Actually to be fair I could be doing this in any particular life circumstance. But as long as I’m here, let’s concentrate on this one, and more importantly, let’s concentrate on what you as a therapist can do to understand people’s, i.e., your patients’ fears. As I have been your patient (in one form or another), I can brief you.

Fears are closely aligned with what you might call a person’s sense of their own immortality. Why? Because fear is just as irrational. It’s irrational to fear anything, to feel a shiver at getting that financial aid form to the post office late when you really need the money to keep your kid in college. Fear though really doesn’t help anything. It doesn’t help you think and it doesn’t help you plan. It only helps you freak out, get jumbled, confused, untrusting, mean, pathetic and weird. So why do we have it?

Well, let’s ask the related question: Why do we think we can live forever? We do, I would argue; all of us. Even though logically we know we can’t, we otherwise believe we will. I believe this is because we’re really not capable of doing otherwise. The life-force in us makes it impossible. And it’s this same life-force that gives us fear. Each of these are old nature or instinct. They are our animal self manifesting itself in concepts now more sophisticated than simply, well, no concepts at all.

So what do you do with a patient that’s afraid? You realize that first and foremost they’re bored. Yes, bored. The first requirement for fear is boredom since the higher reaches of thought and organization inevitably pull you away from the baser places. Higher reaches are where interested and engaged people spend their time. Bored people sway from fear to sex and back to self-aggrandizement, which in my mind is another definition of the feeling of immortality.

How do you help someone quell boredom? You see it for what it is first. Then you begin to engage your patient about that which they’re really interested in, and then find out why, for now, it is not so interested in them. Once you do that, then you begin to find a cure for their fear, since the real cure for fear in general is just remembering to be human again.

I’ve spent a lot of time being bored unfortunately. Many people have and do still. Stepping out of that is often something one needs a therapist for since, well, the first thing that makes us human is being conversant and social with other humans, is it not? Reason is after all a communal experience. One doesn’t need rationality if one is alone in the universe. One can be crazy and call it reason. It doesn’t matter.

Being social, i.e., not alone is the first step towards warding off fear, not because you feel defended by having more friends about you, but because you feel engaged in the upper reaches of your mind. You become the epitome of dust once again and leave your poor groping animal self choking on your epitome.

Right?

I’m not sure. I’m seeing so many revolutionaries of my generation in a weird way today. So many of them are still fighting the good fight or, if they’re not, working ironically for the man while maintaining their distance from that work. No one, I repeat no one I know is working and comfortable and invested in what they do and why. No one is happy. No one.

Well, okay, maybe they’re happy, but they’re not happy as I would’ve figured happy, secure adults would be. I think rather they, like me, are still possessed of a vision of the world in a kind of utopian, perfected landscape. I’m not saying we share a vision but we share the desire and belief in one. This much I think is true across the political and social spectrum.

Reasons for it I guess matter less then the ramifications of it. We have no place to settle, no worldly place to go that will ever feel comfortable. How will anything we do ever be satisfying? I envision people piling into therapists’ offices rife with anger that their bodies are letting them down, that the world is a tale told by an idiot and that their lives have a meaning that is out there and ill defined, a meaning ungraspable but believed in insofar as it would seem something should be able to be grasped.

This all concerns me as I fear the level of frustration I see my brethren soon to fall into. I see the promise of transcendence becoming a curse. I see vision being savagely born upon the psyche of the seer. I fear we will be destroyed by our own hope.

To you my therapist today I say that as Paul Simon once said: “I swear I’ll do some damage one fine day but I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers, still crazy after all these years.”

What was poetry in 1975 is today psychopathy.

She looks at others around her and sees the ones doing as well as she wants to as robots. She doesn’t want to be a robot. I interpret this to mean she does not want to be driven by love of money and/or a single-minded accomplishment she assumes (perhaps correctly) drives these people. She does not want to be that person, or lack of one.

But I think she could be if she believed enough in her choice. Part of the problem of being a complex human being full of choices is to meander around those choices. It also doesn’t help that neither of her parents are models for driven success. They’re nice people, but not heads of industry.

Doubt makes it harder to do hard work. My friend goes to a terribly hard school, one of the hardest in the world. But she doesn’t yet “wear” it. You don’t hear the weather-beaten quality in the voice of someone who really works THAT hard. Not yet. That would be her version of being the robot I guess. What I hear now is anxiety.

Anxiety plugs or pinches the wellsprings of our strength and inspiration, what would keep my friend studying on into the night to achieve what she wanted. Anxiety makes it hard to breathe. I tell my friend to confront her anxiety, try to understand it. I tell her that her anxiety is about the choices she needs to make for her life and what that life will be going forward. I tell her it must come from her. She must learn to rely on herself and her decisions.

I wish I was sure what I was saying.

Truly, I wonder if success is healthy. I don’t mean that to sound ridiculous. But great success seems often tied with great glossing over of problems, of issues that effect emotional health. I’ve seen many successful people, amazingly talented and accomplished folks whose work I yet consider horribly damaging to the world. Yet they are successful because what they do is so good that it overcomes and actually enhances the often cruel things they perpetrate within it. It makes these cruel things attractive and exciting, like spicing punishment with a drug to make it seem a thrill ride.

I do not know what to tell my friend. What I’ve told her so far does not feel satisfying to me. I guess ultimately if I were able to tell her clear and determinedly what I thought was right I’d be being unhealthy.

Or would I?

Whew! I’m still okay.

It was basically a dance party record with spooky sounds and laughs played over instrumental reworkings of what were then popular songs. Next to the songs were listed the dances they were good for: Fox Trot, Hully Gully, Swim, Twist, etc. For example, the song “Ghoulish Heart” (cool name, huh?) was a reworking of “All My Lovin’” by The Beatles, still a popular tune in 1965. None of the songs though were obvious ripoffs. In fact, it took me years to realize “Ghoulish Heart” was just “All My Lovin’” with a zombie mask on. It’s not badly done at all.

But “Ghoulish Heart” isn’t the song I want to talk about. The song “Haunted Mouse” is. Yes, that’s “Mouse” not “House”. No typo. “Haunted Mouse” is a slow and sad song filled with harmonicas, guitars and saxophones. To my ears it is STILL an achingly mesmerizing song, and one that I still adore listening to. The thing is though, I fear there’s nothing redeeming about this little tune. It’s not like “John Henry” or any number of old folk songs about tragic people like Tom Dooly. There’s no obvious human story to understand or recognize. No value portrayed. Nothing like that. It’s just a slow and melancholy tune with spooky sounds. It’s forgettable really. Few people have ever heard it. But I still love it to death.

Why is what I want to reflect on. That song has stayed with me for years when other songs have fallen away from my listening enjoyment. Why? I believe it is because the song captures the sadness of my parents’ divorce which followed within a year after my mom picked “Monster Melodies” up for me.

Loving this song as I do tells me something about depression I think. When I listen to this song despondency feels, well, fun. I groove on it. I groove on it the same way I grooved on black and white B movies late at night back then, the way I grooved on hours spent in front of the TV, or alone in my room, in a world where my mother, alone in her bedroom next to mine, was lost in her own depression. I lived in a world where my brother and I were left to sort of fend for ourselves emotionally day to day.

I guess really the song reminds of a world that had ended but still had me living in it. My room, my books, my whole history had stopped, after a fashion, the moment my dad left. The attic was filled with his books (he was a professor), his life, THEIR life (my parents) and suddenly all that had ended. The continuum that was my life was now over, and I was on my own. Exiled if you will. I was, in the words of Coldplay. sweeping the streets I used to own.

That song, the goofy little instrumental with harmonicas, horns and spooky noises collapses all of the detritus that once had meaning and did no more once my parents broke up. It tells how I went from viable middle class to struggling on the periphery of the economic spectrum. It tells how we fell out of the race and into a plodding pace of survival both financial and emotional. The song reminds me of what was and would never be again. It was a song about my new life within the death of my old one. Its about the haunting of my own world. It’s about me being my own little haunted mouse.

Why do I still hold on to it? One has to let go, right? Of course one does. Of course. You have to move on and fill in good things for the bad things that were forced on you. Even I know that. To be healthy you have to build a “portfolio” of good occurrences and feelings and eventually you push the old ones back into the recesses. You become a healthier person.

But you know why it’s tough to do all that? Because it’s true that bad things happen. And you KNOW it when they happen. And the bad of it can be sometimes everything you feel, especially in childhood, that essential building block of a time and space. The fact that totally loving a song for 47 years is arguably not healthy is beside the point. Well, okay, actually it’s not beside the point. It freaking IS the point. I know it’s THE POINT. Yet that healthy barometer staring at me out there is, to me, still an object of resentment. I’m still angry. I’m still hurt. I’m still haunted. And so I’m still unfortunately, in this big bad world, a mouse.

Depression embraces you. It’s so delicious sometimes because, as Robin Williams said in “Moscow on the Hudson” it’s all yours. It belongs totally to you. In a way it’s you literally shouting to existence that you’re there. “This is me!” you say. “This is what you’ve done to me, world! Damn it!”

And the thing is all the concerns of the people who depend on you as an adult don’t hold a candle to depression. OBVIOUSLY these concerns should, and if you’re lucky enough to get help, they will. But only YOU know the depths of your depression and only you know what it will take to get beyond it. This is because only YOU cherish the identity, the precious YOU that was annihilated by whatever it was that happened to you so long ago. Only you know the potential that might have been. THAT’S what you’re trying to save really, the dream. You keep it alive by not living in the real world because as long as you’re dead, the dream that is also dead is at least as alive as you are.

You can cry about awful things for years. I have. You can let them control you. I have. You can try and try and try to improve, to self-medicate, learn, read, talk, grow… It doesn’t necessarily matter. Hurt cannot be cured. It can however be changed just as I mentioned before. It can be pushed out and replaced by good feelings.

But first I think depression has to be accepted and in fact loved. I have so resolved to love my depression. And so I will love that silly little slow dance song from an ersatz 60s disco record. I will love it because it reminds me of the me who died. It lets me memorialize him.

People visit graves every day. The lure of depression is to not realize that visiting the grave is okay. The lure is to think that the grave is the place where you need to stay.

What is it then? Well, comfort, right? They do call it comfort food. But what is that comfort? And why does it take the caloric form it does? Certainly flavor and satisfaction are powerful things. How could they not be? But is it also a stepping back from awareness that helps as well? Is it possible that eating is a way to achieve a kind of comfortable oblivion?

I actually noticed this in quite an opposite sense when I became a runner. I could get to a point where, with my headphones blasting rock and roll, I could completely lose myself in the moment, in the action. It was thankfully a healthy action but it was one that was still an attempt to achieve a kind of oblivion.

I actually recall that desire for oblivion from a very young age. In pre-school (we called in nursery school back then) I remember watching the teacher tell a story and I was fascinated not by her story but the tone of her voice. There was a monotony to it that was pitch perfect for making me check out of the world. I wasn’t sleeping but I was no longer there, being instead adrift in anti-thought. Oblivion.

I’ve encountered this off and on since then and I have mixed feelings about letting it into my life. But its attraction is hard to dispute. Likewise I think it’s hard to dispute that oblivion and/or overeating is a place you go when life either bores or terrifies you. In nursery school I was bored. When I got fat as a kid I was scared and bored. My parents’ marriage was disintegrating pretty much as early as I can remember and I was basically ignored in the process. Being unable to understand it or deal with it all, I ran off into places that served cup cakes and cookies.

I’m not sure a lot of this is helpful. I know that people who have weight issues really need a lot of help to simply not lose hope that they can accomplish what they set out to do. It’s so very hard to see yourself in the mirror everyday and like what you see, or what you see inside of what you see. Having that vision of a thin person, or thinner or healthier person is difficult to maintain, and to live with. Oblivion is always attractive. It’s always there teasing its way into showing you a good time, which is actually not as good as it is unconscious.

See, that’s the real issue with obesity: emotional baggage. You might just say fat IS emotional baggage. Protection I assert. I assert because I was. Fat. I lost it all though. By the time I was in my mid 20s I was 5:11 and weighed 160 lobs. I was skinny. I ran five miles a day and ate conscientiously. Of course I was no happier than I was when I was thin, but I WAS THIN. I accomplished the goal that stared at me in the face (in the mirror) everyday of my life growing up. I lost weight. I also lost the erroneous impression that weight was the root of my problems. My problems were actually the root of my weight.

I discovered when I lost weight I was alone. Literally. I had moved away from my mom and was living alone in a city where I barely knew anyone. I worked sparingly and then went back to school and worked sparingly some more. I felt no particular attachment to anything and got by through accommodating myself to that which was there for me. In other words, I made friends and did what I could to survive. Normal stuff, right? Not really. I lived like a guerilla warrior on the periphery of life. I didn’t exist as someone with my education and background should. I lived dodgy and oddly. I lived alone. Thin but alone. Thin but still protected by emotional baggage.

I had gotten very used to the old, fat me who knew how to live with people. Once he was gone, I realized that I didn’t know how to live with people because as a fat person, I had never thought of myself as actually being there to live with them. I “played” myself while I was fat as opposed to actually being myself. I was not the person I saw in the mirror everyday so I accentuated and performed the part that was given to me. I was TOO funny or TOO mad. I was “off the charts” in many, many ways. I probably stabbed around borderline personality issues. But by the time I lost the weight, I was in a strange wide and deep valley made up of all the distance that already existed between me and the world. When I had to step up and be me, as it were, I ran off to a place where I could place myself in a quiet and solitary middle of emptiness.

I can never get the years of childhood back. Of course. No one can. I think in some ways I missed a maturation process that I find myself going through now. And though I hate the idea that there is a “process” that everyone has to go through, it does seem to have some relevance to my life. In many ways I’m twelve years old, often snarky and supercilious while seeking to connect and feeling amazingly vulnerable all the time. This is… Well, this has GOT to be a fledgling step in the process of emotional maturity. One that some people probably took earlier than I did because, well, I wasn’t there, remember?

I have more to say on this so more on weighty issues next time.

So I talk about stuff. Maybe about my mom or my wife or my job or lack of one. I’ve tried to do this or that. I’m hoping for this. I’m expecting that. This frustrates the heck out of me. I should do better here. Why didn’t I do that? When is life going to change? You just sit there and listen. You nod your head. Or not. You ask questions. You probe. Perhaps you do what I was taught when I trained for the Samaritans suicide hotline: you angle for the pain, go for what you sense is the root of the misery. Of course I may not help you with that. Believe me, experiencing the pain is not easy and not looked forward to, even if it is ultimately why I’m there.

And when I find the cause of the pain, I’m surprised. I’m not surprised at the identity of the cause or even that I didn’t think of it until now. It’s just that when it hits me it hits me fresh and freshness is by nature surprising. THIS is what was wrong. THIS is what’s been missing. I’ve taken hundreds of thousands of incremental steps away from this basic need for happiness, and I just now figured it out. Extraordinary! I’m relieved. Really, I am. Because I got control of it.

That’s it in a nutshell. Control. I don’t want to use “control” in some sort of yuppified phraseology, where I have to be in control of every aspect of my life, but rather as a step in maturity. Real, honest-to-goodness maturity, maturity that I staked out myself rather than what was mandated for me by the parent I didn’t trust or the wife I didn’t trust. Trust was the key for me. You knew I had to trust myself. And you helped me get there.

It’s not like that’s the end of it, but for today, nice job.

The work of going through therapy from the patient side is often one involving ego or some other word that may be better but which I can only think of “ego” to point to. See, there were times in therapy where I would come in and just be moody, angry and unresponsive. Really I just wanted someone to know how I was feeling, someone to care, even if it was someone paid to care, imprisoned if you will by that 50 minute session. I wasn’t in a mood to work on my problems but rather in a mood to remind myself and the therapist that I had them and they mattered. Or I mattered.

That’s a chief point for us patients. We want to matter. Oftentimes we don’t feel like we do. We feel diminished by one thing or another or several, and we want something or someone to give us power, give us a stake in things, give us a choice, or the capability of choice. Being petulant is part of the process sometimes.

I know for example that I had mom issues. That’s a bit of a simple way to put it but we’re on a deadline here. One of those issues was the safety I felt or needed to feel by being under her influence, letting her decisions dominate mine, which she did because that was our dynamic. Breaking free of that meant I sometimes needed that figure to be petulant or childish to, who would not dismiss me out of hand, who felt responsible for my predicament but would not suggest solutions that I didn’t want to hear. In loco parentis you might say but without the actual parenting part. The trick of course is in therapy as in your life you have to do the work as opposed to your mom doing it for you. As a patient you know that’s true, but you still know you need to be that child for awhile. You just do.

Look, we patients like you guys. We do. And the work you do matters even when we don’t show it or seem to be making progress. In fact, especially when we don’t seem to be making progress because that’s when the work is hardest for us, when we see no change, no improvement, nothing that justifies our faith in the work, but where we realize that the work is part of the process of simply being in control of our lives and accepting that life is ours to control. It’s scary. It’s always scary because oftentimes we’re coming from worlds where the people in control were not very good or comfortable at it. It’s square one for us and you make it even possible to be square two and on up.

Just wanted to say thanks you all for the work you do. It matters. It’s appreciated.

Have a Happy New Year.

What a world that is. To wit:

As I walk into that world in my mind I see my mom and dad who are gone now. Yet in my heart I feel them still here, still right by the phone or near enough to touch. I feel the world as near as the possibility of shooting baskets at the court in the park across the street. I feel the sun as fresh as any day there ever was. I feel new possibility with no particular reason why. And I feel my point of view focused on the moment at hand, this one moment when I see the world no further than my field of vision will go. I am in the moment and that’s just wonderful.

I walk down my street, the one I grew up in, and it is beautiful again. The old neighbors are in their houses. Their lives that I know so well are playing behind those walls. Like ants scurrying in their farm they add life to the undercurrent of the majestic canopy of trees that ascend over my head and have since my memory began. In my heart and soul the world has moved back to its roots. I am in that one and only place where the world is simply the world.

I look to my left. The alley in the middle of the street is there leading so secretly to the next block and, even more secretly to another smaller alley perpendicular to its midsection which will take me back to the street half a block behind me. What wonder! What pleasure to know this secret path that is reserved it seems simply for me here in my own little world. It is a blessing in this sun drenched, tree-filled place to have something carved from history that only those of us with knowledge can be privy to.

What privilege dost thou purport to need further in such a place? Be thee not awash in serendipitous plentitude in God’s own grotto of salient happiness and bliss? I spin with the rush of the breezes through the ample, burnished leaves. The divine speaks in these millions of tiny crashes and flames of sun. There is deafening silence where angels dare you into thoughts that are not thoughts but unreasoning oblivions. You rise into the indescribable. There is not a moment anywhere in the universe that could match this.

This is happiness.

I give thee moments of greatness as the simplest yet most perpetual source of joy in all creation. There is nothing that will ever match the touch of my mind with the mind of the eternal, with the gift of God’s voice, warm and hushed in this flash of revelry. Let all the world know what I have seen and heard. I have been as glad as glad can possibly be, exulted in my simple life by merely my willingness to see what is there to see. Thank you, Heaven, for this delirious moment.