How it is

If I really think about it, I have been struggling for a long time.

The summer before I started college, I was convinced I was dying of some unknown disease and ran a low grade fever the whole summer.

The summer before my sophomore year in college, I was recovering from mono, and plunging into a second round of restrictive anorexia/exercise induced bulimia.

Spring break during my senior year, I took a trip to Jamaica with a group of friends. I was so depressed, I did not participate in most group activities and spent the better part of the week by myself.

The summer before law school, I decided that getting a job was not worthwhile and that it would be better preparation for me to stay home and watch Law & Order reruns -- all day long -- and to eat anytime anyone said "objection". I gained 30 pounds, and even my mother was telling me I should eat less.

The summer before my third year, I developed a pre-ulcerous condition, which is pretty much an ulcer just slightly easier to treat because there isn't yet a hole in your stomach, just a lot of fraying of the stomach lining in one particular place. Either way, it still hurts, and either way, you still have to take a rigorous course of antibiotics for the better part of 6 weeks. Not to mention, I think I was having a low grade panic attack all summer because I was consistently short of breath.

After law school, my eating and exercise habits were likely not the healthiest. Okay, they weren't at all. I was very restrictive with my diet and rigorous with regard to my exercise in an effort to control a life I felt was spinning out of control. This continued for about 4 years. The last two years, I have alternated being controlling and being absolutely profligate when it comes to my eating and exercise habits. Resultantly, I have felt completely out of control most times.

We won't even mention my various panic attacks brought on in moments of emotional devastation. Some people get broken up with and go get drunk with their friends, I proceed to feel like I am having a heart attack and go to the ER, where once I am told I am not dying, I promptly feel better.

In the last couple years, I have also taken to "hiding" when I feel low. I do the bare minimum of what I must in order to fulfill the obligations in my life -- this is generally going to work and doing all that is required there (because I would do anything to avoid being branded a failure or to let people down in a professional context), then going straight home to bed.

These are the facts, and they are undisputed.

It is easy to believe that, despite all of the evidence to the contrary which I have listed above, through this time I was in denial with regard to my struggles. It isn't true. But I can see how it would be easy to believe, as concurrent with the time line above, I graduated in the top 5% of my high school class at the age of sixteen. I attended what some might argue is the most prestigious undergraduate institution in this country, and graduated with honors (though the dirty little secret is that 90% of the class graduates "with honors" -- you almost have to try not to do so). I attended a top flight law school, and graduated at the tender age of 23, on my way to a six figure job with a preeminent and highly sought BigLaw firm. Miserable though I -- and the economy -- were, we both flourished, surviving layoffs and cutbacks alike. When I thought I had reached the end of the my rope with my first employer, I got a job with an even more prestigious law firm. The job was so horrendous, it nearly killed me, but it certainly was prestigious. And now, I work in a job which is enviable both for its focus and its geographical location. Yes, I am thirty years old, my resume is flawless, and my life is a mess.

These are the facts, and they are undisputed.

As contradictory as my personal struggles and my professional accolades may be, I have been aware of the duality. I have tried to bridge the gap. I have tried talk therapy on numerous occasions -- my senior year in high school, my third year in law school, my fourth and fifth year in law practice. I think it is useful to discuss things with a neutral third party. I was always surprised at what I learned about myself in discussing topics I thought I had already parsed through ad nauseum with my nearest and dearest. But talk therapy is expensive and time consuming, and I have yet to come through the process feeling any sense of closure or accomplishment. To this point, it has been only a panacea. Wary as I was, as I had seen it work for a family member and several friends, I also tried antidepressants for nearly a year. There were a number of positive effects, but they came with negative ones which just didn't seem worth it to me. And the positive just didn't seem genuine, it just seemed to be more disconnect than anything. In addition, I have tried nearly anything else that anyone might suggest. I bought meditation tapes. I bought a blender to make green smoothies and adopt a semi-raw approach to my diet. I even tried to feng shui my room, but to my chagrin, all of my windows in my apartment face the wrong direction, so my chi is all going down the drain or something like that. My mother has long been praying to St. Judas (St. Jude -- the patron saint of lost causes) on my behalf. Admittedly, in the darkest times, I do too. But I think I need to be either most specific or more general with him -- because so far the prayers of "save this failing relationship" and "please just help me" have gone unanswered. Or, quite possibly, I am too ignorant to have seen the proper signs with which they were answered.

These are the facts, and they are undisputed.

I know that all of my problems in my life stem from the fact that I don't like myself very much. I couldn't tell you why. I really, really wish that I could. Honestly, when I look at myself (in the sense of evaluating myself as a person both in appearance and substantively) my viewpoint is very amorphous. It is as though I see myself reflected in a pool of water which is held by a sieve. Any reflection I see is by definition ephemeral. Fleeting glimpses, distorted by ripples and tricks of the light playing on the surface. Distortions -- both kind and unkind. So what do I see? I see someone who is smart. That doesn't really change. I see someone who is funny/amusing (though this often morphs into someone who is dorky/trying too hard/completely esoteric/boring). I see someone who wants to be a good person, to be generous, kind and giving, but who realistically allows her inner demons and her selfishness and narcissism to oftentimes keep her from being that good person. I see someone who has the capacity to present as attractive, but who also has the capacity for appearing ugly, and she slips between the two at will. Somehow, when I am in the ugly phase, it seems intolerable to have people see me (so again with the hiding). So I guess I need to add profound vanity to my list of what I see. I see someone who really desperately wants to be grateful and appreciative for the blessings in her life, and who hates herself more every day for her lack of gratitude and her ridiculous grousing and persistent and inexplicable whining. I see someone who has been driven by guilt and fear and and anxiety her whole life. It has allowed her to be a "successful" professional, but I think it has made her a failure personally. This is the one problem that the drive of fear, anxiety, and guilt can't fix. They are the problem.

I am not perfect. No one expects me to be perfect. Well, one person does. I do. Actually, I don't even expect myself to be perfect. I have always said so, and I have believed it. Really. Perfect is unrealistic. So pragmatic as I am, apparently I just expect myself to be able to put up a passable facade of perfect. I feel I am so flawed, I can only be loved if I can do it better than the rest. But a facade isn't even doing it, so what am I doing?

I really would like one day where I woke up and I was so pleased to be me, so happy with what I saw in the mirror, with the person I am in my mind. Where I didn't want for anything.

I don't know how to get there. I have been so sad lately because I feel like I have run out of options. Short of moving so that maybe I can do the feng shui thing right, I just don't know that there is anything left for me to try to make myself feel better. Inevitably, as I ride out the wave of my own struggles, things always get better. Never fails. But I am just so tired of heading back down this road time and again. It is an ugly place, a lonely place. A place where you are your own worst enemy. A perennial victim of "friendly fire" -- which doesn't make it any less dangerous or the wounds any less deep.

I do not know why I dislike myself so much. Maybe if I can figure out where my relationship with myself soured, I can broker some kind of peace agreement. That could be the something new I haven't tried yet. It is worth looking into. We shall see.

Otherwise, I am going to have to move so my windows are facing east.

These are the facts, and they are undisputed.

Naked Lunch

I am having lunch with my mother tomorrow. Which is unremarkable, but for the fact that we have spoken only a handful of times since Christmas, and the only time I have actually seen her since then was at my father's birthday dinner in July.

She lives about 20 minutes away.

Our relationship began to spoil about four years ago, when I allowed myself to be bullied into an ill advised investment. Numerous tearful exchanges, a variety of 6 to 8 month periods of not interacting, and my unending state of continuous denial later, we are having lunch. A cozy party of four. Mother, child, the ill advised investment, and either her failure (or mine) to extricate me from it as the pink elephant in the room.

I need to talk to her. I need to wrest control of the situation back. I need to make her hear me. I need to confront these demons -- the last, and actually, the only which have caused me prolonged stress due to sheer anger. This topic is the only one I can think of, in all my life, that has provoked a visceral and unending anger in me. I have to exorcise the anger. It burns. I generally try to ignore it, but my heart tells a different story. It bears the telltale blistering and puckering. Ever-raw and unhealed.

But this anger, this unexplained rage -- its strength scares me. And only now am I beginning to realize it is because the pool from which it emanates is so much deeper than I had ever realized. The investment isn't the issue. My mother ignoring my opinions isn't the issue. The issue is that the lesson I learned early on, the one I have spent my whole life working towards applying, is that I don't want to live a life like my mother's. And with this ill-fated investment, I feel she has pulled me into that morass. The one that made my breath short as a child, that seemingly compelled me to ensure dinner be made and the house cleaned prior to my father getting home every day in the hopes he would be a little less angry, that spoke with a soft Spanish whisper of "shhhh, don't tell your father" right in front of his uni-lingual-face, that post-dated checks, that was generous with promises, but always made you never want to ask "how" when they where actually fulfilled, that always screened calls, that prized cash-and-carry as the existence of a viable credit card was always a dubious proposition, that was always scrapping and planning, and hoping and wishing and risking and betting, with a wink and prayer that it would all turn out okay.

It did. Well fed and properly clothed, exceptionally educated and not at all deprived is how I turned out. I was a fortunate kid. I am grateful. But that fortune was so hard fought. The battle scared me. I worried about survival from one day of the battle to the next. I worried about the foot soldiers. I was always worried. I was always insecure. I was always afraid.

There was no safety net.

And after all these years, there still isn't.

I am my own safety net. I accept that. I am proud that I can do that. But I am fiercely protective of it. The one thing I loved about working at the firm was that I never had to think about money. I just don't want to think of it. I want it to be a non-issue. I have enough for what I need and for a fair amount of what I want, and that is that. When that is threatened, my whole world seems tremulous. A quivering house of cards that can fall at any moment.

And I fear, as I down shifted the fiscal benefits of my career, that my mother now has the power. The power to pull me down, to pull me under, to drag me out to sea, untethered, unmoored.

I need to talk to her. I need her to hear me.

I am afraid.

Maybe, Just Maybe

Here is a question: If the only knowledge you had of me was through reading this blog, do you know me? Are the words that appear here the "real" me? Would reading these words give you greater insight into who I am than hanging out with me on a regular basis?

In my lawyerly inherently-relativist way, I think the answer is both yes and no.

To know the cyber-me, is to know the peaks and valleys, but none of the landscape in-between. To be fair, there have been a number of stretches of time in the past few years when there wasn't really any landscape in between to report on. Nonetheless, when I write here, it is because I am compelled. I never write out of duty or regularity or even habit. I try to write when I have something to say, but, oftentimes, it is more like I write because I have something to spill. Feelings that are just spilling over and that I can't process any other way than to spew them forth in print, to try to find some safe place to contain them. Though I had never really thought about it, this has long been my practice, even prior to this cyber-endeavor. Often when putting my hand in a long unused pocket or reorganizing an oft-neglected corner, I find folded pieces of paper documenting some angst of the moment in desperate and shrieking tones. Everything is so serious. Everything is so determinative. Funny how different and how very much the same my little scrap paper missives of my adolescence and my cyber entries of today are in both tenor and pitch.

My writing has always been the primary outlet for my scared little girl, afraid of her own shadow and unsure of how to protect herself in a world that made her feel so helplessly out of control. It is only there where she gets a voice. In the real world, she is only found in wracked sobs or rivers of tears. I guess I have always been loathe to speak out loud about a lot of my dark crevices. Actually, I don't think that I could. Correction: I don't think that I could do so without having written them out first. And that is not a matter of scripting things for more palatable consumption by others, but more so because I can't communicate something I myself don't understand. And truly, oftentimes, I have no idea what my feelings are or where they might be coming from till I read the product of my own furious fingers. Even then, my ability to share out loud is limited. There is a line in the sand that I will not cross. I had been so religious about it for so long that I forgot that there might be anything that existed beyond that line. Hence my laughable belief (and I swear, I wholeheartedly believed it up until last summer) that I was an open person.

I always thought being open was a position of vulnerability. But it isn't, it is a matter of trust. And not even trust in the other person, but trust in yourself. Your trust in your own fundamental goodness, and your trust in your choices of the people with whom you have surrounded yourself. Your trust that even if you disappoint people with what you tell them or that they disappoint you with their reactions, that being open was the right thing to do.

In a lot of ways, to this point, I have failed. My life has been characterized by a lack of trust, a lack of faith. In so many ways, it is such an unfair and unreasonable position for me to take. I have been so blessed in this life with more than my fair share of people who have stood by me from the beginning of our relationship to the present day. Even when things are bad, especially when they are. When I have been less of a friend than I should have been, as well as when I was actually present. It is stunning good fortune. It is a solid platform upon which to believe, to reach out, to trust, to let go of the fear.

But I have always been a glass is half empty kind of gal. Funny thing, that, as it really is not a result of my being a cynic, but rather because I am a closet addict to hope. In the fun house mirror inside my head, I have long been a bearer of talismanic worry. If I worry that the worst will happen, if I squelch my impulse to hope that the best will happen, then at least the worst won't occur. What kind of a desired outcome is that? Seriously? It may head off (at least some) searing pain, but the endgame is, by definition, dissatisfaction.

Despite my contemporaneous protestations to the contrary, to this point, things in my life have actually turned out just as they should. That boy (okay, the many boys) I "loved" that I thought I should have been with "forever", the (numerous) jobs I thought I should have which would have made me "so happy", the (various) schools I just had to go to because otherwise my life was "over." All not true. In fact, the alternative result was so much the better -- in the end. Hindsight is 20/20 and perhaps that same hopeful schmuck inside of me is what makes me want to justify all of the events in my life as "ultimately positive" and "hard lessons learned." But the Oprah-speak, therapeutic culture of which I am a product aside, I can see how certain life twists and turns that I disagreed with so vehemently at the time really worked out to my benefit (though I certainly protested, wailed and rended garments enough at the time). Example: the Cubs Fan "breaking up" with me last summer (which was odd because it was only at that moment that I was sure we were "dating"). It felt like the end of the world. I tried to filibuster the relationship back over the course three hours and as many cocktails. And yet for all his faults, he was (let's give him the benefit of the doubt) intuitive enough to make a point to me as to why he thought things didn't work out (hint: it was me, but simply that there wasn't enough of me. More sharing, less obfuscating.) In many ways the statement was outrageous and out -of-line, but mostly because it was true. And being forced to look at it, was a revelation. My own long held assumptions had blinded me to what others could plainly see. Needed to assume less, trust more. Listen better. Think less, feel more. Act accordingly.

All of these people showed me what is possible, and what I want and what I didn't. My academic life is over (unless I happen to win the lottery), my work life is stable and contented (for once), and I am so lucky for having all of my friends. The last missing component is that romantic part, and it does require me to put some things together.

After all of this -- the wit, the wisdom, the whining encompassed within nearly three decades -- I have concluded that the truth is this: Relationships are in fact simple: Holding someone's heart close to your own requires simply this -- you each must provide constant care and feeding to both of those hearts. That is not neediness. That is not obsession. That is love. Plain and simple. Love survives past the initial phases of giddy chemical attraction and through the mire and muck of life only because you both choose for it to do so. You pay attention. You compromise. You share. You talk. You trust. And you do it all again and again, without question, hesitation (though likely a fair amount of exasperation). All of these done, with love, in the deepest, most difficult and knotty sense. Why do you do this? Because you know you both have someone who "gets" you -- all of you -- and you both remind yourself of the precious nature of that gift every day. Even when they are spiteful, even when you are cranky, even when life rains down cruelty, or when tempers concurrently flare. You are angry, but in your heart you remember. You remember the why of that other person. Difficult and angry emotions expressed eventually evaporate, but (I imagine) the why never does.

Life is a difficult process when you navigate it alone. It is foolhardy to expect it to be easier when navigating together and all of the politics and negotiation that that inevitably requires. It is the pay-off of the pleasure of someone's company on that extended journey, and the trust that they will travel with you, no matter what, that makes the difficulties worth it.

Life isn't easy, but it can be happy. But lasting happiness -- whatever form in which it comes -- requires effort. Life is not static. Adjustments must always be made.

Then again, I guess this is the point where my theory of relationship simplicity begins to falter, and where the complicated part comes in. Knowing you need to make continual adjustments is just half the battle, knowing when and how much adjustment is required is another matter.

And so again, it seems we are back to trust.

Trusting in yourself and the other person, to know when to tighten up and when to grant a little slack.

Equal parts bravery and intuition. And a fair measure of luck.

But then again, it is easy for me to pontificate and make sweeping pronouncements, as, at the end of the day, what do I know? I haven't had any kind of a significant relationship in years. And in a truth I have long been unwilling to admit to myself, for me love is simply conjecture, purely theoretical, as it seems to me that love is more a carpool lane, than a single commuter endeavor, and therefore admission requires two people equally invested in the ride. "One-sided love" is, by definition, simply infatuation, right?

Anyway, in another truth about myself that I have always been unwilling to admit, I really am hopeful at heart. Frustrated and prone to self-pity, but deep down hopeful. The hope keeps me going, but the hope keeps me scared. The hope keeps me feeling vulnerable, In many ways, the hope keeps me alone. But in the end it is hope, and it is a precious and beautiful thing, and, much as it might vex me, it is an amazing gift.

If only I knew what to do with it.

Maybe, just maybe, if we can walk forward hand-in-hand -- the little girl and I -- and, all the while, I can carry the hope -- both woven into my heart and written upon my sleeve -- then maybe, just maybe, she and I can find exactly what we are looking for.

We'll know it when we feel it.

Object Lessons

In retrospect, perhaps scheduling a first date on Friday the 13th was not the wisest course of action.

Nonetheless, some object lessons, in no particular order:

• I can in fact be attracted to someone who is not arrogant, snobbish or in any way pretentious.
• Amazing character can in fact come in an Abercrombie & Fitch-looking package.
• I clearly must have a subconscious hero complex.
• I may, in all likelihood, be too weird to date.
• My time in BigLaw, even when I try to give it a positive retrospective spin, is inconceivable, and more than slightly disturbing, to anyone who is unfamiliar with the genre (read: anyone happy, well adjusted and normal).
• Given that, I am not sure how one goes about explaining away six years of living an inconceivable, disturbing workaholic life. Feels like it might be easier (and more acceptable) to say I was in a coma for the last half-decade and have recently awoken. Hell, it would be easier to say I had had some sort of vicious addiction and been in rehab for the better part of the 21st century.
• I have no hobbies. I always hate confessing that. I am not sure that I really want any - it seems like there is enough to do in life already - but I realize it makes me sound (or maybe just makes me) incredibly boring and pathetic.
• I am more confident than I have ever been in my life. However, clearly, that isn't saying much.
  
• I don't think I could possibly be more socially awkward. Truly, there ought to be an award for it. I could use a plaque to put on the wall in my office.
  
• It is so much easier to complain about being alone when one is only theoretically dating. Actually being out there is scary. It is an amount of vulnerability that I had avoided for a better part of a year. I forgot the potential for exhilaration and for bruising disappointment in the risk/reward arena.
• It is a good thing I am out there.
• But it is hard.
  
• Really hard.
  
• And I worry.
  
• A lot.