Tag Archives: mental health

When the Abyss DOESN’T Gaze Back

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I was asked by an agent, whose curiosity was piqued, to send in my full manuscript and give her six to eight weeks to read it. Nine weeks later, I checked in. I was told to wait a couple more weeks. And so, about five days ago, which wrapped up week twelve, I followed up again. This time: nothing. 

Getting a rejection is one thing. It hits you like a punch to the gut, but it only lasts seconds. After that, you have to decide to do next: give up or get up? Does nobody care about your baby, or does somebody somewhere—just not this particular person? How much pain are you willing to endure*? 

I’ve had a few rejections of my writing. Quite a few, actually—professional and personal. Most of us creative types don’t have a lot of confidence to begin with. A large percent of why we do this is validation**. Rejections often make me question my talent and my purpose. And when it stings really, really badly, I still continue to put myself out there, even if it’s just out of sheer momentum.  

But this… this is new to me. And I don’t know what to do with it. I’m frustrated, disappointed, and heartbroken. I just need to let this agent go. Someone somewhere wants to love my baby, I think—just not this person. 

_____ 

* This isn’t a rhetorical “man-up” pep-talk question, by the way. There does come a point that soaking up these blows to the ego is just plain unhealthy. Walking away when you can’t take anymore doesn’t make you any less of a person, no matter what Hollywood says. 

** The rest is “We just kind of have to.” 

I Have No Cutsey Puns for This One

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I have two sisters, one good, one Evil. Like, stupid Evil. Good Sister is the youngest in our family, and the one I was always closest to. She loves animals, and Terry Pratchett books, and gory movies; she’s a lot like me. On Sunday, she sent me the following message: 

I have decided that if [Cat #2] is bad sick I will get [Cat #1] a home and be done. I have had a week of non responses to show it’s cool. You and [Evil Sister] can comfort mom and dad. 

Some context: 1) In February of 2012, she had to put her cat of many years to sleep. She found a new cat, and had to put her to sleep a earlier this year. She got another cat who ran away, followed by a fourth, [Cat #2], has an infection in her uterus. [Cat #1] is her favorite thing in the world right now; 2) This past Thanksgiving, she drank a six pack of beer, swallowed a half bottle of sleeping pills, and called her Best Friend to travel from Pennsylvania to California to find a home for her pets. My sister chose Best Friend because she was far enough away that she couldn’t go over there in person to rescue her. Best Friend made a bunch of calls, which got my sister to a hospital, in which she told the doctors it was an accident, and she was sent home. 

I found out later, from Best Friend, that these kinds of phone calls were not uncommon—this is just the first one that got to that point. Over the past six months, her situation has been precarious. She refuses to speak to our parents, who have been using me as a proxy (mostly because I am also bipolar). She won’t actually speak to me, either, limiting our conversations to Facebook IMing (with one exception, and I’ll get back to that later). Having been in her situation—i.e. not wanting to live anymore, but continuing on because someone else does— I got it, and so I never tried to give her “The sun will come out tomorrow” platitudes that had driven her from her other friends. I was someone with whom she could share her ugly thoughts, such as her resentment of myself and the rest of our family for making her alive. In fact, this, from a recent Hyperbole and a Half essay, has become one of her favorite quotations: 

“… I noticed myself wishing that nothing loved me so I wouldn’t feel obligated to keep existing.” 

And so, on Sunday, just as my spouse and I were trying to recover from a dreadfully boring vampire movie, I received that message. Over the course of an hour or so, I prodded her with questions to find out whether she was seriously going to make another attempt, or if she was just frustrated. And then she said this: 

Could you make sure [Cat #1] gets a good home? 

And her messages stopped for a little while. I reached out to Best Friend, who didn’t get back to me; I called the crisis hotline, who were not very helpful (when it comes to loved ones, they aren’t prepared to handle “experts” in the field like myself). 

And then, suddenly, it was over. My sister seemed to snap out of it. As can happen. She called the suicide hotline herself and spoke to one of the few local friends she had left. Best Friend got back to me and explained that a) she had been incommunicado for a few days, leading my sister to assume their relationship had ended; b) but she finally answered her texts and talked her down; c) my sister went through this kind of thing at least a couple of times a month. 

And so it turns out that nothing I did matters. On her end, the hour and a half I panicked, and mourned, and cried helplessly on the phone to a stranger on a hotline, and hated myself for wanting her to go through with it so she wouldn’t have to be in pain anymore, and suffered survivor’s guilt for having good insurance and a stubborn spouse … all of that meant nothing, because all it took was one (kind of enabling) friend to take care of it. 

I’m fucking sick of this. 

I’m sick of spending the days after these with an emotional hangover, gently poking her on Facebook to see how she’s doing. I’m sick of hiding this from my parents, who are moving to Florida next week and don’t need this shit. I’m sick of being the last person on the list when she needs help. I’m sick of being jealous of the trust she’s passed onto others. 

I’ve made every effort to reach out and be her friend, and she leaves me out—I don’t care the reason. When I flew from DC to LA to hang out and see how she was doing, she spent most of the time drunk and uninterested in doing anything fun. She’s even formed an extremely tight, very public bond with Evil Sister, who has recently offered her a home if she wants to leave California and move in with family. I find this particularly insulting, perhaps childishly so. 

This detail brings me back to the one phone call I received, post-Thanksgiving, in the wee, not-quite-awake hours in the morning. My sister was on the phone with Evil Sister (because it’s okay to talk to her apparently), and Evil Sister stated unequivocally that my sister wasn’t serious about her suicide attempt, because if she was serious, she’d have been successful. Given that Evil Sister made two half-assed, attention-getting attempts on college (afterward, my parents had made me their proxy), she’s kind of an expert on that. She doesn’t believe that capital D depression, or even Bipolar 2, is real. Good Sister took this almost as a dare, and called me to talk her down. Despite this, and despite how horrible of a person she is, Evil Sister will get billed as a rescuer. 

I can’t detach myself from this, because she is a good person, and I love her. But don’t know how long I can keep doing this. 

The State I’m In

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I’m going to be completely honest with you right now: I’m fucking miserable. I don’t want to be. I think Qatar is awesome, and my cats are the best ever, and I love my wife. 

But I’m beyond lonely, and she’s not helping. 

In general, I’m in an awkward time zone, so most people are in bed when I wake up, all the way until my early evening, when my wife comes home. This has meant that I have quietly dropped out of the routine of most of my friends. Every Wednesday evening, I went to a writer’s group and hung out with some great people who hardly seem to miss me anymore. My roomie, who was my best friend, is too busy with her new career and, you know, sleeping to be around for me. 

The compound where I live is populated mostly by entitled parents and international yuppies, and so it’s been difficult to make friends here. And it’s five kilometers to the nearest store, through roundabouts full of traffic that’s not afraid to drive onto sidewalks (not an exaggeration), and another ten kilometers to anyplace that might be fun to explore. 

And then there’s the madness of My Evil Sister’s Wedding from Hell and her little dog too, which have utterly consumed my thoughts. My father took a big step to include me in everything, but once that fell through, there’s been nothing—not a picture, not a Facebook message, nothing. Same thing with the dog—once I stopped asking, nobody told me anything. My Evil Sister lives in the same town as my parents, and it seems like, in regard to this feud, they’ve decided that life is more convenient without me. 

When it comes down to it, the only person other than myself I see most days my wife. 

She is not doing well either. Her job is twice as difficult as it should be, because her predecessor made a huge mess out of it, and there’s a lot of mess and mistrust left to clean up. She comes home from work in the foulest of moods—impatient and indecisive and exhausted, and sometimes just plain fuming. Her response to the stress of it all (and I can’t blame her for it) is to withdraw into herself and her iPad games. I don’t even know if she likes being around me anymore. When I’ve tried to discuss how her bad moods affect me, she either defensively tells me how tired she is, or she tells me about all the times she hasn’t been rude or short with me. 

Lately, I’ve been aggressively writing query letters to literary agents. On Thursday afternoon (shortly before opening of business on the East Coast), I sent out the first batch. Early Thursday evening, I received the first rejection. I shouldn’t feel embarrassed, but I do. I mean, I spent at least an hour on each one, researching their books and their likes to tailor-make a pitch for them, but they don’t want to waste their time on it. It’s not their thing. Is it anybody’s thing? It makes me wonder if it’s any good; I mean, after all, I can hardly get people online to read what I post, and these are my friends (there are many legitimate reasons for this; I’m just describing what the mean voice in the back of my head is telling me). 

I need my wife right now, so, so badly. And she’s not there. In fact, she’s the opposite of that. 

So I keep it to myself. Because my loneliness and rejection feel petty compared to her job. Her criticisms of the way I went about dealing with the dog situation (or the way my family or Gallup Animal Control handled it—all her anger directed at them by proxy through me, of course) make me want never to discuss the issue again, even if it still has me worried. In fact, she’s just too flat-out exhausted to deal with my depressive episodes, which have been exacerbated by the isolation and culture shock. And worst of all, she’s incapable if just listening without offering advice. Because that’s all I need right now. 

I’m really suffering, and I don’t know what to do … 

Fit for a Straightjacket

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In June of 2010, I weighed two hundred and fifty-four pounds. I couldn’t do ten pushups, and a walk up a flight of stairs winded me. I got that big for a number of reasons. For starters, after leaving the New Jersey/New York area, I went from walking a minimum of two miles a day (usually super-fast, because I was often running late) to driving and sitting at a desk. Later, when I got really depressed, I began eating for comfort. When I was on anti-depressants, I ate too much because that’s what anti-depressants do. I literally embezzled money from grocery-shopping trips (i.e. getting cash back from my debit card at the registers) to buy donuts in secret. I was, and still am a little, totally ashamed. 

I seem to have swung in the opposite direction. I now weigh one hundred and ninety-one pounds, have 20 percent body fat (which I’m assured is pretty good, but the Internet tells me that it’s either average, borderline ideal, or really bad; that’s the Internet for you), and do fairly intense cardio four or five days a week. My wife and I have splurged on a personal trainer, and, about half the time, I bike to my appointments, which is about six-and-a-half miles one way, mostly uphill. For the most part, I eat better and less. And I’ve realized lately that I’m skipping lunches in secret. 

And that brings me to today. At my training session, I almost passed out. That’s not the bad part. The bad part is, I tried to pretend that it wasn’t happening. My trainer isn’t dumb, so he called it off before I could hurt myself. It didn’t have to go that way. During my morning ride, before which I had a banana to eat, I felt lightheaded a few times, but I didn’t stop. 

Why not? 

Because I look in the mirror everyday and see the fat guy from over two years ago. Apparently I’m the only one who sees it. However, my friends and family told me, even at my biggest, that I wasn’t fat, because they were trying to spare my feelings. How am I supposed to believe them when they tell me that today? 

On top of that, I have newly developed, low-grade asthma that winds me whenever I work out. I also have a lot of friends who are really, really, really fit, including marathon-runners, long-distance cyclists, and swimmers who make Aquaman say, “Take it down a notch, dude.” I don’t want to run a marathon. I’m perfectly fine running twenty to twenty-five kilometers over the course of a whole week. I just want to be healthy. And I am healthy. 

But that’s not what the guy in the mirror tells me. He uses as a weapon the fact that I had a (delicious) cheeseburger and a chocolate shake (also delicious) for lunch yesterday. He blames my difficulty breathing on my laziness. He says that the weight I’ve put on since I’ve started swimming a lot is me being irresponsible. That the fact that I have a naturally large frame is only an excuse. He’s a lot louder when I’m under a lot of stress, and there has been a great deal of that in my life. So whenever he talks to me like that, I respond by exercising. 

But today, when I got really dizzy and began seeing spots during a routine workout, I put myself in danger. I think have a problem. I can’t stop exercising, because it’s good for me. And yet, I need to know when it’s enough, that I don’t need to push myself quite so hard. 

But the guy in the mirror doesn’t believe that. 

Sister Act

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I haven’t had any contact with one of my sisters for a year to the day. What weirds me out is that I don’t feel all that bad about it. I’m not sure what kind of person that makes me. 

You have a friend or relative like this. They’re the ones who say political opinions you find objectionable, and then defend their point-of-view in the nastiest way possible, using every fallacy in the book, and then pouncing on any admissions you make on the occasions they have a point and using this as a means of negating your entire argument. When you fight back against what they’re saying, they accuse you of trying to silence their opinions. In short, they are bullies. 

I hate bullies. My Evil Sister is a bully. She is the kind of person who imagines herself telling “the truth to power” or some self-aggrandizing bullshit like that. I don’t even know if she believes what she says; it’s almost as if she is daring people to argue with her. Every time I would see a status update or a comment on one of mine, I would clench up a little. There came a point, however, when I decided that I needed to stop. 

You see, thanks to the bravery and encouragement of my wife, I’ve learned to break off contact with people who make me uncomfortable. In the Facebook era of being “friends” with even with that lab partner from junior high, this is kind of difficult. But the fact is, it doesn’t matter your history—if you don’t like a person anymore, they’re not your friend. I cannot tell you how utterly liberating this is.  

When I began doing this back in 2005, it was extremely difficult, so much so that I had to justify to myself why. The guy in question was my best friend throughout high school. In the past when I behaved like a drunk as a bipolar, going to highs, wherein I was a selfish-but-charming douchebag, to lows, where I was a self-pitying Eeyore, he stuck around because he knew I’d even out and be the person he enjoyed. And yet, as I got older, I couldn’t stand to be around him anymore. And then I was advised, by my wife and by my therapist that I didn’t have to. 

My usual method on Facebook is this: I block offensive status updates in an attempt to ignore them. When the offender rudely attacks me for something I say on my wall, I defriend them. Evil Sister had hit the first stage, which is where I had intended to keep her (she is my immediate family and shouldn’t be disowned). However, thanks to the miracle of that wonderful Facebook sidebar that allows you to see who comments on stuff, I discovered something she said that was too much. 

On September 11, 2001, a band of terrorists bombed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, using an otherwise innocuous device—i.e. the passenger airplane—as a weapon. Most Americans are still processing what this has meant to us and to our world. 

Yes, I was there. But that doesn’t make my memories superior to others. On September 11, 2011, a friend in Albuquerque reflected movingly on his first trip to the USS Arizona in Hawaii, when he discovered that it was more than just a tourist destination—it was a tomb—and how that paralleled a reaming he received from a friend for requesting a jar of WTC ashes as a memorial. Another friend wrote an essay, entitled “My Narrative,” about the fear and isolation she’d felt in Colorado as the news barely trickled in over the sound of evacuations. I wrote a piece about how something as ordinary as a statue had been taken from me, using it as a metaphor for how my day-to-day life had been changed. 

Evil Sister for her part, accused everyone—everyone—who shared their “narratives,” (she used the word narratives very specifically) of trying to exploit the occasion to make it all about them—“it doesn’t matter how close you were.” This was a pretty direct, passive-aggressive swipe at me. It was a passive-aggressive swipe against her friend who wrote “My Narrative*.” It was an indirect swipe against my wife, who frequently spends months in Afghanistan, her job being to prevent this from ever happening again. It’s a swipe against the friend I was visiting that very day, a New York firefighter who lost literally dozens of the colleagues who ran into a burning skyscraper when the rest of us ran away from it. When I responded, in the gentlest terms possible (“I am disappointed and saddened that you feel this way, and that this is how you chose to express it.”), her response to me was predictable, but infuriating (“Oh, I forgot, you’re the only one who’s allowed to have an opinion.”). I informed her privately that I would not speak to her unless she apologizes, and that I don’t anticipate this ever happening. She (as I was told later) cussed me out behind my back and told me that I “always had to be right,” and told me that she didn’t care if she never heard from me again**. 

And so, after a year of stubborn silence, I’ve concluded that the only thing I’m pissed off about is how my family, who understandably don’t want to take sides, talks about the incident as if both of us are at fault. We are not equal here. I’m not perfect, but I am not an asshole. I do not treat people with disrespect and venom, nor do I expect my negativity to go unchallenged.  

I don’t miss my sister. I miss what she used to be—my favorite play partner when I was a child. I also miss the teenage version of the friend I mentioned earlier who now thinks that women who use birth control are sluts. Time has marched on, and so have I. 

But I still feel uneasy. I feel like I could have handled this differently. I wonder if maybe I am the asshole. I won’t discuss this with the people who witnessed this, because I don’t want to put them in an awkward position, so I feel alone. And yet, as I said, I don’t like bullies. I’ve dismissed at least five old friends, including my one-time best friend, for saying less. 

My life, as a result, has much less negativity than it used to. It’s also missing my sister. I’m very confused. And I will be for a long, long time. 

* On this particular friend’s birthday, Evil Sister complained in her status about how she hates it when, on friends’ birthdays, her feed gets clogged up by birthday wishes. As maid of honor at this friend’s wedding, Evil Sister accused her of being a “bridezilla,” because this friend wanted to go to a tanning booth to get rid of some of those lines that had built up over the summer, which would have ruined the aesthetic of her strapless dress. Evil Sister is not a very good person, is what I’m trying to say. 

** There are a lot of complications, of course, regarding the parallel and perpendicular relationships my parents have with their siblings, as well as my relationship with my niece. I won’t go into these, because I have rambled long enough. 

Insane in the Membrane

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My therapist advises me against me using the term “mentally ill” to describe myself. He prefers that I say “I have a mental illness.” I understand his logic and intentions—he doesn’t want my identity to be defined by something about me that is broken. However, I can’t disagree more.  

Your teenage years are when you start to forge your identity and become the person you’ll be*. And it was then that I became two people. On one hand, I was a quirky, soulful, artistic, sensitive, and intense guy named Jeremiah. On the other hand, I was a creative, energetic, charming, and very, very confident guy named Jeremiah. The first Jeremiah hated himself with a searing passion, while the second Jeremiah didn’t give a shit about anybody other himself. I was the angel and the devil on my own shoulders, wondering how the other could be so pathetic/such a douchebag. 

And that begged the question, what the hell is wrong with me?  

Lately, I’ve been a big fan of a (mostly) weekly podcast called “Sex and Other Human Activities.” One of the hosts, Marcus Parks, said this about being how bipolar disorder works: “Whenever you’re depressive, you let your life fall apart. Whenever you’re manic, you actively destroy it. It’s a dangerous thing to fuck with.” 

Lots of people talk about the stigma of mental illness. When I hear it described that way, I imagine frightened crowds with pitchforks, torches, and legislation who want to lock up the crazies, or at the very least, not invite them to parties. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived a third of my life in the twenty-first century, but I’ve never seen this. What I’ve seen is a lot of confusion. 

For starters, there aren’t a whole lot of actual “crazy” people. The mentally ill that most expect to see are muttering to themselves about government conspiracies, telling the voices in their heads to shut up, murdering people in cold blood (maybe with a giggle), or—if Hollywood can be believed—helping the normal folks see the world through exciting new eyes.  

That’s the biggest reason those like me can feel isolated. We look just like everyone else. We act just like everyone else. It’s assumed, then, that we function just like everybody else. After all, everyone feels down sometimes, so why can’t I cope? Everybody has mood swings, so what’s the big deal about mine? I seemed fine yesterday, so why not remember that? Life is hard; everybody knows that. Depression, Attention-Deficit Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, and even Asperger’s Syndrome are just words coined by those don’t want to own up to being assholes; they’re excuses people make because they’re too lazy to suck it up. 

I’ve spent a lot of my life believing all of this. In fact, I can’t shake the residual feeling that maybe I am just a lazy asshole. This is easy thought to have, both for me and for those around me, especially because I’m doing really well right now. I didn’t just “snap out of it,” though. I invest a lot of time and money and effort to be this way, and if I want to stay here, I can’t forget that, not even for a minute. 

As far as being an asshole is concerned, manic-depression is an explanation, not an excuse. What’s the difference? Perhaps getting drunk will give us some perspective. A lot of alcohol can give us a lot of confidence, but it can also take away some of our empathy. We do and say a lot of things that would not be said and done otherwise. Some of it is pretty shitty. And if we drink enough, we may not even remember it. These things, however, get done and said by us, and there’s no making them go away. If we get into a fight, or worse, run someone over with our car, it’s our sober ass going to jail. No one ever argues otherwise. Some people can hold their liquor, and some people can’t. Those of us that can’t have a responsibility to control ourselves, even though it can be incredibly difficult. 

So there’s that. As far as coping with life, I know full well that we all have it tough. Maybe I would be happier if I just counted my blessings. I want to. God, I want to. But I can’t. I am physically unable to … Well, that’s not entirely accurate. Sometimes I’m able to. Sometimes I’m not. Day to day, I don’t know what to expect. 

For example, I got mugged at gunpoint once, and for the duration, I thought I was going to die. When it was over, I walked home, called the police, called my girlfriend, had a cigarette, and shrugged off the money I’d lost as a small price to pay for not getting shot. On the other hand, I once watched a braindead-but-awesome action movie I’d seen a thousand times wherein a peripheral character loses his job and his home and dies alone on the streets. I spent weeks full of dread, convinced that this was my ultimate fate. I don’t really have any say in what it’s going to be. 

It goes like this: imagine you’re walking on a patch of ice. Strolling along at an even keel, there are no problems. Folks around you are walking at their own pace. The sun is shining and the birds are singing (shivering, but singing). Unexpectedly, you slip. You’re not sure why—maybe your mind wandered, maybe you caught your foot on a twig or a rock or something, or maybe the wind knocked you off balance. Regardless, you’re lying on your ass on the slick ice, bruised, and every attempt you make at getting back to your feet results in you falling down again. When you finally do get up, the panic fades, and you’re left with embarrassment, wondering why it is that you’re the only one who fell while everyone else can stumble without toppling over. (Answer: everyone is wearing cleats, and yours came out of the box defective.) 

And so now, even though I’m on a mood stabilizer and am exercising like a fiend and keeping up with regular counseling, and even though I feel better and younger than I ever have in my life, I am utterly terrified of feeling. I can’t trust my heart, because it has, in the past, knocked me down onto the ice. It doesn’t look like it, but trust me, it’s a handicap. Like a diabetic, I need take medicine and closely monitor myself if I want to function. Does that make me superior to those who don’t have to work as hard to get out of bed some days? Hell no.  

I can tell you this, though, I got off better than some. Some don’t respond to treatment at all. Some don’t even have the option to get help. Some people spend their whole lives (or, like me, most of it) not knowing that this is a problem with chemistry, not character. I’m lucky; I have insurance, a stubborn wife, and (after a fashion) a good, personally invested psychiatrist who wants to see me working properly. 

It’s not fair that I’m this way—in fact, it really sucks. I don’t know any other way to be. I just am. I’m mentally ill, with all that entails.  

And I’m doing okay. 

*I used the word start for a reason, Argumenty Pants (you know who you are) 

Like a Grateful Dead Guitar Break …

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… it never ends. 

One of the most difficult parts of mental illness is that there is no cure. The talk therapies and medications and even exercise that can stabilize and control emotions are only treatments. Occasionally a sudden, inexplicable, rude reminder of this comes along and gooses me. 

And all I can do is sit down, grit my teeth, and try to breathe it  out. It’ll be better. It always is. 

In My Dreams, It’s Still The Same …

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I hate dating. I hate it with the fiery intensity of ten thousand exploding suns. Dating is a lot like a job interview; it doesn’t matter how good a boyfriend/girlfriend/employee you might potentially be—there is a script, a dress code, and certain dance steps you have to know if you’re going to do it right. The difference between the two is that dating doesn’t require a resume. 

It totally should. Actually, forget the resume. What it needs is a list of references. How cool would it be if you could make some phone calls and find out how you can be expect to be treated? The closest to references any of us gets is the way he or she talks about their exes. If there is consistent badmouthing going on, expect to be badmouthed when you become the ex. It’s a simple formula, but it never fails to astound me how few people put it together. Lord knows I never did. 

It should have been obvious. My habits and quirks were constantly compared to his—and if I ever did or said something similar, I was expected to explain how and why I wasn’t him. It was exhausting, and not once did it occur to me that she would probably be doing the same to some other poor dude or dudette in the future. I wish I’d had an opportunity to speak to those exes, and I wish I had the opportunity to talk to any upcoming boy or girlfriends. I wouldn’t badmouth her, per se; I’d just advise caution. And the potential suitor wouldn’t have to take my word for it, either. There are a number of witnesses who could help build a clear picture of a future with her. Hopefully he or she could learn from our mistakes. Likewise, I wish that my girlfriends could have had access to that kind of information. 

In case you’re wondering: yes, I am talking about a very specific ex. She is one on a short list (a very, very short list) who won’t talk to me anymore, and for the life of me, I can’t tell you why. 

I know that I’ve never really handled a breakup well. What I don’t know is anyone who has. When you’re breaking up, whether you be the breaker or the breakee, not only is it excusable to act like a real fuck-knuckle, it’s expected. In fact, there is no way not to be a fuck-knuckle. If you yell, it’s frightening and stressful. If you cry, it’s pathetic and stressful. If you are calm and rational, it’s coldhearted and stressful. 

Mourning can last for a short period of time, or it can last months, even years. But there comes a point, as in the case with any loss, that you have to take one step and another just to get on with life, because it’s getting on just fine without you. But even then, a little thing, like a song or a stray toothbrush, can send you back into the emptiness his or her absence has left you. 

Then one day, you’re okay again. And if you’re really lucky, you can remember the relationship with fondness, but without wanting to go back. But what do you do if your former partner doesn’t? It doesn’t matter how independent or free-thinking you are; you will always see yourself in the reflection of the people around you. But even if dozens of people think you’re swell, what does it say about you when one person to whom you’d once devoted your soul seems to hate you? 

The time I spent with her was a very, very important period of my life, and it kind of pisses me off that she doesn’t feel the same. Or maybe she does, and my departure is still an open wound. I don’t know, and I’ll never know, and it’s not fair. Sometimes it makes me angry; sometimes it makes me sad; but most of the time, I just don’t think about it. 

Yesterday, she and I weren’t on speaking terms. Tomorrow, we won’t be on speaking terms. Yesterday, I didn’t care that we weren’t on speaking terms, nor will I tomorrow. Before we met, I’d never known she existed. When we were together, I couldn’t imagine life without her. And now, she’s just another chapter. 

Last night, I dreamed that we had lunch. It was nothing special, just an open-air noodle place I’d been to once in Boston. She was so happy, and living a rich, fulfilling life. I never asked if she was in a relationship, and she never told me; there was no romance between us or any yearning for said romance. Our lives had intersected for one brief moment so long ago, and that was it, and that was okay. 

I woke up at peace, but that didn’t last. Instead, I got a little pissed off that this had never occurred in real life. After a little while the anger turned into melancholy. And now, the memory and emotions of the dream have faded into mere facts and images in the back of my mind. I’m grateful for the time I spent with her. I’m grateful for the time I’ve spent with all of my girlfriends, my friends, and now, my wife. Love builds people, and lord knows I’ve had enough of it. 

So I hope my ex is happy, I really do. And I hope that she listens to the bands I’d introduced her to, or reads a book I’d turned her onto, or snickers at a private joke she and I’d once shared; and I hope this makes her smile a little. 

Oh, Bleh …

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I had one of those mornings when I wake up and feel like I don’t have anything to show for my life. None of the stuff in the apartment feels like mine, my job feels fake, and writing takes me nowhere. 

Usually when I feel this way, I remind myself how much flat-out fun I’ve had (ignoring, of course, the crippling depression) and how awesome it is to be married, but that doesn’t seem to be doing the trick today. What makes it really weird is that now, since I am properly medicated, I should be able to shake this easily—more easily, in fact, than before. But not today … 

What I need is to do something useful, and then I’ll feel better.  But first … my day awaits. 

Bleh. 

Sometimes Stuff Just Doesn’t Make Any Sense …

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People make even less sense than that. They don’t owe me answers, or an explanation, or even forgiveness. Likewise, I don’t owe anybody anything, especially forgiveness. 

And that’s okay. 

I have regrets, and that’s also okay. I am thoroughly happy with the way my life has gone so far, but doesn’t mean that I can’t wish I hadn’t sold that comic book; or that I hadn’t said that one thing to that one person at that one crucial moment. Anyone who claims they have no regrets are either lying, or inhuman. 

I’m thinking about this now for a couple of reasons: for starters, it’s the overriding theme of my novella, Clear Spirits, especially as I get into the second half. Also, I’m soon going to be in a place where I will be physically reminded of my mistakes, as well as of my unwillingness to forgive. 

I need to remember that certain things will never be resolved. Loose ends will remain loose; the characters and plot of a prior chapter won’t be the characters and plot of the next chapter; and that things will not be tied up into a neat little bow. I may never forgive them, and I may never forgive myself. 

And I need to know that that’s okay.