Eat.

 

 

 

Dear Friend

 

“All the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room.” - Pascal

Dear Friend -

I am going to come home. 

I don't know when and I don't know how yet but I'm going to make my way back to nature, to myself.  I want to at least inch a little closer to what I thought I was on my way to when I left this town before. 

I think part of why I felt so in love again - despite everything that was happening with my dad - was that I felt like me again.  Maybe that's all love really is: feeling as YOU as is humanly possible, no matter the distractions – for better or worse.  I read somewhere that when people say they just 'know'' that they are in love, it's because they can see their best self reflected in their partner’s eyes.  That they are really just seeing themselves the way they want to be seen (and vice versa).  That is exactly what I've felt both times I've felt 'madly in love' and felt the opposite when I was uncertain of my feelings.  In love I felt beautiful and good and that someone could actually see it and that felt amazing.  When there was doubt I felt ugly, of no consequence, certainly not worthy of any man’s love.  In love I felt appreciated and that his pedestal was my rightful home.  But once I had taken enough hits, once I’d reached my breaking point – and I did several times over in the past few years - I felt myself shrivel up into something that was worthy of no one's pedestal.  And I knew everyone else saw in me what I saw in my own reflection.  The ugly abandon of hope and faith.  Hence the anxiety attacks around other people.  Hence the hermit in the woods.  It all makes perfect sense now for some reason.  Weird.  And I couldn’t know it then but running away and hiding was just exactly what I needed to face my worst fears.  Because they never left my side.  And instead of drowning them in other peoples’ dramas, I’d essentially locked myself up with them until there was no place to run.  And there, in the dark, I was forced to face my worst enemy.  It was Me.

Maybe all the unhappiness in isolation stems from what we already know for certain: it is not life when you do not feel like your best self.  Often times in the past couple of years, I’ve woken up in the morning and I am uncertain that I care whether tomorrow comes or not.  It is not wallowing in pain or craving death so much, just nothingness, total ambivalence.  And it’s the first time I’ve ever known this feeling.  Those moments do not belong in any story.  And if they do, they ought to be shortened, condensed phrases 'the next few years where very hard on J' (and then quickly get back to the exciting parts if you actually want the reader to turn the page and not put down the book, never to pick it up again)  No one wants to read about endless hours of suffering and submission – especially not me.  No one wants to hear the story of a loser, especially not one who’s lost her own thread.

And right now, we're in an important part of our stories, both of us, but I have no doubt in my mind today that it is only a condensed amount of shit - because what heroes can emerge from anything short of a disaster?  And we've both been through disaster.  A disaster that has shaken our faith and made us feel like we've been ripped out of our own stories.  But soon, we'll forget any of the particular pains and we'll shorten that bit.  “Remember that time.  Man, they were the worst of times.”. Because we’re heroes and the only thing keeping us from happiness is the worry that how we feel now will never change, that the story won’t get better.  But it will.  If only because we’re too  in touch with life’s comedy to be tragic heroes.

I remember coming home because I was traumatized by the lady jumping out the window.  And it felt like the only thing to do and nothing in the universe made me as happy as that trip.  It was perfect.  I felt at home.  Not because of Toronto.  But just because I felt like I was living my life.  Surrounded by the characters who's endings I gave a damn about.  Me being a part off their lives felt good too.  Or maybe I'm full of shit.  Maybe my presence meant nothing to them.  But I think of you, of new beginnings and that silly writing group and it made no difference what we did or if any of it worked out, only that we were doing it.  Because the sun was shining and there was beer and music and tomorrow.  In no way was I living the success I'd hoped for but I was living.  And that was enough.

And this year in Paris, it's been horrible.  I have never been so alone and yet have never needed support as much as now.  What's stranger still is that I have experienced more instances of enlightenment and spiritual peace during these awful times than at any other happier moment in my life.  Horrible does bring about positive.  Because in being conscious of the horrors you are equally confronted with the good you've already known, maybe even the good that is still yet to come – there is balance in everything.  Otherwise we'd just kill ourselves.  It's not really hope that keeps us holding on.  It's the certainty that there is more to come even when it feels like things might not ever get better.  They always change.  And life always goes on.

I read a book by Paul Auster while I was here in the Alps called The Invention of Solitude.  As usual, when you need a friend the most and you find yourself all alone, all it takes is to open a book to see that the person you needed to talk to, more than anything, was in your living room, right beside you the whole time.  But you were too vain, too blinded by your hardships to notice.  Books are the one constant in life that always reminded us that I am not really alone.  People you cannot always count on but books are infinitely loyal friends.  It is like having a friend with you, since essentially, they are meant to show us that everything we are feeling, someone has felt before us, perhaps not the exact scenarios we are living but he has the same emotions, the same questions.  And while they're telling us their stories (if you are reading the right ones), we slowly begin to identify with humanity again.  Because when we are suffering, we must be able to know how that suffering compares to others'.  Everybody needs confirmation that they aren't a hypochondriac.  And everybody also needs to hear that the hero's pain did not last forever.  Things changed.  Always have.  Always will.  Not necessarily for the better.  But they changed.  And why couldn't we remember that?  Take comfort in it.  Why NOW did everything feel so much heavier?  And he described it perfectly.  Missing magic.  And the structure of the story.  The thread.  The solitude.

We feel we are living when our life feels in line with our surroundings and circumstances.  That’s when we feel truly infinite.  Not when we feel normal, average, when we are just getting through, even just learning who we are - we feel depressed then, or maybe incomplete would be a better word.  Void.  You do, that is, if you READ.  If you are someone who values a good story, then you must look at your own life in a similar manner, judging it the way you might judge a book.  Do I like the main character?  What are his best and worst traits?  Was he right or wrong when he... what other literary characters does he bear similarities to?  It’s not a choice to suffer but a reflex.  Either you are the kind of person who cares about their thread, their life, their story, its analysis, or else you have simpler wants: dinner and endless hours of stupid television or meaningless movies.  Passive and ignorant.

In a novel, it would be perfectly normal to witness a metaphor that puts the main character so in touch with his own story, or else so deeply connected to what the narrator has designed that what happens to him is impossibly beautiful.  In literature, nature: the rest of the world, their hopes and desires and actions, the weather – they are all there as devices to prove the hero’s story is rightly his, and more, that it is a good story.  That is what makes literary imagery so wonderful.  Orchestrated magic being revealed carefully by the author, slowly, only tidbits at a time, just so, making sure the reader feels as though he is the only one truly able to follow the whole thread.  Life can feel like that too.  But not if you’re too busy or too crowded to see it.    In my experience, only solitude has permitted me to follow my own thread.  It is only in solitude that I see how magical and beautiful my life is.  While I am busy living the human dramas, I forget that I am not the narrator.  I can only see as far as a two dimensional character.  That is, unless I see the signs.  Unless something puts me in touch with the greater story at play: its subtle meanings, archetypes, metaphors, symbols, devices.  Alas, only omniscience can tell us if our traits are flawed, if our actions are correct, if .  Only the narrator can tell us if we're living a tragedy or a comedy.  Only the narrator is privy to that information, until the story's over that is.  And it's already been widely confirmed that the narrator remains shroud in mystery and therefore no means to communicate directly.  We cannot see the Wizard.  We have only the signs to link us.  Metaphoric Moments.  Take them or leave them.  As far as I am concerned, however, without them we are only secondary characters.  I don't know about you but I'm not interested in being a device in someone else's story.

Friend, our stories have been full of metaphors in the past - in the good parts anyhow - and yet this year, I'm not really cool with any of these tragic ones becoming part of the larger picture: hardships, death, winter, desolation, impossible goals, cancer, secrets, old lovers, broken friendships - they're all heavy - and I want more than just heavy, I want relief.  But there's no light at the end of the tunnel.  Where is it?  Where is the light?  How do you go forward into the darkness?  How do you accept yourself as a tragic character and go on?

I've been trying to find a way because this whole time it's felt like things might really not get better.  And then it occurred to me: I don't go forward into the darkness.  I refuse.  I remain patient.  I do what I have to do to get through and then, when the storm has passed, I stand up and I do it better and I end up thanking myself for all that I learned through the horrors.  Heroes are boring anyway if they haven’t suffered and survived.

And that's when nature comes back into play.  It's here and it’s messy.  Dark.  We've been in a never ending storm.  But lucky for us, weather is about as unstable as life.  Nothing lasts forever, that's true and it’s a little sad.  But then, if it DID, this feeling might last forever too.  But it can't.  There will be rain and there will be sun.  And chances are, once a year, we'll be drowning in snow and it'll be fucking cold and everything'll be shit and that someone we know'll probably die of cancer but we're older now  and we finally understand that impermanence, shaking things up, starting over, losing and getting back up, endings, beginnings, firsts and lasts -  it is actually a great part of the story.  It's the only way to make a happy ending, actually.  If things don't suck, if they don't REALLY REALLY suck for you at some point, then you're never really equipped to see the beautiful moments that take you out of it, that fill you with will and desire and good.  You need those crises to remind you of the story you were writing.  And maybe even all the rest too, to give your story the fine balance pathetic fallacy it needs to be half decent. This, after all, is precisely what gives the character depth.  Thank God.  Thank FUCKING GOD.

 Yesterday afternoon, I stood at the top of a mountain and I saw exactly the same image that used to be on the wall of my living room when I was a kid.  It was a painting my dad brought home from Europe - I think it might have actually been what would eventually become just a small square of a much larger wallpaper design.  I imagined, dreamt about that painting all the time: who each of the people were, what they did, who they loved, the secrets they kept which houses were theirs, what job they did in the village.  You could never really make out the faces of the people and I loved that because it was a permanent mystery and the story was ever changing.  Just blurry colours in a beautiful backdrop.  Even the setting wasn't clear if you stood too close but when you took a step back, it looked like the most perfect place in the world.  It looked exactly like the villages down below from here.  The sun is lighting up the two villages below amidst the green and the rock face, and it is simply perfect and the same.  It's hard to explain in words.  It’s not just that it is beautiful (and it is, which is refreshing because not much has seemed beautiful to me of late) but it’s also that it has flooded me memories - good ones - different states of mind when I remembered my story being different.  Back when I had the will to write the kind of story, with my life and with my pen that even I would want to read.   I remembered thinking that I could face anything back then.  I had no fear.  Because you can be fearless when you're not alone.  And finishing that book on The Invention of Solitude this week, it also reminded me why I came here in the first place (to write) and how I am suddenly armed with a shitload of things to write about and the total freedom from distractions to be able to do it.  And I didn't feel sad or lonely for the first time in I cannot tell you how long.  This morning, I set my alarm for 7 am and I was writing with fervour.  And the story, now matter how self indulgent it felt, had enough metaphors to make me feel like it might be one worth writing. 

 

So keep your eyes open for a thread.  There's bound to be one.  Even in the solitude.  Maybe only in the solitude are you able to find it.  And maybe the writing itself will be shit and it will only ever mean anything to me but at least I have that feeling back.  At least my eyes are open again.  And I like who I see in the mirror.  She’s beautiful and good.  I think I am in love.  I wish you the same dear Friend.  And I hope to see you very soon but even if I do not, we will be okay.

Venez les beaux jours.  Faites de moi ce qu’il faut.  Je suis forte et maintenant je le sais.  Je suis une héroine à la recherche d’un happy end pour ma jolie histoire.  Venez les beaux jours, venez avec vos sophismes pathétiques et Je te suivrai partout où tu iras.

So take those long, painful, horrible years of shit and condense them now.  “They were terrible years.  The worst of times.". For me it will be shorter still:  Bad men.  Bad decisions.  Bad luck.   But the times, they are a changin.  And if Bob says so.....

So get to your room!

It’s time to turn the page. 

Love Julie
xoxo

 

 

 

 

 

Paris Is Like A Whore.

In a year's time, I've barely found any words to describe the way this town looks to me now.  It has changed.  Again.  There are not words, only faces and places that come and go.  And a lot of soul searching.  Equal parts suffering and pleasure.

So click on the link below to see the weather in My Tropic of Cancer.  No matter how hard I try to describe it in words, I think you have to see for yourself. 

Bisous.


https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0ROjz8IeEKjMkpaOUxEQ1NTMjg/edit

LA VIE C'EST PAS DU GATEAU

This summer I saw a grief counselor. I spent a lot of time in high school raising money for a cancer support centre in Oshawa (Hearth Place...for anyone who after reading this is looking for help!) The place was headed up by a friend's Mom who struggled with cancer for years before succumbing to the terrible monster while we were in high school.  By that point, only a few close friends had been personally touched by cancer.  It was somewhat rare. Now it seems every other person is dealing with cancer.  Six degrees of separation is down to only one or two these days.

Anyway, I decided to take advantage of some of the services the place had to offer since it was in town and I knew that it had provided a lot of help to a lot of people over the years. I believed in the place from the start but I wasn't really going for me.  I was going to see what options there were for my Dad and also hoped that I could contribute something of value to my family to help them deal with everything.  I thought maybe even just being around other people who had a clue what it was I was going through might help everyone cope a bit better.  My father had not yet passed away but I had accepted by this point that he was going to die.  It took some of the rest of the people in his life a little longer to accept.  That's the funny thing about cancer.  It's never a sure thing: there are so many treatments now and it's so darn rampant, that it's almost become a right of passage.  But it's also this stressful thing that lurks in the darkness.  Every time you close your eyes you wonder if this is it.

The doctors were pretty clear about what my Dad's short future held, as much as the brain tumour guide they sent us home with after St. Mike's anyway but because so many people we'd know had been struck and made it out alive, after watching the battle first hand last a decade in some cases,  it was easy to hold false hope too.   While the surgeries were happening, I was busy on the internet trying to get as may clear answers as possible: what to expect, at what kind of pace he was expected to degrade, how we could minimize his suffering, what different dosages of certain medications could tell us, how much time he had left.  On top of it all, during this time, we were still in the phase where we had to pretend that wasn't the case.  Not in a repressed, 'He can't be dying!' kind of way; which of course we all felt as well but the doctors had warned us that the stress of imminent death would likely worsen his condition and in the case of the brain, if we wanted to make the most of the time we had left with him we literally had to live in the moment.  In other words, we couldn't tell my Dad he was going to die.  We had to walk into the room with a smiles on our faces, not get upset and pretend as though he was only sick but that in the end, he'd be just fine.  Obviously, this wasn't an easy thing to do knowing in a few days time we were going to walk out the door and take Dad home to die in his bed.  All of this was especially difficult as my father had already transformed into another person: he was childlike now, had very little balance and a particular sense of humour: no sense whatsoever of the 'inappropriate'.  Traces of himself but not the real deal.  Of course, there were funny moments here and there.  One afternoon, my brother took him for a ride in his cruiser.  Walking back towards the help, impatient as ever and feeling 'FINE', he fell and my brother luckily broke his fall (he just about cracked his head open on the cement walkway leading to the house) with his foot.  'So Dad, how was your day?!  How was the drive?'  'Well, it was great.  But it would have been better if your brother didn't kick me in the head on the way into the house!!!'  We were much the same, playing along with his temperament, encouraging him to eat more if he wanted to, to fish to play golf to do anything and everything he wanted while he could, but, in the meantime, we were all holding back the tears and the words we wanted to say, the questions we wanted to ask, the undying love we wanted to impart and we just went on pretending it was any other Tuesday: everything was hunky dorey.  Eventually, it all became a little more than I could handle on my own.  It became too much for anyone to deal with on their own.  Each of us took turns having breakdowns.  Mine hit me like a ton of bricks.

I'd seen a counselor a couple of times before but wasn't wowed by the process of it and it didn't make me better in and of itself.  I remember it easing the conscience of a lot of the people I was leaning on for support. Because the truth about grieving is there as much guilt to the process as there is sadness.  You feel guilty that you aren't letting people in.  You feel guilty for asking too much, for being a downer.  You feel guilty about being weak.

The first time for me was after a couple of my friends died rather young.  I was twenty two at the time and found myself in lecture halls writing their names over and over on my notebooks because I couldn't hear anymore. I couldn't listen to anyone talk about anything, it didn't make sense.  This was all that mattered anymore.  They were dead.  We would all die too.  What was the point?  Suddenly talking about existentialism and international relations felt masturbatory and I wasn't in the mood for it. Anyway, I didn't have any ambition left, no appetite, no sex drive or even a life drive at that point.  I wanted absolutely nothing and getting out of bed in the morning was becoming increasingly difficult.

I was pretty messed up about it all, seeing both of them everywhere. Not in a scary ghost way but in the kind of way where I couldn't accept that they were gone. Deep down I already knew what I needed to do and was unconvinced that going to see some university counselor was going to make it any clearer.  I studied psychology and philosophy: I had the tools and the know-how to talk myself down from the ledge but somehow when real life is happening to you, all of that goes out the window.  Before I knew it, I wasn't me anymore and I could feel the Julie in me slipping away into that black hole of depression. I didn't care anymore about love or friends or family or enlightenment or anything. How could I? We were all going to die. And sooner than we think. And having been so sick for so long as a kid I partly felt guilty that life had taken these two great 22 year old friends of mine in such horrific ways. Should have taken me instead. But, you can't go on living that way - I'd done my share of reading about depression already by that point - one foot in front of the other, day-to-day -to-day. So, I caved and made an appointment at the University and I spoke to a psych student, only a few years older than me for a couple of hours a couple of weeks in a row.

Going into the appointment, I half expected the black leather sofa, mohogany cabinets full of books, framed diplomas from this school or that, and paisley curtains. Maybe even a particularly beautiful area rug.  I expected him to have thick rimmed glasses and a  beard and to ask me questions and YES, to answer yours: I've obviously seen too many movies! Instead, we were in a white room that looked a lot like the reading rooms in the library. Plastic and metal chairs and a fake wood desk with a desktop computer and a grey telephone. The man asked me nothing. He told me to talk about what I've been going through, what had happened. What I expected to get out of counselling sessions with him.  The first time I didn't cry. I told the story matter of factly: my friend died. I was fucked up about it. I couldn't concentrate. I was ruining my personal relationships and thinking about dropping out of school or at least taking a year off. Then another friend was in a horrible car crash and escaped as the only survivor, including the three other passengers in her vehicle and the truck driver who struck them. She was in a coma for a month and then died too on the operating table. We weren't extremely close but we were starting to be. I felt lost. I felt that life was unfair and I wasn't sure I wanted any part of it anymore. What was the point? I was reading way too much philosophy and only weeks prior had conditionned myself to see the world in a very different way than before: fearlessly it all fell to pieces quite literally. Particles of matter moving around aimlessly – nothing mattered any more than anything else and everything was suddenly simple and clear to me. We were one, all of us. Every experience, every breath, every life, every death. And then death knocked at my door and my feet slammed back on the ground and I felt like a pretentious bullshitter chasing down my own kind of God so that I could have something to believe in. The church had never done it for me. And believe me, I'd tried that too. At the time, I couldn't see the comedy in this ultimate test of faith. I should have and a few weeks before, I probably would have but once Ian was gone and the funeral was over and done and I was back in Vancouver where no one knew my old friend and no one could undestand how sad I was that I'd never see him again (it happened very suddenly in a swimming pool and he was cremated before I got back home) I was just a scared child, feeling alone and little crazy.  What did I expect to get out of counselling?  Fuck all.  And I expected about as much out of life itself.

Eventually, I allowed the counselling to be what it should be: an outlet for talking to oneself.   Permission to be selfish. No one really goes in looking for advice, they just need to hear themselves tell their story out loud.  It permits you to distance yourself from your own inner pain and brings you back to the bigger picture.  You don't have to feel guilty about suffering.  Until you're talking about it aloud, until you can describe to someone who you once were and the fear you're feeling now over losing some big part of yourself, you can't get better.  You need to get it out of you.  And as long as it's there, locked up inside, you can't get better.  It'll eat the rest of you alive too if you go about it that way.

Truth be told, I probably should have been talking to a therapist for a large part of my life with all the crap I've been through. Sometimes the people you're with make you feel strong enough to deal with anything that comes your way.  Friends can be magnificent for that and yet, it's also an unfair facet of the relationship between two people to lean too much on their supporters.  It's not what you want to share with people you love.  Of course, yes, people who love you will always be there for you but no, friends are NOT for leaning on when times are tough.  They are only reminders of the things to look forward to later.  They are the people you CHOOSE to LIVE WITH. Family is different.  And friends can be like family sometimes,it's true, but in my opinion anyway, there is something all-together mean about dragging your friends into your depression.  It's hard not to feel for deeply when your friends are down and out.  It's hard not to sympathize and want to help but we all know that there is nothing to do but get through the feelings.  We all know that the battle is within us and that no matter how many times we hash the same awful  stories to our friends over and over again, they still won't be able to do anything to help apart from reminding you that they exist and that they're there to have fun with whenever you're ready.  Anything more than that evokes that 'guilt' thing I spoke of earlier and a breach of trust.  Both parties feel guilty.  One for making their friends feel so bad, the other for being unable to solve the problem for you (because a true friend will WANT to do that!)  

There is also a weakness associated with asking for help, especially from the people hat you love and trust and respect that I've never been partial to. I'm kind of a boy that way. I don't like to cry in front of people. I don't like to talk about feelings. I make jokes so that nobody ever digs any deeper, I make light of the serious because if I don't, I'll drown in the suffering. It's not phony and I don't even think it's a defense mechanism (Freud might disagree, who knows...) for me, it's a choice. I used to call myself the ETERNAL OPTIMIST.  My goal in life was to make people happier. To do good. To love well. To understand. To laugh.

Then, out of nowhere, I wasn't able to laugh at my life at all anymore, I was losing my father and a lot of other things too simultaneously (we're friends...I'll spare you the details!) but mainly, I was losing the last of my faith that there would ever be a happy ending.  And I didn't want to bother my friends anymore, they'd already been at my side through piles and piles of other crap leading up to the cancer.  I didn't want to drag them down with me and I could tell that's where this was going.

Things were bubbling up and bubbling over inside of me and I'd already exploded on a couple friends over minor infractions (as though anything whatsoever was their fault) and as soon as I saw myself putting my stuff their shoulders, rather than dealing with my baggage, I sought professional help. It wasn't so much for me but it was to be a better person.  I was smart enough this time around to not repeat the same mistakes.  I also wanted to be able to ask questions for how I could help my own family get through this impossibly difficult time.  Anna Sapershteyn told me something years ago: 'People need to learn to own their own shit'. But the brain is a funny thing. It tricks us into all manners of madness and folly. It fools us with the notion that we are right when often we're wrong. It has a self-destruct button that is so easily set off by the slightest disappointment. Mine does, anyhow. But I had surpassed all that. I was already done with living. Tired. Exhausted. Too much bad. No good. And I felt like a homeless orphan because my family had too much to deal with to be there for ME and of course I wasn't expecting them to. There were bigger things happening but I was also going through some pretty heavy stuff and I didn't know where to turn.

So I called, made an appointment, sucked up my pride and saw Ted one morning at ten o'clock.  I was going to own my own shit, even if it killed me.  I knew I probably wasn't ready to talk about any of it yet, it was all too fresh.  My father was still at home.  Still upright.  Still eating.   He asked me why I'd come to see him and I told him the truth. This happened. Then this. And this and this and this and this and this...he sat there with his jaw dropped and I felt guilty for complaining but only for a few minutes, impossible to feel unlike a whiner when you've got so many complaints and so little gratitude.  I knew the cliches applied: 'La vie c'est pas du gateau' (Life isn't a piece of cake). I already knew all of that and I was naive anymore.  I also knew people who were going through things a Hell of a lot harder than what I was dealing with but I couldn't shake the cursed feeling inside of me. For the first time in a long time, I felt like a victim. Like it wasn't fair. People were unkind.

How did some end up with far simpler existences? Happy families. Love. Profound friendships and careers they reveled in. Mine was the kind of solitary story you write tragic books about (and for that I was grateful, of course) but I didn't want to be ME in my story anymore. I couldn't take one more bit of bad news. When I finally got around to talking about what it was like for me going through all of this stuff I started to cry uncontrollably. Not out of sadness. Not even out of pain, really. It was more overwhelming and inexplicable than that. For the first time, maybe ever in my life, I was listening to myself tell a stranger who I was, where I came from and where I was going and it was too much to hold in any longer.  And by the end of the hour, I knew I'd made the right decision by calling.

Ted let me cry. And he said everything I was feeling was perfectly normal. More than normal. Sometimes we need to hear that from someone that we don't love (because our friends and families can't be trusted in those circumstances!) It's not even about being 'normal' perse, because you don't feel normal when you're going through all of these things; you feel isolated and separate from the rest of humanity and truth be told, you're probably NOT normal while you're going through them.  You become effectively crazy.  But we all need to hear that it's okay to be feeling all that you're feeling while you're feeling it.  That you're not alone in feeling empty - the whole damn world feels the void - why do you think counselling is such big business!?  Ted proceeded to tell me a story about his own life. He lost his father and his brother in the span of a week: à la Joan Didion. He talked about how awful it was, how alone he felt.  How there seemed to be no purpose to go on living without them.  How he almost lost everything in the process.  Somehow it put things into perspective for me in a way that I knew I could only do in my own head.  He made me feel less alone.  He didn't make it better.  He didn't make any of it better but he made that light in my head go on reminding me that 'this too shall pass'.  And while you're in it, you feel like you might drown in there.  You certainly don't see an end in sight.

Everyone has their own bag of shit to deal with.  Full of madness even the Brothers Grimm didn't bother to teach us as children: I'm not talking murder and betrayal, I'm talking about those 'life' things that happen to everyone eventually: the human traumas that makes you question the point of anything at all. For some people it's just loneliness for others, it's evil for some it's just the plain lack of justice in any of it.  There are days when optimism seems impossible, futile and plain foolish.

There's always a reason to be sad and there's always going to be. If they'd have just said that from the beginning, I'd probably feel a lot less dissappointed now than I did in the beginning. But it's enlightening all the same. And that's because of the way I feel today. I feel alive. I wouldn't say good or bad or even alright but I feel alive.  I feel like I'm fighting my way through.  I feel older.  I wouldn't call myself an optimist anymore but I'm shedding a bit of the cynism.  Enough to remember the things that I love.  The people that I love.  Enough to taste my dinner and wash it down with a nice glass of wine.

Ted told me one other thing that stayed with me throughout the time my father was ill and again following his death: 'You'll be surprised at the people who are there for you through all of this and those that aren't. I couldn't believe it. And be ready, the ones you think are going to be there, they're going to be the first to disappear. And it's not because they don't love you but some people just don't know how to deal with death.  These types of things make you realize who your friends are.'

He was absolutely right and it wasn't all a negative experience. In a way, I was happy of the people that weren't around and glad of the people that were. Friendships were solidified in some cases and idealism was negated in others. I saw the best and worst in people. I sometimes felt at home just being in the presence of the right person at the right time - occasionally that person was someone I didn't know very well prior to any of the 'crazy' and going through that together has cleared a space for them in my life that didn't exist before.  There were other moments, I couldn't be around anyone but myself (hence the house in the woods...). Anything more seemed too intense.  There was a long period this year where I'd tested the hypothesis: if you don't have human relationships, then you've only got your own pain and suffering to deal with. If you're alright with yourself, you should still be able to realize a pretty satisfying life: I tried with writing and guitar and piano and cooking.  I was right and being alone was necessary to the healing process and it took forcing myself to do those selfish things just for me to remember who I was.  But there was also an element of humanity that integral in regaining some element of faith.  There was also a time where I needed to clear the cobwebs and tell people what I thought.  Sometimes I didn't have the nicest things to say.  Other times, it was just to say 'I love you' when I had the epiphanies of knowing who I did and didn't love.  Life is short, after all.  And we are all connected whether we want to be or not.

Which of course brings me to the end of this meandering journey through my brain: death. It's always present. It's on everyone's minds a lot of the time. Sometimes we push it out because we're afraid of it, other times we long for it because anything else seems too much or not worth the trouble. Death's going to follow us around for a long time, part of the family. It's not going anywhere no matter how much living we do. Apart from birth, it's one of the few experiences we've got in common universally. You're born and you die. And everything in between is a whole lot of emotional wonder. Wonderful because of it's beauty and heaviness and ability to move us to the poles of pleasure and pain with the flick of a switch. In one year I have felt love more profoundly than I've ever felt in my life and I have felt it's equal share of horror and pain. The best and the worst of it all. And the rôle of death has taken on a different meaning. It's just the end of the story. Nothing more, nothing less. It's not something to fear or chase or even avoid. It's just there and when it's ready for ya, it'll get ya.

I think there are two different parts to living. One where we're alone a lot, reflective, looking at the world we're in, where we've come from, where we're going, where you're going and where you've already been. There's the personal struggle with the universe that we all share: the reasons we look for love and the reasons we seek out the pain and suffering too. And then, there's the debauchery part. The living part of the program. Above, we wouldn't consider 'living'. Thinking somehow gets shoved to the sidelines in today's society. There's just too much to do to wonder why things are the way they are.

Those of us who take the time to look in once in a while, generally fair better in the scheme of things.  So let me be  the stranger that tells you you owe it to yourself to be selfish.  You owe it to the people you love too.  You've got to sit down and look at your story.  And it might be a horrible story at points.  Tragic.  Bloody awful but it's yours.  If it's not bad, you probably haven't done enough living yet.  And until you're ready to look at it front to back, to read it out loud and to analyze yourself as a main character, you just can't get better, plain and simple.

That's what I think.


Don't lose all your faith. There's always a little to hang onto if you put your mind to work. And don't deny anything that you're feeling ever. It doesn't give you a licence to be a dick but it ought to take away a bit of the judgment that we're beaten over the head with as children.  And if more people felt okay to express what was really going on inside of them without the fear of what 'others' might think of them if they say or do this or that, we'd be getting somewhere.

So true.  La vie c'est pas du gateau.  Life's just slightly more complicated than that.   Life's not covered in sparklers and icing.  It's not there just for weddings and birthday parties and first communions.  You could never make one with so few ingredients as cakes...an egg, some flour and sugar and oil just won't do.  Life's a lot harder to digest too.  Sometimes it can take years, decades even.  It's sole purpose is not only to be eaten or even shared.  And yet, sometimes we all wish it were a little closer to cake.  At least then we'd always know that at some point, we'll get yet another shot at having our wishes come true.  No.  Life just ain't that easy and it sure ain't a piece of cake, but then, no one said it would be easy...and anyway, easy usually means 'too good to be true.'