Cheerleading

My younger sister was born with a rare genetic displacement. From the standpoint of her DNA it’s almost exactly the opposite of Downs Syndrome; where people with Downs are missing a chromosome, Amy actually has an extra one swinging on the end of each of her genetic helixes. But from a practical standpoint the only real difference between the two is that Downs Syndrome, owing to the fact that it’s far more common, is more predictable. In terms of day-to-day functioning there’s very little difference. If you were asked to pick someone with Amy’s condition out of a group of people born with Downs Syndrome, it’s doubtful you’d be able to do it.

This is all really just to give you an idea of the level of cognizance at which she lives her daily life. By no means does it imply that she’s in any way dumber than I am (quite the opposite – she can memorize an entire movie after watching it once), but she does go through her existence on an entirely different mental plane than the rest of us, which can sometimes mean that she requires a different set of social circumstances.

Eager to both provide her with said circumstances and get her off of the couch, my mom signed Amy up with a local cheerleading team. It originally started out, apparently, primarily with the intention of cheering for the Special Olympics basketball games, but the cheerleaders have made such a stir in the local community that the club has evolved into its own separate entity. When I asked her what she cheered for, Amy just gave me a disdainful look and said, with the tone of a disinterested bachelor talking to a toddler, “Um, Helena.” Duh.

I was curious to see the group that had finally pried my baby sister away from the imaginary world of movies and books where she’s hidden away from the twenty-three years of the inaccessibility of her particular reality, so I tagged along when my parents took her to practice earlier this week. No sooner had we entered the door than we were swarmed with young women, all of whom possessed some degree of mental handicap and none of whom possessed any degree of social fear.

“Wow,” said Vicki, an especially friendly woman who works with my sister at a farm which employs people with special needs. She motioned to the bright yellow T-shirt I’d borrowed from my mom to work out in – a color, I might add, which does not flatter me – and cooed, “That shirt looks amazing on you! Where did you get it?”

I didn’t have time to answer before another girl, this one bearing an uncanny resemblance to Emma Thompson’s Professor Trelawney character in the Harry Potter movies, her heavily-lidded eyes magnified by thick glasses, approached and said seriously, “Excuse me. Do you have any animals? Say, for instance, a dog, or a cat? Or a hamster?”

“I have two cats,” I responded.

“Great,” said the Trelawney girl. “Do you know what I should do about a parrot with a biting problem?”

I said that I didn’t.

A young woman with bright red hair, meanwhile, was meandering around the room. She’s apparently not capable of talking, but she had an uncanny ability to mentally lock onto an object in the distance and go there, unlock, and then repeat the process with something else. She looked like the pull-back toy cars we played with as kids. I couldn’t help thinking that if someone took my own brain and whittled it down to its very essence, stripped it of all its petty mundane responsibilities and just let it to its own devices, it would very much resemble the ginger who was at the moment weaving her way randomly through other people’s conversations in pursuit of things of which only she was aware but which, I think, were almost certainly far more important.

Another woman, a little older than the others and with the thickest, darkest hair I’ve ever seen, and that sticking out so haphazardly in so many directions that she’d make Einstein look bald, came up to me and without any introduction said, “Where do you get your hair done?”

“In Seattle,” I said. I was about to add what I was sure would be a particularly witty comment about traveling to Seattle making for a very expensive visit to the salon, but before I could say anything more she continued.

“Hm. Yeah, I tried Great Clips last time, but I’m considering trying Supercuts next. I didn’t like it last time.”

And then she walked away.

“Are you going to take her home with you?” Asked another girl with glasses, motioning to Amy.

“No,” I said. “Amy will stay here in Helena.”

“No,” said the girl, raising her eyebrows at my stupidity. “I mean tonight. Are you going to take her home?”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, as far as I know. Yes. We’re going to take Amy home.”

And through went the redhead.

The leader, a volunteer cheerleader from the local college, called them to line up, and they did so with gusto, brandishing their donated professional-grade pom-poms with a special kind of pride, the little slivers of silver in the plumes of red sparkling as the girls shook their hidden fists in excitement. For them, this was barely even a rehearsal. This was a moment in their lives, and as such was to be treated with all the gravity that such an important event deserved.

“Which cheer should we do tonight?” asked the leader.

“I know!” Amy hollered. “Let’s do the one that I made up!”

I felt myself sucking in a little breath of pride. Amy? Made up a cheer? My Amy?

I should point out here that the members of my family are not necessarily genetically predisposed to playing well with others. We are born of a long line of cowboys and farmers and free spirits; it’s not inherently a bad thing, and it might even be one that has even served us well from time to time. But it’s certainly not something that leaves us naturally inclined toward team spirit. My mom said that when Amy first started on the squad she would insist loudly, “But I want to do things my way, mom!” This week, however, when it came time to leave for practice she couldn’t find her uniform sweat pants, and the ordeal nearly traumatized her. “It’s not okay!” She moaned. “If we don’t all look the same, how are we ever all going to look like a team?!”

“H-E-L-E-N-A! Helena! Helena! We’re number one!” Cried the cheerleaders. Then they waved their pom-poms, and Amy kicked her little foot into the air. She hollered at the top of her lungs, like someone had installed a bellows cramp in her stomach. I wondered, just for a moment, what she would have been if she had been born “normal.” And then I thought, God forbid. She’s a much better cheerleader this way than she would have been as a “normal” one.

The humanity, the innocence in the room was palpable, and it was all over far too soon. When they were done the redheaded girl tried to go in one direction until one of the volunteers caught her by the arm and redirected her energy toward different coordinates. Said coordinates turned out to be me, and she beamed as she gestured toward a button on my purse strap with a picture of a cat on it.

“Are you going to take Amy home with you?” asked the girl with the glasses a second time. I began to wonder if she’d been left behind somewhere at some point.

“Have a great trip home!” called Vicki. “Come back next year, okay?”

“Hey,” said Amy to Vicki, “I have an idea. Let’s don’t call ourselves coworkers anymore. Can’t we just be friends? I think that’s better than coworkers.”

Said Vicki, “Okay.”

And we got in the car to drive home, Amy sitting next to me in the back seat practicing her cheers.

“H-E-L-E-N-A.” She was whispering. “We’re number one.”

Metamorphosis, But not Kafka's

In the last hundred years enough has happened to justify us in believing that the pen’s response to the challenge of force is at least not ludicrous and hopeless; indeed, it is perhaps the one serious hope we have.

- C.M. Woodhouse


I’ve been a bit moody lately.

Life this year, for those of you who don’t follow my blog lately, has come at me, to defer to the cliché because there’s no better way to put it, all at once. I won’t go into it all again here. But I have, quite simply, suffered.

Had I written that sentence a month ago, maybe two, I might have meant it just the way it reads, hinting at the bitterness with which we usually read such statements. But the past few weeks of my life have been defined by a drastic shift in attitude. Today, when I write that sentence, “I have, quite simply, suffered,” it is with a deep sense of gratitude and awe. The why me of six months ago, with all of the anger it entailed at the perceived solitariness of my pain, has transformed itself very suddenly into a why me of perplexed gratefulness. The question is no longer “Why am I the one who has to go through this?” but “Why am I the one who gets to go through this?” I feel my spirit getting stronger, the way an athlete watches her body chisel itself because of – not in spite of – sweat and exhaustion, and I wonder why it is that not everyone gets the same opportunity. I actually feel sorry for the people who have easy lives.

In an effort to quell my odd neurological problems, my doctors and I decided to experiment with taking me off of my antidepressants for a while. My psychiatrist was hesitant, since it’s become quite evident that depression is as much a physical and hormonal thing than a situational thing for me, but the physical pain had become so unbearable that I was desperate. I had to do something.

What I hadn’t expected, however, was the reversal of the other side effects, most noticeably my inability to think clearly. The medications seem to be effective on me because they block a certain part of my brain where the Sad Chemicals are stored. Unfortunately, due to what appears to be a result of the chaos typical of neurological bureaucracy, an oversight left the Smart Chemicals in storage in the same room. When the door got locked the Sad Chemicals got trapped, but we also had no access to the Smart Chemicals, which left us spending large parts of our days staring open-mouthed at blank walls and finding them, I must add here, much more interesting than they warranted. And so, when the door went and got itself unlocked I told my psychiatrist to just let it alone.

Staring at blank walls, especially when you have the constant and nagging urge to turn them to murals like the one in the Sistine Chapel, is no way to live a life.

The problem, of course, is that the Sad Chemicals got loose and have been wreaking a bit of havoc. It’s not necessarily that I’m ready to jump off a cliff, merely that life, both the up and down parts, are incredibly more intense than they would have been otherwise, and I’m having to hold on a good deal tighter to make sure the roller coaster doesn’t buck me off altogether.
And so I’ve been doing my best to struggle through this my next level of training, the part where they take away the net and force me to fly without it. It hasn’t been easy; I got my grades back yesterday – grades I nearly killed myself for, since I was in and out of the hospital – and they were C’s. The first two C’s of my college career. In grad school. My first reaction was to do things the old way and panic, to tell myself that any chance of teaching at Harvard has just gone out the window, that I’ve just lost the respect of the entire academic community, etc. etc. But when I stopped and reminded myself what I personally had had to do to get those C’s, they turned into Olympic gold medals. I could have run a triathlon, even with the headaches.

The point is, I am having to learn to live life differently. Every moment. And it isn’t easy. Especially since, because I am doing it out of a necessity very particular to my own mind, I’m having to do it very much by myself. It’s a baby step thing. But it occurs to me, even in my most difficult moments, that each of these baby steps doesn’t just teach me to be more compassionate toward myself, it teaches me to be a little more compassionate toward other people. If I want to be a fully empathetic person, I have to know what it feels like to be depressed and what it feels like to have a swollen neural membrane and what it feels like to get C’s. And then, because I’ve been blessed (and terribly, terribly cursed) with this need to write, I can put it on paper and reach even more people, and hopefully in the end it’ll all be a good thing.

I know there are a lot of people out there who love me and who would love to be able to help me. I know that there are also people out there who want to ‘fix’ me just because they like to fix things, and when they see me I kind of resemble the intoxicating temptation of a broken toaster. But I’m not broken. I’m just undergoing metamorphosis. What kind of butterfly I’ll be in the end is anyone’s guess. But at least I’m trying.

Airplane!

I’m sitting in an airport, waiting for a strange-looking mechanical man-made artificial bird to take me to a place other than the one I currently help to occupy. It occurs to me as I sit here that over the course of my life I’ve taken up a good number of metaphysical spaces in a great deal of different physical ones. Was the Becca who sat in the airport in Taipei a year and a half ago waiting for a flight to Seattle the same Becca who is sitting in Seattle now waiting for a flight to Helena? It’s hardly likely; the challenges of this year have refined this Becca into what feels like such a solidly strong piece of metal that she hardly recognizes the flimsy coat hanger of that other Becca on the brief occasion that she finds enough free time or audacity to look that far backward. That, and I (being the Becca writing this) just read somewhere that on a biological level we human beings completely recycle all the atoms in our bodies every seven years. So if I’m not that metaphysical Becca, and I’m not that actual-physical Becca, which Becca am I? Really, factoring in all of the changes in life, is it ever actually possible to be any kind of Becca other than the now Becca? This is a gigantic paradox, because the now Becca is definitely not the then Becca. But the now Becca wouldn’t be here if she weren’t at least a little defined by the experiences of the then Becca. Should the now Becca bear the guilt and pain of the then Becca? That hardly seems fair: the then Becca got to share in none of the happiness and strength of the now Becca, and neither of us gets a piece of the satisfaction of the future Becca, who, we hope, will go down in history as the woman who finally discovered the social formula for world peace. And so it’s all quite complicated.

I was standing in the security line today when I had some brief flash of a memory, just an ephemeral shot of a picture in my mind, of standing in a security line in another airport, somewhere, and I realized that I don’t know which airport it was. It could have been anywhere, I’ve been so damn many of them. Beijing? Shanghai? Hong Kong? Tokyo? Spokane?

This brought two particularly poignant thoughts to mind. The first was that I am incredibly lucky. How many people can say that they’ve been to so many places that they can’t keep them all straight in their heads? We could, of course, posit that I can’t keep anything at all straight in my head, but let’s leave that aside for the moment for the sake of argument.

The second, however, was that for all the blessings I’ve had in my life, it’s a bit unsettling how much of it I’ve wasted trying to get somewhere else. Really, life is just moments, strung together like Christmas lights on a cord. When we’re children each of these moments is exciting and new to the point where we can’t even concentrate and our parents have to cling desperately to our tiny wrists to keep us from running full-speed into the nearest most colorful object. What is right in front of us is all that exists. This is why kids never worry about anything. Even eating is an adventure; as adults we see it as something obnoxious that must be done quickly so we can get back to writing our papers on rhetorical devices in the Confucian classics. But kids, when they eat they go up and down and around, they stick their hands in pudding just to feel it goop and they chomp on celery just to hear it crunch and they spread spaghetti around just to make art with the sauce on the table. Everything is light and sound and flavor and color and experience. And they don’t even think to appreciate it, because that’s the way everything is to them, because that’s the way everything should be.

When do we start getting to the age where our experiences begin to run together? When do the perfect individual blessings of our sensory experiences, the celery crunches of feeding bread heels to pigeons or splashing in puddles or that really cool gum someone left on the sidewalk begin to run together like a Monet left out in the rain? And why are we so willing to be satisfied with the gray formlessness of a muddled and neglected masterpiece when we could be looking at a Starry Night?