randomness

I don’t eat pork

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G texted the other guy telling him she was excited for dinner – he was cooking, and he was waiting.

For some reason, before heading to his place, she had agreed to meet with someone else – someone persistent and at the same time mysterious. F was slightly older, and it was perhaps his pursuit alone that piqued her curiosity. She could never see, though, that he was truly interested in her, but believed he was interested in the conquest. Not necessarily a sexual conquest, but instead, the breaking down of the barrier that had kept her in a polite outer orbit. She ended up at F’s apartment, a penthouse overlooking the vast city, where he instructed a cook to prepare something for them. He said something about hoping she was not a vegetarian, but said it forcefully, as though he expected her to disavow any idea of being a vegetarian, even if she were lying. Throughout the evening, on all counts, she was reserved, quiet, and to this non-question about her carnivorous habits, she only nodded, quietly saying, “No, I just don’t eat pork.” He laughed too loudly for the circumstances, exclaiming his relief.

Somehow this sitting down together did not reveal much information about him; the only reason she’d let herself be led there in the first place was to satisfy this curiosity. He was as mysterious as ever, with only context in place to reveal or assume certain things: he had money, he had a cook on staff, he was intense and focused at the same time as seeming to be entirely indifferent to her company, to his surroundings. He never asked questions but freely answered them.

She had no reason to do so, and did not have an interest in doing so, beyond curiosity, but she ended up having sex with F after a whole evening sitting at a long table on benches across from one another, talking (or listening and nodding) but never learning anything. He led her around the apartment, showing her all the rooms, explaining how he had come to decorate them the way they were. He seemed as disinterested in this as he did in all other information. This bemused disinterest continued right into his invitation (which, again, was no invitation but an expectation) to bed. It was, it seemed to her, a kind of conquest, but not even one about which he would feel any excitement for having achieved it. No, it was just something fine but forgettable to do. At one point during this cautionless and oddly awkward interlude, he stopped, looked at her and said through clenched teeth, frustration and a hint of threat creeping into his voice, “I was hoping I would not be able to hear you breathing.” Alarmed, she thought she should get up and leave. Nevertheless, he resumed, and she assented, with nothing more being said about the sound of her breathing, and eventually it was morning.

And in the light of day F seemed like a different person. He still did not ask (many) questions, but now he was open and personal, revealing that he had five children. (The only questions he asked were pokes and prods into her desire to have children.) He lay on his back, propped on a pillow, arms behind his head, smiling and warmly inviting all the questions she felt too nervous to ask the previous evening.

She thought, while lying next to F, propped up on one elbow, looking at him, still feeling nothing but curiosity, that she never made it to the other guy’s dinner. In fact, she never talked to him again.

The next thing we knew about her was that she moved into F’s apartment six months after this strange dinner, although she moved into her own room. It was a veiled fact that she didn’t fully grasp until in residence, but he had a girlfriend already. She was in the periphery all along and was the mother of two of his children. She had her own apartment in the same building. G was expected to become a part of this ‘extended’ family. Again, it was posed like a question to which ‘no’ could not be the answer.

As time went on, G realized that F was like a composite of every man she had ever known or been with. Those who would not cut off former girlfriends or those who insisted on open or polyamorous relationships. F was dispassionate but interested in the pursuit. What took time to realize was that F was deeply insecure, despite seeming like the most secure person on the surface. He made a lot of all-or-nothing pronouncements but did not believe fully in any of them. His insecurity led him to be a minor tyrant at times, which grew worse with age. You just don’t know or see what you’re getting into in the beginning, especially when you are young and think you know everything.

She wanted to escape after several years. And after years of F’s household management, it was like an escape. The freedoms had eroded so slowly that she did not realize fully how much her life resembled a prison. She got word to her estranged brother that she needed help. Her brother came from across the country and brought her a car – by this stage in her experience living with F, she did not have unlimited freedom. She had a career and a seemingly lavish lifestyle but could not socialize as she liked, and certainly could not “get away”. Her brother parked the car in a lot near F’s apartment and stashed the key in her office building. When she finally saw a brief window of time to escape, it had been snowing for a full day, and there was no way – not enough time – she could get out and shovel all the snow away from the car without being noticed or missed. She frantically phoned her brother, begging him to help her with the snow. He was already gone.

G collapsed in the parking lot in the snow, leaning against the front of the car, not knowing if she could get away. She waited, worrying that F or someone acting on his behalf would turn up at any moment and drag her away. Closing her eyes, flakes of snow falling on her tired eyelids, she remembered a moment in Mexico, long before she knew F, when she was inadvertently served pork at a roadside taco truck after saying she’d eat anything but pork. Suddenly she realized that so long ago, that first night, F had laughed so long, loud and inappropriately because, after shyly telling him she didn’t eat pork, he served it to her anyway, calling it something else. And that, if only she had realized, should have been the first sign…

Photo by Cornelius von Tiedemann on Unsplash

Contrived

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A person swimming in the pool of her own life, constantly crashing against the concrete edges of said pool, is more likely than anyone else to insist that her own life is “really fucking weird” even if it is, by all objective accounts, mundane and boring as fuck. Some people need to live – or wallow – in the belief that their life is “weird” or surreal to feel that it has some meaning or isn’t just a day-in, day-out account of nothingness. Such people can elevate their boring marital infidelities to soap-operatic, shrill drama; such people can imagine that their semi-imagined illnesses/hypochondria make them special, interesting, persecuted, or even unique.

No, in fact, they don’t. They do, in fact, make one just like everyone else, albeit slightly more histrionic and liable to whip every perceived slight into something it isn’t, to take every comment personally, to misinterpret every possible thing – ranging from the “rudeness” or “disrespect” someone supposedly showed (they didn’t) to truly believing someone’s hollow words, said to keep her pacified, not because they were truly felt/meant. And, most of all, never letting go. Everything has to turn into a years-long, lifelong grudge – as if holding on to that much anger and hatred isn’t in itself toxic and stressful. Witnessing this, one sees how the American world is awash in frivolous litigiousness, bolstered by each individual’s sense of inflated importance.

When a person’s life becomes, for example, a s(l)ide-show of authorities phoning them at all hours of the night to come and rescue wildcats from a dilapidated, abandoned trailer in a rundown trailer park – yeah, then I will agree that that person’s life is “weird”.

When a person’s life becomes filled with manic people from decades in the past, who refuse to let go, making that person central to their present-day lives – yeah, that’s pretty “weird”, too. Especially when the brazenness and grip of the obsession spills over again and again. One compulsive person raping another person’s mind, mining their brain and history for evidence to use against them later. All to maintain this inflated self-importance and immediacy, threatening to (and not in the least caring if it does) disrupt and destroy that person’s life, yes, that’s weird, and a bit tragic and unfortunate. (Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness touched on this kind of disturbed obsession/revenge/sexual jealousy to the degree that I barely wanted to finish reading, seeing as how similar themes have played out before my eyes.)

How much of life and identity is contrived this way – all designed to elicit reactions from others and feed the bloated, hungry or jealous ego?

Photo by Klaas on Unsplash

face and voice

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She attended a few dinners, a few parties, a few dinner parties. She was social and sparkling, even if she wore ugly shoes. She ran into old acquaintances, made a few new ones, smiled, laughed and talked, and more importantly, listened. What, after all, do most people do than love to be listened to? She smiled and nodded reassuringly, understanding deeply, and uncharacteristically, patted a few people’s shoulders, forearms or hands, even reached out to hug them casually before leaving and moving on to the next engagement. At the airport, she had casual conversations. She talked to a couple on the plane coming back. She made eye contact and smiled at strangers, if their eyes met.

For once she did not feel awkward. For once she did not feel mangled. She did not even feel pulled by her normal extremes.

All she could think, with this flood of faces and voices, is that she only wanted one face and voice. The one that had become most important by far. Others played their roles, but it was this pivotal and important face and voice that had paved the way for this equilibrium that let her move through the world without feeling awkward, mangled or extreme.

Photo by Felipe Belluco on Unsplash

Besting the depression beast

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“But despite the enthusiastic claims of pharmaceutical science, depression cannot be wiped out so long as we are creatures conscious of our own selves. It can at best be contained—and containing is all that current treatments for depression aim to do.” –The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon

I admit it – I’ve written a misleading title for this post, in large part because I don’t think there is any such thing as “besting” depression in the sense that you can defeat it completely. Can you best it in that you tame it, manage it, have good days or very long spells of not having depression rule your life? Of course. And it’s in this sense that I use the term “besting”… finding, through all the trial and error that it seems to require, the right treatment for depression to deliver you (or the depressed person) the best possible outcome and way of living. And this, at best, seems to be impermanent and something about which one must be vigilant.

People who are not clinically depressed and never have been are unlikely to ever understand intrinsically true clinical depression or what it feels like. Maybe with observation and experience, we can recognize it in others (“we”, here, being laypeople without clinical depression who are the friends, loved ones and colleagues of the clinically depressed). Maybe we can get brief but “light” glimpses of the multifarious nature of depression (and other mental illnesses, which may or may not accompany depression) when we ourselves dip into our own melancholy.

Like most, I have been through circumstantial depression (when something terrible happens, and triggered by this circumstance, I react in some way akin to ‘depression’ – which can be a whole host of different things). But ultimately I retain, or at least quickly and independently regain, the ability to cope and manage without consequences or lasting physical or emotional effects. Perhaps I am, like many, predisposed to an overly thoughtful and melancholy nature… but this is not clinical depression or mental illness. I have seen the difference up close more times than I care to recount.

I think frequently and often about depression, anxiety and other illnesses, as usual in trying to understand the people around me and, more closely, the people in my life. Those who do suffer from at least depression, if not a smörgåsbord of other issues. This need to understand largely began with my father’s late-1980s breakdown and ongoing battle with crippling depression (which has manifested itself repeatedly ever since but in different guises and ways, something to which he will never admit; he discarded his Prozac after a few years and declared that he was “cured”, but he isn’t). What I continue to learn along the way informs all my interactions with people who share with me that they are depressed or otherwise mentally ill (I have many friends, family members and colleagues who have experienced these conditions at varying extremes). More recently, experiences with depressed (often undiagnosed) addicts/alcoholics have pushed me further into the investigative field, wanting not just to understand limited textbook portrayals of depression but the much more integrative and complex web of interwoven factors that make up depression as a whole.

Looking for a fresh perspective, I turned to Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon. (And strangely, I was only about a fifth of the way through reading the book when Sinéad O’Connor’s recent self-published video, crying out from the depths of her own depression appeared on Facebook. A real-life reminder that depression and mental illness is everywhere, does not discriminate, and that even if stigma attached to mental illness has decreased considerably in the last 30 years, it still takes quite a lot of courage, particularly as a public figure, to put yourself out on display in such a raw, emotive, helpless state and ask for help.)

Immediately gripping in its in-depth approach, starting with the intensely personal and detailed, and weaving itself out into a mixture of the personal (both the author’s own and the experiences/anecdotes of others who have lived with depression) and journalistic/scholarly pursuit of the history of depression and its various treatments alongside the complex web of mitigating factors that change one’s relationship to depression, e.g. poverty, demographics, politics and social perception (stigma), the book has been well-worth the difficulty and time invested.

By “difficulty” here, I don’t mean that it is a challenging or excessively convoluted or academic book – in fact, it reads much more like a riveting, long-form piece in a periodical. It’s technically quite easy to read, fixate on and think about, long after you’ve put the book down. It takes some digestion; it’s almost comprehensive and encyclopedic at tackling all angles of depression. It’s for this reason that my own writing about the book is surface-level at best – a mere recommendation for those who want to understand depression, who suffer from depression and want to see hope through information.

Moreover, despite Solomon’s relatively dispassionate account of his own journey (and those of others), the book is difficult because these accounts are so human and painful to read about, to see, even through the filter of distance, what he and others have gone through, both in the throes of deepest, wildest depression and in seeking treatment. But that is where the power of this book rests – and why this work not only satisfied my desire to know and understand, as closely as I could get to being under the skin of a depressed person, but also is important as a topic of study and discussion, as a compendium of depression and how it is seen, treated, perceived on many levels. As a springboard for continued analysis and study.

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

you never know

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We never really know what knowledge is going to come in handy. I might never need to know that molluscs have teeth, or what kind of teeth they have, but knowing doesn’t hurt anything. But, other than the joy of knowing for the sake of knowing, can it actually help?

Well, one never knows. I think it might have been in Imre Kertész‘s Fatelessness, or possibly in Ta-Nehisi Coates‘s Between the World and Me, or maybe even neither (although each contains some aspect of this theme): you go through life and start to realize, possibly even lament, all those things you could have learned but didn’t because you didn’t see their applicability or value.

In my last job I had to learn a great deal about laparoscopic surgery and specific lap procedures. Being the “all-in” type (as well as the one responsible for drumming up themes, ideas and topics – as well as often ghost-writing the posts – for a blog that internal folks rarely understood the purpose of) I dove into research and studies about laparoscopy and its uses, technologies and tools … and blah blah blah. Sure, this made it easier for me to do my job, much easier to talk to the former clinicians within the company who were responsible for marketing lap-specific products and also to talk to clinicians externally (to whom we were selling). But beyond that, I saw no real scope for applying this knowledge elsewhere. Did that stop me from going wild like a pig at the research trough? No.

And wouldn’t you know that after I spent significant time and effort inhaling laparoscopy, a friend would require a hysterectomy and had been told by surgeons in her country that, because she had never had a child, she would have to have the full open surgery? I’m no surgeon; heck, I am not even a healthcare professional. But I was reasonably sure, given the evidence and research I had just spent months combing through, that it was absolutely possible for her to have a laparoscopic hysterectomy. I gathered the evidence I could find, sent it her way and told her to push back and ask more questions.

This is perhaps the other important note: We don’t know, we are not experts, so we fear pushing back. We tend to trust the specialists in whom we place our care and well-being, and we doubt that their advice is given because they are trying to fool us… but there are other institutional matters a healthcare professional weighs in diagnosing and offering treatment. In this case, the friend’s surgeon perhaps did not have the most up-to-date information or was not capable of performing the laparoscopic procedure himself. Or, as is often the case, the healthcare system and its practitioners will try to push the cheaper option, even if it is riskier and involves longer healing times. We are often at our most vulnerable and afraid in these situations, so less likely than ever to push back: who are we, untrained mortals, to push back against the education, expertise and experience of these medical professionals? But who else is going to advocate on our behalf?

Still, I am happy to say that she did push back, armed with a bit of evidence. (Ironically, one of the world’s leading experts on laparoscopic hysterectomy procedures comes from her tiny country but practices in the US….) And she was referred to a surgeon with the appropriate expertise and had the procedure laparoscopically, with a much shorter recovery and healing time.

And here I go back to the point: I never imagined that the knowledge I gained in my last job, which was so far outside the boundaries of anything I imagined doing in my career, would have a real-life pay off. And yet, that knowledge I gained might well have been the most important thing I ever learned in a workplace in terms of how great a difference it made in someone else’s life and well-being.

Photo (c) 2006 Amanda Graham used under Creative Commons license.

Passé: High and not so dry

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Finally, someone shared the same unusual set of experiences – and was experienced in similar ways. Finally, it meant that she did not immediately get bored, annoyed and frustrated.

Always before, she found that the things that are everyday and even passé to her were inevitably going to be exciting and fresh for most others. Even sought after. Having lived completely different lives within just one life, nothing like what anyone who’d crossed her path had lived, such big divides opened up on fundamental matters, no matter how many superficial things were shared in common. The excitement, anxiety, rush, fear – whatever one wants to call it – that filled most people each time s/he took a new step, particularly on her/his own, seemed quaint and cute to her at first. She had been taking these steps alone, reaching beyond ‘normal’ boundaries and experience, since she was not even old enough to vote, drive or get a job.

It was all ‘been there, done that’ for her – not that she could not enjoy any of these things anew, but for her, the awakening to new things and feelings could only come in relation to others, to see things afresh through their eyes. It would take something truly remarkable to move her deeply.

To others, she was an untrodden path, albeit one set with new traps (for anyone who had been hibernating in a long slumber of a closed system). She represented both the life one could finally see, taste, touch and smell while vibrantly on her/his own, exploring, as a facilitator toward the next chapter of life, and yet also the very real possibility of being ensnared in an offset jaw trap. With teeth bared.

In more literary terms, all entanglements, thus, were short stories with abrupt endings. For those middle-aged toddlers, wandering into the world wide-eyed and virtually inexperienced, or perhaps merely cautious, so much unseen, the story was over almost as soon as it had begun, while she continued to linger in those pages already read, imagining it as one chapter in a longer work. She served as a transitional plot device to some while she was, for still others, the awakening that portended an entirely new body of literature.

She wondered whether people ever actually could find themselves on the same pages, at the same time, or at least find that they were ready to stay within the same chapter to move forward with the narrative together.

And, then, just as the question dissipated, seeming to have no answer, it all changed.

Photo (c) 2011 Minnesota Historical Society used under Creative Commons license.

You bring it on yourself …

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I just can’t “do” pettiness. I have petty thoughts and moments like everyone else, but when the time comes to act petty – to do something that really crosses a line, I can’t do it. And I don’t see how anyone can. Are people so hollow that they must extract a momentary ‘victory’ or pinprick of self-satisfaction from things that will hurt others or ultimately just be a pile of nothingness? Here I think of everything from going out of one’s way to genuinely hurt or threaten someone else because of one’s own childish impulses (and by hurt or threaten, I am talking about actual things, such as launching things into the world that could jeopardize another person’s livelihood or cause problems in his/her daily life) to the daily pettiness, such as spewing anger, hatred, outsized frustration about things that don’t matter, that could easily be ignored, just feeling a need to stir up trouble.

It’s hard to let the impulse toward pettiness take hold. I spend so much time immersed in books about Soviet prison camps, slavery, civil rights, the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, climate change, neoliberal paths to failure and destruction, civil war, post-colonial problems, Ebola, poverty, lack of access to and other disasters in healthcare, discrimination and so many other things that are just so much bigger than whether someone cut you off in traffic, whether your roommate swept a few crumbs off the kitchen counter, whether you feel a little lonely and blue, whether your bourgeois concerns, such as forgetting to cancel a scheduled grocery delivery when you’re out of town, send you into a panic. It’s not that those things don’t matter at all – it’s just that I don’t understand how and why anyone can really get so worked up about them. Is it just that the world is so full of interwoven, complex problems and so much human-on-human, human-created misery that it becomes necessary to go inward, become hyperfocused on the petty and immediate surroundings just to get through?

No doubt: humanity is cruel and ugly – defined in so many cases and total epochs by sheer brutality – my choice of reading and viewing materials are constant reminders that this ugliness is universal, eternal and takes very little to provoke and escalate. I do this to myself, though, creating this chasm between the daily mundane (convincing myself it doesn’t matter) and the big awful (things that, in most cases, I can’t do anything to correct or change anyway). It is perhaps just as nihilistic to find no middle ground where cruelties, ills and evils cannot be mitigated in some way.

I try. Step by step, individual by individual. I have been thinking and writing about, for years, the idea of caring for others, as individuals or in groups/organizations, trying to help in one way or another. But lately the question has reignited in me: where is the line between helping and enabling? The things, the issues, the people who linger and cling – and where I have wanted to help set them on their feet so they could run forward, they’ve instead dug in their heels. Am I blind in these cases, putting my own well-being into peril because of what I won’t see or let go of? And is asking the question a full circle back to the pettiness I am trying to avoid?

Dreamed death on the Jumbotron

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I try and try to make the shot, and even when the ball goes in, no points are scored. My goal was never to die on the Jumbotron – no one would ever think to plan for that. But now I have done that too – died for the whole arena to see.

“Look at the bright side,” my evil inner voice said. “Now that you are dead, all the children you lost can follow you in your misery. You have your ‘family’ – the one you wanted, just not where or how you wanted it.”

Photo by pepe nero on Unsplash

Dual contracts

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“The weariness of being loved, of being truly loved! The weariness of being the object of other people’s burdensome emotions! Of seeing yourself – when what you wanted was to remain forever free” -Fernando Pessoa

Do you feel at the edge of something life-changing? Or maybe that everything has already changed, slowly, almost imperceptibly – to bring you to where you are?

Sometimes I feel close to that edge – like something that will alter or maybe even has altered everything is within my grasp. Other times, like tonight, back home again, as others celebrate Midsommar, I find myself alone watching the sky get dark around midnight, working even though this is still technically my vacation. And I think, sitting in encroaching darkness, “Nothing has really changed at all.”

Glad Midsommar
Swedish summer
In the forest

Some things do change, though, in surprising ways. I think frequently these days about how, as kids, as adolescents, our parents want to know everything we do, going so far as to snoop and spy on our secretive young selves. And yet, as an adult, it’s like they just don’t want to know. And don’t ask. Much of my life, how I feel about things, is in a public-facing blog, but my mom has read maybe only two entries in her life. Not that it matters if she does, but it’s funny that it does not interest her at all now, but in youth… what parents would not have killed for that kind of unfiltered access to their teenager’s mysterious thoughts?

Sometimes I feel like I embody the duality of both the furtive, cagey adolescent, hiding away my real thoughts, feelings and life’s events, and the concerned parent, questioning my own thoughts, motives and feelings.

 

Bless the eyes and hands of experience

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“If thought is really to find a basis in lived experience, it has to be free. The way to ensure this is to think other in the register of the same. As you construct yourself, imagine another yourself that will one day construct you in its turn. Such is my conception of spontaneity: the highest possible level of self-consciousness that is still inseparable from the self and from the world.” –The Revolution of Everyday Life, Raoul Vaneigem

I cannot look at a lifetime of previous experience and find anything but something to be grateful for. How I could find fault with, judge or castigate someone for the things that made him who he is now, brought him to this point, where he feels, breathes, walks, runs, lives, sleeps, fucks, eats, moves in this way that is so precisely tuned to the ‘he’ that I know now?

What we should…

“You should never fall in love. Love will bring you unhappiness. If you must love, let it be when you are older, after you are thirty.” –The Setting Sun, Osamu Dazai

“The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.” –Middlemarch, George Eliot

Maybe the door has been opened, maybe my middle age has made my brain into mush. But we must use the time we have to absorb what is in books, to touch each other, to eat or revile coriander, to hear our voices reach each other and rise above the hubbub and cut through the chaotic din of our other lives to be able to say, do and be only the most uninhibited of things, to walk through the forest or along the river, to nurture and coax the best of each other, to lighten the dark path we each tread sometimes, to dare to be silly or mundane and find beauty in it, to watch a lone cat sit patiently and alert in the middle of an overgrown field before pouncing on its prey, to sing – however dumb we sound – songs that come into our heads, to fall in love (after 30 or even 40), to give and give and give until exhausted, sore and dizzy, to transform and be transformed. We can blink our eyes, and find suddenly that it is over.

Suffering is sweeter still

“but on days when I fear disappointment, I prefer to look on the dark side of things, it pulls me together and keeps me one step ahead of suffering” –So Much for that Winter, Dorthe Nors

And how sad that would be if we didn’t render our own off-key renditions of “Lover Man” while lying entangled in bed or let ourselves cry in the joy of simple closeness, in the tenderness and care of bringing a cup of coffee in the morning, or in the loss of some small thing we barely noticed when we had it, or in the beauty of how glossy and liquid fountain pen ink can look on a page (I noticed this most of all in a recent episode of American Gods – not at all surprised by the tantalizing visuals there). And how empty life could be if we (or I) only grabbed cheap ballpoint pens, cast books aside to watch Law & Order reruns, or as I was recently cautioned against doing – discarded the best person I ever knew just because I don’t know how to be with someone who is undamaged.

But where, indeed, does experience end and damage begin?

“It feels like nothing matters in our private universe.”