Writer's Break

I find myself in a position I haven't been in for a while...wanting to write one of my stories again.
...And now we've reached the point in the plot where the protagonist struggles with the anxiety that comes with attempting such a challenging endeavor.

There was a time in my life where writing didn't scare me this much. To the contrary, the prospect of creating people and places, tapping into themes, ideas, machinations or speculations, used to excite the hell out of me.

Writing was one of the few arenas I ever ventured into where I felt I had some modicum of control over something. I know that observation can imply that I'm a control freak and, depending on your perspective or subjective biases of me, it's not an altogether unfounded one either.

When I was a kid, scratching down stories in old composition notebooks, it wasn't about control but creativity. Why it was that I became interested in storytelling, I couldn't really say. For whatever reason, it was something I just developed a knack for, according to my early grade school teachers.

The older I became and the more I struggled with trying to understand both the people I was in constant contact with, as well as the person I was growing into, the more I needed an outlet, some way to process all of these things pinballing around in my head.

And I won't lie. Some of it was fairly messed up and more than a little scary. That said, I always found it a little reassuring that I was never interested in following in the footsteps of Stephen King or Clive Barker and writing horror stories. My interest was more vested in the psychological, even though there are aspects of it that venture well into the realm of the horrific, trying to understand why we do the things we do to each other, good and bad, always fed my curiosity.

But now, what worries me more is the idea that in order to feel better, whatever the heck that means, it'll involve writing a story that taps into everything I've experienced and how I view the world in all its dark, dirty, unforgiving totality. To funnel it all out into chapters, paragraphs and prose.

It wouldn't be the first time I tried either. The last time I did was six years ago and while it had hints of what I think I'm capable of, part of me knows I can do better...if I can let myself fully go there.

The question is whether or not I can fully commit myself to that sort of a deep dive or not? It's one thing to have an interesting story in your head. It's another thing entirely when it refuses to be extracted.

Nightmares, Teddy Bears and Deja Vu

I woke up the other day from a nightmare so vivid that it's stuck in my mind and pulled on my heartstrings ever since...only it wasn't a nightmare in the classical definition of the term.

We tend to differentiate nightmares from other intense dreams by virtue of the sense of fear or terror they impart on our sleeping selves. This dream I had was on shared that same level of psychological or emotional intensity, but there was nothing frightening or terrifying about it.

When I left New England as a kid, my mother told me that she'd taken some of the things I'd left behind, namely my hand-built collection of model airplanes and all the old stuffed animals I hadn't been willing to part with yet. The one exception to that was a brown 'Gund' teddy bear I'd gotten when I was about ten and decided to bring with me out to the Northwest.

Editorial Note: I still hung on to him even into my mid-30's as something I could pass along to my child when they were born. I ended up giving him to my son when he was about two because his mother tried giving him back to me after our divorce. As far as I know, he still has it.

Anyway, the nightmare I had involved me going to my mother's house in Maine and reclaiming the rest of the gang. My mother was nowhere to be found, but I made my way inside and up to the attic. There, wrapped in a couple of old garbage bags, were friends I hadn't seen in more than a lifetime.

The most familiar one was also the biggest, a tan and brown dinosaur I'd named 'Stanley the Stegosaurus,' because that's what kind of dinosaur he was and I knew my dinosaurs well back then, and because by my childhood logic, Stanley seemed like as good a name as any for a Stegosaurus.

And sitting in that cramped, dusty, chilly space, getting reacquainted with Stanley and the rest, I found myself getting blasted by a rogue wave of emotion I could never have anticipated and absolutely could not escape. So much so that even thinking about it now, I'm not ashamed to say, is making me feel it all over again.

Why did it totally wreck me like that? Because they took me back to the point in my life where I was just a little ragamuffin kid who had no idea or even a comprehension that this is what my life was going to be like when I got to my parents' age. At that point, I was still happy and optimistic about life and the world and utterly blissful in my naive dissonance about just how incredibly screwed up it was going to start becoming before I could even blink.

I was still at a stage where my imagination could run rampant and not be shackled in a cage of mental illness and anxiety. Where I could have friends and not constantly worry about what I was going to do or not do that would cause me to lose them.

Where I could be boyishly smitten with a girl instead of having to be completely terrified as a man every time I let myself get anywhere near that with a woman.

At that point in my life, I still had my whole life to look forward to and if you'd told me then that this is where I'd be...that this is who I'd be...I know my younger self would've probably responded with something along the lines of this.

Then I don't want to grow up. Ever.

But grow up I did. Lessons did I learn. Regrets I have struggled with. People I have lost and pain I have felt.

And I know that's why the longer I sat there in the attic, cradling this old thing of fabric and stuffing and memory, I felt it all just start pouring out of me like a waterfall. I don't know how long I cried. I don't know if anyone heard me and if they did, I didn't care.

That little ragamuffin kid who'd been through so much hell just needed to let it out to someone who wouldn't judge him for doing so. The last thing I remember was wrapping my arms around Stanley and just bawling like I haven't in a long time...

...Then I woke up, and I did it all over again.

Just like I'm doing now as I try to get this all down on virtual paper.

I'm not a believer in gods or religions anymore. I used to believe karma was a thing until I realized the people I knew who did things to warrant getting a heaping helping of bad karma never got it, so they never had to live with what they'd done like I have.

But something I have believed in is deja vu, because I've experienced it more times than I can seriously count, and it's always based on something I've dreamed about at some point. I don't mean in ways like I can guess lottery numbers or presidential elections, but seemingly random moments or encounters that trigger a part of my brain that says with a high degree of certainty, we've done this before.

As sure as I am of anything, I know there's a point soon where I will be in that attic. Where I'll find that bag, open it up, see my old friends again and remember, for maybe the briefest of moments, how it felt to be free of all the things that were waiting for me when I had to leave them behind and had to grow up.

And I know that I will sit there and cry like I maybe have never cried before because there's nothing I can do to go back to that time, start all over, and hopefully get it right the second time around.

Detachment

As much as we despise cliches', there is legitimacy in the one that suggests two of the hardest teachers we learn from are age and experience.

If the last decade has taught me anything, it's that there truly is a sense of liberation in becoming as emotionally detached from the people in my life as much as possible.

When I was younger and more naive, the argument could be made that one of my most obvious flaws was I cared about people too much. I cared about both what they thought of me and I cared far more for them than I should.

Despite my ever-present, stubborn refusal to accept it, it would be unfair to put all this on my shoulders. As cliche' also dictates, we don't get to choose the family we're born into, nor do we always choose the people we end up falling for the hardest. And as much as I am deserving of blame for my part in making a mess of those relationships or potential relationships, it's been pointed out on many an occasion that the totality of said blame cannot solely be mine either.

When I set off on my own, following my divorce in 2011, whatever minuscule bits of romantic I'd managed to retain tried to reassure me it was a chance to meet new people, build new relationships and maybe find an avenue to what we're all hoping for when those opportunities present themselves...Happiness.

But, of course, that didn't happen. Instead, I ended up losing just as many friends as I'd made to that time, for various reasons. So I did the only thing that made sense. What people like my mother and some of the therapists I'd gone to to that point had strongly urged me to do.

I stopped caring about people any more, because as best I could tell, people had stopped caring about me.

In hindsight, I don't entirely blame them, either. When you see someone struggling like I was at the time and they're not able to either articulate that in a way you understand, or it affects their behavior in ways that make their presence in your life potentially toxic, the easiest thing to do is just write them off as another lost cause and focus on the people who seemingly have their shit together.

That was a problem for me, though, because those people weren't lost causes to me. They were friends and family that I cared about. People I'd spent years cultivating positive relationships with and not having that as a possibility anymore wasn't something I was willing to concede.

So I didn't. I tried to put out each fraying thread that connected me to them in the hope that I could salvage at least some part of my particular social tapestry. In retrospect, though, I'm realizing more and more that I should've done the smarter thing.

I should've just let the whole thing burn to the ground.

That is, after all, what we're all told to do. In this age of wholly expendable relationships, even with the people who we matter most to, it takes next to nothing to completely shut them out of our lives anymore. It's what the block function was designed for on every social media outlet we're reliant on for relationships and communication nowadays.

Maybe it's because I'm older and was conditioned in a much different time, but I never saw the benefit of being someone who just arbitrarily tossed friendships and relationships away when times got tough. Then again, I'm just as obstinate about the idea of actually talking to whoever it is you're trying to salvage said relationship with, rather than going through text messages or other passive-aggressive means.

By the time I reached thirty-five, I think it finally sank in that what the future held for me involved having next to no connections with people I know or used to know. I won't lie, it was a bitter pill to swallow, but it also came about in no small part because of what happened with Ghost, as well as my inability to get moving in the sort of upward trajectory that affords chances to have a bigger social life.

Being trapped in the stasis of forced mediocrity makes your attractiveness for both platonic and non-platonic relationships incredibly low. As a result, I struggle to keep in touch with even my closest friends from when I was a kid. 

Dating is another matter altogether. More than once, I had female friends whom I found myself becoming attracted to, only to have them do the same thing that Ghost did, albeit to lesser degrees. Thanks, but no thanks. I then got to watch them go into different relationships with guys who treated them just as badly as the guys who'd came before, and inevitably, I was called upon to be a voice of reason and a shoulder to cry on. 

And I did it. I played my part. But I was again reminded of just why it is that I'm not apparently cut out to be anything other than a disposable friend.

So now, as I approach another birthday in a few weeks, I think I've finally turned the corner on being able to keep people at arm's length once and for all, and my days of being as fully immersed in trying to stay connected to people are over.

It's not that I don't care about them anymore. Instead, I think my compassion has been tempered by all the times where I was slapped down and put in my place for caring as much as I did. There are days when the realization of where I'm at now emotionally does bother me. I know it shouldn't have to be this way, except I don't get a say in it anymore either.

It's an crazy new world. I just happen to be trapped in it.

Masochism Tango

"Why can't you just be happy?!"

This may be the second-most asked question I used to get along with why was I so angry all the time.

Logically, it seems purely rhetorical because if a person is always seeming to be one thing, then they can't very well be another simultaneously now, can they?

I started a new job last week and with that came the implied expectation that being able to make money and pay bills again would provide a measure of happiness. And while this may be true on a certain level, I think we often confuse safety and survivability with happiness.

Yes, being able to take care of myself is a nice thing, but that's a given. What isn't is that even though I like my job, it hasn't made me happier by any real measure, either.

In fact, I honestly cannot remember the last time I felt truly happy about my life from top to bottom.

On the one hand, I suppose it's natural for human beings to never want to reach that apex of complete satisfaction with their existence. After all, there are entire threads of both philosophical and psychological theory that state we never can and never should reach that level, because we should always keep driving towards various goals and never rest on our laurels.

And yet, if you're in the rarefied air of the financial and/or social elite, the rest of us poor paeans assume that's the absolute pinnacle of our modern existence, so it must be impossible to not be anything but happy.

I suppose if that were true, we wouldn't have a need for tabloid journalism, because there's few pastimes we love more as a culture than knocking an elite off the pedestal we sycophantically built for them to stand upon in the first place.

Then, on the flip side, are those of us for who being unhappy has become so ingrained in our DNA that we don't really know any other way to exist. It's not that we don't want to be happy. To the contrary, we spend a great deal of time and energy thinking, hoping, praying, pining for the means by which we can escape the maze of misery that we've locked ourselves into, only to realize that we sealed off the way out a long time ago.

For myself, I'm pretty sure that's been the background of my existence since before I was still in elementary school, and there's a name for this sort of psychological mindset:

Emotional Masochism.

Now, the implied connotation of that word aside, I'd like to think I'm not much different than anyone else in that I am not a big fan of being inflicted with pain. But the difference between physical and emotional masochism is that the former is obviously affiliated with sex, while the latter is both more subtle and also more destructive.

Emotional masochism isn't even so much a byproduct of Depression. For a lot of us, it can become the hinge point on which our attempts to break out of a Depressive cycle or resort to self-sabotage often hinges on.

In hindsight, this shouldn't be anything new to me. Like I said, I've lived like this for longer than I really recognize. Part of what I've been willfully ignorant of, though, is just how pervasive and deeply rooted my emotional masochism has become in the last ten years.

I was talking with my brother a few weeks ago and mentioned that I've been trying to convince myself it's beyond time to get off social media and go back to a non-connected lifestyle. After all, I don't get anything out of it and really haven't for a long time. To the contrary, whenever I do go on it, all it does is make me feel empty, unwanted and depressed because 1.) no one really reaches out to me anymore and 2.) I get a deep emotional longing to talk to people that I can't talk to anymore, because they've permanently disconnected from me.

This is a key tenant of Emotional Masochism. You know that something is only going to make you feel emotionally wounded, and yet you do it because on some level, you can only function by being in that position of emotional pain.

The same goes for:

• Trying to hang on to toxic relationships.
• Seeking approval from people who will never give it.
• Having difficulty existing in a conflict-free environment.
• Disregarding compliments or positive affirmations.
• Chronically pushing people away.
• Being unable to let go of past trauma.
• Needing to fix things with other toxic people.
• Taking responsibility for everything, even if you're not at fault.
• Beating yourself up through external stimuli that invokes sadness or pain.
• Feeling bad and apologizing for trying to be your genuine self.

Now, I may be crazy...but does that sound like anyone you know...?

I'm the first to admit that I truly despise either generating or being in orbit of drama. I've had more than my share for one lifetime and in coming to the realization of my propensity for passive-aggressive behavior a few years ago, I've tried making a concerted effort to both recognize and limit my output of both as much as possible.

But this is different.

It's not because I somehow like being miserable. Hell, nobody likes being miserable.

The problem is this is how I've learned to function for so long that if I find myself potentially deviating away from it and in a direction of possible, genuine happiness, my mind sees that and overcompensates by reminding me of all the reasons why I can never be happy.

And believe me...that list is incredibly long and makes a rather valid case when it wants to.

So when I find myself in those brief moments where I start thinking I've found the way out of my particular labyrinth of self-imposed misery, where I think to myself if I can just summon the means to get one of my books done, or focused on my video essays, or opening myself up to someone I might have an emotional connection with, I'm flooded with all the times I tried to do something similar and it blew up in my face.

Then there inevitably comes the sense that...oh yeah...this is how I'm supposed to exist. I'm the one who's not supposed to be happy because like all things, there's a finite amount of happiness to go around in the universe and if I manage to get my hands on some, then it means someone else has to be miserable instead.

Either that or the few people I have left in my life won't have reason to stay connected to me, because I somehow serve as an emotional counterweight for their own happiness and/or successes.

"Remember, if you're not careful, you'll end up like Devin and we ALL know what he's like. Whatever you do, DON'T end up like him!"

The weirdest thing, though, is as much as I feel the hurt I subconsciously inflict upon myself sometimes, other times I just end up feeling...numb. Like I've gotten so used to the emotional self-flagellation at this point that the sting isn't as sharp as it used to be. The result is I don't downshift into feeling miserable or anything, but more that it establishes a baseline for how I'm going to feel for most of the day.

By now, I'm pretty sure I know every nook and cranny of the labyrinth I've constructed for myself, because I've been round it more times than I can count. If anything, I'm at my most stable when I'm sitting dead in the center of it because, as physical/sexual masochists will likely agree with, you feel the most alive when you're in the most pain.

After this long, I don't know if I'll ever truly stop being emotionally masochistic. I'm so comfortable in beating myself down and self-sabotaging every possible avenue that could lead to some form of contentment or happiness that to suddenly stop doing so feels incredibly alien and scary to me.

I've always told people that I'm my own harshest judge and my own worst critic and for good reason. There's things I've done which warrant such scrutiny and some form of punishment. And I've had people try so many times to convince me over the years that I need to forgive myself for both those things and what other people did to me that I still shoulder the blame and responsibility for.

I know they're right. I know that I should. I know there's nothing I can do about all those things and continuing to hurt myself over them on an emotional level is just as damaging as if I were doing it on a physical one.

But honestly...the reason why I don't, as bizarre as this is going to sound...is because I've been hurting myself for so long that I feel the closest thing to happiness I can reach only when I'm feeling miserable.