Still adjusting

Snippets before I launch into what’s really on my mind…

Tom and I went to a wedding in Kansas City this past weekend. One thing is for sure—I danced so crazy and with such fervor that I woke up with a sore neck. And the other thing that’s for sure—I sneezed while driving back to St. Louis such that some nerves got pinched in my already-sore neck and I had to pull over for Tom to finish the drive home. When I said it was one of the best vacations I’ve ever had (and only 36 hours long!), he thought I was crazy. I probably am, but those two hours of dancing were a bizarre heaven.

Kerry brought over a couple of CDs yesterday. Awesome. Black Diamond Heavies and Scott H. Biram.

I got a haircut last Friday. Turns out that I’ve referred enough people that this cut was free. These salon experiences constitute an indulgence I rationalize as necessary to my graduate school survival. Right.

This Friday I’m training to start as an interviewer on another research project with older adults in St. Louis. This is what it’s all about. Seriously.

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The last week has been a funny one. Not hilarious, but confusing.

Amidst consuming worries about what data set to use for this Advanced Statistics course (trying to maximize my learning while minimizing my undertakings—I do believe it’s referred to as efficiency), I am having mini-revelations each day. These little revelations are of a sneaky variety. They arrest me. It’s true that I am a reflective individual, nearly to a flawed degree (which is why revelations, deliberations, and contemplations arrest and consume me to the same degree as do the dilemmas of a statistics project). It’s both gift and burden and failing. This is all very vague and not quite revealing of recent revelations.

So, yesterday I was off kilter all day, feeling consumed by the reemergence of this emotional part of myself that had been simmering and ignored on a back burner until I was safely back in my comfort zone. Now it’s begun to boil over. What I realize is that this part of me, this part that feels essentially “me”, was unavailable all summer in Haiti. Almost, or maybe completely, this quintessential me disappeared as protection from witnessing the extent of suffering and disorganization. Some thing, or lack thereof, kept me functioning. I developed an impenetrable emotional barrier that I never knew existed… as if I was refusing to accept the reality of it all. And now that I am back here, I’m remembering pieces of it all in a way that I didn’t experience it while I was there.

One day, in mid-August, I was on my way to do a couple interviews. I was riding through town with Pierre Michel at about 7:30 in the morning. The roads were full of typical commotion: mo-peds loaded down with dirty ice-blocks, bionic men pushing wheel-barrows full of charcoal or sugarcane or cement, hundreds of bicycles, dozens of tap-taps, women (with amazing posture) carrying laundry baskets or tables of food on their heads…. We passed the remnants of a fresh and horrible car accident. In the middle of the road was a tap-tap whose side had been ripped off by an SUV. The SUV had spun around and landed about 20 feet away—its windows were smashed in and there was blood all over the driver’s headrest. There was no sign of passengers or victims other than these two bloodied vehicles stranded in the middle of a road—a road that continued to carry the city’s hustle and bustle, seemingly without pause. Pierre Michel and I drove past with hardly a comment or acknowledgment between us. The scene was tucked away in my mind’s deep recesses, because I couldn’t spare the energy (emotional or otherwise) to consider this accident for the time being. Nobody else seemed to consider it either. Is it a luxury to be able to pause to consider such an event? (Perhaps a sick luxury.) I do remember wondering where the survivors could possibly have been treated. And just now, as I write, is the first time it occurs to me that there may have been pedestrians involved. And now, for the first time too, I’m thinking about all the casket makers I saw around the city every day.

It takes some degree of detachment (or faith, I suppose) to get through one day after another there. In this case, I am not referring only to myself. I think at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is something like ‘self-actualization’. For hungry and thirsty people worried about their shelters collapsing in heavy rains, there is absolutely no clear pathway to climb up there.

Sometimes I wake up at night and I look around the room wondering if I am in Haiti. But I’m in St. Louis, witnessing accidents for a second time, from a completely different lens. Not like some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder (at least I don’t think so), but more like trying to make sense of how all that is happening there and I am waking up here. And realizing, in a disconcerted way, that my struggle yesterday was with entering the proper command structure into a statistical software package. And that when I sit down at the end of the day in St. Louis, I’ve eaten enough that I have reserve energy to ponder horrific events, or to listen to NPR and consider other struggles from a safe distance.