The Valley of Suck

While I can’t wait to go outside, visit friends, and buy a cup of coffee for myself, I feel myself descending (again) into what my writing teacher called “the Valley of Suck”.

Just as the Valley of Suck is familiar territory for any writer, and probably any parent, it is all the more so for any immigrant to a country whose language is not a native tongue.

The Valley of Suck pulls me in with deft efficiency with the one word I dread more than all others: forms.

The reality of this time of year is that for most parents with kids, there are a lot of forms. A pile of forms. A mountain of forms. An Everest of forms. School registration forms. School book and supply shopping forms. Activity forms. Meetings with teachers forms. Health forms and trip forms and forms for things you can’t even begin to imagine need forms. Now multiply that by five (kids).

Now add to that all the forms for actually becoming a citizen of a new country–bank forms and health insurance forms and benefit release forms and new passport forms.

Oh and add to that moving to a new apartment forms–water bill transfer and electricity bill transfer and housing tax transfer.

And now the kicker–imagine all of those forms are in a language that you neither read, write or speak particularly well. Moreover, the particular language of forms–words like ‘sign up’ and ‘register’ and ‘give permission to’ are not words I use all that frequently so I’ve forgotten a lot of them in the past few years.

And a lot of the forms will require me to actually pick up the phone and call someone–a school administrator, a utilities company, a landlord–and have the kind of casual, efficient phone conversation that happen all the time.

However, these banal conversations still strike panic in my heart. PANIC. My nouns and verbs often don’t agree. My Hebrew comes out slathered in a thick American accent , with poor grammatical construction, wrong words , embarrassingly long pauses, and periodic insertions of English. The whole process of constructing and speaking sentences is still painfully, painfully humiliating.

So here I sit on my bed, feeling literally ill, staring at form after form after form.

Now lest you are feeling too sorry for me, I know there are friends I can draw on for help, and we even have a friend whose job is helping hapless immigrants like myself navigate bureaucracy and, you guessed it, fill out forms.

But right now, I’m just trying to let my visit to the Valley of Suck be an exercise in self-awareness. Like many things in life, it hurts a little less if I can distance myself from my suckiness, ie, just because I suck at reading, writing and speaking, just because I have now become less literate than a 6 year old, does not mean that the totality of my being sucks. (Although it does sometimes feel that way).

Self-pity and humiliation aside, this seems like a particularly good headspace to explore in Elul. How else to gather the confidence and humility to approach someone I’ve hurt or wronged than to pay a visit to the Valley of Suck, and learn how to be in it, but not of it, and to know that Suck is a stop on a journey that will eventually lead up out of the Valley to a place of satisfaction. And even comfort. Or repair. Or even pride.

For now, however, I’m going to start with baby steps. Maybe I will make a list of all the forms I have to fill out, with a color coded system to give me some drip of dopamine every time I actually complete one and submit it.

Mountain of forms, Valley of Suck—I surrender to you both. But hopefully not for long.