THE NAKED ANIMAL

I had a two-week vacation over the holidays, and I sobbed my heart out (boo hoo) all morning yesterday just thinking about going back to work. My first day back (today) was not as harrowing as I'd imagined. I was able to take on my English teacher persona without much discomfort, though I must say that working a split shift is absolutely dreadful. Going to work twice in one day has a wearing psychological effect that is difficult to sustain. And the relief of getting home from work twice does not offset it. Though I've managed to start using my time productively between shifts (1:30-6:00pm), it still kills me to get up the gumption all over again for that evening class (6:15-9:15). And then it's a late dinner, going to bed on a full stomach, and barely any time to decompress [violins come in here]. Okay, I ADMIT IT--I DON'T LIKE TO WORK, no matter what the job. All I want to do is dance and sing and heal and cook meals for large groups of people (for reasons still hazy to me), but I can't seem to get those passions in alignment with my personal support. In fact, I have no developed talents for any of those things. My life has been all about writing. But writing is getting to me. It feels so removed from the source. Words never quite say what they mean, and meaning itself is so elastic as to make words mere playthings.

Yet I can't say that in general, for I greatly enjoyed reading during my vacation--something I have no time for while working because all my "free time" is spent writing. I sometimes find it unbearably ironic that I'm creating more words and more meaning for the world when there's so much of both already out there that I'd really like to take the time to sit down and study to my heart's content. But I have to work. I have to do. I have to generate product. And sell it. Or sell my time, which is my current situation. It would be nice to harmonize my passion to live and my need to survive. I do believe I can do it in this lifetime, and I'd like to say I'm going to do it lickety-split, but my life feels terribly amorphous and quantum these days: all possibilities existing at once, none of them working their ways into physical reality--at least at any pace discernible to the human eye.

I can see that this is quickly becoming what I'd call a "classic" journal entry. My first impulse is to censor myself and say something clever, make it all into an entertaining piece of inoffensive prose, well-crafted and bloodless. Or maybe I'm being too hard on myself. Anyway, censor be damned, the journal entry continues:

What would I do if I didn't write, which has never made me much of a living anyway? Well, I really don't know because my psyche and soul are barricaded in by a confounding number of walls based on beliefs that I find repugnant, but somehow can't help buying into. Beliefs such as this: that I'm too invested in my life as a writer to give it up; that I'm too old (forty next month) to take off on a whole new tangent; that I really don't have any talent for any other form of expression; that I really don't have any talent at all, just a certain skill for stringing sentences together. And there ya go: I got to that point. That point where the other voice in my head goes, "Wait a minute here. You're not that bad. What are you talking about? Why are you taking yourself so lightly? Why denigrate yourself when you've actually achieved a great deal? Be grateful. What are you so resentful about? Your mind works like a clock, against all odds you're still alive, and you live with a wonderful little family in a nice, comfortable apartment. What do you want, a million bucks and a McMansion? Why can't you just be happy?" And then I think, well, higher-(and rather preachy)-self, that's a question I've been asking myself all my life.

Now, let's see. Maybe it's time to go over this again. Why am I not a happy person? ... You know what? I can't think of one reason off the top of my head except that it's a habit. Like many things. Unhappiness is merely one in a panoply of long-running addictions that have all outlived their usefulnesses. A funny, very pundit-like friend of Philip's swears one needn't so much get rid of old habits as replace them with new ones. Like eating carrot sticks or meditating instead of smoking cigarettes or pot. Like drinking water instead of wine or eating fruit instead of chocolate. Like hoola hooping or hiking instead of sitting around in a foul mood. Like stretching instead of sitting hunched over in front of my computer, wondering what the hell I'm gonna pull out of my ass next. Like loving myself instead of hating the world. Like loving people as much as I love animals, plants--even things. Like doing all the things I know I must do to heal myself instead of just planning to do them someday. Like realizing that someday never comes instead of hoping that it will. Like being happy with the center instead of always having to go to extremes. Like courting balance rather than derangement. Like transforming anger instead of letting it transform me. Like expressing myself instead of worrying about how I am going to express myself, and what effect it might have on others. Like being happy instead of being sad. Sounds so simple.

On. Off. Zero. One. The endless flip of the switches. The machinery of the duality whose expression is life itself. Would we suddenly stop living if the myriad forces that naturally oppose each other suddenly merged? Life is repelled by such merger, I think. The fact that it always remains one step away, or experienced only in certain ways and fleeting moments, as through sex or ecstatic dance or other transcendent practices, is what keeps us alive; the reaching for it fuels our will to live. At the end, we'll merge, soon enough, back into the soup of energy from which our tiny spoonfuls of existence are drawn. Ah, metaphors. They make it so easy to attractively gloss over things you really don't understand. "Oh words are trains for moving past what really has no name"--That's by Paddy McAloon from "I Couldn't Bear to be Special" by Prefab Sprout, a new-wave art band of the early 80s whose lyrics still resonate with me. That line in particular is one of my favorite sentences in the English language. And it expresses beautifully and exactly the conundrum I find myself in these days, as a writer who is sick of words, or at least sick of my own manufacturing of them, and who is going to stop generating them for today (and their little meanings too!) as soon as he finishes this sentence.

Categories: addiction, emotions, meaning, healing