Morning. I realize, surfacing to consciousness gradually, who I am, what has happened. Sadness first. Crushing heaviness in the chest, pain like a jagged bullet blast through the heart. What reason is there to get up?
Then, as necessity dawns, dread. Pulse-quickening fear. Ripples of anxiety burning through my gut like a sulphurous acid. What will I do today? What will I do tomorrow? How will I live? And what, exactly, do I have to live for?
I want to go back to sleep, but the adrenaline won’t let me relax. My racing thoughts are running a familiar track. Going over and over the abysmal loop about the little girl whose dreams never seemed to come true, who grew old alone, destitute, scarcely having lived life, as the world’s ecosystem and economy disintegrated around her.
At that point the only course of action seems clear. And it ain’t sending out résumés.
**
49:49:2. These numbers popped into my head the other day. My coach friend has pressed me to talk about my “dreams,” has encouraged me to run wild with my imagination, and I’ve had trouble explaining why this prodding feels so cruel to me. I might elaborate now that my life often seems to me to have consisted of 49 percent daydreams, 49 percent suffering, and 2 percent actual living.
You see, from the time I was a very young child, I have always been able to vividly imagine the way I would like things to be. And I typically suffered (from feelings ranging in intensity from mere disappointment to heartbreak and total despair) when what actually happened around me — nearly all of the time — was radically different from what I envisioned. (Woody Allen dealt with this conflict between imagination and reality brilliantly in The Purple Rose of Cairo.) Those rare times when there was a match, or more accurately a near-match, between what I wanted and what really occurred, make up the other 2 percent. Some might call me lucky for ever hitting that 2 percent. Some might say, “Welcome to the real world, sweetheart!” Then there are those who would fault me, like the Christians with their mustard seeds, for not having faith enough.
I wonder, in response: how can a young child who believes in Santa Claus and the resurrection not have faith enough?
So I can’t help but react viscerally when asked about my dreams. Especially at times like these, when everyone wants to know what I intend to do with my life. If I could even tell you, friends, would it matter? At 41, is the question even still relevant?
All this historic angst resurfaces when the routines and relationships and duties that have defined me and paid my way for a time are completely stripped away, and I’m left with the pressing immediate question of survival — but also the perennial (and still unresolved) question of life purpose. While the clock keeps ticking.
**
“Unknown” called again on my cell yesterday. “Unknown” has been calling me a lot lately.
If I pick up, I know I’ll most likely hear Officer Frank Lipinsky from the Fraternal Order of Police or Sargeant George Dodd from Disabled Veterans of America or Something Somebody Something from the Society for Blind Homeless Mormon Puppies making a persistent guilt appeal to me for money I don’t have.
If I don’t pick up, I can pretend it’s Sonny (to borrow an old alias of his), calling to see how I’m doing, if I’m okay, if I want to meet somewhere. He’s blocked his number because he’s not completely sure he’ll be ready to talk to me if I pick up. He didn’t respond electronically, after all, when I replied to his brief expression of concern with a heartfelt plea to stay connected.
So I don’t pick up. As usual, there’s no message.
You see how my imagination works?
**
I honestly don’t know what I mean to this man, now, if I mean much of anything to him anymore. I only know what he’s meant to me, and if you’ve been reading me attentively for a while, I don’t have to tell you. He did liberate himself, at last, from the clutches of one of those Fascinating Women who look supermodel-pretty from a short distance, but when you get close to them you see the perpetual discontent drawing down the corners of their mouths (rendering them oddly plain), and hear the chronic disapproval dripping from their voices. I extended her the benefit of the doubt way past its expiration date because I honestly believed she was contributing to Sonny’s happiness.
When it’s quiet at night I think I can hear the dull thwack of him rebounding off of half a dozen headboards around the city. I know the opportunities are there, attractive and ruby-ripe for the picking, and he’s definitely got the appetite (as well as some of the attributes) of a young Warren Beatty. Now that he doesn’t have to behave, he’ll probably be making up for lost time. (I once likened his pleasure-loving nature to that of a five-year-old boy left alone with a tub of ice cream.)
It’s all right, folks; I don’t own him. I know I’ve never had any claim to him in the slightest. None of us ever really do, even if we decide to play by the rules and stand up in front of a person of the cloth or the law and repeat after him or her. We made that stuff up to create a safe boundary, to protect our vulnerability, to not have to relive the irrecoverable losses of our helpless childhoods. The fact is that people are born free, and if what they really need to do isn’t what we would have them do…well, if we love them enough to want them to follow their bliss, we’ve got to let them go. (Once in a while, as happened for the fortunate Joseph Campbell and his wife, two people decide that being together is folllowing their bliss.) From almost the very beginning, three years ago, I knew I’d found a soul brother I would have to wish the best, even if he wound up breaking my heart into a million bleeding pieces.
You may not want me to feel the way I do about Sonny, either, but that’s what I’ve elected to do with my freedom.
**
A friend and I go to see “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Brad Pitt, comely as he is, has never been my favorite actor, but the film is deeply affecting because it’s essentially about change, and, ultimately, loss.
The title character, a man aging in reverse, weathers everything that happens to him with a sort of melancholy equanimity. Raised in a home for the elderly, he becomes used to seeing his companions vanish and new ones take their place. When Benjamin, in his wizened early twenties, finally comes to know the father who abandoned him at birth, he brings the fatally ill man out to the lake where he was happiest. One of the film’s most memorable quotes occurs as son and dying father watch the sun rise over the lake: “You can be as mad as a mad dog at the way things went, you can swear and curse the fates, but when it comes to the end, you have to let go.”
I don’t know about you, but at twice his age I’m still having trouble with that.
Benjamin knows, too, when to exit stage right, when his lifelong love Daisy is obviously not open to being with him — first at a smoky, boozy dancers’ after-show party in New York City where she is surrounded by male admirers (he walks away), and later after a crippling injury in Paris robs her of her livelihood and her pride (she sends him away).
Eventually they will “meet in the middle,” when he has grown substantially younger physically and she has grown substantially older emotionally. Of course Benjamin has no way of knowing if their time will ever come; that’s one thing that makes his surrender to the inexorable conditions of the present all the more admirable.
I can let my time at the studio go, the way Benjamin let his father go: mad as a mad dog at the way things went, swearing and cursing the fates, yet knowing when the end is the end.
But Sonny…I can’t go there. Not now. I can only hope for Benjamin’s equanimity, the gracious exit stage right after seeing the crowded room and the competition (and, perhaps, the injury). The time isn’t right; we aren’t welcome.
Maybe someday.
**
Like Benjamin, my life’s trajectory has been shaped more by haphazard coincidences and personal connections than by some grand overarching plan. His early years were played out on small stages: a house, a tugboat, a hotel — while mine were equally circumscribed by classrooms, kitchens, bookstores, and coffeeshops. I was 38 when I left the country for the first time and traveled to Italy. (That was my “2 percent“ year, the year of exceptions, the year I met Sonny. I could write an entire post on that spring, broad and sunny with possibility like the early years of life.) I honestly can’t imagine what it’s like to be someone who knows exactly what she wants to become from childhood and spends her life pursuing that path. My ideas kept changing: today, a nurse; tomorrow, an artist; the day after, a veterinarian; or, on second thought, maybe an actress; a mother; a pilot; a poet.
The only constants along the way, truthfully, were a burning desire for approval, and an even fiercer desire to be loved by those who elicited my own affections.
Which is funny, really, given the way things have turned out. As if everything that has happened since was meant to teach me that in order to maintain my integrity I might have to relinquish those very fundamental desires. Just as an example, I can introduce you to a few people at my former job who definitely don’t approve of me (!), but I didn’t submit to their bullying in order to be liked — did I?!
As for the second part…well, I’ve discovered along the way that it’s true what the otherwise astringent Christian mystic Anthony DeMello postulated: that the human spirit needs to love more than it needs to be loved. (He identified our two basic existential needs as to love and to be free.) For sure, not getting what you were after from the people you think you love will inevitably teach you the meaning of “unconditional.”
**
A fairly random, heart-driven existence, with no great accomplishments to cite: this has been my résumé, much like that of the curious Mr. Button. I only wish that I were aging in reverse right now. My chronic pain has been intensifying recently, perhaps as a response to all the new stresses. A friend of a friend who does Network Spinal Analysis has just told me that I’ve stored multiple traumas, both physical and emotional, in my spine, and that the blockages are cutting off my healthy nervous system functioning. (This is also, apparently, the reason why I’ve spent so much time in the overstimulated state of fight-or-flight.) It could be treated, if I had several hundred dollars to spend, but right now I’m more likely to be treating every dollar like a plank in my life raft, and seeing what I can cut out of my grocery bill.
The uncertainty and anxiety of poverty and unemployment in dismal economic times, the specter of encroaching physical breakdown and even disability, the prospect of being forced to give up my home and return to the bleak Northeast to live stifled within my relatives’ claustrophobic closet of millennial Puritanism… all of these things have driven me, in recent days, to the handrail of George Bailey’s bridge, staring at the water, wild-eyed. (Where’s that paunchy, bulb-nosed angel when you need him?)
**
Which is where we began. TAKAHO, my best friend from college always says: Tie A Knot And Hang On. I know my body can’t withstand another bruising stint in food service. The prospect of cubicles and fluorescents and sales calls gives me waves of existential nausea. I don’t even know whether I should put the yoga studio on my résumé, or how to talk about what happened there. The mere thought of paging or clicking through classifieds and job boards, attempting to find a round hole I can try to force my square peg into, is enough to make me break into a sweat.
The world of cold, hard survival is no place for choosy daydreamers.
And yet…the little girl still daydreams. Of kindred spirits and of giving help, of creating, of contributing, of having enough.
What she needs right now, frankly, is a miracle.
**
Sonny once wrote to me, “ask and you shall receive” — the irony of which was utterly lost on him. It’s a thing I have only found true, myself, that lucky 2 percent of the time. It’s hard to hear that particular Bible verse quoted, at any rate, when part of you is convinced Jesus fast-forwarded through all your fervent, begging childhood messages, including that one about Grandma’s cancer. Nevertheless, like those raving Secret people, I try to visualize the checks coming in (from where?) and to imagine fortuitous meetings and life-altering chance encounters. We can’t all be Forrest Gump, but poet David Whyte has mapped his life that way in the past, and he’s not exactly a member of the rah-rah manifestation crowd. The angel intervened when George Bailey was at the end of his rope and out of ideas (except for a very permanent solution to a temporary problem). If ever I needed a freakish coincidence, the time is now.
So I’ll refrain from drinking bleach for the moment, and let myself surrender and fall. As if there really are forces working in my favor. Even if the forces amount to nothing more than my belief that forces are working in my favor. I just don’t know. Maybe, sometimes, you simply have to trust that the net will appear.
As Benjamin’s adoptive mother Queenie was fond of saying, you never know what’s comin’ for you.
FORREST GUMP sucked, and BENJAMIN BUTTON was written by the same guy. Only thing is, with the nominations due out soon, there’s no clear PULP FICTION this year. That, I think, is part of the problem: you don’t see a clear alternative to the pablum.
You’ve been dealt a pretty depressing hand, right at the beginning of the year. But remember, along with not having the monetary and vocational stability that you had at that yoga studio, you’re also free of all the chaos and head-into-brick-wall frustration. (What, *me* look on the bright side of anything?…) Time to look them in the karmic third eye and say to ‘em, “Look: at least masturbation brings an orgasmic release of serotonin and oxytocin. What the fuck have *you* jokers done for me lately? Certainly not even that much.”
There is no purpose to life, other than what you bring to it. My (unsolicited) bachelor advice to you is to invest that freedom of action into experiencing as many of the good things in your life as thoroughly as you can. Simple idea, but not that hard to pull off, if you give it a chance. Won’t make the bad things go away, but will help to pass the bad times, until better times come around.
As for this Sonny character: I say fuck ‘im. (In the *good* way.)
I’d add, if you can’t experience the good things at the moment – if you do them but find you’re not experiencing them as good – don’t despair. No one stipulates we have to feel ok all the time.
{{{hugz}}}
It’s too soon, it’s too soon. Far too soon to know how to talk about it, etc.
‘letting go … having trouble with that’
- m’dear, everyone has trouble with that. We don’t need to get things 100% right before being allowed to enjoy life.
‘the human spirit needs to love more than it needs to be loved’
- this makes me think of parenting, which proves that.
The thing that has got me through a lot of times is: It can’t get worse, so it will get better.
The giving-up in your final two paragraphs gives me hope that you’ll be fine. The miracle’s just round the corner. Stop looking for it though – can’t tell you how many times in my life this has come true. While you’re wondering what kind of miracle it will be, it won’t be. When you let yourself fall, you’ll land in safe arms.
No supporting evidence for this. But it works.
Of course the other thing that gets me through very often is: This isn’t for ever.
Mand: my coach friend always says (re things not being forever) “It’s only a moment.” The thing that scares me is that I can imagine *just how much worse* it could get!
I appreciate your kindness and your exhortations for patience with myself and the process.
Russ: I think you totally missed my point about BB due to film snobbery. Kudos, though, for managing to work in yet another reference to masturbation.
I feel your pain. I too am a dreamer in this world of chaos who “feels” that there is meaning and peace in this life, but somehow can’t quite manifest it.
I woke up this morning wanting to stay mad about the night before – wanting to close myself up to the world because it seems there aren’t any words to express how I feel, nor would anyone understand my strife anyway.
I just recently watched “The Power of Myth” by Joseph Campbell. I have had the DVD for over a year and just now got around to watching it…. my soul resonates with the idea of “follow your bliss”, but I’m still trapped in the prison I have created for myself by my lack to stand up for my right to bliss. I’m always trying to please and unconditionally love the other, and therefore leaving myself in the corner with my head down.
Oh well, I guess “this too shall pass”
Yes, I know I must be disappointing you by only offering the PG-13 version, but I figure it’s still early in the discussion, so I’ll save the hard R and NC-17 remarks for when things seem altogether hopeless.
“What the difference between an optimist and a pessimist? A pessimist says, ‘It can’t get any worse than this.’ An optimist says, ‘Oh, sure it can.’”
–Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff), THE WEST WING
If you can imagine how much worse things can get, you can also imagine how much better they can be. It’s the same set of muscles. I know it seems difficult, like nothing ever works. But more often than not, that’s just your depression talking; it may not be as simple as “looking on the bright side”, but dwelling on the negative isn’t going to help much. Our species (not to mention our classmates) have a long tradition of pie-in-the-sky idealism, what most call daydreaming. Times like this, I think, What’s wrong with that? Time to let your vivid imagination pay some dividends. Just keep thinking to yourself, “Reverse cowgirl.”
FORREST GUMP still sucks. I’ll have to see BENJAMIN BUTTON, since it’s most likely going to get several nominations, and the director is David Fincher, who I think is pretty fucking cool. So as your attorney, I advise you to get royally wasted and watch FIGHT CLUB. (That being the last time Fincher and Brad Pitt worked together.) It’ll do you good.
PS – My Crazy Roommate just got laid off, now she’s talking about moving back to Pennsylvania. Whatever you’ve got, it’s going around.
Sagenhoney: It’s nice to see you back here. I envy your knowing what your bliss is, and I encourage you whenever possible to stand up for it!!! I would definitely not equate loving people with having to please them, though. The Aforementioned Gentleman would probably NOT be pleased with what I wrote here, but I still had to write it for my own sake. If there’s anything I know for sure, it’s that it’s ultimately not within our control how other people feel about us. Nor is it up to them how we feel about them…
Russ: I think I speak for everyone here when I say thanks for sparing us the raw stuff.
BB starts off on the eve of Katrina, and I was just thinking about how privileged-white and bourgeois the idea of entitlement to our individual happiness seems in the light of such (all too common) catastrophes…when I saw footage in 2005 of the dark-skinned bodies floating in the Ninth Ward (or, for that matter, the bodies of Palestinian civilians being pulled from the rubble just recently) I knew that *that could have been me.* I wasn’t alive in the 30s, but I read The Grapes of Wrath. Some people didn’t survive the crash and the Dust Bowl, and I don’t subscribe to the exceptionalism that says that just because I’m educated and borderline middle-class, I’ll somehow make it through whatever happens.
Maybe I don’t have to make it. The sun doesn’t rise and set because of me. Maybe, as Wallace Stevens wrote, the health of the world is enough. Obama was a man apparently born blessed with knowing what he wanted to do, or maybe what he had to do, and I’m glad we’ve got him driving the bus now. Thank god (pardon the expression) for people like him.
I did see Fight Club — horribly violent, but I basically liked it. It made me feel really bad for men.
Of course you have to make it–what else are you going to do? The sun doesn’t *have* to rise and set with you–that’s one of the things that makes it the sun. And while it’s good to be humbled by nature and your (our) insignificance in The Scheme of Things, you ought not to lose sight of yourself. The trick, then, is to give yourself your due without having to imagine yourself in a larger context, while at the same time not getting depressed over the seeming meaninglessness and futility that depression brings (and, yes, depression is the cause of these feelings, not the result).
Best of luck with that balancing act. I have the emotional advantage of having been born arrogant.
Funny that FIGHT CLUB should make you feel sorry for men; I view it as a satire of militant feminism (think Ellen James Society). Definitely a guy movie, though. Holds up to repeated viewings, and may very well help you to feel better about yourself. (Guy-advice if there ever was–)
Also: have you seen the movie WHAT DREAMS MAY COME?
AlienBaby: In regards to the individual happiness (and human suffering) comment…. I think that ultimately we DO have to look past our illusioned separations and dualities and focus more on the collective concept that we are all spiritual/limitless beings who are having a temporary human experience, and that regardless of our coordinates in this sphere, the money we have or lack there of, our class, color and age …the essential/core of what we “feel” (whether it be pain, happiness, and so on) is equal in its effect even though the degree seems different.
There is no Other, and there is no Glass (?)
http://www.yuwie.com/clubs/board/view.asp?id=11536&pid=49215
On another note… Fight Club was a strange and violent movie, but the overall plot was good. I haven’t seen BB yet, but plan too. What Dreams May Come is one of my favs, along with
The Fountain
A more mellow version… “Joining You”
Hey, this post seems to have generated more hits and more comments than anything else has in a while.
Russ: You know, I was thinking more of the monologue from Hamlet. But I did see that movie a decade ago. I didn’t remember the plot, so I went and looked it up on IMDB. I forgot Robin Williams has to go pull Annabella Schiorra out of her suicide-hell…isn’t that funny. (!)
Sagenhoney: I’m positive Russ won’t agree, but I hear the truth in what you’re saying. Excessive individualism can be a kind of disease. Those AM lyrics remind me of something I wrote a while back, I think it was the Demolishing History post, about being bigger than anything that happens to me. (The Fountain was Darren Aronofsky, right? Haven’t seen it, but I like him.)
Mand was quite right — miracles come when you least expect them. I’ll leave it at that for now.
Hey, don’t get me wrong–some of my *best friends* are hippies (not to mention my erstwhile Crazy Roommate). Remember, I’m advocating pie-in-the-sky idealism, if it’ll help you get through whatever travails are besieging you at the moment. To be bigger than whatever happens to you–that’s a good working definition of individuality. And if excessive individualism is a disease, then I suppose you can nominate me as posterboy, sure. And so as such, I’ll advocate seizing your self, not letting go. In your post, you talking about surrendering and falling. I say no: if you’re in freefall, now’s the time to spread your wings and fly.
Before I pursue that one, let me talk about why I brought up Vincent Ward’s excellent WHAT DREAMS MAY COME: it has perhaps the best secular concept of hell I’ve yet come across. Annabella Sciorra’s character isn’t being punished for her suicide. She is simply living in a place with no memory of the good things in her life. Yes, she lost her children and then her husband; but when she lets loss erase the joy of having had those things in the first place, she consigns herself to a place of darkness and despair. And as I said, the same emotional and mental musculature that can being depression can also bring bliss. Life’s an acid trip: it’s all set and setting. Get freaked out, and your trip will be a bummer. Surround yourself with things that you like and enjoy, and it becomes transcendent. Miraculous, even.
So trip carefully.
PS — THE FOUNTAIN is fairly good, though it should be taken for what it is. A lot of people didn’t like the future chapter of it, but I thought it was visionary and fit the story just fine.
The mind can make a heav’n of hell and a hell of heav’n, said Mr. Milton. Agreed on that point…
I don’t know anything about flying, I just know sometimes you need something good to happen.
Sartre said much the same as Milton, though Sartre was being more negative.
My own take on the dreadful imaginings is to decide not to suffer the worst before it happens; plenty of time to suffer it when/it does, and if it doesn’t, you’ll feel a fool having spent all that time suffering it earlier.
As for this trauma being not worth the time and energy – i can’t find it on this page but i’m sure people/you have been saying it – it’s also not worth the trouble of trying not to spend the energy on it. Meaning, we can prolong pain by trying too hard to feel that it ‘shouldn’t’ hurt.
In Alexander technique there’s a thing of thanking the painful muscles for looking after you – say it was a tense neck, you thank the neck for protecting you, and reassure it that it can let go now, danger’s over (if it ever existed, but you don’t argue that point with your neck). This is instead of making any effort to make the muscles relax or release tension. That can be translated to feelings methinx: explaining this is getting tricky but i trust your imagination (good ol’ imagination) to get you there.
I’m glad you took my words as kindness – they were meant as such but later i was afraid they’d come across brusque.
Mand, the post about what happened at my work/community/de facto temple is “Adventures in Negativity.” It was way more than just a job…I compare it to leaving the church I grew up in.
That’s some of the best advice I’ve gotten yet. You’re right, a lot of the “shoulds” just make it worse. Like – what’s the matter with you that you can’t get over this/that you feel this way?
I wonder what would happen if I started thanking my seized-up shoulder.
You have always been nothing but kind. I appreciate it.
Oops. You can copy my comment onto the correct post if it matters enough! That’s what comes of following conversations in My Comments.
With your shoulder – i’m certain nothing bad would happen.
First, I like your multiple-vignette writing style. Second, my reaction was: hold on — what you want out of life is irrelevant to who? Who gets to tell you that what you want to do with your life doesn’t matter? Whoever it is, I find myself wanting to kick their ass.
Hey, you clicked over from Urban Monk, didn’t you? You’re that guy I thought was so funny!
Thanks for the compliment. It’s more of a collective consciousness thing, the idea that these are the hardest of times so you’d better just take what you can get (or you’ll be out on the street with all the new homeless). You’d be kicking the asses of a majority of newscasters and journalists, not to mention my family and a lot of my friends and acquaintances.
(Don’t ask me what I’m doing up so late – I keep weird hours now that I’m unemployed!)