My Truth

It's 7:00am on Sunday morning and I want to scream.  I want to scream until my throat gurgles with blood.  I want to punch walls.  I want to escape this fucking unnamable turmoil that lives inside of me.  Sometimes it lies dormant, but at this moment it yearns for expression.

I realize now that the turmoil I feel is not unnamable anymore; it does have a language, even if these words on the screen feel like a gross joke, the far-off ripples of a whirlpool of self-destruction that's trying to suck me down while laughing maniacally about it.  But I won't let it take me, no, fuck that.

This turmoil I have inside of me has a language because other people speak about it and have spoken about it.  Others who look similar to me, and others who seem completely different.  I know this because I took part in the March to End Rape Culture yesterday.

For perhaps an hour yesterday, my voice joined hundreds of others, chanting, marching with people from all walks of life, reverberating off the buildings of Center City into the ears of hundreds or thousands as we commanded the streets, demanding to be heard.  What an empowering thing.

So in the spirit of the March and with the courage to speak my truth still with me, I am going to share my story of sexual abuse.

I am now quite certain that at the age of five or six I endured some sort of sexual trauma.  I don't remember the actual event or events, but I believe it was a teacher, a neighbor or perhaps both, who were the perpetrators.

The insidious thing, and the reason I feel I'll never have the language to exactly describe the deeper feelings around this is that I don't actually remember the event or events.  I was five or six with no conception of what sex actually was.  The events could have been physical in nature or they could have been verbal; I may never know.

What clued me into this is a specific memory of trying to communicate "something" to my parents and receiving a strong reaction of panic and fear.  I said some words to my parents and my parents reacted strongly out of concern.  "What happened?  What happened?  Tell us!!!!"  Incongruence, confusion, panic, fear.  What did I do wrong?

I shut down.  I didn't understand what was happening.  I was trying to say this thing and now my parents are freaking out.  My voice is lost.  I can't say the words.  I don't understand why their reaction to my words is so strong.

Nothing ever came of it.  There was nothing to go on, no words to say to implicate anyone.  Life went on and I was a decent kid.  I didn't act out, I didn't get into trouble.

This memory was buried except in moments of drunkenness.  I'd get drunk in college and start balling on friends' dorm room beds, much to their confusion and consternation, and mine as well.

I apparently shared this secret with a couple of close friends over the years while drunk, that I believed something happened to me as a child, but I have no memory of this.  When sober, this memory didn't exist, it was not accessible.

When I was 27, I had what I affectionately call a psychotic awakening.  And what was the memory that popped up several hours before I lost my shit and landed in a psych ward?  The memory of trying to communicate that something happened to me but having no words to express it.

I recovered from my mental break and life went on.  Until my life unraveled again and I found myself once more on the brink of mental collapse.  And what was there at the bottom of it?  That good old memory, the communication, the strong reaction, the confusion of it.  Except this time when it popped up, I got whiffs of other things.

Walking down the hall hand-in-hand with a teacher in kindergarten or first grade, apparently going to take some sort of test.  Sunlight streaming through the windows of a classroom, alone with someone else, reading Frog and Toad.  There are no faces or names.  Fragments, fragrances.

This time when these memories surfaced, the realization that I had endured sexual trauma was also there.  It's like, wait a second, wait a second, what is this, what is this?  And then it all made sense for a moment:  all of the pain and internal turmoil I couldn't name, it made sense.  It had a name, and that was sexual abuse.  I am a survivor of sexual abuse.  It all added up, the psych ward, the near-psychotic state I was in at the time, churning in my head, all of the evidence, it all clicked.  And then I died.

Everything I knew to be true was a farce.  All of my life from the age of five or six was in some ways false.  I was living under false pretenses.  My frame of reference shifted and I could see clearly, if only for a moment, the truth of my life, the truth that the near-psychotic bed-ridden person with this realization was the same human as the one that at five or six experienced something which no language could describe.  There was continuity.

My life up to that point was disconnected.  A series of disconnected moments.  Drunken reveries the night before turned into dismal hangovers the next day.  There was a free side to me only accessible through substances and then there was the mundane side to me that went to work, but the two were not connected.  The continuity blew through all of that, blew through the walls that separated the disconnected moments and now my 27 year-old self was, underneath it all, the same as my six year old self.  And so my mental conception of myself died, at least temporarily, and my life since that moment has been a back-and-forth wave of transcendence and plunging back into the muck of the mental conception and pain.

While writing this I feel the strong need to exonerate my parents in some way and that doesn't feel quite right.  Exoneration can lead to or be a form denial.  So I don't want to exonerate them, nor do I want to blame them.  I want to simply state what happened to me and my experience of it.  I've talked to my parents about this over the last few years and our relationship has improved, but it has been a difficult process.  At the end of the day, I love my parents and have empathy for their side of this experience.

So who do I blame?  Who do I exonerate?  That's a tough one.  I can't really blame my perpetrators because I don't know who they are.  I don't remember.  That's probably why a lot of the rage I feel is directed at the general level of things, towards society and towards God and existence.  I have a lot of existential grief.  I've also realized that blame doesn't really accomplish anything.

Participating in the March to End Rape Culture and Take Back The Night earlier this year has made me aware of two things.  The first is that we live in a culture that is deeply damaged, that has a rampantly unhealthy attitude towards sex.  The second is that I have a voice to share my truth.  Sharing my truth, living it is the only thing that I can do because I know the other option is denial, which leads to self destruction, which leads to going crazy if taken far enough.

And I haven't even really touched on the shame I've felt and the grief this has caused me.  I'd like to explore the topic of shame in future posts, but for now I will say that if you've experienced some sort of sexual trauma, then you understand what I am speaking of here.  If you've experienced it yourself, or know someone who has experienced it - which, statistically speaking, is likely - then you know.

There was a speaker at the March yesterday, Ronald Savage, a hip hop producer, who recounted his experience of being molested by Afrika Bambaataa.  The message that stuck with me was this: when you're ready to tell someone about what happened to you, then share it when you're ready.

Know that there are others who have experienced sexual trauma; there is strength in that knowing, there is strength in that admission and acceptance.  Like a chant developing in a crowd, one person's voice may not be heard.  But one person steps out and offers their voice and soon others around them add their voices and eventually a hundred, a thousand voices are commanding attention, strong, reverberating, undeniable.  And that's hugely empowering.  That's when change happens.

Don't Quit Your Day Job, But If You Do...

I was sitting at the dining room table one morning three years ago, pre-spring rays piercing the blinds, cat on the windowsill, when a peculiar feeling struck me: I didn't have to work anymore, not in the way society would have me work.  I didn't need this career any longer.  I could pursue music.  It's now or never.

I called my boss immediately, almost on a whim, and explained that I wanted to pursue music and that I was quitting.  The decision to quit came in one instant.  I knew this was the correct path for me, I knew it in my bones, even though the "how" and the "what" of my decision was as opaque as the walls around me.  I also knew it was irrational.

I had no plan whatsoever beyond jettisoning my job.  Life at the time was good on paper: I had a well-paying career, money in the bank, a long-term live-in relationship, a solid collection of instruments, a solid group of friends.  But I was miserable.

My boss, surprisingly, was quite supportive of my decision, relating to me a story of a military general who, upon reaching the shores of enemy territory, decided to burn the boats they'd come in: if there was no chance of going back, then the only option was victory.  I thought it a fitting metaphor and felt inspired by the support.

The job itself was good on paper, but it was soul-sucking, and it seemed at the time to be the reason I couldn't create music: I was so mentally burnt at the end of the day, having ten or so people under me on the org chart, having a demanding client, and traveling every so often, that there were no resources left to expend on creativity.  I had all the equipment I needed to make music and I was in several bands at the time.  And yet, when it came time to sit down and write or record a song, I couldn't seem to do it.  Actually, that's not entirely true: sometimes a creative window would open.  But it felt like the window was either open or shut and I had little control over its state.  When the creative window was open, I was fully aware of the fact that it would soon close and so necessarily raced against the ticking clock to get something out.

One thing I knew could open the creative window were substances.  Alcohol, weed, whatever.  I mean, this is how I would unwind, how I could let go enough to write songs: go to the local bar, get decently drunk, smoke a few bowls, then pick up my guitar.  Most of the songs I wrote during that period were written nearly instantaneously.  If I could get enough of the thing out while the window was open, then the song would exist as-is, as it appeared at the time, with little need for edits.  It was more improvisation than actual songwriting.  Once the window was shut, however, that was it, there was no turning back, no revisiting the song, for the creative spark had vanished.

Writing music was an issue for me at the time, but so was performing.  I couldn't understand why, if I'd been playing music in some form for over half of my life, I couldn't seem to perform in front of others, or even play with others without a huge mental trip.  I could play just fine on my own, but the minute other eyes or ears were in the room, my body shut down.  I couldn't seem to fully control my muscles.  Any eye contact while playing would, and still does, derail me.  

At the time I thought it was my job that was the issue.  Quit my job and I'll have the mental and temporal resources to make and perform music.  Except I soon learned it wasn't the job that was the obstacle: it was myself, some unquantifiable force that was preventing me from expressing my internal music.  And then a series of events happened which blew my life apart.

A few months after quitting, my girlfriend broke up with me and moved out.  And then the drummer in our band died a month or so after that.  And then I seriously broke my dominant arm in a biking accident with no health insurance a couple months after that.  And then I realized a few months later while recovering that I had, in fact, endured some sort of sexual abuse when I was a child.  I felt like I had died.  Everything I knew to be true up to that point was a mirage.  I had zero self-worth.

And it goes even deeper than that.  I haven't quite figured out how to write about this aspect of the last few years, but for now I will say that I discovered a, shall we say, tantric side to my sexuality that, when combined with weed, allows me to enter and maintain profound mental states for weeks at a time.

So here I was, isolated, deeply broken mentally, but also deeply in touch with a more essential part of myself than any words could describe.

I started seeing a therapist and would show up at her office and ramble off coherent but manic theories about what was happening to me, and about life and society.  There was a lot of mental stuff to spin out.  I knew I was on the edge of sanity from prior experience, so I had an idea of how far it could go before I lost my shit.  Somehow I managed to keep my mind enough within the lines, but my therapist said she was "this close" to intervening at one point.

The thing about being in these far off states of mind is, how does one relate to others who have not been there themselves?  I could function enough on paper to pay my taxes and go to the store and do improv comedy, but I couldn't relate to anyone.  I didn't trust a soul.

I recently got the answer to this question through reading "Be Here Now" by Ram Dass.  It turns out there are other humans who have been "there."  I mean, here was a guy, highly educated, successful by the world's standards, who discovered there were other levels to existence by taking psychedelics.  In the first part of the book, Dass describes taking LSD consistently for three weeks straight.  Now here's someone I can relate to.

In his former incarnation, Ram Dass was Richard Alpert, Ph.D. and him and Timothy Leary and another guy wrote a book in the 60s called "The Psychedelic Experience," which is a guide for taking psychedelics based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.  Aha!!  Here it is, here is something that describes what I already know to be true.  I've been to these states, on psychedelics and otherwise, and now there's a language to this stuff I can understand, a map, a progression.

In fact, and maybe this is a fallacious way of looking at the world, but sometimes I tend to think that if you haven't been "there" - out of your head, totally merged with the energy of the larger thing, the beauty and terror of it - then you don't really "know." And if you don't "know," then how can we relate on that deeper level?  And I'm not even claiming I "know" anything here, just that there are levels of consciousness beyond the waking, everyday sort, beyond the drunken sort that this culture values, and, well, that exploring these states opens the famed doors of perception.  And once they're open, society starts seeming crazy and unhealthy and hard to relate to on a general level.

At one point, I started going to AA.  I thought, "Here are people who understand, who know about the other side of things."  Except I found it hard to relate there as well.  I couldn't get past the language of the thing and couldn't seem to connect beyond a certain level that always dealt with the substances and the 12-steps.  I just wanted some fucking human connection, you know?

While I think AA and other anonymous 12-step programs are valuable and helpful to some, the major issue I have with their total abstinence philosophy is that there's a denial of half of yourself, the non-sober half.  This may be for good reason: if you're so deep in the thing that you're destroying or have destroyed your life, then by all means, go to rehab, stop using the substances.  But for me, I understood the issue went beyond the substances; I was already aware of some of the deeper reasons for my destructive behavior.  It's just that in AA you gotta speak the AA language.  And I didn't find the language there to talk about sexual trauma.  I didn't find the language there to talk about my profound experiences of altered states and the value those had and continue to have in my life.

It's like if I know that these other states of consciousness exist within me but outright deny them, label them as "bad" or label myself as "defective," then I'm forever struggling against myself.  If there's anything I learned in the last few years it's that all perspectives are valid and valuable, including perspectives from other humans, including perspectives brought on by altered states of consciousness.

People have shitty things happen to them and end up using substances simply trying to manage the volcano of feelings that erupt inside them daily, trying to deal with circumstances they were thrown into simply by being born, trying to exist in a society that doesn't value those it deems "broken" or "addicted."  And that causes further pain and destruction in their life and for those around them.  And then you go to meetings and learn that you have "character defects" and that the only solution is a higher power you can choose for yourself but that most people seem to call God, and society around you continues to celebrate drunkenness, celebrate violence and greed, and now you're an outcast at social events having to explain that you don't drink, and why is that any of your fucking business anyway?

And so you give up your solution for living, you give up alcohol or whatever your thing is, and learn to live without it.  That part's great, serving others, even living sober, but there's always this part of you that knows it's there, the other states of consciousness.  The alcohol and drugs are simply vehicles.  The consciousness is your own.  It's right in front of you, it is you.  You know these states exists and to deny them is to deny part of yourself.  You know the option to enter these states is always there and that they do provide some value or else you wouldn't desire to put yourself in them in the first place, consequences be damned.  And if that's true, if there is value to these altered states, then there must be a way to obtain the value of these states in other ways, in healthier, directed ways that are not so clearly ambiguous as 12 steps, and that don't necessary prescribe mostly total abstinence from mind-altering substances, excluding caffeine and cigarettes.

Through all of this, the past three years, for all the lack of planning on my part, for following my intuition, for the pain I've felt and endured, I did pursue music.  In fact, it's been my lifeline.  I burned the boats, got deep with life and music was right there with me and for me.  After I broke my arm, I bought a ukulele because it was easier to play than guitar.  That uke and my cat were the only two things I trusted, that I could consistently rely on for a stretch.

And the thing is, as I wake up from the mania and ecstasy and terror and depression of the last three years, the music is still there.  And now I'm finding the strength within myself to share it with others and to play it with others again.  I understand why music is important to me and to society in general.  I understand its power to heal, to communicate, and the role it serves in life.  I have now what I didn't have three years ago the moment I quit my job: purpose.  I've found "The Why."  And you could say that the "why" is my "higher power" - it's the flow of life, it's the energy flowing within me and around me, it's the eye contact with others, the intimacy in sharing myself, it's the connections made.

After all this, I've learned that I am not defective.  I am not broken.  I'm a whole entity unto myself and only then just a connected part of a larger whole.  If I can understand music, then I can understand myself.  And so I will keep doing it, studying music, playing music, sharing it with others, as an offering to the larger thing.  I have a voice, I have been given talents, and so I will contribute what I can.

Two Perspectives on the Flow of Compassion

There have been several moments in my life where I've been keenly aware that the energy I put into the environment, the outside world, is reflected back at me, transformed in some way.

I'll share two of these experiences with you, both profound and life-changing.  The first involves a panic state and is contrasted by the second, which was and continues to be a state of love.

A couple years ago, I was visiting my best friend in DC for the weekend and had, for various reasons, been imagining myself as a single point of consciousness, a unity.  At some point (pun intended), while talking with my friend, I achieved that goal; I became a single point of consciousness, squeezed down and compact in the present moment and time.  I could still talk and move, see my body, but my body was only an external representation, the complex shape, of the singularity of light that was me.

It felt like all of my motions were not my own - that is, I had no independent existence.  I felt that the earth and the universe itself was in perfect balance and that the random unconscious scratching of an itch or the shifting of my body was the result of shifting around me, of my internal motions, and the connected motions of my friend, and the motions of people around me I couldn't see.  Everyone on earth was all shifting together in perfect harmony, silently mirroring each other in infinite, but related ways.  My individual self, this body, was a discrete, yet whole and continuous part of that larger continuous wave.  I felt like I was a coral in a clear blue sea.  Almost motionless, just gentle swaying of energy.

I woke up the next morning and my operating system was clear.  My mind had no content.  I was.  Then I was light.  Then I was the one seeing the light.  Then that light was differentiated.  Over the course of a couple of hours, I saw my mind construct its view of the world from nothing, the absolute beginning, from stillness to motion, from the gross to the granular, in a fractal, recursive, type of way.  I was terrified with joy.

Walking to the Metro that morning with my friend, we came upon some, for lack of a better word, strangers walking toward us, just run-of-the mill people you'd see everyday and walk past without a thought.  These people were aware of me and I was of them.  And then I saw the grid of my life as the literal configuration of other people within space and time, relative to my own position and motion in the moment, moment by moment.  And then the grid rotated and I felt my life take a different direction; I was walking at a slightly different angle through the grid, through the array of people and their motions and paths that present themselves to me in daily life.  The relative change in my position changed my connection to them.

Once my friend and I boarded the Metro, I could feel the last fragrance of the weekend on the passengers' eyes and the heavy fear of the nation in the headlines of the papers, as if the words and the strangers were inconsequential but the feeling was everything.  The people could have been anyone, the words, anything, appearing, as needed, upon looking.  It's not the words or the bodies that count, but the underlying energy of it all.  The single motion was flowing and I was a part of that in a continuous way.

To be merged is to be connected.  There is a flow to life, and if I am fully merged with life, connected with it, then there's just life, there's no individual, discrete "me."  There are eyes being contacted and heads turning, arms moving, people walking, all in one motion and each individual consciousness affects the overall flow and space of it.

We eventually made it to Union station and my friend and I said our goodbyes; I was now on my own in some sort of 4th Dimensional space.

I grab a snack and move to the gate.  I feel that I have created this world at some point in the way, way distant past.  After all, I just saw the whole creation of life from nothing a few hours ago.  I am God in totality and in continuity, but at this moment only a discrete portion of that energy.

I look into the eyes of a homeless woman and feel the depths of her despair.  I can't bear it, I look away.  I cannot recognize the reflection of my despair in her.  I feel responsible.  I have created this mess at some point.  The enjoyment of my life is her despair.   These are the types of thoughts that send you to the crazy house, I know this.

A line forms around me at the gate for my train back to Philly.  People move as separate, discrete particles of consciousness in the continuity of it all, continuously gliding from all directions to stick to the line forming around me, or to continue past, pulled by some other destination.

The line forms around *me*.  I am the center of my experience, the experiencer, that's what "I" am.  Yet I am aware that others are separate, also at the center of their experience and its all interconnected.  The only difference between me and the others in this moment is in terms of mental structures and corresponding physical orientation and motion in space and time, and in physical form.  We are all collectively the experience and the experiencing.

I am now the infinite loop between the past and the future.  I wrap back around myself from the past, over myself, through a dimension outside of space and time, around the present moment, and pull myself from the future.

There was another time I had this flow-of-life realization.  I was on an escalator on the Metro platform a few years earlier, right before I took a sojourn to psychotic awareness.  Standing with my friend, a different one, I turned my head and saw a continuous flow of energy move up the escalator, a flowing of and within the motions of the people around me, the turning of their heads, the scratching of their noses, the shifting of their bodies in response to the wave.  Now, at the time, I thought I had caused this wave, I felt like God but self-conscious of it.  I moved and it caused a ripple effect.  And in some ways I was correct.  But I was missing the other side of the thing, that the people behind me on the escalator were part of the flow and that I was part of the flow as well and that their motions affected mine as much as mine affected theirs, just standing and talking with my friend.

If I take a look at my total consciousness, all of the states I've experienced up to now, I can see that there's the phase of being aware of external reality, awake as I am now typing this out.  And then there are various states within that phase - happy states, joyful states, miserable states.  And then, contrasting with awakeness is sleep and its various states.  If I put both phases together, I can see the whole wave of my life, all of my awakenesses and sleeps, and then there is continuity.  I can trace my consciousness back through the day I was born - I mean, I can see that it's all connected, I can feel that.  And even before this body's birth, well, I can see that that's continuous as well.

If life is continuous so far as I can see, a flow in physical space and through time, then this means my individual body motions now are connected with the motions of the bodies of every human back through time, in a very real and literal way.  Eggs and sperm.  Eggs and sperm.  Motions affecting motions.  Internal motions affecting external ones and back and forth.  Some motions have names.  Processes exist, but motions are motions at the fundamental level.  And then there are the larger motions of the earth, and the galaxy, and so on.

All actions, all motions, occur in the present moment.  So, as an individual, if my actions are not aligned with the flow of the moment, then I have some internal energy curving back towards myself and within myself, a swirl, an eddy, a whirlpool.  My muscles stiffen, I'm always on the lookout for the end.  I can get stuck in these swirls and then my internal reality affects and affirms and influences my external reality which reflects a transformed version of itself back to me and the swirl grows faster and deeper.  This is how I understand karma.

For a long time I believed I was worthless and couldn't fathom why my internal music had value in the external world.  I acted out this belief in manifold and myriad ways.

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Fast forward a couple years to this past weekend.  It felt like a confluence of forces acted to totally break apart my mental conception of life and love.

I began focusing on compassion.  Like, what if I looked at myself with total and absolute compassion and love?  What if all of the motions I've tried so hard to control, by virtue of hiding shame and by virtue of fearing life, are actually OK?  What if I looked at all of my motions in the present moment with love?  All of my motions are OK, past, present, and future.  That includes my thoughts.  That includes my physical motions.  And what's more, I can see that there is a link between the two.

There's now a freedom.  I am free to move, free to express, free to connect.  I had a moment in Clark Park this weekend, amongst beloved friends, where I just let myself dissolve into the thing.  The music I was playing was offered up to the general flow of the sounds and motions in the park.  And it just deepened and deepened.

It's the same flow I'd seen years earlier in DC, but now I was connected to it.  If I can look at all of myself with compassion and love, then anything that enters my consciousness, which includes other humans, will be met with compassion and love.  I am now connected to the flow.  All actions are as they should be.

If I can love and accept the shame about myself and my humanity, if I can look at it, I am no longer afraid to look at others.  The consciousness looking back at me, the light in the eyes of those I am connected to, the flow of people in the park, the movement of a fly in my room, it's all the same light, the same movement as I have inside, the same light that's looking at myself with compassion and love.  There's no reason to be afraid.  I am simply part of the flow.

I went to a benefit dinner on Monday, afterglowing from the weekend, and was in a state some would call in Pentecostal Christian circles being "drunk in the spirit" - I've been there before, much younger, after speaking in tongues, so I recognized this for its clarity and joy and communion with others.  It's the joyful flow, the inclusion, the connection, the offering of food, the tears that happen hearing a Native American spiritual being sung, the embarrassment, the feeling uncomfortable being so physically close in a tiny room, and the absolute acceptance of all of that.  And the fall from that state as well.  If I am a filter of the larger thing, a transformer of the larger energy, the overall wave, then acceptance, complete acceptance of the moment is the valve that lets it all flow.  And behind that is peace and love and compassion.

A Dream of a Dark Humanity

Last night I had one of those dreams that felt cleansing, where my subconscious was able to process some of things that have been marinating below the surface for a while.  I woke up feeling positive, feeling love and acceptance.  Most days, I have not opened my eyes in the morning feeling this way.

One of the characters in the dream subscribed to a philosophy of which I cannot remember the name, but had "Greek" in the title.  So I pulled up dream Wikipedia to learn more about this philosophy.  The gist of the article was that humanity has a dark side, that there's no way around this.  It's only through accepting this dark side that there's any chance of finding peace and happiness.  This dream character had accepted their dark side and was now preaching the gospel, so to speak.

Later, I found myself at a bar drawing a colorful blue and white scene on a large piece of paper.  Those around me remarked how dark the image was and upon closer inspection I see there's some horrible stuff going on: torturous, demonic types of things involving pool cues in places they're not usually put.  But this doesn't scare me at all.  In fact, I feel OK with what I've drawn and say this aloud to my dream companions.  And they seem OK with it, too.  It's just an image and, well, we all have a dark side after all.

I've been struggling with this a lot in waking life, recently.  Humanity just feels so dark and horrible.  I mean, we have and we do some really shitty, horrible, unimaginable things to each other - consistently, on a daily basis.  It doesn't help that the news media is tuned into this frequency.  It doesn't help to constantly read about this stuff on Facebook 30 times a day, either.

But, for me, it's more than that.  I've realized recently that I'm particularly sensitive to peoples' energies.  Some would call this being empathic.  What I mean by this is that I can literally feel what someone else is feeling just by seeing them for an instant at a distance, or by passing them on the sidewalk, or even catching a sideways glimpse of their "eye energy field."

I was out to dinner Friday night with a good friend and we were sitting outside.  Streams of people were passing by and I could literally feel the agressiveness of a lot of folks (mostly male) as they walked by.  That's how the world feels to me:  aggressive and uncaring at best, and absolutely horrid and hellish most of the other times.

I mentioned this to my friend later and was surprised and relieved to hear that he felt the same way, that he could feel those things, too, as we were dining.  It's great to be able to relate to people on this level because for so long I've felt alone in it and at times, crazy.

The fact is that as a white male I don't have to deal with a lot of the things that other groups do have to deal with on a daily basis.  I can walk down the street and be pretty sure that no one will harass me.  I'm not going to be discriminated against or killed because of the color of my skin.

But the thing is, I can see and feel that these are realities for a lot of people and it kills me inside.  I can see that there are a lot of atrocious things happening in the world right now and it scares me to death.  Donald Trump is fucking running for president.  The climate is getting more and more fucked up as time progresses.  It doesn't take any special skills sit down and look at the state of things and see that what we have going on is not sustainable.  We're dealing with finite resources and eventually those resources will run out.

And, well, forget the environment for a second.  We as humans treat each other horribly on both the micro and macro levels.  The Dakota Pipeline issue really underscores how power and money are what drive things and how people with that money and power really don't care about other humans.

Brock Turner gets three months in jail for raping a woman who will feel the effects of that "20 minutes of action" for the rest of her fucking life.  It's absolutely insane.

And, yet, there's still part of me that's like, well Brock Fucking Turner is a person, too.  The pipeline building fuckers are also humans.  How does one reconcile that fact, that there are horrible things done to other humans by humans.

It feels like maybe I got some sort of resolution or answer to that question in my dream.  And that is to accept that humans are horrible to each other, it's a baseline fact.  Humanity has a dark side.  I have a dark side by virtue of being human.  To deny my own dark side in some way contributes to the overall denial of humanity's dark side.  And to deny these things only gives them power.

I often wish I didn't have to feel so many things.  I wish I wasn't so damn sensitive.  I'm a fucking sponge sometimes.  I can be feeling perfectly fine one minute, then go outside and walk around the block and now I'm feeling all the anxiety and fear and whatever that is the bedrock of this fucking culture.  And then it becomes hard to differentiate what I'm feeling and what I've picked up from others.

But, as my therapist says, and what I'm slowly coming to recognize, this is also my superpower.  I haven't really become comfortable with it yet, or figured out how to use in a positive way, but it's there.

I guess if there's one thing I'm absolutely sure of, it's that I don't want to hurt anyone.  I can fucking feel the pain of the world just by walking down the street.  I can feel the aggression and the hatred.  And I don't want to contribute any more to the negative pool of humanity that's swirling itself faster and faster around the drain of self-annihilation.

I think about it this way: if the sum total of human suffering is composed of the suffering of each individual who is alive at this moment, then by suffering myself, I am contributing to the overall total.  So the only thing I really can do here is to choose not to suffer myself.  If I contribute less to the suffering footprint of humanity, if I can break my own cycles, then maybe that'll have a small impact on the overall picture.  Maybe if enough people can do this, things might look up.  Maybe that's naive.  What other choice do I have?

It's fucking slow and fucking painful and very imprecise, but I will not be complicit in adding to human suffering, as much as I can manage.  I will own my dark side, because it does exist.  The kingdom of hell is as much inside of me as the kingdom of heaven.

Be a Fucking Man

A few years ago, a few months after I quit my job, the drummer in my band died suddenly in a tragic hiking accident.  I went to his funeral and saw Ben laying there in the casket, all made up and posed, but stiff and lifeless.  That was certainly his body there - I could identify it as being Ben in terms of form, but that was not the same "person" or "entity" or "energy" or whatever you want to call it, that I'd seen a few weeks earlier.

In that moment, seeing Ben in the casket, I realized that I am not my body.  I can certainly identify with it, I can grow my hair long if I want, I can grow myself fat or thin, I can change its appearance any number of ways and its appearance certainly has changed as I age, but my body didn't exist before 1982 and it certainly won't exist after 2082, barring some sort of technological revolution.

So, it's clear to me that I am not my body.  Do I inhabit my body?  And if so, who is the "I" that is inhabiting "my" body.  Here's where I think language is a tricky thing.  Language, English, anyway, is subjective.  There is always a subject and an object, a related duality, and here I am both the subject and the object.  So to try to directly explain this, well, English doesn't seem to provide an easy means of describing this duality without having it sound weird or woo-woo.

I am not my body and I don't have a body and I don't inhabit my body, because my body and I are not separate.  They are a continuum, a spectrum.  Eventually, this body will dissipate and the energy that animates it will return to the larger whole of the energy that animates the larger things in this universe.  At that point, I will still not be my body nor will I inhabit it but there will also not be an "I" to talk about that.

That's the thing that kills me, sometimes, is the notion that there is something that comes after this or other than this.  And by "this" I mean exactly that, "this."  "This" that is happing right now, that is always happening right now, that will never not happen right now.  The present moment.  I conceptualize "this" in relation to "me" visually as follows:

Prior to my birth I was not alive in the physical human context.  After I die I will also not be alive in the physical human context.  In the middle I am alive and I am a human.  That, to me, feels evident and obvious and logical.

And yet, I was brought up to believe there's something after this.  That there's a linear progression towards some other place that's not this.  But this is all I've known in life.  And prior to this, there was no identity.  "I" was undifferentiated from all of this and after I die I will return to being undifferentiated "this."

So, really, to me, that's what identity is: it's differentiation in form.  I, that is the energy that animates me, in this journey from birth to death, form an identity with things, objects and concepts over time.  I can look at my body and say, "that's me."  I can look at my family and say "that's me, too."  I can have a career, I can have a partner, I can buy a house, own a car, I can believe anything I damn well please, all of which is added to the big sticky ball that is "me."

But, again, what is "me?"  "Me" is a concept.  I, me, mine didn't exist 34 and change years ago and it won't exist 100 years from now, so why do I spend so much time worrying about "me?"  Why is it that I feel so threatened when something I identify with is threatened?

Of course, that begs the larger question in my mind: what is it that "I" identify with in the first place?  What does my big sticky ball of "me" contain?

Well, I can say that I don't have a national identity.  I am American by birth and nothing else.  I, like Krishnamurti, can see the harmful affects of national pride and national identity, and I've never felt any of that and I don't plan on starting now.

I can look at my family and see that I don't have a strong identity there, either.  I mean, I like my family and they are very supportive and they love me, but I don't have loads of family stories or cute nicknames for my grandma or any of that.  To me, my family identity is my genetic identity.  I've inherited DNA and some attitudes and beliefs and all of this makes it nice to go visit once in a while.  But I don't identify with my family name and don't feel a strong desire to pass on my genes, at least at this point.

Speaking of names, I am not my first or middle names either.  For all intents and purposes, on a day-to-day, living-in-society basis, yes, I identify with my name.  That is, I will put it down on government forms and will respond if someone calls it out, but I didn't have my name before I existed, so that name is ultimately just a sound and some curves on a piece of paper, at the end of the day.

So what about sex, gender?  I can look down and see I have external reproductive organs that allow me to pee more easily standing up.  I, by this point, have a pretty good idea of how my junk functions and all that.  But beyond the physical manifestations, what does that even mean?

That is to say, what does it mean to "be a man" or "be a woman."  It's a pure fucking construct.  That is to say, when someone says "be a man," what they really mean is "be tough" or "don't show emotion" or maybe even "don't act gay."  Which is horrible, in my view.

To identify with gender really means to act and dress in certain ways.  This makes sense to me in some regards because to fulfill a gender role means to know your role in society.  You know the rules and everyone else knows the rules, so you know how to act and other people expect you to act in that way and as long as the rules are followed, everything is fine and we're all comfortable.

But that's horrible because it's stifling.  It stifles the true self and it causes suffering.  I have a dick but, like my name, I don't particularly identify with being "male."  That is to say, I will check off the "M" box on government forms if I have to, but I don't identify with what it traditionally means to be a "man" in this culture.  I believe it's this toxic masculine attitude of being tough that is one of the things that kinda fucked me up emotionally and that hurts a lot of other people, males and females alike.

All of this is in recognition of the fact that I am at this moment both this body and the energy that animates it.  That energy has polarities, a yin and yang, a soft and hard, a masculine and feminine.  Some days I feel more of one than the other.  After I run, it feels good to growl at the top of my lungs and see if anyone looks.  Recently, it's felt good to paint my nails.  I can look down and see that these hands are mine, that I have a choice with what I do with them.  Most days I don't feel tough.  I cry a lot.  I like soft energy.

And, of course, when I'm talking about identity here, I'm talking about the deeper side of things, the deepest side of things.  I've looked very deeply into myself the last three years, mostly because I didn't have a choice, and I've had many moments of "I am."  Moments of pure self, untainted by concepts and expectations and all that.  Ecstasy.  I exist and I am aware of the energy in my body and of my body itself.  I am aware of the dual nature of the energy and that the masculine and the feminine are intertwined and not separate from each other.

There are higher-level concepts of privilege and things that could be brought into play here as well (i.e. sure, maybe it's easy as an outwardly seeming white cis male to say some of this stuff because of the privilege society affords and the knowledge that that privilege is always there to hide in), but that's a different discussion for a different time.

At the end of the day, I think my strongest identity is a traumatic one.  I identify with trauma to the extent that when that identity is threatened, I will defend it with my life.  Love and trauma can't co-exist, so when I'm offered love or compassion, my automatic response is to reject it.  If I am not living in trauma-land then where am I living?  How do I identify myself if not for pain and suffering and deep feelings of unworthiness?

I've realized recently, through writing about and sharing my experiences, and with other life changes, that the trauma identity doesn't serve me any longer.  But what else is there?  If I lose my identity, how do I know myself?

But who am I kidding?  I've lost my identity before.  I've experienced ego death so many times, what's one more?  Except this time must be slow, deliberate, and conscious.  And it must include other people in its deconstruction.

It's just that I find it incredibly hard to relate to people sometimes.  It's partially, I think, because this American society identifies and values so many things that I do not.  It's hard to exist in a culture that feels sick and superficial to me.

But what I have noticed is that when I've opened myself up to being vulnerable with others, with sharing myself, the response has been mostly positive.  Nothing terrible happened.  I felt warm fuzzy feelings.  I felt love.  Love is something that's been historically hard for me to allow in.  But fuck it, just because I've historically been closed off to love doesn't mean I need to continue to be.  And, really, I don't see any other option if I want to continue to be alive.

On the Previous (Brief Psychotic) Episode...

One of the reasons I wanted to start this blog and one of the reasons I like a semi-public forum for my thoughts is that I find it so hard to share myself - the personal side of myself - with others in face-to-face or even direct online communication.  It turns out that this is necessary to establish deeper connections with others, which would explain why I don't feel like I have many deep connections in my life, or at least why I don't actively foster those connections with those I do have in my life.

I liken it to a bed of nails.  Talking with someone one-on-one feels like I'm laying on a single nail: piercing, vulnerable, painful.  But to talk or share with a group of people is like laying on a bed of nails - the more nails there are, the more the piercing vulnerability is distributed; I'm less likely to be hurt.  This could explain why I've always felt more comfortable on stage playing music or performing theater or improv than I have talking to people before or after a show.

So in that spirit, I've decided to share something of myself with the lovely bed of nails that is the Internet - something that, it turns out, is a huge part of my development, my identity, and a huge part of my psyche.  It is not something I talk about because, well, these things are difficult to share with others.  These things are not something that just come up in conversation.  I've been in group therapy for a year or more now and I still haven't really talked about this there, in that safe space, beyond mentioning surface level details.

About seven years ago I found myself out to lunch with a work colleague and close friend at the time.  For the weeks leading up to that point I had been consuming massive amounts of coffee.  My reasoning at the time was that I wanted to understand why caffeine suddenly, a few years earlier, started giving me big anxiety and panic attacks.  I'd been able to drink coffee successfully until one day I couldn't.

When I started drinking it again, it was intentionally, with the attitude that I will learn to get over the anxiety, that I deserve to drink coffee as much as anyone else, that by delving into the anxiety full-force, I could conquer it.  After all, I'd managed to quit smoking cigarettes around that time and had just started dating someone I'd pined after for years.  I felt empowered.

So I took the extreme route and drank up to ten cups a day for a period, no joke.  Then I would come home from work all wound up and panicky, maybe smoke some MJ, and explore full blown panic-land alone in my apartment, terrified at my palpitating heart but stoic and determined to resolve the dread and anxiety I was feeling.  I'd recline for hours on my Lay-Z-Boy while my heart spun in my chest.

I did this for several weeks and after a while I stopped sleeping.  Then came the day I went to lunch with the colleague and something made me snap.  We were at Chilli's and I think the Red Hot Chilli Peppers came on the radio and maybe it was the subtle coincidence of that or maybe it was something she said, but I snapped.  When she got up to use the restroom, I ran out of the place, through a local supermarket where I left my phone in the cereal isle, out through the store room and made my way up a hill behind the complex.

As I made my way up the hill, I systematically removed all my clothes.  I then took my wallet and systematically emptied all its contents.  When I reached the top, I was having full blown delusions about heaven and hell, God and the Devil.  I believed the government hatched a plan to nuke it's own citizens but that I had foiled their plot by running out of the restaurant.  So I had to rid myself of everything the system gave me in order to remain invisible.  The answer, it seemed, was nature.

To protect myself from the impending blasts, I rubbed leaves all over myself, plugged all my openings with them (yup, all of them).  I found out later, the hard way, that those leaves were poison ivy / oak / sumac.

On the other side of the hill was a large quarry where active work was being done - I could hear the rhythmic pounding of the machines.  Somehow I managed to make my way down the rock face to the bottom of the quarry where a large excavator rolled by and the driver saw my nakedness with a terrified look on his face.  An ambulance eventually came and I ended up in a psych ward.

I've written a much more vivid, first hand account of these events and maybe I'll share that one day, but for now, for this sharing, I find myself in a psych ward, out of my mind.

The thing is, I can answer all questions correctly: who is the president, what's the date, logical type questions.  I know how my reactions and responses will elicit responses in you, so I know exactly what to say and how to say it to get myself out of this bind.  But nothing else makes sense.  I see patterns everywhere.  I see that everything is essentially the same, complex transformations of some more basic element.

When I first get to the ward, a guy comes up to me, real close, and shows me the bandages around his wrists.  He tells me excitedly that he tried to kill himself.  I'm a newcomer, I'm a star, there's a whole group of people surrounding me.

There were a lot of things I experienced in the psych ward that a lot of people, if I told them, might be apt to dismiss as hallucinations on account of my eventually diagnosed "brief psychotic episode."  I saw doctors one day turn into janitors the next.  I saw complex formulas appear on packs of gum.  Even the fucking doctor assigned to me was wearing the same fucking shirt design as the one I'd discarded on the hill.

All of these things would be classically dismissed as hallucinations of a crazy person or maybe meaningless coincidences.  Fine, easy enough on paper.  But this was my experience, and these things had and have meaning to me.  What I saw and what I experienced were not mere hallucinations, distortions of some more true, objective reality.  What I saw and experienced was more real than this day-to-day bullshit most of us live.  I was tapped into another realm of existence, one better described by quantum physics and probability than by psychology and mechanistic certainty.

I was in the ward for a week or so, eventually being transferred to a higher functioning unit filled with alcoholics and people who recounted their traumatic stories all day on loop.

After I got out, I spent some time at my parent's house and eventually went back to work part-time, then full time.  And the most painful part of this whole experience?  It's not the psych ward itself or being crazy, it's that all of this had zero consequence, save a few thousand in medical bills.  It's like nothing ever happened.

I returned to work and no one talked about it (at least to me).  Like nothing ever happened.  My phone was returned to me, found by the owner of a local burrito joint I frequented.

That's the basic theme: no one talked about it and nothing ever happened.  Who really wants to go "there" right?  And I can't blame anyone for not wanting to broach those subjects.  Or maybe I'm enacting a confirmation bias and people did inquire and I was the one who didn't want to talk about it.  But, then, how could I talk about it?  Who has the language to accurately describe this stuff, the actual experience of it, when you're in it?

This is not to say I didn't feel supported, because I did and I was.  But that's how it felt to me, like it never happened.  Even my freaking girlfriend at the time, whom I had dated for only a few months before that episode, stayed with me.

And so that's why I'm sharing this with you now, you beautiful bed of nails.  Because if you're reading this and you feel like you're crazy or you've been in a psych ward, know that you are not crazy.  It's the world around us that is crazy.  It is our culture's inability to properly manage mental illness that's crazy.  It's all the fucking pills we take to calm ourselves down, the socially-accepted massive amounts of alcohol we consume to socialize and connect with others, and most especially the things we don't say for shame and fear of reproach that makes us crazy.  If there was less stigma about mental illness, then I believe mental illness would start dissipating on its own.  I believe it is what we are hiding out of fear and shame that drives us nuts.

So fuck this fear and shame based culture; I refuse to live that way any longer.  I will be my true self.  I will learn to speak my truth despite the perceived consequences.   I will learn to share myself and connect with others.  I will learn to receive and give love.  I will learn to live a compassionate life if it kills me.

Of Hierarchies and Holarchies

I was talking last night with a good friend and towards the end of the conversation the topic shifted towards college and employment.

He related a story of a woman he knows who, without a college degree, started working at KFC as a server and eventually worked her way up to the corporate office.  She started at the bottom and worked her way up to the top.

I can relate to this.  I left college halfway though and started working at a temp agency, which had me calling dentists as part of a product recall for a dental company.  That turned into a full-time job with the company, which turned into a job at the corporate office, which turned into the full-time consulting gig I eventually left, more or less, to pursue music.

The idea of working your way "up" - that you start at the bottom somewhere and work your way higher in an organization and / or in life and status, that's the basis of "The American Dream" isn't it?  To make something of yourself from nothing.

It wasn't long before the conversation turned to politics and the thought, "well, the system is fucked up" popped into my head, right before my friend verbalized it.  But what about the (specifically US) system is fucked up?  That's a complicated question that has 320 million answers.

This whole idea of there even being a bottom and a top is the basis of a hierarchy.  A hierarchy as defined by a quick google search is  "a system or organization in which people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority."

Reading that definition makes me cringe.  The idea that people or groups are ranked feels unethical and seems to me to be at least partially responsible for some of the toxic attitudes and behaviors that exist in this country.  All I need to do is open up my Facebook feed and I can read any number of articles or posts that make it clear that there are those who are in authority, those with power, and those who are not in authority and who suffer because of it.  It was only recently that I realized my place in the hierarchy as a white cis male...and subsequently realized how that's a contributing factor to why I'm so emotionally messed up sometimes.  But that's a different discussion.

In a ranked system, as above, so below, in order for certain individuals to have power or authority over others, there must exist others who have less or no authority.  In other words, the authority of some is defined be the lack of authority of others.  Both must exist simultaneously in order for the dichotomy to exist, as each defines the other.

This works great for capitalism, right?  My product is better than yours, it's differentiated in the market and so it has value.  Kraft mac & cheese is better than the generic brand by virtue of the generic brand even being called "generic."

Ranking systems help us sort out the big mess that is life, how we make sense of things.  But when we're ranking people, that's a funny thing because, at the end of the day, at the fundamental human level, what makes you so different than me?  Take two random people, a fortune 500 CEO and a homeless person, and put them on a desert island.  What's the difference between them?  Both are living, breathing human beings that eat and shit and have the same capacity for love and the same capacity for suffering and in the end have the same basic needs.  Outside of the system they are the same.  Within the system, they have a rank, which reinforces the system itself.  And where does the system exist?  On paper in the form of laws and regulations, certainly, but I would say it exists even more so in the minds of the people itself, in their attitudes and beliefs about themselves and where they fit into the model.  Racism doesn't necessarily exist on paper but it is certainly alive and well in this country.  So to me, the collective human mind is an operating system whose programming instructions are distributed amongst everyone in the form of attitudes and beliefs, which drive behavior.

I said to my friend, "You know, I read an article someone posted on Facebook the other day about how things are changing, how millennials are fed up with the old model and how the internet is connecting and changing things."  That resonated with me.  I can feel it and I believe a lot of other people can feel it too: things are changing.  They must change or our species will eradicate itself.  But what must change?  The change must be in how we organize the world, how we think about it and our place in it, and especially how we view time.

The way I see it, the most fundamental thing we must deal with is ourselves, which is to say human beings.  On a day-to-day basis, all you ever really deal with are humans - whether that be other humans or yourself.  So why don't we have a more human-centric model, if all there really is, practically speaking, are other humans?  Why does so much hatred exist in the world?  Why do we hate ourselves?  Why can't we see that the other is not separate from self, that they are one complete, connected whole?  And when I say we, I mean I struggle with this as well.

I've spent a lot of time getting deep into the study of music over the past three years.  One thing that became immediately clear to me early on is that music is circular, it is periodic.  That is to say, if I play the note "C" on a piano and play all of the other keys sequentially going in either direction, eventually I'll play another "C" that sounds essentially the same as the original "C."  And yet, the language of music, excepting the circle of fifths, obfuscates the true periodic, circular nature of music.  Instead, it's presented linearly.  The lines on a page of music are, well, lines.  The piano is linear and hierarchically organized, with the white keys given preference, and the key of "C" (and related modes) having preference.  Notes start at "A" and end at "G."

Linear thinking and hierarchies go hand-in-hand.  But why all this linear thinking?  It might sound sound strange to bring religion into this now, but I view the Christian cross, the one that is intended to symbolize Jesus' death and resurrection and all that, as almost more a symbol of linear thinking than anything else.

Whether you believe in Christianity or not, the fact is that the cross is a pair of lines that, well, cross each other.  Lines bread hierarchies.  And where does one of the largest and most historically entrenched hierarchies exist?  The Catholic church.  I don't intend this as a criticism of Christianity or Catholicism, but more to point out the hierarchy of it.  I am criticizing hierarchies and linear thinking.

We think of time as linear.  There's a past and a future and they never connect.  But what in this universe is not circular?  Galaxies swirl.  Even the straightest of roads exist on the curved surface of the earth.  The fucking earth is a sphere that goes around the sun in a circular (OK, elliptical) orbit.  We come back to the same point in space in relation to the sun once a year.  It is the same, but it is different.  It is another "C" that is distinct from the first and yet it's the same "C," to use the music metaphor from above.

So what is the alternative?  Anarchy is one thing that comes to mind, but anarchy is still an "archy" that defines itself by the absence of organization or authority.  In that regard, in my mind, it's just the other side of the hierarchy coin.

Is there a way of organizing that takes into account both the part and the whole, that doesn't have linear ranking but recognizes each part as both a piece of and reflection of the whole and a whole in and of itself?  After all, I can think of myself as having many different levels that have existence in and of themselves but are dependent and interrelated to all other levels without preference.  There's this mind with these ideas, this body sitting here typing them out, the organs and various systems that keep my body operating, the cells that make up those organs, molecules, atoms, etc.  Not to mention the environment in which this body exists, the earth, the air, the sun, other humans.  It's all one connected whole.  All of it is necessary for me to function and exist.

It turns out there is such a method of organization, called a "holarchy."  Where a hierarchy is a linear ranking system with clearly defined tops and bottoms, a holarchy is more like a fractal.  Zoom into any level in a holarchy and you're looking at a whole complete part that reflects both the larger and smaller related wholes.

So how does this apply to humans?  Well, this is where I falter, because I don't know.  Humanity is large and messy and historically violent.  And I can't claim to have any of the answers.  All I know is it seems clear to me that the current way of thinking about ourselves is not working - because the operating system I've been given doesn't work for me - and we need to expand our understanding of what the fuck this spinning ball of life is, beyond traditional concepts and ways of seeing things.  I feel like we're close to some sort of shift, maybe.  But who knows.

I've driven myself crazy thinking about all this stuff and have realized that I need to apply this obsession of deep thinking to something more practical and manageable, lest I wither in a big ball of anxiety and dread.  So I've been looking at music and looking at it very deeply and looking at it without existing language as much as possible.  That it to say, the challenge I've given myself is this: can I produce a theory of western music that doesn't use existing terminology or language as its basis, that doesn't use ratios to describe intervals, that doesn't rely on complex math, and especially doesn't organize things hierarchically?  I believe I've found a way, and that way is to fundamentally never lose sight of the fact that music is circular and that each note, each chord is always played in relation to other notes and other chords.  I believe I can describe music holarchically.  And, I don't know, maybe I think that if we replace notes and chords with humans and societies, maybe a theory like this can have some wider applications.

Until then, you'll find me drawing simple geometric shapes and playing guitar, trying to figure out what all this is for.

The Why

This is my fourth attempt at a blog.  The first I programmed myself in high school before the word "blog" even existed.  It was mostly teenage ranting.  I started my second after I decided to quit my job and pursue music.  That quickly fizzled out when I realized I had no idea what I was doing with my life.  I started my third after six months of sobriety, after a series of life events blew my world apart.  I traded in that blog for more dependency.  And here's the fourth one, 3+ years into the path I chose for myself, the only real decision I feel I've made for myself, a path that's still mostly and dark and murky and fraught with daily struggles.

I thought it was my full-time job that was holding me back creatively, that quitting would free me up to do what I really wanted: create music.  While I have managed to do some of that, the past three years have been mostly a direct confrontation with myself and all the swirling patterns that exist within me and my culture.  

One thing that has been lacking in my life is a sense of purpose.  If I only knew where I was going, why I am existing now, then maybe the obstacles wouldn't seem so huge and impossible to overcome.  Without clear purpose, intention, the core "why" of what I'm doing, everything becomes an obstacle and I'm left overwhelmed by seemingly simple life-things, frozen and unable to connect with others.  

If there's one thing I identify with it's feeling powerless, that I don't have a voice.  So the purpose of this blog is to give myself a voice, a semi-public outlet for what I'm feeling and what I'm struggling with. Because sharing my true feelings directly with most people is too painful.  Because I don't trust people with emotions.  I don't trust my emotions.  

It's when I need to share myself the most that I hide away and lose myself in the murk, able to see other humans but unable to connect.  And I know that there are others out there who feel the same way, as much as I don't want to admit that I'm not unique in what I'm going through.  So if my voice in its many forms can give a little hope or a little bit more vocal power to others, then that right there is some life purpose.

This morning I wrote a little poem type jawn to start off with.  This is where I am at the moment and this is how I feel.  I hope to answer some of these questions as I continue to figure out how to deal with this life thing.  Because to not answer them for me is the loneliest and darkest of slow self destruction processes and I can't live life that way anymore, in silent suffering.

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How will I know myself without pain and suffering?

How will I accept love and compassion when these are the most threatening things of all?

How will I love myself when my culture loves violence and hatred?

How will I exist without these walls of protection?  Will I erode, picked clean by scavengers?

How will I feel good with mostly endogenous chemicals leading the way?

How will I talk to you if I don't have a voice?

How do I choose without the power of choice?

How can I be helped if I feel completely helpless?

How can I desire if it eats me alive, unexpressed and inexpressible?

How can I see you if I can't see past myself?

How can I exist if I don't trust existence?

How do I reconcile I am-ness with ego?

Why is my culture so fucked up about sex when it is the most fundamental thing there is?

Why does sexual abuse exist?

Why can't you see me?

Why can't you hear what I am saying?

How can I help?