I've Got Sand In All the Wrong Places (16 page)

In other words, you know way too much about me and you don't mind. Maybe you can relate.

Or you have a strong stomach.

And a great sense of humor.

Even if your breasts sag.

So what?

Unsaggy breasts aren't all they're cracked up to be, either.

I mean, we get it, girls.

Soon you'll be us.

Anyway, to inch closer to my point, there's an ick factor to the discussion of my second-favorite product, so if I haven't cured you of your prissiness so far, check out now.

Because we're entering the throne room with my favorite new throne.

The Squatty Potty.

I don't know if you've heard about it, but it's my new love.

I heard about the Squatty Potty on the radio, and I thought it sounded like an interesting idea. Bottom line, and no pun, it's basically a stool that fits around the base of your toilet, and so when you sit on the toilet, it raises your legs into a squatting position.

Still with me?

Good. Either way. You can't please everybody, and the people who continue to read will have their life changed.

Or at least their colon.

By the way, I have no problem in the bathroom.

Only in the bedroom.

In that I sleep with five dogs and a remote control.

Plus I'm no doctor, but I believe the Squatty Potty website, which says that squatting relaxes the puborectalis muscle, or basically, a kink in your colon. When you use your Squatty Potty, your colon gets unkinked.

Again, not a medical term.

I have a J.D., not an M.D.

But I like the idea that a squatting position is more natural for your anatomy. It may be a sign of the times that I've fallen in love with a toilet, but I don't view it as being about elimination. I view it as being about my health and by my health I mean me living as long as humanly possible and then some.

I want you to live that long, too, especially if you're buying my books.

I always used to think about death. I truly wonder what will kill me, but unfortunately as soon as I find out, I'll be dead.

Everything has a catch.

But I do find myself being more conscientious about eating healthy foods and exercising even when I don't want to.

Let's pretend golf is exercise.

Everybody else does.

But my favorite exercise of all is sitting down, and now I can sit down and know that I'm getting healthier, every time I'm in the throne room.

Look at it this way.

If you don't want to do squats, you can just, well, squat.

 

Facets of a Stone

Francesca

I think I had a panic attack.

It was the middle of the night, I was lying in bed in a quiet beach house, but I was up, thinking, always thinking when it's dark—when my heart rate suddenly sped up. There was no specific thought that triggered it, no particular emotion I could identify to make sense of it. But I felt like I had been injected with something, a drug, adrenaline. I tried to take a deep breath, but couldn't. My heart was racing now, going so fast it scared me. I sat up and brought my hand to my chest, as if I could catch it by the tail.

The assault had taken place two weeks prior. I had spent the first week at home with my mother recovering from the worst of my physical injuries, then I had accepted my friend's serendipitous offer to share her week in the Hamptons. This was the last night in the beach house before I was supposed to return to New York, fully recovered.

A few days later, our book tour began. Spooked by the panic attack, I'd decided that I wasn't ready to turn the mugging into a story to tell on tour. But I had to briefly address it, because I had posted about it on Facebook when it happened, and because I still had visible injuries on my legs. The response from our readers was uniformly concerned and kind.

And yet on the car ride home after our first signing, I was in tears.

With each person who smiled in relief and said, “You're so lucky,” or “Thank goodness it wasn't worse,” I felt more and more guilty that I wasn't feeling more happy and healed. With every person who told me I was strong, I felt weak and phony.

Ironically, I had felt both happy and lucky when it had first happened.

The swell of emotion when I saw a group of people running toward me seconds after my assailant had gone might best be described as catastrophic relief. I had thought I could die, I had fought for my life, and I had escaped without grave injury. When help arrived, I was manic with gratitude and excess adrenaline. Even when the exhaustion began to hit, I was sanguine.

I was the one who had spent the following weeks telling everyone how “lucky” I was, putting their fears to rest, reminding them it could've been worse, shit happens.

But the feeling didn't stick.

I was still obsessively reliving the attack every night, going over it second by second, trying to fill in the blank spots where fear or injury had damaged my memory. I felt scared walking alone at night. I cut the last dog walk before bed short, sometimes just walking back and forth up and down my block.

I told the story to anyone who asked—even though recounting it made my heart race—until I ended most social interactions fatigued. I wasn't seeking out attention or sympathy, on the contrary, my friends' and family's concern made me uncomfortable, but it was like I had to purge the experience. I wanted to say it out loud enough times so that it did become a “story,” a collection of words in a particular order, divorced from visceral memory. I wanted to transform an attack that rendered me helpless into words that I controlled.

I might still be trying to do that.

But the process drained me. I was receiving many kind messages from friends via email and Facebook, but replying left me mentally and emotionally derailed. Sometimes I let the messages sit in my inbox, starred, and didn't reply at all—which made me feel so guilty.

I still stay up some nights drafting my apologetic responses.

The D.A. assigned to my case encouraged me to avail myself of free counseling provided by the city to crime victims. After the book tour, I waited over an hour in the Office of Victims' Services, an overworked department located in the courthouse downtown. I was given a stack of forms to fill out to qualify for medical compensation, counseling, etc.

Every fourth question began, “In the case of deceased victim…”

It reminded me how many people using these services are bereaved, and how many of the victims lost their lives.

And I wanted counseling because someone roughed me up?

I was lucky. It could've been so much worse.

I filled out the forms but didn't follow up.

I didn't need help, or I decided, I shouldn't.

Judging all of my emotions became a common theme. I didn't want to suppress my feelings, but I didn't want to wallow. I wanted to face my fears, but not indulge them. I put enormous pressure on myself to recover the
right
way, the emotionally healthy, mentally strong way.

To do whatever it takes not to let this leave a mark.

“Victim” has never been a label I'm comfortable with, anyway. I was afraid once you took on that role, you could never shake it.

I was most afraid of being afraid.

That I had made a life on my own in New York was one of my proudest accomplishments. I lived alone and I loved it. I considered myself a strong, independent, savvy woman, like all the women I admire most, like my mother. These were the traits I liked most about myself.

And suddenly I felt they were under siege.

My remaining negative feelings after the assault didn't just threaten my sense of safety, they threatened my very identity.

The night that it happened, the police needed to know the house address nearest to the location of the attack, but I struggled to recall exactly where I had been when it started.

“You had an umbrella, right? Look for that,” the cop said.

I had completely forgotten. With all my things taken from me, it was hard to remember what I'd started with. We drove a few hundred feet more, when I saw it.

My pink, floral-print umbrella lay on the ground utterly destroyed. It was inside out and half-smashed, the nylon fabric torn from its metal limbs, the arms bent back unnaturally.

I remember thinking, if that's what happened to my umbrella, what had happened to me?

That anxiety was part of what spurred my actions the day after the attack. I wanted to do everything I could to return things to normal, by force if necessary.

I declared that Sunday my “day of defiant fun.” My mom wanted me to rest, cancel plans, but I refused. I convinced her to eat brunch at my favorite restaurant and sit outside, because “brunch must go on!” I had my mom take a picture of this victory brunch to post on Facebook.

It took several tries to get a shot where I looked the least injured.

My mom said all the pictures made her sad and deleted them from her phone.

We walked all over my neighborhood to replace what was stolen, from my iPhone to my favorite lipstick, parading my injured body instead of hiding it. I took my mom to the exact spot where I was attacked. I wanted to see it in the daylight, holding my mom's hand, and dispel the bad juju.

I made her take some gag photos on that spot, too.

Again, I wanted to retake control over that physical space. I lived in this neighborhood, and I didn't want to cede any territory to a bad experience.

But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't influenced by the fact that my mother was behind the camera. I wanted badly to prove to both of us that I was okay.

I was probably pushing myself too much when I insisted we keep our prior plans with friends to go to the Broadway Bares benefit show that night. I was exhausted, my voice was completely gone, but canceling something fun and positive felt like admitting defeat.

When we were getting ready to leave my apartment, I realized my new iPhone hadn't restored my contacts list and needed more time on the Wi-Fi network. I said I wanted to wait. My mom said we had to go, or we would be late.

“We won't be late, it will only take ten minutes,” I said.

She insisted that it was rude to keep them waiting.

I exploded. “It's useless without the contacts! What if I get separated from the group? I don't know anyone's number. I just went through this, I can't not have my phone!” I burst into tears, surprising us both.

It was the first time I had cried in front of her, and the first time I had cried since the assault, over a phone.

But I had been white-knuckling it through the lingering sense of vulnerability for the last twelve hours. After feeling stripped bare the night before, I needed the security of a working cell phone.

It was the first crack in my defiantly cheerful façade.

Which is not to say that my behavior that day was artifice. I genuinely wanted to do these things, and I derived real satisfaction from testing and proving my own resilience. But my victory lap belied a fear and anxiety about change—deep down, somewhere I couldn't yet articulate, I was acting defensively.

I didn't want the stain to set.

I didn't want to be “damaged.”

There's a pervasive narrative in books, TV, and movies about damaged women. We see many depictions of traumatized women, women with baggage, fragile women in need of protection and special consideration but just as often abandoned for being too complicated. It's portrayed as a status, not a journey.

But as time went on, I found the starkness of that definition wasn't working for me. It didn't fit my lived experience of trauma and its aftermath, which was proving to be paradoxical. I had to allow for the contradictions I was experiencing.

Yes, I am lucky that it wasn't worse, but no, it wasn't my lucky night. I can be grateful for my current health and the people who helped me, while still acknowledging my own suffering. I can get scared and still be strong. Courage doesn't exist without fear.

Resilience, in human beings, doesn't mean snapping back to normal fast as a rubber band. Resilience begins from the first moment of challenge and continues every day after to meet it. Resilience and struggle are often one and the same.

The way reading often delivers you exactly what you need, I happened to come across an Elizabeth Gilbert quote that reflected my revised view. She wrote, “The women whom I love and admire for their strength and grace did not get that way because shit worked out.”

Mental fortitude doesn't require you to maintain a pristine existence, and real life doesn't allow for that anyway. Emotions, even riotous ones, are the antibodies to a traumatic experience. I have to let them do their work.

Once I gave myself the permission, the freedom, and the time to feel my emotions without judgment, my anxiety began to subside. I haven't had another panic attack since, but if I do, I won't take it as a blow to my identity. I am still the woman I thought I was, and I am still on my way to becoming the woman I want to be.

Like a diamond has many facets, there are many sides to a strong woman. As I go through the spectrum of life experience, I find more and more angles to catch the light.

 

This Call Is Being Monitored for Quality Assurance Purposes

Lisa

If you've read what Daughter Francesca and I have written about Mother Mary, you can guess how she would react to the following story.

In fact, you have to guess.

Because I can't print her reaction here.

We begin with the fact that Mother Mary passed away, leaving a bank account with some money. It wasn't a lot, which was a fact she used to joke about. She'd say:

“I'm set for life, if I die next week.”

God love her.

Sadly, she did pass, and I was named POD on her account, which means payable on death.

This will get funny soon, I hope.

So naturally, I went to the bank to get the money, and they told me I have to produce her death certificate. This, even though they had already been notified of her death and closed the account.