Sorry, guys. I have schlacked off, I have schlucked up, I have schlock-blocked you and led you on and let you down. And it's not that I WANTED to inflict a massive schlockular dry-spell on anyone. The truth of the matter is that I tried many times to set something down in this space, but I actually, misguidedly, ridiculously aim for a certain degree of formal rigor in my personal writing-- even within a stylistic medium as "de-regulated" as blogging, even when absolutely nobody and their mom reads the schtuff that I post here (except for you, Kevin Costner; I know that you creep on me), and even as I simultaneously hold myself to an abysmal, Wikipedia-paraphrasing standard in my scholarly work (which is read by about FIVE people! I'm starting to amass a real audience, yo!)... I must craft the Schlock with all of the schlocky craftsmanship that I can muster, and sometimes it takes a while, okay? It's not an exact science yet. I think that my compulsive drive-to-cohesion stems from the fact that I have spent quite a lot of time chilling out with dead male German composers who prized organicism and motivic integration and teleology, and I have absorbed their dead-white-male aesthetic values, and thus even in my blog entries I strive for thematic unity and a logical progression of ideas because I somehow missed the memo that Structuralism has been dead ever since, like two World Wars or some shit happened, and everyone's illusions about objective truth and the redemptive power of Art had been exploded long before I emerged, Caesarian-style and squalling, into this irremediably shattered world.
(That escalated quickly).
No, so really, it comes back to this: remember when I said that my life had, for a time, turned a Cesspool of Suck? Well, I would characterize the last few months as more of a Whirlwind of WUT-- truly po-mo ("postmodern," "weird for the sake of weird") and dizzying and SO MUCH FUN but a little whackadoo and just generally not the kind of raw autobiographical material that one could potentially fashion into an organized narrative with a take-home message. When I am able to tease out a common thread of meaning from the as-of-now unintelligible morass of WUT, you will be the first to know!
So, anyway. To the heart of matters: I go to this support group at PUNY. It is called "Ongoing Challenges of Graduate Life," and I fell into it somewhat by accident back when I first moved to Schmanhattan. Historically I have been wary of support structures, of self-help, of therapy, of anything that might enable me to complain (any more than I already do) and to introspect obsessively and to make excuses for my shortcomings. Man up, Alana Murphy, face the music, dig yourself out of your doubtless-self-inflicted hole! But I decided to give this group a whirl-- I envisioned it as a graduate-school-themed "Stitch 'n Bitch" club wherein I might meet some kindred spirits who were not so intent on projecting auras of bulletproof-ness but who might actually want to discuss the hangups that come with being marginalized, poor, hyper-articulate, self-sabotaging, post-ironic, and generally useless to society. And The Group was exactly that, for awhile! But then we hit some snags: after I thought we had established a rhythm, we fell into an odd pattern of using our allotted hour to debate what we should use the allotted hour for, i.e. "what does this space mean to us? what is the ideal function of The Group? what should our attendance policies be? what is our protocol?" and I started to get annoyed with what I called this "meta-Groupology," this state of perpetual self-defining that never seemed to quantum-jump to the domain of actual insight or productive life-strategerizing. "Guys," I finally wailed, "when can we talk about REAL THINGS?"
And hey, it took some time and some experimentation, but eventually we broke the tautological death-circle and came up with some constructive directives for our Grad-lives. So, in that spirit of straightforwardness, I am RIGHT NOW dispensing with my meta-blogular tendencies ("what IS a Schlockspot for? what do I DO with my corner of cyber-space? what is the nature of space itself? I guess I should pose these questions for about four paragraphs before seguing into a cryptic meditation on my love life or my dog or something"). No. No more! From this moment onward I will write about REAL THINGS. Read it and weep.
So back to the Cesspool of Suck and the Whirlwind of WUT: I am going to throw out the cutesy shorthands and replace them with more categorical terminology as befits a serious inquiry into the nature of ME. The Cesspool becomes "kind of severe and scary depressive episode." The Whirlwind becomes "renewed desire to wake up in the morning, with touches of mania and recklessness and a whole lot of ill-advised YOLO." It has been a journey, you guys.
(I can't type the word "journey" without hearing it in Teacher's voice. When I was about to give my Master's Recital at Bleep U, there I was, waiting in the wings, saying a little prayer to Jeebus that I wouldn't get lost in the Rachmaninoff, and I was just about to step out to perform when Teacher stumbled into the backstage area all disheveled and out of breath. He scanned me with his dark soulful eyes, said, "Well don't you look lovely!" and took me by the shoulders. "Now listen: you've done all the work, there's nothing more to do in this hour, so just go out there and explore, and listen, and share. It's a journey. It's a JOURNEY." I nodded with all the earnest solemnity of an acolyte. And then he said, "Now hang on a minute-- I have to go to the men's room, don't you dare start without me!" so I was put in the ridiculous situation of calculating roughly how much time my teacher would require to get to the restroom, take a whiz, wash his hands, and return to the concert hall. And, by the power of suggestion, suddenly I was stricken with an urgent pee-need of my own... though it might have been a pre-performance nerves-induced phantom pee [yeah, it's a thing with me, okay?] So anyway, these are my inextricably urinary associations with the word "journey").
God, I'm stalling and I know it. Deflecting personal pain with humor and all, oldest trick in the book. Okay, back to the meat of the entry: depression stuff. Ugh you guys. It's hard for me to write about this, not only because my experience was a frightening one and part of me would like to just sublimate it and smile-grimace through the rest of my life like a real pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps Amurrican! but ALSO because I am a f*cking hipster when it comes to the originality of my blogular content, and the depressional-confessional thing has been attempted by everyone and his or her mom. Seriously, it's so mainstream these days! Et tu, Murphy? I am not even joking when I invoke Your Mom: The NY Times and The Daily Beast both recently ran pieces on the alarming rise of suicide in the Boomer Generation, citing all manner of reasons ranging from the failed economy to the erosion of spirituality and community in our society to the digitally-induced isolation of our supposedly hyperconnected brave new world. As for my own Millennial cohort, the author of the blog Hyperbole and a Half has recently emerged as a courageous chronicler of the serotonin-imbalanced condition. (Now tell me, if her blog is Hyperbole and a Half, what does that make mine? Hyperbole and Three Quarters Times a Billion, To the Power of Infinity, Divided by Zero? Has a certain ring to it, I suppose). And there are all the other memoirs, the personal testimonials, the barfy emo effluvium, all those treks to the darker corners of the psyche that are just cluttering up the Web and the bookstores and the library shelves (here's looking at you, Sylvia Plath and Ernie Hemingway and Virginia Woolfie and Johann Mother-Loving Goethe and innumerable other long-dead sad-sacks). Who am I to add to the noise, the tired discourse, the self-indulgence of grievance-airing? Why do my pithy over-edumacated white-girl problems deserve a voice?
AHA. Bingo. That last sentence of the paragraph. Check it OUT. As obnoxious as the sentiment is, it in fact quite succinctly sums up the depressive mindset-- put another way, "my O Schmerz- moments, my pathetic little self-created loops of suffering, are in fact so pathetic and so little that I am going to make myself suffer further FOR DARING to suffer from such trivialities in the first place." Oh the twisted, paradoxical, self-reflexive logic of it all!
So how do these bullshit suffering-loops even get a chance to take hold? And once they've established themselves, how is one able to break them asunder? At this point, in order to adequately explore the issue (which I feel I must)... sigh, I in fact do need to be exploitative of my singular, unremarkable experiences and put them on the internet. I shall term this "The Altruism of Narcissism." See, if an act of self-indulgent exhibitionism on my part can be simultaneously cathartic for ME, the writer, and relatable or insight-granting or at the very least voyeuristically gratifying/ train-wreckingly Shadenfreude-tastic for YOU, the anonymous reader, then by God I will abandon all pretense of decorum and plunge full-speed ahead! Wasn't it Johann Mother-Loving Goethe or some other navel-gazing nineteenth-century German who said, "That which is most personal is most universal"-- meaning, roughly, that specificities define generalities much more effectively than other generalities? And isn't the latter sentence just a perfect example of why I should jettison all the abstract nouns in favor of some juicy "deets" and get on with the story already?!
I. SUCK! Episode One: The Exposition
Did I, in fact, spring neurotic from the womb? Let us not delve too deeply into a genealogical explanation, an epic origin story, but suffice it to say that I am of Irish and Jewish descent and, historically, those are two seriously sorrowful cultures. Genetic predisposition to victimhood, check! Born to kvetch, born to kvell, born to seek solace in the bottom of a whiskey glass, check. (Did you know that whiskey was my first solid food? No, just kidding, my first food was actually quiche. Quiche! In my day, I was totally the bougie-est one-year-old on the face of the planet, although I'm sure that the stakes for the Baby Bougie Prize are much higher these days).
Anyway, I was a sensitive, outsider-y child, expressive and dynamic at my best-- see me rhapsodize about the plenitude of primordial life in the tide-pools on the beaches that I was privileged enough to have grown up roaming! look at me, dancing and ditzy, over-bright and drunk on the wonder of it all. But I fell apart just as easily. That state of revved-up zest, that coruscating joie-de-vivre was impossible to sustain (and also endlessly mockable to my cooler-blooded peers, as you can imagine) and when I was confronted by anything that would throw a wrench into my Utopian child-vision-- cruelty, alienation, injustice-- I would cry and cry, and so I became the classroom crybaby, the kid who lost her shit. (Sometimes I would cry from more pedestrian things, too, like skinning my knee on the asphalt, or being forced by the lunch-lady to drink my prescribed carton of 2% milk when we only drank skim milk at home OF COURSE, because this was the fat-free '90s, come on lady, get with the times!)
My behavioral patterns only became more pronounced after I was visited by the Monster Pubertus. Teachers at my foofy feel-good privileged private Episcopal high school would write detailed evaluations of students every semester, and I was often "incandescent" but "mercurial," somehow not living up to perceived potential because my flakiness, my fragility was getting in the way. And I just wanted to tell them that it was interesting that they would use the word "mercurial," because didn't they understand that said "mercuriality," my quicksilver thinking patterns and verbal acuity (on full display here? or mega-run-amok here? you decide), could at the drop of a hat turn into fucking mercury poisoning, that in the course of doing a trigonometry assignment I could at one moment be marveling at the beauty of a mathematical formula (like a complete tool) and then whoops! without warming my radiant inner world would go all wonky, my thoughts would take a swerve down some scuzzy alleyway and not only would I become painfully aware of my tool-ery (not to be confused with tomfoolery) but I would also utterly lose touch with whatever had, for me, ever briefly lit up the "maths" in some gorgeous metaphysical way and instead I would see a series of cold symbols that invalidated all of the feeling-y feelings that I was feeling and had no right to be feeling in an unfeeling world, and clearly I was going impale my weak soft self on the spikes of this unfeeling world, this mechanistic mathematical world that would never stand for my chaos!--and, in the wake of such chaos, I wasn't exactly going to finish this trigonometry assignment either. I mean, what did one miserable homework assignment matter when NOTHING mattered. (And therefore the squandered potential; retroactive apologies to my teachers if they are reading this [oh God NO please don't be reading this, Former Teachers, it's worse than the stuff I published in the literary magazine back then {a fine peer-edited journal that was called H.I.P., short for "Hormonally-Induced Psychosis." I'm not making this up!!}]).
Being a person of somewhat nauseating privilege, and being emphatically not cool enough to run with a social circle that would further mess me up, I was supplied with enough shrinks and pills and stimulating extra-curricular activities to hack my way through adolescence, after which the rest of my life stretched out, the promised land, the great deliverance, and I shook hands with Dr. Depression, said that "it has been a pleasure but your services are no longer required," and I watched that scary mofo retreat deep into the recesses of my system, dead or dormant. Hardly a trace was left on the surface, like a faint scar from a teenagery pimple that had once throbbed disgustingly and conspicuously but was healed now that your hormones had died down: when you pressed with morbid curiosity on that scarcely-perceptible radius of scar tissue, you "remembered" the pain in some abstract sense, acknowledged that it had existed but you didn't actually feel it anymore, couldn't access the core of that feeling if you tried.
II. SUCK on Hiatus: The Sublimation Years
It's not like I never had a "pimple" again. Adult acne is a thing, y'all! (It is the documented leading cause of Boomer-suicides, in fact). But, on my own at last, I was able to devise a personal system that kept my loony leanings in check most of the time. I learned to ride my waves of intense blissed-out inspiration, milk them for productivity because I knew that they were unsustainable and they had an underbelly, a dank un-fun flip side that would inevitably follow on the heels of the dazzle-times. Shaky spells, brainfog, periods of being withdrawn and feeling flattened or somehow disjunct, alien. But I developed coping mechanisms. Phone-a-Friend! Take a shot! Come back, come back, find your way to the landing dock and rejoin the human race! And I always managed.
I even learned to troubleshoot, to use an ounce of prevention. You've seen Disney's "Beauty and the Beast," right? (If you have not, get the eff off my blog and fix this right now!) Well, remember when Maurice, Belle's endearing eccentric old dad, sets out for the inventor's exhibition-- "I'm off to the fair!" he asserts with crackpotted enthusiasm, kooky owl eyes wide and head cocked, only to get whacked in the noggin by by one of his own inventions-- and he jaunts off into the woods and sees two signposts, one for the Main Road and the other for a seedy-looking shortcut, but OF COURSE he takes the sketchball route (thus setting the plot in motion) and ends up getting pursued by a pack of wolves and subsequently imprisoned in the dungeon of the freakiest castle you've ever seen. (This sequence scared the LIVING PIDDLE out of me as a small child: when my parents gifted me the VHS for Christmukkah, I immediately spazzed out and threw the cassette into the kitchen trash, loath to revisit the trauma of Maurice's woodland excursion. [The tape was rescued from the garbage by my dad, who was laughing his ass off]). Anyway-- thought experiment. Say you were Maurice, and you had survived that harrowing sylvan ordeal: would you be so keen to barrel down a creepy unknown road again, or would you stick to the map? You would start to know where the bad routes were, the gnarly neural pathways, and you could just say NOPE, not even gonna go there, I already know what awaits so why bother enacting the whole bloody process again?
(Of course, Maurice and co. eventually had to go back to the castle, face the beast within, realize he was an okay guy-- just a lil' misunderstood-- and then defend the fortress against the real villain, Gaston AKA The Patriarchy! And yikes I don't even know how to fit Belle into my schema; you would think that I would identify more with her, that bubbly bookish brunette with a bit of a savior complex, but no, Maurice the whackjob is mah MAN, and the metaphor is unraveling fast now, but the point is this: you can circumvent the deep dark woods for awhile but not forever, you have to go back in for the "third act" and face up to things, and every folk-tale and myth is just an archetypal rendering of one's inevitable confrontation with the self, blah blah. I didn't know that yet, though).
III. SUCK Reloaded: Hemophiliac Attack
So I existed, for years on end, flirting with crisis but always coming back to a safe harbor, just a wee bit "fragile" of emotional constitution-- an image that I was okay with, because it was Romantic and maybe even momentarily enthralling to a few poor suckers out there (and here is the point where I must admit the shameful truth that I sometimes fantasized about being really fucked up, about having a "fun" mental illness that would engender wild bacchanalian attempts at oblivion and forays to the spiritual hinterlands from which I would return, damaged and trembling and haunted yet ethereally, irresistibly fascinating to all worthy onlookers. But no, instead sometimes I just got vaguely sad, vaguely checked-out, carb-craving and prone to feeling unloved and under-appreciated-- and what a trite and prosaic state of being that was, and all the more reason for self-loathing: I couldn't even manage to be screwy in a compelling way!)
For a long time nothing serious came of these tendencies; I always kept the lid on the simmering pot, even when it twitched dangerously with steamy condensation... but then I had this bad breakup last fall, and it kind of blew the lid off of everything. Ugh. UGH. That is THE most commonplace reason for a human being to "ausflippen," so basic, so high-school literary magazine that every fiber of my being wants to press "delete delete delete" and abandon this worn, weary, been-there-done-that territory. Tale as old as time. But, truth be told, it gets to the center of the issue, so persevere I must. To distill the matter: I fell victim to something that I am now codifying as "The Completional Fallacy" (I am officially adding this term to Lady Philosophy's lexicon of "fallacies"-- my major contribution to Academe will be something that I discovered incidentally through my relationship failures! Boom). The Completional Fallacy is this: "I am not complete, I horde within me a sad wounded child, and therefore I require someone to complete me, and this 'someone' had better also not be complete (because what need would he/ she then have of me?) and then we could press one another's injuries together, staunch the flow in a mutual healing process." Pretty fallacious, eh? Now I am not saying that romantic partners should not help one another to grow-- no duh!-- ; rather I am just saying that it is kind of a bad idea to either deliberately or subconsciously seek out someone on the basis of his/ her instability in the belief that this person will then empathize with you, accept you and your similar inclinations, be the one who will not hurt you as everyone else has [supposedly] hurt you (because you're Irish and Jewish, ergo you're fucked, the world has it out for you, has had it out for you for centuries).
So I got involved with this dude who had a lot to recommend him but who had his own demons, and we entered into this covenant where he was all like, "Tell me absolutely everything about you!" and I was all, "You really wanna know?" and he was all, "Yeah! We need to be vulnerable to each other; it's an act of trust, I'll show you mine if you show me yours, " and I was all, "Okay, deep breath, here you go, here is my messy and potentially very unattractive interior, maybe it's time for me to come to terms with it if you will first," and he was all, "I accept it unconditionally!" and I was all, "Great! Hokay, here you go." ... BUT, since I had put my stock in an well-intentioned yet fundamentally unstable individual, it was not long before my apple-bruises, those imperfections that I had with great difficulty revealed, were flung back at me as insupportable, as burdensome and altogether too much to deal with when he had his own full roster of issues; I was marked "defective" and sent away freshly cognizant of my perceived innate defectiveness. Thus the Completional Fallacy made its Fallaciousness manifest.
It was nowhere near the end of the world, this breakup business! Sure, it felt like I had been cut to the quick, but it was really only a flesh-wound and in fact I was culturally entitled to a sick enjoyment of this initial bleeding-out period-- what better time to soak oneself in booze and consume an excess of fried food and run through one's list of underutilized phone contacts to cash in on sympathy? And eventually the immune system is supposed to kick in where the flesh-wound is concerned; a clotting mechanism gets to work, a scab forms, becomes a scar; time and distance work their wonders in this natural physiological process. HOWEVER, if you tend to depression, or at least to my particular brand of such, then what should be a mere flesh-wound becomes a mortal wound because you lack a specific coagulant, an inhibitor that tells the body to stop bleeding out. You are an emotional hemophiliac, and after awhile it doesn't even matter what caused or catalyzed the injury-- it just matters that your system is "irresilient," cannot buffer. The mind says, "Okay, I get it: this hurt a lot, this was perversely fun for awhile but now I am ready to be done, would like to wake up in the morning without instantaneously thinking, 'Oh fuck, I'm awake,' would like to take a simple subway ride without feeling like I perceive in the faces of strangers the Darwinian cruelty that lies beneath the veneer of civilization, I would like very much to not almost lose my shit in the seminar room when the professor sasses me for being five minutes late because the reason I was five minutes late is because I almost didn't get up this morning but I somehow convinced myself to come participate in this charade, a decision that I am IMMEDIATELY REGRETTING b-t-dubs."
The voice of reason, the self-outside-the-self, wants to put a stop to these destructive patterns once they have lost their initial reckless allure, their cute sophomoric abnegational spree. But the chemically-imbalanced brain has other ideas, it has an override button-- no, the old analogy was better: basically you are bleeding out unchecked, and the further depleted you become, the less capable you are of rationally evaluating your circumstances, and in your supine hemorrhagic position you really kinda lose the impetus to spring to your feet and reverse the state of things.
It is scary and disturbing to lose control-- for example, to experience a moment of levity with a friend, a snap-out-of-it joyous bubble, only to be made acutely aware of the moment's transience because you know that soon enough you'll have to go back into your head by yourself, a boomy domed cage from which nothing good is coming these days. "Don't make me go in there alone!" The pallor and bloodlessness, the Dementors, the encroachment of ick, the colonization and conquest of my entire consciousness by SUCK-- it snuck up on me, the sense that something was wrong, off-er than usual and not amenable to a quick fix or a shoving-under-the-rug. Allow me a few snapshots to illustrate the mucky progression of events:
1. I am in NOLA, Nawlins, the Big Easy, at the annual meeting of the American Schmoozicological Society, standing alone in my hotel room on the fifteenth floor with my head pressed against the glass; the seafood gumbo and the way-too-many-mint-juleps that I consumed the night prior have combined in my body to form a toxic sludge that I would not wish on anyone. I am supposed to be downstairs at this paper session or that networking event, but the thought of all those humbuzzing people... snappy in their conference attire, labeled with their university affiliations, eyes always scanning the room behind your shoulders, and the refrain of "so what do you work on?" and the sizing up, the peacocking, how do they do it all day, every day?... and suddenly I feel like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo: the already-formidable distance from my vantage point to the ground augments, accordions, and I have a vision of my forehead shattering the glass and then a perfect parabolic swan-dive to the pavement and I won't ever have to engage in the niceties or the artifice ever again because I am just so *exhausted* ... and then I laugh darkly to myself, a distancing irony swoops in to save me, I am just grotesquely hungover and having conference blahs, and probably more than half of the people who are in attendance here secretly want to defenestrate themselves anyway, it's no big deal.
2. I'm at a small social gathering in my neighborhood with Pablo, an old friend. He and Jana have come up with this rollicking party game called "Suicidal or Homicidal?", the premise of which is that every individual, when pushed to a crisis point, will fall definitively into one camp or the other and it will be obvious which one. They are going around the room diagnosing everyone who is present; when it's my turn to be evaluated, there's an instant chorus of, "Ohhh, Alana's suicidal. Definitely." I give them an eye-roll and a thumbs-up. I almost say, "Pills, uh-huh, definitely pills, maybe a mix of ibuprofen and heavier painkillers and sleeping pills, just enough to go to sleep and check out permanently, no razors for this girl, oh man I really hate blood," but I decide against it because I'm not sure they would know that I'm kidding, because I definitely am but my delivery might fall a little flat.
3. My sister has asked me to sub for her one Sunday at her choir job at a Unitarian church in Crooklyn. (FYI had a brief romance with the Unitarians when I was a teenager and was desperately seeking a spiritual center-- we would sit in drum-circles and sing Native American chants and I would just end up feeling really guilty because we were co-opting an art form of a genocided culture for our pseudo-spiritual self-interest). This morning we sing a version of Bach's "Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben" (that's "Jesu, joy of man's desiring") that is overlaid with an insipid text about gathering together in a community for times of song ("Jesu" is not welcome here!) and I am inwardly snarling at the toothlessness of the whole thing, because I don't ascribe to Lutheran theology or anything but at least it has some friggin' incisors, unlike these people who have just stolen the pretty pleasant music to feel good about themselves for an hour. (And then I think that maybe it is these snarly thought-patterns of mine that cause people to ditch me like the Defective I am). After the service, a couple of sweet eccentric old coots invite me to brunch and I just can't handle it, I am too thick with disdain for them, disdain for myself, so I make an excuse. My phone buzzes as I slip out of the church. It's a text from the sister: "How did it go? It's a nice day, you should walk across the Crooklyn bridge if you can" and suddenly it seems like a colossal insurmountable effort to text back because I am sick with old corroding familial venoms, the years and years of sister-baggage that we are pussy-footing around and I just don't have the will to play anymore, and she shouldn't be suggesting that I go take a walk across a bridge at this particular point in time, what the hell was she thinking?
4. Chez moi, December. It's close to midnight-- the literary hour of reckoning, of crying out, oh how cute-- and I am in bed under the duvet sobbing and sobbing. It won't turn off this time, the shaking, the systemic tremors. I can't even pinpoint a specific thought or event that brought me here (this stopped being "about" the dissolution of a romantic relationship WAY long ago): I can only describe the feeling as "breaking," or, "crumbling," or "falling to pieces," or "cracking up," or "finally snapping," any of those commonplace expressions that we bandy about in our daily discourse, these aphorisms, these stand-ins for experiences that we hope to be lucky enough to never know from the inside. But here I am now in the belly of the beast. I just want it to stop. My self-outside-the-self speaks faintly, from afar, sees the state of affairs and offers this: "Alana. Hey. Maybe it's a good thing that you live fifteen blocks away from one of the biggest hospitals in Schmanhattan. Maybe you want to walk over there right now and, like, ask for a bright fluorescent room and an antiseptic white bed and for somebody to, um, keep an eye on you until the night is over." The self-inside-the-self says, "UGH NO, it would take so much goddamned energy to walk all the way over there to the hospital and even start to explain things..." so I stay paralyzed, face in the pillow, and then suddenly I cackle-snort at the whole twisted line of thinking (you know, that I would totally "off" myself or something were I not so zapped, zonked, and fucking lazy on account of the depression-- funny how it has a fail-safe built in, maybe the disease does not want to kill its host) and I hug myself in bed, and feeble laughter begins to dilute the crying spell and I say to myself-- this is both the inside- and outstide-the-self self weighing in-- that if I manage to ride out the night, I will call somebody up, I will eat crow and not give a deuce about my "image" (because my image has been degraded so far in my own eyes that how could anyone think less of me than I do?) and I will try anything, yoga, therapy, Unitarianism, chemical supplements, a comprehensive rewiring of the nervous system, whatever, just as long as there is a sliver of a chance that I don't have to feel like this ever again...
IV. WUT!
And so, really scared and taking things seriously now, I went out and got myself a coagulant, a fairly standard one; I kept the little orange pill bottle in my kitchen cabinet, began the practice of swallowing a green-and-white capsule ritualistically in the morning. At first the meds seemed to swap out my bleak weepy desolation for cracked-out anxiety: whereas before I had slept a fuck-ton and would "come to" as one emerges from a Rip van Winkle experience, now I sprung out of bed at the ass-crack of dawn all fight-or-flight, heart hammering hard as though I had forgotten to take care of something critically important. (And which is worse, Catatonia or Manic Panic? I don't even know. A splash of wine seemed to even the scales for me in those early medicated days).
I opened up to people, tentatively at first and then spilling out, opened up to professionals and then to friends-- most of whom were like, "oh, you too? yeah, welcome to the club, babe, I have my therapist on speed-dial, come check out my pill drawer!"and I was like, "whoa, we are a messed-up bunch! I guess birds-of-a-feather, you know, fellow Defectives... or maybe it's a generation-wide 'phenom,' or a condition of belonging to the Homo sapiens, who knows... and GUYS really we should have talked about all of this sooner, but I was all reclusive and ashamed and going-it-alone for so long and that's the sneaky thing about the condition, innit? that it makes you ashamed and you don't reach out to anyone."
After a little bit of time something started to kick in, a tingling, a Great Awakening. Maybe it was the combination of factors, of a chemically recalibrating brain and of the odd release/ empowerment that comes with admitting that things are not okay even though you have everything... finally the pretense is over, you know? You don't even have to try to exist within the lines anymore. And I entered this wild and wacky life-phase of Uncaring-- not in the sense of apathy or numbness but in the sense of bulletproof-ness, of "Yo dawg, so I really crashed, I mean really crashed because the worst enemy is, like, inside you, the Enemy is not being able to trust your own mind to not suddenly go apeshit on you, to cannibalize itself, and once you pinpoint the source of the poison and commit yourself to managing it you suddenly realize that the whole external world is child's play, it could never even hope to compete in terms of terrorizing you, so suddenly you're all 'Come at me, bro!' with the world and you can start having some serious fun."
My Euphoria Times, my Whirlwind of WUT, could be symptomatically strange to the external observer. Said observer might have thought that I was totally high, like, on drugs or something. (Oh wait). I was possessed of a sense of grand cosmic irony, of perpetual high comedy that was a purification of tragedy, as though my personal pain had passed through a Refiner's Fire and become allegorical and universal (waddup Goethe!) For example, sitting in the seminar room-- the dreaded seminar room where vitality and inspiration went to be euthanized-- I no longer crumbled despairingly at the meaninglessness of it all but I sat there scarcely able to contain my laughter, because here were all these little people like me who were scribbling stuff down in their planners to placate the professorial demigods and they were SO worried! and so earnest! and didn't they realize that just to be alive and to simultaneously want to be alive was the greatest gift that you could ever hope for?
I sat in the seminar room laughing loonily to myself; I tuned in and out of lectures, plucking the choice bits that lit up my intellectual sweet spots and blowing off the rest in favor of reading my horoscope on my iPhone under the table or something (apparently gloomy Saturn was leaving my constellation and I would soon be breaking some bad co-dependent relationship patterns!) I announced to most of my friends and acquaintances that I was going to quit my PhD-- see the kaleidoscope of possibilities out there in the Real World now that I had stopped being so afraid to face things dead on! and then I somersaulted on the matter, because I wanted to singlehandedly, grandiosely revitalize the Ivory Tower as the last bastion of intellectual freedom and BY GOD I could do it! I chatted up strangers on the street and the subway and in the coffeeshops because they had all stories, they had pain in their eyes and now I understood and wanted to reach out! I went to a conference at Bleep U to give a paper and I finished writing the lecture the morning of. I had salt-and-vinegar kettle chips and beer for dinner about fifteen consecutive evenings in a row. I saw "Showgirls: The Musical" in a nightclub in the company of some guy whose life aspiration was to start a highbrow-lowbrow Philly Cheesesteak-themed food truck in Crooklyn. I asked my parents if they thought I would look good with short hair, and they shuddered and begged me not to be so rash, so naturally I went and lopped off the locks immediately (to great critical acclaim, I add!) I didn't finish any of my term papers or projects on time (the professors seemed to accept my "mercuriality"with a helpless shrug) but I did give two smashing concerts with a violinist (because musical performance is the life force, y'all!) and I wrote a satirical article for Toolyard's independent newspaper that got a few "likes" on Facebook.
One night I met up with my ex-ish person at the pub on my block. We had undergone several months of chilly radio-silence even though he had attempted to re-establish contact on more than one occasion: I fielded the efforts because it wasn't time yet, because on hearing from I still felt a little stab of something unsavory that was directly antithetical to my dippy rainbow super-high... but then, suddenly, the coagulants had taken effect and I didn't really remember the hurt in a visceral way anymore, and I saw that there was a salvageable element to our connection. So we hit the pub, at first approaching one another across the table with slight trepidation, but then the honesty bubbled up (for better or for worse we had a personal dynamic that could not support the superficial for long) and he bought my beer as recompense for "being pretty much the biggest jackass on the face of the planet to you, Alana," and I acknowledged the magnitude of the jackassitude, damn straight! but I also thanked him for, oddly, catapulting me to this plane of fearlessness that I might never have known otherwise. We talked about the fearless thing. "Schmanhattan just kicks the shit out of you," he said, ordering another rum-and-coke for himself, "and I was so insecure and unhappy for so long, and then I realized that ain't nobody got time for that." I concurred, adding that in his formulation,"Schmanhattan" could easily be replaced with "the world," or "the human condition," or "the self" -- you kick the shit out of you. Nobody does it better.
Boy was six drinks deep and it was time to call it a night. The subway was effed up and not running, so I told him that I would wait with him for a taxi; we stood on the sidewalk together in front of my apartment building and he puffed on a cigarette ("remember last summer when you gave up smoking FOR ME?" I said, arms akimbo) and he studied me slurrily through the haze. "Wow. You are really dead set on getting me a cab... you look good in those red jeans, you know..." but then there was a taxi-cabbus ex machina barreling up the block, and I shoved his arse in the yellow vehicle and gave him a peck on the cheek (of the face, not of the arse!) and I promised that we would talk soon, and then I went up to my apartment laughing all the way, incomplete and by my lonesome AND YET totally complete at the same time, a big honking paradox, a Schrödinger's Cat of completionality, a walking-talking Fallacy having the time of her life...
V. Epilog: The Woods are Lovely, Dark, and Deep
Of course, my new Carpe-the-Shiznit-out-of-this-Diem mode of existing was not sustainable, was like overfishing for wild Atlantic salmon or something-- the ecosystem would not forever support the crazy excessive intensity with which I suddenly fished in the Seas of Life after going without seafood for so long (and I actually literally did re-introduce the delicious pescados and the frutti di mare to my diet this spring after a seven-year streak of vegetarianism-- symbolic gesture?) Eventually there were consequences for the YOLO, there was a spectacular trail of chaos where I had been, my coagulant proved not to be a miracle-remedy and things started to get under my skin again and I wasn't totally immune to banality, fuckwittage, the usual suspects. The untouchability had run its course. I had swung a little too high; what goes up must come down, right? (That's what she said?)
And I started to grasp that there was no finite "cure" for this thing-- that I could know myself and guard against the tendencies to a certain extent but that we were in it for the long haul, I would be no stranger to these patterns. The monomythic trajectory, all of those fairy tales with their freaky forests-of-the-psyche and their cathartic culminations wherein the hero slays the dragon, the demon, the stepmother or the witch-- we would like to close the book triumphant, we would like to say "well that was a satisfying ending! On we go!" but we keep getting knocked back afresh to some point in the exposition of the story... like we were moseying along on the game-board of "Candyland" and we had almost reached the elysian realm of Queen Frostine but then we pulled the wrong card and were punted all the way back to the goopy molasses quagmire or to Lord Licorice's Tower of Terror. Oh SNAP!
But there is tremendous healing in the reiteration, in the looping of the journey (HAHA, "journey!") You're, like, leveling up every time that you embark. Have you read Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse? It's just the best: at the end of the novel, our protagonist Harry Haller the Steppenwolf has been through all kinds of trippin'-- he is hanging out with Mozart, for fuck's sake, and he has just "murdered" his female Doppelganger Hermine (who is really a projection of the self, obvs), and then suddenly all of the people in the scene turn into little figurines. Harry hears Mozart's transcendental laughter all around him and he realizes that he will never be done with the game, that he will traverse time and again the "hell of [his] inner being" (oh Hesse you are so FLIPPING Teutonic sometimes) but that in doing so he will maybe someday learn how to laugh. To know what is in the woods and to go there and back again and to wake up on a new day in spite of everything, eyes a little askew and overbright, to load up the cart with provisions in spite of everything and set out on the road and shout out to whoever happens to be around that I'm off to the fair!...
