In the midst of a lot of drama this summer (doctor visits and surgery and jury duty, oh my!), I’ve been keeping my eye on the paw paw tree for a sense of hope and stability. And it’s been working. We have eight or nine paw paw fruit on our tree, some in pairs but mostly singles, and every week they grow a little bigger as if they’re being inflated by a bicycle pump when I’m not looking.
I don’t visit the tree each time I walk the dogs, because I follow the shade wherever I can find it and sometimes the tree is in full sun (good for the tree, bad for me, and my heat intolerance and tendency to sun poisoning), but I check on it at least once a day, and carefully duck under branches and around paw paw leaves to look at the growing fruit.
It helps to have a calm, gradual, positive thing in my life, while I have to do a lot of things that are (way) out of my comfort zone. The paw paw tree has been that reassuring thing this summer – that, and the dogs: Ellie’s sweet, loving face when she cuddles up next to me and asks for head scratchies, and Cricket’s great joy when she sees Kevin, the mini Golden Doodle, coming her way. The good things don’t make the bad things (the news) or the scary things (surgeries) go away, but they give me the strength to keep going, and I feel so lucky for that.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
At my most recent visit with the dentist, about a month ago, I finally asked her about the oral surgeon’s recommendation that I get a full implant to replace my upper teeth – with screws in my cheek bones to stabilize it – and the dentist said it was the best option for me, despite the cost. She said that I will lose more teeth, more rapidly, in the near future, because of the progression of gum recession and bone loss. She was definite, and the hygienist, who I’ve been going to for about twenty years (she worked with my previous dentist too), agreed with the dentist’s assessment, and said that I’d be in good hands with this particular oral surgeon. My mother had also done her research, with friends in the dental field and of course on Google, and she felt that this was the right plan too. And, Mom said, as a result of my father’s death last fall she would be getting a larger social security check from now on, so, in a way, my father would be helping to pay for it.
I was still scared, though, of the cost of the procedure and the radical nature of it; but I was more scared of not doing it, or of not doing it in time, and losing more teeth without having something to replace them.
As soon as we called the oral surgeon to say yes, the process started to move forward at high speed. The office manager at the oral surgeon’s office had to do a credit check to see if I qualified for a loan, and then I needed to go into the office to sign the loan papers, and get x-rays and a lot of pictures of my smile, and intra-oral pictures to cover every centimeter of my mouth, so that the surgery could be planned out and the temporary and permanent implants designed. The doctor’s assistant, who did all of the pictures, some even with her cell phone while I used the retractors to hold my mouth open, also gave me a rundown of what to expect after the surgery: a lot of pain (with a prescription for Percocet, just in case), and bruising on my face for ten days to two weeks, and oh yeah, it might be difficult to get used to eating and talking with the temporary implant (the permanent one would come in three months and be made of less bulky and more long-lasting materials), and I’d have to be on a soft food diet for the whole three months to protect the temporary implant, and probably not eat much at all for the first few days while my gums healed, before they could even put the temporary implant in place.
I went home with a gift bag (a Water Pik, signed loan papers, cough drops, and colorful plumes of paper), and a lot of fear. I knew I had to follow through with this, not just because of the loan papers, but because this would be my best option to feel like a viable person in the future, but I had a lot of nightmares: teeth being pulled out of my mouth with rusty plyers, monsters shoving things down my throat while I’m under anesthesia, etc.
“Monsters?”
A day or two later, I got an email from the Anesthesiologist’s office telling me what I’d need to do for medical clearance before the surgery: I’d need an EKG and blood tests and an overall exam from my primary care doctor, and an okay from a pulmonologist. But my primary care doctor didn’t have any appointments available until the week after the surgery, and it took a while before one of the schedulers at her office offered to let me see the nurse practitioner there who had an opening. And then I called the office of a pulmonologist I’d seen five or six years ago, for shortness of breath, and his scheduler said he didn’t have appointments available until October.
So, back to the primary care doctor’s office for a referral to another pulmonologist, and, wonder of wonders they had a name ready and he had an appointment available within an hour. And he was lovely. He read through my test results from five years ago, and checked my breathing, and took a short history, and gave me his okay for surgery. He told me that he’d had a similar situation where he’d needed pulmonary clearance for surgery, and they wouldn’t take his own medical word for it, so he’d gone to the pulmonologist I’d seen before (the one with no appointments until October) to get his clearance done.
After that, I was finally able to take a deep breath. It seemed like things were going to be okay, and there were even nice people in the world who understood what I was going through, and then I got home and found a jury summons in the mail, for the week of the surgery.
Really God? Really?!
I had to email the jury commissioner’s office directly because the only postponement options offered online were for during the school year, and luckily they were able to give me a new date in August (by which time my bruises would, hopefully, be less visible).
At the same time, I was preparing for the trip to the hospital in Philadelphia (which turned out to be a virtual visit at the last minute, thank God), and worrying about whether or not to take the next semester of my online Hebrew class over the summer, knowing I’d have to miss a couple of class sessions, and possibly stay off camera for a few others, what with bruises on my face and lispy, awkward speech. But the idea of not having those classes, and only having the pain to look forward to, seemed too awful, so I stuck with it. And then I needed to go for a Covid test and pick up the meds from CVS that I was supposed to start three days before the surgery, and…
And then Mom’s hip replacement popped out. Her hip had been sore for a few days, but the doctor wasn’t worried and just recommended more rest. But when I came in from walking the dog’s Saturday morning Mom said, “I have some bad news,” or something equally as understated, and she told me she could feel something protruding under the skin and she was ready to throw up from the pain. I raced around looking for the doctor’s phone number, which was probably in plain sight somewhere, and eventually found it online, and the doctor said to call for an ambulance and go to the emergency room. The dogs barked up a storm from behind my bedroom door when the paramedics arrived, but Mom was really calm and just needed some help getting her shoes on before they guided her down the stairs in a wheelchair and out to the ambulance.
“Why can’t we go with Grandma?”
The ER was crowded with Covid patients, so I wasn’t allowed to go in and had to wait for news at home. And I still wasn’t allowed to go in later in the day, after they’d decided to transfer her to the hospital in the city where she’d had the original surgery, so I had to drop off her clothes and phone charger with a very nice security guard, without seeing her at all. And then I went home and called the oral surgeon’s office and left a message (it was the weekend) telling him that I would have to postpone the surgery, which was supposed to have taken place that Thursday. And then I had to sit and wait.
Up until that moment I’d felt like I was on a speeding train with all of the doctors’ appointments and the upcoming oral surgery and jury duty and then getting Mom to the emergency room and bringing her clothes. And then the world just stopped, and all I could do was sit by the phone.
“I’ll sit with you, Mommy.”
But Mom’s second surgery finally took place mid-week, and it went well, though the surgeon sounded more humble on the phone this time around, explaining exactly what he’d done to make the hip replacement more stable. And then I heard from the oral surgeon’s office manager that my new surgery date wouldn’t be until late in August, dangerously close to the beginning of the synagogue school year (though I’m hopeful that with the latest Covid sub-variant going around, I will be able to wear a mask in the classroom and not feel too self-conscious).
Now that Mom’s home, and safe, I should be feeling better, but I’m afraid of what will happen when the world starts moving again and I have to rush to the drug store, or see doctors, or go to jury duty, or prepare for my own surgery, or go back to teaching in the fall. I feel like a stopped clock that has to be reset, and my arms will flail out of control as I start to speed forward through the hours again. But for now, there’s a calm in our house, as Cricket climbs back up onto her grandma’s bed, and even lets Ellie sit nearby (though not for long); we can all breathe a sigh of relief, knowing we are home, together, where we belong.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
I had a doctor’s visit scheduled for this past week at a hospital in Philadelphia called CHOP, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which is kind of embarrassing. All of the paperwork for my visit included references to “the child” this and “the child” that, and I am, of course, an adult. I worried that somehow they’d missed that detail in my medical history and when I walked into the hospital they’d be horrified that I was so tall. But, I was told that this was the place to go for a possible mitochondrial disorder, so this is where I’d have to go, no matter my age.
This particular adventure started back in March, when I heard from the geneticist that I had some genetic variations that needed to be looked into, and she gave me referrals to a neuromuscular specialist (to check out a possible LMNA disorder, in the Muscular Dystrophy family), and to CHOP (for a possible Mitochondrial disorder). The appointment with the Neuromuscular specialist was easy to schedule, but the process of getting an appointment at CHOP took at least a month, because they had to collect all of my records from various doctors and hospitals to see if they really wanted to take on my case, and, of course, they needed pre-approval from my insurance. Eventually, they sent me a welcome letter telling me that I’d have two appointments on a Wednesday in July, one at nine in the morning with the lab, and one at ten thirty to see the head of the Mitochondrial medicine department. The idea of going to Philadelphia for a doctor’s appointment, a three hour trip each way, was already overwhelming, but to have to be there at nine in the morning?
“Don’t worry, Mommy. I can wake you up in the middle of the night if necessary.”
Mom said we could go the day before and stay over at a hotel to make things easier, but it sounded so expensive and complicated to me (Do we bring the dogs? Would Cricket actually stay calm in the hotel room while we were at the hospital? Could Cricket survive being boarded, even with her sister for company? Would we drive or take a train?), but Mom was confident that it would all work out; and it was still only April at that point, so the specific plans could wait.
And then Mom went to the orthopedist and found out that she needed a hip replacement, immediately, and we fell into the whirlwind of pre-op testing and surgery and recovery. Even then, Mom was still convinced that she’d be well enough to make the trip to Philadelphia, so we focused on getting her well and continued to put off planning the trip.
My appointment with the neuromuscular specialist, about forty-five minutes away, came up a few weeks ago, the week after Mom’s post-surgical check up with the orthopedist (which went great!), so Mom wanted to test her strength and come with me. I drove, and held doors, and watched Mom maneuvering her cane like an oar, and Mom listened carefully to the doctor to make sure I didn’t miss anything important. The doctor was very thorough, and thoughtful, and put me through a lot of physical exercises and questions and said, eh, I don’t think you have an LMNA disorder (no muscle-wasting, no falling eyelids, and no to a lot of other things on her list), but she was optimistic about my upcoming trip to CHOP, and said she thought a Mitochondrial disorder could be a better fit for my symptoms.
I was proud of myself for managing the drive and the doctor visit, and for not being too bothered that yet another doctor and diagnosis had fallen through, but Mom was exhausted by the trip, and by the next day she’d realized, very reluctantly, that she wouldn’t be able to come with me to Philadelphia, even if we did the whole thing by train and boarded the dogs for two days. So I would be making the trip alone.
“Why can’t I go on the train with you?”
I know it shouldn’t be such a big deal for an adult to travel to another state alone, but for me it’s a lot; both because of the inevitable physical exhaustion of the trip and because of the anxiety that floods my brain when I try to manage new situations. So Mom called CHOP for help finding a nearby hotel, and to find out how long my appointments would be so that we could plan the trip home. She made the reservation for me and printed out maps and looked into transportation options for getting from the hotel to the hospital and from the hospital back to the train station. And then we heard from the doctor’s office that, actually, I didn’t have to be at the hospital early, because they wouldn’t know which tests I’d need ahead of time. My only appointment would be at 10:30 AM with the doctor, so we re-planned the trip for a single day, starting at 5:30 in the morning, and cancelled the hotel reservation.
I ordered the Amtrak tickets and studied the schedule for the Long Island Railroad, and wrote up a packing list, and put all of my papers together in one folder. I was still worried that I’d miss something the doctor said, or miss a train, or just get lost wandering through a strange city, but even more than that, I was afraid that nothing would come of this doctor visit, like all the others, and the resulting hopelessness, on top of the exhaustion of the trip, would wipe me out. But I was determined to go anyway.
And then, the Monday afternoon before my Wednesday appointment in Philadelphia, I got a call from the hospital saying that the original doctor had to cancel, but the replacement doctor could do a virtual appointment that same morning. A virtual appointment? As in, I wouldn’t have to go to Philadelphia at all?!
“Yay!”
The woman I spoke to on the phone couldn’t explain why I was suddenly allowed to have a virtual appointment, when they’d told me two or three months earlier that it would be impossible, but I agreed to the change immediately. I couldn’t think it all through at that moment, though, because I had an appointment with the oral surgeon in an hour.
But after I got back from the oral surgeon, with thoughts of general anesthesia and swelling and bruising and 3D printed teeth swirling in my head, I started to worry that maybe CHOP had changed my appointment to a virtual one because they’d decided that I didn’t have a mitochondrial disorder, and therefore there was no point in seeing me in person.
I spent the next day canceling train tickets and looking into possible refunds (nada) and starting to finally feel the relief at not having to get on four, or was it five, or six, different trains in one day. And then I got the email with the link to my virtual doctor visit and did all of the pre-visit check-ins and I finally realized that Mom would be able to be there for my appointment after all, and so would Cricket and Ellie, and a lot of the anxiety that had built up over months finally started to dissipate.
At 9:30 Wednesday morning, I logged on, with Mom and Ellie sitting next to me and Cricket grumbling from her bed on the floor. First, I met the program director, and she was very nice and took some more family history and explained my genetic test results in more detail, saying that I had a rare mutation, as in, no one else in the database had the same mutation on that particular gene (though the database is far from complete). And then she told me about the tests they wanted to do (which I could do at home and send in), and she asked Mom if she’d be willing to get tested as well, to give them a more detailed sense of my genetic background. And then the doctor joined the visit. He did an abbreviated physical through the screen (look left and right, turn your head left and right, show your hands, back and front, and walk to and from the computer), and then he told me that it’s unlikely that I have a mitochondrial disorder, though an LMNA disorder would be an interesting possibility. But do the tests anyway, just in case.
I wasn’t surprised, though Mom and my therapist were both surprised and disappointed, having spent months telling me that this would finally be the breakthrough. For me, it was just one more doctor visit that ended with a ho hum instead of an answer, but at least I got to stay at home, in the air-conditioning, with Mom and the dogs. And it saved Cricket the trouble of having to spend the whole day worrying that I’d been captured by space aliens or enslaved by fire-breathing dragons, or whatever it is she worries about when her people are away. We were also able to celebrate her fifteenth birthday as a family and watch her eat all of her birthday hamburgers until she was well and truly satisfied (don’t worry, Ellie didn’t go hungry either).
Cricket and Ellie are my shining reminders that life can always get better, even when your body isn’t working the way you want it to, or your hair is something of a mess. They know that life will always be full of things that are worth looking forward to. Though not always hamburgers in particular.
“Why not?”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
When I use the Duolingo app on my phone, since I refuse to pay for the premium version, I see a lot of ads. Some are for local furniture stores, some are for Duolingo Plus (the paid version), some are for other language learning apps, but a lot are for games. There’s one where you have to put pieces of a “wooden” puzzle together, and one where the fat king gets in all kinds of danger and his life depends on you moving little icons around on the screen, and then there are all of the different versions of water sorting puzzles; some use test tubes, some use bottles, or vases, some even use colored balls instead of water, which is not the same at all. There’s something unreasonably peaceful, and satisfying, about watching water pour from one bottle to another, until all of the blues are with the blues and all of the greens are with the greens. I found myself watching the water sorting game ads all the way through to the end, instead of dropping my phone and looking for something else to do for those thirty seconds.
“Play with me!”
And a few weeks ago, after the Duolingo tournament had raised my stress level into infinity instead of the app’s usual calming effect, I gave in and downloaded one of the water sorting games.
There’s no productivity excuse for playing this game; I’m not learning a new language or important scientific principles, but the game is actually the embodiment of some lessons I keep thinking I’ve learned, and keep having to relearn: one, that it’s okay to fail, as long as you keep trying (the game lets you retry the same puzzle until you’ve mastered it, without penalty); and two, sometimes, in order to reach your stated goal you have to take a circuitous route, because there will be barriers in your way that you can’t foresee.
“I love to run in circles!”
The goal of the water sorting game is to move the sections of colored water from one bottle to another until each bottle holds only one color of water, and you get two empty bottles to help you sort, because you can only pour purple onto purple or green onto green, but any color can be poured into an empty bottle. And the strategy that works for you in one puzzle rarely works in the next one, so that time after time I have to relearn that even if my goal is to get all of the purples into one test tube, I’ll still have to deal with the reds and greens and yellows in the way.
So, for example, if I want to write the sequel to Yeshiva Girl, which I’ve been trying to do for a very, very long time, I have to accept that there will be more barriers to overcome, and that I won’t always (or even usually) know what they will be ahead of time. I’ll need to try new things, again, and again, again, and if I continue to fail, I may have to start over from the beginning with a blank page. But starting over doesn’t mean I’m failing, it means I’m learning, and inevitably, I will find a way forward.
There’s a variation of the water sorting game where you can’t see the color of the water below the top section of each bottle until you move the top section away and the next color is revealed, and therefore you cannot plan ahead. I love this variation because it frees me up to accept my blindness, and to accept that I won’t know everything that will be coming my way, and therefore I can take a deep breath and know that I can’t be expected to plan and strategize, and it’s okay to just take it one step at a time, and see what happens.
“One step at a time, huh?”
I still go to Duolingo every day to work on my languages, and I haven’t fallen into a deep hole wherein all I do all day long is sort colored water instead of writing or getting chores done, yet, but each time I take time out to play the game, I feel like my brain waves are untangling and relaxing back into place, or finding new and better configurations that can help me work through the knots in my actual life with a little more patience.
“I hate patience.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
Sometimes I just can’t force myself to do certain things, even if I don’t understand why not, and no one else can understand why not. But I’ve learned to trust that internal voice telling me that I’m not ready, or that I’m going down the wrong path, or that I won’t be able to do what’s being asked of me. I’ve learned to listen for the intensity of the I Don’t Wanna voice, because that can help me figure out if I can overcome it, or if I shouldn’t even try to overcome it.
“What took you so long?”
The problem has been that my therapist (and teachers and friends) can’t hear that voice, and they don’t trust me to assess its accuracy on my own, and they tell me, meaning well, that I should ignore it and do what needs to be done, whether I want to or not, and whether I think I can do it or not. They think I can and should ignore the I Don’t Wanna voice, because they think of it as selfish, or self-destructive, or weak, or whatever else they say to themselves about their own I Don’t Wanna voices. And I hear their judgements and their impatience and their distrust of me, and it feels bad, but that doesn’t change what I can and can’t do.
But I’ve noticed, over time, that the better I get at hearing and trusting the I Don’t Wanna voice, the more clearly I can begin to hear the I Wanna voice. It turns out that I wanna teach synagogue school, even though I don’t know why. I can’t explain it, especially after spending three and a half years and a lot of money getting a degree in social work. And I wanna take online Hebrew classes, even though I can’t see the logic in it, or make a good argument for why this is the right good step forward in my life. I just know that the I wanna voice keeps getting stronger the more that I listen to it and trust that it knows what it’s talking about.
“I wanna have chicken treats!”
I was better at hearing these voices when I was a kid: when I knew I wanted chocolate frosting but not the cake it was sitting on, or I knew I wanted to do more math homework, even if I never got extra credit for it. But I was told so many times not to listen to myself and just do what I was supposed to do: eat what I was supposed to eat, take the classes I was supposed to take, accept the friendships I was offered; and never trust my feelings to tell me what was best. And as a result, I lost track of the I Wanna and I Don’t Wanna voices, and for a long time all I could hear was what other people wanted me to do, and their endless judgments when I couldn’t live up to those expectations, and my own confusion about why I couldn’t do what I was supposed to be able to do.
It has been a very long road back to hearing, and trusting, my own internal voices, and it’s still a struggle. There’s so much more than the I Wanna and I Don’t Wanna voices to listen to, but they all seem to crash around in my head at once, becoming noise without much meaning. I’ve been working so hard on Intuitive Eating for the past year and a half, endlessly trying to hear these subtle voices of hunger and fullness before they become shouts, instead of relying on what I think I should eat to please the diet gods, whoever they may be on a given day. But I still fall into the abyss, almost every day, thinking that my own feelings are untrustworthy and selfish and self-destructive and should be ignored. But, in favor of what?
I guess I’ve reached the point in the journey where I know there’s no other path to follow, even though I still feel all of the guilt and self-loathing for not being able to do what I’m supposed to do. I’ve accepted that I have real limitations and I’ve learned to trust them, instead of pushing forward anyway and just waiting for the inevitable disaster. One sign that I’m on the right track is that even though I still have a lot of anxiety, it’s been a long time since I’ve had an actual panic attack, or even a deep dive into depression.
Part of the internal noise I keep having to fight with is that I so desperately want to be a rational creature, with explanations for everything I do and don’t do, but given how much I don’t understand (about myself, about the world, about science and math and the energies in the universe), sometimes my gut feelings are the only map I have left to follow. I wish I could say that I understand how all of the levers and pulleys of my brain work, and that I know for sure that I’m interpreting my thoughts and feelings correctly, but I can’t. All I can do is keep listening for the I Wanna and I Don’t Wanna voices, as they whisper to me, and show them, through my actions, that I am trustworthy, and that if I choose to ignore them, I have good reasons.
“There is no good reason to ignore me.”
I wish the guilt and self-loathing would shut up already, but I guess they count as internal voices too, at this point. They may have come from the outside to start with, but they are part of my gears and wires now and I need to find a way to respect them too.
Ugh.
“Ugh.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 