Update: Worked like a superstitious trinket or expression believed to have magic powers!^[1]

1. Or, you know… a charm.

Ishi: “Do you know why I’m shaking it like this?”
Me: “Of course. The act of shaking transports more water over the surface area of the ice cubes.”
Ishi: “Not only that, but the warmer ice-melt is also more quickly transported away from the ice cubes, allowing water faster access to the ever-colder center of the ice cube.”
Me: “Sweet! Not quite the Mpemba effect, but it works for me!”

This is what happens when two geeks at heart spend the latest heat wave watching back-to-back episodes of The Big Bang Theory.

I want this to be it. I want this to be the last new beginning for a really long time. I once said in some other journal somewhere that I am sick of beginnings. I’m so sick of base camp, LIFE 101, the bottom of the mountain, the bottom rung, the first step of a thousand-mile journey, Level One, prolegomena, all that absolute beginner crap. What I want now is to know what the rest of it looks like. I want to know what it’s like to be in the middle of something. To be halfway done, almost done, and then done! It must be a better feeling than knowing what every single square one in the world looks like, I swear to Cow.

To that end, I spent most of today reading from the books I got from the library yesterday. To the casual observer, they might well seem to represent a jumbled pile of random (and slightly odd) interests. But if you line them up in a particular order, they seem to me to clearly spell out a desperation, a cry for help etched into the sands of the beach on which I find myself stranded.

• An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison

The capital letter ‘H’ in HELP ME. The first attempt ever to understand my own experience of this disorder within the context of someone who has also been there. Maybe this square one will prove to be the launch pad into my life I’ve been looking for.

• Touched with Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison

Once the novelty of finding out you’re not alone wears off, the question becomes, now what? This book promises to be an exploration of the multitude of ways in which people with bipolar disorder have managed to be creative and productive.

• A Patient’s Guide to PCOS: Understanding and Reversing Polycystic Ovary Syndrome by Walter Futterweit, M.D.

I’ve been interested in the degree to which my almost-diagnosis of PCOS might be contributing to the difficulties I’ve had lately… perhaps by way of a nasty soup of unbalanced hormones? Seems a little unlikely, but…

• The Hormone Diet by Dr. Natasha Turner

…this book suggests that entire legions of problems, mental, physical and emotional, can be caused by one or more hormonal imbalances, so I decided to look into it, as I am quite desperate about my physical health as well.

• Walking: A Complete Guide to Walking for Fitness, Health and Weight Loss by John Stanton

Which led me to to pick this book up! The hormone book also extols the virtues of walking, and I loved the “foundation” concept of training, and also the idea that I could be training for a marathon or something. I mean, I can barely walk to the car and it takes me over an hour to do the grocery shopping, but hey… dream big, right?

• Walking for Fitness: The Beginner’s Handbook by Marnie Caron

But uh… not too big… this book would be me acknowledging that in the meantime, I’m still very much a bottom rung person.

• Finding our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices by Brian McLaren

Which depressed me so much I started thinking about all the other times I’ve failed, and how hopeless I still feel about ever changing for the better, and then I immediately went for the only thing I know I can count on when all hope is (apparently) lost. God.

• The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible by James L. Kugel

Specifically, the God of old. The God of Abraham. The God I know from my studies of biblical languages and the ancient documents that didn’t make it into our canon, but which still hold incalculable value for any critical, in-depth study of God and His word.

• The Gospel of Judas edited by Rodolphe Kasser et al.

Like this one! Ever since I read the history of the Gospel of Judas (Bart D. Ehrman), I have been looking for the English translation of the actual gospel. This book also shows how I get so unbelievably sidetracked and eventually wander away from what I started… which brings me back to the beginning of this post.

Please, God. Let this be it. Let this be the launchpad I will remember as being the one that finally sent me on my way to all the things I should be doing!

For the first time in weeks, I felt like I could see normally. No longer a dingy veil fluttering over my eyes, but a clear and distinct ability to appreciate the sun shining into the windows. It had been shining all along, but my perception of it was as though it was shining into a room on the television, or perhaps even in a book. More a feat of imagination than anything real in front of me. I cuddled with Ishi, got dressed, switched the kettle on… nothing was different at all… and yet everything was different. The outer world was exactly the same, but the person experiencing it was not the same.

I can’t quite explain the prickles of nausea and the chills that were dancing on the back of my neck. They were, I suspect, gut reactions to the realization that I had survived one of the worst Deep Darks yet. Similar, I imagine fancifully, to the morning after a terrible car accident which swung death like a sickle within inches of the faces of the survivors. Gingerly pressing tender and swollen elbows and foreheads, the shakes start in what we like to call “a delayed reaction”. I felt truly out of the pit… perhaps not skipping across the meadow just yet, but definitely clear of the rim. Still intact, yet forever imprinted.

And knowing absolutely that something has to be done. I don’t even want to speculate whether I could survive another episode like that… all I know is I don’t want to find out.

So when Ishi had to go into work to solve a crisis, I jumped into the car with him (miraculous achievement!) and, armed with a grande mocha and a newly minted library card, embarked on a hunt like none other. For the first time since reading The Angry Heart, I was going to find someone, anyone, who could tell me what the hell has been happening to me. This is so much more than Borderline Personality Disorder. This is so much more than depression or a funk or a lack of self-discipline. This, especially this last one, is a toxic sludge of ennui so thick and so potent that I’m not even sure I can properly describe the utter devastation it has wrought in me. That it happened in summer, traditionally such a safe time for me, and that it is relinquishing its hold on me so easily serves only to underscore the complete and utter abnormality of the situation. It’s abnormal even for me, and that’s saying a lot.

In the middle of the aisle that starts with “how to get pregnant”, moves on to “PCOS and Infertility and You”, and ends with “What to Expect When You’re Expecting”, there are two shelves dealing with insanity. Right smack dab in the middle. I laughed out loud at the perfection of the arrangement, and at the bizarre parallel the books ran to my own life. I’ve gone from one end of that aisle to the other over the last ten years… but I must have missed something in the middle there, because there I was again, looking for the words that would release me from my bondage of total aloneness in this horror of mine. Looking for the author who wasn’t Patty Duke or a tortured musician who couldn’t tell if it was bipolar disorder or the typical effects of heroin. Someone real, who lived the freaking real world and didn’t spend their entire lives building shrines to themselves… was such a one even out there?

The answer is yes. The first book I picked up was Touched with Fire. The title drew me; a vivid phrase that immediately brought to my mind the image of my beloved prophet Isaiah, crying to the Lord in desperation because he has seen the LORD and is immediately ashamed of his “unclean lips”.^[1] A seraph relives Isaiah’s shame by touching his lips with a burning coal which cleanses him. Isaiah was chosen by God to see God. God could handle Isaiah’s sin, but Isaiah couldn’t… in just one of tens of millions of acts of deep kindness, God relieves Isaiah’s agony and Isaiah is able to hear God’s word. I doubted very much there would be any religious themes in a book about mental illness, but I was intrigued anyway. Suddenly I noticed the author’s name. Kay Redfield Jamison. Another title popped into my mind, along with a memory from long ago…

“You must read it, Ishkael. Your father will never make sense to you… you will never make sense to you, until you understand what it really means to be manic-depressive.” My gorgeous neighbour clasped my hands with hers over the fence that separated our back yards. She was an addictions counsellor. She spent her days with the fringe element, the outside track… people who wouldn’t or couldn’t come down from the highs of substance abuse. I was a high school senior who was flying pretty high myself, sans substance of any sort, and was convinced that my wildly quicksilver intellect and boundless, bubbling energy were simply who I was… just me! My neighbour’s beautiful eyes, usually sparkling with gentle laughter, were intense and worried on mine. “Promise me.”

I pulled away, wishing I could make her understand that other people had problems, other people couldn’t manage themselves, not me. “I will,” I lied. “What’s it called again?”

“An Unquiet Mind.”

The words shimmered on the cover of the book in my hands. An Unquiet Mind. In the years since that conversation, that phrase had pushed into my thoughts again and again… for a long while I thought maybe I’d made it up, or it had come from a movie I’d long ago seen and forgotten. An Unquiet Mind. Whenever the impossibility of trying to explain my difficulties to someone weighed heavy in my chest, those words flowed out in a sigh. Unquiet mind. Uncalmed waters. Not noisy mind… rough waters… unquiet, uncalm… the picture of the way it should be, with the deliberate un-ness of it in front.

I put the book in my bag with seven or so others, keeping a careful distance from it over the next four hours. I read book after book, and the phrase hummed expectantly beneath my brain… Unquiet. Unquiet. An Unquiet Mind. It already sounded like she had a better chance of understanding my Dark than any other author I’d ever glanced at.

By the time Ishi had finished saving the day at work (yay, Ishi! Not just my own personal superhero, are you?), I was in an awesome mood… even just not feeling suicidal felt wonderful! I convinced him to skip the border^[2] with me for a total greasefest at Sonic and a case of Cherry Coke (a stateside-only treat, I’m afraid). We had such a good time, and then on the way home we found the Big Bang Theory^[3] had arrived in the mail! Talk about an absolute perfect evening. We stayed up way too late (again), ate too much junk food, and laughed harder than we’ve laughed in weeks.

It’s almost enough to make me believe I’ll be okay again.

1. Isaiah 6:5-6
2. Or, you know, cross in a completely lawful and somber way…
3. Season 1, Disc 1

At some point, this will be an even sorer regret than it is now… so I must! But what can I do? How shall I do it? When… alas… there she slips, through the open kitchen door and into the seductive day once again.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

Without a doubt, Ishi. By the time mid-November rolled around, I had several large writing assignments looming on the horizon and the end of the semester was approaching at the speed of light and sound combined. I was a physical and emotional wreck. Fractious, impossible to please, and panicky. But also strangely unresponsive to the pressing concerns around me. Instead of working or doing anything remotely productive, I would spend hours trimming the split ends off my hair, or playing some ridiculous online game. Then something would set me off, like, oh I don’t know, the sound Ishi’s feet made as he walked into the room? It really didn’t take much. And then I would snap at him, and sometimes cry. I frightened myself.

Ishi was an absolute rock. The kind you cling to in the middle of a raging river. The kind you pray for when you’re hiking and you slip on a particularly steep grade. The kind that gets up at 4:00 in the morning and makes a Timmy’s run for the double-double that will keep you out of bed as you struggle to get just one more page written. The kind who does the laundry, the shopping, and the spontaneous rubbing of tight, aching necks and shoulders.

The kind who holds you when you’re sobbing so hard you’re gasping, convinced you’ve gone as far as you can go and it’s all over, and tells you how proud he is of you. That you make him want to find the money to send you to this school as long as you want. That everything you see as a failure, he sees as an achievement and as another reason to love and respect you.

He outdid himself. It was nothing short of the absolute best he has ever done when it comes to loving his wife as Christ loved the church. He had his own stress and exhaustion to deal with and yet during those crushing weeks, he never uttered one complaint to me. I felt utterly borne up and sheltered, and the love I feel for him now as a result is tremendous in its weight and depth.

Even better, we both felt a hot and intense deepening of our love for God, as though we were being bathed in it. It suddenly felt very easy and natural to pray out loud together, and we’ve started doing even more praying than before. Truly, when husband or wife loves well, the effect is powerful and delightful. No wonder God loves marriage!

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don’t do resolutions as most people know them. Instead, I prefer to renew my commitment to several core principles, most of which seem to fall right in line with the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9). Especially the part which says, “love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” Some other core principles I intend to focus on this coming year are the finer points of being a wife who honours her husband, and the idea of giving my expectations to God. Dreaming and planning are wonderful, but I need to be more comfortable with things not going how I expect. Instead, I resolve to focus on my reactions being in line with trusting in God.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
No, but we conceived for the second time ever, in October of this year.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Yes… the baby stopped growing and we lost her at almost 6 weeks.

5. What countries did you visit?
Just the US this year. Texas is better than most places I’ve been!

6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
Money! No, I’m just saying that because we’re so skint right now. It’s been a rough couple of years. In 2010, I would love some stability and peace. I would love some of my exuberance and passion back too, please. I felt strangely numb for most of 2009 and I would really rather not get too comfortable with that state of being.

7. What dates from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
January 11 ~ For the first time in my life, I simply could not rally and do what needed to be done, at enormous professional and personal cost. For the first time, I truly gave up and did not even try. For me, it was necessary to know what giving up would do to me. It gave me the impetus to try again later in the year.

March 9 ~ I had surgery to remove an “irregularity” in my uterine lining that was supposed to be the answer to all my reproductive woes. I woke up from that surgery absolutely euphoric.

March 10, 11, 12 ~ Instead of taking time to recover from that surgery, I was forced to clean house and open my door and/or watch as they strolled right in without knocking multiple times a day because the landlords put the house on the market. Watching people traipse through my apartment while I sat in pain on the couch in a blanket was just awful.

June 30 ~ I finished HKIN 190 at TWU and got my first post-secondary A+ ever!

September 16 ~ Two words. Dry. Sockets.

October 21 ~ two days after the one-year anniversary of losing Nathaniel, I got a BFP. I very nearly fainted with shock and joy.

November 2 ~ The doctor called me as we were driving to class. The third beta-HCG fell instead of doubling. The baby is not going to make it. For a little while, I wasn’t sure I would, either.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
All my achievements this year were amazing to me: I quit my 4-or-5-cans-a-day Diet Coke habit, I quit eating several pounds of chocolate a week (yes, that’s pounds… pounds of chocolate), I kicked caffeine for two months and can do it again, I created and followed a menu plan full of healthy meals for 8 whole weeks, and I got pregnant for the second time^[1]. But I think the two that are vying for the top spot are these:

1. I had a major turnaround regarding a huge issue in my marriage. We were absolutely stonewalled and in a very bad place because Ishi wanted to start a business and I didn’t want him to. I simply didn’t trust he would be able to succeed and I wanted him to stay at his job (which has awesome benefits and which was slowly draining him of the will to live). During the few glorious weeks of my pregnancy, I suddenly realized that the little girl^[2] growing inside me was going to have Ishi for a father. That she and her potential siblings would learn about life and living from Ishi and that the way in which he provides for his family would be a fundamental example of a lot of life’s lessons for them. All of a sudden, the penny dropped and I realized I wanted them to not be afraid to strike out and try new things. I never, ever wanted them to trade little pieces of their souls for a job they hated but which was comfortable and paid well. And yet what was I asking Ishi to do? So after almost a year of stalemate and bitterness, I did a complete one-eighty and told Ishi he had my support for the business he wants to start.

2. I managed to stay in school, and stay engaged with my courses, my professor and God despite a horrific experience getting two wisdom teeth extracted which resulted in two dry sockets, and the second miscarriage in a year. I will always believe God carries us when we just can’t go on, because I have no idea how I kept going. In each of the two courses I took, I earned an A-.

9. What was your biggest failure?
You know, I’m honestly not sure. All I can think of are the typical failings I have: forgetting to trust God, refusing to believe in myself, and giving up too easily. However, I made such tangible progress in even those areas that I can’t help but feel I failed a lot less this year than ever before.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
See above. Dry sockets, miscarriage, and then just when I thought 2009 was done kicking my ass, I fell in the shower yesterday. I have a bruise that goes from my ass to my knee and many other injuries that don’t show until I try to walk. But not a single cold, and no swine flu!

11. What was the best thing you bought?
Hmmmmmm… we bought lots and lots of stuff early in the year. Mostly furniture, and a notebook for Ishi which he very generously shared with me for school. I would be hard-pressed to come up with the one single best thing, though. Oh! Our car. There you go. We bought our little 1993 Chevy in January and it is awesome.

Oof. I really wanted to finish this tonight, but I am not the night owl I used to be and my jammies are calling. I usually feel like it’s bad luck to spend any time on New Year’s Day looking back, but what the hell. All of my other notions have been turned on their heads; why not this one? So, until tomorrow… bonsoir!

1. You have to realize: this was the second pregnancy in less than 18 months when we have been trying for 9 years!
2. We were absolutely convinced this one was a girl, but it was far too early to ever know for sure.

And there’s nothing wrong with any of that, to a degree. However, I just read over the last couple of weeks of posts and I don’t feel that they do even a passable job of what I created this blog to do.

I’m here because I’m lonely. I’m here because people who are lonely the way I am lonely have a very hard time finding each other. I’m here because I have spent many a three o’clock in the morning typing in one search phrase after another, hoping to find someone else who is fighting some of the same fights I am. I’m here because I found so many strong women, beautiful women, hurting women, bravely writing down the nitty gritty details of their struggles and these stories helped sustain me. I’m here because I hope that I might sustain someone else even as I myself am still supported by the words of the people I have found who will share such private battles with the lonely souls still awake at three o’clock in the morning.

Being hearing impaired is lonely.
Having bipolar disorder is lonely.
Being an undergraduate student in your mid-thirties is lonely.
Being a Biblical Studies major is lonely.
Being infertile is lonely.

And even though it shouldn’t be, being desperately in love with God is sometimes the loneliest feeling there is.

So there it is. I’m dropping any attempt to be slick or intellectual or one of the cool kids. I’m just here to share the things I struggle with, the things I’m trying to understand and the things I am learning.

And I am actually learning more than usual these days, now that my HK!N 190 class has started! I love being back on campus. Love it. I am a little unsure of how I feel about summer courses, though – tomorrow is the end of the first week and we’re having our midterm exam. Whoa! It really does feel like being on fast forward. I’m very much looking forward to the weekend. I wonder if it will feel longer than usual or if it will fly by like the week did?

The problem is, I took a semester off from school to recoup after the loss of a pregnancy that we’d waited eight years for, and the loss of my Nana in the same week. I thought I would write more about my grief, but it’s been too hard to expose most of those thoughts and feelings. In the nature of my totem animal, the rabbit, my instinct is to sit very still and hope I remain unnoticed by my predators.

Without school to write about, and with very little happening in my life besides my obsession with all things TTC and healing my poor broken heart, I fear this blog has gotten off to a fairly boring and pointless start.

God has blessed me tremendously with the opportunity to take a summer course at TWU which begins on Monday. Instead of writing about it or even thinking about it, I’m allowing myself to be endlessly distracted by a parade of things that honestly have nothing to do with anything.

I’m not sure if I’m depressed, or…

…relaxed.

The women, anyway. The men are more likely to resurrect tired old racist jokes and laugh uproariously. This despite the fact our family stopped being 100% white in 2005 and is well on its way to becoming even less white!

So race came up, as it will these days. My Mom has a unique vantage point of being Canadian, white, and living in Houston, Texas. She’s also lived overseas multiple times, in countries where to be white was to be one of the visible minority. For her, it was a tremendous adjustment to live in a city where it is an actual issue. Canadians tend not to predict how an encounter will go based on what ethnicity the other person is. At the very least, I don’t. For me and some other Canadians I know, I wait until the person starts speaking before I make my snap judgments and steretypical assumptions.

Because for many of us, it’s not the people who don’t look a certain way that bother us… it’s the people who aren’t like us at all. It’s the people who leave India or China because of the lack of human rights or the atrocities of honour killings – and then bring those foul ideas with them. The people who want to enjoy our incredible freedom, our luxuries, our peaceful way of life, while arranging the hitmen who will hunt down and kill their daughter who is dating the wrong boy. It’s the people who leave because their wealth will go farther here, and allow their kids to go to the clubs packing weapons, or turning our streets into their own personal racing strips where our citizens are maimed or killed.

We concluded that for Americans and Canadians, the issues are indeed very different. I don’t care what a person looks like, I only ask that he embrace the values that make this country the greatest one on earth. Canada is the only country I know about who is expected to just accept every single cultural difference as being a legitimate and valid one, simply because it is Canada. We watch Australians announce that certain cultural ideas are simply not welcome in Australia and we wonder how on earth they get away with it. What we should be wondering is how on earth we became the only country in the world who can’t? I, for one, refuse to accept that being Canadian means being a pushover, or accepting any value or tradition at all simply because it is someone else’s. I am one of the few Canadians around who can say that my ancestors actually built this country and they established a long family line whose tradition I refuse to abandon simply because there are others around me who don’t agree. The Canadian I was raised to be accepts a variety of physical features, dress, food, languages, and any religion which doesn’t directly oppose Christian values. I don’t care if you believe in Jesus, that’s between you and God. But I will not support any religion that espouses or even condones killing for “honour” or censoring our papers from saying anything that is “disrespectful” to a religious figure. I’ll say what I want about who I want, and those who don’t like it can go back to the countries where they can cut a tongue out for that kind of thing. Why do they think we’re doing so well over here? I’m going to bet it’s partly because we don’t cut out tongues for expressing dissenting opinions!

From what I’ve seen, Americans have completely different issues. They get upset about having to press 1 for English… I wonder what they would make of having to look for English in a drop-down menu with four or five other languages… on a government website! There is a strange homogeneity in many areas of many states and cities… like oil and water, they slide past each other with some interaction and a great deal of friction. In San Antonio, Texas last May, I noticed an Asian man on a balcony on the River Walk and realized, with a start, that he was the first Asian (East, South or otherwise!) I had seen since I’d gotten off the plane some three weeks earlier. And yet I had felt a constant “us-and-them” feeling the entire time. It was puzzling how it never looked to me like there were “foreigners”, and yet my American friends would purse their lips and shake their heads at “those people” time and time again. I was reminded each time that I was a member of a camp. Straying over the line earned me strange looks and frowns. I became very stressed out, feeling like I didn’t know who was friend or foe, until I toed the line and simply stayed within the circle that had been drawn by Americans centuries ago. My parents lived in a very predominantly black community and were truly perplexed by the reactions they garnered when they went for walks, or to the pool, or even just grocery shopping. In Canada, a Wal-Mart in Richmond is exactly the same as a Wal-Mart in Langley or Calgary. I mean right down to the aisle number the bath mats are in. In Houston, the Wal-Mart in one community is dirty, unkempt, poorly (and differently) stocked, than the one in a much better (dare I say, whiter) neighbourhood. My parents were determined not to conform and stayed in the black community for two years. Eventually, they decided that they weren’t going to change the world at their ages and got tired of carjackings in their building’s parking lot, and moved. My Mom says life in the “race-appropriate” (white, again) community is like being in another city. Different issues indeed.

Five minutes after I hung up, I opened my e-mail and saw this:

So funny and so close to true, Mom!