There’s an un-driven purposefulness happening in my life right now, a mode to which I’m unaccustomed.
This is the type of silent, meandering emptiness from which I fled just a few years ago. The quiet solitude was meant only for hiding, the hollow space filled with the terror-filled visions of my head of what might lay ahead. Addicts know that fear. I suspect the mentally ill do as well.
A sickness in the fantasies your mind constructs. An overwhelming cloud, like a bag slid over your head, suffocating.
This is not that. It’s the opposite of that. It’s a feeling of serenity, floating emptiness where the petty bothers of the world around me have ceased to motivate me. For some, this may sound like hell, I guess. For others, it may sound apathetic.
I feel sorry for both of those kinds of people. Not condescendingly. That would require a belief that this way is the best way, a notion of Big T truth that I mostly reject. It’s something far more benign than that, one that I can’t explain to someone who doesn’t already get it.
***
The weekends were the worst when I was drinking.
Not for the hangovers or lost nights. Those weren’t relegated to weekends. The weekends were awful because of the silence, the separate from the masses. Where my brain would go into overdrive.
I understand why criminals return to the scene of the crime. Why we believe criminals are stupid. Why cheaters have an obsessive desire to be caught.
The fantasies, the guilt, the mind-warping. These begin to take over your waking life, paralyzing your every thought. Your every move.
The mind screams in a chorus of voices. Haunting.
Returning to the real world is a relief. Not because of the connection you feel with others. Because you hope this is the moment you are caught, where the hiding ends. You need the collapse of everything to know peace.
***
I’ve always had a problem with people who tell me they are too caring or too kind.
Outside of the assumptions these statements bring (e.g. that other people aren’t caring or kind enough), these statements belie a selfishness and meanness about the person.
Those statements serve to both exonerate the individual from any blame for the damage they cause while simultaneously relegating the object of said kindness and caring to less than person-hood. As if somehow this caring and kindness will miraculously heal, help or change another human being.
Some folks read this as cold. I’ve always found that a simplistic analysis of the text.
They forget that my life as a teacher involves both of those emotional connections with students. My life as a recovering addict is about creating caring and kindness for those around me.
But too much of anything is bad, particularly when it becomes colonial in its application. Which it does the first time you climb on the cross declaring the need for someone to validate your caring and kindness. That’s when it becomes clear exactly for whom you are doing this.
***
I’ve lived in six states. I’ve lived in 8 cities.
Twice in my life I’ve had bank accounts with so few funds that I couldn’t make a withdrawal. Both times, I had no job and no job prospects. I’ve slept on floors, couches and beds at near strangers homes while trying to get back on my feet. I’ve worked third shift jobs at gas stations and cleaning bars to make ends meet.
I’ve arrived in town where I didn’t know anybody, didn’t have any money and didn’t know where I was going to stay. I’ve slept on beaches and in city parks.
I’ve traveled to San Diego, Berkeley, Phoenix, Cleveland, London and New York trying to convince people to hire me for jobs that never materialized.
I’ve taken a bus across country to meet a girl I didn’t know. I’ve driven through two states to ask a girl on a date.
These are the things I think of when I think of the love in my life. I think of the people who have enabled me to land softly, not the ones who have tried to prevent the leap.
***
We are more than the sum of our decisions
I feel the unhappiness in others now, the profound weight that slowly crushes the life out of people. I see those who try to control the universe, who rail against everyone around them, who seek comfort in the speediness of life, who become invisible in the masses. The people who feel constantly pushed upon by life as a justification.
They are the reactors, both metaphorically and literally. Or as Randy Pausch would say: Eeyores.
Nobody, I tell my students, plans on becoming a negative vortex, driven down by life. That comes unnaturally after a series of decisions, ones that many don’t see as related.
But what we see and what is are not always the same.
***
Then again, this won’t make sense to everyone.
