LizzieJ in LA

Hey Friends –

I have a proposition.

I’m thinking that its time we start being a little kinder to 2020.

Before you get your pitchforks hear me out!

I have reasons! Real ones! In multiples!!

I 100% agree that the strife taking place during this particular span of days feels disproportionately more severe than in years past. I have laughed at many genius memes that illustrate this fact. Many many memes.

However, I truly think it might be in our best interest to lay off the Chicken Littlesque 2020 rhetoric.

My first reason is I think we are trying the Law of Expectations.

In my experience working with kids for decades now, it’s been my observation that the Law of Expectations is very strong. If there is a kid who everyone believes to be trouble, they will, in part because of that group think, figure out ways to make it more and more true. The same is true for the opposite. If there is a kid that everyone believes to be smart, talented, and or “good”, they will, for the most part, figure out ways to make that more and more true. The more we think of 2020 as a villainous septic tank of a year, the more it will be.

The second reason is a little more involved.

When I was going through the grief process when each of my parents died I realized something. Grief is a big feeling with lots of facets and living with it day in and out took up the majority of the capacity of my emotional CPU. All of my crisis mechanisms were tied up with grief so when something came along that required an ordinary level of emotional bandwidth to process (read: Hallmark commercials or Adele songs) I only had 10% of my emotional faculties available. And you, you bright things, I’m sure can imagine how well that went down.  I was usually left in tears or disproportionately annoyed or both. I felt so unstable but in retrospect, anyone with only a fraction of their emotional reserves available to cope with life would be.

I feel like the entire world is experiencing something similar with 2020.

I think the literal mortal peril that living through a pandemic presents is more overwhelming that we’ve let ourselves realize. All of our internal Weasley clocks are pointing to midnight, they have been for months, and we are trying to navigate the going ons of a normal year with only a fraction of our emotional CPUs available.  I know some of us have acclimated to the stress, to the “new normal”,  but on a base instinct level, we are not meant to feel in mortal peril all the time every day. We just aren’t.

So when something else comes along that is also a big deal or significant, like, say a social upheaval or long overdue cultural shifts and unpacking 400 years of anger and/or guilt during said pandemic, we only have about 10% of our faculties to deal with it and it all overwhelms us. And then an earthquakes wakes us up and we have 10% to deal with that too. And in rapid fire craziness we attempt to manage and feel more and more buried under the 2020 docket.

I always thought living through history would be dynamic and exciting. Turns out its terrifying and exhausting and I am so sorry if you’ve been beat up by 2020.

I guess what I’m trying to say is try to imagine living through the 2020 headlines independent of the burden of ALSO living through a pandemic and then compare what you feel against what has transpired in previous years.

When I try, it feels a little bit easier than the normal 2020 weight to me. All the feelings and stress and worry feel manageable and that tells me that 2020 is not this Megatron-grade villain of a year, the pandemic is. It’s one thing to laugh at the crazy but don’t surrender your hope that good things can come along too. Maybe even try to go on a treasure hunt to start seeing all of the miracles that are coming up from the ashes of recent months. Give 2020 the grace it needs, that we all need, take a deep breath, and let the entropy diffuse as it will. Let it be a mechanism to find the treasure that both Calvin and Hobbs have assured me is everywhere and decide to stay healthy and alive long enough to find it.

I had an experience on Friday that taught me a little bit about myself. I went to Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland for the first time and the experience was so much more than I imagined it was going to be.

I’m a Star Wars fan; a massive one. I grew up on the movies and playing Princess Leia in every game of pretend in the back yard. I’ve had many involved conversations about kyber crystals and why Mace Windu’s lightsaber is purple. I wept bitter, loud tears the morning I heard Carrie Fisher passed away. My license plate is even an obscure Star Wars quote. It was no secret to me that I’m a true blue fan but I was not ready for the long-buried childhood dream of going on a Star Wars adventure to surface as profoundly as it did on Friday.

I don’t loudly broadcast my Star Wars love for the very sad, societally conditioned reason that I am a girl and if you are a female Star Wars fan (a girl claiming any “geeky” fandom really…) you all of a sudden go on trial with the geeky males around you. They, for some reason I still don’t understand, believe you like what you like. It’s assumed you’re just trying to fit in or flirt with the immediate nerd-boy population and nothing else. That is slowly changing but sexism is still wildly alive and largely unchecked in the Nerdy Realms.

I took (and still take) serious offense to having to prove my love for something I truly treasure. It diminishes it to me so I tend to defensively not disclose my full love of Star Wars to the male geek world.

Reason number two is many early childhood flubs with other girls that I found out liked Star Wars. There was always slightly horrified looks sent my way after I verbally vomited my pent up childhood devotion to Star Wars all over them. “YOULIKESTARWARSTOO???ILOVETHEM!WHATDOYOULOVETHEMOST?ME-ITSALLABOUTBRINGINGBALANCEBACKANDBEINGTRUETOYOURSELFEVENIFITHURTSESPECIALLYIFITHURTS.ITSUPERHURTDARTHVADERBUTHEDIDIT.ITWASLOVE.ANDTHEFORCEBUTTHEFORCEREALLJUSTISLOVEIFYOUTHINKABOUTIT.”

……

So I learned not to engage girls with Star Wars either, not right off the bat anyway. I eventually learned to reign it in a bit but when you’re 8 and the world still has a sense of emotional clarity it’s easy to get a bit unhinged and swing your Star Wars love around like a toddler with a lightsaber. I was an unbridled Rebel Pilot with no X-wing to vent my sense of justice regarding the universe.

So I got older and went to college and read a lot more books and went on a few other kind of adventures and my Star Wars love downshifted to a background setting for my adult brain and a conversation piece if the subject came up. No biggie, right? We’ve all grown up and have to give our best attention to things like doing taxes and planning retirements and not getting diabetes.

However, in places of wonder like Disneyland, where whimsy still has a home I’m reminded for a few hours at a time that there are other things that give life meaning too.

On my Batuu day I was going to meet my friends who were already in the park and in line for Smuggler’s Run, so my first steps into Batuu were all by myself and the second I went under the bridge that led to the land I started to feel the bubbling up of my long-forgotten childish yearnings of wanting to be a part of a Star Wars adventure. There was a good 7 minutes of wandering around a Star Wars city and turning corner after corner and finding more wonder. Then, when I turned the last corner of the cantina and saw a life-size Millennium Falcon – I lost it. Every wish I ever had to hop on the Millennium Falcon and go help save the good things in this world came bubbling up, barreling though my subconscious, and manifested in disbelieving, happy tears.

Yes, a spaceship made me cry.

A fake one.

One that has never been to space. I get that.

But Star Wars has a perfect grammar of symbols and the Falcon is one of my favorites. To me, it represents hope. The Falcon always makes the impossible fall within reach. As long as it’s around, there’s a chance, no matter the odds, and I LOVE that. We need the Millennium Falcon more right now than ever before methinks.

I spent an incredible half-day taking it all in and my friends and I did really well on Smuggler’s Run. I was a very capable gunner, thank you very much.

I feel like my visit to Batuu was my first true experience that Disneyland strives to give everyone; that of feeling the wonder of being able to enter and be a part of one of your favorite stories. For most girls going to Fantasyland and meeting the princesses usually does it and for me, that was all well and good but it’s never turned me into a big-eyed, wandering, gap-mouthed, elated, barely-contained joy of a human like Batuu did for me at 40 years old.

On the drive home I turned off my audiobook and got in my head about why it was so much more of a powerful experience than I was expecting it to be. I like to think that I’m pretty good at gauging this stuff by this point in life but the magnitude of this this truly caught me off guard. I was expecting wonder, but not unbridled joy. That doesn’t come around too often anymore.

As a girl I read my fair share of fairytales and loved them all right but I think that growing up just a few blocks from the Huntington Library provided me ample opportunities to wander around real-live palaces and stroll up and down real winding staircases and out into real rose gardens and through real forests that none of that felt like it was limited to my books or movies. It was a part of my life too. I also grew up blocks from CalTech and if I needed to live out any Beast’s library fantasies, I could head over to the library there or at the Huntington. I was a very spoiled with the spaces my childhood imagination had to run rampant.

What I wanted though, more than palaces and balls was adventure. I love, and still adore, the idea of space adventures and inter-planet politics. That was not something the Huntington could bring to life for me. The science wing is amazing but it’s a little short on Ewoks and lightsabers.

So I learned that yes, this little girl is still waiting for her space adventure and to defend justice, mercy, balance, and love in a universe that so easily gets lopsided and puppeteered by the influence of the Dark Side of the Force and she now has a playground just down the freeway in which that can all happen.

May the Force be with you. Now and always.

<<<Obligatory Spoilers warning. Imma gonna talk about errrthang>>>

OK.

I think I’m ready.

I’m finally ready to talk about the last season of Game of Thrones.

I’ve been really emotional about this guys.

Yes – I realize that was *so* three weeks ago.

Yes – I realize that the online petition to have them redo it is at over 1.6 million signatures.

I realize all that, its just taken me a good while to process the 3 mile long train wreck that the greatest TV show the world has ever seen, managed to devolve into in such a short period of time.

I am one of the many for which this TV show was much more than just a show. I was a book reader of this series when it first came out 20ish years ago. A buddy at work let me borrow his copy of “A Game of Thrones” when he found out I was a fantasy reader. After I finished, I promptly went out and bought the three published works that were available at the time. These characters and this story carried me through a really rough season of full time work/full time college/4 hours of sleep a night. These book characters already felt like old friends and when a high production value TV show came along it felt like watching your old friends finally make it in the Industry.

THEN to see the world catch fire and fall in love with the characters you’ve loved for so long?! That is the ultimate nerdy validation. Game of Thrones is to book nerds what the Marvel movie popularity has been to comic book nerds, what both of us have wanted our entire lives – an invitation into the main stream.

Game of Thrones had everything in place to be a standout show not just in scope and popularity but in the ever-present tendency for visual versions of written works to fall short of the quality of the source material. Game of Thrones went a bit away from the books and even past the books but they did it so well (at that juncture) that I didn’t mind. I was on board, I went with it. I trusted them! I trusted the show runners, David Benioff & D.B. Weiss. They seemed to get it and had the means to truly pull it off.

But, by episode 3 of season 8, I started to have this sour feeling in the pit of my stomach. I was beyond excited that the Night King was dead and that Arya got to throw the final blow. I felt like that was a win for Feminism and all of us Aryaites but underneath all that surface excitement, it felt wrong. It was a strangely familiar wrong feeling to but it took me until episode 6 to figure it out; betrayal. Not the violent, loud, Dynasty-plot-twist kind of betrayal, it was the quiet, creeping, kind of betrayal. It felt familiar and horrible and then it hit me – this feels like a break up.

I needed a metaphor. I can only understand thehe scale and type of these kind of feelings through metaphor and then it came to me: Game of Thrones is the dreamy college boyfriend who failed to launch.

Game of Thrones is the amazing boyfriend you had that made all your college love life dreams come true. He was the handsome, interesting, athletic, dynamic, ambitious, charming guy that swept you off your feet and you thought, truly, was the one. He was the one that you thought will be the best and your last. You graduate college together, you start your entry level jobs together etc and slowly but surely you start to see that while you’re growing into an awesome adult he’s stuck watching old football tapes or playing too many video games and he’s not getting serious about moving to the next level. So not only do you have to break up with him but you also have to grieve the future you imagined for you two together.

Up until season 8, Game of Thrones was on track to redefine the experience of storytelling. It married intelligent, complicated characterization, and writing to epic level production values and world-building. It was supposed to redefine everything about TV shows and was 100% on track to do so but then the fizzle finally came and the sonorous question is “What changed? Why? What happened?”

Why did the writing go from the best in the industry to After School Special quality within the space of a season?

Why did the character arcs they spent the good part of a decade crafting just suddenly become the plank of wood on which the producers decided to practice their Riverdancing?

Why? Why? Why?

So many whys – all I have is my conjecture. I have no inside information, but as an intelligent observer and someone who has been in and out of a classroom in almost every roll possible for the last 15 years, I have a few thoughts. I’m sure there was a lot of burnout happening at every level of production. I’m sure some of the senior writers had taken very generous job offers elsewhere before the end of the show. Even Benioff & Weiss are neck deep in their next project, planning the next Star Wars movie, but what I think the true mortal sin was that imploded season 8 was that Benioff & Weiss, B&W if you will, drank the Kool-Aid.

I think they saw their bank accounts start hitting 7 figures and had the Star Wars deals rolling in and had HBO writing them blank checks for their show and the millions of sign-waving fans all over the globe and they internalized it all. They chose to drown in the fame. It is a cruel irony that most, if not all of the best Art that’s around is typically created when there are stark limits to work in and a deep hunger from which it comes. If you don’t have any kind of hunger: for fame or financial stability or validation from your peers or family, to do something no one has done before etc. If none of that is in play, I think your relationship with your muse desperately suffers and that’s what I see here.

I think they stopped asking the right questions. I think they started to think what would wow the fans and cause the biggest splash instead of honestly digging down into their hearts and asking where do these characters truly need and deserve to go.

It doesn’t make ANY kind of sense to spend seasons and seasons building up Arya as a magical assassin just to have her perform the biggest act of her character, nay the show, as regular Arya, and to accomplish it with a bit of athleticism, fighting skills, and barrels of luck, no real flexing of the assassin she it. But it would make a splash with fans.

It doesn’t make any sense to spend seasons and seasons building up the conflict with Jon and the Night King just to have Arya fly out of nowhere to magically kill him by chance while Jon is screaming at and having a dance off with an ice dragon on the other side of Winterfell. Jon is the one who brought the reality of the threat of the Night King to literally EVERYONE’s attention. There is a pre-face off between Jon and the Night King at Hardhome that is one of the best gauntlet throws I have ever seen on a screen, and yet B&W just let it fall to the floor like a peanut shell at dive bar. There should have been an incredible fight with Jon with Ghost and a flaming sword and the Night King but no. Nothing. We got 10-on-the-vault Arya (who I still LOVE, don’t get me wrong) and it just doesn’t feel right.

It doesn’t make any sense for there to be a seasons long redemption arc for Jamie just to have him piss out at the last minute right after he really starts being true to his actual feelings and building a character of quality by fighting for what he believes in and having the courage to move on in love and choose someone who is good for him and believes in him. Brienne deserves so much more than him going fluttering back to Cersi with no explanation besides the fact that “he’s not a good man”. What. The. Hell. Was. That? I’m still mad. Brienne is (no pun intended) heads and shoulders one of, if not THE, best characters in the whole story and they just use her as a punctuation mark. It’s not right.

And then the rolling dumpster fire that is Dany’s time line…. Oh man – the absolute stupidity of having a character go crazy just because it’s been rumored that that’s what goes on in her family sometimes, is insane. Dany, from the start, was a portrait of mercy and justice. She was brutal sometimes but she was measured and managed to keep the big picture in mind. She had good people around her, sure, but they weren’t the sole reason she was who she was. She very often listened to what everyone had to say, then did what she wanted and it was the unequivocally the right thing to do. The gods flipped a coin when she was born and she was decidedly not crazy for 99% of the story. It is beyond lazy writing to just say “Woah…. and then she went nuts because she had hurt feelings because she was a girl and her bff died and she couldn’t handle it”. She watched her beloved husband die a very slow death and then had to finish him off herself, she lost a child, lost Jorah a few times, broke up with Dario (who I believed she genuinely cared about), watched her brother die, watched two of her dragon children die and seemed to manage the grief all right, nay thrived despite it and managed serious character growth but somehow being in King’s Landing negated all that charcter? Cersi killing her bff was what flipped the switch? Please –  They might as well have had Tyrion wake up at the end of everything and go “Oh – wow. It was all just a dream!” Blah. It still draws a physical reaction of anger and disappointment from me. Dany was a goldmine of storytelling potential but they turned her into a trite PMS metaphor and it truly breaks my heart.

The list could go on and on but my heart can only take so much in one sitting.

Needless to say – I hope the Creative zeitgeist will not lose the lesson: do not drink the Kool-Aid no matter how pretty it is. Stay loyal to the characters and story that made you and do justice by them, not by anyone else. They are your primary responsibility; not the fans, not the producers that employ you, not the actors that are animating the characters, not anyone else. Do right by them and everything else will fall into place.

The cartoon series The Last Airbender is probably the best example I can think of where not one single character ball was dropped. Everyone grew together, grew to be better, accomplished their goals, and did it as a team. If you need an emotional and writing cleanse, I’ll point you in their direction. Don’t be deterred by the fact that it’s a cartoon, it’s amazing and it won’t let you down like GoT did. It is the boyfriend that got the good job, moved out, started cooking and eating vegetables, outlined his investment portfolio, went to Tiffany’s and leveled you both up. Those show runners got it and it shows.

I have every hope that the next great book-to-screen project will have learned the lesson. Don’t be GoT. Stay the course. Take care of the characters trusted to you and they’ll take care of you.

For the last year or so I have been trying to solve a mystery. Last November, when I was out at trivia night with some friends, my heart, out of the blue started racing like I was being chased by a bear. I wasn’t being chased by a bear. We weren’t even losing at trivia. I wasn’t feeing emotional. I wasn’t short of breath. I just could feel my heart pounding like a drumroll in my chest and it really scared me. I didn’t say anything to my friends. I, Queen of Minimization, just drove myself home. It didn’t abate at all once I got home and I started wondering how fast it was beating so I downloaded an app my trainer at the gym told me about to use to figure out my resting heart rate. It uses the camera and light on your phone to observe your pulse in your finger and I fired it up and looked at the numbers. A normal heart rate is 60-80 bpm. If you’re working out: 80-120bpm. If you’re working out and going for broke: >160. Mine was between 168-200bpm. Yes. 200bpm. Just sitting on my bed wondering what the hell was going on.  It would drop down to a normal rate for a few minutes and then fly back up to those scary numbers. I didn’t think this could be right so I downloaded another app to see if it was saying the same thing. It was. It was around 11 at night at this point and the episode started around 8:30 so I was getting a little scared. I didn’t want to wake up my brother to say my heart was freaking out and I needed to go to the hospital. My poor brother has dealt with taking enough family members to the hospital and I stubbornly didn’t feel bad enough to feel like I needed to go. I still wasn’t flushed or out of breath or over-emotional, mostly just confused and worried. I finally took myself to the bathroom and majestically, I learned, that the act of bearing down can reset your heart rate. Within a few minutes I was back to the 90-110bpm ranges and that was good enough. I relaxed enough to finally get to sleep and thought that was just that.

However, the next morning I was feeling really tired (like spent the day at Disneyland tired) and knew it would be pretty stupid to brush it all off like it was just a fluke. I asked a few friends that day if they’ve ever heard of this happening to anyone and they hadn’t. I asked my brothers if they’ve felt anything like this and they hadn’t. I was more mystified as the day went on. Also, every single person said the same thing while I was going over it with them: go see your doctor.

Here’s the thing; I deeply admire doctors and have many people that I love and respect that have gone into medicine. They are amazing. That being said, I really hate going to the doctor. When you’re overweight you can go into a dr’s office with an arrow sticking out of you neck and they will manage to turn the conversation about your treatment to dropping weight. No matter what. At least with the string of doctors I’ve had. It’s almost comedic. Hand to the sky – I have been lectured about my weight when going to the doctor’s office for the following reasons: ear infections, skin issues, broken toes, sore throats, eye irritations, inhalation, and many many more I can’t think of at the moment. It’s cartoonishly bad. “Thank you Dr. So&So. I am aware I’m overweight. Every magazine, television program, failed relationship, interaction with a stranger, shopping trip, and trip through the grocery line sonorously reminds me of that fact. I am aware my health will be improved if I drop weight. Yes, I am actively working on it. No, I do not want any more pamphlets about low fat diets and the benefits of cardiovascular exercise. I’m quite familiar with the mechanics of it all. I am a rational, literate human after all — What I do not understand is how my BMI (a profoundly flawed metric mind you) relates to the 60% compromise of the joint in my broken elbow.”

The idea of dealing with the stress of that infantilizing condescension from my doctor along with dealing with the stress of a heart that isn’t behaving as it should was almost overwhelming. But I’m a grown up who’s father died from a heart attack so I went anyway. She listened to me and it wasn’t too bad. My doctor had me wear a heart monitor for two weeks to see if they could capture an episode and I also went in for an echocardiogram to see if any damage was done and both of those tests came back clean and normal. Not a blip outside the norm. So guess what – they thought it must be because of the weight and my blood pressure.

I did not like these findings. It didn’t feel right but I humbled myself (I do not have a medical degree after all) I went on meds but also started making every lifestyle change to get off of them because I really, REALLY hated the idea of being dependent on a pharmaceutical to feel normal. I still do. My feelings for Big Pharma are vast, dark, and profound. I don’t like participating in the creepy hostage situation they have going with most of the Western World. I do, however, love Science and hallow advances in actual treatments meant to truly help people instead of making them dependent on a drug and take their money. So I chose to believe the best of this particular situation and agreed to take the meds. Part of my deal with the doctor was that I wanted a referral to start working with a therapist as well. I, at that time, believed it was related to some of the incredible amounts of stress I was having to manage at my new job and wanted to address the issue from that perspective as well. It wouldn’t kill me to take the med in the meantime while worked on and resolved what I believed was *really* the issue.

Sidenote: Therapy is AWESOME and I strongly encourage anyone and everyone with a mind to keep healthy (that’s all of you) to make it part of their health regime. We don’t think twice about working with a trainer at the gym to improve our physical health so why do we go all ho-humish about going to see a therapist? They’re amazing and my life is exponentially better for involving them in it.

Three months later though, even with the meds and talk therapy, I had another episode. This time I went to urgent care but the episode was over before they could hook me up on an EKG so it just looked like I was being melodramatic and that I had Anxiety. However after the 1st episode, I bought myself an Apple Watch and set an alarm on it so if my bpm gets above a certain rate, it lets me know and I can do what I can to calm down and bear down etc. Also, I had the episode on record, but apparently it that wasn’t enough to look closer and they put me on a 2nd blood pressure med. That’s easier I suppose. They didn’t ask how therapy was going…

Then, 3 months later, *another* episode. This time I was picking up my niece and nephew at jujitsu and I had to get someone to come get them and then get someone else to take me to urgent care and, again, the episode abated before I got on the EKG so the doctor at urgent care diagnosed me with panic attacks, asked if I wanted a prescription for anxiety (I didn’t. My CBD oil was doing the trick for me just fine and if I were to start on one, I’d want my therapist to prescribe it, not an urgent care doctor that had known me all of 5 minutes) and sent me on my way.

THEN – this last Sunday I was sitting at home enjoying a mellow Sunday evening and my heart started racing again. I gave it about 15 minutes and finally gave in asking my brother to take me to urgent care. I got there and while I was checking in the sweet cashier girl asked the admitting nurse to come give me a once over and she hooked me up to her heart rate monitor (that little finger clip thingy) and it shot up to 197bpm (just like I had just told her it was) and the nurse very non-chalantly said “Oh – you need to go to the ER. We can’t help you here.” and then turned around like our conversation was finished. No offer for a wheelchair, no offer to call someone, just done. So, totally mystified, I walked my palpitating self down to the other side of the hospital, told the admitting nurse in the ER the exact same thing, was hooked up to an EKG 2 min later. FINALLY had a print out of a pulse rate of 197 (it peaked at 208bpm that time) and was in a hospital bed in the ER being treated within another 5 min. When the nurse was rolling me down the hallway all of the other nurses that got the call were saying “This is the SVT? She’s so calm…” I didn’t know what being an “SVT” was but yes, I was calm because I had done this so many times before and was half expecting to be told to just take a few breaths, eat some celery and just rest.

Within minutes though I was in a hospital bed with an IV getting a medication called adenosine that literally reset my heart. I have been thinking about this experience all week; the magnitude of it and the almost endless metaphorical implications of it that I’ll probably get to those in another post. What I will say now is that it was the strangest thing I have ever felt. The whole med team working on me said “You’re going to feel really weird for a few seconds but then you’re going to be all right” and they were right. The second they gave it to me I said “Guys – I feel really weird!”. It was like a bit of cold water that I felt go in my hand, up my arm, go around my heart and then shoot down to all of my extremities. Within a minute my heart rate went from 197 down to 104.

This whole time I was running down the last year to the ER doctor as concisely as I could with all pertinent details and when I got to the part about the urgent care doctor thinking I had anxiety he literally scoffed. He scoffed and then asked me “Who told you that?”. I didn’t remember the doctor’s name, I just told him he was upstairs in urgent care. He then unfolded the EKG printout that had the scribble of my heart rate, turned it around to show me and said “You cannot imagine this. This isn’t in your head. This isn’t anxiety. This is an anatomical issue with your heart and God willing, I am going to help you figure it out. When I listen to you I don’t hear anxiety, I hear an intelligent woman that it trying to figure out why her heart is beating too fast.” and I can’t tell you how strangely vindicated and validated I felt hearing that.

From there they started ALL the tests. When it comes to your heart, Kaiser, like a responsible provider checks down ALL the boxes to make sure the diagnosis is right and that, as I learned, takes some time. They took blood samples, they took urine samples, they took all the samples. After an hour or so the same ER doctor that was very good at listening (who was quite handsome and had the speaking voice of a young Morgan Freedman) came in to tell me that he liked my numbers so far but I was going to need a series of blood tests that they were going to have to space out every 6 hours, a stress test, an x-ray, and an echocardiogram. There, in the ER, is where they told me my new diagnosis: supraventricular tachycardia (SVT). Yeah, it was a mouthful for me too. The ER nurses were super awesome though and even helped me learn how to pronounce it. It essentially means that sometimes my heart’s electronics short out and cause it to beat waaaay faster than it needs to. My good friend is one of the head librarians at Western University of Medicine and gave me a whole bunch of reputable resources to learn about it which I fully consumed over the next few days.  The causes are wide and varied, none of which really applies to me (extended tobacco use, extended drug use, extended alcohol abuse etc). My cardiologist later told me that I could have been 100lb wood-dwelling vegetarian and I would still have this issue, that I was born with these kind of heart cells and that it’s better just to focus on management/solutions instead of dwelling on the cause. I agree with him.

Back to the ER-

I went for my x-ray and like all good x-ray techs the second I got wheeled and started getting up she asked me if I was pregnant. I said “I am literally menstruating right now.” (which I was. perfect storm, no?) and the tech asking said with just as much candor and gusto “Me too!” and we high fived. There was a second or two of much needed laughter and the tech in the booth said “I hope all our patients tonight are as cool as you.” to which I replied “Me too!” and we shared some more laughter. Apparently experiencing profound medical duress really puts me in touch with my comedic timing.

Getting all the necessary blood tests at the correct times meant staying overnight in the hospital which I did not enjoy the thought of. Some amazing friends of mine came to the ER to sit with me and bring me burritos and tea and make me laugh through the ridiculousness of it all but when they finally admitted me at 11 at night, I had to say goodbye to them and when they wheeled me away I got really scared. The last time I spent the night in a hospital it was at my mom’s bedside holding her hand all night and knowing she was most likely going to die in the morning, which she did.

I got wheeled to my room, all set up, and once everyone left the room I promptly started to ball my eyes out. I didn’t know what else to do. Hospitals have this horrible way of making me feel so isolated and helpless. Think about it – you go into this painfully impersonal space with people you don’t know, are asked to change out of your clothes and give away your nakedness to strangers in this handy though shapeless gown, they stick needles in the parts of your body you need to move to do anything at all so essentially stab yourself at least 3 times an hour on top of all the other shots and blood draws they do, and you, to a degree feel held captive there. Not by the people persay, but by the situation/circumstance.  To compound all of that you also know that every person helping you in that hospital only wants to do just that and they are some of your best and last chances to figure out what the hell is going on so you feel guilty for all of your reluctance to being there when you should be feeling grateful. Mix all that with keen memories of your mom dying and its perfect cocktail for Lizzie tears. Just many many many feelings.

Needless to say I didn’t sleep well and I woke up the next morning at 5 am to someone poking a needle in me for the next round of blood tests. It is not the most pleasant way to start your day but I was trying to make the best of it so I ordered breakfast, did my best to make use of the hygiene kit they provided me (as another side note, trying to comb my hair with one of those disposable combs they use for picture day at school was a laughable experience). I tired though because didn’t want to sport the Robert Smith look if there was a chance Handsome ER Dr would be popping in. He never did but it was a happy thought over the two days.

Throughout the day I did my stress test and passed with flying colors and both sets of subsequent blood tests came back normal for which I was very grateful. All this was all done by 12pm and I was just waiting on the echocardiogram techs to come by so we could wrap that up. It was the last piece of data the doctor needed to decide if I got to go home or not and I was SO I was ready to go.

I waited and waited and waited and the nurse told me that they’re really behind schedule. The test was ordered the night before so how backed up were they? We were closing in on 24 hours. Around 4 pm I started getting panicky because I wanted to go home so bad so I buzzed for the nurse again who told me I was most likely staying one more night. That’s when my angry white lady kicked in and I asked to speak to a manager.

A few minutes later the Charge Nurse came in and told me the exact same thing my nurse had (which I wasn’t happy about) and got to see me burst into tears again. Frustrated tears this time. Like the ugly, can’t talk through them kind. All I wanted to do was go home and I felt like I could come back fro an echocardiogram. I’ve popped in to cardiology for one before, I could do it again. That, however, as the Charge Nurse explained to me would be leaving against medical advice which is the surest way to never get good hospital care again.

So I took a shower, and resigned myself to one more night of broken sleep full of beeping machines, flashing lights, and periodic needle pricks. My brothers, sister in law, her mom, and another sister friend came that night to cheer me up with phone chargers, proper feminine hygiene products, and non-hospital food. It was a lovely evening and exactly what I needed. The next day was finally getting my echocardiogram, them reviewing it and finding it beautifully normal, and being discharged by 12:00pm with a new prescription and a whole new perspective about many, many things.

My overall feelings were of gratitude; grateful that I have a job that provides me such good health benefits, grateful I live within easy driving distance of a world class hospital facility, grateful for the hard work and education of all the people in that building who work so hard at all hours to help people who need it most, grateful that I got to walk out in the first place. Not everyone who goes into a hospital gets to leave. Grateful for supportive family that was waiting outside with hugs and and smiles for me, grateful for finally knowing what was going on with me and having a name to it and knowing I’m not alone with this weirdness. So many things.

I have a feeling this is the beginning of a new chapter in the Life of Lizzie and Her Corporeal Existence and not the end of one but I’ll keep you all posed. For now, know I’m doing well, in the hands of super-capable awesome doctors that did not condescend or belittle me, even once, during my stay, and that I’m ready for whatever is next.

So yeah –

I signed up for an MLM. I don’t live in Utah. I am not going to start spamming up your respective Facebook feeds with different Odes to Protein Shakes, I was not promised I’d “make 6 figures in 3 months if I hustle” and believed it. I have simply gotten serious about my health and found to be Shakeology an exceptional product and tool for restoring my health.

I’ve been drinking it for years and it’s the real deal. It’s not a miracle product, there’s no abracadabra when it comes to building health. But for me, for my money, it’s the best shake on the market that I could find and I’ve looked. Really hard.

When I lost both of my parents in my mid thirties to heart disease it made me take a hard look around. I’ve always been heavy, even when I was playing collegiate water polo and worked out for 4 hours a day. I watched my mom gain and lose 100lbs 3x over her life time. Think about that for a second. Three (3) times. I saw my dad carry 200 extra pounds for most of his life and still have a brilliant, meaningful life. We just had to shop at different stores than most.

But when I went into grief counseling after I lost my mom (and having lost my dad 2 years before her) I learned a lot of things about myself. In my grief I started unpacking a lot of “parent stuff” and with my mother there was a lot of body stuff that went with it. She always had this antagonistic relationship with her body. It was something to conquer, resent, and begrudge. It was difficult to watch. Being the only daughter and the sympathetic person that I naturally am, I absorbed a lot of her dysfunctional ideas and coping mechanisms. I knew I had to work on my relationship with food, I knew that was the crux of it all but what took me a long time to find was the why, my why.

For some girls wanting to date and be socially accepted is reason enough to take off the weight. But if someone passes on me or doesn’t want to be my friend because of my weight?  Eff that and them. I’m amazing. I don’t owe anyone thin or pretty and I never have. Neither do any of you reading this for that matter. Fat was and is the perfect litmus test for potential boyfriends or friends. It filters all the a-holes out. It perfectly exposes them for what they are. American body norms and fatism being the last acceptable prejudice have done all that footwork for me. So that wasn’t reason enough, not for me. Also, because I’d seen what “diet and exercise” resulted in with my mom it wasn’t something that made any sense to me. That wasn’t a good enough why.

For some it’s a matter of health and by virtue of stubborn Scottish Highlander genetics I’ve done and am doing amazing in that section of life. I’ve had doctors take a look at my blood test at my yearly physical and then look up at me, then back down at the numbers and then ask me to confirm my social security number. There’s room for improvement, sure. Being more fit is always on the To Do list but nothing, health-wise, is a heavy burden right now. <knocks on wood> Doctors are some of the most offensive fatistists I’ve ever come across by the way. I’ll come in with a bad cough needing penicillin and they’ll take up an hour out of my day trying to convince me in their best preschool teacher voice that gastric bypass surgery is a good idea, which it’s not. A 30% recurrence rate in the first year and 60% over 5 years are not reassuring numbers. Irreparable damage to my body is also a deal breaker. So that wasn’t a very strong why either –

But I will tell you what is a strong why; a conversation I had with my dad once talking about typing speeds.

My dad could type faster than anyone I had ever met. When I was a little girl, like 8 or 9 I remember him having this typewriter in his home office and he would get going so fast you couldn’t hear the break in the clicks, just this continuous sound. My dad loved computers and knew they were the future so instead of making us kids practice piano he made us all practice Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. I was horrible at it. I lost that game every time and in one particular car ride where it was just us I said something along the lines that I’ll never be as good or fast at typing as him and he got really serious on me. He told me “Sweetheart- it’s your job to be better than me. Faster than me. Smarter than me. At everything. Typing, running, cooking, swimming, thinking, reading, everything. That’s how we progress as a species. That’s the only way. You will type faster than me eventually. You were built to.”

I’ve never forgotten that conversation. That’s how we progress as a species. You were built to.

Heart disease took my dad at 59. He was carrying 200 extra pounds and never got diagnosed with diabetes, just high blood pressure and walked on his own volition till the day he died. He took a nap one day after working for part of a Saturday, had a heart attack and never woke up. Heart disease was a major player in my mom’s death 2 years later.

It’s not going to get me.

Being my father’s daughter I went straight to the library and the internet to find out everything I could about heart disease aside of the high fat, red meat, butter and heavy cream cautionary tale that I’ve been told since I was a kid. That didn’t make too much sense to me either. Human have been eating fat for millennia and heart disease is only a 50yo plague. My search led me here and here and a number of other places including this amazing book that made EVERYTHING make sense to me.

If obesity is caused by a poor diet and lack of exercise why are 6 month old babies that only drink their mother’s milk and don’t have the physical capacity to exercise obese?
Why are there people who weigh 230 lbs that can train for and run the Los Angeles Marathon and not drop down to a normal weight? Why did my mom try everything from liquid diets to counting points but did nothing but yoyo her whole life? All of the health advice I’ve gotten from purported experts had yuuuge gaps in it which made me doubt it. Also, they rarely worked in any real sense. I’m going to take off the weight but I’m only doing it once which means I need and want to figure out the most correct way.

Then straight out of Toronto comes Dr. Jason Fung – a Canadian endocrinologist – so someone who has been trained in and is at liberty to practice medicine independent of the pressure and corrupting force of a bottom line and Big Pharma looking over your shoulder and smashing her boobs against your back. He’s figured it out. It’s insulin resistance and the way to fix it is to bring your insulin levels down, essentially. I heartily recommend his book and all his YouTube lectures.

This makes sense to me which in turn has led me to the Keto way of life.

Beachbody perfectly fits into Keto living and I am mad as hell at sugar companies, their invasion into my food supply, their roll in killing my parents, and the havoc they’ve reeked on my body and country. Sugar’s tendency to hijack your brain is also a little concerning and I’m still figuring out how abstaining from sugar in my church community where our only vices are “shoes and chocolate chip cookies” according to my mom.

I’ve read a lot of Beachbody and different kinds of health journeys and, I’m not going to lie, it’s sometimes hard not to roll my eyes when someone wants to talk about “their journey” but what I get now is that in a world like our where everything about you that’s not your body is generally perceived as completely secondary, when you chose to work on your body, you’re literally remaking your place in the world. It’s a biology project, sure, but because of the socio/emotional climate we live in, when you physically remake yourself, you are doing an emotional renovation on literally ever aspect of your life and carving a new place for yourself in the social order of things. I wish thin privilege wasn’t a thing but it is and moving from one way of life to another is, in fact, a journey. Not just an empty adage.

That’s what’s worth writing about. It’s worth announcing on Facebook. It’s shakes, sure. But it’s also a story worth sharing. We all flock to a transformation story, a come back or a make over. Because I believe that deep down, we all know and recognize that this mechanism of change, this struggle, that it’s essential because it’s how we progress as a species. It’s what we were built to do and its always better and easier to do something that drastic and important together.

I’ve been on my couch all night with my “I Voted” sticker on watching the numbers and they just called it. The demagogue Donald Trump was just elected as president of my beloved, gullible country.

My thoughts and feelings are all over the place.

I’m sad, deviated really. I’m so disappointed and disillusioned. I can’t believe that someone as blatantly racist, misogynistic, and unqualified for the presidency got elected.

I’m ready to put competition behind me and work to unite the country again, and Trump is just one man and I firmly believe that the US’s government is resilliant enough to weather a bad presidency (it has many times before) but what has me the most upset, what I’ve been weepy about all night is what I’ve learned about my country tonight.

I’ve learned that we haven’t socially progressed as much as I was under the impression we had.

I have learened that we are taking WAY more council from our fears than we should and that we’ve forgotten what “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” means or where it’s written.

I’ve learned that we are comfortable with our racism and will protect it at the expense of a lot of things, like our future and credibility with the world.

I have learned that we are a country of cowards and would rather elect a loud bully of a candidate that is literally endoresed by Nazis and the KKK than take him down for what he is.

I’ve learned that a good portion of my country thinks that being “great” only includes being white, US soil born, male, straight, and Christian.

But I think the most potent lesson I’ve learned today is how little my country thinks of it’s women. That it didn’t see fit to elect one, that it abided a hideous double standard when it came time to examine her qualifications, that it turned a blind eye to a candidate that not only has regularly committed sexual assault, he’s bragged about it and thought it was funny. That they’ve all silently nodded that they agree with him instead of throwing him out on the street where that kind of behavior belongs.

I am legitimately worried for my person, for my students, for my family, and for the future of my country.

I haven’t felt this way since the night my dad died. It’s a literal kind of nausea that feels like a punch in the gut that I know is going to last for a few weeks. I don’t know what’s next or if I’ll sleep tonight or at all for the next few years.

All I can do is pray and hope for a miracle and the ability to cope until it gets here.

NaNoWriMo is upon us which means that I’m going to dust off my blog for some good ole procrastination. Also, my heart is really full and I think some writing is in order.

Four years ago tonight, I got a Phone Call. Capital “P”, capital “C”. It was my mother, teary and hysterical asking me, my brother, and sister in law to come to the house because my father had died. It was not the way I thought I was going to end that day.

It has started out as one of hope. It was the day of the Village Venture,  Claremont’s annual craft fair and unofficial start to the holiday shopping season. My friend and I had been planning for months for the booth we rented. She was going to peddle some of her creative knitted creations and it was the world premier of my my infant-stage artisan soap and personal goods business “A Modern Apothecary”. I spent the whole day feeling like I had just started a new chapter of The Book of Liz in the eternally optimistic streets of the Claremont Village.

My Uncle Dave, my dad’s brother, had called me that day. We didn’t talk often so I ducked out of the booth to take the call. He had had an idea of taking a road trip with my dad out to Ohio to visit their parents as a way to reconnect with him and also, to obviously have all 4 members of their family in the same room. Apparently it hadn’t happened in quite a while. He was asking me for my help in convincing my dad to do it and I loved the idea and said I would.

After the day at the craft fair I went to a Chaucer mass at the local catholic church. As you do in Claremont. Card carrying Mormons typically don’t go to mass, especially on a Saturday, but my friend who is a Chaucerian scholar had been asked by the organizers of the mass to do a reading in Middle English and I went to support her. It was lovely. I even stayed for the traditional punch and cookies.

Then I went up to my LDS church where there was a Trunk or Treat Halloween party in full swing, met up with my brother and sister in law and we wrapped up the game booth they were running and decided to head home to watch a movie and end a productive day on a highly entertained note. Right after we pressed play the phone rang.

My little brother hung up the call and said “Apparently Dad is dead”. We all silently got up and got in the car. We took the whole trip across town to my mom’s house in stunned silence but in my head I was violently changing and rearranging the facts that I had (which were few at the time) so they landed in an order that would make it impossible for my dad to be gone. I had never, once, imagined a world without my dad in it. We had never had any end of life discussions with my parents though we should have. I understand now that that was carefully sculpted denial. My dad was really sick. He was close to, if not north of, 400 lbs when he died and had been a food addict for all of the adult portion of his life that I can remember. Some people self-medicate with work, some with porn, some with sex, some with gambling, some with cruelty, some with shoe shopping, some wth Iron Man competitions, and some with food. Kids of alcoholics grow up finding empty bourbon bottles stuffed underneath desks and in trash cans. Kids of food addicts find gas station bags full of empty hostess and snicker wrappers tucked under the drivers side seat when it’s their turn to clean the car. I knew the gravity of the behavior, but at the same time I wouldn’t know. It was too scary and my dad, through my daddy’s girl glasses, was too good of a man to be addicted to anything. He loved all of us so loudly and so perfectly.

He seemed bullet proof to me, despite his disease. I’m pretty sure he had single-handedly willed away diabetes because he danced the blood sugar line a lot but was never diagnosed. He had high blood pressure but had never had a cardiac event. He walked and moved around on his own volition till the day he died. His mind was so strong and his body, despite it’s limitations, followed where his strong mind led it. Nothing seemed impossible to me if my dad had decided he wanted to do it. It was just a matter of him wanting —

He wrestled with mild bi-polar disorder that mostly manifested in him working for a few days at a time and then sleeping for a few days at a time. He worked. That’s what he did. He kept busy all the time trying to be productive. It was normal for him to work most of a Saturday and then nap away the later portion of it on the couch in front of his desk. That’s why it wasn’t weird when he was still asleep into the evening but my brother did not find a napping dad when he went in to wake him up for dinner. He had had a heart attack while he slept and was gone.

When we got to the house it felt like the whole world had gone quiet. Someone, probably my subconscious, had hit the mute button. There was a police car there with the lights on but no noise. My mom was sitting in a chair next to the couch holding my dad’s unresponsive hand and crying, rocking back and forth trying to comfort herself. My brother’s dog was licking my dad’s leg like she always did when she wanted him to wake up. My older brother that lived with them kept coming in and out of the room trying to answer all of the sheriff’s questions and checking on my mom.

I immediately went to my mom’s side and started rubbing her back and she started verbalizing the flurry of facts she had been rearranging in her own head trying to understand what was happening:

“He always takes a nap on Saturday. He loves to nap on this couch. He was fine this morning. He made me breakfast. We’re supposed to meet up with (our friends) tomorrow after church. I was just resting back in my room. I have no idea when it happened. He didn’t make any noise. We didn’t know”

On the drive over I was telling and convincing myself of every possibility to would make my father not dead but the second I saw him the truth and brutal finality of the situation distilled on me. I took a deep breath and prepared for the Long Family Crisis  Mode Metamorphosis. My brothers, usually the picture of calmness and composure, all get super emotional and fly to their respective corners to self-sooth and I, typically a little on the emotional and emotive side, become strangely still and clear minded and I start directing traffic.

My littlest brother, upon seeing Dad, couldn’t contain his grief, grabbed his wife and they just hugged and cried together. My older brother, I could tell was needing to take a minute or two to fall apart in his own way but we had the sheriffs there. Apparently when someone passes away at home that isn’t under formal hospice care the local authorities can’t release to body to the funeral home without the signature of  or speaking to a primary care physician stating the death was expected. We got them in touch with the doctor and they started in on their respective paperwork. One was the vet who had done this before and the other was the rookie that was being made to learn and fill out the form who couldn’t have been more nervous or uncomfortable.

The older sheriff was the most gentle, grandfatherly public servant I’ve ever spoken to and he had, as you do when you’re a cop, visually inventoried our house, art, and books and had gathered we were an LDS family and was apparently savvy to our support systems. He asked if we had called our bishop yet. I said we probably hadn’t. He suggested that would be a good next step.

We were all just stunned in place. We had weathered our share of disappointments and struggles as a family but this was next level. Weathering a loss of a parent is hard enough when it’s expected and you’ve had time to emotionally prepare but the trauma of the sudden loss and the emotional weight of the loss is a 1-2 blow that none of us were prepared for. I was desperately grateful for any guidance on what to do next.

We eventually found all the people that we needed to get Dad to a funeral home and they arrived in a nonchalant white van to collect him. I was kind of disappointed it wasn’t a hearse. This whole experience felt almost cartoonish. It seemed natural the car that would take my dad away should be as conspicuous as every part of me felt at that moment. I took my mom back into her bedroom with my sister in law because we knew watching them move him would only exacerbate her distress. My two brothers, the bishop, and the two funeral home personnel managed to move Dad and we watched that white van drive away and we all looked at each other with a lot of love but also with a big “now what?”

Mom asked me to come stay at the house so my little brother, sister in law, and I drove home in silence. But this time it was a resigned, grief-stricken silence. The kind of silence when your reconciling the fact that you life will never be the same and not in a good way. My brother and sister in law came with me to my house while I packed. We all were instantly reluctant to leave each other’s sides. It was like this rule of trauma that we all suddenly understood: Don’t leave anyone alone. Protect who we have left. Protect the herd. No one is going to bear this grief alone.

My roommate at the time had lost her mom in a tragic accident when she was 21 so when I walked in the house she took one look at my face and instantly recognized that core-shaken-by-grief look. I said “My dad died tonight”  and immediate hugs and prayers were said but I remember how foreign those words felt in my mouth, like a dance step I was trying to learn that wasn’t in my body yet. I remember thinking and literally practicing saying “My dad is dead. My dad died.” because those were words I had never put together before, never said aloud, but they were part of my script now. They were part of My Story.

I went back to my mom’s that night and didn’t leave for two weeks. The next day more wagons circled. Cousins and friends appeared with cleaning supplies and homemade bread and cute animals and toys for my out of town nephew to play with and more food than any of us knew what to do with. Funeral plans were laid. I bought my dad’s grave plot, literally, on Halloween. There were flowers and transportation to arrange, songs to learn for the service, friends to communicate with, a eulogy to write. It was a comforting flurry of things to do. But there was something that I had heard at my friend’s mom’s funeral that I had attended the year before that kept pinging through my mind. The pastor got up and said “The hard part is when all the commotion with the burial calms down and the family has to go back to their regular lives and figure out how to keep going without the departed there.” I kept wondering how the world could begin to work without my dad in it. He made everything make sense. He made things safe. Understandable. Attainable. He was the glue.

Robert Frost very famously once said “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on”. I very reluctantly agree.

I have managed to figure out how to keep going without my dad. It never occurred to me that I had the luxury of not moving on. I always fully intended to, I just had no idea how to go about it. The thing that guided me the most, though, was the idea that the absolute last thing my dad would want would be for me to wallow. The best way to honor him is and was to be the best version of myself possible and to apply everything he took so many pains to teach me. I made it one of my top tier life goals to make him proud. He would also want to make sure my mom was taken care of. She was his number 1 priority since the second they met and he kept her there for almost 40 years so I took extra pains with her until we lost her 3 years later.

My dad was never a rich man. His legacy, to me at least, are the relationships he had; how well he loved and honored my mom, how much he loved and taught us, the loyalty he inspired in his coworkers, partners, and friends. He was a man of principle and it echoed through everything he did. There was just this strange short circuit when it came to loving himself. I suppose he had to have some flaw or another. When he died he had been working with a therapist and had been making a lot of progress. It was the first time in his life that he conceded enough intellectual and emotional ground to get help. I like to think that that was the final lesson he had to learn and once he did, that’s thats when he graduated to the next phase.

I miss my dad. I’m proud of him. I’m proud of how much he struggled and that he never gave up. He might have taken some breaks but he kept chipping away at the problem. He held tight to the things that he knew to be true and good. I miss having someone that I was so confident loved me and believed in me to talk to. I miss how safe I felt when he hugged me and how I felt like a million dollars when I could make him laugh.

It’s impossible to look at the world and not be reminded of him. So many things that I love are things that he gave me, showed me, taught me, modeled for me. He was, simply, a really good dad and that plain, profound fact is worthy of remembering and celebrating.”It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life”.

I miss you Dad and I’m trying. I’m trying to make you proud.

photo credit: Soosh via Upworthy