How Are You? I am Barbie Disco Ball.

The question I can't answer. And glaciers and Annie Dillard and George Ella Lyon and Jane Jacobs and inductive reasoning and time.

I am not doing well at replying to texts, especially when they ask the hardest question: how are you? How is Cliff? I wish I knew. Often even though I love the person asking, I put the answer off until later because it induces a sense of slight panic, because it’s weird to not even know how I am. Then my strained and multi-tasking brain forgets to answer the text. I guess one answer to the question is, “I’m not doing well at returning texts.” I feel glacial, like these big inchoate feelings are scouring my geography.

I talk every night to my husband Cliff, who is either crying or is not. I try to sleep, and sleep just isn’t the same—I never feel rested. He is often despondent, and doesn’t want to be where he is or how he is. Sometimes—like over this past weekend—his normal voice comes back and I am filled with such a sense of hope and joy. He is getting treatment but it is not working yet. And then that hope cracks and for one reason or another he is again filled with despair.

I am the person who currently has to remind another person how time works, and that everything changes, that there is forward motion. This level of reminding is the substance of my days.

I understand this place he’s in. I am lucky that Zoloft has worked for me since age 19, that it has been my constant companion, and in many ways it has given me my life. I said this recently to my wonderful therapist, Heidi, and she said, “Well, maybe you had something to do with your life, too.”

With the help of Zoloft, I have been the most willing student of structure. This includes the structure of writing but also the structure of feelings and their expression. I have trained my brain through Al-Anon and any other program I could grasp at to give myself some internal structure. This is why I adore the quote from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”

Interestingly enough, Dillard later renounced the book, as Richard Gilbert explains in a great blog post. I understand that the gem she created was not to her taste. That’s the mystery of writing: sometimes things come out of you that don’t fit into the overall invisible structure you are trying to build, the conversations you are having with yourself. I still adore the book; it might be one of her best.

Other structures have given me this “peace and … haven set into the wreck of time.” Buddhism tells me to ride it out; everything changes. Al-Anon tells me to do the Next Right Thing and introduced me to the radical idea of doing things that would help my own well-being. I know that I need structures to tell me what to do next when I am at a low place. But I am not sleeping, and so the elements of mental and physical lows tend to sink their teeth into each other.

My husband recently received a one-page handout on the basics of “acceptance,” and I almost wanted to laugh when he showed it to me. It was a distillation of ancient philosophy into a few short sentences that didn’t have the punch or grandeur required to understand the idea intuitively. Without the stories or the context, it felt kind of insulting, like almost every pithy thing we say to people who are suffering, as if there is a fix, when the very unfixability of the present moment is what is causing the suffering. I only understand the slogans from Al-Anon by repeating them to myself over years and years until they acquire the mark of my skin, my particular brain.

I am trying to give myself rest and gifts: the gift of time with friends, a five-dollar massive ornament that looks like a Barbie disco ball, which I hung from a hook on the ceiling fan in our living room. It looks like it’s always been there; I might keep it up all year round. I bought myself a three-dollar bath bomb with charcoal and eucalyptus, and I thought it would be weird to stew in a black bath, but it was fantastic. It felt witchy and strange, and I guess I am sort of always celebrating Halloween in my head, letting the ghosts flit about and being scared by things that flash at the corners of my vision.

I’m getting a tattoo in a few hours. This will be my fifth, and it’s the first one that will be very visible. I’ll share it soon. And the tattoo itself says something, too, because I’m only moved to get them at points of crisis or major turning points. I get tattoos to remind myself of things. I don’t yet exactly know what I mean to remind myself of with this one, but I’ll know soon, as I live with it on me.

It’s hard to rest. And to be honest, I kind of dread my husband’s nightly phone call. I am having trouble accepting that this is where we are. The urge to try to imagine fixes or to will myself out of this current reality has been so strong that it’s giving me restless legs of the soul. I want to scream at the slightest thing; I’ve been a very impatient driver.

For a project I’m working on, I have been reading the work of urban commentator and anti-planning planner Jane Jacobs. She grew her theories not from abstractions but from the concrete: her neighborhood outward. And she wrote at one point in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “Why reason inductively? Because to reason, instead, from generalizations ultimately drives us into absurdities.” I am so inductive, and I imagine many people who make things are this way: we start with the details, the specifics. This is how vivid writing works, too: we start with the details and build a world outward, one we can feel and sense, and we intuit from that world the larger meanings and see our possibilities for agency in the specific.

As an aside, I think this is why the writing prompt to echo George Ella Lyon’s poem “Where I’m From” is so often surprising and successful. It short-circuits the general and abstract, and like all the best writing instruction, points to the specific.

Because I work in academia surrounded with very smart people, I’m often telling myself that I’m not articulate enough, and I stumble over my words when I attempt to speak in generalizations. But give me a few details and the whole world and its implied structure fly into place.

So I’m also wondering if the question “How are you?” stops me because it’s so general and abstract. I think that might be true. The question invites a brief response, which is usually “Fine.” I’m not fine. I’m not good. I am intense and I hope I don’t ever have to live through this again. I’m struggling and I feel like the machinery of my hope is an external construction made of Tinker Toys that keeps breaking itself and so I keep putting the pieces back together each morning. I’m so tired. But my in-laws are here, who I love, and they are hurting too, and we are going to see Cliff tomorrow. And my son came home last night to open his birthday presents and stay for break, and he’s twenty years old as of last weekend, and when I told him I was getting a tattoo I think he knew everything about what that means for me. He talked about getting a tattoo with me sometime in the future, two matching tattoos, and I think there’s no greater gift for me than to have a boy who’d want to get a matching tattoo with his mom.

The pouches of skin under my eyes actually hurt from my broken sleep. It’s raining and cold. I’ve been impatient toward our cats. The time feels like airport time, like we don’t know when and if a flight will ever appear to get us out of this place. I don’t know where the flight will be headed, and I don’t know if I want to go there. Sometimes I beat up on myself and ask myself “Why is my life like this?” but the answer is only: this, too, is life.

How am I? I am barbie disco ball ornament and charcoal bath balm; I am the sting of a hopeless phone call and the tinker-toy machinery of my hope. I am glacial and I am the forgetting of text messages from people I love, and I am willing to have something inked on my skin as a signpost.

I hope you have a nice Thanksgiving, and by “nice” I mean that even if someone in your house is screaming at you or is miserable or there is a fight, that you get one mouthful of something you like, and that you tell yourself that this is not about you; this is what life is, and anyone who tells you differently is lying. Life is the carrying of heartbreak as it coexists with a $5 disco ball. I know, too, that the mirror pieces will probably fall off, and that I can glue them back on. I am still alive enough to find delight and even to see myself in the individual rose-colored fragments.