Mr. Doom 1.0
I'm blogging so infrequently I fear I'll lose my blog readership, all six of you. I've made true friends up here, even if they're virtual friends, Romy, Mike, Karen, Sheri, Amanda, and brought back a couple old friends, Scott and Pdub. But again, I'm finding blogging these days to be challenging.
In more than one sense. Reading KMJ's posts recently...I echo her feelings...what do I do with blog? Truthfully, the most gut share stuff I could put up here would be unfair to my wife. How do I write about my past and honor her as a reader? Not that my past was dramatic or promiscous. But I think of Edward Abbey's title for his journals (or his publisher's): Confessions of a Barbarian. When I saw that, even as a grad student, I thought, man, that's me. I'd call my blog that, but it's taken.
Barbarian how? In so many ways...anger and frustration, lust and sweet desire, above all, a great belief in the promise of my own future, much of it fastened unwisely on girls. Somehow, someday, journalling in anxious desair, living in my mom's living room at 20, I believed someone would read my journals (and now, funny thing, it's almost happening). I knew somehow I'd overcome my challenges; I'd have the great life, the nearly perfect life, the golden girl bride. Yet I made decisions which brought me something much less than that. Even now, there are things about my life I don't like which will never change, things I'm trying to change, and a whole lot of other material which affects my mood I don't even process yet. Barbarian, somehow. But with an insane belief in never fully quitting, an optimism which kept me alive.
And so now what will I write about tonight. The second part of Estella's story? No, I'm going, deeper, darker. Into a past I don't like to remember. How far I can go I have yet to see. And I know I can't do it as well as others who blog, and surely, writing in between am. lit. essays which are due tomorrow, writing at midnight, I don't have the time to reach even my limited narrative potential.
This, though, is a story I have long wanted to tell; one which was meant to be told to a safe audience as it was happening and wasn't. Here is my beginning:
***
Mental illness is more treatable now than at any time in history; it is also better understood. Still, much is not known, much goes untreated; some still can't be. What I will say at the outset is that it is one thing to go into a depression for six months, or develop an anxiety disorder for a year because of a new boss, or become bulimic during college. These are serious conditions which deserve professional treatment. But it is another thing to carry a lifelong weight. To have one's illness define one's life. For as long as I can remember that has been my story (though I admit, the last year has brought great change, the latter stages of years of change).
I have had anxiety my entire life, though it is depression I eventually want to focus on, to spit from the mouth of Mr. Black, his memory, his sharp-edged touch. But before the death-urge came the terror. Before Mr. Black came Mr. OCD (both of whom, I believe, will die the second death under the feet of the Lamb).
I was hospitalized for twenty days in traction at 19 months (yes, at the beginning of Margaret Mahler's critical rapproachment period) for a broken arm. In those days, children were left alone at the hospital at night. At least I was. My parents were never good at spending time with me or looking out for me; my grandmother did most of that. But my father tells of going to see me once and I had sores on my tongue, I was not taken care of, I was wailing, dehydrated, had vomited. My grandmother told me she could watch me through the glass windows until they'd close the curtains at dusk and I'd cry and cry. Any therapist will tell you now that a child cannot be left alone at night for days in a hosital, let alone in pain and in traction, without damage, but these, I guess, were the Camelot years. Even more amazing, according to my grandmother, who was not an educated women, my doctor was 'sadistic.' That was her word. I was afraid to go see him after I got out, he would hurt my arm, I guess, during examination. Sadistic. All I must have felt was terrified, angry, very weak.
For after that experience my mother tells me I was never the same. I followed her from room to room, developed what is known as seperation anxiety, though to me it simply felt like an unarguable, overwhelming rush of terror whenever I was left alone. Something I long felt as a deep weakness, a crack in the foundation of my soul. What we might call a character defect. I was afraid to be separated in the super market; afraid to be alone in the house. It didn't help that my mother and grandmother held to some strange religious beliefs also, derived from the Holiness: everytime you sin, your salvation is lost; if you die, you'll go to hell. Worse, or so it seemed to me as a little boy, if the rapture comes, and it's coming any time now, you'll be left behind. I kept my aunt Carole's phone number where I knew I could get itjust for this reason. Though she lived four hundred miles away I knew she smoked, hence, she'd get left behind at the rapture too and my little brother and I could live with her. I was very young when I had that number, between five and seven. My brother was two or three.
School terrified me. I was petrified of physical confrontation, horrified of being beat up on the way to school or in the boy's bathroom. Above all, being left alone in the house filled me with dread, as I've said. I'd walk home from school every day in the fourth grade past this long Mayflower truck which was always parked in the same place on our street in Cyrpess. I knew when I got to the end of it I could see my home, and my stomach would churn, whirl, burn, I'd salivate and fear I'd throw up until I got past and could see my mother, my angry, distant, aloof and disturbed mother, had her car in the driveway. Once it wasn't there. I ran to a friend's house (we hadn't even lived in the neighborhood long) because I couldn't get in and was horrified (the rapture, finally?). The kid who helped me, I can still see him...blonde hair, gray sweats, none of my own fear though he was concerned. We tried to break in for a while, then my mom finally showed up. I was so nervous I went into the bathroom and threw up, a reaction I'd had since the first grade at least when my anxiety got very bad. My friend quickly left. My mother berated me, horribly, told me she couldn't do anything, couldn't go anywhere, had stopped at a garage sale with my little brother (wandering around, that same absent look in his young eyes amidst the emotional chaos; does he remember this day at all?) If she called me names, weak, pathetic, nervous, I can't remember. She did other times. But I do know it was not good when she did get home.
Oh, my friends, I have so much more to share.
Terror, like that, became agoraphobia: if I went to the mall or the park I'd get my ass kicked. Hence I couldnt' leave my house except to go to my private school. I was afraid all through junior high. Why? Another story I guess, but that's how the terror lodged itself. In high school, when I realized that if I did have to throw up in a public place, things got a bit better, though I remained scared of horror movies (wouldn't go; why the hell would anyone want to be scared!) physical confrontation still, having a stomach ulcer, getting tetantus, or rabies...before my ocd kicked in full swing at around 16 (though I had been counting to assuage anxiety since seven or so) I was painfully hypochondriacal. And when the fear is that strong it is unmanageable by the subject-self. I had no tools and no one to tell me I was okay. What I needed was a figure I could trust (and with my parents, just who would that be) to sit me down, affirm the reality of my fears but then teach me that they were unfounded; these things weren't going to happen to me. I do this for my own son now all the time, more when he was younger. I never had that. No one was able to tell me I had nothing to be afraid of, and I was scared to share my terrors with the barely functioning parents I had. So I lived in horror, night was the worst, all of my childhood.
When my mother left us at 14 I 'swallowed it down' as I put it at the time; I had no experience feeling any kind of emotion besides terror. Seeing the closet with all her stuff gone from her half was hard, but she didn't even tell me they were getting a divorce. She woke me up, said she and my father were having problems, and that she was going to stay with my aunt (the one, incidentally, I just had such a good time with in Sedona). It was my father, later that day, who told me the truth. And only when I protested, 'it's not like you guys are getting a divorce,' and he simply nodded, sadly, seriously, but like a child would nod.
(Word of advice here. If any one us ever decides to leave our spouses and children are involved, do it fucking right, if there is a way; involve a support network; be truthful. Don't bail, not tell the entire story, and leave it up to a dazed, depressed, and shocked parent to explain.)
Anyway, a couple years later began dating my stepmother. During those years I couldn't bear to be seperated from Sandie, my little high school girlfriend. She went to Wyoming the summer I was 15 and I couldn't eat; only when I went to the beach and felt the warm air blowing on me could I relax enough to eat Arby's. I made a calendar and crossed off each day she was gone, and I cried, hard, as if at a death, every day. The next summer I managed (with my dad's help, incidentally) to talk her parents into letting me go along. When I came back after two weeks, all the furniture in our little apartment was gone. The couch (granted, tacky red velvet) my parents had owned together was gone. All of it. In its place was Nancy's stuff, my stepmother's stuff. They were not yet married. I had no warning. This was very hard for me. The fact that she was living there before they were married was hard, but the entire loss of my home...I still don't know if I've processed this.
It was only a few days later I was sitting on her/our couch talking to her, a sixteen year old desperate boy still looking for acceptance and nurturance and not getting it, when she mentioned how a friend we knew had died of a brain aneurysm. What's that, I asked. She told me. From that moment on, I was in terror, surely this would get me, surely I would drop dead at any moment. I had this. I would lay in bed and hear my pulse pounding in my head and know it was coming.
How I tried to shake that obsession, for obsession it was. I remember going to see Keith Green in Long Beach and praying so hard....imagining leaving the aneurysm behind me at the concert hall, being free. But I wasn't free. It didn't work. And that was the first true obsession I had, the beginning, friends, of much darker and more terrifying days. It's where I'll end now. That first chronic phobia developed into others much worse, more un-real, ones I'm afraid to share but will share I believe. This kind of writing may not have much of an audience, and I'm blaze-drafting without whatever little craft I may have, but I'm sharing here, not composing.
I think I've found what I want to do with my blog.
Peace and more soon, promise,
In more than one sense. Reading KMJ's posts recently...I echo her feelings...what do I do with blog? Truthfully, the most gut share stuff I could put up here would be unfair to my wife. How do I write about my past and honor her as a reader? Not that my past was dramatic or promiscous. But I think of Edward Abbey's title for his journals (or his publisher's): Confessions of a Barbarian. When I saw that, even as a grad student, I thought, man, that's me. I'd call my blog that, but it's taken.
Barbarian how? In so many ways...anger and frustration, lust and sweet desire, above all, a great belief in the promise of my own future, much of it fastened unwisely on girls. Somehow, someday, journalling in anxious desair, living in my mom's living room at 20, I believed someone would read my journals (and now, funny thing, it's almost happening). I knew somehow I'd overcome my challenges; I'd have the great life, the nearly perfect life, the golden girl bride. Yet I made decisions which brought me something much less than that. Even now, there are things about my life I don't like which will never change, things I'm trying to change, and a whole lot of other material which affects my mood I don't even process yet. Barbarian, somehow. But with an insane belief in never fully quitting, an optimism which kept me alive.
And so now what will I write about tonight. The second part of Estella's story? No, I'm going, deeper, darker. Into a past I don't like to remember. How far I can go I have yet to see. And I know I can't do it as well as others who blog, and surely, writing in between am. lit. essays which are due tomorrow, writing at midnight, I don't have the time to reach even my limited narrative potential.
This, though, is a story I have long wanted to tell; one which was meant to be told to a safe audience as it was happening and wasn't. Here is my beginning:
***
Mental illness is more treatable now than at any time in history; it is also better understood. Still, much is not known, much goes untreated; some still can't be. What I will say at the outset is that it is one thing to go into a depression for six months, or develop an anxiety disorder for a year because of a new boss, or become bulimic during college. These are serious conditions which deserve professional treatment. But it is another thing to carry a lifelong weight. To have one's illness define one's life. For as long as I can remember that has been my story (though I admit, the last year has brought great change, the latter stages of years of change).
I have had anxiety my entire life, though it is depression I eventually want to focus on, to spit from the mouth of Mr. Black, his memory, his sharp-edged touch. But before the death-urge came the terror. Before Mr. Black came Mr. OCD (both of whom, I believe, will die the second death under the feet of the Lamb).
I was hospitalized for twenty days in traction at 19 months (yes, at the beginning of Margaret Mahler's critical rapproachment period) for a broken arm. In those days, children were left alone at the hospital at night. At least I was. My parents were never good at spending time with me or looking out for me; my grandmother did most of that. But my father tells of going to see me once and I had sores on my tongue, I was not taken care of, I was wailing, dehydrated, had vomited. My grandmother told me she could watch me through the glass windows until they'd close the curtains at dusk and I'd cry and cry. Any therapist will tell you now that a child cannot be left alone at night for days in a hosital, let alone in pain and in traction, without damage, but these, I guess, were the Camelot years. Even more amazing, according to my grandmother, who was not an educated women, my doctor was 'sadistic.' That was her word. I was afraid to go see him after I got out, he would hurt my arm, I guess, during examination. Sadistic. All I must have felt was terrified, angry, very weak.
For after that experience my mother tells me I was never the same. I followed her from room to room, developed what is known as seperation anxiety, though to me it simply felt like an unarguable, overwhelming rush of terror whenever I was left alone. Something I long felt as a deep weakness, a crack in the foundation of my soul. What we might call a character defect. I was afraid to be separated in the super market; afraid to be alone in the house. It didn't help that my mother and grandmother held to some strange religious beliefs also, derived from the Holiness: everytime you sin, your salvation is lost; if you die, you'll go to hell. Worse, or so it seemed to me as a little boy, if the rapture comes, and it's coming any time now, you'll be left behind. I kept my aunt Carole's phone number where I knew I could get itjust for this reason. Though she lived four hundred miles away I knew she smoked, hence, she'd get left behind at the rapture too and my little brother and I could live with her. I was very young when I had that number, between five and seven. My brother was two or three.
School terrified me. I was petrified of physical confrontation, horrified of being beat up on the way to school or in the boy's bathroom. Above all, being left alone in the house filled me with dread, as I've said. I'd walk home from school every day in the fourth grade past this long Mayflower truck which was always parked in the same place on our street in Cyrpess. I knew when I got to the end of it I could see my home, and my stomach would churn, whirl, burn, I'd salivate and fear I'd throw up until I got past and could see my mother, my angry, distant, aloof and disturbed mother, had her car in the driveway. Once it wasn't there. I ran to a friend's house (we hadn't even lived in the neighborhood long) because I couldn't get in and was horrified (the rapture, finally?). The kid who helped me, I can still see him...blonde hair, gray sweats, none of my own fear though he was concerned. We tried to break in for a while, then my mom finally showed up. I was so nervous I went into the bathroom and threw up, a reaction I'd had since the first grade at least when my anxiety got very bad. My friend quickly left. My mother berated me, horribly, told me she couldn't do anything, couldn't go anywhere, had stopped at a garage sale with my little brother (wandering around, that same absent look in his young eyes amidst the emotional chaos; does he remember this day at all?) If she called me names, weak, pathetic, nervous, I can't remember. She did other times. But I do know it was not good when she did get home.
Oh, my friends, I have so much more to share.
Terror, like that, became agoraphobia: if I went to the mall or the park I'd get my ass kicked. Hence I couldnt' leave my house except to go to my private school. I was afraid all through junior high. Why? Another story I guess, but that's how the terror lodged itself. In high school, when I realized that if I did have to throw up in a public place, things got a bit better, though I remained scared of horror movies (wouldn't go; why the hell would anyone want to be scared!) physical confrontation still, having a stomach ulcer, getting tetantus, or rabies...before my ocd kicked in full swing at around 16 (though I had been counting to assuage anxiety since seven or so) I was painfully hypochondriacal. And when the fear is that strong it is unmanageable by the subject-self. I had no tools and no one to tell me I was okay. What I needed was a figure I could trust (and with my parents, just who would that be) to sit me down, affirm the reality of my fears but then teach me that they were unfounded; these things weren't going to happen to me. I do this for my own son now all the time, more when he was younger. I never had that. No one was able to tell me I had nothing to be afraid of, and I was scared to share my terrors with the barely functioning parents I had. So I lived in horror, night was the worst, all of my childhood.
When my mother left us at 14 I 'swallowed it down' as I put it at the time; I had no experience feeling any kind of emotion besides terror. Seeing the closet with all her stuff gone from her half was hard, but she didn't even tell me they were getting a divorce. She woke me up, said she and my father were having problems, and that she was going to stay with my aunt (the one, incidentally, I just had such a good time with in Sedona). It was my father, later that day, who told me the truth. And only when I protested, 'it's not like you guys are getting a divorce,' and he simply nodded, sadly, seriously, but like a child would nod.
(Word of advice here. If any one us ever decides to leave our spouses and children are involved, do it fucking right, if there is a way; involve a support network; be truthful. Don't bail, not tell the entire story, and leave it up to a dazed, depressed, and shocked parent to explain.)
Anyway, a couple years later began dating my stepmother. During those years I couldn't bear to be seperated from Sandie, my little high school girlfriend. She went to Wyoming the summer I was 15 and I couldn't eat; only when I went to the beach and felt the warm air blowing on me could I relax enough to eat Arby's. I made a calendar and crossed off each day she was gone, and I cried, hard, as if at a death, every day. The next summer I managed (with my dad's help, incidentally) to talk her parents into letting me go along. When I came back after two weeks, all the furniture in our little apartment was gone. The couch (granted, tacky red velvet) my parents had owned together was gone. All of it. In its place was Nancy's stuff, my stepmother's stuff. They were not yet married. I had no warning. This was very hard for me. The fact that she was living there before they were married was hard, but the entire loss of my home...I still don't know if I've processed this.
It was only a few days later I was sitting on her/our couch talking to her, a sixteen year old desperate boy still looking for acceptance and nurturance and not getting it, when she mentioned how a friend we knew had died of a brain aneurysm. What's that, I asked. She told me. From that moment on, I was in terror, surely this would get me, surely I would drop dead at any moment. I had this. I would lay in bed and hear my pulse pounding in my head and know it was coming.
How I tried to shake that obsession, for obsession it was. I remember going to see Keith Green in Long Beach and praying so hard....imagining leaving the aneurysm behind me at the concert hall, being free. But I wasn't free. It didn't work. And that was the first true obsession I had, the beginning, friends, of much darker and more terrifying days. It's where I'll end now. That first chronic phobia developed into others much worse, more un-real, ones I'm afraid to share but will share I believe. This kind of writing may not have much of an audience, and I'm blaze-drafting without whatever little craft I may have, but I'm sharing here, not composing.
I think I've found what I want to do with my blog.
Peace and more soon, promise,
Comments
I don't want to sound cliche, but you drew me into your story and I felt the power of your honesty. I echo what mrsfish said, it made me want to hug you. I too am glad that you are able to bring this to our little cyber tribe. There is prayer here, support here and most of people who want to listen. Thanks again.
Like Mrsfish, I get so upset and angry just reading about the hurt and impacts that these doctors, nurses and your mom & dad caused you (whether intentional or not). Although you certainly have a burden to carry in this life, you have learned to shoulder it very well... and in many ways rise above the stranglehold it could have had on you.
Scooter often mentions the Lost Dogs. This is a quote from the lyrics to one of their songs (and one of my favorites)...
****
And after you've been broken,
You may not realize,
That you are grace to the broken hearted
And a blessing in disguise
You are a blessing in disguise
I will finish my story. Because this is what I've needed all along; to share, to be heard, to hear my anger (which I still deny much of the time) echoed, over and over. Thank you also for the virtual hugs.
When I first checked in today, somehow, I thought I had no responses. I thought, oh well, I guess this was too intense. But when I took another look there were so many beautiful posts. selah.
now I'm crying. okay, guaranteed, more to come.
t
Your voice, your voice, your voice...it's like we never left that silly little apartment building in Long Beach, and I am once again zeroed in on your thoughts and emotions. Such raw power here, bro. I know it's beating a dead horse, but I, too, find myself shaking in rage at those doctors and nurses who had no idea, no idea at all what they were doing. Thank you so much for sharing this, dude - this is a story even I haven't heard before, and it's truly stunning - not in the sense of something wonderful, but in the awfulness of it all. However, your voice speaks not of victimhood - I'm sure there's not a reader here who would call you "victim" - rather, "victor." Post whenever you can - I can't wait to read more.