Plate o' Shrimp

Long Lost Post

Here is something I wrote almost two weeks ago in California---

Tomrrow New York

Thursday---Grenada

more from the road soon....

Sa

Checkbook mind


It is twenty minutes past midnight—just barely Thursday December 29th. I am at what has been my home for the last 10 days, the couch in the living room of my Mom’s elegant Palo Alto condo. I had meant to get any early start to my Dad’s in Cherry Valley tomorrow but my head has been swirling with an assortment of mental grocery lists and speculations and sleep now seems very far away.

At the foot of the couch I have a brand new neat little black canvas medical bag that I filled this evening and showed to my Mom who said “there you go, Doctor Alvord.”


My house is sold, my tickets purchased, my financial aid has come through ( I was even awarded a merit based scholarship!) and so now it seems real.

I am moving to Grenada in less than two weeks

I am attending the medical school that became my top choice

And I will become a physician.


It feels as if I have left my old life already. Two weeks ago Sunday I left New Mexico for an extended visit in the Bay Area—spending time with Mom who has been incredibly supportive and connecting and reconnecting with old friends.


I got to connect with my dear friend Dan—who I had not seen in between five and ten years (we couldn’t figure out how long it had been) After a surreally long two hour drive from Palo Alto to the City, we met in a tea house on a rainy slightly cool and muggy San Francisco night. We caught up on our stories, although I think Dan still owes me some. I was telling the tale of the Zen center I belonged to until it folded because the teacher there was having an affair with one of his students and had made passes at many more. When asked about the Zen Center I usually talk about how I found it because of a writing workshop that was being held there—but when Dan asked me why I meditated what I got out of it— I told him that meditation really helped me with my anxiety attacks and I told him a little about my found years and my bad case of checkbook mind.

This is the long story. Dan got the short one. It is important to me that I tell it now before I forget what brought me to this point—and how the parts I didn’t talk about were the hardest ones.

About a decade ago I did something similar to what I am doing now. I sold my house, did some traveling and tore up my old life and tried to reinvent my self. I moved to Colorado, fell in love hard and tried unsuccessfully to be something other than a chef. I though my relationship with K was it—the one in the most romanticized and unrealistic way. And I ended it—and he was with someone new days later so I must have had some semblance of functioning emotional radar left—and I took it very hard. I remember going into work—a small resort in the mountains-- and lying on the floor in the back banquet room and crying for hours on end. I let depression and anxiety chase me to Seattle and back to Santa Fe again. I had a sales job that was bruising my ego and was even more bruised when I was laid off. Living on my unemployment I had little excuse to leave the house.. and so I didn’t. The anxiety attacks I had all my life became frequent unwanted visitors. What was worse than the paralyzing attacks of fear of my own annihilation was the fear that someone would find out that I was having them.

And eventually, thank god, my unemployment ran out and I had to get a job. I started working for a small gallery 10 minutes from my house. Started putting my finances together a bit, and somehow managed to tell my dear friend miss Shelly that I couldn’t go out to dinner because I was afraid I would have an anxiety attack.
She told me it wasn’t Okay to be that way and gave me J. the shrink’s number.

I called j. the shrink and finally found a therapist who I wasn’t smarted than I was so I couldn’t out maneuver. J was no nonsense and straight forward, with a no whining sign on his bookshelf near the clock. After a couple of hours he sent me home with a single juggling ball with the instruction that I should CLOSE MY EYES and toss it from one had to the other. Anxiety attacks, he explained, arose in part from a localization of brain activity in one hemisphere. It wasn’t a cure-all, but it helped.

It was at about at that time that I started going to the Zendo for Sunday morning meditation.


And for months, on the mornings that it was really really hard just to get out of bed, I got out of bed telling myself I all had to do that day was toss the ball and sit facing the wall for ten minutes and then I could go back to bed if I needed to. After tossing the ball and sitting with the wall, I never needed too.

Eventually I stopped needing to toss the ball, but I sat more and more.
For four years I lived in a lovely crumbling old adobe with friends who became like family, working a simple job ten minutes away and sitting Tuesday nights in Lamy—Sundays in Albuquerque—at home most mornings and a few long retreats toward the end.

I think of this time as my found years. Not that I believe in the concept of enlightenment. Most of the folks I have met who think they are enlightened or who are overly concerned with seeking enlightenment simply seem to have stopped looking at themselves and have grown intolerant of the human frailties of others. But meditating as much as I did I found out some things. Like I have a very busy mind, that is full of lists, that is eager to problem solve, obsess over and over about the same things. And I am a verbal processor and no matter how long the meditation retreat, my internal monologue never shuts off. In the end if I let go of things through meditation it was because I found myself boring—in I can’t believe I am still obsessing over this petty shit sort of way. What I found was the very changeable me, my sanity and my neuroses, my kindness and my pettiness, my intelligence and my denial. And I started to get to know myself without trying to edit who I was first.

Four years ago I had a very different holiday. I was back in school and had the time finally to sit some long meditation retreats. In Dec ember 2001 I sat an eight-day silent meditation retreat. I went home to Santa Fe for a sweet and somber Christmas with Lily and Susan—who had just lost her father. I went back to the Zendo after four or five days for a five-day new years retreat. My retreat experience was intense. I was sitting the full retreat schedule and running the kitchen for all the retreat participants so that I could attend for free. Late one afternoon 3 or 4 days into the year’s retreat I had a full-blown anxiety attack while meditating. I flushed with panic.. my heart started racing I felt like jumping up and running to my room to hide. I had long feared that I would get an anxiety attack while meditating with in the zendo with my fellow students and that I would embarrass myself and show them how crazy I was.

I didn’t run away--- I did what my fellow students told me they did when unpleasant or unwanted emotions came up during meditation. I invited my fear to sit down and stay awhile, to see what it had to say to me. In some small corner of my brain I gave myself permission to have a full meltdown. I trusted that those folks I practiced with would take care of my if I ending up a shaking crying puddle on the floor. And as soon as I did that my fear went away. And for a few heartbeats I thought of nothing--- and then my old friend checkbook mind came back and I listened to myself think soup I was making for dinner and who was signed up to serve it.

Friends and acquaintances tell me it must be so hard to go back to school, that I am so courageous to sell all my things and move out of the country.

But I love school, I love to study. And all those things I had filled my house with—even my books, didn’t matter as much as becoming a physician-- so I had a smile on my face as I pushed three grocery carts filled with books into the local Salvation Army.

For me, as busy as the last few months have been, all those overt efforts at change have not been the hard part. I didn’t tell most people about the really hard things, the ones that led me to this moment as surely as my A in Organic chemistry did.

What was hard was telling Shelly that I had anxiety attacks

What was hard was going the zendo to sit that first time

It took all my courage some mornings to get out of bed those mornings when I felt so worthless and fearful that if anyone looked at me I would simply cease to exist.

Even as my anxiety attacks and depression had almost entirely lost its grip on me, other new hard times presented themselves.

A few months after my retreat filled December, my teacher resigned because of his affair with a student and the Zendo folded. It was not hard to loose my teacher—he did not change after all-- only my perception of him did. It was hard to loose the Sangha—the community of Zen students who were fractured by those events.

And then there were loved ones with cancer—the pain of their death and the pain of my relationship to those who loved those who died changing as well.

And my fear of the depression I felt after I ended my relationship with K still haunts me enough that I have spent the last decade alone.

Persevering through the long frustrating limbo of finding the medical school that was right for me has been incredibly difficult as well.

Stepping onto that plane in January will be the easy compared to those things.

Before we were to do a new form of service in the zendo one day, which made most of the student edgy at best and fearful at the worst, my teacher said to us something to this effect “it is hard to do things new because we want to do them correctly but don’t know how to do them correctly--- but you should taste that not knowing, it may be sweet”

And all the not knowing ahead of me seems incredibly sweet now.

I am not excited precisely, but I move forward in wonder and gratitude that I have even a shot at becoming a physician, that I get to go to Grenada for two years to study, that I get to come back to California to be closer to my family to do my clincals, that I will get to see much more of my friends and family if even half of the people who have said “Oh we are definitely visiting you in Grenada” actually show up, and that I get to attend an internationally focused medical school with a good reputation that is filled with students who, like me, do not fit the traditional mode. I am doing what I want to do professionally, and leaving my previous employer on good terms with the respect and admiration of my colleagues. I will wake up two weeks and a day from today in my dorm room off Grand Anse beach in Grenada.

I have no idea how this will all turn out. I know it won’t be what I expect it will be. And that thought just makes me smile. And as it is now twenty past two—I am off to seek the sleep I need for the next day that will bring me a little further down the road.

posted by Sa @ 1:50 AM