L.L. Kirchner on Meditation, Eye Surgery, and Starting Over.

Read an excerpt from L.L. Kirchner's riveting new memoir Blissful Thinking: A Memoir of Overcoming the Wellness Revolution

I’ve known L.L. Kirchner for years now through various online writing groups and have always been bowled over by the beauty of her writing and her impressive roster of publications: Shondaland, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, Glamour, and more! She writes about loneliness, addiction, menopause, and mental illness. In other words, the human condition. And she delves into all it with keen honesty and also tenderness. She has a Substack for creatives:

Notable

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L.L.’s memoir, American Lady Creature: (My) Change in the Middle East, tells how, after losing her two dogs, her health, and her marriage, she was left to redefine herself as a woman and a boss while living in a country where dating was illegal. Her deep honesty and dark humor won praise from everyone from Kirkus Reviews to NPR.

So I’m delighted to share this excerpt from her new memoir Blissful Thinking: A Memoir of Overcoming the Wellness Revolution. After a brutal divorce, L.L. fears a return to her addictions. In search of both support and bliss, she tries everything from meditation to chanting to a sex cult. But in the end, it’s the death of her mother that allows L.L. to know herself more deeply and find the peace she’s been seeking.

Blissful Thinking

Bangalore 2007

You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought as the driver stopped in front of a concrete wall. Scrambling out of the car, I scanned the cement blocks for a sign, something, anything, to tell me what to do next. The surface was bare. 

Was I even in the right place? Only I could get lost on the way to a meditation retreat. 

But the place looked nothing like the lush, verdant settings I’d seen online, environments meant to help me find my bliss while I sat in silent contemplation. I was standing on a treeless scrap of cracked earth, staring at a blank wall as my driver sped off behind me in the dirt. There was no road leading here. It wasn’t like I could call someone either. No one knew where I was, least of all me. “Hi, can you come get me? I’m somewhere outside Bangalore. Near a wall.”

Suddenly, a ways down, a gate opened. A heavyset Indian man puffed past me toward a car I’d failed to notice. Beyond the opening, a squat row of buildings formed a courtyard albeit around another square of parched dirt. The resulting haze of dust made the place appear neglected. 

To the left of the enclosure sat an Indian woman in a high-collared, 1980s-era ruffled dress. She turned to look at me from behind a plastic folding table, the glare from her pink, oversized Sophia Loren-style frames camouflaging her face. Extending her right arm while pumping her fingers into her palm, she beckoned me in. I looked behind me, vaguely amazed at her confidence I should be there. Only it wasn’t so amazing. 

I was a forty-year-old, green-eyed, bottle blonde American in wide-legged kurta pants and a Superman t-shirt. We were well outside civilization, let alone any tourist destination. Once the driver had left behind the dirt roads, even the wooden shacks that sold lottery tickets, cigarettes, and bootleg hooch had disappeared.  

This must be the place, I thought, not entirely relieved as I entered and took a seat. Without a word, the woman pushed forward a sheet of paper, a long list of rules. 

I was used to the no “hello.” That was pretty standard in India, a land that continually astonished me with its baffling mix of open-hearted kindness and brutal honesty. I was more surprised she didn’t comment on my eye. 

As part of my transformational fervor, I’d recently had Lasik, vision correction surgery I’d long wanted but feared. “You should absolutely do it,” Debra, my host in Bengaluru, had said. “The office is completely high tech. It’s a myth that this country is third world—there are more millionaires in India than in the U.S. My driver can take you.”  

Lying in the cold antiseptic room—one eye covered, the other with the cornea flipped aside—I was sightless but still aware of people scurrying around. This must be what it’s like to die, I thought, which was terrifying. So when the doctor went for my second eyeball, I flinched. The suction cup missed the mark, and I was left with an eye that turned Christmas décor—a bright red and green ball—as opposed to simply bloodshot. It took months to heal. Though hideous to behold, it didn’t hurt. Plus, my vision was better than ever. I’d grown used to strangers, in that polite yet blunt way I’d encountered across India, pointing and demanding to know, “What is wrong with your eye?” It was a question I’d grown to love because, at least when it came to this aspect of what could be wrong with me, I had an answer.

Or maybe the woman had said nothing because the silence had begun?

I looked down at the paper.

No stealing, no sex, no killing. Check.

No talking. Precisely what I’d signed up for.

No reading. Damn, I’d been thinking this would be a good place to catch up. 

Wait, what? No writing? How would I remember the insights I was expecting?

The kicker was what stopped me. No food. 

Sophia Loren wanted the Pringles sleeve poking out of my bag. Oh no, she wouldn’t. Taking firm hold of the can, I popped open the top and proceeded to stuff every last chip into my gullet as I marched across the courtyard. 

One decree I hadn’t missed in my cursory research was the center’s twice-daily meal schedule. I figured they skipped a feeding because of the cost, which was free, or more specifically, donation based. The first donation I was ready to make was more food in the bank of me. As a hypoglycemic, I wouldn’t make it on two meals a day. Especially not on top of mornings that began at the crack ass of dawn, presumably without the benefit of caffeine. Ten to twelve decaffeinated hours a day in cross-legged meditation would be rigor enough. Letting my blood sugar levels tank would make the ordeal unbearable.

As I stood chomping on my chips, I spied another car dropping someone off beyond the still-open gate. If I moved fast enough, I could catch it.

Then I caught myself, remembering my ex’s words from the one in-person discussion we’d had since he’d ended our marriage over the telephone from eight time zones away. The only reason he showed up for the meeting was because I’d forced his hand by bringing his dog. 

What had been arranged as a Stateside lovers’ rendezvous turned into a perpendicular face-off. Our exchange—across the green-striped, prickly woolen couches that my mother had dragged from Pennsylvania to Michigan to Alabama and then back—was reduced to negotiations over the dogs, two fur babies he’d not only abandoned, but not once asked about since leaving Qatar. Yet I longed to jump to his sofa and burrow into his side. 

I settled for asking, “Why do you want a divorce?”  

“I don’t feel like being married anymore,” was all he’d say. 

As I stood on the vipassana center’s thirsty ground, licking salt from my fingers, I remembered his words, relating. I might not have been the one to quit my marriage, but I was adept at leaving. The circles I’d ridden around the Rust Belt as a kid had established a pattern—I grew itchy if I stayed in one place too long. To scratch at that agitation, I’d abandoned numerous lovers and jobs. I didn’t want to be someone who quit when I didn’t “feel like” doing something hard. This was why I’d signed up for a vipassana in the first place. 

My deepest wish was that ten days of sitting in silence would reveal the hard truths about myself that years of self-inflicted toxic positivity had failed to erase. Otherwise I feared I’d never move on. 

I turned and strode back toward the front gate.

Tell me…

Have you ever experienced transformational fervor?

Have you ever had second thoughts about something and then done it anyway? If so, how did it go?

Have you struggled with toxic positivity?

Have you learned hard truths about yourself?

I’ll join you in the comments!