Struggling to Breathe
When I was six months old, my lungs collapsed while I was sleeping in my crib. The way I understand the story, my mother happened to be in the room, happened to notice I was turning blue. Had circumstances been different, I might have been another statistic of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Instead, I was rushed to the hospital and spent the next few weeks in an oxygen tent, a small cloth bunny rabbit my only companion. I remember none of it. But it’s my worst physical fear: not being able to inhale and knowing it.
Breathing is a matter of expansion and contraction. Fill the lungs, empty the lungs. Fill the lungs, empty the lungs. Fill. Empty. Fill. Empty. I never worry about the emptying part, only the filling. As if one day, I might go to take that breath and forget how it’s done. Or worse, my lungs will just fail me with no warning. It’s the awareness part that terrifies me the most. The idea that I will be struggling to take in air and… nothing.
During the first part of COVID, I was oddly in a place of expansion. I’d left a job that I thought was my dream job and turned out to be really not that at all. I was building my political consulting practice with clients I really liked, I was teaching writing in exchange for donations to causes that were important to me which brought in all kinds of new students, and I was even giving free online cooking classes that I called Quarantest kitchen. My husband and I were going for walks every day, regardless of the weather, and despite the general anxiety and worry about COVID, I felt pretty okay in my day to day life. Workwise, I felt back in my zone of genius – that place where the things I was doing felt less like work and more like they just matched up with the things I know that I’m good at. It’s a feeling of limitless expansiveness where the inhale is always greater than the exhale. It’s a feeling I chase.
This is what I want to spend my time doing; consulting with good candidates running for office, sometimes in very difficult races, and working with women who want to use writing to find their voice and transform their relationships to the stories of their lives.
And then my lungs collapsed.
In November, my parents both got COVID. My dad got sicker and sicker. In December, I went to Chicago to try to help them recover. I wore an N95 mask and gloves every time I came upstairs from the basement couch where I was sleeping, taking my meals, and watching entirely too much television. My dad was in bad shape. A couple of times I got really scared he might not make it and urged him to go to the hospital but he didn’t want to go back there. On those nights, I’d set my alarm and get up hourly to check on him, to see if he was still breathing, holding my own breath as I stood outside his door hoping we could get through the night.
On January 6th, things seemed stable enough for me to go back to New York. It was incredibly hard to leave, harder than any other time. I drove the familiar route – Illinois to Indiana to Ohio to Pennsylvania to New York while listening to podcasts as I always do when I’m on a long drive. Somewhere outside of Pennsylvania, I had the unusual urge to turn on the radio and when I did, I heard the Insurrection beginning to unfold. It was terrifying.
In April, my dad was back in the hospital and I went back to Chicago. After a week, I decided to return to New York so I could come back and help when he was released. When my plane touched down I got a message from my brother that I needed to get back there as soon as possible. The next morning I arrived and helped to get my dad home, where he died a day and a half later. It still feels wrong to put that in writing. He was the last man – maybe the last person - in my life who will ever love me without a single condition. And when he died, so did a sense of security I’d always had without even knowing it was there.
In May, I had to let go someone who had worked for me and been a part of my daily life for three years when the problems that had been there all along came to a head. It was a business I had started years ago and didn’t want to be doing on a daily basis, but wasn’t quite ready to shut down. It felt like another death, and one that required me to take on a work life I didn’t want with a lot of physical work, early mornings and long days. It was a work life that felt like it emptied my lungs but left no space to inhale.
In July, I got Lyme. It’s the sickest I’ve been since I had cancer and I still am dealing with it four months later. The work I didn’t want to be doing took all the energy I had, and everything else contracted. The exhale took over and I struggled to take in air and… nothing but little sips. A good friend who encouraged me to keep going and told me how gifted a writing instructor I am. A great partner in my political consulting business who made me feel like what I was doing was more than enough. A client who told me I helped transform her life by helping her change her relationship to her stories of trauma. Another who published her first book and it hit the Amazon best seller list. It was enough to keep me going, like being in the oxygen tent. But oh, I have missed that feeling of self-generated expansiveness.
“I help people communicate for a living and I can’t seem to communicate effectively about what I do in my writing classes to attract new participants,” I told a friend who specializes in marketing who I hired to help me. She has taken my classes for years and reflected back to me what it has given her and then gently walked me through some steps I might take. A hit of oxygen, but still not on my own, combined with the tight-throated feeling of trying not to cry.
And then it struck me. I have to learn to embrace the exhale. Embrace the contraction. Embrace the emptiness. It’s the only way to make space for a new inhale. And the only way I know how to embrace what scares me is to write about it from a place of truth and authenticity.
I believe that sharing our stories is the best way to change our relationship to them. I believe that we all have the capacity for genius in our art. I believe that creativity can change your life. And I believe that everyone deserves to experience spaces that are nurturing, encouraging, and designed to help us find that crystal of genius in our creative work, even when we can’t find it ourselves.
There are a litany of things for me to be grateful about; that my work and financial circumstances allowed me to spend a month with my parents, that I got back in time to be with my dad before he died, that my husband has been gracious about holding down the fort for long periods of time while I’ve been gone, that a new little kitten came into our lives at a time when I needed him most, that my mother recovered from COVID, and that I have great clients and friends.
And yet, I know that it’s not gratitude that I need to turn to right now. It’s something else. It’s finding the medicine in the poison as my Buddhist teacher would say. I need to embrace the exhale, embrace the losses, embrace the contraction and recognize the room they create to take a cleaner, clearer breath. I know that I need to find the good in the stillness, the good in the emptiness, the good in the nothing.
