EveDestiny's Vox

What to Expect When Your Mother Dies Unexpectedly #PSA

IMAGE: Death and the Child by Edvard Munch

When my mother collapsed and then slowly died over a two-week period in early November 2022, I knew very little about what to do or in what order to do them, and I quickly realized many of my assumptions -- about her health status, about preparations for such an unhappy event, about even the process of planning a funeral -- were wrong or warped. And while the internet provided some general guidance, it was haphazard and often too high-level to be of much use. “What to do when your parent goes into a coma” and “how to plan for your parent’s death” were poignant but somewhat useless, because each state was subtly different in such matters, and I was in shock. I needed marching orders, not gauzy advice.

Over those weeks and after, I took tons of notes, and I post it here — maybe it will help someone else navigate this bizarre and byzantine process.

My mother lived and died in central Arkansas, so some of my experience was specific to that location. But much of her own preplanning was wonderful and would work for any state; much of what she failed to do taught me lessons that I offer, should someone be desperately searching the internet for “what to do when your mother dies without a will or warning.”

It seemed tragic and wrong that in the end, her life was boiled down to paperwork and preparations, both those she made and missed. But that’s exactly all it was, to anyone not family or friends: just forms and documents (or not) and dates and numbers. A checklist to help you avoid some of the pitfalls is at the end of this post.

1. Dying sucks -- especially as a single parent.
   
   My parents were long divorced, and my mother did not remarry. So when she fainted and lapsed into a coma in Arkansas — I live in Texas — I was immediately reliant on my very-not-reliable younger brother who still lived near her, to be the hospital go-between representative. Eventually I used her previously executed Power of Attorney to establish better communications on her health status and financial matters, but it took me several days to get that act together; more on that below.
   
   Had my mother remarried, her spouse would have been the person to deal with hard decisions and transfer or hold any assets. (This is largely the point of martial law in the United States, especially for the elderly: to ensure that the lived legalities of a deceased spouse transfer to a surviving spouse. But when there is no surviving spouse? Any children get pinned with those difficult choices and try to sort out what exactly were the day-to-day operations of the parent’s house and life. This was a puzzle I never wanted to solve.)
   
   If you have a single aging parent, it is critical to draft at the least a power of attorney (there are various versions, preferably “durable” is best, but at least “financial”) while your parent is in good health, mentally clear, and alive. A Power of Attorney (POA) is no longer valid the moment the parent dies.
   
   A will is also incredibly important, and it’s not enough to have your parent tell you they have one. Insist on seeing it; preferably, get a copy and keep it someplace fire-protected (a firesafe, a bank deposit box, or your freezer in a pinch). Because …
   
   
2. Dying without a will (also called “dying intestate”) sucks even more. 
   
   My mother said she had a will. But she didn’t.
   
   When your ill/incapacitated parent is still alive, a Power of Attorney (POA) allows you to stand in that parent’s shoes and operate as if you were them, to shut off her insanely expensive cable bill, or find homes for her three dogs. Once your parent dies, however, that POA is worthless.
   
   POA’s are only for the LIVING; wills are for the dead. And dying without a will meant everything without a superseding, named beneficiary — like on a life insurance policy or a retirement account — immediately became the property of the state. Every estate goes through probate, even those with a will, but the will determines where things go. If there's no will, the government/court/state decides that. So the name of the planning game is "KEEP AS MUCH OUT OF THE ESTATE AS POSSIBLE" and "have a will to say what goes to whom." 
   
   
3. Dying without enough health (or life) insurance makes everything worse.
   
   My mother was on Medicare. She was 75 and retired, but she did have one additional health insurance policy — a Supplemental Medicare policy that she paid $170 for every month.
   
   As of November 2022 when she died, she had one of the better ones, which paid most of her medical bills — BUT NOT ALL. There were still residual balances — deductibles not fully met, charges that were more than what was contracted for with Medicare, etc. — for which collectors wanted to be paid. You can ask the doctors and hospital to forgive those unpaid balances, but if the remaining balance is high, those unpaid balances will become liens on any assets in the estate.
   
   This supplemental policy, also known as “Medigap coverage” (and there are multiple kinds … which are confusing and beyond the scope of my situation, because she already purchased a policy) meant that most of her end-of-life care was paid by the supplement. Otherwise, I would have been fighting with a hospital about a $218,000 bill. I recommend investigating Medigap options at https://www.medicare.gov/health-drug-plans/medigap). Do not assume that Medicare will cover much or be of much use to you or your parent should extreme medical care arise. I made that assumption, and I was very, very wrong.
   
   My mother also did not maintain life insurance. She’d had policies at one point but had cashed them in or let them lapse, and so she had only whatever cash she had on the day she died, and that was it — to pay the dozens of niggling fees that cropped up. Like sales tax on some of the things she’d bought in her funeral package. (This topic especially enraged me. More in 4. below.)
   
   When none of her antidepressant pills were found in any of her bottles at home, we all discussed the possibility that she’d taken them all on purpose or mistakenly taken them all too fast for too-few days. If she had done it intentionally as a suicidal act, she had purchased her life insurance many years prior; most policies won’t pay on suicide within two years of a policy purchase. Some rarer policies do have clauses that hamper paying benefits if a death was self-inflicted. It’s worth it to locate any parental life insurance policies and confirm what the clause and disallowances are, if any.
   
   
4. Dying without pre-arranging your funeral plans might be one of the meanest things you can do to those you leave behind.
   
   After her own mother’s death and funeral, my mother went back to the funeral home, to choose the details for her own funeral — which urn or coffin she wanted, what kind of service (in the chapel, only grave-side, with a funeral home officiant or not, etc.), and most critically — she bought a “burial" insurance policy. I did not know this kind of thing existed! It paid for the price increases between what she prepaid and the increased costs of those things after years had passed.
   
   What it did not pay was sales tax on the smallest of things: her urn, the box they burned her corpse in, and other unbelievably petty things. I had to pay that balance myself, as it was not covered by the burial insurance policy she purchased — bizarrely.
   
   Another eyebrow-raising glitch from the funeral home was their lack of help to sell her no-longer-needed cemetery plot (she decided at some point she wanted to be cremated and paid for that in her package). They told me to “list it on Facebook Marketplace or sellmyspace.com" — I am not joking -- and with the ding for sales tax on her urn and such ... it seemed indecent then and still does. I still have not tried to sell the cemetery plot. The funeral home folks are right there, all day, every day, right next to the plot, and I’m 611.2 miles away, but for some reason I have to sell the plot myself. (Trafficking in the bodies and business of the dead left me disgusted with the entire industry, but that’s for another blog entry.)
   
   
5. Dying without designating beneficiaries is definitely one of the meanest things you can do to your loved ones.
   
   My mother filled out the beneficiary forms on her two small retirement accounts; this bypassed the estate and state probate as well. This was both one less thing for me to wrestle with, and it ensured that her hard-earned money didn’t go to the state to pay administration and probate fees.
   
   My mother owned a paid-for Kia Sol. But she had not listed a death transfer or given joint title ownership to anyone, so no one owned her car if she died. And then she did die, and the car was an “orphaned asset.” Since it was an older, low-value vehicle, it did not push her combined assets value to an official estate (in Arkansas, estates valued under $100k are considered not worth the judge’s time to probate, and they are just auto-probated without a court appearance … but probate and estate laws vary by state and by amount! Plus, I got conflicting advice from two different estate attorneys). With her house jointly deeded to my brother, there was no house to probate, so her "estate" was under that small estate threshold. 
   
   
6. Dying in debt is crummy, but ….
   
   My mother owed almost $10,000 on five different credit cards, and she still owed money on her tiny house. I think she was using her credit cards to live, to fill in the gaps for things her social security did not cover: vet bills for her dogs, replacing her air conditioner. Those unsecured creditors all looked to file liens on anything she owned.
   
   Since Arkansas law was so confusing on small estate probate (and I got conflicting advice from two different Arkansas attorneys), I filed probate on her vehicle only, because she hadn’t death-transferred it, and it had no loan on it. Almost immediately the credit card companies circled like proverbial sharks hunting chum, using my contact info from those court documents to stalk me. They were all very careful to tell me they couldn’t force me to pay her debts, but that did not stop them from near-harassment-levels of contact. Eventually I concluded that probate was mostly intended for higher value assets like real estate in Arkansas, and so there was no reason for me to have filed probate at all. When the Arkansas court clerk handed me the probate papers, she'd said, “Take this to the DMV,” thinking I would use the documents to tag the vehicle in my name, I guess. But as a resident of Texas, I had no plans to do that. Her car remained in storage in Arkansas for months. 
   
   One of her five credit card accounts had a “payment insurance” policy, and that meant I didn’t have to “negotiate to settle” on this account. It just paid itself off. But the other four balances did not, and so I was contacted repeatedly for months by creditors wanting to be paid the moment her end-of-life expenses were complete. Things like funeral costs and and remaining healthcare bills had to be paid before unsecured debt would paid from any decedent’s assets. My mother owned so little, her cash was quickly gone, and so her creditors got nothing. But that didn’t stop them from calling me and sending me letters for months.
   
   Had she put payment policies on each credit card account, for pennies on the dollar of what she owed, I would not have been stalked. Had she left even a single small life insurance policy to pay off her debt, I would not have been stalked. Had she put a TOD name on her auto title, I would not have had to file probate at all.

Every time I got a call or an email or a letter about any of this, it ripped open all my grief and anger, over and over. I would not wish this experience on anyone. And yet almost all of us will go through it, when a last parent dies, or when those of us with children die and leave our kids to deal with the aftermath.

Here is my strong, insistent advice, a checklist from the last 10 months of my life that was lost in the sinkhole of my mother's death.

First Things First

BEFORE THEY GET SICK

• GET A POWER OF ATTORNEY BEFORE YOUR PARENT IS SICK or demented. Keep a notarized copy or original if you are the person named on the POA.
• Insist on a copy of any will. Do not take no for an answer! Some states don't require much for a will; just being named executor/executrix can make your life a lot easier if you are the one to handle everything post death.
• Be sure you know your parent's social security number and their date of birth.
• Have your parent use a Password Vault or manager, like BitWarden or 1Password, etc. that you can access, too. Or dump all their passwords from their browser to a hard copy printout, that you keep securely locked away, and know that as they add accounts or change passwords, your list will be out of sync. At the very least, you will need access to their mobile phone and/or email account, for password resets.
• Have your parent name beneficiaries for all assets, and jointly title any vehicles.
  • Houses can be deeded to living relatives (my mother quitclaimed her house to her son, but this was dangerous — had this deed happened too close to her death, her creditors could have challenged the quitclaim and my brother lost the house. Luckily, she did that in 2014 and died in 2022).
  •  She should have filed a right of survivorship warranty deed instead, based on "joint tenancy," but that was more expensive and more complicated. Not every state does joint tenancy, and if your parent adds anyone other than a spouse as a joint tenant of a property after its purchase, then it may be treated as a gift. If so, half the value of the home would be treated as a gift, and any amount exceeding the gift tax exemption might be taxed. As always, these complicated situations may require the expensive assistance of professional like tax accountants or estate attorneys.
    
    Proceed with caution; many attorneys or tax CPAs will consult with you for a free first chat, to determine the scope of any estate, and many questions can be answered in that free session.

AFTER THEY GET SICK

• Use a spiral notebook to take notes about all of it: the conversations with doctors, with the nurses, with the credit card companies, the utility companies, the funeral home, Social Security ... all if it. Then it will always be in one place, and the act of moving a pen or pencil helps the mind remember, and it helps ease some of the tension as it's happening.
• Immediately put in a mail forward, temporary or permanent, so your parent's mail will come to your house. You can always cancel it if needed, but do this right away.
• Locate their internet passwords!
• Use a (durable) Power of Attorney (POA) while your parent is alive to ensure:
  • Beneficiaries are listed on every bank, investment, and retirement account.
  • Review the last 3-6 months of bank account transactions, so you know what was being routinely paid for and when, from which credit cards to utility amounts. Better: dump a year's transactions to Excel so you can quickly search and sort it offline. 
  • CREDIT CARDS: cash out any accumulated rewards and stop paying them. BEST: Establish/arrange a payment policy for each account to pay off its balance in the event of death; sometimes this can be done online with a few clicks. It will depend on how much your parent owes and what the bank’s details/requirements are.
  • If you think you have time, complete TOD (Transfer on Death) requests for any real estate (house) and vehicles; death transfer filings keep these out of any probate proceeding! (Check your state's requirements, as they do vary significantly from state to state.)
    • A TOD can happen timely on vehicles. Real estate is a much harder deal and may be challenged by creditors if your parent dies too soon after a TOD deed is filed.
  • Sell any vehicles. If your parent’s prognosis is poor, and there is no TOD (Transfer on Death) name on the title, consider selling vehicles immediately — especially ones that are paid for/have no loans against them. (Vehicles with loans on them will likely be repossessed once the loan is not serviced.) 
  • "Pause" your parent’s house: confirm auto payment of mortgage and utilities, but winterize or summerize the house if no one will be in it. Change the thermostat to an unoccupied temperature. Cancel subscriptions that will not be used (cable, newspaper, magazine, box stores like Costco, gym online media like Netflix, Disney, or Amazon) and consider halting vehicle insurance, vision/dental, and any other repeating expenses that only an ambulatory, competent adult would need. Throw out produce or fridge contents that will spoil quickly. 
  • Remember! Once your parent dies, the POA will no longer be of use.
  • FIND THEIR WILL!
  • And find any life insurance policies.

IF/AFTER THEY DIE

• Notify the Social Security office immediately about the death. Even if the funeral home says they will, do it yourself, too. (My mother’s funeral home said they would and then didn’t, and it caused multiple months’ delay in turning off the monthly SSA deposits, all of which had to be returned to the government!)
  • There are SSA rules about which payments remain in a recipient's account and which are retracted. Monthly Social Security deposits are for the previous month. Any month’s payment -- when your parent is not still alive on the last day of the month -- will be forfeited. See https://www.usa.gov/social-security-report-a-death for more details.
  • For example, my mother collapsed in early November and died November 17. A SS deposit was made on November 13, while she was in the hospital but before she died. That November 13th deposit was for October and remained in her account.
    • The November payment was not deposited until until the following month, on December 13.
    • Since my mother did not live for the entire month of November, the November payment deposited on December 13 was forfeited.
    • It also took the Social Security Administration almost two months to not her death in their records, because the funeral home failed to notify them of her death. The SSA didn’t know until I called them and sat on hold for two hours.
    • Other payments occurred while I waited for the SSA to retract forfeited monies. Eventually they did automatically deduct out all payments that had been made after her death. 
  • Contact your local Social Security office, ideally, or call the SSA's main number at 1-800-772-1213 (TTY 1-800-325-0778) — be prepared for endless waits, e.g., more than an hour on hold or waiting in line.
• Find your parent's wallet and keys to secure/retain their identification, plus any important cards like insurance coverage cards, credit cards, etc.
• Do not give out your actual mobile number or regularly used email to everyone. I gave out an underused email address and my Google Voice number so that I would get emails about voice messages, and I could go about my usual days without being harassed until I was ready to listen to the messages and deal with the demands. 
• Order and pay for death certificates; they will be needed to close accounts, initiate beneficiary settlement processes, and dispose of their assets.
  • My mother’s funeral home put in a request for death certificates for me, from the Arkansas Department of Health. The first one cost $10; subsequent copies were $8. Costs of death certificate vary an astonishing amount; Alaska, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and Utah all charge $30 or more for a death certificate! Many more charge $20-30 for one.
  • I thought I would need more original copies than I did; most banks and vendors took emailed scans or made photocopies of a single original. Probably three copies would have been more than sufficient — unless your parent has many assets of various kinds (houses, investments, vehicles, etc.).
  • I had to pay for these copies up front, and it can take weeks to receive these death certs; in Arkansas, it was stated to take 7-14 business days, but actually took longer than that.

Wrapping up a life is a slow, laborious, and dreadful process.

Second Things Second

Generally, there were some things I decided to do (or not). These are the top ones from my experience:

1. Talk to an estate/probate attorney, or maybe more than one. You can usually have a first consult for free.
2. Go to the bank branch your parent used the most, and meet with an onsite manager. My mother's was closest to her job (when she was still working); yours might have used one closer to home or the grocery store. 
   
   Refunds of all kinds may process for 9-12 months after the date of death. For months afterward, I was forwarded escrow refunds, class action lawsuit payouts, utility refunds, etc. in the mail. If I had closed her checking account, I would have been unable to do anything with these monies. Since I kept it open for almost a year after she died, and because I had a relationship with someone in the branch, I was able to mail checks to them for deposit, and they helped me close it over the phone, since I lived out of state. 
   
   
3. Much advice exists about filing a last tax return. I did not, because I was couldn't confidently prepare an accurate return: I wasn't sure of all income she received, and what I did know about was only Social Security, which neither the Feds nor the state of Arkansas taxed. 

Lastly

Turns out there were many other kinds of insurance — not just the well-known “life” policy — that my mother purchased that were hugely beneficial and not particularly expensive:

• Medicare Supplemental (a MUST!)
• Burial (a MUST!)
• Credit card balance pay off (really really helpful if at all possible)

To confirm if your parent had any life insurance policies, contact the NAIC (National Association of Insurance Commissioners) for a free policy search.

~~~

My mother, despite her health challenges, mental health damage, and rapidly-increasing dementia, did a number of things right, and I am so grateful she did them:

• She prepared and prepaid her own funeral, with a price protection insurance policy. I cannot imagine what it would have been like to organize that surreal and horrible experience in the few days I was able to fly into town the week she died. Plus, figure out a way to pay for a many-thousands-of-dollars cremation and service. She saved me that, and I will always be grateful.
• She purchased a Medigap/Medicare Supplemental insurance policy.
• She put my name on her checking account (specifically as right of survivorship: “right of survivorship” on a bank account bypasses the estate, so that when the primary holder of the account passes away, the named individual retains full ownership over all of the funds the account). That means the STATE didn’t get it, and I could immediately write checks on her behalf using her money (while it lasted).
• She prepared a Durable Power of Attorney. And she prepared a Living Will/Do Not Resuscitate. The pricelessness of aPOA was already mentioned; the Living Will and DNR were equally important. These documents  allowed me to prevent the hospital from keeping her alive in a vegetative state for months or years. It was a horrible experience, but I was relieved to know her wishes, and having it in writing meant I could do what she wanted done, when no one else would turn off the machines.
• She named beneficiaries on any asset accounts, like IRA, retirement, investment, other. This bypassed any estate and the state did not get it; her beneficiaries did.
• She put, on at least one credit card, a Payment Protection Policy. I wish she had done all of them; this would have saved the revolting “death circling” of lenders who wanted payoffs on unpaid credit card balances.
• She printed out a list/log of passwords on her dot-matrix printer. Not the most secure thing to have done, but a lifesaver for me when I was trying to turn off or on auto payments, or check her social security details, or watch/review her bank balance. BETTER: if she had used a digital password vault/manager, like 1Password or BitWarden. 
• She packed up jewelry she wanted people to have in labeled envelopes and left them in her fire safe. 

What she could have done but didn’t:

• In Arkansas, her living will would have been more effective if she had written additional details in her own handwriting. As it was, she only initialed and signed, and this made for a less than vigorous endorsement on terminating her life support.
• In Arkansas, she could have hand-written a will on notebook paper, just generally stating who would be the executor and a few high level “leave this to that person” notes. With two witnesses and a notary public, it would have been as official as any will could have been in the state. With such a will, the executor would have been empowered to make decisions about paying final bills, interact with creditors in an official way, and generally be better-treated than I was as a daughter with no legal standing for anything my mother left behind. Sadly, she owned so little of any value that the state didn’t want to bother with her orphaned vehicle or her costume jewelry or furniture.
• She could have put family heirlooms like photo albums or her wedding dress or my grandmother’s afghan somewhere that cigarette smoke wouldn’t ruin them. Some things just do not survive decades of smoke and ash. I still don't know how to salvage those. 

Leaving those -- who will be left anyway, when we die -- prepared to just mourn might be the single most loving thing a person can do for their loved ones. There were countless other details I had to sort out, and I couldn't have gotten to them as well as I did if my mother had not done a lot of the work herself. These were just a few of the decisions that needed discussion, logistics, and attention. I was dealing with those as well:

• Who will conduct the service. What will they say, what will they be paid. 
• When will the service be held to ensure those who most want to attend can do so.
• Will there be an after-funeral gathering, and if so, how many should it host, how much will it cost, can mourners get to it easily.
• There were other legal documents I'd hoped to have and didn't: like Disposition of Remains/Authorization to Autopsy. I couldn't manage any of that because she had no spouse, and I wasn't allowed to without documents authorizing me to do so. Like a will, I knew she'd known about those documents, and I assumed she'd completed them, and that I would find them in her fire safe. But they were not there. 

When it was all over, I created a FUNERAL folder in my own fire safe, to hold copies of insurance policies, wills, medical directives, funeral plan documents, etc. in it. And we paid a small retainer to an estate attorney and put her contact info in the fire safe, too. 

If you are here, reading this because any of this applies to you, I am sorry for your loss. 

Finally a trophy wife

Over the chapters of my life that I refer to as “my career,” I enjoyed a long history of Making the Money in my relationships. Except for periods of unemployment — by choice and by economic mishap — I made more income than any partner or spouse. Until recently!

With those higher-income jobs came higher levels of stress and responsibility, as well as far more work travel than I wanted. After I learned very early on in “my career" that work travel was less glamorous and exotic than it was billed to be, my enthusiasm for such travel waned deeply and vigorously. Perhaps some folks out there in the Ether had fun coworkers or went nifty places that lured tourists. I did not. I had tea-totaling coworkers overly enthused with their bible apps or went to destinations like Greenville, SC. (Nothing against Greenville, SC, it just wasn’t a place I longed to visit, especially not for 15-hour workdays with non-imbibing religionists who were super prudish about profanity. #notmyjam)

On rare occasion, I got to take a spouse with me on some work trips. I would depart the hotel room to go to my workday — usually with dread because I never cared much for my jobs or my employers, but I very much cared about the paycheck — and leave my companion ensconced in the room, with no real plans or demands on their day. And I would be pea-green with envy.

Things have changed.

I left my corporate America job in October 2021, with no intention of finding more work for the foreseeable future. We had relocated halfway across the United States just as the pandemic was beginning, to be closer to friends and family and lower our costs of living so that we could live on my husband’s salary and let me get away from the corporate rat race and deranging political BS, and recover.

All those decades of  corporating™️ (definition below) had pushed me beyond the outer edges of burnout and fully into depression. In 2019, I had planned to end everything, a tidy missive-by-suicide that involved a handgun, parking in a work parking lot on the weekend, and leaving it all to be found by company reps. (It all felt — and still feels — fitting: let them clean up the mess they caused.) Instead, I started an antidepressant and elected to have shoulder surgery and (another first) used FMLA to cover my 3-1/2 month leave of absence.

So by this time — February 2023 — I am well into my self-determined and funded sabbatical, and able to travel with my husband to his corporate America job. His team is based out of Raleigh, NC, so for the cost of my plane ticket, I got to finally be the hotel-ensconced spouse and not the slogging-to-work spouse. I took pretty clothes for dinners out with him and his coworkers; I took books to read and a laptop for journaling and blogging — not work! These were the markers of Trophy Spouse in my world, and by the gods, I finally wrested them from the universe.

I even got to take some photos that were meant for more than expense reimbursement. #winning

=======

GLOSSARY:

Corporating: the societally-encouraged and condoned exploitation of employees via modernized indentured servitude; common features include:

• unpaid overtime (especially when unplanned);
• always-on access via email and always-\urgent project assignments;
• gaslighting and ghosting in response to voiced concerns or questioning strategy; and
• enforced identification with and consumption of branding or marketing “corporate cool-aid™️” in order to brainwash recipients into a venerated corporate culture.

Go Away ... aka A Travel Law, Continued

(Post 2 in a series, probably of 3) 

There's an old fable about a vegetable, eggs, and coffee. Sometimes the veggies are potatoes, sometimes carrots, sometimes green beans. It's an adversity tale, shrouded in narrative, wherein hot water is introduced to each of the three things (veg, egg, coffee), and thermodynamics alters states: the veg becomes soft, the egg becomes hard, and the coffee becomes transcendent. And the morale of the story is revealed -- “When adversity arrives, what is your response? Are you (most like) the vegetable, the egg, or the coffee?" 

AirB&B's "First Law of Travel" pulled that fable to mind, with its "you have to get lost to be found" message, a conventionally-wise reminder about travel/challenges telling us who we are, since ostensibly adversity is the "fuel of greatness" and innovation and purportedly many positive things. The law, per the ad, summarily asserts (see my previous post for the complete narrative): 

... Travel reminds you ... every moment that you’re not on top of things.

The point of travel is to take a plunge, to venture into uncertainty, ambiguity, even fear ... when you’re lost or uneasy or carried out of yourself, you find out who you are.

Transformation comes when ... not in charge.

The first law of travel and therefore of life: you are only as strong as your readiness to surrender.

If we are to believe the First Law of Travel, and its Veg/Egg/Coffee corollary, then adversity must prove a tonic (not turmoil) and accelerant for at least the rare Coffee Bean superstars among us. The veggies and eggs can just hit the trash can, I suppose.

First, some basic sanity hammers. 

• Pull a potato from the ground, an egg from the nest, and immediately place them in boiling water, and after a sufficient amount of time, this narrative holds. One gets soft, one gets hardened; check, check.
• Pull coffee beans from a bush and put them in boiling water, and it very much does not hold.
  
  Reality and logic must be suspended to make the coffee piece work -- as the coffee endured at least a couple different preparatory forces to convert them from beans on the plant to grounds that can be worked upon by the water. Let's pop those bits back in, and now the story isn't so instructive. 
  
  Those missing parts of the supply chain story are desperately necessary. The beans had already met heat once before, by roasting, and then those same beans had to be thrashed, almost pulverized to dust, to make them permeable to the hot water at all. Youch! What previous adversity must occur before one is truly grounds (what an image) upon which adversity can work magic and not just trauma? Before traveling snafus are a balm and not a burden?

The Travel Law starts to pull apart from its seams right at the get-go for me: adversity (aka travel in this ad) is like getting lost (or experiencing fear, natch), but that is no quick fix for finding oneself or perhaps anything else ... because getting lost-n-found might actually require some other previously-installed circumstances to work out well -- like knowing the local language, or being healthy and not sick, or having some currency in the pocket. How about just good old fashioned luck?

For vacations, the best are often the least eventful, the most restful, not ones full of adversity that test our character and transformational ability and strength. Don't we have normal non-vacation life for plenty of that? How battered does one have to be by Life (pre-roasted! pre-ground!) in order to be transformed by adversity, aka "an uncertain trip someplace unknown," a trip that will put you "not in charge" and worse ... "ready to surrender"! 

This ad appears perfect for the daft, slick modern age! Because those beans aren't gonna brew themselves! But let's not talk about how the coffee actually gets receptive to hot water, let's just talk about the tasty brown water it ends up as, shall we? Ah, the magic of the modern marketplace, operative word being "magic." 

Second, there's the really sticky bit in the First Law of Travel about "transformation coming when one is not in charge." So lyrical and poetic! Yet so empirically false in any consistent sense. Almost the entirety of our lives is conducted when we are very much not in charge -- drudgery-filled, with illness and debt and disappointments; there is precious little of which the human animal is truly in charge.

We have some semblance of control over health (e.g., diet, fitness) but not genetics, over attitude but not environments. Ponder examples of amazing transformational achievements, from massive weight loss (human in charge) to career changes (human in charge) to athletic excellence (human in charge). Transformation occurs more often when one is both in charge and motivated to be in charge. No fate but what we make, n'est pas? Travel accidents not withstanding.

And the final "I seriously doubt the veracity" point: you’re only as strong as your readiness to surrender. Pardon me while I cough "bullshit" in my lightly-closed fist.

At first, this was the only compelling part of the narrative for me, because it's fairly true from a Buddhist "radical acceptance" point of view, a la the proverbial tree that bends but does not break. But without a definition of terms -- as in, what exactly is meant by the words "strength" and "surrender" -- it's again observably false that surrendering while traveling is some indication of strength.

-    Losing one's luggage and sanguinely surrendering to buying more clothing is certainly evidence of a character trait (and maybe the means to front the cost until the airline reimburses) but is that a transformational travel event?

-    Does the failure of a car's GPS on a solo-female trip in remote parts of Greece, when one doesn't read Greek or have English maps, present a transformational opportunity? Perhaps, but it took years for me to process that harrowing experience, and all it did in the moment was curtail my countryside exploration. And it made me a more paranoid traveler, which was not what most would term an improvement.

-    Does missing the last bus out of Sienna back to Florence provide surrender-worthy events? Maybe once we started freezing in the wee hours of the night and the metal park benches were too cold, so we tried door handles of cars and huddled on church stoops and eventually laid down under alfresco tables on a closed restaurant's patio. I was transformed into a potentially hypothermic trespasser, desperate to lay down and be warm. One star out of 10, do not recommend, would not do again. 

-    Does a nation-wide, week-long blackout on the first night of my Puero Rican vacation create transformational and surrender-strength-building events? Nope. It caused businesses to close and cancel excursions, traffic-lights-out government shutdowns. We paid $4000 to sleep in sweaty darkness, eat in dim heat, slick without break for a week, and eventually went without showers or water of any kind once the AirB&B's building generator failed on Day 3. After we returned home it seemed to take two weeks to recover from the lost sleep and borderline dehydration.

As of this last travel fiasco, I'm not ready to travel again for quite a while. 

So maybe I'm an egg not coffee. 

Increasingly, science has proven out some parts of the hot water/adversity narratives: stress (in moderation) can be beneficial. Maybe it's sufficient to agree: when the plane is delayed, one does better to just accept it and not rage against the machine. Is this transformational?

It is quaint, this advertisement meant to entice you to travel so you can Find and Transform Yourself, and pay AirB&B whilst you do it, but make no mistake: you will need to be roasted and ground first. You must afford the trip, have made accommodation reservations (unless you like sleeping on benches or sidewalks) including those too-often-extra-hidden AirB&B fees, and have funds to at least be able to purchase fresh water ... because when the power goes out -- the faucets will not work, and if they do, it damned sure will not be warm. Please note: a person can survive without water for about three days. 

Herein endeth the real Travel Law lesson.

Image Source: https://printawallpaper.com/shop/global-travel/ 

AirB&B's First Law of Travel Commercial

(post 1 in a series)

Before the latest Dr. Strange movie, an AirB&B commercial ran: "The First Law of Travel." 

Have you seen it? If it was clever enough to prompt me to write, you can view it here: AirB&B Commercial First Law of Travel 

The dialogue from the ad: 

At home, it’s dangerously easy to assume we are on top of things. Out in the world, you are reminded every moment that you’re not, and you can’t get to the bottom of things either.

The secret point of travel is to take a plunge, to venture into uncertainty, ambiguity, even fear. And it’s then, when you’re lost or uneasy or carried out of yourself, that you find out who you are.

And the one thing that I have learnt, is that transformation comes when I’m not in charge. And we're reminded of the first law of travel and therefore of life: you’re only as strong as your readiness to surrender.

I used to be an avid traveler. But not anymore. 

There are many reasons for that change, but the posit in this advertisement was worth examination. Is one only as strong as one's readiness to surrender? It sounded so very Buddhist ... a recent Curiosity Object for me (sometimes CO's become Current Obsessions). 

And what about transformation only happening when one is not in charge? 

Advertisements are almost universally garbage, but this one provoked thought, and I'm still thinking. Come think with me and leave a comment with those thoughts. 

--- NOTE! This post is not an endorsement for nor recommendation of AirB&B. 

Image Source: "Cangrejo Arriba Blackout" - evedestiny

 

At a Winery in Trump Country

My first traveling visit of the COVID Pandemic occurred this past month (May 2021).

It was a big damned deal, especially because I had a violent cough from newly-discovered South Texas mold allergies. Mold counts in the air had swelled after an epic amount of rain fell over the spring. When I got on the plane to fly to Atlanta, I had one of my coughing fits that required an inhaler to quell. And I felt like Patient Zero or Typhoid Mary whilst hacking and choking on that plane, with all those leery people staring at me. So that was (not) fun. 

Several days into the visit -- to see a friend I'd known since we lived and worked in Little Rock, Arkansas, together, and who now lived in Decatur, an Atlanta suburb -- we headed north of town to visit a winery. (Who knew Georgia had wineries? Not this adopted Texan.)

Speaking of Texas, any time it came up in conversation, my friend was not amused. She carries what I would call a surprisingly common, virulent state-wide revulsion by Arkansans for Texas, a kind of viral infection of hatred for Texas. I was never sure how this infection got acquired. She's not the only one of my friends who has it; I myself had it most of my life, but after a year or so of living in Texas, that revulsive mindset was eradicated. Now, I embrace my new, big-old-braggadocio home state. My friend took on a bodily tension and a weird smirk any time Texas came up. I didn’t poke at that much; I could enjoy Texas without her condemnation and judgment. But she most seemed to resent the sense of pride most Texans have for their state. Well, at least they can point to real things that are Texan and known for being Texan. Their bragging rights need no introduction, do they? If they do, here are some: Texas Primer on the Texas Brag

When we got to the Feather's Edge winery, we sat down with a bottle of rosé and some cheese and cherries, and listened to some passable local country musicians. The wine was good, and the label was charming. 

But the location ... not-so-much. 

I've written previously about “outside the perimeter” around Atlanta (ITP and OTP Atlanta Style), and this winery was well outside it, so we saw plenty of Trump 2020 signs still up, which irritated me and stirred a sense of despair if I thought about it at all. There were also plenty of “my god this and that” signs, too.

It made me #grateful to live in a CATHOLIC city in Texas, not an evangelical one ... because non-evangelical religions don't need to preen and posture and point as much as the Americana ones do. In those random Trumpian displays and reminders of all the judgy types lurking in the surrounding countryside (and with glimmers of the coming disclosures of Trump's election racketeering), I was deeply and honestly glad to be from elsewhere, where the wackadoodlery was a little less vocal and a little less sure of themselves.

It reminded me that mature minds are much better at enduring uncertainty than less mature ones.

My favorite kind of knowledge is the provisional kind. 

 

ITP and OTP #Atlanta

In Portland, Oregon, it's called "the Bubble," a reference to "what lies beyond" the city and its culture, vibe, and community. After recently visiting Atlanta, Georgia, I learned that city also has an insider reference to environs that are "in group" and "out group." I wondered what other cities have this open secret about areas claimed by the city and those disavowed. 

In Atlanta, the moniker for in/out is called "the Perimeter." Anything that is "ITP" is Inside the Perimeter and deemed safe and proudly different from what's around it. "OTP" it Outside the Perimeter, and there's a local comedian who says "OTP is Georgia, y'all," and it's like a tap-the-nose moment for Atlantans. Perhaps a political image to short cut that would be to say what is ITP is blue and what is OTP is red; the Perimeter is defined by I-285, which forms a ring around the city.

Source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/atlanta_n_5008299 

The ITP/OTP distinction reminded me of living in Portland, OR, and how there was definitely a bubble around the city, closely aligned to I-205 on the east side, down south to the Clackamas County line, and over to include parts of the next county to the west: Washington County's Beaverton and Hillsboro and south to the wineries of Newberg. (Portland's bubble was a lot more amorphous than Atlanta's perimeter.) 

I would love to know more cities' insider references to itself and its enclaves. I suspect that most of Texas' cities have such perspectives, but it's hard to find them online. San Antonio's mostly aligns with its county (Bexar County, pronounced in the modern age as "Bear," but longer ago, the Tejano pronunciation was likely, "BA-har," in keeping with the silent Spanish "X" in the center). 

I sheepishly admit to being amused and relieved at such burgs and bastions and the differences inherent in the "city state of mind/reality" and those of the farther flung country/rural sensibilities. But mostly it bums me out, because it seems a shame to me that these distinctions of place are made. It seems this Us vs. Them is a deep a part of what is rusting the American culture from the inside: our quickness to drive In-Group and Out-Group biases. Whether we cloak them in city or state pride, or school club vs. school club, or sports team vs. sports team, it seems at its core to be inherently about who is In and who is Out. 

And this seems unworthy of freedom's flame to spend a lot of time supporting even tendrils of this ancient bias and its tribalistic roots. My flavor of patriotism doesn't lean that way, but I suspect I'm an oddball in this. 

(See this article for a bit more discussion on In Group bias: https://exploringyourmind.com/in-group-bias-what-about/.)

~~~

“Patriotism is a gateway drug to fascism. Tribalism is the gateway to racism.”
~ Oliver Markus Malloy, Inside The Mind of an Introvert

Why limit happy to an hour?

(Source: https://www.ziggosparty.com/)

The COVID pandemic and resulting quarantining and working at home has given many of us a revelation in work/life balance. It also stole friend-time (or coworker time) and all the socialization that goes with that. A good friend of mine lives with her sister; they have a lovely, comfortable house in Decatur, Georgia, and they instituted a wonderful routine that I have adopted myself: the daily Home Happy Hour. It provides a welcome transition from work time to home time, and it allows a push of dinner to a later time as well, giving more productive time while the sun is still up -- and I'm still detoxing from the work day (e.g., need to find ways to expunge work stress and distractions). 

It can be a spread or a small affair (based on my friend's feedback, more than two cheese is a holiday offering, but going full-bore with fun cheese and accoutrements is part of the fun). Here's a recent experience:

FIVE cheese, a variety of crackers and bread, some fresh cherries, real honeycomb dripping with honey, and some delicious quince jelly from Lebanon. Paired with a few glasses of wine, it was stupendous and fun and a wonderful hour or two between work and the evening, and it was enjoyed outside in the breeze, with conversation and laughter. 

We gave it two thumbs up, and I would recommend everyone give Home Happy Hour a try. It doesn't have to be every day, but if I am doing things right, I'm doing it more days than not. Why don't you join us and break up your day with a Home Happy Hour for you and yours. It's ... happy. 

~~~

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
~ J.R.R. Tolkien

when last we spoke

Source: https://tinybuddha.com/blog/how-to-cope-with-a-toxic-family-relationship/ 

I occasionally dabble in my family tree. 

This activity darkly amuses me, as I live largely free of apron strings. I have long found it too vexing for me to suffer proximity to most of the living branches of my tree. I have almost nothing in common with most of my relatives, and certainly I am not close with most. This is all just a polite way of saying I generally cannot stand a huge swath of my blood relatives, from both sides of my family creek, paternal and maternal. Yet I find the actual history parts -- who was born where, who died when, tidbits from newspapers and wedding or birth announcements -- to be a pleasing kind of puzzle, combining actual history with personal spurs from my lineage. 

In trolling amongst unknown branches, tied to the many women whom my paternal grandfather married and had offspring, I sometimes run into someone still alive but with whom the family "fell out" or lost touch. (If ghosting one's relatives was an Olympic sport, I come from a long line of champions.) There are so many relatives I have not seen or spoken to in three or more decades. And these are first cousins, mind you, the children of my parents' siblings! No "long-lost" here, except in terms of "lost contact." And even then it is misleading to say, "lost," as if one of my parents dropped the line of communication and didn't realize it. No, these are mutually-held hurt feelings and bitter anger driving sections of my family into Mere Strangers Now. 

I recently talked to a first cousin I had not spoken to since before 1987. Talking to "Beverly" (name change) was surreal, for so many reasons, not the least of which was that I had not heard her voice in more than 35 years:

• I could not remember the last time I had seen or talked to her; it had to have been the mid-1980s. At three years older than me, she and I were both in the throes of burgeoning adulthood, and our lives were full enough with all the trivial and interstellar things that bedevil 19 and 23 year olds. Certainly none of it had to do with my mother being locked up in a psyche ward after she tried to kill herself multiple times, post-bombshell from my father about a divorce and the other woman being someone who was ALSO in our family. Wrap a head around that one! It was Arkansas, so the joke goes ... everyone is related to each other. 

• My mother had been checked into the "funny farm" in a west Little Rock hospital. It was early 1987. I was 19 at the time -- I did not turn 20 until July of that year -- and the last person in Bev's family that I spoke to was her mother, Aunt Sylvia. Sylvia had come up to the hospital to do whatever it was she planned to do. (Sylvia was a living, breathing, walking Battle Ax, a tense, rigid woman with a bible shoved so far up her backside I used to believe she rarely ate because she knew she could not get anything past that well-sunk book up her butt.) Sylvia was my father's older sister, an in-the-flesh "christian warrior woman" if ever there was one. As I recall in my memory, Aunt Sylvia arrived at the hospital carrying a bible and her usual air of sanctimony. She had come up to “console” us, presumably, on the heels of my mother attempting suicide. Which attempt was this: the time with the gun out at my father’s shop? The pill overdose? The garden hose snaked into the car's tail pipe in the garage? And where WAS my delinquent, misbehaving father then, as I and my brother sat stunned and dispirited in the hospital waiting area? In my mind's eye, I only remember seeing Sylvia striding in, 10-feet-tall and bulletproof in the armor of her country-fried-faith. Thankfully, I no longer remember what she said to me, but it did not sit well because I DO recall what I said to her -- that she could take her narrow bible-thumping ass elsewhere as I didn’t want to hear anything from her. And she left. And I never saw or spoke to her again. Aunt Sylvia died in 2018, so she's dead and buried now, and I certainly did not mention any of that to Beverly. Sylvia's legacy to me was the irony that such a holy-rolling "turn the other cheek" type would allow a comment made by her only niece, whilst under the gallows of her mother’s attempted suicide, to permanently usurp any contact with me, that she never got past that or offered forgiveness ... ? For me, that says all I need say about my experience of Aunt Sylvia's faith, piety and judgement, n’est pas?

• It was mostly pleasant to “catchup” with Beverly. At three years older than me -- making us closer in age to each other than I am to my husband -- it was surprising that she spoke with a vague hint of “older than me” in her tone. Uncharitably, I would call it “condescension,” but perhaps it was merely slightly patronizing. In her memory, I was and am still the adorable child with the infectious giggle that she recalled from her own childhood. Ah. But I am no longer that child, not in any shape, form, or fashion. She definitely spoke down to me in some odd way, not maliciously, just as “an older and wiser person would to a younger person.” Some patterns remain stuck for some of us. 

• In discussing parents, hers and mine, Beverly offered that when “someone ‘truly’ walks (or did she say "parents" as a verb?) with Jesus, that person raises children who know that their parents have their best interests at heart." I graciously accepted her broad, blind, and gauche pronouncement, deftly responding that I was happy that this was her experience and that she had this frame. She picked up the verbal side-step and asked me point-blank if I still believed in god. I told her no, I am “a non-theist who leans heavily toward buddhism,” to which she commented that such “could hardly be farther from christianity,” and I politely agreed. (By design, cherie, by design.)

• Beverly insinuated that her parents had raised her via Jesus, offering "she always knew that her parents loved her, that no matter what she did they would have helped her and supported her," even throwing down the chestnut of “had she been pregnant, she could have told them and they would have worked something out.” I couldn’t resist the irony, given my own experiential evidence of exactly this; I was raised in a house so authoritarian in nature I truly believed my parents would at worst kill me or best disown me, after I became pregnant before graduating high shool. So I volunteered that very thing HAD happened to me, and that at 17 I just had an abortion rather than risk being excommunicated or "killed" or disowned or whatever my virulently religious parents would have done. I also offered the amusing fact that my anti-abortion father actually agreed many decades later that I had made the right choice to abort said fetus, and that he was grateful not to have a grandchild fathered by the person I had been with at the time. 

• After saying what she had about Jesus being the secret sauce of great parenting, she failed to explain the gaping hole in her own family, after recounting a decades-long silence and avoidance between her father and her brother (her brother had “divorced them,” she said). Are we to infer then that Jesus is only effective on wounds inflicted prior to the age of consent or adulthood? NOR did she seem to glimpse her own naïveté when she mentioned she was about to let her 19-year-old niece live with her, because her sister "had had enough" with the girl. I guess Jesus is no good for that claptrap either? (Ah, the cherry-picking glory that is these rarefied Judeo-Christian religionists! Such myopia! Such self-blindness, such happy occupancy of crystalline houses and favored hobbies of stone-throwing!)

Oh it was (dare I say) "fine" to have spoken with my long-"lost" cousin. She seems to have grown into a sweet and relatively pleasant woman, with three daughters whom I have never met and with whom -- statistically for this family, miraculously, natch -- she still speaks and visits.

But there is a feeling one gets afterward, after narrowly skirting past something malodorous and singeing. After I closed the call with her, I felt this feeling, born first like a whiff of mildew and smoke on the breeze, followed by a weird internal vertigo, as if I had a little blindly walked too-close to a tar pit or the edge of vast chasm and barely avoided falling to my doom. I do not know what kind of life my cousin has led, and I do not feel particularly called to know. All of her brand of believerism -- so prevalent and overwhelming in her life -- is gone from me now, purged like a virus from my blood and synapses, and like the gene for motherhood, I do not have it and am glad of it.

"There but for the grace of my own hard-won good sense go I."

I AM #Vaxed (not #vaxxed, which is a psuedoscience attack on the scientific efficacy of vaccinations)

I got my first of two corona virus shots yesterday. I originally meant to get it on February 17th, but Mother Nature and two back-to-back winter storms (gee, thanks, Shirley and Uri) planned otherwise. It was the Pfizer dose, and I'll have to go back for the booster in a couple of weeks. I was part of the 1B Phase due to asthma, with which I am lucky to struggle very little most years!

Everyone's reaction to both the first and second shot is different, so I'm sharing mine to add to the data of experience and outcomes. 

I did not feel the shot at all, not even a little! About an hour afterward, I had some warmth at the injection site, but very minimal (far less than I had from the shingles vaccine I got back in January). I had no soreness and no swelling, either. Today, it feels vaguely bruised, but only when I mash down on it with some pressure. 

Last night I felt chilled, a bit run down, like maybe I had a cold coming on or my immune system had dipped. My nose felt hot and dry, and my eyes were a bit scratchy. I had a slight headache, and as the night wore on, I definitely felt more chilled than usual (I live in south/central Texas, and it was in the upper 60s after sunset). I might have run a degree of fever, but it was so un-notable that I did not even bother to check for fever. 

So it's possible to have the first shot and have very little reaction! I presume this might mean my immune system will take a much harder knock upon the second shot in a couple of weeks, but the painless experience of the first one creates far less anxiety for me than I had marching into the bowels of University Hospital yesterday afternoon. 

I got vaccinated for #COVID because I get the flu vax each year (having had influenza in 2012 and never been so sick in my life, I never want it that bad again ... and that's what vaccinations are meant to provide -- a buffered illness or even none at all). The facts of germ theory are pretty clear about how disease spreads, and the efficacy of countless vaccines convinces me of the benefits of such preventative efforts. So for me, for my community, I got the #vax. I hope everyone does. 

#SATX #covid 

... the Undiscover'd Country

What lies beyond burnout?

For a long time, as I existed well beyond the entry borders of burnout, I imagined it as Shakespeare describes in Hamlet, a place "from whose bourn No traveller returns"? In Hamlet, the undiscovered country was death; "bourn" was a journey, a life. For a decade and a half now, I definitely described my beyond-burned-out state of mind as like a death, a slow, slogging slide toward darkness. I searched the interwebs for data on long-term burnout effects, but that topic remained its own kind of "undiscovered country," for in guidance, there was none. Unless I was a doctor or a working mother (and I was neither), there was basically nothing to steer me back to normalcy. Meanwhile, career demands continued to grow, acquiring a series of houses and "assets of success" made their own monetary demands, and the endless grinding cycle became a circular loop I never thought to try to exit. I just researched coping mechanisms, or a means to return back to from where I had come. All hail the gods of capitalism, career, and presumptive character flaws, that unique form of American worship!

My own burnout journey began in the late 1990's, although I did not realize it then and would not have agreed to the diagnosis at the time. I was in my 30's, a time in a life when expectations were to build and prosper, not falter and fumble, to lose focus and resolve. But in hindsight it is clear that working six-day and then seven-day weeks over several years did extreme damage to my reserves against fatigue and stress. I experienced my first searing insomnia in those years, struggling and muddling through various life upheavals as well, until the 2000's stretched toward 2010, sacrificing physical health and mental health to what I believed to be "temporary demands," but the demands and stressors just kept coming and growing, like a metastasizing tumor eating my life. I never reached a "rest on my laurels/take a breath" plateau; it was always more more more, better, faster, and only sissies and failures paused. I could keep going, so I kept going. What else was there to do?

The top three burnout symptoms (these are widely cited across multiple well-reputed internet information sites like WebMD, Psychology Today, and MayoClinic): 

1. Exhaustion
2. Cynicism (less identification with a job)
3. Feelings of reduced professional ability

I blazed trails through these three, ad nauseum, and intractable depression set in 2015. No antidepressant or other drug could touched it, and I tried so many: from alcohol to four different antidepressants to psilocybin to many, many flavors of cannabis.

In hindsight, I see burnout clearly in the DNA of my career change efforts, which I only began actively attempting in 2008 and 2009, redirecting a scrim of my dwindling energy toward some kind of last-ditch dive to resurrect myself. My career change plans focused mostly on trying to leverage what had gone before without staring over completely. I was focused on the least effective changes, trying to escape the burnout tumor, but not really the burnout itself. This only further trapped me in the tumor's gravity well. A famous quote (that has been attributed to Einstein, among other brilliant minds) embodies that chapter of my life well: "The definition of insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting a different result." Perhaps not so surprising that I felt increasingly insane. Burnout was now a permanent part of the persistent landscape; it seemed I could not escape it.

My life remained largely the same, no matter what geography I occupied or job adjustment I pursued: I worked too much, tried too hard, and eventually I set up residence in the very deep ditch into which I had fallen. And then I stopped even trying to drag myself out of that chasm. In October 2019, I wrote my first suicide note. 

Image source: https://i.insider.com/52d81fc66da811191d3574b6?width=750

That was the nadir or my life. I could not say what stalled me from just plodding along toward a conclusion of that suicidal ideation. Certainly my modus operandi had consistently been to keep putting one foot in front of the other; I'd have bet money that I would give up and finally shuffle off the mortal coil ... anything to just be done with the unremitting grind of it all.

And yet: a return to psychotherapy played some role in halting that journey to literal death, as did finally locating an antidepressant that was wholly beneficial and not merely a complicating tradeoff of deadened body and dazed brain. (To anyone struggling to find an assist in medication, I recommend Trintellix! It, and my therapist, surely saved my life. Cognitive Behavior Therapy -- CBT -- is outstanding for rapidly arresting a downward spiral. Looking for help in that specific approach/modality was key to inserting a speed brake on my descent. Please seek help if suicide becomes a regular thought topic!)

As 2020 began, the coronavirus spawned unprecedented isolation and anxiety and the planet's inherent suspicions and distrust rose to boiling points in dozens of modernized countries. Two surprising silver linings peeped through the leaden dread of COVID: I went to remote work and immediately halted all the grind of going to an office I loathed, and the internet sprang green with an increasing awareness and fresh discussion of burnout, across all industries not just healthcare and care-based fields like childcare and eldercare. Long overdue, concern about this insidious syndrome finally bubbled into the mainstream. Several prominent authors began to suggest that burnout is inextricable from the unrelenting pace of modern life, resulting in depression, which upended the correlative nature of depression -- supposedly depression preceded and fed burnout, but now it is no longer clear which comes first, and the pummeling we all take from information overload and exponential demands on our time and focus helps no one, least of all ourselves. It seems a damning sort of realization to acknowledge the existence of and wide prevalence of burnout in America, and that perhaps that might factor into the escalated use of antidepressants and much of the detachment and depression that is now a pandemic of its own. 

I still reside in Burnout, which I have come to think of as an actual location in space and time, a place that I arrived, and that I can depart. One does not simply move out of Burnout, but nor is a death nor an inevitable path to death for me ... or it does not have to be. I now see Burnout out as part of my journey, something I can and will move through and not the final destination that trapped me and will end me. I am merely passing through it -- finally. It was a detour, without question, and not one I would willingly re-experience, but it has served me with some excruciating and existential lessons. Burnout has informed and altered me, and it will continue to form me -- now -- toward overt self-care and self-prioritization.

I am exiting something, coming out on another side I would never have found had I not wandered in that long desert wilderness of my psyche, poisoned nearly to death by my Puritanical upbringing that valued career achievement above all, a toxic combo with my innate conscientiousness. I was my output, I was my performance. NO. Those are merely outcomes, but not MY outcome, not ME. What lies beyond this experience, what lies beyond Burnout ... I now see that is almost wholly up to me. My "undiscovered country" -- flavored via Burnout -- is a rediscovery of who I am now, after the Burn. I am altered from the person who entered Burnout, and now, as with adult-onset allergies, I no longer experience life the same way. Maybe I finally do believe in some kind of "afterlife," but it's one after burnout, the metaphorical death that feels -- whilst trapped in the mired tarpits of depression and aggravation -- a lot like death but is not literal death. 

In hindsight, I would have been better served to just reboot my work completely; a better answer might have been to go back to school for Something Completely Different, instead of paralleling work I had already done and found toxic. But it's not too late! In the middle of my life, I am much better informed now on the boundaries of what I desire, what I am willing to sacrifice. I have put plans in motion to give myself that long-awaited rest period, to take a year or two off, a gift to myself of a kind of unpaid sabbatical -- to heal, to learn, to recharge. Burnout now feels like less like a funeral pyre and more like the altar of a phoenix. And that phoenix is me; I will find myself in a country that I discovered when I left Burnout. 

Source: https://fanart.tv/movie/9267/and-now-for-something-completely-different/