"I'm only valuable if..."

Thoughts on worth that I couldn't keep to myself this morning

Not, of course, that I have a habit of keeping anything to myself. But it’s been a big week in the Working Out Issues department, largely, I think, due to my committed hiatus from social media. The amount of time and energy I got in the habit of expending to make sure that strangers thought I was funny or clever or insightful fell away from every day so swiftly and effortlessly that I honestly didn’t know how often I was escaping into the pool of mass-validation and harmless-but-intense flirting that was My Twitter Existence. Since committing to a hiatus that I’ve chosen to extend for at least another week, I’ve actually had to feel things when I feel them, and that has been a game-changer to a terrifying degree.

There used to be a gigantic tree down the street from me, in front of a few small apartment buildings, and it was a tree I loved. That tree was, to my hippie heart, a big part of what made a walk through hideous anti-architecture worthwhile. It had sprawling branches and, while not historical-redwoods old, was clearly old enough to have an impressively thick trunk, and amidst the too-clipped lawn settings of our insult-to-aesthetics side of town (Lake Merced is lovely but can only do so much heavy lifting in the Beauty department) this tree was an actual, everyday tree-of-life. That’s how I thought of it anyway. And for a city like San Francisco to cut down a tree like that, well, they must have a reason, we’re not living in The Lorax over here. But I don’t know the reason, I was not informed, and my walk to the gym yesterday included stopping in front of that stump and accidentally bursting into tears. I’m talking loud sobbing. I’m not sure what all I had wrapped up in that tree on a subconscious-symbolism level but whatever it was, I’m grieving.

And all this is to say, a minute or so on Twitter would’ve numbed that feeling into a superficial facsimile of contentment, had I allowed it to, but without that crutch (ahem) I had to walk to the gym with those tears in my eyes, those feelings gripping my stomach and my chest. I had the best workout of my life thus far. More “Damn, no that looks GOOD!’s” than my no-bullshit trainer has ever been given reason to utter. The morning before that, I’ll skip the details, but let’s just say we were talking about a different kind of tear-soaked session that wasn’t pretty, and Ian said, “These are old tears, hon, you’ll just have to cry them,” and, as happens all too often, he was right. I value laughter and connecting through laughter, I’ve been raised to understand that it’s one of the most sacred acts we’ve got, but there’s no doubt that I used laughter-from-and-for-twitter to escape a hell of a lot of old tears.

Here they are, then. Well, not here, not now: I’ll take a page out of my old teenage poems and say the rain outside is graciously doing the crying for me. I keep waking up at 5:30 gripped with the worst possible flashbacks from the distant past, and if I lived alone I would just stumble dissociatedly through the rest of my day like I once did for so many years, but I don’t: I live with the only person in America who, from the very depths of his being and for his entire life, has never seen any value in escape. Lucky me. (I say that simultaneously with profound gratitude and bitter sarcasm. We can hold multiple truths.)

For a long time, I’ve taken a lot of my self-worth from particular images of myself that I wanted people to hold/polish/keep. Maybe you’ve noticed this. If, for example, I go off on a ridiculous tear about the testing-the-bounds-of-the-law revealing ensembles I wore when I was 22, there’s a motivation in that: this is how I want you to see me. It was how I wanted everyone to see me, that’s why I wore those clothes. I think of myself as an ultimately pretty unedited person, but the truth is, I am very, very careful about revealing what I want, when I want, not exactly for the purposes of crafting a “character” but…well, actually, never mind, it’s exactly for the purposes of crafting a character. The character is accurate, but she — they — are also incomplete. There is so, so, so much about me that I thought I would die if you saw. And I’ve been so convinced of this for so many decades that I nearly destroyed my relationship with the one person I know who’s had the dubious fortune of seeing everything for the past ten years. When I described to my therapist what (contrary to his every insistence) I thought Ian sees when he looks at me, she said, “…Sounds like you’re projecting a little bit.”

And of course this morning around 6am before the sun even rises, all the things I don’t want you to ever see or think about rose to such a head that we had to visit some of the darker things about my past that you do know about, and Ian said, “Maybe you would never have been suicidal if you hadn’t had in your head, ‘I’m only valuable if.’” I decided I would risk a sweeping statement and say that a lot of suicidal ideation or worse comes from the destructive assumption that “I’m only valuable if.” I’ve been doing a lot of research on Theranos for a project that’s still unfolding, and one of the elder scientists who was initially integral to the company’s fraudulant success was subpoenaed early on to talk about whether the company did any damn thing it said it was doing (epic story short, it did not) and this scientist, who was nearing 60 and a rockstar in his field, told his wife there was no way he could lie in court about what a complete and potentially dangerous sham this so-called detect-disease-through-one-drop-of-blood-company was. (That’s the thing Theranos promised to do, and was given a total of 9 billion dollars in order to do it: test for a multitude of diseases with one drop of blood via a machine small enough to fit in your home, thus universalizing life-saving early-detection technology while eliminating the need for needles. This cannot be done.)

This scientist asked his wife if she thought he’d lose his job in the event that he testified truthfully about its practices, and she said yes, he would. He killed himself shortly after that, the tragic culmination of a roaring depression that started to set in just as he was beginning to realize that Theranos wasn’t an exciting challenge but rather an insult to science, to patients, to investors, and a complete fraud. His self-worth had, it seems clear, been entirely founded in his ability to do great things via the scientific method. “I’m only valuable if.” “I’m only valuable if.”

My self-worth was founded in something a hell of a lot less clear cut and I really will, in a rare show of propriety, save the unpacking of that one for my therapist. But I’m making this public because I think this affliction affects far too many people. I think it’s a rare minority who value themselves because, to paraphrase Bill Bryson’s eloquence on the matter, it’s a fucking miracle that the atomic composition that makes each one of us-in-particular possible has made it this far. I’ve long thought that the reason why Christianity can inspire such zealousness in overnight converts is because of the assertion that Jesus loves you just for being alive, great if ya know, you like, do something with it, but the love won’t diminish if you don’t. How many people do we believe love us that way, really? In my case, I didn’t actually trust anyone who did.

It’s still raining.