Edelweiss: the Flower

Leontopodium nivale, commonly called edelweiss, is a mountain flower belonging to the daisy or sunflower family.  The edelweiss is a scarce, short-lived flower found in remote mountain areas, growing at high altitudes where few other plants or vegetation can survive.

The flower's common name derives from the German word "Edelweiß", which is a compound of edel “noble" and weiß "white". In Romania it is known as Floare de colt, which means Cliffhanger's flower.

Although the Edelweiss belongs to the Asteraceae family, technically it is not a flower. It consists of 50 to 500 small flowers that form 2 to 12 flower heads. The head is surrounded by 15 white leaves that form a double star shape. Historically, according to folk tradition, giving an edelweiss flower to a loved one is a promise of dedication. The flower itself is considered a token of love.

The edelweiss flower is hard to reach due to its ability to thrive in very rugged conditions, but if it can be obtained, the edelweiss contains healing medical properties that are used to help people heal from a variety of illnesses.

One of the most important features of the edelweiss is its ability to withstand the extreme temperatures of the Alps. It is often considered to be a sign of strength, courage, and the ability to withstand life’s challenges.

Act I: Emily

Emily
Words are such tidy things, so clean. The implied logic and understanding one assumes, as if words are a simple little taxi that can take one from point A to point B and then they will understand and that will be that, is a really convenient illusion.

Real life is not so sanitized. The experiences that string together to incorporate a life sometimes defy sense, sanitization, sanity.

Even words like terror, heartbreak, agony, despair, betrayal, isolation, devastation… they cannot convey to you where I’ve dwelt, the serrated blades of knives where I’ve had to make a bed in which to lie. They can’t take your hand, walk you blindfolded along the edge of the canyon, shove you down into hell, into my history.

Which perhaps is just as well. My history almost killed me, many times.

Imagine a tiny infant, lying swaddled in a hospital crib, face scrunched, beanie stretched taut over the soft wrinkled scalp. Still slick with warm blood and the slime of afterbirth, heart beating crazily from the squeeze and near-death expulsion from the womb. 

Fresh as a tiny pearl. Tender. Alone.

This baby does not know safety, her heart will break early. She does not feel the welcome of a mother, there is no centering force by which to ground herself to the planet. She is fire and water and the cost of survival will be the burning of her senses until they freeze in smoldering sleep. She does not know anyone’s delight in her existence, she has no light by which to see her path, or any path at all.

And she never will.




I. Basic Assumptions of the Internal Family Systems Model: 
• It is the nature of the mind to be subdivided into an indeterminate number of sub personalities or parts
                                                                                                
Coffee
It was 2005, and I was 23 years old. I was sitting with a new friend in Starbucks, it was casual, I had no idea how one conversation was about to alter the course of my life in a single moment.

I met Shannon a mere four months after graduating from a Christian inpatient program in Nashville by the skin of my teeth, after 11 months in the program. It was a complete surprise to most of the staff, I think. After struggling and drifting along for 9 months—which is 3 months past average and was later disallowed—in about 8 weeks I’d randomly made a total turnaround. 

Eating disorder, self-harm, chronic depression, anxiety, suicidality: origins unknown. 

The origins were unknown because most of my childhood was missing from memory at that point. I may as well have sprung from the ground, fully grown, and the only thing I knew about it was that, wherever I came from, my history was all really happy and the parts that weren’t were definitely not because of anything my parents had done wrong.

The exact reasons why my first suicide attempt happened at age 11, my first psych hospitalization at age 12, were a mystery to everyone, myself most of all.

Even so, it didn’t really matter why I’d been chronically depressed since grade school. What mattered was that I was better now. I had Made It. 

Recovered. 

Overcome. 

Praise the Lord.

Or whatever.

At any rate, Shannon was the founder of a nonprofit organization that helps people with eating issues. This was back before its popularity took off, and she was still holding small groups at her home in Franklin. Every week or two she’d have people over for dinner; I suppose it was sort of a relaxed version of group meal support. Or something.

Shannon took a special interest in me, as people were wont to do, right before they decided it was too much—that I was too much—and dropped me. You’d think I’d have recognized that pattern by then, but I didn’t. Out of all the secretly or not-so-secretly distressed young women showing up at her house every week, I, on the other hand, was nonchalant. I made jokes, talked about work, showed people my art. I certainly didn’t have a problem. Or problems, plural. Not I. 

I was an inpatient graduate, goddammit, and I Had Claimed The Victory™.

Besides, things honestly just didn’t seem that bad to me at the time. I wasn’t sleeping. I was barely eating. I was starting to have disturbing visions (flashbacks, though I didn’t know that at the time) on a semi-regular basis…but I still didn’t understand what was going on and I still blithely trusted that there was a God who would fix it. So, no big deal.

Shannon thought it was a big deal. Especially when I had come back to her house after a brief, tense visit home to see my family. It must have been Christmas or something. She said something confrontational—I don’t have a clue what it was—and I blanked out, just for the span of a few sentences. 
I heard my voice snap sharply back at her, though I couldn’t make out the words. She blinked. There was an awkward, lengthy pause. Then everything came back into focus. My cheeks flushed. My brain scrambled to recalibrate. What did I just say? How bad was it? What is she thinking? Do I apologize when I don’t even know what I did? Do I pretend like nothing happened?

Truth be told, things like this had been happening for my entire life…I just didn’t know it was outside the realm of what would be considered “normal” experiences. I had a tendency to mentally jump in and out of the same (ongoing) conversation with people, and didn’t know this wasn’t normal.

Switching behavior, though I didn’t figure that out for another couple years.

Whatever someone experiences usually seems normal to them because they don’t have anything else to compare to. 
Sometimes I’d “come back” to awareness in the middle of a situation (which was me switching back in after another of my headmates had been out in my place), like this particular conversation, and just have to figure out where I was and what was going on by listening and observing. I wasn’t a huge talker, so it wouldn’t have seemed out of the ordinary to anyone else for me to do this. They would have had no idea that the person they thought of as “me” had only just arrived. 

I, myself, just didn’t know that this doesn’t happen to everyone. I thought it did.

But this was the first time I was keenly aware of the brief absence of what I was inclined to think of as myself, juxtaposed against a new awareness that in “my” absence, there was the definite “presence” of…someone else, filling in for me. Operating my body.  Speaking with my voice.

Someone who—by the look on Shannon's face—was not acting enough like me to fool her.

Not that day, anyway.

This might even have been why we were at Starbucks, I really don’t know. I don’t remember there being a formal, stated purpose, though there may have been. A lot of details are missing for me from that time period. But in the course of our conversation, I said something I thought to be a casual remark. Something anyone and everyone would surely be able to relate to.

Something about listening to all of the people talking inside my mind, and then I laughed it off, saying, “But everyone does that, you know?”

Shannon grew very quiet. 

It scared me.

She looked at me with a mixture of concern, pity, and regret, and said to me, as if pulling her words very carefully out of the air, “No, actually. I don’t think everyone does. I know I don’t. And neither does my husband. And neither do most other people I know.”

She was watching me closely as she delivered this information. When she finished speaking, her eyes dropped to her hands, curled around a coffee cup on the table. So did mine.

I was stunned into silence. I hadn’t even realized until then that what we were talking about was all that serious.
The only thing I could think to say, after awhile, was: “Oh.”
I think we were both shocked by the direction things had taken.

It was news to me that other people did not have a constant litany of conversations going on in their mind. In 2005, the internet was still more of a luxury than a utility, so the only sources of information I had were the books at the library and such limited occasions as I could manage to wrestle my way onto a library computer and Ask Jeeves.

Like most people, I’d only ever heard the concept of hearing voices mentioned in the context of schizophrenia, which was maybe twice in my entire life; once in high school health class in the brief chapter on mental health, and once in an intro to psychology class in college. The information I knew probably comprised two paragraphs or less.

I distinctly did not feel crazy, but then, I wondered, maybe that’s part of it? When you’re crazy, part of being crazy is that you don’t feel that you are?

When I started looking up symptoms, they didn’t match. I didn’t devolve into flights of ideas. My ability to distinguish reality from fantasy seemed fairly well-developed to me, and anyway, I wasn’t afraid of the voices I was hearing nor did I feel they were a direct threat to me or anyone else. They didn’t tell me to hurt people, or that people were trying to hurt me. They didn’t even strike me as odd, other than the sudden new awareness that in my case, they existed; whereas for other people, they apparently didn’t. They sounded, for the most part, like “my”…“thoughts,” albeit communicating ideas, opinions, and feelings that I myself did not always recognize as a perspective I would hold.

I entertained a lot of possibilities in the early days, in my quest for answers. 

Naturally, as one does, Shannon decided that my issues stemmed from some form of demonization, and arranged to take me to an exorcist. I’d read They Shall Expel Demons two years earlier while on the waiting list for the inpatient program, and while it had terrified me at the time, I hadn’t given it much further thought. 

“Which is exactly what they’d want,” she murmured earnestly, so I agreed to go. 

The experience, while strange, was not overly traumatic at the time. We met with a man who looked very un-priest-like in a choir rehearsal room next to the main sanctuary at Belmont Church, which is within walking distance to Music Row in downtown Nashville. The chairs were arranged in a circle for rehearsal, and Shannon and the priest sat opposite me, about ten feet away. Before sitting down, the man handed me several Kleenex and told me to cough if I felt like coughing. He told me not to suppress any compulsive desire I might suddenly have to yell, vomit, curse, or cough. Then he began to pray out loud.

I didn’t feel like coughing or yelling, never mind vomiting or cursing.

I didn’t feel anything, other than bored. I sat with my head bowed, eyes closed, while they stared at me from across the room, watching for any signs of demons coming out, I guess.
At one point the priest told me he saw a vision, of me as a child. Something about my heart being orphaned and searching my whole life for a mother. I suppose it touched a chord in me somewhere, because some sadness bubbled up and I was finally able to use the Kleenex for something besides shredding. He wondered if Shannon would give me a hug, to represent the “mother-love of God,” so she walked over and put her arms around me for a minute. Then she sat down in the chair next to me, eyes glistening.

After about twenty more minutes of absolutely uneventful prayer, he trailed off into silence. My tears had long dried, so I opened one eye and snuck a look at him. He motioned to Shannon, who nodded and stood up.

I stood, too—uncertain—and we left.

Apparently the exorcism was deemed a failure, and Shannon gradually stopped returning my calls over the course of the month that followed. 

I was devastated, as usual. This was a pattern with me.

The pattern went: 

I would meet a maternal mother type of figure, she would single me out and act especially interested in me, I would get extremely attached to her, and then for whatever reason she would end up rejecting me and ending the relationship.
It was excruciatingly painful, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself from attaching or from doing whatever it was to drive them away. I had no idea why anything was happening the way it was, and over and over. 

But that weekend something new happened. For the first time, I was able to “see” inside of myself, in a way I’d never been able to before. And what I saw terrified me.

I saw a small child—and innately understood that she was one of the ones who kept attaching to mother figures—and a taller, older teenager dressed in chains and grunge. The teenager was yelling at, threatening, and berating the small child for continually getting attached to people. In her mind, that was “our” entire problem.

The child was wailing. The teenager screamed at her to shut up.

At some point, the teenager slammed out of the room—a shadowy place I couldn’t see clearly—and disappeared.

I woke up on the floor of my closet with a half-empty Tylenol bottle on the floor next to my head. Looking at my watch, the information that three whole days had passed without my awareness crept through the fog in my brain.

Sounds echoed.

I couldn’t bring objects into focus.

The looming questions that were becoming more and more inescapable were, What is going on, and what am I going to do now?

Honestly, schizophrenia would have been easier.





Emily
In my early twenties I was the frog halfway down the pelican’s throat; partly-masticated, covered in bile—but still alive and fighting. Mental illness had all but wrung the fight out of me.
In 2005, at twenty-three, I gave up and let it swallow me. 

After leaving inpatient treatment I was a displaced refugee in a whole city of displaced humanity. While I myself was only fleeing the chaos of childhood, college, and, you know…deadly mental illnesses, everyone around me was biding their time in one career while waiting for entrance into another.

Nashville is a city of musicians and artists; you can tell just by how they drive (if you’ve ever been to Nashville you probably know what I mean). Even the design of the city mimics a drunk, imaginative architect’s vision; you have to go north to go south, and you have to go east to go west. Figuring out how to get from place to place before the days of iPhones and GPS for someone directionally challenged was mildly infuriating. And the rich neighborhoods often did not possess streetlights.

In Nashville, your waiter is a drummer in a loft band and your internet installer is a vocalist trying to get a recording contract; everyone is convinced that they’re just one talent scout away from public acknowledgment of greatness. 

Nashville ranked #8 in the nation’s top friendliest cities in the US in 2022 for the Reader’s Choice Awards offered by Condé Nast Traveler, and has ranked similarly for decades. Given how everyone in Nashville is hoping you might be the keystone to unlocking their fame, I can well believe that. Until they know you, no one would risk being rude to you just in case you have, or know someone who has, the power to make or break their rise to stardom.

Once they realize you’re not rich and don’t know anyone important… that’s when no one cares anymore.

I was an irritation; an anomaly. It took me awhile to pick up on the fact that in Nashville, first introductions—to anyone, in any context—were a ninety-second job interview, wherein you were expected to give your bid for immortality. A list of your marketable talents was standard, and name-dropping of anyone important that you knew, were distantly related to, or saw at a bar once, got bonus points. Having left a college with a competitive music department where I’d started off working toward a music degree, I did arguably have some skills. But I resented having to parade them to strangers—and it quickly became clear that my social life would be a nonstarter for it.

I went to the small group I was assigned to by my church, hoping to fare better. The women noticeably snubbed me, smiling politely when I tried to talk to them and then excusing themselves. I was inexplicably terrified of the men, and avoided eye contact with them, so I ended up hovering at the edges of rooms, drink in hand, staring blankly. Finally one night a few weeks later, in the middle of a group discussion presumably about God, I tried to open up about how difficult it was to be in a new city, going through a massive personal crisis, and one of the women blurted out, “Oh… we thought you were so quiet because you were here to try to steal our husbands!” —then all the women laughed nervously. Mortified, I could feel my face turn red.

I never went back.

It became clear that I could not have any friends whilst going through…whatever it was that was happening to me. I still didn’t quite know how to categorize it. I had no language for the chaos my life had been thrown into, and the timing was utterly embarrassing. I had graduated from the Christian treatment center; I had been deemed a success story. My “testimony” had been featured in a local magazine. And here I was, less than a year later…circling the drain. A few of the people I’d met in Nashville stood on the periphery, gaping at me, rotating in and out. 

The friends I’d made at inpatient treatment scratched their heads, shrugged, and turned away.

The new, improved self I’d had a tenuous grasp on after leaving treatment began to slip through my fingers, while I began to wonder more and more, how exactly I’d gotten here.

• Update #4 - Shifting from traditional publishing April 5, 2024

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  My agent and I met with the CEO of Publishizer last week. She is delightful and really listened and gave thoughtful feedback and asked …

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• Update #3 - next steps March 21, 2024

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• Update #2 - next steps March 2, 2024

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• Update #1 - We have 12 days left! Feb. 26, 2024

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