Sorrow

I have been reading about death. A strange time for this: a summer when I've been feeling more well and purposeful than I'm used to. But avoidance is the habit I wish to break, and isn't it better to address difficult matters of the soul from a position of strength?

From Mark Doty in Heaven's Coast:

We trivialize pain if we regard it as a preventable conditon the spirit need not suffer. If we attempt to edit it out, will it away, regard it as our own creation, then don't we erase some essential part of the spirit's education? Pain is one of our teachers, albeit our darkest and most demanding one."

Doty describes wandering into a big church in New York City and finding unexpectedly a memorial to those living and dead with AIDS, where he collapses. He asks a Hispanic woman standing nearby for a tissue. She rummages through her purse but finds none, and goes away. He keeps trying to leave the memorial, but every time falls apart. Sometime later the woman returns with a napkin. He cherishes her gesture.

We are helpless to experience sorrow without one another, he says.

I haven't had close encounters with death except in university when my roommate and his girlfriend (she was one of the people I most adored and admired) were hit by a drunk driver. I have never seen a loved one decline through a protracted illness.

On the other hand, I have experienced overwhelming loss due to alienation like no one should ever have to experience. Prior to coming out as a gay man, I spent eight months in a deadly struggle. I've always identified it as my worst bout of depression, but today that word seems to trivialize the pain.

I had to accept something about myself that denied everything I believed. I must lose the safe, comfortable, honoured lifestyle built for myself and family. My resistance was so crushing, I couldn't get out of bed sometimes. My wife loathed me. My friends (all evangelical Christians) gradually stopped associating with me. The ones who came to visit verbally abused me. My parents, at first supportive, didn't have the resources to understand what I was going through, and cut me off emotionally. By my own intense homophobia, I had isolated myself from community with gay people. I had two friends and my doctor whom I could talk to without facing judgment, but no one was in a position to identify with the choices I had to make, reassure me about the consequences, or stand up for me to those who were treating me badly.

Without anyone's understanding, I was indeed helpless.

I felt the loss, especially the difficulties over access to my children, and allowed myself to grieve, but never found a mirror in which I could see my own strength and resourcefulness reflected back, no one except my children to whom my survival seemd to matter, and no one who could tell me confidently I would be well. I survived by establishing an attitude of avoidance toward the world and normal emotions.

A friend recently commented that people sometimes use mental illness as "a crutch that allows them to continue destructive behavior." The idea disturbs me. Politicians in this province have used that very rationale to eliminate programs designed to help addicted and depressed people get back to work. From the outside I might have seemed to be relying on helplessness. On the inside I was flailing around to find the source of my own strength. Sometimes I found doors, only to have them closed in my face. Until recently it seemed nothing would ever work, and despair visited frequently.

The first new friendships I made were unstable and ill-conceived. It has taken me years to recreate myself, the way I behave in the world and ask people to treat me. I've had a luxury of time unavailable to most people trapped in their own minds. For the first time I'm willing to admit that, despite my parents' lack of empathy, their financial support was invaluable to me. I did not become utterly dependent on them; I had time to learn to trust myself. I feel stronger now than ever.

Yesterday was the saddest day of the summer, dropping the girls at home, not knowing for sure when I'll see them next. In the car leaving Lindsay, I was tempted to put an upbeat CD in the player. I thought, "Time to move on, get organized, get busy to distract myself from the pain."

That's the way I've habitually acted, and it's wrongheaded. What I've learned from reading Doty—a thing I've known before, but had trouble apprehending—is that sorrow pushed away is only deferred. I've deferred it for years, but now I've arrived at the place of reconciliation.

I am my father's son, and tears do not come to me. Lately I've noticed how I hold them in check, not because I need stoicism now, but because it helped me survive as a sensitive boy in a small town.

Not feeling the tug of tears, I went in search of them, opening my throat, the place where things get blocked. I played sympathetic music: Fire Requiem by Nicholas Lens—at first it seemed too morbid, but I resisted the inclination to minimize my distress, by switching to something lighter. Before long, other body parts began to harmonize with my throat: first eyes, then diaphragm.

After a few minutes I thought that was enough, started to step back, but the voice inside had found itself, growing louder, more insistent. So I went with it until the energy expired. The requiem played until I reached Toronto, then I switched to something gentler and sweeter, Canteloube's Songs from the Auvergne: a shepherd girl's sad longing for a beautiful boy across the valley.

Doty says:

I will look at the great black tree of the world through the window of bitterness, the window of misery, I will put my face to that dark, and I will say what I see. Silence is submission to the irreplacable order. For Job, silence equals the death of the self.

This from an agnostic. I too can relate to Job's complaint.

It would be dishonest to say I'm ready to face that darkness baldly, or will be ever. For the past two years I've relied on mirtazapine, an antidepressant, to ease symptoms of anxiety. It allows me to sleep more consistently and deeply.

But this therapy is part of the reason I can commit myself today to a renewed honest experience and expression of feelings. Not only the good ones, like love, although love has also helped me unseal this openness. Western culture teaches us to expect mostly pleasure and fulfilment in life, but that is unrealistic. The best we can do is be prepared for whatever comes, and treat happiness as a gift from the universe.

September beginnings

I arrived home from Toronto a short while ago after a brief visit with Danny. Dinner last night was a good old-fashioned LiveJournal jumble: vaneramos, djjo, bitterlawngnome, danthered, token_otter, redregon, kindar, rfmcdpei and Jerry. Watched my first Fellini film this afternoon: Roma.

I intend to work out a new daily routine for the fall. This is not intended to be rigid, but a framework, so, as lilactime once pointed out, I know what I'm supposed to be doing. Priorities to include:

1. Cleaning the apartment, an hour a day until order is restored.
2. Resume work daily on Pilgrim's Cross, the complete first draft of a novel I set aside almost two years ago.
3. Start taking mirtazapine a half hour earlier, at 9:30 p.m; hopefully I'll be able to get up at 7:30 a.m. a little less groggy.
4. Volunteering at Two Rivers, Out on the Shelf, and Rainbow Chorus will keep Tuesdays and Wednesdays busy.
5. Start a job search.
6. Back to the gym three mornings a week.
7. Resume a daily practice of meditation and walking.
8. Drawing two afternoons a week.
9. Regular time, once a week, for exploring and photographing Ontario countryside and nature.
10. Find or organize a writers group in Guelph.
11. A balanced approach to LiveJournal, correspondence, and relationships with other friends.
12. Time to read every day.
13. To approach showering, eating, masturbating, sleeping and dreaming with a sense of comfort and self-care.

I'm feeling ambitious. I've made regular habits of all these things at different times in recent years. Only the job search, country drives and writers group are new. The trick will be getting all these activities working together. Realistically, I'd be delighted to get four of them in place this week, and phase the rest in by the end of September. I also have wild elderberries to pick, canning to do, one more post to write about the Bruce Peninsula experience, and a load of more recent photos to process.

I don't feel the necessity, as usual this time of year, to take time out and withdraw. I do want to be honest with myself about how I feel, to allow time within my activities and creative work for processing it and resting, without letting it stall or isolate me.

One last photo of Dorcas Bay: