Damaged; Perfect

Sometimes you just have to go through the fire.

(~8 minutes reading time)

My birthday is next week, between Christmas and New Year’s, and thus it barely exists as a birthday. (With apologies to Bishop Berkeley: If a person falls over into a new age but nobody remembers it, did it really happen?) My trusty kid sister–that’s who she’ll always be to me, despite being a 50YO accomplished scholar and tenured professor of classical literature–SHE always remembers. She sent me an early present, a beautiful, durable wok, one in the Japanese rather than Chinese style i.e. flat-bottomed with a single long wooden handle, and flared rather than curved sides. It’s the kind of tool that can be used daily and still last a lifetime if you treat it well from the start.

And by treating it well I mean scrubbing it with steel wool in scalding water to remove the manufacturer’s protective coating, then heating it over high flames until the center starts to char, then rolling it around slowly in the fire, from flat bottom to top edge, for quite a long time, to ensure that the entire piece of carbon steel turns a sickly gorgeous, dark yellow-blue. (It's amazing the thing doesn't start to scream.)

You torture it with water, abrasion, and fire, then work some cooking oil into its still burning hot surface, letting its opened pores absorb the liquid until steel and oil have fused to create a harder composite material with a permanent nonstick surface.

The process offers a weirdly sensual satisfaction, this baptism by flickering blue flame, this anointing with vegetable oil. It’s an activity that makes you feel very, very adult, very much a non-procrastinator. Ultra responsible. You’re taking simple steps now to ensure years, maybe decades, of usefulness and reliability.

(A friend told me that for Hanukkah one year he gave his parents a whole set of cast iron cookware, which is still in its original box and which they keep promising to get around to seasoning. They’ve been saying so since, like, 1992. Of course, this friend once drove a rental vehicle for something like 7 years because he couldn’t decide which new car to buy, so….)

The last time I experienced this particular type of accomplishment was when I measured a new wood dining table that seated up to 10 and bought custom-sized protective pads for the entire thing, two extensions included. This sounds very haute bourgeois but it sure beats the attitude that everything should just be used and abused and thrown away.

The wok now sits out on the burner because I can’t bear to store it in a cabinet. In its damaged-toward-perfection state, it’s too inspiring to be hidden.

​​​And it reminds me of myself after this long and very hard year. Abraded and burned. External substances and processes have changed my composition. Stronger than ever. Things don’t stick, things don’t have to be scraped off with pressure and intention. They just slide.

It’s weird how I got here, and how quickly. Many of you longstanding newsletter readers know that in July I went through a significant crisis when my elderly mother seemed to be on her deathbed. (She’s still on the edge, but not tumbling down in quite such a headlong manner as before.) The first part of my year had already contained hard knocks–the end of a marriage, the end of an important professional friendship, the slow yet steep erosion of my confidence and purpose–but by mid-summer, I found myself genuinely hysterical and deeply depressed. It showed up in one particular newsletter in which I could barely contain my ancient grief and rage at having been raised by flawed parents, and having to be the caretaker of one who could still lash out and be hurtful. So much old stuff, stuff I thought I’d neutralized and contained fairly well over the years, suddenly went flagrant. It was not pretty.

I think all that was the erosion-by-abrasion and the hot, hot flame. In any case, unlike the stoic wok I was pretty much screaming.

A rock bottom was achieved (ha!) in early fall. I spent a lot of time weeping on the couch. I was nominally functional but that’s putting a fair amount of PR spin on the situation. It was a bad scene. I don’t want to romanticize anything about depression: sometimes, all too often, people hit that rock bottom and never get up again. But other times–and in this case–the hardness of the fall may produce an equivalently dramatic bounce-back.

​​Oh, I’m sure the gajillion hours Zooming with and journaling to my therapist helped, as did a renewed daily meditation practice. I mean…this stuff works if you work it. Well, sometimes, anyway.

Then there was the sudden simultaneous occurrence of a few cool, ego-boosting things. A couple of excellent job opportunities, dream jobs, really. A successful first live concert playing INNOCENT MONSTER material. A boyfriend from thirty-two years ago, someone who had dumped me and crushed my heart, texting me to say he was sorry about the way he'd treated me and that he still, after all this time, missed me. (This last event was, I’m sorry to admit, extremely fun.)

Proof that you’re not a total loser is helpful when you feel like a total loser.

I find myself wondering if my crash was overdue and necessary, like a market correction after a period of irrational exuberance. I sort of loved the early 2020 months of the shutdown—it’s when I did a huge amount of musical self-training and pushed myself to a new level of mastery. I taught myself to produce my own pro vocals in my tiny home office during the sweltering summer, spending sometimes 10 hours a day singing and recording and singing more and rerecording my new album tracks. This may sound strange, but that self-empowerment experience is probably also why I found the strength to leave a 25-year marriage that was no longer working well for either of us.

​​The year 2021 was harder in many ways than the previous one, and involved a huge number of personal transitions, not to mention continued political peril and virus vulnerability for us all. I’m certain I’m not the only person who did okay last year but has emotionally collapsed in recent months. “Peril and vulnerability” is the human condition, but I still wouldn’t recommend it in the megadoses we’ve been getting lately.

And there’s also the fact—well documented by sociologists and historians—that our most challenging time is not when we’ve lost hope, but when things are getting slightly better. Oppressed populations of effectively tyrannical governments don’t rebel. The citizens of dictatorships only start to rise up once they’ve been offered a taste of democratic freedom without the full and real thing. This is how 2021 and the promise of the vaccine affected us: joy when it seemed the worst was over, followed by deep disappointment when we realized the refuseniks were going to prolong our collective ordeal.






Between October and the present moment I’ve gone from starting to climb out of it to full-on a level of self-mastery I’ve never experienced before. It’s not a bipolar thing, not a feeling of runaway inflation. This is solid, but boy was I tested before arriving here. The transitions in question were apparently lessons, opportunities to face my own character flaws, grieve a few critical mistakes, and then grow the fuck up. Personal improvement is stochastic like this, sometimes. No one could have predicted that I'd rise up out of myself so quickly and effectively, least of all me. It's a bit like raising one's inner child: they are stuck in this awful phase you, the parent, think will last forever...and then one day they surprise you with their sudden maturity.

This packet of lessons have been learned; I'm sure more homework will arrive eventually. But for the moment, I have surrendered. I have put aside the kind of unspoken rules we all harbor for other people's behavior; I have realized that certain things I thought very important were not important at all. That argument I prosecuted was not important at all. That pain I felt, that blame I nursed, that grievance I insisted upon, that hurt I was harboring…all were totally unnecessary. They were hobgoblins, messing with my head, tricking me into believing that thoughts and feelings have measurable size and weight.

​​Has a cherished friend betrayed or abandoned me? So what? People can only give you what they give you, and everything they give you is a gift. Is my mother at 84 years old still being belligerent, paranoid, delusional, abusive at times? So what? Sometimes she’s also grateful, smiling, sweet. I must accept that part of the picture, too. Am I stricken with worry about the country’s future and the planet’s future, even when I’m not all that worried about my own personal fate? Well, do something or do nothing but stop obsessing because that helps nobody.

With some focused practice and intention, I now find myself letting worries and grievances slide right off me. Well, OK, not always. I’ll admit to having pushed hard and a bit nastily when Intuit took two weeks to acknowledge and finally fix a QuickBooks problem that was about to rob me of $250.

​​But most of the time these days, I am surprisingly chill. Maybe one day soon I’ll be so seasoned and slick, the hobgoblins will never even gain purchase on my surface. I do hereby declare this my New Year’s wish for myself and for you all:

BE DAMAGED TOWARD PERFECTION. Go through fire if you have to. Get charred. Get oiled. Be sickly gorgeous. Get slick. Let everything slide.

Happy solstice and joyous new year. See you in its first week.