The other night I got to craving a bean sandwich.
Ever had one? Spread two slices of soft white bread with some mayonnaise. Sprinkle one slice with salt. Open a can of baked beans and carefully spoon a layer of beans on the other slice. Depending on how dry you like your bean sandwich, you might want to press the spoon against the inside of the can to drain the beans a little along the way. Place the other slice of bread on top. Cold beans taste better.
A bean sandwich can be a little bendy, so the tidiest thing to do is to eat it over a plate to catch the spillage. The stress of maneuvering a sandwich that’s dropping its beany innards onto a paper towel while you shove it in your mouth can result in a wolfing down of the sandwich.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
When I was little, bean sandwiches were a treat, a welcome break from cheese sandwiches, leftover goulash, or beans and franks served with iceberg lettuce salad. In the summers there might be tomato sandwiches, or even sweet banana sandwiches, all with mayonnaise and salt, never cut in half.
So a few weeks ago, when I found myself craving a bean sandwich but lacking the ingredients, it dawned on me that those bean sandwiches that were such a treat were a creative, protein-rich solution to a severely limited grocery budget. We ate bean sandwiches because we were poor! And I loved them!
I called my mother to share my realization, and she got a proud chuckle out of knowing that it had taken me such a long time to figure her trick out. When I was a child, any difficulty I had from being poor had nothing to do with an awareness of money, and everything to do with my mother’s struggles with rage and despair, and my father’s loud absence.
Looking back as an adult, I have great compassion for what my mother went through, raising a sickly child alone on welfare.
Learned Helplessness is one of those light-bulb explanations many depressed people get from any garden-variety Cognitive Behavioral Therapist. It’s often accompanied by a new understanding of the misguidedness of living your life as if it were run by an External Locus of Control, and the realization that some of us were raised in families where Cluster B Personality Disorders thrived. The gist of Learned Helplessness is that if someone experiences a lack of control over painful events in their life, they sort of give up trying; even if they later have the ability to stop the painful events, they won’t try to change their circumstances. They give up.
If we’re lucky, these definitions spark synapse-firing epiphanies that free us from destructive ways of thinking about ourselves and our place in the world. If we’re extra lucky, our attempts to change our own behavior inspire any family member suffering from Cluster B disorders to reach for emotional health as well.
The sticky part is that, even with all of this Oprah-worthy self-awareness, undoing decades of self-destructive habits of thought is more than a little difficult.
It’s one thing to name your enemy; it’s another to destroy it.
Hope is a tricky thing. So is money.
I never really understood from a big-picture perspective how to get money. It was always just dribbling in here and there, randomly. When I was 8, I knew I could earn a dime for doing chores, or for helping my mother tidy the racks of clothes in the store she managed. At 13, I started babysitting and working odd jobs, sometimes without pay because I just wanted to be useful.
I remember helping my mother open many stores in malls as an adolescent. I was too young to be left alone overnight, and so I’d be taken out of school and off we’d go to a Holiday Inn adjacent to a mall somewhere in the middle of…oh…Tennessee. I’d spend my days either watching soap operas in the hotel or helping assemble four-ways and tee-stands with a rubber mallet in an unfinished store. We had usually brought a cooler of bologna sandwiches because room service was too expensive.
When it came to getting school clothes each year, my mother would bring trash bags of damaged clothes home. She was supposed to have taken them to Goodwill but she brought them home so I could go through them first and pick out my clothes. I was a freshman in high school wearing clothes from Dress Barn.
Naturally, when it came time for me to get a part-time job in high school, I worked in retail, since that was the only job I’d ever seen adults do (all of my mother’s friends were also in retail). I watched my mother run herself ragged and develop health issues from travelling and working long hours in retail. She always put herself last, and is still paying a heavy price for mortgaging her health.
I went to four different high schools, the last one requiring a move in the middle of my senior year, just when everyone was applying to college. Over the years, as I had bounced from school to school (12 total), I was labeled either as gifted or as in need of remedial instruction, depending on how far ahead or behind I was. By senior year, I had sort of given up on learning anything, and had developed an attitude of gaming the system, even going so far as to change an F on a report card to a B.
I was accustomed to taking diagnostic tests and talking to Guidance Counselors, and I passively went along with this latest one’s idea of applying to college, even though I had no clue how that worked—no one in my family had ever gone to a four-year college.
My best friend’s mother had gone to Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, and it was decided I’d apply there. I can’t remember the other schools I applied to, but I do remember what happened months later, when other students started to get acceptance letters. The Guidance Counselor and my mother both found it odd that we hadn’t heard from any of the colleges I had applied to. They also found it odd that none of the checks for the application fees had been cashed.
I had never mailed the applications.
Besides not feeling confident in completing the applications, I couldn’t really see the point. These colleges all cost thousands of dollars, and my mother was doing well enough at that point that the odds of me receiving needs-based aid were very slim. I knew my father wouldn’t help—he hadn’t called when I graduated high school. When I turned 18 there was no card from him, but he was so glad to be rid of his obligation that he sent the last $128 check for child support a month early.
A flurry of last-minute calls were made, and all of a sudden I was listening to a woman from Agnes Scott tell me over the phone that they would be happy to have me without an application, on account of my test scores and probably a good word or three from my friend’s mother. I knew this was a generous offer, but I couldn’t understand why everyone was ignoring the fact that we didn’t have the money.
So I became an assistant store manager in a mall. And then I went to a community college. And then I started therapy. And then I transferred to William and Mary. All baby steps toward believing there was a point to thinking positively. In college, I was fortunate to have some wonderful professors who were kind in light of my shyness, and who were supportive of my creative writing. One professor even let me turn in a 220-stanza poem in lieu of a term paper.
It still seemed to me that the only way to get money was to run yourself into the ground. I worked up to six jobs at a time to pay for my food and housing while my mother paid the $3,000 annual tuition.
In an attempt to further things along, I applied for a research grant administered by the college. As I sat in front of four professors, explaining my project goals, I quickly realized that I was supposed to have already researched my proposed subject thoroughly. They asked all sorts of questions, but of course that was why I was applying for the grant in the first place, so that I could drop my part-time jobs and find the answers. I was embarrassed, and there was a shift toward disinterest on my examiners’ part as they leaned back in their chairs.
After graduating with High Honors and watching my classmates move on to graduate school, I became a temporary office worker.
You can compare my relationship with money to my relationship with my creative goals, or even with love. I’m lucky to know what I want, and I’m lucky to have had the occasional mentor (not that I’ve ever had a love mentor, but you know what I mean). But I never seemed to be able to figure out how to get what I wanted. So I started wanting less. And less. I started telling myself to just make do with what I had. After all, who was I to think I was entitled to anything other than bean sandwiches. Besides, they’re delicious anyway. Right?
Fast-Forward an Undisclosed Number of Years
I just finished my first year in New York City. I heard someone say once that people don’t move to NYC to have it easy. The first day I started looking for a job was the day Lehman Brothers fell. I’ve had stuff stolen and I’ve laughed off an attempted mugging. I’ve had three apartments, two of which have flooded.
But I’ve had far more gifts and opportunities come my way than challenges. A family friend gave me several bags of nice clothes, I found a contract position at a television network, and I’ve started to publish articles as a freelance writer. I’m making friends, I have a good apartment, and I have a savings account. I even bought some clothes that were not from a thrift store.
Still, it’s proving hard to let go of some fear-based habits. Back in DC, I got by on as little as $11,000 a year as a teaching artist and playwright. In 2006 I lost 18 pounds in 3 weeks because I was depressed and couldn’t afford groceries. The depression’s been gone for more than two years, but I’m not so proud as to think that it will never circle back around.
I have a protective tendency to worst-case-scenario everything. It’s not that I expect something tragic to happen like, “She was happy for the first time in her life, too bad about that speeding bus.” It’s more that I try not to rely on anything, because I don’t expect things to last— work, friends, food, shelter.
Now, sure, it’s wise to understand the impermanence of things, that life is fluid and you can’t always be on an upward trajectory. And I know that the hard times I’ve been through have helped me to thrive my first year in New York. And I’m lucky to know that I can get by on bean sandwiches if I need to. But lately I’ve begun looking at my life as more than an exercise in endurance. I’m no longer bracing myself against something awful catching me off-guard.
I’ve started to see past my circumstances, to believe that I can try to change them. That’s not to say that with the attempt comes guaranteed success, but I see the point in trying. I’m unlearning helplessness. And I can see the steps I want to take toward turning my creative goals into reality.
And yes, I have the especially good fortune to know that, if after trying, I don’t succeed, I’m perfectly content to console myself with a cold bean sandwich.
I want to thank Leah for letting me be a monthly contributor. We haven’t met in real life (yet), but we “met” years ago through our blogs, and we recently reconnected on Twitter. I also want to thank you for reading, and to thank those of you who leave comments. I think writing and reading are two of the most powerful and intimate ways people can share themselves.
