The denatured mind

against the cult of self care

I tried all the self care. I retain all of it in my repertoire now: running, spending time outdoors, with friends, with friends outdoors. Keeping a journal, adding in yoga twice a week, practicing good sleep hygiene, meditating. In one of my meditation sessions, the narrator/guide asked “what are you resisting?” — a framework I have found useful because, as he predicted, the moment you recognize that you are resisting something, the resistance eases and you feel better.

I kept getting this image in my head, of a large rodent, like a woodchuck, grabbed and lifted by the nape. It chittered and writhed, while the person gripping it firmly by the nape was unperturbed, waiting for the animal to stop resisting. I thought of my resistance—to my situation, to people who had wronged me and been deeply unkind, to my own feelings—as the woodchuck, and the hand holding it as my calmer, better self. As perspective.

As the fall semester began, and I went back to teaching, physically in a classroom for the first time since March of 2020, I was feeling shaky and unwell. Educators all over are burning out, growing demoralized, quitting. Those who are trying to gut it out report unprecedented exhaustion after each day of teaching, and a feeling of not knowing how to meet the accustomed demands of the work, but also all the extra burdens that have come along since COVID. Students have needs so broad and deep they’re queasy-making to look into, and none of us have been unscathed by this ordeal either. We’re not well. Still, the message is, “Back to normal everyone! Changing lives everyday!” — an attitude I saw one teacher on Twitter refer to as toxic positivity, and which appears to be epidemic in this line of work.

It’s hard to explain why things are so brutally bad. I get images in my head of what I feel like inside. The woodchuck, but also others recur: in one, a foreclosed house, plundered, the walls bashed in so the copper pipes could be stripped away. I am always hollowed, harrowed. It’s a little comfort, commiserating with others in this line of work, who also can’t explain why they feel so incapable of going on. We didn’t watch people die in droves the way depleted health care workers did, but still, there is some sort of moral parallel that we cannot describe, and also our culture makes a hierarchy of grief and suffering, and since we didn’t have it that bad, we know we really ought to pipe down about it.

As the first weeks of the semester passed, there was some little flicker of joy in being physically with students again. But every morning, despite that, I awoke straight into dread. There was my classroom, but nothing beyond it. It felt like being an adjunct again, showing up to teach, and then leaving right after—no colleagues, no support, no sense of being anything but an itinerant contract worker. I was getting ever more threadbare. After a couple hours of teaching, reading student work or laboring over my online classes, I’d need many more hours of recovery, and often found myself just lying on the floor in the dark, too dull for anything else. I’d been given to understand that if I could not meet all of my contractual obligations, then I could meet none, and would have to go on leave from my job. There would be no bending, no accommodation. I muscled on through each day, borne up by my students’ good humor, honesty, gratitude, and need, but with a growing sense of incapacity.

In biology, there is something called the “central dogma” which summarizes how DNA-based instructions for how to build proteins are delivered to the rest of the cell via an intermediary messenger called RNA. Proteins do almost all the jobs in cells: acting as tiny machines, holding things together or apart, facilitating interactions between molecules that would not otherwise come together. Like any machine, the function depends on the form. If the protein isn’t folded right, if it doesn’t take its proper three dimensional form, it will be compromised, and often useless. Even proteins that start out folded correctly can lose their shape. Heat, acid, radiation—all manner of forces can jostle or interrupt the attractions between sections of the protein strand and cause it to collapse. Textbooks usually depict these collapsed proteins like a strand of spaghetti, a random tangle that lies as it fell. This loss of structure is called denaturation.

I’m taking an art class this semester, as yet another act of self-care. Our assignment last week was to draw a folded piece of paper. Rather, to draw a piece of paper that was once folded. I made myself a paper airplane, unmade it, and tried to draw what I saw. I worked a long time on trying to discern the subtle shifts in value across the various planes of the once-plane. This paper was some sort of intermediate thing now. It could not fly, but neither could it be fed into a printer or offer a smooth surface for writing. What could it be good for, in this denatured state, besides being a model for a drawing exercise?

In cells, denatured proteins can sometimes be coaxed back into functional forms, but it frequently takes the assistance of still other proteins called chaperones. These little machines guide and support the denatured strand until it can hold itself together again and be useful. It’s worth the energy, compared with how much time and resources would be needed to recycle the whole protein and build a new one from scratch.

I want to be of use. I want to be helpful, but I have come unglued. I did strive, mightily, for the first few weeks of the semester, to continue, but I am no longer in the proper form. My mind is not shattered, but is certainly collapsed into formlessness. I spent those weeks wrestling down the growing certainty in me that I would not make it through the semester, that my condition was too grave. I could not tolerate the thought of the disruption it would cause my students, if I left them part way through the semester, so I set the possibility aside. In my meditations, the image of the squirming woodchuck came again and again. “What are you resisting?” I asked it over and over, waiting, as instructed, for the answer. I worked on centering myself less, being less self-absorbed in my anxiety and exhaustion. I read that a good treatment for those things is to ask “How can I help others?” and then do that. I focused on my students and how I could help them, and still the animal gnashed its orange teeth and flailed in my grip. It refused to give in, to slump its defeat. I thought about a favorite bit of advice from Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey: “If you ever fall off the Sears Tower, just go real limp, because maybe you’ll look like a dummy and people will try to catch you because, hey, free dummy.”

Across spiritual traditions, the idea of discernment appears. Prayer, meditation—they’re different words for the same sort of idea. That by seeing rightly, we can discern the best course of action, the one that will decrease suffering, increase kindness. As I hauled myself through the days, increasingly fragile, jumpy, intolerant of interaction, it felt less and less tenable. On a run one afternoon, I thought about the woodchuck again, only this time, it occurred to me to wonder whose hand held it fast. I’d been thinking the animal and the arm were all parts of me, my mind. That it was my resistance fighting, while the firm, sure grip was my saner self. I backed away from the image then, panning out to a wider view, to the bigger picture, to the structures and systems that led anyone to think we’d just “go back to normal” and then would enforce that expectation like a law. To the rigidity of it all, to the lack of care, to this individualistic society, to the cult of self-care because no one else can be expected to care for you. I discerned, finally, that I’d misperceived things. That the woodchuck was not my resistance, or some part of me that I was failing to integrate into the rest, but me, in my entirety, and I was flailing and squeaking for just cause, snatched up as I was. Who would expect such a creature, so captured, to ever go limp and give up, as long as it had any strength at all to resist? Who would expect such a creature to focus its mind on tending to the needs of others when its own need was so great? The proper remedy is to set the animal down and make it free.

I did go on leave from teaching. I had, as my therapist calls it, decompensated. There were no intermediate steps, no way to try lesser interventions and stay partly at work. It was all or nothing, so, nothing it had to be. I need time to mend, but already, my attention is on what conditions will be required for my return. How will I re-compensate?

Proteins have only one job. They have to be properly folded for that job or they are nothing but a pile of scrap. I don’t know if I can be renatured into my prior form, go “back to normal.” To expect anyone to manage that trick seems willfully, wishfully ignorant of reality. To watch the exodus of exhausted, devastated people from the caring professions and think it’s some sort of coincidental individual phenomenon is not sane. To believe each person must crawl up out of their hole alone, clean off, act normal, meet all the demands of the prior world plus all the ones of the new is deranged. I am still me, but not currently suited to a particular purpose. I want to be of use, to help, but I cannot do it flopped formless on the floor, and I am exhausted of self-care. What I need now is other-care, and on a broader scale than that provided by my family, my friends. Who and what can scaffold me back upright? How can we remake a society that does that for everyone, everywhere? Or will we be outdone in this by the mindless machines whirring away inside our cells, chaperones nursing the fallen until they can stand?