We Keep On Living Until We Die

Tonight it's going to be one big word soup.  I need to avoid exhaustion so I'm going to go to bed before 11pm for the second night in a row.  I have a queer feeling as though my book may suffer for my absence but I have to vacuum, play chess with my kid, visit with friends, and cook food.  I would like to escape to a mountain retreat (with no ticks) to write until that sucker is completely hammered out, but that's not what's going to happen.  I miss my characters and I feel their lives hanging, waiting for me to come back, to exhale the next words, to show them the next thing.  They will have to wait.

I don't have time for a really well worked anything, but I have thoughts I would like to expel from my head.  More about faith, belief, and miracles.  A commenter, who we'll call "Jo", because that's what she calls herself, has suggested that faith need not be religiously centered, that it can be about letting go of control, about letting go of our egos enough to heal.  Her unfortunate way of expressing herself has made me feel almost as though she's telling me that I could heal, if only I didn't have such a big ego.  She also mentions my disability with the qualifier "real or imagined".  These comments of hers are odious to me.  They call into question not only the size of my ego, suggesting that the fact that I am not healed is somehow connected to the enormous size of my ego.  It also calls into question whether or not I'm actually suffering from a real illness or just imagining one.

She also puts "biting" in quotations which is mystifying.  When I said I bit myself until I bled I meant it really, I really did.  And I didn't bite myself often or for long; eventually (as most people here know) I began cutting myself.  Even that ended after a couple of years.  I don't harm myself physically anymore (except for the beer and cheese) but the desire to do so never goes away when I'm under acute stress.  You want to know why? 

BECAUSE I HAVE MAJOR DEPRESSIVE DISORDER, GENERALIZED ANXIETY DISORDER AND OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER.

I suppose if you don't believe that mental illness is real you might wonder how come I haven't just meditated this crap away?

Ego for me is, at best, a very warped and difficult concept.  So I'm glad someone brought that up.  Finally, we can examine what my ego problems are.  Part of my perpetual problem is that I feel infinitesimally small, matterless, unimportant, invisible, impotent, stupid, inadequate.

Although I have always known exactly who I am, I have a very strong sense of what I'm about, I have never felt confident that this person I am  really matters.

The over-riding sense of self that I have had my whole life is this:

I AM NOBODY.  I DON'T MATTER.  I AM NO ONE.  I AM INVISIBLE.  I WILL FADE INTO NOTHING.  I AM A NOTHING.  I AM NOTHING.  I AM NOTHING.

I will take this moment to say that I have worked tirelessly on myself to develop a sense of pride, a sense of belonging in whatever place I'm in, a sense that I matter, a sense that I am someone to someone.  Because deep inside myself I still fight this whispering voice:


I don't think my ego is getting in the way of healing.  I think what's gotten in my way of healing for many years are people who tell me that I would be better if I tried harder, that I would find peace and all the abundance of the universe if I just trusted, if I just believed, if I just did yoga, if I just drank milk at night, if I just took St. John's Wart, if I just concentrated, if I just loved myself a little more (!!), if I took more B12, if I gave up dairy, if I gave my heart to Jesus, if I had five children, if I stopped swearing, if only I would take colloidal silver, if only I would listen to God and pray, if I only ate whole wheat noodles, if only I stopped eating wheat at all, if only I would accept who I am, if only I would stop fighting what I can't control, if only I would see that L. Ron. Hubbard isn't a creepy mother fucker* but that he has the answers to everything in his own complete fictional version of life on earth.

I think a lot of people are unaware of the true voice of my ego because I have developed a necessary bravado to bluster my way through life.

The first time in my life that I finally started "healing" and finding peace with myself is when I got an official diagnosis and a psychologist said to me "This is not your fault.  You aren't struggling because you're not trying hard enough.  You have a mental illness and you were most likely born with the wiring that makes you this way, and circumstances** may have worsened the problem, and there's no cure, you will always have it- but you can help yourself improve and medications can help you live more comfortably so that you don't want to hurt yourself when someone hurts you, so that you don't want to die."

That was a powerful moment for me.  But healing, if we're talking spiritual here, is not an easy thing when your illness has a constant grip on your emotional and mental life.  My whole life has been about not being in control.  My whole life has been a struggle to find enough of it to survive.  For me to let go of what control I have would be tantamount to suicide.

Which is enormously ironic.

I just finished watching "Kung Fu Panda" with Max, again.  The whole predictable theme of the film is "All You Have To Do Is Believe".

And I think there can be no message more misleading, more false, and more destructive than that.  It is as officious and untrue as the Beatles sentiment "All You Need Is Love."  No, that's not all you need.  Everyone needs a hell of a lot more than that.

I'm not saying I don't believe that people can achieve amazing things.  They can.  I am a die hard fan of the underdog.  I am the underdog.  I believe that people can achieve things that SEEM impossible.  I believe that people can surprise themselves with what they can do that they didn't know they could do.  I believe that people can overcome a lot of shortcomings and bad shit.  I believe that people can change, which is the closest I come to believing in miracles.

But I also believe that to achieve anything we have to work our asses off.  It's not enough to "just believe".  Are you fucking kidding me?  Look at Obama, people are saying things like "We never thought it could happen!  It's a miracle!"  It's not a miracle.  The dude has worked his ass off.  He got himself an education, he has had to run the gauntlet of politics as a person of blended races.  He has worked hard, he actually voted against the war when all the other stupid-ass politicians were too afraid to do it.  He has worked, dammit, he didn't sit around believing he could just fly on wings to the white house.  Fuck that shit!

I don't even think you have to believe in yourself completely to achieve great things.  Why?  Because I believe that in trying for things, whether we believe we are capable or not, we can surprise ourselves.  I didn't believe I would get my design accepted into the apron book.  I wanted it, I desired it, I knew I was good, but I didn't believe I was good enough to get in.  What I did believe was that if I didn't put my very best effort forward, if I didn't make the charge with my javelin thrust straight- that I would never know.  I would never know.  So I put my heart into making my design.  I put my mind into it, I put all my skill into it and I made something that I was proud of.  I actually submitted two projects I was incredibly proud of and only one got picked.  Luck of the eye.  Luck of the judge.

I stand by my denigration of faith as a concept to live by as understood by people who want everyone to have "faith" in the power of the almighty, in the goodness of Christ, in the miracles of God.  I don't believe in this whole crap language of God and Gurus and "enlightenment".  It always comes back to the elemental for me.  The flowers in bloom.  The minerals that thrust to the crust of the earth, the soil, the tang of iron in the air, the whole system of stars.  The magic of life, for me, is that we keep on living until we die.  The magic for me is simple and real.  The magic is that I can still love humanity even though I often feel outside of it.  The magic for me is that no matter how many seeds I plant that die, there's always one that is so determined that it rises from the primordial soil of my garden, clean, light green, new, and eager. 

There is no corporeal healing for people with chronic illness.  So I will deal with it every day of my life until I am ash.  Some days, some months, some years even will be much better than others.  I may go long periods of time without sharing what I am struggling with because people get tired, (understandably), of hearing about the negative.  It must be ameliorated with hope.  It's what I, myself, long for.  I try to give it to the people I know, the people I wish to know, and the people I know are like me.  I don't share this dark stuff every day because some days I find hope, I find the most incredibly gorgeous roses in my own yard and I want to share that.  I make the most amazing food, and that's enough for all of us a lot of the time.  To hold onto these little pieces of beauty, of pure love, of simple joy.  It may not over-ride the long hours of night, it may not cure us, or solve world hunger, but I look for these globes of light wherever I can and sometimes there are enough that people forget how messed up I am.  How hard I find it to traverse social life.

I have a few thistles growing in my yard right now.  Part of me wants to rip them out right away (if only I could muster up the energy and the time) but another part of me sees these bristly, sharp, mean big plants and sees my own heart there.  They seem unapproachable, austere, painful, and just when you are cursing your loudest at the needles plunging into your surprised leg, you notice the flower: the completely impossible flower!  The buds swell, covered in spines, and then they open to this magnificent hopeful regal purple and suddenly it's all worth it.  All the danger of impalement. No, not just the danger, the reality! of impalement.  Even the most spiny forbidding of plants has flowers that open up under the sun and reach for your eyes out of the wild tangles of unwanted "weeds". 

There is always a lot of "wild" in my garden.  And there is always a lot of wild in my heart too.




*Oh, I'm sorry.  That was harsh.  It is rare that I use that expression.  I find it coarse, harsh, and nasty. I think it applies in this case and I'm sticking to it.

**There are some circumstances that I cannot share.