On being twice-exceptional.

In a dusty drawer somewhere, there’s a home video of me in my pre-school nursery rhyme pageant. My classmates and I all sat in a line wearing homemade paper hats and recited a collection of nursery rhymes. As the camera pans down the line, showing toddlers bouncing happily in their seats, it stops at the end to focus on the redhead who is throwing her hat across the room and jumping up to get it at regular intervals. 

That’s me. I’m the redhead. 

When I was in third grade, I would often be kept in from recess. During these occasions, my teacher would have me stand by my desk and watch as she dumped its mass of contents onto the floor, requiring I clean it before I could join my classmates.  

When I was in fourth grade, I was tested for giftedness. At this point, I was routinely leaving my desk during class and wandering around the classroom. I completed my work quickly and would then look for books to read or games to play to pass the time. The school said I was bored—I was gifted, so I wasn’t being challenged enough. I tested high enough to be placed in the gifted program, and the school was satisfied it had done its due diligence. 

During middle school, my teachers would often do “notebook quizzes.” Students were required to keep a binder of all the handouts, homework, and tests they had completed for each class, and on occasion, teachers would create a quiz meant to assess how complete and organized those binders were. I failed every one.  

Some nights in high school I would cry into the pages of my Algebra II book. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the material or didn’t want to complete my homework—I just couldn’t. I couldn’t get my brain to wrap itself around the idea of doing the 35 questions. I knew I was capable of doing it, but some nights I would hit a wall so solid the only response I could formulate was to cry.  

My first car had manual locks. I locked my keys in it so many times I stopped keeping track. I once managed to lock the keys in it while it was still running, even. I lost track of my possessions constantly, leaving my cellphone in clothing store changing rooms, losing important documents… My room was in a constant state of clutter.  

In undergrad, I often needed extensions on assignments, especially if the directions were too open-ended. I would get overwhelmed by all the different possibilities that were available to me in completing the assignment, and I would become paralyzed. I once even took an Incomplete in a class because I couldn’t complete an assignment whose directions were, “Write a short paper about something not covered in this course.” And even with the Incomplete, I missed the deadline for submitting the assignment and needed to retake the course. 

My whole life, my eccentricities and difficulties with tasks like organization had been chalked up to being creative or intelligent. I was just a precocious kid with a lot of energy and not enough to occupy my time. I was just careless. I was just unmotivated. I was just preoccupied with too many thoughts. I was just… smart. 

ADHD never even showed up on my radar until I started my master’s program in psychology. I remember looking at the criteria for the first time in my psychopathology class, a small question mark popping into my head. Is this… me? 

No, I thought. People with ADHD are off the walls all the time. 

Still, the small question mark was enough to prompt me to ask my psychiatrist about it. He shot me down almost immediately, stating I was doing well in my graduate course work which would likely not be possible with ADHD. And, even so, the medication I was already taking for anxiety and depression would benefit ADHD, too, so why worry about it? 

It wasn’t until the second year of my doctoral program that I finally took matters into my own hands. Through the encouragement of a friend, I scheduled a neuropsychological evaluation to assess whether or not I had ADHD. 

And I did. Overwhelmingly so. Combined type, too, meaning I had difficulties with both inattention and impulsivity. And I had been struggling, at that point, for 27 years. 

Mine is not an uncommon story. According to a meta-study on twice-exceptional students, gifted students with co-occurring disabilities such as Specific Learning Disorders, Autism Spectrum Disorder, and ADHD are often under-identified due to their performing at grade level. In essence, their giftedness masks their struggles.  

This leads into the question I’m often asked: “How were you able to manage for so long if you truly have ADHD?” 

Well, neurodivergent people develop what are called compensatory strategies. These are the mechanisms that not only allow us to mask our symptoms but also to survive in a world that is not set up for the success of neurodivergent individuals. I would rely on bursts of hyperfocus to complete my work, usually spurred by a rapidly approaching deadline. I only needed to tune into 5 minutes’ worth of a teacher’s explanation of a concept before I knew I could mentally tap out and focus on something else. Basically, my intelligence was a double-edged sword: it allowed me to navigate the demands of K-12 schooling, but it masked my ADHD so effectively that no one saw it for what it was. 

For many twice-exceptional individuals, their disability is not caught until the environment finally exceeds the individual’s capacity to compensate. For some, that moment doesn’t come until college… or graduate school, or licensing exams, or a fast-paced job environment. We rely on our intelligence to brute force our way through our academic demands while our personal lives and environments are in shambles, never understanding why there is such a large discrepancy between the two. We end up blaming ourselves. We call ourselves lazy. We tell ourselves we’re not living up to our potential. We beat ourselves up as we rifle through piles of papers trying to find tax documents on April 14. We wonder why things like organic chemistry come so easily when things like remembering appointments seem insurmountable.  

I want to emphasize that intelligence and mental illness are not mutually exclusive. Being gifted does not negate the impact of being neurodivergent. You can be smart and have a disability or mental illness, and that doesn’t make you any less intelligent. Your struggles are valid. 

If you have kids or work with them on a consistent basis, please stop and think about my experience before you punish a child for being messy or daydreaming. Try to work with them to find what barriers are preventing them from accomplishing what you’d like them to accomplish. Teach them strategies for organization and time management instead of assuming they should already have these skills. For people with ADHD, acquiring such skills is a lifelong journey, and being met with compassion and understanding rather than judgment and discipline makes a world of difference. 

Twice-exceptional kids exist, and they’re begging you to notice. 

Everything in Its Own Time, Or: When Cliches Come True

Around this time a year ago, I was preparing to interview for a doctoral program in psychology. I had only applied to one program, a mix of hubris and convenience, though at the time I was likely to say that it was the natural progression of things. I was at the institution where I received my undergraduate degree, and having almost completed my master’s degree at the same campus (though different discipline), I figured I’d go for the trifecta and pump out the final diploma.

At the time, I was confident. I had done well in my studies and was involved as essentially an administrator of our outpatient training clinic, so in my mind, I was more than prepared to apply to continue in my institution’s doctoral program. I had ignored the nagging in my back of my mind that pointed out all the signs of my not being satisfied with my experiences during my master’s program there, but I wasn’t willing (or able) to look at other schools, since other schools meant uprooting the finally-stable existence I was able to carve out for myself in a city with which I had a love/hate relationship.

My interview day came and went. I was with faculty I’ve known for two years and things went… adequately. I thought I had done well, but there were moments that stood out as being red flags. The details are unimportant, but in weeks to come I would realize,  in the interview experience alone, how misaligned my goals were with the program I was pursuing. At any rate, I interviewed, I waited, and, in the meantime, I hopped a plane to Arizona to spend spring break with my best friend.

This, as it turns out, was fortuitous for reasons I never could have fathomed at the time. I knew before booking the trip that I would find out my admission decision to the program while in Arizona. Either way that decision fell, I knew I was in good company for a celebration or a consolation. If I’m being disgustingly honest, I hadn’t anticipated it being the latter, but the latter it was.

I remember the air being sucked out of the room when I read the rejection email the first time. The second time, reality bended down a long, dark tunnel. The third, my vision blurred with tears. I was too numb to move for a bit, but when I regained my faculties enough, I shut myself in the bathroom and sobbed. The plans I had made for myself for the next two years (at the least) exploded in the span of an email two paragraphs long. I didn’t know how to piece the shrapnel into a new vision, so I lay on the floor and cried, trying to explain to my friends at school how this could have happened.

The first day was a blur. I vacillated between anger, fear, and sadness, steeped in equal parts defiance and failure, wanting desperately to defend myself but also wondering if maybe this was a sign that a doctorate wasn’t in the cards. Maybe I wasn’t half the student or clinician I thought I was.

Maybe I was just not good enough.

By the next morning, I realized there were two options: try to find a school that was still accepting applications, or try to find a therapy job with a terminal master’s and no license and bide my time until applications next year. For the latter, I did a quick Indeed search, and, as I had anticipated, there were no jobs in my area for people with my degree. For the former, I searched the country for Psy.D. programs with late or rolling admissions and found three that were viable: one in Philadelphia with a similar training style as my alma mater, and two in Arizona… within 30 minutes of where I was staying.

One of the schools, I decided after more research, was crossed off my list because it gave me an uneasy vibe (now, a year later, it’s on the brink of closing). The other had a curriculum I was immediately drawn to, amazed that there were so many areas I could study and opportunities I could have. I set up a meeting and ended up visiting the campus twice during my trip. The more I fell in love with the program and the school, the more I began to panic. The realization that I might be traveling down the road of drastically changing my life was setting fire to my already damaged nerves.

Over the next month, I created a whole new application. I got new letters of recommendation, concerned less with the perceived reputation of the reviewer and more with how well they knew me and my capabilities. I rewrote my personal statement, then wrote it again. When I got invited to campus for an interview, I pored over faculty CVs. I spent an entire day going from store to store trying to find the right outfit only to buy something completely different the night before. I spent the plane ride studying interview questions and thinking through my answers.

The interview day was an 8-hour marathon. We had an on-site writing sample, a one-on-one faculty interview, a student-led group interview, a faculty group interview, a tour (wearing a heavy blazer in 90 degrees), a talk from financial aid, introductions to all full-time faculty, an overview of the program and its components with the clinical education coordinator… but through all of it, I felt myself becoming more invested. More determined. It was equal parts exhilarating and terrifying.

Less than two weeks later, I went on a graduate student tour of some wineries in the Finger Lakes. I was with several people I had gotten to know throughout my master’s work, and I had a blast just letting go and spending time with people I regret not bonding with sooner. On the bus ride home, tipsier than I maybe should have been, I checked my phone to see I had a voicemail from an unfamiliar number. It took a moment for my wine-logged brain to register that the area code seemed familiar… like some numbers I saw when I was in Arizona. I held the phone up to my ear, practically holding my breath while trying to hear the words over the chatter of the bus. I picked out the name and thought I heard something about “good news,” at which point I shot up out of my seat and yelled, “Guys! It’s Midwestern. I can’t tell, but I think it’s good?”

There was a charged silence. My coworker from the clinic suggested we connect my phone with her Bluetooth speaker so we could hear the message. My heart hammered in my throat, everyone leaning into the anticipation, the air electric. The voice on the message barely got out the word “congratulations” before our section of the bus erupted into cheering and engulfed me in a combination hug and tackle.

It was one of the best moments I’ve ever had.

In the coming days, the joy turned to anxiety. I had two weeks to make a decision, which also included a $1,000 deposit. It was May, and the academic year was set to begin in August. That gave roughly three months to figure out a cross-country move, if we decided to go that route. I talked to anyone who would listen to try to wrap my head around the life-changing choices in front of me. There were pro/con lists. There were nights when I cried in frustration because I couldn’t imagine having the strength to uproot myself and move so far, even if it was an amazing opportunity. I questioned myself. I questioned the world. I questioned logistics, weather, housing, happiness, money, life itself… there seemed no end to the questions and no answers to stem the flow.

Even when I submitted my deposit, we hadn’t officially decided to move. I remember staring at the confirmation screen with dread, feeling the weight of $1,000 on top of the already heavy options still left open.

When we decided to commit to the move, we opened the door to two solid months of anxiety fueled chaos. Our lives became increasingly surreal as our house began to empty. We spent the last night in our home of five years the same way we had spent the first: sleeping on a mattress on the floor of an empty bedroom. I read the card from a dear friend by the light of a strand of white Christmas lights bunched up on the floor, fighting tears and panic and the sinking feeling that it was all an astronomical mistake.

I sit here, a year later, filled with such gratitude for all of it. I have learned more about myself and who I want to be than I ever could have imagined. I have access to more amenities and opportunities than I ever thought possible. I walk past cacti and mountains and look up to see hot air balloons. I’m thriving in a program aligned with my professional goals in a department that cares deeply about its students. It’s a crazy, unexpected journey, but every day I wake up excited to experience it.

So when life hands you rejection, disappointment, and hurdles that feel like solid walls, keep going. Change is scary, but it may just lead you to exactly where you need to be. Be willing to learn the hard lessons because they teach much more than a textbook ever will. Be humble. Be open. Be confident that you can weather any storm. And most importantly, look for the beginning hiding in every end… it may very well be the start of something incredible.

Why Anxiety Sucks: Coming Clean About Panic Disorder

I’m writing this in my semi-empty living room exactly two weeks out from moving across the country. My stomach caves in on itself whenever I realize the 2300 miles that will stand between me and everything I’ve ever known. This is mostly normal, but for someone with an anxiety disorder, it’s also augmented, especially given that my anxiety, for much of my life, has been triggered by being away from home.

I was diagnosed with Panic Disorder when I was 18. Up until then, I was convinced that my panic attacks were actually asthma attacks because sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night feeling like I couldn’t breathe properly. I would go into my mom’s room and sit in the middle of her bed hyperventilating until I got so exhausted I would fall back to sleep. That, I believed, was asthma.

It wasn’t until I went off to college that I realized it wasn’t asthma. I was halfway through my first semester of my freshman year at Susquehanna University when one night I awoke at 3 AM convinced I couldn’t breathe. I hunched over in my bottom bunk bed, trying to expand my lungs and slow my breathing. You know that feeling you get when you’re about to fall asleep at night and come to the sudden realization there’s a huge deadline coming up that you’re not prepared for? Take that feeling, mix it with the feeling of missing a stair when walking down a staircase, and spread it through your whole body. That’s what it felt like, sitting there gulping down air. I used my inhaler, but nothing happened. My teeth started chattering uncontrollably, though I was sweating.

Fearing something was wrong, I went down the hall to the room of some friends. I sat in a chair in the darkness of their dorm room, feeling the pinky and ring fingers of both of my hands start to go numb. I took to pacing up and down the long hall of our wing of the dorm, shaking and rubbing my hands. I needed to get off campus. Needed to get to a hospital, maybe, but was too scared to describe what was happening and, anyway, I felt I couldn’t catch my breath enough to try. I finally called my mom, who was two hours away. I talked to her and let her soothe me until I managed to fall asleep again at 5.

When my alarm went off at 7:15, the panic picked up right where it left off. Within a week, I had to take a leave of absence from school, at that point having panic attacks nearly every day.

For a long time after that, I was afraid of going to sleep. I was so terrified I would wake up in the middle of the night in a panic that I paced my room at night with the lights on. Any time I left the house with a friend, I would secretly Google how close we’d be to the nearest hospital in case my “asthma” got bad. I wouldn’t stay overnight anywhere that wasn’t home, and even being home didn’t save me all the time.

Finally, I decided to seek mental health services. I entered into therapy and began taking medication. It was the beginning of a long journey of discovery and healing—one that will never truly end. I’ve had times when I’ve been agoraphobic, too afraid of having a panic attack away from home that I simply wouldn’t leave the house for days at a time. I’ve spent nights staring at the clock literally counting the seconds until my medication would kick in and save me from the terror inside me.

And that’s the thing—when you have this, all of it lives inside of you. You can so easily get stuck in an awful loop, because the thing about Panic Disorder is that it becomes a fear of fear. You avoid anything that you believe will cause a panic attack because having a panic attack is your worst fear. Panic attacks have the power to convince your brain that you are dying, even when you still have your mind enough to know you’re not. You are trapped inside of your mind, wanting nothing more than to unzip your own skin and crawl out of your own body. It’s as close to hell as I’d ever like to get.

Being two weeks away from moving across the country starts to dredge up some old fears and makes me worry that my illness isn’t as well controlled as I’d like. And, even though I study psychology and am often surrounded by therapist colleagues, I am reluctant to disclose these struggles because I feel like I should be excited, not scared. Because I still hear the disappointment of the chorus of voices telling me I shouldn’t have left Susquehanna. Because I still can’t accurately describe what panic feels like. Because I want so badly to be unencumbered by this—to be the kind of person who can uproot and readapt easily—but I’m not. This disorder is a part of me, and I can’t be the therapist I want to be if I can’t claim my own baggage but still expect my clients to claim theirs.

So this is it. I’m scared. I feel the tingling in my shoulders, the dissociation in my head, and that doesn’t mean I can’t do this. It just means that my illness is still a part of me, and I’m allowed to acknowledge it.

A Year of Dad: Making Sense of the Senseless

“I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.”

I once read this quote on a whiteboard outside of one of my professors’ offices. I’ve always admired her endless positivity, viewing it as some far-off destination I’ve circled on a map that maybe, someday, I’ll get the chance to visit. It’s hard sometimes to separate yourself from your backstory–to rise above the pages of narrative that trail behind you each day. I spent many years believing that the past was something I couldn’t escape, its poison-ivy fingers wrapping themselves around my ankles and slowly pulling me backward into the shadows. I was, for a long time, what happened to me, and I felt about as much in control of my destiny as I was of the weather.

There’s an inherent value in believing that everything happens for a reason: it allows you to believe that there’s a method to the madness that is life–a kind of stability within chaos. I tried to frame my father’s death in these terms, trying to divine a reason for tragedy. When karma is a didactic tool used to teach children to be kind and just, facing something that seems anti-karmic is a jarring experience. What had my dad done to deserve dying so young? What had I, in my short life of fourteen years, done to warrant such a harsh punishment? For years I sat writing my way through an event in an attempt to make sense of the senseless. If everything happens for a reason, what was the justification for this?

The professor to whom the whiteboard belongs met me when I was still defining myself in terms of the effect my father’s death had had on me. I spent a decent amount of time relating my backstory to her as if that were a means of introducing myself. Since her academic specialization was religion, I implored her for a reason why God would put my family through something so terrible. One day, she shrugged her shoulders and said, “Those who have suffered are called to a higher purpose.”

This was the first time I was presented with the idea of choosing what I could become in the face of what I had been or what had been placed upon my shoulders. If we’re being honest, I didn’t like it. In my mind, her response did nothing to answer my question. I didn’t care what my purpose was–I cared what the purpose of my backstory was. Looking backward for years at a time had stiffened my neck to the point where it had forgotten that “backward” wasn’t the only direction in which it could turn.

It’s interesting to me how epiphanies happen so suddenly, but once they do, it’s as if no other way of thinking has ever existed. There’s “before epiphany” and “after epiphany,” but they seem miles apart from each other even though, temporally, they’re separated by a matter of minutes. Although many conversations and a lot of introspection lead to my understanding what all of these threads meant–even though it took me years to weave them together into something real–it happened as dramatically and suddenly as a bolt of lightning. One moment I was the past, and the next I was the future.

There will never be a reason for my father’s death. It happened, and it’s not my job to determine why the stars aligned the way they did or what lesson was supposed to be learned from spiderweb of cracks that radiated from the impact. That’s beyond my control, anyway.

Accepting the past for what it was was a radical enough development, but I took it one step further: I chose what to do with it. In that moment, I chose to use my experiences to help those who can’t imagine a life other than being defined by circumstances that were beyond their control. 

Psychology was always an interesting thought to me, and all of my writings throughout high school related to the amazing capacity humans have to relate to one another. Becoming a psychologist existed in the town next to my professor’s optimism on the map of places I hoped I’d end up one day, but when that lightning bolt of realization jolted through me, I picked up the map and drove.

I can’t change what happened to me, but I do, absolutely, get to choose what to do with it. Like all humans, I have the ability to create light where there’s only ever been darkness, and that’s what becoming a psychologist is for me. It’s making sense of the senseless and turning tragedy into a higher purpose, if such a thing exists. My future clients will never know this event that defined me for all of my adolescent life, but they will know I walk with them in a way no one else has. Because I have suffered and cursed God and lost my way, I know–in a way I never would have understood otherwise–how to sit with someone who no longer follows the plot to her own life. 

Throughout his life, my father gave me the gifts of patience and presence. Through his passing, he encouraged me to give those gifts to someone else.

Thank you, Dad. Always.

—–

(I realize I didn’t post for February. This is mostly due to school work but my inability to think of something “good enough” to write definitely factored in. This project also serves as a reminder to cut myself slack when things go awry, so that’s what I’m chalking last month up to. I will make an honest attempt to double up for March.)

A Year of Dad: Driving

My dad was good at a lot of things: writing, research, being a dad, etc. One thing my dad was not good at was driving.

Being absent-minded is a quality I inherited from my dad. For me, it manifests as getting endlessly sidetracked and forgetting obligations. For my dad, it manifested as… not being the greatest behind the wheel. That’s not to say that he was a danger to himself and others per se, but he had some bad habits that would preclude him from any driving awards, if there were such things.

For example, my dad picked me up from school a few days a week. At least once a week, we would be in mid-conversation, halfway home, when my dad would nonchalantly put down the parking brake. (To be fair, I would do that myself if my car didn’t yell at me for having the brake on while driving.) By the time I started driving his car, I’m pretty sure the parking brake was nothing more than decoration, its efficacy having been worn out by miles and miles of being used incorrectly.

One day, while my dad was apparently zoning out, he rear ended another car. I mean, not in a huge way–just tapped the bumper–but it was enough that the driver in front of us immediately threw on their blinker. I must have been in middle school at the time. My dad mumbled, “Shit.”

We pulled over, and before my dad got out of the car, he turned to me and said, “Just… don’t tell your mom, okay?”

Nothing came of it, so it was relatively innocent, like the rest of my dad’s driving infractions, and almost all of them happened on these after school commutes home (a drive that was probably three miles or so). My favorite driving moment, though, happened outside of this tradition. Once again, it involved Bonnie.

My dad and I were taking Bonnie home one afternoon. I was sitting in the front seat while Bonnie was nestled in the back next to a pile of empty boxes my dad had for his business. Toward the beginning of Bonnie’s road, there was a massive curve that was marked by chevrons and a huge arrow. We had navigated this road several times before without incident, but this time, we approached the curve with a decent amount of speed, went off the road into the gravel shoulder, and skidded to a stop perpendicular to the road.

Without missing a beat, my dad turned to me, and then swiveled around to Bonnie, who was lost under a mountain of boxes, and said, “Well, ladies. It looks like we ran out of road.”

What more is there to say after something like that, really? We continued on as if nothing ever happened, and we never spoke of the incident again. (Or any of the incidents, for that matter.) My dad’s driving habits were an implicit understanding.

Luckily, it seems I drive more like my mom. Mostly.

A Year of Dad: The Slip-n-Slide Incident

(This is part of a year-long series, the rest of which can be found here.)

For Christmas, I wanted to recount one of my favorite stories involving my dad. Appropriately enough, it has nothing to do with Christmas.

My dad worked from home as a bookseller and a finder of rare books. Basically, if you wanted to find a really obscure book about the military—especially T. E. Lawrence or the French Foreign Legion—you went to my dad. He was very well known in his field and was one of the founding editors of T. E. Notes, a newsletter that has archives in Oxford and Harvard.

Because he worked from home, he pulled double-duty as a kid wrangler while my mom tended her store. I was pretty easy to wrangle, as I enjoyed making stuffed animals have conversations with each other and writing stories. However, when I had friends over, it unleashed some kind of inner child demon in me, which rubbed off on my friends. We caused a gentle sort of chaos, and most of the time my dad didn’t interfere, possibly because he didn’t realize our devious ways but more likely because he was a secret lover of chaos himself.

For example, my dad didn’t ask any questions when my friends Casey, Bonnie, and I marched through the house in our bathing suits carrying every liquid soap product the house had. Obviously when three ten-year-olds are swiping things from the house, there’s no real good that can come of it, but he turned a blind eye (or maybe winked in our direction) as we started setting up what can only be described as a bad idea.

We had a slip-n-slide. Every kid had a slip-n-slide, but most people, at that point, had fancy slip-n-slides with pools at the end and arching jets of water the length of the plastic. We had the most basic, prototypical slip-n-slide that ever existed, so we needed to rely on gravity, soap, a garden hose, and desperation to have any fun.

Our 1.5-acre yard had many hills. On the left side of the house, the hill was terraced for my mom’s garden, but the right side had one sizable hill, perfect for a slip-n-slide. My dad’s office also had a window overlooking the right side of the property, so we were somewhat nervous my dad would catch on and stop us, but at the same time, a slip-n-slide is pretty innocuous, right?

Of course, it wasn’t enough to just have a slip-n-slide that was lubricated with half a bottle of Dawn—we also had to put a skateboard ramp at the bottom, because what’s life without a little mystery? We also rubbed liquid soap all over our, uh, bottoms, just to make sure the slip-n-slide offered enough slip.

The spigot to the garden hose was directly under the window to my dad’s office, so it was impossible for him not to hear the squeak squeak squeak whoosh of the valve. He didn’t care. It was summer, and the girls were outside making noise instead of inside making noise.

For a good half an hour or so, our plan was genius. The ramp was kind of a dud—it slid with us rather than allowing us to fly like we initially thought—but the water pooled at the end in a muddy, grassy mess. And when you’re ten, a muddy, grassy mess is the Best Thing Ever.

One thing about the slip-n-slide we neglected to care about was the fact that it had a giant slit in it. Halfway down its yellow runway, the slide sported a foot-wide gash that gave a glimpse of July grass underneath. Since we flew past it on our way to the makeshift ramp-pond at the bottom, it was nothing more than a flash of green on the journey.

Until it wasn’t.

We decided to go down in a line. Casey went first, followed by me, and Bonnie came close behind. We tried to hold onto each other—clutching ankles and wrists—but it was a jumbled, soapy mess. Bonnie had been trailing her hand behind her to stay on the slide, and in doing so, her pinky got caught in the slit. She kept going, as bodies in motion tend to do, but her pinky didn’t. That damn law of inertia.

We knew it was bad. Bonnie’s face screwed up in pain and tears leaked from her round eyes as she looked at her pinky, which jutted out an an angle just odd enough to be unsettling. We ran inside and called frantically for my dad, our bathing suits dripping puddles at our feet. He appeared in the living room, took in the scene, and stopped.

Unless specifically trained in medicine, dads don’t really know how to deal with health emergencies (or at least mine didn’t). Moms kind of have an instinct for bandaids and bruises, and dads have an instinct for calling Mom. But, as misfortune would have it, Mom wasn’t around.

We explained to him what happened, and he was silent, staring at the pinky with an intense look—not one of disgust but of a man trying to solve a complex calculus equation.

It’s important to note here that my dad had a horrible sweet tooth (one that I unfortunately inherited). He was especially devoted to ice cream, but during the summer months he sometimes opted for those Pop Ice pops—the ones that come in long, plastic strips and are essentially frozen Kool Aid. As kids, we loved it because it gave us an excuse to eat things we probably shouldn’t.

On the surface this seems like an extraneous detail, but you may sense where I’m going with this.

Hit with a sudden epiphany, my dad held up one finger, said nothing, and disappeared. He returned several moments later with a strip of three Pop Ice, a rubber band, and a pair of scissors. Again, without a word, he wrapped the ice pops around Bonnie’s finger, making a little triangle, and secured them with the rubber band. He then cut the tops off of the pops and said, “It’s a splint. It’s ice. It’s also edible.”

And he smiled to himself, because it was just the kind of insane, chaotic genius my dad was known for. He laid the scissors on a table next to the couch, and from the doorway to the living room he said, “And there’s plenty more where they came from.”

He promptly left the scene, satisfied with how he handled it. I guess we weren’t too concerned, either, since Bonnie ate the ice pops and Casey and I got ourselves some, too. She ended up going to the hospital later on, and they told her the finger wasn’t broken. Months later, though, I think she went back and found out it had been broken and healed slightly crooked, but rebreaking it would have been massively painful and definitely not as fun as the initial slip-n-slide, ice-pop pinky breaking.

So that’s the story about how my dad was simultaneously the best and worst at being a parent under pressure. Bonnie still laughs about it, thank God.

A Letter to Marywood University’s President

In light of the changes to Marywood in the past few weeks, I’ve decided to take action. I’ve written the following letter, which I will deliver to Sister Mary Persico, IHM, Ed.D. sometime in the next week. If you are upset or angry about the current climate of the school, please share this letter or write your own.

Dear Sister Mary,

I have been a student at Marywood University since August of 2011. I received my B.A. in Comparative Language and Literature, was inducted into both Delta Epsilon Sigma and Phi Sigma Iota, and served as the president of World Language Club for a year and a half. I am currently working toward my master’s in psychology with intent to apply to the Psy.D. program. I have dedicated myself to this school tirelessly because I believe in its promise and its mission.

However, as both a current student and alumna, I am deeply concerned about the direction in which my institution is headed. I realize that the financial situation and inner workings of the university are vastly complex, but that does little to undo the frustration I feel in learning of the cuts being implemented. As a former member of both the Spanish and English departments, it is incredibly discouraging to find that Spanish is being devalued so heavily. To take away its status as a major is to completely go against the global mission you spoke of during your inaugural speech. How can students ever hope to be global-minded if they cannot speak the languages of other countries?

These cuts—to departments, to staff—are being conducted under the justification of budgetary concerns, which is understandable given the mess left by the previous administration. I fail to see, though, how cutting the Spanish, Religious Studies, and Philosophy majors will help shore up funds. These disciplines are still part of the core and still have minor programs, which means they will continue offering the same classes they offer currently. Therefore, no money is being recuperated by eliminating their major programs. Even given low enrollment in these degree programs, just one major brings in money for the university. (Also, many students enrolled in other majors choose to have a secondary major in these areas, since liberal arts classes complement nearly every discipline. Incidentally, these double majors are not “counted” when tabulating how many students are in majors such as Spanish.) It is difficult for me to understand the financial—or logical—justification for eliminating these degrees.

The only explanation I can conceive of is that the university is preparing to make cuts to its core curriculum. A revamping of the core was obliquely mentioned in the SRA report, though the details of that process have not been revealed. Because the financial reasoning behind eliminating the three aforementioned majors is shaky, I would postulate that their elimination is a way to ease into cutting them from the core. This would be a detrimental mistake.

As I mentioned earlier, I am currently a master’s student in psychology. When I changed disciplines, I was afraid I would be behind, not having studied psychology during my undergraduate career. However, it became quickly apparent that I was better prepared by my background in English and Spanish than I would have been receiving a degree in psychology. Classes in the humanities teach more than the names of philosophers or how to say “chair” in another language—they teach students how to digest information, transform it, and apply it to novel situations. They teach students how to write, communicate, and think critically and deeply. In essence, they teach students how to be better students—and people.

I can say with complete certainty that I would not be the student or person I am today without the humanities classes I took at Marywood University, from Latino Writers in the U.S. to Climate Justice to Social Morality. All Marywood students deserve that experience; they deserve to receive an education that is as well-rounded and deep as the world into which they will enter post-graduation. To deprive them of that by way of eliminating classes in the liberal arts core is to do them a massive disservice in their future endeavors.

Finally, the reason I have chosen to complete my master’s degree at Marywood is because of its faculty and staff. The individuals who work at Marywood and interact with students on a daily basis are brilliant, compassionate people who truly love what they do. They are the backbone of everything the university does and the vehicle through which students are transformed from eager freshmen into learned, prepared graduates. As one of my former professors eloquently said before leaving Marywood to take a job at another university, “Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions.”

When the school administration decides to eliminate nine positions and gives those terminated thirty minutes to clear out their offices, it not only affects students, but it also violates the compassion that underlies our Catholic mission and identity. When two deans are told to decide amongst themselves who will continue to serve as a dean come August 2017, students and faculty alike feel the effects in terms of negative morale and a lack of faith in their administration to make firm and just decisions. I understand the need for budget cuts, and that might explain why my professors have watched their hard-earned benefits get reduced, but as the administration chips away at these professionals—devaluing their disciplines by eliminating their degree programs or leaving their buildings in such disarray that a projector screen falls and breaks their foot and leaves them needing stitches (which happened just before Thanksgiving break)—they are chipping away at students and the quality of the education they are able to earn.

I can appreciate the fact that you inherited a convoluted financial and administrative situation when you took your post, but please, for the sake of our institution and its students and staff, be just and compassionate. Please hear the pain that we are feeling. Students are angry. Staff are demoralized. Money is a bottom line, I know, but the numbers, in the end, do not add up. I realize the decision to cut Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Spanish degree programs is final, but please do not cut them from the core. Students need the skills taught in these classes in order to be competent workers and, more importantly, fair people.

Thank you for your time, Sister Mary. I appreciate your willingness to read the letters of the students you serve.

Sincerely yours,

Megan McDonnell

A Year of Dad: The Eulogy

(This is part of a year-old series, the rest of which can be found here.)

A couple weeks ago I found myself at the funeral of my dear friend’s mother. I was surrounded by people I had never met hearing stories of a woman I had never known, yet I couldn’t have felt more love surrounding me. This was my ninth funeral, but I had only ever heard one eulogy in my life. As I listened to my friend speak of her mother’s beautiful life, I couldn’t help but realize that my father was not sent off with words from his family. For better or worse, my family doesn’t do eulogies, but, being inspired by this touching funeral mass, I’ve decided it’s time we did.

So to start my year-long series devoted to my dad (albeit a few days late owing to the election insanity), I’m writing his eulogy. It makes sense, in a way, to start here; I’ve just documented his passing, so to write something about his funeral is the next logical step. I guess I just never realized how powerful and meaningful a eulogy could be until this month.

How do you start one of these? I guess something like…

Hello, family and friends. (In my mind, the church is packed with my dad’s business associates and long-lost friends, even though in actuality the people in attendance that day all fit comfortably into two pews, and the service consisted solely of my mom’s family and my dad’s brother and wife.) You all knew my dad, Denis, in one way or another, and I’m sure you could all tell stories of his deadpan sense of humor or his dedication to his work. These are stories I will never know, but luckily I have stories of my own.

You see, there’s a lot I don’t know about my father. Fourteen years might seem like a lot of time to get to know a person, but when you’re six, you’re not interested in your dad’s rich backstory so much as smashing rocks with a hammer to see if there’s quartz inside. At the same time, I know everything I need to know about my dad through his fourteen years of supporting me and shaping me into who I am.

When I was younger, I used to love climbing trees. Being chronically short of stature, I liked seeing things from above, looking down on the world and marveling about how small everything ultimately is. I liked the challenge of hoisting myself up and testing my weight on increasingly shaky branches. I could have lived my whole life in a tree and been happy. My usual haunt was a Japanese maple tree on the edge of our property. I knew it like it was the lyrics to a favorite song, and even now, I remember the easiest path to my favorite branch.

One day, though, I decided to take on a new adventure. I left the comfort of my Japanese maple for a more complicated but exciting prospect: the enormous magnolia hanging half over the garage roof and half over a small hill in our backyard. None of its branches were particularly high, but they spread out like cracks in a windshield, reaching out in tangles across the lawn. I didn’t get particularly far in my quest to climb; although the branch I was on was more than sturdy enough, I slipped. Somehow, I managed to wrap my little arms and legs around a branch that was almost the same thickness as me.

There I was, hanging like a sloth six or seven feet above the ground. I didn’t have a good enough grip to climb back up, and if I let go with my legs, the force of their falling would pull my hands off the branch, too. I couldn’t see a way out of the situation that didn’t involve snapping my neck. With my heart in my throat, I yelled, “DAD!”

I didn’t have to yell. Somehow, the moment my fingers slipped from the bark, my dad was there to catch me. I fell softly into his arms, and he hugged me close to him. I cried.

That has been my father’s presence in my life. No matter the circumstance, my dad has been there to sweep in and catch me before I hit the ground. Even when it seemed like our relationship was based more on silence than words, he was present in a way that most others weren’t. If that were the only thing I knew about my father, it would be enough. While I cherish every restaurant visit he made better by being unruly, that one afternoon he saved me from falling gave me everything I need to know about him.

Nothing gives me more pride than the ways in which I am similar to my father, not just in trying to proverbially catch people in their most emotionally charged moments but in the little things. Every time I bring my eye up to the viewfinder of a camera, I see his eye staring back at me—green flecked with light brown, just like mine. Every time I sit down to write, I feel him leaning over my shoulder. Even struggling in geometry made me smile because I remembered my father telling me it was the only class he had ever failed.

Maybe I don’t know as much about my dad as I want to, but I only have to check in with myself to understand who he was. I share his love for learning and books, his analytical nature, his sense of humor. I share his nose and his height and his habit of eating ice cream in the dark.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that my father was a good man—a man I will always remember for his dedication to me. When I was diagnosed with asthma, he quit smoking. He had tried to do this for decades (unsuccessfully), but knowing that his vice was affecting my lungs, he stopped. He bought the patches and gum, and while he ultimately succeeded in quitting, he did find himself suddenly addicted to gum (after he transitioned from Nicotine gum to Trident), which was convenient as I also had a pretty serious gum habit.

He was not perfect, and God knows I wasn’t, either. But he tried. Every day of his life he labored over choices, always trying to find the one that would best benefit his wife and daughter. Everything he did, he did for my mom and for me. So maybe I don’t know what my dad was like when he was a kid, and maybe I don’t know where he grew up or what he dreamed of being when he was in high school, but I know that he loved me with everything he had.

And that’s all anyone needs to know in the end, isn’t it?

Now if this were a real eulogy, I would have included some of my favorite stories about him—ones that involve laughter and hijinks—but that’s what the rest of the year is for. In this moment, I want to honor his life in a way that would have been fitting when I was fourteen and lost in a world I couldn’t recognize without his presence. The world still doesn’t look the same without him, but the colors get richer every time I connect with him through writing.

A Cold and Broken Hallelujah: Living in Trump’s America

I thought I was okay, or at least on my way to okay, but I was wrong.

No matter who you are or what your personal ideology is, this is a strange and uncomfortable time to live in. Elections always bring out the best and worst in us–create new wounds where old ones have healed, sow seeds of discords and frustration, ramp up tensions until they’re almost too much to bear. That’s normal. We clash and use our votes as our weapons, but when the battle is over, we come together to repair the damage caused.

Until now.

The truth has been an illusive beast this past year, which isn’t altogether uncommon for politics, but this election cycle was beyond the norm in every conceivable way. Allegations abounded: of foreign leaders interfering with our elections, of the FBI interfering with our elections, of classified information in unsecured emails, of sexual assault, of rape, of fraud, of racism, of crookedness, of being in bed with Wall Street. We all found our own version of truth amidst the fragments of information we could gather from varying news sources, and that truth led us to cast our ballots.

I’ve been nervous for a while. I’ve seen Trump’s loose-cannon personality steamroll entire groups of people. I’ve watched his narcissism prevent him from staying on track, derailed at the mere suggestion of personal attack. I’ve listened to him vacillate between viewpoints and spew hatred like a poem he once memorized for a middle school English class, so ingrained in him like it’s tattooed on his heart. The idea of this man leading my country made me uncomfortable, but I prayed that my fellow Americans would hear the same warning bells that had been ringing inside my head for months.

It wasn’t the case.

At first, I was in disbelief, which is an emotion I’ve carried with me through much of this election cycle. It all felt like a joke that went one step too far. My nervousness turned to fear for the first time, not for myself but for many people whom I love and respect–people who were reeling in the news, wondering how best to protect themselves from the inevitable surge of violence. I tried to be an ally, an advocate, a friend. I tried to believe that this was a temporary phenomenon and that there couldn’t possibly be enough people in the country to believe in the darkest hate. I fixed my face in grim acceptance, hoping that the man I so vehemently opposed would bring my country prosperity and hope.

It’s too early to tell if my optimism was unfounded. I have to believe that the future holds light because the alternative is too much to bear. But right now, my boundless optimism is crushed beneath the weight of hatred. I see photos of swastikas painted on community dugouts and read stories of Mexican children being tormented by classmates and teachers alike and wonder how to exist in a world so contrary to my own beliefs. This time in my life is marked by a thousand little internal battles and the process of trying to integrate this experience into my existence without having to rewrite everything I knew about myself and the people around me.

That undertaking was something I thought I could do with ease, but it’s not turning out to be that way. Until this morning, I truly believed I could stand by my principles and be the person I want to be, but my foundation has been shaken too much to be able to stand with confidence. The hate around me is seeping into my pores and fighting its way to my heart, and I don’t know if I have the strength left to fight it. I stand on my soapbox and preach acceptance and tolerance, but how long can you continue to speak those words when no one is listening?

I’m trying with everything I have to understand where Trump voters are coming from. I’m a democrat, but that doesn’t mean I believe that my party is correct about everything. I understand limiting the size of the federal government and giving more rights to the states. I understand concerns over the morality of most forms of abortion. I understand fears of economic instability. If this were any other election, I would not think twice about anyone filling in the oval for the republican nominee, because there are facets of policy on which I agree solely with republicans. Voting is a complex thing, filled with research and learning and viewing situations from every possible vantage point. If there’s anything I can say with certainly that I resent, it’s when people accuse me of not doing my homework or of believing everything the media says. I’m a rabid consumer of knowledge, and I don’t take voting lightly.

That being said, I’m still having trouble coming to terms with the idea that people could overlook the immaturity and hate Donald Trump has displayed throughout his campaign. I have reasoned with myself and given justifications of what would lead someone to vote for a personality like Donald Trump, and I understand the rhetoric: anti-government/anti-corruption candidate, Washington outsider, restore the country to some former state of glory. But even if you believed in every plank of his platform, I still have trouble understanding how you could, in good conscience, ignore his instability of demeanor and his unending hatred for nearly everyone. I’m not even referring to allegations of sexual assault, because until there’s an indictment or conviction, they are only allegations, just like the FBI case against Clinton was only an allegation. I’m referring to things that were directly observable to the American public without the lens of any media–without any interpretation handed to us by left- or right-leaning news outlets: undoctored footage of Trump mocking a disabled reporter, unedited audio of Trump normalizing the objectification and sexual assault of women, his suggestion of making an entire ethnicity register with the federal government, his call for the mass deportation of Mexicans (with the rationale being that all Mexicans are ne’er-do-well rapists and drug dealers), and on and on…

I will not–and will never–equate voting for Trump to being a racist, a bigot, etc. I can, however, say that voting for a candidate who actively endorses those things means that they’re not so egregious that you would consider an alternative vote. It means you’re not upset enough about it to let it change your mind. In essence, there are more important things to worry about. Maybe that’s true, but I can’t wrap my mind around being comfortable with bigotry being the face of our country–not just at home but around the world.

At first I was only upset in the sense that Trump’s victory offered legitimacy to radical groups of people rooted in violence and intolerance. It wasn’t Trump so much as the minority of his followers capable of doing real damage without, in their minds, fear of repercussion. It was the fear of people believing that, in Trump’s America, it’s okay to beat up LGBT youth because of their sexuality, or it’s okay to rip hijabs from Muslim women’s heads. That was my fear, and even though I felt like I was allowed to be afraid for myself, I wasn’t. I was afraid for my friends and classmates.

While this may sound trivial, I wasn’t able to address how I, as a woman, felt about the election results until I watched Kate McKinnon perform in SNL’s cold open.

I should have known the day after the election that I wasn’t okay on a personal level. I wasn’t able to watch Clinton’s concession speech because I knew it would stir in me a disappointment that reaches well beyond seeing my candidate lose. For many women, this is deeply personal, and I ignored that as if focusing on other people’s pain would somehow erase mine.

Then I heard Kate McKinnon’s Hillary Clinton sing, and something inside me broke.

I did my best–it wasn’t much. I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch. I told the truth; I didn’t come to fool ya. And even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand before the lord of song with nothing on my tongue but ‘hallelujah.’

I did not want Hillary Clinton to be my president because she is a woman, nor is that the reason I voted for her. I truly felt she was the more qualified candidate, and when you compare her 30 years of public service to Donald Trump’s zero, she was, in every respect, wildly qualified to win this election. Her loss is more complicated than attributing it to one variable, and I’m not enough of a reductionist or cynic to believe that her gender was the only thing holding her back. However, I am enough of a realist to know that it was a factor.

I recognize that being a white woman in America holds its own privileges, but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. Hillary Clinton’s loss, in a way, speaks to every woman who has ever lost out to a less-qualified man. It harkens back to every time I was told as a kid that only boys were allowed to do certain things. It underscores every “I want to speak to a man” I endured as a service technician at an Apple store. Unless you’ve been treated like a second-class citizen for an aspect of yourself you can’t control, you can’t possibly fathom what it’s like to be “less than.” Clinton came into this race with a resume several pages long, and Trump had a sheet of paper with his name on it.

And, with a collective voice that still reverberates in my head as I try to sleep at night, we chose the latter.

Hillary Clinton’s heartbreak is my own. I have to own it–wear it on my sleeve like a badge of honor, if only to remind myself of how long of a road I have left to walk. She feels like she has let me down, but she gave me hope that one day I might not be treated like my ideas are less legitimate because of my 23rd chromosomal pair.

I will still continue to promote tolerance, even if that means shaking hands with people whose ideals I cannot–and possibly will never–truly understand or be able to support. I will promote peace on both sides of this divide: no swastikas, no burning flags, no threats, no destroyed police cars. I will try my hardest to embrace all Americans, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or political affiliation.

But that does nothing to rid my mouth of this sour taste or to staunch the bleeding of my stubborn, complex, and confused liberal heart.

A Decade of Grief, Part Two

(If you missed the first part of this series, you can read it here.)

For a while after my father’s death, everyone treated me differently: spoke to me as if I were damaged, touched me as if I were made of glass, looked at me with their heads cocked to the side. It wasn’t bad, necessarily—just very different. And then, all of a sudden, they stopped. For them, life continued as it always had, and they expected the same would happen for me.

The thing about life is that it’s like a merry-go-round, except it’s going at 200 miles an hour. It doesn’t feel so bad when you’re on it and you’re strapped in; you get used to the pace because it’s all you’ve ever known. I had been tossed off of the merry-go-round, though, when my dad died. I sat on the ground, dizzy and disoriented, and watched as everyone else just continued spinning onward. It’s tempting to just sit and watch, but the longer you wait, the more you miss. Of course, the idea of leaping onto something that’s spinning at 200 MPH is terrifying, so that’s a factor.

I didn’t know how to jump back on. I faked it. I faked it so well that people believed I was okay. Even I believed I was okay, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t okay for a very long time, but faking it became so second nature for me that I convinced myself I had processed the loss and was moving forward.

The whole processing thing was complicated by the fact that we opened a lawsuit against the hospital. The moment that happened, a gag was placed in my mouth. I was forbidden to talk about anything related to my dad with anyone other than my mom. Any time I even mentioned him to someone else, I was looking over my shoulder, waiting to get caught. I needed to talk about it in order to process it, and I couldn’t.

The few times I did tell people what had happened—the actual details—any relief I could have gained from it was replaced with crushing guilt, wondering if I had just jeopardized the entire case. At fourteen, fifteen years old, my shoulders already ached from carrying the burden.

For the first year or so, no one knew about the lawsuit. Once the local paper got wind of it, though, it became common knowledge.

The first article was the worst. The writing made the implication that our case couldn’t hold water even though all we had done at that point was file the lawsuit. The comment section of the online version of the article was worse. My family was accused of being gold diggers and of profiting off of my father’s death. We were dragged through the mud by strangers. Students at my school—ones that I even considered friends—stopped talking to me or, at worst, were openly hostile. One girl told me it “wasn’t a big deal” that I no longer had a dad and that “everyone dies.”

I wasn’t allowed to defend myself. I had to keep my mouth shut and my head up, but nothing inside of me wanted to do that. I wanted to scream at these people and remind them that I never chose this and had no control over any of it.

I still feel uncomfortable talking about the lawsuit because there are people around me who are connected to the hospital and get frosty when I make reference to it. However, this is my experience. I own it. It happened to me—not anyone else—and I’ve earned the right to talk about it.

The hospital lied. They lied from the moment the surgery happened to the final days of the trial. They changed numbers on my dad’s chart and cited “pen malfunction” as the reason the numbers didn’t match. They lied under oath and changed a narrative that had already been written and done. They said things like, “I didn’t know Denis, but I could tell he was a great man.”

I watched my mother go through hell as she listened to deposition after deposition of varying accounts of how her husband died. Every deposition happened at the hospital rather than a court house or a lawyer’s office, forcing her to essentially relive my dad’s death for years.

I, too, was deposed. It was the first time I had stepped foot in the hospital since my dad’s death, and I felt dizzy and sick the entire time I was there. They asked me endless, probing questions about my relationship with my dad, my life, that month he was in the hospital, and ended up subpoenaing all 25 journals I had written from grades 7-10. My “homework” was that I had to read each journal and mark every single reference to my dad.

In preparation for my testimony, my lawyers took it upon themselves to remind me of all the things in my life my father would miss—graduations, weddings, births of children, every career milestone—as if I didn’t already think of those things all the time. At that point I was 18 and had already felt his absence at my high school graduation, three talent shows, countless softball games, and several other accomplishments. My heart was already scarred, and in some places I was still bleeding.

Some wounds never heal.

The night before the trial started, my team of lawyers took over the entire basement of Settler’s Inn. I called it The War Room because everything about it made it seem like we were preparing for this bloody battle. There were papers and files strewn about over several tables, with boxes lining the walls. The lawyers kept asking us if we wanted anything to eat or drink, and there was an entire table laid out with snacks and bottled water.

I didn’t take any of it, even though I knew we were footing the bill for it. Oddly enough, I wasn’t very hungry.

One of our attorneys took me aside to prep me specifically. He handed me photocopied pages of my journals, marked with neon flags indicating where I was supposed to read. I looked at him blankly. “I’m reading these?”

“Yes.”

For four years I was told to stay silent—to box up and put away everything I knew about my father—and now I was being asked to split myself open and spill my soul out to a room full of strangers, some of whom had a direct hand in my father’s death. The numbness I had experienced for so long came back full force, because if I had felt the terror of that, I would have collapsed under its weight.

I was free to go after I was prepped. I didn’t want to stay and listen to the strategies or catch snippets of what happened on that operating table. My aunt was there, and I remember her crying and hugging me and saying, “This is for Denis.”

I mean, it was. The whole point of the lawsuit was to force the hospital to take responsibility for their actions—to have some kind of justice in my dad’s name. What happened to him deserved to be brought to justice somehow, and maybe that should have made me feel better, but in that moment, knowing what I’d have to do soon, it didn’t bring me any comfort. I stood stiff as my aunt sobbed into my shoulder, and as soon as I was able, I got into my car and drove home.

On my day to testify, I had to get to the courthouse sometime in the late morning. My mom and aunt were already there, so I had to try to figure out the courthouse alone. I ended up in a sort of waiting room on the top floor. It was January, so snow was falling outside, making the whole day seem gray and dismal. I watched the school closings ticker at the bottom of a TV screen mounted to the wall, seeing if Honesdale had an early dismissal, even though at that point I was no longer in high school.

The wait seemed endless. During the trial’s lunch break, my lawyer went over my testimony with me one more time.

I don’t remember how I got into the court room or even being sworn in. Everything else is crystal clear to me, though. The jury was to my left, and behind them were long windows with ancient, yellow curtains. Directly ahead of me was my lawyer, and behind him sat my mom and my aunt. In front of me and to the right was the entire panel of defendants and their attorneys. To my direct right, almost so close I could touch her, was the court stenographer, whose clicking keys distracted me, but not nearly enough.

Being on a witness stand is like being in a small cage, which was appropriate because I felt like a sideshow act. My hands trembled as I held the xeroxed copies of my journals—fragments of my fragile soul that had been transformed into paper. My lawyer instructed me which passages to read, and I began.

At first I thought I could compartmentalize like I had for the past four years. After all, I had gotten good at pretending, and this was just the olympics of trying to pretend that I was okay. But that wasn’t the point. I was there to prove pain and suffering, and I was reading my pain and suffering. There’s no getting around that.

The emotion built up inside of me like bile, starting in the pit of my stomach and burning my chest on the way up. It burst out of me like vomit, wracking my body with tremors. The words in front of me blurred through a torrent of tears, and my voice croaked out every last private detail of those pages. I tried not to look at my family, knowing that seeing them would crack whatever stability I had left. Instead, I looked at the jury, trying to catch their eyes and make them see the pain buried inside of me that was finally gushing out—four years of festering wounds now being bled for the benefit of their judgement.

Not one juror could look me in the eye.

When I was finished, the judge asked the defense if they had anything they’d like to ask me, and all they said was, “We’d like to thank Ms. McDonnell for her honest and heartfelt testimony.”

White hot flames of anger licked my insides, but I was too drained to say or do anything other than step down from the stand and walk out the back of the courtroom. The door lead into a dark staircase carpeted in royal blue. I made it down half a flight of stairs before collapsing in the corner of the first landing and sobbing. The wall I leaned against was the only thing keeping me from slipping into the ocean of grief inside of me.

I allowed myself to be there no longer than five minutes. At that point I straightened up, caught my breath, and walked out of the courthouse, leaving it all behind.

The hospital ended up settling, which meant that my dad’s passing was ruled a wrongful death caused by the hospital’s neglect. Interestingly enough, though The Wayne Independent reported on the opening remarks of the trial, they never reported the outcome. That falls to me. Consider this to be the article they never bothered to write.

With the trial over, the gag was finally taken out of my mouth. I was free to talk about it, which meant I was finally free to “move on” and process the loss. However, I had gotten so used to being silent that I didn’t know how to talk about it or understand it. I hadn’t been allowed to grieve at the appropriate time, so grief felt very removed and foreign to me.

To be honest, it still does. I have moments when I’m able to fully understand what happened to me and my family, and those moment are immensely difficult. I have others when I can’t conceptualize that this is a real thing that happened in my life, and in those times, my dad is nothing more than a character in the story of my childhood—a childhood I have trouble believing I ever had.

I used to think that, because I never really broke down over my dad, I didn’t love him. It’s the opposite, though. When people get into car accidents and are seriously injured, they stop feeling pain. They go into shock in order to protect themselves from the trauma they’re experiencing. The same thing happened to me, but since I couldn’t physically see the wounds, I had a hard time coming to terms with my lack of emotion. The problem was that I loved my dad so much that his loss cut too deeply to be felt. I lacked the capacity to feel something that painful and profound, so my brain just shut it off.

His loss is still a daily struggle—one that I work on both actively and passively. It took me a long time to find meaning in it. It still is—and always will be—a senseless tragedy that could have been avoided. There will always be times when I’m angry at the universe for taking my dad away from me because it wasn’t necessary, and neither he nor I had done anything to deserve it.

That being said, my way of making sense of the senseless is to try to turn it into something positive. I know very intimately what it’s like to lose someone you love. I know what it’s like to fall deep into depression—to shake hands with the demons that live inside of you. I know what it means to suffer. If I can take that knowledge and use it to help other people, then my dad’s death serves a purpose. He can continue to influence me and guide my life if I use his passing as a way to help others through the same traumas. This is why I’ve decided to be become a psychologist.

I miss him. Nothing will ever change it, and no amount of insight or processing will ever make it okay that he was taken from this earth. He was 53. He had so much life ahead of him, and it’s not fair that it was stripped from him.

On the tenth of every month this year, I’m going to write a blog about my dad and all of the wonderful things he was. I want to honor his memory, and the first step of that was to tell the story of how he died.

Now I get to tell the story of how he lived, and as his daughter, I’m proud to have that honor.