Second Mountains

This week, I came across this article by David Brooks, which felt like a description of my life journey over the past 10-12 years:

But in the lives of the people I’m talking about — the ones I really admire — something happened that interrupted the linear existence they had imagined for themselves. Something happened that exposed the problem with living according to individualistic, meritocratic values.

Some of them achieved success and found it unsatisfying. They figured there must be more to life, some higher purpose. Others failed. They lost their job or endured some scandal. Suddenly they were falling, not climbing, and their whole identity was in peril. Yet another group of people got hit sideways by something that wasn’t part of the original plan. They had a cancer scare or suffered the loss of a child. These tragedies made the first-mountain victories seem, well, not so important.

Life had thrown them into the valley, as it throws most of us into the valley at one point or another. They were suffering and adrift.

Some people are broken by this kind of pain and grief. They seem to get smaller and more afraid, and never recover. They get angry, resentful and tribal.

But other people are broken open. The theologian Paul Tillich wrote that suffering upends the normal patterns of life and reminds you that you are not who you thought you were. The basement of your soul is much deeper than you knew. Some people look into the hidden depths of themselves and they realize that success won’t fill those spaces. Only a spiritual life and unconditional love from family and friends will do. They realize how lucky they are. They are down in the valley, but their health is O.K.; they’re not financially destroyed; they’re about to be dragged on an adventure that will leave them transformed.

They realize that while our educational system generally prepares us for climbing this or that mountain, your life is actually defined by how you make use of your moment of greatest adversity...

When people are broken open in this way, they are more sensitive to the pains and joys of the world. They realize: Oh, that first mountain wasn’t my mountain. I am ready for a larger journey.

He concludes with this:

On the first mountain we shoot for happiness, but on the second mountain we are rewarded with joy. What’s the difference? Happiness involves a victory for the self. It happens as we move toward our goals. You get a promotion. You have a delicious meal.

Joy involves the transcendence of self. When you’re on the second mountain, you realize we aim too low. We compete to get near a little sunlamp, but if we lived differently, we could feel the glow of real sunshine. On the second mountain you see that happiness is good, but joy is better.

It reminds me of a quote from CS Lewis:

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

It's also similar to something I wrote on this blog 10+ years ago:

I have to believe that the past two and a half years have been God's way of showing me that that's not what my life is supposed to be about.

You know what? Saying "God has a Plan" is just too glib, too simplistic. These two and a half years have been SO hard. I had been worried about a financial crisis, but I wound up in a crisis of faith.

...

And three months ago, I wound up with a job that is a hundred times better than anything I could ever have imagined. I'm only earning about a third of the salary that I was making before, but I'm not wasting my life feeling tired, and anxious, and stressed out all the time.

I'd love to say that the story ends here. "And we lived happily ever after." But that would be glib and simplistic too.

I still have hopes and dreams that may go unfulfilled. I still struggle with thoughts like, "God, if you love me, why won't you give me the one last thing that I so desperately want?" I still have bouts of self-pity and depression. And it's still really hard for me to accept that I'm not the One in control of the Plan for my life.

It's good to look back at these words and recognize that they're increasingly true.  I still love my job-- It really is a perfect fit for my skills and interests.  And that "one last thing that I so desperately want?"  Well, as it turns out, I've got two of them now.  ;)  Not to mention wonderful friends and a deep sense of community...

My second mountain is better than anything I imagined when I was struggling on the first one.

All the World's a Stage...

Yesterday, our new bedroom furniture was delivered. I let my daughter into the room to see it, and she immediately climbed up on the platform bed and started dancing, stomping, tapping, and skipping around for much longer than her toddler attention span would normally last. When my husband got home from work, she treated him to an encore performance. (And after she went to bed, as we put the mattress in place and made the bed, I felt horribly guilty for depriving her of a dance stage just because of our selfish desire for a comfortable place to sleep.)

I captured a couple of great videos, which I shared with friends and family on Facebook. Everyone says that we should sign her up for tap dance lessons, but that's just a small part of what was going through my head as I watched her dance...

To my daughter:

Adoption involves so many unknowns. In the beginning, all those unknowns can be really hard and challenging. But today, as I watched you dance, I realized that the unknowns can be beautiful and magical too.

Because your Papa and I are both engineers, I tend to assume that your little brother is predestined to grow up to be an engineer, or something similar. My family's strong German pragmatism is almost inevitable.

But you are a Mystery. We know very little about your biological family-- just some names and a little bit of medical information-- so we have no idea what you might grow up to be or to do. Your DNA is your own secret, and since we don't know your history, we can't make assumptions about your future.

So I'm simply going to assume that you have artists, and actors, and athletes, and academics inside of you. I don't know what's in your "nature" so I just hope to nurture you in anything that sparks your interest, whether that includes dance lessons, or musical instruments, or art supplies, or soccer cleats, or cooking classes, or power tools... (And of course, I promise that you will always have plenty of opportunities to go skiing.)

We've been given a magical seed. As your parents, our job is to plant you in a loving home, provide you with the things you need to grow and develop, and protect and watch over you.

You are my beautiful, funny, clever, sweet daughter. You are already so much more than I ever imagined. And my heart is overflowing with happiness because I have the incredible privilege of watching you grow and blossom. You have been, and will always be, a wonderful surprise.

And now back to the good stuff...

So in my previous post, I probably under-emphasized the fact that, after a long run of bad luck, my life has gotten much, much better in the past year and a half.

Here are the highlights:

• In June 2010, we adopted a beautiful baby girl, who brings sunshine into our lives every single day.



• Last May, just as we were starting the process to adopt again, I was surprised to discover that I was pregnant. We had a few scary moments along the way, but our son was born in November, healthy and perfect. He was very small (3 lbs) at birth, but he has been making good progress at catching up to the size he ought to be!

(That's a standard-hospital-issue pacifier in his mouth, by the way. I realize it looks a little strange because he's so tiny!)


• I still love my job-- I get to work from home, I have a flexible schedule, and I really enjoy what I do.

Depression is a Lying Bastard

So in case you haven't noticed, it's been awhile since I've written anything here.

I could say that life has been busy, but the truth is much more complicated than that. The reason why I stopped writing is because life got very, very hard for a long, long while. And then, even after things started to get better, I felt like somehow I wasn't entitled to just pick back up where I left off without giving some sort of explanation about where I'd been.

It feels dishonest to only write about good, happy, strong stuff, while sweeping sadness and weakness under the rug. And the honest truth is that I suffered from clinical depression for about a year. It makes me uncomfortable to admit to that, because I like to think of myself as a strong person, and there is absolutely nothing that feels weaker or more worthless than Depression.

In my head, I always think of it as Depression, because it really is totally different than the "I'm feeling depressed because I hate my job" sort of thing that everyone experiences. Depression means crying every single day. It means stumbling through life in a haze. It means not being able to focus on anything. Except, of course, when you're lying awake at night, tormented by horrible, evil thoughts.



I read something recently that challenged me to see my experience with Depression in a new way:

"When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker…but as survivors. Survivors who don’t get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it. Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand."

This post made me realize that damaged relationships are a sort of comorbidity of Depression and that I won't be fully recovered until I repair the friendships that got injured along the way. I'm making this my New Year's Resolution.

I also need to take a moment to say that I will forever be grateful to my wonderful husband, who never, ever stopped fighting for me:

"I celebrate the fact that you may not understand the battle, but you pick up the baton dropped by someone you love until they can carry it again."

I want to believe that my Depression was an isolated event, a single episode, which only happened because I was absolutely battered by wave after wave of horrible, traumatic bad luck. I hope that's the case, because it would make me relatively lucky. Depression is more typically an illness that comes and goes throughout a person's life. And maybe mine is only in remission, and I'll experience it again someday.

I worry about that, especially in the past few months. I've been afraid that I might suffer from Postpartum Depression, and I became even more apprehensive after having an emergency c-section and delivering a tiny preemie who had to spend a couple of weeks in the NICU. When you combine physical trauma, emotional stress, hormonal fluctuations, and sleep deprivation, it creates really fertile ground for Depression to take root.

Fortunately, after several weeks spent "waiting for the other shoe to drop" I'm finally starting to breathe a little easier. It looks like I'm going to be OK.

I'm a survivor.

A Love of Books

As I've mentioned before, I participate in a tutoring program at my church. This is my 5th year with the program, and my 4th year with the same student. J---- and I were paired up together when she entered the program as a 3rd grader, and now she's in 6th grade. Time flies!

Her birthday was on Sunday, so Monday night after tutoring, I took her out for dessert to celebrate. And Teller's managed to out-dessert the ultimate dessert-atarian! She was overwhelmed by the richness of their Molten Chocolate Cake with raspberry sorbet.

It was a Good Time.

I like to give books to J---- as birthday and Christmas gifts. Mostly I've been giving her the books that were my favorites when I was her age. First, I gave her the Chronicles of Narnia books, and last year, I gave her Anne of Green Gables. So this year, Anne of Avonlea was one of the books that I bought for her.

I also found a recommended reading guide, which was really helpful. Since J---- has read all of the new Nancy Drew books from her school's library, the guide book suggested Shakespeare's Secret by Elise Broach. I also picked out a jewelry-making instruction book / kit that looked fun.

(And because I think that it's really important to teach kids about money, I also bought Complete Idiot's Guide to Money for Teens. But that's a tutoring/mentoring aid, not a birthday gift. J---- usually finishes most of her homework before tutoring, and she doesn't really need to work on basic math or reading skills, so we're going to devote part of each tutoring session to reading this book and talking about money.)

This year, I decided to include a letter with J----'s gift. I thought I ought to share it here, in honor of all of the people who gave me books when I was a kid:

Dear J----,

I wanted to tell you a little bit about why I buy books for you as birthday gifts and Christmas presents. The first reason is that I’m your tutor, so I think it’s good to give you gifts that are at least somewhat educational. But that’s kind of a boring reason.

The other reason is because I love books. I have always loved to read, and that’s something that I want to share with you too. (When you love something, like reading or skiing, of course you want to share those activities with people that you care about!) Many of the books that I have given to you are books that were given to me by people who loved me.

My step-mother gave me the Chronicles of Narnia books when I was a little girl, because she also loved those books when she was younger. I’ve read them dozens of times, and I still re-read them every couple of years, because C.S. Lewis’ stories are more than just fairy tales. He was a very wise man who wrote some important books for adults, but adults can also learn from the stories that he wrote for little kids.

I bought you the Anne of Green Gables books because my grandmother bought those books for me. My grandparents used to go to Prince Edward Island for their vacation every year, and my grandmother bought the books for me while she was there. My grandmother loved history, especially the history of the United States and Canada, and I remember her house was filled with books. One of her hobbies was studying genealogy, and she discovered that she had an ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War.

So these books are a sort of heritage that I want to pass on to you. In addition to being great stories, they remind me of people who loved me. And I hope that when you think about these books, you’ll also remember that I gave them to you with lots of love!

You know you're an adult when......you suffer through a Thirtysomething Crisis.

I spent an hour or two on the phone with my friend J---- last night. She's having a Thirtysomething Crisis. She loves her job, but she's also under more stress than any human being was meant to carry. Having been through this sort of thing myself, I can empathize completely with what she's going through, so we both wound up sniffling and crying while we were talking on the phone.

I have several friends who have suffered through this type of crisis in the past couple of years, and I can only wonder why Life has chosen to haul off and punch us in the gut at this particular age.

It can't be called a Midlife Crisis, because we're only in our thirties. And it's not an Existential Crisis, because it's NOT triggered by a search for significance, but rather by an external voice telling us that we're failing at the one thing that we thought was our purpose in life.

Being an adult is really hard sometimes.

Quality of Life

I've been doing a lot of blogging recently, when I really ought to be doing real work. But I've got something personal to share, so I hope you'll stick with me here...



In the past few days, I have been processing through several seemingly disconnected concepts, and they just kind of congealed into a consistent theme this morning.

Here are the three motives, and also two figures that fill the spaces in between them:

• Motif - The Giant Pool of Money - How the Subprime Mortgage Crisis became the Global Financial Crisis.


• Figure - United States of Appetite - "Is the middle class ensnared in a culture of consumption?"


• Motif - Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey


• Figure - Between the Scary and the Monastery - "We don't need to live through a disaster to know there's a more human way to live."


• Motif - Quality - "The race for Quality has no finish line--so technically, it's more like a death march."

A Global Financial Crisis has occurred because the world no longer has faith that America can make good on its debts. And I'm starting to think that they're absolutely right not to trust us--As a country, we are upside-down, deep underwater, drowning in debt, and it's entirely possible that we can't be resuscitated. As this article in Time magazine puts it:

Japan and Germany make cars. Saudi Arabia pumps oil. China supplies the world with socks and toys and flat-screen TVs. What does the United States produce? Lots of stuff, but in recent years this country's No. 1 export--by far--has been debt.

When you look at things this way, it becomes clearer what the frenzy in New York City and Washington is all about. There are major quality issues with our nation's flagship product.

I'd like to hope that we're just facing a mild recession, but realistically, if we're going to prevent a profound Depression, we have give the rest of the world a reason to have confidence in us. We need to pay back our debts (personal and national) and start living within our means.

So while today's crisis management makes a certain amount of sense, returning to the borrow-and-spend status quo afterward seems like a disastrous idea. If the U.S. is to have a future as an economic power, its long love affair with borrowed money has to end.

And so our race for a bigger and better Quality of Life has become a death march.



Two weeks ago, we had a huge windstorm in Cincinnati. Most areas lost power for days. But I've heard a lot of people talking about the good things that came out of it--Neighbors got to know each other; families played games together; we were all forced to slow down and interact with people, instead of wasting all of our free time in front of televisions and computers.

Maybe McMansions, SUVs, and HDTVs aren't the secret to happiness after all.



I believe that there's a better way to live.



About two years ago, I lost my job, and we lost 50% of our household income. I immediately rushed into another job, earning less than half of what I had been making.

It was not a good job. It was juvenile and frustrating, but I stuck to it. It took a couple of other life crises to bring me to the point where I was broken enough to quit.

The thought of being unemployed terrified me. I was afraid of fighting with my husband about money, I was afraid of losing our house, and I was afraid that my career was in a downward spiral, circling the drain. My sense of self-worth was totally tied up in the idea of earning a six-figure income.

I have to believe that the past two and a half years have been God's way of showing me that that's not what my life is supposed to be about.

You know what? Saying "God has a Plan" is just too glib, too simplistic. These two and a half years have been SO hard. I had been worried about a financial crisis, but I wound up in a crisis of faith.

I felt like every single time I got back on my feet and started moving forward, another door would be slammed in my face. I said that to my husband several months ago, and a few of weeks later, I found a couple of quotes from C.S. Lewis saying exactly the same thing:

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be--or so it feels--welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become.

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not, 'So there's no God after all,' but, 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.'

He's talking about the death of his beloved wife. I was grieving for my personal goals and dreams. (How crazy is that?) Fortunately, the story doesn't end there:

Your bid--for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity--will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world. Nothing less will shake a man--or at any rate a man like me--out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.

And so, perhaps, with God. I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: You are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.

The analogy is perfect. You have to be so exhausted, so very nearly dead, that you stop struggling and go limp, and that's when God can finally start to turn things around. That's exactly what a crisis of faith feels like.



So in the meantime, my husband and I had to cut back on ways that we were spending money. We had to give up going to Hawaii and the ski trips out West that we had been doing every year. We ate out less, and we didn't buy new clothes. I started getting books from the public library, instead of spending hundreds of dollars at Barnes & Noble. My husband deferred a lot things that he wanted to do--taking a sabbatical to finish the basement, buying woodworking equipment, purchasing an HDTV, etc.

But here's the crazy thing: We didn't really miss most of those things. And we didn't fight over money, and we didn't have to sell our house. (My husband deserves full credit for that, because he's the one who insisted on using conservative estimates for our income when we first established our budget for building the house five years ago.)

And three months ago, I wound up with a job that is a hundred times better than anything I could ever have imagined. I'm only earning about a third of the salary that I was making before, but I'm not wasting my life feeling tired, and anxious, and stressed out all the time.

I'd love to say that the story ends here. "And we lived happily ever after." But that would be glib and simplistic too.

I still have hopes and dreams that may go unfulfilled. I still struggle with thoughts like, "God, if you love me, why won't you give me the one last thing that I so desperately want?" I still have bouts of self-pity and depression. And it's still really hard for me to accept that I'm not the One in control of the Plan for my life.

So I guess you'll just have to stay tuned...

Working from Home

Back in June, I started working for a small engineering software company.

Really small. I am Employee #7.

My salary is much lower than what I was earning at my Corporate job, by a factor of about 1/3. But there are some key benefits that are worth far more than money ever could mean to me:

• I'll own a stake in the company, and I can see how my hard work will contribute to the company's success.


• I have the rare privilege of doing meaningful work for an ethical manager.
  
  After my own work experiences and witnessing all the struggles that several of my friends have gone through in the past few years, I started to believe that good jobs just didn't exist. So now I'm especially grateful to have a job where my boss respects me and I actually enjoy the work I'm doing. I get to do real engineering, without the paperwork and bureaucracy and politics that consumed 80-90% of my time at my previous jobs.


• I get "six or seven weeks" of vacation!!! (My boss wasn't worried about the details when he offered me the job.)
  
  When I was working for the big Corporation, I had to use some of my precious vacation days to run errands or even to take a nap. Now that I have a flexible work schedule, I have no real need for six or seven weeks of vacation. My husband gets four weeks, so that's pretty much the upper limit for us to travel anyway. The real beauty of the whole situation is that I'm free from the stupid pettiness of tracking and hoarding half-days of vacation.


• I get to work from home!!!
  
  In fact, the company has no central headquarters. Everyone works from home, and we're scattered across the country-- Massachusetts, Ohio, Iowa, and Colorado. (Future-Employee #8 lives in California.) We communicate with each other mostly by email and IMs, and our weekly staff meetings are on IRC. Sure, there are times when it would be easier if we could communicate face to face, instead of using GoToMeeting. But the upside of working from home is that there are fewer distractions-- no coworkers talking on their speakerphones, no need to trek to various ends of the building several times a day, and no mandatory meetings consuming 10-20 hours every week. I feel far, far more productive than I ever did living in cube-land.
  
  SIDEBAR: In my not-so humble opinion, cubicles may be one of the most evil, demoralizing inventions of all time. And don't even get me started on the new trend toward lower walls...

I've got to tell you, I really LOVE working from home. There are too many benefits to list them all, but here are some of my favorites:

• I finally have an office with a window and a door. It's comfortable in a way that a cubicle could never, ever be.


• I get to bring my dog to work with me. She naps under my desk while I'm working.


• I sleep an hour later every day, and now I don't wake up every morning feeling like I've been hit by a truck! (I never realized how chronically sleep-deprived I really was.)


• I can wear comfortable clothes, and I don't have to put on make-up or do my hair if I don't feel like it.


• I eat healthier food for lunch, because now I'm not choosing between fast food or the cafeteria. There are no french fries in my kitchen, so I don't have to deal with that temptation at lunch time!


• I have the flexibility to volunteer more of my time for things I feel passionate about (like getting 60 inner-city kids organized to go to camp) and I can go to yoga classes in the middle of the day. In fact, I usually work at my church on Thursdays-- Free coffee, free wireless, and free yoga!

In thinking about working from home, it occurred to me that for thousands of years, people worked in or near their homes. Whatever their trade or profession might be, they worked within walking distance of their homes. For many workers, it was normal to go home in the middle of the day for lunch and maybe even a siesta. So why on earth did we ever accept that a "normal" day should include an hour or more of road-rage and 8-10 hours spent sitting in a cube?

In the immortal words of Peter Gibbons:

We don't have a lot of time on this earth! We weren't meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about about mission statements.

Done!

It's taken more than two months now, but I have apparently completed every single test that my team of doctors could think of-- I've had approximately 20 vials of blood drawn, I went through a very unpleasant x-ray procedure, and we wrapped it all up with outpatient surgery on Tuesday this week-- and I'm finally DONE!!!

The final consensus seems to be that there's nothing seriously wrong with me, or at least nothing that can't be counteracted by appropriate medications, so that's a huge relief.

As it turns out, I have two different genetic issues that both relate to blood clotting. MTHFR mutations can cause clotting, and I also have another condition that prevents clots from breaking down. (My official diagnosis is that I am compound heterozygous for MTHFR and I am 4G/4G homozygous for PAI-1, which stands for Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor.) So now I'll be taking 8 pills/day, but eventually I should be able to drop down to just 4 pills/day, and that doesn't seem so bad.

Don't be a BLY

A busy day... I spent a few hours meeting with three of my friends to discuss stuff related to their jobs/businesses. During yoga, a guy in my class appeared to have suffered a heart attack, and I helped convince him that his symptoms were serious and that he needed to go see a doctor immediately. I also had to go get blood drawn for one more test. (Let's see, this makes the 4th time I've gotten stuck in the arm in just 4 weeks. I'm not really enjoying this mutant thing, and neither is my insurance company.)

I arrived at the testing lab at 3:30, and sat in the unattended waiting room for 15 minutes before someone came out to see why I was there. I presented my script for the testing, and she immediately starting looking for reasons why she couldn't draw my blood, mostly because she said that the office closes at 4pm. (Nevermind that the company's brochures and the signs in the waiting room all state that the office hours are 7:30 - 4:30.) First of all, she looked in a reference manual and found that one version of the test required fasting for 12 hours. I told her that my doctor's office hadn't mentioned anything about that. She double-checked the book and found out that there was an alternate version of the test which didn't require fasting. She called my doctor's office, probably hoping that they wouldn't answer, but they did. They said that I didn't need to do the fasting version of the test. Finally, she settled on the idea that the sample would require "immediate" processing, and the next courier pick-up wouldn't be until 7pm, so she said I'd have to go to a different office to have the blood drawn and collected in a timely fashion. It didn't seem worth having a debate about the definition of "immediate" processing, so I got directions to the other office and went on my merry way.

Things got even more aggravating on my way out of the parking lot. When I came to the end of my row of parking spaces, I was preparing to turn right, into the exit lane for the parking lot. As I was glancing over my left shoulder, checking for cars moving toward the exit, I heard a car horn and instinctively slammed on my brakes to avoid hitting a very expensive Mega-SUV, driven by a woman with an attitude as big as her vehicle. (She had just turned right into the parking lot from the street.) She was actually in MY lane, but apparently it's MY fault that her Land Yacht is way too big to navigate a normal turning radius. Obviously, I must be the idiot in this situation, because she actually rolled down her window to scream obscenities at me.

So the moral of the story for today is: Don't be a Bitch in a Land Yacht.

(Thanks for letting me vent.)

It's Official: I'm a Mutant.

More specifically, I found out yesterday that I have compound heterozygous (C667T and A1298C) mutations for the MTHFR gene. These mutations cause a thrombophilia (blood clotting) disorder. So now I've got follow-up appointments with a whole host of doctors, including a hemotologist and an endocrinologist.

There are a couple of reasons why finding out that I have this mutation is actually good news:

• It explains the significant medical issues that I've had this year, which have caused anxiety, depression, and grief for both me and my husband. So as weird as this may sound, it actually comes as a huge relief to have some sort of definitive diagnosis, because now we have hope that things can be better in the future.


• The condition is treatable, and the treatment is pretty simple and very effective-- I'll just have to take baby aspirin and extra supplements of folic acid, B6, and B12 for the rest of my life. (I may also need heparin injections, but not all the time.)


• By finding this out now, I can significantly reduce my risk of having a thrombosis, stroke, or heart attack later on in life.


• Since it's an inherited condition, my family can be tested for it as well. And if turns out that some of them are "mutants" too, then they can also reduce their risk of having thromboses, strokes, or heart attacks.

Preacher's Gift

Have you ever felt like your job has taken over your soul, and your life is spiraling out of control?

You're not alone.

Please set aside 40 minutes, and listen to this.

Frustration & Faith

I've been meaning to write up this posting for quite awhile now. (My first attempt was back in January.) I think that there are two reasons why it's taken me so long to get around to it:

1. I needed to dedicate a fairly sizeable block of uninterrupted time to doing it. (i.e. You may notice that this posting is rather long.)


2. I think I needed to be ready to let go of it. What I'm trying to say is that I couldn't write about all of this while I was in the midst of it. But now I feel like I'm ready to mark a moment, kind of like a memorial, and move on from here.

In the past year and half, I have had to really struggle through some serious questions about who I am, how I define my self-worth, and what my purpose is. Throughout this period, I've had a playlist on my iPod called "Frustration & Faith." Now, as a general rule, I don't look to pop music for philosophy or counseling, but these songs either say how I was feeling, or they say things that I needed to believe in. And somehow I just feel like I should share this...

1. Bad Day - by Daniel Powter
   
   When things at my job were at their absolute worst, this song seemed to be on the radio every single time I got into the car. And since I had literally a 5 minute commute each way, it also seemed like something more than coincidence. The song is actually way too upbeat to describe how I was really feeling-- I think the only lyrics that specifically applied to me were:

   
   You're faking a smile with the coffee to go
   You tell me your life's been way off line
   You're falling to pieces every time

   
   That part reminds me of going to get coffee in the cafeteria at work every morning with my friend Gus, which was invariably the high-point of my day. The rest of the day was always miserable.



2. Meant to Live - Switchfoot

   
   Maybe we've been living with our eyes half open
   Maybe we're bent and broken
   Broken
   
   We were meant to live for so much more
   Have we lost ourselves?
   Somewhere we live inside
   
   We want more than this world's got to offer
   We want more than the wars of our fathers
   And everything inside screams for second life




3. Tell Me Who I Am - Steve Manuel

   
   Cause I know I'm not the sum of what everybody says
   And I'm not a magazine, or what my body image is
   I've got to be more than my job
   I've got to be more than my address
   More than living to get by
   Or trying to impress...




4. Out Is Through - Alanis Morissette

   
   My tendency to want to run away feels natural and
   My urgency to dream of softer places feels understandable
   
   The only way out is through
   The only way we'll feel better
   The only way out is through
   Ultimately




5. The Beautiful Letdown - Switchfoot

   
   It was a beautiful letdown when I crashed and burned
   When I found myself alone, unknown and hurt
   It was a beautiful letdown the day I knew
   That all the riches this world had to offer me
   Would never do
   
   In a world full of bitter pain and bitter doubts
   I was trying so hard to fit in, to fit in,
   Until I found out
   That I don't belong here
   I don't belong here
   I will carry a cross and a song where I don't belong
   But I don't belong




6. Martyrs & Thieves - Jennifer Knapp

   
   And I know they are wrong
   When they say I am strong
   As the darkness covers me
   
   So turn on the light
   And reveal all the glory
   I am not afraid
   To bear all my weakness
   Knowing in meekness
   I have a kingdom to gain




7. Maybe There's a Loving God - Sara Groves
   
   I wrote a previous post about this song, and it just continues to be a favorite of mine.



8. In the Palm of Your Hand - Alison Krauss

   
   I'd rather be in the palm of Your hand
   Though rich or poor I may be
   Faith can see right through the circumstance
   Sees the forest in spite of the trees
   Your grace provides for me




9. Faithful to Me - Jennifer Knapp
   This simple, acapella song was a late addition to this list...

   
   All the chistles I've dulled carving idols of stone
   That have crumbled like sand 'neath the waves.
   I have recklessly built all my dreams in the sand
   Just to watch them all wash away.
   
   Through another day, another trial,
   Another chance to reconcile
   To One who sees past all I see.
   And reaching out my weary hand
   I pray that You'd understand.
   You're the only one who's faithful to me.




10. Word of God Speak - MercyMe

    
    I'm finding myself at a loss for words
    And the funny thing is: It's okay.
    The last thing I need is to be heard
    But to hear what You would say
    
    I'm finding myself in the midst of You
    Beyond the music, beyond the noise
    All that I need is to be with You
    And in the quiet hear Your voice




11. To Be Free - Steve Manuel

    
    You can live by the book, but it's slavery
    You can try, try hard, to do right
    I would pray that I would be given bravery
    Just to live out my heart in the light
    
    I want to be free
    I want to know life
    I don't want to live afraid to die
    I just want to kill the fear in me
    I want to let it go
    I want to be free




12. Open Your Eyes - Snow Patrol

    
    My bones ache, my skin feels cold
    And I'm getting so tired and so old
    The anger swells in my guts
    And I won't feel these slices and cuts
    
    Get up, get out, get away from these liars
    Cause they don't get your soul or your fire
    Take my hand, knot your fingers through mine
    And we'll walk from this dark room for the last time




13. This Is Your Life - Switchfoot

    
    This is your life
    And Today is all you've got now
    And Today is all you'll ever have
    
    Don't close your eyes
    
    This is your life
    Are you who you want to be?
    This is your life
    Is it everything you dreamed that it would be
    When the world was younger
    And you had everything to lose?




14. Perimeter of Me - Dividing the Plunder

    
    Well, I'm frightened by how easy it can be to live so long
    Going from one thing, to the next thing, to the next,
    'Til months have gone
    And you realize you have really not done anything at all
    At night you fall asleep believing you've just climbed
    So you could fall
    
    And I don't believe that "Who I Am" is something I can find
    It's whatever I create with what I do with all my time
    It's who I choose to love with all my heart, and strength, and mind
    And whether I believe that what I have is really mine




15. Giving In - Steve Manuel

    
    No more fighting, please
    No more pointing at me
    No more mourning who I'd hoped I'd be
    No more defending
    None of this wishing I was right
    No more concessions to my appetite
    
    I'm giving in, I'm giving up
    I won't let my pride into it
    And like cool wine poured from a crystal cup
    I'm giving in
    I'm giving up




16. Better Days - Robbie Seay Band

    
    Wherever your are, breathe out, and breath again
    And know that life is hard, but it's worth breathing
    Listen to me now, for Love, oh Love
    Is waiting for you, just to say:
    Here come better days




17. The Long Day Is Over - Norah Jones
    To me, this song is just a promise of something to look forward to-- That no matter how bad things get, there will eventually be an end to it, and a well-deserved rest. A feeling of coming home.

Life, in a Nutshell

I realize that it's been a very long time since I've posted anything on this blog, and there are some very good reasons for why I haven't been writing. This past year has been extremely difficult, and it seems like most of the things that have happened were just too personal and too emotionally draining to try to share on a blog. But since these things were major events in my life, I would have felt dishonest if I had continued to write about trivial stuff, pretending that everything was OK and normal when it clearly wasn't.

So here's the (simplified) update of everything that has happened in the past year:

• Jobs - I no longer work for a Fortune 50 company, and I hope that I never will again. For awhile I worked part-time for a small company (~20 employees) and that was a learning experience too. After that, I took some time off. Now I'm working on starting up my own LLC. I'm really, really excited by the idea that I'll be working for my self, from my home. I'll have a hard-wall office with a door and a window-- the dream of every cube-dweller-- and I'll also have the option of working from my back deck or pretty much anywhere else I want to be. There's no dress code, I can bring my dog to work with me, and I won't have to worry about what my boss will think if I have to go to a doctor's appointment or if take an hour and a half to have lunch with friends.
  
  My self-confidence was really shaken by losing my "dream job" last year, but I've come to realize that I am an intelligent, responsible, hard-working, talented engineer, and so I deserve something better than being treated like a replaceable cog in a corporate juggernaut that grinds out far more bureaucratic sludge than productive results. I hate corporate politics, and I hate that my roles have been defined and my worth has been determined by managers and directors who are inept at best. (I won't even try to describe the worst bosses... I know. You know. We'll leave it at that.) I know that I can be far happier and more productive working for myself, and I now I see that my true "dream job" is SO much bigger than anything that could fit into a 6x6' cubicle.



• Pets - I am no longer the proud parent of a tubby tabby and a cross-wired wiener dog. We still have the dachshund, but my sweet fuzzy cat was stricken by cancer at Christmas time, and she died in March. At the same time, I suffered through a difficult health issue of my own, and I wound up depressed. I tried some medication, but the side effects seemed as bad as the symptoms, so I quit my job and got a puppy instead.
  
  Her name is Bella. The rescue folks told us that she was a Border Collie / Golden Retriever mix. Now that she's grown up a bit, we think it's more likely a that she's a Border Collie / Labrador Retriever mix, since she looks just like a small black lab, but with white toes. We've been talking about getting another cat, but I think we'll probably wait until Bella settles down a bit.



• Travel - I have done a quite a bit of traveling in the past six months or so.
  
  In February, we did our annual ski vacation in Tahoe. There couldn't be a better group of friends to ski with, but things went badly for me at the end of the trip, so the memories of this trip aren't as fond as they have been in previous years.
  
  At the end of April, I tagged along on my husband's business trip to Zurich, so I got to wander around the town while he was working. I really enjoyed Switzerland, and since my new LLC will be partnering with a software company there, I hope that I'll be able to go back again.
  
  In June, we went back to Longboat Key for a week with my mom's extended family. This year we got to spend time with my mom, my grandparents, my grandmother's sister, her three daughters, two of my aunts, two of my uncles, two of my cousins, and one of my cousin's kids. The weather was nice. I got to feel tall for a week. It was a good trip.
  

So that's my life, in a nutshell. Now that things are looking up, I have a feeling that I'll be writing more often. Not to mention that now I'll be able to blog from work without having to worry about getting busted by my boss and I can blog about work without violating any stupid corporate policies!

Bearcat

I registered for classes on Friday. Actually, I tried to register for classes on Friday, but I wound up registering for a class on Friday, which I wound up dropping on Sunday so that I could change to different class. Anyway, the point is, starting September 20th, I'm going to be taking classes at University of Cincinnati, which means that I can now (if I so choose) call myself a Bearcat.

Life has a funny way of throwing you curve balls. When I was in high school, I considered applying to UC, but then I visited CWRU and discovered Biomedical Engineering, so I gave up on my plans to study Architecture. (Actually, I was considering Architectural Engineering, which is somewhat different-- Less emphasis on funky-looking buildings, more emphasis on buildings remaining standing over the long haul. As a campus, UC seems to prefer "funky-looking" over "remaining standing" so I'm not sure how much I would have enjoyed that program anyway.)

Luckily, UC has a branch campus just a mile from my house, so that's where I'm going to be taking classes. I took Friday afternoon off of work to go register for classes, and the process was pretty much what I expected it to be:

ENROLLMENT: "Are you matriculating into a program of study, or just taking classes? Fill out this form and turn it in at Station 4."

STATION 4: "Here is your temporary ID number. You can use it to register for classes on-line. You can use the computers over there if you want to register now."

WOMAN WITH THE DESK CLOSEST TO THE COMPUTERS, aka FLIBBERTIGIBBET: "No, that's not a valid student ID number. You can't use that to register on-line. Well, yes, it's a temporary ID number, but I just heard that those numbers don't become active in the computer system for 24-48 hours. Oh, I see. Well, since the class has just one opening left, I suppose I can help you get registered now. Fill out this form and give it back to me."

FLIBBERTIGIBBET, TAKE 2: "The computer is saying that both of those classes are now full, so someone else must have registered for that Biology class in the last few minutes. You can either try to register for different sessions, or you can try to get the professors to sign an override form. OK, well, write those other class numbers on the form, and give it back to me."

FLIBBERTIGIBBET, TAKE 3: "I can register you for the Sociology class, but the Biology class is full. Well, they might be willing to give you an override, but that's really up to them. I can't make any promises. The contact information for professors is on-line. Do you know the One Stop website address? Well, here it is. Go to this menu, then this menu, then this menu, and there they are. No, I don't think they'll be in their offices this afternoon, given that it's a break period between Summer and Autumn terms. Ok, well, good luck."

BIOLOGY PROFESSOR'S OFFICE: "Do not enter. This building is closed for renovation."

SOCIOLOGY PROFESSORS'S OFFICE: "I am out of the office until sometime in September. If you need to reach me, leave a voicemail message."

Getting shut out of classes completely is a new experience for me, and I realized how lucky I had been to go to a smaller school, where registration was fairly easy, or at least I don't remember ever having to get an override from a professor at Case. On the other hand, I entered Case a year after Adelbert burned, so all of the student services had been farmed out to various buildings around campus. There was always a run-around at the beginning of the year that went something like, "Go to Baker to pick up the course listings. Go to Building A to register. You can't register because you haven't paid all your tuition up front. If your parents are paying on an installment plan, you have to get a memo signed by the Cashier's Office in Building B. Go back to Building A to register. Go to Building C to sign up for points for your food plan, but only during the right hours. Go to Thwing to buy your books." So at least at this branch of UC, everything was located in one office, which made the experience relatively painless, and Flibbertigibbet was friendly and helpful.

SIDEBAR: I can't remember the names of the buildings that housed Registration and the Cashier's Office now. I just went to CWRU website to check the map of campus, and those buildings are no longer there. (I think they may have been two ends of the same building, but I clearly remember that you had to outside to get from one place to the other.) Baker building is gone now too, which is not such a tragedy, because the buildings weren't anything special-- Baker in particular was blight in a circa-1960's "modern" style --and they obstructed the views between Case quad and the classic (and proudly rebuilt) Adelbert Hall, not to mention foot traffic from North campus. But it does make me feel a bit older to know that places that I remember are now gone forever.

Anyway, I left voicemail messages for both professors, but then later on I realized that there was another Biology class that (a) sounded more interesting to me, (b) wasn't full and closed, and (c) might fulfill my prerequisite requirements for Ethics as well as Biology, so I signed up for that one instead. And it sounds like the professor is going to let me into the evening session of the Sociology course, so all's well that ends well.

And now I'm a Bearcat, just like my husband, my dad, and several of my friends. Life's funny sometimes.

What I did over my summer break...

It's been a long while since I've written anything here. There's a really good reason for that. First of all, this spring has been a really rough period for me at work, and I was working crazy long hours. That came to an abrupt end in June, but I've been waiting to write until I got some things resolved...

Not everything is resolved yet, but maybe that's just how life goes.

So here's what I did over my summer break:

• Went on vacation. We spent a week at Longboat Key with my mom and my sister. We also had a sort of progressive familiy reunion with my aunts & uncles, cousins, and cousins' kids. (Three of each, as it turns out.) The first tropical storm of the season made the first half of the week pretty rainy, but at least it was restful. And we got to go snorkeling with manatees, which was pretty dang cool.


• Lost my job and found a lawyer.


• Mourned the loss of a good friend, who died while scuba diving in Mexico. We don't know what happened, and it will never make sense to me. We miss him.


• Had several job interviews and worked out a win-win situation with one of them. Starting Monday, I'll be working about 30 hours a week, which will keep me busy (but not too busy to pursue other opportunities) and keep some money coming in while I figure out what to do with the rest of my life. I may find another job, I may go back to grad school for my PhD, I may go to school to do something completely different, maybe a Physical Therapy program. Only God knows...


• Speaking of Physical Therapy, I've also spent a couple of days observing at the Sports Medicine / Biodynamics Lab at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. (One of the prerequisites for applying to PT programs is to spend 50-80 hours observing/volunteering in a PT setting.) It's been interesting, and I'm learning lots of new stuff along the way.


• Painted the kitchen / dining room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. (OK, I'm still working on the 2nd bedroom and the bathroom, but they'll be done soon.)


• Played a lot of Sudoku and Lost Cities. What can I say? I'm hooked.

You know you're an adult when......you hire a lawyer.

The negotiations are still going on, so I can't discuss any details here. But it's definitely an adult moment when you go downtown and sit across the desk from someone to discuss legal issues. It's also one of those moments where you think to yourself, "I never imagined I'd be doing this. This is not in my plan for how my life was supposed to turn out." But you find yourself doing it because it seems like it's the only way to get someone to acknowledge that the situation is just completely and utterly not right.



(PV31W and I have both experienced this particular YKYAAW moment.)

Life Wounds

Ok, I originally thought that my most recent post belonged only on my "You know you're an adult when..." blog. But the more I think about it, the more I believe that it belongs here too.

This is me. This is who I am at this moment in time.

So, rather than duplicate it all on this blog, you can find the original posting by clicking here:
You know you're an adult when...
...you get your dream job, and then someone tells you that you've failed completely at it.

Coincidentally, two of my best friends in the world have gone through similar experiences in the past six months. It's like a virus, or the Gen X version of a (pre-mature) mid-life crisis. (Who has a mid-life crisis at the age of 32?!?) I won't say that misery loves company, because I wouldn't wish this experience on anyone. But I will say that I take courage from the fact that I'm not alone. They're both surviving, improvising, adapting, and possibly even overcoming, so I have hope that I might too.

One of my friends has a saying, "Life is hard for stupid people." That's a basic truth. Stupid people make bad decisions, which put them in difficult situations, from which they have fewer options and make even worse decisions. I've been hearing her say that for years, and the whole time, I've been smugly relying on a theory implied by the inverse of that truth, which is, "The smarter you are, the easier your life should be." And then, suddenly, the bottom dropped out of the theory, and I have been decimated to find out that being smart isn't enough. Oh, and by the way, working hard, having good intentions, and desiring to be productive and successful aren't enough either.

Life is hard.

Life is certainly not fair.

(Actually, in the grand scheme of things, that might be a good thing. "Fair" isn't all it's cracked up to be.)



...I'm not seeing any upside to the "Life is hard" thing, though...

You know you're an adult when......you get your dream job, and then someone tells you that you've failed completely at it.

NOTE: This entry was originally posted in a different blog, but after Blogger added the label feature, I decided to consolidate everything here.

WARNING: This entry isn't going to be a light-hearted as the other postings on "YKYAAW..."

I have three blogs, and they fall into three distinct categories:

1. My day-to-day blog - Also includes travel and vacation stories.
   (It's now out-of-date by 2.5 vacations, but that's not really the point right now.)


2. Wonder - Thoughts about philosophy and religion.


3. YKYAAW - This blog was originally conceived as a pseudo-ironic look at how a person occasionally (and unexpectedly) realizes that he or she is actually becoming a grown-up, even though he or she may really feel like a little kid just pretending to fit into adult society.

Unfortunately, the subject matter at hand fits most closely into the YKYAAW category. And so, instead of some light anecdote, you're going to get a full dose of reality here. Ready?



I have worked at the same company for the past eight years. Within the first year of starting work, I knew that I wanted to be a Design Engineer in R&D, and for almost six years, I pursued that goal relentlessly. A year and a half ago, that dream came true, and I finally, officially became a Senior Design Engineer. In January, I received my first performance appraisal-- which was basically, in a nutshell, "Your performance is completely inadequate, you're on probation, and you have 90 days to convince us not to fire you." Two years ago, I got the highest rating possible (reserved for just a handful of people in the entire company) and a huge bonus. So this was a shock, to put it mildly.

Since then, I've gone through several of the 5 stages of coping with catastrophic news:

1. Denial & Isolation - Yep, been there, done that.


2. Bargaining - I'm trying to figure out if making contingency plans for a lawsuit falls under "Bargaining" or "Denial"


3. Anger - Oh, yeah, I've definitely fallen down hard right in the middle of this one.


4. Depression - Plenty of this one too.
   I cry...a lot. If you count the days when I break down sobbing vs. the days that I just manage to hold on by my fingernails, I'm probably averaging about 50/50.
   And I'm really tired, all the time. Of course, lying awake all night thinking about work will do that to you. And even when I am asleep, I still can't escape from those thoughts-- On Saturday night, I had a very disturbing, very realistic dream about running away from my life.


5. Acceptance - I didn't think I was here yet, but last night I found myself filling out an application to go back to school for an entirely different career, so maybe I'm starting to dabble in this one.

(Oh, and I also think that Humiliation, Frustration, and Overwhelming Indecision need to be added into the middle of that list as well.)

Sometimes, it feels like it takes every bit of courage I've got just to get out bed and go to work. I wake up with a headache that starts in the muscles on the sides of my skull, and by the time I swipe my badge and walk in the door to my office, I feel like I'm carrying a 25 lb lead weight in my stomach. By 10am, the headache has encompassed my entire scalp, and my throat is sore because I forget to swallow when my jaw is continuously clenched. By 4pm, I'm mentally & physically exhausted from the stress, and I still have a few more hours of work ahead of me.

I am trying to keep some sort of perspective. Certainly, things could be worse. No one in my family is sick or dying, my husband is a source of strength, and we have enough savings to survive for awhile if I do lose my job. But I've been looking, and I'm just not seeing the silver lining here, or even the light at the end of the tunnel.

I feel wounded.

Broken.

And I'm starting to wonder if courage even means what I've always thought it means. Because right now it just feels like a word that describes a lack of any better options. What are my options? Should I fight? Should I quit? Right now I don't even know which option is fighting and which one is quitting.

The thing is... it's still my dream job. I can't think of anything else that I would rather do. I love being an engineer, and I thought I was good at it. Certainly, it's a huge part of my identity, which is exactly why this ordeal has made a such deep wound that hurts all the way down to my core.

What I'm wondering now is... Will it heal? Soon? Eventually? Or do I need to cut it out like a disease and throw it away? How deep will the scars go? How long will it take for them to fade?

How obvious is it that I'm broken?

You know you're an adult when......your back goes out.

Yesterday I suddenly became 80 years old...

• It takes me about 30 seconds to transition from standing up to sitting down, and a minute-plus to make it from sitting down to standing up straight.


• Getting in and out of my car is time-consuming and painful.


• This morning I had to apply some strategic problem-solving skills to put on my socks. ("OK, so the immediate goal is to get all of my toes into the top cuff of the sock. If I can accomplish that, I think I'll be able to figure out a way to get the sock pulled up over my foot and ankle.")


• When I drop something on the floor, I spend a few moments debating whether or not it's worth the trouble of picking it back up.


• I think I'm starting to scowl at people around me-- partially because I am in pain everytime I move, but also because I know that if anyone bumps into me, I will certainly fall right over, and then I'll hurt worse than I already do. So now I view everyone walking around me as a potential threat to my (not-so-)well-being.

The problem is, I haven't had 50 more years to prepare for being 80-- It came on all at once, without warning of any kind. So I don't know any coping mechanisms.

I don't know why my back has suddenly gone into spasm. I wish I did, because then I could ensure that I wouldn't do whatever it was again. I guess I'll have to plan on doing preventative maintenance-- As soon as ski season is over I'm signing up for Yoga or Pilates.

Getting old sucks! I'm not mature enough to be old!