1. You have enough energy to get the laundry started in a half ass way on day one. You feel pretty okay about that or even proud-- look at me, adulting!--but your sense of competency extends only to sort of jamming all of the dirty laundry into the washing machine in one load, and you know you *are doing it wrong* yet again, and you know that *doing it wrong* is why you have been abandoned and unloved *all this time* and it's all you can do to push through and just sort of get the laundry done.
2. It's day two and you are putting up with your laundry being all over your bedroom because you didn't have enough energy on day 1 to finish the process post-dryer.
3. On day three, you get almost all the way through the job of folding and at least sort of organizing the laundry, and you go to hang up your shirts but there aren't enough hangers for some reason, even though you could swear you've been able to hang everything up in the past, and you stand and stare at your closet for a while trying to figure out what could come off of hangers in order to hang the shirts, but you really can't figure it out, so you go to bed and sleep for 4 hours.
4. On day 4, you finally figure out the hanger situation, after a few hours procrastinating on getting started with several different projects you have to get done before June 25, while feeling guilty and ashamed for not contacting one of your committee members for the PhD who has generously offered support for a crucial phase of the work you are doing. You reflect totally reasonably on how every idea you have had for the PhD is the most stupid fucking idea ever conceived by any human and how all of your field work and research has been utterly in vain because what you are doing is trivial, has been done before, and will be completely laughed out of the room anyway. While you are pushing your way through the whole laundry ordeal having these totally reasonable thoughts, you remember the 2 or 3 people you have recently emailed or messaged and how they have not replied and of course, why would they reply? You are, after all, a laughable and insignificant piece of shit. In spite of how harrowing that thought is, you keep on task. All the clothes get put away almost completely perfectly, but a few are just up on a top shelf in the closet and not really folded correctly and you feel haunted by that and can't get the introjected ex-girlfriend out of your mind who would have scoffed in an outwardly light hearted manner at the shitty job you did with the laundry that took forever (outwardly light-hearted but one of the actual reasons she abandoned you and thinks you are a fucking loser asshole dumbass) and a cascade of excoriating self hatred runs through your body at a cellular level and you flash on thoughts of suicide again.
5. You get back to the projects you absolutely have to have completed in the next 10 days but while you are at your desk and looking at your home screen on your laptop you notice your resume that you meant to revise a couple months ago (which task is intimately tied in to the burgeoning debt you amassed from transitioning from being homeless after the breakup to having a place to live with a bed and a desk and having to fund field work and so on...so it's not really about noticing the unrevised resume at all, it's really about at least seeing the crest of that mounting tsunami of complete incompetency (which is why your ex-girlfriend rejected you, really, and why you are laughable and why you will die alone) rising on the horizon like the last scene in peter Weir's The Last Wave), a folder that has unedited photographs in it that you need for your projects, 30 new notifications on Facebook and also remember that you still have vinyl you need to digitize. In the midst of this weird "large field" stimulus of several things you could do, at first, the projects you have to work on take the backseat, and then they fade, and then they dissolve entirely-- until you snap to them again about 12 hours later and feel guilty and panicky that you have done shit all to move them forward, *still* haven't called your generous committee member and have been in your pajamas all day. Instead of self care like eating and taking a shower and getting some sleep, you "decide" to stay up until 3 fucking around on Facebook.
6. You make a resolution like "I am going to work out at least for some time every day until I leave again on the 25th" and the first time you miss a day you sullenly decide fuck it, I'm not working out any fucking times at all, that was stupid and who do I think I am anyway? You remember that at age 55 you lose any of the gains from working out in a very short period of time anyway. You think obsessively about being 70 in 15 short years. You subtract 15 years from 55 years and recall that being 40 years old seems like just yesterday, so of course, turning 70 will happen pretty much tomorrow. This throws you back into a miasma of self loathing, anxiety and self doubt where you picture yourself at 70 being a comical figure teaching school (the ridiculous old man the kids all laugh at, a comfortable kind of old scarecrow) because you have no retirement savings and your social security is laughable and it will probably be completely gutted by greedy politicians by then anyway. The combination of all of these cast iron thoughts of decay, disintegration and doom leads to either more hours of restless sleep with awful dreams or more hours of aimless procrastination.
7. You wake up one day feeling pretty good, actually, so you jump on the opportunity and manage to schedule one-on-ones with two of your 4 sponsees, set aside times to hear their 5th steps and to do your own 5th step with your own sponsor, manage to push through a few aspects of the projects that have to be done, pay some bills and generally operate almost like a competent adult. Somewhere along that trajectory suddenly and without warning the dark, heavy figure of bottomless sorrow and grief straps itself to your chest again and you find yourself standing in the middle of the backyard sobbing and not even knowing exactly why and let's just say that nothing else is getting done on that day that started out pretty well, actually.
8. You are driving 4 miles or so to one of your regular AA meetings and every single driving behavior on the part of others makes you fly into a Philadelphia style road rage of peak absurdity and irascibility. "What the actual fucking fuck, you fuckhead, find your goddamned gas pedal and use your gas pedal, I'm right here behind you, turn the fuck left and get out of my way you fucking asshole!" and so on. On the way to a meeting of recovery. Where you are trying to work a spiritual program. And you feel like a fake, and an asshole, and like dog shit on the shoe sole of the universe, but you can't get out from under the red rage. You try praying for the well being of all sentient beings who are pissing you off and you just feel like a New Age, culturally appropriating fake ass motherfucking ASSHOLE fake Buddhist who should just die. And this cascade of insanity leads to a panoply of memories of all the times people were actually with you-- mostly girlfriends-- in the car, when you were insanely irritable and in a rage, and how they had to catch the sidestream of it, and no wonder you're alone and no one ever wanted to stay with you. But you do make it to the meeting. Where you say the serenity prayer at the beginning and have about an hour and half of relief. So there's that.
9. You can't remember a lot of things. For example, you didn't finish your coffee yesterday and didn't want to waste it, so you put your full coffee mug in the refrigerator in order to have ice coffee "later," then you go through the whole clothes hanger debacle, sleep for hours, head out to the meeting, experience insane rage, etc. Then you get home at 10 at night and go to put the half and half you bought in the refrigerator and you see your full coffee mug in there and you don't at first even remember putting it in there and then you just feel crazy, like an idiot. Like an incompetent old fool. Meanwhile someone you care about is having a hard time and you want to offer support but everything you think of messaging to her you judge as being stupid, meaningless, trite, ineffective, moronic, condescending or forced. And somehow this combination of self-embarrassment at forgetting the coffee in the refrigerator and helplessness in the face of the suffering of someone you care about makes you flash on how much your ex girlfriend seemed to end up just hating you completely, refusing to even speak with you as you slept on the sofa in the living room the last month you were at what was always really her house anyway, and the most searing memory of her coming back inside on a cold February night a week after Valentine's Day (on the 13th anniversary of the night of your DUI and the night you spent in jail) when you know she was out for a walk talking on the phone with her new paramour and when she comes back inside she lies and says she was "just getting some steps" but the look in her eye is one of complete joy and lovestruck glistening and shine, almost on the level of how she used to look at peace and full of contentment and inspiration after the two of you would make love. And these things all congeal into a kind of autonomous monster that lives in your guts or is parasitically attached to your cervical spine and won't be shaken for anything and is desperately eating you from the inside out or sucking your blood and you flash on suicide again as the most obvious, reasonable and pretty much welcome solution to these things.
10. You try to talk with someone in the AA program about all of these things and they a). don't give a shit and tell you to work the steps harder, b). do not respond directly but offer some kind of behavioral strategy for "dealing with it" or c). seem completely baffled and start talking about how hard it has been for them to quit smoking.
11. You go to see your counselor and lie to him because you are ashamed of how bad off you actually seem to be. "Oh, yeah, making a lot of PROGRESS. Really feel like I'm getting out from under it! I might even phase out the Wellbutrin over the next month!" He knows you're lying to him but he doesn't push it. He just has you do some non-verbal exercises that bypass the whole lying thing altogether and at least you feel a little bit connected and that someone gets some of it.
12. You make a beautiful and nurturing connection with someone who honestly enjoys your company and you're grateful for it, but the dementors flying around on the sidelines start in with their Greek chorus of scolding, doubting, insecurity-inducing mocking and anxiety-inducing what ifs. "She doesn't really like you. You're faking it and she likes the fake you. You're a toxic selfish dishonest piece of shit and you should be ashamed for involving anyone else in it. You'll just fuck this up too, like all the rest. You have no business being with people at this point but should isolate completely until you figure out your stupid fucking shit. You are a useless, untrustworthy sex and love addict and every single thing you do with women is abusive. You should be ashamed of having desires of any kind. Who do you think you are, letting someone think she is getting close to you?" There really isn't much available relief for this so you sit in breathing meditation for 30 minutes. You camp in the middle of nowhere for days. You avoid all people, including the person you began to form a connection with. You disappear. You disappear more, as much as you can. You are tempted to say untrue and cruel things to the person. To dismiss them somehow. You feel utterly and completely broken and incapable of simple human relationship. You know that you will "never" form a real bond with someone that is good for them, let alone good for you. There you are in yet another cascade of shameful projection, and back come the thoughts of annihilation, and of course those just reinforce the whole deal.
13. Every now and then, and maybe even more frequently as time goes on, especially as time moves ineluctably more and more away from the breakup (which you are actually embarrassed to say was traumatic), you start to have light days. They are astonishing. You don't trust them. You know with certainty you will sink again. But even so, the days stay light. You are glad you stayed sober. You're happy to be alive. You're glad you never made a plan or carried it out. You are on the other side of something, at least for a time. You are something like Walker Percy's "ex suicide." It may not last. The next maelstrom may even be worse than the last. But for now, you'll take it, because a part of the astonishing aspect of the light day is that you will take it. It's so light that the lightness actually includes faith and hope again. But even more than that-- it includes no faith and no hope at all-- it is in fact an opening into having nothing to lose by being alive. Of course, you can't tell anyone-- because then they would expect you to be "all better," and it would exasperate them when you inevitably sink again. But you can hold the light day as your own secret, your own grace. Maybe it will be a lighthouse along the rocky shore where the rock beneath the waves is what it always was.
And for all this nature is never spent;
ReplyDeleteThere lives the dearest freshness deep
down things.
Hopkins