Last night after dinner I started to feel depressed, hopeless. There were good reasons for this. On the most surface level, I’d just finished a dystopic novel and a character I’d liked had died pointlessly. More pressingly, our cat Tisha is extremely ill (although, paradoxically, he’s still so energetic that we had to make two unscheduled trips to the vet this week because he’d pulled off his bandages). My grandfather is dying too, after more
Gong-Gong in 1981
than 90 years of inexplicable health — he’s a lifelong smoker, non-exerciser, and eater of ice cream for breakfast — and is doing it in painful inches, painful to him and painful to his children who visit him daily and shuttle him around to the doctors. For most of my life he was just kind, generous Gong-Gong whom we didn’t know very well; when I got to college, I started thinking I should interview him about his life, but I couldn’t work up the nerve; by the time I left grad school, I was almost ready, and then his mental health declined within months. Now, the memories are still in there, but there is no way anyone can get them out, and he spends his last days in a jumble of confusion and discomfort. Not pain yet, I don’t think, but whether he enjoys anything anymore, I don’t know. Food maybe, or listening to opera, and as recently as a couple of months ago, he smiled and laughed with us at family gatherings, so I think love still works too. But he’s going, and in such a way that by the time it happens, there will be no one left to say goodbye or “I wish I could have gotten to know you better” to, because that person is already gone.
Constantly caring for my grandpa tires out my mom, my aunt, and my uncle, and for Dajiu, Gong-Gong’s decline comes on top of his wife’s recent loss of her sister to cancer. Dajiuma’s sister, whom I met maybe once or twice as a child, suffered for months before moving back in with her parents to live it out. When we went to Hong Kong in April we carried Chinese herbs back with us, fat bundles of “doesn’t hurt to try” whose bitter scent permeated their wrappings and left traces on my clothing. At that point it was already understood the herbs could do nothing, but our Hong Kong hosts — herbalists and Dajiu’s dear friends from his sent-down days — sent them home with us anyway. When I handed them over to Dajiuma I saw in her eyes what this gesture meant: love in the face of death, loving action against resignation to futility.
It’s terminal cancer our cat has too, our own furry little counterpart to the struggles my relatives are going through. For months we got to think that it wasn’t, that he just had a weird infection, but by July the growth affected his appetite, and he just faded away into near-skeletal lethargy. He got up once a day to sit on my lap and purr. Cancer or not, it was clear he was going to die anyway, so we gave him up to the veterinary surgeon for a last attempt at removing the tenacious growth. Against my expectations she did remove it, and now Tisha eats, sheds his bandages in ways we can’t even figure out, and naps in the sun. But when they got the growth out, they biopsied it properly, and that’s how we found out Tisha’s new lease of life would last maybe nine months at most, with chemo. “What if we don’t treat him?” I asked the oncologist, thinking after all this, Tisha deserves a break from vet visits. “Then,” he said with quiet sympathy, “the growth will come back.” We both knew what he was actually saying was, this whole drama will play itself out again. “Damn,” I said, visualizing it. “I know,” he said.
One of my friends has an aunt who flew from her home country for cancer treatment in San Francisco. When she got here the doctors told her they couldn’t save her, and they refuse to let her fly home again, telling her the flight will kill her. My friend never met this aunt until she came to California to die, and now she sits with her in the hospital room, the aunt’s nearest relative in the States, and rubs her stomach to ease the pain. Even if her aunt never makes it back home, she will want her body to rest there, and that will cost the family $15K, my friend tells me.
I didn’t realize, before this summer, just how sticky and drawn-out death can be. I didn’t know about being exasperated with my deathly-ill cat because he’s so alive he’s causing us trouble with the bandages and the pills. I didn’t know my grandpa could go from robust to frail within a year, and then hang on for so long in weakness and confusion. I didn’t know, in other words, that death isn’t always the worst possible outcome, that continuing to live can bring up questions that are impossible to answer. And I didn’t realize this will be the future for us all, whether it’s our own slow dying or our loved ones’ — that as we get older, we will have to face the grey areas of death again and again with everyone around us.
So yes, there are good reasons to be depressed.
The weird thing I realized, as I tossed in my bed last night, is that it’s not the death and dying that depress me, it’s the living. As I lay there exploring my mood, I recognized it as the feeling of failure, and more particularly, the feeling of failing at everything. The thing you have to realize about me and failure is that (1) I’m terrified of failing, and (2) I’m enough of a perfectionist that all imperfection appears to lead to failure, so that if I’m not doing something well, I’m failing. To put it simply, I’m highly uncomfortable with being bad at things.
As you must know, I have recently revamped this blog so that I cover a different subject on each weekday. This has given me lots of joy and creative momentum, but I didn’t notice until last night that this also gave me five whole new fronts on which to do poorly. That, I realized as I flopped over yet again in bed, was what depressed me so much: thinking that now I had even more ways to fail at everything and now it was all public. And I guess this is where the death and dying part comes in, because I started to see myself never doing any great work, and getting older and older, and then facing this miserable drawn-out dying with nothing to show for my life. Mediocrity at everything. That’s what terrifies me more than death. (I think.)
As always, once I give name to my angst, it becomes manageable. Once I figured out that I was fearing failure at everything (again), I could remind myself that I’d been here before and knew what to do. “The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure,” Virginia Woolf noted in her diary, “and being read the superficial.” The feeling of failure is an illusion, caused by measuring my worth by external markers, ignoring what really matters to me. External markers of success are nice to receive, but they never suffice; they can always be taken away, fade away in time, or be overshadowed by someone else’s glory. Evelina told us this at VONA, and I nodded because I knew this but always, always need to be reminded. External success, creative products, acclaim — these don’t quiet the anguished voice of 3 AM. But making what I want to always feels right, even when the product isn’t perfect. The internal feeling of success is what matters. When I remember this, I can work hard and long and feel happy. I don’t know how much time I have before my death; there may not be time for great work. But there is always time for great striving and working, and that’s what I need to remember.
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I’m sure someone else has said this better, but mediocrity is not failure at everything, it is never even trying. And all those ghosts that haunt us at 3 AM, turn into dust in the light of morning…..
Too true! And writing about things always makes me feel better and more empowered to deal with them. 🙂
This is a strong, honest post. When I was a young child, I wanted to hide from public view. Being one of the only black kids in my universe it was all the more obvious that I was there.
I remember when I spent the summers with my grandmother in North Carolina in her black neighborhood, I felt even more like hiding because I felt so weird and unable to connect. So, I tried to “hang back” which annoyed my outgoing, hardworking, fun loving grandmother to no end. She used to say, “What is wrong with you?” And I’d always say, “but everybody’s looking at me.” And she would say, “Nobody has time to be thinking about you. You think everybody’s thinking about you. But who cares about you? Go on out there and stop being embarrassed. You think anyone really cares?”
I remember thinking EVERY time we had this conversation how rude that was but as I got older I understood what she meant. My fear that people were spending their days and nights pointing out my imperfections was a matter of how I felt but not based any kind of reality. Who is that person making a list of my embarrassing moments, my failures, my dreams unaccomplished? In short, who remembers, who sees, who cares? The rest is up to me to crawl, walk, fall, dust myself off and try again.
The saying goes, no one remembers the losers. The only comfort in that is seriously, no one cares when you dont succeed. Just do it again. Work harder and eventually maybe you’ll realize that particular thing you’re doing, yea, not so much. That’s not your thing. Next!
I think I have come to terms with this in my recent post-20s adult years as I have tried learning new things. It’s hard to learn as an adult. it’s hard to learn to swim, to tap dance, to knit, and know that you will fail–in front of people who will be better than you. You dont have years to secretly master these skills and show up to class as an expert. You just have to go, look dumb, forget to connect with the floor when improvising a poorly timed tap rhythm, shrug, adn smile.
Isn’t it amazing how you really do think everyone’s looking at you, at least when you’re young? But I never quite believed that no one was looking at me, because goodness knows I was watching everyone else, trying to figure out how they got to be the way they were, trying to pick up cues, trying to be more like them. These days I tell myself it doesn’t matter who’s looking.
One thing I’ve learned in the past year or two is that being bad at things, like everything else, is a skill to be learned! I’m a lot more comfortable with it now than I used to be, but when it comes to things that really mean a lot to me (like writing and drawing), I still have to remind myself that it’s necessary to be so-so before I can get to be really good.
I have so much to say in response to this gut-wrenchingly honest post, but for now, I had to share my thoughts on this particular comment. When I was in high school–I cringe even writing this–my friends and I would viciously gossip about anyone and everyone, and it wasn’t until I was older that I realized I’d picked up that toxic habit from one side of my family who can verbally rip someone to shreds and follow it up with a flippant, little laugh that literally gives me the chills when I hear it.
During this gossiping stage of my life, I was super self-conscious and insecure, and while the gossiping wasn’t entirely to blame for that, I’ve noticed that when I decided to go on a gossiping fast a few years ago in an attempt to kick that nasty habit once and for all, my feelings of insecurity started to lessen. There was definitely a correlation between my analysis and judgment of those around me and my tendency to turn that judging eye inward.
Now, I’m not at all saying that your behavior is in any way like mine was, but perhaps there’s something relevant to your process in the idea that learning to accept other people’s flaws, which I find is much easier at first than learning to accept my own, might be good practice for easing up on yourself.
Hi Mo! You’re right, I think there is a real connection between nitpicking at others and doing the same to ourselves. I also have certain critical relatives whose views of others shaped the way I viewed people (and, by extension, myself). People were always pointed out for being imperfect in some way (tacky clothes, weird grooming, publicly displaying work that wasn’t stunning), and I’m sure that my internalizing that critical voice is largely responsible for why I feel so pressured to be perfect at everything. One of the reasons I loved VONA so much was I never felt I had to live up to anything there; there was nothing to prove. I have to remind myself of that now when I look at other people, and when I look at myself. We’re all imperfect and trying, and that’s the way it should be.
And oh, I can’t believe you gossiped like that — or I wouldn’t be able to believe it if I hadn’t some awful gossipy habits in my own back history!! I think of some of the things I said (and since I’ve been journaling forever, some of them are actually written down) and I just pray for forgiveness.
We need to hang out 🙂 I’ll be up there on Monday the 23rd to drive Grandma to her doctor appointment. Let’s go get lunch :)…maybe ChauFa and Fettucini. 😉 I miss you~ and Thomas says “Hi”.
Death is tough, but living is even tougher. I can totally understand what you’re going through. Know that you’re not alone. And know that if you need anything, let me know 🙂
I’d love to have lunch with you, Jinny! And hi to Thomas too, hehe. 🙂 I have yoga till 1 in El Cerrito, but could meet you after that if that’s not too late!
Thank you for the love 🙂
I hear ya, Lisa! You’re right, lots of external happiness and success are always there but if you dont internalize any of it, at 3am it will all come crashing down. This is why I like to read your blog. We always seem to be struggling with the same things at the same time. I guess that does prove that this is just growing pains and nothing more.
I like your blog too. 🙂 Neurotic eating habits and related thoughts? Yeah, I am all over that!! 😉