Pride – Marilyn R. Gardner

“I think surgery is the best, maybe only, option.”

I’m not surprised to hear these words from the surgeon sitting across from me. Aside from his appearance (he looks like he is 12) I think I trust him. I did the google on him, and evidently his competent 12 year old hands and brain have a brilliant success rate.

For months now I have had increasing pain in my hip. When treatments, physical therapy, and sheer grit did not work, I decided to see a surgeon.

So I find myself sitting across from a stranger who is showing me an X-ray of my hip. What I see is not pretty.

“Can I tell people it’s a skiing accident?” I ask. I think I whined, but I can’t remember. He laughs. He thinks I’m joking.

But my pride is hurt. My vanity is wounded. I feel far too young to have a hip replacement, especially when I can blame it on nothing but arthritis. If only I was an athlete – a runner, a skier, an aerobics instructor!

I am none of these things.

I am a 57 year old woman with arthritis.

Just saying it makes me want to curl up in dismay.

Secretly, I think we all believe that aging is for other people, not for us. We secretly remark on how “grey and wrinkled so and so is getting,” while in the mirror the wrinkles hide under the perfect make up foundation – denial.

Denial paints our bodies and skin in the flawless glow of youth, even as we marvel at the years weighing others down.

Aging is not for the timid, not for the fearful, and I fear I am both.

In late February I visited my parents in Florida. Though they live in Rochester, New York, they have tried to get away for a couple of months the last few winters. Rochester is cold, snowy, and icy. It’s a fall waiting to happen and the prospect of warmer weather drew them to warmer climates. So at the end of February I found myself visiting them in Panama City Beach.

This area is known for its incredible turquoise water and white sand. The contrast is stunning. Along with this contrast is the contrast between the young and beautiful and the snow bird aging population.

The weekend did not turn out the way we expected, but we still deeply enjoyed each other’s company. As I looked with eyes of love on my parents I realized that I don’t like the aging process. But as I watched them, I recognized that I am not afraid for them – I’m afraid for me. I don’t have the kind of stamina and courage they do. I don’t have the faith that they do. I am not brave. I do not want to age.

It is a relief to admit this. I do not want to age. It’s not about the wrinkles, though they are tough. It’s about the body.

Aging is hard work, and I am lazy. Aging is for the courageous, and I am not.

I don’t feel sorry for my parents. They have taken all the changes with incredible grace. Their minds are alert and active. They live independently. They take their pills with discipline and a good deal of humor and grace.

I feel sorry for me – because I clearly have some things to learn about life and the body, and I better learn them quickly.
Perhaps being honest about this surgery is my first step. Perhaps admitting publicly that I am vain, that I have to have a hip replacement, and that it is NOT because of a skiing accident, or a marathon run, or a heroic act of physical courage is the best first step.

I wake up this morning and I take off the make up of denial, and I pray for courage and strength to face a reality that every human being who lives longer than 50 has to face: The reality of aging.

But I still may tell people that it’s because of a skiiing accident….,

machine-Anne Lamott

One day last fall I was speaking to my priest about self-centeredness and pride. In the course of our conversation, he relayed to me this story: It seems a man came to a priest one day and asked him how he should deal with people who praise him as well as with those who criticize him. The priest looked at him and told him to go to see a man who lay dead in a room, waiting to be buried. “Go and ask him what you just asked me and see what he says,” said the priest.

The man was puzzled but this was his spiritual father, so he did what he asked. When he came back to the priest, the Father asked him what had happened. “Well, nothing,” said the man “he was dead.”

“Then that is how you are to react to both of those things.” said the priest. “Like a dead man.”

I love this story because I struggle with both of those things. How do I act when people criticize and how do I act when people praise. I am incredibly sensitive to words and opinion. Far too sensitive. It is one of the things that I have had to learn as a nurse – when a doctor, another colleague, or a patient yelled at me, angry with what I was or wasn’t doing, I wanted to fall apart. I wanted to hide myself away and be able to cry until there was nothing left of me. But that wasn’t going to work as a nurse. I had to face it and act like nothing happened.

So why am I blogging about this? Because this past week Between Worlds came out on Kindle. Not only did it come out, but for a limited time it is free. I am delighted and overwhelmed by the response. It has been shared over and over – and I am glad! I want it to be available to people overseas who can’t buy it from Amazon. But there is another thing happening here. I’m also aware that the more people read it, the more vulnerable I become to criticism. Everyone will not like it. Everyone will not think it was worth publishing. There will be those who verbalize this in any way possible.

Because that’s who we are as humans. We find our own opinions valuable and feel they will benefit others.

And so I go back to the story of the man who asked a dead man how to respond to both praise and criticism — and I find that is what I want to do. Perhaps not totally dead – but comatose, with a mere nod and squeezing of the hand that I hear the words, but they will not affect the core of who I am. Because I know this – I don’t want either criticism or pride to prevent me from doing what I have grown to love.

Anne Lamott, a well-loved author, wrote a book on writing called Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. My friend Robynn gave me a copy this summer and I have loved reading it, underlining and nodding through the entire book. Because it’s not just about writing, it’s about the human condition and our insecurity, our anxiety, our fear of failure. In her case these things manifest themselves in the response to her writing, in other people these things may raise their strong, ugly heads over other things.

As I think about reacting as a dead man to praise and criticism, I also realize that there are those, like Lamott, who have walked this road a lot longer and open themselves up to far more criticism than I ever will. And so I close with some of the quotes that are helping me as I navigate this world of writing.

“You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won’t really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we’ll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.”

“What if you wake up some day, and you’re 65… and you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life?”

and finally: