14. The gospel of selflessness.
On my 21st birthday, I was laid up in a screened-in bunkhouse at the top of a mesa in the High Desert of New Mexico, nursing a tailbone injury. I was thrown from a horse mid-summer when one of my coworkers, a cocky 17-year-old wrangler from Rock Hill, South Carolina thought it would be funny to spook the horse while I was sitting atop her: not riding, no tack, just laying around on horses talking like horse people do. He slapped her hindquarters and shouted “he-yah!” and she shot out from underneath me and bucked me off her rump, sending me sailing high in the desert air and landing hard on the desert earth. The wrangler from Rock Hill (who, at the end of the season, at a party at a lake house, crawled into my bed and stuck his hand down my pants, believing I was passed out, which I froze and pretended to be, for neither the first nor the last time) drove me the 45 minutes to Española and the nearest emergency room, which was more of a drunk tank, where I got an x-ray and spent some hours on a hospital bed in a room between two groaning, weeping gunshot victims. I left with a generous prescription for Percocet, which, by what now feels like some untold grace, I couldn’t tolerate and threw up every time I tried to take one.
After my birthday, after my brother came to New Mexico and failed to extricate me back to Georgia, my mother tried to sort me out by bringing me with her to Uvalde, Texas (the very one) where our family friend Charlotte, everyone’s favorite mentor and grandmother figure and the person from my childhood who saw me most completely, was dying of stomach cancer. I caught a ride to Santa Fe and a Greyhound to Albuquerque and then a flight to Dallas, where my mom and I met and flew together to San Antonio, then rented a car and then drove the rest of the way to Uvalde, to Charlotte’s family homeplace, the ranch where she had gone to live out her days with her formerly estranged sister.
Physically debilitated and in an emotional free fall of relentless panic attacks, I sat on the plane next to my mother, crawling out of my skin. She required an explanation of me, of why I was so preoccupied with worry, when I had been given so much and was so fortunate and had been given every opportunity. I tried to justify myself, really, I sincerely tried to explain, even with my limited understanding of my own situation. “You know, maybe it has to do with being like, a creative person, like, you know that thing about ‘genius and madness…’” and before I had finished butchering Aristotle and Leonard Cohen, she turned back to her copy of the Marietta Daily Journal newspaper, gave the pages a shake and scoffed, “well. You’re no genius, so there goes that theory.”
“Of course, oh no!” I responded, embarrassed, “I mean, I didn’t mean, I wasn’t trying to say I was a genius, I just mean like genius like in the general sense, like the creative impulse in all of us, just like that maybe there’s a gift that comes with…” and then, panicked, flustered: “I mean, Mom, don’t you ever just feel, like, an overwhelming sense of dread?"
She paused, and looked at me, eyebrows cocked, and replied, matter-of-factly, “no, Jodi, I don’t,” as though, rather than asking if she could empathize with my excruciating pain, I was instead asking if, say, she wanted to eat my shoe. And then she doubled down: “you know, Jodi, being depressed is just another way of being self-absorbed. There’s no difference in being an egomaniac and hating yourself, either way it’s just SELFISH.”
And there it was. The coup de grâce of every argument. The worst insult my generous, life-of-Christian-service mother could hurl. Really, the worst thing a person could be. Want to sleep in? SELFISH. Nose in a book? SELFISH. Didn’t turn in your homework? SO. DAMN. SELFISH. And that’s what I was, what I was desperate not to be; it was the worst thing to be so it was the best way to control me: I would do anything not to be selfish.
Unfortunately, this revelation of the moral turpitude of my mental illness did not, in fact, make me a less self-involved, less anxious person. Sufficiently broken down, my mother went about her work of building me up: while Charlotte struggled to keep down water and threw up constantly from the chemo, I laid on the couch in the air conditioning, piled under blankets for a week, heating pad on my tailbone, now feeling not just the relentless existential dread of my panic disorder, but also the relentless shame of being so selfish as to acquire a panic disorder in the first place, while my mother made beef stew and biscuits for me and Charlotte, her “invalids.”
In the cosmology in which I was raised, the prosperous prospered because God had rewarded them for their works and their ingenuity, and as the Bible says, to whom much is given, much is required. I wished to be worthy, so I gave away everything I had, but eventually I began to suspect that this conspicuous generosity was not selflessness at all, but rather a sort of transaction (a tax or a penance, or most cynically, a laundering scheme) in exchange for the right to exist, for approval, for absolution.
These days, I try to be less concerned about someone calling me selfish and more attuned to loving the people closest to me, which must also include me. I’m becoming kinder to myself, working to be my own best friend, have my own back and not sell myself out to please other people. I no longer feel that I have to justify, advocate, defend and explain myself1 to exhaustion.
Towards the end of my stay in Uvalde, Charlotte had the coffeepot and the toaster oven set up on the Mexican oilcloth-covered kitchenette table. In the mornings, we sat in the kitchen and toasted an endless stream of leftover biscuits, slathering them in butter and honey, drinking bottomless cups of chicory coffee and watching the cattle loiter near the house at the edge of the wide mesquite plains. It was a respite, and I gathered some strength for the next leg of the journey. I saw Charlotte one more time a few months later. In hospice, in a morphine haze, she said her last cherished words to me: “I’m sorry they sent you to that camp for surly children,” which I took to mean, “there’s nothing wrong with you.” At the end of the summer, after failing at being free and easy in New Mexico and then failing at organic farming in California, I went back to Georgia and back to school, and the next day I met Duncan, who is playing guitar in the next room as I type this missive.
A wise person once told me, “being good to get what you want is the opposite of knowing that you are loved unconditionally by a conscious universe,” and this, I suspect is the true good word: that we don’t have to earn love through self-sacrifice, that what counts is not our scorecards of selfless acts, but how we treat those closest to us when no one else is looking, that attuning with empathy and love in the mundane acts of everyday life is the only true wealth in this world, and that building a safe container for love and protecting it fiercely is not selfish but sacred. Amen.
Home + The World is an occasional newsletter from Jodi Rhoden featuring personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you. ⚔️❤️
Beltane Blessings
Tomorrow is Beltane, May Day, the delicious bacchanal celebrating the cross-quarter day between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice. Please enjoy this pandemic time capsule blog post I wrote entitled “May Baskets are the Perfect Craft for Social Distancing” including a recipe for rustic petit fours!
Eight of Cups
Known as the Lord of Abandoned Success, the eight of cups symbolizes walking away from something in which the seeker has invested much, turning her back to the crowd, and walking out towards the unfamiliar: the sacred journey of self-discovery.
May you find strength and comfort on your journey this week, and may you become your own most loving best friend!
⚔️❤️ Jodi
JADE is a concept from Al-Anon that refers to a manipulation tactic of exhausting and disorienting someone by engaging them in dialogue where they feel they must constantly Justify, Advocate, Defend and Explain themselves. According to Psych Central, “codependent traits generally develop as a way to cope with trauma and often include high levels of shame, the feeling of being flawed and inadequate, low-levels of self-esteem, difficulty trusting, wanting to please others and keep the peace, perfectionism, and wanting to feel in control. These traits contribute to our compulsive need to take care of, or fix, other peoples problems, prove our self-worth, and please others. And our fears of being inadequate and rejected, lead us into destructive communication patterns in which we feel we must justify, argue, defend, and over explain ourselves.”
Exactly what I needed to hear today. Love you Jodi - thanks for being a portal to the wisdom!