SHEDDING

Yesterday's blog post, entitled 'MOM,' was written stream-of-conciousness, off the dome, and sounds like it; it sounds like the ramblings of a crazy person. Here's the truth of it: I am a crazy person. I am an insomniac. I don't sleep much and I don't sleep good. Yesterday, I wrote all that on hour number 48 of no sleep. I wrote it, and then slept an hour and a half. It is what it is.

If 'crazy' is disordered in any way, well, then I'm crazy, because I am profoundly disordered in this one way. I have, in my past, come up with all kinds of deeper meanings behind my insomnia. One of those deeper meanings was couched in something I read of Cornelius Van Til, about how some men are born watchmen-on-the-walls.

There was a season I really connected with the prophet Habakkuk in my devotional studies, as he was himself a night watchman of sorts. But no boy grows up aspiring to be the Paul Blart Mall Cop in the kingdom of the heavens.

What's more, I never labored in prayer like a spiritual watchman should. I always believed Christ's words about not babbling on like the Gentiles who are known for their many words. So a little lifting of the head to God as Brother Lawrence put it, but then I would go right back to whatever else I was doing.

For awhile, I was sedating myself just to sleep. But then I got in trouble with some drugs and I have swore off all that stuff enough to finally feel clean again. And I do prefer sobriety, as states of being go.

For another short season, I fantasized about, like, my insomnia had something to do with some transmission I needed to receive from the gods or whatever. I was trying to calm my mind through the use of meditation and I was having these profound experiences surrounding the idea of samadhi, it was all very pagan and each time I explored these things I felt strongly I was going against my Baptist sensibilities (though we, ourselves, are pagan). Even as I felt permission from the Spirit to explore breath-work and yoga, it all felt very much like I was switching sides, and I held always in my mind that if my conscience was condemning me on the matter, but that the Spirit had permitted it, then I should take heart because my Creator is greater than my conscience.

But some of these experiences scared me. They were like dream-states except I was fully lucid and totally aware of my surroundings. I was in a great, cavernous hallway with doors on every side. I walked down the long, narrow corridor toward one single door at the very end of the great hall. I paused at that door, knowing somehow that behind it was something very important. In my pause, I did some more little breath-work exercises and visualization exercises I had learned to calm myself. I pushed through the door and into a vast, eternal Library.

I was totally sober.

I entered this great Library, perhaps the library of my own mind, and I encountered a small man at the front desk who told me that he would be willing to show me the book of my life. We walked for what felt like 20 minutes in silence. He climbed a ladder. He descended, and in his hands was the book of my whole life, and I felt this, and I could feel the spine of it, and I opened the cover and on the title page it said that my name was Ezra, after Ezra who, 'opened the scrolls.' I am a book-opener.

The experience got weirder, because in this meditative, lucid, but dream-like state, suddenly I started to smell fish. I’m standing there looking at the book of my own life and I’m smelling fish. I'm talking freshwater, like salmon, and I could smell it so real and so clearly, and then slowly I could see my breath in front of me, and then in another instant, I was a bear. Straight up. I felt all the things a bear would feel. My nose was wet. I was starving hungry. I could smell raw meat and it smelled incredible. I could also smell wild blueberries. And I was itchy all-over and felt I needed to, like, shed.

It was weird. For a sheltered, naive little church-boy who grew up most ardently believing in all the many tenets of American evangelicalism as the truest expression of Christianity on earth, it was really, really weird. I shut the Ezra book and I looked at the little library attendant and I asked him what just happened, and he told me matter-of-fact: "In one of your past lives, you were a bear." 

Now, do I believe this?

No. Not really. I do not really believe in reincarnation. I mean, I guess I can see it, on the basis that I do rightly believe in incarnation, in souls coming to inhabit bodies most notably in the person of Christ who left the glories of heaven and came and subordinated himself taking the form of a servant here and all that's biblical, so if I believe in initial incarnation, why not reincarnation?

But we did so much to strike down eastern religions in my mind during seminary, we just tore these strange ideas right down. You can understand why meditating, then, and having a weird samadhi vision in meditation or coming to lucid dream felt like I was enrolled in Defense Against the Dark Arts but for little Baptist church-boys.

Stone sober, and I'm having psychedelic experiences working with these weird eastern practices. Just anything trying to get a couple nights’ sleep in a row. But that season of my life had to end too, because the deeper I got into the idea of lucid dreaming, the more and more of the demonic I encountered. Not real demons, 'cause those probably don't exist. But the demons of my human nature, in a lucid 'test-environment' state where I could do anything I wanted to whomever in my mind? I shudder even today.

We are not called to live in dreams. Dreams are given as gifts and are themselves powerful motivators, but we live and work in reality, where basically nothing bends to our will, where the curse of sin causes everything to be toil.

Meditation got me through one of the most acute distresses of my life, over four years ago, and did so in ways rationalization with God through prayer couldn't, but then when I was done with it I knew I was very, very done with it. I'm tracking the breath right now though, in-out-in-out, because it got so deep in me. And it still has its full effect, keeping me grounded in the present moment. Yesterday, I said a lot of words about my past, but those are things I almost never talk about, and meditation helped me to see how that past doesn't exist, how, really, no one who puts hand to plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom.

Then for another short season of life, I thought my insomnia would be an opportunity to explore my trauma and to heal. I did a lot of writing in that season. Want to know the annoying thing about trauma? Ok. I think I was victim of some kind of abuse in early, early childhood. I think this because I have shared my life-story and my experiences with my diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder, recurrent, this life-long thorn in my flesh. I would describe to each of these counselors and therapists (I've had six of them not counting anyone called in when I was very young...), and following my description of these experiences I've had, each, univocally pointed out that something must have happened to me.

But all I have are clouded memories and weird little stories about me. In one story that gets told, I was a toddler and no one could find me, and when my mother finally located me, I was hiding and scared and she thought it was hilarious and she took a picture, and no one in the family knew what so deeply bugged me out. That's one story that gets told.

Another is that, I loved preschool so much, until one day I just refused to go. And this, I remember. I remember abject terror at the thought of being away from my mother. I'm talking visceral, whole-body, sheer terror.

There is a family story of me finding a gun while riding my bike and just bringing it home. There is a family story about how my mom told me never to ride across the big four-lane over to the comic book shop, but that I did it, and this I also remember: I remember crying and having a total breakdown in that comic book shop and my mother having to drive and pick me up. This was the '90s, like, we just rode our bikes everywhere. There's a vague memory of something happening at a camp-site, and my parents joke about how I was never able to go to camp, to leave home as a child, how I never wanted to spend the night over at friends' houses and I never wanted to overnight with my Royal Ambassadors troop, which was the Baptist version of Boy Scouts, led by older boys, and I never wanted to be alone with them.

A very clear memory I have is of my complete and total nervous breakdown in Mrs. Goldenberg's class in the third grade. I was just sitting there, when all at once I was struck with the profoundest feeling that in all the world there was no light whatsoever, and death itself darkened the corners of my vision, and I thought about my first crush Aubrey having to move away and I thought about the butterfly I had raised from a caterpillar, who couldn't get his little pod made completely, and so he fell out, deformed and dead, a grotesque and Lovecraftian looking, half-metamorphosed eldritch horror of a butter-pillar or cater-fly.

My mom took me to a butterfly farm after all this, and one landed on my nose.

Anyway, I'm sitting in the third grade, minding my own business, when suddenly the fog of depression descended perhaps for the first time in my age of reason as a child, and all the light went out of my world, and Aubrey was moved-away and my butterfly was not just dead but like, I watched him die all deformed and weird looking and sort of mucousy or viscous, and reality just broke for me. I just remember Mrs. Goldenberg desperately trying to prevent me from hyperventilating and I remember teachers running and I remember people asking if there's anything going on at home, and I remember my mom picking me up, and I remember feeling so guilty and so stupid and telling my mom, like, "I don't even know why I'm crying. I don't know why I am sad." 

And I took time for a short season of life in my insomnia to write about and think about and try to recall the details of all these things.

I first tried to commit suicide in high school. I think I had stopped sleeping for a time. My memory of high school is totally wiped, though, because of a later trauma, or, if you ask my best friend he says it’s because I was huffing gas (that’s a hilarious story I’ll save for another time on the blog, my home had a gas-leak for a week right over my bedroom and I was hallucinating at school, and my best friend Ty legit thought I had separated from reality altogether, and he tells some really funny stories about me just being a wildman for a week at school for no reason. Ok I guess I just told the whole story but yeah. Shortly after losing my memory to a gas-leak was when my bestie says I started trying to kill myself, but like, it was funny).

The later trauma, though, ok. I got kicked out of school at age 20, following some issues with suicidal thoughts (and the school having no clue what to do to help a kid like that) and an accusation levied against me by an academic rival, an accusation which led to me being kicked out of school, something I've talked about with you at length if you and I have shared life together at all thus far. This false accusation and my evangelical fundamentalist community turning on me during another suicidal season of life... it impacted the whole of my being and informed every stupid thing I did to cope through my '20s.

So, yeah. I'm a little crazy. Here, let me celebrate a few wins: 1) I haven't tried to kill myself in four years; 2) I've been sober four years; 3) When I don't sleep now, I have a support system all around me and I have good enough treatment methods and strategies to work with the sleeplessness, to stave off a crisis; 4) I haven't been hallucinating or hearing voices lol, something I am constantly worried about is like, what if I slip into psychosis? I have my wits about me, y'all; 5) I am masterfully managing my stressors and my triggers such that, in my adulthood, I've engineered a life for myself where, in a depressive cycle, like, sure, I feel awful, and when I don't sleep, like, yes, that's literally the worst, but it doesn't derail my whole life anymore. I just text my boss and tell her, hey, 'didn't sleep last night, but the good thing is I'm three days ahead on my logs. I might be a little slow to respond to messages today. We’re looking good on those revisions from Promos...' And then I just know not to drive and not to take on any new commitments.

In a way, now, each trigger is just a gentle little reminder to rest. A gentle reminder that I am human and I cannot be perfect. And there is nothing more sane than that admission. Nothing in this world is more sane than when a crazy man says that he’s beginning to feel life is becoming ever so slightly unmanageable, meaning he needs to step back and step away and rest. Like, yeah, I’m a crazy person as evidenced most perfectly by these world-salad blog posts, but I’m also the most rock-steady, super stable and dependable person you’ll ever meet now because I will freely and quickly and easily let you know exactly where my boundaries lie. And in relationship with my Christ, like David said, he has made those boundary lines to fall in such pleasant places for me of late.

This is where I'm at with my insomnia.

It is not bipolar disorder, though I labored under that diagnosis for a time. I don't have manic episodes. You could challenge that, careful reader, by quoting me from yesterday where I was talking about how religious mania feels so good, how a spiritual high feels so right and proper and pure but how I got caught up chasing that feeling. That was a kind of mania, a kind of spiritual drunkenness that I could prompt on command through the use of tools like emotional praise and worship music (for awhile, when I was, I guess, a true believer, fully bought-in to evangelicalism and enraptured with my experience of megachurch). When my worship music parlor trick stopped working to get me to the god of my own understanding, and then I broke, and in the absence of belief in evangelicalism's god, I discovered the God Beyond All Understanding, and he don't dish out cheap highs. He only gives long and steady graces, doles them out over time. He gives manna for bread each morning and you can’t keep it overnight, you have to trust him for it again tomorrow.

I don't have manic episodes, but doctors were saying, 'Yeah, but you aren't sleeping.' And yeah, that's mania. But the other stuff that comes with mania, the grand plans and new commitments and filling of the social calendar and boundless energy and the unregulated eating and drinking and the really, really unregulated spending... yeah ok sometimes all those things happen to me like compulsions far beyond my control coming over me. But in my most manic states, I've always, always, also been depressed, which means I doubt very highly each flight of fancy that comes over me except that one which tells me nothing's good, nothing's pure, there is no magic.

I need to mention here, too, that there are several well-known and well-conducted studies which find no correlation whatsoever between heightened religious activity and schizophrenia, another theorized diagnosis I labored under that didn't quite fit. No, I'm not schizo, I'm not bipolar, and I'm not manic-depressive... it was always something else. 'Tormented' is my favorite word for it. 'Cause I grew up convinced if anyone had ever been haunted by a demon, I was being haunted by a demon. I get sleep paralysis and I have night terrors and I have experienced that spiritual state that missionaries so frequently talk about where they wake up with the feeling of hands on their throats, only to find later it was some witch doctor deep in the bush-country who was praying for their ultimate demise. You read accounts like that from the missionaries, and you have some sleep apnea, and you're like, 'Well heck I wake up thinking a demon is strangling me, gasping for air, choking on spit, crying into my pillow, and sweating through my sheets... I must have a demon too!' That's a really weird line of thinking for a thirteen year old boy who probably should have been reading Harry Potter instead.

What I have are just these intense depressive episodes, but the weird thing is, they don't follow mania as with manic-depression, they happen like clockwork. I can predict their coming, feel it coming on much like stories I’ve heard of women who so often feel a period coming. Like I can feel it, and I can say yeah ok I need to get home and do all the self-care and self-protection things I programmed with therapists and I know I need to do to preserve my own life. It's not mood swings, for me. It is a weekly, biweekly if I’m lucky, downward cycle into hell that lasts just longer than a day and a half, and, perhaps it's in my emergence from this downward cycle that I feel most manic and then it all stabilizes and I am perfectly normal for the remaining five days in the week. Once a quarter, I might have the Big One, where I’m down in the dumps for a whole week. And the not-sleeping thing certainly doesn't help the depression, but often my sleeplessness is totally removed from all depression, like I'll be just fine and not sleeping. Like neither one seems to follow the other or cause the other.

I'm doing all of this samurai-level mental martial arts on myself 24/7 in a way that, yes, ok, if I don't do it my life will be in danger from me-myself, but, managing my triggers and my stressors and watching my thoughts, taking each one captive or trying to, working through old memories of past pains, and talking it all out and doing all of it on no sleep, like... in the past 72 hours I have slept four, total. Only four, fitfully, an hour and a half early this morning and about two hours late last Friday night. I know I'll probably crash tonight after the basketball game and I'm looking forward to it. When I crash, I get about 6 hours of sleep and it is amazing. But my point is that I'm doing all of this high-level healing 24/7, fighting for myself and my sanity in ways no one will ever understand.

Another thing I’ll quickly mention about my healing. I am 34, about to turn 35. Major Depressive Disorder, recurrent, is a diagnosis which causes an enormous increase in all-cause mortality, especially in men. Every man in my family was dead at or around 70 from heart disease. And chronic sleeplessness is a condition which has been found (according to Dr. Walker, to that Why We Sleep book) to directly cause heart disease. I also gained 150lb. after being kicked out of school over a decade ago. With all this going on in me, I do not expect to live to 70 years old. That means I’m living the back-half of my life now, and I want to live it well, which is another reason I’m unpacking all this pain and all these little stories and trying to make sense of it all, so that I can put it away once for all and play the back nine loose and free.

I'm blogging all these confessions and admissions and they're coming off of me like, feels like I'm shedding them, feels like I'm being prepared for something, feels like something incredible is about to happen, feels like something in me is stirring...

I'm doing two things right now, on the blog: 1) I'm getting it all out there, clearing the tap, letting the faucet run until the inspiration flows pure; 2) I'm preparing a clean mental space for the new realities I encounter in this next spiritual season of life as a now (hopefully) much more enlightened adult.

A couple of things, as disclaimers: 1) I am working closely with mental health professionals and have taken great care these past four years and have been legitimately healing. Do not come to view all these admissions as a cry for help. I am so helped. Like Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection wrote, I have no need of a director to advise me. Not anymore. I have a great need at the present for a Confessor to absolve me. I need forgiveness, now, not permission. But I have so much great and wonderful care all around me in my '30s, adults who didn't exist or who didn't step in and protect me in my terrible twos or threes or earlier, whenever whatever it was or whoever he was broke me; 2) I ain't even told y'all the half of it so buckle up! It is not my intention to sound as though I am celebrating dysfunction, but you know I gotta get it all out on the table. A priest was telling me about this idea of making your one big confession, and that being the basis of Augustine’s tome, like, a confession about the whole of your life as this entire body of sin, and IDK how much of all that I believe, but the idea did intrigue me. Get it all out there. Let everyone know where you stand.

These are my confessions. This is how I am getting by. This is how I'm dealing with regrets and shame, having (in small ways) perpetuated abuses by letting whatever might have happened to me, that caused all this mental mess, to turn me into a little fundamentalist Baptist monster those years ago. My last humbling was the very humbling I needed to fully and finally break from any pride about life or any self-righteousness with regard to my religious views. This is how I'm exploring, how I had to grope in the dark and reach out and try to touch divinity, how I had no spiritual help before in the common church. How I've found the Church from within many churches, using the Word from within many words and calling on the Name, no longer calling on names which can be named but which are not the eternal Name. This is how I have made sense of all the spiritual ephemera I've collected in my studies, too, like how I just quoted the Tao Te Ching. This is how I've come to cope, as a grown-up kid stunted by some suppressed trauma. This is how I had nervous breakdowns and how I grew up under Columbine and 9/11 in the absence of childhood therapy in the '90s, having moved around and maybe huffed gas for a week each night, it's the story of adults who missed the mark in caring for me. It's the story of how I have missed the mark, blindly expressing only my trauma in the ways that I lived so disorderly and almost menacingly neurotic. This is a story about me that has given meaning to so many random strings and odd threads, it's the story of talk-therapy and group-therapy and behavioral-therapy and it's the story of drugs and docs and the story of mental illness and the story of a rational soul trapped in an irrational body that just does things, the story of a justice system that can't figure out what to do with the mentally ill, the story of going to jail and rehab and people finally asking, 'Hey, what do you think caused this?' It’s the story of waking up in ditches after a bender or waking up in hospitals. It’s my story.

This is my story. This is the story of a good Baptist kid, well-read, a little sensitive, who got broke by the world, grew up to be a religious tyrant in my fundie views of that world, then got broke not by the world but by my Creator himself or herself as a means of grace which led me back to him or to her. Yes, we’re sticking with the him-or-her from yesterday, though I did drop a couple G-words above, I think. I’m trying to correct my speech to reflect absolute precision and perfection of truth, so that you might come to trust a person (myself) who has not been trustworthy.

And, having done the work I've done thus far, ok... there are people in my life who think I need to go to therapy even more than I ever did, they’re so dysfunctional. And some of these don't see how far I've progressed in such a short time because they just lack a paradigm for such things. And some of these, they don't trust that I will use the tools given to me by therapists to manage all these stressors and episodes, ‘cause like, when you've tried to kill yourself now four times in adulthood, all the people around you want is for you to stop everything you're doing and be healed this very instant and it just doesn't work like that, so I'm earning trust by not being too crazy right now, by showing all of them I am managing so well.

And I am managing so, so well. But what I was going to say to conclude was that, having done this work, and having a bit of spiritual sight about me, I can see trauma and victimization everywhere now (that might also be the result of an over-therapized generation, as evangelicals so often critique, like, they're right that we didn't have this overwhelming mental health epidemic on their watch, when the Religious Right ran the world in 1984. Oh no wait I forgot that I know history and don’t idolize Reagan, who repealed the Mental Health Systems Act and set the field of therapy back so far and denied treatment to a generation of sufferers before me). It's like, I can see the weight of all our human sin as we perpetuate humankind's earliest abuses onto each new generation, and, like, I'll be totally zen in the midst of chaos now just looking around at all these adults who grew up never giving a single thought to the way such abuses have formed them, now going around acting like grown-up children just perpetuating the shame of all that came before.

So I talk about these things because, in opening up about my struggles with my own mental health, I'm really hoping that you out there, who are most assuredly more normal than me, might feel the freedom to shed whatever baggage or compulsions you might have, too.

This is how we get to heaven, by shedding the world.