My Recession Miracle

I’m probably not the best personal banker in the world — I don’t log on to check my checking account on a daily or even weekly basis. And since my expenses are fairly static and most of my deposits are direct deposits, I generally know how much I have. Since I still only use a bank in Princeton and make car payments through my parents, they can usually see my balance too.

As a result, I was really shocked today to get an email from my mom asking if I realized I had $X amount of dollars in my account. Without being specific about the amount, just know that $X was exactly 10 times the usual amount.

Sure enough, I logged into my account and saw that she was right. On June 24, somebody that wasn’t me deposited enough cash to help me breathe a LOT easier during this bout of unemployment. I looked at my balance and wanted to cry in relief, thinking “Wow, God really DOES work in mysterious ways.”

I started to imagine who my anonymous benefactor might be. Perhaps it was an undercover Robin Hood type, one who bears a striking resemblance to George Clooney, who stole money from my last employer’s coffers and used my direct deposit information to give me a cash infusion. Or maybe it was a merry band of guerilla do-gooders that infiltrate banks in the middle of the night to plump up the bank accounts of the recently terminated.

In my head I mentally started writing another essay I would inevitably send to Chicago Public Radio about my Recession Miracle. Other listeners would call in and share their stories of finding a bit too much money in their accounts. Eventually, word would leak that it really was the doing of the Obama administration’s secret Random Acts of Kindness provision in the stimulus package.

But, alas, this isn’t the kind of banking irregularity that can go unchecked. If someone out there had my account number, they could withdraw as easily as they could deposit. The more likely scenario was that my dad goofed while depositing money from the hardware store. So I called and told him to check his account balance, and sure enough he had deposited into the wrong account.

My hopes were crushed. The giant sigh of relief I had started to breathe deflated. My healthy, vital bank account would have to go back to being pathetic once the banking error was fixed. I thought of all the different ways my life would be different if I always had that much money in the piggy bank (for better or worse). So maybe it’s not an altogether good thing, but it sure was nice while it lasted.

Books, Bikes and My Brain

In case anyone was concerned by my complete lack of posts recently, no I haven’t had any bike-related injuries rendering me unable to type. Which is kind of a miracle in itself, really. I was completely expecting to have at least a couple “Mary Bites the Dust” stories by now, but so far, smooth sailing. I can scarcely believe it myself.

On my way home from a ride last night, I ran (not literally!) into a friend who was out for a walk. After I introduced her to Hildy, she told me she’d been holed up all day working on a spiritual memoir. More specifically, she said the memoir is about her search to figure out where God is during a trauma — in her case, a life-threatening childhood illness. The ensuing conversation reminded me that I hadn’t yet properly reviewed the migraine memoir “A Brain As Wide as the Sky” yet like I promised I would a few weeks ago. I realized the reason I hadn’t written the post yet is the same reason I haven’t written openly about my own migraines since immediately after my stimulator surgery: I had long given up on trying to derive any meaning from them.

I’m not sure how it happened, but somewhere along the way I had internalized the belief that constantly writing or thinking about how migraines impact me means I’m “dwelling” on it too much — and everyone knows that dwelling automatically leads to self pity. And people who indulge in self pity start to use their illness to get out of things and avoid responsibility. This is nonsense, of course, but it took me a long time to understand that.

I knew I would love this book when I saw an excerpt on Amazon where the author, Andrew Levy, compares having a migraine to “being punched in the face by God.” Shockingly, he doesn’t resent God for this — quite the opposite actually. He writes: “Look at what most appalls God: stiff-necked people, people with hardened hearts. As Elaine Scarry writes in an absolutely perfect phrase, God’s ‘forceful shattering of the reluctant human surface and repossession of the interior’ is where the Old Testament action really lies. God doesn’t have an agenda: He just wants us to be pliant, humble, cracks us open like eggshells because that, really, is all we are. And pain is the agent that makes this happen.”

As I mentioned, this book is the reason I decided to call my bike Hildegard, after the eleventh century migraine sufferer and saint, Hildegard Von Bingen. Levy opens one chapter with a passage from her writings: “But I, though I saw and heard these things, refused to write for a long time through doubt and bad opinion and the diversity of human words…until, laid low by the scourge of God, I fell upon a bed of sickness; then, compelled at last by many illnesses, I set my hand to the writing.”

Thankfully, Levy doesn’t spend the whole book talking about migraines through a Christian-only lens. He offers an equally fascinating take on chronic pain and its reasons for existing from Buddhist, Darwinian, Freudian and historical perspectives. For example, he says Buddha is the man for pain: “It seems to me that the migraines accomplish much of what Buddhist teachers hope to accomplish for their pupils with meditation. They clear the mind wonderfully. During a migraine (the worse the better, of course), you will not be thinking about food cravings, or sexual desire, or work anxiety, or all of those worldly matters that calm breathing practices are supposed to sweep from the mind. You will be thinking about the migraine, but even this, somehow, seems right: the Buddhist teachers often recommend focus on some single mantra, some process, some conundrum, some object.”

The historical perspective Levy uncovered was new to me also. I used to consider myself a bit of an expert on famous migraineurs, such as Elvis, but this book was eye opening in that I learned so many of my favorite artists and writers suffered too — no wonder their work has spoken to me for so long. Their ranks include Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keefe, Van Gogh, Picasso, Dalí, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Nietzche, Susan Sontag, Monica Seles, Oliver Sacks, Ulysses S. Grant, Chopin, Rudyard Kipling and lots of others. That these people, despite their level of disability, were still able to make such significant artistic and cultural contributions in their less painful moments is hugely encouraging. His discussion about how pain affects creativity is something I’ve missed in my attempts not to “dwell” on my own suffering.

Writes Levy: “They were all rebellious thinkers — although, sometimes, surprisingly reserved ones, often disabled by what liberated them…it is not enough to tough it out. When migraine doesn’t want you catatonic, it wants you making something new and won’t rest until you do.”

What I appreciated the most about this book though, is how Levy doesn’t sugarcoat the reality of chronic migraines. He doesn’t try to minimize it or spin it into lemonade. He talks about the resentment, the fear, the depression, the anger and the frustration it also inspires. He writes about the dark sides in a way I’ve never been able to fully recognize or articulate. He writes about it without fearing that others will see him as lazy or faking it. He acknowledges that migraine is often seen as a woman’s disease and thus, stigmatizing.

When I saw Andrew Levy speak at the Printer’s Row Book Fair earlier this summer, he and the discussion moderator, Paula Kamen, brought up a point I had never considered before: When you go through life constantly trying to cure your headaches, you’re really missing out on life. By waiting for so many years for my head to get better before making a go of it by myself, I had put my life on hold. Immediately, I was sad it took me 29 years to recognize this, but then I realized some people never figure it out.

In closing, I offer this paragraph from the book (which you should totally read, by the way):

“In the end, you cannot divide the headaches from the art they help produce (or suffocate in infancy). And the wild treatment, the headlong dive across Europe, one’s own skull as the canvas or the clay? In the end, you cannot divide the desperation to find a cure from the need to create, or from the intellectual desire that compels you to try and answer these damn questions, and not live with the question marks.”