All That Is Bitter and Sweet

by Ashley Judd

  The tens of millions of dollars I have left on the table rarely crossed my mind. I still pull my weight in the marriage, which is a 50–50 financial partnership, but I long ago stopped participating 50–50 in the posh extras. I chip in what I can for vacations, but for private travel and such, my contribution is nowhere near what it used to be. The days of hopping on a little private plane to attend a UK basketball game are long gone. When I meet with my financial planner, I realize she may assess me as an “under earner,” given my potential. She is a counselor, in addition to being one of the top financial advisors in the country, and in her own 12-step recovery. Ted, she, and I talk about the feelings that come up around money as well as the dollars and cents. My feelings are almost uniformly positive, and I live in a sense of abundance. I have no regrets, and that is freedom.

  I continued to sleep well, almost twelve hours a night. I enjoyed the weight of my worn daily meditation readers in my hands every morning, and had resumed reading the End of Sorrow, Bhagavad-Gita for Daily Living where I left off. Ekneth Easwaran, the great teacher who inspired my meditation practice, would have said I had a golden opportunity to take my practice deeper than I ever dreamed possible, but that it takes consistency to ride the waves of consciousness to arrive at the still, deep ocean floor, where the rubies and diamonds are. But I still felt very sick, and not over the reentry. I decided to see a psychologist I knew in town. After we spoke a while, she offered that what she was observing in me was mostly grief, not trauma, and reminded me of the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She said “You are still grieving, Ashley, and sometimes you sound like you are in the bargaining, too. And the only way out is through. I imagine you’ll kick whatever is making you feel like you are sick, when the emotional part is purged.”

  Her words were all it took for the dam to break. I began to cry. I could not stop. The force of it propelled my chest forward, which came to rest on the tops of my legs. I sat that way, folded over, limp but for the sobbing, for a while, until the old shame crept up on me, the lie that my feelings are a burden. I began to fear I was wasting her time, excoriating myself for driving forty-five minutes to pay someone so I could cry on her sofa. I glanced up and apologized for being a dork. “You’re doing good, Ashley. You are doing so good,” she said softly.

  I sensed there was double meaning in her offering: the work abroad and taking care of my grieving self within the work. Touched by her encouragement, I let go for good, and cried it out. This was the woman, after all, who after my very first trip with PSI all those years ago, had said, “You know, the little girls are always going to get to you.” Though my eyes had filled spontaneously with tears, I had been baffled by what she said.

  Soon, indeed, I began to feel better. A sense of something invisible being lifted occurred, and I was no longer dragging around, pushing myself, struggling to stay upright. I flew with Dario to his race in Pocono, and on his bus did some laundry from previous races. I paused, though, and registered in my body how it feels to do two loads, separated by color, with chosen water temps, and custom spin cycles, on a bus. I was physically better, but I retained the awareness of, the sensitivities to, the ridiculous abundance of our lives. When it came time, I could not put our clothes in the dryer. I just couldn’t. I took them outside and spread them on chairs. I wondered how Dario would feel when he came back from qualifying and all the wash was hanging in plain view of the driver’s paddock, a veritable neighborhood filled with racing drivers, their families, team members. He is a natural boy, I suspected he wouldn’t mind.

  I heard the cars on the track, and I wanted to watch. In spite of trepidation, I decided to experiment, and walk to the pits. If it was too much, if I could not be kind and patient, if I wanted to explain to everyone who asked for an autograph, “No, but have you heard of Rwandan genocide? Are you aware there are more slaves today than at the height of the nineteenth-century slave trade?” I could just return to the bus.

  I made it to the pits, and the absurdity, the insane luxury, of putting so much time, attention, and hundreds of millions of dollars into being .001 second faster than the next car—the sums, hundreds of thousands of fans pay each season to sit and watch cars go in a circle could provide school for … I couldn’t finish the sentence. I put it out of my mind. This was my husband’s life. In my sleep that night, I found another way to look at it, to frame it as one of the many extraordinary things humans can do with their potential when we are freed up beyond merely surviving and reacting to violence, hunger, disease, trauma.

  On Saturday, we took a rare race-weekend hike after Dario’s practice. There was a beautiful state park nearby, and we enjoyed each other’s company and the many waterfalls that dampened sharp rocky outcroppings, carefully picking our way along the terracing of creeks. Occasionally, there were deep pools into which the creeks rushed in and out. I cannot resist a good creek, and I paused, looking both ways on the trail. My husband knew what was coming, and made his usual and always futile protestations. I sneaked off my clothes and plunged into a cold mountain pool, exhilarated, needing this, thinking of my Uncle Mark who baptizes in the creek, feeling how water cleans, refreshes, promises, transfigures. I heard, and duly ignored, Dario’s insistent pleas of “Babe! BABE! You’re a nutter!” because I knew he wouldn’t be mad for long. Submerging my head again and again, opening my eyes to see the world under the oxygenated bubbles of moving water, I recognized that something deep inside me had settled, had sorted itself out. It’s like an internal click, and it comes when it comes, and it cannot be hurried, the moment when I know I am okay, that deep inside I have always been okay, and when I don’t feel okay in the future, I will somehow have a process I can trust, that promises I will be okay again. The click. I stepped naked from the creek, smiled at my husband, began to put clothes on my damp body. I was ready to face the world again.

  Chapter 23

  CRIMSON DREAMS

  My dad and me on my first day of graduate school—making up for lost time.

  may my mind stroll about hungry

  and fearless and thirsty and supple

  and even if it’s sunday may i be wrong

  for whenever men are right they are not young

  —E.E. CUMMINGS. “may my heart always be open to little …”

  n June 2, 2008, trembling just a bit with healthy fear, I used my voice to bring the sacred narratives of the vulnerable and mute to the world’s most expansive stage: the United Nations General Assembly. As a board member of PSI, I had been invited to speak about the scourge of human trafficking and to promote the solutions that I had seen at work in the field. I used this opportunity to describe the insidious enmeshment between poverty, illness, and gender inequality and how that triad sets up the exquisite pain and degradation that is sex and labor slavery. And, as always, I did it by sharing the stories of the poor and the vulnerable, the disempowered, and the exploited people I had met in my travels, those to whom I had made my one keening vow: I will never forget you, and I will tell your stories. So the representatives of 196 nations were introduced to the transgendered sex slave in Cambodia whose face had been mauled by her rapist’s dog; to Natasha, the literate, high-priced “call girl” in Mumbai who could see no way out of the netherworld of sex trafficking; and the children born in a squalid Indian brothel, collateral damage of sex trafficking, who wrote their names for me on dirty scraps of paper: Aadarshini, Yamuna, Nabhendu … And I reiterated the basis of my faith: that every human life is of inestimable worth and that when we save one, we save the whole world.

  I quoted the effervescent light that is Marianne Williamson, who said, “We are, all of us, not just some of us, children of God, and our playing small does not serve the world.”

  I was standing before the United Nations because when it comes to human dignity and rights, I refuse to play small. Knowing I was surrogate for the real experts, the survivors whose stories I told, I remembered Elie Wiesel’s quote, “Not to transmit an exp
erience is to betray it.” And in my head, a plan was already forming that would expand my game beyond anything I had ever thought possible.

  I had always wanted to go to graduate school, but I never pictured myself at Harvard. I had briefly considered divinity school and had thought I might go for a master’s in public health at Berkeley. I also considered Vanderbilt University, an outstanding school that was less than an hour from my front door. I talked it over with a friend, Dr. Volney Gay, a head of the Religious Studies and Anthropology Departments at Vanderbilt. I explained to him that I wanted to learn, to study, to expand my mind, but a degree should be highly relevant to my interests—not so much a professional credential, but a passion credential. He was prepared for our appointment, offering me names of Vanderbilt colleagues I should look up, suggesting different courses of study. Just as we were about to close, he asked me, “Ashley, why aren’t you going to Harvard?”

  Thunderstruck, I blurted out, “Why am I not putting a rocket up my ass and flying to the moon?”

  I went straight home and called Carol Lee Flinders, one of my mentors, who cooed, “Oh, the Women and Public Policy Program, founded by Swanee Hunt, is at the Kennedy School. Of course, it’s the perfect place for you!” I did some Internet research, cried when I read the WAPPP website (my people! I thought), and linked over to the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy site, also at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. I asked a fellow board member at PSI, one of the first women ever to graduate from Harvard Law School, what she thought, and the next thing I knew, I was on the phone with the dean of admissions, being recruited to go to Harvard. The Kennedy School offers an intensive, year-long midcareer master’s in public administration, aimed at established professionals from all over the world who want to broaden their horizons and increase their efficacy in public service. Alumni range from Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the United Nations, to New York police commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. Well, hey! Why not add a Sicilian-hillbilly rabble-rousing actor-activist to the roster?

  When it came time to fill out the application forms, I had some welcome help from an unexpected source: my father.

  Dad and I had become increasingly close in the years since we reconnected during Ted’s therapy sessions and our remarkable experiences during the family weeks at Shades of Hope. He and his wife of ten years, Mollie, are frequent occupants of our smokehouse guest cabin, and they spend summers in our house in Scotland. When Dad sat down with me on our sleeping porch to help organize my essay topics and put together a comprehensive curriculum vitae (not a small task, as I’ve never kept close track of my zillions of endeavors), I felt as if I were being given a second chance to do over the whole college application process that I had missed out on twenty-three years earlier. I needed him, and he was there for me. It was a joyful time.

  In early 2009, to my astonishment and unbelievable gratitude, the dean of admissions personally phoned to tell me I had been accepted into the program. The committee vote was unanimous, he added with a smile in his voice. I threw back my head and hooted and hollered at the top of my lungs, racing from room to room in our big Scottish house, my excitement echoing off the old walls. I kept my new knowledge to myself for a few hours that afternoon, reflecting on this amazing turn of events while hiking up the ben in record time. Now, I reckoned, all I had to do was let my various colleagues know I would be unavailable for anything for a full year. And then move to Cambridge.

  I still wanted to make movies, but I had purposefully slowed down the pace of my filmmaking career after I went to Shades of Hope to focus on recovery, put it first in my life, and continue digging deeply into my healing process and new way of life. Crossing Over, about labor trafficking in Mexico and California, was my first picture in recovery. I played a little supporting role, gently dipping my toe in the water again, and the experience was just what I wanted. Then I took on a much more challenging project, playing the lead in Helen, an independent film about a woman who suffers major recurrent suicidal depression. As soon as I read the first pages of the exquisite script by the auteur director Sandra Nettelbeck, I knew I had to be involved with the movie. I was concerned that the material might be too close to the bone, so I had copies of the script sent to Tennie and Ted. My question was, “Can I play the disease without being in the disease?” Both of them read it and quickly called me back with essentially the same reaction: “Ashley, how dare you not?” It was an answer that sent a frisson through me.

  Filming Helen was a wonderful revelation, and I was reminded of why I love to act. My only bad experience during that snowy winter in Vancouver was not psychological but physical: An attack of acute appendicitis landed me in the hospital for emergency surgery and shut down production for two weeks. I had an otherwise extraordinary experience playing the role, using all my tools while delving deeply indeed into a performance of which I am very proud. I sacrificed a vestigial organ for that movie! I did a delightful and touching children’s comedy called Tooth Fairy after that and then told my longtime agent, Michelle Bohan, that other projects would have to wait until after my graduation.

  Next I found a homey, quiet place to rent in Cambridge, a beautiful brick house with a peaked slate roof, sycamores in the front yard, and lots of evergreen shrubs and trees in a large (for a town!) fenced backyard. We shipped up some furniture and then all the pets. Shug was skunked in the backyard on the first night, and giving her a bath with my magic deskunking potion made it feel instantly like home.

  I had shipped up my Mini Cooper, but when I inquired about having a car on the quirky campus streets, the secretary’s response was to hold the phone away from her mouth and cackle. So I outfitted myself with a pink Hello Kitty bicycle and began practicing riding back and forth to Harvard. I wheeled up in front of Widener Library, with its crimson flag proclaiming Veritas (“Truth”), the Harvard motto, and I had to seriously pinch myself to believe this was all true for me.

  Classes started on July 22, 2009. I looked around at my 208 classmates, who represented ninety-eight countries and an encyclopedic array of backgrounds and prior achievements, from humanitarian aid workers to hedge fund founders, cabinet members, and NGO directors. When I inquired what one woman did at the World Food Program, she replied, “I run it.” We were all unabashed do-gooders, united by a desire to change the world for the better. I was just about twisted inside out, I was so excited. I was twisted inside out, too, because I was starting to grasp the basics of the academic schedule, which for midcareers included intensive course work in microeconomic and quantitative methods. I had not done math in years, much less math at Harvard. It was easily the most intimidating thing I have ever done in my life. (Sorry, Morgan Freeman, that includes that first day on set with you on Kiss the Girls. Even though you are a legend, you’re a lot less scary than quant.) There were former ministers of finance in my class, economic policy experts, and other wonks whose math was lightning fast, and I had zero shame about placing in the lowest-level section; I was right where I needed to be.

  It was easy to decide to forgo socializing in the quad, and missing the volleyball games to which I had been looking forward. Instead, I set up tutoring in economics and math, the latter with Professor Graeme Bird, a Renaissance man from New Zealand who is equal parts mathematician, Greek scholar, English teacher, and jazz musician. He is so kind, so genuine, and so flawlessly patient that he could actually make me believe he liked sitting in his office with me six hours per week, eraser litter all over my scrambled papers and his desk, doing the work everyone else seemed to have mastered yesterday.

  “Graeme,” I would choke, “I am making you think I am an idiot, that you cannot believe I was accepted at this school, you are bored sick, and you wish I would leave your office so you did not have to explain this yet again to me, who is clearly remedial in math.” He would just smile and talk me down. Then explain it again. (When I graduated, I awarded Graeme a diplomalike certificate students may give select people for whom they have exceptional gratitude fo
r the role they played in helping them achieve their academic dreams.)

  We were advised that something was wrong if we were devoting more than ninety minutes per class on homework; in my case, then, something was seriously wrong. But it was what was wrong with the past, not the present. So much old fear kept coming up, I was battling across lifeline time zones. I would have blessed stretches during which I rocked and rolled on homework, ripping through problems, reconnecting especially with anything related to algebra, which I loved in high school and still find very creative. But then I’d hit a wall, and the crap from the past would fill the room like unseen smoke, and I’d be confused, despairing, inept, facing intractable quant calculations. It was definitely consoling to know I was not alone. We midcareers, facing academic rigors in some cases for the first time in decades, would group up in the lunch room and corridors, before class and outside the tutoring hall, comparing notes about our cycles of confidence and doubt, hard work and peace, procrastination and angst. Many of us experienced identical patterns: Satisfied at the end of a long day that we had given it our all, we would lay our heads on our pillows unperturbed (after shoving my school work off the bed; my resolve never to do homework in bed lasted less than a week). But long about dawn, some icy fear would grip us and we’d bolt awake, racked with shame for not having been able to do better or more, and we’d arrive in class exhausted and full of doubt, until some placating professor soothed our spastic emotions and our minds began to work again.

  On top of this, I was heartsick because our beloved cat Percy went missing a mere two days after he arrived in Cambridge. I searched frantically for him, my voice bleating his name every moment I was home from school. We put up laminated posters and endlessly called neighbors, businesses. I felt terrible guilt: If only I hadn’t brought him here … if the doggie door had been closed.… I would wake up in the middle of the night and stumble around the neighborhood in my nightgown, crying, searching. Then I would go to class, go to tutoring, and do homework. It was hell for me.