No Short Cuts

I am not of the opinion that anxiety is completely hereditary. Dr. Gabor Mate wrote an extremely informative book which covers (among many others) this subject, entitled "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts". In this book he discusses the development of the incredibly sensitive, highly evolved human brain during its most crucial period in the womb and the following first year of infancy. Mate reckons if pregnant mothers are stressed, depressed, scared, or anxious for any number of reasons from starvation to a crumbling marriage, their bodies will produce different chemicals that essentially prepare a baby's body and brain for a stressful world. As Mate explains, unborn babies literally swim in the stresses and insecurities of their mothers.

And so must have been the stressful case for my grandmother in my great-grandmother's womb 89 years ago. My Mammaw's (as we say of our grandmothers in Alabama) losing battle with anxiety pains her shoulder, leaves visitors at the door, and causes those who love her to keep possible dangerous information away from its grip. I can remember, when I was younger, gearing up for the 9 hour drive south, and my mother specifically instructing my brother and me to keep the visit a secret from Mammaw, so as to save her the grief of worrying over our very-unlikely-yet-possible car crash on the way down.

When my mother was 9 years old or so, she was bitten by one of the neighborhood dogs; as my mother screamed and cried from the bite, my Mammaw, unknowing of the guilty dog, ran to my mother's aid, offering from her terror-filled expression sound advice, "Oh, Margaret, rabies is such a terrible death!"

And while I cannot bring myself to believe that the gene for an unhealthy dose of anxiety passed from my mother and on to me is the sole cause for my irrational anxiety, nail bitting, sore stomach, bad sleep, and headaches, I'm fairly certain I was born with a predisposition for my irrational unease of common and distressed situations alike.

My anxiety has always been the precursor to every aspect of my personality. When I was 4 years old, stretching for my first ballet class, my mother watched as all the other uncoordinated 4-year-olds laughed and chatted to one another, and I stood alone, rubbing my hands together and bitting the inside of my mouth, terrified that I'd fail in a ballet class for 4-year-olds.

In my elementary school days, I was a swimmer. I was certainly not the best young swimmer, but I was fast enough to win a few heats and take home the occasional ribbon here and there. But racing gave me such angst that I'd spend the night before the meets, tossing and turning, with my stomach burning completely unable to sleep, fearing the races, fearing losing, fearing everything.

And then one day, in my late adolescence, a doctor gave me a little pill called Paxil. It knocked me out, allowing me to sleep more heavily than I'd ever slept, and when I awoke, I felt no stress. For the first time, in my young, nail-bitting, ulcer-making life I felt no stress. Weights lifted from my shoulders; my head stopped ringing with 'shoulds' and 'shouldn'ts'; I could breath before I spoke; life seemed doable.

But like all synthetic, man-made things, the pills' effects were short-lived. Eventually, my brain built tolerance to the increased release of chemicals, and while my stresses never returned, a numbness blanketed over me. Numbness, for those of us accustomed to living in the extremes, is a far greater sentence than a life plagued with irrational anxiety. So off the pill I went.

The past 10 years of my life have been a slow progression toward finding natural ways to ease my anxiety, and so too will be the next 10 years, and all of the following decades of my life. And while I don't mean to completely discredit the importance of a pill that can show a never-been-calm brain how easy life can seem, I am a firm believer of there being no short-cuts to healthiness. Just as we cannot take pills to lose weight, or have our fat liposuction-ed off of us and truly be physically fit, neither can we take mood-alternating drugs and expect that this alone will help to find peace within our minds.

Secular meditation has been the single most beneficial aspect to calming my mind, though it has not been an easy accomplishment. Asking a constantly fluttering adult mind to sit still and concentrate on nothing is on par with asking grandpa to learn to ride a unicycle. Stillness is something my mind has never known, and teaching it to undo decades of learned behaviors is quite the task. When I began meditating, I could sit still for maybe 1 minute, on good day. But each day, stillness becomes more and more attainable. That said, I've been meditating daily for nearly 3 years now, and 15 minutes pushes my maximum for truly remaining still and thinking of nothing other than the constant inhaling and exhaling of my breath.

When we stop working, stop socializing, stop exercising, stop eating, turn off the TV, put down the books, turn off the music, shut down the computer, get off the phone, and turn off the lights, what's left but the constant inhaling and exhaling of breath? If peace cannot be found in this space, it'll never be found while surroundings buzz.

Reading and Feeling, Feeling and Reading

I am highly effected by everything. Sensitive may be a better word. When I was a kid, I couldn't use but a few types of soap for fear of all-day itchy repercussions. My mom had to buy and use expensive 'for sensitive skin types' detergent to wash my clothes or my skin was sure to break out in itchy welts. My Aunt Kim once sent a big, perfumed, birthday doll to me and after spending one night snuggled up to my new stuffed friend, I awoke, itching, red faced, miserable, and down one stuffed friend.

I am also allergic to penicillin; every Dr.'s appointment I can remember included my mother's retelling of my first and (then) only experience with penicillin. As an infant, infected with some sort of bacteria capable of penetrating all my body's natural attempts to create antibodies, a Dr. prescribed kiddy penicillin to me. "So maybe you were allergic to the suspension, and not the actual drug," my mother always explained. Recently, however, in Korea, my allergy to the drug was confirmed by a Dr. who failed to ask about my medication history and so prescribed me something in the penicillin family. When the glands around my neck swelled up so big it hurt to open my mouth fully, and breathing became a task, I figured it wasn't the suspension.

In the same way that my skin and blood are highly effected by various common elements, so too are my preceptions, feelings, emotions, and awarenesses. A few weekends ago, I was staying alone, in a Hotel in Seoul. I awoke hours before I assumed my mates in the next room would begin to stir, so I flipped on the TV and searched for the few English-speaking channels. I came across a movie, that had I been in an English-speaking country, I surely would have flipped past, however, I decided to watch Armageddon this early Sunday morning. Two minutes later, Liv Tyler is crying as she talks to her oil drilling, recently-made astronaut, hero, father, Bruce Willis, over the NASA TV phone, and I started crying. I wasn't crying heavily, I don't even remember my breathing getting much deeper, but tears definitely fell out of one of my eyes.

When I was in High School (it may have been Jr. High), I was reading a book about a woman who was domestically abused by her husband. I can't remember the specifics of the story, but I can remember reading the book in my parents' music room, and setting the book down one afternoon, when my step dad suggested that I stop reading the book. He insisted that it was changing my moods, which I refused to knowledge in my stubborn teenage self. But if I can cry over 2 minutes of Liv Tyler saying good-bye to Bruce Willis as he is about to die saving the Earth, I'm sure I was moody, mean, angry and sad while reading an entire book about a woman regularly being smashed into by a person she once loved.

Recently, I've been tearing through books, in the past three weeks, I've finished an atheist's manifesto on how 'religion poisons everything'; a short story suggested by a friend about a fella who has no real substance thus faking everything he does in life, from his relationships to group meditation; the published journal of a man who, in the 1950s darkened his white skin, so he could travel through the racist south as a black man; David Sedaris' hilarious accounts of his ordinary life in his not-so-ordinary accounts of life; and I am 50 pages away from finishing a book that discusses ADD in such great detail that I've made mental lists of all the people I need to send this book to.

When I was reading the atheist's manifesto (God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens), I found my mind constantly considering ways that secular society could work harder to provide some of the invaluable services that church societies (for example) notoriously do well. I even envisioned conversations where I would passionately prove to some devout believer that the (few) benefits of religion can exist without all the scary lies of an 'invisible man in the sky' (to quote my partner) and eternal burning hell for sinners.

As I read the published journal of John Howard Griffin, entitled Black Like Me, I couldn't help but constantly think and talk about homogeneous Korea and its overwhelming problems with racism. Usually, westerners feel 'positive' racism here in Korea. Store owners give us freebies just because we are the first westerner to walk into their store; Children say 'beautiful' and 'pretty' in Korean with looks of awe across their faces when we walk past. However, we do get a fair share of mean stares from the older generation who'd rather English not be such a priority for their country's future.

Additionally, when I showed a picture of black South African children to one of my 5th grade classes, they couldn't stop laughing. And when I showed them a picture of white South Africans, they didn't believe that these people were African. A friend of mine while teaching an adult class, was explained by a Korean adult that a black person couldn't swim to safety off of a deserted island, because black people can't swim, they just sink. Regardless of whether the treatment is positive or negative, the motivation behind the behavior is one based purely upon race; and so is racist.

Furthermore, I couldn't help but imagine someone performing this same experiment in Asia; Korean Like Me, we'd name the book. Some westerner would disguise as a Korean, speak the language fluently and take note of all the differences felt by Koreans if they considered you 'one of them'. Upon completing this book, I vowed to study Korean harder!

While I was reading David Sedaris' latest book (or at least I think it's his latest), When You Are Engulfed in Flames, I couldn't help but narrate my life in short stories that started and ended with the same funny sequence. I began noticing the hilarious irony in everything mundane,. I couldn't help but think and rethink about those various stories that I'd told and retold to friends, which were capable of eliciting some sort of laugh; hence the increase in my blogging over the past few weeks!

Currently, I'm reading Scattered by Gabor Mate, M.D. He discusses, in detail the importance of unstressed, loving parents for the brain development (to avoid developing ADD) of infants. I find my mind wondering to stories of my own infancy, my partner's, my brothers, my mothers, my fathers, my step-brothers, my nephews, my step-mothers, my step-fathers, my friends, my friends' partners, my friends' partners' families, and so on. Not to say that I believe everyone in my life and in the lives of everyone I know to have ADD, but in my wondering mind I am certainly assessing why people I know seem to have more stability versus other people that I know.

This book has made me infinitely more thankful for my mother and her innate kindness and empathy, and it is scaring me silly at the prospect of one day becoming a mother as well.

I suppose a less-sensitive person could be more sensible with their thoughts and feelings; able, possibly, to read a book without transforming their every thought into the issues discussed in the book (or heavily feeling a senseless, overly dramatic good-bye scene in a 2 star action movie). But I'm certain that were I to become less sensitive, it would only numb my feelings, rather than make them more logical!

What's in a Name?

When I was a young girl of just 5 years old, entering a whole new life of public schooling, I was sorely disappointed to learn that despite how special I may have felt leaving my house, in my brand new blue skirt, complimented by adorable blue suspenders, I was merely just another 'Nicole' in a sea of adorably dressed 5-year-old 'Nicoles' placed in Ms. Wachimici's class for morning kindergarten that year. And out of our Nicole posse, 3 of us were 'Nicole B.' My name every weekday from 8:00am - 12:30pm, therefore went from Nicole, to Nicole B. to Nicole Ba.

I can't say that it was at this 5-year-old moment that I decided to change my name, but just 3 years later, when my family decided to move to a new city, I decided to push Nicole aside and use my unique, rolls-off-your-tongue middle name; Arielle. At the time of my decision, my biggest concern with name changing was the similarity between the sounds of Arielle (long 'A' sound, 'E' in the middle and 'Elle' at the end, sounding more like the three letters R-E-L) and Oreo cookie. Despite my desire to be as unique as possible, childhood name teasing was high on my list of angst as well. Fortunately, the 'Oreo' vs. 'REL' similarity only occurred to a few, and so never caught on as a source of childhood torment.

However, I could have never foreseen the Little Red-Headed Mermaid flipping her way to ruin my childhood; and certainly couldn't have predicted her everlasting effect of the mispronunciation of my name for decades. Even now most people choose to hear me say, Ariel (Air-E-ul) when I introduce myself. And then I have to awkwardly, even snobbishly correct the mispronunciation, 'No, Arielle, more like the tree letters, R-E-L.' And most people, I imagine, envisioning that beautiful red-headed mermaid princess, nod yes, yes yes, and say 'I see, Air-E-ul'.

After we moved, when I was in forth grade, there was a great rumor about the new girl, 'that she loved Disney movies so much, she'd changed her first name in honor of the mermaid, and her last (Ballou), to represent the Jungle bear.' Years later, I had a friend tell me that my names were more like a Disney catastrophe, a Mer-bear, all flippers and scales on the bottom, and all gilled bear on the upper half. Or perhaps a Bear-maid, if you will.

These days when I reveal my name change, friends always insist that I seem more like an 'Arielle' anyway. As if to suggest the common 'Nicole' is inferior in some way to the more unique and more often mispronounced 'Arielle.' And I have to consider, if I am more of an 'Arielle' than a 'Nicole' more unique in character in some way than all those other Nicole B.s from my kindergarten posse, then need I have changed my name anyway? Could I have not been just as unique in character had I gone by Nicole Ba all my life?