2009 Was Not a Good Year

You know, looking over the experiences of the past few weeks and thinking about my reaction to them and especially my friends’ reactions to them, it’s easy to come to a few conclusions—not just about my life, but about the people I’ve got in it.

The garden obviously needs to be weeded.

So yes, some very bad things have happened. There were the catastrophic and humiliating work events that precipitated my illness, of course—but who could’ve been surprised by that? Someone's enormous ego was involved, and we all knew what we were dealing with by the time we finally moved into action in my department. C'est la vie. Much more surprising and wounding, frankly, was the dissolution of one of my best friendships earlier in the year. I’m not sure I ever dealt with that sufficiently—I was depressed about it for months--but I suppose I have to now. And I have to accept that there's nothing I can do about it.

Yet instead of the sadness or bitterness you might expect from my remark, it doesn't feel that way at all. I just feel acceptance. There is a new me now, a me who is emerging from a long period of stagnation. I have to say I kind of stopped growing for a few years in there, while I was trying to find my way and reassert whatever it was that had drawn me to academia in the first place. I felt in many ways like I was not doing enough. But in retrospect, with my projects now lined out in front of me and this list of things I’ve been doing, everything seems as if I was preparing for this one single moment—this moment, after the surgery and the recovery, when I can do anything at all. It feels like it’s all been part of the overall plan all along.

I’m a big one for plans, and this sounds a little hoodoo-guru, so I don’t want to take it too far. I’m not talking about a divine plan or purpose or anything like that here. I’m just talking about me, and the way my own brain, somewhere deep back in the machinery, had all sorts of plans for me. Sometimes our conscious selves don’t fully understand or have things all worked out yet, much as we’d like to think they do, but our brains—which are not at all the same as our conscious selves--know them anyway. And they keep pushing us along, through the good and the bad.

One just has to manage the stress, the depression, and the doubt that afflict so many through this somewhat grueling process. Manage that, and you’re good to go.

In the mean time, I’ve come to important realizations about the people in my life: which ones care about me, and which ones don’t wish me the best. This topic used to bother me. But it doesn't anymore. Instead I’ve adopted a new attitude: “well, that’s just the way things are, and it doesn’t have anything to do with me. But it’s not good for me, so I guess I can’t have it.”

It’s such an amazingly simple realization that I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to grasp. It just doesn’t matter how other people see me, especially if I’m certain that my actions have been as generous as they can be. It also doesn’t matter whether they like me. Not everyone will—some people are always just going to have a negative reaction to you regardless of what you do. That goes for all of us. I make my share of mistakes—lots of them! And worst of all, sometimes I’m so oblivious that I don’t even know I’ve hurt people. But I try to be self-reflective and especially to recognize when I’ve said something unkind--however unintentional it may have been.

Because the thing is, it’s so enormously freeing, realizing that you're not going to be perfect (or even mildly reasonable!) all the time. And being able to get over your own mistakes is an enormous thing to be able to do. Of course, some people are a little too flexible in this regard (!), but you know what I mean. Sometimes a little self-forgiveness--tempered with a healthy dose of shame and a will to do better--allows you to move on. It doesn’t even matter whether all is forgiven and forgotten, either, as long as you know you've done the best you can and that your conscience is clean.

It’s become so hard in this world for us all to reach out to each other and make that connection—and yet it’s that connection that makes all of this worth while.

That’s all there is here in life, after all—it’s just us, here together, making it all matter.