Someone once said that, if you live long enough, you’ll have the opportunity to face all of your rash judgments, one by one, as they become you. At least, I think someone did. Or, someone should have.
For me, I have recently faced two of these lickle nasties, moments of extreme negative judgment of others that have come back to haunt me as I have embodied them myself. I’m sure there are many more, but these two stand out today.
The To-Do List of Sanity
In the early 2000s, perhaps a year or two after the towers fell, I visited a friend who had recently moved into a houseshare in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. He had two housemates, one a rather ridiculous German who regularly filmed porn in his bedroom, and the other an incredibly shy, somewhat mousy and nervous younger woman, who, as far as I could tell, spent most of her time smoking a giant bong and scurrying around the flat with a large, 5-subject Mead notebook shoved protectively in her arms.
I didn’t speak to either of them very much, although they were welcoming and kind to me as I crashed on their sofa, and I knew of them mostly by their noises: Him, various grunts and yeses coming from his room; her, a quiet that was broken only in the late evening hours as she stomped down the hallway in platform boots on her way to her job as a dominatrix.
One morning, I went into the kitchen to get a glass of water, and I saw the coveted Mead notebook sitting on the counter next to the fridge. It was opened to its most current page — about half-way through — and had a meticulous to-do list on it, laid out with boxes to the left, from the top of the page to the bottom.
- Wake up
- Roll over
- Take a bong hit
- Get out of bed
- Walk to the door
- Open the door
- Walk into the hallway
- Turn right
- Walk to the bathroom
- Open the bathroom door
- Enter the bathroom
- Turn on the light
- Shut the bathroom door
- Walk to the toilet
- Pull down panties
- Sit on the toilet
- Shit
- … etc.
Now, I am an ardent fan of the to-do list — I have to-do lists of the to-do lists that I need to make! — but this seemed a tad bit unhinged to me. I mean, who can shit on demand?!?! I flipped back through the pages and they were all like this, documenting each movement from waking up until going to bed.
When I mentioned the discovery to my friend later, he said that she had fairly extreme OCD and ADHD and this was the only way that she could cope. Each night, she charted out the movements of the next day, and then she could sleep; but she could only sleep if she checked off each of those movements during the day, too.
I remember thinking how horrifying it must be to not have any spontaneity in my life; to just have an endless to-do list, day in and day out, comprised of minutia and basic bodily functions. That seemed like no way to live.
Cut to me roughly 25 years later, and I cannot fucking function without a detailed to-do list each day. In fact, it feels like it’s the only thing keeping me together, sometimes. At present, I feel rather directionless and without a path or purpose, and so the to-do lists are keeping me straight. I now understand the sweet comfort of the detailed checked-in boxes, especially in times of both internal and external turmoil, to pull things down into the micro when the macro is, quite simply, out of fucking control.
So I have lived long enough to realize what I had judged as unhinged was really a way of operating in the chaos of the world, still being able to get out of bed each day, and function.
Prozac Nation
When I was about fifteen, the women from the Mormon church had gotten a bug up their butts to try to “reactivate” my mom. Each year, there’s a big conference in Salt Lake City, a couple of weeks of classes and such, workshops about heysoos and the Mormon’s unique perspective on reality, and these women invited my mom to go. I went along for the roadtrip, and to stay with an aunt and uncle while my mom attended the conference. Legit, I just wanted to get out of town.
Sandwiched between two middle aged women in the back of sedan for the better part of 12 hours, I listened to them wax poetic about their lives: All of them didn’t really work in the traditional sense, but they each had at least five children, headed up various activities in the scouts, at the church, in the schools, and spent much of their life trying to nurture a community and make adults who wouldn’t fuck shit up too bad. Heck, some of them even succeeded in one or both endeavors.
This was around 1990, a few years after Prozac had been introduced in the US, and all of the women except my mom spoke of it in reverent terms. It changed their lives. They wouldn’t be alive without it. It completely turned everything around for them. They don’t know what they would do without it. They went from crying all day and not being able to get out of bed to being themselves again.
Now, as a quasi-punk rabble rouser of a teen, my takeaway from all of this was if you bitches didn’t live such horrible, oppressed lives then maybe you wouldn’t need happy drugs to make everything okay. Their tales of biochemical triumph made me sad for them, pity them. They had such little power in their own lives that all they could do was take a drug to feel okay about it. To me, it didn’t seem that much different from any other drug addict running from reality on the back of a pharmaceutical dragon.
Cut to me roughly 35 years later, in the throes of perimenopause, looking back on that drive and realizing that every. single. one. of those women were the age I am now, or around it, and were all very likely in the biochemical chaos that is perimenopause — and, no, the irony is not lost on me that my salty judgment all those years ago was being leveled when I, myself, was in a similar biochemical war zone, just at the opposite end of the experience — and I’m like, motherfuck.
Who knows if their lives actually sucked? Who knows if they felt oppressed? That judgment was 100% informed by my own sense of self and the oppression I felt in the church, even as a child, but who’s to say that they didn’t dig it?
What I do know is that the present day, capitalist-inspired obsession with menopause was not even a twinkle in anyone’s eyes at that point, and those women were not being told about what might be going on with their hormones, they were just prescribed drugs.
But my judgments became biases that ultimately became a prejudice, to the extent that I was terrified of trying anti-depressants to manage my extreme mood and hormonal fluctuations, and I probably white knuckled it for a year longer than I needed to, just because of that teenage prejudice calling the shots.
And here I am all of these years later, hopped up on HRT and Prozac, just trying to keep it together through my meticulous to-do lists as the world slowly melts into itself, and I have to own up to my mea culpas and remind myself, each day: Just fucking give grace. No reason. Just do it.
