I kind of hate birthdays, but not for the reasons you might think. I don’t even much like other people’s birthdays, and can never remember the dates. I don’t think anyone in my family has ever received a birthday card from me on time, and I seldom buy them for friends. I feel guilty about this, because I know other people do like birthdays. I just really, really don’t.

It’s not about aging. I’ve never wanted children, so I’m not worried that some kind of clock is running out. I have never considered myself pretty, though experience suggests that there’s something attractive about me, and its influence seems to wane over time. This is annoying, in that I’m used to being able to provoke positive reactions with light flirting, but hardly devastating. I’m just not girly enough to care. Mostly it’s a relief to become invisible to men, frankly, at least to the kind of men who overtly notice women.

I don’t mind getting old. I love the feeling of knowing more than I used to. I don’t know how wise I am, but I’m certainly not as stupid as I used to be. There’s a lot of satisfaction in that. Every year I read more books, have more experiences, meet more people, know my friends better. It’s a good thing.

But I’m afraid of dying, so having that number – my age – go up by 1 on this day makes me a little uncomfortable. It’s a vivid reminder that the clock is always ticking, and there’s only one way this story can end. On the other hand, I used to be terrified of dying, so perhaps I’m making progress. Since my main goal in life is to ensure that the moment of my death is not full of horror and regret, I suppose how I feel about each birthday depends on how I think I’m doing. This year I feel pretty good, looking forward to going back to school, and learning a lot.

For a few years I went big for my birthday, and invited all my friends to share an experience all or most of us had never had before. Once I treated everyone to an evening in the Tactile Dome at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Another time, I took everyone to a firing range – that was interesting.

One year we all went to a restaurant that featured flamenco dancing, which I’d never seen in real life. Unfortunately some people I knew from work took off without paying, and then a few other people didn’t put in enough, and the whole thing turned into a hideous mess. I was outside smoking to relieve the stress and missed the dancing altogether. I wish I could’ve just paid the whole bill myself, but I was temping at that point and couldn’t afford it. That may have been the last time I did anything on that scale for my birthday. It still makes me cringe to think about it.

Although my friends saved the evening not only by paying the bill, but by presenting me with a birthday cake in the shape of a coffin. This amazed and confused the restaurant staff and remains the best birthday cake I’ve ever had. What could be more perfect?

Normally, though, I can’t stand the whole cake-and-candles ritual thing. Cake is all well and good, but please, don’t get me started on the Birthday Song. What am I, five? I hate being the center of attention that way. I even hated it when I was a kid.

One of my closest friends sings me “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” every year as a compromise.

I hate opening presents, too. I get overwhelmed by a sense of obligation I know can never be satisfied. (I’ve worked on this, but it’s no good.) Last night two friends took me out after work and treated me to beer, pool, and a cupcake, and I swear I just about wept with gratitude at their thoughtfulness. It was precisely what I needed.

What I do like about my birthday is that it marks the beginning of an upswing in my mood. The stressful grind of the holidays is followed, for me, by my least favorite anniversaries. I was raped at the end of January, and my mother and my brother both died in February; my mother died a week before my fifth birthday. No wonder I don’t like to make a big fuss. I get so depressed in February now, especially since my brother died, that I can’t even begin to make birthday plans, and couldn’t stand it if someone else made them for me – I don’t need the pressure.

I wish I lived in a culture where birthdays aren’t acknowledged after, say, your 18^th (with special allowance made for 21, perhaps?), but now I’m being a wet blanket. Now that it’s here, I feel good. February’s over, I have friends, and as I like to say when I’m feeling bleak about life:  at least nothing in my immediate vicinity’s on fire. Including birthday candles. Things could be a lot worse.

Time to get ready to go out, shoot some more pool, and get a little tipsy. I’m actually looking forward to this. But they’d better not have gotten me a cake.

How do you feel about your birthday?

I’ve had an epiphany. I’m going back to school for Environmental Studies, and I want to be involved in sustainability planning for communities. Ta da!

Only took me twenty years to figure that out. I’ve never been particularly interested in anything specific as a job, except writing novels. And I certainly don’t give a crap about a career just for the sake of a career. Associate manager to manager to senior manager to associate director to director to senior director – who cares? Do any of those people actually enjoy what they do every day?

People care about the money, of course, and the status. I don’t care about status, in fact in most cases the higher up a person is in a corporation the less I respect them, since I’ve worked in that area long enough to know what it takes to advance that high. And it’s way more important to me to be interested in what I do, and to feel like I’m doing some good or at least no harm to the world, than to just make as much money as I can.

So, what to do?

Finance – vomit. Energy – blech. Manufacturing – do we manufacture anything in this country any more? Medicine, hm. Too much science, too much one-on-one with people. Same with therapy, which I’ve seriously considered. Or teaching – could I get up and perform in front of people every day? I don’t think so.

I would love to help women, children, or animals that have been abused, but emotionally, I couldn’t do it. I cry at the commercials. No help at all.

My most recent chosen profession has been web development. IT is a good field to go into if you hate computers and people. Even if you went into IT because you love dinking around with hardware or you have a passion for programming, you’ll end up in management. And as anyone who’s ever worked for other people knows, rare is the manager who actually likes people and knows how to inspire them. It’s certainly not a job requirement.

I suspect it’s like that in most fields. You go into the industry because you like working with whatever it is – clothing, books, education, numbers, design, programming, etc. – and you end up in management, because if you’re not moving up the ladder, you’re a loser. And once you’re in management, you’re no longer working with whatever it was you liked in the first place. Nonprofits are no different from corporations in this respect, though I suppose if you’re passionate enough about the issue or the industry, it doesn’t matter to you.

I’ve never been that passionate about anything, unless I’m too passionate. I could never work in publishing, for example. I love books so much, but working in publishing would be something like a person who loves steak getting a job at a slaughterhouse. No thanks.

Academia is similar, to me. I can see how it’s a lot of fun to dissect other people’s literary work down to subatomic levels, but does it do good for the world in general? Plus, academia is just as competitive as the corporate sector, if not more so. And there’s the teaching thing, too. Not for me.

Before my career got derailed, I was moving toward usability. To help the web become easier to navigate for everyone, that’s a good job.

Unfortunately my “career,” such as it was, got derailed by 9/11. I’d just moved to NYC days earlier, got laid off a few months later, with no contacts and no experience in the city, which was now in a deep recession. My field was way over-saturated, outsourced, unstable, yet still demanded that its players relearn everything, every couple of years. I could never get enough work to keep up my skills or pay for classes, so every year I’ve fallen further behind. If I were enough of a graphic designer or a programmer to be a strong competitor, I would be okay, but I’m not. And, sadly, I’ve become less interested in usability, too. In what’s starting to look like a permanent recession, no one’s hiring anyone simply to make their web site easy to use, yet a lot of education is needed to learn to do it well.

And it doesn’t do enough good in the world to inspire me.

But I can’t just work at a bookstore, my other job. Talk about a dead end. It’s been killing my body and my soul for the last couple of years, but my mind has just been churning in circles.I don’t want to be a manager, or work in the head offices. What should I do? Leave the city? Take some programming classes? I’m sick of freelancing, too, and that’s what most programmers are nowadays. Go back to school? I haven’t wanted to go back to school. I feel like I’ve done that, and I need to move forward. Of course, I would do anything if I could only pick a goal. But what goal? What should I do? What should I do?

My thinking has become kind of frantic this past year.

I just kept going on, doing my best, when I can, to figure out why I’m alive and what I’m doing here. Watching the depression grow again. Ugh.

Trying to do the thing, I did NaNoWriMo again this past November, and wrote the first draft of an apocalyptic novel that’s been in my head for at least twenty years. It was so much fun, and turned out well enough that I decided to keep working at it. I’ve thrown myself into researching climate change, epidemiology, water issues, large scale environmental disaster, and have surprised myself by getting more interested, instead of burning out.

I even considered becoming a disaster relief worker, but I don’t think that’s a full time job. Also, I think that kind of work is physically demanding and requires a person to be away from home for weeks at a time. Hm.

I kept getting a vision of myself installing solar panels. So I started to look into that. I thought it would probably be handy to know a little bit about how electricity works, should the apocalypse come along, and I thought my classmates would be interesting – would I be the only woman, the only person my age? I wouldn’t care.

As I looked through the programs at each college in New York state, I kept seeing programs in environmental studies. And I found a great program at CUNY Hunter College. You can focus either on the science-y bits or on policy and management, which sounds boring but actually means “planning sustainable communities,” which is what, I realized, I want to do. Yay!

And as soon as I started talking about it, I found all kinds of advice and connections all around me – people who know people in the field who are willing to talk to me, or who can suggest certifications and so forth to get me started. Contacts, networking, mentoring – it’s all that stuff they tell you about in career advice books and articles, but I can use it now, because I have a goal at last.

What a difference it makes!

What’s interesting to me (and hopefully to others) about this process is the idea that action creates action. Even if you don’t know what to do, you have to keep doing something in order to make something else happen – a new idea, a new opportunity. Otherwise you might as well lie down and die, which tempts me at times, believe me. It’s transforming, to have a purpose. I’m even studying Algebra, in preparation for placement testing, and actually enjoying it.

That’s where I am today. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about this whole process. Wherever you are in your life, I wish you luck, and the energy to keep trying!

I flew to the Midwest last Sunday, not wanting to go but unable to get out of it, and as it turns out I’m glad I did. In grief, a person will say things they wouldn’t say at any other time. We don’t really talk about anything in my family – at least, we never have before.

My sister had her own family emergency that I won’t go into, but one result was that she dropped me at our father’s house on the day of the funeral and had to take off immediately, which meant that I spent about three hours on my own with him that afternoon. Pretty much exactly the situation I had always dreaded.

We looked at some photo albums, and he teared up and admitted it was hard to look at the pictures of my stepmother. I did my best to comfort him, and teared up myself, on his behalf. She was never a monster; she always seemed like a perfectly nice person, but even at eleven I could tell that she didn’t want to be raising any more children, especially someone else’s. Her kids were grown, with children of their own. My problem was that I always needed more than that, and was disappointed over and over by her coldness. After my mother had died, my father didn’t seem to want us around, either. He and my stepmother both always did the conventionally correct things, especially materially, so we had regular meals, and vacations and Christmas presents and birthday parties, and clothing, and I got braces, and in spite of the upheaval of my mother’s death and my father’s eventual remarriage, we had stability. Lots of people don’t have that, growing up, and I’ve always been grateful.

But it still hurt that there was no love there. My father was always harshly critical of us kids, contemptuous, really, and incapable of controlling his temper. My mother could mellow him out, and to a lesser degree my stepmother did the same, but there were those years between his marriages, when we lived in constant fear of his wrath. We laugh now about the time we were coming back from Disney World, and had stopped at a McDonald’s for lunch. My sister wouldn’t eat her hamburger because they put onion on it – she was always the stubborn one, the one most like my father – and my father was furious and yelled at her. And then we got back to the car to discover that we had a flat tire. This meant that my father had to unload all the camping gear out of the back of the station wagon to get at the spare. He was beet red and cursing the whole time, and the three of us stood frozen on the sidewalk, staying out of his way and trying to ignore the stares of happier families. It’s not a particularly funny story at all, but I’m glad we can laugh.

Not at all funny were the times when my brother got into trouble, which was often back then, and my father took him into his bedroom and beat the crap out of him. My sister and I would stay in the living room, out of the way but hearing it all, trying to act like everything was okay. My brother was the oldest, and probably the most affected of us three kids by our mother’s death. What he was doing is now called “acting out,” and if it had been the nineties, his school might have recognized it and convinced my father to get him some help. As it was, in the seventies, though everyone in our tiny town knew what was going on, nobody could really do anything. The beatings stopped when my brother ran away at 13 and was brought back by the police. My father stuck to just yelling after that, which was bad but not the worst. He and my brother never reconciled their troubled relationship, and even now, when my brother has been dead for seven years, my father despises and blames him for causing all that trouble.

Not funny, either, were the constant insults I endured from my father. I didn’t just have a messy room; I was a pig, I was disgusting. I didn’t just get a bad grade; I was stupid and lazy, a disgrace. He always expected the worst from me, and accused me of lying when I hadn’t done anything bad.

One Saturday afternoon I came home after spending the night at a friend’s house. We’d gone sledding that morning, running up a big hill and sliding, screaming with laughter, down again, over and over. We’d had such a good time, and when her mom dropped me off, instead of going straight to my room, I went into the kitchen, where my father and stepmother were, to let them know I was home and had had fun. I was reeling with fatigue, not having slept much, of course, and then all that sledding, and my father accused me of being drunk. Drunk? I was twelve. I hardly knew what that meant. I realize lots of kids do start drinking that young or even younger, but I was a good kid. I never got in trouble at school, and certainly had never given him any reason to suspect that I was one of those kids. I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t convince him that I was just tired from staying up late and being a kid. I went up to my room, all my pleasure gone in frustration and hurt.

It’s hard to convey how hurtful all of this was to me as a child. Lots of people experience that kind of parenting, where nothing is ever good enough, and the slightest infraction is blown way out of proportion. As an adult, I can see that the good outweighed the bad, but as a child, all I knew was that my father seemed to hate me, and I became convinced that there was something wrong with me. I entered adulthood with shattered self-esteem, hating myself and constantly expecting other people to hate me, too, crippled by a deep, unconscious dread of other people. Though I knew it was really a fear of my father, that knowledge never took that sick feeling away. I moved far away as soon as I could, going to college at seventeen – another good thing my father did – and rarely going back to his house, moving to San Francisco the day I finished my studies. I’ve seen my father and stepmother five times since then. They never invited me to visit, and I certainly didn’t want to. Relations with the rest of my family suffered as a result, but I had to do it. I had to get away from him and sort of re-raise myself. Find some sense of self-worth, stop getting into relationships with people who treated me like my father did, and learn how to love people.

My father’s contempt extended well beyond his children, and encompassed most of the human race. He was no Archie Bunker; he was aware that you’re not supposed to talk like that, and seldom did, but his racism was clear to me when I was very young. He would drop remarks about Blacks, Jews, Arabs, Asians, everybody – even Italians. The Irish got it, too, though his children were half Irish. I’m grateful that he doesn’t hold women in the same contempt, or I would be an even bigger mess than I already am.

He did teach me, inadvertently, to separate a person from his faults and not to dismiss a person for having one or two bad qualities, and also not to disdain an entire race because of the actions of a few; because that’s what he did, and I could see that it was wrong. But I always thought that, underneath all of that, he was a good person and would be there for me if I really needed him.

And this is the ultimate issue I have with my father: that he proved me wrong. After I was raped – by a black man – he and my stepmother both treated me badly. My father blew up at me at the hospital, and the nurse had to step in, mercifully, and take me away. My stepmother treated me even more coldly than usual, and at home my father lectured me at great length about how you simply can’t trust a black person, they were just violent, natural criminals. Then he ordered me not to tell anyone what had happened, and that was the end of it. Not a single word of kindness; they never even asked me if I was okay.

This betrayal was a far more serious trauma than the rape itself.

The ironic thing is that I trusted that guy, the rapist, and agreed to give him a ride (“just down the road”), because he’d paid me a compliment and, during the few minutes that we talked, asked me about myself and appeared to be interested in what I said. I was sixteen, and that had almost never happened to me. And when I hesitated to let him get in my car, he said, “What’s the matter, you don’t trust a brother?” and I thought, That’s my father’s voice in my head, telling me not to trust him because he’s black. I didn’t want to be that way. I still don’t. I’d rather trust the wrong person some of the time, than trust no one, ever.

My father’s racism was more important to him than his daughter. I’ve tried so hard to forgive my father for this, understanding that forgiveness is something you have to do over and over, but I never could conquer the rage I felt whenever I thought of him.

That the fight we finally had, my father and I, was about politics, is hilarious to me. We’ve never agreed about politics. My earliest political memory is the presidential race in 1976, when I looked at the two candidates on TV and said, of Carter, “I want him to win.” He had a kind face, and his name was Jimmy. My father said, “No, we want the other guy to win,” and I thought, No, I don’t. But of course I couldn’t say that aloud. I was already afraid to contradict him.

So we were in the car, last Monday, going to get some information from a cemetery/mausoleum where my father was considering placing my stepmother’s ashes. I guess I started it. My father is one of those people who forward those hideous, racist, hateful, lie-filled emails that the more rabid form of conservatives send around. I do not exaggerate, if you’ve never seen one of these. They don’t just say that Obama is the wrong man for the job; they say he’s a terrorist. A few of them even say directly that a black man should never be president, and go on in terms that could have come directly from the KKK. I’d surprised myself by hitting “reply” on a few and refuting them, calmly and rationally, trying to reach my father as an intelligent person, to no avail. Even though they were just emails, hitting “send” was terrifying to me. Anyway, in the car that day, I noticed that Rush Limbaugh was on the radio, and said something light about how I could see where he got his ideas from. My father unleashed the most hateful tirade I have ever heard.

And I spoke up. After all these years, I finally wasn’t afraid of him anymore.

I have learned, from the internet, how to argue with someone without resorting to ad hominem attack. Calling someone names in an attempt to cow them is ineffective and degrading; my father has never learned this, being unaccustomed to having people disagree with him. I let him talk, but whenever I started to say something, he just shouted over me. And when he called me an idiot, I said “Don’t call me an idiot. You disagree with me, but I’m not an idiot.” I asked him how he knew he was right if he never listened to differing opinions, and he said he didn’t need to hear another point of view. He said such awful things, about how anyone who didn’t have health care was lazy and deserved to die, that everyone in Guantanamo was a terrorist and should be killed, in fact all Arabs should be in prison, and I asked him a question I’ve wanted to ask him for decades: “How can you call yourself a Christian? Your god is supposed to be the god of love. How can you say those things?” He had no answer for that, just snorted.

I let the argument go after that, for the most part. I mean, his wife had just died. I was surprised it had gone as far as it had, and even more surprised at how calm I felt. I had kept my temper, held my own with my father, and spoken the truth, and the world hadn’t come to an end. We arrived at the cemetery and everything just went back to normal. If he was at all disturbed by what had happened, he certainly didn’t show it. Another good thing about my father is that while he can dish it out, he can also take it. He referred to our argument over the next few days, but didn’t seem to feel bad about it. He also didn’t try to make me feel bad about it. Not that he would have succeeded.

He even told me and my sister over dinner that he felt awful about not being able to keep his temper with us when we were kids. And he told us that our stepmother, when her first husband died, had promised herself that she wouldn’t marry a man with kids, that she didn’t want to do that. We refrained from letting him know that we could tell. These admissions were huge for him, and I appreciated them. But I’m even more thankful for all the work I’ve been doing, these last twenty-five years. I like who I am. I’ve slain the dragon at last.

I told my father several times that I loved him. He even said it back, grudgingly and not terribly sincerely, like always, but it doesn’t matter. At some point I would like to talk to him about what happened after the rape, but even that is no longer such a barrier between us, for me anyhow. I’m even looking forward to visiting more often, seeing my cousins who also live in the area, and my sister and niece and nephew, whom I love so much.

I don’t believe my father is capable of loving his children like he loved both of his wives, and I’m more sure than ever that he genuinely, deeply loved my mother. He can’t decide where to put my stepmother’s ashes because he’s conflicted about where his own remains should go. The space next to my mother in the cemetery in New York belongs to him, and he feels he should rest there, beside her. But thirty years with my stepmother mean a lot to him, too. That’s a good quality for a man to have. I can love him for that.

It saddens and disappoints me that this sangha didn’t work out for me, but once the depression lifted, I realized that of course I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was intimidated in the beginning, and I never got through that. I’m sure my discomfort was evident to anyone who looked at me. It’s not anyone’s job, as far as I know, to help people who seem to be struggling; maybe that’s not the case in other sanghas. I would’ve liked it if someone had at least tried. These are not bad or insincere people by any means. No community is perfect, and I didn’t expect this one to be. We just never reached each other.

Though I could wish I had quit a bit sooner, I am glad I didn’t give up on them right away. Sometimes it’s hard to know how much effort to put into something. You have to trust a teacher, for example, and keep on doing the thing even when it’s hard, even when it doesn’t seem like there’s any point to what you’re doing. I tried really hard to make this group work for me, and to be a part of it, but I couldn’t do it, and that’s okay. It’s not the only one. And it’s not like I gave up quickly. I tend to put up with bad or uncomfortable situations for much longer than I should, but there have been times when I bailed out on something I probably should’ve stuck with. At least this way I know.

I had doubts about writing that post. I took a vow to esteem the Three Treasures, and not defame them, and I take vows seriously. And the last thing I want to do is discourage anyone else from trying a zendo. But I don’t think what I did was defaming, and I’m not splitting hairs here. Part of the reason you need to “kill the Buddha” is because slavish devotion to a guru hurts everyone involved, and the same is true of the community. We’re all just people, and it’s worth remembering that a group of people is not going to be any different from any other group of people, just because they’re engaged in a spiritual effort. This is true whether it’s a zendo, a church, a synagogue, an ashram, a mosque, or whatever. And while I found many articles about people having trouble with gurus, I didn’t find any about people having trouble with their sangha.

Could I have done anything differently? I can’t help being who I am, and part of that is being shy in certain situations, unfortunately. Maybe trying a sangha that is friendlier and more involved is the way to go. I don’t know. I just need to let it go for a while. Any advice is welcome.

And I still feel I need to see Roshi and talk about this with him. This is where it gets unpleasant; I would have no problem continuing to support the monastery and seeing Roshi occasionally, while not sitting zazen with the group, but my finances don’t really permit this since if I find another group, I’ll have to contribute financially to them. But in the zen tradition, the teacher-student relationship is paramount, and I knew that going in. I can’t just ditch him, and I don’t want to. Maybe we can work something out.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to get in the habit of sitting zazen at home. More on that as it develops.

This was a big deal to me. Both of these posts were very hard to write. I still believe zen is the right path for me; in fact, even without sitting for a few weeks, the changes are still there, just as strong. I know I’ll figure this out, and all will be well.

The sangha at this zendo were never very warm and welcoming, which I found reassuring at first. I was nervous enough about the whole thing and it was good not to feel like I had 100 or so brand new best friends, like it’s a cult or something. I assumed that we’d get to know one another and I’d eventually find some friends there.

And when that didn’t happen, I thought maybe I needed to keep going for a while before they trusted me. Even in the first few months I saw how many people show up just a few times, then disappear. It’s a tough discipline and doesn’t necessarily show any results right away, maybe not for years.

I tried to be friendly, but something just wasn’t working. Apart from the core group who were almost always there, I found it hard to tell who was brand new and who was a regular. A lot of people there don’t speak English very well, and were even more shy than I am. And I’m never quite sure what I’m allowed to talk about.

We often have these informal teas after doing about two hours of zazen (I go on a regular night every week). I’m thrown into a group of people who really have nothing in common, aside from an interest in zen, but apparently you’re not supposed to talk about zen. Whenever I mention anything at all about zen, people literally turn away from me. I once, in a desperate attempt to start a conversation, asked the head monk about a couple of statues on the altar, having heard someone else do the same once. He gave me some brief answer, but with an expression of such – it seemed to me – hatred and fury, that I took an involuntary step backward. His teeth were literally clenched, and he glared. I am still bewildered by that.

I can do small talk, but only if I feel reasonably comfortable. Once you’ve asked someone what they do for a living, where they live, and if they’re reading any good books, where do you go from there? After three years, I can definitely say that most people do not help me out at all. They might stand and look at me for a moment, but won’t make the effort to keep the conversation going.

It’s hard not to take it personally. I know I’m not that socially retarded. I’m shy, but people generally like me. I can be charming, even. But not there.

I always blame myself in situations like these, though very often after a looong time, I realize it wasn’t me at all. But this, I don’t know.

In the past year, perhaps because of the chronic condition in my feet that leaves me in constant pain, I’ve slid into a pretty bad episode of depression, something I’ve suffered from all of my life. Doing zazen overall, I believe, is helping me; but when I do it with the group at the zendo, I am often left very depressed afterward. All I want to do is go home and sleep, but I have to attend these informal (infernal) teas, because I get “volunteered” to help out every single time. To have to make light conversation, through a minefield of things I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about, is hell at such a time. I’m absolutely sure it shows on my face. This is the only possible reason I can think of for the sangha’s cold and even rude behavior toward me.

But what kind of compassion is that? Some of these people have been sitting for over 20 years. Compassion is a huge thing in Buddhism, and it’s always been a biggie with me. One of the many issues I have with Other People is that I am not often treated with the same compassion I offer others.

If they’re trying to teach me something, I’m missing it. I can now count on being extremely depressed every Thursday, my zendo night. In the last few months, a few times I’ve been so depressed I couldn’t leave my apartment, so I missed a few nights. I also work so much that I can’t often make it to the weekend sesshins (all-day sits). I know they assume it’s because I’m lazy or I don’t care. I know this because the head monk once asked me if I was coming to that weekend’s sesshin, and when I said no, he actually followed me out of the room to say he hadn’t meant to make me feel guilty. Apparently something showed on my face. I didn’t tell him, and maybe I should have, that I wasn’t feeling guilty; I was feeling judged.

You can’t volunteer explanations for things, at least I can’t. It just sounds like you’re making excuses. And I know from having depression all of my life that despite how common it is, few people really understand it. The head monk has mentioned several times in talks he’s given, that you shouldn’t stay away from the zendo “just because” you’re depressed. Well, when I can’t stop crying long enough to get on a bus, or I can’t lift my head from the pillow, I stay home.

I wish there were another word for this kind of depression. It’s not a matter of “feeling a little down.”

I’ve been persistent – I’ve been going there for three years. I’ve tried not to be self-conscious, tried not to think of myself at all. It’s too hard to do that when I’m depressed and people are acting coldly towards me.

It’s not just the head monk I have a problem with, but I don’t want to spend time just bitching about people. He is supposed to be in charge of this zendo, though there is an abbot who lives at the monastery upstate. The abbot is awesome. He knows his shit, and talking to him is wonderful. But I seldom see him, as I can’t afford to go up there very often, and as he’s older he doesn’t come to the city very often.

I’ve been hanging on because of the abbot, actually. But after last Thursday, the only thing that made me stop feeling suicidal was the realization that, duh, I don’t have to go there. I can find another zendo. It’s a serious thing to ditch one’s teacher, and I don’t want to do that, but this situation at the zendo may in fact be a major cause of the depression I’ve fallen into this past year. If that’s the case, I need to fix it or get the fuck out.

I’m going to send an email to the head monk to ask if I’ve done something to offend the sangha. If I can’t work it out with him, I will only go when the abbot is there, several times a year. If people are really rude to me when I do show up, I’ll write to the abbot and tell him I want to look for another teacher for that reason. Maybe I’m not the only person who’s been treated this way. Maybe that’s why so many people stop coming.

It’s actually been with me for years, it just took me this long to realize it. Doing zazen, as I’ve said, means all kinds of day-to-day junk precipitates out (thank you, high school chemistry) and lets me see clearly what I’m really thinking. It was during zazen that I really started to see this little film clip, and afterwards I realized that it’s popping up quite often lately. It plays many times a day.

I don’t really know if it’s only because of my mind clearing. I think it’s because of what this image represents, and what I’ve been going through for the past year.

I hate talking about this, because no one wants to hear complaining, but I really have been in constant pain for a year now, from this thing that’s going on with my feet, and having to work on my feet all the time. Equally painful is having to say to people, look, I need to sit down. I need the day off. I need help.

I need.

I can’t tell someone what I need without getting distressed. And then to accept help? Oy. Yet I have to.

The other day I had to tell the manager at the bookstore, after they had me at the cash register for a while, that I can’t stand still for more than about ten minutes without serious agony. She, busy, nodded and said “Okay – learn to speak up.”

Oh my god. Learn to speak up. So, I’m in pain because of my feet. I’m distressed because of having to speak up. And now she’s criticizing me for not speaking up sooner.

I know she has no idea what goes on in my head (god, I hope not) and only meant, just let us know and don’t suffer next time, it’s not necessary. They’ve been so accommodating at work, as much as they can be. This whole thing is hard, and the constant pain and stress has brought on all this depression, and that makes everything, everything, so much harder.

Man with a stick, hitting me.

So I know this image comes from somewhere. It didn’t take long to recognize it, once I let myself see it. He’s standing in front of me, slightly to the right. He’s right handed and I’m putting up my left hand to defend myself. It’s cold.

This is a moment from when I was raped.

It’s not a stick, it’s an ice scraper. Not the little plastic kind, but the kind that’s a long wooden dowel, with a scraper on one end and a brush on the other for the snow.

He and I are in a vacant lot in Detroit. It’s January. He’s ordered me to get into the back seat. It’s my father’s car, which I’d driven to work.

I get out and scan my surroundings. I have seconds to decide. Try to run through the foot of untouched snow to the twelve foot chain link fence? Can I scale it before he catches up with me? Then what? I can see cars, maybe six city blocks distant. There’s no way I can outrun him, in my stupid girl boots. I’m 16. He is a grown man over six feet tall and in very good condition.

I am numb. I open the back door. I’m not thinking anything when I see the stick in the back seat and grab it. I try to whack him in the head with it as he approaches.

A friend took a women’s self defense course. She told me that the hardest thing about the class was retraining herself to hurt someone. Even if she thinks her life is threatened, a woman is so socialized not to hurt anyone that it’s almost impossible for her to defend herself. Yet another way we are crippled by the world we live in.

Needless to say, I am ineffectual. He whips the stick out of my hands and starts hitting me with it.

And… scene.

What does it mean? It’s obvious, and it’s about more than just that one incident. I don’t dare try to defend myself. I feel I have no right to assert my will on my own behalf. And when I make the effort, against all those bad instincts, I am instantly punished. I’ve only made it worse.

I can’t even begin to describe how this was so much more true of my relationship with my father, though he was not physically abusive to me. You’re just going to have to take my word for it.

I had a few flashbacks in the months after the rape, the really intense kind where the real world disappears and you see this kind of 3D movie instead. This is like that, only less intense. I can sort of feel the blows, but I don’t lose the world around me. I just space out for a second.

I have an appointment with my therapist tomorrow evening.

I’m still trying to figure out what kind of blog I want this to be. I’ve just spent the better part of the past week reading a friend’s blog, completely unable to stop reading the next entry, and the next entry, and the next… She’s having a very interesting life, is brutally honest, and knows how to tell a story – the best combination in the world. And I got to thinking, I need to tell more of those kinds of stories here.

What am I so shy about? That my friends will read it? Generally, when I’m hanging out with people, I’ll tell any kind of story that pops into my head. I’ve gotten a little more circumspect in recent years, but that’s more because I want to tell new stories, and most of the more titillating stuff happened a long time ago. Also, I don’t want to sound like I’m showing off. I don’t think there’s anything special or better about me, I just like to tell stories and think about life. And anyway, I can introduce you to a dozen people who are way cooler than I’ll ever be.

Part of this is coming up because there’s a book being published in the fall. It’s a collection of essays and art from a magazine that ran for about ten years, called Morbid Curiosity. A friend of mine ran it and was kind enough to publish a couple of my essays in it, and one of those made the cut for the book. I’m excited about it, and happy for her and everyone else, but… this essay, written under my real name, is about me getting off in the torture museum in Amsterdam. In the bathroom. By myself. So, not only am I telling the world that I’m kinky, I’m also advertising a time when I masturbated in public. When I decided to use my real name on the piece, I thought, fuck it. I’m not ashamed of who I am.

And I’m still not. So what’s the fucking problem?

I’ll tell you what the fucking problem is. Along with all the fun stories I want to tell – like the camel trek in Egypt, flying in a helicopter over a glacier in Alaska, having sex next to the dance floor in a London nightclub – there’s a whole lot of fucked up stuff. I don’t know if I’ve told you this before, but I’m kind of fucked up. And I’m still figuring out how to deal with that.

I can’t tell the fun stories without telling the fucked up stories. In fact, a lot of the fun stories turn into the fucked up stories. But if it’s all attached, even obliquely, to my real name – and I’m laughing as I type this – will it prevent me from getting a job someday?

Maybe it’ll get me a job someday. That’s the life I want to be leading.

I’m not too worried about my family. My sister would take it all in stride, and my niece and nephew are both cool and over 18. My father would probably just ignore it, if he ever heard about my blog or any book I’m in, which is unlikely (I’m sure not going to tell him). And the extended family is not really a factor.

The reason I used my real name on that story is because I wanted to commit myself to being who I am, no matter what that means. Now I look back at myself 10 plus years ago with affection and exasperation. Can I really follow through? Can I really be that brave?

I haven’t written anything here that isn’t real. And I still want to talk a lot about this Zen thing. I just don’t see how I can have a really kick-ass blog if I don’t risk letting out too much information. Besides, people love that stuff.

I’m going to take the gloves off. You’ve been warned.

This post is dedicated to Jenn H. I love you!