“Does this seem strange? it is like when, watching the sun going down gloriously at sunset, disappearing slowly behind distant clouds, we suddenly remember that it’s not the sun that’s moving but the Earth that’s spinning, and we see with the unhinged eye of the mind our entire planet – and ourselves with it – rotating backward, away from the sun. We are seeing with “mad” eyes, like Paul McCartney’s Fool on the Hill: the crazed vision that sometimes sees further than our bleary, customary eyesight. “ The Order of Time – Carlo Rovelli
On Not Hitting Your Head
Sometimes things happen around us that are great views into what goes on inside of us.
This last weekend I had a friend over, she was playing around on my pull-up bar that is in the doorway to the kitchen. It seemed as if she were struggling a bit, and then she said something like “this is hard I might hit my head”
My pull-up bar is at the top of the doorway between the hallway and the kitchen. Above it on the hallway side is a climbing board. If you were to stand facing into the kitchen and do a pull-up you would smack your head into the bottom edge of the climbing board. Which is exactly what she was doing.
I stopped and thought for a brief moment and said “let go, turn around and try it again” by standing facing away from the kitchen into the hallway, you won’t hit your head on the climbing board. Once she realized this, we both had a good laugh.
So what is this about?
She was so focused on not hitting her head, she couldn’t see anything else. All that she could see was that as she did a pull-up she would hit her head. She couldn’t see that there were choices, the choice to not hit her head. That taking a step back would give a different perspective, other choices.
I think that a lot of times we are so focused on not getting hurt, or trying to avoid pain, that this focus keeps us from seeing clearly, from seeing the bigger picture. Like maybe not hitting your head.
So maybe try letting go and standing somewhere else.
Just a thought…
“In the psychical sphere there are no facts, but only interpretations of them.”
―
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Alone, Isolated, Depressed
As we fall further into despair we isolate ourselves, we stop socializing, we withdraw from the community. When we do this the meaningful feedback and conversation we partake in diminish as well.
The only voice we hear is our own. What are the conversations we have?
Life is miserable
I am a bad person
No one would notice if I were not here anymore
I am stuck and nothing will ever change
Nothing I do is successful
Our internal conversations become louder and more frequent. They feed on themselves and we start to spiral down further and further into darkness. We have no other point of reference except the stories we keep telling ourselves. Ask yourself, where you first heard those conversations, whose voice they were in? I would guess the answer is the voice was your own.
We need a new story, we need to change our point of reference. What if you started changing the story?
Life is fucking wonderful
I am a good person
Things can change
I am successful
Now I am guessing that as you read this you may be thinking that I am full of shit. That it’s all a bunch of BS. I would have said the same thing a few years ago. I would have shaken my head and said, “you don’t understand, my life sucks”. Oh, it did suck. It was a miserable mess and I had no way out. I also realized that whatever I was doing wasn’t working. Why should I keep doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result? I realized that where I currently stood was leading to only one thing. I looked at it this way, if what I am doing now isn’t working, why not just try something else, something new. Maybe I could change my point of reference, my story. And you know what? It worked.
You become the character in the story YOU tell YOUrself.
What story are you telling yourself?
Stop calling it Suicide
Suicide, Suicide, Suicide!
What does that even mean?
From Etymology Online
Suicide (n): The deliberate killing of oneself. 1650s, from Modern Latin suicidium “suicide,” from Latin sui “of oneself” (genitive of se “self”), from PIE *s(u)w-o- “one’s own,” from root *s(w)e- (see idiom) + -cidium “a killing,” from caedere “to slay” (from PIE root *kae-id- “to strike”).
Why isn’t it murder? What is it, if not premeditated murder upon oneself.
My opinion is that using the word Suicide removes some of the stigmas of murder and makes what is happening or has happened clinical. To me, Suicide sounds so…”Clinical”. It separates us from the ugliness and horror of what we are planning. It prevents us from seeing what is really happening. It’s a cold and unemotional view of what is happening.
As I myself struggled through this journey, I stopped using the word suicide and instead started using the word murder.
Murder (n): the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another, the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice From latin murdrum “a killing in secret”, “the killing of an unknown man”
The 4 Minute Mile
Up until May 6th, 1954 no one had ever run a mile in faster than 4 minutes.
The conditions people believed were needed to break that barrier were – no wind, a dry hard track, and a multitude of cheering fans.
On May 6th, 1954 Roger Bannister arrived at the track it was cold, the track was wet, the wind was blowing 15 miles per hour, and there were only a few thousand spectators to cheer him on. For all intents and purposes, not a good recipe for what he was attempting to do.
Up until that day experts, doctors and “authorities” claimed that the 4-minute mile was impossible if not deadly. The general belief was that running a 4-minute mile was not possible and potentially lethal.
Roger decided to run that day anyway. His time was 3 minutes 59.4 seconds
He had achieved what was believed to not be possible. He had done so in conditions that were not conducive to making it possible.
How? Because he believed it was possible.
Prior to that day, the 4-minute mile was just slightly out of reach by 1.4 seconds, which had been the case for 9 years. 46 days later on June 21, 1954 Bannister’s record was broken at 3 minutes 57.9 seconds.
The prevailing belief system that it was impossible and deadly had been shattered.
A few things to ponder.
What is your metaphorical 4-minute mile?
What beliefs do you have that are keeping you stuck where you are?
What conditions do you believe are required to become unstuck?
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t–you’re right.”
―
The Best Christmas Eve
For the first time in many years, I was alone on Christmas Eve. It was difficult and made me feel sad, aren’t we supposed to be with others on the holiday? I spent some of the time pondering aloneness. Why do we feel it, what is it and is it OK to feel alone?
In a way, we are all alone, and that just is. When you get down to the root of it we are alone, but yet we aren’t alone. I say this because when it comes down to it, we are only responsible to ourselves, we can change nothing but ourselves. But yet this wonderful thing we call “life” wouldn’t be what it is without others.
Being with these thoughts and feelings all day left me in an interesting place. I was chatting with a friend later in the day and told him of my aloneness. He invited me over. I respectfully declined as I didn’t want to drive that far and had sort of become one with my aloneness. There was more to examine.
There were several things that contributed to my aloneness. My 2 sons were with their mother, my girlfriend was with her son, some of my closest friends don’t live nearby. This all left me feeling alone and distraught.
Around 7 pm I decided to go for a walk. I went along my usual walking route. The streets were silent, homes were filled with people, yards with twinkling lights, I walked alone in the cold evening.
As I walked along 6th Ave I saw a woman in an alcove, she was alone and eating food from a paper plate. As I passed, I smiled at her, she looked up and had tears in her eyes. I kept on going, thinking now about how she was alone, how she sat there on the cold cement trying to stay out of the rain.
I continued walking for a mile or 2 and was starting to get chilled, so I turned around and walked back the other way. As I approached the section of the street where the woman was huddled in the storefront I wondered, does she have a place to stay? Why is she alone? What is her story?
As I passed her I stopped and knelt down and asked: “Are you OK?”. She shook her head and looked up at me. I moved across from her and sat down on the cold concrete. And she started to talk, she told me of her trials and tribulations, she told me about her family and her life on the street. She told me how she hadn’t seen her kids in 7 years, about her health problems, and her rocky relationship status.
For the next hour, I sat and listened, listening to her unwind her story, I could clearly see in a way how she and I were experiencing the same Christmas Eve. But yet here we were neither of us were alone now. She told me about her struggles with depression, drug use, and suicide. How was her situation different from where I had sat so many years ago?
She wasn’t different from what I was. We each had trials and tribulations, though she was still stuck in hers.
I could see myself in her.
After listening to her for an hour, it was getting late, I started to get up and excuse myself. I asked her what her name was she said “Mary”, She asked me mine and I introduced myself. I remember thinking what can I do to help her? What does she need?
As I stood there I said, ” Mary, remember the most important thing you can do is care for you.” She looked up and smiled, she really smiled.
Sometimes our aloneness is a gift. A gift to share with others.
Remembering
re·mem·ber /rəˈmembər/ verb: Have in or be able to bring to one’s mind an awareness of (someone or something that one has seen, known, or experienced in the past).
Herein lies the thing, How can you bring something to your mind when you have no awareness of it? How can you remember when you can’t remember?
How can you remember something when you don’t even have any inkling of what it was, no awareness of something else?
Most of the time, our awareness is very limited to what we experience and have experienced. We use these experiences to weave the tapestry of life we exist in. What if there are other threads, other colors, other materials that we are not aware of, that we could use?
This is where I stood. I had stood in this place since I was in my early teens, for nearly 35 years. I believed that my life was a miserable, suffering, dark thing. This limited the materials I had available to me to create the tapestry of my life. Why couldn’t I see anything else?
Trauma, either self-inflicted trauma or real trauma, it doesn’t matter. Trauma colors everything we see. If affects us deeply. It may be that we did experience something traumatic, something really horrible, that happened. We also may have self-inflicted traumas that we aren’t perfectly clear on.
Enter the concept of the CSO (Compassionate Self Observer)
F asked me who I had loved. Who did I have a great relationship with when I was young? I told him it was Pete, my maternal grandfather. F then asked me to describe him in words
I choose: Kind, Loving, Intelligent, Caring, …
Then F asks me who the opposite of Pete is, in my life. This is the NSO (Negative Self Observer)
I tell him Jill (Name changed to protect the innocent). F asks me to describe her in words.
I choose: Mean, demeaning, angry, upset, belittling…
Then, F says to me that the CSO is actually who you are and the NSO is what you do to you.
BOOM!
Remembering: To be able to bring back a piece of information into your mind, or to keep a piece of information in your memory
Up to this point in time the memories of Pete were entangled with his death. He died alone in the assisted living facility late one night. We had all gone to visit him earlier that day but then we left because we had life to deal with. How was it that we were so busy with our own lives we couldn’t be there to be present with death? I remember thinking, we should stay because he might die tonight. He did. He died alone. For thirty-some-odd years I couldn’t recall or remember any of the good times with Pete. All I could see is how I had failed him and he died alone. At the moment when F told me that I was the CSO, that I was Pete, I was all of a sudden, able to start remembering the good times. Riding in his pickup, sitting on the front porch with him, the smell of oil and dirt that permeated his workshop.
A self-inflicted trauma had filtered my memory of Pete. I say “self-inflicted trauma” because it was that. Had I failed him? Had he died alone because of me? Had I caused his death? No, I hadn’t, I had simply heaped the responsibility of it on myself, add to that large portions of grief and loss, and I had a recipe for a self-inflicted trauma. When we change the way we look at the world, when we rub the years of accumulated sleep from our tired eyes, the remembering changes.
When the perceptions of our trauma’s start to shift and change, we also change, our view of the world changes.
Now I can guess you may be thinking WTF, you aren’t Pete, you and he are different people. While that is true, it’s also not true. It’s true because we both were different collections of cells acting in concert to create a human form. But what about when we look deeper? All the attributes I had ascribed to Pete were ones that I saw as a child and remembered somewhere deep inside myself. Wouldn’t I have tried or wanted to be like that? What if I can view my thoughts and actions as Pete would have? Instead of doing what I had always done.
I had simply forgotten, forgotten that he loved me, the kindness he showed me, the even temper he always had. In doing so, I had forgotten to love myself, to show myself kindness.
And what about the NSO, The Negative Self Observer? Was Jill really those things? Was she mean, angry and demeaning? Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that by ascribing those attributes to her, I had, in a way, altered my perception of how she treated me.
“I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.”
―
ChaChaChaChanges
After my first “therapy” session with F, I felt slightly different. As if maybe my current state and condition was not some inescapable dark abyss. How had I ended up in my current state?
Life. My life seemed to be a miserable, difficult, daily struggle with the darkness that I saw around me. How had I ended up here? Did everyone experience this same thing (I assumed not as then everyone would be suicidal)?
I had a laundry list of things that caused me trouble
- Failed marriages
- Difficult times at work
- Difficult making and maintaining relationships
- Feeling isolated
- Feeling like nothing I did ever worked out
- and on and on…
I had changed a lot of things over my life in an attempt to make things better. I moved, I changed jobs, I got divorced, quit drinking, quit using drugs, etc…
But things were still generally shitty and miserable. What more was there to change?
ME
Throughout my life, I had changed all the things external to me, gave up drugs and alcohol (self-medication), changed jobs 30 some odd times, moved… Yet here I was suicidal, what more can I change to have a different experience? The daily struggle with my own mortality had reached a pinnacle and I wanted to jump. I had done all the things.
Or maybe not.
All of the changes I made to feel less miserable were external to ME and my self. It’s a fine line, ME and the things I want to change. External or internal. External things are easy to change, you just remove them from your life and go on. Internal things that is were it gets dicey. If one only looks at changing external things it’s a piece of cake. My problems are because of you, and I’ll just remove you from my life, I hate my job I’ll get a different one. Internal things not so much, how does one remove the self? Well, suicide is one answer. Or at least it appeared to be from my vantage point.
But how do we change the self? Is it about finding the self? Is it lost? To be lost seems to indicate it is somewhere else, somewhere unknown. If we could only have a spiritual GPS of sorts on this lost self then it would be easy to find.
But maybe we aren’t lost at all. Maybe instead we have forgotten who we are.
Thus I began the process of remembering who I was.
Reality is a Rainbow of Gray
- Black & White
- Right & Wrong
- You & Me
- Mine & Yours
- The light and the dark
These are all ways we view the world around us. They exist at the ends of a spectrum. Dualistic, extreme, polarized. What about all the things in-between? All the shades of gray that exist between black and white, between right and wrong, between you and me?
Each of these opposites cannot exist without the polarizing opposite. How can you see the light unless you know what the dark is? How can you be right unless you can also be wrong?
But what about the middle, where things are less exact, less defined, and more nebulous, hazy and vague? That’s where it gets difficult. We like to see things like this or that, black and white. It’s easier, less gray, less nebulous. We like things to be clear and exact.
The Shambling Suicide Beast
The shambling suicide beast is what I call it. In the darkest times of my despair, it would arrive, from somewhere on the dark horizon of my mind it would appear, on the edges of my perception, it would come crashing through my inner landscape to bear down on me, crushing the will to live from my soul.
I wasn’t constantly suicidal. Some days were OK, most days weren’t. On a scale of 1-10, where 1 is “I’m going to kill myself”, and 10 is “I can’t believe how great life is” , I look back and think maybe I was at a muted 3 with frequent forays into the depths of -5. Nowadays I would say I flow right around a 7.
In the times when things were just drab, gray and lifeless, it was a constant struggle to function. I knew taking my own life was wrong but I couldn’t stop thinking about it, how great it would be to just check out, to not be here.
The shambling suicide beast that was out there was something I had created. It was ominous, dark, heavy and loathsome. It was huge and nondescript, massive, colossal, dark and shadowy. It contained all my darkest fears, my anger at myself, my failures. I had pushed all my dislikes, frustrations and otherness into it. It grew each time I put something else into it.
In retrospect, anthropomorphizing my suicidal intent was in a way a gift. The beast wasn’t me, it was something else, part of my inner landscape that I had created. Maybe I could tell it to go away, to back off, that it had no power over me, that I was stronger than it was.
Even now, it’s still there, it lurks on the periphery of my consciousness, I can feel it. It’s smaller now, it is smaller than I am. It doesn’t dare approach me, I have knowledge of its flawed machinations.