Build Love

Build love. I laughed at the man who said that to me. I laughed until I heard it echo off the jagged walls of my cold empty cave as I sat in the dark with my most loyal life companion, No One. No One wrapped his arms around me and held me in a deep embrace, like no human ever has, soothing me in places no human has ever reached. We are together again at our demented tea party, laughing arrogantly as the sweet lumps of judgment dissolve in our hot cups of pain.

Some might question the company I keep; No One seems ugly to others. Secretly I have always felt slightly more evolved as the only one who can see his true beauty. I look at his soft shape and he is so dear to me, as my oldest friend. Stitched together, a patchwork of those who shaped my fears, his voice a broken recording of things I can never unhear. We look at the world with unforgiving eyes and each time we dissect something until it becomes ugly we become closer as our hearts melt together a little more. He is the only one who has ever felt safe to me.

Build love? Love should just appear, as a magical burst that comes straight out of no where! Just as I expected to move 3,000 miles away and start my life over smoothly as if my past suffering were some form of currency with which I could buy immunity from the trials of life. Without the universe forcing me mercilessly to inconceivable lows then even lower to teach me that pain is actually a bottomless, infinite abyss and the only thing that can pull you up from the depths is your own fucking spirit. Just as I expected to somehow become a masterful artist in a short span of time where it took others a lifetime of dedication. Just as I marked on my calendar the appropriate date when my wounds should be healed from things that clawed their way through my skin and feasted on my soul like it was a Sizzler buffet. Just as I lived my way straight out of really living in life and walled myself into this cave with No One.

Build love. Me and No One, we destroy shit. We dissect everything; we take things apart before we even have to experience them because we are so clever that we can see exactly what they are all about and how they will end. And when we have finally figured out the final move in the scenario we didn’t participate in, we march around our empty cave in darkness with our heads held high, celebrating our cleverness at having outsmarted life and feeling superior to the ignorant people who are foolish enough to actually experience things.

Build love. I thought about this as I sat in my cave on the pile of a lifetime of leftover scraps I was given that I didn’t build love from. I looked at all of them again. None of them were good enough, they weren’t my idea of how I thought they should be, they seemed strange or foreign, they didn’t fit my abstract plan, they made me nervous, they just weren’t right somehow. Maybe they were real, but they were not magical by my narrow definition. They weren’t my personal idea of perfect. So I threw them away without ever thinking to polish them or paint them or added fucking anything at all of myself to them. Or even just to engage in an activity of creation of any type with them because that is just the natural flow of life. I never considered I had the power to make them what I needed them to be, that perfection could stem from the simple act of adding something of my own to them. Instead I imagined what someone else would build with them and shut down the plans when it fell short of my vivid imaginings.

Build love. As if it were a structure. An actual refuge you could dwell in, not just something that would fade as you get close as you realize it was just an apparition made by heat on the horizon. Something you could patch and repair and expand to suit the needs of your soul, if only you would participate in its construction.

Build love. It is much more intellectual, I always thought, to be clever enough to see the worst in everything. To always be a step ahead of living the moment. To see the tragic ending, to live out the twists and turns and endings in my mind, saving myself from the experience. I did not build love. I built a world of such solitude only I could understand its complexity and lurk in it comfortably. Me and No One.

Build love. How foolish. Isolation… that’s intellectually evolved. When you can think your way out of all the beauty you see and you are smart enough to pour ice cold water on the tiny embers that begin to light up your heart, you are truly a master of your emotions. When you can talk yourself out of all your heart wants to experience with your suspicious thoughts, and warning signs, and you inhale deeply, getting high on the poisonous fumes of judgment- you are truly smarter than those ignorant fools who dare to go on adventures of the heart.

Build love. We laughed at the man who said this, and we sent him on his way as we tore him into pieces until he became something to hide from, and so smartly decided you can love the message without loving the messenger. And we embraced as we always do. Me and No One. We destroy shit.

See a monster and I will love you

I’ve had an uncomfortable feeling lurking in the shadows of my heart lately. As soon as I try to shine my flashlight on it, it evades my beam, moving further into the dark recesses. This afternoon I finally caught it, dragged it out into the light and inspected it in all its ugly glory.

Once when I was 7 or 8, I ripped out a picture of a model in a magazine and hid it in my room. It was a cosmetics ad, a beautifully done-up woman who seemed so serene and just unscarred, untouched by any of life’s filth and trials. My mom, who would stay in bed in the dark for months, oblivious to anything outside her own suffering, had some kind of inexplicable nose for things like this. Some kind of extra sensory perception that could detect when anything was in her vicinity, no matter how hidden, that was a potential threat to her insatiable and hyper-sensitive ego. I knew this very well by now, yet in a small act of rebellion I hid the picture and looked at it often as a secret escape, in hopes that one day I could feel so free and pretty.

Under interrogation, I admitted that I liked the picture because I thought the woman was pretty and yes, I hoped to look like her one day. It was one of those many moments when I knew showing something of my real self and true opinions had fractured my mother and wounded her in ways that I could only repair with extensive personal suffering and sacrifice to reestablish my allegiance. My stomach dropped, affected by the gravitational pull of sheer dread. I felt my blood temperature drop several degrees as I watched in slow horror the look in my mother’s eye shift as her brain switched me from a lateral standing, to that of an enemy target, front and center. I was sure she was going to fly into a rage that I would have to retreat far into myself to endure. However, instead she took the picture and sat me on her lap. We stared at it together. I loved the feel of the warmth coming from my mom’s head when it was in close proximity to my own. It made the happy centers in my brain light up in warm fuzzy colors as I savored the rare feeling of being close, connected to someone.

“I am shocked and disappointed and horrified.” She began, “You have been completely brainwashed by society. She frightens me. She is frightful! She looks like a hideous monster!” The train was the leaving the station, heading down hill with no working brakes, as her cadence grew faster and faster.

“Look at the shape of her eyes and how dark they are. Look at how cold and evil. She has no warmth, no depth, no soul. They are unkind. They are so small. People who are cold have small eyes like that. Look at how big my eyes are. Yours are a little small too, but they are bigger at least than hers.”

I packaged up the new information that my own mother was judging my character by the size of my eyes and stored it for later examination. “She looks so fake and phony. Look at her nose. How sharp and small, how ugly. She almost looks deformed. She’s a monster! A hideous monster!” And it went on… and for a very long time I sat there with my mother shredding this picture to pieces, picking out all of the flaws, fabricating small bits of horror where I once saw a larger picture of beauty, in exchange for love and bonding. Just to feel those warm fuzzy colors lighting up the happy centers in my brain, if only for a little while.

And that’s just it. Every time I shut someone out of my heart I feel inexplicable closeness to my mother. I can feel her love and pride beaming inside of me. Thinking about it further, I realized those are the only times I have ever experienced that.

Time to re-align my loyalty to my self and to my own heart.

Rollercoasters and Seeds

Flipping back through this year, I can’t really say that outwardly I have made much advancement, but I have come to understand that outward things are always the last to change. Our external life is always a reflection of things that stem from spaces deep below the surface. First the seed buried under the soil must endure a long winter and begin to grow in ways undetectable to the above ground observer. It must first admit it feels the pull of the sun and wants to grow in that direction. It must have faith that this pull is not imagined, but is real and necessary. It must see itself as part of the mysterious magic, not a separate entity. It must find solace in the fact that no matter what it must endure, somehow deep within itself, it contains all of the knowledge and energy to get there. It must figure out how to circumvent any obstacles that stand in the path of its growth. The desire to live out its life soaking in the sunshine, in communion with the energy that feeds all of life, fulfilling its purpose based on the nature of what it feels in it’s heart and nothing more, must outweigh all else.

Having a clear picture of the garden can be a source of sadness and emptiness in life, if you never plant the seeds that would allow it to be anything other than imaginary. Once you hold this picture as a distant reality, instead of a delusion, your life changes entirely. The only thing you can do is get down in the dirt with your seeds so that you can understand what each one needs in order to grow. You guard them and tend to them, and the value of everything else you possess diminishes. As you place each seed carefully, and it disappears deep down into the blackness of the earth, you look at your empty hands and doubt your sanity because at that moment you are hit with the reality that you have nothing. Nothing tangible anyway. Nothing except faith… faith in something that you can only see inside your mind, often only in abstracts and broad disconnected strokes.

And because of human wiring, faith is a roller coaster ride of great peaks and depressions. At low points, you see patterns where there actually are none, you use your past failures to tell yourself that your empty hands are a sign. A sign of madness or whatever it is that you fear most about yourself. In the lows, you find you have the courage to carry on in this way- knowing that you maybe you imagined the whole thing, and your fate might actually be to die down in the very same dirt, your existence merely fertilizer for someone else’s garden.

But at the same time, you have growing respect for yourself, filling up parts of your self where you didn’t even realize there was a void. And you realize there are no limits to what you can feel. You are not a container of predetermined volume, but instead a soul with infinite capacity for new levels of existence. And at these high points you begin to realize that if, when, your garden does grow it will not feel like you have imagined, because you are imagining it from a place that has not yet experienced such explosions of color and light.

Always strive for that brilliant picture. Laugh when you catch a glimpse of yourself covered in the dirt of life. Embrace the chaos.

Be a Bright Spot

There comes a point in your life when you find your religion. It comes straight out of nowhere, shooting straight through all the dirt and grime in your life and penetrating deep into the untouched parts of your soul with its purity. It is the culmination of all your experiences and the content of your heart all clicking together to suddenly form a giant spark that ignites the center of your being. In that moment you just realize you have lived your way straight into all of the answers that you need and you are no longer obsessively hungry for anything more. The tight muscular tension with which you indefatigably seek and question, that tension which you define as your sense of self, loosens to the point where you become fluid and moving in unison with the energy around you, and as you stop resisting. You suddenly just feel the peace of being part of something greater without the desperation of trying to define it.

For me that moment came at a time I could never have imagined possible as I was exploring the new realization that sadness is in fact infinite. There are no boundaries, there is no bottom. I had decided to chase my dreams and had just moved 3,000 miles away from anything familiar with no where to live ahead of time. For months before I exited my previous life, my stomach dropped constantly as if I were high above my home planet about to jump with no idea if I were even close enough to be within the range of its gravitational pull or if I would be sucked out into blackness. I was no longer an age where these things seemed fun or adventurous or even feasible, but I had come to a clear crossroads. I came rather abruptly to a sign in my life that clearly had 2 choices. One read “keep going in the same direction and give up your dreams” and the other direction said something else written in some indiscernible foreign language, but I felt an inexplicable deep magnetic pull from that direction as animals are drawn to migrate in the direction of food and water.

Before I set off into the sunset, I looked into the sky and raised my hands. In them I imagined I held all my struggles and suffering up as tokens with which to bribe the universe to be kind and supportive of me. I just had to believe that I would be rewarded for this courage, for finally choosing to get on the path I felt I was meant to be on. For shaking uncontrollably but deciding not to let fear define my fate.

Shortly thereafter I would learn a hard lesson. Suffering is not currency with which if you save up enough of it, happiness is somehow owed to you. A holy shit storm of apocalyptic proportions broke loose and in the course of a year and half I had become so depleted and beat down, that the place where the sun had always shined on the inside for me seemed like a foreign land that maybe I had only imagined I had been to. I became obsessed with questions. Why did these things have to happen now that I am 3,000 miles away from anything familiar and completely alone? Why at this particular point when I am finally on the right track? My world went dark, and the universe seemed evil and plotting against me for the first time.

I’ve never given up on anything I wanted in my life. Never. No matter what the obstacles, or how badly they mangled my soul, I managed to pull through. What good did that do me, spoke my newly frosted inner voice. The sound of it frightened me, I had never heard those tones before coming from within myself. I watched the twinkle in my eye grow dimmer and for the first time I didn’t fight it. In the midst of all that happened, I had decided to carry on with my intention of going back to school, but now I was so far beyond the threshold of what I could handle, and I bitterly felt like I had spent most of my life like that. I dropped two classes. I was so disappointed in myself and in life and I felt sick in places most uncomfortable.

One of the teachers was a gentle soul in his 70s. I felt peaceful just sitting near him. I could almost feel his unique vibrations, he seemed to radiate out a lower deeper frequency and I found him really soothing. I emailed him and briefly explained the circumstances and thanked him and told him I had to drop his class. I didn’t expect to ever hear from him again, I figured he probably didn’t know my name or how to even check his email.

The next day he wrote back two sentences that changed me forever. “You will be missed. You were always a bright spot.”

And that was it. In that moment the piles of sadness and pain shifted and collapsed down to near nothingness as I realized the purpose of life is to be a bright spot in the lives of all those whose paths we cross. Nothing else really matters.

In loving memory of Jack Bosson 1937-2012

A birthday on the other side

Here’s something you might not know about me. Because really I don’t fucking want anyone to know. Because I would much rather paint a giant pretty canvas full of kittens and rainbows pooping butterflies and distract you with that while I cower behind it in a tight little ball in my secret reality. Someone who knows all the things I used to spend way too much energy hiding recently told me, “I love your humanness”. And that is it… you can only lay yourself out as a giant buffet of flaws, mistakes, secrets, shame, quirks, and imperfections, and hope that the people who attend your feast find their way to the sweet sauces and toppings and pile on enough to make the bitter and sour bites seem tasty. Because in the end, they make up their own experience of you.

When I went out into the world on my own for the first time, I sunk into a depression so deep that it became all there was to me. I know now that this made sense as I had never learned healthy ways of processing the world, had no social skills and no constructive means of dealing with anything. I was completely dysfunctional and overwhelmed merely by existing. It got to the point that all I thought about was death, every moment of the day. Yet part of me was so grateful to finally be out in the world, finally in the world beyond the mimosa tree with the big bright sky and the soaring birds that I used to look at with wonder standing on my tippy toes in the cage of my childhood. More than anything I wanted to experience it the way I dreamed it would be, the way I felt it in my heart when I was little and hadn’t yet learned to discredit intangible things.

Proud of myself for admitting I had a serious problem and wanting to be a better person, I went to a doctor and got put on medication. The kind that makes the whole world turn pretty colors in the commercials. Followed by more and more and more. Ten years passed. Ten years of flat lining between peaks of pain and loneliness that I won’t even try to describe. Ten years of staring into the face of my creator and begging for mercy that never came. Ten years of being told by countless doctors that I will never be off the meds. I will never feel better. That I need to settle peacefully into my straight jacket and accept the fact that depression isn’t about being cured it’s about learning to cope.

The last chapter in that part of my journey concluded when the latest new doctor told me I not only would never recover, but I probably also had a rare form of bipolar where instead of cycling from high to low, I cycle from low to lower. Right now, he explained I was feeling slightly better because I was on an “upswing towards down”. He wanted to put me on anti-psychotics, in addition to all the other medications. I had absolutely no interest in knowing what that life would be like. None.

And so it was almost 5 years ago that I decided not to travel any further down this sewer tunnel that was my life. I decided I deserved freedom, and there was clearly only one way for that to happen. I had lived my best, fought my hardest and was now accepting defeat. I began making my peace with this decision mentally. I loosened my grasp and watched my dreams float away, off into space. I let go of the love I had for the few people I was actually close to. I let go of my curiosities, my desires, the things I wanted to explore. I let all of it go in exchange for the comfort of knowing that soon I would no longer suffer.

There was just a few little shards of curiosity that remained in my freshly emptied hands, a few tiny questions I couldn’t let go of. Was the tremendous joy I felt in my heart before all the stuff happened that dimmed my fuken shine… was the person I believed I was born as… that I somehow never let go of… the life I believed implicitly I could somehow have no matter what had happened… was all of that nothing more than the delusion of a broken, sick mind? Was whatever created me so merciless that no matter what I did I could not lift the sentence of endless suffering? Did laws of nature just not apply to me… where if you plant a seed upside down it will figure out which way to grow towards the sun, yet my mind could never seem to right itself?

And so that was the last day I took a pill, the last day I let others define me. The last day I ignored my heart which somehow managed to still be whispering to me after all that time.

Every year on my birthday I used to look at old pictures and just fall to pieces, confronting the reality of my life in contrast to who I felt I really was and unable to reconcile the difference. But this year, I sit with the sun streaming through the windows looking out into the endless blue sky reflecting back on all of this. I’m finally out in that world I used to see in the distance. All of the furious vibrations of my suffering and all of the static that drowned out my peace have been gone permanently for so long now. I finally have my answers.

A beautiful note from a friend… thank you.

“The more of your writing I read, the more I… I can’t even put it into words. Maybe three or four, times in my life I can say that. If my soul had a wrist I could cut to give you your time back, I would do it to well beyond weakness. Your ability to remain unbroken pales me, and I respect your strength. I doubt I myself could have endured such trials. I fear I would have caved quickly in fact. There was a time, not long enough ago, that violence became my sword, shield, blanket, and food. After that, there was no more torture, no more pain, no more hurt, and everything was easy. I regret that, but it did shield me from a great deal that would have hurt me in a past that until now seemed an incomparable nightmare… You are a much better person than I am, you started out better, and remain so. I can only hope one day I would be able to unfuk myself. I fear the time to start that process may have been long ago, but it sounds as good a path as any to a wandering man. Thank you for sharing of yourself.”

I am no better than you, just forced to contort in different ways, and squeezed to the point where I had only two choices: bitter insanity or make a commitment that, no matter how difficult, I would live my life in a way that one day far off in the distance I would be able to look back down upon all that has happened and feel grateful because it is what forced me to keep climbing to this beautiful vantage point.

Floating in space hanging onto a doorknob

I had a friend who I was pretty convinced was packed up by angels before she was sent down to earth. Every single thing I ever craved in terms of just basic worldly comfort, she was carefully accommodated with. Her life was soft, gentle, and comfortable. If I closed my eyes, I could almost hear the soundtrack of harp music playing in the background. She saw none of it, and more often than not was obsessing over small details of imperfection. She would ruminate to the point that her world would go dark and collapse under the weight of her despair. Our knowing each other used to consist of her using me like a stuffed animal saying whatever she pleased, knowing I would listen as long as necessary and say nothing back, while silently feeling like a circular saw of anger and frustration fueled by injustice was sawing its way deeper and deeper into my chest.

One day I cracked. “When I was growing up, sometimes in the middle of the night I would feel as if I were floating in space. I had no home planet and no where that I belonged. Imagine not only not having your family, but no species, no people, no God, and no home planet.” I said. “It took all of the courage I had to slip into the darkness, wondering if gravity would fail me and make my way to my mom’s door. I would try the knob. The deadbolt was always locked. So I would make my way back into the darkness and grab some pillows and blankets and make a little nest and snuggle against the door. It was cold at first, but soon the wood would warm up. As the sun would start to rise, I would stare upwards and I could see beautiful patterns in the chipped paint on the doorknob. The knob used to be gold but then it was painted over in white and then at another point, in blue. In some places the scratches are chasms of pure gold. The gold shines brilliantly in tiny revealed slivers peeking out from layers of white and blue in the morning sun. I would get lost in it, in its beauty. I never saw the scratches, it just seemed exactly as it should be. The world would slip away and I would feel truly happy.”

The colorful explosion of horror and confusion on her face, turned to plain dismissal. “I am not the type of person who can look at a doorknob and feel happy.” she snapped viciously.

She didn’t have to be.

Opening Paragraphs from my book : Unfuk Yourself

I awoke slowly to find myself standing in a passage darker than night. It was as if there was a subtle vacuum effect penetrating the seals of this hallway slowly sucking the darkness out into an unfathomable void beyond. The lack of light and hope was like a straight jacket that wrapped me tightly, as if in this situation I needed further restraint.
I was at a point in this vast darkness where I had lost the ability to dream of anything outside of it and had lost the ambition to keep trying to fight my way out. I felt a slight painful amusement at the irony of how many years I had spent kicking and fighting only to end up right here, as if all I along I was actually just some demented toy with imagined free will.

This place had all the qualities of a nightmare, where the things you observe are detached and opposite from the things you feel. The darkness was so black that my mind began to project colors into it- color schemes smeared everywhere matching the twisted colors from Edvaard Munch’s The Scream. Colors that were supposed to be bright and happy, but instead they were skewed tints of pure dripping horror.

It was as if the fabric of the universe that I had always felt secure in was becoming frayed, the weave was stretching, the holes between the threads were becoming so stretched that I suspected I would soon fall through. Death is frightening because of the unknown… but slowly over time, the known had become much more frightening.

I now understood people who took their own lives. As I stood here in this dark tunnel, I knew it was the view they saw when they made their final decision. I imagined I would soon slip through, as they had, absorbed by the swirling colors of the nightmare, the peacefully floating in pure terror. It was here, in this state of suffocating deepening darkness, this submission to its force, the dreams I could only vaguely recall slipping gently from my opening grasp, that I became curious about something… something that made me fall in love with myself and begin on the journey of a lifetime.

Tweety and His Extension

One day I received a large package in the mail from my mom. It stunk like the mildew of where I grew up and I had to leave it outside for several days before I could even stomach the smell and begin to plan a strategy for penetrating the massive layers of duct tape, electrical tape and scotch tape it was secured with. The sadness of the return address washed over me, as I noted that my mom had stopped using a last name. When I finally found adequate tools and sawed my way in, I had a similar feeling to that moment in the movie Seven when he opens the box and pulls out his wife’s head. Mainly horror and disbelief, and not really understanding what I was looking at.There were two bird stuffed animals, one big one and one little one that looked exactly like each other. My mom had cut and punctured holes in them and stitched them together in a wild fashion with multicolored ribbons and string. The little bird was sewn right to the front of the bigger bird. There were enough stitches that had these birds been subjected to medieval quartering they still would not have separated cleanly. She had replaced their eyeballs with glued on sequins and glitter, special eyes for an alternate world only they could see. At that moment, I would’ve been relieved if it had been a human head in that box instead of this nightmare.

At the time I think I just laid down feeling disturbed and horrible. I spent many years feeling like I was living in quick sand, being dragged down by unbearable heavy weight, succumbing to the thick murky soup of confusion and conflicting bad feelings that I could never quite separate, articulate, or resolve no matter how hard I tried.

I had grown up in a house full of all kinds of crazy art depicting only a mother and baby. The more abstract, so that there were no boundaries between the separate beings, the more it appealed to her. I was told constantly that I chose to be born to her, and my divine purpose was in so many words, to take care of her. There were so many layers of messages in all of this and when I finally stopped running and started exploring it, I stopped hating myself. I had a new found compassion for my confusion and all my struggles. Here she was again, reminding me that even though I moved 1500 miles away and tried to build my own life, I was not free. The worst part was she was right. You never realize how bound you are to something until you try to escape it by geographical means. And then you understand being owned.

At some later point I read about Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It explained how one who suffers from this literally does not see others as a separate identity, all other egos are an extension of their own master ego and they develop a finely tuned skill set to manipulate and control everyone around them to satiate their own needs. I remember reading this and thinking back to those birds and suddenly feeling a cold feverish tension seeping out from my spine and radiating out into my muscle fibers, and I felt panicked, wondering if I just created pre-cancerous cells.

And so that has been my life’s work… Removing those stitches, repairing the holes, washing the glitter off of my eyeballs so that I can see my own world.

Unfuk yourself.

Crack

I distinctly remember the day I first cracked. A friend of mine told me a secret. It was something that left me speechless mainly because had it been me, I never would’ve had the guts to tell anyone. He just dumped it on me, no warning and no easing into it. He looked me straight in the eyes to see if I would falter as a friend, as a human. I stood in awe of the amount of courage it must’ve taken to face the possibility of judgment and rejection like that. In that moment… lost in silence, I felt myself overcome with a giant wave of love and compassion for my friend. It was so strong and came from such an innate place that it startled me. It wasn’t my brain thinking of how to react; it was just a human reflex to embrace him. All of him… secrets, flaws, imperfections, all of it. In that moment, his I saw his humanity shining far brighter than any tarnish this secret threatened him with. I decided from that moment on, I would crack open my shiny, painted, carefully constructed, porcelain exterior and begin to let the light in.
Unfuk yourself.

"Cancelled"

My dad is a handsome man. He played the cop that got slapped by Zsa Zsa in the Sizzler commercial from the 80’s. Sometimes while he is rambling on, I imagine I am constructing a steel spine and staple-gunning it to his back and ripping off his metaphorical frilly pink tutu and give him a good injection of testosterone with a needle fit for a T-Rex.

We have somehow managed to become pals in recent years. Although they’ve been apart for almost 30 years, my mom wound her strings so deeply into the fabric of his being that even his handwriting looks like a cheap imitation of my mom’s “cosmic swirls” and everything he paints whether it’s a horse, a pirate, or a boat looks like her. For many years, she made him keep a notebook of all his thoughts while away from her during the day, which she would analyze when he got home from a long day working in the city. She would scream at him based on her interpretations until long after even the devil retired for the evening. He used to get so angry at my mom, but instead of speaking up for himself, he would bite huge chunks out of his arms.

He told me once about a terrifying recurring dream he has been plagued with for many years. He is in total darkness on a pier. A huge figure is coming towards him, similar in figure to the Michelin man. He knows it is going to absorb him, and he must choose between that and jumping off the pier into the black ocean. “Can’t you see that is exactly what happened to you?” I asked. My dad, the psychologist… speechless.

I remember him coming over when I was really little like a handyman, to fix the house, yard, and pool. He was not allowed to interact with me. It was a strange experience hearing continually that he was plotting to kill us, and then seeing him with a chainsaw in the backyard. Even when she would leave, he adhered to the law… as much as I would let him. I was supposed to be afraid and full of hate, but I was fascinated by him. I think to this day it is why I have a tendency to poke at people who are unfriendly or mean. I just want them to crack open and see that there is another way entirely. It is still my way after all these years of saying “Come play with me”.

By the time I was 8, he had already endured almost 20 yrs of her and decided he had enough. Since he didn’t get to see me, he didn’t see the logic in paying child support. Maybe because the animal you left your daughter with was being consumed by mental disease and drug addiction? That was not how his logic worked, I guess. He says he can’t explain it, it but it made sense at the time. My dad, the psychologist.

He tells me stories sometimes, which I always sit eagerly through like a pathetic dog waiting for a milkbone because it is starts off as a comfort to feel like I have a history and a connection to a family. I am waiting to feel some normalcy but I should know by now, the stories are always things more like about how in her early 20s, my mom would stay in bed all day and how many pets they had to give away because she couldn’t even put seed in a bird’s bowl. This is the person he left me with, and I admit it has been hard to get past that and enjoy a burger sitting across from this man. I asked him to explain this to me once. Specifically how he found it perfectly fine to leave a helpless human in the care of someone incapable of dumping birdseed into a bowl once a week. He said he didn’t really have an explanation, but would think about it and get back to me. That was December 2008.

Sometimes I picture my dad’s head mounted on my little wall of personal triumphs. It is one of the biggest, as the beast of his effect on my life was one of the hardest to slay. It used to be that I would completely shut down and be reeling mentally sometimes for months after spending time with him. Sometimes I would realize months later what had happened that upset me so much. I had no control over the depths to which I would fall in the meantime. I am running a totally different operating system now. When he says something painful or just fucking inappropriate, I recognize it instantly; I stop and deal with it in the moment. I don’t waste a second wondering if I really should be upset, planning out how I am going to react and making sure it’s the best way possible. Who gives a fuck, my priority in these situations is taking care of me. I blow up if I have to; no way am I carrying that shit around with me… because I am intimately aware of the toxic effects of holding it in. It took a long time to get to this point, but because I now have the ability to take care of myself in this manner, I no longer fear him. I am no longer at his mercy… He no longer has the power to knock me off course. We no longer sit there lightheartedly laughing about my mom not being able to take care of a hamster. Ha ha ha… found such good homes for all the pets she couldn’t take care of. Ha ha ha… ok, nice to see you, ha ha ha let me go want to die for the next 8 months… not sure why… Ha ha ha… must be something wrong with me.

The story I have the most trouble getting past is the story of my birth. When my mom went into labor, my dad put her in the car and went back in the house and called the doctor/ hospital and told them it was false labor. Then he took her to the hospital, and the doctor wasn’t there and they weren’t ready for her. I started coming out in the waiting room, and they pushed on the top of my head accidentally resulting in a large hematoma.

All of my life, my mother told me I probably had brain damage from this, and I was lucky it was only that, as most babies die from hematomas. Growing up thinking you are brain damaged and also living in an alternate reality from your mom, and as a result of your mom, living in an alternate reality from the rest of the world, definitely presents its challenges. Perhaps this is why I don’t relate to Norman Rockwell.

When I got older and became reacquainted with my dad, I asked him about this whole story, mainly assuming it had been another one of my mother’s delusions. But he said that unfortunately it was “Not untrue”. My stomach dropped straight into the depths of some kind of internal Marianas Trench, to think that this was actually how my experience on this beautiful earth began. “I can only explain it as I just had some sort of a reaction. I thought maybe if I cancelled the whole thing, you would just go away.” I wish there was a special font to denote, I swear on my life those were the exact words used.

My dad, the psychologist. And so we sit in cafes sometimes, having a burger and a beer. I listen to his stories about his softball games and his little dog that he didn’t expect to have feelings for yet actually feels a certain type of love for. Yet in the background of my mind there is always this static. If I listen closely it is one word echoing over and over: “Cancelled.”

Hello Boos

Since I started this blog, I’ve had some pretty bad anxiety. First I blamed it on the heat wave and my new vitamins, but for some reason I just kept thinking of images from Super Mario Bros where the Boo ghosts chase you as long as you don’t face them, but as soon as you turn around and look at them they stop. That inspired me to stop and think about what is really chasing me. Growing up, I had to learn to navigate in a world which made no sense to me; one I would later realize was all a delusion in my schizophrenic mother’s mind. Part of learning to navigate was to be identityless, opinionless, and voiceless. Speaking my mind would trigger her to recognize me as separate from her and would invite an entire shit storm of fuckery upon myself. It took a very long time to break out of these patterns as an adult, especially as all my relationships and circumstances were formed from this place. Although it was terrifying at first, finding and strengthening my voice was a form of healing and rebellion, of reclaiming my self. Every time I say what is on my mind I push myself further from that place of subjugation. It’s no wonder some of those old feelings are flaring up now, as I am working on this blog also a larger web project which I am hoping to launch in about a month- with the theme that there are very clear (and resolvable!) reasons why we suffer from things like anxiety and depression, if we look below the surface and don’t just run to the pill bottle. Glad to be exploring this… Masking symptoms is living a partial existence. Freedom begins when you figure out what formed these reactions.
Unfuk yourself.

My shape

This lifetime has shaped me in ways that I suspect will always leave me a certain bit lonely. I can’t imagine that there actually is someone who could fit into the strange shapes that have been carved out by the winds. My father likes to discuss the great mystery of why I am not out there roaming the streets with no connection to reality. If I were bitter, cold, angry, dissociative, evil, vengeful… dead and dark in the eye, no one would dare fault me. In the end I find I can only be grateful. I have been entertained beyond belief… I have seen things through the eyes of true madness. I have been hurt to the death… I have laughed to the point where I could no longer feel the confines of my humanity. I have known moments of pure joy in things not visible to the ordinary senses… I have drowned in the abyss of inconsolable sadness. I have lived through a million miles… I have died a thousand deaths. I have been caged… I have been freed.

The Boombox and the Towel Monkey

My mom would take your soul and shred it like a block of Parmesan in her cheese grater, letting particulate fly everywhere… high on your pain and laughing all the while grinding harder and harder. And, a moment later cry with such heartfelt passion for what we did to the Indians and how we tricked them and slaughtered them. She would torture you with a rage that you would have to forgive and actually pity, as the only explanation could be she was possessed by pure evil – and then moments lay down on the sidewalk and try to comfort a beetle she had accidentally stepped on.

Her favorite hobby was trying to crawl inside my mind and rewire it for her own personal benefit. I let her think she was successful, yet my terrible secret that I felt extreme guilt over most of my childhood, was that she only entered the reception area of my mind. I had falsely decorated it to her liking for the purpose of containing her. There are rooms far beneath the surface that she never suspected existed and that is where I stored my self, waiting for a day that I feared might never come. I knew early on I had to store my version of reality, opinions and thoughts somewhere safe, somewhere that this could not probe. I am the only one who escaped her experience with my soul which is a pretty incredible feat considering I was born into this and it was all I had ever known, and the rest of the victims entered as adults.

The work on my subconscious was not all evil, sometimes it was for my benefit. One day she dragged me into the city to buy this rare old boom box that played 6 cassette tapes front and back in a row. It had a big metal draw that automatically came out and an arm extended as it switched the tapes into the player slot. And so she would load me up on Barry Konikov, Louise Hay, and Jack Canfield. Topics like overcoming shyness, expressing love, self esteem, and feeling fear and doing shit anyway . The first sides of a lot of the tapes were lecture and the backsides were subliminal messages playing (supposedly) underneath the sounds of the ocean. This strange contraption provided the soundtrack of my life for hours all day and all night long for many years. (If you want to see me lose my shit, put on a track of the ocean waves and I will go Hiroshima on your face…)

I thought of it like mechanical parenting because this went on while she spent day after day in bed in a dark room that was often locked. The incessant talking was something I was not used to as an only child living in an isolated environment, but in the end, I became grateful to have a companion and someone saying encouraging things to me. The little mechanical arm always did as was expected and this was a comfort to me amidst the chaos.

One day I was climbing through piles in the basement and I came across a picture in a frame of a baby monkey snuggled up to a wooden post wrapped in a towel with eye balls sewn on it. I asked my mom about it. She said it was one of her favorite photos, because there was just something so strikingly sad about that baby monkey snuggled up to the fake monkey mom, the only comfort he had in this world. As she spoke I thought of myself snuggled up to my boom box, pressing my cheek against its cold metal speaker until I could feel its vibrations… like some kind of mechanical pulse. I wondered if I was the only one who could see myself.

The Morning Crash

Every morning for a few brief moments, I wake up in a state of complete serenity. I can’t feel my body and there is no detectable boundary between myself and the magical electricity of the universe. I have no identity and therefore no history, present, or future. Time doesn’t exist; there is only this one beautiful bright swirling moment. This used to last a matter of seconds and then as I scrambled for my identity as one might scramble for their bathrobe, every morning without fail a giant 1,000 ton elevator car would come crashing down on me from far far above, paralyzing me with its weight and trapping me under its sheer magnitude. It would knock the breath out of me as I became overwhelmed, paralyzed with fear & dread and all kinds of other non-descript horrible feelings that swirl around in that thick murky soup of fuckery. The simple act of waking up and remembering my identity was the most difficult part of the day, as depression and confusion over the past, anxiety over the future, and disappointment over the moment consumed me. I wasn’t who I dreamed of being, I wasn’t where I wanted to be, I didn’t see any hope of getting to where I so desperately in my heart knew I needed to go in order to be free. Dreams felt like a curse, as I saw no path and had no resources to help me get to the distant places I dreamed of.
This went on for years… as I struggled against all logic and everything I had ever been shown to create a life that matched the images I saw through the eyes of my heart.

Now, I still have those few blank moments upon awakening… moments which I count amongst my greatest treasures as I could never articulate the pure peace of them… and then, as I recall who I am, where I have been, and what I will do, a slow sleepy smile spreads across my face as my heart fills with joy….

Unfuk yourself.