Today is not going to go as planned or hoped. Acknowledge, learn from the mistake, and move on.
Mistake: I did not go to bed until 3:00 a.m. Yeah, I know. I feel like hell. What can I say?
When I wrote the last sentence in my garden journal on a Sunday morning not quite two weeks ago, it awakened an old, old memory. A high school assembly to announce the results of class elections. Josh Siskin, new class president, opens his speech with, "What can I say?" to much laughter and applause. I don't know why. "Inside joke," someone tells me. Inside? Seems like everybody was in on it but me. As usual.
My thoughts went into stream of consciousness ... that must have been junior year - I'm sure the senior class president was Kent Petrie, who started the wonderful Cool Hand Luke "night in the box" parody at the senior talent show. That was the year the freshmen boys started calling me "Twiggy" ... and the faculty chose me to be a member of the Steering Committee. I never figured out what I was supposed to be doing there ...
The high school was new, and we were going to be the school's first graduating class. I remember Jim Benson(?) was a Presidential Scholar, what a coup for the school...I think he went to MIT. I remember Mom and I went to an immaculate mansion where an immaculately groomed lady talked all about some university, and I had no clue why. Months or maybe years passed before I realized that I was being recruited because I had great scores on the college boards. The high school I went to was focused on academics. Unless you were a straight D student, you went to college - it was de rigueur. Every Good Student Goes to College. Amen.
Only I was a messed up, miserable, depressed, socially and emotionally retarded good student with a lot of talent and a tendency to cover my shyness and defy my loneliness by showing off - and a background in performing arts. No one believed I was either miserable or shy. No one imagined that the thought of leaving home affected me pretty much as if I were about ten years old.
Gradually it filtered through to the faculty that Marcia Had Still Not Chosen A College. Horrors! Marcia hadn't even applied to a single school! Blasphemy!
They whipped me into the college counseling office, who catapulted me to the school counselor with the comment, "Confusion about future plans." At the end of our first session, the counselor, may she ever ben blessed, said, "Let's put 'confusion about future plans' aside for now, shall we? You have a lot more important issues to deal with."
Thanks to her, there was no more pressure on me to go to college. Instead, when I graduated, I got a job because my dad insisted I couldn't just sit around all day (wasn't ready for that reality, either - it was a hell of a shock!). And more important than that, I went into therapy.
The next five and a half years were a patchwork of five jobs, three colleges (in Oregon, Illinois and Iowa), two years of therapy with a year off in between, at least two near-breakdowns - no, had to be more than that - sex, marijuana, LSD, methedrine, toxic relationships and misery. After completing wasting the first semester of my senior year of college, I dropped out 34 hours short of my degree, went home, got the fifth job, then decided it was time to be a big girl and move out. Back I went to Des Moines with my neuroses, depression, undiagnosed fibromyalgia and social retardation. I found the job where I would stay for over 23 years, and rapidly descended into hell. Within a couple years of moving I was so ill from stress and exhaustion that my 5'10" frame carried just 107 pounds.
My stream-of-consciousness blurs over the next many years. Profound depression, hysteria, alienation; loneliness, lostness and listlessness; glorious periods of creativity and heartbreaking years of writer's block; the ecstasy of falling in love and the pain of his death 11 years later; and it all came down to a moment in 1996 when I realized, after my father's death, that there was nothing left to keep me in Des Moines any more. New top management had turned our once-friendly office into a pressure cooker, and my love was dead; my mother needed me. It was time to go back home.
The retrospective came to a surprise ending. I'd recalled just what a MESS I was as a teenager (well, actually, since first grade) and throughout my 20s. Thanks to a fantastic counselor named Diana and my dear Richard, most of my 30s were pretty good. I was 42 when Richard died; 18 months later I had a severe depressive crash that led to my first being medicated. How did it happen that now, as I am about to turn 55, I have spent the last several years being depressed mostly about clutter, disorganization, my weight and my garden? Where did the turbulence go?
Oh my. All the turbulence came from interaction - and I've become almost a hermit. Not an island - a peninsula, maybe. And definitely not a rock.
To hell with this. I've got to go work on my garden.
