Happy Cows

Originally this essay was named “People with PTSD should avoid dealing with Facebook.” When I started writing it last summer, Facebook was threatening to topple Comcast from the Bad Customer Service throne. Don’t ask.

After the effects of customer service trauma wore off, the essay’s working title became “People with PTSD and Facebook should switch to …. What exactly?” 

We choose to connect to people through Facebook’s accommodating platform. Nevertheless, everyone has a story about Facebook’s epic fails and creepy stalker recommendations. 

My biggest head scratcher came after I posted a link to my blog essay “Unfuzzy Things.” To help manage my trichotillomania, previously I'd been fiddling with oversized pipe cleaners in order to distract me from pulling out my hair. At my father’s suggestion, I started using synthetic industrial samples instead. He found the purple Unfuzzy Things while touring a mattress factory in Utah.  

“Unfuzzy Things” included a photo of one of the samples that I took myself at home, rather than downloading an image from the internet. The essay didn’t show a mattress or identify the company. Nothing on my computer or phone did. Nevertheless, the next day Facebook began targeting me with an advertisement for innovative Purple™ mattresses and pillows. Episodes like this test one’s faith in the ability of Ockham’s Razor to explain strange coincidences. Or one’s confidence in Facebook’s purported “privacy” policies.¹

¹You’ll be shocked to learn that five minutes after I typed that last paragraph on my laptop, Facebook helpfully let me know my friend Goran in Minneapolis likes Purple™ mattresses. Ever since, Facebook has been reminding me about Goran and Purple™ every time I open the app.

Of course, it’s not just Facebook. They’re all equally bad – Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, AT&T, etc. For example, whenever Google Images is stumped by one of my search inquiries, it sycophantically suggests random pictures from my own website. That’s just lazy. 

The key to dealing with Facebook is to remember you’re not the target of Facebook’s business model – you’re the company’s product. Facebook’s actual customers are paying advertisers. In a popular and apt metaphor, the rest of us are merely a herd of cattle. 

I’ve run the numbers, and I’m pretty happy with our little arrangement.

Facebook and its customers want to harvest two things from the herd.  

Their first goal is to change our behaviour, particularly by motivating us to buy things. However, I’m broke and I hate shopping. Although I'm sure Goran is correct and a Purple™ mattress would change my life, I'm still not going to order one. As far as I can tell, ten years of Facebook marketing efforts have been utterly wasted on me. Unless that’s what inspired me to vote for Donald Trump. 

The other way Facebook makes money is by gathering and selling data about the herd, as well as information about individual cows – I mean “members.” 

Facebook sells two basic kinds of data:  (1) who we know, and (2) what we all “do” – for example, when each of us responds to a particular Facebook post by clicking on a link, or sends a message, or leaves behind a comment and emoji.

So what does Facebook know about me? Mostly that have an interesting and diverse group of friends. According to Facebook, I currently have 359 friends on its platform, all of whom share some actual real world connection with me. (Unlike some of the exhausting extroverts I know, I don’t use Facebook to promote myself, or to set some kind of record for the number of casual contacts.)

My Facebook friends include:

·     Mormons 

·     Ex-Mormons

·     Non-Mormons (Mormons refer to them as “Gentiles”)

·     Jews (who confusingly count as “Gentiles”)

·     Canadians

·     Family members, including extended relations, ex-in-laws, and relatives of my adopted children’s birth parents

·     Lawyers from across the political and professional spectrum

·     Pro-Beard partisans

·     Anti-Facial Hair fanatics

·     People affected by mental illness

·     Musicians

·     People who read my blog

·     People who think my blog posts are too long and confusing

·     Transgender individuals

·     Cisgender men and women

·     Lesbians

·     Avowed heterosexuals

·     Gay men

·     People I’ve made out with²

²SPOILER ALERT: That last group is a small subset of the previous category. Although a Mormon girl I briefly dated at BYU friended me recently.

Many of these categories are shifting and/or overlapping. Needless to say, my Facebook friends are not a representative sample of the general population.

Whenever someone posts something on Facebook, the site’s algorithm decides who should see it. Facebook is constantly trying to guess which shiny bauble will appeal to each ruminating cow, whether it’s an advertisement for adult diapers or another picture of my daughter mugging for the camera.

Mathematicians have a formula for integrating new information into existing probability assumptions. It’s called “Bayes’s Theorem,” after the eighteenth century English clergyman who introduced the concept. As I wrote last year in “Tuning Your Gaydar,” statistics guru Nate Silver explains Bayes's Theorem with the example of “living with a partner and coming home from a business trip to discover a strange pair of underwear in your dresser drawer. You will probably ask yourself: what is the probability that your partner is cheating on you?” Bayes's Theorem tells you how to calculate the changed odds based on what you see when you open the drawer after your next trip.

Or suppose you stick your hand into a haystack and it comes out covered with needles. Then the next time you reach in and grab a handful of nails. Eventually even Facebook’s algorithm is smart enough to figure out this is not your normal haystack.

Information travels both ways, particularly if you’re paying close enough attention to subtle clues like context and body language. 

Facebook receives a little bit of signal and a lot of noise about me. Meanwhile, I’m getting all kinds of information from Facebook. Much of the data is about world events and popular culture; some of the information concerns Facebook itself. 

Mostly, however, Facebook feeds me information about other people. This data trove is particularly useful when you’re trying to figure how to interact with other human beings, but you’re kinda Asberger-y, and have severe social anxiety.

I wrote most of this essay at a park in Vancouver the afternoon before opening night of our 70s concert. I’d already been musing about Facebook data trends, and I decided to go back and summarize recent posts on my timeline. Usually I don’t post to Facebook multiple times in a single day, but I realized there had been an interesting mix of news to report:
   

·     Earlier that day I watched my son compete in the annual city-wide Grade 5 track meet

·     The night before I’d published pictures from my daughter Eleanor’s Grade 8 choir concert

·     Friday was also my daughter Rosalind’s birthday, so I shared cake photos from over the years

·     After the Vancouver Men’s Chorus performance that night, I flogged our fabulous 70s Show

·     And while writing in the park, I published a selfie of my fresh summer haircut.

Artificial intelligence algorithms like Facebook’s look for patterns in the flood of data they collect. Based on previous experience, they predict how the members of the herd will respond to future stimuli. For example, many of my Facebook friends are fans of pictures and anecdotes about my three adorable children. Facebook has figured out that some of you have a favourite among my kids. 

Facebook also has its own agenda. Last fall Facebook significantly reduced the number of friends who see links to my blog posts, vainly hoping that I would pay to “boost” my profile. (We'll see how Facebook punishes me for posting this essay.)

Certain memes appeal to different arrays of Facebook friends – posts involving Canada, or showtunes, or sports, or progressive politics, etc. Other subjects are obviously less appealing. Apparently only lawyers like legal stuff. 

Some people's eyes are drawn to pictures of me taken in flattering lighting. Mostly my selfies attract the attention of little old ladies. They've always been my most reliable demographic – just like the audience for long-running dramas on CBS. However, I do inspire the occasional thumbs up from members of the gay cohort. Someone should ask me out for coffee sometime. Or introduce me to a single friend. I realize you're no Facebook algorithm, but by now you all should have figured out that I'm never going to do it myself.

In describing trends in responses to particular types of Facebook posts, I don’t mean to characterize any individual friend’s age, gender, or sexual orientation. In fact, I haven’t gone back to examine who actually saw or liked last week’s Facebook photos. I'm sure they would add up to the kind of small, nonrandom sample that a real statistician would warn you not to rely on.

On the other hand, our Facebook encounters typify two of the biggest challenges that face any decision maker: incomplete information, and overdetermined connections. As humans, we are constantly presented with chaotic problems that defy the predictive power of mathematical tools.

As I’ve previously discussed in various blog posts, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman offers a useful model of how our brains rely on two contrasting mental processors, which I've referred to as Thing 1 and Thing 2. Thing 1 is fast and automatic, constantly multi-tasking as it retrieves memories and generates intuitions. In contrast, Thing 2 allocates our brains’ limited conscious attention to effortful mental tasks. Among other things, Thing 1 is responsible for maintaining our brain’s working model of the world around us. Our brains necessarily rely on numerous mental shortcuts. This allows us to smoothly interact with everything from gravity to peer pressure without our heads exploding.

Because we’re profoundly social animals, our unconscious mind is particularly interested in evaluating each of the people we encounter. Are they members of our tribe or outsiders? Potential threats or lovers? As a result, my brain automatically generates all kinds of social expectations – including assumptions about the types of people Facebook will select to see the next picture of my family or the beach, and how particular individuals might respond to specific stimuli.

Meanwhile, everyone else on social media is unconsciously generating their own working models of the world.

In addition to being social animals, humans are uniquely intelligent. After millions of years as just another primate, humans became the dominant species on the planet a few thousand years ago. According to evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, this happened when we developed the skill of making effective but “fallible guesses from fragmentary information.” Our brains solve each “unsolvable problem by a leap of faith about how the world works, by making assumptions that are indispensable but indefensible – the only defense being that the assumptions worked well enough in the world of our ancestors.”

Pinker’s brain model is consistent with Bayesian probability, as well as with old-fashioned American pragmatism, which teaches you to keep an open mind and apply reason to the best evidence you can find. My favourite literary detective Nero Wolfe sums up this approach when he sends his gofer Archie Goodwin out into the world: “Act in the light of experience as guided by intelligence.”   

Life unfolds as a series of decisions based on overwhelming yet incomplete data. Facebook spends billions of dollars trying to anticipate and duplicate human decision-making. But human brains still are much better at this process than any of the artificial intelligence algorithms generated by Facebook or the other rapacious monopolists. In fact, humans are smarter than any other species we’re aware of in the 14 billion-year history of the universe. Including cows.

Spongeworthy

One of the many enduring memes originated by Seinfeld is the concept of “spongeworthiness.” Elaine discovers her favourite contraception product, a female sponge, is being pulled from the market. She immediately runs to the pharmacy and buys the last remaining carton in New York. Going forward, any potential partner must demonstrate he is “spongeworthy.”

A few months ago I was relaxing at Showtunes Night after chorus rehearsal. As Kerry played “New York State of Mind,” I had a great idea for an essay that used the spongeworthy metaphor in a nonsocial context. When I got back to my laptop I created a file labeled “Spongeworthy” to flesh out my cool idea. 

Recently I opened the Spongeworthy file and discovered it was blank. I probably thought my metaphor idea was so good I’d never forget it. Or maybe I just forgot to hit save.

After the Vancouver Men’s Chorus concert Wednesday, I stopped by the weekly sing-along Showtunes Night. This is how theatre nerds relax after a long night of singing.

The crowd was in particularly good voice. However, after belting out a few standards, I remembered that with another four VMC shows coming up this week, I needed to save my own voice. 

Then I realized I’d found a new application for the “spongeworthy” metaphor.

I hate Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-running musical Cats. One of my greatest regrets from the 1980s is letting a bunch of heterosexual friends drag me to the show, wasting a precious night in New York City.   

As usual, at one point during Showtunes Night, Sean played “Memory” – the signature number from Cats. I began unconsciously vocalizing on a few chords.  
                                                                                                                       

Then I realized I had to stop singing. If I have standards, Cats is below them. 

I managed to keep my mouth shut for the next half hour. Then Kerry started playing “One Day More,” the multilayered Act I finale from Les Miserables. 

I couldn’t resist joining in. No one could. As we reached the final climax, I could tell by reading his lips that Kerry was singing the melody line of Enjolras, the tall revolutionary in the middle of the picture. I sang along with the tragic young lovers, Marius and Cosette. But I added the Andrews Sisters note to their duet and turned it into a trio.

For the rest of the evening I successfully resisted doing any more damage to my vocal chords. Even when Kerry and Sean played Sondheim, and Dear Evan Hansen, and more songs from Les Miserables.

I even resisted singing along when Trish, one of the event organizers and exceptional performer, sang “On My Own” from Les Miz. See, I can make responsible choices.

Trish loves Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, because he writes great lyric soprano parts. Near the end of the evening she took the mic to sing “Think of Me Fondly,” from Phantom of the Opera. The crowd sang backup. It was a damn good performance, and everyone knew it. Still, I couldn’t join in.

Even with Sean playing the piano and Trish singing, Andrew Lloyd Webber simply isn’t spongeworthy.

Earlier in the evening, an unflattering green light suddenly bathed all the patrons sitting next to the wall. The gentleman in the chair next to me asked if I’d hit the switch, and I said obviously not on purpose. 

Kerry was playing some song from Wicked at the time, so we hoped it was just a temporary Emerald City effect. If not, I offered to find a defendant we could sue on behalf of the class of bad lighting victims. (I’m a lawyer. All I need to get to work is a potential defendant within 75 feet who has decent liability insurance.) And I told the gentleman I’d let Trish know about the lighting problem the next time I spoke to her.

When I went over to chat with Trish, I told her the good news was that I’d written an entire blog essay during one of her lovely performances. I said the bad news was that it would be titled “Spongeworthy.” Trish laughed and said she would be honoured. With a u. 

We agreed to donate our share of the class action damages for the harsh green lighting to Planned Parenthood.

More Showtune Night Stories:

"Missing Marie's Crisis" (5/6/17)

"Get Out and Stay Out" (10/18/17)

"Six Degrees of Kristin Chenoweth" (10/31/18)

"Comfort Animals" (4/24/19)

"I am Third" (5/29/19)

"Maybe I Love Showtunes Too Much" (9/17/19)

"Artificial Emotional Intelligence" (2/25/20)

"Do Gay Androids Dream of Electric Brunch?" (2/26/20)

"A New Brain"  (5/5/20)

Dr. Practical

.

I've managed to avoid hospitals for fifty-five years. In particular, as long as I retain any voluntary muscle function, I’m never going to be sick enough to go to an emergency room. 

Fortunately, being surrounding by loving family means that if I really needed medical assistance, someone will take me to the ER as soon as I lose consciousness. Then the ER stops being an indefensibly profligate expense. 

But I’m also a good parent. I wouldn’t wait for one of my children to be unconscious before seeking medical attention. Of course, all three times I took children to the ER in Seattle, they were immediately admitted to the hospital.

Happily, our insurance now includes a "walk-in" clinic that’s open seven days a week. It's brought a sane equilibrium to healthcare in our family.

The Bellingham clinic is inconvenient enough to deter casual visits, even by notorious hypochondriacs like my daughter – no one wants to sit for a couple of hours in a waiting room surrounded by sniffling children. It’s ideal for those of us whose medical problems don’t involve gunshots or heart attacks, but still can’t wait till we can get an appointment with our regular physician. 

The first time I visited the walk-in clinic was a couple of years ago, when my daughter Eleanor “absolutely” needed an updated school sports physical exam “that day.” Since then Eleanor has been back for various actual medical needs. Each time we’ve seen the helpful and practical Dr. Julie Terry. 

Bellingham is a small town. It turns out my daughters go to middle school with Dr. Practical’s daughter.

In “Ungilding the Lily,” I observed that unlike practitioners of certain dubious fiction genres, a memoirist can't get away with describing too many implausible coincidences in a row. Numerous ruthless deletions are therefore necessary in order to avoid straining credulity, or exhausting readers’ patience.

Because this is an uncharacteristically short essay, I thought I’d take the opportunity to share a couple of examples of the type of piled-on coincidences you regularly miss out on:

·     Both times we switched insurance in Bellingham, my kids were assigned to Dr. Terry as their default provider before connecting with our regular pediatrician. I still have insurance cards with her name on them.

·     On the way home from the clinic, Eleanor confessed that she’s actually been in their house with her classmates, and recognized Dr. Practical from her family pictures.

But I digress.

At my annual physical last year, my regular Bellingham physician Dr. Heuristic diagnosed me with age-related tinnitus, i.e. ringing in the ears. The ringing usually is not noticeable enough to bother me. Years ago a Seattle friend developed tinnitus and had to quit the chorus. I thought he was being a drama queen, but now I owe him an apology. 

During the “Hell Week” of tech and dress rehearsals with Vancouver Men's Chorus this month, my body became predictably run down. For the first time, the ringing in my ears was deafening. Even worse, the ringing resonated with the sound system at Performance Works. It felt like someone was holding a speaker next to my left ear. 

Each day it got louder. By the end of the concert Saturday night, the ringing in my ears was unbearable. I drove home to Bellingham, and first thing Sunday morning I showed up at the walk-in clinic. 

After the nurse checked my vital signs, Dr. Practical came in and introduced herself. I reminded her that she’d treated me before – when I came home from the Vancouver Men’s Chorus Retreat this spring with a huge boil next to my left nipple. It told her it now looks like a small-caliber bullet wound. She said “I remember you – and the chorus.”

She checked my orifices and concluded my sinuses were infected. My chronic allergies mean I’m used to getting occasional sinus infections. However, this year the congestion combined with tinnitus to make the ringing in my left ear excruciating. 

Dr. Practical prescribed a round of antibiotics. She also told me ordinary Sudafed would quickly relieve the pressure on my Eustachian tubes that was amplifying the ringing in my ear. Sure enough, by the time I got home from the pharmacy and the Bellingham Youth Pride parade, I could hear normally again. I also realized the ringing in my ears had been distracting me from the infection's nasty congestion and sore throat.

I'm still waiting for the antibiotics to kick in. But Dr. Practical assures me I’ll be ready to sing five more VMC concerts this week.

Mormons are terrible at moderation. That's another bug or feature of my heritage that I haven't escaped. 

One benefit of the plagues afflicting me over the last few years is that I’ve gotten much better at accepting assistance from others. But the old heuristics I used to rely on before seeking help have all failed me – rules like “Do I have a fever over 103 degrees?” “Have I lost a litre of blood yet?” and “Am I unconscious?”

Now I’m looking for more practical clues when something might be seriously wrong. So far, both my trips to the walk-in clinic have involved bacterial infections. Both needed to be treated with antibiotics. Both happened on weekends. Both occurred after spending time in Vancouver with the chorus. 

Hmm.

Crazy Mormon Mommy Bloggers

Apparently we went through a “Mormon Moment” a few years back, somewhere around the time Mitt Romney was running for President. Mormon Ken Jennings’ all-time Jeopardy record still seemed unbeatable. The Book of Mormon was the hottest ticket on Broadway. Yet for once the Mormon Church resisted knee-jerk outrage – instead the church ran cute proselytizing advertisements in the show’s Playbill. Some folks sensed a thaw in the glacial relationship between the church and “feminists, intellectuals, and homosexuals.”

Perhaps the perkiest fad we saw during the Mormon Moment was the phenomenon of “Mormon Mommy Bloggers.” Back then “blogs” were a vibrant social media thing, not today’s literary ghost-town. “Mommy Blogs” were bourgeois pornography, like HGTV or IKEA – the kind of porn you can either project yourself on, or ridicule, or both. And “Mormon Mommies” were the Disney Princesses of Mommy Blogs. It’s our people's wholesome white-bread perfection vibe. Mormon Mommy Blogging was the ideal platform for displaying fascinating womanhood to the world, and maybe even for earning a little pin money from appropriate advertising. Obviously without competing with your husband's priesthood role as the family's divine breadwinner.

In contrast, the Queen of the Mommy Bloggers wrote from the opposite end of the spectrum. The website was “Dooce.” Her real name Heather B. Armstrong. 

Dooce was a dark queen – raging about housework and parenting and hormones and stress. Yet by most economic measures she was the most successful blogger in the mommy niche. Her blog generated enough ad revenue to support a family of four in style. Heather's essential gimmick was to avoid the kind of latter-day Ozzie and Harriet repression you’d get from those Stepford Mormon wives. Dooce repressed nothing. To the contrary, she wrote about everything, with no respect for authorities of any kind, churches definitely included.

Ironically, Heather herself grew up Mormon. She still writes about being an exhausted single mother from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Heather Armstrong graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in English a few years after me. We’ve never met. However, she went to college with several friends who worked on Student Review, the student newspaper I helped start at BYU in the 1980s. They introduced me to the dooce website, and I would occasionally read Heather’s candid tales of post-Mormon parenting.

Heather began publishing online in 2001. By 2005 www.dooce.com was generating enough advertising for her husband Jon to quit his office job and focus on the blog business. However, Heather’s career illustrates both the economic and noneconomic perils of blogging. You can see some of the trends in the titles of the thought pieces that regularly appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Slate: 

“Work-Life Balance When Your Mom Is “Mommy Blogger” Heather Armstrong aka Dooce”

“That Outrageous Mommy Blogger Who Refuses to Stop Writing About Her Kid Highlights a Key Parent-Child Generational Gap” (Not Heather, BTW, she respects her teen and tween daughters’ boundaries. Mostly.)

“How the Mom Internet Became a Spotless, Sponsored Void: Gritty Blogs Have Given Way to Staged Instagram Photos”

Eventually website advertising dried up for all the Mommies, even dooce. Heather couldn’t bring herself to whore out her children as advertisements for appliances. She continued writing sporadically. But after divorcing and becoming a fulltime single mom, she was forced to find a stressful job with a local nonprofit.

Like blogging and the Romney campaign, the Mormon Moment eventually disappeared. Careful observers heard the door slam shut in November 2015, when the Brethren announced a virulently unchristian policy targeting the children of lesbian and gay parents.

The Mormons’ homophobic announcement coincided with my diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In addition to triggering additional PTSD symptoms, this Mormon connection helped my healthcare providers identify the youthful traumas underlying my PTSD.  

About the same time, Heather Armstrong began a major depressive episode a thousand miles away in Utah.

As I wrote last year in “Reslient,” Depression and Anxiety are labels for the two categories of mental illness that affect the largest proportion of the population. Here is a model I’ve found useful for contrasting these two distinctive types of mental experiences:

Anxiety is a disproportionate response to the future. Depression is a disproportionate response to the past.

I was introduced to this dichotomy years ago when I read Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Solomon described depression and anxiety as "fraternal twins." As Michael Pollan observes, "Both reflect a mind mired in rumination, one dwelling on the past, the other worrying about the future. What mainly distinguishes the two disorders is their tense."

The skewed responses of anxiety and depression are rooted in powerful emotions that generally benefit the species. Humans should worry when a saber-toothed tiger is approaching at high speed. And we should grieve at the loss of a loved one. When these two healthy emotions lose proportion and negatively affect important aspects of our lives, however, they become potentially deadly disorders.

Back to Crazy Mormon Mommy Bloggers. Or rather to Ex-Mormon Single Parents Writing About Mental Illness Because Someone Fucking Has To.

Heather and I are primarily anxious people, but we both have endured the occasional bout of major depression. Heather’s first book, It Sucked And Then I Cried, was about post-partum depression after the birth of her elder daughter, who is about the same age as my two daughters. [Ed. Note: Hmm, hormones offer yet another argument for adoption.] 

Heather’s new book is about her eventual recovery after eighteen months of debilitating depression. As Michael Pollan recently observed in How to Change Your Mind, depression patients are finding new hope in variations on old technologies, including 1960s psychedelics and 1970s party drugs. There’s even a resurgence in Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT).¹ 

¹No, not the kind of aversion therapy where doctors attach electrodes to the genitals of desperate Mormon gay boys and attempt to shock them into heterosexuality as they watch gay pornography. Yes, the Mormons were still doing this when I attended BYU in the 1980s.

With modern ECT, patients receive controlled electric shocks to their brains while under anesthesia. ECT is effective for a significant percentage of patients with treatment-resistant depression. However, ECT still has serious side effects, including memory loss.

Are you a fan of the British sitcom The IT Crowd? It’s set in the London headquarters of a fictional corporation. Regardless of their IT problem, help desk callers all hear the same tape-recorded question: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?

That describes Heather’s recent depression treatment. In 2017, she volunteered for a study being conducted at the University of Utah. The experimental treatment sought to obtain the benefits of ECT without its nasty side effects. Rather than shock the brain into rebooting, as with ECT, the doctors instead used powerful anesthetic drugs to turn her brain off completely for fifteen minutes before reviving her. Heather’s mother and stepfather valiantly escorted her to each of the ten treatment sessions.

The title of Heather’s new book, The Valedictorian of Being Dead: the True Story of Dying Ten Times to Live, refers both to the nature of the depression treatment and to a lifetime of Mormon perfectionism. As she reminded her faithful Mormon mother, “when I want to do something well, I become the valedictorian of doing that thing.” Not just the obvious things, like being named as valedictorian of her high school graduation class. For example, during her treatments Heather “bragged to the phlebotomist about being the valedictorian of having my blood drawn.” So of course “no one does dead better” than Heather – even being “dead” for just fifteen minutes, with a host of medical professionals and family members closely monitoring her vital signs.

Fortunately the experimental treatment worked. Heather still takes her meds and copes with mental health issues every day, but her depression lifted and hasn’t returned. Nevertheless, Heather recognizes that “part of the ongoing ‘medication’ for my mental health has been identifying triggers for my anxiety. I either avoid these triggers altogether or I develop habits to handle them.”

Heather concludes by confessing “I used to think I was good at choosing my battles. What the depressive episode taught me was that I was terrible at it. In order to manage my anxiety, I have to let so much go. This isn’t easy for a valedictorian.” 

Have I mentioned I was the valedictorian of my graduating class at BYU?

Chronic anxiety is exhausting. But major depression is even worse. As Heather summarizes,

Depression extinguishes our purpose in life – the purpose of anything in our lives – making it quite literally impossible to handle anything. Every day and hour and minute is an obstacle course of things we are supposed to handle; most people do so without any effort, but we can’t even see around the first corner. And so we collapse. Or we sleep for days on end. Or we yell at people who don’t deserve it. Some of us drink ourselves into a stupor. Other scream into a pillow or crawl into a corner to rock back and forth. Some of us retreat to a closet to call their mother and say, “Please, let me be dead.”

Midway through the round of treatments, Heather started to take an interest in life for the first time in many months. She showered. She listened to music. She played with her daughters. The fog of depression began to dissipate. 

At this point, Heather told her mother “I feel like I died and someone brought me back to life.” Her mother’s response: “You do realize that’s exactly what happened?”

In addition to frankly chronically her experience with mental illness, The Valedictorian of Being Dead is a moving tribute to Heather’s endlessly supportive Mormon mom. Blogging is no longer Heather’s job. But as her mother puts it, writing about mental health is Heather’s “calling” – “this is what you were meant to do.”

The first writer I ever met was my maternal grandmother, Helen Seeley Phillips. Mostly she was a perfect 1950s Mormon housewife, of course. And a perfect grandmother. But she also was a lifelong freelance writer – meeting monthly with her ladies’ writing group in Denver, diligently practicing her craft at home, and regularly publishing items in magazines like Readers’ Digest. 

Among the many life lessons I learned from Gram is that being a writer is not necessarily a day job. In fact, for most writers most of the time, it probably shouldn’t be. 

Before returning The Valedictorian of Being Dead to the library, I suggested my mother read it. I figured she could relate to the tribulations of other heroic Mormon mothers. And their even more aggravating and oversharing ex-Mormon children.  

After she finished Heather’s story of mental illness and recovery, Mom showed me a letter my grandmother typed to a friend on May 8, 1945 – the day Germany surrendered to the Allies. Eventually the letter made its way back to the Phillips family, and now it’s carefully archived in my mother’s files.

My mom was born during World War II while my grandfather was serving in the Pacific. I didn’t realize Gram worked as a typist for the Veterans Administration in Salt Lake City during the war. Each day she would leave my mom and her older sister Carol at home with family members, and go do her part for the war effort. 

Single parenting is hard, in war or peace. As Gram wrote to her friend, “Marcia always pleads tearfully, ‘not go to work today, mommy! Stay home with sus girls.’” But “at least the job accomplishes the purpose for which I took it---it keeps me too busy and too tired to do much worrying about Boyd.”

Gram’s long letter to her friend is filled with numerous throwaway lines that resonate with family members seven decades later, such as “I don’t know what is wrong with me. Every time I pass the yard goods counter in a store, I invariably buy a piece of material.” In response to patriotic nagging about recycling from school-aged Aunt Carol, my grandmother observed “Everything I am, or hope to be, I owe to the prodding from my offspring! I begin to have sympathy for my parents.” Me too.

But the real reason my mother showed me Gram’s letter was what my grandmother wrote in gossiping about an acquaintance's discharged husband:

He recently returned home, classed as Psychoneurotic. His wife said that that at first just having to decide what he wanted to eat made him violently ill. Also in the VA files there seems to be lots of Anxiety Neurosis. In my unlearned way I had been classifying that as “worry wart” – we learn something every day.

As Gram concluded seventy years ago, “when I see in our files just how many fellows are given discharges for various neuroses, I’d like to broadcast to people how no stigma should be attached to it.”  

Gram was such a perfect 1950s Mormon housewife she couldn’t help intimidating her three daughters. Carol, Marcia, and Sidney are such perfect Mormon homemakers in turn that they couldn’t help intimidating their six daughters-in-law and all my exes. Hopefully my daughters’ generation of great-granddaughters has finally achieved a healthy feminist equilibrium. 

In many ways my grandparents were typical, even stereotypical:  Pops’ engineer precision, Gram’s salon hairdo, their stoic repression and New Deal Democrat politics. But the Phillips family legacy is not limited to Greatest Generation clichés, or to the missionary rolls and the chocolate chip cookie recipes in the family cookbook. My grandparents also bequeathed each of us a witty and resilient sense of humour, a passion for language and books, and their boundless love and empathy. 

That’s a priceless heritage for any family, Mormon or otherwise.