Let's Talk About The Dark, Part 3: Eric Maisel and An Existential Solution Suggestion

If you made it this far into this little series about being sad, well done and hello!!

Quick re-cap: Part 1 of this series told you the story of me and why I get depressed, how it feels, how I feel about it.  A personal tale, partial and leaving out loads of things, as any story will, not perfect; a human told it.  Part 2 had a quick investigation into the ‘medicalisation’ of some of our ills, and the labelling we accept from the medical profession, and those that benefit by them.  Whether these labels are useful or not.  This related to a segment at the start of Eric Maisel’s new book, Rethinking Depression, which is what has prompted this little series of mine.  I’ll return to the topic of labelling and its usefulness or not briefly, at the end of this post. 

This is the segment where I tell you a little bit about Eric Maisel’s ideas for how to cope with feeling sad, and how to live a better, more authentic life.  The clue as to where this will be going is in the word ‘authentic’ – it’s the catchword of Existentialists.  Existentialism is a philosophical line of thought; remember Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, France after the Second World War?  Ever read Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, heard of the Theatre of the Absurd?

The key idea of Existentialists is that there is no meaning to life and the universe other than what you give it yourself, what you make for yourself.  In your attempts to make a life of meaning, your own meaning for yourself and true to your own personality, you are attempting to create an Authentic Life. This is – clearly – an atheist philosophy; you’ll find no god concept here. (Though interestingly, did you have a partiality to a god or two, I think you can work this philosophy fine alongside any faith you have, working along the simple idea that my nanna told me, and all your nannas told you: God helps those who help themselves.  Pray to God sailor, but row for the shore.  End of aside for anyone of faith.)   

Sitting about, feeling rather confused and down and thinking: ‘Why am I here?  What’s it all for?  Does anything I do count for anything at all?  What’s my place in the universe?’  is a valid Existential angsty moment (or decade or two if you get really stuck with this)…Their answers would likely be versions of, as Eric Maisel would put it:

The most important shift for the contemporary person to make is the…shift from the despairing “Why do I exist?” to the bracing “I exist”.  She must stop pestering herself with the unanswerable questions that plague her […] and accept as her mantra “I am alive”. […]  We opt to really live the twenty years or the sixty years ahead of us.  This may be all that we have, but it is exactly what we have.  As nineteenth century philosopher Richard von Schubert-Soldern aphoristically put it, “To understand life, we must contrast it with death”.  We force life to mean because we are alive and not dead.  We force life to mean until death releases us from our responsibility to live authentically.  We say, “While I am alive, I can love”.  We say “While I am alive, I can learn a few things”.  We say, “While I am alive, I can create”.  We live authentically because we can. (pp.78-79)

Why would trying to live ‘authentically’ help a person feeling down?  What would an authentic life entail, what does it even bloody mean?!  I’ll set out Eric Maisel’s suggestions of an authentic life for you, with a small explanation of each, which will answer these questions, as we go along.  Now bear in mind and keep it there – this is a PHILOSOPHY book.  It might help you, you might find it in the Self Help or Psychology section of the bookshop, but I find the best thing about this, is that it’s a philosophy book.  It’s a way of thinking about stuffs in life that relates to the Real World, and action you can take there.

You Look Life in the Eye (pp.63-67) and You Decide to Matter (pp.75-81)

Basically, for anyone who has a love of film and pop-culture references, this is the metaphorical taking of that pill in The Matrix, and seeing that life is tatty and grey and really unattractive – and preferring the stunted nature of how things do actually seem to be than the shiny leather kung-fu lies of the Matrix illusion, because if you know the truth of the universe as you see it[1]: you can begin to work within it purposefully, to change your world for the better, according to values you will decide upon.  Your actions will mean something, because they mean something To You.  The first thing to do, he suggests, is to accept that things can be quite crap, regularly – for anyone.  Life can be horribly unfair, and our own and everyone else’s motivations are complex and ethically suspect, often (p.66).  He agrees it may not be less painful to admit to our failings than to deny them and feel (falsely) better (p.65).  A double-edged sword.  The thing is – I would say that most chronically sad people see this sort of reality anyway – and are badly confused at a lot of other people’s avoidance and denial of it.  So it’s a cheery message really:  Life IS terribly hard, you were right!!  Let’s accept you were right about all that pain around the place and the universe not caring about you or anyone in particular, and move on from that starting point (p.75).  Not going to argue with you about it…

You Investigate Meaning (pp.69-73)

If you are down and have decided to look life in the eye, and acknowledge all the sadness and awfulness around us – as well as all the beauty and joy – you may still feel that it’s all futile and meaningless.  But if you don’t try and have a go at making some meaning for yourself (are you not bored of waiting for it to come upon you, all this time??), he suggests you ‘will likely remain confused about and estranged from life’ (intro points, p.57).   He defines meaning as ‘what we value, how we construe our life purposes, what we make of the facts of [our] existence’, and he makes clear this will be ‘entirely subjective’ to each individual (p.71).  I would add that actions are never futile, they just sometimes don’t have the intended results, but trying is better than not trying for your sense of self worth, right?  Futility and meaninglessness are not the same thing.  What means something for one person (he gives an example of ‘watching ducks’ hopping about for an hour in the park (p.72) – something I would find very meaningful, cos I like that sort of nature watching), will have zero meaning for another.  Start to try and find things that mean something just for you, and try to populate your life with more of them.

 You Accept Your Obligation to Make Meaning (pp.83-88)

He points out that faced with a decision to make personal meaning most people opt out in some way, choosing religion, selfish hedonism, indifference, obsessive seeking or simply crumbling into despair at the mammoth nature of the task (p.84).  He suggests that maybe people stumble so early because they feel arrogant at making their own meanings: we have had other people’s meanings pushed onto us all our lives.  He suggests that thinking of it as an ‘honourable’ thing to do, to live by principles you have decided on, is a better way, and need not suggest a superiority of attitude to anyone else (p.85).  He makes the incredibly relevant point that ‘we object to a universe where meaning has to be made’ for ourselves (p.86, my italics), and where it will, by that nature, never be settled once and for all – it will shift as we learn and live (p.88).  And linked to that, that it’s very hard work, and ‘we know ourselves too well’: we will let ourselves down and constantly – which will generate massive anxiety (pp.86-87).  He suggests that we view it as the ‘epic’ story of our lives, the ‘loving work of self-creation’(p.87) – if you think that sounds pompous, could it be because you don’t think you deserve to matter, only other people do? Why not just try and see, and keep trying – we already, all us sad people, know what it feels like to give up, get up, try again, give up, get up, try again…

You Decide How to Matter (pp.89-96)

This section is quite vital, and is about how you make decisions in your life, acknowledging that you often have whole cartloads of semi-conscious desires and prejudices within you as you do so, so that there is no such thing as a pure intellectual, or even pure emotional decision – there is just trying to do the right thing as you see it, at any time.  He describes it like this:

You weigh your actions against a vision you have of the person you would like to be, the person it would make you proudest to be; you take action, you learn from your experience to what extent you guessed right; and you make use of what you’ve learned as you weigh your next decision.  We can give this a shorthand name: the principle of personal pride.  You use the principle of personal pride to make your meaning.  This may be the beautiful, imperfect, harrowing way – the way of making meaning. (p.96)

(Me speaking to sad people:  This idea should work, I reckon, even in nasty twisty decision scenarios, for the reasons I give in footnote 1 – that you can only ever work with the info you have at the time, if mistakes are made due to lack of information or due to misjudging information all you can do is learn: becoming mired in a pit of blaming yourself is understandable, should an error occur, but you need to try and tease yourself out, and look clearly again.  The next decision awaits, as does your life, of course.  You will learn, and sometimes having learned is all you can take from a situation that has harmed you greatly.)

You Negotiate Each Day (pp.163-168)

I personally, hate any Trying To Help Me book, that gives me loads of good ideas, but then leaves me there, like the real world and its constant demands aren’t something that will really bother me, now I have reached a higher level of perception.  This book doesn’t do that.  This is a lovely chapter – and it gives many examples and many different sorts of choices you can make for each single day, be it working day or free day, or a mixture.  From the minute you get up to the minute you sleep it gives you ideas on how to get through that day without feeling so wan and despairing, if you do feel that way:

Each day is a special sort of negotiation.  You make decisions about where you will invest meaning, how you will handle activities that hold no particular meaning, when you will take your vacations from meaning, and so on.  You make a daily bargain with yourself that if you hold to your intentions you will find no reason to doubt the meaningfulness of that day. […]  You do not aim for some unattainable perfection. […]  You accept that you need daily vacations from “the whole meaning thing” [as well as] adamantly demanding of yourself that you put in that hard hour …doing the thing that you’ve been avoiding, because that is your prime meaning-making activity on that day. (p.163)

I think these chapters are the core of the book – the rest is incredibly useful elaboration on these ideas, and back-ups, things to help you integrate the ideas into your life more and more closely, with many specific scenarios and examples for thinking with.  There is quite stringent help on how to formulate values without feeling you are contradicting yourself or not allowing for wants and needs as well, for example (pp.97-104).  Prepare to really feel like your head is getting bent trying to work that one through! I ended up questioning some values I thought I held (and I have few, very few), and adding some I really did not think I had sympathy with (oddly, things make a bit more sense with them in the mind-mix).  As usual, all these things are provisional, we’ll see how they go. 

There’s a section on pages 125-8, in the section on You Focus on Meaning Rather than Mood, which describes quite heart-breakingly why we can feel so constantly up against the experience of ‘the void’ in our daily lives, despite all our scientific progress and civil society: its almost poetic.  He suggests that because we are so used to this experience of scary disappointment, and the ‘taking the temperature’ of ourselves (p.128), checking in on our moods and seeing it as ‘bad’ during these moments, that we have slipped into a sort of trance, ‘convinced that an unlived life is less painful than reality’ (p.129).  A trance where we live only half awake, because it’s the only bearable way to get through, say, a dead-end job (or even a great job that just isn’t satisfying us anymore – the guilt!!).  The trance is aided by the advertisements coming at us all the time, trying to get us to buy something, the lifestyles we see on TV or film, all over the place (on p.131 is an absolutely brilliant rant against advertisers).  He makes it clear, as he does throughout the book that you need to rebel, against trance and culturally induced desires for unimportant things (my friend Mr Hooting Yard would call this The Man), against allowing all that to constantly derail you in your attempts to live life by your own principles.  Earlier, he says:

This is the dynamic, unavoidable tension that adds unwanted stress to every contemporary person’s life: even as she is poised on the brink of meaninglessness, she must repeatedly fight her way back to meaning (p.79).

He gives several chapters of attention to how to fight back if you feel your meanings slipping – how to get it back; or make new meaning for yourself: to understand it’s not a static thing – you will grow and change, and so will your ideals, and your meanings you make (pp.169-206).  It reads both fierce and calming. 

My thoughts on all this are twofold.  Firstly, to live life authentically, that is, true to whatever you have personally decided is important for you, is going to be utterly uphill – because it involves going against the grain of our society which is all (outwardly) about working, acquiring, competing, celebrity and money.  I think those of us that have become depressed, sad, whatever: I don’t think all these things are working for us anymore anyway.  I know I wish they did; I have many times wished to be stupid and quiescent and living a quieter life!!  But they aren’t, so trying to think clearly, when we can, is I reckon, a good start, and trying some of the tools for trying to become closer to the person you wish yourself to be are surely better than just giving up on life?  Surely worth a go?  It can’t be a bad thing to try and be that change you want to see in the world, as Gandhi said, just starting with yourself, surely?  (And remember, for those of you out there allergic to the idea of self-help – this is a sodding philosophy book!)

Secondly, to return to the issue of ‘Depression’ as a label and whether it’s helpful or not.  I asked Eric Maisel some quite raw and open questions on how to cope with my feelings of isolation and overwhelmedness some days as a mother alone at home with a demanding toddler.  I confess, I was expecting answers along the lines of, ‘on days where you feel xx levels of anxiety and sadness, possibly you could try [insert various strategies here, that are in the book].’  ‘And on days where you feel worse, possibly these ones might be of help’.  ‘And on the worst days, maybe to get right back to basics, possibly remembering just this or this might help’.  What he actually said, was that he had had a fantastic time raising his two children at home as a house-husband, and didn’t ‘understand the question’.  His answers were well-meaning and said in a spirit of kindness, but they underlined something that has occurred to me more and more when I think about ‘depression’.

It’s about EMPATHY.  Though Eric Maisel had been in a similar (not the same, note, as he is him and I am me!) situation to me – rearing children at home, mostly alone; because he himself had navigated this challenge very successfully (he produced both personal meaning and a body of work in that time-frame), he was for some reason unable to mentally step into my shoes, and inhabit my experience of this same challenge as different from his own.  This despite many examples of him stating in the book that people view situations very differently, and that circumstances can appear great on the outside and yet still you feel sad.  He did not see that I felt very lost sometimes, and suggested I view my ideas about ‘proper parenting’ and ‘proper house-management’ differently, to allow more time for creation (my writing).  The suggestions were valid and practical, but not talking to the spirit of desperation I had attempted to convey, for when I am very sad and anxious.  I know I am not the only woman who finds child-rearing at home very hard sometimes, exhausting and weirdly unsatisfying, despite having chosen this role freely.  I felt very cast down.  I admire the man’s work; I find his books very helpful.  And yet, on communicating with him, I found him unable to meet me where I was inside, and engage with me there, however briefly. 

This is just a shade, a reminder of the way that people who get sad feel when they try and explain this to other people.  I think it’s likely that the reason the population of Western society were so eager to have the word ‘depression’ replace the word ‘unhappiness’ in our vocabularies, was the lack of empathy and compassion they experienced from others.  We wouldn’t have needed a medical definition of sadness, made respectable with the word ‘depression’, if we were ALL more empathic to one another and didn’t discount each others sorrows and difficulties as unimportant or un-understandable.  Empathy is incredibly important.  The reason depression is a helpful label sometimes, for some people, is because it provides them a validation of their feelings and their existence as they are experiencing it in a way other people in their lives have not.  It gives them a starting point to dealing with their sorrow.  I am here, oh – where do I go from here, how?

And that, along with the proviso that as long as you can think clearly enough that day to try and read, this book may be of great help to you, is that.  It doesn't matter that my personal communication with Eric Maisel did not feel as successful for me as I would have hoped, in the end.  I’ll give him the last proper word – this is what I would have said to me perhaps, as a start, were I him…but it's there already in his book, so I have it anyway:

It makes no sense to suppose that a creature with consciousness could always feel happy.  It is absurd and telling that as a society we think unhappiness is an embarrassing, inappropriate emotion. (p.49)

Maybe we feel trapped by a life that sounds all right in the expressing but that feels dark, stressful, and ordinary in the living. (p.51)

Some endeavours, such as service [here think motherhood, me!], are indeed regularly experienced as meaningful…But they are not intrinsically meaningful.  They are only meaningful when they are experienced as meaningful. (p.70)

You can’t make all the meaning you want.  You can’t provide yourself with a continual experience of meaningfulness.  Authenticity is not like a ladder you climb…where one day you see all the authenticity you need.  Authenticity is about trying, day in and day out, in the small gestures and in the big decisions you make, to live out the vision you have for yourself and to earn the experience, if only on that day and for that day, of having lived authentically.  There is no journey from unhappiness to authenticity, as if unhappiness were something that could be left behind in the dust.  You live authentically, and sometimes you are unhappy. (p.211)

Nothing could be more natural.  What sort of creature do we think we are?  A kind of wishful thinking has washed over the developed world that life has become simple and settled.  […]  This is a false view of life.  Life is a project. (p.209)

You will have plenty of reality with which to reckon.  This reckoning is heroism.  It is how you earn your feeling of authenticity. (p.140)

I do recommend this book, I do. I think a bit of Existentialism can be very good for the brain, if you aren't too flat on the floor to concentrate for it. If you experience depression as a sort endless trapping in a nasty self conscious present moment (as I often do), these ideas could help to nudge you toward a more advantageous self consciousness.

For other stops on Eric Maisel's Blog Tour for this book, see here. 

Eric Maisel, Rethinking Depression, California: New World Library (2012)

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And these posts can be in honour of my dad, a difficult but brilliant and sometimes very kind man, who I loved very much, and whose echoes in my mind keep me engaged with life, to this day.

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[1] Notice I say the truth as you see it.  I do not think there is any such thing as objective 100% true Truth, all of the time, for anything much.  I think truth moves, I’ve said so before.  You can make a decision at any time, based on the best information you had, the truth as you then saw it.  Later you can find out that there were many other variables you were unaware of.  These may have caused you to make a bad error.  Truth changed.  Information comes, or not.  You only do the best you can at any given time.  (Maisel makes this point with some very good examples, on p.72.)

Let's talk about The Dark, Part 1: secrets of my personality, 1, 2, 3...

Ok.  There hasn’t been a serious thought piece in this blog for a bit.  So there are going to be 3 now.  One after the other.  This is a bit of an exploration, an expedition to stuff I usually allude to but don’t come right out with.  I’m going to be frank in these pieces.  We’re getting ready for Eric Maisel to visit next Thursday, and I’m not going to write a small fluff review of his new book, I’m going to really think about this topic.  Depression, sadness.  My home turf, yes?

So.  Let’s talk about the dark.  Ready?

I had a dream the other day.  A nightmare.  It went exactly like this:

I was in a dark shadowy basement boiler room, as me, now.  A real one, that I used to go to with my dad when he was alive and I was a girl, in the bottom of the office block at Grosvenor Hill.  We had a storeroom down there where we kept our excess books.  I was alone, just there, looking at the red massive old boilers, reading the old dials, to check the temperatures were right, just as I used to when helping him.  A man appeared in front of me, dressed in a faded security guard’s uniform.  He was middle aged, nondescript.  I was holding a hammer.  I beat him in the head, slowly to death, while he weakly pleaded with me, almost conversationally, to stop.  I don’t know why I did it.  Afterward, covered in blood and bits, heaving huge sobs of terror and revulsion at myself, I stumbled further into the boiler room, to our store room door.  Behind one of the boilers there, I saw a body.  Shaking and dripping, I squeezed through the small section between the wall and the boiler’s edge.  My father lay there, dead and decaying.  Wearing a security guard’s uniform.  I realized what I had done.  I hated myself.  I couldn’t bear the feelings rushing through me, blotting out everything.  I knelt down by his body.  The head was crushed in.  I leant forward, and took up part of the skull.  It came loose with a viscous noise.  It was wet in my hands.  I had the forehead, the eyes, part of the mouth: large browned teeth glistened as I moved it closer to me.  I put the skull part over my face, like cleaning myself with a cloth doused in cool clean water.  As I put my fathers face over my face, I felt so comforted.  By the complete darkness, the crushing out, winking out, of everything else there ever was.  Just the darkness was left.  I was so relieved.

Now.  The thing about that massively melodramatic dream, and the fact I woke up hugely disturbed and freaked out at my own obvious nuttiness, is that it’s one of those easily interpretable dreams.  There I am at a subterranean level, where things are boiling away, unseen.  Things I might not think about consciously, so much.  My father was a housekeeper, a sort of security guard for a lot of his life.  Live in, with us, his family, mum and me.  We lived at the top of office blocks around London, through my middle to late childhood.  We didn’t really mix with other family much, and I didn’t have friends over much.  I did go and help on the locking up rounds often, because an empty office block has an amazing spooky charm unlike any other emptiness.  I learned to not be afraid of literal actual dark on those rounds.  Dark is just dark. 

My father, on the hand, was a man for whom life had not gone as he hoped and wished it had.  He was embittered.  He had not become a lecturer at a university, as he would have wished, one of his dreams; he had had to look after his younger brother instead, as happened in those days, in poorer families.  My mother and I were often something of a disappointment to him.  He told us this, sometimes quite plainly, sometimes by his behaviour (contempt, dismissiveness, cruel gestures or statements).  Other times, he was sweetness itself, and was incredibly kind and empathic.  We loved him.  My mother loves him unswervingly and with many kind explanations for his personality, to this day.  I found I was treasured as a small child and looked upon with increasing suspicion as I came of an age to think for myself – even though some of the time, he loved my brain and praised it.

I don’t want this to be a dad bashing post. I merely attempt to be very frank.  I loved him wildly, he was a little god to me, as most fathers are to daughters when they are young.  It was difficult to stay in his good books; it was great when you were there.  When you weren’t, you were simply eclipsed.  He wouldn’t talk to or acknowledge you.  If he did, it would be to slice with words.  Waiting out the displeasure period quietly and unnoticeably was usually the best option.  I learned to sneak about, to tell half truths, then outright lies; I played rooms with him in by ear.  I learned to value dissembling quite a bit.  I became an amazingly earnest liar at one of my first schools, until one day I was caught out spectacularly in my invention of a life different to my own (I spun a tale to my mother about an incident at school, completely untrue, that was unfortunately checkable, and I had made it sound like it needed checking, stupidly – so I humiliated my mother when she phoned the parent of the other child it involved…never my intention, I remain eternally sorry for that).  I learned the value of keeping lies as close to the truth as possible after that; though to this day will occasionally embark on an outright untruth with huge embellishments, just for the joy of it.  (Or I write a short story.)

My dad was tough to love and live with.  He hurt me and my mother many times, never physically (lucky), just with his anger and disappointment at just about everything.  I would like to say I used to defend her, he used to put her down infront of people and such, treat her like a doormat in front of me.  When I was quite young and he was god, I observed her just taking this behaviour and saw her through his eyes: as weak, and deserving of contempt. Act like a servant, get treated like one.  I joined in.  I treated her like dirt too.  Thankfully (for my sense of self), this only lasted a couple of years. Once I hit the earliest possible puberty, life kilted itself right over.  I remembered my mother had been caring for me all my life: taking me to museums and ‘places of interest’, taking me out and away, encouraging my love of stories and writing, reading my little ‘books’ I made.  She was always so concerned if I was sick, or unhappy.  Apart from believing my dad was always in the right (a religious belief; that is, taught to her by her religion, that men were better, and women subservient, especially wives to husbands), she was damn near as lovely as a quiet person gets. 

Also, at this point, dad seemed to become suspicious of me.  I was suddenly, sometimes, for no reason *I* could see, the enemy.  I got the benefit of the treatment my mother had been receiving all this time.  Nothing makes you have sympathy with someone like suddenly BEING them!  I remained in this boat with my mother till he died, decades later.  Never getting back that early relationship of him being loving (teaching me all about classical music and films and having endless mini philosophical discussions), just sometimes brittle and difficult (always ending up making me cry when helping me with my homework, because he had no patience if I was slow in any way), and never being the Horrible Daughter for him again, never the co-conspirator again.

To get back to the dream, it was quite clear to me that I am terrified of becoming him.  I have very little patience with people when they are slow about something I understand well (I NEVER understand when people say I should be a teacher because I know lots about this or that bookish topic and can express myself reasonably well; being a teacher is about loving to help people think for themselves, and I fear I would get too frustrated and be rubbish and unkind).  I have had a lifelong experience of something we could call low mood.  I see things as full of great joy, and great sadness.  Everything feels A LOT, far too much.  I often lose my own side of a discussion or argument, because I have entered into the other person’s so much and can really feel it.  I don’t know where my bit has gone.  I feel permeable, skinless, almost all the time.  I have to be careful in crowds, or I vanish and feel only the cacophony of the hive, the mob, the cult.

Things are either ok to wondrously quietly euphorically peaceful (no massive unrealistic highs here, ever); or they are dark dark dark.  On good days, I go about my business and my head is quiet.  I can think thoughts and do stuffs, and smile and I feel the sun, I feel my connection to everything.  It hums quietly: and all is well.  On the bad days, usually from very early, I just feel that the raincloud is over my head and I am soaked and foggy.  On these days I am just in fear, despair and…darkness.  My head says unkind things to me all day, and when I contradict them, I hear only myself telling me lies.  (Don’t get me wrong, these aren’t separate voices, this is me ganging up on me.)  It has been this way since I was very small.  One of my first memories is of being sad.  One of my others is of Victoria Park’s orange garden and the wonder of those colours, the green, the orange, the blue sky: I reached up from my baby stroller and grasped an orange.  I stroked the sun.  I smiled at my mother. 

My point there, is that clearly I grew up with loads of baggage, and I worry that I will end up like my dad – a contradictory person who is at once terrified (he was practically a hermit, yet liked to paint my mother as the scared one – it took someone pointing that out to me after his death before I saw it), very mean and yet full of warmth sometimes, and creativity he never let out.  (He wanted to compose, to write; he wanted to be a missionary preacher: he wanted to be a change in the world.  He was quite the autodidact all his life.)   

In the last couple of years before he died, he and I were almost estranged.  I had divorced Troubadour which really really upset dad.  I had ‘broken Biblical Law’, he said.  The one and only time Stanley ever went to meet him, he got the silent treatment.  Dad would not acknowledge him beyond a muttered hello; would not look at him.  Would not even get dressed, or look away from the TV.  I was mortified; mum tried to explain it away, and I didn’t bother with dad for some months after that incident, deciding silence – finally – can go two ways.   

Of course, what mum and I didn’t know, was that by this time the COPD that had been eating him up for years (what a smokers cough, was what we thought – we thought he was the only one spitting up all that phlegm all the time) had been joined by prostate cancer.  He didn’t tell anyone.  We think he knew he was dying, but didn’t want to know what of.  He never went to the doctors unless my mother somehow made him.  He quickly became much smaller and wizened than he had been (I missed most of this, busy making my point as I was), and oddly nondescript.  He lost all his colour, all his fire.  In a photo of him shortly before he died, he smiles benignly out at me, with genuine gentle sparkle, genuine good humour – none of his anger remains.  He has a semi shaved head, as he got bored with doing anything to his hair, which remained thick into his late 60’s.  By the time I was speaking to him by phone again, I was stunned by his compliant behaviour – he was kindly, nice, welcoming, happy to hear from me.  Not sarcastic or unkind at all.  Not thinking I was just ringing to borrow money (as I had borrowed a lot of money one way and another over time, and his always giving it to me, and the way he behaved about the loans, were one of the most dysfunctional things about us).  I thought I had shown him that you can’t treat people this way without getting your own medicine back at you sometimes.  I thought we were finally relating as – sort of – regular people: two grown ups. 

Then I visited one last time, saw how thin he was and realized he was very sick.  My mother was trying to not notice (she had become – and remains – very good at not noticing things she does not know how to deal with in a way that squares with how she wants to be, which I do not fault her for; the woman has not had an easy life, we all have our mechanisms).  While I was there, he became suddenly very ill, breathing troubles, pains, terrible pallor.  We called the ambulance.  Two nights later he was dead.  Pneumonia has a way of intervening.  We only found out about the prostate cancer at the hospital the night before he died – they thought we knew. 

So I hadn’t ‘shown him’ at all.  What I had done was have an unequal battle with a dying man, who died quietly without forgiving me for being such a bloody disappointment.  (There’s the nondescript security guard who I beat to death.  And yes: he was a Housekeeper, a sort of security guard; and what is a dad, but a security guard of his children??)  They had asked my mother and I, at the hospital, about resuscitation when his lungs gave out, as they unquestionably would; a machine was already helping him breathe...They made it clear he would just be on life support after that, no more waking, no more dad, his body had given up.  My mother was unable to have this decision alone, and turned to me.  I said no, let him go.  I was thinking of all my cats, who get the dignity of going when its clear their bodies are given up on them; when we humans don't always get that choice.  And yet, it came to pass, and I somewhere within feel like I killed  my father.  Mercy it was, but nonetheless.  Before you say – oh for fecks sake, enough with the guilt and the melodramatic way of interpreting events, all I will reiterate is that I am telling the truth as I see it, for me, and for no one else, with reference to no one else.  I judge no one but me.  What happens in our lives, and how we tell the story to ourselves is part – how can it not be? – of who we are.  At any given time.

There’s the other fact that as I am sure you will have noticed from all the previous writing exercise posts and such, that I had all this going on at home and school was rather a disaster too.  The pack scented a bit of a freak and I wasn’t able to be less freaky, at that time; I just couldn’t understand why people kept judging me as lesser, not good enough, a bit of a joke.  I withdrew, and stayed withdrawn.  My whole not good in groups thing.  Work has been an improvement on all that, especially my last job, where I was, for the first time ever, accepted as myself in a group type situation, after hours.  (I always do jobs where I work alone; but I can socialise after.)

Anyway.  So I have always been an odd, delicate flower of a person; and my childhood more or less explains it.  Dad was unhappy and didn’t deal with it very well, mum was doing her best, and I had a bit of an approval deficit problem looming.

The Dark is always with me.  Even on good days, I feel it in the background.  I am just well capable of ignoring it, those days.  On the bad days, I see the light, but I think it’s a lie other people indulge in – the truth is that it is, and always will be: Dark.  I wish I could be in on the lie too, of course, but on those days, I can’t.  I can only just about do what’s needful on those days.  Yes, I think of suicide, I always have thought of it. Once I tried it and failed, despite my best efforts.  Raven Digitalis has memorably called this feeling the Goddess Suicidia – “she challenges our fears of Being”.  I’m afraid I can’t reference that properly, as he said it on Facebook on a status ages ago – it just caught my thoughts: challenges our fears of being.  That is exactly what I am afraid of: being here, dealing with everything.  When I think of suicide, I am aware what I actually want is to Go To Sleep, and Wake Up When I Feel Better; or next week sometime.  I DO want to stay here, I just want a bloody good rest.  And a brain clean…

Eric Maisel’s new book that I am going to talk around for the next 2 posts, is a book of 2 halves.  The first half posits that there is a difference between regular human unhappiness (however profound and longlasting or persistent) and this modern beast we have come to know as ‘depression’.  The second half talks of ways to take care of yourself and your mind, your body, to minimise the effects of human unhappiness.  It’s a lot about existentialism, a lot about not surrendering all of yourself to a label, no matter how comforting it can be to finally have one.  To take some control and personal agency back, from where you can actually lose it, in the medical system, and do some helping for yourself, quietly, gradually and at your own pace.  To learn to stand bravely in your life, knowing it won’t always be good feeling, but knowing you always have some kinds of tools to help you try to Be.  Gently.

Now I’ve explained where I see my own Dark as coming from, and the fact I am still, on and off, in thrall to it, I will state that some days I can’t existentialize my own way out of a paper bag.  And I will ask him about those days.  I don’t agree with everything he says – but he has some very useful things to say, and they are well-reasoned.  We’ll start on them in the next post, with a little background to his ideas too – he isn’t the only one worried by the way we are laying down as a culture and wishing to be Made More Normal (by the same people who told us we are Not)…

Come back soon…