Accompaniment and a Stolen Salad Bowl
On getting through crisis with the generous love of amazing humans.
I’ve been feeling numb, which I think is partially exhaustion. Who am I kidding—it’s complete exhaustion. My husband is safe and receiving treatment. My in-laws came here for Thanksgiving for the first time, and like the excellent guests and wonderful humans they are, they cooked the meal. My full contribution was making a gluten-free pumpkin pie and opening the canned cranberry sauce. And I got to enjoy everything including my son, who was home from college. And OF COURSE I had to mention during dinner that the cobbled-together table was covered with a shower curtain that has also doubled as a beach blanket, because that’s how I roll.
Today I’m thinking about how to tend to my numbness, how to not force myself to come out of it too quickly. This, too, is a fallow place. And I’m also in a fallow writing place, tending the fallow and tentatively trying to write new things after a few books have been released. I’m also writing here, which counts. It all counts.
I’ve been having a hard time replying to texts and social media messages, even though they are from friends checking in and wishing me well. I think in the past few weeks I’ve used up a bunch of stored adrenaline and I’m at that level of brain-tired where naps don’t even help. But this past week with family has helped, and signs of improvement about, and I think I’m slowly transitioning from numbness back to myself.
The main thing helping me navigate this season is the fact that I’ve had so many people reach out to me privately to share a bit of their stories of a loved one’s mental health crisis, or just reach out to ask what I need or bring food or offer encouragement. These things all make me think of accompaniment, and what it means to truly not be alone in the midst of awfulness. Each person reaching out with a raw edge of a fact or a timeline or something that worked: they have saved me, made me feel less like this is a shameful or embarrassing period in our lives, helped me to mean it when I say “This is just life.”
The word “accompaniment” first brings to mind music, but it’s also an idea from social justice work. To be honest, I heard the term so long ago that I didn’t know where or how the idea got into my head. I had the initial impulse that it was from Latin American solidarity work in the 1980s. As I googled and tried to trace the idea, I found this:
Rev. Gustavo Gutiérrez OP, often referred to as the “father of liberation theology,” finds great inspiration in the concept of accompaniment. In the Company of the Poor, a book co-authored by Dr. Paul Farmer and Rev. Gutiérrez, features a discussion of their shared sense of the power of accompaniment. “To accompany is to help the person take their own destiny in their hands and allow their voice to be heard,” Gutiérrez once said during a workshop at Notre Dame.
Often considered a theological concept, accompaniment has deep relevance in the secular arena as well. It reframes the idea that we’re working to help people “over there,” in recognition of the fact that “over there” and “here” are intertwined. The beauty of accompaniment is in the blurring of the boundaries between us and them, doctor and patient, donor and recipient, expert and novice, teacher and student. Instead, we are partners, walking together.
(Sidebar for the nerdy among us: When I started googling, a recent book came up first, which looks really cool: Insubordinate Spaces, by Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz, Temple U Press, 2019:
Insubordinate spaces are places of possibility, products of acts of accompaniment and improvisation that deepen capacities for democratic social change. [This book] explores the challenges facing people committed to social justice in an era when social institutions have increasingly been reconfigured to conform to the imperatives of a market society. …
The authors argue that education, the arts, and activism are key terrains of political and ideological conflict. They explore and analyze exemplary projects responding to current social justice issues and crises, from the Idle No More movement launched by Indigenous people in Canada to the performance art of Chingo Bling, Fandango convenings, the installation art of Ramiro Gomez, and the mass protests proclaiming “Black Lives Matter" in Ferguson, MO. Tomlinson and Lipsitz draw on key concepts from struggles to advance ideas about reciprocal recognition and co-creation as components in the construction of new egalitarian and democratic social relations, practices, and institutions.
I have been massively accompanied. I count myself very lucky that some of my own crises happened earlier in my life, so that I used them as a reference point and built a life around having them not happen again (but of course they do anyway, but at least when they do, I know the terrain).
Although we don’t say “she had a nervous breakdown” much anymore, I kind of miss that phrase. Because it just happened to people, like plantar fasciitis or shingles, and they took a few months of a rest cure, and then they were okay or could continue.
I looked up—as apparently many other have—whether it’s okay to say “she had a nervous breakdown,” and apparently it is still used conversationally and it’s not something that’s bad to say. It’s not the term clinicians use, who might call it instead a “mental health crisis.” Somehow a bucket term like “crisis” or “breakdown” is kinder than having a diagnosis that you have to haul around with you for the rest of your days. Maybe we could just say “I had a hard season.”
And oh, have I had hard seasons too. I had one hard time in college and left for a semester, and it turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made. I got to shave my head and get a tattoo and join an anarchist collective and kiss a girl who is still one of my beloved friends and help write street theater! Come on: hurrah for all that!! It BROUGHT things into my life. That was when I started therapy, and when I first really began to take stands for myself, on behalf of myself.
But it started really hard. I was hospitalized for what turned out to be panic attacks in 1991 or 1992, before they entered the general consciousness, so that was terrifying. At the time I got an ambulance ride, a sternum rub (this is very bad and I hope none of you have to experience this while you are awake), and a stay in the hospital where the medical staff wondered in front of my whether I had a brain tumor.
My mom who is also my hero drove up from Illinois to get me in Minnesota, and she took me to the Mayo Clinic, where they saw me and literally said to me, “We can’t find anything wrong. This must be all in your head” and let me go.
On the drive back home to Illinois with my mom, we ate at some buffet-style chain restaurant, and I was so struck by the beauty of a beige plastic bowl from which I ate my salad. It was one of those moments where you’re on the edge of life and things seem to somehow shine with a beauty you are conscious you might lose.
I never thought to google “beige plastic salad bowl” but it was this one!!!
My mom wiped the bowl out with a napkin and shoved it in her large purse. (Fucking awesome, right?) Because anything that made me happy that was attainable, she wanted for me.
The fact that I don’t still have the bowl is awful—I don’t know what happened to it. But apparently I can get a case of 48 Carlisle 800M20 24 oz Melamine Salad Bowls, Maple, for only $236.95. I cannot express how excited I am that I know its name. OMG! The internet! It apparently has a capacity of 27 ounces, which is a big salad, and I think maybe on some level I was drawn to the graceful size of the darn thing, how much it could hold. And okay I can get one on Ebay for $8.99! This is awesome. I don’t know if I need one, but the fact that I now know it’s out there is really cool. The awesome thing about rabbit holes is that there are often bunnies inside them.
ANYWAY: back to the mental health crisis/breakdown timeline. I had another one about seven years later, in Ohio, after I got a master’s degree in journalism but couldn’t even get a receptionist job and I didn’t know what to do next; I wasn’t medicated at the time and I ended up in a lovely Psych ER in Columbus—you could just walk in and ask for help!!—and they gave me meds. I later sent those folks a big basket of daisies from a florist, and I remember that feeling of gratitude so keenly, standing at the counter, writing the sentence “Thank you for saving my life” on a little card in ballpoint pen.
That second crisis came about because I’d stopped my medication for reasons I don’t really understand now. I look back now on all the times I tried to get off of Zoloft and really wonder what I was thinking. I saw it as a “crutch,” which come to think of it, is SO SO ableist. Good lord, some of us need crutches to walk. That’s not a weakness, that is only an indicator that we have a beautiful array of bodies and experiences. I look back now with the knowledge that I was playing with fire, in that I clearly needed medication—I just cry way too much when I’m not on it. I also know, now, that each time you go off an SSRI, you run the risk of it not working when you go back on it. I thought it was somehow nobler to “feel my feelings.” The numbness I mention above is relative, because I am swimming in feelings all the time. (Clearly I can get super-excited about just about anything.)
During my second crash, my mom drove out from Illinois to Columbus because I’d called her and confessed that I didn’t know what to do. We ordered Middle Eastern takeout and a fantastic piece of chocolate cake and rented a movie based on a Brontë novel. We watched the video on a large t.v. that my friend Sharad had given me; he often in my scrappy early life just showed up to buy me things I didn’t have. I think being able to ask for help, having my mom there for a weekend, was what allowed me to both feel comforted and to see that I needed to ask for help in other ways. It trued me up to where I needed to head next.
The chief joy in my life is this miraculous network of friends—Sharad, so many others, my mom. The fact that I count some of my relatives as also friends is not a demotion. It’s a promotion; friendship means the person will be with you, has signed on to share their lives and love you as well as you love them, and your job is to love them in the very best way you can. When people say “Family is everything,” I just don’t relate. Not because I don’t value my family, but I equally and emphatically have been saved not by blood relatives but by people who have both been blood relatives and those who have been former strangers.
What I am finding out now, in the midst of this crisis in this hard season, is that when you are in crisis, and the net of people who love you pulls tight around you, you aren’t taking anything from them. You’re giving them a chance to understand how much they love you. You’re adding intimacy to so many relationships all at once. Gosh, is that sustaining. To be willing to be loved, to be helped, is a massive and brave thing, as my sister (also my friend!) reminds me in her texts from Australia where she lives.
So: now it kind of makes sense that these words on this substack are coming out of me during this difficult season: it’s because I am aware of who I am writing to on this app. I am feeling very accompanied, by my friends and family and also by you, whoever is reading this, and I am massively grateful for that accompaniment.
I wish accompaniment for you. I wish that in struggles we engage in for justice, that we keep the idea of accompaniment in mind. I wish that all those who are suffering find support.
My English mother would call it "feeling a bit low."
Beautiful! Finally reading all your essays back, in order and aloud to my 16 year old Olive. I wish you could be in their circle! You two would have much to talk about. And my mom would steal bowl for me without hesitation. I love you have a mom like this!