It’s been a while…

Since I last wrote. I have been going through some transitions in my personal counseling experience. My awesome counselor had to go to internship so I got shuffled around a bit. Finally ended up with a male counselor, who was not a bad fellow, but I just can’t relate as well to a male as I can to a female.

Ultimately, I hope that I can find a new counselor that will be the kind of counselor I need.

In the meantime, I keep working on myself, confronting a lot of the stuff that lurks in the background. I won’t say that I’m fearless, because I’m not fearless. I know it will be tough work. I know that it will not be pleasant. But I want to do it.

Bright thought of today:

“In order to double your success rate, triple your failure rate.” – T. Watson

Feeling Down

I’m feeling down. This is, really, not a national emergency. It’s not even a unique event. It’s just a normal part of my week. Living with depression means understanding that, sometimes, you will feel down and there won’t be a good reason why. I had an OK morning. I got to work on time. I had a decent breakfast. I have no reason to be down, really: I have a family who loves me, I have a decent job. There are plenty of people who are worse off than I am. But there it is.

 It is really not the being down, but how one responds to it, that makes the difference. I suppose I could point to a lot of reasons why I might be down, but I don’t want to belabor the point. Ultimately, whether the feeling is just some chemical weirdness in my brain, or born out of some actual reaction to the world, it’s there. Sitting with it, noticing it, talking about it; these are the ways I’ve learned, that I’ve taught myself, to cope with it all.

 But it doesn’t define me as a person. It doesn’t make me different from other beings drawing breath. We are all in this together. So, despite the feelings of loneliness that I feel, those feelings I get from time to time of being an alien in a crowd of normal folk, I know that we are all built with the same kind of DNA. I am not alone. There are the sounds of people’s voices just down the hall, or across the way. So, I comfort myself and I go on.

Here’s hoping you will, too.

Very cool fiction representation of ADHD in a girl

Theo Waitley, the protagonist of the Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s new novel, Fledgling, is clearly someone with attention issues. How the authors deal with it is fairly realistic, and it is a very empowering story for those of us who have felt this way. In this story, the ADHD-like conditions Theo has demonstrated are actually an outgrowth of her genetics: she comes from a family of fast-reaction-time spaceship pilots.

Fledgling is a coming-of-age story. I hope you enjoy it and the podcast, as I am involved with reading the story for the podcast.

The Challenge of Depression

I just read a news article that featured the findings of a Canadian study on depression.

This study determined that people who were reported “cured” of their depression and subsequently exposed to “mild sadness” would frequently re-lapse into a depressive state.

What this means is that, even if you are “cured” of depression, and you stop taking anti-depressants, you may relapse into depression afterward.

This is not surprising. I believe there are some folks who will always be on anti-depressants. I believe that I am one of those people. But does this mean that life is not worth living? Does this mean that I can’t expect to have some measure of happiness ever?

Of course it doesn’t mean that. It means that there are some folks who are always going to have to mind their emotional health, and take care of it. There are people who are more emotionally reactive than others. These are people who are, by nature, also able to be affected positively and who feel emotions more deeply in general than others, in my opinion.

 I’d love to see a study that took that into account as well.

 As for me, I’m going to keep on, keeping on. There is no other choice. If I have to keep taking anti-depressants, then I will. That’s just that.

I certainly would rather not have to need them, but if I must, I will.

Silence

Lately I'm fighting a lot of creative silence. There are things I want to say, but the words are being too timid to leap out onto the screen or into the air. Part of the silence has to do with a lot of inner changes I'm going through due to my counseling. Part of it is that my life is stressful. Part of it is my depression.

I try not to let the silence win. I accept it, open it up, realize that silence is sometimes necessary, realize that this, too, will pass and I'll soon be back in the thick of things.

It's hard in these moments, however, because I can't help feel as though I'm speaking only to myself, when I do speak.

And it matters to me what other people think. I don't write, or podcast, for fame or glory but I wouldn't mind having some. Heck, all I really want is for someone to occasionally pay attention to me. Not all the time. Not in a weird, obsessive way. But just…sometimes. Knowing that I have an audience. Knowing that another human being wants to know what I think – that's a powerful thing.

I know to devote myself to my art and my writing, I'm going to need to get over this need for feedback / response / recognition. I'm sitting with it, knowing how hard it feels, recognizing what parts are inside of me irrevocably and sadly – what parts of it are brain chemistry rather than Truth.

I refuse to accept that my brain chemistry is truth. Life is true, beauty is true. Depression is a foul plague of shadows, and it isn't at all true. I have had my share of grief and sadness, but do I deserve to be this sad all the time? No, I don't.

So, I answer back the brain chemistry with the shot-in-the-dark chemicals they give me to make me more happy, more compliant to social convention, more attentive to things that I otherwise find boring. I'm here. I'm trying.

I'm turning over all the boxes and trying to sort through them, throwing away that which is not useful or important anymore.

There just doesn't seem to be enough time to do what I want to do and what I must do and what I should do.

Let me quote a science fiction TV show. "I stand between the candle and the star." Between the last hope of light and the source of all light.

And I refuse to let the Shadow do me in.

May it always be so.

Lost in the Forgetting

As I grow older, I realize that my memory is for crap.

That fact has been used to hurt me in the past. There are several people who, in the course of my life, utilized my poor memory against me.

For the longest time, I tried to hide my memory problems. Trying to lie to cover up the fact that you just don't remember is not exactly the best solution for the problem. For one thing, liars need to have a really good memory, to be able to tell the same lie over and over again.

As I have come to understand the truth of the idea of "honesty making the best policy," and implement that policy, I've started to have less and less trouble with that kind of memory problem.

Being consistent is not just a good idea for memory retention, it helps you be able to present a decent face to the rest of the world, as well.

Sometimes, though, there are whole conversations and whole agreements that I have had and have made that I just don't remember. This is difficult for me, especially since I used to spend a lot of time with a person who really used my poor memory against me. This person knew that I was vulnerable to forgetting things, so she utilized this knowledge in "Gaslighting" me.

Such a manipulative person should have the license to talk revoked, in my opinion. But I digress.

I don't think that anyone in my life would purposefully do this to manipulate me. I believe I've learned over the course of years to seperate myself from that kind of person.

So, now, I just have to sit down and say, "OK, look – I don't remember what you're talking about. I'm willing to believe that you said it and that I was there. I can't for the life of me recall saying that. However, if you'd like to tell me what we talked about, I can give a stab at remembering it."

 My memory is relative and relational. Each meme unit is connected to other meme-units. If I can get the meme-units linked together, I will have a fairly decent memory of something.

In order to create the meme-unit connections, I try to establish ties with the memory to already existing frameworks. For example, if I need to remember a particular appointment, I always do better when I have a reminder pop up on my computer, my cell phone, and my PDA AND having a post-it note on my computer monitor AND putting it on my car dashboard AND talking about it to several people, who will most likely ask me, "So, did you get the tickets to that Brazillian Penguin Performance this weekend, like you said you were?"

Actually, it's only things I find boring that I have a truly hard time remembering. I have developed several different strategies for remembering these things:

• Tie the boring appointment with something fun in your mind: If I go to the Doctor's appointment this Wednesday, I will reward myself with a stop at a bookstore.
• Reinforce things. When doing chit-chat about your week, say to your chat partner, "I'm going to get to go to a bookstore this week when I remember to go to my doctor's appointment."
• Use a website like AirSet.com to send yourself phone messages reminding yourself things – 48 hours, 24 hours, 12 hours, then 3 hours, then 1 hour before hand.
• Leave notes for yourself.
• Call your own voicemail.

Above all, avoid beating yourself up for having a bad memory, because it just makes you stressed out, and stress leads to distraction, and distraction leads to having a bad memory.

 When doing something where you're handling really difficult topics, use a computer. Chat logs are so much better when you can go back and read them later and say, "Wow, OK, I remember when I said that you could paint yourself purple. I didn't realize I had agreed to that. OK."

And keep your sense of humor and forgive others their memory lapses. This is especially important.

Hunter’s Mind

I feel as though I have struggled all my life with not being in sync with the world around me. 

Let me explain. I am not trying to say I'm some sort of whiz kid or some sort of supah-genius. I am just a regular guy for the most part. But I have a very active brain. And my brain demands input. And when it doesn't get input, it gets antsy.

I call this Hunter's Mind – because the most useful this state can be is when I'm sitting and waiting for something to occur, waiting on something to change. I can sit still when I am doing this. If I am engaged mentally, my Hunter's Mind can keep me still for hours.

And there are all these novelty circuits in my brain. Novelty shines through the sensory noise of everything else and suggests itself to me very quickly. 

 My brain craves the novelty, recognizes the patterns of novelty and goes after it. *Snap* Like that.

 This is not a great adaptation to living life in a civilized world. Polite society has very little need for hunter types. So I have been diagnosed with a "disorder" that is called "Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder"

I don't feel that it is a disorder. I agree that it doesn't fit this world very well. But I don't think I'm broken. 

Love makes you real

I'm torn. My whole life, I have been torn. I know for a fact that I was rejected from the moment I was born. Most folks are born and have their mother love them and care for them. My birth-mother gave me to someone else to take care of me.

Now, I have heard all of the propaganda and the things that people say:

• Your birth mother loved you enough to give you to a family who could take care of you.
• You were chosen by your parents – most people don't get to choose.
• You were a love child – isn't that romantic?
• Aren't you glad you weren't aborted?

All of these things may be true, but you know what? They don't help. There is no getting around the fact that, at the root of my lifespan there is a moment of rejection that can't be erased.

Yes, I was a love child, and no, it wasn't romantic. It meant my birth parents probably didn't think much about birth control. That doesn't register as being very intelligent or very considerate, especially in a time when birth control was a lot more available than it had ever been. Am I glad I wasn't aborted? Well, if I had been aborted, how would I have known? I personally believe my life force would've flowed back to the source and would've mixed with the life force available for new life and would've manifested in some other way.

The potentiality of who-I-am-now would not have been known in that timeline – in that timeline I would not exist. Although I hope that the world is made better by my being here, I cannot bring myself to be so egotistical as to think that the world would even notice my absence if I had never been.

Yes, my parents chose me. But now I know that it takes a long time to get a white, male baby in the adoption process, and it's not like you're going to be choosy at the point which you're handed an infant. You're going to bond with the infant. So it wasn't much of a choice.

"Your mother loved you so much…" is crap, frankly. This was not love. This was selfishness, as was the act of my conception. Love doesn't send people away, it makes a way. Love doesn't divide, it multiplies. Love finds a way to make things work. Neither my birth-mother or (if he even knew) my birth-father were unselfish enough to keep me and just make it work out, but not selfish enough to abort me.

Now, I'm not saying that I am unwilling or unable to get around that rejection, to grow and move forward. I am more than my beginning. However, it does inform my life and may go to explain this sense that I have that I am somehow apart, somehow different than other people. Not better. Just different.

My parents (the people who reared me, the only people I have ever called mom and dad) were very good to me in the overall scheme of things. I was lucky in that I never had to worry where food was coming from, or where my shelter was, or whether or not I'd have medical care or shoes or new clothes when I needed them. I can't say that I provided that level of material comfort to my own children.

And you might say that my upbringing is what causes me to be an eternal optimist, because I grew up and felt that sense of pure taken-care-of that I have come to realize is incredibly rare and very difficult to achieve in this day and age.

On the subject of my birth mother, I have felt at turns total ambivalence, a fascination and curiousity, and absolute anger at her for her rejection. Part of me longs to be in her arms even to this day - but accepting that that will probably never happen is part of my struggle to obtain a healthy and lasting peace and clarity in adulthood.

In fact, the one of the biggest reasons I am a loving, caring and expressive person is that I had a mother who mothered me just as much as my birth mother could have.

In many ways, this leads me to the subject of my fascination with the anima, the feminine. It didn't help that I grew up in what amounts to a matriarchy. By the time I was an adult, the power and mystery of the feminine was definitely ingrained in me. It took me a good long time in my life to claim my own, masculine, power and to recognize it as a seperate thing from feminine power: not derived from the female, but an individual source all my own.

But the fascination with the feminine continues, and that's OK. I love women. Had I been born a woman, I'd probably be a lesbian. That doesn't mean I don't love some men, but even the men I care about have strong aspects of the feminine to them. So ultimately, it is the "other", the female, the mystery, that I am drawn to. And that is why I am writing this journal – to explore that sense of being apart, and to share my experiences of living life as an alien.

Understand that I have already forgiven my birth-mother and  my birth-father for what they did, and now I can feel love for them. And love is the only way I can know them, because they are not available to me in my life. Because my love makes them real – and that is all that matters.

But I don't love them the same way I love my real parents, the people who took care of me and changed my diapers and helped me with my math phobia and helped launch me into this life. Those people will always loom large in my personal mythology.

Thank you for reading.

Welcome.

Well, I finally decided to get “a real blog” and write a bit about my feelings of alienation. I’m feeling them particularly keenly today and am trying to manage them while I get work done. More about this later.