On becoming vintage, OCD, and manufactured shame
Barbra Streisand helps me appreciate who I was and am today
The video undid me. A svelte secondhand shopper on TikTok elaborated on a silk Ralph Lauren skirt from the 1980s that she had recently thrifted. No catches in the fabric, she marveled, in a piece that is fifty years old. If I had been sitting, I would have fallen off my chair. I was born in 1985, and I’m 37. The skirt is at most 42 years old. It would be like if I found a jean jacket from 1990 and told someone born in 1995 that it was 40 years old.
As I walk toward middle age, I’ve been reflecting about where life has taken me so far. I am at the 13-ish year midway point between finishing graduate school and being old enough to join the dating app Our Time, for daters 50 years and older. That thought both staggers and humors me. My age now and my ongoing aging is not the problem. Fifty sounds like a great age to me, one I would be fortunate to reach.
The fact is, I am nowhere near where I would like to be as far as the development of my life & achieving adult milestones goes, and it’s hard for me to imagine all the changes that would have to take place in the next thirteen years to make them possible. Just as I was desperately trying to engineer my ascent into adulthood, my accident happened and knocked me into an altered state of consciousness where all of life was held in suspension. Trying to renter the world of people and things feels like I am entering the matrix after having been out of it, living with one foot in both realms.
Having been thrown back to a childlike experience of the world (being unable to read, support myself emotionally or professionally, live independently, walk reliably, feed myself, or remember my life), and now carrying what feels like an unbearable burden of pain & trauma, I feel like I’m starting doubly behind. I never got the chance to “get started” in the first place. My hopes for a life where I could support myself in the job market, making measured steps toward finding a partner and settling down, all vanished overnight.
Just as I was desperately trying to engineer my ascent into adulthood, my accident happened and knocked me into a coma-like state where all of life was held in suspension.
Being able to recoup what I lost because of my injury alone feels monumental. The fearful prospect that I might never get it back can feed a constant low level of despair in my consciousness. I know now that showing up to life and putting forth my best effort does not guarantee success. I know that although I have every safety net, those safety nets are not enough to guarantee a life protected from medical disaster and poverty. I subsist on the earnings and labor of others.
With my injury, I lost the physical ability to work and most importantly I lost my sense of self-efficacy, something that is necessary to make any steps in the world. I planned to work. I wanted a career. Yet even before my injury, working was extremely hard on me. I could never really get my feet under me professionally. I was already falling apart from burnout, ODC, PTSD, and other neurodivergences, and in spite of searching paths up and down, I couldn’t see any kind of way forward. After my injury, I saw even less of one. If my future was going to be filled with professional accomplishment and supporting myself, I lost my future entirely.
Being a reliable worker is baked into American culture, and my generation grew up understanding that we, too, would take our place in the economy. There was even hope in that, especially for women. I wanted to be one of those working women, like my mom. I wanted to have a meaningful career doing work that I loved. As I have recovered, I have relied on my family’s financial architecture, which existed before I was aware of what that meant. I’ve always dreaded being dependent on others’ efforts and expertise; as a toddler I told my mom, “I hold my hand.” Thanks for the assist, but I can cross the street just fine.
Reader, even then, I was not fine. I’ve had OCD since childhood. This quiet disability is a riot of sound and images and pain clanking around in my brain. This invisible force was constraining my efforts long before I had my latest brain injury. It was guzzling my mental energy and taking massive efforts to maintain. The American economy has no grace for this. In one of my first jobs out of graduate school, I curled up under my cubicle as OCD thoughts ricochetted through my brain. It was so bad I couldn’t focus on my work from day to day.
Not being able to support myself financially as I had hoped has felt humiliating and unfair. The economic pressures and intergenerational bullying that happened to, about, and around millennials contributed to this deadly shame. I’d been preparing to be able-bodied, even as I worked under the burden of disabilities I didn’t know I could receive support for at the time. What if I knew I was disabled even before my injury? What if I knew my body couldn’t handle working at an intensity required to survive most jobs? Part of me knew. No career ever seemed to fit.
I did not know how to stop worrying, how to overcome the shame of not having lived up to my or society’s expectations of what I would be and what I would do.
This kind of economic anxiety makes me a millennial cliche. Nevertheless, the pain of not being able to support myself financially was real and burdened the stall of my recovery unnecessarily. What if instead of feeling the desperation of one who’d been raised in a society where it’s work or die, I had been injured in a society that actually cares for its chronically ill and disabled members? What if my doctors had taken personal responsibility for my rehabilitation, had sat with me while I followed their direction?
What if instead of feeling constant terror that I could not support myself, I had known that all would be taken care of? I had that situation thanks to my family and still I could not feel it. I had failed my prime directive and I had no idea what I was going to do to recover. I was so hellbent on taking responsibility for my own life that I could not relax. I did not know how to rest (even though rest was absolutely enforced by my brain’s limitations). I did not know how to stop worrying, how to overcome the shame of not having lived up to my or society’s expectations of what I would be and what I would do.
This framing of my life’s story caused me so much pain and amplified my desperation to get back to work. I learned the statistics. A meta-analysis of six studies on homelessness and brain injury published in 2019 found that “more than half of homeless persons and others living in unstable housing situations suffer traumatic brain injury (TBI) at some point in their life, a rate that far exceeds the general population.” It became clear to me quite quickly that people don’t just suddenly drop the reins on their lives without provocation. A brain injury is just such a sudden provocation—a catastrophe that can kick you to the street.
Having significant executive dysfunction issues meant that managing my finances on my own was impossible. Earning money was out of the question. State and employer support never happened. I didn’t have enough energy to carry a lawsuit through. I learned that when you have a brain injury you have family support or your life falls irreparably into disarray. I would be dead were it not for my family’s assistance, and yet taking their assistance was personally painful. I felt like a failure. I felt guilty that I had privilege others do not. I felt years’ worth of shame manufactured in response to America’s toxic individualism and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality.
If I had needed only temporary support, that would have been one thing, right? Just till you get back on your feet.
If I had lived in a culture where just being was worthy of celebration, I wouldn’t have felt so mentally tortured. If I had known I could receive financial support from my community and those around me without feeling like I needed to earn it or to feel like I needed to perform self-efficacy that did not exist (oh, you look great! Yeah, thanks, I feel like I’m dying). My injury and disability weren’t “bad enough” to elicit belief and support from organizations supposedly designed for situations such as this. What was I supposed to do? I didn’t appear sick enough but couldn’t really exist out of bed for four whole years. I could smile like I was a child of the sun and have a destructive dance pinging around in my skull.
These stories and inadequacies have shadowed me my entire recovery. If I had needed only temporary support, that would have been one thing, right? Just till you get back on your feet. Well, I haven’t gotten back on my feet. I am still inching along many days, even with therapeutic supports I am incredibly fortunate to have. I’m not homeless. I know only a shadow of how thin the razor’s edge is. Trying too hard injured and continues to injure me. I dearly want to be myself again. I dearly want to participate. When I work too hard I get sicker. I have to stop trying and rest.
One Saturday night I stopped my ruminating orbit around various problems to listen to Barbra Streisand’s “Live at the Bon Soir,” an epic performance I had no idea existed until I happened on a NYTimes piece covering its release that weekend, 60 years after the fact.
Streisand performing on The Ed Sullivan Show on June 9, 1963
With “Midnights” just out, I was listening to the generational equivalent of a young Taylor Swift entering one of her early eras of becoming an icon. It’s 1962. Barbra Streisand has been holding court in a tour-de-force of vocal prowess at Bon Soir. Judging from her banter on the album and the linguistically sharp song selection, Barbra sounds more mature and effortlessly shrewd at 20 than I could ever dream of being.
When Barbra had the remastered recordings played back to her, she said, “‘I didn’t realize, actually, that my vocals were that good ’til they played me the new one…. I thought, ‘Oh my God. That girl can sing.’” This floored me. How could she not have known? I thought. Well, for one, the speakers her voice was being transmitted through hissed, and she didn’t like the sound, like a scratched up record wobbling over her ethereal, assured warble.
Aging has offered an instant remaster of the tapes of my life. The sound engineer has filtered out all the static through which I was trying to perform my true self.
I don’t know if Streisand suffered from self-hatred or self-deprecation on top of having an ear that could easily single out her own flaws, but for me, hindsight reveals just how pristine I actually was (how pristine we all are) in my growing up. Aging has offered an instant remaster of the tapes of my life. The sound engineer has filtered out all the static through which I was trying to perform my true self. That relentless barrage of intrusive thoughts, the insecurities, the relentless lack of assurance that everything would be okay and that I could fit in. I was already doing such a good job, knew so much about who I was, and yet knew nothing of my own magnificence and very little about my own limitations. I marvel at what I survived. I long to be that person again, even with all the mental struggle I was enduring to become who I hoped I’d be. I already was that person in many ways.
It’s taken me until this year to really internalize my own mortality in a way that is unsettling and salutary. Even though I believed/feared/lamented (was tormented) I was going to die during my 20s and early 30s, this moribund fixation has taken on a new reality for me. I feel like my brain is waking up to it’s own impermanence and limited time on earth, like, “No, but really, guys, we could die at any time. Time’s a-waistin’. Stop figuring and DO THE THINGS YOU WANT.”
I spent so much time figuring. Ruminating. Wrestling. Even if I had jumped in wholeheartedly to the life I wanted, I don’t think my sense of self would have supported it. I suppose she would have learned to support it. I have done exactly that. I’ve been striving so long to get to a destination where I would not be tossed by all the static, where I would have arrived financially/professionally/relationally that it’s been hard to enjoy all the selves I’ve been but who I miss now, want to gather into an impossible hug and say, “You are shining right now. You’re the best you’ll ever be at this moment in time. Life does get better after a lot of hell. You learn more. But life isn’t in the future. It’s here and now.”
This picture from 7 years ago popped up in my memories on my phone. No one would know just by looking at me the constant & unbelievable pain churning in the spaces behind my eyes.
I have achieved very few milestones associated with traditional adulthood so far. I own no significant property. I have no partner and have never been in a long-term relationship. I have no children. I have professional accomplishments people praise me for, but no job that has lasted more than a year and a half and never one that came close to fully supporting me financially. I am entirely reliant on the financial generosity of my parents to literally stay alive. The government pays for my health insurance, a bitter reality I have struggled to accept.
Life holds us all, and it should hold us all for our preciousness.
Through all my striving to recover, I have learned to be wary of false hopes. The road is intensely wearying. Accomplishments like reading novels and poetry again (on some days but not on others), spending hours processing trauma, and regaining a desire and ability to be outside, living again, don’t pay the bills. I’ll always keep my hopes up, even when trauma sends swirling waves through my brain. I’ve survived, with lots of help along the way, and I’m still here. From my now-vintage vantage point, I know we’re all worthy of unconditional support—manufactured shame be damned. Each person deserves all the support they need, economically and otherwise. Life holds us all, and it should hold us all for our individual preciousness, whether we have the voice of a legend or the heart of a saint or the courage of someone living with a chronic illness.
Yesterday I woke up and the shame of my reference frame disappeared. I saw how my suffering had been amplified by what I believed and by my own expectations of myself, of my desire to perform in a society I could never have hoped to please with my neurodivergent brain. In the wake of my injury, I couldn’t have done otherwise than I did; I wasn’t a different person. My injury gave me obstacles I hadn’t known yet, which felt like the end of the world, the end of my world. Yes, the bottom could all fall out, but it hasn’t. It isn’t. The worst could come, but it might not. I continue to try. I make books and I sell art. It’s what I can do right now.
Wrapping up 2022
Today (December 22) is the last day to see the Arch-Hive’s most recent show (covered in The Salt Lake Tribune), at Writ and Vision in Provo. Scrupulosity, or religious OCD, is just one of OCD’s many flavors and one that I know well. My pieces Holy Sh*t and Internal + Beloved are on display.
Thanks so much to the wonderful editors of The Exponent Magazine for nominating my poem for a Pushcart Prize! You can read the poem and see the other nominees here.
My book is on sale for $7.95 right now, so if you’ve been waiting for it to fit into your budget, now is a great time to buy it.
Twitter’s ongoing implosion has brought with it a surprising amount of grief, and for now I’ve landed on Post as a new place to think into the void. Join me over there.
Thank you for being here and supporting my writing! If you didn’t get a postcard in the mail from me, here is a virtual one. I chose the juniper tree for my card because it contains healing properties, displays resilience in inhospitable conditions, and possesses incredible root systems. Like these unique trees, you hold up the sky in your corner of the world. Much, much love to you.
