Author Archives: Jennifer Butler Basile

Kramer painting Seinfeld
Depression

Music, Mood Disorders, and Manifestation

At some point in my life between the end of high school and becoming a mother, when I had time to ponder and plan such things, I dreamed up the perfect playlists for various moods.  I wanted to create mix-tapes (and then burned CDs) ready to roll on appropriate occasions.  When getting amped up for an evening out, high energy dance numbers.  When nursing a lonesome melancholy, low fi instrumentals and lyrics that reverberated deep in my soul.  Either way, a continuous loop of pertinent music that did not necessitate the shuffling of CD cases or channels. 

I remember especially wanting the low fi loop.  I don’t think it was so much about maintaining that mood, but that only certain sounds were tolerable during it.  If no person around me could understand how I felt, the aching melodies with which I resonated could at least reflect it.  While I wallowed, I at least had a soundtrack and a companion. 

As my own girls approached this age, my two oldest with wildly different tastes in music, the idea of emo came into being.  Outside of the scoffing my husband and I made that it had all already been done in the name of goth, there was almost a mocking attitude toward this music and lifestyle.  I got the sense that my kids and those their age who didn’t identify as emo feared turning so if they listened to the music. 

The Cure fan in me was insulted.  Why discount music based purely on the associated stereotype?  Now, I was not defending Panic! At the Disco, but I felt it was dangerous to swear off an entire category of music and its fans simply because they were misunderstood. 

And while I wore my darkness in the quiet of my teen bedroom ensconced in sound, such mocking obviously struck a chord.  What about the kids who needed a musical companion to confront or survive the darkness inside? 

That’s when I started wondering what came first: the Cure fan or the depressed teen?  Boys (and girls) about to fall out or those who already down?

Was the music a crutch or did it egg the depresso on? 

During a summer when my then three children were home on summer vacation, I discovered the book A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman.  I loved it so much, I wrote extensively about it, but in describing its eponymous main character’s drastic means of dealing with his deep depression to a relative, she asked whether it was a good idea for someone dealing with her own depression to read such a novel.  Ah, I scoffed, I’ve already been so freaking low, what else can happen?  From then on, I read it with a ‘come at me’ attitude, daring the book to do its best. 

Backman’s treatment of depression and the loneliness it breeds was achingly beautiful.  He handled Ove’s character with such compassion and dignity – while also being starkly accurate.  I appreciated the unflinching reality of the illness from which I also suffered.  And yet, the realistic descriptions did bring back my own reality.  Even in memory, the feelings were difficult to relive.  Come at me, they did.

And so a few weeks ago, like a dolt, I plucked another questionable title for such a highly sensitive survivor as myself off the library shelf.  The book jacket description of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh –

“A shocking and strangely tender novel about a young woman’s efforts to duck the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes”

A Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

– piqued my mental health-abstract fiction-tragic hero-loving, meaning seeking self’s interest.  Never mind that ‘ducking the world’ was high on my postpartum mother’s list.  It was like Kramer’s portrait in Seinfeld.

Kramer painting Seinfeld
“He is a loathsome, offensive brute. Yet I can’t look away.”

I wondered whether reading about a woman who obviously did not deal with her ennui by healthy means was a narrative I should entertain, but I threw it into my bag of books, alongside Clark the Shark and Elephant and Piggie. 

By the time I’d powered through the three other books I’d selected – in hopes of inspiring juvenile summer reading, but ended up reading in moments stolen between snack-getting, screeching, and screen time – I’d forgotten what the fourth book at the bottom of the bag was. 

Oh, I thought as I pulled it out. 

Reading late at night and in a bleary-eyed early morning state may not have aided my digestion of this book.  The end of the summer with kids all sick of each other and me with a new school looming over all of us may not have helped my self-esteem either.  I mentioned my possibly poor choice of books to my therapist.  She said, at the very least, you can reflect on how things could always be worse.  Which made me laugh, of course. 

Moods do tend to overcome me.  Even other people’s.  But if I pull myself out of the moment to take stock of my mood, especially in relation to everything else – the big picture as they say – I should be all right.  Even with ennui and affective moods and music.  I won’t blame my depression on Robert Smith just like I won’t become a psychotropic fiend a la the young woman having a year of rest and relaxation. 

Just as flies didn’t issue forth from mud in medieval times, moody music doesn’t cause depression.  Do people who suffer from low moods tend to gravitate toward such music?  Perhaps.  Would I be as compelled to read novels about mental illness if I didn’t suffer from a form of it myself?  Probably not. 

Everyone needs to be conscious of the media they consume – especially those who are highly sensitive. 

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executive dysfunction
Mental Health

Even Executives have Support Staff

Can we talk about executive dysfunction?

I feel like this absence of function is everywhere!

On reels about Adult ADHD to menopause to thyroid conditions, to depression, anxiety – the list goes on.

The proliferation of social media content sharing symptoms with clickbait titles like, “Sure signs you have trauma-informed . . . insert syndrome here”, clarify some things for us, giving us those, oh that’s why I do that moments. But they also can make us (me, we’re talking about me – maybe you, too) paranoid, thinking we have every flipping struggle under the sun.

While the A-ha moments can make our lives easier, especially if we take our new questions and epiphanies to our therapist to work through them and integrate tactics into behaviors and routines, most of these posts offer no solutions – just a new title to add to our tally of neuroses.

I read an interesting article this week positing that while such posts have helped decrease the stigma surrounding mental health via awareness and exposure, mental health practitioners aren’t 100% appreciative. The phenomenon of ‘therapy-speak’, this widespread use of therapy vernacular, has assigned mental health diagnoses to non-clinical behaviors by untrained people.

“Mental health professionals urge, you should embrace nuance and avoid pathologizing normal – albeit annoying or painful – behavior.”

Allie Volpe, “The Limits of Therapy-Speak” in Vox

Enter my paranoia (and my comment about bringing such concerns to a trained therapist).

I’m not walking around diagnosing my friends or strangers on the street, but more than one of those reels has given me pause with my own concerns.

Which brings us back to Executive Dysfunction (and yes, I see the irony in my sidebar).

When a Gen Xer such as myself was raised in a people-pleasing, perfectionistic-inducing atmosphere, it may have been easy to mask symptoms of ADHD. And just like my depression didn’t fully manifest – or become a real f*$%ing problem – until my third postpartum go round, I’ve been able to function and keep all.the.plates.spinning – until now. A friend, helping to manage her own child’s ADHD and discovering her own possible similarities, found in her research that women approaching and going through menopause is the largest group of new diagnoses for the disorder.

Now, my people-pleasing, perfectionist tendencies (see above) doth protest. I’m not having a problem functioning, says the woman with unfinished tasks all over the house. I don’t have a problem managing, says the woman who is running late to every single event she attends.

And those freaking reels do not help, with their peppy, easily digestible, eye-candy way of pointing things out.

But how much is a lack of executive dysfunction and how much is the untenable expectations put on modern mothers? How much is the lingering effects of a global pandemic? How much is my lack of sleep? My wonky thyroid? My anxious tendency to flee from the overwhelming? How much is the reality of four freaking kids and their often inattentive attitude to my pleas for help? The very people-pleasing, perfectionist feeling I have to, promising to, do all. the. things?

The answer likely lies right in the middle.

But that’s not something I can suss out all by myself. And I suppose that’s the point.

Not only would my executive dysfunction likely not let me (insert self-deprecating laugh here), I am not the professional trained for that job.

executive dysfunction
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Weekend Write-Off

Collective Superstition

“Air-conditioning will give you kidney stones,” Luka said. I was gradually recalling those mundane moments – the ones that had until now given way to more traumatic memories – of a childhood governed by collective superstition: Never open two windows across from each other – the propuh draft will give you pneumonia. Don’t sit at the corner of the table; you’ll never get married. Lighting a cigarette straight off a candle kills a sailor. Don’t cut your nails on a Sunday. If it hurts, put some rakija on it.

I tried to think of a singularly American superstition. I’d learned a few from the Uncles – something about not letting one’s shoes touch the kitchen table – but those were all imported from the Old World. Perhaps a country of immigrants had never gotten around to commingling the less desirable pieces of their cultures. Either that, or life wasn’t difficult enough to warrant an adult’s belief in magic.”

Girl at War: A Novel by Sara Novic

https://sara-novic.com/girl-at-war
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smoky sun
Living

Persimmon Haze

Of course the sky is apocalyptic this week

an orange hue signaling a climate change

both here

and abroad

A shift in the very air we breathe

New and different and unsettling all around us

A golden glow lit up a heart etched in tree bark,

but it only looked so beautiful

because the world is on fire.

smoky sun
Jennifer Butler Basile
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Write to Heal

Chopping out a Shared Space

After nearly three years of living with postpartum depression and anxiety and four months less treatment, my mind and heart began to yearn for processing through the written word – as it always has. I should have known I was coming back into myself if I began to get that itch, to set pen to paper and excise those thoughts, soothe those frayed nerves.

I even got the urge to share these thoughts online. Still, the stigma – that keeps many mothers from seeking help at all – gave me pause. Did I want to air my dirty tattered laundry for all the world to see – and judge? The fact that all my secrets would be laid bare became the determining factor. If I was to write my story, I was to own it and post it for all mothers to see that they were not alone in their struggle.

Motherhood – be it ‘typical’ or out-of-the-ordinary, adoptive, biological, or step, mentally fit or ill, of littles, teens, or empty-nested, sought-after or surprised, happy or hard – is a challenging road. As I’ve risen out of the deep depths of environmental, mental, emotional, and hormonal morass, I’ve talked. I’ve sat around tables in the dappled sunlight of backyards, holding cups of coffee long since gone cold or empty, on sidewalks, at kitchen counters, in the unearthly glow of the computer screen late at night, in the darkness of a lone streetlamp that just closed its pool of light. And the more I talked, the more I learned that I wasn’t alone. The more I shared, the more it opened the floodgates of similar experiences and struggles.

There is community in common experiences. There is solace in shared realities. There is strength in vulnerability.

If you’ve read a blog post and thought, yes, that’s exactly how I feel, I’m honored that I’ve given a struggle a voice.

If you’ve joined in a discussion at a workshop and felt, yes, I see a way forward, I am humbled that a question sparked an answer.

If you’ve been yearning for a way to hold space for yourself and fortify or expand that space’s edges, I hope you’ll join our journey with its weekly promptings.

Subscription Details Coming Soon!

chopping potatoes
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Identity, motherhood

Your Strength Comes from Within

Flashback to that time in prenatal yoga. The first time you were pregnant and had no other job, maternally anyway, than growing that tiny human and channeling all your energy into it. When you could go to a class once a week by yourself, surrounded by other expectant mothers. Where you could bask in the beauty of rounded bellies, orbs in profile as your fingertips pointed forward. The potential energy of abdomens and archetypes. Muscles taut and ready to tense, to push a new soul earthward. And while intuition and multigenerational muscle memory take hold in the throes of labor,

it is you

who fire the muscles

who isolate the exact ones at the precise time

who activate the strength within

and gasp the first lung-filling breath.

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motherhood

Growth and Girl Scouts

Any Girl Scout leader will tell you a troop is born of one girl’s total insistence – and that girl is usually her daughter.

That’s how they get you – the girl and the Scouts; they know you are wholly dedicated to her growth and will do anything, including hundreds of volunteer hours, to facilitate that.

So how did that commitment ten years ago land me in the same church hall last night leading a workshop for mothers?

That, too, is all about growth.

When I trained to be a troop leader, I did not know with whom I’d be working. Ironically enough, there was an existing troop at my daughter’s elementary school so both my daughters joined. Fresh-faced and grateful for all the two co-leaders were doing, I eagerly attended each meeting, offering whatever help they needed. I knew these two moms, their oldest girls in the same classes as mine, but not closely. As the girls bonded over ‘Simple Meals’ and ‘First Aid’ badges, I got to know and enjoy crazy times with these women. Overnights and hikes, crafts and camping. When I went to Troop Camping Training with one of them, we found a whole crew of women dedicated to the cause and having a whole lot of fun doing it.

The circle of women I got to know only grew as my girls progressed through the levels. My younger daughter started as a Daisy and a new crop of girls and moms came in. Leader meetings gave us a chance to ease the commitment we’d taken on by sharing ideas and resources and they almost served as a troop meeting for the women themselves. Very often, the speaker had to deal with unruly ‘kids’ just as a leader did. The leaders of the ‘mega troop’ of many levels all three of my girls eventually joined even went on a scavenger hunt scouring three towns.

It all started with a desire to empower our girls. But I wonder what other motivations kept us dedicated. Was it the thrill of recapturing a lost girlhood? Carefree and fun and sequestered? Or did it speak to a longing that grown women, especially mothers, don’t often find fulfilled? Companionship, camaraderie? And was it also a safe way to seek this out, without guilt, within an activity that also served our children?

Even though I took on a troop when my fourth was a newborn, I eventually ‘retired’ from leadership. I remained a registered member and assisted with my youngest’s troop, but I was too tired to lead. Still, there are times I miss the sisterhood of women bonded by the girls they serve.

Now that newborn is old enough to insist I bring her to Girl Scouts. I did. Our service unit hosted a ‘Learn about Girl Scouts’ series for parents and girls. Over the course of three meetings, girls experienced troop-like activities while parents learned all the stuff I already knew. My former service-unit manager outed me to the Council member running it, saying ‘she’d be a good leader’ with an elbow to my side. I admitted I was a ‘recovering leader’. But as she explained to parents how leading her troop for thirteen years gave her her own set of friendships with women as they nurtured the girls, I was wistful.

A mother seated next to me, who may indeed end up being the leader for her daughter’s troop, said, “I want to do Girl Scouts! Can there be a Girl Scouts for adults?”

I think it’s safe to say that most adults yearn for the simpler days of their childhood. Not the growing up all over again, but the chance to do things just for the fun of it. To play with friends. To not have to be the one in charge. To feed our soul with things that feel good and light us up – not alienate us and drag us down.

As I packed my things last night in preparation for the workshop, it didn’t escape me that it was same as setting things down into the tote bag I used to haul Scout supplies. I loaded the trunk and drove the same route. I parked by the ramp and unlocked the door with the same key I borrowed for meetings. As I set up in the rosy glow of sunset slanting through the blinds, the quiet excitement with which I laid items out on tables, shifted chairs into place, had the same feel as preparing for a troop meeting all that time ago. It was oddly satisfying and soothing to be preparing for this new type of meeting in that same place. It was like coming home.

But this time, it was for the moms.

A meeting to discuss putting ourselves on the schedule. Where our motherhood ends and our self begins. Or the jumbled up place in the middle where they intertwine. About taking care of others and ourselves.

I’m not saying my meeting was Girl Scouts for Adults, but it was a chance to sit uninterrupted and think about what we, as women, as individuals, want from our lives. With like-minded people experiencing the same things, facing the same struggles.

Because no one wants to be lost in the shuffle – girl or woman.

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Write to Heal

Exciting News!!!

I will be offering women the opportunity to explore their identities and where mother and self intersect through reflection and writing. There will be several ways to do this – including an interactive one right here on my blog – but my inaugural offerings will be local in-person events this month. I’d love for you to join me on this journey!

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