The Ball Jar
Seriously, what the fuck is Perimenopause’s problem? What did any of us do to make him such a miserable little shitgibbon?
There one goes, just trucking along, getting another year older and miser [not a typo, have you seen the economy?], and finally making progress in loving oneself and then—BAM!—a one-two punch of connective tissue breakdown and hormonal imbalances that will fuck one’s shit all the way up.
I knew about the exhaustion and the night sweats and the hormonal shifts, but what I didn’t appreciate was how much of an impact endocrine disruption would have on, well, everything.
What do you mean my already debilitating migraine condition could get worse depending on whether and how frequently Perimenopause decides I should keep Tampax in filthy riches?
What do you mean thinking will feel like trying to make sense of a differential equation after someone has taken a red-hot ice cream scoop to my pre-frontal cortex?
What do you mean that I, who am otherwise a (mostly) rational person, am going to have at least a week every month where I’m convinced I’m the most dogshit human who has ever walked the Earth and, therefore, I strongly consider either: (1) walking into the sea with my dress that has pockets (yay!), filled with stones (less yay) or (2) blowing up every functional relationship I have to spare my most precious loved ones the burden of knowing me?
What. Do. You. Mean. that I would develop another inflammatory condition, this time one that targets the collagen that anchors the bone cage where my most vital organs live and can be readily confused for the catastrophic failure of the muscle that pumps life-giving, iron-infused salt water around my meat sack!?
Perimenopause must be fought and brought to heel. What’s that? Oh, it’s an understudied phenomenon? Because it largely affects women?
Cool.
** ** **
One of the more life-complicating perimenopause indignities is the soft, yet chewy cookie-crumble of my logical faculties. Most recently, this played out as follows: I, in my infinite wisdom, thought to save myself the mess of using the pressure cooker by soaking garbanzos overnight. I hate cleaning rubber gaskets at the best of times and, Gentle Reader, last week was not the best of times. I was wavering between nauseous optimism over the midterms and gathering shelf-stable foods and bottled water in case all hell broke loose and I had to feed the household and the neighbors. Work has been . . . you know what, let’s not get into it. And that pesky little inflammatory condition had not yet been diagnosed, so I was several days into wondering if family history and the near-decade I spent eating takeout while working 16 hours a day had finally caught up with me to hand me a gift-wrapped legacy of my ancestors in the form of angina.
Therefore, I, in my ::checks notes::—okay, finite wisdom, put a pound of garbanzos in one of those 32-ounce Ball jars, filled the jar to the tippy top with water to help the garbanzos get fluffy, and screwed a metal canning lid on to keep out bugs and dust. Then I left the jar on the kitchen counter overnight, chillin’ like a villain, next to the teak, knife block and a Costco-sized cardboard box of kosher salt. I then proceeded to have a terrible night, dreading early morning blood work after a lifetime of phlebotomists doing damage to my veins—and nerves (both literal and figurative).
When I got up the next morning, a hair’s breath from an anxiety spiral at the thought of the needle and the dozens of vials I’d have to fill, the countertop was weirdly wet with a gelatinous sort of smegma. A problem for post-“just a small pinch” Hypatia.
When I got home, however, I realized that the Ball jar had cracked fully down one side and through part of another, and the only thing keeping it together and most of the garbanzos in the jar, was the lid collar. There was slimy garbanzo water and little bits of glass everywhere. Why? Because my brain is the most unstable of pickled meat jello molds of late and I put beans in a glass jar with water without any room for them to expand.
The cleanup was a nightmare, not least because the glass was hard to find, and the knife block and the kosher salt had capillary-actioned a bunch of garbanzo water. Too many minutes into trying to pick broken glass out of half-swollen garbanzos, I finally decided that because I was uncertain of which garbanzos were safe to eat, I had to scrap them all and start again.
So I poured another bag, carefully sorted and washed them, and set them in a comically large mixing bowl with water, and a kitchen towel over the top. As I was moving the mixing bowl on the counter, I nicked my pinky on a glass shard I had missed.
Then I sat on the sofa and cried.
** ** **
Fast-forward to Election Night and yours truly heads to bed in a daze, both relieved and disbelieving of the electoral map. Blue as far as the eye can see. Blue in the post-Shelby County American south. Light blue, dark blue, electric—no, electrifying blue thanks to the tireless, incredible, loving work of women-led, Black and brown organizing. She goes to sleep sobbing joyfully and wakes up to blue nail beds.
Blue nail beds are the telltale sign that I’m having a panic attack. I slump down on the floor of the kitchen and run through my safety checklist. I’m safe. Everything is okay—better than okay. So why is every mitochondria in my body gearing up for a physical threat?
** ** **
The thing no one tells you about healing when they tell you its not linear, is how precipitous the drop on the y-axis can get. One second, you’re bopping along in the upper right quadrant and in less time it takes your food-motivated dog to demand some—no, all!—of whatever you’re eating, you’ve plunged so far down that you need to tell the wonk who made the chart that you’re gonna need a bigger chart.
It’s been thirteen years. Thirteen years of therapy and journaling and somatic exercises. But abuse is abuse. And it leaves scars so deep that no matter how much scar cream you slather on them, no matter how much they fade, the wound is there, waiting for you to move the wrong way or get too little Vitamin C. You feel a twinge and suddenly you’re hyper-attuned to the cycle and its rhythm, which is so horrendously, terrorizingly familiar that you’re anticipating every downbeat and your pulse is syncopating in step. As you listen. And you dread.
** ** **
We’ve been experiencing abuse on a massive scale. And our abusers have been so emboldened, that they haven’t even gone through the motions of reconciliation’s false apologies or falsely promised change. Instead, they’ve been relentlessly crowding, crushing, and boiling us because they didn’t think there was anything we could do to stop them from torturing us. They had all the exits covered and didn’t consider we would pull a garbanzo army, Kool Aid Man through the wall, and wreck their shit like the Jenga tower three moves before the whole thing collapses.
And now, after the euphoria of escape, at least for me, the doubt and fear are creeping back in. I’ve spent so much energy planning the escape that I'm on empty. And, god, there’s so much work to do. And all the while, there’s the knowledge, borne of personal experience, that an abuser is most dangerous when you’re making your escape.
Unlike the Hypatia that was going to make a stew, the Republicans didn’t have the best of intentions. They didn’t even have good intentions. When I was sorting and culling and soaking, it was because I wanted to get us through the week and freeze the excess to feed us and others in the future.
But the Republicans intentionally sorted us and culled us and funneled the remaining of us into that jar—and they did it to punish. Now there’s so much to clean up. Meanwhile, some of the escapees are compromised by shrapnel. And if we don’t get the lid collar off, some of our ranks will stay trapped before we have time to get them out—before the Republicans come back to make us pay. Or (somehow) more insidiously, before the Republicans try to lure us back with false apologies and false promises of ‘never again,' bolstered by enablers who insist a healthy America needs a Republican Party, despite everything bad it has done. Before the people who think this is all just a game because they’re immune or because they benefit, crank up a campaign on behalf of their friends to gaslight us all into being the “bigger person” who forgives and moves on without any meaningful repair—not one of those selfish people who can’t let everyone move on.
***
The Republicans are never going to cry over the half-bloomed garbanzos in the broken jar. They’re never going to try to save them or the beans compromised by glass. They’ll never experience the moment as an opportunity to consider that they might have been wrong.
They’re narcissists. No one exists but them. Everyone else is an NPC they exploit to varying degrees for their own benefit.
They will never admit that they have wrought havoc and disaster. In fact, it will be the fault of everyone but them—better yet, it will be our fault, for demanding more water and air and everything than we deserve. And they will want to punish us for it. It’s anyone’s guess whether they’ll blow up or play nice, but, regardless, they will want retribution.
Either way, the only path out of this fucking mess is to clean it as thoroughly and as carefully as possible.
Part of cleaning up is making sure we are made whole, so we can build something new. Something better. Being made whole starts with restitution, by making sure our abusers are held accountable for their actions, but it can’t end there. Their enablers must be held to account as well.
We will also need to heal ourselves—for ourselves and for those we love. Part of that healing will be recognizing the scars, accepting that we are different now, and acknowledging how they are likely to disable us in the future, so we can have resources and treatments ready for when they do. And above all else, we need to prevent this from ever happening again to us or anyone else.
That means no return to normal. That means institutions that protect us, not power. That means systems that reject narcissism and can mobilize quickly against injustice.
That means building a world designed for equity, that allows every little garbanzo to bloom.
