Incapacity or Courage?

 Granadilla

I cut myself upon the thought of you

And yet I come back to it again and again,

A kind of fury makes me want to draw you out

From the dimness of the present

And set you sharply above me in a wheel of roses.

Then, going obviously to inhale their fragrance,

I touch the blade of you and cling upon it,

And only when the blood runs out across my fingers

Am I at all satisfied.

--Amy Lowell

"Courage is often confused with stoicism, the stiff upper lip, bravado that masks fear. There is another kind of courage. It is the courage to live with a broken heart, to face fear and allow vulnerability, and it is the courage to keep loving what you love “even though the world is gone.”"- Catherine Ingram

You ever listen to what other people suggest for a long time and get twisted because what other people are suggesting is just not working for you? Then you give up trying and go with your own intuition and values and your own sense of yourself and, finally, everything clears up significantly. Comparison is fatal in these moments, "Why can't I forget and be tough and let go and not care," for example, "like so and so." We usually are wrong about so and so anyway, but even if we're right, sometimes, for me, the answer is because it's not ME to do that. I don't do that. I am not tough, I don't forget, and I do care. 

What's going to happen is probably going to square with my intuition and my values. The rest is noise, frustration, distraction and false comparison. Blake said the enjoyments of genius look like torment and insanity to the angels, and it's sort of like this. Another person may observe how we live and think we are "suffering needlessly." They may, even in a well-intentioned way, try to tell us some other way. Thanks, but you thinking I have a problem is the problem, because there is no problem. Or, worse, you trying to solve my problem that I don't even have. 

And to think that we can have the most extraordinary experiences of our lives without suffering? Where does that idea come from? This reminds me of what is sometimes said to newcomers in AA- if you are going to stick around, buy a black suit, you're going to need it. Love is not possible without grief. And exactly how quickly are we supposed to be done with grief? And along exactly what linear and measured path? 

Forgetting and moving on is cheap and tawdry. Everything is forgetting, Forgetting is the most common thing there is. Forgetting and moving on abandons what was real, throws our experience and our heart under the bus, and for what? Ease and comfort. Cheap bullshit. The thin stuff of trying to stay in control of our story at all times. It's all just swept under the rug, or even deeper, swept under the floorboards anyway. You'll hear that telltale heart beating soon enough. I could run my whole life, trying to forget. What bullshit. And yet, the most common kind of advice one gets from people when something doesn't go one's way or when someone doesn't do what we want or what we hoped they would do is: "forget it." 

Miles Davis said that the key to happiness was having a bad memory. But he was fucking miserable. He was lying too, because you can hear what he can't forget in a lot of his playing. He liked to provoke. He wanted to seem tough. You can hear the searing tenderness and ache though. Sometimes Davis plays a few notes and all of his losses and all of his grief are in there. 

Remember the amazing things you've had in as much detail as you can bear, be grateful, and stay close to grief and love. Stay alive. You'll be dead soon enough, what's the goddamned hurry? I feel like I was 30, I blinked my eyes, and now 60 is one year and 19 days off. What's the rush? Humans are so fickle and unreliable by nature, guaranteed we'll forget without even trying. What's our hurry? 

If this all hits you the wrong way, just forget it. 

Complicated Grief

 Persistent complex bereavement disorder is not an official diagnosis in the DSM-5, but is in the section of "conditions deserving further study." The symptoms, which also need to be chronic or recurring for more than about a year, are:

Indefinitely yearning/longing for the deceased or ex

Preoccupation with the circumstances of the deceased’s death or the circumstances surrounding the end of a relationship

Intense sorrow and/or distress that does not improve over time.

Difficulty trusting others

Depression

Detachment and/or isolation

Difficulty pursuing interests or activities

A desire to join the deceased or the presence of suicidal or self-harming fantasies

Persistent feelings of loneliness or emptiness

Impairment in social, occupational or other areas of life 

This experience used to be called "complicated grief."

I feel like this applies to my life since about 2016. I honestly cannot say I have had a whole lot of relief and freedom from grieving, including grief that feels multigenerational and transpersonal, or even global and in regard to the whole energy of being on this planet, I feel like my version of functionality is more having learned to live with grief. I guess there have been flashes, when I am completely alone, out camping somewhere. And falling in love, but that's a whole other conversation. 

I used to feel like I could grieve, and let go, and move on, but at this later stage of life, especially as I stick to a daily meditation practice and get my ear really close to my own ground, so to speak, I am discovering more and more that I was deceiving myself, and the "letting go and moving on" was often merely distracting myself, finding a shiny new relationship, staying busy, doing a geographical cure, etc. 

I mean if "healing from grief" or "letting go and moving forward" is just denial, forgetting, the formation of emotional scars and calluses, etc., then it's not really letting go and moving forward. (We are only undeceived of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm- TS Eliot). It's still holding on and carrying forward, but just out of the way, pushed into the shadows. It all just goes under the bed, or in the trunk, or up in the attic, or whatever location metaphor you want to use. 

Maybe all grief is complicated, and the blessed for whom it's just "the grieving process" and they come out of the other side free and clear and ready to "move on" are the real anomaly, and the rest of us destroyed humans are just complicated grievers. 

Also, if there's complicated grief, maybe there should be other adjectives for grief. Mysterious grief. Annoying as fuck grief. Tiresome to everyone who has to listen to it over and over again grief. Absurd grief. Ecstatic grief. Passive aggressive grief. Living through the loss of every familiar inherited value system and paradigm grief. Total global environmental catastrophe grief. 

I have a former student, who, at age 29, was just diagnosed as autistic. We sometimes chafe against labels, but, for her, the diagnosis and the framework has offered her the first flash of possible freedom and self-understanding that she has had in years. Being diagnosed with persistent depressive disorder back in 2017 provided a certain amount of clarity for me. So now, when I go into my next counseling situation, which I hope will be soon, I'll have a label: persistent complex bereavement disorder. Nice. 

Heart's reasons

Relationship recovery and self help stuff is extremely helpful, highly recommended. There's probably no way anyone has been raised in this culture and escaped toxic and false narratives about love and relationships. 

Dog and Peach: an unlikely love affair?

I draw a fairly hard line between recovery and self help, as the goals and methods are totally different for these two areas. In self help, and therapy for that matter, the effort is to gain control of one's decisions and behaviors- the self is still at the center of the enterprise, and solutions involve behavioral change that one manages on one's own. In recovery, one surrenders, unlearns, and endeavors to form a relationship with a greater power, re-centering the business in spiritual principles (admittedly a subjective experience), diminishing the role of the self. 

Both efforts are useful, but I think self help and therapy have limits that recovery does not. The crux of self help and therapy is the assumption that I myself can help and heal myself using myself, which, if you're myself, is demonstrably iffy, and the essential core of recovery is that the self is not effective at overcoming the core wounds and brokenness of the self, just by itself. The process of behavioral change in recovery requires a power greater than the self. This is a confusing sticking point for a lot of people, and I don;t blame them, but, even though I am an atheist, I have never had trouble with it. There is something that works for me, that is a power greater than I, and on which I can rely, and that's all I have needed. 

Anyway, I have been reading Melody Beattie's pioneering syntheses about codependency, and she's fucking annoying. Here's why, thanks for asking: her advice (usually delivered in the manner of a condescending and bossy friend with a smile and an "oh honey listen" kind of brittle exterior) usually amounts to this syllogism: "Behavior x is hurting you. Think about why you do behavior x! Stop doing it!" haha. Okay sis. "Doctor, it hurts when I do this!" "Well, don't do that!" I mean, really, if I were capable of *following advice* do you really think I'd have the relationship history I have? Her essential solution, practically, is to THINK, REALIZE and then CHANGE- a sequence that almost never has worked for me. 

What's your love language?

The early relationship recovery and self help work of a great many popular helpers has an interesting, cynical, dismissive and even contemptuous attitude toward love. Essentially, it's like when someone discovers a new thing and then just runs to the extreme with it. In this case, the "new thing" was the discovery that romantic love in its inherited and unexamined forms is a hot bed (heh heh) of dysfunctional misconceptions (heh heh) and projections and harmful assumptions and behaviors. Having discovered this, the earlier helpers went to town on smashing all of this shit to bits, and were quite thorough in their dismissals and rejections. Very helpful, in the short term. The level of mockery and contempt for falling in love, being in love, romantic attachment, etc. is really amazing though. And you hear it "in the rooms" as well, especially from newcomers. 

I want to balance it all back to more tenderness and understanding, a more accepting and gentle approach. It feels to me like falling in love and being in love are core, key, very real experiences, and among the peak experiences of most lifetimes (and will *always* be a "bad decision," but more on that later) and the acidulous cynicism probably is overdone most of the time, and probably also causes real harm. There's an element also of "rational" and controlling energy in a lot of it. The pure light of reason is great to expose bullshit, but nothing worth living for stands up under scrutiny, and the sheer messy humanity and blood and guts unmanageability of love definitely does not. 

Insight and the human potential movement seem to believe that reason can out reason the heart. But wisdom knows, and knows well, and has known for thousands of years and has shown the tragic effects of trying otherwise, that the heart has its reasons that reason knows not.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

 I'm glad I took some time to do introspective, emotional work back in July. Shortly after the last post here, on July 19, I got a new teaching job in Los Angeles, traveled fairly directly from the Minnesota woods to LA to find a place, signed a lease, flew to Phoenix on a Saturday, drove back in a U-Haul the next day with all the stuff from storage, and moved in. 

Art by Amrit Brar

The teaching job has involved a ton of onboarding red tape, since the school is affiliated with UCLA, and my new faculty orientation started this week as well. The first day was in person, with tons of distancing and masks, etc., and the rest of training for the month of August are via Zoom. 

The apartment is total chaos, as I need to buy shelving, and take care of some other basics. The car needs tires, 120,000 mile service, and a new rear bumper (because I backed into a rock). The tasks and training for the new job are endless. I also foolishly agreed to do a webinar, and I'm still in major revisions of an article on its way to publication. I feel like the universe basically just pulled the plug on introspection. 

Self Portrait by Photographer Noelle S. Oszvald

Back in Los Angeles! The two years that I lived here in the early 2000's were great in some ways, nightmarish in others. The entire experience led to sobriety for me, and at the time, I knew it would be challenging to stay sober living here, so I moved back to Santa Fe. But, after 16 years sober, it's feeling good, living here again. It's a crazy ass city for sure. 

It does not currently look quite like this....

But I lucked out on a great one bedroom for a relatively affordable rent, 3 miles from work, 3 miles from the beach. The neighborhood features every imaginable service and hosts a range of food from around the world (Indian, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican (Northern and Oaxacan), Persian, Italian, American, El Salvadoran, all within walking distance). Wrangling the transition to California is almost like moving to another country, since the systems in place are so labyrinthine. But I'm managing, one day at a time. 

It's a ten minute drive to the beach in Santa Monica. A ten minute drive to work. It's oddly subdued and strange in the city right now, due to the pandemic, but I don't need to go anywhere much, since my entire job is virtual at least until the end of September. I've been maintaining contact with everything I learned in the hermit passage from December 11 until late July, and it feels like the trip through Hades is either in a completely new phase or, miracle of miracles, might be drawing to a close. 

Time will tell.