May Day

Two years ago, the summer before I was to leave for grad school I got into a car accident. To this day I am not sure what exactly happened. I was moving steadily along the freeway in my beloved yellow buggy. (I wouldn't describe myself as particularly materialistic and I am certainly not a car person but I loved my bug just about as much as anyone could love a thing)
Within a moment the car was taken with indescribable force and I found myself spinning across three lanes of traffic, ultimately to be t-boned on my driver side door by a pickup truck in the furthest left lane going 70 mph, sending my car up onto the freeway's median. As I sat in my car atop the median covered in glass and sopping wet, I frantically searched for the source of my profuse bleeding. I was relieved to discover that while I was bleeding some, the main source of my being soaked through was due to a cooler of sodas in my backseat that had gone flying and exploded on impact! (I wasn't particularly tidy when it came to my car…) I screamed for help through my shattered windows and a man (who had previously been a paramedic) quickly approached and pulled me from the car. A slew of unexpected people stopped to offer assistance until the ambulance arrived.

While I was spinning toward what seemed a precarious fate, I reassured myself of my future. In those few seconds I had a lengthy discussion with myself insisting I was merely using one of my nine lives and I wouldn't have survived the cancer or be on the brink of attending my dream school if that moment were it. In a matter of seconds what swirled about me were reminders of my miraculous past and promises of my glowing future. This terrifying moment has always served as a significant reminder to me of how I ought to frame my fear.

The thing about the incident I have continued to marvel at is my head and neck remained completely still on impact. I didn't even sustain as much as a mild case of whiplash. Had I hit my head or had it even been jostled a bit too much, I could have sustained devastating injuries based on the prior trauma to my head from the cancer surgeries.

In recent years, every May, without fail, I have had an experience that shakes me awake. An experience that exhausts my patience and demands I remember my miraculous past and exercise exceeding faith in my future. One of the consequences of being an inordinately loud person is often life has to be equally loud in order to get your attention. I remind myself every year after the resounding checkins arrive to be more teachable, to be quiet enough to listen to the subtle lessons of everyday life and to stay alert enough in order to avoid the awakenings.

This year I hoped I had avoided my need for a May Day. After all I had shown I could be humble right? I had spent the year fruitlessly searching for full time gainful employment, I had lived with and mooched off my mother, I had bummed off rides from friends like an awkward 15 year old kid (as I was now carless from prior May Days), I had been told I was too "rubenesque" by my OBGYN during my pap smear and my eye changed colors as though it was the technicolor dream coat.

What could I possibly have to learn about humility?

A lot apparently.

Last week my May Day came. Overnight (literally) the pressure in my right eye dropped to the point of no return. It began to recede and shrink from the fight. After the crusade of a decade, five surgeries, two months radiation, and more injections than I can count, I am going to have to give up my eye. I am going to have to face the surgeon whom I battled fiercely to keep it in the first place, I am going to have to face an almost 3 month recovery from surgery, and I am going to have to face the fact that half my sight will never return. No small flicker of light will even be permitted through my new artifice of an eye. The glory of victory comes in winning but the art of victory comes in knowing when to give up the fight.

Though I am losing half my sight, I have gained double (triple, quadruple) my vision from this past decade. As all my May Days do, I have been beautifully reminded of my miraculous path to this place and reinvigorated with the promise of spring in my future. I am grateful this May marks seven years of my remission! I am grateful for all the remarkable people who have fought as hard as I have for my eye.   I am grateful life cares enough to shake me awake and remind me of things as they really are even when I have had to be compelled rather than chosen to be humble.

May Day Lessons: Choose to be humble, choose to be teachable, choose to see, choose to be receptive and aware of all the glimmers of light that come within your field of vision.

Not Buying It: Why I can't keep up with the Kardashians...

During my time in grad school, I had the opportunity to cross enroll for a course at Harvard Law School. Though the most obvious reason for my taking the course was to fulfill my lifelong dream of becoming Elle Woods, it also had the fringe benefit of bringing presenters from all over the country, who worked in various professions relating to child welfare and advocacy. One class meeting in particular continues to stir my conscience and haunt my heart. The presentation was on human trafficking. The panel included various attorneys, a woman who had started an organization providing support and refuge to victims of human trafficking, and two young girls (about 16) who had been enslaved by this obscene crime for most their adolescent lives. We listened to gutting and glistening stories of survival and analyzed the legal, social, emotional, and financial factors we believed perpetuated the crime. When the presentation concluded the class was invited to ask questions. The most obvious yet perplexing question was asked "What can we do to stop human trafficking?"

I was floored and heartbroken by the response.

"Discourage your colleagues from hiring prostitutes."

The panel went on to explain that the very thing keeping human trafficking alive and well in the United States were the high powered, suited, clientele that had likely once sat in an Ivy clad classroom similar to the one we were currently sitting in. Of all the advice or rationale that could be given, this was the single thing they unanimously believed would do the most to prevent human trafficking. It was to be verbal about our disdain for our male colleagues who alluded to any type of purchased promiscuity, and to make our feelings known about human trafficking frequently and publicly.

"Sex sells." These two words in sequence have become the most debilitating and dehumanizing sentence our world has ever seen. Making a human being a commodity is a subtle and subversive part of our purchasing power on a day to day basis. This power comes early. I remember as a young girl always including a cleavage line in my illustrations of women. I first learned this aesthetic from drawing Princess Jasmine over and over again as the Disney movie Aladdin was particularly popular at the time. As I reflected on this I realized I had never seen a Disney Princess without cleavage, have you ever seen a Disney Princess without cleavage? Did you know the Disney Princess franchise ranks as one of the highest grossing industries in the United States? The princess cleavage costumes available at the Disney store create revenue competitive with US automotive and tobacco industries!

While it is particularly scary how we socialize young women, I have become even more frightened by how we socialize young men. We teach them emotional expression makes them lesser, weaker, and easily dominated. Consequently this allows them to see other men and especially women who emote as lesser, weaker, and easily dominated. This sets them on a trajectory to begin to see women as malleable objects. Making a human being an object rationalizes violence against them.

As terrifying and problematic as our buying into the Disney franchise and socializing boys out of feeling is, I believe our cultures' purchasing power is most devastatingly spent on one thing...pornography. Countless studies have revealed the tragic impact of what many now commonly accept and are desensitized to. Grocery stores checkouts are peppered with "soft" versions of it and most media has become so sexually saturated and dysfunctional that almost all of it is "pornified" in one way or another. Living in an NC-17 world has proved to have crippling effects on women in regards to body image, eating disorders, political efficacy and safety. Additionally it has normalized in the male psyche an idea of women as objects, falsely justifying violence and misuse of them.

If we are to join in the pursuit of bringing back our girls and ending human trafficking for good, I believe we must start with evaluating our personal and collective purchasing power. We have to be willing to speak up about the ideas and industries we refuse to buy into. For me this has come with the sad recognition that I must give up my US Weekly addiction and can no longer keep up with the Kardashians. It is recognizing the need to speak boldly and clearly against pornography and any thing that demeans or diminishes human life.