Friday on the Downhill Slide.

It's January, 2013. I am officially four years older than my dad. I made it.

I'm not sure what that means, or if it means anything at all. 

When I first began therapy my expectations were broad and shallow. I wanted to get my professional life back under control. I was tired of feeling sad all the time. There were moments when I was so angry it frightened me. I was exhausted from swinging like a pendulum between these two poles. 

Doctor, I'm broken. My dad was a shrink so I'm familiar with the schpiel: "the therapist only points in the right direction. It's up to the patient to walk the path." Yeah, fine, whatever. Fix me already.

 

I wanted to keep looking out to the horizon, same as always, Mr. Intellectual, suspended at a critical distance from himself. My therapist made me look down and see all the ankle-snapping potholes that perforated the tarmac underfoot. Awareness of potholes in the road--stage one, check. Stage two: avoid potholes, check. One, two, one, two, one, two.

Nothing worthwhile is easy. 

I don't want to revisit my dad's death every January, any more than I want to accept that I'll be a flat-butted hairy Viking for the rest of my days, but walking backwards through life will eventually get you decapitated, right? That's the key to the trouble. Turn the problem around until it makes sense. Get the perspective nailed down, lest every step lead to a tumble. 

This isn't about dad anymore. It hasn't been about him for decades. It's about me. All of it, from the darkest moments when I think about chasing after him to the brightest, when it seems like everything is possible and within my reach, this revolving storm that hits the same point of land every twelve months is what I have become, sui paternis. I am more than my father's son. I am four years off the map and still going.

Maybe that means as much as I want it to mean.

Listen to Yourself.

Last night, while speaking with a friend, I learned that a former neighbor of hers had committed suicide. He left behind a trio of teenage kids and a wife.


37 years ago, as of next Tuesday, my own father did the same thing.

This fellow tried self-medicating, with alcohol.

So did my dad.

Today's keyword is hopelessness.

I don't know what prevented this fellow from getting some help. I can imagine myself in his shoes. Dad's blood runs in me. Combine that line with the thread of mental illness in my Mom's line and I get a sympathetic vibration for everyone in this tragedy.


The stigma that enshrouds mental illness gives resistance where almost any other medical condition would invite acceptance, the debate over health care costs notwithstanding. I wouldn't think twice about letting EMTs patch me up after a car accident. I *did* resist treatment for my own depression. I hung back out of shame. I made excuses, procrastinated, and continued to trip over my own feet for decades. What made the pain preferable to treatment? I didn't see it that way. I saw treatment as a prize far above my head and out of reach. Money, time, opportunity, what did it matter? I saw myself as hopelessly broken. There was no point in seeking therapy.

I wasn't entirely wrong in thinking depression would always be with me, either. It will. Depression's my cancer. I'm treating it with drugs and it's in remission. Past that point the analogy breaks down. It's an iffy thing at best to try and wish away a carcinoma but choice plays a big role with the healing process where mental illness is concerned. Therapy's taught me how to moderate the effects of depression. I've learned how to treat myself. I'm learning how to live with depression.

I've learned that hope never leaves. I couldn't see it because I'd pushed it out of sight.

And who am I? Ordinary. One red-haired, gawkish, muddling single adult white male. It has often felt like it's taken superhuman effort to keep myself going, but that's only me swimming through my own life. I am not special in the wider world of my kind.

You can do what I've done.

Try.  Please, try.

I can't ask it of my dad; it's too late.

It's not too late for you.

Turn and Turn.

Round and Round and Round it Goes.....

...Where it Stops Nobody Knows.

That's what sticks most in the craw when it comes to inner demons: they never stop having a say in your life. You wish they'd just go and stay gone.

Our media makes us addicts to the Miracle Cure.  Have a weight problem? Try the Zone, the Paleo, the Crawl, the Butterfly, the Strain. You're unhappy? Buy a car! An iPad Mini will put a smile on your face if the iPad didn't. Just get yourself a new house, a better job, more money, a man, a woman, Jesus, a baby, a submarine, a rocket-powered elephant, and all your problems will vanish. The message says internal turbulence has an external pacifier. Wouldn't that be lovely?

Your inner demons are a part of you. You were compelled to make them. You survived by staying hidden in their twists and folds. Then conditions changed. You grew up. You got out. The folds ceased to be protection; they caught your feet, tripped you up, held you back. You sought help and met your demons face-to-face for the first time. You came to understand them a little. Session by session you regained the control you'd handed them when the world was too hard to face any other way. You learned how to hold on when they fought back. You found you were strong enough on your own. Now you don't need them any more.

The inner demons don't know that, don't want to hear it, won't ever believe it. Their reality will forever be the nightmare that gave them purpose and they will always try to make you see the world through their eyes. You can dismiss them, calm them, quiet them, but forget about getting rid of them. They are part of your framework. You don't reach peace by waging war against yourself but by achieving a detente with the little bastards. They ruled you, once upon a time. You have to parent them to keep them quiet.

Periodically you'll slip and they'll drive you for a while.

Remember what you've learned and gently push them aside.

There is no Miracle Cure.

Healing comes one twist at a time.

Stormy Weather.

Hey. Looks to me like you're getting soaked out there.

You know you can come inside any time, right?

And therein lies the problem: translating awareness into action. It's easier to hold tight and hope for clear skies. The longer you wait, the easier waiting becomes, until the day when waiting is all you know how to do.

You got stuck out in the rain one step at a time. Quit thinking about retrieving safety in giant leaps. Go back to the tried and true method that you misused. Give yourself permission to take a step or two towards a place that's dry and warm instead. Keep at it.  That's what will make it into a habit.

One day you'll look up and realize you reached the sunshine all by yourself.

The End of the Road.

Is it?

The end of the road represents a choice. You can choose a new direction and move on.

The depressive's addendum to that moldy oldie "when one door closes, another one opens" is good to remember when you're trying to change where your feet tend to take you. (Hopefully you'll forgive the mixing of metaphors. That appears to be the leading indicator of today's personal climate.) The mentally ill know better than most how the doors tend to change shape the more you insist on the downward ride; how they get to be smaller, bleaker, less inviting, until the roads they lead to disappear into trackless forest.

The doors behind you often wind up locked. That's the toll for the road you've taken.

Don't give up on creating change within yourself but let go of the need for absolution. Changing your behavior is the best thing you can do for earning forgiveness. Just don't count on it. Don't expect it. Try to be a better person right now, this minute, then the next, and again, and again. Good habits accrue as the bad ones do, step by step. The straightest roads meander. Should they bend back towards a door that was once locked and you discover it's open again, celebrate your own growth for an instant. Absorb what it feels like to recover lost ground.

Big doors lead to smaller ones on bad roads. Make yourself turn around.

Pre-Turkeyfest Musings

The first rock opera I ever heard was Pete Townsend's collaboration with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, "Tommy". It came in a big two-record set with a full-color insert whose contents were partly graphic--illustrations in a style like Peter Max on acid, or is that redundant?--partly artfully-staged photographs. Here's Tommy's pinball machine on the beach. Here it is, nestled amongst scrub and deadwood. Here's the chrome of the pinball containing the world in mirrored backwards perfection. Here's Cousin Kevin, made out of thick plasticized strokes the width of your thumb, and here's the chair he used to torture Tommy, the stylized chunks of glass rising from the seat in jagged mountain ranges.

The metaphor of the chair was a regular feature in my therapy drawings. It wasn't a conscious choice on my part. I made the connection six years after I began drawing my way through healing. The messages in the photographs and art from Tommy penetrated deep and so cleanly I needed the shock of therapy to understand how profoundly they'd affected me. This is a chair, and also a prison cell, and a panic room with glass walls, a baby's crib and the dentist's chair from Marathon Man, where I played both Dustin Hoffman and Sir Lawrence Olivier. The chair was where I was supposed to be.

Pete and his buddies put that kid Tommy through an awful lot of crap. He witnesses his father murdering his mother's lover. Mother and father demand he blot the event from his memory. Tommy's a dutiful little kid and he does what any child desperate for his parent's love would do. He finds a way to bend to their will. He makes himself deaf, dumb and blind.

That doesn't sound outrageous to me. Adults put their kids through jarring realignments of what equals security all the time. What wouldn't you do to stay in the shelter of your parent's shadow? What would you sacrifice to keep them together if they were getting divorced? What would you willingly become to make one parent happy after the other has died? A puppet? A perfect student? A hellion? A china doll? A perpetual child?

Tommy's spell is broken when his mother shatters his mirror, the only physical thing he's reacted with since the murder. Does that mean his mirror was like a projection screen for his mind's eye? Maybe that was the idea. It sets him free. The circle is broken and he spills into the world as a prophet.

I have never experienced one overwhelming shift in self-perception from which all the days that followed were free of old weights (or chairs). My revelations have come as fast as I've been able to handle them. Sometimes that's in been in bunches, like a fistful of grapes. More often it's been a slog. I got out of my chair like an agoraphobic going to the grocery store, slowly, hesitantly, resentfully. Comfort and confinement combined make you a junkie for dependence. I hated that I hated letting go of such a crippling thing.

The chair rests discarded in the attic of my head. I stumble across it now and then. I know I don't fit there any more. You can't blame a guy for trying. It's scary out there.

May tomorrow give you many reminders of what you have to be thankful for. May you face no Cousin Kevins or Uncle Ernies over the dinner table. I wish you love and to be loved in return.

May you be free.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I walked into the world and the world bit me in the ass. I walked into relationships with my eyes closed and it bit me in the ass. I walked through life and life bit me in the ass.

Problems you can't see are kin to the crocodiles you can't see--they're the ones you should worry about.

Welcome aboard, 2012

And if it's the End of the World we have coming, then that's just fine. I choose to live, regardless of the consequences.

2011 was like traveling a comet's orbit around the sun. A case for extremes and instability....but without that parabola you'd never fledge. Be ready for the truth to come. You might as well. Truths come down the road blind and indifferent as a wrecking ball. One truth is that you'll fledge multiple times over your life. Adulthood is a state of mind leveraged against the constant pressures of swimming in the stream. Some days you'll stand fast. Other days you'll be swept off your feet. Accept that big dreams demand big risks.

Swim back to shore. Stand up again.

Boy, you're gonna carry that weight.

...really? You sure about that?

I swear you don't have to.