Exodus: A memoir (2 page)

Leaving, to me, felt like climbing a tremendous hill, one of those steep inclines that becomes almost treacherous in that the more momentum you build while racing down it, the more difficult it becomes to stop safely. If you’ve ever biked up a hill only to zip freakishly fast down the other side of it, which I did for the first time the summer my son and I moved to the country, you’ll understand what I mean. The wonderful thing about it is the natural leveling of the ground that occurs at the bottom. And eventually, we all do hit bottom, and not in the way of the cliché, which I’ve always disliked. (The bottom is a good thing. Who decided otherwise?)

When you hit bottom, and your bicycle tires spin more slowly, or your awkward, close-together steps become longer and looser, you’ve hit your stride. You’ve found your gait. And everything is A-OK. You get a silly smile on your face at the memory of how you felt flying down the hill, and you think, man, I am awesome for doing that.

Let me be clear: my life, right now, is amazing. I have everything I ever dreamed of, and I never forget just how lucky I am to have achieved it. But my feelings have been failing to catch on to the changes in my life; in some ways my brain is still stuck in the past. When I finally went to a psychiatrist to receive a formal diagnosis on the list of mental illnesses I was so sure I suffered from, the verdict of post-traumatic stress disorder seemed almost anticlimactic.

It might not even be that, the psychiatrist said, recommending talk therapy and nothing else. It could just be an adjustment disorder. Those things go away in six months, he said.

And yet, I was having bad dreams every night, waking up each morning enveloped by feelings of dread, and I panicked secretly when in groups or crowds. None of this was consistent with the calm and fulfilling existence I had begun living.

How to describe this feeling? A form of displacement, like being unable to see yourself in a photograph of a scene you remember being part of, or looking at the spot on the map where you know you live but being unable to find the street. Somehow you’ve been erased, as if it were all a dream. I had begun, since leaving, to see life as an enormous grid, a cross-section of human connections. Every man and woman appeared as a plotted point on an intricate map, lines drawn between them and close family members, longer lines waiting to rush through open tunnels on the grid to anchor friends, neighbors, lovers, even acquaintances. Wherever I looked, I saw the invisible threads that connected people; every person seemed to have their grid firmly and inextricably in place. And I
thought of that saying “No man is an island” and wondered how long I’d survive without a grid of my own, and if it was even possible to rebuild one from scratch.

Maybe my residual angst is actually predicated on a real experience, not just leftover trauma. Is it the experience of being dislodged from the grid? Funny, since I can’t ever remember having been securely fixed on it, and I have a niggling fear that my birth was a mistake, like a computer glitch that left me permanently disconnected, smack in the middle of a no-man’s-land between points, with no ability to form real and lasting connections. The system that everyone else uses seems closed off to me.

I suspect I’m not the average loner. For my entire life I have occupied an enclosed mental space that no one has managed to penetrate. I have grown “close” to people in the sense that we have been in each other’s proximity, but never close enough for those walls to come down. Ask people who know me and they will confirm that in a whole manner of ways. Is it just a coincidence, I wonder, that many of my most beloved friends live in different states, or that the meaningful romances in my life have been long-distance relationships?

Perhaps I’ve chosen loneliness because it is my language. I don’t want it to be, but it’s the only condition that feels familiar to me, and somehow safe. Of course I’d like to earn my rightful place on that grid, no matter how poorly plotted my location, because this feeling of placement that I’m searching for—well, that’s a basic human right. So I’m going to try to figure out how to fight my way in, even though I’ve been thoroughly trained to fear being a fully realized part of the outside world with every fiber of my being. I don’t yet know where I’ll end up—in fact I’m starting to realize that the process may be more complex and time-consuming than
I’d suspected—but if there’s something I’m sure of, it’s that the process itself is worth it. Sometimes it’s only through pain that we feel alive; better to have that than no sensation at all.

I had gone six months without a full night’s sleep when I stopped into my favorite coffee shop one morning in March of 2013 to perk myself up with a soy latte before I picked Isaac up from school. It felt like I hadn’t slept in years; I had been struggling with middle-of-the-night insomnia. As I sat down to wait for my coffee, I recognized an acquaintance, Robert, a local naturopath.

“You look a bit under the weather,” he remarked.

“I haven’t been sleeping,” I said. “I really need to see someone about this.”

“You should meet my friend Ed,” he said, pointing to the white-bearded man sitting next to him. “Ed’s a renowned sleep specialist.”

What a crazy coincidence, I thought. I reached out to shake Ed’s hand. “Hi, I’m Deborah.”

After he introduced himself, I jumped right in. “Have you seen the article in the
New Yorker
this week about that woman who went to a sleep clinic?”

“I did.” Ed nodded his head sagely.

“I loved what she said about larks and owls,” I said, referring to the article’s differentiation between two genetic types of sleeping patterns: early sleepers and risers were larks, and late ones were owls. “I had never heard that before, but it totally makes sense. I’m such a lark.”

“That information has been around for a while. But the article really offered very little in the way of a solution to insomnia. Even
the woman’s insomnia wasn’t cured by going to the clinic—it was just more finely diagnosed.”

“That’s the thing about doctors, isn’t it?” I laughed. “They’re really good at telling you what your problem is, but not so good at fixing it.”

“Very often that’s the case, yes.”

“Do you think you can help me?” I asked. “According to the article, I’m an MOTN, or middle-of-the-night, insomniac. I fall asleep somewhat easily but wake up on schedule a few hours later, and then I can’t fall asleep again until dawn.”

“That doesn’t work for you, having two sleep periods a night?” Ed asked.

The article had said it was normal, and I’d read the research: middle-of-the-night wakefulness had, until the industrial revolution, been accepted as a normal period in one’s daily routine.

“I have to get my son to school at 7:45, though. Then it becomes stressful, knowing I won’t get the sleep I need. I’m starting to be afraid of nighttime. I’ve always been a good sleeper too, before this year, so I can’t understand why it’s happening.”

Ed fumbled around in his tote bag. “I don’t seem to have any business cards at the moment, but here, take my personal one.” He handed me a card with his name and email address on it, and the word “Shaman” printed on the top right corner.

“Shaman?” I asked.

“Long story,” he said, smiling. “That’s who I am in my personal life.”

“Well,
that’s
who I want to see. Not the sleep doctor! Shamanize me!”

Ed bowed his head and smiled. “Why don’t you come by next week?”

We made a date for the next Tuesday.

“Just one thing,” he said. “Between now and then, keep an eye out. Any new animals cross your path, anything out of the ordinary at all, take note of it. You’ll tell me about it when we see each other.”

I agreed to keep an eye out for any strange encounters, but nothing special crossed my path in the following days. I did notice one thing as I was driving around a curve late one night: a strangely positioned waning crescent moon, looking like a prim smile in the black sky. I had never seen the underside of the moon lit up in that way. It seemed to me that crescents should be upright, not lying on their backs as if they were cradling something.

I arrived at Ed’s farmhouse on a cold day in late March. We had just experienced what would be our last snowstorm, and the land was blanketed in a fresh layer of white powder. Yet the birds seemed to know that despite the snow, it was spring after all, and they flitted from frozen tree branch to frozen tree branch, chirping merrily.

I parked in front of the barn turned garage and walked past the enormous pile of wood to the front door, where Ed greeted me. I left my yellow galoshes on the doormat and followed him in my socks to the sunroom at the back of the house, a light-filled space framed on three sides by floor-to-ceiling windows. What looked like a massage table draped in Navajo-themed fabrics was on the right. On the left was a chair and a table, on which sat a bowl of different colored crystals.

“Pick a stone,” Ed instructed me.

I selected a smooth black one, which looked to me like obsidian.

“Interesting choice,” he said.

“I have a dark side,” I joked. It was then I noticed the pretty but unassuming rose quartz I’d overlooked.

“Why don’t you sit there on the bed?” he said, motioning toward the massage table.

I did, shifting until I found a comfortable spot.

“Do you know why you haven’t been sleeping?”

“Stress, I guess. I have a lot of anxiety. I’m very neurotic—if you define ‘neurotic’ as having a fear of life.” I smiled sheepishly. “I’m afraid of everything. It’s embarrassing.”

“Blow it into the stone.”

“What?”

“Cup the stone in your hand and blow your anxiety into it, as hard as you can.”

I did it, feeling foolish. Snow had started to fall again, a thick curtain coming down around us.

“Now you can watch as I prepare a sacred space for us.”

He pulled a hooded brown cape over his head and turned to me wielding a wooden rattle and a bottle of vanilla-scented water. I listened to his chants, which he addressed to each wind, claiming their qualities and asking them to assist in the healing process.

“South Wind, great serpent, wrap your coils of light around us, teach us to shed the past the way you shed your skin, to walk softly on the earth, OH!” He paused, shook the rattle, blew over the top of the bottle to make a soft whistling sound, then swished some of the water in his mouth and blew it out into a furious, blooming spray. I was caught completely off guard and jerked backward away from the spit.

“West Wind, mother jaguar, protect our medicine space, teach
us the way of peace, to live impeccably, show us the way beyond death, OH!” Again, Ed performed the same routine of rattle, whistle, spit. I tried to appear unperturbed. “North Wind, hummingbird, grandmothers and grandfathers, ancient ones, come and warm your hands by our fires, whisper to us, we honor you who have come before us, and you who will come after us, our children’s children, OH!” Rattle, whistle, spit.

“East Wind, great eagle, come to us from the place of the rising sun, keep us under your wing, show us the mountains we only dare to dream of, teach us to fly wing to wing with the Great Spirit, OH!”

Ed crouched to tap the wide wooden floor planks with his rattle.