When we moved to Dallas, one of my first jobs was working all over the city in Dallas ISD middle schools. I did not have a smartphone, so I was forced to navigate different areas of the sprawling metropolis using my wits and a giant, yellow Rand McNally Atlas. Getting turned around and then finding my way back became a nifty skill for this small city girl. I learned to remember where I was in relation to Downtown Dallas and I had a map of the DFW highways firmly etched in my mind. If I could make it to a highway, I could find my way home.
Earlier this month, I went to brunch at a friend’s house that I’d never been to before. She lives far from me, about a 30-minute drive. Due to the restrictions of the 2002 Experiment, I couldn’t use the Google Maps app, so I looked up directions on my laptop at home and scrawled them on an index card, confident about my ability to find her house without technology.
Well, I must have been lost in my thoughts when I blew past the multiple giant signs for I-30 and drove happily under the spaghetti pile of on and off ramps. It wasn’t until I got to the much smaller highway intersection for Highway 80 that I thought something might be amiss. I took an exit for a road that sounded vaguely familiar and followed it until it got me back to something recognizable. I slowly retraced my steps to a spot where I could restart the process on my index card directions and made it to her house, late but not too late.
I’d found my way. Eventually.
Back in the olden days, before a calming voice was telling you every turn and redirecting you around construction and traffic, you had to rely on other things. Maps that others had made. Your intuition. And, in some cases, you had to pull over and ask for help. From an actual person. Who hopefully knew more than you.
That was, of course, a last resort. You’d exhausted all other options by the time you turned into a convenience store and approached the clerk with your crumpled map.
“I’m lost. Can you help me?”
***
Last Wednesday, a ghost of patchouli from the crystal store out front haunted the nondescript hallway as I made my way up the stairs to a nondescript room looking over the graveled roof of the bazaar next door. I sat in a mismatched cushioned chair at a particle board table, the kind that my church had when I was a child. The faux wooden melamine layer had been chipped away by other nervous people who had sat there before me.
As the meeting got started, I looked around the room at the other people sitting in mismatched chairs at mismatched tables and recognized some of the bleariness in their eye, the hunch of their shoulders. This is a place for broken people, I thought, chipping away at the table myself.
As people started to share, I listened to words that very easily could have been mine. They were saying things that I had said. Doing things that I had done.
The realization slowly dawned on me.
This is a place for broken people.
This is a place for people like me.
It felt like a revelation.
***
I’m just now coming out of the fog and realizing that parenting wrecked me. Is still wrecking me. Alex and I adopted two children with lots of needs that were not their fault. I did not take care of myself because I didn’t know how and self-care paled in comparison to everyone else’s competing needs in my life. At least, I thought it did.
“I’m fine!” has been my chorus for so long that it’s rote now. I don’t know how to respond any other way.
“How are you?” a friend asked me recently on a phone call after a very stressful, chaotic day.
“I’m feeling fine,” I told her, plopping down on the couch.
“Bullshit,” she said. “You’re not fine.”
I had nothing to say. I burst into tears.
I was not fine.
I knew that this month was going to be hard. Sure, the 2002 Experiment sounded like it could be funny or interesting. Hyuck, hyuck, where’s my Roomba? My kingdom for a Roomba!
But I knew. In my heart of hearts, I knew. Lurking just there, deep under layers and layers of distraction and denial, was the sense that I was not fine. It took almost the whole month for me to finally arrive here, after excavating layers of bad-coping strategies with a teaspoon, it felt like. I needed the forced quietness, the boredom, the silence to get me here. And here I am, tired of pretending that I am fine when I am not. I can no longer fool even myself.
I am thankful that this stupid experiment led me to this place, an unfamiliar-to-me neighborhood of the human experience, The Borough of Being Broken and Knowing that You Are Broken. I don’t know where downtown is. I don’t know the highways. I can’t even read the signs yet. There is no Google Maps app to help me find my way home. It feels overwhelming, but there is good news. Lots of other people reside here, the kinds of people who joined me at the chipped table in a nondescript room this week. Until I get my bearings, I’ll have to wander to get the lay of the land, occasionally pulling over and approaching someone with my crumpled heart.
“I’m lost. Can you help me?”
Leave a Reply