I Am Responsible
“Your true home is the here and now.” -Thich Nhat Hanh
One Sunday morning during the adult study at Orange County Buddhist Church, I was having an especially troublesome bout of Imposter Syndrome. Sometimes feeling like an imposter is a red flag to be heeded, like when I was an Imposter Arab and an Imposter Catholic going to the Melkite church. I never understood a word that was said during service, and afterward an old lady predictably approached my teta to ask if I could meet her grandson. The only part I enjoyed was the bread dipped in wine. Everything else was torture. Not to mention nobody could explain to me why the men were allowed to smoke outside during mass while the women had to carry the load of modesty and faith inside.
Sometimes we feel imposterhood in places where we know in our guts we do not belong, no matter what’s in our blood. Other times, the feeling of discomfort can become a gateway to growth into places that we adopt.
I waited for my two oldest children to get out of their dharma school classes with Toddlerzilla strapped onto my back. I never quite knew what to do with myself during this time. I couldn’t remember anyone’s names or faces and I didn’t understand the traditions. This was my husband’s territory. I had long ago given up religion. I tried to be a Catholic. No, that’s not quite right. I did try, but technically you don’t have to try if you are baptized, which I was. You can’t even unbaptize yourself. But I did try in the sense that I wanted it to click for me. I wanted it to feel like home. I had even become someone’s godmother during my years of claiming the religion that I had been born into, but eventually I had to reconcile that it wasn’t for me and I couldn’t keep pretending. My husband wanted to raise our kids Buddhist like he had been, and I didn’t have any objections. It just had to be his gig, not mine. I didn’t want religion. Here I was just the chauffeur for the children. This wasn’t my home. I didn’t need anything.
Toddlerzilla stayed quiet a little longer with something to eat, so we wandered into the social hall for coffee and donuts. This is how I accidentally found adult study. You eat and drink and discuss a topic while the children are in their classes. The subject that day was happiness. Everyone read an essay together like they were in English class, and then Reverend Harada said a few words. He asked if anyone wanted to share their ideas. The room fell silent. You could almost hear the thoughts churning inside of people’s heads as he waited for a brave soul to volunteer. I felt the urge to raise my hand. I had so much to say about trying to be happy despite the pile of crap I was currently buried under. I teetered on the edge of my seat, debating whether to take the mic.
More silence.
I probably wasn’t happy enough to share any wisdom.
I mean, really. What did I know about happiness? I was a 34-year-old widow and single mom to three young children. I would sound childish trying to pass myself off as an expert.
I slunk back into my chair.
Happiness Imposter.
I tucked the essay into my bag, and left with the baby on my back.
I think I was born feeling like an imposter. Maybe it was because of the way my parents favored my brother, who never had to try as hard as me but always got more praise. Perhaps it stemmed from being female, and therefore subject to impossible societal standards of beauty. As a woman, since girlhood, I’ve never felt pretty enough. My torso is short. I don’t wear crop tops because I think my stomach isn’t flat enough. The number on the scale has never been low enough. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time standing in front of a mirror to examine myself from various angles, and I am never satisfied with the reflection staring back. I have to admit it continues to low-key plague me into my 40s, well past the time when confidence should have shown up on my front porch and I should have had everything figured out, but I’m getting better, slowly. My hair isn’t straight enough, and damn it, my younger sister got green eyes while mine are poop-colored. I’m a half Christian Palestinian, half white American (the washed out kind with no remaining culture) mutt who was born and raised in California, existing in a space that did not have a category to properly describe what all of that entails. I wasn’t Arab enough to fit into that community, but my mom packed lebani and zaater sandwiches on Arabic bread for school lunch. When I went to a family reunion in Ohio for my dad’s side of the family, they commented on my “exotic” looks (AKA having brown hair and brown eyes in a sea of blonde and blue). I frequently get mistaken for being a Latina even though my 23andme report indicates I don’t have even a drop in me. It’s difficult not to feel traces of imposterhood when you feel like you do not belong anywhere.
I don’t want to bore you with a history lesson, but I once thought about happiness in the throes of my self-hatred, and it reminded me of something. Stay with me for just one little historical-ish paragraph. I promise not to completely geek out on you. (Although as a disclaimer, you should know that I am a nerdy American government teacher who spends her days teaching democracy to teenagers who would rather watch Tik Tok.)
Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we had the right to pursue happiness. It feels like an empty promise. A fake nicety to fool the masses. Crumbs thrown at us. You can be happy! Or at least you can try to be happy. Or appear happy.
That’s your consolation prize: Fake Happy.
Most of us don’t even know what happiness is. We learn at an early age to attach happiness to nouns: people, places, and things. It’s always, “If we just had ____, then we’d be truly happy.” But that is like feeding tinder to a campfire. It works to ignite the flames, but inevitably the fire will shrink and leave you with nothing but smoldering dreams.
Death is the universe’s way of reminding us that we are never fully in control. Most of us are not ready to experience grief when it strikes. I certainly wasn’t. People don’t like to talk about their unhappiness, so it’s likely you won’t come into contact with this tumultuous kind of pain until you lose someone close to you. I know you aren’t supposed to compare grief, but there is something earth-shattering about losing your partner, co-parent, colleague, bestfriend, and a paycheck all in the same day.
And it wasn’t only about losing my husband.
It was also losing my sense of who I was.
My place in the world.
My self-worth.
My confidence.
Desirability.
Security.
Hope.
My happily-ever-after.
I went to bed one night, falling asleep in between sentences exchanged with my husband, and the next morning his aorta exploded in the middle of our diaper years. Just like that. We spent years building our life together, but it only took a second to fall apart. The real world is the place where best laid plans can and will unravel.
Widow and single mother were labels that felt sticky in my mouth, not wanting to be said out loud. I was ashamed to be those things. I didn’t choose them. They were not me. That could not be the culmination of all my hard work and planning. Nobody grows up and declares “this” as their life goals.
I felt like a teenager again: dateless, lonely, unsure and anxious about my future while my parents were back to meddling in my business. I was that vulnerable young woman again wondering if I was the kind of person who deserved to be loved.
Your story might have a different kind of pain. Divorce. Addiction. A terrible childhood. Illness. Abuse. Maybe you never got married and really wanted to, or you never had the child of your dreams. Perhaps there was a catastrophic turn of events in your career or finances. It doesn’t matter what cracks us open. That part is inevitable. We can not escape suffering; it is the price we pay for being human.
When I accidentally listened to Buddhism while waiting around for my kids, I realized it addresses suffering. That’s its entire purpose. Buddhism teaches people how to manage inevitable pain and how to live a meaningful life no matter what happens. It helps us practice gratitude and stay present. You learn to embrace the universal truths of impermanence, interdependence, non-duality and no-self. It teaches how to let go and reminds you about attachment being a root cause of suffering. I had been emotionally hemorrhaging and drowning in hopelessness, but for the first time I felt like I was in a place that was actively giving me the tools of how to be happy, no matter how unhappy I currently was.
When I looked around the sangha, they were kind, gentle people. I was not a kind, gentle person. My insides were on fire. There was anger and contempt churning inside of my hollow heart. I felt bitter and resentful at a universe that could exile me to widowhood and rob my children of a father. I could not see a shred of hope on my horizon. But I did notice the people in the sangha, and I was sane enough to know I needed whatever they had. Give me what they’re drinking.
I am responsible.
To forge my own path.
To seek happiness.
Real happiness.
In the here and now.
With gratitude.
Recently I was in a funk. A seasonal funk, the kind that entails too many softball games, football games, soccer games, someone lost a cleat, never enough time, haven’t been alone in forever, angsty about work, still single, and when I looked at my reflection I saw my youth in the rearview mirror. My weight was on the uptick. I wasn’t getting creative projects done. My left shoulder felt busted and I was tired. Everything felt increasingly bleak. I was short-fused with my kids. Irritable. Anxious, biting my lips, feeling on edge. My own parents kept suggesting that I start drinking wine at night to relax, in the way people who haven’t been alone in 45 years could come up with the answers to solve world hunger from their couch. A drinking habit wouldn’t magically erase the fact that I’ve been doing every single drop-off and pick-up for seven long years with many more into the foreseeable future.
I led meditation one Sunday morning in the middle of this funk. I did not want to do it. I dreaded it. Lost sleep over it, even. But I wasn’t over the edge enough to shirk my responsibilities, and in the interim between getting free coffee at adult study to now, I had been recruited as a minister’s assistant due to my enthusiastic study of Buddhism during COVID quarantine, when I had enough idle time and space to say yes.
There I was. A basket case, ready to lead the morning. There were new members in the room and two ministers present. I wanted to die. What if I scared the new members away? What if the ministers thought I was terrible? Or maybe I wanted them to think I was terrible and stop asking me to do this so I could stop feeling like a basket case. And then there was the other MA in the room, a Buddhist lifer, who surely a convert like me could never compete with in things like chanting or knowing which foot to put in front of the other when offering incense.
I led meditation anyway because running away didn’t seem like a viable option, but I didn’t relax a beat. I cycled through my head all of the things I was supposed to do, so nervous that I would mess something up. Ring the bell, keep an eye on the time, close the book and bow properly, chant Namo-Amida-Butsu, begin the next meditation — should I have given more meditation directions? Then the chanting, my worst nightmare. I sound like a dying cat with zero musical abilities other than to find obscure Grateful Dead songs on YouTube. Finally, the dharma talk. I raced through it, and since I picked an emotional topic, my voice cracked and I fought back tears. I forgot my water. What if I had a coughing fit happened? Nobody choked. The talk was over. Everyone offered incense, the finish line. Clap, clap. Now to run away.
One of the ministers approached me before I slid out the door.
“You went too fast. You’re too anxious. You need to slow down.”
I smiled, not wanting her to see how close I was to crying. I knew I went too fast. I knew I was too anxious. I debated explaining how miserable I currently felt, but why? Instead, I smiled. Nodded politely.
“Too fast. Too anxious,” she repeated. “We want people to come here and get a sense of calm and peacefulness.”
I stared.
“Just slow down. Slowwwww down.”
She was right, of course.
But how, was the question. How when you are in the middle of your own mental breakdown? How, when your chest feels tight and your lungs not big enough to take in air, when you’re a one-woman show keeping the entire ship afloat and you are so very tired? How when seven years later you feel more hollow than ever on your husband’s deathiversary, when all of this should have been over by now?
A few weeks later, the angst melted away. Life slowed down. I meditated and stretched and brainstormed and found my center again. That’s the thing. No feeling will ever last. Not with the same intensity. Happiness is riding out the storm for better days.
This is not a story of having all of the answers and everything figured out with advice wrapped up in a magic bullet to erase your suffering with a lifetime guarantee. This is a story about trying and trying to do better before entering the dustbin of history, seeking joy and meaning out of this crazy journey while there is still time, right where you are today. This is one person here to tell you there is a path, you will stumble, but also you can and will be happy and sad; both can be true. It is worth it. But first, you might need something.
