“Choose to be optimistic, it feels better.” Dalai Lama
I had the skeleton of story, already in the word oven. In case, I don’t get there, I owe it to both of us to do a quick intro. Each of us are born, a living coloring book. Absolutely everything that is supposed to happen and actually happens is colored in the special pages of that book.
You begin to realize an amazing thing over time. The colors of your past keep changing. Memory is like a vapor of infinite moments, continually redrawn. The crayon photo will attest to my intention to go somewhere weird. Hopefully, I’ll come back to it, but I confess to being a little troubled.
I am feeling there is a bit of a danger in being a writer, whether you’re good or you suck. God only knows, who makes that determination anyway. I think it is possible to believe, because a person has a gift and I am NOT talking about me, they likely have their shit together elsewhere on their own planet of a reader’s imagination.
I had a really difficult night last night. Writing about it for me is like going into battle with my memory, no armor between me and my thoughts. Plus, this kind of thing has never been my bag, ever. I have never wanted to go there, writing and writhing in an endless confessional. I woke up after a cupful of hours, the perfect time for a rock star to go to bed. I had a crushing anxiety. I was in and out of bed like a fucken cuckoo at midnight. Time stopped moving, offering no end between this breath and the next.
This kind of shit doesn’t happen by dumb ass accident. Calling up my ten years of therapy, those precipitating moments in your life often end up as, “Oh, and by the way.” They’ll eventually appear at the bottom of your litany of all that has recently happened. There, conveniently forgotten, is the guilty bastard that started it all.
I am pretty certain one of the smothered fuses that got me going in the first place, was an innocent accident, if ever there was one. i received an incredibly touching comment on my last story. It felt like my heart was going to explode. It made me feel that my stories actually reach some people. Leave it to me to look for trouble, where there isn’t any.
“Who the fuck am I?” Let me tell you something, anyone who does anything at all that can be considered self-expression, has to be propelled by an energy, leaking out from the fissures in their soul. It’s like having opposing forces within, coming together and finding a way to creatively manifest outside yourself. The exchange set me off internally, making me feel a kind of uncomfortable vulnerability.
I swear I just remembered another big event from yesterday. Here I am, living proof of my own theory of, you guessed it “Oh, and by the way.” We are live in my brain. I had a techno mental -meltdown over my ancient iPhone. It greeted me in the morning, precipitating a slide into emotional oblivion. I won’t upset my stomach by rehashing its failings. I’m like fucken Rain Man, when it comes to technology and too many other things, I’m afraid.
Somehow, without paying attention, I have allowed technology to take up a large part of my life. I rely on it for most everything. Any problem, real or imagined, that disrupts the flow of facts and feelings through the umbilical chord, hot wired to my private gadgetry, instantly becomes my very own, living Titanic.
I felt incredibly off-course last night. Part of me was thinking about having a sense of responsibility regarding what I choose to share. and how I share it. Because of how I write, I wouldn’t want anyone to have the wrong idea, thinking I am coming from some kind of special vantage point. I swear, I love to think I am living proof that absolutely anyone can write. I do this thing to try and share where I happen to be at any moment and that’s all.
My Rain Man incarnation had me feeling incredibly uncomfortable as well, anxiety trampling tranquility to the max. To me, technology is a strange kind of oxygen. I suffocate in its absence, regardless of the reason. The mechanical deprivation lasted for several hours and the emotional aftermath lingered a bit longer.
So, I had a double dose of energy that I carried with me to bed. Night came along and the demons invaded my sleep after a few hours. I felt the weight of death crushing my chest, stealing my breath. I couldn’t lie still, a seething panic engulfed me.
Now for the good news, from the moment I decided to share this experience, it immediately lost its residual impact. It is no longer a prisoner inside of me.
In the spirit of honesty, starting with a handful of paragraphs above, this is now being written on Saturday, the next day. Normally, I don’t really give a shit, because there is no point in encouraging confusion of any kind. This time, it matters. I slept much better last night, after having written the body of this story regarding the previous night. Got it?
I sit on my cushion every morning before sunrise. I do yoga everyday. I have an extremely loose, Zen practice and am very fond of the Dalai Lama. Let me tell you, there are just times when fear doesn’t give a shit who you are or what you believe in. It’s got a nose for those soul fissures I talked about. It will slip in when you’re distracted, cause you’re always trying to catch up with what just happened.
When I was living through that night, I can’t imagine what colors I’d have used on that page in the book. There is now a rainbow of colors between the brutal rawness of that frightening experience and its softened memory today.
Without that night, I wouldn’t have had this story to share with you. I feel so much better, because of it.
I have you to thank.