“Vivienne?” the voice is both foggy and tinny at the same time, coming at me from some part of this white metal cylinder that currently encases my body.
“Yes?” I raise my voice back at the white metal cylinder, hoping it can hear me above its loud and obnoxious humming.
Meanwhile, I’m focusing all my attention on not moving my head (or any part of my body), lest I interfere with the high-resolution 3-dimensional pictures it’s currently taking of my brain.
“Great, we just wanted to make sure you were okay. So, now we are going to show you a fixation cross and we need you to look at this cross for the next 7 minutes without moving.
The white cross appears on the black screen and my eyes have nowhere else to go really.
The machine rumbles louder and I give thanks for the ear plugs the technician gave me for my ears before pushing me in.
I thought I would experience some form of mild claustrophobia being stuck in this machine, but with the ear plugs and ear cushions holding my head in place, I feel strangely safe and – hugged.
In a time where we’re constantly told to keep our two metre distance and we never find ourselves in small, contained spaces anymore, I welcome this feeling of being hugged by the MRI, while it fusses over me with its otherworldly noises.
It’s been a strange month since coming back from Christmas. I struggled with the long distance of my relationship more than I have before.
In the two weeks of quarantine Peter and I spent with my parents, it felt like time stopped for us and instead revolved around our routines of long breakfasts, work sessions to lo-fi music in the basement, walking in circles on our well-trodden track in our backyard and nightly rounds of card games with the parents.
But the night before we both went our separate ways, it hit me that time does go on and that no matter what I did, I was going home to a quiet studio apartment and a regular work-at-home/lab routine.
That was my life, and this wasn’t.
And it was both the inevitability of that fact and my need to still struggle against that inevitability that made me sad.
Since coming back to my apartment here in Montreal, I’ve done all the things the mental health experts say to do.
You know the drill – make sure you exercise and eat well, get into a routine, connect with your social network.
I’m swimming in my condo pool, drinking my smoothies, talking to friends every night after I get home from lab, engaging in as much creative activity as I can on the weekends.
But, the mental health experts don’t tell you that you could do all that and still dread going to work on a Sunday night.
That you could swim laps, drink smoothies and talk to friends with an underlying sadness.
I try to journal out the sadness; that’s one of the main ways I cope with undefined, persistent emotion.
It could be just the month of February, you know, the whole coming off of the holidays into this dreary month of slush and bitterly cold winds (you know it’s cold when your eyelashes start freezing and you notice the effort it’s taking you to blink).
It could also be work-related. The life of a graduate student consists of running a lot of the same experiments, with very few of them succeeding and not really knowing why.
These past few weeks was more of that, coupled with equipment not working the way it’s supposed to.
I meet with my supervisor and feel the suffocating need to prove myself – that I have indeed been working diligently in the lab, even though I don’t have the results to show for it.
I can feel her stress and my own crushing people-pleasing tendencies.
I want to deliver on the results she’s looking for, but then again, what control do I have on the outcome of my experiments?
In the stress questionnaire they issued us before the MRI, they asked us to rate how frequently we think thoughts like, “I feel unappreciated for the work I do” or “Even though I try, I still get poor results.”
I normally wouldn’t consider myself stressed. When I think of stress, I think yelling mom with young children in tow or high-strung businessman closing 6 figure deals. Yet, why do those thoughts seem uncomfortably familiar?
Objectively, things are going fine. I have a job. I’m in grad school. I have a house and more than enough clothes to wear.
It’s almost like I don’t have a right to be stressed.
But there are still times when I think about how many things could go wrong in any given experiment I set out to do in a day (I know it’s a pessimistic way to view it, but I DID start out optimistic and that didn’t get me any more success), or the infinitesimally small existential weight my PhD carries even if the experiments were to work and wonder if this could be me experiencing stress.
It could also be my reflection on recent events, more specifically the closure of the special needs orphanage in China that I spent two years at before coming to Montreal due to new governmental restrictions.
How sobering it is that everything one has poured and invested one’s life into for the past ten years could cease to exist so suddenly.
My eyes focus back in on the white cross in front of me.
It is the first day of Lent and how funny it is that I am strapped into a machine, unable to move and somewhat forced into 7 minutes of meditation on this little, white fixation cross.
Lent is a time of stripping away, of surrender.
Buddhists would say that the core problem of humanity is desire. We desire too much and our solution is to strip ourselves of desire.
But I don’t think that’s the kind of stripping away I want over Lent, for my stress, sadness and angst don’t seem to find their origin in bad desire.
If anything, it stems from good desires not being met.
The desire to physically be with the person you love, the desire to be diligent at work and produce something of value, the desire to do ministry that brings about the kingdom of God.
This is the tension: we desire good things and don’t have absolute control in bringing those things to pass.
So then Lent is more about acknowledging the unmet desire and receiving our broken, limited state of humanity.
Isn’t that, if anything, is what Jesus’ body hanging on the cross represents?
In Lent, I want to remember that I am not superhuman.
I cannot make my experiments go the way I want any more than I can will borders to open and pandemics to end.
I need to sit and marinate in that thought for longer.
But, if there is no one to whom I can entrust these unmet desires, then the only solution is the Buddhist one – that is to give them up.
On the other hand, if we live in a world in which God exists and if my theology is one of a good and sovereign God, then I can be okay being small and ordinary.
I don’t have to strive to make an impact or to be noticed, because I’m not the one who runs the world.
In fact, I can lay still in this MRI staring at this white fixation cross listening to the dulled hums of this machine while the world goes on perfectly fine without me.
That thought is at once frightening and gloriously liberating.
“You’re doing great in there, Vivienne,” the tinny voice pipes up, disrupting my thoughts.
And truth is, I don’t want to leave.
But when time is up, the technician slides me out and removes the cushions from my ears so I hear sounds from the real world again.
“Were you ok?” he asks, concerned.
“Oh yeah, it was amazing. I felt like I was being hugged by the MRI machine.”
“Well, that’s not one we hear often,” he chuckles, bemused.
Well, it’s not every day that you’re forced to be completely still while staring at a white cross, I think to myself.
And I think about what it would mean to carry this practice of feeling small, powerless and insignificant into my daily life –
knowing that I don’t have much to offer but have already been offered everything in the mystery of the cross.
Don’t worry – I don’t have brain cancer or anything, but was a control subject in a clinical trial for insomnia where they looked at my brain activity when I did cognitive tasks and during my sleep. It was actually really cool and I can’t wait to get my sleep report + MRI images back!
But yes, that is the context for why I was in the MRI on the first day of Lent 🙂
Are you doing anything for Lent this year? What are the good desires that you feel you have no control in bringing to pass?
These are the things I’ve been thinking about and would love to hear yours!
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