Gunnar and I went to Guatemala.
I’d been to Guatemala before. I’d been many, many times. For a handful of years in my mid to late twenties, I went numerous times a year. Sometimes I went for a week. Sometimes I went for two months. I had friendships. I knew streets, trees, and mountains. I read novels and newspapers in Spanish; I could gossip and argue politics and have heart felt conversations. I had a canvas duffle bag that I never used anywhere but there. I could sling it effortlessly across my back and walk for hours.
Then I stopped going to Guatemala. I didn’t think about it, either. Twenty years passed.
A riddle: what are you avoiding?
How would you know? How do you know what your subliminal mind is avoiding if the subliminal mind itself is so cunning, so mischievous, so much smarter and more constant and strong than you are?
Years will go by and you’ll not realize what you’re doing to yourself. Theoretically, quite probably usually, not knowing will be the story of your whole life.
I stopped going to Guatemala because I got needed to get sober. In needing to get sober, I had to drop everything. Everything. I had to stop being who I was. I had to constantly ignore my impulses, swallow my pride, disregard my thoughts and beliefs. This is a mind bending, exhausting, exhaustive thing to do. I had to, as it’s said, surrender. I surrendered. This was, by any possible criterion, the most beautiful, wonderful, and strange thing to ever happen to me.
But in the process I stopped going to Guatemala. This wasn’t Guatemala’s fault. Guatemala had nothing to do with my downward spiral. But in getting sober a whole continent, several individuals, and a handful of character making things slid - like a doomed ship - below. Below.
This is a story, I suppose, of how weird character is. How, if we are talking about healing and transformation, we are actually talking about decades. This might also be the story of how failure really isn’t. Ever. Not if you can look at it in a certain way. Or give it enough time.
In the past six months, I have failed a dozen things pretty brutally. Little things. I burned a cake. I wacked my shin. I backed into another car in the grocery store parking lot, but so slowly and softly no damage was done. Great Big Things: I applied for a Fulbright and was rejected. I attempted to stop teaching yoga and write every day, only to find I’m too entangled and couldn’t get out so easily. I tried to finish - once for all - the Goddamned Book. It bit me on the nose.
One failure after another until my gut was sore from the punches. Failure kept rolling at me from out of the blue. I took ‘em like a champ. I felt like I was spitting teeth. I got a funny cockeyed stance about me and bent my knees. I couldn’t process one failure before the next one spun me. It was happening in so many places in my life that I started to wonder what I was doing wrong.
And then, subtle and without knowing I was doing it, I knew that it was all fine.
At this point I think all understanding is subtle. If it isn’t subtle, it isn’t really understanding. This is where the cockeyed stance came from. The bent knee and wink: I knew I could handle it. I suspected there was some kind of reshuffling underfoot and I knew it was going to happen whether I wanted it to or not: might as well take it. I began to suspect that I had brought this on myself. I do not mean I deserve failure or am a failure: quite the opposite. I brought this on myself by stepping up and forward.
It began (apparently) randomly. Someone suggested I apply for a Fulbright. I could go to India and write about it. (Weirdly) I immediately agreed. I should! I could! Why not?! I asked G. He answered with enthusiasm, a hundred gear turning questions and supports. I asked my mentors. Yes! they said. You should! They said. This is perfect! they said. You are exactly the person to write that thing down.
Please understand that that is woefully out of character. Such ease. Such gamey confidence. The willingness. The vulnerability. The wild ‘ok! what’s the worst that could happen?’
I have become unafraid of failure. It isn’t that fate has tossed me over or done me in. Nor is it that some key misunderstanding or maladaptive quirk is driving my behavior. Nope: this is pure and clear. It’s awkward precisely because it is pure and clear.
Here is where the subliminal started to crack it’s knuckles and bounce around like a featherweight in the shadows.
I’d applied for a Fulbright before, once upon a time in a prior life in Latin America. It was suggested to me by my mentors at the time. It made sense in terms of what I wanted to do with my life. It would have allowed me a year of living abroad, talking to people, and writing it all down. I was studying state failure and community resilience. (Yes dear, I am aware of the current relevance of something I studied a lifetime ago). I was interested in the gap between historical record and actual human beings. There is history - which is fascinating and wonderful but often misses the people, the culture, the hidden voices and realities - and then there is ethnography, anthropology, that which just keeps asking: what is this humanity?
Across the world, communities will care for themselves when the government can’t. Across Central America and the Andean region, violence and governmental strife had left a legacy of abandoned communities, shabby infrastructure, neglected schooling, a void of police and medical care. In that void, communities began to care for themselves. Small villages would gather, heads of families in a circle, and discuss their needs. Small, intimate communities tend to know, if something has been stolen for example, who the thief was. But they also tend to know that the theft was prompted by a crop failure or a death in the family. They understand, in a way that an abstract political body cannot, that the crime was prompted by poverty. The community might vote some kind of accountability or recompense into place, but they are also likely to establish community support for the family until things leveled out. Give the guy a cow.
This is beautiful. Actual democracy! I thought. I was fascinated.
It’s not as perfect as it sounds. There is often a vein of vengeance to the proceedings. There are vigilantes. Small communities often replicate the tortures of a terrorist military or police with precise, haunting details. There are motives and personalities involved. History and pain matter. Gangs are pretty much an expression of this banding together. “Community”, however it’s structured, tends to not include women in the definition.
I had built relationships in a small village called Saraguro in the Ecuadoran Andes. As a guest of honor, I’d gnawed on the skull of a guinea pig. I’d been granted permission to interview and tag around with the local cabal. I also walked around the corner and talked to the women, who had their own stories to tell. I had ins with some University and government archives folks in Cuenca and in Quito, as a way of comparing ‘the record’ to memory and glimpsing how frequently vigilante killings popped up in the news. The plan was for me to split my time between Saraguro and the city for occasional research.
I originally went to Guatemala to learn Spanish. I had a ragtag spanglish I’d picked up working in social justice. You can’t answer a domestic violence hotline in Chicago for very long without realizing you need, you must, be able to say please stay on the line while I get someone who can talk to you. When you work with a dozen Latinas, and everyone in the office realizes you’re trying to learn, you’re suddenly practicing every day. People push food in your face. Tres leches. Chilis rellenos. Everyone asked: will you go to Puerto Rico or to Mexico, first? winking, because each of them was from one or the other and Chicago is like that.
This was wonderful, but I never learned to do anything other than slap random words together and reiterate slang. I had some key vocabulary words sobre los derechos de la mujer. They taught me about la migra, and el machismo. It wasn’t until I started to learn that I fully understood the complicated operations of semi-legal tortilla factories and canning shops. I also learned more about the sex trade than I was prepared for.
Guatemala was purported to be a great place to learn. Guatemalans have a softer accent than other Spanish speaking countries, and a slowness that is kind to those on a learning curve. I went because I wanted to learn. I just happened to fall in love with the place. I just kept going back.
It was all going beautifully until I spent a weekend getting shitfaced and failed to show up where I was expected Monday morning. Shortly after that I went on a real tear. I tried to right myself but promptly did it again. Then I did it again, with my chin lifted. Defiantly. I don’t want your good thing anyway, like. Fuck you, like.
In the end I failed to even submit the Fulbright application. I ghosted my mentors. I left friendships hanging. I dropped out of school for the umpteenth time. I ended up in a beach town in Peru, spending two weeks in a dark room listening to the ocean. When I’d wander out for more booze, folks asked if I’d seen the whales. Did you see the whales today? They asked, smiling. No. No I didn’t see the whales. That week I got pregnant, after dancing in Guayaquil. That pregnancy - and the fact that I couldn’t stay sober for it - were the things that first sent me to a twelve step meeting.
And then years passed.
Last summer, G found tickets to Guatemala. He is the one who finds us - through web connections unknown to me - our cheapish flights. Over the course of pandemic, we have had several trips booked and subsequently cancelled. Some money lost and some disappointment, but mostly we just keep scheduling the next one. Pivot artists.
One day a text message at lunch time: want to go to Guatemala? Immediately I said yes, sure. Of course.
I didn’t think, when I answered him, of my history. That was so long ago. Years before we became we or I became this eye. No: I was only thinking of us, here and now. I was thinking of how great we are at packing and wandering and eating. He super plans. I wander down streets aimlessly. It works out.
As the day went on, I found all sorts of memories, feelings, and vertigo like queries coming up.
Man, I’m old; that was so long ago for example. Sweet memories, enthusiasm to share something I love with him, eagerness to smell things again, taste them again, be where I once was. There was also dissonance, little jabs of regret and grief. Because I was not healthy at the time, I did a lot of dumb things and wasted many, many opportunities. And then there was a swollen, mumbling sense of being given: not that I can reclaim lost time or make up for lost experiences, but the even stranger possibility of going back to something done poorly, something broken, something lost, and making up for it. A murky realizing, for all I haven’t really thought about anthropology or worn out jeans or how did I get here afternoons, I’ve got Guatemala stuff all over my life (a Virgin in the bathroom, rosaries with my mala beads, a salad bowl I use almost every day.).
We’ll climb a volcano, I told him. We’ll walk through the jungle surrounded by the dragon sound of howler monkeys. We’ll look at the mountains and see calla lilies growing in the ditch. I told him about cold showers and hot milk in your cereal, which seems like a weird thing until you try it in the mountains in the early mornings where the houses are cinderblock and the air is cold. Then it makes sense.
I said all of this, and as I spoke I heard a high humming sound arising in my brain. At first it was so slight. It gained over the course of the day. It wailed. Then I promptly shelved all thoughts and feelings about it.
It wasn’t until the week before we left until that I realized my avoidance. I’d been not-thinking-about-going-to-Guatemala with an intensity that was downright stupid, childish, irresponsible. The morning before we left G asked where my passport was. My brain did the loud flatline thing. The high whining thing. The blare of I will not think of that and if you force me I will run, thing.
But I could see it. My avoidance was so obvious, and so ineffective, it became funny. I went and got the passport for him and then I crawled back into bed. As I lay there I realized it was more than avoiding thinking about a vacation for nine months: I haven’t thought about Guatemala in 20 years. I haven’t just not spoken Spanish; I’ve denied it. I have, all subtle subtle, blasted even the remote possibility of a conversation from all likely interactions. It’s silly. I live in the United States. I could easily be speaking Spanish every day. We have a favorite taco truck nearby. Laying there, looking at the ceiling, I realized I always somehow make Gunnar go and place the order.
I laid there. I cleared my throat. I folded the quilt under my armpits and stared at the ceiling. I tried to think something in Spanish. The high whine amplified. The blood hardened down my inner arms. The muscles parched. Looking for a word felt like trying to talk in a dream.
People say: oh, it’s like riding a bicycle. They say It will come back. But I’m not talking about if you don’t use it you lose it, even though that is true. I’m saying even if I wanted to, even if I had it in me, there is a visceral scream of shut down when I open my mouth. Something anesthetic leaks through my body.
It was okay. That’s the moral of the story. I applied for a Fulbright to go to India and was rejected. And it was fine. I actually felt something around the previous Fulbright experience resolve. By which I mean unearth.
And we went to Guatemala. While we were there I spoke like a child. Hesitant, quiet. Confused. Again: like trying to speak in a dream. I grieve this a little. I’m embarrassed a bit. But I got us through. My Spanish works well enough. We both had a lovely vacation as a couple, visited jungle and highland and mountain lakes, and at the same time I stepped into something personally huge. I felt stunned, just waking: subsumed.
And it was fine. Enveloping and fine. On one of our last days in Guatemala, I grabbed a book in Spanish. Now I read it as I fall asleep, surprised at how easily I read. I changed my phone and computer settings to Spanish. I’ll learn - I’ll learn again, if I have to. Except it isn’t again. It’s just learning to make room for this hugeness in my heart. How to both grieve and celebrate.
Follow the threads with me. Yoga. Allows me to begin recovery. Recovery is prerequisite to any relationship with my husband. Our marriage is what has given me this life where we can text each other plans to visit foreign countries. It is only because of him that the trip to Guatemala ever came up.
For the last year, my practice has mostly been chanting. Which is all about deep language and deep memory. Half a dozen times, my chanting practice has bumped up against the languages I’ve lost in my life. Like fish in the dark. Caves and murk. Scraps of French arise in a dream, along with the feeling of a skirt I used to own on the skin of my thigh. Several times, in chanting, a background question of why I should spend so much time chanting in Sanskrit: what would happen if I had the same dedication to studying something actually useful? Like Arabic? In my chanting, there is a shifting of deep waters, a raising of questions and ghosts. One morning, making coffee, I said “I want a cup of coffee” in Greek. Apropos of nothing whatsoever. To the nobody else standing in the kitchen with me. Several dozen times, as I studied my chants, I had flirty, pale memories of studying Spanish - how hard I worked! For so long! - and a growing awareness of the fact that I don’t speak Spanish any longer. Faces welled up in the corners: women I worked with in domestic violence,, the guys who worked at the bodega in Brooklyn. A summer afternoon. A six pack. A pet name. Laughter. I’m not saying I manifested any of these things, Guatemala or Fulbrights or marriage itself. I’m only saying my practice allows me to accept them. Leave nothing unturned. Recover what you’d forgotten.
Point being: I apologize for not writing sooner. I’ve been busy.
Point being: it might take you decades - it may have been decades - but what is it that you’re hiding from yourself?