FISH.CLIMB.BRANCH. In Summary...

This website is called FISH.CLIMB.BRANCH... This entry is the fourth of four brief narrative essays to explain why in the hell that is.

Growing up, we had the things that make life beautiful. Mom and Dad loved each other, and us two kids, and we all loved the dogs. We had a pond teeming with frogs and dragonflies and backwoods to explore. We grew gardens bursting with vegetables, fruits, and flowers. We rode bikes to the neighbors' houses and stayed up past dark playing kick the can together. We didn't focus on the hard things. Why would we? We were blessed.

Our Dad's Dad lost his mom to the Spanish flu pandemic at age two. Once grown, Grandpa fought in WWII, bearing witness to and liberating survivors of the Holocaust. He came home, planted a large garden, bought extra freezers, and did dust spot checks around the house. Our Mom's Mom was sexually assaulted as a teen and was married to Mom's Dad after unplanned pregnancy (my Mom in utero). My Mom's parents were alcoholics for most of her childhood, capable of affection but also criticism and violence. Once my Mom fled the nest of her childhood home, she kept on flying. She flew into Dad's arms, and a life of adventure they built together.

In my sophomore year of high school, I was diagnosed with mild dyslexia and well as ADD, specifically the inattentive space cadet kind rather than the hyperactive kind. The just-sort-of-thinking-about-other-things kind. My educational testing came back with a high IQ and that I am a "spatial genius," which I think - practically speaking - just means I'm really good at that shape sorting toddler toy and fitting luggage into the car trunk. On the way home from receiving my diagnosis, my Mom pointed my attention to the literature from the testing center that listed Einstein as having ADD. Skeptical and unimpressed, I did not acknowledge the story aloud, but tucked it away. Arriving home, my dad asked “how did it go?” and I replied, “the world needs ditch diggers too." Though I tried to dodge the question with a movie quote (Caddy Shack), I perhaps also revealed some despair at feeling that I now had evidence that I was neither smart enough nor capable enough, and I didn't belong.

Soon after, Mom arranged meetings with a revolving door of experts. There was the woman in a zebra print skirt who took me through criss-crossing, knee-touching calisthenics to warm up my brain for academic work. The man with handsome dark leather office couches who talked at me for an hour before summing up my mental and emotional challenges (inaccurately in my view) to my parents in front of me as if I were an end table. The most helpful among them, a wonderful woman with adult acne, met with me and picked up my disheveled school papers out of a laundry basket, one at a time, and patiently asked me "what is this?" and then "what do you need to do with it?"

I was 15 years old when I was diagnosed with ADD and mild dyslexia. That's late, but the experts said that a strong working memory and general intelligence enabled me to academically compensate throughout most of grade school, masking my disability. It was only when I got into higher level math, science and foreign language where language and concepts got complex that my disability was revealed, they said.

But here's the thing. In sixth grade, I had a "boyfriend" who was my best friend with whom I would joke and laugh all day, but whom I did not hold hands with. In seventh grade, I dated a boy for one day, until he kissed me in the school hallway in front of a teacher, panicking me and prompting me to call it off. In eighth grade, I moved. Some girls threw my French notebook in the trash and another stole my jeans, but I made some friends too. One boy at my new school pursued me so much at school dances that I hid in the bathroom and on another day another boy whom I barely knew stood up on a desk in his classroom and announced: "tonight's beat [masturbation] is dedicated to Els [me]." My peers told me about it later at recess. Not long into the summer after that school year, dejected and low, I went back home and visited with the neighborhood boys I grew up with. I was invited into a bedroom and sexually assaulted by one of them, a trauma I did not share.

At the beginning of ninth grade, two well-liked boys sat on either side of me in a movie theater and touched my leg, both at the same time, as if I were a football each wanted possession of. I chose one of the boys to be my sanctioned boyfriend and - to my subconscious teenage brain - legitimized my sexual assault by going further with him sexually than with my sexual assaulter. We were in love, in the sense that he became a man in the most shallow of senses and in time came to enjoy my company; and I exchanged my body for what I perceived to be protection and care.

It was about a year after my sexual assault and new relationship that my grades started to slip. Instead of getting straight A's which I had previously done, I got a few B's and C's come midterm. My mom, ever-devoted, sprang into action. She filled out the surveys and got me tested and called the experts and connected the dots of my early childhood behaviors and slipping adolescent grades. She advocated for my accommodations with the school, went to bat to implement my educational plan with my teachers, sat with the Principal and launched a learning disability support program not just for me, but to benefit students like me to come after. I was too overwhelmed to feel grateful about much of it. Mostly, I felt ashamed and shut down.

I wish that I'd felt safe enough to share my sexual assault with my family at the time that it happened (13). The first time I shared it with anyone, I was 26 years old. I told my sister, after her wedding, because my assaulter had attended the wedding and practically chased me around the dance floor. At one point as the wedding photographer snapped a group picture of the old neighborhood kids, my assaulter reached across my hip and touched my stomach. I felt nauseated.

I wish I hadn't been so desperate for a sense of validation and belonging that I'd given away my power to my high school boyfriend, a teenage boy who didn't have the wherewithal to respect my dignity or prioritize my needs. I wish that in that regard I'd been less of an end table about it all.

Most of all, I wish that when warning signs had cropped up, someone had asked me how I was doing with deep listening intention. You see, when I now read "The Gifts of Adult ADD," I think: "Yep, they nailed it." Those strengths - exuberance, expressiveness, consciousness, daydreaming, interpersonal intuition - and also some of the harder dynamics sometimes seem to describe me with pin-point accuracy. And yet, once chronically late and surrounded by mountains of disorganized paperwork, I've evolved. I'm a capable adult who can time manage and organize and plan a day and accomplish tasks I set out to do. Those skills were hard-earned, but I've developed them.

And also this. The same symptoms of ADD - impaired executive functioning, deteriorating organizational sills, inability to focus and prioritize - can be symptoms of trauma. You see, the brain finds it hard to focus on school or really anything matter-of-fact when it's not even sure the body it is directing is safe.

There is a plant called a sensitive plant (latin name Mimosa pudica) with the most miraculous adaptation. When you touch it, it moves, withdrawing and furling up its leaves, protecting itself. The sensitive plant, having evolved in the South and Central American plains, developed this way to prevent itself from being trampled by the hooves of animals. I keep buying these plants out of fascination, and can't seem to keep them alive. My goal is to one day feed them the delicate balance of nutrients, water, light and love they need.

I believe living things have wisdom in them, whether sensitive plants or people. They have needs, and - when threatened - they find ways to self-protect. Often times those adaptations are intelligent. In the case of my own self-protection, there was a logic to the suppression of my assault in the beginning. But in hiding and ignoring my trauma, it built up over time, became toxic, and froze many aspects of my forward movement. You see, life wants to move. People, and even plants.

The quotation that inspired the name of this website reads: "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a FISH by its ability to CLIMB a tree [BRANCH], it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." Some attribute the phrase to Einstein, but most credible sources cast doubt on the claim. I like the sentiment, whoever said it, though I do wish it were Einstein because of the affinity I feel for him. You see, I did tuck away that factoid that my Mom shared with me as a teen about Einstein's alternative thinking brain. I held tight to the possibility that perhaps his difference and genius were related, were one. What gave me a small flicker of hope then was the idea that a person could feel or be different and yet find their way to great things. It was hope for a pathway to contributing meaningfully and belonging.

In my earlier years, I felt often felt like a fish out of water who could not breathe air or climb trees and could feel the struggle but not identify the source. In time, I found the love of my life, a partner who would sit with me and listen, who would see me and give me love despite any flaws I perceived in myself. We weren't always totally synched up in the beginning, but we were loving and loyal and on some level we knew we needed each other. We committed ourselves to learning and growing together. We now have two young kids and four dogs -- a family and backwoods of our own to explore. And we have all the giggles and snuggles and meltdowns and challenges that accompany this sacred stage of our lives. And - through devoted, exhausting, supported healing work - I've come to embrace the fullness of my story - both the beautiful and hard - which has finally enabled me to be and discover my authentic self. I've found my water, an environment in which I not only fit but can thrive. All I needed was there all along, but I had to come home to myself to see it clearly, and to receive it.

When I was ten or so, my dad wowed me with a story about Amazonian fish he learned of through his involvement in an environmental conservation non-profit. When the river and its tributaries flood, he said, the fish swim into the surrounding forests and eat berries. Sometimes the berries have fallen into the water and the fish sip them in. Other times, the berries hang from branches above the water, prompting the fish to jump out of the water to snatch them off the branches out of the air. As it turns out, some fish are adaptable enough to learn to climb tree branches. And so, this fish in my mind, I see that it is both. In life, we must both find where we belong and also adapt along the way.

My Mom loves researching our family's genealogy. She gifted me a genetic test, I wonder if just as much to support her research as to benefit me. The spit test confirmed something I've joked about for years - that my ethnicity is "Western European Mutt," although I was a rather surprised and pleased with the Scandinavian bit -- 2% Swedish and 13% Norwegian. You see, when I was a little girl, a Swedish family moved to our town and we grew to be dear friends. Their parents grew close to my parents. Their two daughters, the same age as my sister and I, were so like us. They played soccer and instruments. Their little brother became the little brother I always wanted and finally had. Both of our families were absurdly competitive about yard games and board games, and we played together often, with an abundance of rib-splitting laughter.

Regarding adaptation like tree-scaling Amazonian fish - and related to the topics of both genealogy and Sweden - there are two Swedish scientific studies which sit at the heart of human beings' most up-to-date understandings of evolution. One study involved Swedish chickens who were placed in a hellish henhouse environment whose lighting and food mazes disoriented them and raised their stress levels. Interestingly, even once these chickens were returned to a calm environment, the next generation of chicks, although never directly stressed themselves, were less capable at solving problems. It turns out that the mother chickens' exposure to stress had resulted in their chicks being born with a heritable gene expression of greater disorientation. A second study, tracing 19th century genealogies of Swedish families in the far north who suffered through specific years of crop failure (famine) and overproduction (feast), revealed that individuals who over-feasted in the abundant years birthed children whose specific gene expressions translated to shorter, less healthy lives.

These finding of these studies belong to a new field, called epigenetics, which looks at how gene activity can change in a single lifetime (not involving DNA change, but sequences that control gene expression outside of it), and how these changes can get passed down to at least one subsequent generation. Thus far, the field of epigenetics tells us that our gene expression is more pliable in response to environmental changes, over shorter periods of time, than we previously thought. Prior generations' events and experiences can quite literally impact our predispositions to dysfunction or function through gene expression. The hopeful bit about the hens is that they found if you remove the environmental stressors, the problematic epigenetic marks begin to fade.

And so I also wonder, what power do beneficial environments have to wire in positive changes? I imagine a lot. It squares some of my firmest held spiritual beliefs and some scientific studies I've found to corroborate them. That plants (and people) grow better when you talk to them lovingly. That the agelessness of my friend's Reiki healer aunties is not a coincidence, but the logistical consequence of how a certain shiny vibe of energy plays out. And so I commit myself to navigating and making meaning of the hard things so I can, with gratitude and depth, lean towards that shiny energy to wire positive changes, both for me and for who comes next. I see now that trauma is a collective issue. Generations are tethered together through not only blood, but our stories and the marks they've made on us. If so, then healing can free up those who come after and maybe even before too.

Living things toil to survive, whether fish at home in the crystalline waters in which they evolved eons before or adapting by leaping into trees to eat. Challenge is a part of life; it's how we respond that matters. The questions for me are how do we find our water (find and create the conditions where we can thrive) and how do we leap out of it as needed (adapt to forge a better path forward)?

In this, I look to the component pieces of what inspires me.

To fish: to hope and wonder at the beauty and mystery all around.

To climb: to persevere, overcome and to find a way to a higher perspective.

To branch: to stretch oneself through openness, honesty and bravery.

In my life, the gifts I've received that have helped me thrive and adapt have had everything to do with relationships. My first family taught me to climb. My partner taught me to fish. My children inspired me to branch. Finding my way back home and discovering capacities within myself I didn't realize I had has only been possible in community and through love: falling in love with and learning from nature, learning how to love myself, and discovering how to more truly love and be loved by others. These multiple forms of love - perhaps life's most essential, powerful force - are what helped me finally see the genius in all living beings (fish, plants, and me) and to continue to wonder what conditions allow any spark of genius to be illuminated.

May we never judge a fish struggling to climb a tree, nor allow it to judge itself. Instead, may we all know our and others' unique geniuses, find our places, and also have the power and bravery to learn to leap beyond our comforts into new realms. And no matter the question before us, may we know that the answer is always more love.