Category Archives: personal

How do people stay ahead of their demons?

Many people, to avoid thinking about painful or threatening things, keep themselves heroically, productively busy all day and go to bed exhausted.  They wake up early the next morning to work hard all day, every moment programmed down to the minute.  My father used to call this lifestyle “running a full flight pattern” and you can picture a harried, over-caffeinated air traffic controller doing the job of four, eyes darting constantly from the sky, to a computer screen, to the blinking dots on a wall map, to the sky, to the runways below, to his watch, to an open game of solitaire on another computer, to the coffee maker and so on.

Other people try to live in a more contemplative way, allowing time to think, feel, seek a little clarity in a world of chaos and senseless cruelty.  The usual example of a contemplative life is a monk in a monastery, though life in a monastery is highly programmed too.   I have always, from as far back as I can recall, preferred living an unharried life in this mercilessly harried world.  

I have to admit, I feel smugly superior to those running a full flight pattern, the coffee and cocaine achievers I’ve known, the exercise addicts, self-righteous compulsive workaholics of every stripe.  I am also compelled, of course, in this case in my disdain for the outer directed, those who march ahead according to the dictates of a brutal status quo keeping themselves constantly too busy to ever question the orders they are following or why they are running full tilt all the time.  

The most engaging part of a person is their inner life, what they are like when nobody is judging them.  To be allowed to see the vulnerable core of another person, to me, is the greatest gift a person can give you.  The trust and acceptance involved in this kind of sharing is, to me, the essence of love.

I am living in a fucking dream world, of course.  I spend an hour or two every day typing, putting my thoughts and feelings, and sometimes my dreams, in order, making them as clear as I can, to myself and to anyone who might stumble on them.  Even if you are well-paid to write, and I am not, man (or woman) does not live by writing alone.  It is a beautiful and indispensable thing, to be able to write clearly, but it is not something you can do all day.

Generally, when I am stressed I have always gone for a long walk, or a strenuous bike ride.  Or do some pushups, which always get my heart pounding and make me feel strong.  A brisk bit of exercise is a wonderful thing for calming the mind, getting some air flowing through the stuffy attic.  Currently I’m unable to walk more than a block or two, complications from knee replacement surgery almost a year ago.  Pushups lately are also off the menu, as the pain from my left synovium seems to have migrated up the entire left side of my body, into my left hand and left shoulder.  Physical exercise, an old standby, is not one of my stress relief options these days.

I always feel better when I spend an hour or two playing the guitar, or, in a pinch, the piano.  My left hand, while willing and able, is playing on borrowed time before the pain in the fingers make it impossible to continue.  The fingers get the unmistakable message in about five minutes.  Ordinarily, in my frustration, I’d throw myself on the ground and grunt out some push ups, but, currently, that would only lead to shoulder pain in addition to the hand and knee.

So what do we say about these constraints on a contemplative lifestyle?  I’m fucked, in a word.

Luckily for me, I have inner resources many do not.  Unluckily for me, you find the outer resources curtailed enough and your inner resources become overloaded. 

Then, in a word, you’re fucked.

Trauma for beginners

Trauma is the unbearable feeling of being powerless against a malevolent, deadly force intent on destroying you. It is the searing terror felt in a nightmare, the panicked vulnerability of not only being defenseless against a deadly enemy, but also finding yourself unprotected by anyone you’d expect to defend you. Trauma is an actual wound, of a different order from the things that annoy, frighten, hurt and threaten us because it is deadly, relentless and will certainly kill us.

A quick internet search adds this: trauma is a person’s experience of emotional distress resulting from an event that overwhelms the capacity to emotionally digest it.

Being traumatized regularly changes our reactions to the world, our health and even our DNA.

When you need understanding and a loved one suddenly shows you a face like this:

You are fucked. If you have experienced trauma, and a pattern of betrayal during moments when you were most vulnerable, you can smirk and shake your head at an old friend glaring silently with the implacable mask of an indomitable psychopath. You can opine to someone else about what an immature, enraged asshole the glarer is. You can shrug it off like an adult and go about your business.

It is only later, when you try to close your eyes and go to sleep that you find yourself unable to keep your eyelids closed. You are suddenly hyper-vigilant, disoriented, in a world unaccountably turned vicious and supremely threatening. The essence of trauma is that terrifying feeling of defenselessness, of betrayal by those who claim to love you.

There is a class of traumatized people who become reflexively brutal dominators of others. They only feel safe when they’re certain that they can control everyone around them, that there is no possible threat to them in any given room. They exert this social dominance using charm, guile, a politician’s toolkit, all sorts of devices, until they feel threatened. Then their only possible response is to attack and eliminate the source of the threat, and they do this by any means necessary. They will literally kill you, if it comes to that.

There are other traumatized people who, able to feel the heavy weight of betrayal without being crushed by it, maintain their empathy toward others. This type seeks reconciliation after a conflict with a loved one rather than demanding capitulation on pain of eternal, blind revenge.

I don’t know what decides which traumatized person emerges from trauma as the sadist/masochist or the injured nurturer. It may be that the latter group found themselves saved by someone who showed them real compassion when it mattered most while the destructive ones never found any relief when they were in the most extreme pain.

What I do know now is how essential it is to stay away from the extremely damaged type that lives in a dark, zero sum world where there is no possibility of redemption once hurt occurs. Those fuckers will kill you, if it comes to a choice between you and them. If they become dictator they will build death camps to put disloyal, betraying fuckers like you in. Count on it, their type has no other choice.

Suffering is not a contest

You may have noticed that certain people treat suffering like a competitive sport.  There’s long been a senseless, passionate public debate, for example, about who had it worse:  

a) millions of people, over hundreds of years, kidnapped, sold, dragged in chains across the ocean, packed together like sardines, countless souls dying and thrown overboard to the sharks that always trailed such ships, the survivors sold into lives of unspeakable horror once they got to their new, eh, I suppose we call it “home”, or, 

b) millions of people, over a span of a few years, chosen by their religion, herded into disease-ridden slums for abuse and eventual collection to be taken by cattle car to camps where they could be killed en masse, the lucky survivors getting to work as slaves until they could work no more.

In a world that was not insane, you would have to be insane to argue about which atrocity was worse. Can any atrocity be worse than either one of those? And there are many other atrocities in history, and even in the present world, that are as bad as those two, particularly for the victims and survivors of those atrocities. 

But I’m not here today to write about politics. I’m thinking of something more personal, the suffering of people around us, the suffering of people in our lives.  if you are not a guitar player, or a violinist, or someone who uses one hand for a specific, skilled task, sharp pain and stiffness in your left hand, annoying and concerning as it may be, is not a reason for despair. If you play music every day, and it is one of your great comforts, and suddenly one of your hands is too stiff and painful to do that, fuck.

Humans look for comfort (all animals do, actually), we look for empathy, we look for help when we are in trouble. Not everyone is built that way of course, some take comfort only in feeling superior to others. In their citadel of desperate superiority there is little space for empathy and for helping anybody except for quid pro quo maintenance of the humble servants of their need to feel better than others.

When I come across one of these assholes, I have to remind myself of my vow to first do no harm.  To forget that is to become more like the thing I hate.

To learn or not to learn

Anything important that you learn leads to new things to learn, for those excited about learning.   We are constantly building on the lessons in our life, if we are inclined that way.  It is possible to be quite content with what one knows, rest on our present level of expertise and become incurious, but for me, life is about  getting better and better at life itself.

Things that hurt us, things we do that hurt others we care about, remind us of work we still need to do, things we need to learn.  If I am constantly wounded by the same thing, I can learn to move my head out of the way instead of leaning in to that particular punch in the face.  I can learn to be kinder, more patient with people, know when it is important to withdraw, give others space.   In my life I’ve come to understand that if we give others power over us and they misuse it more than once, there is an important lesson in that.

There are some challenging things that can be impossible to do without intelligent feedback from others.  We simply can’t see the bigger picture sometimes.  A guy in obvious turmoil, a stranger, asked if he could talk to me.  He told me the story of how his wife left him after he fell off the wagon, his life was so painful that he reached out to a stranger, as his AA sponsor had advised him to do, instead of getting drunk, as was his long habit in painful situations.  As a stranger hearing the story an obvious thing hit me as soon as he told me that his wife was also in Alcoholics Anonymous.   His alcohol binge was a direct threat to her sobriety so she packed a bag and moved out.

He was shocked at my brilliant insight.  I told him it was as obvious as the nose on his face, though we also both agreed that in a dark room, even with a mirror, you literally can’t see the nose on your face, even though you’re breathing through it, can touch it, etc.

We are all in a metaphorical dark room sometimes, unable to see what is instantly clear once a light is turned on.  How do we turn on the light?   Often the darkness is illuminated by someone else, someone who has lived through something similar, someone who just knows how to listen, someone merely stating the obvious.  Obvious as it may also be, sometimes someone simply saying it out loud to us is enough to turn on a light in the blackness, once we hear it.

Our lives are shaped by our perceptions.  Reality itself is only our perception of reality.  Our perception is formed by the stories we believe, stories give us the lens to see everything else through.  Some stories are helpful and can teach us important things we need to know to live richer lives.  Other stories are harmful, confirm our worst suspicions, fuel our fear and anger and teach us only to repeat our past mistakes over and over and justify them better and better to ourselves. 

I suppose wisdom comes from learning to embrace the true sounding stories that give us more health, more peace, more ability to understand others.  The other kind of stories, bad news, bad karma, and more of the same incomprehensibly fucked up shit.

Collective Trauma, anyone?

Most people are so concerned with being normal [1], working and playing in the recognized world of reward and achievement that everybody exists in, that when people start breaking down from the stress, even when they become fragile as glass and barking mad, they will insist that they understand everything perfectly and that it’s other people who are fucking insane. You can trust me on this, or you can take a breath and look around.

[1] normal- for the thoughtful details of what this means in practice, see The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate.

The need for validation vs. the need for good feedback

People with an insecure sense of self are outer-directed, they live their lives for the validation of the people around them. Since they felt belittled and neglected when they were too young to do anything but suffer, they take pains to look physically perfect, according to the fashion of the day, they seek praise, status, social position, awards from their peers. All these are part of a lifelong attempt to make themselves feel better, more valuable and worthier of love, than others. They live in a hierarchical world where some people are simply much more important than others, by virtue of working to earn their self-worth in an objectively quantifiable way.

They live in a win/lose competitive world where winners win and are admired by those around them for having the will and talent not to be losers. As far as I can see, that world is the destructive illusion of superficial idiots, but I have always been super-opinionated about things like the justness of rigid social hierarchies and those who conform to social systems without any real questions about their validity. I keep thinking of the billions of people this worldview consigns to inferior, permanent, inter-generational loser status simply as the way things are.

I have always felt a need for the useful feedback I almost never got as a child. What is different about my need for a response and the need for outer validation I’ve sketched above? In both cases we are looking for assurances about the good effect our words and actions have on others. Everyone likes a sincere compliment, it’s always gratifying to be spoken well of by others. In the case of validation-seeking, the thing sought is praise and admiration. That is different, to my mind, than seeking an intelligent critique of your work, sometimes your deeds.

A person writes to convey thoughts, ideas and feelings to others. Writing is an extension of the desire to have a good, mutual conversation, one of the great pleasures of being human, as far as I can see. There is really no better way to gauge how well a piece of writing achieves the goals you intend than by getting good notes from a reader. This feedback allows us to understand what is still unclear to others in our work, or objectionable, or feeble, or unconvincing, and to address ambiguity, sloppiness, or assuming the comprehensibility of complex things we have not sufficiently laid out the context for understanding. With those comments in mind we can fix those things and come closer to our aim. Comments we can mull over keep the conversation moving forward, which is integral to why we communicate in the first place. Silence by way of response is a real conversation stopper, to state the obvious.

Validation-seeking people tend to stay very busy, they are socially active, work hard, program their leisure time down to the minute, consult the clock for when it’s time to end the party and get eight hours of sleep to be up and at ’em full force the next morning. Their every waking effort goes toward earning the self-acceptance and self-admiration they can’t feel except as reflected back to them by others. Sitting quietly by themselves, unless they are exercising their abdominal muscles, burning calories or something useful like that, is unthinkably difficult for them. It is as if they literally can’t see themselves unless they are engaged with others who appreciate them.

Of course, I probably only feel this way because I’ve always spent most of my hours alone. One could make a decent argument that I like nothing better than the company of my own constantly rippling thoughts and ideas. I learned early to soothe myself this way when I felt ignored – learning to play music, drawing, writing, cooking. I am always happy to spend time with other people, or talk to them at length – and I need these contacts as much as anyone does, maybe more – but I also accept myself the way I am and have as much compassion for myself as I do toward anyone else I care about.

Am I a great guitar player or any kind of virtuoso? No, but I am the greatest guitar player I can be at the moment. It means a great deal to me to play every note as cleanly, purposefully and soulfully as I can, to learn new ways to play the same melody, new positions on the neck for chords and little tricks, to become a more fluent improviser. Most people don’t think of any of these things, like the many different ways to play the same note, which I think is a shame.

To those who focus almost entirely on what the outer world says about us, you are either a professional musician getting paid and recognized for your work or an amateur with a slightly obsessive hobby which is nice, but a bit vain, because what does it really say about a person if they waste hours a day playing Beatles tunes?

It would be marginally better to the validation-focused, perhaps, to play sophisticated, challenging jazz tunes, or the best of classical guitar, if they would even notice that difference in material. They’re often not even able to hear any of it very clearly because it is just – they don’t even know what the hell compels someone to do it. Beatles, jazz standards or classical — best, to me, is playing what you love best and can make sound the most beautiful, but, fuck, enough about me.

Catastrophizing

I wake up with my skin crawling. Can’t sleep anymore because, in addition to all my other troubles at the moment, I have these fucking microscopic devils running around under my skin. Oh, my god… the horror, the fucking horror! I am soon ripping at my own skin.

This hellish looking baby is called a scabie (Sarcoptes scabiei), a parasitic mite that lives, in the millions, under the skin and causes a contagious itch with… exudative crust…

I scratch my skin hopelessly because it itches everywhere, worst in the places I can’t hope to reach. 

Note: there is no evidence that I have scabies. In fact, I don’t have scabies.  A friend in France recently described this nightmare to me, and the wonderful news he had from a doctor — his case is called “clean scabies” which, like “friendly fire”, or “collateral damage”, really doesn’t change the awful outcome, but is supposed to make you feel better since, in your case, the plague that is tormenting you did not result from your own poor hygienic practices.  

I looked up scabies and found this nightmarish image of the tiny fucker who runs in hoards making the skin horripilate and forming crusts over the itchy places where exudation occurs. Naturally the image of this tiny, demonic monster popped into my head when I woke up today itching. Once it was there, I couldn’t get it out. 

Because my new knee is still often immobilizingly painful ten months after replacement surgery, because I can’t exercise, because, after an objectively hellish experience with old friends I am wrestling with a playful anaconda of a manuscript that, while smiling, challenging and fun much of the time, is still a twenty foot long deadly constrictor, because all my eggs are in one basket and that basket is shredding, because I am flesh and must go the way of all such things… because the city cut off the water this morning and I have buckets of water all over for cooking, washing and toilet flushing… because, because, because….

It doesn’t occur to me, or it does but I dismiss the thought, that I am itching because of dry skin, a common malady of winter in temperate zones that gets more demanding with age. Next to the bed I have a pump bottle of moisturizer, placed there for soothing dry, itching skin. Applying it is a much better option than clawing at my own skin and twitching at the thought of parasitic mites doing gleeful gymnastics under my skin, but it seems as hopeless as everything else at the moment, too much skin to moisturize, can’t reach the places it itches most, wah, wah! Catastrophe!

Catastrophizing happens when you are overwhelmed by the challenges you face and are at the end of your ability to objectively weigh your circumstances. You can no longer see them one by one as discrete things to deal with, they have united to destroy you once and for all.  All the afflictions described two paragraphs above are true. Taken one at a time they are all things that can be taken care of, though some take a long time and require a long term perspective. Taken as a whole, as the relentless, million-faced army of the same implacable enemy, they appear in the form of the undefeatable microscopic tormentor pictured above.

The thought of this whole subject makes my goddamned skin crawl.

Chapter 72 Authenticity

We are living in an age when weak, needy, ruthless, vengeful, endlessly covetous men (and a few women) are seen as geniuses, visionaries and strongmen. Acquiring everything possible for themselves while promising horrific retribution for offenses real and imagined is seen as strength and cheered by admiring crowds. We are living, boys and girls, in an Age of Idiocy, more specifically, the Age of Narcissism. It appears to be dawning on us all slowly.

The most searched for word in 2022 was “gaslighting”. This form of psychological manipulation gets its name from a creepy old film, Gaslight, where the wealthy female protagonist is wooed and married by a man who convinces her she is insane, to cover his own criminal activities. He pretends to go out every evening and secretly searches for stolen treasure hidden in the attic of the mansion, under gas light. Because he’s using lights in the attic, the lights in the rest of the house dim. The husband convinces the wife she is going insane when she tells him about the lights, and for a time she believes him. Hence, gaslighting – lying to make you doubt the reality of your own perceptions, feeding you a diet of deliberate falsehoods to make you fear you’re going mad. Any wonder it was Word of the Year in 2022?

In 2023 the Word of the Year was “authenticity”. It means 1: not false or imitation; real, actual 2: true to one’s own personality, spirit or character 3: worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact, conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features, made or done the same way as an original.

This is the essential quality a gaslighting narcissist forces his victims to abandon. They will tell you what is true, what is false, what you should believe, why you are wrong to believe otherwise, how you should act, look, feel. Your feelings and ideas are wrong, they will tell you authoritatively. They demand that others to be as inauthentic as they are.

It is impossible for a “perfect” person to be authentic, to act according to their true character. They never were allowed as children to develop a true character and be loved for it. Their only choices after that damaging deprivation are a grandiose veneer of perfection or utter, humiliating worthlessness. In order to foster a created, performative persona of strength and perfection, very fragile when held up against reality, it is necessary to keep all those around them in a state of inauthenticity. Everybody in their orbit must be true not to their own spirit and character, to what they need in order to feel comfortable, but to the narcissist’s need for unconditional admiration and obedience.

These kinds of sick fucks have always ruled others, it is easily observed turning the pages of any history book. The rule of the select few is always explained and justified by the mores of the time, slavery was for centuries the norm, for example, but over time the same privileges of a tiny, all-powerful minority are maintained the same way, using the leverage of great wealth, intimidation, fear and violence to hoard the wealth of the majoritarian masses.

Parents who can never be wrong teach their children that they’re wrong even when the kid is right. Narcissism is a zero sum game, meaning there is only winning and losing, controlling and being controlled, the image of perfection or terrifying annihilation. This black and white worldview afflicts people who have been crushed in their soul at a very tender age. The abuse and emotional neglect they suffered renders them unable to compromise or even to listen to anything that contradicts their brittle sense of their special wonderfulness. They are the furthest thing from authentic, since they rigidly cling to an unrealistic view of themselves as perfect, the only alternative to feeling hideously, unlovably flawed, none of it having anything to do with authenticity.

It is a terrible constant in human affairs, the outsized influence these inhuman bastards tend to play on the world stage. Scroll from window to window, you will see these very important pricks pontificating on every platform. They simply cannot shut up. The appetite for their brilliant opinions is seemingly endless. We are fascinated by men who acquire 100,000 times more than any wealthy person needs. Accumulating billions in wealth appears to be proof of their indomitable will to have everything, which many reckon the mark of someone to be admired, even idolized.

As for me, I’ll take someone who can look at herself and the world honestly, in all its color, nuance, light and shade, and speak authentically, with humility and openness, about the hellish odds we are all up against, just trying to be authentic, empathetic and offer each other shared things we all value here in this threatened miracle of a world.