Walking at Radnor Lake was part of today’s post-election self-care plan. More images on Instagram. iPhone 10 ©LeisaHammett.com
From the perch of his high-backed Queen Anne chair, he stabbed his finger in the air and moved it in a series of dips and valleys. “That’s how you are right now. We need to get you to more of an even keel.” I was 25 and he was the first of a series of therapists I’d see over the next two decades.
Flash forward to 10 years ago:
“If my shamans knew how easy I go on you, they’d call me a wuss.” Wuss or not, (NOT,) the shaman I worked with for five years at the start of last decade, and who uttered those words, used to hound into me: Non-attachment! Detachment! Non-reaction! “Don’t react!” “You allow your emotions to jerk you around.” “Expectations are a set up for disappointment, Leisa!” “Accept the way it is.” “It is what it is.” “That’s just the way it is.” “The only thing you can control is you and how you react!”
That part about reaction? I thought I’d never arrive on that distant shore. As our country has just washed up on the shore of a tumultuous election, uncertain who will be our president, I’m surprised to find myself not reacting. *Please-please do not read lack of reaction as complicity, complacency, apathy.* No, it’s just I’ve finally learned not to get myself tied up in double knots over stuff that happens. Big or small. I want Biden-Harris to lead our country. I do not want another four years of Donald J. Trump, but if the later happens, (and thus the foreseeable dismantling of our democracy,) beating my chest, pulling my hair and gnashing my teeth won’t make a difference. But, more about that later.
Flashback to year 2000. Grace’s second year of kindergarten. We’d held her back to give her more time to master basics. I had written a proposal that our school district start a program for children with autism in each of the district’s clusters. I had already compromised the quality of her preschool education by going to an inferior preschool program versus a better one across town that had no fencing and regular lockdowns for drive by shootings. My daughter’s future was to be bused across town because that’s where they sent children with special needs. This way she went to school close to home and she was educated part of her day with typical peers. Not ideal, but much better. And I wanted the top teacher for autism. So, like I did throughout my daughter’s schooling, I found the best para-professsionals and teachers and I asked to work with them.
To this day, that teacher is an avid democratic organizer. A year into her tenure at Grace’s elementary school she took a leave of absence to help with Al Gore’s campaign. That left our classroom a couple months into the school year with a temporary teacher and with a paraprofessional with mental health problems and all things ran amuck. I took everything personal. Everything was a drama. I was constantly in turmoil over the things that were not going well in Grace’s classroom. Then one day I was driving home and it happened. I knew what is was and I called my family physician that day. I’d never had one before, or one to that degree since, but I knew that it was a mild anxiety attack. Though not a fan of prescription medication, I knew that my neurochemistry from months of constant mental chaos and negative thinking was out of whack. I went on an antidepressant, got stabilized and two months later was able to come off of it. And, the regular teacher returned to serve out the second semester. (The individual brain chemistry of one of us is different. Take Grace’s. It was born imbalanced and is stabilized through medication to compensate for chemicals she does not manufacture naturally.) I’d stressed my chemistry to the point that it was depleted.
Flash forward two years and I had my one and only teacher from hell. She was horrid. She was verbally and emotionally abusive to me and I’d later learn verbally abusive to the special needs children in her charge. It took me until two months before the school year ended to convince the new principal with a 22 single-spaced document of that teacher’s hideous infractions plus a half-dozen auxiliary professionals (occupational, speech therapists, etc.,) backing me up and with a list of their own experiences, that this woman was dishonest and abusive.
But that time, with a situation much more horrid and that lasted an entire school year, I kept my cool. Early on I began to watch my thoughts pile up and I ordered them to stop it. I was not going to let them take control like I had two years earlier. And I didn’t. I learned that I had control of my thoughts.
It would be many more years before I learned that I could choose how I could react. And I think I’ve arrived. We won’t change the political climate by emoting. We will only eat up our own individual insides. These are tenets of Buddhism. And I’ve learned them in the last 15 years in various ways, though I subscribe to no religious system. I also learned by observing one of my traveling companions, a devout practicing Buddhist who puts my daily 5 minutes of meditation to shame. But she doesn’t react. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t care….I’m not going to stop being an activist for people with disAbilities or an Enneagram 8 championing the underdog. But I don’t have to let circumstances make me miserable.
Ad nauseum: The pandemic has been a teacher. In this lockdown we’ve had opportunities to find joy when all the things that once might have had been impossible or less accessible. When, in my disability journey I’ve frequently checked my reflection to see if I was wearing rosy tinted glasses, I remembered others who had much more dire circumstances. They were able to find joy. I’ve been meaning to read the Diary of Anne Frank. I grew up on stories of my parent’s bootstrapped depression upbringing….
It is not about what happens to you. It is not about what is happening around you. It is about how you choose to react.
Which does bring me to privilege. Even in the journey of having a differently abled child, I’ve chosen to admit that I have privilege on many levels. That means I must roll up my sleeves and help others. And. To choose how I react. To even choose not to react. Even to choose not to let circumstances rob me of mining joy where I can find it. I am determined to find it. I have. And I will.
