Adventus

We like victors. We like survivors. We like those who have endured darkness, and came out of it alive. It is important to us to brush against the deep, vertiginous underneath of the world with someone who assures us that it can be overcome. Christ goes before us in all things, including what terrifies us. It’s not so much that we don’t have to go into the dark anymore – oh, we definitely do – as it is that Someone is with us and waits for us, simultaneously, on the other side.

We do not like struggling, surviving, enduring. We do not like being confronted with the uncertain expanse of someone in the midst of things, when it is all too clear that – sometimes – it does not turn out okay. That it might not be okay. That right now is not okay. There is an ugliness to being between, or perhaps just a vulnerability that seems ugly if only because it frightens us so.

I think of this often as I am in the midst of healing. As I am in the midst of fighting for a sense of stability against a lifetime of scars. No one likes anyone who is sick, a very familiar and very old voice reassures me. I have struggled to be healthy ever since I was born too early, decades ago now. It marked me forever. Those burdens of health are complicated by burdens of mental health, by childhood violence, by years struggling to pretend nothing happened. So, I am very familiar with being sick, in whatever way, and I know this: people like when someone has been sick, when it’s over, when it’s become a lesson and a triumph. But being sick is much more frightening and overwhelming, because it is less clear that there will be a triumph.

I fight daily in the middle of things, and sometimes it is very unclear indeed. Based on where I have been, I am considerably better. I think, on good days, that I might be slowly growing toward the kind of life I’ve never known: one in which my primary experience is not one of suffering. Still, it is true that most of my days are spent in immense, immense psychological pain. I want a medal, some days, for braving my ghosts and demons, for going out and doing anything at all. Whatever normal thing you do without a thought, it took me at least ten times more courage to do that thing. I want a freaking medal.

Comparing struggles is a dangerous game, of course. Things like writing arrive to me more easily than many people, and so do other such intellectual efforts. Or I easily hold sway in a classroom. Ultimately, suffering in human beings is unevenly shared, even in the horizon of an individual life.

But it is dangerous to know these weak things about each other, because we can take advantage of one another, and because sympathy for suffering is neither easy nor simple. More pointedly, institutions and systems are not typically built to accommodate human weakness. I know this, and I worry.

I wait, painfully, for a day in which my suffering is relieved. I fight, painfully, to see that day through. I do not know how it will end, I don’t at all, but I would affirm the movement of grace in my life even if it did not end well.

It is exhausting to wait. When I count the scars that mark my body, they seem to age me like rings on a tree, and I feel as old as the world. I feel more tired than human speech has words to mean. How long, Lord, until I see your face?

As I wait, I worry. I worry about work especially, where I am in constant agony over whether my successes there make up for when I fail. Did I publish enough? Serve on enough committees? Remember to get those assignments graded? I worry about missing a meeting because I have to see a doctor, a doctor I’m seeing because I want to be better – though for now it makes me worse. Worse because I’m not there, and I’m not exactly saying why, because I’m terrified I’ll be ostracized. I know I fail in other ways, that my suffering makes me worse in other ways, and I break my back trying to be amazing at what I can do, hoping that… I don’t know. Hoping it all evens out. I’m a talented scholar, but forgetful; I’m great in a classroom, but take forever to grade; I’m good at organizing tasks, but details are lost on me.

It’s all very, very human. I’m just a human who happens to also be mentally ill, which is also a deeply human experience. Not that we think of it that way.

I know the academic world well enough to understand that I don’t get any extra points for doing what everyone else does, even if it took me significantly more effort to do it. I’m not even sure I’d want those points anyway. I also know that mental illness does nothing but harm my viability for the job. (I worry, worry, about whether and how much this blog has already hurt me, and a recent experience cuts at me. This blog has helped. How much has it also hurt? I must think about this.) There is, after all, nothing more poisonous for an academic than to have something mentally wrong deep inside. Despite how common it is, and despite the absurd notion of the mind we presume in our daily work.

Besides. I might fucking die on you. So, I get it, that’s not great. (Excuse the sarcastic anger, as I am cynically aware that we are worried about my death for very different reasons. One of us is worried about my usefulness; one of us just wants me to be alive.)

I might also live and flourish, and have all kind of insights into being human that are not readily available to people who have not suffered like I have. That would be great.

I’d argue, with intense ferocity, that my talent and skill earn me my place, and that I should not be held back because I suffer mental illness. I didn’t mean to be abused as a child. I didn’t mean for that to mess me up in the ways it does – and it definitely does. Still, that is not all of me, or primarily me, even as it profoundly affects me. Even as it demands deep understanding from others, perhaps more than they can give. I would resent having to argue this at all, but sometimes I feel cornered, and worry that I’ll have to. That the moment is coming, soon, when I’ll have to. I will have to expose my weakness and then explain how, even though all this indeed makes me very, very weak, it also makes me very, very brave.

I won’t say “strong,” because, I don’t know. It’s not about whether I win. Mostly, mental illness feels like I lose all the damn time. So, let’s not talk about strength and victories. Let’s talk about getting up again and limping back into the fight.

Apocalyptic imagery usually centers on some kind of battle between heavenly and earthly forces. We are supposed to read the story and be assured that, bloody as the battle is, heaven always wins. I think that, even if I lost, heaven would win. This is a comfort to me on my bad days. It comforts me on the days that I can feel comforted, anyway. Some days, there is no comfort, none at all, and all I know is that I take my next breath. All I know is waiting, breathing.

I hope that such a small thing it is enough for God, even if it is not enough for the world.