44. To Shake the Sun.
Last week, I left my house with my backpack packed for the weekend, and walked towards the subway on my usual commute to work. The morning was cold, but it was Imbolc, (Candlemas, Groundhog Day) and the shift was palpable, the earth turning that unmistakable corner towards spring: daffodil bulbs pushing out their first urgent leaves, vibrant green against the dirt and salt and grime of winter; the morning sky lighting up noticeably sooner and stronger and brighter than the day before; sparrows and cardinals and red-breasted robins chattering frenetically. I reviewed the inventory in my mind: toothbrush, ID, I need to buy snacks at the airport. I put in my earbuds, intent on finishing the last chapters of my current audiobook (Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal) before the library snatched it out of my phone again, shuffling me to the back of the line to wait for weeks to re-borrow it.
I merged with the stream of kids on their way to school, kids like water, pouring off of buses, flowing down the stairs into the subway station, filling every crack and crevice of space between them and their destination, a river of black puffer coats, long braids, and gleaming white sneakers, as I listened to Daniel Maté, Gabor’s son and co-author, read soothingly into my ears about co-regulation and trauma and healing, about anger and authenticity and compassion: when I speak of healing, I am referring to nothing more or less than a natural movement toward wholeness. Nor is healing synonymous with self-improvement. Closer to the mark would be to say it is self-retrieval. Yeah, baby. That’s the stuff.
I swiped my key card as I do every morning, muscle memory timing my movements in cadence with the anticipated cheerful bleeps and blinking green lights signaling the unlocked turnstile (in this case, the wheelchair accessible saloon-style doors), when I was abruptly teleported into the present moment by a glaring red X, and a comically aggressive buzzer sound, like I gave the wrong answer on a game show.
I looked up, rattled, lagging behind what was happening, audiobook still playing in my ears, while the kid who had just swiped in front of me, a child of maybe 9, looked back, clocked the scene instantly and held the small panel door open, eyes finding mine with assurance and hand motioning for me to come through in the seconds before it locked again, but I hesitated, confused. I was within arm’s length of a SEPTA attendant, who was blinking at me with bored contempt (contemptuous boredom?) from the booth directly adjacent to the turnstile, so I felt a little afraid to disobey the rules, even though I watch people jump the turnstiles every day, continuously, while the attendants remain completely unperturbed (all you have to do is squeeze yourself between the panel doors, slip in close behind the person in front of you, or pull the turnstile bar towards you so it opens halfway, slide your legs into the little gap, do a little hop on your tippie toes, and voilà, you’re on the other side).
In a split second, I looked at him (the kid), looked at her (the attendant), then back at him, wait, I just renewed my monthly pass? Wait, I... and I missed the moment. The doors closed and locked, my hero shrugged and kept it moving, the attendant looked at me with bored annoyance (annoyed boredom?), and then I felt it: the hot rush of shame and embarrassment washing over me, starting in my groin, my gut, my belly, up my back and over my head, taking up permanent residence in my cheeks, flushing beacon red to match my red wool coat, my walk catching up to me, sweat sprouting beneath my keffiyah, in my armpits, on my scalp. I saw myself from outside myself: completely ridiculous.
I was, first and foremost, ashamed that I failed to validate and receive that kid’s amazing altruistic gesture. I genuinely felt guilty for letting him down, for missing my chance to let him save me, which would have been so cool, and so smooth, and maybe would have culminated with a triumphant high five. Dammit. I turned to the attendant, halfway expecting her to take pity and just open the door for me, as the attendants often do for folks who are having trouble, just to keep the stream of people flowing unimpeded, but nothing happened. I started to explain, but I have no idea what I said; probably some version of can you help me or what should I do? and then Hello?
She blinked again, completely unresponsive, and then slowly reached in front of her to push the button on the microphone, and spoke, her voice flat with bored apathy (apathetic boredom?) something about how she can’t hear me because the microphone is off and what did I want. I felt humiliated. What person does this, I thought. Who watches a person struggle and has no impulse to help. My shame turned to rage. I responded. Something about thanks for fucking nothing.
I walked to the opposite side of the mezzanine, away from her, to try to pull myself together. I took off my backpack, heavy with coffee, water, a phone charger, breakfast, lunch, two changes of clothes, pajamas, tarot cards, and a book for the plane, and fished out my wallet, balancing the pack precariously on my knee, because there was nowhere clean enough to set it down—and looked for my extra key card, when I remembered that I had cleaned out my wallet that very morning in preparation for my flight, taking out everything extraneous, including my spare key card. Ha! It just kept getting worse.
I walked over to the ticket window (not the attendant booth) and mustered as much calm as I possibly could to inquire about why my key card wasn’t working when I had just replaced my expired one last week, and had been assured that my monthly pass had been transferred to the new card. I was informed that it wasn’t enough to simply follow the stated instructions to replace the key card and transfer the monthly pass to the new one, but there was a special secret step that I had failed to execute: to inform my employer about the change so they could transfer my pre-tax discounted monthly pass on their end too. OF COURSE! I laughed maniacally. OF COURSE I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT. Thank you SO! MUCH! FOR! YOUR! HELP!
I gulped another breath. I would just have to deal with this later. I needed to get to work. I could go to the vending machine kiosk and purchase a paper ticket. Then I remembered, of course, you can pay for SEPTA with your phone now. For fuck’s sake. I opened my phone and easily tapped through the turnstile, looking across the mezzanine towards the bored, contemptuous, annoyed, apathetic attendant. Our eyes locked, and I summarily and emphatically flipped her the bird, then disappeared down the next set of stairs to the train.
As meltdowns go, it could have been worse, and I’d be lying if I said that giving her the finger didn’t feel good at the moment; but just as quickly as that feeling appeared I was back to feeling completely ridiculous, ashamed that I lost my cool, me, who is competent at riding public transit and kind to customer service workers, me, who is sober, who meditates.
I arrived at work, and promptly spilled my coffee in my lap while reaching for something on the shelf behind my desk, which then caused me to knock down a little foam stress ball with the words take a deep breath printed on it (LOL!), which, obviously, I threw across the room, trembling, quaking, incandescent, with a rage to shake the sun.
One of my clients told me recently that she was trying to wean herself off of her Suboxone1 by taking smaller and smaller pieces of it, and that she had weaned herself down to a daily piece of film the size of a question mark. I thought about her, about my morning, about my key card not working but what if I also had a stroller, what if I didn’t have a salary, what if I didn’t have a safe place to go, what if the only hope standing between me and my active addiction, losing my kids, my limbs, sleeping on the street was a sliver of lemon-lime flavored cornstarch the size of a question mark.
Rage to shake the sun vs. hope the size of a question mark. How does hope even stand a chance?
Later that day, I waited at a different train station, this time to take the regional rail to the airport. I looked up from my reading and saw a familiar face on the opposite platform. A child, about 3 years old, standing on the bench, leaning up against his mom: a client of mine and her son, both beloved to me. My heart swelled with fondness; I wanted to shout their names across the platform, but of course, I am an actual mental health professional and to do so would be inappropriate. So instead, I just watched them sweetly chatting, their bond unmistakable, even from afar, as their train arrived and they filed on, folding the stroller, finding their seats. Later I learned they had just been at a medical appointment, where she could hear the nurse in the hallway loudly disparaging her to the other workers for being on methadone: what a waste, how irresponsible. Rage to shake the sun.
Later, I sat on the plane, looking out the window at a river mouth the perfect macrocosm of a placenta, as I flew to North Carolina to be with my friend as she laid her teenage son’s ashes to rest, her beautiful child, killed 2 summers ago by 6 bullets at age 17, to bear witness to her grief and sorrow, to sit with her in her rage. How can one even fathom a rage like that? A rage to shake the sun, indeed, a rage to blot out all the stars.
We sorted through boxes of dried flowers to make a mandala at the gravesite, we gathered and made a ritual of words, tears, the earth, the wind, the creek, the beech trees.
Hope is said to be many things: it’s a waking dream, it’s a light in the darkness, it is the thing with feathers, it floats. But I think many people have learned not to have hope; they believe that they can’t afford it. To wit: I had to abandon the hope that I could change my family and make them into people they had never been. I had to sacrifice the hope that if I just tried harder, worked harder, that maybe my constant, exhausting efforts to be understood, to explain myself, to state my case would eventually yield the understanding, attunement, resonance, and safety I yearned for, but in giving up that hope I have found a new freedom, a modicum of peace and a path forward. Maybe in that letting go, there’s a tiny hope, the size of a question mark: that I can have those things, but in ways previously unknown, or different from how I had imagined them.
Maybe hope is not a costly gamble, but rather a practice, a discipline, a rigor of vision, a chosen and intentional antagonist to despair. Why make a mandala from dried flowers on a gravesite, if there’s no hope of life after devastating loss, no enduring love between yourself and the deceased, no knitting together of family and community around the bereaved? The act of remembering is an act of hope. Rage, or more accurately, healthy anger,2 contains within it the seed of hope, planted in the dark of winter, a refusal to give in to despair, an insistence and persistence and urgency towards life, a defense of what is sacred and human in the face of cynicism, apathy, and contempt.
The World.
Some links to share:
Healing-Centered Resources for Those Impacted by Violence in Palestine/Israel.
The latest bulletin from WAWOG: Writers Against the War on Gaza. An excellent and thorough accounting of US journalism’s bias and complicity in the genocide.
on Anger: on anger:
Home + The World is a weekly newsletter by 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. All content is free; the paid subscriber option is a tip jar. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you.
⚔️❤️ Jodi
Some of my clients—women with opioid use disorder—are prescribed Suboxone instead of methadone. Suboxone is like methadone in that it contains an opiate agonist (buprenorphine), a synthetic opioid used to stave off withdrawal, but unlike methadone, it is combined with an opioid antagonist (naloxone, aka Narcan) which helps prevent overdose. Suboxone comes in a film that is dissolved under the tongue.
Dr. Gabor Maté on anger from The Myth of Normal: “People often ask me to define "healthy anger." Here’s what it’s not: blind rage, bluster, resentment, spite, venom, or bile. All of these stem from an unhealthy buildup of unexpressed or unintegrated emotions that need to be experienced and understood rather than acted out. Both anger suppressed and anger amplified out of proportion are toxic. Anger in its natural, healthy form is a boundary defense, a dynamic activated when we perceive a threat to our lives or our physical or emotional integrity. Our brains being wired for it, we can hardly avoid it….Its full functioning is a standard feature of our wholeness, essential for survival: think of an animal protecting its turf or its young. The movement toward wholeness often involves a reintegration of this oft-banished emotion into our repertoire of available feelings. This is not the same as stoking resentment or nurturing grievance—quite the opposite. Healthy anger is a response of the moment, not a beast we keep in the basement, feeding it with shame or self-justifying narratives. It is situational, its duration limited: flashing up when needed, it accomplishes its task of fending off the threat and then subsides. It becomes neither an experience to fear and loathe nor a chronic irritant. The fact—and some people may need to actively remind themselves of this—is that we are talking about a valid, natural feeling that does not in itself intend anyone any harm. Anger in its pure form has no moral content, right or wrong—it just is, its only “desire” a noble one: to maintain integrity and equilibrium. If and when it does morph into a toxic version of itself, we can address the unhelpful stories and interpretations, the self-righteous or self-flagellating thought patterns that keep stoking it, without invalidating the emotion.”
“Hope the size of a question mark” hope in the non absolute- such a helpful, beautiful reminder!