I Wish I Never Wrote This

PERHAPS the best way to sum up my experience inside a psychiatric institute is that it taught me how to take control of my own life. The whole point of practicing “mindfulness” and discover its power was to regulate and moderate one’s response to stress. I’ve been doing this for 12 years now. I modulate my emotions. I have this weird sort of multitasking brain, one which revs and redlines and thousands of RPMs and permits me to be able to do some wonderful and remarkable things when I’m in control, and leads me to spiral hopelessly into abysses when I’m not. I am the ultimate multitasker, able to juggle and triage and slot a dozen different things at once. I can focus on a task at work while my brain is juggling a math problem or a scrabble anagram. It’s a gift and a curse, one which, through mindfulness and through the act of making a point of experiencing what it is that I am feeling – be it physical, mental, spiritual, what have you – and then rendering it simply a data point. If my shoulder hurts, I relax my shoulder. If I feel deep pangs of regret or anxiety, I start to breathe. The mind revs and redlines 24/7, but I control my emotions and maintain focus, keeping in the present, all the while being fully aware of how perilous this life can be.

Perhaps the greatest expression of this sensation that I’ve seen in a film is in the phenomenal 1992 film The Waterdance, which is about paraplegics in a rehab institute. In a key scene in the film, during which a black man and racist biker get drunk and bond over being reduced to cripples in wheelchairs, Wesley Snipes tells a story of how he dreams that not only can he walk again, but that he is dancing on the water, he is dancing on the surface of the lake and if he stops dancing, he drowns, so he just keeps dancing. He dances on and on upon the surface of the water. It’s a beautiful image and also a terrifying one – the idea that life is so fragile and perilous, so short, and that you must struggle to summon the strength to survive when it seems impossible. This is my life, every single day. I’m constantly cycling through images, through metaphors. I’m constantly picking up my feet and doing that slide step against the waves lapping up against my ankles. It’s exhausting as fuck, but goddamn it, were I to step on dry land again, I would cut one helluva a rug.

But recently, I find the waves washing over me, threatening to drown me. The steps I’ve learned can no longer stem the tide. I feel as if I’m sinking, as if I’m drowning. It’s not because of any particular thing happening to me – I’m relatively healthy, save for the numbness in my left arm and stiffness in my right leg and deafness in my right ear. All of that has become normal to me and I play through it. I’m used to it by now. I’m relatively secure, if those bastards who pay me bother to pay me on time. I have a reasonable life in San Francisco, a city where achieving a reasonable life is becoming harder and harder by the day. It’s not that bad, really. I get by.

But I have no control over what afflicts those who are close to me. My father will be 78 years old and now suffers from dementia. My dad taught me the jump hook, which was my most devastating weapon on the basketball court. My dad played ball well into his 60s and was so healthy that he had 7,000 hours of sick leave at Washington State when he cashed it in on his Fulbright to Belgium. My dad had such an impeccable memory that he walked into my office one day in Seattle in 1992, shook my boss’ hand, and said to her, “yes I remember you from my Poli Sci 222 class in 1967. You got an A.” He remembered her maiden name, for fucksake. He remembered her fucking maiden name from 25 years earlier! And now that memory is eroding, that mind which made him a go-to expert on international affairs, sought after by everyone from the Pentagon to film producers in L.A. My dad taught me inclusiveness, tolerance, and open-mindedness, since he was a professor of International Studies and introduced me to so many people with different experiences and points of view. He is languishing, and I can’t fucking do anything about it. I cannot make it better for him. I talk to him on the phone, I am encouraging and positive, but I cannot make it stop. I cannot stop it. He is sinking into an abyss, one which also has a terrible effect upon my mother, who is dealing with this day by day, and there is nothing I can say or do or act upon which makes a shit’s worth of difference.

And I cannot stop the cancer ravaging my ex-girlfriend’s body. Kate has fought it for 13 years now. She is the strongest person I’ve ever known. She is my hero. I wish that I were a tenth as strong as she. And there is nothing that I can do about it. It’s cruel, it’s unfair: she’s spent all of her late 30s and her 40s fighting this most goddamnest of diseases, and winning a lot of the time, and yet she suffers. It’s an inevitable sort of suffering which, a decade ago, you would have accepted – “a decade from now, you will have all kinds of trouble, but until then, you might be okay.” Eventually, the bill comes due. I wish that I could make it better for Kate. I wish that I could take it all away. I feel an incredible guilt and shame – it was right after we broke up, an awful point in both of our lives, that she found out she had cancer, and because I was so mad at her at the time, I didn’t help her even though I could have and should have, like any fucking decent human being should have done. I wish that there was something – anything – that I could do to make it better for her. She’s one of the most remarkable persons I’ve ever known. She doesn’t deserve to be dying at 48 when there are so many goddamn fucking awful human beings running unabated across this globe at much older ages. Seriously, fuck this world.

I can’t do anything about this. All of my mindfulness routines which I’ve carefully curated after my mental institute experiences are about handling what it is that you can possibly control. But what about what you cannot control? There are simply some things that you will never accept, that you will never get over, the deaths and demises of loved ones being at the top of the list. I’ve reached what Laura, my therapist and my friend, calls “the end of language.” I’ve lost the ability to express and explicate the helplessness and the grief. The grief. Jesus bastard christ, the fucking grief.

What do you say about this kind of thing? What the actual fuck do you say? I understand that this is the nature of our short and fragile lives – we will have to come to terms with the mortality of everyone around us and then, more importantly, ourselves. But for fucksake, I’ve been making my reputation, if not my living, on my ability to explicate most everything, and I’ve got now fucking idea what to say or what to do about loved ones who are dying and who are disintegrating before my eyes. I don’t know what to say or do. I feel helpless.

And I’m drowning. I’ve been dancing on the surface of the water for a dozen years now. Because see, in attempting to learn how to modulate and regulate my own behavior so as to deal with the wildly undulating nature of my mind, I never learned the language of grief. I don’t know what to do or what to say. I’ve reached the end of language.

And I cope with this by drinking myself into a stupor, but that doesn’t fucking work, because I just wake up hungover and headachy and achy and I have to make a fucking 2+ hour commute to Palo Alto and GODDAMNIT I HATE EVERYTHING on a daily basis. Sure, this is the human condition. We have to come to terms with the inevitability of time, come of accept that which we cannot control. But fucking goddamnit, I don’t know what to do. None of us do. If we did, we’d all be fucking ascetics capable of escaping suffering through achieving enlightenment or whatever the goddamn hell you want to call it. Ultimately, I feel powerless to impact the lives of loved ones around me, and in that state of complete existential dread, all that I do to respond is drink myself into a stupor.

If any of you have any suggestions, I’m all ears.

We are fragile and frail. I write often about the greatest of warriors, those seemingly impervious to pain. Bullshit. It’s all bullshit. We all must come to accept our frailties and our failings, our own shortcomings. As strong as we may be, we cannot defeat those. Nor can we ultimately change the fate of others, as much as we would like to think so. There is nothing that I can say or do to take away some goddamn gene or chromosome which renders people in my family prone to dementia, What do you do? You be there, I guess. You consider it all “time well spent,” and be grateful for that time, even as you watch persons become a shell of the persons that you knew. You live in the past, remember them for who they were even though you know that they cannot ever be that person again.

I hate that way of thinking. I hate it. I hate all of it.

And I’m saying this now because I keep saying to myself, “THIS is the weekend that you’re going to make change and stop being a drunk and drinking yourself into a stupor,” but it’s not the weekend that someone who I know and love and care about stops dying, nor is it the weekend that I stop grieving the inevitable loss. And yeah, fuck, I understand that you should make the most of the time in the here and now and love to your greatest ability, but jesus fucking goddamn christ what is the fucking point? And like I say, I’ve reached the end of language here. This is all me just ranting and raving like a goddamn lunatic, pissing and howling into the wind. It’s as if saying nothing was just as valuable as saying everything, since whatever you say will be the wrong thing.

And what’s the bloody point? What value is there in an empty gesture of spending two years of your life working on the next novel when the people who inspired and motivated you will either be dead or incapable or remembering what it is that you did? What’s the fucking goddamn point of any of it? I feel no motivation to finish anything, even though I’ve got about 1,000,000 words’ worth of text stored up on my hard drive, great stories with great characters in need of being explicated. What’s the goddamn point in any of it? It’s all a tree falling in the forest. Who the fuck is there to hear it?

Obviously, I don’t know what the answer is to any of this. If I had some sort of insight, I wouldn’t be screaming into the wind at 1:00 a.m. after I’ve had too many whiskeys if I did. Being gript by joint senses of helplessness and hopelessness doesn’t really suit me, as I’m an optimist by nature who wants to believe in the goodness of people and the ability of people to make the lives of others around them better.  But all that I’ve done to make others’ lives better hasn’t amounted to shit. It made no difference. I’m just a tourist and a traveller, I’m simply passing through.

Jesus fuck, I am such a pathetic fucking sop.

Seriously, people, love those around you. Love them so much that they resent how much you love them, and then love them even more than that. I cannot tell you how grateful I am that I have this incredible spouse who loves and adores me. I’m the luckiest goddamn motherfucker in the world. I’m absolutely blessed for that. Love those people and tell them that you love them all the time, even if you think they’re getting sick of hearing how much you love them. If nothing else, just opening your goddamn mouth and saying “I love you,” will come to be cherished. It’s the most precious goddamn thing on this earth, to be honest. It transcends everything. It is everything that matters in this lifetime. I don’t give a shit about your stats. I don’t care how much you’ve made or what you’ve achieved. Have you cared about other people? Have you given love in this life? Have you made it known to someone going to their grave that you will always cherish their memory? That’s all that matters.

I grieve for Kate. I grieve for my dad. I feel crushed. I feel heartbroken. I wish that I knew what to do. I wish that I knew what to say. And I wish that I never wrote this. I wish that this feeling never came to be.