“Where you come from is gone,
where you thought you were going to
never was there,
and where you are is no good
unless you can get away from it.
Where is there a place for you to be?
No place.
Nothing outside you
can give you any place, he said.
You needn’t look at the sky
because it’s not going to open up
and show no place behind it.
You needn’t to search
for any hole in the ground
to look through into somewhere else.
You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards
into your daddy’s time
nor your children’s if you have them.
In yourself right now
is all the place you’ve got.
If there was any Fall, look there,
if there was any Redemption, look there,
and if you expect any Judgment, look there,
because they all three
will have to be
in your time and your body
and where in your time and your body
can they be?â€
Status: Irritable, angry, feel like the cosmos – and a person here and there – is laughing at me, making this EVEN MORE DIFFICULT than it already is. One little passive-aggressive omission is enough to mess up my whole psyche right now. So FINE.
Yes – keeping to it, despite recurring themes of infuriation. In-fury. Harpies, valkyries, screeching ugliness inside.
Let go? Be angry? Be sad? Not even stable enough to decide.
Bad dreams – being chased, stealing a series of cars. One car had switches on the top of the dashboard for 32 speeds and a wheel tilted horizontal. Dreams on Chantix – vivid, hitting all the hot spots.
This bites. Hard.
Another week. In another week it will get easier.
Meanwhile – I’m not lovable. I’m a caged feline – with long, strong vicious claws. Keep away. Stay back. Leave me alone. Take off.
Every repetition, every hurt right now is likely to make me explode. I am unrepentant. I am flexible and I make way for others all the damn time. Right now I’m seething, and it doesn’t matter how damned stupid or inconsequential any of it is. Not one bit. Just – keep your damn distance.
I don’t have to be patient or kind or understanding or mature today. For today, I AM JUST NOT FAIR. Ok? Today, I don’t care about my carefully constructed edifice of contextual ethics based on empathy and compassion. Every day, like millions of other people, I face a world and a set of circumstances that isn’t fair. Nothing is fair. I’m never going to be that shining light upon the hill and I can’t fix a thing that’s wrong. So for today, I GIVE UP, already.
I only have an hour or so to be evil, and I’m staying home – and away from my husband and son.
We just watched “Man on a Ledge” and I was thinking it’s a good thing I can’t get any altitude tonight.
If all I can do is manage is not to have that cigarette I desperately, desperately want right now, that’s ALL I CAN DO.
I knew this would happen. I got through this far, through a couple of depressive swings, and a bunch of self-pity, and even one fairly self-destructive episode where I had to have been begging for some sort of psychological trauma even by entering the realm… and finally, all it takes is a simple little thing, a thing I should let pass, a thing that really doesn’t even matter – not really. I shouldn’t really even be surprised.
But that one little thing could be my undoing here. I just won’t let it. It doesn’t matter – I’ve gone through a hundred reloads today. I only have to get through a little while longer without a smoke.
Looking at the moon should help. But not tonight. Lasers and lightning bolts from my fingertips. Do you feel THAT, moon?
When the darkness falls like a curtain
And the night ahead is a long and uncertain dream
Beyond the loss and the hope of redemption
At the broken heart of the city
Where the hollow light of day never reaches in
A man can break down and fall into pieces
He will fall asleep like a baby
And the unforgiving arms of the cradle
Rock as hard as the face of the city pavement
Hide your eyes
Hide your eyes
He can see the face of a lover
In the lonely face of the angel above him
Carved into the stone that is changing around him
He can feel her breathing inside him
And the unforgiving visions deny him
Life can only be what a man can make it
Hide your eyes
Hide your eyes
Sunday morning
Yellow sky
The sun is floating diamond high
Hours passing
A baby cries
In the arms of someone you imagine
Close your eyes
This is your lullaby
Close your eyes
This is your lullaby
He can feel his skin like a prison
Like a dying cage he struggles to live inside
He tries to call out but nobody hears him
At the ragged edge of the silence
In the calm that only comes with the violent sleep
Inside the heart and the hope of redemption
Hide your eyes
Hide your eyes
In the heart of someone you imagine
Close your eyes
This is your lullaby
Close your eyes
This is your lullaby
Down, down, down
Would the fall never come to an end?
Wonder how many miles I’ve fallen
Must be somewhere near the centre of the earth
How funny it will seem to come out among the people
Who walk with their heads downwards
Down, down, down
Down, down, down
Would the fall never come to an end?
The combination of nicotine withdrawal, chantix prescription medication, and the increased attention I’m spending to my own state of consciousness is all creating very strange thought-storms. I know that all of this will pass, and I know not to believe any of it or even to take it that seriously. This is where training in observing your own thoughts and emotions is very helpful.
Yes – I’m bracketing for my own protection, but there is no reason to spiral down as though any of this were real.
I know, I’ll miss that. A lot.
Then the voice is MY voice. I can’t reproduce the entire chant that got me home, but I fell into a sing-song negative rant. I tried to let the thoughts be spoken to help release them. Here’s a little sampling of what I remember – it was a constant stream…
(reee-me-owwwww, morphing into a deep double-sound chant, then) yah yah yah, nee nee, LAAAAAAA!
You don’t even know a thing
You don’t even know
ALL THAT WORK FOR NOTHING
IDIOT
NAH nah nah nah nah
Cuz I’m a girl, ain’t it
Blue collar RISING
SICK of it
SICK of HATE HATE HATE HATE
Sanctimonious self-righteous corrupt asshats!
Wadda ya think you’re gonna do about it?
YEAH, just be the crank, just be the crank
I shall wear purple? PURPLE?
Like royalty, like PRINCE?
What does it matter?
What’s the damn point?
Why do I even waste my time?
I don’t have the energy.
So tired, can’t do anything.
DO DO DO DO – la – DO DO DO
You are such a stupid little shithead
No imagination at all –
Dumb suburban undisciplined scatterbrain
Dumb dumb dumb dah dah dah dah DUMB
All that money wasted
All that reading just to be alienated
All that curiosity just to be faced with
Yeah, yeah, FEM FEM FEM FEM
fem fem fem fem
fem fem fem fem FEM FEM fem fem
Everything’s a mess
People don’t really like me
I can’t keep my house clean
I have so much to do
I’m so TALENTED –
I’m so INTELLIGENT –
I’m such a waste of air.
WHY do I try?
I could give up like a ZEN MASTER
and back away and escape SUFFERING
and bathe in LOVE LOVE LOVE
But I hate those indoor voices
TOO DAMN soft! FAKE! FAKE!
Compassion! Yeah – TRYING! TRYING! TRYING ALREADY-YA!
Turn down the critic!
Turn down the intellectual!
You’re PUTTING US OFF…
OK – NICE NICE NICE NICE NICE NICE NICE
Then I can be WRITTEN OFF
Underestimated, then I’m
PERKY!
NICE NICE NICE NICE NICE
OH “YOUR” so SWEET!
I’m NOT SWEET!
I’m an ALIEN! A LEGAL Alien!
WEIRDO, different species.
Must be me.
Must be MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
So yeah, it took about 45 minutes to get home. It had been a trying day. The tears that followed restabilized me, and then I waved my arms up vaguely toward the clouds, as though some God(esses) would shoulder my dark side for me.
Still – the benevolent deities did do a nice thing. My son had lost his key in the bushes, leading to a series of issues and problems – but I got out of the car, walked over to the general area and walked right to the key and picked it up.
Key. Got it.
I’m not the stoic kind. I’m checking in with people I trust as an early warning system in case things need to be adjusted and I can’t see it. My mind is going places without me – but this too will pass.
I’m rather down today after formally ending a friendship that went all the way back to childhood. Normally, I would feel it was better to simply fade away, but in this case I felt I had to draw a very clear line. After a couple of attempts to try to maintain the friendship despite our deepening differences, there was a online conversation back and forth about a news story that troubled me. The way the comments were framed, the information that had to be ignored to do so, the transparent rhetorical strategy – all of it illustrated a deeply problematic character in her husband. My intuition was screaming alert.
I did some research. In doing so, I came across a truckload of information that made the friendship impossible to continue, and even made me wonder if there had ever really been a friend there at all. Just following the thread of this one person through the maze brought a deeper level of understanding about how certain things are structured right now in this country of ours. I feel like I had a brush with the-opposite-of-greatness. Horrible. It’s not that I didn’t already have some indication that her husband was a bit of a jerk, but I was able to put it off to differences in political opinion and in “I guess you had to be there” allowances – for as long as I didn’t have too many details. As a last gesture of honor toward our shared past, I won’t illustrate with all the links, and funding sources, and results. Over time, I’m sure others will do so, and in ways more effective (I hope) than anything that I could do. History will be the judge.
I have no idea what could have possessed the person I thought I knew to drink the kool-aid on these matters, not only politically but also in terms of some rather basic ethics. I’m bewildered and deeply disappointed. The girl I knew could have chosen any path. What an incredible waste. How could she have sunk so low?
Dear X – This isn’t about the back and forth on the dueling couple, but the responses I saw troubled me in a number of different ways. I’ve had a bad feeling for a while, really ever since I saw your husband disallow you from eating some dish at the reunion. I knew he was a right-wing academic, but I also knew that you guys had supported Y in his music – and figured that he must have another side to him. Yes, we disagree on politics, but our friendship is more important – I let it go.
Until now, I really didn’t understand the level of corruption that was possible to maintain while still claiming an academic position. It would be one thing if the problem were merely a set of political differences, as I thought. Unfortunately what I’m seeing is much, much more than that. It’s amazing what you can find when you have a thread to follow. I wrote about seven pages last night detailing it, but you’re an intelligent woman and I have to conclude that you not only know but also approve.
I actually believe in intellectual integrity, and don’t think that universities should be the location for sham research, paid-for-comment faculty, and political think-tanks – but rather for independent research that is peer-reviewed. I have no idea how you could have married someone who actually specializes in undermining academic integrity and in the distortion of public information, and who is part of the corruption of the political process for private gain (regardless of citizen/consumer rights or protections, regardless of casualties). I’m not just theoretically opposed to the content, but I actually consider this to be unethical – even criminal – behavior, and want nothing to do with it in any way.
I can’t see a way to justify trying to maintain a friendship with someone who obviously participates in – and approves of – all the corrupt practices and money trails I’ve discovered. I hope that at least your chosen path has brought you something that you wanted badly enough to justify it to yourself.
I’ll just remember you as the talented, intelligent and graceful girl I once knew, and grieve for her. Further communications from either of you are not welcome.
Goodbye, X.
So now it’s done, and I feel like it was just the first step in a process of disentanglement for me. Do I have any white sage? I actually feel – somehow – tainted. I know that people change, and that there are always existential choices to be made. I’ve made mistakes myself. Perhaps I’m still making them. I try to have a caring center and to offer compassion to others. But there’s a limit, and this is toxic at a level that I haven’t been this close to before.
I don’t hate my old friend. I don’t even hate her horrible and corrupt husband. But I won’t allow that kind of thing to be part of my life, nor part of my personal set of friends and associates. I can’t live with this knowledge and still call her “friend.”
Corruption and fraud in the cause of greed can succeed for a while, but it will always be discovered and judged, even if it takes a hundred years. Those who participate in it still have to live with the knowledge of the hurt they’ve caused, the casualties of their destructiveness. Deep down, we all know the truth of it. I see the causes, the studies for hire, the interests behind all this. It sickens me.
I remember the primal anguish that is born out of the belief that God is the source of both love and pain.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve observed that the feeling toward the universe it engendered is very similar to that of a hostage, a victim of abuse, a prisoner. Instead of creating a subjectivity of love in freedom, of caritas and kindness, and peace, it seemed to create an obsessive and paradoxical longing and fear that felt so meaningful that it was difficult to release.
The first stage of exit was pure rage, in my case perhaps only because of some hard-wired sense of self-preservation. If I hadn’t become angry enough, I never would have left. Yes, I also wouldn’t have spent years in college, or racked up student loans, or seen my career path veer off into something I never expected, but I also wouldn’t have had anywhere to stand, wouldn’t have slowly reconstructed a space in which I could live.
I’ve been thinking about the pathological aspects of religion for many years now. Talking with others who left the Jehovah’s Witnesses has been very healing, and I’m so very happy that such discussions have been made available. I was alone, it seemed, at first. As much as our conversations mutually heal, there are still times when the raw feelings burst through. Yes, even now when it seems that early experience shouldn’t matter anymore, I look around at our cultural landscape and see all the similarities to the dynamics that I felt way back then. The stated arguments, then the cruelties beneath them. It’s part of the reason that I follow politics so closely.
When you’ve lived in a space where justice is proclaimed, but unkindness rules, you feel things. I’ve always been too sensitive to that difference, to the unfairness, and it’s only expanded into more understanding of structural, institutionalized unfairness. For that reason, I was never able to reach that enlightenment space that some highly-evolved religious people sometimes reach, where you’re in tune with the love of the cosmos and shine out in peace and love because of that.
I am amazed at people who first question God because of logical arguments – it’s why I was first interested in philosophy and theology. I never expected answers, I was just fascinated that anyone could ever manage to think clearly about an embedded belief system. For me, the questions just keep getting better and better.
But first, I had to step away from the thing that felt so inherent to my soul. It helped and hurt that I was a woman, and one gifted with both imagination and intelligence. I was rewriting stories all the time.
Throwback moments are still powerful because I still recognize them. If they ring true, they can almost call me back. Some versions of religion look nice, but they don’t address this hard-core total involvement of the person. The pathological edges of religion do – and this, I think is both their advantage and their biggest threat. They encourage power distortions – masochism and sadism, entwined, enthrallment and rebellion, entwined. Fanaticism has incredible payoffs. I understand.
When I saw the song below performed, I didn’t know the words. I didn’t have to know them, although they do fit (a bit strangely so).
What I saw was a priestess exorcising her demon. It was so powerful that I was shaken for the rest of the night.
Every time I hear it, like I accidentally did over my morning coffee, I feel it punch the solar plexus of my soul. I cry every time, and I always remember, I remember how it felt.
This was how I felt about God.
Although I haven’t been in that particular space for many years, it still has a power, and as much as I remind myself of the path of forgiveness and kindness and peace, as much as I am more lovingly attuned now, I still lack the total transformation that would make this song just a song like any other.
Music is a personal thing. Everyone projects onto music to some extent. This is not meant to be a song about God, but it resonates there for me.
For you. In remembrance, in grief. To sing, to exorcise your demons, and perhaps to be able to voice some aspect of the experience that conversation can’t really ever address. But, lovelies, sing something sweet afterward… If you can grok it, this one takes strength to hear.
Alanis Morissette, “Sympathetic Character”
I was afraid you’d hit me if I’d spoken up
I was afraid of your physical strength
I was afraid you’d hit below the belt
I was afraid of your sucker punch
I was afraid of your reducing me
I was afraid of your alcohol breath
I was afraid of your complete disregard for me
I was afraid of your temper
I was afraid of handles being flown off of
I was afraid of holes being punched into walls
I was afraid of your testosterone
I have as much rage as you have
I have as much pain as you do
I’ve lived as much hell as you have
and I’ve kept mine bubbling under for you
You were my best friend
You were my lover
You were my mentor
You were my brother
You were my partner
You were my teacher
You were my very own sympathetic character
I was afraid of verbal daggers
I was afraid of the calm before the storm
I was afraid for my own bones
I was afraid of your seduction
I was afraid of your coercion
I was afraid of your rejection
I was afraid of your intimidation
I was afraid of your punishment
I was afraid of your icy silences
I was afraid of your volume
I was afraid of your manipulation
I was afraid of your explosions
I have as much rage as you have
I have as much pain as you do
I’ve lived as much hell as you have
and I’ve kept mine bubbling under for you
(repeat 2 x)
You were my keeper
You were my anchor
You were my family
You were my saviour
and therein lay the issue
and therein lay the problem