Self-Care for the Empath Writer: The Letter that You Never Send.

Writing isn’t just for an audience or publication.  It isn’t just so you can wear a tweed jacket with thick glasses and “prove something” to the critical voice in your head–which by the way, never came from you, but is a combination of the least supportive (and most expensive) writing instructor you’ve ever had and the family members who keep asking how much you’re making on that skill.

Writing isn’t about any of that.  For one, becoming a “skilled” writer (whatever the fuck that means) is generally a financial waste, which is why you keep being bothered by your family members about it.  Secondly, that unsupportive writing instructor actually has no investment in your growth and spiritual development as a writer.

The question you need to answer is what brought you to the page in the first place?  What agony needs to be given shape?  What clogged scream needs to storm the barricades?

Writing is, primarily, a private act.  It is between your brain stem and your frontal lobe.  You cannot go backwards, logic to feeling, which means you cannot start with criticism.  You must always start from within and go outwards.  From the writer you were before you showed your writing to anyone.

Criticism does not belong at our centers.  Nor does anyone else.  Which is what brings me to the title of this piece–the letter that you never send.

As an empath, I consciously screen every word I speak through the ears of my audience.  Whatever I get across needs to 1) avoid their triggers, 2) validate them, and 3) empower them.  I endeavor far more messages that will be read by another, than will only be read by me, and exist solely for my learning.

The “Letter That You Never Send” is a letter that you pretend they will understand; not one they actually will.  When a 6-year relationship ended 3 years ago, I began letter after letter after letter, but kept stopping myself because I knew he wouldn’t get it.  I was allowing the outer world to influence the inner world.  Each time I stopped myself was with the same stifled disappointment I felt in our conversations–stonewalling myself and editing myself, because I knew I was speaking to an earless void.  In my stem, I didn’t know who I was writing that letter for.

It’s about you, honeybun.  Writing is always about you.  You have to start from the inside out.  That’s the whole goddamn process.  Those who criticize this writer or that writer for being “self-indulgent” have a funny idea of what writing is truly about.

The word “aubade” comes to mind here (allow me to flex my tweed jacket and thick glasses for a moment).  It is a 17th century poem (SNORE) written about the separation of love at dawn–originally, to a sleeping woman (perhaps she fell asleep during a lecture about 17th century poetry).  

What I’m saying is, we’ve always been doing this.  If the poem is written to a sleeping woman, who is this song really for?

Wherever the energy between you and your loved one diverged, garden the space with your words.  Not for them, but because you deserve flowers in the empty space. 

Post-Severance Reflections on Work

Growing up in a baptist home, my earliest ideas about Hell were quite primal–constant physical agony, fire, torture, “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”  They became slightly nuanced when I read CS Lewis’s The Great Divorce and deeper when I saw Richard Mattheson’s What Dreams May Come, which spoke to my developing agnosticism.  It wasn’t until Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium (which spoke to my solidifying atheism) that I started understanding “modern hellscape” as an emerging genre of storytelling.  

Like science fiction, hellscapes give us an alternate reality where we can run through believable scenarios, change one thing, and learn something about our identity and values as humans.  Also like science fiction, the variable tends to deal with either new technology (Black Mirror, Westworld), environmental discoveries (Color Out of Space, Annihilation, Sphere, Solaris) or medical advancements (Maniac, Altered Carbon, and the show that inspired this piece, Severance).

Within the first episode, Severance tells us that it knows exactly what it is.  The boss of the company, Miss Cobel, advises the protagonist with the following:

My mother was an atheist. She used to say that there was good news and bad news about hell. The good news is, hell is just the product of a morbid human imagination. The bad news is, whatever humans can imagine, they can usually create.  

What separates a hellscape from a horror is the believability.  Mark H isn’t trapped in a lake of fire or a pit of skulls.  He’s trapped in the same carpeted, fluorescent prison we’re all trapped in.  He gets worker appreciation in the form of fruit platters and paper weights.  His compensation for a work-related injury is a gift card to a bar & grill.  Those details are what make the horror of his daily life resonate deeply in us.

The sheer amount of time and energy Mark spends at work is amplified through the show’s use of lighting.  We only see the sun when it is low in the sky–either on Mark's commute, or briefly right outside of a building to have a quick conversation.  The rest of the show takes place either in the bright synthetic lighting of an office, or in the cold blackness of night where his only work-free life exists.  

Even at an indoor book party, the characters float in a poorly-lit abyss of a life that allows little time for connection.  At the climax of Season One, Mark fights his way through a current of meaningless interruptions–“You didn’t bring your own book?  Oh, shoot.  Hm.  Shoot.  Maybe you can share with someone”–to have one single, life-defining conversation with his sister.

Do we live in hell?  Are we stuck in a bottle episode of our careers?  Why does Mark’s horrific life look so much like ours?

“Let’s chat about something I bet you have heard of, the ‘work life balance,’ ” Mark tells his coworker Helly (hmmm.  Hell-y.) on her first day.  “To start, imagine yourself as a seesaw.”

That’s the moment I jumped out of my crumb-sprinkled couch and pointed at the screen.  Had they been reading my diary?  Yeah, of course I’ve fanticized cloning myself to be my work-errand-cleaning slave so I could write and play and have sex all day like a king.  

I love my career.  I know this because I ask myself every evening if I love it, as I put my bag down, look at my running shoes, and fight the urge to nap.  It’s a losing battle.  I can’t help but harbor a little resentment when so little of my energy is left for just me.  

Miss Cobel, I too am an atheist, which makes Time more powerful than either of us.  And this art witch refuses to die before it’s my time.  But I can’t snap my fingers and change the weight of the market, or the anthropology of economics, or the universal pattern of power and slavery.  And what Severance teaches us is that the fantasy of “leaving it at the door” wouldn’t actually make us happier, and it certainly wouldn’t give us more time.

So I wake up, center myself, hunt for joy through fervent meditation, and bring it to work.  Not Garden-of-Eden joy, mind you–I mean rebellious, stupid, silly, gritty joy.  I dance my way down the halls and make goofy faces at my coworkers.  I approach conflict as a challenging puzzle, which means that solving it counts as play.  I compose my prosody and body language like an opera.  When a compromise is reached, I sing a victory song from old video games.

I can do all these things and still meet 85% of my daily expectations, which is a fine number.  Severance might even call it a “happy” number.  Some things don’t get done.  But I can love myself enough to foster the joy I deserve in a work culture that I can’t change.

I’m not happy everyday.  Some days I message my husband, “Kill me please.  Have mercy on my dying corpse.  For the love of Christ, cut my arteries,” and I have to remind myself that the end will come soon enough.  The hellish truth to our lives is that work is a constant, inescapable shackle that occupies most of our corporeal allotment on this earth, leaving us paltry crumbs when it is time to clock out.

The good news about hell isn’t that it’s fake–it’s very real, and we’re very much stuck here.  The good news is that our inner world…our whole inner world…still belongs to us.  As Orwell wrote in his most famous hellscape (1984), “If you can FEEL that staying human is worthwhile, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.”  

So maybe, definitely, shirk something.  Find one thing on your plate that no one checks, and banish it to fluorescent oblivion–as bright as forgetfulness, as invisible as the question, “What was that thing?”  Because our brains need space and stimulation to be creative.  Because creativity is a human right.  And as we can see from the diminishing sunsets in Severance, it actually can’t wait until 5 PM.

Unclogging Spiritual Chakras: Evolution vs Constance

In my Christian upbringing, the theme of constancy was holy and revered.  God never changes; He is always the same and always will be the same.  The Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End.  We should be like God.  Therefore, we should be constant, or at least approaching a universal standard of ethics.  Our love should last forever.  We should always forgive.  There is Right, and there is Wrong.

I am learning to embrace the different women I become, and the different ethics I develop as I understand the nuances of being human, of being alive.

Being alive means sailing in a whirlwind of physics.  The chaos of electrons as they swirl around the nucleus like flies around a light.  As your prefrontal cortex grabs the windbag of sparkling entropy and steers it in a direction based on code.  The code that you are continuing to write every day.

Your ethics are supposed to change.  The universe is breathing and branching, and you are a glowing branch.  Which means sometimes you have to bend, because that's where the forces are taking you, and that's where your light will keep shining.

You're not inconsistent.  You're learning.  

You weren't wrong.  You're growing.

There is nothing more holy than that.

Kiss, Cry, Repeat.

Wednesday, at the peak of my spring break, I took care of a very sad girl.  It was the kind of day where playing video games was an accomplishment.  I believe this was my schedule:

9:00 AM:  Wake Up  

10:00 AM:  Get out of bed, figure out of I’m going out or not

11:00 AM:  Eat something, realize I’m not going anywhere

12:00 PM:  Video Games

2:00 PM:  Cry & nap

4:00 PM:  Wake up & cry

4:30 PM:  Rumination time–fight, give in, fight, give in…

5:00 PM:  Snack, cry, sit with an open book on my lap that I don’t read while I play Solitaire on my phone

6:00 PM:  Get ready for a date with my husband

Throughout the day, I had a deep fear of this kind of unsustainable, debilitating sorrow.  “I can’t love like this anymore,” I admitted.  “It hurts too much.  I get too vulnerable.  I can’t sacrifice days like this to just feeling.  I have things to do.  I can’t be a pathetic lug like I was in my twenties before I went on meds.  Monogamy is safer.  You don’t have days like this in monogamy.  Where does the pain actually end?  I can’t even wrap my mind around the immensity of it.”

And in that concerto of self-doubt, regret, and melancholy, the only voice of comfort was the knowledge that it would end soon.

I don’t like that the only comfort is temporality, because I don’t like temporality.  I want to believe in everlasting existence, in life-after-death, in eternal love, in “we’ll last forever.”  The very source of my anguish was that I missed my long-distance boyfriend who had just left for home–the temporality of our visits, our moments together.  To say, “don’t worry…this will pass,” is like saying, “don’t worry, you’ll die someday.”

There was another voice too.  Not so much a comfort as a law of emotional physics.  It was the symmetry of “I can’t keep loving like this.”  

This is the other side of love.  

This is the antithesis to “my heart is so full that I can’t contain all of this joy.”  It is the other side of the looking glass–a shadow to every beam of light.  Waking up and wanting the day to be over instead of at its beginning.  The immobilizing weight of nothing, of isolation, of the off-switch.  

How does oblivion cohabitate right next to connection and exuberance?  It’s just a few hormonal shifts down the hall from it.  They’re fucking neighbors, which seems to negate the very foundation of what oblivion is, or why we fear it.  How can death be final…but oblivion be temporal?

Whatever it is, it’s not a comfort; it’s a law.

Admittedly, I do find something grounding about laws.

Maybe all I’m realizing is how small I am.  Joy and grief are both bigger than me, but they’re a package deal.  If I make room in my calendar for one, I better make room for the other.  Because she’ll just let herself in regardless.

Keep your video games handy, my friends.

Look for the one flea that is laughing

Sometimes a joke hits you really personally.

One of my favorite Louis CK jokes is when he talks about performing some self-love directly after 9/11.  Specifically, he said it was "Some time between the falling of the first tower, and the second tower.  Because I figure, if I didn't, then the terrorists win."

I don't know if I can accurately describe what this joke means to me.  That in the face of tragedy, one would dare to laugh.  One would dare to tell a childish, morally irredeemable joke.  One would dare to be happy.  It's like taking your pain and throwing a knife in its gut.  The pain will come back, of course.  With a vengeance.  It doesn't go away because we stand up and yell, in our most melodic Nelson Muntz impersonation, "HA ha!!"  First up, and then down.

But laughing at pain does something inside us.  It pits grit against grit.  The gravitational vortex of grief pulls you into the vacuum of time, and laughter is a crumb of a moment that is your own.  It is a dry-heave when you're drowning.  It is a sandy oxygen tank.  Maybe it's no more noble than saying "You can't do worse to me than I could already do to myself."  But as Atreyu tells the assassin of the amorphous Nothing, "If we're going to die anyway, I'd rather die fighting."

Galway Kinnell's masterpiece Book of Nightmares contains two quotes that I'm heavily considering getting tattoo'd on me.  One is "the wages of dying is love," meaning that the darkness of mortality leaves us with no other option but to connect with each other for short time we have.  The second quote is darker, and means the same thing.  "On the body, on the blued flesh, when it is laid out, see if you can find the one flea which is laughing."

If you're struggling today, try to find the flea that is laughing, and then find what he is laughing at.  And then practice a smile.  Because you have to keep going, because we're dying anyway, because you deserve to smile, and most importantly, because if you don't, then the terrorists win.

x

Returning from Bereavement Leave

I had to smile a second time.  It felt intrusive because we’d already said hello.  We used to walk with someone between us, two bags each, the size of six people.  We had to merge our walking route into 2 lanes instead of 3 and I had less bags because I didn’t feel like eating.  We learned over time to walk closer, to fill the empty space, to look at each other, to savor the nibbles of small talk.  That’s why I smiled just now, because I remembered that I haven’t been remembering.

That's what she wanted, to pour into each other’s absences and become the multitudes she is now a part of.  Flesh of many dissolved into one, something about stars and gases. I don’t like the “big picture” because I don’t like disappearing. That’s not a disorder, it’s a personality trait.

No, the doctor says, it’s not about disappearing, it’s about leaving an impact.  So now I daily trick myself that teaching children how to support a thesis means feeding the five thousand.  I can’t tell if I want to believe in Jesus again or if I’m just jealous of his impact. My mother is afraid the f-word will take her three steps closer to hell.  I’m afraid that hell doesn’t even matter.

I wash the dishes one-by-one, reliving the last conversation between us, looking for the word I wanted to complete the melody.  Later tonight I will sing it as, apparently, I breathe her in one atom at a time.

America needs to get better at breaking up.

"Don't shit where you eat."  A mantra we all follow, or at least acknowledge the merits.  But it doesn't stop there.  Don't date a friend's ex.  Don't date inside your friend group.  Don't date anyone in your band.  Don't date your doctor.  Don't date your kid's teacher.  Basically don't date any person you would have a shot at meeting and having a conversation with.

Where the fuck is anyone supposed to date?  My calendar looks like an episode of horders.  How many niches do we have to carve into ourselves before we start to look like leather?  You know why so many people shit where they eat?  Because we eat all.the.time. and we have to shit somewhere.  Does any human actually work 8 hours a day?  I haven't met anyone who works less than 11 hours since 2002.

There's a common thread between the "don't date" maxims, and it's prevention.  It's not how great your relationship will be while you're having it, it's how bad things will be when and if that relationship ends.  Of course, there's nothing wrong with prevention-brushing teeth, applying sunblock, wearing a seat belt.  But heartbreak is not a root canal, skin cancer, or fatal car accident, and it doesn't need to turn us into a truck-smashing Carrie Underwood.

Let's go through a break up for a second.  We love each other, but we're not happy and we're not willing to change.  We stick with it longer than we should, because the love is still there, but the unhappiness grows all the time, joined later by sacrifice, loss, and resentment.  Eventually the love runs out, and the resentment takes over, and it's time for the conversation.

This part is why we can't have nice things.  Also Carrie Underwood, but this too.

Why did we wait until now to take the other person's wants seriously, or attempt to be flexible, or decide where our boundaries lay?  It's too late to be civil now; the reserves are bone-dry.  All empathy has gone out the window.  All the tactics we learned in COM 101 are gone.  All Sunday School lessons, PBS propaganda, children songs about sharing and giving and listening, done.  Because now it's about

I DIDN'T GET WHAT I WANTED, FUCK YOU.  Here we are at our weakest, our hearts at their most vulnerable.  No more compassion.  No more religious, agape, love-for-fellow-man.  Now we strike with the claws of Mephistopheles.  We have seen each other naked, we have caressed each other's scars in the dark, and now we dig our nails in and rip them open in broad daylight.  The sun rays burn our wounds, and it's tear-for-tear.  You rip me, I rip you, you pull wider, I pull deeper.  We
don't stop until we're both crawling away.

And with that, we cement each other as the most painful thing that's happened in the last 5 years.  We can't even bear the thought of each other.  We have to change up the times we each go to our favorite brewery.  We have to make our friends choose who they're hanging out with to make social events easier.  We immediately post hot pictures of ourselves on social media advertising our singleness and new-found freedom from that bitch/asshole.  If we see each other, the best-case scenario involves grinding teeth and chugging water until the moment ends.  The worst-case scenario involves lawyers, restraining orders, and debt.

Does this sound familiar?  Because this is why we can't date anybody, anywhere, ever.

But Tindr!  But Bumble! But OKCupid!  Oh, you mean the apps we all hate and complain about because they burn us out with alarming consistency.

Okay, I know they actually work for a lot of people.  But for the minority of cavemen that still desire to meet people organically, there should be a more effective strategy.  And regardless of technology, at some point we all have to gather at the river, hold hands, and find some way that we can take a risk on each other without ruining our lives if it doesn't work out.

For example.  Has it ever occurred to us as a species to be more peaceful when it's time to break up?  If not to make dating easier, just to make life better in general?  To learn that pain doesn't have to be accompanied by malice?  To grow in our perseverance and patience?  To show the aliens we're not a self-destructive animal?

Let's go back to that break up.  What if, instead of ripping open your wounds, I gently opened mine instead?  What if I acknowledged that I made a few mistakes?  What if I kept my part of the conversation about the things I did wrong, and left your own reflection to you?  What if I viewed you as an autonomous being, as the only person who could decide if and how you were going to change?  What could we walk away with?

We wouldn't just keep our dignity.  We'd keep the part of each other that we originally liked and respected.  We may not be best friends any more, but I might be able to continue trusting your professional opinion, or enjoy the unique twist you add to our friend group, or stay focused on how I can help my child succeed in your class.  Hell.  I might even be able to keep working in the same building as you.