Day 2,678: Standing Up

I haven’t written in a long time. There are a lot of reasons for that. The main one is that I finally realized I was in the throes of a crushing depression, and I needed specific intervention. The light went on when I realized I had finally managed to lose a few of the 10 pounds I had wanted to lose—because I was too apathetic to eat. I found myself crying, an alien scenario for me. I didn’t want to do anything or see anyone; I wanted to flee, to get a divorce, quit my job, move. My anxiousness and restlessness were at fever pitch. I knew I did not just need therapy. And so, I, the person who hates taking medication more than anything, asked to go on antidepressants. I asked my gynecologist. If you read this blog, you won’t find that odd. Within five days of taking 10 mg of Lexapro, I was baking a cake. I felt like a totally different person. Three months in, and the difference is astounding. The fatigue, loss of libido and even the possibility that this drug is destroying my liver (since I was on liver-killing anticonvulsants my entire childhood and I took liver-altering chemo as well) have not stopped me from thinking the drug in some ways has saved me.

In a sense, Lexapro made it possible for me to help myself in other ways. At the same time, I started going to a trauma-based therapy practice—the first time I have ever found therapy to be useful. This was after I read an article about trauma-based therapy and saw that I had not one or two but at least five different categories of things that qualified me. I also decided to stop drinking, and I never even drank much. I did all of these three things at the same time. And I came to realize that I had been living under a continuous haze of PTSD, not since cancer—for probably at least 30 years. Do not think I am being dramatic or seeking sympathy. I have learned that coping mechanisms are just that—they can be extremely positive. I have learned a lot of things about myself now that the chemicals have released me from decades of constant agitation, anger and furiously-driven purpose. I have been able to sit back a little, and reflect.

I will write more about all of that in another post. Today, however, I want to talk about something else. And I haven’t written in a long time, so it will be a long one.

The last week has been filled with the same public insanity and inanity that has become our common culture. The person who is representing our country to the world berated an entire continent and two unrelated countries, all of which are populated by mostly black and brown people, as shitholes, while opining about Norwegians helping him fulfill his Aryan race fantasy. At the same time, the #metoo movement collided with the equal pay movement in an absurd situation in which one male actor made $1.5 million while the leading female actor in the movie made $1,000 for a reshoot that had to take place because one of the other actors was a pedophile and sexual predator. The male actor waited for all of his coworkers to make a deal to get the project completed, threatened to refuse to “authorize” the use of the replacement actor who could wipe the floor with him from an acting perspective, and then negotiated his deal. That guy also, incidentally, has a past history of violent hate crimes against black and Asian Americans.

Welcome to America.

I have been involved in multiple social media discussions about both of these issues. Until reading a recent piece in the Washington Post, I could not exactly put my finger on what bothered me so much about the confluence of these two events. One has a much greater global impact, obviously. They seem completely unrelated. So what did I see in these events that brought out some of the old anger that had driven me my whole life, until I got this short reprieve?

It is the way we reward terrible behavior—not the way we forgive it, or look past it, but the way we reward it.

We really only do this with white men, as a rule, but it is that which infuriates me. I have listened to so many (usually men) tell me that an actor who uses others’ generosity to get something for himself is just a good businessman, that his manipulation of others’ goodwill is nothing but a pointer to how weak and ineffective and stupid the people (women, often) on the other side must be. We have to hear our political leaders defend the indefensible by saying everyone talks that way, which is not only not true, but even if it were, is not something to find admirable. An actor, I should understand, is not working for a charity project, or a nonprofit organization (and always the sneer that I hear, and have always heard, including in my professional life, when people say “charity” and “nonprofit”). People need to make money, Katy. And, apparently, people who are mediocre need to make 1,000 times more money than every single one of their co-workers, or they need to become president—not because they deserve it, but because their lack of deserving it and asking for it anyway somehow MAKES THEM DESERVING.

We did not elect an unrepentant racist and white nationalist to our highest office by accident. We did not put a serial sexual predator, a noxious misogynist, a toxic xenophobic, in the Oval Office because we as a society looked the other way. People ADMIRE those traits about the current president. The worse he reveals himself to us, the more there is a subset of society—or maybe a bigger part of it than that—that is thinking, this guy is so bad, it must mean he’s better than the rest of us, because he’s getting away with it.

He profited off of the foreclosure crisis and discriminated against minority buyers—he’s a shrewd businessman trying to get his! This other guy asked for a pardon of his detestable hate crimes so his restaurant business could be more profitable—you can’t hold that against him! Their total lack of concern for other people or how their actions impact those in close proximity to them cannot be—gasp—used to form negative attitudes towards them or think they are terrible people. Of course not! We can only use past incidences of rich white men being terrible as a way to slyly laugh about them and denigrate their accusers and detractors.

It is not only not acceptable to formulate negative opinions of (certain) people who have done selfish and destructive things—we seem to have a masochistic need to reward these people/often men. We promote them. We elect them. We defend them, when they don’t deserve it. We see a man treating people horribly in the office and decide, well, he must have some leadership skills! We put narcissists in charge of the courts, brutes in charge of companies, corrupt sycophants in charge of large school systems, psychopaths in high offices.

And even that is not enough. We have to--to justify this--denigrate people who object. People who work together or forgo salary in a collaborative moment in response to a terrible situation are idiots, weak, losers, they have no idea what they’re doing and they make terrible decisions. People who decry the depravity and sophomoric language of an abusive and racist blowhard are lazy, out of touch, liars, and in denial about their true feelings.

What is required of detractors, apparently, is forgiveness—we must forgive all of these men their sins, no matter how destructive, violent, abusive, selfish, or impotent their actions are, we must forgive. In fact, the worse the behavior, the more we should praise them, because look how far they’ve come! They’ve made a lot of money, gained a lot of influence, they are laughing all the way to the bank! Well, of course they are—because we are driving their Uber to the bank for them and thanking them for the privilege when they stiff us as they flee the car. We are rewarding them for being terrible. And you know what? We should stop.

There is no situation in which you are successful, or happy, or healthy, that should bar you from thinking about other people and, yes, even putting them above yourself. There is no situation in which you are unlucky or suffering in which you should get a pass for using that bad situation to make things worse for other people. And there is no world that I want to be a part of where charity and compassion are four letter words and greed and egomania are blessings.

I’m sure, like many things I’ve written here, this seems like a long diatribe of seemingly unrelated words that I’m using to denounce perceived injustice. And that’s probably true. One thing I have learned about myself from therapy is that it is, actually, difficult for me to feel certain things; this includes the fact that it is difficult for me to feel that my problems matter. I have written for years about cancer without really writing about it, I’ve used this forum as a way to write about social injustice issues that matter to me. I have used my experience to illustrate my points because that is actually how I view my own experiences—as objective examples that are useful to make a broader point. You might have noticed that in all of these words, there is not a lot about how I FEEL, but a hell of a lot about what I THINK. Such is the nature of the person I have become.

And why the preceding paragraph? Well, because I am going to do what I do. I’m going to use a personal story as an example of why we should not reward selfish behavior.

As a kid, as you all know, I had epilepsy. To make a long story short, when I was 8, a doctor whom I now believe was somewhat of a sadist, kept me in the hospital for a week doing tests on me like a guinea pig because he would not admit that my body was having a toxic reaction to my toxic medication. That whole story is for another day. Today, for the first time, I can say something about one of the most traumatic things that happened to me due to my chronic medical condition as a child. I am convinced that children with such conditions learn early to disassociate themselves from their bodies (and not, necessarily, in a bad way—again, that is for another post) because they are forced to relinquish control of their bodies to adults and agree to do absurd and painful things. In this instance, my neurologist decided he needed to give me a barium enema, to try to diagnose an abdominal condition that he most likely knew did not exist.

I was 8.

If you aren’t aware of what this procedure is, it is a large amount of barium inserted into your rectum. I might have weighed 40 pounds when I was 8. To get the procedure, I was put into a communal room with others who were having barium enemas, separated only by hospital curtains. Two adult women were before me. I sat there, patiently, listening to them screaming from the pain of the procedure. They both just screamed and wailed. I knew that what they were experiencing was coming for me, with no way to prepare myself for the pain, and the disadvantage of being a quarter of their size.

Then, it was my turn. The pain was so, so unbearable. It took my breath away.

And I did not utter a sound. I did not even cry, except perhaps silently.

I told my therapist this story, because I thought it represented something about the way I have handled things in my life—for better or worse. But then she asked me a question that took me by surprise. She asked me how it made me feel. How what made me feel? How the women screaming made me feel. I could tell, when I answered and saw the look on her face, that she had expected me to say “it terrified me, it made it so much worse.”

Instead I said: it made me so fucking angry. I could not believe they could be that selfish. How could they scream like that, knowing other people , including a child, were about to have the same procedure? How could they be so focused on themselves? I decided right then and there I would never be like them, that I would never be that person.

I am not here to say whether or not my reaction was the right one, or a healthy or normal one. I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. I do know this. Decades later, when I was getting chemo for my second cancer, and a woman who had refused to get a port even though she hated needles was screaming bloody murder about their IV attempts and causing a huge scene, I remembered being 8 years old. I got up from my chemo chair with the needle still in my arm and wheeled my IV stand over to a nurse. I told her to get that woman the hell out of the communal chemo area. Give her her own room. Make her family of 7 leave (most people were there with no one or one other person). I was furious. I said, I have done this 15 times. But other women here have never done this. They are already terrified. She has no right to be here, getting special attention from four nurses, while other women are silently enduring her screams, imagining how awful chemo will be.

She has no right.

And she didn’t. and he didn’t, and he doesn’t, and he doesn’t. We must stop rewarding people for being self-absorbed and injurious to other people. We must start rewarding people for being thoughtful and empathetic, for thinking of others first. And if we, as a society, cannot do that, then we, as individuals, had better get up out of the goddamn chair and say something.