Peggi

This is a repost bc I don't think I included enough to demonstrate my use of dialog. 1. A Bargain In the same way a priest nobly chooses celibacy or a gambler swears off betting, I believed I could live outside of my desire. Especially if I set the stakes so high I couldn’t afford to lose. I began crafting a bargain. By the time the spring warm-up I’d waited impatiently for arrived, I was ready. Jacketless, I headed down the hill where I frequently took “worry walks,” my mostly fruitless strategy for controlling anxiety. Before rounding the cul de sac, I paused in the street with my thoughts. I watched but barely saw a hunched man spray his hose in an arc of water towards his azalea bushes, and I heard but barely listened to the high-pitched barking from behind a yellow two-story house. “It’s time,” I told myself. Still standing in the middle of the street, I closed my eyes and called up the words, speaking them out loud with finality. “God, if you will keep me from my mother’s fate, I will never cheat on Jim.” With that, I wished away my tenacious longing for intimacy with a woman. Before God, I had cemented my bargain with a promise and closed with a prayer for the strength to stay true to my word. If it worked, I could let go of my biggest fear, confident God heard me; not yet knowing God had heard me in ways I never imagined, not yet wondering if the bargain precipitated the biggest watershed moment of my life. # The bargain bridged two decades as I crossed from my fifties into my sixties. I kicked off my new decade on a Sunday afternoon at a Charlottesville vineyard set in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains. My three friends and I reached back and forth across the picnic table to fill our wine glasses and pass hunks of cheese and plates of olives and crackers. We clinked raised glasses to toast my years to come. All of us were unaware Judas sat beside me and would abandon our friendship by my next birthday. But for the sake of righteousness instead of money. The next night, I sat across from my husband, Jim, in a historic downtown Charlottesville restaurant. He didn’t offer a toast, but he had secured a table by a window. In the ebb and flow of conversation, we looked out at passersby, both of us unaware they were walking to and from the spot where someone would soon die during the 2017 Unite the Right confrontation. My final birthday celebration came the next day. It was without cards or toasts or tasty food, but it was the weightiest. Behind a closed door, I lay on an exam table surrounded by sterile walls (except for the detailed poster of a “person” with no skin), my doctor standing beside me. “Your health is stellar,” he said, then extended his hand to help me sit up. He smiled and wrapped up my annual physical with words everyone wants to hear, especially on a milestone birthday: “Live with joy.” On those words, I uncrossed my fingers to let the worry I carried like a cross succumb to the glories of the coming summer. If ever I could live with joy, it was in the warmth of summer. Summer, the reason for my career in teaching, would bring my college-aged kids back home and coax my leisures. There would be happy hours with friends, piles of novels and tennis. Yet… I felt a pause, my inner knowing waving a yellow flag at my new decade. 2. The Therapist There was a sudden flash—not a flash of inspiration, but a flash like the old-fashioned pop of a camera bulb. Except it was green. I looked up from my book, almost expecting to see the flash had come from a source somewhere in the room. From my place on the couch, I panned the family room, eyeing the wall of exposed red brick between the 1960’s paneling. Things looked normal, but I was shaken. I put on my shoes for a worry walk. Outside, the bright summer light hurt my eyes. Squinting behind my sunglasses, I noticed a green saucer shape sitting at the bottom of my right eye. Within half a block, creeping anxiety began to outpace my effort to stay ahead of it. I cut the walk short. Back inside, I called out to my nineteen-year-old son. “Micah, look in my eye,” I told him with some urgency, pushing my sunglasses to the top of my head. He directed me to the nearest window, where the light coming in required him to hold my lid open. With my head tipped back, I moved my watery eyeball up, down and around. “It looks fine, Ma,” he said. We diagnosed “weird floater.” “Floaters were nothing to worry about,” I thought. The anxiety eased, and I allowed a summer evening to unfold as it should, with a glass of beer on the front porch steps, an easy dinner and an early retreat to the king-size marriage bed Jim and I had never really shared. I crawled in and cozied up to my book, but I had to keep shifting it to see the bottom half of the pages otherwise obscured behind the slice of lime green. “Wait!” I thought with a start. “Floaters float.” This wasn’t floating. # “You had a branch retinal artery occlusion,” the retina specialist said. “Clinically, a BRAO; informally, a retinal stroke.” Of course I’d never heard of such. He pointed to the magnified image of a dark segment on a tiny artery. “The clot lasted about a minute, long enough to cause the green flash.” The yellow flag? The doctor saw no plaque or obvious cause for the clot, which was meant to be good news. “Sometimes this just happens. Don’t go looking for the zebra in the tall grass,” he said, not knowing that was like telling a hungry lion not to pursue its prey. The parting words of his assistant were starkly different, simultaneously directing me towards the office exit and a field of hidden zebras. “Good you came in,” he said off-handedly. “The clot was in your eye this time, but it could happen in your brain.” Head-to-toe panic flooded my body as it tried to bolt out of itself. This wasn’t the anxiety I was used to. I knew that kind—I lived under its constant shadow. “That” anxiety and I made coffee together in the morning, passed in the halls during the day and retired together at night. But this anxiety reached a new height. We weren’t just cohabitating; it was a coup d’etat, a complete usurping of what had been the status quo. The next morning, I was back in my primary care doctor’s office. “I was just looking at my phone,” I told him, recounting the events leading up to the green flash. “And before that I was watching the women’s Wimbledon finals… Venus Williams was in it.” I didn’t know why he would care, but I couldn’t help but add, “She’s my all-time favorite women’s player.” In fact, that July, as Venus Williams wound her way to the 2017 finals of Wimbledon, I watched every match from my seat on our purple basement couch (a “final sale” purchase). Watching Venus play was both exciting and nerve-racking; I cheered her, I chastised her, and I prayed for her to the end as Garbiñe Muguruza took her down in a two-set final. Watching the grand slam title slip away from Venus was painful, but hardly stroke-inducing. It was barely a month since my stellar check-up. Even though my summer joy had come with a sense of caution, a stroke was not something I ever imagined. I took care of my body. I followed all of the current health and wellness guidelines. If a stroke, then what other malicious matter was hiding in my blood or my bones, or within the DNA of my cells? I could only speculate, which I did all too well. “Do you think the eye stroke is related to the recurring ache in my arms?” I asked my doctor. “My upper arms often feel like they are being wrung out like a wet cleaning rag.” “I think that's a stress response,” he said, but he agreed to pursue cardiovascular and other clot-related etiologies, at least until he set off on a two-year sailing trip. Unlike the many alarms my brain sounded over the years, this time I had evidence of a real problem. I knew I could not sustain the anxiety the stroke had unleashed. It was anxiety like the alarm of an abandoned car. I had no key, no way to turn it off, or to even dial it down. It just kept blaring. I also had no way of knowing the stroke was one of those things that happens for a reason not understood until long after the event. No way of knowing the green flash was my personal big bang; one that would expand an incipient religious reformation that had been progressing more slowly than my lifespan might afford. One that would let me finally come of age. Within a week of the retinal stroke, I made the life-changing decision I would wish I made years before. “I don’t want to live like this anymore,” I told a therapist over the phone.

1. A Bargain In the same way a priest nobly chooses celibacy or a gambler swears off betting, I believed I could live outside of my desire. Especially if I set the stakes so high I couldn’t afford to lose. I began crafting a bargain. By the time the spring warm-up I’d waited impatiently for arrived, I was ready. Jacketless, I headed down the hill where I frequently took “worry walks,” my mostly fruitless strategy for controlling anxiety. Before rounding the cul de sac, I paused in the street with my thoughts. I watched but barely saw a hunched man spray his hose in an arc of water towards his azalea bushes, and I heard but barely listened to the high-pitched barking from behind a yellow two-story house. “It’s time,” I told myself. Still standing in the middle of the street, I closed my eyes and called up the words, speaking them out loud with finality. “God, if you will keep me from my mother’s fate, I will never cheat on Jim.” With that, I wished away my tenacious longing for intimacy with a woman. Before God, I had cemented my bargain with a promise and closed with a prayer for the strength to stay true to my word. If it worked, I could let go of my biggest fear, confident God heard me; not yet knowing God had heard me in ways I never imagined, not yet wondering if the bargain precipitated the biggest watershed moment of my life. # The bargain bridged two decades as I crossed from fifty-nine to sixty. I kicked off my new decade on a Sunday afternoon at a Charlottesville vineyard set in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains. My three friends and I reached back and forth across the picnic table to fill our wine glasses and pass hunks of cheese and plates of olives and crackers. We clinked raised glasses to toast my years to come. All of us were unaware Judas sat beside me and would abandon our friendship by my next birthday. But for the sake of righteousness instead of money. The next night, I sat across from my husband, Jim, in a historic downtown Charlottesville restaurant. He didn’t offer a toast, but he had secured a table by a window. In the ebb and flow of conversation, we looked out at passersby, both of us unaware they were walking to and from the spot where someone would soon die during the 2017 Unite the Right confrontation. My final birthday celebration came the next day. It was without cards or toasts or tasty food, but it was the weightiest. Behind a closed door, I lay on an exam table surrounded by sterile walls (except for the detailed poster of a “person” with no skin), my doctor standing beside me. “Your health is stellar,” he said, then extended his hand to help me sit up. He smiled and wrapped up my annual physical with words everyone wants to hear, especially on a milestone birthday: “Live with joy.” On those words, I uncrossed my fingers to let the worry I carried like a cross succumb to the glories of the coming summer. If ever I could live with joy, it was in the warmth of summer. Summer, the reason for my career in teaching, would bring my college-aged kids back home and coax my leisures. There would be happy hours with friends, piles of novels and tennis. Yet… I felt a pause, my inner knowing waving a yellow flag at my new decade. 2. The Therapist There was a sudden flash—not a flash of inspiration, but a flash like the old-fashioned pop of a camera bulb. Except it was green. I looked up from my book, almost expecting to see the flash had come from a source somewhere in the room. From my place on the couch, I panned the family room, eyeing the wall of exposed red brick between the 1960’s paneling. Things looked normal, but I was shaken. I put on my shoes for a worry walk. Outside, the bright summer light hurt my eyes. Squinting behind my sunglasses, I noticed a green saucer shape sitting at the bottom of my right eye. Within half a block, creeping anxiety began to outpace my effort to stay ahead of it. I cut the walk short. Back inside, I called out to my nineteen-year-old son. “Micah, look in my eye,” I told him with some urgency, pushing my sunglasses to the top of my head. He directed me to the nearest window, where the light coming in required him to hold my lid open. With my head tipped back, I moved my watery eyeball up, down and around. “It looks fine, Ma,” he said. We diagnosed “weird floater.” “Floaters were nothing to worry about,” I thought. The anxiety eased, and I allowed a summer evening to unfold as it should, with a glass of beer on the front porch steps, an easy dinner and an early retreat to the king-size marriage bed Jim and I had never really shared. I crawled in and cozied up to my book, but I had to keep shifting it to see the bottom half of the pages otherwise obscured behind the slice of lime green. “Wait!” I thought, this time with a start. “Floaters float.” This wasn’t floating.

One: To move towards her lifelong desire of being in a same-sex relationship, the protagonist must untangle her religious beliefs from a mental health disorder that, together, keep her trapped within a heterosexual marriage. Two: The protagonist and antagonist are the same character who is locked in a back and forth over the freedom to fulfill her lifelong desire. In me vs. myself, the antagonist is personified in patterns of anxiety and evangelical certainty. I fight my own entrenched religious fundamentalist beliefs and layers of distorted thinking that keep me in a state of fear and a miserable heterosexual marriage. Three: What the Third Eye Sees: A Foray into the Forbidden Certain Beliefs: Unraveling the Anxiety in Fundamentalism and the Fundamentalism in Sexuality Certain Uncertainty: The Magic of Overcoming Distorted Thinking Four: HIJAB BUTCH BLUES by Lamya H. Written from a Muslim perspective, the author dissects traditional stories of the Quran in the way I use the Christian spiritual practice of lectio divina. Both of us reinterpret what we have been taught to renegotiate the binary character of God. We come to a new understanding of ourselves and integrate our sexuality and feminist beliefs into our faith. Although the root causes differ, Lamya H and I both struggle to be vulnerable and are lonely souls in search of the authentic connection that isn’t available to us through romantic heterosexual relationships. Primary differences between our stories make them unique to each other. First, I chose my fundamentalist faith as an adult and built my marriage and parenting on its tenets, whereas Lamya was raised steeped in the teachings of the Quran. Also, because I came of age in an era that obscured the gay landscape, I lacked an understanding of my sexuality until I was middle-aged and already married to a man. Lamya, however, understands this when she is in her late teens and unmarried. Further, the layered themes in our stories are different. Lamya writes of the difficulties of being a Muslim immigrant near the time of 9-11 while I include the complex layer of an anxiety disorder. MAYBE YOU SHOULD TALK TO SOMEONE by therapist and writer Lori Gottlieb. Gottlieb’s memoir follows a chronology much like mine. The plot is anchored in the therapy sessions of the main characters. As readers sit on the couches with Gottlieb’s clients, so they sit with me in my story. Both stories present mirrors to readers and enjoin them in a process of self-examination, but my story is told from the client’s perspective rather than the therapist’s. Further, my story is broader in scope as it captures life outside of therapy. LIVING, LOVING, and LEAVING the WHITE EVANGELICAL CHURCH by Sarah McCammon. Evidenced by its rapid rise to the New York Times bestseller list, this memoir reflects the appetite for books about the evangelical world across a broad readership. The book, which is part memoir and part investigative journalism, addresses evangelical cultural issues of her childhood, including sexuality, women’s roles, and other dogmatic religious teachings. While I speak to many of the same issues, I, in stark contrast, could be the parent in her story because I raised my children much like she was raised. Another difference is my emphasis on the patterns of dualistic thought produced by a fundamentalist worldview; patterns that were kept in place by a need for certainty and reassurance. In addition, McCammon is not a lesbian. Five: After years of battling an anxiety disorder, a health event propels a 60-year-old evangelical woman into the therapy that springs her from traps of distorted thinking and frees her to choose her authentic sexuality. Six: Early spiritual and supernatural experiences of “hearing” God nurtured the belief that every choice or decision is either the right one or the wrong one, and that making wrong choices will result in displeasing God or tragedy. Overcoming binary thinking means foregoing religious teachings and the need for certainty. When therapy uncovers a childhood trauma of sexual assault, the embraces that as the cause of her same-sex attraction, but only tells her husband about the assault. As she tries to extricate herself from the marriage, he holds on to the idea that she can be healed from the assault’s wounds, forcing them both into a cycle of guilt and reprieve. Seven: The story is anchored in therapy sessions in two different offices, but flashbacks take the protagonist out of those places into other primary settings of her home, neighborhood, inside churches, and the bar at a local grocery store. Scene is enhanced by the behavioral details of the actors, such as jangling keys, slamming doors, picking up lettuce off of a plate, and looking down at the floor.