How to Keep Doing Things You Don't Feel Like You Can Keep Doing

I legit have no fucking idea. But in many situations in my life, one way or the other, I have in fact kept doing things I didn't feel I could keep doing. So many different dynamics along these lines. My experience has been at many different levels with this. 

In general, staying alive through periods where I didn't want to. So that's the big one. You know, the big existential one. For me it's usually just, "well, here I am. I'm not going anywhere. I can't stand this, but I'm NOT going to x myself out, so here I am." I had a Facebook friend of mine describe suicide as something, for him, that "lives in the future." That is: it's out there. It could be, some day. But it lives in the future. It's a weird thing to live with though, because, to varying degrees, the thought of it recurs. There aren't very many other areas of life where the *decision* has been made: I'm not going to do that. But the *thought* of doing it returns again and again. This was briefly the case when I got sober, regarding drinking or drugging. But what AA calls "the mental obsession" was miraculously removed from me fairly early in sobriety, and I hardly ever think about drinking now. But even in my best moments, even after the work that's gone down the past year around depression, I still "think about" suicide on a fairly regular basis. It's not like I can manage it or control it. The thought just busts in. Sometimes it is aggressive, like, "I fucking hate myself and I fucking hate this and fuck you, I'm out." Most times it is embedded in furling melancholy and is just a cri de coeur, only meek and mild, like a thick black exudation of the soul. Sludgy and strange. Time to die. 

Panels from the book Agony, by Mark Beyer, who was a friend of mine when I was a kid in Allentown

Sometimes my sense of life is that I am already dead, anyway. That is, in that dialectical sense, my life contains and is constituted by my death, the germinating seed of which grows in ramifications more and more the older I get. The odd despair that comes, for example, from having a memory of an event that was 30 years ago, when I was 26, and feeling that the intervening time is vapor. Just a shade a blink a ghost of time. No time at all. A grey stretch in a flash. And then snapping to the fact that, if I am lucky (?) enough to live another 30 years, such will be my experience of what is happening now, but I will be fucking 86 years old. 86. 86 years old. And then I figure fuck this. What kind of deal is this? 

I know one is supposed to age gracefully, and I had always thought that phrase was more about physical appearance and capacity. Now I see it is in fact the developing resilience and acceptance of this excruciatingly painful state of affairs. This passage of time between blinks, in a blink. This horrifying sense that each moment gets precipitously shorter in a calculus of demise. 

Anyway, there's nothing that can be done about it. So ultimately it is a lesson in unmanageability. In this way, it is exactly like, well, everything. My life is unmanageable by me. 

Again, going back to the first step in CoDA: 

We admitted we were powerless over others— that our lives had become unmanageable. I don't think I can "handle" some behavior or other on the part of someone else, sometimes a close intimate, sometimes a total stranger. It's not so much the behavior that ends up infuriating me, wounding me, cutting me to ribbons, causing me grief. It's the inevitable confrontation with powerlessness that I most resent and that is the most painful. You can wish for your love to contact you, to be affectionate, to reassure you, to be available, all you fucking want. You can even explicitly ask for it. But fuck if you can make it happen. You can't make it happen. You can try withdrawing in order to be pursued. You can rage. You can beg. You can seduce. You can do whatever the fuck you want. But if you are going to stay in close relationship with someone who is not doing what you want, you are just going to suffer. You're fucked. 

I don't feel like I can keep doing it. But I am doing it. I sometimes lose my shit and try to dig a new channel for the stream and force another person to flow that way. It takes more than the entire Army Corps of Engineers to pull that shit off. I can "work on letting go," which is fucking hilarious, if you think about it. "Hey, will you fucking work on relaxing?" Nice meditation. 

Top all of this off with my tendency to get intimately involved with people who are not available and it's quite a recipe. Jung repeatedly talks about how the unconscious self creates situations where we have to confront our shadow, our greatest fears, our most primal wounds. I assume my tendency to get involved with unavailable people or to be in situations where the whole fucking situation is fucking fucked and is basically characterized by the word UNAVAILABLE has got to be deeply entwined with the deepest wounds and soul-problems I carry. Each time of course my unconscious probably is like "hooray! finally I will be heard and healed!" and then each time in the past I have gotten only so far. My kind therapist and my relatively kind sponsor would say, well, you have gotten as far as you were able to get at the time. Yeah yeah yeah. Failure is fucking failure, but thanks for being nice. 

Anyway, thanks for reading this far in this little ray of sunblight, as a friend of mine would say. Tell me you don't identify though. Or, actually, if you don't, fuck that. I don't want to hear it. You are not the person for me if this isn't some form of the self-same trip you have been on or are on. No anodyne either, no matter how hard you try. It is what it is. The only way out is through, say the goddamned sages, and goddamn it if they aren't correct.