Love

There's a lot of grim humor in the nurses' station at a psych hospital. You have to joke, or it would be unbearable. So when a patient comes in and the nurses or social workers say, "Oh, I love him. I hope they assign him to our team," for a while I thought they were being sarcastic.

I eventually realized it wasn't a joke. When the staff say, "I just love him," or "She's such a sweetheart," they mean it. Some patients aren't easy to work with, like the woman who stands at the door of the nurses' station bawling "I wanna get ouuuuutta here! What's wroooong with you people?" As her social worker gets up to go talk to her, there's affection on her face mixed with the exasperation.

If you're a people person, a psych ward is a strangely satisfying place to work. You see a different part of people, rawer and deeper.

A typical episode: One of the older women is having a rough day. She's been sitting at the table in the milieu muttering and shouting all morning. The most veteran counselor there, a burly American Indian man the patients call "Chief", walks to the middle of the room and stands before her. He plants his feet, spreads his arms, and begins to sing.

"You must have been a beautiful baby,
You must have been a wonderful child,"

Activity in the milieu stops. The patients turn to look.

"When you were only starting to go to kindergarten
I bet you drove the little boys wild."

(This is true. She showed us a picture of herself as a young woman, and she was gorgeous.)

"You must've been a beautiful baby,
'Cause baby, look at you now!"

He finishes up, arms flung wide. It works: she cracks a smile.

Showing off, growing up

When I was a teenager, my family went to a folk dance week once a year. The young people there danced harder, stayed up later, and were generally way cooler than me. I desperately wanted to be a hotshot like them. Unfortunately, I was stuck in a town without much of that. I was the only young Morris dancer within seventy miles. Our contra dances were infrequent and slow-paced. It was frustrating.

When I was sixteen, I had an email exchange with a young dancer in the Boston area. She complained about how the youth rapper sword team she danced with wasn't really her favorite, and she would prefer to be on one of the other youth rapper teams. My jaw dropped. There wasn't a sword team in my entire state, let alone one with anyone under 30, and she was complaining? I vowed to move north as soon as I could.

At age twenty-two, my dreams were coming true. Everyone wanted to dance with me, I was engaged to a hot young folk dancer and musician from Boston, and we were working on the crew that summer at Pinewoods dance camp, folk mecca of the United States. Of course, I was also terrified because the other workers at Pinewoods were people who had grown up doing all this. These were kids who had been hot dancers for a lot longer than I had.

The crew worked all day together, and at night we danced. We formed a crew rapper team, and I was sure I wouldn't be good enough. My boss, the one I wanted most to impress, was the best rapper dancer of us. I was sure she would lead the set. Instead, she asked me to take the leading position.

I couldn't understand. She knew the most, by far - why wouldn't she want to take the lead? Eventually, I figured it out. She had passed through her hotshot stage. She knew she was a better dancer than the rest of us, and wasn't interested in showing off. She was moving on to the teaching stage.

Last summer, Jeff and I went to a contra dance together. It was pretty tame, as Boston dances go - not many dancers, not many young people. Jeff was calling, so I couldn't even dance with him. But there were a few beginners there, and I made it my mission to be sure they had a good time. In the process, I had a good time too. If I had only been at the dance for my own enjoyment or to show off, it would have been miserable.

There are dancers who stay obsessed with The Best forever. They don't want to dance with beginners. They want to dance the fastest and coolest they can, all the time. But the more mature ones move on, and start bringing out the best in others.

New blog!

Charitable giving is one of the most important things in my life. If you read this blog, you know that.

I have enough to say on the topic that I'm giving it a space of its own. Introducing:

Giving Gladly

A blog on why well-planned giving is the most important thing you can do -- and more fun than you thought!

There but for fortune

Today in the mental hospital where I work, I met a woman who said she had learned to be all brain and no heart. When she was five, the authorities found out her father was raping her, and she was sent to be raised by her aunt and uncle. They were hands-off academics who fed her mind but not her emotions, and in fifty years she has never had any close relationships. She came to the hospital because she was homeless and considering suicide.

This woman speaks with the richest vocabulary and most careful grammar of anyone I've talked to in a long time. Her intellect is completely sound, and she has clung to it because she has very little else in her life. She is who I might have been if I had been born into a different family.

Before I started work on a locked psych ward, I thought it would be scary to be around people who were totally unlike anyone I knew. Actually, the scary thing is that the severely mentally ill are a lot like people I know. They are people like any other people - professors, parents, dockworkers, students, cashiers - whose brains played them a trick. This, frankly, sucks.

All our brains go a bit askew at times, especially when we dream. You know that dream where your teeth are knocked out, or your finger is cut off, or you have a terrible haircut? That same fear, brought to waking life, is body dysmorphic disorder. You know how in dreams you know something is terribly wrong, even if you can't explain how you know it? That, when you still feel it the next morning, is paranoia. You know how scenes suddenly change into other scenes, and impossible things happen? That, if it goes on for months, is schizophrenia.

All our distancing from the homeless, from the insane - it's to help us pretend the distance is far, but it's not. We need to push them away to pretend it can't happen to us, or that it doesn't suck. But it does.

Remember this when services are being cut. Remember it when you hear someone shouting nonsense from a street corner. If this is not actually your neighbor, your sister, your self - it could be. It is people very much like you. Be kind.

What keeps us safe

My housemates' baby is four months old now. As I watch them bounce, cuddle, and sing their son to sleep, I wonder about how lullabies worked before recording. If you're actually only singing them when your child is so young they can't fall asleep unaided, the child is too young to remember songs. Maybe older siblings hear what their parents sing to new babies, or what neighbors or relatives sing?

There are modern lullabies that obviously never went through the folk process. Take the beautiful "John O' Dreams":

When midnight comes good people homeward tread
Seek now your blanket and your feather bed
Home is the rover, his journey's over
Yield up the night time to old John O' Dreams.

It's lovely, but it's not exactly for kids. It's got four wordy verses which I've sung dozens of times but can't remember. This is clearly not the kind of thing that sleep-deprived parents pass down orally. But why write a lullaby for adults?

The other shoe dropped for me recently in a lecture on self psychology. Self psychology is cursed with terrible nomenclature - almost none of its terms accurately describe what they mean. So the "idealized parental imago pole" of the textbook sounded like mumbo-jumbo until the professor explained: "Our lifelong task is to find what feeds us and keeps us safe." We never outgrow the need to feel that we are protected by someone wise and strong. People may get this from religion, from idealizing a romantic partner, from hero-worship. And it's okay, because it gives us ideals to strive towards as well as a sense of wellbeing.

Children are born without much ability to self-soothe. Parents do it for them with sounds and touch. Later children carry around objects (blankets, dolls) to comfort themselves with when the parent isn't there. Still later, we repeat verbal assurances we have heard from others. (The first time I took a city bus alone at age fourteen, I repeated the phrase "It's going to be okay" under my breath for the duration of the trip.) The need to be comforted doesn't go away, but we learn to parent ourselves.

One of my favorite experiences is falling asleep while other people are awake and making music. It feels comforting in the same way that reliving childhood pleasures is comforting, except that this wasn't actually something that happened in my childhood. I think it's the sense that I can relax because all's well in the world. I've heard other people describe this feeling while falling asleep in a car with someone else driving.

This is why we have wordy lullabies for adults. This is why 25% of businessmen take their teddy bears with them on business trips. This is why Guns N' Roses wrote "Sweet Child O' Mine" as a joke and it topped the charts. Even if our parents will never literally hold us and comfort us again, we have to get that feeling somewhere.

On suffering

My social work internship this year is in a psych hospital. Today I heard a patient explain her view on suffering.

"My angels think suffering is something holy, but I don't think so. Like Christians hang a cross with a dead Jesus on it over their beds. That's sacred to them, but I think it's creepy. I don't think Jesus had to die at thirty-two. I think he should have stayed alive and raised his daughter. Did you know he had a daughter? It was on the History Channel."

She echoed almost perfectly the words of Spanish poet Antonio Machado:

¡Cantar de la tierra mía,
que echa flores
al Jesús de la agonía,
y es la fe de mis mayores!
¡Oh, no eres tú mi cantar!
¡No puedo cantar, ni quiero,
a ese Jesús del madero,
sino al que anduvo en el mar!

Song of my homeland,
that throws flowers
to the agonized Jesus
and is the faith of my ancestors!
Oh, you are not my song!
I cannot sing, don't want to
to this Jesus on the cross,
but to him who walked on the sea!