Oh, How the Mighty are Fallen!

“Oh, how the mighty are fallen!”

It’s a turn of phrase I like to use at opportune moments posturing self-abasement in the form of humor, even if only meant to make me laugh. It often blaringly comes to mind during momentary strikes of, what I view, as external agitation.

Three forty-one am last night would be such an example.

The rhinoceros, with his oversized clumpy folds and slow-mo waddly walk has more grace in the tip of his tusk than I had in my nocturnal restroom trudge down the steep, creaky steps leading from my attic existence to the non-blended seven-person family washroom.

Not so long ago, I lived in a floor-to-ceiling windowed apartment in a building with a modern gym and roomy lap pool in downtown Abu Dhabi. The gorgeous never-ending sunlight from the desert sky graciously seemed to squeal “thank you!” every morning when I opened my brocade cream-colored window treatments and allowed its steamy rays to grace the coolness of my perfectly high-polished, smooth, tan-colored marble floor.

I basked in its heated gratitude.

Fast forward… if the same sun manages to get a ray into the small three-by-two foot attic window I currently use as a small porhole to determine whether the timing on my clock is AM or PM, it is I who is titillated with gratitude.

But rays of sun were not my problem during my daring early morning jaunt down the stairs.

At that time, I was angling for a grasp of the wooden handrail teetering precariously on the top step using my toes as blind people canes looking for the edge of the landing.

I envisioned what a crashed me would look like tangled at the bottom of the steps.

For sure I would be discovered in the morning. Probably by Ellie.

Who, at 14-years old, would just pause, mouth-open and mutter and elongated “bruuuuuuuh” as she stepped over me to get into the bathroom before anyone else.

Having always been a fairly fit, city-living, get-my-steps-in walking woman, I was equally dismayed at the sort of artless sidestep maneuver I used to safely descend, planting one foot on the next step before bringing the other to match.

What the actual f—? I feel forty-seven going on eighty-one.

“Oh, how the mighty are fallen!”

Then I thought, “Wait. ‘Falling’. Not ‘fallen’.”

“I am not dead yet.”

Fortunately for me, the family loo is directly across the hall from the attic door or “THIRD FLOOR!” as I hear my sister shout in my head every time I tell people I live in an attic.

This is an ongoing, spiky debate between us sisters.

I literally live in her finished attic. Because I am privy to painted walls, wood flooring, a ceiling fan and some nominal amounts of temperature-controlled forced air, she wishes to remove the negative connotation associated with the term “attic” and deems the area worthy of the title “third floor”.

I, on the other hand, am a creative person finding her way in the world and need—nay!—CRAVE the drama of putting my hand over my forehead as a 1920s fainting flapper whilst denouncing my dire plight of being a struggling artist living in the attic of a house in the middle of nowhere hemmed in by cornfields.

I tell her all the time when she echoes my words with that stupid phrase, “Dude. Don’t robe me of my travesty. It’s the stuff of Pulitzers.”

But, controversy aside as, at that hour of the night, I had no care for whatever anyone wanted to call that gauntlet of death-trap stairs. I finally reached the bottom securely and was home-free from further dramatic, plunging imaginations of that harrowing trail.

I had only to deal with the task at hand.

Entering the restroom, flipping the light, dropping my drawers and drowsily plopping onto the potty seat, I let my body do its business. Mostly my eyes are closed when attending to this tedious nighttime chore, but they do have to spread their lids open to some degree when the game of potty paper hide-and-seek ensues.

As stated afore, there are seven people living in this house - three adults, three teenagers and an eight-year old niece I fondly call my “Little Potato”. After patching the drywall more times over the years than patching all her kids’ tiny boo-boos with Band-aids, sis gave up on the concept of a toilet paper holder long ago opting for the more fun hunt-and-peck approach.

…A concept which, since moving in about a year ago, has caused me considerable angst and has been the topic of a few of my therapy sessions.

Given the demographics of the home, there is usually, if any, only one roll.

Usually about a quarter full on that one roll.

Located in some unknowing, unreachable place.

My Little Potato especially likes to hide it in the trash can; being yet youthful in her approach to bathroomhood, she often clogs the hopper after using a half-roll to clean her little potato bottom and, thus, deems a quarter-roll ‘not enough’ and worthy of discard.

However, we adults have come to realize the outlandish price and fear of scarcity associated with this precious commodity, and know a quarter-roll is worth ‘all the tea in China’. We will cheerily fish it out of the manky trash can - even give thanks for it with a little wave in the air - because, let’s face it, the alternative is horrifying.

I sighed.

“Oh, how the mighty are fallen” I think again.

Not as emphatically, though.

Defeat is settling in, tainting my battle cry.

I am acclimating to mediocrity.

Trying to tune it out unsuccessfully, I experience another flashback into my former glamorous apartment on the other side of the world. There, located on the left side of my procelain princess, one can probably still find a stainless steel silver spray gun not unlike the ones found attached to many common American kitchen sinks.

A small little watery hero. My personal handy-dandy butt gun.

Amid the culture shock of retuning it the US after seven years abroad, I would be remiss not mention my longing for this powerful contraption that worked wonders, more than any man, in keeping my womanly pearls both wet and satisfactorily happy.

I found myself pissed at America, admittedly I still am - so quick to design gizmos to wash grease off pans but slow to realize that same helpful tool can remove poo from backside cheeks.

We are a nation churning butter.

(Side note: See Ellie, consult the urban dictionary, or just kinda hang around teenagers for a couple of hours if unsure the meaning of ‘churning butter’. Culture shock #2: what the frick happened to our language?!)

I digress; this rant not being about the leftovers in my crotch but rather the hunt for paper.

Which I cannot find.

Because it is not there.

Moving from my time overseas but before coming back home to my sister’s attic (THIRD FLOOR!) in March of 2024, I lived in an equally bougie apartment in Tampa, Florida, for the space of a year.

Decadent windows, year-round sunshine, seamless glass showers, large balconies overlooking palm-treed pools and oversized soaking tubs are apparently my calling.

I thrive living the middle-class high life.

Until December 29th, 2023.

When I found myself in my swanky black-and-white tiled, mustard-colored toweled, upscale Bath & Body Works candle-smelling bathroom sitting on my latrine…

…without toilet paper.

And I cried.

And I wept.

And felt like a loser at life. At living. At breathing.

That year, my life unraveled month-by-month, sometimes day-by-day. Overcome by a profound sense of identity loss, my mind perpetually playing the radio of white noise, the mighty me fought valiantly to exist - to go to work, to put on clothes, to be a manager, to be a leader.

It was a fight to get out of bed many mornings. I looked forward to time off work when I could fetally lay around for hours sucking the thumb of my depression. I seesawed between a longing to pass away, not to be here anymore, and momentary spurts of “I got this!”, feeling I could not give up just yet.

I remember the day I lost my job. Nick the Dick called me into the office. I was accused of ordering a manager of mine to forge documents.

I did not, of course. Despite my ‘loss of identity’, I was self-aware enough to know I was an ethical person, integrity intact.

The manager in question had failed to follow protocols in a timely manner. She took it upon herself or solve the problem with a little ink on some papers she thought would not be audited.

But… surprise!

She said I had told her to do it.

Nicky-Dick and her being chummy (she had worked for him before)… well, I had been told by multiple people to “watch my back” and “it will eventually come down to you or her”. My favorite was “Shane - choose violence!" - a prompt to incite me to go on the ‘offensive’. I still scratch my head. I have no idea what that actually meant.

I would amusedly laugh and naively say, “Nooooo! It’s not like that. People are good and good work stands on its own merit! I do my job with excellence. I don’t play politics. You guys are just being dramaaaaaatic!" Haha, lol, *insert funny emoji*. “Stop! I’m fine!”

Ha.

Well, that was big topic #2 with my therapist sorted: Trust issues.

When it all went down that day in the office, I was… tired. Beyond tired, really. Too tired to protest, too exhausted to stand up for myself. Pale of heart with fatigue of mind, bereft of emotion, I left work the final time, took the trolley home and slept for fourteen hours.

Two months later, pants-down on my commode, I collapsed in utter misery, no paper to wipe my bum, and only $.70 in my account.

But the real reason for tears?

I had no vision or understanding of what my life meant. No passion or purpose. No direction, it seemed, to find any of it.

Just a loser amoeba who fell off the highway and got lost on the service road of Life.

The lack of paper was the proverbial straw breaking the camel’s back, i.e the moment the mighty truly fell.

I had given up so much, scratched and clawed my way through a survivalist life to break a mold and wield a sword, only to have to let go and flush it away like the number two I had just let go.

“Oh, how the mighty are fallen!”

My sister had been begging me to come home for years.

“We miss you,” she would say. “Just stop and come home. Haven’t you had enough?”

I wanted to go home; I was ashamed to go home.

Empty-handed and humiliated, I was afraid to go home.

It was nearing spring in Tampa. The sun was out and temps were rising. There was a fairly decent, friendly community of homeless in the area. And wouldn’t that be more dramatic than an attic? I was certain I could rock homelessness. Make it trendy.

I mentioned it to sis in passing once when she called one morning. “Omg, you cannot be serious, Shane. It’s not clean. You’ll get a disease.”

Because that was obviously the biggest challenge to consider. I had thought maybe lack of nutrition should give me more pause than lack of hot showers but - my bad.

Going home would mean facing the music, looking in the mirror, and coming to terms.

In the face of these obstacles, I would have taken the disease.

A small one, anyway.

You see… I have five children and had not seen them since 2019. This was partly due to traveling restrictions during Covid, but mainly because avoidance had manifested itself deeply into my core operating system and ran its code throughout my life.

“I never want to speak to you again until you face me like a man!”

These were the last words I had heard from my middle son six months earlier. They were accompanied, for emphasis, with five TikTok pictures of his middle finger decorated with a short note - “one from each of your kids”.

I cried then, too, while the hiss of bleakness continued to pull me to the bottom of its sea.

At what seemed like the dark end of a long, abysmal rabbit hole, I did decide to go back. Not out of bravery but defeat. Not to re-fuel and re-fire, but to put down the heavy burden I had been carrying for so long and just… rest.

Not to face the music but maybe, just maybe, to hear it?

Within two months of pulling the trigger on my decision to return home, sis had called a carpenter, built a wall, bought a bed, outfitted a room and prepared a snug little space for me to land - to heal and to give me a space to find my way. No strings attached.

Pure sister love.

In the year since then, the rediscovery of my family has brought me immeasurable amounts of joy among moments of equal irritation. I have had to answer hard questions, face arduous truths, and, more than dealing with sisters, parents, nieces and my kiddos, I have had to come to terms with me.

With myself.

But I have found within the folds of the world “family” unconditional love and unquestionable support.

And in the case of my children—undeserved forgiveness.

To date, I have logged hours of laughter, bottles of happy tears, and loads of tongue-in-cheek family snapshots as I have ventured forth into therapy, healing and trust.

So, as I sat there on my early morning throne helpless to find a roll of ass paper, I suddenly smiled at, how a year ago, the same fate caused me to weep - the difference being in my new perception.

A year ago, I didn’t have paper because I was a loser.

Now I don’t have paper because my family are losers.

And this is a comforting thought as I rooted through the little trash can hoping to find a scrap of something to wipe away my dribble of wet. I got lucky finally finding a half-crumpled toothpaste box, praying it would have some kind of sopping power if I used the cardboard side.

Lumbering back up the stairs - not so nearly daunting a journey as coming down - I climbed step-by-step with a kind of lilting smirk on my face, chuckling at my transitional reality while trying to ignore my lightly damp undergarment.

I will have to shower again in the morning. Or find a wet wipe, at least.

I entered my bedroom knowing the path to the bed without needing light, found my comfy niche in its enfolding softness and snuggled into the warmth of an electric blanket set on high.

“Oh, how the mighty are fallen!”

Yes, it’s funny, isn’t it? I can poke at myself and find humor.

Good for me.

Nearly a year of family fun and therapy to be able to half-laugh at Life’s ironies.

But, lying there, a thought struck me like a jolt under my skin.

How about, how about… if I now change the narrative?

I mean, I think it’s time, don’t you? Time to level up, turn the chapter, end the old essays and write the new?

So, I tried. And I tried this instead.

Tell me what you think; tell me how it sounds:

“Oh, how the fallen are mighty!”