Secrets of the mouth grow larger the longer you keep them, swelling until they press against your lips. They fight to be let free.

Secrets of the heart are different. They are private and painful, and we want nothing more than to hide them from the world. They do not swell and press against the mouth. They live in the heart, and the longer they are kept, the heavier they become.

Teccam claims it is better to have a mouthful of poison than a secret of the heart. Any fool will spit out poison, he says, but we hoard these painful treasures. We swallow hard against them every day, forcing them deep inside us. There they sit, growing heavier, festering. Given enough time, they cannot help but crush the heart that holds them.”

–Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear

I am sitting in the orthopedic surgeon’s office, waiting for him to arrive. My pain cannot be defined as chronic yet, it has “only” been two and a half months. I grasp my hip. I’m mildly aware that sitting for too long exacerbates the pain, but if I pace, I might appear anxious. I already know the MRI must be negative. If they had found anything they would have called. I hope anyway for answers, for a diagnosis, for a direction to head.

“There is nothing wrong with you.”

Maybe for most this would be positive. If it was a routine check-up, I would want to hear nothing else. However, this is not normal. Something is wrong. My pain is constant. It isn’t relieved by rest or Advil or meditation or exercise or any number of things I tried before admitting that the pain was out of my hands. Trying to remain calm I ask him what I should do.

“Return to your normal activities. There is nothing wrong with you.”

I had. I tried running through the pain. I tried yoga and stretches. I tried not to be “weak”. I tried simply ignoring it. I tell him something is wrong, my pain is constant.

“Well, physically there is nothing wrong with you.”

I do not know if I imagined the emphasis on physically. I felt the sting of the subtle accusation: your pain is not real, your pain is imagined, your pain is caused by your negative psychological state.

When I relayed the results to friends, I felt like they believed the diagnosis too. I was just complaining or looking for attention. I did everything I could to look like I wasn’t in pain for fear of losing my job (where I coincidentally study pain). I didn’t look like I was in pain. Soon, I started to believe it too.

I caused my own pain. If I was happier, if I could let go of my stress, maybe it would go away. I immersed myself in hobbies, trying to find my “cure”. I gave them up one by one and soon I had nothing left but the pain.

There wasn’t any particular day I woke up and announced to myself I was a chronic pain patient. In fact, the months rolled by and suddenly I had been living more than six months with my pain. For the most part my pain was moderate, always rating between four and six. Every so often, I would have what’s called a “flare-up”, where my pain jumped up to an eight.

I could never let anyone know or see. The pain wasn’t real, no one believed me. When I wasn’t paying attention all the walls went up and I was looking through a window at everyone I loved and I was alone. Everyone was there, but I was alone.

---

Shortly before my freshmen year of high school, I met my first love. My mother sent me away for part of the summer. Despite my docility, she believed I would become rebellious in high school and she wanted to send me to a boarding school. She promised if I was good and worked hard during the last part of the summer, I could stay with the family. Though I can never be defined as “rebellious”, especially in high school, I believe this “deal” sparked what little defiance I had at the time.

I met him when I “got lost” while hiking. I was heading up the trail, I looked up at him, our eyes met briefly and I smiled politely before passing by him. I didn’t get more than a few feet before his hand grasped my shoulder and he asked me to wait. He asked me why I had smiled at him. I laughed and told him that everyone deserves a smile.

He walked with me to the top and we talked for a long while. Over the next few weeks we would sneak out to meet each other. He was a few years older, his father was abusive and both his parents were alcoholics. He ran away from home and was working to save money for college. He smoked, but he was trying to quit. “I wish I never started.”

In a world where we felt rejected by the people who, by society’s standards, should love us move than anyone, found love in each other. I was only fourteen and I know many would dismiss our love as teenage hormones and lust, but, to this day, I really believe that I loved him.

I left to go work for my mother, but we sent each other handwritten letters which I’ve kept to this day. We talked about our daily lives, our dreams of me moving there to continue school, how we would go to college and then get married and live happily ever after. My mother decided to keep me because I worked so hard. At the time I was glad, but I never got the affection I wanted from her and even twelve years later, I can’t help but think how things might have been if I had left. It’s a worthless and painful exercise, but one I participate in nonetheless.

We kept writing to each other until his last letter to me he told me about how his father had killed his sister’s dog and she subsequently took her own life. I wrote back with my sympathies, explaining how I wish I could be there for him and how horrible the situation was. Even now, I don’t know how to write that letter. I did the best I could as a fourteen year old who had never experienced such a loss, but he never wrote back. To this day, I don’t even know if he ever received it.

The day of his sister’s funeral, his best friend caught him drinking. A lot. I didn’t know at the time that he was an alcoholic. Having grown up in a household where drinking was so pervasive, he picked up the habit young and it controlled his life. Until he met a girl who told him that everyone deserves a smile.

I almost wish I had said something more potent, however stupid that sounds. In a fictitious story, I would have. Something that really resonated. Something that would really stop someone from jumping off a cliff, if they were tempted to do so, as he was that day. Apparently what I said had been good enough. Or maybe it hadn’t been the words, maybe he just needed to know that someone out there would show him any sort of kindness.

The sort of kindness that was better than the numbing effects of alcohol. The sort of kindness that was worth trying to regain control of his life. I think he just needed someone to hear his story. He needed someone to let him know he didn’t deserve to be constantly inflicted with pain just for existing. He needed someone to be there.

His friend, who had become a mutual friend, caught him drinking and, knowing that he had been an alcoholic and had quit, lambasted him for giving up at his sister’s funeral. Ashamed and drunk, he left the funeral and drove to the mountain where we had met and jumped as he intended to do six months before.

Most of this I learned from his diary and the note he left behind. I can’t help but wish I had been there. I can never know if I would have stopped him or if our relationship would have lasted, but I can’t help but feel like I belonged there, comforting him after the loss of his sister.

I was depressed when I learned what had happened. I was guilty and I felt like it had been my fault. I couldn’t tell my parents, I had gone against their wishes. I never told my friends about this boy and it didn’t seem right to now. Who would even believe a timid girl such as I had a boyfriend in a different state? I felt the blame from our mutual friends. We were all in shock and sad and the ties between us seemed permanently severed. I went about my daily routine, but everything was different.

I forced the secret down into my heart and I was never that timid, smiling fourteen year old girl again.

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The weight of the burdens we hold, the secrets of our hearts, can crush us if we let them. No matter how deep we push them, they are ever present, waiting to break free.

I’ve held my secret of the heart closely, allowing it free a few times in moments of vulnerability, moments where I choose to write, such as this one. Sometimes in the months of pain, the secret pushed against the walls, threatening to come alive, and I wondered if the secret caused my pain. The guilt, the sadness, the shock bubbled below the surface as it had for eleven years. Maybe it was taking revenge for its captivity. Maybe it could never be controlled.

I’m releasing the secret. If the right person reads this blog, there are enough details to know it’s me. I lost my best friend, I lost someone I truly loved, and for a long time I believed it was because I was selfish. No, it was a tragedy, and he needed someone to share his own secrets with, but it was not my fault.

I’m releasing the secret, but not because I believe it will cure my pain. I’ve since released the secret of my pain, and while I feel the relief of the burden, it did not cure me or make my pain better. It did help me though. I don’t feel the paranoia anymore, like everyone is waiting for my pain to overtake me. I feel now like I’m building a solid support system where I can talk about it freely, I just had to take a chance on the right people.

I’m sharing the secret with you in the hopes that you can see how deadly secrets of the heart can be. They’re a ticking time-bomb, a parasite leeching away you energy, the seas slowly drowning you without mercy. Sharing the secrets of the heart make us vulnerable, but I know I am strong. I know I can survive the secret that has been fighting to defeat me for twelve years. I hope others can find the courage to set their secrets free as well.

Today, I am a better person than I was yesterday.

The Weight of the Burdens We Hold

There is a story that is frequently passed around on social media. Credit is often granted to a variety of people, but the true origin seems to be unknown. It goes similarly to this, though there are a few different versions:

A lecturer, when explaining stress management to a class, raised a glass of water and asked, “how heavy is this glass of water?” Answers called out ranged from 20g to 500g. The lecturer replied, “The absolute weight doesn’t matter. It depends on how long you try to hold it.”

“If I hold it for a minute, that’s not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I’ll have an ache in my right arm. If I hold it for a day, you’ll have to call an ambulance. “In each case, it’s the same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes.”

He continued, “And that’s the way it is with stress. If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later, as the burden becomes increasingly heavy, we won’t be able to carry on.” “As with the glass of water, you have to put it down for a while and rest before holding it again. When we’re refreshed, we can carry on with the demands of life.”

It’s an interesting concept that even a small stressor can have such an impact on one’s life and health, but I take issue with the conclusions that people can draw from it. A similar version of the story was shared on Reddit’s /r/GetMotivated and it was pretty disheartening to read people reaching out about depression or anxiety or the stress that weighs them down on a daily basis and that responses they received that were simply “you need to try mindfulness meditation”, “see your doctor for medication” or “meditation and yoga solve all these problems”. I think when these people commented they had the original poster’s best interests at heart, but I don’t think people realize how dismissive these comments are.

As I mentioned in my previous post, one of my many hesitations about this project are that I don’t want to be perceived as speaking for all of those with chronic pain. I have talked to others about chronic pain and I’ve been on both sides of the window. We can never assume that the solutions that work for us will work for everyone in our condition. We’re too different. We have different support systems, different jobs, different families, different hopes and aspirations and all of these things play a role in how we handle our stressors. I don’t want to imply that for someone who handles their depression with mindfulness meditation that the route to their treatment was easier than that of the person their advertising their treatment to, but I think it’s important to consider that what works for you might not work for another person.

My favorite example of this is insomnia. I loathe talking to someone who doesn’t suffer from insomnia about it because I am immediately thrust into a conversation that I’ve inevitably had before including a slew of home remedies that I’ve already tried.

• Screens off before 8 pm. Check.
• Develop a regular sleep schedule. Check.
• Quit coffee, alcohol and nicotine. Check.
• Don’t use your bedroom for anything but sleep. Check.
• Make a list of all the things that you’re worried about. Check.
• You should try melatonin! Check and I hate you.
• You should try valerian root. Studies show it was not significantly more effective than a placebo, but check and stop suggesting it.

The worst part is that the inevitable conclusion drawn is that I just didn’t do these things right or I didn’t try hard enough or I didn’t want it to work. Placebo effects demonstrate the powerful effect of wanting or believing that a treatment will work, but sometimes wanting and believing just aren’t enough. You better believe that when it’s Thursday and I’ve only gotten six hours of sleep since Sunday I really, REALLY WANT to sleep and it doesn’t even matter what I “believe” at that point because I’m essentially hallucinating anyway. I’ve had a battery of blood and hormone tests to evaluate why I can’t sleep and the doctors are baffled. The home remedies and traditional treatments don’t work for me and it’s not because I don’t want them too.

I think it’s really unfair for someone to suggest something without knowing all the background and then dismiss someone’s concerns when it doesn’t work the same way for them. When someone explained to me the philosophy behind making a list of everything that makes me anxious as a way of putting those things aside so I wasn’t thinking about them while I was trying to sleep, I truly believed it would work. I totally bought the concept and I tried it for two straight weeks before I had to give up because I was too tired to see clearly the notebook I was writing in. Making the list increased my anxiety. I didn’t realize how much was bothering me until I made this huge list that was now sitting on my bedroom table, mocking me. I hid the notebook at night, locked it away, and in an act of utter desperation well into my hallucination phase I tried to burn it.

I think my friend was flat out offended when I relayed my experience. “The point of the list is to release your anxiety. You need to let it go. It would have worked if you stopped thinking about these things.” I really tried. I have no reason to lie to you about this. I really tried to let it go and forget it and just relax and sleep. And my friend’s anger just added another stressor to my list. I stopped talking about my insomnia after that. Some people think I don’t struggle with it anymore, but I still do. I desperately cling to most of the listed habits just so when a doctor suggests them to me, I can say I already practice them.

I think if people felt safer talking to others about their anxiety and depression, it would be a lot easier for people to find help or at least feel comfortable in their journey to handle it. It’s so easy to accuse others of “choosing” their condition. I really don’t think it’s that simple. Imagine a single mother raising two children with little to no support system who understandably suffers from anxiety. Is she supposed to shut her kids into a room, say “Mommy is going to practice mindfulness meditation now, so no noise and don’t cause any problems”? Can she get a babysitter? Maybe if she has the money. What if she works two jobs to support these kids already? Is she supposed to take more time away from spending it with them? Who will feed them? What if something happens? Thinking about the hypothetical stress of this hypothetical mother is stressing me out. Can she really be blamed if mindful meditation doesn’t work for her? I really don’t think so.

There’s a lot of philosophical constructs out there about how stress is imagined and something we bring upon ourselves. Just being a functional part of society introduces a person to stress, manageable or not. I think with the right tools, a person can find treatment and handle it, but I also think we as a whole need to be supportive of people who are struggling with this. Instead of saying mindful meditation will solve all the world’s problems if you would only just TRY hard enough, try listening to a person’s story. Actually hear the details, instead of trying to cure them. Maybe you can learn why your magical cure isn’t right for them. Maybe you could just be there for them while they struggle to come to terms with another failed attempt to bring their condition under control.

I can’t relay to you exactly how all the walls were built that trapped me on this side of the window. One went up after the orthopedic surgeon I visited relayed that there was nothing “physically wrong” with me. One went up when a group of my friends got mad at me because I couldn’t run a 5K with them. Another went up when my fiancé told me I wasn’t doing enough to find the cause of my pain. Really, the walls continue to go up every day and I haven’t been able to break them down. Someone makes a remark which may or may not have any malicious intent, but I’m programmed to misconstrue it as an accusation that I’m just not trying hard enough. Sometimes I believe I’m not trying hard enough. I can’t blame them for thinking it if I think that too.

I guess the moral of this post is that your words have power. That’s why we post quotes and write things and communicate with other people. Those words are so powerful that the make the construction of the walls easy and the deconstruction hard. I wonder if the deconstruction would be easier if I knew someone was sitting on the other side of the wall, waiting for me to break free. Not judging me for how long I take, not threatening to walk away if I don’t break through, not telling me everything I’m doing is wrong and why I should do it their way instead. Words have power, but silence is powerful too. Listening can make us powerful too.

I’ve always been afraid that the things I say won’t be meaningful, that they won’t matter to anyone, that they aren’t powerful. I think I’m still afraid of that. But I’ve discovered the strength in listening to others. I’ve learned from them, I feel connected to them and I’ve learned to say meaningful things back when they’re ready to listen to me. I think we need to think of our relationships more as a partnership, where we help each other along and wait for our partner to catch up when they need a break. Can you imagine trying to hike up a mountain with someone and you’re struggling and running out of breath and the whole time they’re nagging you with advice about the way you’re breathing or walking or this wouldn’t be a problem if you had exercised better. I’d bet you’d at least consider punching that person. I know I would.

I’m not trying to lecture at you from a high horse, because that would be completely hypocritical from the point I’m trying to make here. I think we need to worry less about trying to help people and instead just being there for them. I’m working on this too. I give out unwarranted advice all the time (case in point: blog). I just want to offer this perspective: the person who is falling behind and doesn’t think they’ll ever catch up, but desperately wants to and tries to with all the energy they have. I know people mean well when they offer their advice, but having good intentions doesn’t mean having good actions.

I just want to know someone will be standing on the other side of the wall when I finally break free. I don’t ever feel sure of that. At least for today, I am a better person today than I was yesterday.