We Are All Perfectly Fine

by Dr. Jillian Horton

  “Roy, do you think the problem is we’re holding ourselves responsible for things that aren’t our fault? Or is the problem that we need to forgive ourselves for the things that actually are our fault?”

  “What do you think?”

  “About you or me?”

  “Whatever’s true for one of us has to be true for both of us.” Roy puts his arm around me and steers me back towards the main building. “For everybody in there. Every one of us.”

  * * *

  WE PART WAYS at the top of the stairs, keep our eyes to the ground. A few people are out walking in the rain by themselves, on the bridge or headed down towards the mill. No one seems to have noticed us together, talking, flouting the rules.

  I head to my room, wet clothes sticking on me. I peel them off, change into sweatpants and a fleece, get under the covers, see if my teeth will stop chattering.

  I’ve noticed a shift. I’m not raging against being here anymore. There’s just an immense feeling of sadness, a sense I’ve been totally defeated. I try to follow that emotion like a trail of breadcrumbs, hoping it will lead me back to its origin. As if going there enough times could unlock a way for me to write another ending. But an ending to what? My un-hero’s journey? The students, turning on me, coming at me with pitchforks? Mr. Ripple screaming he’d never forgive me, Mike not being able to reach me before he died, the twenty-four-year-old woman on the cardiology ward, that very first cell mutating in Wendy’s head, the pie-graph doctor yelling at my mom and dad? My brain, stuck in a groove like a damaged record, repeating the same things over and over. Saying to me: maybe if I went back one more time, just one more, the ending might be different. As if there really were a solution, to any of it, a way to put shattered-but-still-whole back together again.

  Mick keeps asking, What’s present for you right now?

  It’s that I’ll never stop being who I am, never stop practising with love, or going down into the mineshaft when others are trapped there, so I can be with them. I love being a doctor. You wouldn’t know it when I talk about what it’s done to me, but you’d see it immediately in the way I practise. I know who I am when I put that stethoscope around my neck. I know why I’m there. My patients know why I’m there too. They see me, the way van Gogh saw Gachet and painted him as fully human. That’s not where things went wrong.

  It’s that I thought—I really thought—if I were a teacher, or an associate dean, maybe a dean someday, I could just teach people to be themselves. To be human. To make it so no one would ever scream at the parents of another little girl with cancer again.

  But teaching isn’t a job for one person. You can’t do it alone, without some kind of infrastructure, something behind you and underneath you that won’t break and send you tumbling over the edge the first time somebody stabs it with a pitchfork. I started walking through the fire thinking I could change everything. That just my faith would be enough. Now I’m the one who needs a teacher, to show me the way through the fire.

  What would Mick or Ron ask if they were here right now?

  What if you accept this fire? What if there is no fire? What does it mean to walk “away”?

  Well, I’m not the Gambler; I’m not walking away. I’m looking for my way. I started this week, with my first step, the one I didn’t want to take.

  I came here.

  23

  Mirroring

  We fumble through a silent supper. I try to chew and taste my food, but it’s impossible to keep from thinking about everything Roy and I talked about by the pond. I like the way Roy listens. I like the way his too-bushy eyebrows are always moving, like the silhouette of a far-off seagull. I see him over by the window, alone with his head down, eating a fleshless chickpea patty with a very large glass of milk, chewing like a schnauzer. God, what an endearing weirdo. I wish I was sitting with him. Just as I’m considering whether to leave my table for his, Ikiru appears from behind me. Wordlessly, she joins me. We don’t make eye contact. But I feel her. It’s as if we’re radiating benevolence towards each other. I soak it in for a few minutes. I notice Roy drink his milk in one long inhalation. He pushes his chair away abruptly, stands up, takes his tray to the big, morgue-like sinks in the kitchen, dumps his scraps into the compost bin.

  As much as the silence is unsettling, I have to admit it’s also a relief. I feel constantly responsible for everybody. This is a problem that tends to afflict women more than men, because we are assigned responsibility for everybody. There’s literature to show that patients expect female physicians to spend more time with them than male physicians. That we have to be even kinder than men in order to not be judged harshly. So much effort funnelled into being pleasantly innocuous, lest we be told what most of us are told at critical junctures at some point during our development: that we are too much. And then, shortly thereafter, that we are not enough.

  This on one of my high school report cards:

  Jillian works very hard to be creative, but she needs to put more effort into having this occur naturally.

  There’s not a Zendo tonight. We’re gathering outside, on the large, interior courtyard, for some kind of silent meditation. Ron has told everybody to dress warmly. I slip into my rainboots and short black raincoat, like I’m planning on blending into the night. Everyone is waiting by the sliding glass doors that lead out onto the raised deck. There’s a feeling of expectancy, of some looming drama or catharsis.

  Greg is standing next to me. I stifle the instinct to say “hi” because of the silence. A smile dies on my face in a bad impression of the Mona Lisa. Why haven’t we looked at that painting? What do we think about that look on her face, anyway?

  Mick ushers us into the courtyard, starts calling out orders. It’s like a morose square dance. We start by finding a place on the deck, facing outward. Then he tells us to turn towards the person on our right and follow them in a slow, silent march around the perimeter of the square.

  The rain has picked up in intensity. The sound of our footsteps in near unison on the wood is a counterpoint to the taut, random notes of raindrops exploding everywhere around us. The air is thick. The dank smell of the forest, rich and earthy. There’s a mystical feeling to what we’re doing here right now, as if it were a secret ritual.

  Where did healthy ritual go, from my life? There were years when I went to synagogue, drawn to my mother’s roots. I didn’t believe Moses literally parted the Red Sea, but I knew those chants and prayers made me feel better, affording me a peace I had rarely inhabited elsewhere. A clearing of the mind. A feeling of the residue of the week having been washed away. Respite.

  And yet, I never really felt I belonged there. It was as if there was an imperceptible whiff of Christmas tree instead of latke on my clothes in December. Some difference that raised suspicion on a subliminal level, something I always felt I had to apologize for, one more way in which I wasn’t really good enough and didn’t belong to anyone or anything.

  What rituals did I turn to in later years, trying to recreate that same comfort? Running and biking obsessively, counting the minutes spent in exercise every day, the distance travelled. Fanatical preparation of the same meals, day in, day out. This much oatmeal. So many almonds. This much cereal. This lone, perfect oval of an egg. Weighing and recording and writing it all down, as if a biographer might want to read it one day.

  You know the egg, that oatmeal: they were proxies, right? They were all Rosebud. They were love and guilt and more love, everything I could never separate from, all of it hopelessly scrambled.

  Roy said it’s not my fault. But what’s not my fault?

  The circle is moving more slowly now. Mick calls out for us to change pace. He reconfigures the group, and now half of us are walking in one direction and half in the other. We pass one another, neutral, unsmiling, two lanes of human traffic. The continual thudding of our feet against the boards. The pitch of the darkness, the tiny spears of rain. One expressionless face after another.

  Mick stops us again. Now we t
urn to the person on the left and mirror whatever movements they’re making. We’re allowed to look at them directly. I end up across from a woman I don’t know, shorter than I am, middle-aged, wearing a neon windbreaker. We put our palms up against each other, without touching, as if we’re separated by a film of glass. I follow her lead, arms moving up, out, then around. Finding the confines of a space that eludes us, a space we can’t even define.

  There’s been a film between me and everything for much of my life. It predates those awkward years in the synagogue, a girl with faint Ashkenazi features who spoke like a WASP. A girl who, like many girls, struggled to figure out exactly how much of her other people were entitled to. A girl who felt cleaved from the one thing she loved more than anything—her own family—because their lives were engulfed in flames, and she was the one who walked away when the metaphorical plane went down.

  My partner makes circles in the air, like ripples in water. I try to emulate her every movement. She slows down, I slow down. Our breathing synchronizes. Spontaneously, our eyes meet. I wonder who she is. But besides wondering, I try to direct my attention to the fluid, dreamlike movements of our hands, as if she is painting me in soft brushstrokes, and I’m her self-portrait. Mirroring.

  We have a whole mirror neuron network. It’s a social phenomenon, something that allows us to thrive in groups where empathy is adaptive to the survival of the whole. You cross your leg, I cross my leg. You feel pain, I feel pain. What happens when that network goes into overdrive? In cardiology, there is the Frank–Starling law. When blood pressure is high, the powerful left side of the heart is able to work harder, to bulk up. But after years of this adaptation, pressure builds, then backs up into the lungs, then overwhelms the right side of the heart, so the whole system ultimately fails. What started as a single modification has a series of irreversible consequences. Does that happen in the brain, when we’re pushed too hard, for too long, when we go for years in chronically sleep-deprived states? When do those early modifications begin to fail?

  People here are dealing with everything from chronic inferiority to severe anxiety to addiction to depression to crumbling marriages to the same depersonalization that first afflicted me as a resident on the wards. Somewhere along the way, their modifications have also failed. It must be the same for most of the people I trained with and work with. But deep inside the labyrinth of my own pain, I missed their grief too. Some of them could have used my kind words, or an observation that they seemed sad, or just off, or were drinking more than they had the previous year. But I couldn’t help them, because I was drowning too.

  It used to hurt so much, that sense of betrayal. That no one gave enough of a damn about me to try to poke beneath the superficial first layer, the haphazard veneer. It’s what grieved me the most, that I could be walking around a hospital with a shattered heart, and nobody could see. It only made me sure that my pain didn’t matter. Their blindness made me feel like even less of a person.

  I think about my old friend from residency, Todd, the one who used to call me to chant on the answering machine that our lives sucked. Our lives did suck. But I think it was apparent that mine sucked more than his. Why didn’t he ask if I was all right? I feel a sob rise up in my throat as I think to myself how abandoned I felt by him, how ridiculous I feel articulating it even now. I was a grown woman. He wasn’t responsible for me. But Todd should have known. He had to know. Wasn’t I even worth the discomfort of asking? We haven’t talked for years. The last time he texted, it was my birthday. A lame text, a nothing text, a message I couldn’t even be bothered to answer.

  But then: my birthday. I think of a moment from the year Todd and I first met. We went to a craft sale, the kind you have to pay a lot of money to get into. We walked around the halls, lifting and touching pretty things. Every time I picked something up to admire, Todd would roll his eyes and say, “God, that’s ugly,” or, “Your taste is revolting.” By the end of the show I was hurt by his barrage of criticism. I wanted to get away. I left him at the subway station and rode home fuming, vowing to cut him out of my life.

  He called the next day. I was cool on the phone, pretended I had plans. Could he just drop something off for my birthday? A while later he came to the door, handed me a big bag brimming with little parcels. I pushed the layers of tissue paper aside.

  I looked up at him, his face full of care and affection. I realized what he’d done. One by one, I pulled out all the things I’d admired at the craft sale. He was paying attention. In fact, he’d been keeping track of what I wanted, waiting for me to spell it out. So he could give it to me.

  I forgot that he did that. I only remembered the hurt.

  Mick calls out to stop mirroring. My partner and I turn away from each other. Mick asks us to stand, in complete stillness, to see if we can notice any feelings of connectedness that may have arisen during the mirroring. To just notice what’s present for us, in this moment, right now. We’re far enough apart in the darkness and the rain that I can’t see other faces. They’re soft, multicoloured blurs. I think of the faceless statue out by the pond.

  It’s raining heavily now. The two light posts on each side of the courtyard make wide triangles of yellow light. There’s a military quality to our presence, as if we’re a noble army. I read something before coming here about the “polyvagal” response of meditating in a group. The calm, parasympathetic effects of the body’s mysterious vagus nerve when it’s activated. I brushed it off as pap, but now I feel it unmistakably. It is, in a sense, a safety response. It might be adaptive. No animal wants to be separated from its pack. When it comes to survival, aloneness is the definition of vulnerability.

  I realize it, as soon as the thought has formed. Somewhere along the way, I was separated from my pack. So were Roy and Jodie and Greg and Ikiru and Joss.

  Now we’re together, reunited. For one more day, here in the woods.

  I don’t know if it’s enough.

  * * *

  MICK RELEASES US from marching. Like a flash mob, we disperse quickly. I go get ready for bed. The centre is eerily quiet. I change into my pyjamas and climb under the covers. I open the drawer in my night table and check my phone. There’s a message from Eric that the boys are fine, a group text from my two friends back home. How’s the granola? Had your brain removed yet? We miss you at coffee. I text them back: Actually you guys it’s turned out to be really good. But I notice how even the act of getting my phone out of the drawer raises my heart rate just a little, precipitates a micro-blast of stress hormones. Who wants something from me now? Who’s complaining about something? Who needs me to save them? Who’s going to save me?

  Is the problem that these messages are coming in, or is the problem my reaction? Every time someone lights a match, I come flying at them with a water bomber.

  Is this a pattern for me?

  I wish I could stay here more than a few days, in this suspended state, this cocoon of silence and stillness. And yet, I miss Eric. I miss my patients and my friends. Most of all, I miss my kids. I want to be with them, snuggling in one big bed, rain making orchestral sounds on the tin roof. I lie back on the pillow. A tear runs down the side of my face. I notice my chest tightening, a sensitivity in my teeth, a bogginess in my mouth.

  Have I made my life harder than it has to be?

  Maybe. But maybe I did it for a reason. Maybe I did it so there would be something to listen to other than wailing. Something to distract from the insurmountable losses, from all the grief I couldn’t begin to articulate. A way to take control of the uncontrollable, like the band that played on the deck of the Titanic as it sank, drowning out the real emergency, the one it was too late to fix.

  I thought it was my fault the boat was sinking. I believed all of it was somehow my fault. I believed my sister’s cancer had visited us because of something I’d done. An assumption so obviously erroneous, it seems implausible that an intelligent child would hold it. And even though that fallacy felt as factual to me as my name or date
of birth, because I didn’t want anyone to think I wasn’t an intelligent child, I never gave voice to it, never gave anyone the chance to correct or remove that ridiculous, mutated thought, and it worked its way into my DNA, into my whole life, and it just became a part of me.

  And thus, I took on that same belief, subconsciously, for every person I cared for. Whatever ultimately happened to them was my fault. I was obliged to fix what could never possibly be fixed. Psychiatrists call this a repetition compulsion, a tendency to recreate a condition or scenario over and over, trying to resolve a leading note that lingers in your ear perennially, even when no one else can hear it.

  I’ve been hearing those notes all my life. Just the way Wendy’s radio and television played the same songs over and over, year after year. Just the way Wendy would call out sometimes from her bedroom, asking hopefully for the one hundredth time if doctors could fix the problem in her brain so she could walk again.

  Four

  24

  Enough

  The next morning, we shuffle into the Zendo in darkness. Above the high row of windows under which Mick and Ron are sitting, vestiges of pre-dawn light appear. Their faces are parked in neutral. I brought the wool blanket from my room and am using it like a shawl. I’m in a haze of silence and stillness.

  I’m surprised by the juxtaposition inside me of peacefulness and undulating surges of emotion. I try to observe my thoughts, to identify what precedes each short spasm. Sometimes it’s nothing I can identify, like a shadow on the grass of something flying over, high in the sky, gone by the time you look up.

  Roy has a seat in the corner. He looks sad and tired. Ikiru is a few rows down, her black hair as big and messy as a crow’s nest. I like seeing everyone in sweats, unbrushed hair, no makeup. We try to create illusions of flawlessness, to leave the impression that nothing bothers us or hurts us. We leave work, we go home, we fall to pieces. We didn’t tend to our little green shoot. There’s nothing in the garden. We don’t know how to start again.