CW: Suicide

Sherrie was my friend.

Sherrie and I never met in person. We talked on the phone once ever for a few seconds. But we interacted a lot via text - on a posting board, over LiveJournal, via email, via snail mail. I crocheted Sherrie a hat that I never got around to sending her. When I was in my first year of teaching, Sherrie sent me letters and stickers and a magnet. The stickers were glittery kittens and autumnal leaves. Sherrie loved glitter.

I was in my second year of full-time teaching when Sherrie died by suicide. I didn’t find out about it until five days after it happened. When I found out, I was devastated. My heart was broken. I knew Sherrie lived with bipolar type II. I knew she had gotten a lot of help and it had never been enough.

Sherrie wrote beautifully. Sherrie would dress up in fun ways. Sherrie was a glamazon. Sherrie made some of her friends angry. Sherrie was a lot.

Sherrie was a mom. (I can’t say more than that because this is the part that makes me cry the most.)

Two days after I found out about Sherrie, I had a meeting with an assistant principal to discuss a classroom observation she had conducted in my class a few days earlier. It was the Ides of March. As a Latin teacher, I carried on a tradition my teacher had of having “toga day” on March 15; students got extra credit for coming to school draped in a toga, and as a teacher, I participated too.

So there I was, sitting in this AP’s office, KNOWING I was about to hear about a terrible observation because the day she had observed was Not Good. The class she had observed was my most challenging class ever. While I’m pleased to report that the students who challenged me the most in that class turned into lovely adults who I sometimes ran into because one of them was in undergrad at the same university where I was working and then getting my PhD, at the time, they had their own stuff going on at home and I was Not Equipped to support them through it. The school had failed to implement a key piece of their IEPs and it left them and me high and dry and none of us had what we needed to turn that into a positive experience.

So the AP observed me teaching that class, a class I never did a good job in and where most of my students learned a lot more about Roman civilization and culture via documentary video than they ever learned about language, because it was the only way I could manage for us to all get along and we were all, together, in survival mode.

Like I said - I knew this was going to be a bad review. I hoped the AP would have some suggestions for how to handle it.

My eyes were red and puffy because I had been crying for days. She had stood me up for this same appointment earlier without warning, and we had rescheduled. The only time she had available was during my 25 minute lunch period.

I sat at her desk and opened by telling her that I had lost a friend to suicide and only learned about it a couple days earlier and was still raw from grieving, so if I was especially emotional, that was why.

I don’t remember response, but I remember it was somewhere between awkward and cold. I got the sense that grieving my friend’s suicide was a Me Problem, something I should have left at the door when I entered the building at 6:55 am that morning.

There were a lot of things about my life that were Me Problems, because teachers aren’t supposed to do anything besides be teachers, apparently. Or at least they weren’t in 2007. I don’t suppose it’s much better now.

The AP genuinely opened by just saying, “That was bad.”

I said, “I know.” I told her I was looking forward to this meeting and her feedback on how I could be better.

She told me she didn’t know.

She told me to go ask Barbara. Barbara was the head of the initially licensed teachers program. Barbara would not be available for days.

Somehow this exchange took up my whole 25 minute lunch period. I arranged for a colleague to cover my class for just a few minutes so I could tend to human needs like going to the bathroom and, you know, EATING.

But when I got to the classroom, there was the principal, waiting to conduct my third and final observation for the year.

THAT’S RIGHT: the amount of time I had to improve between “feedback” and my next observation was THE WALK BETWEEN THE AP’S OFFICE AND THE CLASSROOM. On my own. With no suggestions or advice from the AP who had just told me I had done a bad job.

That day I was giving a test, which should have made the coverage easy for my colleague, but instead, it meant I had to get these students settled and make it through the 45 minutes of observation before a colleague could bail me out so I could eat.

Grieving, with low blood sugar, having been at work since 6:55 and it now being 1 pm with me not having eaten much between those two times, probably woefully underslept due to a relapse of anxiety and depression brought on by Sherrie’s death, and immensely frustrated because of this ridiculous observation setup, I broke.

I had been too permissive during my last observation, so I swung the pendulum and I swung it hard.

My students were engaging in antics that I usually “managed” through warmth, joking, and being resigned, but this day, I snapped at them:

“THIS CLASS IS NOT A JOKE. I AM NOT A JOKE. THIS TEST IS NOT A JOKE. SIT DOWN AND GET READY TO TAKE THE TEST.”

This was very un-me, not my usual teaching style, and my students for once obeyed.

Guess what? That wasn’t a good observation either.

I was in an operetta that week. It was tech week. The night after this observation was our final dress, if I recall correctly. The director had explicitly told us in a notes email to leave our personal stuff outside the theater door. We were here to make magic and do art and focus.

Normally I love leaving my stuff at the theater door.

That day I Could Not.

I showed up wearing Rainbow Brite pajamas. I sobbed on my way into the dressing room. My mom was working on the show and I got a hug from her.

I made it through the rehearsal. After rehearsal we were discussing makeup and what some people whose makeup wasn’t strong enough could do to fix it. Somebody suggested replacing drugstore makeup with MAC.

Sherrie loved MAC.

I was done.

I made it home. I made it through the weekend of shows. We might have been doing two weekends that year. I think we probably were. I don’t remember.

I didn’t have the time or space to grieve Sherrie: not at work, not in my happy space of the theater, not in my social environment or hobbies. LiveJournal was the only grieving space I had. (Don’t ask why I didn’t try to take sick leave from work. I was teacher. Taking sick leave as a teacher is at best a hassle and at worst literally impossible because there are no subs.)

That was almost fifteen years ago.

Eleven months ago today, my grandmother died. I knew my grandmother much better than I knew Sherrie. She was my last living grandparent. I grieved her more intensely than the others, because she was the one I was closest to. Because her house was the closest thing I had to a childhood home.

And most of all, because I had a visit scheduled with her for April 2020, of which the pandemic robbed me.

Blessedly, I had plenty of time and space to grieve my grandmother.

For three weeks after she died, I did nothing besides parent, eat, sleep, crochet, and watch Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was what I needed. It was what I could handle. And I’m so grateful for that space.

In spite of it, I’m still grieving. It feels a bit like when a wound heals slowly. Or reopens and weeps a bit. Only in the past few weeks have I actually started crying about her death. I have dreams where she is sick and dying but not dead, and my dead grandfather is tasked with caring for her, and I keep protesting that someone who is already dead is not the best caretaker if we’re trying to keep someone alive because how can a dead person possibly do a good job?

I don’t have a conclusion to this. It was brought on by Kelly J. Baker’s piece for Women in Higher Education, No Space to Grieve.

Photo by Vidsplay on StockSnap

This post contains minor spoilers for Star Trek Discovery Season 4 Episode 2, “Anomaly.”

Near the end of the latest episode of Discovery, Lt. Tilly tells Dr. Culbert that something feels off about herself, and that she’d like to talk to him about it in a professional context sometime.

This feels to me like a clear indication that Tilly is dealing with depression, anxiety, or both, and I’m very interested in following where this goes, especially as I read Tilly as my own sort of Discovery-avatar.

Over at Keith R. A. DeCandido’s recap for Tor.com, a commenter says,

The best thread for later is Tilly. Does she miss her mother? Is it about all the stress and loss and responsibility they’ve had? Mental health is an all too often ignored issue, so I hope they do it justice.

I, too, hope they do it justice, but what I don’t need is for there to be something Tilly’s depression is “about.” There certainly are things that can trigger depression, but the depression itself isn’t always a response to trauma. Sometimes it just happens because your body isn’t producing the chemicals it needs to.

I would love to see Tilly work through identifying how she’s feeling, struggling to decide between treatment options (or whether to go beyond talk therapy at all), and dealing with the consequences of whatever treatment she chooses. I’d also just love to see what mental health care looks like in the 32nd century.

But I don’t need there to be a reason she’s depressed.

Because depression doesn’t require a reason to appear.

I mentioned in September that I was going through the Artist’s Way. I got about three weeks in when I realized I was only doing morning pages and reading, but not doing artist dates or any of the exercises. My motivational tendency is obliger, so I thought maybe if I were doing it in community, I’d do better.

But then I thought about organizing a whole community and I got weary immediately. I looked over Julia Cameron’s Guide for Starting Creative Clusters and registered a big old NOPE.

So I’m planning to do it MY way.

My life mantra is WHAT I CAN, WHEN I CAN.

I’m inviting you to participate. Here’s how it’s going to work.

1. I’m going to do morning pages as often as I can, but I’ll be keeping them to myself. I might occasionally blog about what I’m learning from doing them.
2. I’m going to do Artist Dates as often as I can. I’ll blog about them, with what I did, and my response to it.
3. I will end both morning pages and Artist Dates posts with a question about how they’re going for you, what you did, and what you’re getting out of them. You will be able to reply in one of a few ways:
   • through a Micro.blog reply
   • through an IndieWeb webmention
   • through Disqus comments
   • through Twitter replies
   • through Facebook replies (yes, I’m even going to try this on Facebook)
4. I’ll essentially do the same process for exercises, writing about my response to them and maybe even my answers, then asking if you did the exercise and how it worked out for you. You can reply in the same ways mentioned above.

I’m not in a place where I feel good about confining myself to a 12-week schedule, and I know if I try to turn it into 12 months or something I’ll lose steam around the 8 month mark, so instead, I’m just going to do it WHEN I CAN. Here’s what that will look like:

1. I will make a short post when I start a chapter/week.
2. I will make a short post when I finish a chapter/week.
3. And all the exercises and stuff above, I’ll make a note of what chapter/week it’s from.

Here are the rules to participate:

1. Do what you can, when you can.
2. Avoid trying to fix people’s problems or offer advice; “listen” to understand. I encourage you to respond, but try not to have it be advice-focused.

That’s it. I really hope you’ll join me.

I’ve been in the middle of a Star Trek: The Next Generation rewatch for months, maybe even more than a year. Maybe since before the pandemic started, I don’t remember. I often will fall asleep to a TNG episode. I do this with the same episode over and over until I actually watch it all the way through while I’m awake.

Back in May, just over a month out from my dissertation defense and with no plan for the future, the episode I slept through over and over again was “Peak Performance.” It’s one of my favorite episodes, for many reasons, and one reason is a B story focusing on Data. (Surprise!)

The A story is that a strategist named Kolrami has come aboard the Enterprise to evaluate the crew’s performance in a combat exercise. Kolrami is a jerk and has real problems with Commander Riker, suggesting that Riker’s jovial attitude is not compatible with strong leadership.

Kolrami is also super arrogant. He comes from a species called the Zakdorn, well known for producing the galaxy’s best strategists. He prides himself on his strategy and uses it for games as well as combat exercises; he is a grandmaster of a game called Stratagema. Riker challenges Kolrami to a game of Stratagema and loses after only a few moves. Thinking that with his fancy positronic brain Data might actually be able to beat Kolrami, Dr. Pulaski eggs Data on to play and eventually misleads Kolrami into believing Data has challenged him. Data agrees to the challenge, in spite of not initiating it.

Kolrami and Data play Stratagema and it lasts longer than the game with Riker did, but Data still loses. Then this exchange happens:

Pulaski: How can you lose? You’re supposed to be infallible.

Data: Obviously, I am not.

It seems like a simple and innocuous response, but Data goes on to remove himself from bridge duty, believing that his loss at stratagema indicates a defect in himself:

I have proven to be vulnerable. At the present time, my deduction should be treated with skepticism.

I am concerned about giving the captain unsound advice.

This has indicated that I am damaged in some fashion. I must find the malfunction.

I heard the exchange above and these lines from Data and felt a deep resonance in my heart. Isn’t this how so many people feel, all the time? Isn’t this especially how scholars feel? Especially if you are an overachiever, you may make it all the way to a PhD program and only know what it is to excel in everything, and then meet a challenge that you can’t surmount.

You might be pursuing a tenure-track job, have done all the things you’re supposed to do, and still not get hired. Maybe you have tons of publications, brilliant teaching evaluations, a robust record of service, and did important dissertation research. And it doesn’t matter.

Data explains to Picard why he has removed himself from the bridge and what prompted him to do so. Picard replies:

…it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.

Um, excuse me Captain, just a moment, I got something in each eye and it has caused them to water profusely and also has made sobs wrack my body, hold on…

In the end, Data challenges Kolrami to a rematch. We see them play, Kolrami moving more quickly and becoming more agitated by the moment, as Data plays slowly and maintains a calm expression. Kolrami suspends the game, yells “This is not a rematch. You have made a mockery of me!” and storms out of the room.

As Data’s colleagues come to congratulate Data on his victory, he points out that he didn’t win, though no game of Strategema has ever gone to as high a score as this one has. Data explains that Kolrami was playing for a win and assumed that was Data’s goal as well, but Data had in fact chosen his own goal: a draw. He let many opportunities that would have supported a win pass him by in order to maintain a balance that would let him challenge Kolrami indefinitely.

Is this a perspective that can be useful for anyone dealing with impostor syndrome, and especially PhDs moving away from the tenure track? I think so. The “victory condition” for a PhD is assumed to be a tenure track job, but I went in with the intention of learning about qualitative methods. Now, I write about qualitative research and am pursuing other writing and consulting opportunities. It’s not success by the usual metric, but it’s a path with which I am happy. And it’s a path where no one tells me to wait for tenure before I have a kid (whoops did it during the PhD!), do public scholarship, or have opinions. And thank goodness, because that’s a long wait for a train don’t come.

Hi web friends.

I’m having a weird day, with some great news but also me not feeling like doing anything, where I can swing from ecstatic about great news to extremely irritable with my kid. I’m not always the most gracious or graceful parent.

The great news is medical stuff: after only a week of modifying my diet to be more PCOS-friendly, my blood sugar has moved from high to high-normal. My liver indicators were looking rough a month ago, presumably because I was taking a LOT of Tylenol for headaches, but after a month of supplementing with milk thistle, it’s back to normal. My doctor prescribed a new migraine medication for me and if I take it REALLY at the first sign, it actually works.

This is all wonderful! Really exciting stuff!

But I also spent all day kind of blah, not really feeling like doing much. So I focused on really basic self-care: a little yoga, dental hygiene, outside time. I hope I’ll feel less Bartlebyish tomorrow.

The parenting stuff is no big deal, just being annoyed when my kid does stuff like hate every food he used to love or use my head as a footrest when I’m trying to fill his essential oil diffuser. Nornal kid stuff and of course he’s still my favorite person.

I’ve been reading the Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO and geeking out about it. I had in my head that SEO was gross and pushy, but it’s actually about getting resources to the right people, which makes it a good skill for librarians.

Now I’m quite tired, so I’ll watch a bit of Star Trek Discovery and nod off.

I really needed to read “Drafting a Personal Essay Is Like Stumbling Through a Dance” today. Here are some bits that hit me hard:

It’s not enough to see a successful dance or personal essay—you can study all you want, but it’s only in the act of doing that you learn what’s right and what isn’t.

The bad news about first drafts is that they are necessary. The good news is that they’re only a starting point.

There are many ways to get better at writing—take classes, join critique groups, read voraciously—but nothing gets you around the fact that you must also write and revise.

…take comfort in the fact that your words are still on the page. You’ve done the hard part and unleashed your awkward vulnerability.

I highly recommend Sara Fredman’s Write Like A Mother newsletter, in which Sara interviews writers who are also mothers. Some bits from the recent issue with Kate Baer resonated especially with me, so I thought I’d share them here.

Mothers were so punished in this pandemic.

This. I’m playing the pandemic on easy mode - working part-time from home - and I still feel this. The social costs and lack of a village are what’s hurting me most. For the first time since the start of the pandemic, I hung out for a long time with other parents while our kids were at the park and it was huge. Pre-pandemic, M & I spent every weekday morning at a co-working space with a Montessori school on-site. My co-workers were almost exclusively fellow parents of young children, mostly moms and non-binary primary caregivers, and at the time I didn’t really appreciate how special it was.

…nobody cares if you’re a writer. Nobody, nobody cares if you’re a writer, except you. If you want to be a writer, then you have to take control of the situation. You have to think of yourself as a writer, you have to treat yourself as a writer. You have to treat this like this is a job… I have to be the one who cares so much about being a writer. And so I think part of that is just filtering out that noise and just taking yourself super seriously, taking the work super seriously.

I have only recently claimed the title of writer for myself, despite having written all my life and having my first paid byline 10 years ago, and I feel this so hard. I’m still working on taking myself and the work seriously.

This doesn’t include the discussion/Q&A because things started to go so fast I couldn’t keep up.