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a movement of remembrance and recovery

Being Yuman

2/26/2016

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This is a creative non-fiction essay, discussing the last five days before my friend Maryclaire passed. I was in Yuma, AZ and learning a lot about the place and myself. ​
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photo by Chris Putnam
 In Yuma,
I had discovered not just an alien place but pieces of myself. 
​Residents of Yuma call themselves Yumans, a playful claim to embody a universal set of common traits.  And yet, like the Saguaro cacti that populate their native Arizona, they are unique to this area.  Yuma and its people should not exist, let alone thrive.  The town is in the Salton Basin of the Sonoran Desert, a sandy region that averages only 3.5 inches of rain a year.  Most Arizonans, however, do not see the romantic nature of a town--a genuine Brigadoon--emerging where it should not be and dismiss Yuma as a backwater.  "Why are you going there?" I was asked more than once, when I told residents of Phoenix or Tuscon that I was to visit this southern place.  For residents of Phoenix and its elite suburb Scottsdale, home to some of the wealthiest people in the US, Yuma is no more than a pit stop on Route 8 as they make the six-hour trek to San Diego.    
Yuma is an idiosyncratic city unlike any I had yet experienced, and it brought out the best in me.  I have lived in many different places, from cosmopolitan Paris to its African foil Bamako, where, though capital of Mali, most buildings are one floor and all roads but one are unpaved.  Yuma has a singular identity premised in part on its complex past, one that fights Starbuckization tooth and nail.  There, I found beauty in a regional center that others cast aside as remote and boring.  I also took the first steps in a personal journey that would bring me a deeper understanding of my own past as well as a new understanding of the need to be more fully present in the here and now. ​

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Owning My Story

2/12/2016

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Stacy running through a field in Vermont wearing her favorite striped sweater
"Run Unashamed" represents an effort to own my story "à la Brené Brown."  I am intrigued by this psychologist-cum-public figure who inspires women to embrace vulnerability.  Indeed, I have just begun her latest book Rising Strong. In it, she criticizes that "we like recovery stories to move quickly through the dark so we can get to the sweeping redemptive ending" (xxiv ).  This passage resonates with me, for my blog represents a work in progress, not a finished tale.  It is an effort to expose via myriad anecdotes what Brown would identify as "wounds that are in the process of healing" (xxiv).

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I recount my story in the hope that others will not distance themselves from their friends due to feelings of shame; instead, I hope readers will share their vulnerabilities with loved ones who will support them.  Brown notes that "When we deny our stories, they define us.  When we own our stories, we get to write a brave new ending."  For too long, denial of an eating disorder informed how I thought, behaved and acted in the world.  But I refuse now to submit to ideas or concepts of what may--or may not be--the expectations various people have of me.  Instead, I perceive the rightness of "how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.”
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The sudden and bewildering death of Maryclaire provides the cataclysmic moment of what just may be my life's principal storyline.  Henceforth, there is what came before 12 December 2015 and what came afterward.  This sudden and startling tragedy forced me to break free of the complacent manner in which I treated relationships, because I realized, too late, that I had presumed that I could catch Maryclaire up with my travails--depression, eating disorder--at a future date.  Her death represents a low point propelling the denouement: do I pull the covers up over my head and give in to the darkness, or do I allow myself to heal and to grow.
 
The deep feelings wrought by tragic events forever change us.  In her emotionally astute essay "This Is It, My Pet Pachooch," Bonnie Friedman notes that she had been "drifting" before the death of her sister, but Anita's passing helped her understand that "life is short and mustn't be wasted."  I, too, choose to honor Maryclaire by effecting positive change in my life.  Since her passing, I have reengaged my creativity via wordsmithing, begun a running regimen, and focused a lot more attention on relationships that are important to me.  Like Friedman, "I only wish it hadn't taken the loss of my sister to rouse me." ​

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Sifting through the Past

2/5/2016

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I am a professional historian, and a nearly obsessive eye for detail serves me well as I reconstruct, for example, systems of urban labor in nineteenth-century Morocco.  As I grieve the loss of my friend, I find myself sifting through the past--this time my own--with the keen eye of a practiced expert.  I search, desperately at times, for tangible evidence--documents, photos, material objects--that reveal something of the ways in which my life connected with that of Maryclaire.    
 
In one instance, only days after Maryclaire's passing, I spend an hour, maybe more, searching for a worn blue tank top that I borrowed from her around 1986.  It would be a coup to find something physical that could be touched and passed around to our high school friends Susan and Cindy.  But I can't find it.  Its petite size, I vaguely remember, had taunted me, reminding me that I had gained seventy pounds.  An unwanted reminder of Binge Eating Disorder, the shirt, I am forced to conclude, had been relegated --carelessly, I now chastise myself--to the rag bin.                 

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Silver Flats

2/2/2016

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Ann Taylor Lowey Metallic Leather Flats
​I received what would have been--pre-the-passing-of-Maryclaire--an innocuous promotional email from Ann Taylor that I would have sent straight into the trash.  But a flash of silver and gold caught my eye, and it stirred memories.  I had to investigate.  As I thought, this company was promoting an end of the season sale on flats.  I looked at the simple design and the matte metallic surface, and my mind turned to Maryclaire again.  The shoes reminded me of her signature look when we lived together in Boston.  Was there ever a time when we shared an apartment on Knapp Street in Somerville or Fairmont Avenue in Cambridge that she didn't have a pair of silver flats?  No.  Like an exotic bird, she was drawn to shiny objects that sparkled and so made her stand out from all the sparrows that tend to populate the American northeast.  

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    Stacy E. Holden 

    Remembering and recovering through running and blogging.

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