Come out, come out, come out

Often I am led to reflect out of pain and distress.  I have this (admittedly romanticized) memory of my absolute pure longing to learn in my late teens and early 20s.  Once I finished high school, with its cruel start times, endless classes about material we’d never need to know as south side Chicagoans unlikely to get out of the neighborhood, and my crushing awkwardness, I had no plans.

I could reinvent myself.  I wanted to escape to a mid-coastal town in Florida and write.  That was as sophisticated as my plan got.  I figured I could study journalism at a community college and write articles about local senior citizens getting surprise visits from Midwestern grandchildren to pay for my alcohol.  I still can feel how warm the sand would be, rising to my ankles.

Thus it was with this starting block that my mind began to awaken to knowledge.  The popular kids would not scrape your nuts as they passed you in the hallway and wait until, seconds later, you fell to the ground with guttural cries and the retreat of your testicles into your throat, so they could laugh at this tragedy; you would no longer get chalk-saturated erasers thrown at you for sleeping through biology class; you would no longer be encouraged to read Hemingway by Brother Mahoney because of the small penis joke at the beginning of the novel, which the Brother illustrates by holding up his pinky finger.

I read Kerouac for the first time and his vision of the world’s expansiveness was my road sermon.  I read Les Miserables and I finally had confirmation that the world as a whole, if not a few other human beings, felt the sharpness of emotions.  I even read Ayn Rand’s catalog and worshiped the heroic in man.

This would change in a few years, but during that time of the youngest adulthood possible, I read and I wrote out of excitement, drawn to psalmic praisings of nature or blazonings of women I fell hopelessly in love with but could do nothing to get their attention.   This would change in time to studies of the invisible on the streets, the drunks in the bars, the homeless (God bless you ravine Rod, if you are still alive).  Even those subjects got me because I wanted to capture them.

It is difficult to say if I was or if I am more motivated by the mere act of writing or by the subject matter.  I tend to think it’s the writing itself that is necessary; the topic is often secondary.

Even so, so much of the last decade has me coming to write being chased by the most clawing discomfort.

Today, I shall celebrate what I have seen.  I slept last night for the first time in years.  I do not know why.  I woke only 2 or 3 times, and for not long.  I had no idea when I readied myself that today would be blessed.  This morning I woke with about 1% of my usual level of stress and anxiety and walked into the humidity with an appreciation for the silliness of a spring morning.  The sky is blue, Anna, the sun is shining, Anna, the air, Anna, is scientifically 100% saturated with water yet I can see none, in fact, I can see the horizons in all directions, and I’m hot and cold at the same time.  I felt the confusion and powerlessness of youth and also the peaceful joy in not being in control of it all.  I saw a cat sleeping in the sun on a porch.  I know that cat from my walks home, and often she will comfort me after a brutal day; she will cozy up against my leg and let me pet her for as long as I like.  Her eyes were closed and I said her name in my head silently as a hello and I heard her in her head, Thank you for not waking me, and on I went with her blessing.

I am alive today, living with my actions and feelings, rather than trying to understand how to act according to the words of the holy, and the demands of unholy critics in my head.  The same critics that tell me not to write tell me to tread slowly through life, to respond to pain and look suspiciously upon what comes naturally.  I can count on one hand the instances in my life when I opened to the moment in the guise of myself.  Intoxicating, I remember.  Women were suddenly attracted to me like never before, street passer-bys turned around and looked after me as if I were glowing.  I’ve seen this in other people; I search for it every day.  I look for the fearless warriors attired joyously in their naked selves.

The best thing about the fearless who are unselfish with their genuine self is that they see your genuine self.  They call to it.  C’mon you golden child, offend me with your awkwardness and show me how even your adult language cannot hide your child-like innocence and joy at being alive.  Come out, come out, come out.  There is endless time but every day hiding is an eternity that viciously promises an end.  It is only in the moonlight that infinity and timelessness is value-less, is as instrumental as your pinky finger, and ready to be used in whatever way you want.

Do you want to know how I know all of this with such assurance?  Because I left my home today and through a world of water I walked without once getting wet.

Smudging

it’s been a month, which is far too long to let this blog lie silent. I don’t know exactly why I haven’t written anything. Ideas have come, thematic ones too, that would swell one or two of the subjects in the Topic Cloud. I haven’t wanted to speak though; most of my time has been spent in silence. Don’t misunderstand that as some idealized form of contemplation and meditation, though. I haven’t been regarding much; I’ve been weathering more than creating and seeking to understand.

I stood looking at a fire hydrant yesterday afternoon outside a 12 story office building on the water. The commercial building office park hydrants are so aesthetically displeasing compared to the traditional red residential fire hydrant. These are a reflective steel, with two nozzles, ready to blast incredible amounts of water given the right crisis. I suppose when you have the entire San Francisco Bay a couple hundred yards from the hydrant, it makes sense to increase its output capacity. Has marine life ever unwittingly flown through an open hydrant?

I’ll look that curiosity up later. I looked at the hydrant thinking of this blog and began to wonder what the purpose of it is. I am more fearful of creating an online journal or diary than writing post after post of overwrought academic essays about spirituality or mental illness or literature. I wondered after its identity, its purpose, especially in relation to those who read it.

There is always a self-consciousness, both for myself and for anything that I am responsible for putting into the world. An existential question of, Well, why? Is there a purpose to creating this thing? Otherwise, it is just more crackling noise in a dimension and milieu choked with crackling noises; dirty, like the sight of urban snow along street curbs a few days after snowfall. I seek out some of this noise when I am lonely and listless at home, like now, at 345am. Typically, even if the content has some substance, I am disappointed emotionally after having consumed the material. There must be something more than gathering information, or gambling on Stumble Upon for personal contentment.

Or something less, perhaps something right-sized. I still love the warning to not mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. I don’t know if I’m trying to moon everyone who reads this blog; perhaps more just make sense out of a personal cosmology that might bear resemblance to your own. And we must speak from what we know, and what I have known of late is a stultifying struggle with the validity of mental health and its treatment.

As I’ve said many times, the stakes seem high if I play around with this too much, yet I become absolutely lost in attempting to understand and accept what living with manic depression means for my life. It is a mourning of an old identity, a solemn dirge that reduces quickly to anger when I recall my late-teens and early-20s when that boundless energy seemed to have reins, even if the reins were alcoholic. I stood in the shower the other night remembering how excited I was during that time to learn; everything seemed fascinating and staying up for days on end reading everything was the only way to grab hold of that shimmering universe. There was hope, and exuberance; power and self-confidence.

Then, there were other times, times that do not come so readily to mind, when every day and night was devoted to drinking and sleeping, ruining relationships and believing that I had been given a second liver as divine authorization for an urge to drink that seemed as necessary as any other nutrition. Those times my memory elides, in the way that I do not remember having stuffed sinuses while looking out at Lake Zürich and the Swiss mountains in August.

I don’t recall those times unless I pry the pitch fingers from the photographs. The other end comes back, the fiery lightness, the blinking absorption of everything in view-and-between library binding, when I could ignite an entire prairie by glaring at it through my peripheral vision. That felt creative, that felt meaningful, that felt like the life I wanted, guided by a an indisputable teleology. I have chosen to not remember the other side.

That may be the only purpose here sometimes, to chart the process, the swaying, because that is the reality running beneath the surface, like that toxic river in the old subway tunnels in one of the Ghostbusters sequels. I look at this collection of entries and sniff at it sometimes, because it seems like a bunch of pre-fabricated wind-up music that springs from a jack-in-the-box. It needs some dirt, it needs some smudging, it needs what a burning ember would look like if that two-valve hydrant had washed over it.

The Idiot

The inevitable interceded before the other inevitable could occur. How do you avoid an inevitable? Apparently by an act of intercession that imposes an earlier inevitability. Two weeks ago my doctor imposed a psychiatric hold and I was off to a crisis residential center for a week. I had a lot of time to mull over my situation and to see how truly powerless I am over what is an exogenous imperative to end my life. My thinking, that stalwart nuclear reaction that I have relied upon for my entire life, was water to the oil of the imperative. Different substances, incapable of merging and influencing one another.

I always expect that an admission of powerlessness comes with a price: shame, inferiority, self-loathing. Yet, to my surprise, as has happened before with an admission of powerlessness over alcohol, this gradual acknowledgement has brought peace, and unexpected comfort. One night early that week at the crisis home, after taking the nightly lithium and moving toward bed, I decided to make my goal for the next day to stop fighting everything and anything.

This led to a thought experiment: what would my life be like if I stopped fighting? I followed the train of thought to the ultimate reductio ad absurdum. Curiously, the end result was not absurd at all. In the experiment, I imagined taking the suggestions of those placed in my life — doctors, mentors, rule-makers, and every possible path of least resistance. Truthfully, my thought experiment broke down before I could imagine all the possible scenarios; I just cannot say what my life would be like if I consciously did not fight at every turn. The contradiction I expected to find was that if I stopped fighting everyone and everything, I would end up impotent, victimized, and eventually deprived of my life. So, not fighting as a way of living life, I expected, would lead to a crippling existence and then death. Not exactly a philosophy that young, vibrant folk can embrace.

What surfaced, though, was a spiritual challenge: if I believe that my God is a benevolent force in my life, wouldn’t I be submitting myself to His care? Would my abstract idea of God — that gentle, loving, irreducible and omnipotent presence — put doctors in my life who sought to medicate me because of a diseased, profit-centric model of health where meds are given out like candy, put employers in my life who wanted to take advantage of me, put people in my life who wanted to hurt me? Must I be so damned autonomous that I must vet every person, place and thing that comes my way? What if I let go completely, accepted what was told to me, what was given to me?

Something inside of me starts to agitate when I think of living this way. Of course, I would have to analyze some things, right? What if I received a bill from the power company and I knew it was incorrect, would not fighting mean I paid it anyway? I mean, we all know PG&E is capable of some nefarious acts, that’s common knowledge.

Two throbbing objections / fears came to mind: first, if I stopped fighting, wouldn’t I be naive and gullible?; second, wouldn’t this lead to a complacency that would let evil acts go on around me, and indict me as acquiescing by silence?

As for naiveté, and the certainty that I would be endlessly taken advantage of by swindlers and utility companies, I suppose that might happen. I really don’t care when a person on the street asks for money. I will most often give what I can regardless of their story, or the fact that I saw them using a cell phone, or any other supposed indicator that they are not in need. A friend saw me give money one night and she pulled me aside later, in a tone of gentle, condescending instruction, “You know she doesn’t need that money, right? I saw her using a cell phone and she had a good chunk of cash in her pocket too.”

Alright. But, she asked. That is all that concerned me. She was not aggressive or demanding, she simply asked. I don’t care about the merits of her request; the request is enough. What I trust in those situations is that God has taken care of me thus far, through homelessness, addiction, and an illness that tells me to kill myself. Giving money to that woman is a selfish affirmation of my trust in being taken care of by God.

That is a bit abstract. the feeling is even more visceral. I believe that naiveté is a spiritual virtue. It is the stuff of wonder, of dreamers, the giddy certainty that most of my life is perceptible only outside of my senses and my reason. A cheerful Scottish band, Camera Obscura, puts it more directly: “Oh don’t get wise to everyone and everything / Just leave a little room for some naiveté.” Naiveté is a spiritual practice of trust and an understanding that my thinking cannot encompass the whole of reality and I will allow for contradiction. I learned that recently through a near-fatal lesson that water cannot manipulate oil.

One of the best understandings of the spiritual value of naiveté comes from Fyodor Dostoevsky. He comes back to it over-and-again, but my favorite is in The Idiot. (Apparently my old copy with all of the highlights is gone! The copy I have has a few, though the entire effect of the Prince’s behavior is best gotten from reading the whole thing. So I encourage everyone to read this wonderful novel). Prince Myshkin, the “Idiot,” says,

                “You know, in my opinion it’s sometimes even good to be ridiculous, if not better; we can the sooner forgive each other, the sooner humble ourselves; we can’t understand everything at once, we can’t start right out with perfection! To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well.”

Later, his betrothed Aglaya (have you heard a more pretty name?) tells her competitor:

                “I must tell you, too, that I have never met a single person in my life who is equal to him in noble simple-heartedness and infinite trustfulness. I guessed after what he said that anyone who wanted to could deceive him, and whoever deceived him he would forgive afterwards, and it was for that that I loved him . . . “

The second fear is that a trust in the world and its people and refusal to fight would lead to appeasement with the forces of injustice. I’ve always been a fighter in both mind and body; a bar-room brawler, believer in the strong arm of workers and Labor, venerating the soapbox and fiery rhetoric that incites defiance, upheaval and change. More personally, the last thing I want someone to think of me is that I laid down without a fight, that I disappeared in a heap of wrinkled skin and exhaled air that seemed to whisper, Milquetoast. Wouldn’t the powerful continue to trample the good? Wouldn’t I forever be giving Poland away?

I am taught here by images, not logic. The only scene I remember from the film “Gandhi” was a journey he made with others, a long, foot-borne journey, to oppose a British policy relating to salt, I believe. The image sticks because the protestors stood still as the British soldiers approached them. A soldier would knock one of the Indians on the head, and he would collapse. This would continue, and the Indians would not fight, just simply rise up again and accept the next blow. I don’t recall the specifics, but I remember the soldiers begin to look like machines that could not understand the input. The action was inaction, and the result was profoundly impactful.

Maybe it’s helpful to understand what “fighting” actually means. I think fighting means a particular spiritual and mental posture that in the end may not be very effective at all. Refusing to fight may not mean giving away Poland for eternity. Fighting seems to me an unnatural response to a situation that has begged for an address over-and-over in the past. I don’t want to speculate; I think I’m trying to say that through a habit of better thinking and better habits and better behavior, I can assert myself as a powerful agent in the world.

That kinda muddies the original simple question of accepting everything as a spiritual exercise. But I think it starts there with the unconditioned “yes,” and the behaviors and habits come as a result.

Finally, a parting image that refusing to fight can be the most powerful action. I have seen countless media reports of Occupy movements and the violence by some protestors. So-called anarchists in Oakland smashing windows, setting fires, and facing off with riot cops. I’ve also seen the non-violent, but still fighting spirit actions of protestors shutting down the Port of Oakland. I’ve heard public opinions on both sides about the propriety of these actions. There is debate; it’s almost as if these fighting actions have led to fighting words among community members and observers.

And what, to my understanding, has been the most prominent Internet image to date, the one that seems to capture the essence of the Occupy movement and the injustices that the movement is seeking to change? A campus cop at UC-Davis, casually walking by defenseless, seated protestors, spraying them with a pepper spray so orange in color it stings to even look at. Something was allowed to materialize in that scene because the seated protestors were humble enough to be ridiculous.

Pressing lidless eyes

Superheroes are generally well-regarded. People get excited about them: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman; even the more human superheroes like Sherlock Holmes, or Rain Man, or Monk.

Really, though, I have noticed that those around me feel fear, apprehension and even a certain pity when they learn of a supernatural ability with the senses. For instance, I see things occasionally that I would not dare tell anyone about because they would either contemptuously disbelieve me, and classify me as a fibbing child, or they would see it as an unmistakable sign that the illness has progressed into delusions, and possibly psychosis. I hear things as well, with different voices and unique personalities.

Even at this point, your mind is probably greeting these disclosures with a look of suspicion. Stop for a moment, and re-read that last paragraph, and observe what your mind automatically generates, how receptive you may be to whatever may come next. I am telling you that I see things that I suspect other may not see; and that I hear things, human voices, when there are no human forms around. Alright, how has your mind attempted to integrate these facts of mine?

• Delusional
• Conscious lying
• Attention-seeking through:
  • Exaggeration
  • Romanticizing an illness

What else comes to mind?

Put those aside for the time being; we’ll come back to them.

Fortunately, the conversations I hear in my head are typically in moderate tones. There have been a handful of times in the past when the voices were screaming, relentless torturers and the tortured, screaming nonsense, or commanding me to hurt myself . . . but I have been spared those thus far in sobriety, and since I have been at least partially medicated. I don’t have any schizo diagnoses and I would not understand those sights and sounds as pathological. They are part of me while being separate from me. They are gadflys on my brain’s haunches.

In any event, with that prelude finished, I can say that I woke this morning immediately after my own voice sounded clearly in my head, explaining to another person in a dream, “My head is nervy and my heart is broken.” This was an easy one, a lucid dream, that shoved me into the daybreak with a status read of my vitals. I welcomed the information as useful. That is one of the prime benefits of being conversant with voices in my head — I have a genuine respect for what is being said and often find that it can guide me in ways that my conscious, rational brain cannot.

I went through today with a hovering awareness that my head was nervy, and that my heart was broken. Now, I generally will not feel what my heart feels unless certain unusual conditions are met, mostly solitude and a lessening of mental churning that allows my heart some room to reflect. Today I could pause and see if any of my discomfort was because of a nervy head or a broken, lonely heart. It helped; I felt compassion for myself, even in the midst of that ever-judgmental brain telling me that I was not productive enough at work, that my boss and co-workers could tell that the gear factory in my head made funny noises and was not operating properly; I could have compassion for myself when I was certain that they could smell the lithium salts in the very light sweat on my button-down shirt beneath my sweater. My brain could tell me, They know of your mental frailty and can tell that you have begun treatment; they are respectful, yet clearly cautious and afraid. I saw that in everyone’s eyes today, and I retreated to my office exhausted, my sinuses throbbing from inflammation. I felt terrible because of what they knew; yet, I did have some softness for myself, because my head is nervy today and my heart is broken. As I sat there, I could not help hearing T.S. Eliot’s voice on that old tape that I have, and smile:

“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think.”

“What shall I do now? What shall I do?
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?
What shall we ever do?”

I am comforted by the sights and sounds that don’t seem to come directly from my standard-issued senses. They give me information that that ruthless, dictatorial mind either drowns with noise or cancels with skepticism. So, back to your checklist from earlier. As I re-read it, I can see that my mind’s imperial skepticism makes it very difficult to know anything of those unorthodox perceptions. “This,” it tells me, “is not Gotham; this is not a fictional story, you cannot fly nor can you hear what you think you can hear. In fact, let’s not dwell on what you think you have seen or heard. It is not only embarrassing but it distracts us from the more important matter — what are you seeking from believing this nonsense?” and then on-and-on through the self-psychoanalysis of motives and checklists. A very carefully filtered experience; one meant to as best as possible maintain sanity.

I suppose my question is: if it is so palpably apparent how swiftly your mind can execute the legitimacy of voices and sights not borne by usual means, when presented as my experience, how much more quickly can that same mind prevent you from hearing what you are meant to hear and seeing what you are meant to see?

Underwater Prayer

Lately, as my mood has gone from agitated and restless to uncomfortable and despairing (a profound emptiness . . . one without words), I have been observing how my relationship to suicide has been changing as well. Suicide, since the single-digit ages, was a fantasy, one calculated to bring about a relief that was so needed that I was willing to sacrifice life to obtain it. In that way, the thought and planning of suicide was a palliative. If it got any worse, if I did not wake up from this one last nap feeling even an inch more space to breathe, then I could end it all.

Even when I felt as if I had some reserves left, the prospective thought of going through these cycles for the next 40, 50, 60, 70 years seemed like the greatest torture imaginable. How many times can the underside of your skin burn with such poison, and the runaway momentum of a brain that hurls itself into walls, how many times can these occur, then subside, then heal, then return, before the very weariness of the cycle is enough to seek a self-inflicted end? There are entire catalogues of songs that I cannot listen to because they recall a very specific physical location, and very specific emotions, and a very unique despair — an entire scene so particular that it carries its own scent, like a prey warning that it will hurt if you choose to consume it. The night skies, the throbbing mornings, the memory of looking at the horizon and feeling so far from home. I can’t keep doing this, I would think, I can’t keep burning the earth I have lived on and running. Eventually I will run out of new places, I can’t sustain such vagrancy, can I?

Now, I have lived in the same place for 8 years. It is one of the most beautiful areas, generally regarded as a prime destination for travelers. San Francisco Bay; a place Kerouac described as end of the world sadness. I can see its beauty still. On the freeway last night, I saw the orange-glow sunset beyond the east bay marshes and the Golden Gate, and the candy-dot lights of commuter traffic over the bay bridge. Everything was reflected on the water in a perfect light, the reflection being asked to appreciate itself. I looked at it and tried to find that warm surge of appreciation. I couldn’t feel it, but I knew at least cognitively that I was looking at something special, and that I was privileged to be looking.

Most of the days, though, are spent walking the pavement, up the same hills, past the same curbs and storm drains, and it’s all the same. Lately, everywhere I go feels like a hospital. When children cry, I smell the antiseptic and mold of a hospital. I see how the neighbor’s garden lies down all crooked in autumn and see a ward of mangled patients. I taste bitter metal when I see the steel covered curb painted over and know that it is some temporarily unused medical device, like an MRI machine. The air is full of germs. Everywhere I go is a hospital.

This has been the evolution of this despair. I have not even used the word “depression” during this latest phase of illness. It would be an inexcusable misnomer to label this depression. I am not sad; I do not feel melancholic. I feel unwell at a marrow level. My body wants to turn itself inside out, and be shaken over a fifth floor balcony, then left in the rain for a few days to be washed. The sickness has metastasized from my thoughts and my head into my blood. Even deeper than blood; it feels as if it has become the air of the entire insides, the atmosphere in between the furious workings of my organs and glands. It is smog, pollution, it knows no form of its own; it is no longer constrained by the physical dimensions of my head.

I have a longstanding fantasy of suicide involving the cold metal of a gun against my temple. It is a very specific image. I have known this image for decades, and I am just about 34 years old. I retreated to the image as automatically as others may bite their fingernails or twirl their hair. I felt it. When I fell deeper into illness, I would begin to plan how to get that gun, and then holding it up to my head while I took my time to plan the other elements — last notes, cleaning up debts, getting a sleeping bag, choosing a location to minimize trauma, devising a way to alert the authorities so they came prepared and no random passerby discovered a gruesome scene. Then I read that often choosing to shoot oneself in the temple does not lead to death. I further read that a certain angle inside the mouth is more effective. I lost the comfort of feeling the cold metal butt against my temple. Now every time I think of it, my brain changes the image, as if a kind tutor, No, no, not that way, here, inside your mouth. And suddenly I get no comfort from imagining myself with my lips wrapped around the barrel.

I wanted to kill the activity of my brain; I wanted the bullet to splinter the thoughts and scatter them so nothing but a calm prairie wind blew. Now, though, I would be quieting my words. It was not satisfying. I still have things I want to say; or, at least, I am very dependent on my words to keep people away, and for begging them to approach me, to touch me, to treat me like a person.

It is an odd coincidence that as my sense of this illness expands from the confines of my skull to the ether of my entire body, I have lost the comfort of blasting some calm into my brain. I have lost the comfort of knowing how to treat this illness. Perhaps this is an act of God’s grace. Suicide has gone from a palliative to a global act of compassion. It is no longer soothing a part of me that is ill by killing my entire self. Now, the entire body feels ill, and in pain, and I am beginning to see suicide as euthanasia. Mercy killing. The cancer has spread and no amount of excision, of precise little surgeries, can save the central body.

Without any left to lose, I agreed to start taking lithium again a few days ago. It has been sedating thus far, and the longer windows of sleep have been welcomed. I can sleep for 2.5 – 3 hours without waking which feels like a lifetime compared to the usual 25-40 minute wakings. I have been trying to frame this experience in spiritual terms (as always), but I feel very far away from God, Mother Mary, Tara, or any of the saints and angels I have prayed to over the years.

Praying feels like shouting underwater.

I do not believe that my God is senselessly sadistic; I have not fallen to that state. Simone Weil says, in one of my favorite passages, “It is in affliction itself that the splendor of God’s mercy shines, from its very depths, in the heart of its inconsolable bitterness. If still persevering in our love, we fall to the point where the soul cannot keep back the cry ‘My God, why has thou forsaken me?’ if we remain at this point without ceasing to love, we end by touching something that is not affliction, not joy, something that is the central essence, necessary and pure, something not of the sense, common to joy and sorrow: the very love of God.”

gentle

 

herding fireflies

I write and think often about attention, and the spiritual value that results from undivided focus, regardless of the object of the attention. I think about it as one who has not exercised in 20 years thinks about running a mile: it would feel good certainly and I’m going to try it one day, and then it will become a habit that will come to define the character of my life. I do love getting lost in something, where my attention is gathered into one net like herding fireflies, and the consequent warmth from dwelling among the concentrated light. It usually happens without planning or deliberation, and often I am surprised by the subject matter holding my attention.

I of course think of Simone Weil’s article on the right use of school studies. A child learns the skills needed to pray by focusing undivided attention on a difficult math problem, regardless of the validity of the solution. I imagine I should be able to apply this scheme to my wage earning activity, fashioning my cubicle into an ersatz seminarian’s cell, learning to attend on God by concentrating on regulations and contracts that form the basis of my work.

Yes, some of the reason that pen and coin has experienced a lapse has been the start of a new job. I find working, in my experience, to be a soul-crushing exercise. I have only rarely been inspired by the activity of my brain and personal genius at a wage-earning job. For most of my work career, which begins in my early teens, I spent the hours waiting for alcohol, or drank at work, or before work. Getting a little loose helped me focus on the work of the job, until the job became an afterthought to the absolute need to get alcohol right away. I remember walking to BART through the Mission one morning on my way to a contract position and fighting over whether I should stop in the liquor store for a pint of whiskey to get me through the day. No, I would not give in, it is disgusting to have to buy whiskey at 8am to plan for the day, even though I had done it hundreds of times already. I couldn’t not buy some; once I got to the office, I would have to walk a mile to the closest alcohol merchant and wouldn’t be able to get away from my desk until 10am at the earliest.

I vividly remember the grey sidewalk sky and how sick I felt, and tired. Exhausted. I stopped in small newsstand and bought two bottles of irish whiskey, all the while acting like a businessman who was planning to gift these bottles that afternoon to important colleagues. My sunglasses were crooked and hanging gracelessly from my face; I had already begun to shake. I loathed myself for giving in and buying the pints, but I also felt that extraordinary comfort knowing I was protected for the day, that nothing could harm me.

Now that I do not drink, my relationship to work has changed dramatically. I am beset by anxieties and fears, incredible swells of ego when I am effective, and often just tired, wishing for a midday nap. The most exhausting part is not the energy spent trying to focus, or the reading, or the writing. Most tiring is the constant tension of appearing professionally acceptable, from the clothes to the demeanor, when sometimes my skin is crying out for synthetic fabrics because cotton hurts or when that restless engineer in my blood makes it impossible for me to sit still, and I have to pace the office or my tiny cubicle.

what exactly am I tying to say? attention is not railroad building. I still furrow my brow and tense my brain as if it were any other muscle and unless I am in that posture, I do not consider myself to be paying attention. This very idea has driven me from sitting meditation practice because who wants to sit and squint for 20 or 30 minutes? So I am trying something new: since I seem to be rather efficient in taking care of my work duties, and then spend the rest of the time trying to keep my attention attenuated like perfectly cast fishing wire, I think I will add to the entries here during these moments at work. Some old middle manager voice in my head is affronted that I would write in a personal blog during work hours but I have no real schedule these days and really, is it better for me, my productivity, my creativity, my attention, to pace the thin office carpet and disturb others with my mumbled self-talking, or will I keep my thinking fluid by writing during these lulls?

I am curious, if for nothing else, to see how this experiment changes my relationship to work and the idea of work. It could use some updating, some sudden enlightenment.

auction block

Last Independence Day, I laid down on my old mattress on the living room floor, before sundown, and felt closer to suicide than ever in sobriety. I remember thinking that a short walk to the emergency room and a 5150 was going to happen. But I did not have the energy to get up and dress. The only thing stopping me from getting help was the only thing stopping me from killing myself–complete paralysis. I remember how disgusting I felt physically; how everything ached in a marrow way; I wanted nothing more than to die, quickly, completely; I felt alone and beyond touch. I remember hearing the fireworks and wishing they were bombs that would do the work that my bound limbs could not do.

I made it through that long night by saying the serenity prayer over and over whenever i was not unconscious. I would wake to terror, the still, hot air and what felt like a bleeding atmosphere. The entire night screamed without sounds. I recognized where I was, on the floor, on that stained mattress, and I wanted to die again, so I said it, God, grant me the serenity, to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Thy will, not mine, be done. Over-and-again; nothing else mattered, nothing else existed.

A few days ago, as I began to feel the stale air within my head that signifies depression, I realized that this was only the third 4th of July that I would pass sober. Three times. There is very little that I have done for the third time without error and difficulty. I relaxed myself a bit, after this calculation, but I also prepared myself for what was to come. Today. My mattress is no longer on the floor in the living room (in fact it is in Fresno with some airplane mechanic,) but my new bed hosts me once again on the 4th. I loathe people; I actually heard myself declare misanthropy this afternoon. I loathe myself; I loathe the minutes and the hours; I loathe the sticky heat and the molting pavement. my head aches from sinus and my eyes are watery and tired, dry from the constantly running fans and my body exhausted from its malady. I am sick. That is all. Head and body, sick.

I refuse to call s.; I am nursing a resentment against her for not offering her help. I told her a few nights ago that I needed help living, the remedial things, cleaning, eating, laundry. She only calls timidly, and says sorry that I’m having a hard day, but she never offers to come over and take care of me. Maybe it’s not her job, but that’s what I need and I don’t need a girlfriend right now to go on dates with and have sex with; I need someone to take care of me, to nurture me back to health. She is incapable of such things; she is selfish and young, and is too dull-witted to even perceive the need. I resent her for not being what I need her to be and I am punishing her by withdrawing. I could call her, alternatively, and vent my spleen, so withdrawing is at once aggressive and kind.

I don’t have many others to call upon, and those that I normally would seem almost comically unavailable. N. and M. both have disappeared, refusing to return calls and never reaching out themselves. I am in a very familiar place. Alone, without the comfort of prayer or meditation, without the comfort of people, without the comfort of alcohol or drugs, and suffering from what I am almost completely convinced now is mental illness. Crazy and alone. Worse off than most and ignored by them. and it is an insulting, teasing isolation. if the phone rang right now i would scoff, look at the caller ID, and ignore the call, to spite them, to hope that they would worry about my absence. I need help, I want to ask for help but I don’t know who to ask and I don’t know what to ask for. I need company, I need medical attention, I need someone to give me a hand living, to keep me company, because the memories and the nightmares are driving me completely unhinged. This is the truth, and it is unpleasant. I hear critical voices in my head, the audience that is never really there, they tell me that I should stop pitying myself and take action. I am a powerful agent, I can make a change, I can do more than sob from underneath the duvet. I believe them; I feel the shame of not trying.

Then I see that this fiction has dogged me forever. This egotistical presumption that I can change things by myself, that it is really just a matter of pulling bootstraps and changing perspective. The fact that I am even writing is a grand triumph worthy of 40 tons of that self-reliant puritan action. Why do I think I should be able to croak like a toad because others tell me that that is the way to move beyond depression and self-consumption? I am doing all that I can, and what is happening must happen to me from here-on-out. My action only heightens the fever.

I denigrate my spiritual practice when I feel like this; I tell myself that I must be a fraud and that my spiritual life is conceptual and coffee-table conversation. Why, if I were truly touching something genuine and divine, would I find myself in such a dark place? I imagine God tapping fingers waiting for me to figure out what I need to do to feel better, what perspective, how much to squint one eye and and hold the other’s gaze to see the redemption. I think of how I have not always felt like this, how at times I have felt euphoric and certain of my intimacy with God, and I wonder what I have done to knock myself so far off course.

Again, it reduces to my, to my agency to my effort, and on some level i suppose that is meant to be comforting, but at this point, my helplessness, my true state of being completely and utterly defeated, would be a relief that no satiation knows. I am defeated; I have taken the action that I am most capable of, writing these words, and my action has led me to conclude that I am defeated. What does one do when he is defeated? He becomes a slave; he obeys what is told him, and his gaze reaches no further than his master. I am enslaved; I must find my salvation in this slavery and seek only the will of my commander. I don’t know how to see myself as a slave, but the brand is there on my soul, and my imagination and ego distort my vision, but what I feel urges me to submit, let go, follow.

Sub For: Acceptance

I can become so suddenly irritated, and then my anger could consume the world. Annoyed, disappointed, frustrated with my girlfriend. She is constantly in a state of worry and I am normally able to laugh it off, tease her gently, and be supportive. Lately, though, I am simply exasperated as a first response. The thing that has been getting at me lately is her intractable vigilance looking for symptoms of mania in my behavior. She is scarred from my infidelity last year, I know; this time reopens those wounds just as an anniversary allows celebration. I can summon compassion when I think that her concern of my behavior as it relates to bipolar disorder stems from her vulnerable fear that it’s not just high energy and sudden, considerable spending, but soon will be promiscuity. Fine.

But I so much want to make this a personal flaw of hers. She can’t be excited for the way I’m renovating my wardrobe and A/V needs in my apartment; she will always prioritize worry before excitement, suspicion before enthusiasm for new projects. She can’t and won’t join me in my enthusiasm and not only abstains but by her very silence (and occasionally, timid questioning about my motives) suffocates my own excitement. Oh, no, we can’t be happy about a symptom of a psychiatric diagnosis.

Bullshit. Even if I were to concede that this is an elevated hypomania and may get out of hand unless I resume mood stabilizers I cannot automatically say that my symptoms are always and everywhere alarming. I hate this diagnosis; now any outrageous or wildly unusual behavior is a sign of a mood episode rather than self-expression.

This is not always true. I know that she is piecing together bits of evidence and is probably concerned because I am in grave debt already, borrowing money to pay my rent, and still accruing about $1k in credit card debt in a few weeks, on clothes and electronics. I’m furious with her lack of excitement and companionship, yet I can also admit I am given a slight pause to reconsider my behavior. I wouldn’t take this time to pause if I weren’t able to be candid with myself; I wouldn’t be this deliberative if I were afraid of contradiction. I mean, I plan to go to Costco tomorrow and refill a prescription I have for lithium. I haven’t taken lithium in four months and, although I have half of a bottle at home, I want to ensure that I have enough in case I get really angry and decide it’s time to swallow them all. That sounds dramatic, but it’s really just sensible. It forestalls the actual act, too, if I plan and gather and prepare. I have had thoughts again recently, for the first time in many, many months.

Today is Easter, too. This stuff never respects holidays.

The Sad, Beautiful Fact

Via @nprnews: The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything