October 22, 2022
Mary is right. I should give some time to writing just for myself, with no imagined audience. I feel like it’s my best writing, where my voice is strongest and sharpest, and where I discover the most. It’s almost a clue – if I get bogged down figuring out just the right way to say something I’m probably off track. I know that’s the opposite of what every writer and writing coach says (“that’s not writing, that’s typing!”). But for me it’s how to get it out, and more than that, how to find my way there. Because when I start writing I don’t know what I’m going to find or what I’m going to learn. It’s almost like tumbling down a hill (except, fun). All this terrain, that had been unknown to me.
Mary says I should put it into a blog: “Notes to Myself.” Is it exactly what it is, though? Or is it more like, “Notes for Myself.” What about “Findings”? Are they always findings? I think they often are. That’s why, when I start, a lot of the time I don’t know where it’s going to take me. So it isn’t just the “findings.” It’s also the process of being drawn toward something. Is it a process of following something? Like, the wind? Sort of. But it feels more like being pulled, as though I have allowed myself to slip into its stream. “Slipstream”? You follow the wind; you get carried by the wind. Spirited away? “Windswept!” “Tumbleweed?” I like how it bobbles along. Windstream? I like it but it is the name of a recreational vehicle, isn’t it? “Slipstream” is cool, and the official definition feels right – being drawn along behind some kind of mass. It is also drafting, which makes me think: “Draft.”
Which also has a perfect double meaning. Because if I write this way, everything will be a draft. But also, I will be drafting behind – whatever that is, that I follow and that pulls me along – or at least makes it much easier to go forward. And, it is so much easier there – why would I travel anywhere else? I draft in the slipstream.I would like to impose some kind of structure. Should it be as simple as, a new entry every day? Yes, it should. Is it weird that the most recent thing always comes first? A little. But I guess you could always reorder it so that last thing you wrote comes last.
And what about editing previous entries? I’m not sure. Maybe a quick cleanup, but new sentences, new paragraphs? I don’t think so. The problem is, my ideas spread like weeds. Wherever I plant myself, new ones spill out, and spill over what I’ve already written. Spreading in a new direction, or covering over what was already there. I think each day I should plant myself anew, and see where the weeds spread. Do I really want to call my work “weeds”? No I do not. But my words seem to spread out so profusely. Maybe it’s like vines, or ivy? I wonder if there’s a kind of plant that spreads out over the ground, fast. It does sound like a weed. Is it bad if my writings are like weeds? It sounds bad. What are weeds? At the least, they are plants that grow fast where you don’t want time. They are what grows instead of or at least along with what you actually want to grow. They compete with and overgrow cultivated plants, that are beautiful or that you can eat. They unbalance whatever environment they enter in to. I really can’t find a damn thing to say about weeds that is good, or that I would like my writing to be like!
But think: the earth, long ago, before life formed, was nothing but rock. Rocky surface, rock all the way down. And then somehow life, plant life got a foothold. And it replicated, and new forms developed, and lo, it spread across the earth! That was not weeds. That was life, extending itself and unfolding in all directions. Covering the earth. So what is that? From the rock’s point of view, I guess, infestation. But of course, the rock got to still be there. And will always be there, even if all life ends. So maybe what I’m doing, or what it feels like I’m doing, or what it feels like my ideas do by themselves if I let them loose, is spreading life (plant life, is what it feels like) out over what had been dead surface. But no: allowing life to spread out – almost in whatever direction I point it – or at least, it starts out in that direction and who knows where it goes from there. Over hill and dale. And of course, part of why I don’t know where it is going to go is because the terrain is uneven, and I don’t know what is over them thar hills! SO much of the fun is finding out. And covering it with life, or letting it be covered with life.It is somewhere in between. I am doing something. I am, I guess, even creating. But it is so easy, because I am drafting. Following the wind.
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November 10, 2022
This blog is about how to find some peace in an emotionally turbulent life. I go into this knowing that everybody has their ups and downs, and that life is challenging for everybody. As my friend Mark has said, we all suffer.I am acutely aware that I have always lived a fortunate life. I was born into comfort and security, was always loved, got a top-notch education, have had good friends, have a life partner who is a genuine soulmate, and have kids who are getting a good start in their adult lives and who we have fun with. The wolf has never been anywhere near my door and never will be. I don’t have much to suffer about.I wish I could say I’ve enjoyed my privilege more, but for some reason I haven’t. It’s so unearned. I know it doesn’t help anybody that I feel that way, and goodness knows I’m not looking for sympathy. I’m just providing some background. I am living proof that it is possible to have a life that feels hard even though there is nothing hard about it.What could possibly be hard in a life for which the skids have been greased from day one, and which has been blessed with good fortune at every turn? Well, think of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story Harrison Bergeron, where people have to wear helmets that blast noises of foghorns and explosions and sirens into their ears, over and over, all day every day.My life is hard in ways that are a little like that. I am overtaken, over and over, by what could be called abrupt and intense changes in mood. In fact, I was diagnosed years and years ago with a mood disorder, Bipolar Type 1; and even though, thanks to the miraculous effects of lithium, I don’t experience the extremes anymore, my moods have continued to be disordered, and have continued to disrupt my day to day life. That is what has made my easy life hard.In truth, it might not be accurate to call these disruptions changes of “mood.” Despair, perhaps, is a mood. But is fear a mood? Self-recrimination? Self-attack? Resentment? Contempt? Hatred? Suspiciousness? Feeling unliked? Feeling doomed? Feeling like you’ve fucked up in a way that can never be undone? Having a vague feeling that there is something you have to hide from everybody else? From yourself? These are more like violent ideas than moods. Or maybe like pain that spawns violent ideas that amplify the pain – a vicious circle. And of course, the violence can be directed at others or at oneself. Thankfully there are nicer moods. Gratitude. Generosity. Openheartedness. Relief. Joy. Humility. Peace. But, looking closer, should they be called “moods?” I don’t think they are moods or even ideas. I believe that they are simply our natural state – which is, in a word, love – and that the “bad moods” that I just named are disruptions of it. You might think, given my mental health history, that the emotional fluctuations that I’m describing are a kind of junior bipolar disorder, quieted by lithium. However: 1) it isn’t really that quiet; and 2) disruptions of the peace don’t have to be lows and highs. My emotions are disordered, but they aren’t, for most part, manic or depressive. To wit: mania is not peace. It is energy that builds and gets out of control, moving from hyperconfidence and elation to grandiosity, disorganization, paranoia, delusion, and psychosis. And although the disruptions that I experience can be components of depression, and probably causes of it, they are not themselves depression, thankfully. Bipolar depression is walking death.So I don’t think that I have been manic or depressive for a long time. Not all disordered feelings, even feelings that fluctuate between terrible and great, are bipolar disorders.----------------------------I don’t think most people are slammed around by their emotions like I am. But I’m pretty sure that most people experience some amount of emotional pain. It's hard for us to know exactly what anybody else might be feeling, because talking about shame and self-attack in ordinary conversation is a total downer and generally out of bounds. If everybody started doing it out in the open, people might stop going to work and society might begin to break down, for all we know.But I know from conversations with friends, and from watching how people act, and from the unending demand for self-help books, and from the fact that anybody who wants a therapist will probably have to get in line, that a lot of people do feel bad in these ways. Maybe not everybody, and maybe not that often, and maybe not that intensely. But a lot of people do. And even people who don’t think they do might be in denial. You never know.So I might not be exactly normal, but I don’t think I’m so alone in feeling bad in the kinds of ways I’ve mentioned. It may be unusual to experience wave after wave, and to be quite so stricken. But there is a certain advantage in being like me. I can hurt pretty bad, so I am highly motivated to make it stop; and I get chance after chance after chance to work with it. I’ve learned some methods of returning to OK. And OK is pretty good.----------------------------Life is a kind of laboratory that you can experiment in, trying this and trying that, keeping what works and refining our techniques. This makes it sound kind of fun, but unfortunately, it isn’t always, because sometimes what you are experimenting with is something that you’d like to get as far away from as possible. It doesn’t feel very good to realize that you’ve fucked up in a serious way and it can’t be fixed, or that you’ve ruined a relationship with a friend, or that it’s no surprise people don’t like you, or that you’ve wasted your life. And no matter how patiently you remind yourself that you are not fucked, that it’ll be OK with that friend, that you are lovable, and that you’ve built a good life, none of that is not going to change how you feel, or the reality that you see. To do that you will have to find those bad feelings within yourself, get as close as you can to them, and love them, which is the last thing you want to do. You will have to love your demons. You will in fact have to LAEL!® (Listen, Accept, and Envelop with Love.) But I get ahead of myself.----------------------------What I want is pretty simple. I want peace. I would like to be hit less often with the poisonous waves I’ve been talking about, and to be hit less hard. I want the sea to be more calm. I know there will always be waves, and that there’s no point in hating them or resisting them, because that just makes them hit harder, and last longer. I know that the best I can do is to not shy away from what hurts, and to let love in. I know that all of this is possible because I do it all the time.I think that all of us have to heal ourselves. I’ve gotten better at dealing with the disruptions that are a constant in my life, and I’ve learned some techniques that are usually helpful and at times seem almost miraculous. I’d like to share them. But I have my doubts. I have not mastered anything. Masters are not routinely afflicted by attacks of resentment, fear, shame, self-attack, a sense of having unfixably fucked up, etc. At least, I don’t think they are. How could they run a five-day retreat in Maui if that kind of thing were going on?So the best I can offer is a chronicle of my voyage, as I get blown off course (repeatedly!) and then reorient. You might see yourself in places, and if you do, I hope you find some comfort in being reminded that it isn’t just you. A little more ambitiously, I hope you will try out some of the methods that I describe, and I hope that they help.----------------------------It can be reassuring to know that we are not alone, and that some of what is happening within us happens within other people too, even if we don’t talk about it, and even though we want to avoid it. But when we do look, and when we see what we don’t like in ourselves (and in each other), we have a chance, even though our habits of criticism are very ingrained, to soften up and see with some kindness. Kindness can become a habit, too.That’s love and that’s what heals and we can see it for ourselves. All of my own experiments, with suffering and with healing, are built around a single hypothesis: love heals. There would be nothing good about love if it didn’t melt pain away, and bring peace, and feel really good. But it does. Don’t take my word for it, do the experiment. We have nothing to lose but our chains!