Resilience...

These things can exist at the same time: The desire to disappear, to die, to float, to fly, to become one with the air. Young ballet students making a huge beautiful leap forward followed by an unrelated soul crushing disappointment. A view so beautiful that it takes your breath away and tears spring to your eye and a remark so cutting that it has exactly the same effect...a swell of pride at a job well done and a wave of despair which erases all sense of accomplishment. A small child can just move from one to the next. As adults, our emotional state tends to be less fluid. We question and get overwhelmed. I am told that to weather this you must choose moment to moment which emotional state to let rule your world, that one is objectively no more powerful than the other. I am not sure that most adults see it that way, we give each experience a different value. Apparently, this is not the path to contentment.  If you are a happy (read as "good") person you will choose the happy experiences and if you are a sad (read as "bad") person you will look to the harder situations to frame your experience.  The key is that it is all within your control. That, at least, is the story told by all of the new age blogs and books and healers. Just decide to be happy and you will be. Follow the four or seven or ten rules of happy people. Sometimes that works. It does. Sometimes it doesn't. There is often another force at work. There is what lives inside, everything that has come before. Some of that prior life experience is clear and worked through and doesn't get confused with the present moment. But some of it isn't clear and hasn't been worked through. It slaps you when you least expect it.  These are experiences that remain fluid in your being, that reemerge unbidden as unformed images or intense sensations or whispers and bring up a host of emotional reactions.  Sometimes the reaction is fear that bubbles up and threatens to kill you. You know that you cannot actually choke on that fear, on the self hatred that rises in your throat, cutting off the air and making you see blurred shapes and hear the whisper of ghosts.  You know that all you have to do is ride it out. Feel the pain and move on. But, it is going to kill you. This feels certain but it won't. What it will kill is your ability to make that previously mentioned choice; the choice that happy people make, to focus on the positive. So you find yourself in a trap, reliving this fear over and over, unable to find or even recognize the positive choice. As a result you find yourself diminished, damaged, and could eventually disappear entirely.

Damaged people live in the grasp of memory. The world of theater and literature is filled with them.  A Street Car Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Merrily We Roll Along, and the more recent August Osage County spring to mind. The stories can be beautiful and can move an audience to both laughter and tears. You can learn about the human experience through these fragile and generally lost souls and be enriched in the process. In real life these people (and I count myself currently among them) are harder to accept and to keep in your life. They can be depressed, stuck, and are often angry in a self deprecating or destructive manner.  I believe that these memories are holes in the heart, black holes that suck energy. The memories can be specific and identifiable or unformed and vague. Either way they manifest as holes; God shaped holes or ex-husband shaped holes, dream shaped holes or parent shaped holes. Amorphous holes that take up space and don't allow for the retention of new experiences. People move in and out of your life. Normal people  possess the ability to refill the spaces that are left when a relationship ends or a dream dies. They move on and find a new boyfriend or lover or dream and start over. Those of us who don't know how to refill them just walk around with the holes in our souls, the memory of the person or the experience or the yearning for an explanation. It is the difference between the person who ends a bad marriage yet is happily dating six months or a year later and the person who is still alone years down the line, guarded and scared and smaller.  A person who sees a possible relationship as a risk that will simply rip them open further and create additional dark matter.

The question is then, how do you change? How do you become the person who can fill the empty space inside, accept the loss or the uncertainty. How do you learn to allow for the presence of ghosts and sad memories and accept the hurts of the past while still moving on? That is the challenge. It looks so simple on paper: fill the hole. Yet, we know how many people do that: alcohol, drugs, over-exercise, food.  Filling those holes with people or love is much harder.  From here, where I sit, it seems impossible. I watch other people move on from disappointment and heartbreak and I believe that I must be from a different planet. The air I breathe does not allow for such fluidity of spirit and soul.  I do not understand how they make it happen. I sit on the sidelines and watch. I watch marriages and kids and divorce and starting over.  I watch careers take off and flounder and resume with greater success than before. I watch. And I wish........

Photo credit: morningmeditations.com

Yearning for an imaginary friend....

I recently read Matthew Dicks' delightful, touching, incredibly creative and imaginative novel Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend. The book opened me up emotionally in unexpected ways and created quite a dialogue in my head.

My name is Budo.
I have been alive for five years.
Five years is a very long time for someone like me to be alive.
Max gave me my name.
Max is the only human person who can see me.
Max's parents call me an imaginary friend.
I love Max's teacher, Mrs. Gosk.
I do not like Max's other teacher, Mrs. Patterson.
I am not imaginary. 

There is a desire in everyone to be seen. To be substantial. To matter to those who surround you. To be able to trust your instincts and to have an awareness of that ability. I think. I think that these desires are true. The search for life's meaning is something that most sentient beings embark upon when we reach a point of stasis in our lives. I started the book with these detached intellectual questions and observations.  However, as I read it and lost myself in the world and quirky characters, an unexpected swell of feeling arose as the intellectual faded away. I started to feel a primal, visceral yearning for a friend like Budo; a friend who loves me unconditionally, one clever enough to rescue me, not from a real world danger, as Budo does Max, but from myself. I simultaneously identified with Budo. If someone could just see me, communicate with me, then I could save the other Nancy, the one is such dire straits. I could explain-in language clearer than is currently being employed-what is wrong and what she needs.  I started reading as if in school; Is Budo an extension of Max or an entirely different being? Why were certain words and phrases chosen?  What would I have written?  After a while that logical approach faded away and I just connected to it and let the story's emotions flow through me.

I often feel like two people; one watches my life and my (often questionable) choices and one makes them. One is hopeful that I will pull it together and one (currently in control) is bent on destruction. This is not a completely analogous comparison, as I think that an imaginary friend is something different than simply two sides of a self. Budo has a much broader world view than Max. He knows things that Max doesn't. Max however exists in the outside world, is the person seen by everyone else.  Of course I am being too literal, as this is a novel and BOTH Budo and Max are imagined beings. That said, what was ignited by this story is not imagined but a real, intense desire for two things: a friend like Max, who would fight for me, even when I can't or won't fight for myself and attached to that, the ephemeral desire, one that I am not even sure I admit to, of salvation; both by myself and from myself. 

Fighting depression is a daunting battle, not the least because you have to muster your will; your will to live, to engage in the world,  to nurture the physical. My will has left the building. I find that when left without the structure of work and responsibilities to others, I don't care. Working hard quiets my mind somewhat, and on long days with no breaks, I do better. Other days are tortured and endless. I don't want to talk to people, to eat, to leave my house. My mind circles around itself, in smaller and smaller spheres.  If I can break the cycle,  I do sometimes feel better. When I pull it together to have coffee with a friend or take a dance class; when I put on my mask of normal, I can follow the script for a while. Working out is the only thing that I find I do not need prompting for, which is probably due to a combination of the endorphins released and the anorexic side of my personality urging me to somehow whittle away yet few more pounds. On the positive side of that addiction,  I also feel, when running or cycling, that somehow the negative voices can't quite catch me. I stay just half a step ahead of them. In doing so, I think that I can almost hear my desire for creativity, for connection, for success and work coming through.  I can hear my desire for all of these things while running the streets both morning and night, a wanly voiced desire usually drowned out by the one clamoring for self destruction.

There is a question posed here;  What do I need to change this dynamic? This is an almost silly solution but perhaps the creation of an imaginary friend is an answer. In saying that, I do not dismiss the love and gratitude I have for my actual flesh and blood, quite wonderful friends.  I have a few dear people in my life who are begging me to take the help that is offered, who remind me that I matter. Friends with whom I can laugh and who let me cry (not that I let down my guard to do much of that....), friends who occasionally even let me care for them in return. But my need is so overwhelming that I believe that if I really let them in, the weight of it will crush them.  If I share, in the moment, how much I am struggling, how hard it is to get through each day, how incredibly heavy my heart is, they will disappear. I see the fear and pain in their eyes when they get even a glimpse. Most have already pulled away, not willing or in a more likely scenario, not able to witness or partake in this journey/struggle/insanity. To my horror, I have also found myself lashing out at those who stay. Their optimism, when everything feels so incredibly dark, feels like dismissal. When timidly asked if things are getting better or when someone says something complimentary,  I get angry and frustrated at my inability to answer positively, to absorb the praise, to let an attempt at care make me feel better on any level.

Who is this imaginary friend that I need to create? There are no boundaries on who he or she can be, look like, what powers he can possess, so mine changes at will. He is intensely masculine when I need to feel held by a partner.  She becomes soft, comforting, and envelopes me in warmth when I need to be cared for by a mother. Sometimes my imaginary friend is a cat, snuggling in just to remind me that there is sweetness in the world, sometimes a horse to help me run away. My imaginary friend is also able to help me be social and masks the unbearable shyness that often runs my interactions in public by waving a magic wand.  My imaginary friend doesn't get upset or angry at me for being broken, like real people do.  Self destruction threatens our sense of balance and world order and humans get angry at those perceived to be throwing their lives away.  Many take it as a personal affront. What gets lost in all of that concern manifesting as anger or rage is the inability of a depressed or suicidal person to control the fall.

So, you create an imaginary friend to guide you through the dark times and then what?  That is also explored in the novel.  In the story, when no longer needed, all of those loyal and loving companions fade and disappear.  The story seems to imply that their soul lives on, but I don't know.  I have a slightly different version in my head.  Assuming a positive outcome, which is a stretch in my current mindset, I think that when the need for an imaginary friend passes, it is because rather than disappearing, the imaginary friend is absorbed into the imaginer, almost like glue, mending all of the broken pieces of the soul, filling in the holes and creating strength to move forward and up, out of the dark.

Matthew Dicks' Website

Becoming transparent

I am trying to become transparent. Literally.  I have this belief, which is crazy I know, that if I just get thin enough I will be able to see deep inside my body and in doing so I will be rewarded. I will discover what it is that comes back in cycles and makes me so unhappy. The secret that is buried there, that makes my existence here on earth seem like a mistake even though the outward appearance of my life is fine, that secret will slowly be uncovered as each layer of flesh is removed, similar to the text revealed as the sand is brushed off of an ancient slab of stone .  Ever since the end of last year, when my internal world slipped once again off of it's axis, I've been whittling my body down. It wasn't intentional at first.  It started subtly, but then accelerated.  Five pounds, then ten, maybe close to twenty.  I don't generally weigh myself, so it's hard to be precise, but it's been significant and I'm a petite person to begin with.  It's not so much about imagining that I am fat, though it would be dishonest to ignore that those voices have returned as well.  It is instead an admittedly twisted need to be solely spirit, to acknowledge no need of the physical.  The answer to my heartache (a pathetic and imprecise word to be sure) is to ultimately disappear entirely.  The reality (absurdity) of this and of the fantasy are completely separate.  As my therapist stated, with a rather sad smile, an answer is not actually etched on my bones. I am not going to be able to see words written there. More concretely, the real world result of becoming so thin that one disappears is death. That is not a sane nor reasonable desire. In spite of that inevitable final destination (or perhaps in longing for.... which is a darker truth), in spite of weekly therapy and medication and frustrated friends and family, I'm holding onto this path of self destruction because a very loud part of my being believes it is the only way to be free of this recurring spiral of shame and loathing.   Maybe there is an answer in the DNA, in the depths of my experience, locked into the bones. Maybe that is why they ache at night, why I struggle to stay still, to spend time at rest.  There is a story trying to come out. And the part of me that lives in the combination of metaphor and body thinks that maybe I can help it by becoming air myself, even if that means I no longer exist.

Image via Tumbler

I am a dancer. I communicate through my body. It makes a sort of twisted sense to me that I would look to it to find answers to what is wrong.  Movement is the only language that I understand. Shaping and molding my body has defined my entire life. It feels, maybe this is simply an attempt to excuse it, as if I am exploring, using my body in a new way to work through this unnamed unidentified horror that has once again resurfaced. I separate into two people and can defend what I am doing yet I am not blind to the damage I am creating.  I am destroying my health, my relationships, my professional life and reputation. I am also not deaf to the other voice that says that my time here is up, that death and darkness will be preferable to this life that can turn from something manageable and within the realm of normal into an internal nightmare for no discernible reason. 

I am not at a place yet where I have a solution to this (obviously) untenable position that I have put myself in. I don't yet want to give up on the quest for an answer, though this is not a logical path. Logic has never been my forte. For now, I am dealing with the chaos in my mind by pretending that all is normal. I  just get through each day and try to be as honest as possible with myself and with those who are trying to work with me, while attempting to not let too much angst and pain into my relationships with those who are not paid to deal with such things.  It's a funky crazy balancing game, but one that I am (mistakenly?) telling myself that I can play. Like a teenager, I have a belief that I am actually indestructible.  I will work this all out, be thinner than a piece of paper and still go on with my career and life.  I can balance on my toe in a pink satin shoe. Surely that is training to balance between one plane of existence and another......

she asked.....

how is it possible...no.

rephrase.

is it possible for a heart to break, not once, but over and over.....

each night as the clouds gather and the dusk falls

and the temperature drops and the nicks and tiny slights of the day add up

is it possible that those miniscule little hurts could break something as strong as a heart

over and over and over and over and over again?

no one answered.

her throat closed and tears welled up

and it hurt for real

in her heart

and head

the tips of her fingers and down to the depths

of what?

her soul....

melodramatic are we not???

the wind whispered and the house echoed the silly question

the heart breaks each evening and over night it heals, cracked and battered

but sewn back up into one piece by morning

why?

laughter....soft and sweet.

so that it can be broken again. 

but of course.

what comes next.....

I wrote an upsetting and slightly hysterical post last week. Slightly removed from it, I am first of all mortified that I was so careless and let my shame spill out.  That I let people see, however clumsily and ineffectively,  how hard I struggle, most days, to just appear happy and stable. I am also deeply touched by some of the responses and grateful for all of the love that came my way.  I think, in re-reading it, that I made it all seem petty and silly and narrowed down to a lack of a partner or a secure job, to the same loneliness that bedevils most single women.  There is truth in those things.  I am lonely most of the time and my career is not anything like I dreamed it would be.  I haven't been on a date in years.  Literally years.  These very concrete holes in my life do exist, yet that is not the gnawing I feel ripping through my chest and into my fingers.  I feel myself spinning into a familiar yet uncontrollable place and it frightens me.  I don't know how or even if I have the will to fight my way back.  I don't know if all of the work on coping and the training that I have done over the last two, five, ten, the last twenty years is enough.  These are old battles, ones begun in the years before adolescence. I have once again made food an enemy.  I have an almost uncontrollable urge to rip off my skin.  I am exhausted during the day, yet can't sleep at night.  None of this stems from the day to day.  My daily life is, if I look at it objectively, better than it has been in a long time.  I had an amazing year in 2012 and have so many wonderful projects in the works for 2013 and beyond. Beyond that, I have gained knowledge and skill, especially over the last two years. I know how to move from this spiral of shame and hate.  I  know how. I wrote a post about a year ago to a friend's brother and said, life doesn't get better, you get better. You get stronger and smarter and you find what makes your heart sing.  I believed what I wrote then. I still want to believe what I wrote,  but there is this nagging voice. What if I was wrong?  What if I had it backwards? What if, even when life does gets better, I don't? I walk around with this false confidence that doesn't quite reach my eyes and an eternally broken heart which does.  I pretend that I am smart.  I pretend that I have healed, whatever the fuck that means.  I talk and talk and talk about eating disorders and cutting and depression and suicidal idealization, as though they are completely defanged; foes long dead and buried. I buy into the "act as if" school of thinking.  And I am lying. I know in my core that I am lying.  But, there is this; my core could be wrong.  I hang onto this one little thread of hope that says that core fear of not ever being okay is wrong and I will, once again, dig myself out of this spiral and get to a place where I can talk of wanting out as a long ago memory....of it being something I just felt once....as something from then and not from now.  I am just hanging onto that thin shiny strand and hoping, hoping that I am wrong.

I question the intelligence of writing this, in the throes of the spin. After this entry I won't continue to post about it.  Although there is a value in writing for an unseen audience, of attempting to clarify your thoughts enough for others to understand, possibly empathize a bit, and maybe, just maybe see themselves in your struggle, at this point I feel that this discussion needs to once again become private. It probably should never have left that realm. It is hard to put on your public mask when you know people are reading about your private shame and I need to be able to wear that mask, to smile and say I'm fine and have it end there.  So for now, I'm fine.  Thanks for asking.  We'll talk soon.  Love, Nancy

And here we are again.....

Night:
For a person with as many friends as my Facebook page or my phone tells me I have, I am shockingly alone when it gets dark.  This statement is not meant to denigrate my friends. My solitude is not their fault.  I create it myself.  I carry it almost as a badge of pride, yet I can, tonight when the future seems so unbearable, admit that it is killing me. When  I am alone  at night and the world closes in and I am literally unable to breathe, I do not have someone to hold on to. I am so so so so afraid of being held, yet in these moments I look that fear in the face and know that of which I am most afraid is the only thing that is going to save me.  This sounds ridiculously melodramatic, but isn't all psychic pain ridiculously melodramatic and incomprehensible to anyone not in the throes of it?  I have, on some level, admitted it and have even been taking action in my own messed up way;  by trying to fill that relationship place with spiritual or career guides, with mentors, with people who I think will be there because I pay them to be.  This is, once again, proving to be an absolutely terrible system.

I need to be held.  I need to mirror my self worth in someone's eyes, and not in a someone who is paid to mirror it back. I've been pretending to be done with therapy, while simply making someone who is trying to do a different job fill that space.  It has now blown up in my face.  I can so easily use this to fall back into a place where I am struggling to live.  I can feel that pull.  I want to end things tonight.  I am acutely suicidal and if I weren't so damn worried about everyone else and the unintended but absolutely predictable pain that (even) my suicide would cause, I would do it.  I'm exhausted by the fight.  I literally cannot see to tomorrow.  Which proves to me once again what an ungrateful and pathetic person I am.  Because this pitiful and self centered way of dealing is contrasted by what others are fighting.   A friend, who I care for deeply but with whom I have not been in touch, other than the occasional like or comment on Facebook, passed away suddenly, at least it was sudden to his friends.  He had kept his illness quiet. It is heartbreaking and I am heartbroken--for his loss and for the loss of his future.  He leaves a college age daughter and so many friends and colleagues dumbstruck.  He was still young enough for this unexpected death to be tragic. On a personal level, he was one of the first people to reach out to me in LA and to value me as an artist.  I will always hold him in my heart.  Yet, and I am not proud-- indeed I am disgusted to admit this--deep inside, where I am filled with shame and self hatred,  I am jealous.  Again jealous of someone who got out early.  That is reprehensible. I don't have an explanation. It's been a rough start to the new year. My commercial agent dropped me, and in trying to do so in a way that was kind, basically said that I am untouchable as an actress.  A job I was counting on to help get me out of debt is ending.  I don't have a theater gig.  My production company feels like a pipe dream.  These things are unrelated, and in no way on equal footing, yet my broken spirit feels them the same.  People die, people abandon you (even though I have learned through many years of therapy that you cannot be abandoned as an adult), careers don't happen, relationships evolve/dissipate/fall apart.  Failure exists over and over.  I know this. I know it as a successful person who has fought over and over again through depression and anorexia and cutting and has also experienced moments where I've been overcome with happiness and love and the joy of sharing the experience of life.  So where does that leave me tonight?  Alanis Morissette manages to make music out of these feelings.  I know that is what I should do....make art, elevate it to something worthy, but all I can feel right now is a primal urge for self destruction....

Morning:
After writing this, and a few restless hours of sleep, I'm actually at a new day. Choked down  2 pieces of toast and a cup of  coffee.  I am embarrassed to read the words above. There is nothing more self centered than someone circling their own emotional shit. Yet, I don't think I am able to retract it. I still feel the truth, no matter how sadly distorted to my own reality, in those words.  I wish I could say that I awoke to a new day where the sun is shining (it is in actuality raining) and I feel inspired to tackle the world in new ways.  I don't. I feel hungover, though I did not drink last night.  I feel completely defeated.  I want to crawl back into bed, though I awoke well before my 6:30am alarm. Instead, I will go out into the world.  I will go teach my classes and praise my students, and admonish them to always give me 100% of their energy, to breathe, to love what they are doing.  I will meet with my business partners and believe in my projects.  I will read a script and prepare for an audition. I hope that by engaging my students and friends in my battered dreams, a little inspiration will come back to me and I will once again climb out of this spiral of self loathing.   I'll go hug some puppies on my break and listen to music and maybe go into an empty studio and dance or sing.  Somehow I'll fight my way back. I always do. I will just keep telling myself that I always do.