Between 1996 and early 2004 I was enrolled in a doctoral program and working on it part-time while I worked. My dissertation topic was "The Reconstruction of Masculine Identity in Midlife." I didn't finish, even though most of my research was completed because I was out of work and not prepared to pay another $15,000 for my last year, maybe more, and deal with the ever increasing bureaucracy of the program. I'd already lost six months early in my research when the chair of the committee that approved research plans delayed me because she couldn't be bothered to look up or ask a fellow faculty member what the term "bricolage" meant. It felt like throwing money away at a time I could ill afford it, and I do regret not finishing.
Not that it would have been civilization altering research or anything remotely like it. But I learned a lot and have taken away that value.
Basically it is this: to a very large extent, we are who we say we are. We are our narrative of ourselves. This is neither new nor earth shattering, but it is something that we don't have much in our consciousness.
A lot of the ubiquitous self-help literature and the human potential movement says something like this but they have it off a bit. The implication they like to forward is that you can declare something you want to be and then that will somehow magically "manifest" itself in your life. Okay, so let's see. "I declare that I am the world's greatest brain surgeon!" You betcha!
You are who you say you are, but that includes the subtext. So if you say out loud that you are a courageous man of integrity and underneath know that you are a timid lying weasel, well guess what shows up. If what you declare bears no relation to how you feel and think in the quiet of your mind, it isn't going to count for much in the narrative, which will include the subtext, like it or not.
Having done my own hours in 12 step work and various human potential and self-development workshops, I have to admit to making affirmations and doing all the stuff despite a certain skepticism. And, yes, it was helpful to me to get "out of my stinking thinking." But also true was that I couldn't will myself rich or a brain surgeon.
It is useful to look at one's own narrative of self and to see what can be cleaned up about it. Some aspiration as well as honesty doesn't hurt either, but you might check out what the subtext is. It can carry a lot of weight.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Monday, December 19, 2011
Remembering
I had occasion recently to remember something about someone famous I met when I was seventeen who is gone now and that led me into thinking about the people I have known who I was more or less close to who are no longer with us, as well as the well-known ones. I'm a sucker for that part of the Oscars where they memorialize the people who have passed in the last year. I'm enough of a film buff to feel that at least some of them have been in a way part of my life. But back to those who have actually been.
First the story about the person I met at seventeen. I was working at the Boston YMCA and had been involved, despite my relative youth, in resurrecting a chapter of a young men's organization called Phalanx. I was the program Vice President. The President was a man only a few years older who was a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor. Len got the opportunity to meet with and interview Malcolm X and he invited me to come with him. So one afternoon I spent three hours in a small conference room at the Y with Malcolm X and two of his associates while Len did the interview. It was during the time that Malcolm X was still with The Nation of Islam. Those three hours were quite the education. His assassination some four years later troubled me as much as some of the others of that decade that saw so many.
On the personal side, the first death of someone not a relative that I had known personally was Charlie M. I had met him when I was hanging around a coffee house in Boston's Back Bay writing and reading poetry for a free coffee. Charlie and Vinnie were seminarians at Boston College in the middle of a serious bender that started at New Year's and was still going as Easter Sunday rolled around. The woman I hung out with during those few months (some 9 years my senior) roomed with the woman Charlie spent time with and eventually fathered two children with. About five years later we heard of their deaths in a terrible car accident.
After that came Jan W. Her husband was a classmate where I first went to college and we all attended the same church. I had left the city to move up to New Hampshire when I heard of Jan's death when their car went off of Memorial Drive into the Charles River one winter night. Her husband and the children survived. The strangest small world event of my life occurred some 17 years later here on the west coast when I met the woman who had been his second wife for a time. I used to think of Jan often. She had been one of the most even keeled and level headed people I knew.
Another person I think about who has died is someone who may have made my life as it is possible; and since I had not stayed in touch, I did not know about his passage until years afterwards. During the year I went to live with my father I was enrolled in a really good public school, one that you had to test to get into. My French teacher was quite the character. He was referred to as Papa John by some of the kids. He had one of the very first VW bug cabriolets in the city and he used to load it with kids after school and drop them off at their various homes or bus stops on his way to his night job at American Airlines. The kind of positive personal relationships he had with students would probably not be allowed today, and certainly not what he did for me.
About halfway through the school year my father got a job (after being out of work for three years) in another city. John E. approached him with an offer that I could stay with him and finish the school year. John lived with and supported his mother. The second job was so that he could afford the insurance and save the resources she would need if something happened to him. I now suspect that John was in the closet--that he was gay--though he never gave me any reason to think so at the time. Nominally I was being given room and board to take care of walking the dachshund who had caused John's mother to get a broken hip the previous year. John was at work at his night job.
John E. was in my life a lot like the character Sidney Poitier played in "To Sir with Love." The first night in his house for dinner I learned how to eat an artichoke. When I was getting ready for Junior Prom, John took me and a classmate shopping, mostly for Mary S. to find a dress, but we went for a tux rental fitting as well. The expedition was an extensive lesson in manners and public decorum. "No, Mary. Proper young ladies do not smoke on the street."
A regret is that I never stayed in touch with him, but my excuse is that the next two or three years were the toughest of my life as I left the home that had become an alcoholic disaster area and set out to make it on my own. By the time a dozen or so years later that things in my life had stabilized I had no idea how to go about locating him. There was no internet white pages then--no internet at all. A few years ago I was able to find a record about him. It was a reference to his obituary. He had died in the mid eighties. He could not have been more than 55 or 60. So when I think of him I do try to think my thanks for that half year, That full year in that school was a real gift and may well have enabled some things that happened later.
The other person that comes to mind is someone whose death I only found out about last year. One of the first more serious relationships in my life was R. and she found me last year. We've exchanged a few emails but early on she told me that she thought she had found notice of Monte C.'s death in a west coast paper. Monte was one of my bosses when I worked in the Youth Department of the Y. He was African-American, incredibly well educated, and one of the best bosses I ever worked for. My most moving memory of him was when I came in to work one Saturday and he asked me if I had been home. I had not. That spring of my senior year I had often stayed away from home for days at a time. After one memorable drunken screaming scene in the main lobby of the Y while I stood in the doorway to the Youth Department, my father pretty much ignored my absences.
Monte said come with him. Our first stop was at the city hospital where my father was being detoxed from his third intentional overdose of pills in that one year--this time because when his employer had made him join AA, his lover had departed because "Edgar, you're just not any fun anymore." In the hospital my father didn't even look at me. Then Monte had me get back in his car and we drove out to a park by the river where we just walked. He didn't ask me to talk. He didn't say anything. We just walked. I remember that as being cared for in a way that my self-preoccupied alcoholic father was absolutely incapable of.
When I remember what life was like for me then, I think that John and Monte, and there were others, are all that was between me and being institutionalized, jailed, or dead before I was twenty. They may well have been. I only hope that in some small way I have given back in my life some of what I got from them.
First the story about the person I met at seventeen. I was working at the Boston YMCA and had been involved, despite my relative youth, in resurrecting a chapter of a young men's organization called Phalanx. I was the program Vice President. The President was a man only a few years older who was a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor. Len got the opportunity to meet with and interview Malcolm X and he invited me to come with him. So one afternoon I spent three hours in a small conference room at the Y with Malcolm X and two of his associates while Len did the interview. It was during the time that Malcolm X was still with The Nation of Islam. Those three hours were quite the education. His assassination some four years later troubled me as much as some of the others of that decade that saw so many.
On the personal side, the first death of someone not a relative that I had known personally was Charlie M. I had met him when I was hanging around a coffee house in Boston's Back Bay writing and reading poetry for a free coffee. Charlie and Vinnie were seminarians at Boston College in the middle of a serious bender that started at New Year's and was still going as Easter Sunday rolled around. The woman I hung out with during those few months (some 9 years my senior) roomed with the woman Charlie spent time with and eventually fathered two children with. About five years later we heard of their deaths in a terrible car accident.
After that came Jan W. Her husband was a classmate where I first went to college and we all attended the same church. I had left the city to move up to New Hampshire when I heard of Jan's death when their car went off of Memorial Drive into the Charles River one winter night. Her husband and the children survived. The strangest small world event of my life occurred some 17 years later here on the west coast when I met the woman who had been his second wife for a time. I used to think of Jan often. She had been one of the most even keeled and level headed people I knew.
Another person I think about who has died is someone who may have made my life as it is possible; and since I had not stayed in touch, I did not know about his passage until years afterwards. During the year I went to live with my father I was enrolled in a really good public school, one that you had to test to get into. My French teacher was quite the character. He was referred to as Papa John by some of the kids. He had one of the very first VW bug cabriolets in the city and he used to load it with kids after school and drop them off at their various homes or bus stops on his way to his night job at American Airlines. The kind of positive personal relationships he had with students would probably not be allowed today, and certainly not what he did for me.
About halfway through the school year my father got a job (after being out of work for three years) in another city. John E. approached him with an offer that I could stay with him and finish the school year. John lived with and supported his mother. The second job was so that he could afford the insurance and save the resources she would need if something happened to him. I now suspect that John was in the closet--that he was gay--though he never gave me any reason to think so at the time. Nominally I was being given room and board to take care of walking the dachshund who had caused John's mother to get a broken hip the previous year. John was at work at his night job.
John E. was in my life a lot like the character Sidney Poitier played in "To Sir with Love." The first night in his house for dinner I learned how to eat an artichoke. When I was getting ready for Junior Prom, John took me and a classmate shopping, mostly for Mary S. to find a dress, but we went for a tux rental fitting as well. The expedition was an extensive lesson in manners and public decorum. "No, Mary. Proper young ladies do not smoke on the street."
A regret is that I never stayed in touch with him, but my excuse is that the next two or three years were the toughest of my life as I left the home that had become an alcoholic disaster area and set out to make it on my own. By the time a dozen or so years later that things in my life had stabilized I had no idea how to go about locating him. There was no internet white pages then--no internet at all. A few years ago I was able to find a record about him. It was a reference to his obituary. He had died in the mid eighties. He could not have been more than 55 or 60. So when I think of him I do try to think my thanks for that half year, That full year in that school was a real gift and may well have enabled some things that happened later.
The other person that comes to mind is someone whose death I only found out about last year. One of the first more serious relationships in my life was R. and she found me last year. We've exchanged a few emails but early on she told me that she thought she had found notice of Monte C.'s death in a west coast paper. Monte was one of my bosses when I worked in the Youth Department of the Y. He was African-American, incredibly well educated, and one of the best bosses I ever worked for. My most moving memory of him was when I came in to work one Saturday and he asked me if I had been home. I had not. That spring of my senior year I had often stayed away from home for days at a time. After one memorable drunken screaming scene in the main lobby of the Y while I stood in the doorway to the Youth Department, my father pretty much ignored my absences.
Monte said come with him. Our first stop was at the city hospital where my father was being detoxed from his third intentional overdose of pills in that one year--this time because when his employer had made him join AA, his lover had departed because "Edgar, you're just not any fun anymore." In the hospital my father didn't even look at me. Then Monte had me get back in his car and we drove out to a park by the river where we just walked. He didn't ask me to talk. He didn't say anything. We just walked. I remember that as being cared for in a way that my self-preoccupied alcoholic father was absolutely incapable of.
When I remember what life was like for me then, I think that John and Monte, and there were others, are all that was between me and being institutionalized, jailed, or dead before I was twenty. They may well have been. I only hope that in some small way I have given back in my life some of what I got from them.
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Inventory
I have in mind a couple of posts. Not sure what to tackle first so I think I'll let my stream of consciousness guide me.
I started this partly because of a conversation with a therapist after a blowup. He mused about whether I wasn't still experiencing the effects of transitioning from being employed to my then unemployment and potential immediate retirement. Since, I have landed some part-time work I enjoy and have gotten more comfortable with not being the major financial contributor to the household, and we seem to have adjusted the homekeeping duties to a more satisfactory balance. Since writing helps me to process things, it seemed to me that doing this blog would be useful. It has been, but obviously I have been slowing down in the last couple of months.
It's not that I am done with this current transition. I may never be, given that our society seems to treat the old as something to be thrown away or shuffled off out of sight. [Worth being angry about, that.] I think it is more that I am moving through it and have less struggle with it.
It is also a season that demands attention even though it also bring things up to remember and to inventory.
I'm fortunate. Whatever my complaints, I have to admit that I am fortunate. With someone I care about and who cares about me for the last twenty years and the foreseeable future, with whatever happened before that long gone--that's worth feeling fortunate about. My general health as well, especially when I know what some friends struggle with--two are working their ways back from brain injuries. I think what I have had to deal with is minor: chronic arthritis in my hands and feet dating from my late twenties, that I have now mostly compensated for; diverticulitis that only infrequently bothers me; not the best teeth in the world due to childhood neglect, but now well cared for and maintained; and about to get the second eye cleared of a cataract and the lens replaced giving me vision I haven't had for twenty years. The worst of it is the changes in plumbing operations since my treatment for prostate cancer--not embarrassing or debilitating, but mostly annoying. It's not a long list and it is none of it very serious.
Really, I'm looking at seventy next year and my mother died in her late forties, my father in his early fifties. Both had been ill for years before their deaths. Thanks to the encouragement of my spouse I am working out three mornings a week and while not in wonderful shape, I take no routine medications and my annual shows me within normal parameters. I have struggled with not smoking. After nearly fifty-five years I have been able to be off of the weed six months out of each of the last two years, and am taking another run at it that feels like it will stick--two months so far. My doc is encouraged and so am I.
Sometimes I think that my general good fortune at this point is something of a payback that I have earned. Whatever it is, I don't want to take it for granted.
I started this partly because of a conversation with a therapist after a blowup. He mused about whether I wasn't still experiencing the effects of transitioning from being employed to my then unemployment and potential immediate retirement. Since, I have landed some part-time work I enjoy and have gotten more comfortable with not being the major financial contributor to the household, and we seem to have adjusted the homekeeping duties to a more satisfactory balance. Since writing helps me to process things, it seemed to me that doing this blog would be useful. It has been, but obviously I have been slowing down in the last couple of months.
It's not that I am done with this current transition. I may never be, given that our society seems to treat the old as something to be thrown away or shuffled off out of sight. [Worth being angry about, that.] I think it is more that I am moving through it and have less struggle with it.
It is also a season that demands attention even though it also bring things up to remember and to inventory.
I'm fortunate. Whatever my complaints, I have to admit that I am fortunate. With someone I care about and who cares about me for the last twenty years and the foreseeable future, with whatever happened before that long gone--that's worth feeling fortunate about. My general health as well, especially when I know what some friends struggle with--two are working their ways back from brain injuries. I think what I have had to deal with is minor: chronic arthritis in my hands and feet dating from my late twenties, that I have now mostly compensated for; diverticulitis that only infrequently bothers me; not the best teeth in the world due to childhood neglect, but now well cared for and maintained; and about to get the second eye cleared of a cataract and the lens replaced giving me vision I haven't had for twenty years. The worst of it is the changes in plumbing operations since my treatment for prostate cancer--not embarrassing or debilitating, but mostly annoying. It's not a long list and it is none of it very serious.
Really, I'm looking at seventy next year and my mother died in her late forties, my father in his early fifties. Both had been ill for years before their deaths. Thanks to the encouragement of my spouse I am working out three mornings a week and while not in wonderful shape, I take no routine medications and my annual shows me within normal parameters. I have struggled with not smoking. After nearly fifty-five years I have been able to be off of the weed six months out of each of the last two years, and am taking another run at it that feels like it will stick--two months so far. My doc is encouraged and so am I.
Sometimes I think that my general good fortune at this point is something of a payback that I have earned. Whatever it is, I don't want to take it for granted.
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