White Light (reposted)

This post was originally published on October 31, 2012. I leave you with it, in anticipation to a post coming soon....

It was only after I saw my shrink, today, that I fully understood what I had done.

Resolved the defining challenge of my life.

Defining because, yes, it had ruled me since I can remember. I couldn’t get the sounds in my head out of the cello. I raged, I bit myself—never puncturing the skin, but leaving the indentations of teeth marks for hours. I once broke a bow, slamming it on the strings of the instrument.

I knew it was in there; I couldn’t get it out. And with the rage came the depression. Black days, awful days when the minutes dragged, when no amount of will could banish the demon that lurked in the corner, always crouched, always ready to pounce.

Things I didn’t care about I did well. Teaching, never a problem.

The cello?

An agony that I couldn’t do, and couldn’t not do. I couldn’t breath at the cello, I held my breath until I had to gasp. My shoulders cramped, so tight was I.

I was practicing for hours at a time. There were days it went well. I floated down the street, beaming at strangers.

Most days it didn’t.

Late at night, in Chicago. Raf asleep, Marc alone in an empty apartment. I would be meditating, and almost get through.

I called it the breakthrough. The music would get out, I would get out, the struggle would be over.

I’d win.

Or be free.

I’d masturbate, hoping to use the energy of orgasm to push me through that door. And use Rush, amyl nitrite. I’d see a white light, I’d move closer, the orgasm would stun me. But I never got through.

Last March, I relived the moment I lost my mind, back in December. Had two weeks of struggle, of fierce concentration and mindfulness. It took five minutes to save a document. I washed dishes as if the process were a koan. I retrained myself to do everything.

At the end of the day, I would be exhausted. I’d sit and read what someone else had written.

I’d laugh out loud.

“He’s so funny,” I’d say.

“He makes the most amazing leaps,” I’d say.

I was reading that day’s post in a blog called Life, Death and Iguanas.

“I’m taking the writer to get his teeth fixed,” I told Taí. She was in a storm of worry ten islands down the Caribbean. I made sure he ate. I obsessed about his having water at all times. I needed to take care of him, this gifted guy whom I have nothing to do with.

And everything….

“He didn’t go away, I could have lost him,” I’m telling the shrink. And then, “hey, aren’t you guys supposedly to have Kleenex?”

He gestured to the side table.

Well, they are our confessors, these shrinks. And at one moment, retelling the story, I jumped back, back to a dark apartment, back to a man in agony, back to a man with his brain flooded with chemicals, and a light, a light, a light I could not get to. A light that would recede and leave me so stabbed with alone.

I’m gasping, now, as I was gasping in that red velvet chair, as I was gasping at the cello.

I have just had an orgasm I have never had. Nothing physical, no hands to wash, or floor to wipe. And no, I saw no white light.

I see that white light when I sit in my chair, at five in the afternoon and read the absurd, the tortured, most—the gifted—words he’s written.

He’s filled with that light, and I tell him, “fuck, you’re amazing.”

Grrrr

Grrrrr….

This is a letter to the world that will never be read, since at the moment I am without Internet access. And why is it that it puts me into a total funk?

Consider, I have lost my mind, my mother, my job. I should know something about perspective, about what’s important and what matters.

I also feel that I’m spinning my wheels, not doing anything important, not doing what I need to do. I’m stuck, and I don’t believe in stuck. But even though I am writing every day, I’m in writer’s block—which at the moment I can’t define for you, being Internetless. Or unInterneted. Or sans Internet.

And I’m hungry—why won’t they feed me? Previously the old system worked—I gave them money and they gave me food. Today, I gave them money and now? No food.

Well, it’s clear that the world went off somewhere and decided not to take me along. But shouldn’t it have left a note on the refrigerator door? Something like, “Sorry, but you’re fucked today. Don’t try and do anything. You’ll be tired and not able to sleep. You’ll be hungry and they won’t give you food. Expect to fall and break your leg for no reason. Fire may break out. There will be insurrection in the streets. Prepare to be struck by a meteorite…. Get the picture, sucker?”

And this guy at the café which is not a café since that would imply food and that, it appears, is reserved for other people, all of whom are sitting in front of plates and slowly munching away…. Now then, why is it that my least favorite person in the café has decided to fuck around with the staff, distracting them when they should be exerting themselves at full speed with the obviously imperative, critically important task of feeding me? No but there he is, and worse, he has an Argentinian accent, which totally drives me insane. It’s Spanish with a heavy Italian inflection. And now, guess what? He has chosen to stand between a seriously beautiful guy—a man who doesn’t know, though I could tell him, that his identical twin is named Adonis—and me.

And why do I have to go to Boquerón? It was supposed to be a hotel, Copamarina, which was nice, but now it’s a timeshare in Boquerón and people will be sleeping in the living rooms, which is crazy. And where will I go when I wake up, as I always do, at three in the morning and there are sleeping and probably snoring bodies in the living room?

Outside, said Mr. Fernández, or the hotel lobby. So the whole world will be sleeping and I’ll be up and bug eyed and pacing around the lobby, accompanied with the sound of profoundly unjustly earned snores.

Well, well—I shouldn’t complain. Because my mother-in-law has decreed that she wants vegetarian lasagna, and guess what? That falls on Mr. Fernández, who has almost never made lasagna in his life and who cannot even eat lasagna, since it has pasta, and that has become the fatalist-no-computer-I-meant-fatalest (and you know where that red squiggle can go, don’t you?) of poisons. So Mr. Fernández has washed the pan that was collecting the water draining from the third floor, and he is now probably elbow-deep in that infernal pasta, which will kill us all.

Well, I for one refuse to eat it, on general principle, and to spite my mother-in-law, whom in fact I like except on days when there is no Internet and no food. No, I intend to sit at the table but with my back turned to it, in silent but very much obvious protest. Nor am I going to talk to anyone at all—not a word will be wrenched from my lips—for the entire week we’re there, since it should be Copamarina but it’s not so guess what! No words from Marc!

Hey, maybe I’ll make a sign! “I AM NOT TALKING BECAUSE THIS IS WHERE I SHOULDN’T BE AND I PROTEST AND UNTIL THE PLACE IS RIGHT AND THE FOOD COMES WHEN IT SHOULD AND THE INTERNET AGREES TO BE AVAILABLE INSTEAD OF OFF SOMEWHERE ELSE, DAMMIT, I AM NOT TALKING AND YOU CAN’T MAKE ME!”

That’s what I’ll do. I’m tired of being adult and reasonable and nice and not making a fuss and going with the flow. I’m gonna get good and mad, and tell the whole world about it. In fact, you know that lasagna? I’m gonna spit on it, on the whole pan of it, so that no one can eat it. That’s what I’m gonna do, and just wait and see! Then we’ll have to go to Copamarina which is where we should be and not in Boquerón where I can’t go anywhere when I can’t sleep! Hah!

Now let’s see—what else can I do?

And now it’s several hours later and Jaime has come in and made me drink three beers, so now I can’t think!

Grrr….

Panic on the Plaza

“You’re shaking, Marc” said Mendoza, the nice kid who makes me tuna sandwiches (for which I pay him, of course), and then I realized, ‘yes, I am.’

Well, I covered by telling him, “too much coffee,” but I suspect he knew: that wasn’t it.

And that’s when it hit me: that’s why I flubbed all those auditions—those many, many auditions which involved hours of glorious playing at home, a wrenching ten minutes of sheer musical hell, a taxi-ride-with-tears-suppressed home.

I am a racehorse, not a plow horse. At any loud noise I startle, panic, bolt. And today, merely by going off to read names with two loved ones—something I have done for months now—I was nervous.

Yes—we’re a third of the way through the 30,000 LivesProject; today we finished Hawaii and began Illinois. And Raf’s mom, Ilia, strolled as always into the plaza, dispensing greetings, muzzling kids heads, assuring all the little girls they were “tan linda, nena.”

“Besos,” she tells me; we kiss.

I have been sitting in Plaza de Armas on a green resin chair, next to which is another green resin chair, on which artfully is draped a shirt and blue jeans. And I have been pondering my body, specifically my brain, which is firing neurons down to my adrenal glands, which is making me want to run, not fight.

Do I know that I am not in danger?

Yes.

Do I know that I am scared, shaking, dreading the moment when I will have to start reading names, approaching people, trying to engage them and—more often than not—getting no response?

No.

Does my body know?

Yes.

That’s the thing—I may rationally have known that I was under no threat, as I waited those hours for my moment to fail the audition to come. My body, however, was screaming a different story. And it’s curious—both the body and the mind play the cello. Yes, those are my fingers on the fingerboard, holding the bow—but those body parts are under the control of the mind.

And for all those years when I was failing auditions, I never really knew that.

Or did I?

Yes, I had been a psychiatric nurse; yes, I knew something about physiology. But at the core, there was something wrong with me, something bad about me, something shameful.

“You have to believe in yourself,” friends would tell me.

“You have to see it, really envision it, make it real,” they would say.

“Did you want to fail?”

Why was I sabotaging myself? What dark corner of my psyche hid the roaring beast that would spring to attack me, those auditions behind the curtain? What was wrong with me?

It was savage—enduring and cleaning up from those auditions. It would take a couple of months, before the pain would start to ebb. I could talk to no one, I who was so flawed that I had caused myself once again to fail.

“It’s OK,” I told him, that guy in his thirties and forties, that guy who lives in me, that wonderful guy. “I’m here, remember? I walked you to El Morro and showed you my door and pounded on it and taught you and protected you. And remember, I read you and laughed at you and thought, ‘shit, how did he do that?’ Remember? And I still do.”

“I know,” he told me. “Thanks for that. Thanks for being here.”

“You’re wonderful,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter about those auditions.”

“Right, so can I get the cello out?”

“We gotta call Rodrigo, the repair guy.”

“Can you do that for me?”

“Yes.”

An old lady is pushing her walker towards me; the wind blowing her chestnut hair, the smile leaping up in her face.

“Besos,” she says.

We kiss.

All three of us.  

The Second Coming, Aborted

It was new and it was old, the trip to the hospital.

I went to see a lady I didn’t know. And what a charmer she was! She managed, despite her difficulty breathing, to entertain a stranger seemingly as effortlessly as if we were meeting in her home.

Almost….

Look, a hospital robs you of many things—usually starting with your dignity.

Which may be why I called her by the honorific “Mrs.” Everybody else, I’m sure, was calling her by her first name. But we chatted, she and I, and though she had no idea who I was, she carried on gamely.

Brought back memories. I spent a decade as a nurse, in a hospital that was virtually identical to the one I visited yesterday.

What struck me the most?

Oddly, the handrails on the walls. But there were familiar sights everywhere—the glassed-in nurses’ station, the waddling nursing assistants, the covered dinner trays.

I remembered the feeling of being in a hospital, and of being a nurse. Oddly, I have no particular memories of those days?

Why?

It may be the curious effect of depression on memory. Some people hypothesize that depression and especially anxiety hinder the ability to retain memory. I can recall bits of that past, but not much. I know that a lot happened, much of which should have been, and was, memorable. But it’s not there.

Wait—a patient. Manic as hell, and completely out of control. Admitted pregnant, by another patient, who was even worse. It was a nightmare—virtually no drugs could be given to her, because she was pregnant. And so she shredded the unit into chaos, and there was nothing anyone could do.

The doctors, of course, came and went. But it was eight hours of sheer hell for the nurses. The patients got the worst of it—24 hours. Well, no, 22 hours—the patient was sleeping only 2 hours a night, and that intermittently.

So the nurses were howling. One—what were we going to do about that unborn child? Sorry, but it was the clearest possible choice for an abortion. The gene pool was a disaster. And the parenting skills / home environment were even worse.

The problem, of course, was consent. We were documenting that the patient was running naked down the halls screaming that Jesus was humping her. Could we then turn around and attest that she had knowingly consented to an abortion?

It went on for weeks. There was pre-hell—the hours before your shift when you counted the minutes before you had to go in there. There was the hell itself. And post-hell, which generally meant several strong drinks and bed.

News alert to doctors—fetuses grow.

So there she was in her second trimester. Still untreated, still crazy. We knew, those of us aware of the past, what Bedlam must have been. Except that instead of one untreated crazy, Bedlam had a ward-full.

Somebody screamed loud enough, or perhaps long enough. Social services looked for some family member who could give consent.

Nobody—the patient had exhausted her family.

Eventually, the hospital went to court. Which meant, of course, a delay of some weeks.

The hearing was postponed….

The patient was now of the belief that she was carrying Jesus’ child, which would be the Second Coming. This excited ribald commentary in the staff; I wept.

And I was the nurse to prep her for the abortion that eventually the judge ordered. Oh, and to give her the medicines that would finally, finally sedate her.

“When Thorazine first came out, it was in a container about the size of a gallon of water. Had a little pump on it, and you were supposed to put precisely 100 or 150mg of the stuff in a glass of orange juice. Well, I did for a while. Then, I just started to take a look at the patient. If he was really crazy, I’d just pump away like hell!”

The words of an older nurse. And one I respected. So of course I topped up the pregnant patient’s drink, as it were, and put her on the gurney. We went down to surgery together. I signed off, another nurse took over.

You’ll have guessed what happened.

The abortion was performed, and the child was…

…born alive.

Which meant, of course, that a code had to be called, and every effort made to save the life of this poor child.

I left nursing soon after that.

Oh—and is that the reason I remember so little? 

Performance Through Panic?

If true, it’s amazing.

The problem?

I don’t think it’s true.

But what do I know? I don’t play golf. So I have no way of knowing whether Charlie Beljan—28-years old, recently married, recently childed (his son was born in September), and needing a top ten finish to stay in the PGA—played his way through a panic attack to win the Children’s Miracle Network Classic.

OK, so I don’t know anything about golf. But I do know something about panic attacks, having had two or three at the beginning of this year. That said, could I have done a routine activity, an activity I had spent thousands of hours to perfect?

Teaching. I have taught for twenty years, and the average person works 2000 hours per year. So, I have an estimated 40,000 hours of teaching notched on my belt. Could I have taught a class—that day the decision to hurl myself into the stream of cars or fish out my cell phone and call for help was made by convention only?

No.

Well, the clip below lets you see for yourself. Something is clearly happening. I don’t think it’s a stunt. I’m convinced that what was happening was exactly what we see—a guy struggling with anxiety, a man battling demons.

And Beljan was fighting some heavy odds. There are three things, scientists say, that completely remap your brain: getting married, having a child, moving to a foreign country. Beljan was married early in the year, and his first son was born two months ago.

Never had the experience, but I’ve heard about it. Yes, initially it’s exhilaration. But it quickly turns to exhaustion.

So he’s already under stress. And then, last Friday, on the second round of the first day of the golf tournament, he goes into a panic attack. And emerges with a 64—his second best performance.

Gets into an ambulance, goes to the hospital, gets a battery of tests. Comes out the next day, and decides to do the last two rounds. “I was crying on the range because I was so afraid these feeling would come back,” the New York Times quotes him as saying.

Two other quotes:

1.     Beljan also picked up a paycheck of $846,000

2.     “I never tried to make golf something more than it is.”

Well, my question would be ‘what is it?’ Is it a game or a high-risk, high-exposure job under conditions that you mostly cannot control? The Times quotes an expert as saying that golf is the most mental of games (though what about chess?).

And certainly sports is about pressure, and how we react to it. My current theory is that guys, for most of our evolution, were hunters. The chase, the hunt, the kill are bred into us. The corporate world isn’t quite the forest or savannah we crave. A football stadium with 250-pound muscled beasts facing us is more to the taste.  

And there’s a term in sports—the choke. A talented player, someone who has worked ceaselessly to perfect his game, loses it completely, enters into a panic, gets worse, gets tight, starts to analyze when he should relax. It’s a horrifying spectacle to see. (Even worse to go through, as I have….)

My take? Beljan did a reverse choke. He was operating under extreme stress, but somehow never lost his automaticity. Look at the clip—yes, he’s gasping for air and crouching on the sidelines (or whatever golfers have). But when he’s playing? He seems as loose as a jellyfish.

My question? What would have happened if he had lost, just for a second, that automaticity, that ease? For most of the time, that’s what happens. A missed note, a missed shot—the shoulders go up, the forearms tense, sweat forms and runs down the fingerboard. The next high note will now be harder, you think, and then….

…you’re spiraling down.

Did Beljan trust his body so much that he never lost flow?

Think so.

Panic attack?

No.

White light

It was only after I saw my shrink, today, that I fully understood what I had done.

Resolved the defining challenge of my life.

Defining because, yes, it had ruled me since I can remember. I couldn’t get the sounds in my head out of the cello. I raged, I bit myself—never puncturing the skin, but leaving the indentations of teeth marks for hours. I once broke a bow, slamming it on the strings of the instrument.

I knew it was in there; I couldn’t get it out. And with the rage came the depression. Black days, awful days when the minutes dragged, when no amount of will could banish the demon that lurked in the corner, always crouched, always ready to pounce.

Things I didn’t care about I did well. Teaching, never a problem.

The cello?

An agony that I couldn’t do, and couldn’t not do. I couldn’t breath at the cello, I held my breath until I had to gasp. My shoulders cramped, so tight was I.

I was practicing for hours at a time. There were days it went well. I floated down the street, beaming at strangers.

Most days it didn’t.

Late at night, in Chicago. Raf asleep, Marc alone in an empty apartment. I would be meditating, and almost get through.

I called it the breakthrough. The music would get out, I would get out, the struggle would be over.

I’d win.

Or be free.

I’d masturbate, hoping to use the energy of orgasm to push me through that door. And use Rush, amyl nitrite. I’d see a white light, I’d move closer, the orgasm would stun me. But I never got through.

Last March, I relived the moment I lost my mind, back in December. Had two weeks of struggle, of fierce concentration and mindfulness. It took five minutes to save a document. I washed dishes as if the process were a koan. I retrained myself to do everything.

At the end of the day, I would be exhausted. I’d sit and read what someone else had written.

I’d laugh out loud.

“He’s so funny,” I’d say.

“He makes the most amazing leaps,” I’d say.

I was reading that day’s post in a blog called Life, Death and Iguanas.

“I’m taking the writer to get his teeth fixed,” I told Taí. She was in a storm of worry ten islands down the Caribbean. I made sure he ate. I obsessed about his having water at all times. I needed to take care of him, this gifted guy whom I have nothing to do with.

And everything….

“He didn’t go away, I could have lost him,” I’m telling the shrink. And then, “hey, aren’t you guys supposedly to have Kleenex?”

He gestured to the side table.

Well, they are our confessors, these shrinks. And at one moment, retelling the story, I jumped back, back to a dark apartment, back to a man in agony, back to a man with his brain flooded with chemicals, and a light, a light, a light I could not get to. A light that would recede and leave me so stabbed with alone.

I’m gasping, now, as I was gasping in that red velvet chair, as I was gasping at the cello.

I have just had an orgasm I have never had. Nothing physical, no hands to wash, or floor to wipe. And no, I saw no white light.

I see that white light when I sit in my chair, at five in the afternoon and read the absurd, the tortured, most—the gifted—words he’s written.

He’s filled with that light, and I tell him, “fuck, you’re amazing.”

To the edge once again

It’s the reason so many psychiatric patients eventually exhaust all but the most devoted of their support system.

Come clean—I stopped taking one of my meds.

But be fair—I told my doctor, my psychiatrist that is, and though skeptical, he agreed.

It’s called Remeron and it has two faces. The first is to lift the spirits. I looked it up on a great website—crazymeds.org. OK, maybe not the most reliable, but definitely more readable than the drug-sponsored sites.

This guy’s take (site is obviously written by a manic)?

Remeron is legalized marijuana.

Might be. Because it does exactly what dope did to me, those many years ago when I was young and experimental.

Remember the munchies?

“Coffee ice cream!” I shouted over my shoulder at Raf, who was puzzled—why was I going to CVS at 11PM? And why couldn’t I stop and answer, so urgent was the craving?

Oddly, I don’t actually like coffee ice cream—but four hours after taking Remeron 15mg PO at HS (that's for Ruthie, to remember her nursing days) I would commit armed robbery to get it.

Well, it wasn’t doing my blood sugar any good—to say nothing of my cholesterol. And my other antidepressant—Lexapro—had worked fine for two years, until Wal-Mart sacked me when I was working my way through the death of Franny. 

I convinced the psychiatrist. And I tapered off the drug, as instructed.

First days were fine. Actually, almost better than fine. I was in Culebra and had an exalted moment. I was on the morning trot, listening to The Creation, when it hit me, how uncannily apt the music of my journey had been. Starting with Winterreise as I went into the bottom of death and despair. Then Beethoven, the Heiliger Dankgesang—as I moved through sickness to health. Lastly, The Creation, as I gave birth and set forth a Franny—a new Franny, my Franny—into the world again.

The Creation—get it? The gods aren’t subtle around here....

We came to a hill, Franny and I—she was trotting alongside of me—and the Haydn came to a long, achingly beautiful ascending—acsending, catch that word?—passage.

Right, so we were three: Franz Joseph, Franny and I.

So I had Franz Joseph in my ear. I reached out and grabbed Franny by the shoulders and hugged. And we sailed up the hill together.

Right—all was well for the next couple of days. But then I stopped writing. Got off my normal schedule. And two days ago, had a very strange thing happen.

Hypoglycemia.

Well, it’s happened before. And somehow, it was 2PM and I hadn’t eaten anything. So I went to the café, and they made me a very good, very large tuna sandwich.

Oddly, the sensations didn’t go away. For me, hypoglycemia is about anxiety. I get desperate / frantic to eat.

You do, and it goes away.

Why wasn’t it?

Right—went to CVS and bought orange juice. Drank the full container. 

Still felt hungry.

Then Miss Taí calls—she’s sensing a rat, or maybe something fishy. I tell her about the hypoglemia. Call tomorrow.

By the time Raf arrives, I’m pretty much a wreck. Now I’m having muscle cramps, and I decide I need magnesium. And oddly, the muscles cramping are ones that never cramp—my fingers and the top of my ankle. Then I notice that I can’t really breath. Well I can, but not easily. And damn, what’s going on with my blood sugar?

Why am I so anxious?

And why was I still feeling strange the next day?

And feeling dammit it’s not fair why has my life been so fucking hard I’ve had to STRUGGLE FUCKING STRUGGLE for fucking years now and I’ve never had it easy and fuc kingf can fuqeiufam l;alcqm09rinf             p’

Phone rings. Miss Taí, wondering how my mood is? 

Can’t talk, I need to eat, call me tomorrow.

But she made me think. This couldn’t be hypoglycemia. Come on, Marc—you’re an old nurse. Think it through. What’s different?

I go into the kitchen. Why am I here? Why is a banana in my hand? Am I supposed to eat it…..

You can eat it if you want. Now go back into the kitchen.

Why am I standing in front of the sink?

Water—you need water.

And now the pill.

I see the pill in my palm. I take it and swallow it. It is four fifteen.

At five, I am doing dishes. I am telling myself, ‘you’ve also been given stuff many people have not. You are way talented in ways many others are not. You see things others don’t. You had wonderful parents, and have a long stable marriage. Yes, it’s been hard. But others have had it harder….’

OK—so Taí?  Call me at four—let’s figure out how to sell this book.

And thanks!