Tunnels
I’ve always had what I call crazy brain—a mind that runs
and spins, that remembers obscure details and whirs in the
middle of the night. My mind is quick and clicking, which
was a gift in a classroom, and explains why Q & A is my
favorite part of every event; but it also runs ahead of me
quite often, catastrophizing, over-analyzing, spinning out.
As my patron saint Anne Lamott says, my mind is a bad
neighborhood. I’m not a potter or a dancer—my mind is my
only tool, and at the same time, it’s my greatest challenge,
an overeager puppy, a spinning hamster wheel.
In the last few years, there has been, in some moments, a
thread of inner violence inside me. In some moments, I feel
such profound self-hatred, and that terrible darkness bleeds
out onto everyone around me, the way darkness does.
And then at one point, the volume of that inner violence
started to scare me. I could recognize it as separate from me,
not built on the true materials of my life or circumstances,
but more like a curtain dropping, like a virus infecting
everything. It became harder and harder to walk well on
those days, even while I knew they were an aberration.
I felt that in many ways I was making good progress,
inching toward a life marked more by presence and