Living and dying in the middle of the street
When I started this process two and half years ago, it was a voluntary descent into a kind of madness. Something that no one would do with her own life unless she had no choice. And that was my situation at the time.
After a life lived circling around a dark pit in my psyche, the place where other people had a clear sense of their own identity, it also felt like the first real gift I'd ever given myself. It's not that I never was selfish, or made decisions based on my own desires. God knows, I'd flown enough times into relationships and commitments that seemed like the Big Solution. But they were always about finding something outside myself. This time I was taking myself on, figuring out what the hell was wrong with me that my life was one endless serial disaster.
Having spent my life as a writer, I also thought that something might come out of it. Something publishable. I knew that I was taking on a personal project that no one I knew had ever done. To a large extent, I intended to the the work myself. I'd been through years of therapy, mostly wrapped around various depressions and breakdowns. None of it had gone deep enough. This time I intended to use my own sledgehammer and pickaxe and excavate the damned thing, bring it to light and fix it, whatever it was.
I knew I had lived through four years of paternal incest. I knew it was probably about that, though it might be about more than that. But I didn't understand the linkages. Didn't understand the things that were staring me in the face in my life at that moment. Why I was still deeply attached to a man I had finally managed to get out of my life after five painful years in which my self-esteem, my career and my way of life were deeply compromised. Why I had become, once again, immobilized by something you could call depression, but for me was like a kind of suspension of time, while I waited for my mind to come up with an idea, to produce an exit strategy that would help me understand and find a way out of this mess.
Other people who look at my life think it was extraordinary in some ways. I've travelled. Built a business. Written books. Been romantically involved with exceptional people. Seen and been involved with some moments in history -- like being a newspaper copy girl in the last days of hot type and living in Spain during Franco's reign and doing high-tech PR in the last wild days of the dotcom days -- that were fascinating.
But to me, the essential thing that characterized my life was a lack of courage. I was always ready and grateful for the opportunity to experience some new thing, whether it was a recreational drug or a chance to learn to ski or to go live in the Hollywood Hills. But virtually all of it came to me because of some kind of relationship. I never knew how to make my own fun. More than that, I was unable to plan, see my own future, or understand how other people did. There was something in me that just turned my whole brain into high-tension white noise whenever I started to try.
More fundamental was my lack of courage as a writer. I know how smart I am, and how talented. If I didn't know on my own steam, one writer after another has told me. Teachers have arranged writing scholarships at good schools that I didn't pursue. I've been welcomed in graduate writing seminars though I never finished college. I actually had my college expenses paid on the strength of my speech-writing. There's no writing job I've ever been handed that I couldn't do. But I couldn't hand myself a job that I could make my brain hold onto. I have files full of novel beginnings, poems that never got beyond the first draft. My mind just slid away from them, like someone who can't remember why she's quitting smoking on the second day of trying. Or all I needed was one tiny bit of criticism, or worse silence from a test reader, for me to toss something into the drawer and give it up.
I knew, intuitively, that my problem was something that was more important to me than the writing. But I didn't know what the obstacle was. I couldn't name it. I thought when my parents died, I would be able to write. I thought that when I was older and understood things better, I would be able to write. I thought that lover or another could give me the necessary emotional or financial support so I could write, but that never happened. I could feel the screaming wind of some kind of emotional noise in my head, but not interpret the meaning of it. Unless I could quiet it, find the Big Solution, that would let me track my own thoughts and maybe see a path into the future, I wouldn't be able to do anything but what I did spent my life doing. Which were projects based on short-term commitments to other people for money.
So this attempt to sort myself out was partly about that. But it was also about timing. I was in my mid-50s, and my parents and most of my close family were dead. I had met this last lover at 49. By the time I got him out of my life, I had aged massively. My heart was hurting all the time, as were my joints and bones. I'd given up exercise. I was constantly fighting off one infection after another. My workaholic habits and spending were out of control. I knew that I was on a fast-track to an early death, though I thought I might reclaim at least some years if I could change my life. But even if I did recover, I was looking at, at most, the last third of my existance. If I was ever going to accomplish anything that meant anything to me, this was my last chance.
There are all kinds of courage. I truly wish that my exercise of courage was less self-involved, and I hope someday that it will be. That is part of my vision of the end of this. That my attention will turn away from myself and toward what good I can do in the world. And sometimes courage isn't a matter of choice, but forced upon us, a kind of live-or-die situation. We do extraordinary things just to survive. I feel that this is that kind of courage. But it took force of will to decide to follow this path toward survival. In many ways, it would have been easier to just kill myself, and hope that there would be a chance to start over again in another life. But I couldn't do that to my son. The parenting I gave him, however well-intentioned, had been sketchy enough without leaving him with that sort of legacy. And besides, with all my trying to find one solution after another, this was the one I hadn't really tried. To just bite the bullet and find the cure inside my own darkness.
I knew that whatever I would gain from it, I would lose as much. I knew that the decision would separate me from mainstream reality, and probably cost me my career and most of the people in my life and possibly everything I owned. I knew I wouldn't get a lot of support on it, and I didn't. People who were initially sympathetic with my problems, became exhausted with me. Increasingly I spoke in a language that was meaningful to me, the language of my inner world, but that was stressful for people who were not engaged in similar life struggles. Over time, I became unable to work, as I was unable to maintain other relationships, because what I had once considered normal in my life became too painful to bear. I became increasingly isolated, because I didn't know how to communicate with other people in ways that didn't expose my emotional work. I had increasing difficulty maintaining my house and property, and finally had to accept that it might just all turn to a wreck around me while I got through this.
But despite all that, I had a clear sense of purpose. And perhaps for the first time in my life, an absolutely conviction that I knew what I was doing and the willingness to invest the time. I knew in rough terms what the path would look like, the structure of the work. And even, again in rough terms, what the payoff would be. There wasn't anything that anyone could say that would make me question myself. I didn't care what it cost. It was my life and there was no one but me who could save it. I didn't know if I could do it, but I intended to try.
All the way through it, I wrote. I am still writing through it, and this posting is part of that. The issues have evolved. In a way, they are the same issues, like going around and around the same mountain, but they are at a higher level. I'm out of the dark, battering confusion at the base. Now I'm dealing with more clearly defined questions. The same questions but increasingly answerable, managable and ownable. Questions of identity, entitlement, adjustment to reality, willingness to engage with life.
I knew I would lose something, but I didn't anticipate how much I would lose. Not in my life, but in myself. How much personal style and humor would be tossed in favor of lucidity and honesty. How much trust and generosity would be tossed in favor of realism and careful negotiation. How much openness and permeability to everyone and everything would be tossed in favor of groundedness and taking responsiblity for my own experience. It's like descending from sainthood into the dirty fingernails and muddy shoes of human life. I know I chose this, and that the changes come with some real benefits like actually being able to grasp what's going on around me and learn from it. But I can't say I don't miss the old me. And over time, I hope I'll remember how and find ways to be generous and permeable and occasionally saintly again. Well, maybe I can live without all that, but I would like to regain some style and humor.
Which brings me back to those damned poems. Everything is a metaphor for something else, and these poems are as much a candidate for dream analysis as the rest of this story. The truth is that I hate them, as I hate most of this writing from a critical perspective, because it is so humorless and relentlessly self-involved. It's not who I wanted to be, or want to be today. It conflicts with a half-dozen voices of the superego. The nasty ones that sneer, "Who do you think you are? You're getting a too big for your britches." And the milder, but no less powerful ones, that say that no one will invite me back unless I'm perky, charming and leave them laughing.
Knowing when to listen to those inner voices and when to tell them to just shut up is the study of a lifetime. Or not. Sometimes, it's better to just shift levels and punt. Which is what I'm doing here. I think this is about something else than getting along with other people or keeping my self-importance in check. I may be wrong. But there seems to be a deeper, more central voice that's guiding me on this. It's not just that I need to get well for myself and for what good I may do with the rest of my life. It is that is the only opportunity to do good that I've been handed.
It's not the one I would have chosen. I would have liked to have run for office and found some brilliantly incisive cure for poverty or racism. I would have preferred to have become a female merger of the voices of Barth and Gass and Rilke, writing prose and poetry that opened people's minds and gave them new powers of perception. I would have like to have become a great philosopher, synthesizing all ideas about culture and personality and ethics that float around my head.
And maybe I'll do some of that, if I don't grow senile first. Who knows, maybe I'll get sufficiently okay with myself and trusting of the universe to fall in love again, though I can hardly imagine that now. Anything's possible.
But now, this minute, it feels like the opportunity, the gift I was given with the history that was such a nightmare to live through and afterwards, was to do this healing in public. It's not pretty, not elegant or sociable or even common language. It makes it hard work to even look at me, and I know that. But it's also, except for the experience of giving birth to my son, the most truthful and essential thing I've ever done in my life. And as a creative and expressive person, it's what I can say. And how I say it seems to be part of what it is.
I keep wanting to hold it back until I can make it more stylish, more amusing. I think about turning myself into a stand-up comedian. Or a poet in service to form. I think about turning it into a novel or a book of daily meditations for women who live around the pit where their identity should be. I'm second-guessing myself as I've been second-guessing myself my whole life, but now I understand the outcome of that. I just don't have time for it. I have to risk being a bad writer, a boring person, a failure in some other way.
This does not go in the drawer. In fact, I couldn't put it there if I wanted. It has a life of its own. Maybe it's my life. If so, there's more of me, more power and determination, than I ever knew. And that, I guess, is the question of the day. Can I do this? Will all that baggage keep holding me back. It feels increasingly like a lot of noise out of the past, like chewing gum on the sole of my shoe, but this is on my soul, clinging to some ideas about what I can and can't do, what I need to survive or be loved, that are legacies of a truly awful childhood. But they are childish ideas, and I think I'm finally becoming an adult.
We'll see.
After a life lived circling around a dark pit in my psyche, the place where other people had a clear sense of their own identity, it also felt like the first real gift I'd ever given myself. It's not that I never was selfish, or made decisions based on my own desires. God knows, I'd flown enough times into relationships and commitments that seemed like the Big Solution. But they were always about finding something outside myself. This time I was taking myself on, figuring out what the hell was wrong with me that my life was one endless serial disaster.
Having spent my life as a writer, I also thought that something might come out of it. Something publishable. I knew that I was taking on a personal project that no one I knew had ever done. To a large extent, I intended to the the work myself. I'd been through years of therapy, mostly wrapped around various depressions and breakdowns. None of it had gone deep enough. This time I intended to use my own sledgehammer and pickaxe and excavate the damned thing, bring it to light and fix it, whatever it was.
I knew I had lived through four years of paternal incest. I knew it was probably about that, though it might be about more than that. But I didn't understand the linkages. Didn't understand the things that were staring me in the face in my life at that moment. Why I was still deeply attached to a man I had finally managed to get out of my life after five painful years in which my self-esteem, my career and my way of life were deeply compromised. Why I had become, once again, immobilized by something you could call depression, but for me was like a kind of suspension of time, while I waited for my mind to come up with an idea, to produce an exit strategy that would help me understand and find a way out of this mess.
Other people who look at my life think it was extraordinary in some ways. I've travelled. Built a business. Written books. Been romantically involved with exceptional people. Seen and been involved with some moments in history -- like being a newspaper copy girl in the last days of hot type and living in Spain during Franco's reign and doing high-tech PR in the last wild days of the dotcom days -- that were fascinating.
But to me, the essential thing that characterized my life was a lack of courage. I was always ready and grateful for the opportunity to experience some new thing, whether it was a recreational drug or a chance to learn to ski or to go live in the Hollywood Hills. But virtually all of it came to me because of some kind of relationship. I never knew how to make my own fun. More than that, I was unable to plan, see my own future, or understand how other people did. There was something in me that just turned my whole brain into high-tension white noise whenever I started to try.
More fundamental was my lack of courage as a writer. I know how smart I am, and how talented. If I didn't know on my own steam, one writer after another has told me. Teachers have arranged writing scholarships at good schools that I didn't pursue. I've been welcomed in graduate writing seminars though I never finished college. I actually had my college expenses paid on the strength of my speech-writing. There's no writing job I've ever been handed that I couldn't do. But I couldn't hand myself a job that I could make my brain hold onto. I have files full of novel beginnings, poems that never got beyond the first draft. My mind just slid away from them, like someone who can't remember why she's quitting smoking on the second day of trying. Or all I needed was one tiny bit of criticism, or worse silence from a test reader, for me to toss something into the drawer and give it up.
I knew, intuitively, that my problem was something that was more important to me than the writing. But I didn't know what the obstacle was. I couldn't name it. I thought when my parents died, I would be able to write. I thought that when I was older and understood things better, I would be able to write. I thought that lover or another could give me the necessary emotional or financial support so I could write, but that never happened. I could feel the screaming wind of some kind of emotional noise in my head, but not interpret the meaning of it. Unless I could quiet it, find the Big Solution, that would let me track my own thoughts and maybe see a path into the future, I wouldn't be able to do anything but what I did spent my life doing. Which were projects based on short-term commitments to other people for money.
So this attempt to sort myself out was partly about that. But it was also about timing. I was in my mid-50s, and my parents and most of my close family were dead. I had met this last lover at 49. By the time I got him out of my life, I had aged massively. My heart was hurting all the time, as were my joints and bones. I'd given up exercise. I was constantly fighting off one infection after another. My workaholic habits and spending were out of control. I knew that I was on a fast-track to an early death, though I thought I might reclaim at least some years if I could change my life. But even if I did recover, I was looking at, at most, the last third of my existance. If I was ever going to accomplish anything that meant anything to me, this was my last chance.
There are all kinds of courage. I truly wish that my exercise of courage was less self-involved, and I hope someday that it will be. That is part of my vision of the end of this. That my attention will turn away from myself and toward what good I can do in the world. And sometimes courage isn't a matter of choice, but forced upon us, a kind of live-or-die situation. We do extraordinary things just to survive. I feel that this is that kind of courage. But it took force of will to decide to follow this path toward survival. In many ways, it would have been easier to just kill myself, and hope that there would be a chance to start over again in another life. But I couldn't do that to my son. The parenting I gave him, however well-intentioned, had been sketchy enough without leaving him with that sort of legacy. And besides, with all my trying to find one solution after another, this was the one I hadn't really tried. To just bite the bullet and find the cure inside my own darkness.
I knew that whatever I would gain from it, I would lose as much. I knew that the decision would separate me from mainstream reality, and probably cost me my career and most of the people in my life and possibly everything I owned. I knew I wouldn't get a lot of support on it, and I didn't. People who were initially sympathetic with my problems, became exhausted with me. Increasingly I spoke in a language that was meaningful to me, the language of my inner world, but that was stressful for people who were not engaged in similar life struggles. Over time, I became unable to work, as I was unable to maintain other relationships, because what I had once considered normal in my life became too painful to bear. I became increasingly isolated, because I didn't know how to communicate with other people in ways that didn't expose my emotional work. I had increasing difficulty maintaining my house and property, and finally had to accept that it might just all turn to a wreck around me while I got through this.
But despite all that, I had a clear sense of purpose. And perhaps for the first time in my life, an absolutely conviction that I knew what I was doing and the willingness to invest the time. I knew in rough terms what the path would look like, the structure of the work. And even, again in rough terms, what the payoff would be. There wasn't anything that anyone could say that would make me question myself. I didn't care what it cost. It was my life and there was no one but me who could save it. I didn't know if I could do it, but I intended to try.
All the way through it, I wrote. I am still writing through it, and this posting is part of that. The issues have evolved. In a way, they are the same issues, like going around and around the same mountain, but they are at a higher level. I'm out of the dark, battering confusion at the base. Now I'm dealing with more clearly defined questions. The same questions but increasingly answerable, managable and ownable. Questions of identity, entitlement, adjustment to reality, willingness to engage with life.
I knew I would lose something, but I didn't anticipate how much I would lose. Not in my life, but in myself. How much personal style and humor would be tossed in favor of lucidity and honesty. How much trust and generosity would be tossed in favor of realism and careful negotiation. How much openness and permeability to everyone and everything would be tossed in favor of groundedness and taking responsiblity for my own experience. It's like descending from sainthood into the dirty fingernails and muddy shoes of human life. I know I chose this, and that the changes come with some real benefits like actually being able to grasp what's going on around me and learn from it. But I can't say I don't miss the old me. And over time, I hope I'll remember how and find ways to be generous and permeable and occasionally saintly again. Well, maybe I can live without all that, but I would like to regain some style and humor.
Which brings me back to those damned poems. Everything is a metaphor for something else, and these poems are as much a candidate for dream analysis as the rest of this story. The truth is that I hate them, as I hate most of this writing from a critical perspective, because it is so humorless and relentlessly self-involved. It's not who I wanted to be, or want to be today. It conflicts with a half-dozen voices of the superego. The nasty ones that sneer, "Who do you think you are? You're getting a too big for your britches." And the milder, but no less powerful ones, that say that no one will invite me back unless I'm perky, charming and leave them laughing.
Knowing when to listen to those inner voices and when to tell them to just shut up is the study of a lifetime. Or not. Sometimes, it's better to just shift levels and punt. Which is what I'm doing here. I think this is about something else than getting along with other people or keeping my self-importance in check. I may be wrong. But there seems to be a deeper, more central voice that's guiding me on this. It's not just that I need to get well for myself and for what good I may do with the rest of my life. It is that is the only opportunity to do good that I've been handed.
It's not the one I would have chosen. I would have liked to have run for office and found some brilliantly incisive cure for poverty or racism. I would have preferred to have become a female merger of the voices of Barth and Gass and Rilke, writing prose and poetry that opened people's minds and gave them new powers of perception. I would have like to have become a great philosopher, synthesizing all ideas about culture and personality and ethics that float around my head.
And maybe I'll do some of that, if I don't grow senile first. Who knows, maybe I'll get sufficiently okay with myself and trusting of the universe to fall in love again, though I can hardly imagine that now. Anything's possible.
But now, this minute, it feels like the opportunity, the gift I was given with the history that was such a nightmare to live through and afterwards, was to do this healing in public. It's not pretty, not elegant or sociable or even common language. It makes it hard work to even look at me, and I know that. But it's also, except for the experience of giving birth to my son, the most truthful and essential thing I've ever done in my life. And as a creative and expressive person, it's what I can say. And how I say it seems to be part of what it is.
I keep wanting to hold it back until I can make it more stylish, more amusing. I think about turning myself into a stand-up comedian. Or a poet in service to form. I think about turning it into a novel or a book of daily meditations for women who live around the pit where their identity should be. I'm second-guessing myself as I've been second-guessing myself my whole life, but now I understand the outcome of that. I just don't have time for it. I have to risk being a bad writer, a boring person, a failure in some other way.
This does not go in the drawer. In fact, I couldn't put it there if I wanted. It has a life of its own. Maybe it's my life. If so, there's more of me, more power and determination, than I ever knew. And that, I guess, is the question of the day. Can I do this? Will all that baggage keep holding me back. It feels increasingly like a lot of noise out of the past, like chewing gum on the sole of my shoe, but this is on my soul, clinging to some ideas about what I can and can't do, what I need to survive or be loved, that are legacies of a truly awful childhood. But they are childish ideas, and I think I'm finally becoming an adult.
We'll see.