Being Em
“Every night, as I lay in bed, I think about you and this past week. It was great!”
Happiness is comprised of it-was-great moments. When I experience one of these moments I feel a simultaneous urge to wag and purr, or otherwise express the heart felt emotion that is bottled inside of me. There is no need to analyze or try to label the moment in any way, other than to say “It was great!” I do not know if there is anything more that we can ask for from life other than to be open to experiencing such moments. So often we think we know how things will evolve or try to control the previously arranged encounter before it happens. I think the it-was-great moments only occur when we are able to jump and free fall.
Being in Ithaca where I have been using my bicycle for transportation has reminded me of many happy memories that Ben and I created while riding our bicycles in Germany between the summers of 1994 and 1995. It makes me smile to think about our shadows dancing on the Karlsruhe castle walls as we sped through the grounds after dark, the hours we spent wandering up and down the Neckar River that runs through the center of Heidelberg on Ben’s grandmother’s 50-year old bicycles, and the multi-day bike trips we took through the Black Forest and along the Romantische Strasse (Romantic Road). It feels good to be in a space where the happy memories outweigh the sad ones.
The lessons that I have learned this summer have come fast and furious and have been profound. If were to attach a quality to them it would be bittersweet. If I were to ascribe a primary subject, it would be love. Although romantic love has not been the main source of the love I have experienced, I believe it will be the area in which I experience the most growth in the months and years to come. Having someone want to be with me enough to dare to act on her feelings has reminded me of the essence of romantic love. It is so pure – pure, untainted, and often elusive. I seek a life partner with whom I can hold hands and jump.
Last week I spoke with a boyfriend from high school, the first person I ever kissed, when he called to express his condolences for "my loss." It had been seven years since we last spoke. He is now a major in the Air Force with responsibility for controlling nuclear weapons. For at least a half an hour he talked about himself, his wife, his daughter, his work, and random people from high school I never really knew and barely remember. About me he wanted to know what kind of car I drive and where I lived in Nepal. When I mentioned I had been living in a rural area where I was exposed to a civil insurgency between the Maoist rebels and Nepali government, he responded by saying, "That must have been so cool!"
When he remarked how different our lives have become, I asked whether he wanted me to share how different they really are. I revealed that I meditate, am becoming a Buddhist, have a gluten intolerance, am a marathon runner (although he is out of shape now, we used to run together, so this wasn't too much of a stretch), and am gay. It would have been interesting to have had a video connection to see what I perceived to be his jaw dropping in response to my last statement. His first response was to say my news doesn't change anything. He then proceeded to paraphrase the Catholic position on homosexuality. Afterwards, he wondered how he could possibly face his liberal brother with whom he had had a fight about gay marriage the previous month. How could he confess that he had dated a woman who is now gay? Of course, everything was about him and how his friends and family were going to perceive him given this new information. I am not sure why he felt a need to share my news with everyone he knows. How could he possibly sleep that night? He was away at a conference and worried about waking his daughter if he called his wife to help him process the conversation. What a relief it was for him when she buzzed his other line.
We hung up as if we were in regular contact and would be talking again soon. I felt devoid of emotion. Although I have experienced an array of reactions when I have 'come out' to family and friends, I believe this was one of the most extreme.
"I can't get enough Emily today!"
I can be pretty thick when it comes to relationships. Sometimes people have to bonk me over the head to let me know they are interested in me. Me? You mean I don't have to spend years jumping through hoops and overcoming obstacles to 'earn' my time with a potential love interest? You mean another woman can actually take steps to be with me because she wants to be with me and not because she thinks I have something to offer her? It is an amazing concept, the effects of which have been washing over my body for the past few days.
If life on the road has taught me anything, it is to be open to opportunities when they present themselves. I didn't see this coming, but in hindsight all the signs were there. It has been brewing for a while now. Recent events in both our lives pushed it to a head. It feels absolutely wonderful to be valued for the person that I am. I think we are both open to seeing what happens. As I have discovered with some of my past relationships, this one can't be boxed. It seems to be a heart connection that we are finally acknowledging.
Why am I writing about this? There is a part of me that wants to convince myself that it is real. There is another part of me that wants to record important life events for my memory. Sometimes I worry that I will forget my stories -- my link between the past, present, and future-- if I don't record them.
Tonight's welcome-to-Ithaca activity was flying up and down the grocery store isles on the back of a shopping cart. I had the most amazingly aligned cart in a relatively empty store with aisles long enough to get a running start before balancing myself with my arms on the bar at the back. With practice I figured out how to steer by swinging my legs to one side and holding them before moving them back to center. Being the oldest child I always had to be so responsible growing up. It is only since I turned 30 that I have felt totally free. I giggled at the idea of a local newspaper headline: "Tops grocery store expels 34-year old woman for reckless shopping cart behavior."
I have a history with shopping carts that dates to the spring of 1991 when I was one of the instigators of The Great Shopping Cart Roundup Scheme. During the 1990-1991 school year I lived in Coventry, England on a coed floor in one of the University of Warwick's student residences. Although my good friend Ian and I were not the oldest students living on the floor we assumed leadership from the beginning and functioned as king and queen of the floor. Aside from my neighbors who were totally captivated by each other's company and rarely left their dorm room, the other students on the floor were friendly individualists like ourselves. One Saturday evening about 10 PM as we were winding down with a cup of tea in the common room, we came up with the wonderful idea of rounding up all the shopping carts on campus and taking them back to the two local grocery stores about a mile from campus. I believe the initial idea was Ian's however the rest of us embraced it wholeheartedly. I remember being one of the motivating forces behind the scheme. In order to release a shopping cart, or trolley as they are called in England, from the linked chain of carts, money had to be inserted into a flat coin collector. Pound signs danced in our heads as we gathered all the carts on campus and then walked them the mile to the grocery stores. We calculated that each of the five of us would earn at least 4 or 5 pounds (quid) for two hours of labor. Imagine our disappointment when we revealed the creative techniques that other students had employed to secure a free cart. That night we collectively earned 1.5 quid and a heap of cardboard circles, paper clips, and other bits of trash. The last laugh was definitely on us. Ian and I still laugh when we talk about the escapade. It is a fond memory.
On Saturday I drove to New York with a large, full sunflower on my dashboard. As I discovered driving a car full of colored balloons, I had trouble focusing on my worries. The sunflower kept catching my attention and provoking a smile. As I drove north on I-95, I smiled, and smiled, and smiled. The experience reminded me of my first return from Nepal when I drove around Baltimore City in a borrowed car and kept yelling 'WAHOO' because it felt so good to be home. I believe it is impossible to frown when yelling 'WAHOO'. Each time the word escaped from my mouth, usually as I was cresting a hill, I smiled and giggled. The simple joys of life sure can be the most profound.
I have re-entered the world of the living. My attention had been so focused on Dad that I did not appreciate how completely I had removed myself from life until two weeks ago when I had an opportunity to spend some time with a friend, her 14-year old daughter, and her daughter's friend. On an excursion to a local video store, the girls left the house wearing their pajama bottoms perched so low that their stripped, soft-cotton under shorts were almost fully revealed. Their attention to detail and desire to be seen was such a contrast to Dad's behavior in the final weeks of his life of pulling his hospital gown and sheets over his head to hide. I suppose the beauty of life is the simple fact that it never stops. The lessons that I learned this summer while helping Dad die will remain with me as I pour the energy that I gave Dad into caring for myself and my other family members. It is time for me to invite life back into my depleted, fatigued, and under nourished body.
Thursday came and went. I am still trying to make sense of and work through some of the deep feelings that it evoked. I passed my defense and will earn my degree once I submit my final edits. Theoretically, the day was a success. However, there was a quality to it that marked it as being one of the most disappointing days of my career. In the past, doctoral students have spoken about their defense as being a defining moment, an opportunity to talk at a collegial level about their work. I suppose I was expecting acknowledgement of my hard work. What I found was a difference in opinion between the three disciplines represented and a list of revisions that must be made before I can claim the degree. I expected edits. I did not expect the tone that they were delivered. I felt as if the developmental psychologists had lost perspective of the big picture. In other departments, it is possible for doctoral students to complete their dissertations in six months when they analyze data that their advisors collected. Very few students collect their own data, much less do this abroad. Even fewer use as rigorous a design as the randomized, placebo-controlled trial design I used. I had done so much to get to that defense that it seemed inappropriate to be scolded for not including classic developmental references in my introduction. On a day when I anticipated feeling joy, I left the test room feeling unappreciated and under valued.
Between 1998 and 2000 I developed a proposal and sought funding for conducting research on the effects of zinc supplementation on the cognitive development of infants living in Lima, Peru. I applied seven different times to have my project funded and received seven different rejection letters in response. Twice the same person sat on the review committee. He disagreed with my idea to use a standardized, but nonspecific developmental test. It did not matter that I wanted to use this test in conjunction with another specific test. His opinion was enough to influence my funding score. I had just received my seventh rejection letter after submitting the proposal for a large grant that would have funded me, my second advisor, and the project as a whole for several years when my present boss and third advisor approached me about working for them on a project in Nepal. I was able to take some of my ideas from my Peru proposal with me, which served to ease the frustration that I felt three years later when my second advisor stopped me in the hall one day to tell me that she had submitted 'the' grant with minimal changes to a different funding source and had received funding this time. All she needed was a student to do the work. My name and all identifying information linking me with the work I had done had been removed from the document. Free labor is often the plight of doctoral students.
Despite all the problems I have outlined in previous blog entries about my experience in Nepal, everything about the project in Nepal was a better fit for me than the one in Peru would have been. During the summer of 2002, a professor from my division traveled to Kathmandu and praised my work. At some point in the future, I would like to remind him of the meeting we had shortly after I arrived at Hopkins in 1997 when he told me under no circumstances would he consider funding me to do a project in Nepal. It was his impression as principle investigator that American students are incapable of learning Nepali. He explained that the one American student who had conducted her doctoral research in Nepal was an exception. Over the past few years I have been invited to talk about my work in several different meetings that he has conducted. He and his colleagues are primarily interested in a piece of my work that I did in collaboration with the reviewer I mentioned above. This reviewer and my third advisor had collaborated on several different projects in Zanzibar, Tanzania prior to our work in Nepal. He continues to challenge me professionally, but also has turned out to be one of my strongest supporters. We will meet in November when I travel to Peru for the first time to present the work that I did in Nepal.
Life sure is funny. I suppose it is the uncertainty, the twists and turns that one must take before attaining one's goal that make it interesting. While I fully appreciate the fact that praise is never given when we expect it, thinking through the nuisances of my doctoral journey has helped me come to terms with some of the residual feelings from Thursday. I have spent the past nine years creating my professional vision and feel that I will spend the rest of my life fine tuning it. Experience has taught me that it takes time for my perspective to be valued. I suppose from this point forward my primary challenge will be to continue fostering my self-confidence and faith in my ability as a scientific researcher, while warding off the doubt that occasionally seeps through the cracks in my mind. I recognize that feedback helps me grow. I just wonder where I am going to find the reserve of energy I will need to continue pushing myself to make my mid-September deadline. What a summer it has been.
This summer has proven to be a test of my faith in the strength of my family, the quality of my work, and the power of love. I have had to focus, act, defend my belief in the possible, and present the inner workings of my mind. None of this would have been possible had I not spent the past year grounding myself, embracing my true self, being Em. I have been tested in ways I could not have foreseen nor could have prepared for other than to be myself. I am still standing and believe I will continue to stand tall after the chaos has passed. It is empowering for me to witness how much I have grown.
On Thursday I will present my work to the Johns Hopkins community and will 'defend' my dissertation in front of five professors. I feel very nervous and not quite prepared, but excited and ready at the same time. My challenge will be to continue breathing and speak gently to myself as I confront my fear. It has been a long road. The defense marks the culmination of nine years of graduate education: two years of work toward a master's degree in public health and seven years of toil in the doctoral program in international health. I broke with tradition and inserted my voice at the end of my dissertation. Below is the editorial I wrote to address the topic of policy implications. I offer it as an illustration of my work.
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July 18, 2004, three days before Dad died
There is a dearth of literature that addresses the effect of participation in international field study on the health of resident researchers. Ethnographic researchers, such as Margaret Mead, her colleagues and predecessors, opened the door to the possibility of academics leaving their institutions to experience firsthand life in their research community. While anthropologists continue to immerse themselves in foreign cultures as a means of gaining insight into the one they left behind, scientists of all disciplines have broadened their scope and are traveling around the world to investigate research questions that have the potential of addressing significant concerns. Given the time that it takes to seek funding, research is often started in the midst of unforeseen circumstances, such as famine, flooding, or war. Exposure to extreme environments, or even seemingly ordinary ones for an extended period of time has the potential to cause morbidity, even mortality. Researchers are not immune to the environmental influences that affect their study participants. The vast majority is impacted at some level; however, there appears to be an unspoken code that encourages scientists to report only the science. What happens when the science becomes personal?
Between December 2000 and May 2003 I conducted my research in Nepal. While I was in the country, the royal family was massacred, the civil insurgency between the government and Maoists intensified, the government declared a state of emergency, Nepalis were kidnapped and executed, the Maoists destroyed much of the surrounding infrastructure by bombing telephone towers, hydroelectric plants, and vehicles on the main thru-fare, and the country experienced the heaviest rains it had seen in the previous 20 years (since I left Nepal, the violence has continued to intensify and the country has experienced heavier rains). While I was living in Sarlahi District, there was a rash of murders and/or suicides among women living in one community, children began playing ‘government and Maoists’ (similar to the cowboys and Indians game that American children play), and the effects of the civil insurgency described above were experienced at a local level.
Personally, I experienced malnutrition, parasitic infection, and the stress of not knowing whether I would need to evacuate any one of my three homes at a moment’s notice. As a result of eating the local cuisine, I contracted anemia, diarrheal illness, and was febrile for months on end. Between November 2001 and April 2004, at least one of three parasites (giardia, amoebic dysentery, or blastocyst hominis) inhabited my body. I had guns pointed at my head as our project vehicle pulled up beside military checkpoints on the road between Sarlahi District and Kathmandu, the capital or military vehicles pulled in front of my bike in traffic and I suddenly found myself facing the open end of six to ten rifles that were pointed out the back of the truck. At the beginning of one of the 13- to 16-hour roundtrip weekly excursions I took to Kathmandu in order to seek refuge from the intense isolation I felt in the project site, I witnessed the aftermath of a horrific traffic accident that continues to haunt me today. When I completed my data collection, I was fortunate to be able to return to a country that possesses as many resources as the United States, where I had access to nutritional supplements and professionals equipped to help me heal both my mind and body.
What strikes me about my sojourn in Nepal is that everything I experienced, witnessed, was in the presence of Nepalis. Together we endured nightly curfews, the inconvenience of nationwide political strikes that did not allow us to work or travel, and the ever-present fear that permeates life in a country rife with civil conflict. It has taken a year for me to achieve optimal health, be able to work effectively, and to reach a point where I no longer see imaginary guns pointed at me or experience regular panic attacks triggered by something so common as violence in a movie or road kill. I am not a weak individual. If the two years I lived in Nepal had such a profound impact on my health and general well-being, how is life amidst such stressful conditions affecting Nepalis who continue to live in their indigenous environment?
For the past year, I have worked on characterizing the nutritional status and development of Nepali children less than two years of age. I described anemia, iron-deficiency, motor delays, and the effect of supplementation with iron-folate and zinc on information processing among these children, while I worked through my own nutritional deficiencies, injuries, and change in cognitive functioning as a result of receiving nutritional supplementation. Further research on the effects of supplementation on the development of young Nepali children needs to be considered in order to clarify the association between iron-folate and zinc supplementation on the development of locomotion and cognitive processes. We know maternal depression and poverty impact child development. How is the present socio-political environment impacting the health and well being of all Nepalis? What are the implications of an entire nation experiencing despair, depression, and anxiety? Because researchers are choosing to live in and travel in and out of the communities in which they are conducting their research, they have a responsibility to raise the awareness of policy makers to the broader implications of the effect of environmental factors on the health and well-being of their research subjects. This is a task that will mostly likely cause them to reach beyond their research domain, but is also one that has the potential to have a profound impact on society as a whole.
For the past week I have been mulling over the definition of 'home'. Driving into Baltimore on Monday morning filled me with joy. Who would have guessed that the city I perceived to have an absence of greenery when I first visited in 1997 would end up feeling more like home than just about any other place I have lived? After everything that has happened this summer, I have felt comforted by my connections with friends and colleagues over the past few days and I find myself wishing I had more time in Baltimore, that I had not moved.
Many people are puzzled by my nomadic lifestyle. When I lived in Nepal, I constantly shifted from one of my three homes to the next. Often my decision was based on unforeseen political activity that required me to move from possible danger. When I returned from Nepal, I traveled up and down the east coast visiting family and friends, trying to figure out the best accommodation for weekdays versus weekends. There was a period of time that my possessions were dispersed between four places in two states and three places in a foreign country, Nepal. This summer I have confused many people who have harmlessly inquired, "How is Ithaca?" or "Haven't you moved?". With my work in Baltimore, my possessions in Ithaca, and my dad in Atlanta, I have felt the familiar sensation of life on the road, living out of a suitcase for months on end.
Tuesday evening my yoga teacher,
Linda clasped her hands over her heart and remarked that I have managed to find home inside of me. Intuitively, I have understood Linda's words for some time. Wednesday morning as I set out for my first run in a week with my favorite running tape in hand, I felt their essence in the core of my body. The voices that flooded my ears as I settled into a rhythm on an unfamiliar street in a Washington DC suburb were the same voices that I had heard in Nepal, Baltimore, and Atlanta and will be the same voices that I hear in Ithaca. The music and the familiarity of the activity of running made me feel as if I were home. I suppose this week in Baltimore has given me an opportunity to regroup and gather strength before traveling to Ithaca this weekend. As much as I want to hold on to the familiar, I am beginning to feel ready to face what lies ahead. Life awaits.
