#studying in medical archives now to submit myself to a life of paperwork

[lovelornings]

( Oh my lord it's been a while

I would detail about where I've been but honestly it's too long of a story and I don't feel like getting back into work drama I just got out of )

[for-your-therapeutic-smile]

They Never Teach You How to Stop

Rarely do I lack the words to express myself. Perhaps this reflects my failure to maintain my journal consistently throughout 2020. Here goes an honest attempt to capture and document my mental state and the fatigue of Covid, the inertia of this shelter-in-place, the anxiety of this political crisis we face as a nation, the pressure of being a 1L in law school against the backdrop of civil unrest and Justice Ginsburg’s death, coming out - my dad told me he was disappointed -, the possible erosion of my relationship with someone I love, and this feeling of absolute dread and resentment for a system that continuously fails my and future generations (robbing us of a social contract that promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), among many other things I’m too tired to consider. When did we accept a $0 baseline as the American Dream? Oh, to be debt free - free from this punishment for having pursued an education. Stifling the educated to prevent them (myself included) from organizing and mobilizing the masses so we can supplant this system with a better one is the overall objective of the oppressive class (read: Pedagogy of the Oppressed); it’s the conflict between the bourgeois and the proletariat. The proletariat has swallowed the middle class, leaving only the ruling class. I am essentially on autopilot, forcing myself to go through the motions so I can survive another day. I know others join me in this mental gymnastics of unparalleled proportions, one social scientists and medical researchers will soon study and subsequently publish their findings in an attempt to explain the unexplainable. Despite a lack of air circulation, we are breathing history; the constitution, like our societal norms, must adapt accordingly. Judge Barrett: there is no place for originalism. While I seldom admit weakness or an inability to manage life’s curveballs, this series of unfortunate events seems almost too much to bear. 

And yet somehow I continue to find the energy to submit assignments due at 11:59 p.m., write this post at 1:38 a.m., “sleep”, wake at 7 a.m. so I can read and prepare (last minute!) the assigned material leading into my torts or contracts class. I find the energy to text my boyfriend (or ex-boyfriend) so I can attempt to salvage the real and genuine connection we have, cook elaborate meals to find some solace, wrestle with whether or not to hit my yoga mat (I don’t), apply to a fellowship for the school year and summer internships, prepare my dual citizenship paperwork, manage a campaign for two progressive politicians, and listen to music in an attempt to stay sane . . . ~*Queues John Mayer’s “War of My Life” and “Stop This Train”*~ . . . I realize I have to be kinder to myself, give credit where credit is due. I hate feeling self-congratulatory though.

Mostly, I am too afraid of the repercussions if I stop moving at a mile/minute, that I can just work away the pain and be the superhuman who numbs himself from the low-grade depression and nervous breakdown. My body tells me to slow down, as evidenced by the grinding of my teeth, but I take on more responsibility because people rely on me. I must show up. I am a masochist in that way. This is what I signed up for and I’ll be damned if I don’t carry through on my promise to do the work. Pieces of my soul scattered about like Horcruxes, though they’re pure, not evil, so I hope nobody resolves to destroy them. 

My mind rarely rests. It’s 3:08 a.m., one of the lonelier hours where night meets morning; it’s the hour for and of intense introspection. It makes you consider pulling an all-nighter, one you reserve for an “important” school or work deadline. We always put our personal lives on the back-burner. 3 a.m. sets the tone for a potentially awful day. But that doesn’t matter right now. I’m letting some of my favorite albums play in the background: Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Mac Miller’s Circles, Rhye’s Blood, Alicia Keys’ ALICIA, Coldplay’s Ghost Stories, Frank Ocean’s Blonde, Miley Cyrus’ Dead Petz in addition to other playlists, Tiny Desk performances, and tracks (I unearthed last week, like When It’s Over by Sugar Ray). I need to feel something. I need to feel anything. I need to feel everything. We experience such a broad spectrum of emotions throughout the day that we lose track of if we don’t pause to absorb them. Music reinforces empathy; it releases dopamine.

I spent the past two hours reading through old journals and posts, as scattered as they were, on a wide range of topics: poems I had written about falling in and out love, anecdotes about my world travels, and entries on personal, political, and professional epiphanies. The other night I found one of my favorites, a previous post from my time living in Indonesia, centering on the dualities of technology. It resonated with me more than the others. To summarize, I wrote about my tendency to equate the Internet with a sense of interconnectedness (shoutout to Tumblr for being my digital journal; to Twitter for being a place of comedy and revolution; to Instagram for curating my *aesthetic*; to Facebook where I track my family’s accomplishments and connect with travel buddies displaced around the globe all searching for a home). And yet I feel incredibly lonely and disconnected whenever I spend too much time using technology, so much so that I set screen time limitations on my phone recently to curtail this obsession with constant communication and information gathering. Trump and Biden admitted that it’s unlikely we’ll know the results of the election on November 3rd during their first presidential debate. Push notifications don’t allow us to learn of trauma within the comforts of our own homes. I’m already fearing where I will be when that news breaks. 

This global pandemic and indefinite shutdown of the world (economy) undeniably exacerbates these feelings. This is some personal and collective turmoil. But I was complicit in the endless scrolling and swiping of faces and places long before Covid-19. Instead of choosing to interact with my direct environment (today’s research links this behavior to the same levels of depression one feels when they play slot machines), I am still an active on all these platforms, participating the least in the most tangible one: my physical life. I am tired of pretending. I am tired of being tired. I am tired of embodying fake energy to exist in systems that fail me. I am tired of the quagmire. Like Anaïs Nin, I must be a mermaid [because] I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living. This particular excerpt from that 2016 entry was difficult for me to read: “The fantasy of what could have been if a certain plan had unfolded will haunt you forever if you do not come to peace with the reality of the situation. I hope you come to terms with reality.” I am not at peace with my current reality. But is anyone?

It’s a bit surreal for my peers to have suddenly started caring about international relations theory. It’s transported me back to my 2012 IR lecture at Northeastern: are you a constructivist or a feminist? Realist or liberalist? Neo? Marxist? The one no one wants you to talk about. Absent upward mobility, this is class warfare. But I cannot be “a singular expression of myself . . . there are too many parts, too many spaces, too many manifestations, too many lines, too many curves, too many troubles, too many journeys, too many mountains, too many rivers” . . . It feels like America’s wake-up call. But I know people will retreat into the comforts of capitalism if Biden wins and, well, we all enter uncharted waters together if the Electoral College re-elects #45. For those who weren’t paying attention: the world is multipolar and we are not the hegemon. Norms matter. People tend to be self-interested and shortsighted. Look to the past in order to understand the future. History, as the old adage goes, repeats itself. Once a cheater, always a cheater. Taxation without representation. Indoctrination. Welcome to the language of political discourse. Students of IR and polisci have long awaited your participation. Too little too late? Plot twist: it’s a lifelong commitment. You must continue to engage irrespective of the election outcome or else we will regress just as quickly as we progress. Now dive into international human rights treaties (International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights; International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights), political refugees, FGM. No one said it wasn’t dismal. But it’s important. We need buy-in.  

While I am grateful for the continuation of my education, for this extended time with family, for this opportunity to be a campaign manager for two local progressive candidates (driving to Boston to pick up revised yard signs as proof that the work never stops), it would be remiss of me, however, not to admit that I am lonely: I am buried in my books, in the depressing news both nationally and globally, and in precedent-setting Supreme Court cases (sometimes for the worst, e.g. against the preservation of our environment). In my nonexistent free time I work on political asylum cases, essentially creating an enforceability framework of international law, for people fleeing country conditions so unthinkable (the irony of that work when my country falls greater into authoritarianism and oligarchy is not lost on me). I am fulfilling my dream of becoming a human rights lawyer which stems back to middle school. I saw Things I Imagined (thank you Solange). I have held an original copy of the Declaration of Independence that we sent to the House of Lords in 1778 and the Human Rights Act of 1998 while visiting the U.K. Parliamentary Archives as an intern for a Member of Parliament. This success terrifies and exhausts me; it also oxygenizes and saves me. Every decision, every sacrifice, has led me to this point. 

“It’s the choosing that’s important, isn’t it?,” Lois Lowry of The Giver rhetorically asks. This post is not intended to be woe is me! I am fortunate to be in this position, to have this vantage point at such an early age, and I understand the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. My life has purpose. I am committed to the work that transcends boundaries; it is larger than life itself. It provides a unique perspective. But it makes it difficult to coexist with people so preoccupied in the drama they create in their lives and the general shallowness of the world we live. It feels like there is no option to pump the brakes on any of this work, especially in light of our current climate, and that pressure oftentimes feels insurmountable. Time is of the essence. It feels, whether true or not, that hardly anyone relates to my experience, so if I don’t carve out this time to write about it, then I am neither recording nor processing it. 

Tonight, in between preparing tomorrow’s coursework, I realize that I have an unprecedented number of questions about life, which startles me because typically I have the answers or at least have a goal in mind that launches me into the next phase of life or contextualizes the current one. These goals, often rooted in this capitalistic framework, in this falsity of “needing” to advance my career as a means of helping people, distract me from asking myself the existential questions, the reasons for why we live and what we fundamentally want our systems to look like; they have distracted me from real grassroots community organizing until now. They distract me from the fact that, like John Mayer, I don’t know which walls to smash; similarly, I don’t know which train to board. Right now feels like we are living through impossible and hopeless times and I don’t want to placate myself into thinking otherwise despite my relatively optimistic outlook on life. As we face catastrophic circumstances – the consequences of this election and climate change (famine, refugees, lack of resources) – I do not want to live in perpetual sadness. I am searching for clarity and direction so I can step into a better, fuller version of myself. 

It’s now 3:33 a.m. Here is the list of questions that I have often asked myself in different stages of life, but recently, until now, I have not been willing to confront for fear that I might not be able to answers them. But I owe it to myself to pose them here so I can have the overdue conversation, the one I know leads me to better understanding myself:

Are you happy? Why or why not?

What do you want the future to hold? What groundwork are you going to do to ensure it happens?

What does your ideal day/week/month/year/decade look like? Why?

With whom do you want to spend your days? Why?

Who do you love and care about? Have you told people you care about that you love them? Does love and vulnerability scare you?

What do you expect of people – of yourself, of your partner, of your family, and of your friends? Should you have those expectations? Why or why not?

What do you feel and why?

What relaxes you? What scares you? What brings you joy?

What do you want to improve? Why?

What do you want to forgive yourself for and why?

Does the desire to reinvent yourself diminish your ability to be present?

Do you have a greater fear of failure or success? Why?

How do you escape the confines of this broken system? How do you break from the guilt of participation in it and having benefited from it?

How do we reconcile our daily lives with the fact that we’re living through an extinction event? This one comes from my friend (hi Jeanne) and a podcast she listened to recently.

How do you help people? How do you help yourself? Are you pouring from an empty cup?

How will you find joy in your everyday responsibilities, in the mission you have chosen for yourself? What, if any, will be the warning signs to walk away from this work, in part or in its entirety? Without being a martyr, do you believe in dying for the cause?

So here are some of the lessons I have learned during this quarantine/past year:

“I’ve Got Dreams to Remember,” so do not take your eyes off them. Chasing paper does not bring you happiness.

Be autonomous, particularly in your professional life.

Focus on values instead of accolades.

Do everything with intention and honest energy.

Listen to Tracy Chapman’s “Crossroads” & Talkin’ Bout a Revolution for an energy boost and reminder that other revolutionaries have shared and continue to share your fervent passion . . . “I’m trying to protect what I keep inside, all the reasons why I live my life” . . . When self-doubt nearly cripples you and you yearn a few minutes to run away when in reality you can’t escape your responsibilities, go for a drive and queue up “Fast Car” . . . “I got no plans, I ain’t going nowhere, so take your fast car and keep on driving.”

With that said, take every opportunity to travel (you can take the work with you if absolutely necessary). Go to Italy. Buy the concert ticket and lose yourself in the moment. Remember that solo excursions are equally as important as collective ones. But, from personal experience, you prefer the company. Find the balance.

Detach from the numbers people keep trying to assign to measure your personhood.

Closely examine the people in your inner circle and ask them for help when you need it.

“And life is just too short to keep playing the game . . . because if you really want somebody [or something], you’ll figure it out later, or else you will just spend the rest of the night with a BlackBerry on your chest hoping it goes *vibration, vibration*” (John Mayer’s Edge of Desire) . . . so love fiercely and unapologetically.

Be specific.

Go to therapy even when life is good.

[nancygduarteus]

Should Women Be Paid for Donating Their Breast Milk?

When Ariyah Georges was born 15 weeks early, she weighed only one pound, 12 ounces. Her mother, Jovan, knew how important breastfeeding was, especially for micro-preemies like Ariyah, so she began pumping milk to feed her through a tube. But two days later, Jovan felt dizzy and feverish—104 degrees, in fact. She had a blood infection and was close to full septic shock.

“I almost croaked,” Jovan says. She entered quarantine for nearly two weeks at the regional Northern Virginia hospital where she’d delivered. During that time, she could still pump breast milk, but Ariyah couldn’t consume it because of the risk of developing sepsis herself. Without it, the newborn was particularly vulnerable to a disease called necrotizing enterocolitis, the number-one cause of death among premature infants in the United States.

Enter donor milk—breast milk purchased by hospitals for mothers who aren’t able to produce enough milk on their own, due to health complications, stress, or other factors. The milk comes from milk banks, organizations that collect, screen, and pasteurize breast milk from lactating women willing to donate. Usually dispensed in neonatal intensive-care units, the milk is only available by prescription. And it hasn’t just been found to improve infants’ health outcomes; it can lower hospital costs by reducing the number of surgeries and interventions to correct life-threatening conditions.

In recent years, both milk banks and the use of donated human milk have risen swiftly in the United States. In 2011, 22 percent of NICUs used donor breast milk; four years later, that number doubled to nearly 40 percent, and went even higher for the most intensive NICUs—as much as 75 percent. There are 23 milk banks in the United States accredited by the Human Milk Banking Association of North America, or HMBANA, double the number that existed five years ago.

But as demand for donor milk rises, banks must find more charitable donors—a task made more complicated by informal, unregulated networks of milk sharing that happens online. And many of the most vulnerable infants are still not being reached.

* * *

I became acquainted with the world of human-milk donation quickly and unexpectedly last April, when my own son was born 10 weeks early. I blamed myself for his premature arrival, even though there was nothing more I could have done to prevent it. When it came to breastfeeding, my body seemed determined to redeem itself. I was lucky to have an immediate and bountiful supply—so bountiful, in fact, that I quickly stocked two freezers full of extra milk. I was producing double what my son needed, and quickly running out of room.

I began donating to the Mothers’ Milk Bank at Austin, which served the hospital where my son stayed. The Texas-based organization caters to hospitals in 22 states with milk from about 1,200 donors around the country. They’re on track to dispense a total of 5 million ounces by the end of this year.

The screening process to become a donor is extensive. Before I began trundling a cooler packed with vials of frozen breast milk through downtown Washington, D.C., I completed several phone interviews with the bank, submitted recommendations from my doctor and my baby’s doctors, took a blood test, and filled out a detailed questionnaire to screen for medical history, drug and alcohol use, diet choices, and so forth. Once the bank received my donated milk from the drop-off center in the city, they screened it for bacteria, pooled it with other donated milk, pasteurized it, and shipped it back out to hospitals.

To cover these costs, the bank charges each hospital a “processing fee”—usually $4 to $5 per ounce. The donors themselves don’t receive any of this money. Even as I pumped away, I began to wonder about the industry built upon donations from women like me. Were donors ever reimbursed for our efforts or expenses?

“We don’t pay donors,” says Kim Updegrove, the executive director of the Mothers’ Milk Bank at Austin. Doing so, she explains, might encourage pay-to-pump situations where mothers are cashing in on their “liquid gold,” as breast milk is often called. What if a mother begins neglecting her own child’s nutrition in pursuit of money? In addition, one study found that breast milk available for purchase is often tainted with cow’s milk; and milk sourced via the internet may contain higher traces of bacterial contamination.

Still, a company called Prolacta Bioscience, which produces a human-milk fortifier used to supplement both formula and breast milk for extremely premature babies, pays $1 an ounce to approved donors. Some moms also sell their milk outright—either to a co-op like Mother’s Milk Cooperative in Oregon or through the website Only the Breast, kind of a Craigslist for breast milk.

For me, coordinating milk drop-off in the city was enough of a hassle and expense that I soon tried a different route: I found a local mother of a NICU baby to donate to on my own. I met the NICU mom online, through a Facebook group set up to facilitate informal sharing. Every few weeks, she drove to my house and picked up dozens of bags of frozen milk, which helped ease my workload as a donor. (I later learned that milk-bank volunteers may help overtaxed moms like me with milk drop-offs.)

I certainly wasn’t the first person to try this approach. Social media is a major factor deterring potential donors from formal milk banks. It’s often simpler, logistically, to get milk to a local parent in need than to ship it across the country. And there’s no complicated paperwork. There are, of course, no regulations at all.

For Updegrove, informal sharing of this nature is a question of ethics: “how we decide to use the limited resource for the most vulnerable.” She argues that extremely premature and ill babies need donor milk more than healthy, full-term infants. Babies fed breast milk are less vulnerable to illnesses such as diarrhea, ear infections, and pneumonia, and they are less likely to develop asthma or become obese later in life. But among premature babies, the effects can be even more profound; in addition to helping prevent NEC, breast milk can help stave off sepsis and promote long-term development. For these reasons, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends feeding preemies donor breast milk over formula when mothers’ milk is not available.

The very lack of regulations in informal sharing, though, means that breast milk is often not given to the babies who need it most. “We’ve got babies who would die otherwise if they don’t get human milk,” Updegrove says. Her reasons were convincing enough for me to resume formal donations once my son’s needs eased.

* * *

Although milk banking has sharply increased in the past few years, there are still many hospitals where donor milk isn’t an option—and they tend to care for the most vulnerable babies at the highest risk of developing complications.

“I know this will sound backward to you,” Updegrove says, “but we are working hard to increase the demand.” She is confident that donations will continue to go up as demand increases, because more mothers will learn about the option to donate from hospitals using donor milk.

Expanding the supply of donor milk is about reaching out to women who aren’t yet aware that milk banks exist, says Naomi Bar-Yam, the executive director of Mothers’ Milk Bank Northeast and the current president of HMBANA. “There are a lot of moms who still don’t know about this possibility. So we work hard to educate them,” she says. Beyond recruiting more donors in the short term, banks also focus on strengthening breastfeeding in general—which has ripple effects for donation. Promoting a culture of breastfeeding, Bar-Yam argues, will result in more breast milk out in the world.

In fact, she highlights a counterintuitive trend: “As hospitals use donor milk in the NICUs, over time they need less donor milk.” This has to do with those hospitals’ newfound veneration of the bodily fluid, Bar-Yam explains. Both the staff and the parents learn the value of breast milk, and they work harder to support successful lactation with new parents—thus decreasing the amount of donor milk they need. “Just the very fact of having the milk there,” she says, “is a very important message.”

In Northern Virginia, the hospital staff encouraged Jovan to continue pumping as she recovered from her blood infection, even though she had to discard the milk during her illness. Although she was frustrated to “pump and dump,” Jovan was encouraged by the thought that her daughter would seamlessly transition from donor breast milk to her own—without ever relying on formula. In the 1990s, Jovan’s two older children had also been born prematurely, and donor milk was not an option at that hospital. “A lot of kids got sick because they had to give [them] formula,” she says.

For Jovan, the message was now loud and clear: Donor milk had helped her baby, and it was time to pay it forward. When Ariyah left the NICU after 105 days, Jovan donated all the extra milk she’d saved up for her daughter at the hospital—about 350 ounces. She continues to pump about 100 ounces a month for donation to the milk bank, The King’s Daughters, that served her daughter’s hospital.

“If someone else didn’t donate, it wouldn’t have been available for my daughter,” she says. “I want to help someone else’s baby the way that they helped my baby.”

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/12/breast-milk-donation/547250/?utm_source=feed