I decided to undergo “training sessions” like I’d given Frances by going into my trailers. When I walked in, I definitely felt the mold: I felt a sense of pressure in my nervous system, a creepy-crawly feeling on my skin. The trailers were not as bad as many buildings in town, and I was glad—just as we’d kept Lao far enough away from Frances to not overwhelm her, I figured I needed to start with a building that didn’t have mold sliming across the walls. And I kept my first session short, just a few minutes, for the same reason.
I started by talking to myself, out loud. “Thank you, nervous system, for letting me know about the mold in here. I hear you. You’ve been doing me such a service in alerting me to mold—I’ve really needed that, so that I had a chance to heal. But we’re doing so incredibly well now! Remember how okay we were in that moldy hotel lobby? No way could we have handled that months ago. So I’m confident that you can handle a few minutes of being in here now. You can trust me—I’m listening to you, and I promise I won’t let you get hurt. But for a few minutes, we’re going to be fine.”
After that, I got inventive. Sometimes I meditated or did yoga. Sometimes I stroked my skin soothingly. Often I put on raucous music and danced. Sometimes I walked around congratulating myself for how well I was doing, throwing my arms in the air in a victory sign, giving myself hugs, jumping up and down in glee. Sometimes I visualized the mold bouncing off a force field around me, or entering my lungs and then being breathed right out. Sometimes I thought of that man in the park and practiced shouting “No!” as loud as I could, thrusting my arm up in a stop signal. Sometimes I thought of my tribe of ancestors surrounding me, keeping that bad man at a distance, and I mimed hugging them, one after another. My theory was that I wanted to do things that would reach my body and not just my mind, things that would convince my body that it was safe. Each time I noticed the mold, I acknowledged it, thanked my nervous system for the information, and told myself that at this level, it was just fine.
Day by day, I stretched my time in the trailers longer or waited longer to shower afterward. And day by day, I felt the strength of my reaction diminishing. Not only that, but I found that other moldy buildings were bothering me less as well. I didn’t manage to end the reactions completely, but I did reduce them substantially.
Just as I didn’t think that the success of my work with Timmy showed that my body’s response to mold was purely an overreaction of my brain to an otherwise harmless substance, I didn’t think this did either. Mold had to have hurt me before my brain could have learned to overreact.
But it made sense to me that once mold had sickened me, an exposure set off a characteristic firing pattern in my brain, over and over again. And that alone is enough to change a brain: An old saying in neuroscience is “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” With each reaction, I was essentially practicing a particular response, as if I were playing a musical passage again and again on the piano, burning a pattern of finger movements into the wiring of my brain. Just as practicing piano allowed my fingers to flow more fluidly over the scales, “practicing” reactivity allowed my body to respond more quickly and powerfully to the presence of mold.
My ridiculous antics in the trailer were a way of unlearning that response. It was as if I’d made the same mistake over and over as I’d learned a new piece on the piano—the way to get rid of it was to start from the beginning and play the passage slowly, carefully, and accurately, as many times as necessary, rewiring that neural pathway in my brain, teaching it a new pattern of response.
I became convinced that I’d learned how to hack my own nervous system.
CHAPTER 24
A SHAKESPEAREAN ENDING
Six weeks after John and I first met, we were driving back to Santa Fe to meet up with my sister Robin and her husband, Kevin, who were driving in from Arkansas. It was the first time John would meet any of my family.
We’d just entered New Mexico and were driving past the smooth, round hump of San Antonio Mountain in companionable silence when a thought flitted through my mind so naturally I almost didn’t even notice it: One of these days, we’ll have to get around to getting married.
I reported the thought to John, commenting on my surprise both to have thought it and to have had it seem so self-evident. He responded intently: “Do you want to?”
“Yeah, at some point,” I said, carefully keeping my voice light and casual.
“So . . . shall we tell people we’re engaged?” John asked.
Oh my god! I thought. That’s not what I meant. I’m not ready for that. We haven’t even had a fight yet. Maybe you turn into a monster!
I couldn’t figure out what to say. The silence stretched.
John reached for my hand. “That scared you, huh?” I gave a tight little nod.
“We don’t have to do anything that scares you,” he said. “We can take as much time as you want.” I almost wept with relief.
The weekend with Robin and Kevin was perfectly comfortable, the four of us settling into an easy rhythm of chatting and cooking and hanging out and walking and fishing. The person I was with John and the person I was with Robin felt entirely compatible with one another, and when I talked with Robin about him, I felt a relaxed pleasure and pride in him I’d never felt about a previous partner.
John was training for a 31-mile trail race in the Rockies, no biggie by his hundred-mile, 15,000-foot-elevation-gain standards, and Kevin asked to join John on a run. “Okay,” John said, “but I’m going to be running for five hours in the mountains. You up for that?”
“Sure!” Kevin said. Kevin ran fast road marathons with his buddies in Arkansas, and he calculated that the distance John was planning wouldn’t be more than he was used to. He was well groomed and tightly muscled, a salesman for a pet-supply company to Walmart, with an extremely positive, can-do attitude perfectly suited for a soccer coach. As the two of them talked about the run, I could see male bonding in action.
Kevin arrived for the run with a fanny pack carrying two vials of water that held approximately one thimbleful apiece. John and I exchanged a look: This guy has no idea what he’s getting into. But we got him supplied with extra water and off they went, out the door and up the trail.
Robin and I luxuriated in vicarious pleasure in their run. I described the route they’d be running through to her, starting at our house at 7,200 feet, going past waterfall after waterfall, up a rocky cliff, across an aspen-studded meadow, past the ski basin, up through dark ponderosas, and then above tree line at 11,600 feet, where they’d have views across the whole Rio Grande Valley. My favorite land in all the world.
We rushed out when we heard Kevin running up the driveway: “How was it? How was it?”
He stopped, spread his arms wide, looked up at the sky, and gave an exclamation I never heard from him before or since: “That was a spiritual experience!”
John ran in a half hour later, having added a side trip. He and Kevin gleefully recounted nearly every step of the run as they drank their beers and ate green chile stew and cornbread. John had coached him through it, teaching him form tricks, encouraging him to take energy from the landscape, helping him keep going when he thought he couldn’t make it. The next day, on John’s suggestion, the two of us bought a topographic map, drew the route on it, and framed it for Kevin as a gift.
As we drove to meet Robin and Kevin for dinner in town and give them the framed map, I told John that I’d changed my mind in the last few days. Holding back felt silly. “Let’s tell them we’re engaged.”
“Are you sure?” he asked. “Like I said, there’s no hurry. I’ll wait for you as long as I need to.” I just smiled and squeezed his hand in response.
Robin screamed and hugged us when we told her.
We decided to have the wedding in June of 2013, a year after we met. John, who had never been married, had clear ideas about it: He wanted to invite all his friends, he wanted music, he wanted dancing. A big shindig.
Oof. I thought. I’m not sure I
can do that. I’d already had one wedding that was a big shindig. I was thinking instead of a few friends, a quiet ceremony, dinner afterward. But John was already waxing on about the songs he wanted on the wedding playlist, and I could see that no small, quiet ceremony would cut it. I was going to have to come around.
Over the year, as my health varied, the wedding felt like a goal line: By then, I wanted to be all better. I felt as though I were on a treasure hunt, finding the clues I needed to repair my health: mold avoidance, showers, laundry, ozone, coffee enemas, saunas, supplements, Timmy, connecting with my family, brain retraining. Each one seemed like a piece of a puzzle, and once I assembled them all, I would once more be whole—or at least I hoped so. I could feel a tension in myself around that, a sense of pressure, but I couldn’t entirely let go of that expectation and ambition either.
Since we were going big on this wedding, I naturally invited all seven of my assorted siblings. I was sure Robin would come, but I hadn’t seen Ty in many years, and I had no idea how many of my half siblings on my father’s side would make the trek—especially because they didn’t all get along with one another. Two of them, Troy and Carol, hadn’t spoken in years, driven apart by family history and clashing personalities. But one by one, I heard back from each one that they’d come. I held my breath: What would happen when Troy and Carol realized the other was also planning to come?
A little while later I heard from each of them, saying the same thing: “I’m coming for you, Julie. The rest will just have to work itself out.”
Ty also said he was coming and bringing his seven-year-old son with him. But at the last moment, he told me he couldn’t afford the airfare. A cousin of mine had given me a gift of $1,000 to spend on the wedding, “for something you wouldn’t do otherwise,” she said. I bought Ty and his son plane tickets with great satisfaction.
Never before had all eight of us siblings been together.
I walked down the aisle on the arm of a dear friend. John was looking extremely dapper in white tails, with the continental divide providing a backdrop, its peaks still topped with the tiniest bit of white. We were in the meadow outside the house John owned in the mountains. He’d bought it years before I met him, the fulfillment of his Colorado mountain man dreams. After he’d lived there a couple of years, though, he grew so lonely—he was single then and didn’t want to be—that he moved to a rented house in town and rented out his mountain house. John had sadly accepted that the mountain house was too moldy for me when I staggered out of it the first time. Having our wedding here felt like a way of pulling the potent energies the house contained forward into our life together.
John took my hand and helped me up onto our little stage in front of the audience. I looked out over everyone assembled: Not only were all seven of my siblings there, but also Geoff, cousins, and aunts and uncles of mine, John’s family, old friends, joint friends, new friends, Frances—more than a hundred people who loved us (plus a dog). In the front row, we’d set aside chairs for our three parents who had died, with pictures and flowers. My mother’s also had her gold watch; my father’s had his cowboy boots and bolo tie. It seemed unimaginable that a year and a half earlier, I was lying in my trailers feeling utterly, profoundly alone, unsure whether I’d ever have much of a life again.
During the ceremony, John and I each spoke about why we loved each other. I started: “Being with John has opened me wide to the world . . .” Then I had to stop because I was already crying. I looked at John and he wiped a tear from my cheek. I buried my face in his neck, breathing him in and feeling his arm around my waist. I felt the seconds stretching as I worked to smooth my breathing.
Then I tried again. “Being with John has opened me wide to the world, infused every aspect of my life with meaning, and softened me. He’s contributed to an amazing transformation in my life that began before I met him, helped to prepare me for him, and has only accelerated in the time I’ve known him.”
I gave a quick sketch of my illness and described how generously and gracefully John responded to it. Then I talked about the spaciousness and ease and abundance he’d brought into my life, and to illustrate that, I told a story from the previous weekend, when we went for a hike with a couple of John’s relatives. Early in the hike, I found myself feeling tired, and I told him that I needed to stop and rest but that they should continue. We were both disappointed—we’d hoped I’d be able to gambol up the trail like a mountain goat with him, as I sometimes could. But John immediately didn’t just accept my decision; he embraced it, hugging me, equipping me with everything I might need, and continuing on with a bounce in his step.
After they disappeared up the trail, I lay on a rock, listening to the roar of the white water next to me, feeling the support of the earth and the cleansing power of that water, and all the while I felt as though John were right with me, holding me and cheering me on. I had the space I needed for myself because I knew I could trust him to enjoy himself without me. Eventually, I found myself up for walking on to rejoin them, and soon I saw John running down the trail toward me, his face aglow and his arms open wide.
“Over and over,” I said during the ceremony, “my illness has presented John opportunities to feel resentful and constrained, but he’s embraced the challenge every time, offering me his faith in my body’s ability to heal. Most of the time, we’ve managed to make the whole thing feel like a crazy adventure, but there have been moments when we’ve both felt overwhelmed, worried that I’d never get better. Then John has embraced even that, his love burning through his fear, and he’s told me that . . .” Here, I choked up again, and then spoke through my tears: “He’s told me that even then he would be thrilled to be with me. I am quite awed by that.”
When it was John’s turn, I listened eagerly, not having heard in advance what he was going to say. He began by describing my lack of victimization and my courage in dealing with my illness and with life in general. “This has made it so easy for me to show up and be helpful,” he said, “and to be a way I love to be, which is to feel needed. It’s given me so much joy to be able to make a difference. I love to be able to help you.” I’d long felt that from him, but still, I soaked in his words.
He went on to describe my combination of strength and softness; the comfort, ease, and spaciousness of our relationship; how our relationship supported him. He wrapped his comments up with this: “When I look into your rich brown eyes, I see an invitation and a reward at the same time—to be all that I am, to forgive all that I’m not, to heal all that’s broken.” My eyes filled with tears once more.
We didn’t exchange vows. When we’d met with our officiant (a dear friend) to plan the ceremony, he’d crinkled his nose in disgust when we mentioned them. “You don’t need that,” he said. “Vows set you up for failure. They’re heavy. Make offerings instead. Offer your partner only what you can easily, joyfully give.” I had smiled when he’d said that—lightness and ease had filled our relationship from the beginning, so offerings felt just right.
So in the ceremony, I started off by offering John my deep joy in life, pointing out that the previous couple of years had taught me what an incredible gift it is to be alive and showed me that I could feel joy even when things were difficult, indeed even in the difficulties themselves. I offered him my commitment to keep myself aligned to that joy. I offered him my attention; my commitment to ask for what I wanted; my belief that there was plenty of space for both of us to have what we want, together and separately. And I offered my support in allowing his creative work to unfold and be central in his life, along with my certainty that this world needed the best, fullest expression of him and would provide him what he needed to bring it that.
John started, “I offer you my warmth and love and affection, in their endless supply. Because they come from a love larger than mine that is endless, I have a large love to share with you.” That got me right away: I’ll take it! Just as I had, he offered to let me know what he needed, and to help figure out how to g
et my needs met. He offered his communication skills, his peace, his support for my writing and emotional development, his sense of humor, his family and friends. When he added, “I offer you . . . a running companion,” everyone laughed.
“I offer you a bond with me that will be family, and to add to that family in whatever form it takes. I know we will have offspring that will be love manifested, through home projects, writing projects, endless projects. And perhaps we will be so lucky”—here it was his turn to choke up—“to have offspring in the form of a child.”
After we walked back down the aisle together, we wrapped each other up in a hug. Everyone else fell away, and our two bodies became an entire universe we inhabited together. I felt as though a channel had opened between the earth and the heavens, and a giant flow of energy was pouring down through us and out into the world, encompassing this beautiful place and all these people we loved. We stayed there for many long minutes, swaying gently together and kissing one another, as everyone got up and laughed and chatted and moved toward the drinks.
We finally let go, and I suddenly became aware that I was exhausted. We’d been pushing for weeks organizing the wedding, and suddenly, my energy was running dry. We’d known this might happen, so we’d set up Maxine in an out-of-the-way corner as a retreat. I let John know where I was going, and as I slid her metal door open and climbed inside, I felt so grateful for this little bubble of quiet. I laid down on her bench seat and let every muscle release, my mind pulling in, following the energy traveling through my bones and sinews. I pushed away my niggling fear that I wouldn’t be strong enough to be at my own wedding.
One thing John had said when he was describing why he loved me floated back into my mind: “You even had the audacity to say you would be well by this wedding, and compared to where you’ve been, I’d say you’re pretty damn near well!”
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