Able to Be Otherwise: A Memoir

Author’s Note

This book is a record of my breaths.

Imagine my shock and disbelief when I—a first-generation, low-income student with no parents—received a full ride to attend Brown University. Surprise held my breath captive long after I read that magic word: Congratulations.

My first semester at Brown, I learned how to breathe again. I participated in workshops led by the contemplative studies department faculty that taught me how to control my breath and exist in the present moment. It’s much harder than it sounds.

It went a little bit like this . . .

I slowly breathe in, relishing the sunbeams pouring through the window, warming me to the core. As I inhale deep breaths, my eyelids droop low, letting in only the faintest hints of shapes and colors. My ears are ever more alert in the still room of breathers. The quiet offers me the opportunity to hear things that often go unheard: the rustling of the leaves outside, the creaking of branches flexing in the breeze, and my own breath. Exhale.

I notice the clamping down of my jaw, my raised shoulders, and my more rapid, shallow breaths when a memory takes advantage of my mind’s stillness. I picture my memories as books, occupying rows and rows of cranial bookshelves. Some sport a fine layer of dust, some unfortunately lie entirely forgotten on shelves in dimly lit corners of my mind’s library, and others are worn from their constant summoning. This last category enters during moments of stillness: those painful memories that refuse to be unwritten. Their familiar tear-stained pages still manage to force the breath from my lungs.

I visualize a healing touch undoing the chains that tether my trauma to my body. Inhale. As my mind wanders through scenes of grief and hardship, I gently lead it back to the present. It is time to heal, to decide how I want to spend the time I’ve been allotted to help heal others and alleviate a bit of the suffering around me. Each time I breathe deeply, I become a little lighter, a little more present. Exhale.

This book explores the moments in time, now memories, when my breaths have come quicker, shallower, have all but stopped, and meandered peacefully in and out of my lungs. I will share with you my memories of breaths that have survived poverty, despaired over addiction’s stranglehold on a loved one, and gasped as they witnessed the horrors of climate change. I will also share with you my memories of breaths that have proclaimed joy and love in the midst of heartache.

This book is also an experiment in imagining how the way we as a society think about and approach our greatest problems could be otherwise. It resists the despair and resignation that I and so many of us feel when faced with problems as immense as poverty, addiction, and climate change.

I share these memories of both my lightest and most labored breaths as a small contribution toward the larger ongoing effort of breathing a more gentle, more compassionate future into existence. Just as we are healed slowly through the succession of our breaths, we must use our breaths to protect and heal others. Let us take it even further and use our breaths to heal and protect our Earth.

The first step toward healing is to breathe. Inhale. Breath is the anchor that grounds us in this strange reality where we all exist on a rock spinning in a vacuum. This is where the second step comes in. Wondering and marveling at the world and its happenings aids our healing. Beholding the beautiful, improbable, and incredible expands our reasons for living. As I wonder at the improbability of my loved ones’ and my existence on this planet, I am grateful and joyous. I am healing.

Breath is another way to think about time. Like the second or minute, breath is a marker of continuity. With time comes healing. To get through grief, you just get through it. Be patient with yourself. As your breaths follow one after the other, you are healing. Like a tree slowly growing out of the scorched earth after a fire, healing will follow loss. Breathe in. Breathe out.

It is through the breaths of protestors and the breaths of those demanding to be seen and heard that we are breathing a future into existence that values all of our breaths and values everyone’s healing. It will take many breaths, but there are a lot of us.

Inhale. Let a deep breath fill up your lungs. Feel your body become lighter; feel your mind become more focused on the present. Let the oxygen energize you. Do you feel your power?

Each time we dare to acknowledge that things are able to be otherwise, we move toward a world where everyone can breathe deeper.

Introduction

I am engulfed by a symphony of crickets, their chirps made ever louder by the depth of the darkness that surrounds me. My classmates and I are out for a silent night walk in a small patch of woods a mile away from Brown University’s campus in Providence, Rhode Island. We are trying to walk silently with intention and attention, to sense our surroundings, and to focus on all of the muscles and movements that make up the act of walking. I let myself appreciate the swinging of my legs, slowing myself to match the rhythm of the shadow I can just barely make out in front of me. I focus on calming my breathing into a steady rhythm that mirrors the movements of my limbs.

We head in no specific direction. Our professor called us to these woods on a field trip to see what we might learn from them and from each other as we enjoy a contemplative walk together. Although we started out as a cohesive group of twenty, we soon fracture into subgroups as we lose each other in the darkness. A few others and I manage to head off down a leaf-slick slope, a rather sharp detour from the well-worn path above. Slipping and sliding down the slope, we grab onto the rough bark of small trees to halt our descent. Realizing we are lost in the dark of this city-bound forest, we erupt into laughter.

At first, I try to stifle my laughter, worried it may be inappropriate given our vow of silence. But it bursts forth nonetheless, drowning out the chirping of the crickets. I picture our laughter as a joyful offering to the woods in recognition of the limits of our sight and the shortness of our lives.

To laugh is to be firmly rooted in the present, just as to focus on one’s breath is to be intensely aware of one’s existence. To laugh with others is to celebrate the pleasure of each other’s company and, at times, a way of mutually recognizing the absurdity of a shared condition.

When our bellies hurt from straining muscles and our lungs hurt from expelling air, we slowly amble back up the slope in search of our classmates. We circle together in a wide clearing to share our experiences and thoughts. Looking back, this is one of my favorite college experiences.

I like to think of this night in the woods as an apt metaphor for navigating uncertainty and suffering in this life. Regarding uncertainty, I’m learning to accept that life resists being planned. It is not possible to see all the steps ahead of us when the future resists being beholden. In the moments when we find ourselves off of the path we predicted lay ahead, community becomes a vital resource. We laugh, celebrate, mourn, learn, and comfort in communities. It is in community that we are re-energized, and it is together that we find our way back to the path.

Or consider this: suffering is a thick blanket of darkness that surrounds us on all sides at times. With suffering so all-consuming, it can be hard to trudge onward, and it can be easy to get lost. We all suffer in different ways and at different times. This is unavoidable. What’s important, though, is that we are there alongside those who are also suffering, providing company, encouragement, and understanding. It is important that we have people in our lives who are there alongside us when suffering takes its grip. Community is a buoyant force. In community, we can be lifted from the deepest pits of despair. This power that community has, though, is only possible when we agree to be lifted and we agree to lift up others.

These times seem particularly heavy with uncertainty and suffering. This book is very much a reaction to all that we have experienced together during this prolonged quarantine. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been claimed by a pandemic that has driven countless individuals deeper into poverty, addiction, and despair. Income inequality continues to grow as the rich become richer, while tens of millions of people around the globe have fallen into poverty as a result of the pandemic.¹ The opioid epidemic continues to claim lives as individuals find themselves lonely and without the medical resources they need. Wildfires of historic proportions have burned up and down the West Coast. And, for the first time in a long time, I have found myself with time to reflect.

I graduated with a master’s degree in public affairs from Brown University at my family’s dining room table in the spring of 2020. I had no future plans and was very distressed over the magnitude of our collective challenges. Confined in our rural Northern California home, I knew I had to do something to help heal a world in pain, a world grieving over loss of life and injustice. As poverty, addiction, and climate change became common issues discussed alongside COVID-19, I saw an opportunity to contribute to these conversations.

This book is a testament to my belief in the power of stories to provide comfort, to aid in understanding, to delight and inspire, and even to change minds. I share my story with the hope of bringing increased compassion and understanding to conversations surrounding poverty, addiction, and climate change.

This book is also a celebration of the power of community and of hopeful imagining. With every loss and every injustice, there is a community of people who are grieving, comforting, and demanding that such suffering never happen again. I write this book in recognition of the many people who have cared about me and brought me into their communities. This book dares its reader to believe that together we are able to transform the imagined into reality so long as we take the first step: believing that things are able to be otherwise. We must labor and breathe and laugh together. We must support each other and be kind to one another.

My hope is that you walk away from this book empowered to imagine alternatives and with the conviction that things are able to be other than the way they are. This world is a work in progress waiting to be transformed by our collective imagination. As I join many others in this exercise of hopeful imagining, I hope you’ll join me too.

1 Christoph Lakner et al., Updated Estimates of the Impact of COVID-19 on Global Poverty: Looking Back at 2020 and the Outlook for 2021, World Bank Blogs, January 11, 2021.

1

Mom decided, after hearing the voice of God, that we were intended to pack up our lives in Murrieta Hot Springs, California, and head south for the border. I was just turning seven years old, and we were moving to Tijuana, Mexico, where she had been told she was to meet the love of her life. The love of her life turned out to be named Alex. A yellow taxi driver, Alex was convinced that he, too, had met the love of his life in my mom.

Mom had woken me up late one night to break the news. Lying beside me on the bed, she stroked my forehead until I managed to partially crack open my eyes. Her permed brown curls framed her face alight with revelation.

Susie, Susie, wake up! she whispered excitedly. We’re moving to Tijuana.

What? Why? Where is that? My questions blended in with each other. My confusion shocked me fully awake as my eyes searched Mom’s face for the reason behind this altogether unexpected announcement.

I’ve been going down to Tijuana the last few weekends, she explained. When you were with your sitter, I was following the voice of God. God told me to go down to Tijuana last month in church, I heard Him, and I listened. Minutes after I crossed the border that first time, I met him.

Him? Is she saying she met God in the flesh?

I met Alex. I know we just met, but I love him. God led me to him, and we are going to move to Mexico to stay with him, she declared.

I never asked what specifically God had told her in church. I figured it had to be pretty convincing to get Mom to pack up our lives and pull me out of school. Mom was happy for what seemed like the first time in a long time, so I went along with it. I wanted her to be happy.

In the years before Mexico, we lived in a two-story apartment along a quiet street. The front yard of our apartment was an endless land to be explored. Populated by mysterious trees bearing berries, ladybugs, bushes, rocks, and discarded toys, I spent many of my young days getting to know the terrain and its inhabitants. I never grew tired of my expeditions, and the yard was, in my mind, vast and inexhaustible. The small alleyway that snaked along the far and backside of the apartment complex was the secret trail I took to surprise my friends when we played tag. It allowed me to pass undetected from one side of the complex to another.

While I can’t recall my first memory, I do have a distinct first love. When not outdoors, my young years were spent in front of the television watching the original Scooby-Doo episodes on VHS. I idolized the friendship between Scooby and Shaggy, the way Fred lays out a perfect plan although it is never executed perfectly, and the way Velma seems to either have all the answers or at least know how to find them. Life for the Scooby gang was never boring.

I watched Scooby-Doo amid piles of Mom’s books (a good share of them being vampire romance novels), clothing, and random trinkets. My mom was a hoarder, but I was too young to know of the existence of any other way of living. Child Protective Services intervened when I was a handful of years old, telling my mom that if the house wasn’t cleaned up, she was going to be deemed unfit to parent. Apparently, the piles upon piles of stuff, dirty dishes, and our daily habits meant that my home environment was not safe for me. Family pitched in to help, and soon the place was tidier.

When the CPS people come to our house tomorrow, Mom told me, it’s important that they see you are happy and healthy here.

Okay, what if they don’t think that? I could see the stress in Mom’s eyes. I knew she wasn’t telling me something. Anxiously, I clutched my favorite stuffed bear, Girl, closer to my chest.

You need to convince them, okay? So you can stay here with me.

I want to stay here with you. Please don’t let them take me. I was beginning to panic. I could feel my heart beating in my neck.

It’ll turn out all right. Just smile and answer their questions, Mom spoke softly as she stroked my hair back from my forehead.

The next morning, I sat on the couch and smiled at strangers as they roamed around our house. When asked about my quality of life, I assured them I couldn’t be any happier. Our house remained clean for about a month after the inspection. While we could put on a show for CPS, actual change was hard to come by.

Some months after the CPS fiasco, my mom took me to an adoption agency. When we first pulled