Hello, world (and thank you, Google Reader)

January 18, 2009 at 12:12 am | Posted in reflections | 1 Comment
Tags: buddhism, compassion, completion, desire, Jung, projection, reflections, self-awareness, wholeness

Inspiration strikes… possibly my favorite drug.

I finished my MFA applications less than a week ago and have been anxiously awaiting the recovery of my creative drive. Having attended a reading tonight featuring Aimee Bender and Sean Stewart, I think the moment has come.

My tendency here has been to write like I knew what I was talking about, and even when there was uncertainty, to contain that for you in a neat package, to make sure you understood it was manageable. Which meant I had to believe, too, that it was manageable. It took some work. This is part of why I haven’t written in a month or two. As time closed in on me, my anxiety gained dimensions I couldn’t measure, much less quarantine. Eventually it swallowed me, right around the holidays — as such overwhelming negativity is wont to do — and now I am back on the other side, still a little fragile for the whole experience, but feeling my way back into functionality.

Two months ago it seemed everything was about sex, or at least featured it prominently. My sex drive has been gone for weeks now, and though I am still dating three boys (god help me), they all know it and at least two of them know better than to press the issue. Is it ever really about sex, for me? When I want to act tough and cold, I say it is. But no. It’s about vulnerability. Softness, the kind of softness that breaks with careless handling. How does one operate in the world like a clenched fist? How can one feel anything at all? All I could feel was the tension, the fear that held me in and back.

Is it ever about sex? My interest in the pain of ropes and knives and teeth has dissolved, at least for now. I don’t need more pain right now; it doesn’t take anything away, just bruises the tenderness that I’m trying to heal. It doesn’t distract me. Nothing has been able to distract me. Maybe that’s the scariest thing about that depth of depression. There is so little in the way of consolation, except the gentle kindness of someone who cares. Everything else is meaningless. And maybe even that is sometimes not enough to get through. The pain of isolation is the worst possible aspect of that state, for me: to feel absolutely sure that my uncontrolled feeling frightens even good people away, and that the rest could not fathom it even if they wanted to. Thank god I found out I was wrong about that last part. This was my first major depressive episode in a while, and definitely one in which the turning point was clear to me. Such is progress.

Obviously I’m writing all this at the risk of sounding insufferable, one way or another. Again I fall into the trap of writing only when some semblance of clarity imposes itself upon my self-perception. But I’m feeling forgiving tonight, so on I go.

Vulnerability. Intimacy. Abandonment. Conflict. Connection. Wholeness. Completion. Integrity. Authenticity. Spontaneity. Self-awareness. Trust. Innocence. Courage. Curiosity. These, I guess, are the things that have been weighing on my mind over the past couple of weeks. My goals don’t really change; my values, at their core, only clarify over time, and cycle in importance. I want what I’ve always wanted.

Jung talks a lot about wholeness as a goal. There is a difference between wholeness and completion, though. We cannot be made whole simply by introducing another person or people into our lives. We become whole by expanding our self-awareness to encompass all aspects of ourselves, to acknowledge the depth and breadth of our selfhood. Maybe it’s impossible, at least functionally, to fully achieve this. Completion, on the other hand, is definitely impossible within our lifetimes. And yet we yearn for it; this is, in fact, the foundation of our incompleteness. As humans, we want. We are capable of seeing what’s missing, how things could be better. And, pleasure-loving creatures that we are, we want whatever it is we’ve thought of. It’s never over. The Buddhist mentality may be better understood as an attempt to lighten up our approach to our desires. They’re never going away; stop taking them so seriously! No matter how many desires you fulfill, there will always be more. Freedom comes from not letting them rule your life, and from recognizing that having what you want is not going to make you happy.

I imagine I’m preaching at least partly to the choir. Or then again you may be wondering what the hell my point is. That’s a good question. I guess I’m just rambling. So if fulfilling our desires isn’t the path to happiness, what is? I don’t know. All I’m saying is that there is that void in all of us, the yearning, for most people totally unarticulated, sometimes even unrecognized. It is part of the human condition to feel this emptiness, this incurable ache. And yet we are conditioned to ignore it, to pathologize it when it can’t be ignored, to hide it from each other. And doesn’t this just increase the pain? We are alone and shamed for our acknowledgment of incompleteness. I wonder how a universal recognition of this as a fundamental human experience would change the way we treat each other, the ways that we could interact and live and love in the world. Is it so wrong to want to bond over a shared pain, to make that the keystone of compassion?

From the start of my current job, I began to idolize one of my coworkers. She is my age — a couple of months younger than I am, in fact — but just so amazingly smart and insightful and, perhaps most astoundingly to me, compassionate. She can see everyone in a forgiving light, imagining keenly into their wounds. This touches on what I see as some of my biggest weaknesses: my unwillingness to be soft with people unless they’ve already revealed weakness to me, and my capacity for cruelty when I’ve been hurt. The amount of personal power she holds because of her compassion is what really amazes me. Yes, she can still be hurt, but she can never be psychologically victimized. Her sense of self seems unshakeable. Her sense of purpose is crystal clear. I can barely imagine what it must be like. I am almost afraid to want the latter. My devotion to this image of her makes me anxious, because I recognize on some level that it’s a projection and that someday I will discover she isn’t perfect, and when I find this out, I’ll be both disappointed and relieved. I guess, not surprisingly, there’s a part of me that wants to find unmitigated good somewhere in the world, preferably in a human being. Yet, for the moment, her presence in my life is enough to make me tentatively reach for these things: to develop firmness of purpose, to know and love and forgive myself completely, to draw my boundaries and take care of myself and still take care of everyone around me in a way that makes them feel honored and loved and seen. Wow, just writing that out makes it seem incredibly daunting. One thing at a time, I guess. I’m working on the sense-of-self part at the moment.

I’ve done a lot of abstracting in this post. I guess I’ll have to come back and flesh it out with the concrete events that spurred all of this lofty stuff… all the melodramatic stuff of soap operas. Tune in next time.