Geoff’s mental state continued to be far worse than mine. He had lost his job and spent hours driving around aimlessly in his truck. His brown Toyota seemed to reflect his internal state: A missing screw left its license plate hanging askew, and the stickers declaring his ham radio call sign were crooked because of the medication-induced shake in his hands. My desperation to save him had withered. Now I just hoped I could save myself.
We agreed on the obvious: Our marriage was over. But Geoff insisted on moving into the house, setting up residence in the guest room. I feared I wouldn’t be able to get him to leave, an uneasiness that mounted as he unpacked his library of math books, a residue of our former lives. The volumes formed a more impressive collection than most of our professors at MIT had had. I knew he’d read few of them, and now that we’d both left graduate school, he almost certainly never would. Had those thousands of dollars of math books been an early sign of his mania that I’d missed, a harbinger of the spending sprees to come?
Geoff’s sister came to visit for Thanksgiving just after we’d moved into the house, and bless her heart, she found him a new place to live and helped him move out. By then, I couldn’t feel enough to be heartbroken.
I set to work to rebuild my life. I was at my happiest coming out of a good class discussion—my life might be a mess, but at the college, I felt confident I was contributing to the world. I volunteered with Big Brothers Big Sisters. I forced myself to socialize, even though I often only wanted to curl up in bed. I started running, picking up again three years after running a marathon back when Geoff and I had first begun building. I rejoined the search-and-rescue team, though when my body slumped at the mere idea of carrying a loaded pack, I stuck to administration, eventually becoming president of the team.
I was coming back to life, but it was slow. Something had broken in me that I didn’t know how to heal. At 30, how had I managed to make such a mess of my life? The easiest mistake to point to had been marrying Geoff. He’d already slid well into bipolar disorder by then, so what had I been thinking?
The memory of the morning of our wedding pricked me like an invisible pin stuck in a chair, and mentally I shifted this way and that, trying to find some position I could sit in unpoked. When Geoff and I got married, we were in the middle of building our house, and our wedding reception was our wall-raising. The morning of the ceremony, we carved out enough time to hike up our south hill and sit quietly together in the early morning light. We’d planned to say a few things about each other as part of the ceremony, but I’d been rushing all summer to get the house ready to stack the bales and hadn’t yet found a moment to consider what I’d say. That half hour on the hilltop was my only time to do it.
We sat there together as the sky brightened behind us, looking out across the Rio Grande Valley. It was the first time I’d sat still in weeks. The early-morning chill seeped beneath my shell of determination, bringing a sudden, unwelcome awareness: I was terrified.
Already, then, I’d felt him slipping through my fingers, as though his illness were gelatinizing his very flesh, oozing him into a different world. Oh god, what am I doing?
I glanced over, and Geoff’s face looked vague, lost, its edges blurred with insecurity. I no longer knew what was his illness and what was him—or even if the question made sense. I tried to blink my eyes clear as I wrapped my arms around my goosebump-covered knees and looked out across the valley.
Our little village snaked along the stream below, and the ribbon of green stretched out across the strange, eroded pink mud-hills called barrancas toward the Rio Grande. Georgia O’Keeffe’s favorite mountain, Cerro Pedernal, poked up like a pig snout on the other side of the great valley where 35 million years before, the continent had been ripped open and wrenched apart, the wound slowly healing, slowly becoming this place where I was staking my tiny claim.
I reached back in my memories to remind myself that Geoff had once been Geoff, that I hadn’t been crazy to fall in love with him. He’d caught my eye the first day of my first undergraduate class at MIT, a strapping 29-year-old man among the nerdy boys that surrounded me. We’d discovered we were in the wrong classroom and run down the hall together. Later, his voice had sliced through the testosterone-driven clamor of the math study group we both joined, saying as he often did, “Wait, guys, I think Julie’s idea might work.” Then his arms had wrapped around me for the first time, his scent had filled my nostrils, and I’d suddenly known that my life was about to change. And later, I had woken in the night, felt how graduate school was breaking me, and sobbed for hours in his arms so intensely I wondered if I might suffocate, while he massaged my face and stroked my hair.
Sitting on that rock on the hilltop years later, those times felt mythical, remote, like someone else’s life. But I reminded myself that all that was real, as real as the pain that was ripping me apart as surely as the rift had split the continent.
I pulled the piñon-spiked air deep into my lungs, and the immensity of the world filled me, the forces so far beyond the hubbub of individual wanting and avoiding and trying to bring about, beyond my desire for a happy marriage, a healthy partner, and children playing in the stream. Clarity flowed from deep in the earth, up through the rock I was sitting on, searing my spine as it reached beyond me into the sky. It etched into my bones the knowledge of the beauty and wholeness of the world, even though—as I would eventually discover—I had no more power to heal my beloved than I had to close that great gash in the earth.
I looked at Geoff again, his familiar strong brow, his fluid body that could pick me up as if I were made of air: I loved him. We would join our lives together. And we would let the wind and the rain and the ice shape us, as it had the rock.
I took his hand and we walked down the hill together to meet our guests.
Remembering this two years later, living alone in the house we’d built, I thought, Stupid! I was just too young and starry-eyed when we got married to know how terrible things could get. My psyche seemed to have played a stunningly cruel trick on me, pouring that clarity into me the morning of our wedding and then snatching it away, leaving me surrounded by the shards of that world I had envisioned as whole and beautiful.
But that grim view provided me no peace or resolution, because it couldn’t answer a basic question: If I couldn’t trust a feeling like that clarity, then what the hell could I trust? As I went through my days, teaching my classes and living in my house, I felt disoriented, as if I were descending stairs and had lost the feeling of where the next step would be, my leg dangling in the air while my body still traveled downward, my foot seeking solid wood while my back braced to tumble, tumble, tumble.
Mostly I just tried to set these questions aside and build a new life for myself. My exhaustion was easing, but I couldn’t exercise the way I used to. I had trained myself to run slowly when I was building up to the marathon, but now I wasn’t just slow—my body plodded along like an old nag, inching forward joylessly and only when forced. I found it bizarre that all that labor of building could leave me out of shape, but so it seemed to be.
Perhaps, I thought, the problem was that, mysteriously, I had gained 40 pounds while building, despite eating the same way as ever and working like hell. I was running such short distances that I swallowed my pride and joined a group of couch potatoes training to run a 5K, only to find that I trailed the back of the pack week after week. Over months, I barely got faster or stronger. Nor did I lose any weight.
Still, gradually, gradually, I began to feel a bit of the pleasure in exercise I had before. I also found myself noticing the incredible blueness of the sky with a shock, as if I hadn’t truly seen it in years. Sometimes as I drove home, I traced the voluptuous lines of the hills and marveled at this place I lived in. I still couldn’t see a path from my broken-down life to the life I wanted to live, but I did feel like I was drifting in the right direction.
Then one Saturday morning in late 2002, about a year after finishing the house, I received a letter in
my college mailbox informing me that my reappointment at the college had been denied. My knees went weak and I closed my eyes. Teaching had been the one thing I thought I was doing well, the thing I held on to amidst the devastation. I felt as though gravelly pavement were scouring the thin pink flesh just emerging from under warty scabs.
The first thought that went through my mind was, Julie, this is the limit. You now have permission to kill yourself. The thought washed over me like a warm shower, comforting and welcome.
But when, driving home, I reached the cliff that had drawn me for so long, I found to my surprise that I no longer felt tempted to crank the steering wheel over the edge. Time, it seemed, was healing me more than I had realized.
When I went to teach on Monday morning, I could barely look my colleagues or students in the eye. But when my students heard that I hadn’t been reappointed, they gathered in a tight knot around me. “We’re going to get this fixed!” they cried, full of the youthful power that had been ground to powder in me. I cried as they hugged me.
Over the coming weeks, I began recognizing other emotions mixed in with the shock and humiliation and fear that I expected: Relief. Excitement. Possibility. As much as I loved teaching, I felt like I never finished a thought of my own—my job, after all, was to help my students develop their thoughts in our discussions, not to run off with mine. Fantasizing about a career with my own ideas and creativity at its center made me tingly and nervous.
I appealed the reappointment decision and, gratifyingly, got my job back. But it was time to move on. I couldn’t imagine spending the next 40 years of my life doing this. I felt hungry and trapped, like a dragon imprisoned in a cave, twisting up as I outgrew the space. Instead of slowly knitting myself together, it seemed to be time to blow my life up completely, to change everything, to see how I was out of my confinement.
And surely, in the process, I would leave the dregs of my exhaustion behind.
CHAPTER 2
CRIPPLED
Fall 2005
Blowing my life up sounded like a good idea, but I had to figure out what to do next.
I wasn’t drawn to math research anymore. My experience in graduate school at MIT had been brutal, and I hadn’t recovered from it. I also found that I was more drawn to the real world now than I had been in my early twenties. I wanted to become more fully baked, acquiring a browned crust where academia had left me white and squishy. My thoughts turned toward writing: Beginning in childhood, I’d been conceiving of books I’d like to write. I settled on writing about science, since that seemed to weave together many of my interests and talents. To get started, I decided to do a yearlong graduate program in science writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The morning I left Santa Fe for Santa Cruz, my next-door neighbor brought me fresh milk from his goats. I wrapped my hands around the jar, a quart of my own beloved valley to fortify me for the trip, and then tucked it next to me in the car’s console. I watched my house disappear behind the oaks and willows as I drove away pulling a U-Haul trailer, my heart simultaneously constricting and expanding. I felt as though I were ripping myself apart in leaving my house, but it was time to leave the agony of the past few years behind and build a new life. I wondered who I would be when I drove a trailer in the other direction on this road and reunited with my house and land.
I felt like my body was finally coming back, so when I arrived in Santa Cruz, I decided not to buy a parking pass and to bike to class instead. Biking required climbing a brutally steep road through massive redwoods, emerging from the trees to find a view that stretched all the way across the Monterey Bay—well worth the sweat and pain, I figured. I started off so slow I half expected to be passed by a toddler on a tricycle. That just means I’ll improve more quickly, I figured. Plus, it gives me a bit more time to enjoy my ride. At the end of the first quarter, though, another bicyclist flew past me and called out encouragements: “It’s always hard the first few times you try it! You’re doing great!” I smiled through gritted teeth: First few times, huh? Why am I not getting faster?
It was easy to push away those worries in my delight over graduate school. A fleet of top-notch writers devoted themselves to my learning, and as a grown-up, I was exempt from the angst of having my identity at stake. I spent half my time in class and half at internships with newspapers and magazines in the area, writing some science stories and some more general ones. I wrote a story about an Internet cable being installed in Monterey Bay that underwater robots would use to communicate with their scientist overlords to reveal the unexplored deep sea; I interviewed an 11-year-old girl who rescued herself and her two younger brothers after her uncle stabbed her parents and set their house ablaze; I walked through stubbly fields with farmers whose land would be ruined if neglected levees failed in an earthquake. I felt like I had a backstage pass to the entire world.
I went home to Santa Fe for winter break, and since I’d rented out my house, I stayed with my next-door neighbors in my own enchanted valley. I hiked up the stream to the first big waterfall, which had frozen into a fractal fantasyland of delicate pillars. Falling water flickered behind the ice like the royal occupants of a rococo ice palace. I felt my body realigning with the land, as though my feet were reaching down through the earth, my body stretching up along the waterfall and blending with the water, my fingers extending to the peaks of the mountains where the water first seeped out of the ground. When I visited my renters in my house, I was oddly pleased to see that they seemed to be camping out, their belongings strewn about in ragtag piles. It was easy to imagine sweeping them out of there and reoccupying it myself.
My love for my own house and land simultaneously grounded and ungrounded me. I was building a new life when I still didn’t understand why my previous life had dissolved. I felt like a tree emerging from a tiny crack in a cliff. Would the next wind rip me out by the roots? And although I liked my classmates, instructors, and colleagues, I struggled against a relentless loneliness. Were these my people—or at least could they become so?
Still, when I got together with friends from the college in Santa Fe, I confidently reported that I was thrilled with my new life. My worries squirreled themselves into a corner of my mind, rarely emerging into consciousness. And in any case, the change felt irrevocable: I seemed to have stepped across a small crack, and now the Atlantic Ocean was opening up between me and my old colleagues, our two continents drifting inexorably apart.
The first day of classes after I returned to Santa Cruz after winter break, my legs screamed as I rode my bike up the hill. I tried standing up for better leverage, but it felt so hard that I sat down and shifted to the easiest gear, my legs spinning as I labored but barely moved. I found myself eyeing the hollows at the roots of trees, imagining curling up in them and sleeping. The ride didn’t just feel hard, harder even than when I’d first arrived—it also felt in some indefinable way wrong, like I shouldn’t ask this of my body.
Fuck this, I finally thought, turning my bike around to zoom back down the hill. My joy at the effortless speed temporarily soothed my shock and disappointment.
I tried biking another day with the same result, and then another. Never again did I ride up the hill. I didn’t give up on exercise, but I scaled back, doing short runs instead. I couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation for what was happening to me. It didn’t seem normal, but I didn’t know of any disease whose only manifestation was an inability to exercise much. And as long as I didn’t push it, I felt fine.
An old boyfriend visited for a few days in the spring, providing a longed-for respite from the loneliness. I took him up to campus, we ate at my favorite burrito joint, we rode a tandem bike across the Golden Gate Bridge, and our bodies again fit together when we tangoed. Shortly before he left, though, we reenacted one of our old arguments, and I was forced to remember all the ways we weren’t right for each other.
After he left, I found that I could barely get out of bed. I shivered uncontrollably, and m
y back throbbed. My new therapist, Chris, suggested it could just be an odd emotional reaction to having spent time with my ex-boyfriend. I’ll just take good care of myself today, I figured. But the next day, I had to call in sick to my internship. The third day, I staggered through classes in a daze and then went back to bed. I told people I had the flu, but it wasn’t like any flu I’d ever experienced—no stuffy nose, no upset stomach, just pain and an exhaustion that pulverized my brain.
Over a week, the “flu” gradually faded away, and I dove back into my work and thought about it no further.
I finished the Santa Cruz program in June and moved to Berkeley to do an internship at the alumni magazine of the University of California, Berkeley, and to be with a new guy I’d met, William. William struck me as smart and grounded, less impressed with me than my previous partners had been. He seemed like someone with the strength to stand up to me.
After nine intensive months of graduate school, I figured I was finally really going to get into shape. I didn’t know why I’d lost my ability to exercise in the spring, but now that the stress of graduate school was over, surely I could get through that strange glitch, whatever it was. I rode my bike in the Berkeley hills and delighted in how I could so quickly pedal from urban intensity into the wilderness of Tilden Park—and I was even getting a little bit faster. The day after a ride, though, I was always outrageously sore. William and I would laugh about my “Frankenstein walk.” I “worked from home” on those days, though mostly I lay in bed, drifting in and out of sleep. I finally got worried enough to go see a doctor in Berkeley, but all she suggested was to test my thyroid, which turned out to be normal.
In the fall of 2006 I moved to Washington, DC, for a four-month internship at Science News, and by that time, I was forced to admit that something was wrong. I had to give up exercise entirely so I could do my work consistently, and I rested almost all the rest of the time. I went to a doctor a friend had recommended, and she put me on adrenal supplements, probiotics, and a near-vegan, grain-free diet. None of it made me feel any better—though as a side effect, I did steadily and happily lose the weight I had gained while building my house.
Through the Shadowlands Page 2