Stop Being Mean to Yourself Read online

  “Welcome to the village of Giza,” he said. “My name is Essam.”

  I looked at the man holding open the door. He wore a long, dark skirt over his pants. He was of medium height, slightly rotund, with hair that had begun to thin. He had kind eyes, a sweet round face, and a gentle spirit. I stepped out of the taxi and offered him my hand.

  We talked for a minute. I told him where I was from, and that I had just arrived in Cairo an hour ago.

  “Would you like to see the pyramids?” Essam asked.

  I said I would.

  “Would you like to ride a camel over there?” he asked.

  I swallowed hard, then said yes. “But it’s so late,” I said. “How much will it cost?”

  “Don’t worry,” Essam said. “This is Ramadan, a time of giving, a time to remember Allah. You go to the pyramids, touch their powers, your first night here. When you return, you pay me what you think it was worth.”

  He smiled. “Have fun!”

  I swung my right leg over the humped back of the biggest creature I had come across in my life. I held onto the saddle. The camel jerked upright from its knees, gently throwing me backwards. Then I started grinning and couldn’t stop, as the camel clopped along the narrow passage next to the sandlot, down past a block of shops, then up the side of a mountain, and down onto the desert. A boy of about seventeen, Essam’s nephew, rode next to me on a horse.

  We rode to within a few hundred feet of the pyramids, then stopped. The Sahara surrounded me. In the distance, the glistening lights of Cairo touched the edge of the night sky. I sat on the camel, gazing out at the pyramids, the Sphinx, and the desert. The frenzy and fear I had felt earlier disappeared. I was safe.

  After about twenty minutes, we clopped back to the perfume shop. Essam was waiting for me with a cup of hot Egyptian tea. He assured me it had been brewed with bottled water. He said he didn’t want me to get sick.

  I tipped the boy on the horse, the one who had accompanied me. I put a handful of pounds in Essam’s hand and thanked him. He said I had given him too much money, and he returned half of it. We talked for a while. I told him I didn’t know how long I would be in Cairo, maybe a few weeks. He said he would help in any way he could. I made plans to return in a day or two, then asked the cab driver to take me back to the hotel.

  From the moment I met him, I knew Essam would be a teacher and a friend.

  Back in the cab, it took about fifteen minutes to reenter the chaotic downtown Cairo district. Before long, I spotted my hotel rising in the distance. We got closer and closer, then 1 saw the hotel disappear behind us.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “You will come for coffee with me now,” the driver said firmly.

  “No thank you,” I said. “I’m tired. Take me back to the hotel.”

  “You will come with me,” he said.

  He drove under a bridge, then parked the car in a small lot, way too small for the ten cars that were crammed in there. He walked to my door, opened it, took my hand, and guided me out.

  “Where are we going?” I asked again.

  “Coffee,” he said brusquely.

  “I don’t want coffee,” I said. “It’s too late . . .”

  He ignored me and kept walking, pulling me along by my hand.

  We walked up a flight of stairs, over a walking bridge, down the stairs, and across a street. I was dusty from the desert, confused, scared, and curious. By now, my thigh-high stockings were bunched around my ankles, but we were walking too fast for me to pull them up. We rounded a corner and entered a section of the city that had no car traffic. Instead, people—hundreds, thousands of them—crowded the streets. They jammed so close together that there was no space between bodies. People touched those in front of and behind them as they moved along the street. Yet I saw and felt the same erratic rhythm here with this mass of people that I had observed with the cars. The driver and I were swept up by the throngs of people and moved along by the pulsating tempo of this gigantic conga line.

  The sidewalks were crammed with old shops, piled one atop another. I saw silversmiths. Fruit stands flooded with dates and oranges. Clothing. Rugs. Every kind of Egyptian ware, product, and foodstuff imaginable. It had to be after midnight, yet all the shops were open. For the first time in all my travels through the Arab world, I saw women talking, walking, shopping. I was torn between gazing at the stores and their colorful displays, and vigorously trying to keep my place in line. Someone pinched my butt. I couldn’t stop moving. I would have been trampled. I looked over my shoulder. A shrunken, gray-haired man about four feet tall and eighty years old grinned at me. He had no teeth. I glared, then turned around.

  Suddenly I got it. Oh, I thought. This is the souk.

  I remembered what the travel agent had said about the souks, the mysterious marketplaces of the Arab world. “They run for miles. People live in there. They’re born, live, and die in there. Be careful. People can go in, and never come out.”

  “Is this the souk?” I screamed at my driver, talking slowly enough so he could understand me and loudly enough to be heard above the noise of the crowd.

  He nodded. “The souk,” he said.

  We walked block after block, going deeper and deeper into the souk, pulled along by the massive moving crowd. Finally, my driver steered me out of the main stream of traffic and led me up a flight of stairs into a small store. He guided me through the store onto a second-floor balcony. He pulled out a chair in front of a small table and said, “Sit.”

  I wanted to pull up my stockings, but I didn’t know how I could possibly do that. They were completely around my ankles.

  So I sat down. The driver sat down next to me. Minutes later, a waiter came to the table. He seemed to know my driver. They talked in Arabic for a few minutes. Moments later, the waiter returned lugging the largest, most ornate, floor-standing water pipe, or hookah, I had ever seen in my life.

  The driver lit the coals like an expert, took a big, deep puff, then passed the hookah tube to me.

  I looked around the balcony. There were four or five other small tables, occupied mostly by men. All of them were smoking water pipes. Oh, my God, I thought. I am being drugged and kidnapped. It’s all coming down, right now. I am watching it happen. I have just been spirited to the Egyptian equivalent of an opium den.

  I wanted to be invisible on this trip but I didn’t want to disappear.

  For the second time that evening, I became paralyzed with fear. Again, I felt an ancient stirring within, this time a recollection of being powerless, unable to speak, helpless to defend myself.

  Just a minute, I thought. I’m a forty-seven-year-old woman. What would they possibly want or do with me, even if they did get me?

  I relaxed for just a moment, then flashed to the sign at the airport: DRUG USERS WILL EITHER BE EXECUTED OR IMPRISONED FOR LIFE. No matter what’s coming down, this is not looking good, I thought. I have to get out of here. This is not a good thing.

  I looked at my driver. He was looking at me, holding out the drawing tube to the hookah, offering it to me, waiting. My voice was paralyzed. My hands were sweating. I could neither speak nor move.

  One night back home, I dreamt I was alone in a house that was about to be attacked by thieves. One of the doors was unsecured and could easily be accessed by anyone desiring entry. Three robbers stood outside planning and discussing the evil they intended to do. I saw the thieves. I heard them. But I couldn’t speak and I couldn’t get away. I felt helpless. I panicked. In my dream, I picked up the phone and dialed 911, the emergency number. No response. The phone rang into a void. I set the receiver in the cradle and just watched as the robbers discussed how they were going to enter through the unsecured door. They were laughing about the harm they intended to inflict once they entered. In my dream—just as at the pyramids and now in the souk—I watched, fully aware it was happening yet unable to speak up or protect myself. “Help,” I screamed in my dream. At first my cry sounded weak; then my voice
became louder. Finally, I screamed “Help!” so loudly I woke myself up and startled my bird. Minutes later, while I sat in my living room trying to make sense of the dream, I could still feel the resounding vibrations from my shriek.

  Still back home, days later, I had a similar dream. In that dream, a woman entered my home uninvited. I knew she was not of good will; she meant harm. I didn’t want her there, but she just walked into my house anyway, as though she had a right to be there. Again, I just watched, speechless and paralyzed. Finally, I mustered up the courage, the energy, and the power to push through the block and speak the words stuck in my throat. “Get out,” I finally screamed, again waking myself up. “Get out!”

  At home, my dreams then took me back to my childhood, and to one of several incidents that I wished were only dreams. When I was twelve years old, I often baby-sat for the children of people who lived in my neighborhood. One family I frequently worked for was a well-respected, friendly couple with three young children. I liked their house. It wasn’t fancy, but it was clean and pretty. I liked their children. And they paid me fifty cents an hour—good money at the time. One New Year’s Eve when I was baby-sitting, they returned home late. I was asleep on the couch when they arrived. The woman disappeared into the bedroom. I was too tired, it was too late, I was too young to notice how drunk the man was—too drunk to drive me home. On the way home, instead of turning at the corner where I lived, he continued to drive. After a few blocks, he parked the car. In the next instant, he was on top of me, all over me, pulling off my clothes. “Stop,” I wanted to scream. “Get off! Get away!” I couldn’t. Those words had stuck in my throat, too. I lay there frozen, until he finished, zipped up his pants, and drove me home.

  Now, in the second-floor balcony in the small Arab shop in the heart of the souk in Cairo, Egypt, I forced myself to push words through that same block in my throat. The words gurgled out weakly at first, like water just coming out of a rusty spigot. But they came out.

  “Hashish?” I asked, pointing at the water pipe. “Is that hashish?”

  The driver looked at me, leaned back in his chair, and started laughing. “Hashish? No!” he said. “Not hashish. Shisha.”

  “Shisha?” I said.

  “Shisha,” he said.

  “What’s shisha?” I asked.

  “Egyptian tobacco. Soaked in honey. Smoke it in shisha,” he said, pointing to the pipe. “It’s good.”

  “Tobacco?” I said, pointing to the pipe. “That’s what that is?”

  “Shisha,” he said. “Try some.”

  I looked at the other people on the balcony. This time I studied them more closely. They were all drinking fruit drinks and teas. I scanned the menu on the wall, trying to read the words. I was in a juice bar, the Egyptian equivalent of a health food store. The only difference was that here, health food stores apparently served juice with a water pipe and tobacco. I sniffed the shisha. It smelled good, like pure pipe tobacco. I thought about trying a puff, then, remembering my experience with the milk in Morocco, decided against it. My stomach still hurt. I ordered a glass of mango juice and sat back.

  Ten years ago, a psychic—a gypsy I knew hack then—wanted to give me a reading. Her jewelry clanking, she dug out her crystal hall. Her eyes glazed over as she began gazing into the glass sphere. After a few moments, she looked into my eyes and made her solemn extrasensory pronouncement.

  “I see—I’m getting—that you don’t really love yourself,” she said.

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” I said to her.

  Although I probably wouldn’t make it into the Howard Stern Self-Loathing Hall of Fame, I knew I had moments when I came close. I had my bouts with self-contempt, fear, and at times downright self-hatred. I was as prone to betray and deceive myself as I was to allow others to betray or misuse me. But I didn’t see that great a difference between myself and most of the people I knew.

  The gypsy’s words stuck with me for years, implanted in my psyche like a foreign object. I agreed with her; I probably didn’t love myself as much as I should. The problem was, I loved myself as much as I could and as much as I knew how.

  Looking back, it was probably then that I began to glorify the idea of self-love, turning it into an ideal. I searched for it as if it was the Holy Grail—hidden, just out of reach, yet a worthy and noble cause. I began to believe that self-love was a static condition, like reaching majority. Once a person is over twenty-one, that person is over twenty-one forever. I envisioned running around like a Stepford wife, loving myself all the time, not feeling any emotions, not feeling tormented, just glowingly, contentedly (and I might add nauseatingly) loving myself. That description didn’t apply to me and probably never would. Yes, I decided over the years, the gypsy was right. I don’t love myself.

  It’s better for me not to consult fortune-tellers anymore, not because they’re bad, wrong, or necessarily evil, but because I’m too susceptible. It’s easy enough for me to hand my golden ball of power over to people I can see. I’m a walking target for unseen entities or those that claim privileged connection to unseen powers. And I have enough misconceptions of my own to unravel—especially about love.

  In Aikido, the martial art I’ve been studying, the student learns to be strong yet gentle, relaxed yet deeply alert and intuitive. The word “Aikido” means “the way of harmonizing and unifying oneself with the spirit and energy of the universe.” Learning Aikido is a lifetime commitment. And a student can practice and keep getting better at it as long as she or he lives. The light in that golden ball of power, the one each of us has in our solar plexus, doesn’t deteriorate with age. It increases as the student acquires and practices certain disciplines, like rolling forward, rolling backward, and learning to breathe. One day my teacher told me that O Sensei, Aikido’s founder, did demonstrations until the day he died. The master even got out of his hospital bed and did a final demonstration of his skills shortly before his death.

  These same ideas have now replaced my idealized notions about self-love. Loving ourselves requires a lifetime commitment. It is the art of growing in our ability to live in harmony with ourselves and the spirit and energy of the universe. And if we keep practicing certain disciplines—including breathing—we can get better at it as long as we live. Our golden ball of power just keeps glowing more brightly.

  Somewhere between abject self-loathing and the grandiosity and narcissism of believing that we’re impervious and know best what everyone else in the world should do is that sacred space we call self-love. It is a portal and a gateway. How we find it is a mystery; so is its power to get us to the next place.

  While some people say that fear, hatred, and contempt are the opposites of love, I don’t see life as such a tidy package of dualities anymore. I believe our fear, hatred, and contempt—even those moments of contempt for ourselves that choke us up and paralyze our voice—are only barriers, obstacles, and blocks to work through on the way to finding that sacred space.

  The whirling vortex of energy in Cairo had taken me, in my first few hours here, to the Nile, to the ancient mystical pyramids, to the Sphinx, to Essam, and to the souk. But it had also taken me back to myself. As I sat on the second-floor balcony in the Arabian health food store sipping my mango drink, the message became clear. When life turns on you, whether that turning is real or imagined, clear your throat. Speak up. Tell someone who cares. Most of all, learn to tell yourself. The wisdom of the ages may be buried in the tombs of Giza, but it’s also buried deep within each of us.

  I looked down at the bustling street below. That’s when I saw him, across the street from us. I had noticed him for the first time when I moved through the crowded streets on my way here. He caught my interest then. Now I found him compelling. I pointed to the man, then pulled at my driver’s arm, trying to get him to put down the shisha.

  “Who’s that?” I asked. “And what’s he doing?”

  I LOOKED AROUND THE ROOM where I stood in the Tel Aviv airport. By now, the crowds of tra
velers had thinned to one or two people. The entire line of Japanese tourists had cleared security. The subtle methods of the interrogators had sucked me in again.

  My palms were sweating. I felt frightened, persecuted, and trapped. I hadn’t felt this under the gun for a long time. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t say “I don’t want to discuss this” and walk away. It wasn’t like talking to the media, or a feisty lover.

  I had no choice but to continue telling my story.

  chapter 7

  The Sandlot

  I returned to Essam at the Lotus Palace Perfumes the following day.

  Lotus Palace Perfumes had belonged to Essam’s father until the father died. Now Essam and his brother ran the store. They were gentle men and devout Muslims. Although the Ramadan fast continued throughout my stay in Egypt, Essam made sure I ate each day. He would have the women of his house prepare a typical Egyptian lunch, and the children would bring it to the store: a loaf of bread, slabs of cheese, dates, hot tea brewed with bottled water, and fruit—an orange or a tangerine—to finish the meal and cleanse the palate.

  Sometimes at the end of the day, Essam would invite me to join him and any men friends from the village who wandered by for the sundown feast to break the day’s fast. By then the men would be ravenous. The boys would scurry from the sprawling house next to the shop carrying platters of chicken, rice, and many other Egyptian dishes. Soon the small perfume store would turn into a dining room. We would feast, as Essam passed the platters from person to person, making certain we tasted each succulent dish.

  Most of the activity, however, took place outside in the sandlot on the wooden bench in front of the store. During the day and long into the evening hours, the men would gather at the bench. The boys would play and ride horses and donkeys in the lot. Occasionally, I would see a woman vigorously grooming a camel, but to see a woman here was rare. Sometimes Essam would push the stand bearing the small black and white television set outside and position it alongside the bench. Then all the men and male children would gather around and watch.