May the Days Be Aimless

May the days be aimless.  Do not advance the action according to a plan.

That’s from DeLillo’s White Noise via the filter of my memory.

I like the sound of those lines as much as anything, but some other things too, though I should mention that speaking these lines do not exactly solve the narrator’s problems.  He has a wee bit of trouble taking his own advice, and does in fact advance the action in his life according to a plan, and shall we say it’s a bit of a bad plan and goes disastrously, but not unamusingly.

But the thought–

I don’t suppose it would be practical to abandon all plans and be aimless, but I’m thinking that a little of this lightness and non-attachment could help sometimes.  Especially because non-aimlessness planified actions do not always seem to be entirely optimal in my case, not least because I sometimes have bad plans, or a combination of bad and good plans, or just a general crazed drivenness or obsessiveness.  These, of course, are not particularly productive even if they are well-meaning.

What works is me doing things toward goals but not always too narrowly defined–sometimes just directions–and not crazed plottingplanning.  And then once I’ve done some of each those things it would be better to let go and quite fussing with things or over things.

And aimless days–what a thought–like a dream.  May they be.

Because then I think there’s space for things to happen.

Jewelry and Despair

Those appear to be my latest topics, and maybe I’ll just alternate between those a lot. I can through in the pair “yoga and bleakness” too, so that I have a little rotation of ways to bounce between extremes.

Vitality and passion, suicidal gloom. That seems to be the landscape I’m moving in these days. I’m a typical addict in that way I suppose, no middle way carp when I can have intensity or just shut down and collapse or a bit of each.

Today I was back with some recovery people and this whole week, doing things with people that I normally do but have missed while away in hellworldfamilyland for the “holidays.” And I felt so connected at times but then would sink into utter sorrowful “everyone-wishes-i-were-dead” mode. I don’t know. Craziness. And then I wonder why I’m so exhausted.

I feel like I’ve aged a decade in this last year. Too much loss, too much suffering–some good stuff too but it all still takes its toll.

I was in DC at the Smithsonian and saw a pre-Raphaelite exhibit that pulled me in. Mostly it was photographs and just a few paintings, and in the photographs they’d be staging medieval scenes or often things like Tennyson poems, and this one that they included just says it all right now, the refrain from his poem “Mariana”:

She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!’

It pretty much fucking sucks to feel that way, but the slightly florid drama of phrasing it this way and in someone else’s words helps a little.  I also feel the opposite of this, at times, or at the same time as this, which is pretty fucking confusing.

Fuck.

Can Complain. But Too Tired.

I somehow got involved in a whole big holiday family get together type thing. I say this as if I had no control over it, which I suppose isn’t true, but it felt like it sort of happened in a larger way than I’d envisioned. Like many things do. It was okay though, really, can’t complain.

Can.

Can complain, about family things, things that aren’t said, that I carry. Can complain about stupidhead peoples and situations at work. Can complain that therapist did not have her usual appointment with me today because she’s spending that time with her lovely family instead of her dumb little client. Poor pathetic me, right? Dull, I know, but that’s how it goes. Actually it’s a lot more bottomless than that makes it sound. Plus, it’s old therapist never wanting to speak to me again in spite of promising to. Pain not going away. Depthless pit of hurt and woe and all that sort of thing. You know. Nothing new.

Can complain, of course I can. So: complain, complain. Same old things.

Could be worse. (Samuel Beckett’s style is creeping in here, so let’s roll with that). Could be worse. May be worse yet. Not yet worst.

Somehow, I find that sort of talk deeply soothing. Perverse, I know, but let’s roll with that too. What else is there to do?

Complain, yes, but we already did that. Could complain again. Could, can.

Though I do not complain about these cats. (We recently lost one, but we still have two).

Two soft snuggly silly things. Three, counting me. Though not so soft.

Cut Loose

Today I got some of the worst news I can ever remember getting–not the worst–and it’s a job thing not something more.  But it’s kind of a whole career possibly ending kind of thing.  And the decision process is not exactly sharp and fair-seeming.  Tenure, or the lack thereof.

So it sucks, and I am so sad for the loss it means.  Loss of how I pictured the future, and maybe things’ll turn out well somehow but it feels like a big ending, which it kind of is.  Not right this second at least, not so soon that I won’t have time to figure out a new plan or not be able to pay the bills.  But still.  And a loss of a group I thought I’d be joining, and of hopes that I had.

Maybe things will open up in some other way but it surely doesn’t feel good now.

But you know waiting was worse.

And I guess the thing now is not to make thing far worse than they in fact are, because I could you know, I could so easily.  So much worse.

I’ve been sober now for 9 years and a month.  This is the kind of time an escape would be really appealling.  I’m sure I’ll find plenty of little escapes, not all of them dazzlingly healthy, and I can live with those.  But not this one, alcohol, that’s an escape I can’t live with.  Not for much more than a day or two if last time was any measure.  And that’s if I’m lucky enough to get help right away or die quickly, without something terrible happening or a slow excruciating slide.

It would be so easy to forget all of that, to let myself go.

And these people are so not worth it.

The people that aren’t my fans, I mean–there are those who are and they’re the ones I’m so sad I can’t stay with.

I have no idea what the future holds.  I guess that’s really  always the way though, and this tenure track business has been making it seem some other way, and maybe it would have locked me in to tight.

A Book to Save your Life: A Shining Affliction

This book is beautiful and I read it as I was trying to survive rejection by therapist, which might not sound like a big deal to someone without attachment problems, but it is I think like being disowned by a mother.  So I needed–and still need–all the help I can get.

From Annie Rogers’ A Shining Affliction:

“It was as if my body carried an unspeakable story, and the logic and order of spoken language had become treacherous.  The language I knew lived encoded in my body.  It held my knowledge and story intact, but I could no longer speak it.  This language was not only untranslatable, it never occurred to anyone that it was a language and in need of translation” (126).

Yes.

Telling It Like It Is=Being “Love’s Executioner”

This seems to be something of what the title of Irvin Yalom’s Love’s Executioner is getting at.

And here’s what he says are some key givens of human existence:

“I have found that four givens are particularly relevant to psychotherapy:  the inevitability of death for each of us and for those we love; the freedom to make our lives as we will; our ultimate aloneness; and, finally, the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life” (4-5).

Telling it like it is–bracing.  A bit rough, but I’m not gonna argue.

What I also really like is the french character in the film I Heart Huckabees with its existential detectives.  This charcter’s business card simply says something like “Lies, Cruelty, Manipulation, Meaninglessness.”

Don’t Know.

I see that it’s been a long time between posts for a while now.  I think this thing with my old therapist has shut down some things in me and is leaving me quieter.

Sucks.

Not that it would really be a problem to be quieter necessarily, if it were just that, but it’s a sort of squashed quieter.  It’s a look-what-happens-when-I-open-up kind of quieter.  I’ll probably do it again eventually, I can’t ever seem to help it.  But this awfulness with the old therapist isn’t going away.  She doesn’t care I guess.  She certainly doesn’t seem interested in apologizing which i guess isn’t something people do all that often at least it seems so to me, but also she doesn’t seem to wonder how I am or anything.  I don’t understand what changed.  I hope some time she will talk to me–it feels like i need that to release me.  I don’t want to be bound like this forever, I am already bound in enough ways.

My new therapist has said a few times things about my sharing a lot that day, and I wonder if that means it’s something not quite right.  That is what I generally wonder about everything, to some degree.  I also think it’s a little of a the desperation of the person with attachment problems.  I don’t know.

I’ve had a stressful day with my job feeling like one big bunch of scrunity and criticism.  Tenure-track.  The rack.  Publish or perish.

It’ll be over in a year or less really, one way or the other.

But I also did just have an amazing time at a conference.  I’m finding ways to pull the drive and interest I have in the relational/mind things I write about here a little into the work I’m doing, which is cool.  And I got some good responses.  More importantly, I was more able to meet and connect with people.  I still went off on my own plenty, I just seem to need that a certain amount.  But I did more of the other too, and I felt more like I belonged, or at least less like I didn’t.  Then I came back to daily work here  I work and didn’t feel quite so much that way.  What does that mean?  I know part of it is just the ickiness of where I am in the process, and how hideous I find being in a scrutinized situation, but is it just that?

Don’t know.

Still on about the therapist.

I feel silly having all these feelings and going on and on but I know I’m not the only one who goes through all kinds of pain with therapy and therapists.  It seems that attachment problems add a layer that not everyone would have.  I felt a little dumb trying to explain the depth of my emotions over losing my therapist and there being some rough parts of how it’s happened at one time or several, but it helps to be able to talk about it.

This is just what attachment pain does, and it lasts.

Anyway, I did finally get to talk to mine by phone and she seemed open to listening to me and considering helping things be resolved better if possible.  I was very careful to try to say the right things and I think I did well.  I wish I didn’t have to get it just right or else, but I’m tired of wishing for things like that right now.  Maybe sometime.  So I don’t know, but it went better than I expected.  I know she still might decide I have to deal with it without her, that she’s done.  That would be tough to handle, but I suppose that’s where I was anyway.  It’s not so bad to have a hopeful patch regardless of how it ends up I suppose.

I had a long long day of much text and discussion thereof so I’m surprised I’m writing now.  My brain is fried and then refried but I don’t mean that as a complaint really, because it’s fried from some really good intellectual stimulation.  I like me some of that.

Two Roads

Two roads, diverging, that sort of thing.

We boil the significance of our lives down into one little essence, force it into one little shape.

As if.

As if it’s so simple, or so clear at the time or in retrospect that we did what was best for us, or that one path is necessarily so much more fated or commendable than another.

As if.

Not that I’m dissing Frost–far from it–far, far, from it–because he didn’t really make things so simple as we take him for sometimes.

Irony, dripping with.  Frostiness.

That’s the way I like it.  Sharp, biting, but beautiful.

Good fences don’t really make good neighbors–you didn’t think it was that simple did you?  Because good fences just make cleanly separated people.  Not just in my little opinion supra-added to the poem either.

And two roads, sure, and far hence we might well be saying that it made all the difference.  But that doesn’t mean that it did.  That’s the younger man thinking life is all turning points and obvious courses, and the older man wanting to believe it mattered that much and that he did the right thing.  We all want these things.  That doesn’t make them true.  Not untrue either, not one nor the other.  The poem holds these possibilities.  It’s not some stupid cutesy piece of syrupy copy for a poster.  It’s the real thing–the kind of work that penetrates to the mystifying heart of human life.

Well now that I’m running out of ranting I’ve almost forgotten what I was going to say.

Something about two roads, feeling faced with two ways of being in the world, and not knowing which to choose.  I am told to take the healthy way.  I am drawn to the more exciting and dangerous and wildly energizing and potentially bloody and promising way.  Perhaps neither is really what I think it is.  Perhaps I don’t have to chose.  Perhaps they aren’t really even so distinct from one another as I think.  Perhaps I can’t have it all, or can’t escape anything.  I don’t know how to frame the situation, how to envision the space I’m in.  A clearing in the forest.  Let’s leave it at that, for now.

TraumaTime/StoryTime

In spite of what lots of self-help books say, and even what therapists sometimes say, feeling the fear, “sitting with the feelings,” doesn’t always make it go away.  I think it’s true with grief and probably many feelings, just not always with traumatic/scary ones.  With grief, I find the idea that the only way is through, to go into it rather  than fleeing it (well a little fleeing might be okay, if only for a moment’s respite).

I know they don’t claim fear goes away instantly if we sit with it, but I do think it can stay just as intense even if we feel it, and sometimes it can get worse with time.  I’ve read some trauma theory about how with instrusive memories the fear/stress can grow or escalate each time it’s reexperienced.  The brain doesn’t know it’s not “really” happening now.  It’s feeling it now; it is now.  Or it’s the only now there is.  That’s also what trauma does:  it makes one moment expand as if it’s happening for all time.

I do think that shaping our own stories about the trauma and where it fits into our lives (as we see it–not as someone else tells us it should be) helps.  That, and someone or someones to listen, to witness it.  Narrative seems to be my solution to everything, just about, along with poetry.  I can live with that.