On an unseasonably cool evening in the
latter part of June 1989 I boarded a #3 MTC bus on Grand Avenue and
paid my seventy-five cent fare. I rode down the big hill to the edge
of downtown St. Paul, where United hospital was situated next to the
new I-35E interstate highway construction. It had been a little over
a year since I graduated with honors from Macalester College, also on
Grand Avenue. When the bus stopped in front of the unassuming plaza
fronting the low, brick-colored wing and tinted glass doors, I
stepped off and walked into the comfortable, carpeted lobby with its
tropical plants and sofas. I asked where to check in and proceeded to
a desk behind the seating area. Seated by the desk with the
impersonal secretary and the computer she never took her eyes from as
she entered my answers to her questions, I wondered what she was
thinking. I clutched an oversized patterned pillow in one arm and
with the other kept my dark gray EMS backpack from tipping over as it
rested against the brown metal legs of the chair. If she were
thinking anything, it wasn't revealed, and my attempts to
good-naturedly elicit a personal response of any kind went unheeded.
In the backpack were a change of
clothes, some inspirational books, like “Be Good to Yourself
Therapy” and “the Herb Book,” and an assortment of other things
that were meant to create a feeling of comfort (I think there might
have been a small stuffed animal) or remind me of academic
achievements (a gold Cross pen and pencil set in a green leather case
that my dad's boss gave to me for graduation). I had brought these
things to the hospital as defensive talismans against the threats I
thought likely to encounter – challenges to the values I was
investing my identity in, like holistic health and a college
degree...even though my presence at the check-in desk seemed to
indicate some pretty significant limits to their usefulness at that
moment.
When I began college four years
earlier, my weight had been a hundred and forty-seven pounds. During
the fall semester, it quickly dropped to a hundred thirty-five and my
eyes sank back in their sockets a bit. That was less extreme than
what followed the loss of the supportive, completely financed
structure of residential academia. When I checked in at United
hospital, I weighed around a hundred pounds, the result of trying to
become “healthy” - well, actually I just wanted to figure out how
to feel good - on a diet that consisted mostly of brown rice, and
things like broccoli, almond butter, and the occasional egg. Food
wasn't the real issue, and I didn't have a conventional eating
disorder, but it had become the most visible stage on which my
post-college drama was being acted out. That drama, like that of many
others, was set somewhere on a sea of vague expectations bothered
with storms of anxiety. Like the rest of us, I was suddenly expected
to learn the rules of games I had not yet played and customs that I
had never encountered before. For me personally, it brought out my
lack of experience when it came to knowing how to care for myself
emotionally, and it highlighted my neglect of social connections and
nurturing relationships, which made it hard to feel secure and
comforted as I fearfully ventured out into this new world, feeling
like I had nothing except a college diploma and a lifetime of
resentfully achieving for teachers and professors.
Two months earlier, I had left a job at
a family-owned Vietnamese restaurant, which was, like everything
else, on Grand Ave. I had worked there for about a month and hadn't
worked since. I couldn't, I stated desperately and somewhat angrily
to Rose, when she called asking me to fill in for someone. I just
couldn't. I don't know why I couldn't, except that busing bins of
plates and waiting on customers was hard physical work. I wasn't
really sure what I could do or when to know that I had reached my
limit. That kind of vague unknowing pretty much characterized my
entire state of being, and I was intently focused on it. It was not
the image I cultivated for myself. I was a hard-working successful
student. Truth be told, I was afraid of many things.
After graduating, I had found some work
in my field, as one might logically expect to do, but I either lacked
belief in myself or had a somewhat arrogant sense of my importance,
so these were insincere or uncertain efforts at best; at worst, I
resented or discounted them. During the summer months, I had worked
at a tiny environmental foundation in West St. Paul, run by an older
woman onto whom I projected an increasing amount of frustration. One
day I took my bag lunch, walked a mile down the road to the nature
center, hiked around a little, found a staff person, and asked if
they had a job there for me. Well, we don't really have anything,
except an internship – it doesn't pay much...Okay, I said, eagerly
and a little bit falsely perhaps, as I had been conditioned to do. No
need to think about it. I'll take it. If I wasn't obsessively stuck
on making a decision, this lack of self-respecting consideration was
typical of my process, too.
For the next few months, I led tours
and participated in events and staff meetings, and it went fairly
well until late October, when, feeling an especially acute amount of
anxiety, I uncharacteristically failed to show up for an evening
event. I finished the internship the following month, looking rather
unhealthy by that time, and traveled back to my family in
Philadelphia for the holidays.
I've just now realized that the two
internships were the last “jobs” I would have that were related
to my college major – environmental studies with concentrations in
geography and biology – until I began graduate school seven years
later and taught physical geography labs. I must not have liked
something about myself very much to have put so much work into a
degree and then feel like I had to turn away from it to accomplish
the basic goal of earning a living. Maybe too, I didn't really know
much about why I had chosen those majors and lacked a desire or the
courage to go deeper. Perhaps, also, I simply preferred to avoid the
issue of putting myself out there in the world by staying in an
academic environment, even though I often felt lonely there, too. Be
that as it may, in the years that followed, I learned a lot about
everyday jobs, almost as if to compensate for my flippant refusal to
seek employment as a teenager, and I learned about the pressures and
problems associated with not having a job.
After the good feeling of college
graduation celebrations wore off, the comforts of familiar people and
accustomed roles had gradually faded or shifted to less familiar
ones, though I lived close enough to campus to continue to stay
involved and occasionally hang out with friends. I wasn't part of the
crowd that was busy working new jobs and I was too cautious to hang
with those who sought to forge a less traditional path. Basically, I
had to both appear responsible and avoid being overwhelmed by
responsibility. I had relatives in the suburbs, but lacking
transportation and feeling poorly about myself, I didn't take many
trips out their way. This cutting myself off from people would be a
habit I still have to work hard to change.
On the positive side, I was subletting
a cozy room in a renovated horse stall that smelled pleasantly of old
wood. Heavy wooden doors sliding along a thick iron rail separated my
space from the hallway that lead to the garage in one direction and
the laundry in the other. The stall/bedroom was on the lower level of
a carriage house behind a mansion on Summit Ave. The other tenants,
with whom I shared a sunny, modern kitchen and living area upstairs,
where the other rooms were located, were friendly professionals and
graduate students, two American men and a Canadian woman. The stairs
were opposite my nest, next to a small room with bench seats and a
wood stove.
In the house at the front of the lot,
also divided into apartments, lived a woman who was a therapist and a
member of the Twin Cities Society of Friends, a group I did things
with in my kind of erratically shy and enthusiastic way. It was her
vision of me living in the carriage house that had been all I needed
to call Bill, who was heading to Hong Kong as an Outward Bound
instructor, and arrange for a three month sublet of his room. I
brought in my futon and turntable and the folk albums I was listening
to at the time, browsed the books he left in the cases lining the end
wall. One in particular, “I'm OK, You're OK,” stuck out in my
mind. Since it was a popular self-help book at the time, and I was
starting therapy at a clinic in the far western suburbs, having
declared myself “all better” to the Jungian analyst who lived in
the neighborhood, this was a bible of sorts that I should let people
know I was studiously attending to. I probably read parts of a
chapter or two.
I might have connected with the other
tenants more than I did, but I was having a hard time hiding the
effects of my insecurities on my emotional and physical well-being.
Basically, I knew how to worry and feel frustrated as I studied
furiously and got good grades. I liked seeing classmates and
relatives, being part of a dinner or some other special event. The
symphonic band wasn't the most exciting thing in the world, but it
was a comfortably familiar ritual too, and there were several other
groups, but to be honest, I didn't really value connecting with
others socially as much as I thought I valued getting grades, even
though I often felt desperately lonely. In fact, I recall badgering
my roommate about his habit of heading off to someone's room at one
in the morning, or bringing someone by ours, because they wanted to
talk about something or go somewhere. As conscientious as I was about
keeping a hard-working, studious attitude, he was about attending to
the needs of his friends to be listened to, including mine. Maybe I
just didn't know that such a thing was important. Maybe I didn't
believe I could succeed socially. In either case, when I fell beyond
the pale of what were the comparatively nurturing arms of the
educational institution, I floundered.
One example of this was my attempt to
turn the holistic health clinic I was frequenting into my next
college and the chiropractor there into my next adviser. He did serve
this role as best he could and connected me with both an analyst and
a clinic in the suburbs, but my vision was producing more frustration
than achievement. I still have a pretty clear memory of the tidbits
of information I pored over following their classes and seminars, as
if they were scraps of ancient texts of wisdom that offered a ticket
to success and freedom from my prison of bad feeling and insecurity.
I had taken the initiative to start
treatments there about sixteen months prior to that point. In
December of 1987, at the end of my penultimate semester, before I
moved into an apartment off campus, some of the people from the
clinic presented at the student union. The staff included the
chiropractor, his wife, an assistant, a macrobiotic, former French
chef nutritionist, a receptionist and office manager, as well as a
massage therapist and their professional friends and colleagues.
Having had some kind of muscular back seizure earlier that fall, I
followed the logical line of reasoning that treatments there were a
diligent and rational decision, and I was attracted to the intriguing
new perspective of holistic health care.
I sought to take them up on their
introductory offers and convince my father to cheerfully pay for it.
My father worked for the organization that oversaw the medical board
examinations at a time when chiropractors were viewed by the medical
profession as quacks. But at this clinic, I enthused, they would
educate me about healthy food choices and cooking methods and I could
get a massage and take classes and seminars with other like-minded
followers...eh, I don't think chiropractors really do anything, but
if you think you'll learn something from them...well, I'm sure
they're good enough, and if it will help your back...you sound very
enthusiastic about it...how much is it going to cost? For how long
will you be going?
For most people, a decision to treat
their back at a chiropractic clinic would indeed have been a sensible
thing to do. Others might have politely declined and taken care of
themselves, but for me, there was nothing but to sell myself and my
family and anyone else who would listen on their idea and become an
enthusiastic “patient and student,” as I later defined myself on
my resume. Um...yeah, sometimes, I think original, attention-getting
ideas bordering on flaky are brilliant. I'm kind of learning to
recognize these feeling and take a few steps back toward a safer,
more practical stance. Another thing I'm learning is when to let go.
I continued for years at this clinic and then switched to another
chiropractor whose office was next to the Vietnamese restaurant. The
man, who was at the time her partner and the father of their soon to
be born son, befriended me after I got out of the hospital and began
working at the grocery store across the street. When, after a couple
years, she told me that I was too much of a victim for her to
continue working with, I went back to my first choice, though as my
life improved in the coming years, I reconciled with her and
continued getting treatments until leaving for graduate school in the
mid90s.
Suffice it to say that, although the
treatments had had the expected positive results at first, I wasn't
exactly getting healthier when I went to talk to a medical doctor
about my weight loss and depression, and my choice to use a
chiropractor and learn about alternative healing had become a nagging
source of contention with my family, who were basically wanting to
know when I would get a job and everything would be fine.
In astrology, four elements and three
modes combine to create the twelve signs of the zodiac. I had learned
about elements at the holistic health clinic, though that was the
Chinese system, in which there are five. The astrological elements
are four: fire (inspiration and intuition), earth (practical
matters), air (intellect and sociability), and water (feeling).
Planets, which loosely speaking include the sun and the moon, more
properly known as the lights, represent components of the
personality. Each uses the energy of the zodiac sign in which it is
placed to express itself.
When I was born, there were no planets
in the signs of the zodiac associated with fire, and I think that
tellingly describes my lack of a certain kind of energy as I
attempted to take on the challenge of doing the expected things,
while maintaining my sense of health and well-being. My natal chart
has many planets in mutable signs. There are three modes in
astrology: cardinal (active), fixed (established), and mutable
(evaluative, adjustable, educational). I found many ways to keep
learning after leaving college, and had many new experiences despite
the mounting difficulties. I showed initiative (cardinal mode) in
trying things out that solved practical problems (earth element), but
the learning, in the emotional arena (water signs), was an area of
life that could no longer be ignored out of anxiety or fear of losing
a certain attitude that had to that point driven me onwards. The
emotional and mental stresses ate into my ability to function in
practical ways (earth) and in intellectual and social ways (air),
which are otherwise strong points in my personality.
I guess one could say that the therapy
I had begun and the hospital mental health program I became involved
in at the hospital were my first steps toward a degree in emotional
knowledge from the school of life, though I always seemed to escape
from the true lessons before they sunk in and would return to therapy
to reach my latest, anxious goal.
The Moon intersects the Earth's orbital
plane at two points. At one, it is moving into the space above the
plane (to the north) and in the other, it is moving below the plane
(to the south). These are the points where eclipses occur, because
the Earth, Sun, and Moon line up in exactly the same plane. The
points move as the earth moves around the sun. When viewed against
the backdrop of the tropical zodiac, which is based on the Earth's
seasons and made up of the four elements and three modes, they
migrate backwards in overall motion, changing signs in a little over
a year's time, sixteen years to cycle the complete zodiac.
When I was born, the south node was in
the fourth degree of Sagittarius, and the north node, which is always
exactly 180 degrees away, was in the fourth degree of Gemini. The
south node represents things we are born already knowing well, a kind
of default behavior or attitude, while the north node represents the
things we must, without any real incentive, learn how to do to
balance the south node and feel satisfied with what we've done in
life. Sagittarius values freedom above all else and is scholarly,
too. The Moon is located just past halfway between the North Node and
the South Node in Virgo, another intellectual, analytical sign.
Getting a book to study something and working toward some kind of
career student hood seems to be how I approached my Moon's square to
my South Node.
The South Node is in my natal tenth
house, the part of life that is the most public. It represents the
public roles people play and the part of life for which one gains
recognition, such as a career. I would follow a career path that
included college, and do well...that meant security, though it never
honestly felt that way even when I was highly stimulated by the
learning. The North node is in Gemini, a communicative energy based
on immediate connections in the environment. It is factual in its
outlook, and more local and everyday than the culturally astute and
conceptually oriented Sag. It is in my natal fourth house, the most
private area of the chart, representing one's home, family,
ancestors, and inner life. I have learned to talk and write about my
feelings, though with Gemini, one truth is often as good as another,
so being honest with how I feel is a challenge as well – the Moon's
square with the North Node. Becoming critical about everything is
another associated with the Virgo Moon, and that makes acceptance of
one's faults (so that one can actually want to change them)
difficult, though I am getting much better at it. It is finally
starting to feel okay to set aside cynicism and adopt a positive, but
not pollyannish, attitude. Discriminating between the two is one of
the strengths of Virgo. There's a lot more astrology in the words
above. I discover it as I write it, or I think I do. It would take a
long time and a lot of energy to patiently write it all out, and so
I'll wait for a good reason to do so or let it go.
