Category: poetry

hope where it once was forgotten

Published on by KateLeave a comment

I like being married. I like having a stable job, a house, cats, and a meat thermometer so my steaks always come out perfect. I like my sensible car and knowing I have a pension waiting for me some day. I like stability.

I like not being a slave to my stormy emotions, being dragged around by impulse and a heart that cares too goddamn much about the wrong people and things.

But it has cost me.

I’m starting to wonder if there’s a middle ground between being a Chaos Tornado and being so complacent that I spend entire weeks and months essentially numb to all but the strongest stimuli. I’m starting to wonder if all the pills I take to keep me on an even keel, and sleeping at night, and not freaking out– if all this modulation of the highs and lows has reduced me to a dull, beige middle.

I woke up before 5 a.m. today, and like any sensible person I decided to go through all those people search websites and try to get myself hidden or deleted. In doing this I stumbled on my old blog from 15 years ago. There were words and photos that reminded me of what it was like to feel things so keenly, the sweet ache of longing, the inspiration that comes from living closer to the edge than I’ve allowed myself to be for a long time.

Last Friday, I went into the office, which is what I do most Fridays. I was surprised to learn that my former boss was there. He’s someone I always really liked and admired, and when I was his employee and just starting out, we had some great conversations about a lot of things. We managed to talk a few times throughout the day, but as the afternoon wore on I sort of started avoiding him. And as I was driving home that evening, it struck me how much of myself I now keep behind walls and gates and bulletproof glass. It might not be obvious to anyone else, but it’s obvious to me. My husband pointed out that it’s a good thing not to let my freak flag fly too high at work. But I feel like I’ve lost something. I think those walls exist in my marriage and friendships, too. I think they exist inside my heart.

Now that things are looking up, now that I’m finally getting some relief from the clusterfuck of stress the past few years have been, I’m taking a step back and admiring my own strength. I sustained a serious head injury and I didn’t die. I got horrifically depressed and almost lost hope, but I held on. I am employed, still, and married, still, and I have a house and two cats and I didn’t die.

But it cost me. I’m still learning how much it cost me.

I’m sure part of it is just getting older, and I’m sure that a lot of it is just getting healthier. It reminds me of a poem that I have probably pasted to this blog before, but here we go (again?):

the lesson of the moth by Don Marquis

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires
why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense
plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then to cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is to come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves
and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity
but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

Borderline

Published on by Kate3 Comments

I don’t like it when people try to get me to have what they call “perspective,” but I am a firm believer in context. I’m not interested in being beaten about the head with stories that are supposed to remind me that there are people so much worse off than I am. I know about the Holocaust, and all the other mass-killings that society doesn’t deem worthy of capital-letter infamy. I know about serial killers, abused children, the poor. I know, I know, I know.

But context is a different thing. As my friend J says, your own worst day is your worst day, period. And he’s a one-armed, eye-patched survivor or a horrific car accident, so I think his words have some worth. Nando Parrado, survivor of the Andes Flight Disaster says that everyone has their own Andes. It’s all about the context of your life and how much you can bear. We learn that we can survive horrible things because we survive horrible things. But some people die from horrible things, and some people simply never get better.

So comparing my worst day to your worst day doesn’t really amount to much. And frankly, it’s bullshit to try to put someone else’s pain on some arbitrary scale and say, all right, you get to suffer this much and you get to grieve this much and then you’d better get over yourself and move on because, frankly, we’re tired of all this boo-hooing and don’t you know that so many people have it so much worse?

In September, I spent five days in a mental health center because I was having suicidal thoughts. While I was there, I was diagnosed with something called Borderline Personality Disorder. I didn’t find out about the diagnosis for over a month and a half because no one mentioned it, and some people thought I already knew. I was shocked when I was told that I’d graduated to the ranks of the truly mentally ill (depression is so common as to be passe, after all,) and especially because everything I knew about BPD was gleaned from an outdated book on mental illnesses that I read in my high school library back in 1995. Apparently, in the 18 years since I first heard about this disorder, the prognosis has become much less bleak. But all I knew when I got my diagnosis was that people with this condition were considered untreatable. It felt like a life sentence– I will never be sane, I will never feel whole, I will never be loved or be able to love anyone else in a healthy way.

So as soon as I got home, I did some research to try to figure out how I was going to navigate my life with this terrible illness, and that’s when I learned that psychiatry has taken a few leaps since 1980, when this disorder was first brought into the public eye, and even since the 1990s when BPD really was kind of a horrible thing to be labeled with. There’s treatment, now, and people do improve. There’s a lot of work to be done, but there are many reasons to believe that I’ll feel better soon.

And GEE WHIZ, does this diagnosis fit. According to the internetz, these are the nine hallmarks of this disorder, and if you’ve got five or more, chances are good that you’ve got BPD*.

[*Of course, it’s possible to have one or several (or all) of these symptoms and not have Borderline Personality Disorder. Everyone can identify with some features of mental illness, to some degree, some of the time. These are human issues, and most are common enough. It’s when these symptoms disrupt your  attempts to live a healthy, successful life that they’re considered pathological.]

  • Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
  • A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation
  • Identity disturbance, such as a significant and persistent unstable self-image or sense of self
  • Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating)
  • Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior
  • Emotional instability due to significant reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)
  • Chronic feelings of emptiness
  • Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights)
  • Transient, stress-related paranoid thoughts or severe dissociative symptoms

All my impulsive decisions, my wanderlust, my inability to let anyone get too close while paradoxically craving acceptance and unconditional love, my intense emotions that no one understands because everyone else is cold and unfeeling and detached — all of that suddenly makes sense. I’m not shiny and special, I’m mentally ill!

Well, my shrink says it’s possible to be both. That my intensity is both a gift and a curse, and that my job now is to figure out how to still be emotional and vibrant and intense, but not get torn to shreds by my own transient emotions.

Being crazy is hard work, ya’ll.

The past year has been excruciating. In fact, the past three and a half years have been such a mish-mash of BEST EVER (!!!) and HOLY FUCK PLEASE STOP that it’s hard to know what to expect. I keep losing important people, not to death or distance, but because we’ve failed to meet each other’s expectations. That’s the most diplomatic way I can put it. It keeps happening. To quote noted existential poet Jewel:

Guess I’ve mistaken you for somebody else
Somebody who gave a damn, somebody more like myself

Word.

I have to move again around the end of the year because of one of those dissolving friendships. Just as I had to move in May because of a dissolving friendship. And while my friendships dissolve, so do I. I don’t understand why people keep leaving me. And it’s not all in my head, but maybe I have been unconsciously choosing the very sort of people who can’t give me what I want or need. Maybe the detachment I admire in them actually indicates a basic incompatibility in the way we relate to others. I don’t know.

But I’m proud of myself for having done so much of the work already. Even before I knew I had BPD, I’ve been a counselor to myself as part of my quest to not be a miserably destructive human being. And so I’ve been asking myself for a long time if I’m the one who’s the asshole. I’ve been good at not emailing people after midnight because usually those emails are insane. I try not to blame people, or think in black-and-white terms, and I try to forgive when I can. I certainly haven’t figured everything out, and I am far from perfect, and I still have a long way to go, but I started the work a long time ago even before I learned what I was working on.

And as much as I can, I’m trying to take these incremental steps to improve my life. I’m seeking stable housing, supportive systems, ways to lead a successful and healthy life. It’s difficult, and I’m exhausted, but I’m getting things done. I have hope. I can hold my head high as I walk away from (metaphorically) yet another burning building that I once called home.

The Aliens, by Charles Bukowski

you may not believe it
but there are people
who go through life with
very little
friction or
distress.
they dress well, eat
well, sleep well.
they are contented with
their family
life.
they have moments of
grief
but all in all
they are undisturbed 
and often feel
very good.
and when they die
it is an easy
death, usually in their
sleep.
you may not believe 
it 
but such people do
exist. 
but I am not one of
them.
oh no, I am not one
of them,
I am not even near
to being
one of 
them 
but they are
there 
and I am 
here. 

A friend indeed

Published on by KateLeave a comment

I just wrote this haiku:

what is there to say?
you were my worst decision,
and i hope you’re well.

…in response to the stubborn continued existence of someone with whom I share mutual friends on Facebook.  Someone I used to know, but don’t know anymore.  The “who” in the answer to “what is the worst thing you’ve ever done?”  Every now and then– more often, recently– I think of this person.  And I want to say something, but I don’t know what to say.

A few months before The Worst Thing I Ever Did, I wrote this (rather embarrassing) poem:

I will break open wide
and spill all of this nonsensical poetry
i’m keeping in here

if you were to merely beckon
or
touch me soft like that again
I know I would

for all the promises
oh i never
I couldn’t, I am not
that kind of girl
[anymore]

I know that you would merely have to touch me
soft, like that
[please]

again

I would spill

That’s how hung-up I was.  Hung up enough to eschew the common parenthesis for the more angular, distinctive bracket.  Such was my longing.  And this is all just a long way of getting to The Worst Thing I Ever Did, which is:

When I was 20, I slept with my friend’s boyfriend.

There are mitigating circumstances, and they are these:

  1. He was 33, and should have known better.
  2. I was obviously and obsessively infatuated with him, and he should have known better
  3. I was high on LSD, and so was he

But on the other hand:

  1. I was 20, and should have known better
  2. It’s not like it “just happened.”  I’d been infatuated for months, and I did, in fact, know better.
  3. I went to his house and took LSD knowingly and willingly and with the idea that something might occur.

I was no innocent, is what I’m saying.  I don’t know if he saw it coming or not, but he would have been an idiot not to.  I, in my complete lack of defense, saw it coming a week off and even postponed our evening together because I was having second thoughts.  I didn’t know if he wanted me, but I knew that I wanted him, and that if the opportunity arose to have sex with him, I’d do it.

I’m sure I didn’t think of it so crassly.  It wasn’t crass sex, either.  Certainly not gentle lovemaking, but it wasn’t heartless lust-fucking either.  We did genuinely care about one another.  There was love there– fucked-up love between fucked-up friends, but love nonetheless.  And if you can take that one night out of the context of cheating and just see if for what it was, damn it, it was sweet and it was grand and it was a long time coming.

But you can’t take it out of that context.  And I was no innocent, but she, the friend/girlfriend, she was.  Innocent.  And sweet.  And undeserving of the wretched sort of person she had for a friend in me.  I didn’t just betray her, no.  I didn’t even have the audacity to lie.  I didn’t have to.  She knew, she knew, of course she knew.  And she didn’t want to know, so for the next seven months she talked to me about how she had suspicions, she had fears, she felt that something had happened.  We’d have long, long conversations on the phone and she would talk and cry about how she suspected something must have happened that night, but she never once asked.  And so I never had to lie, and damn it, I never did.

Of course, I told her eventually.  And eventually she even forgave me.  But I have never forgiven myself.  And it’s been nine years, and sometimes I look him up on Facebook.  I look at his picture because he looks exactly the same and I wish I had something to say.  It seems like I should have something to say other than wanting to blame him.  Because the shame of what we did almost killed me.  It really did.  I was so horrified with what I’d done that I tried to kill myself, maybe not very effectively, but sincerely and more than once.  And still, nine years later, I want to blame him.  But I also want to say, hey, I hope you’re well.  You look exactly the same.  Thanks for introducing me to some really good bands, letting me smoke pot and do acid and drink to excess in a safe place, for being my friend, for inviting me into your bed even though it was the worst decision I ever made.

We can’t change the past, after all.  What would be the point of regretting it?  I wanted it so badly by the time it finally happened, that if it hadn’t happened I might very well have exploded.  What I regret, if anything, is not saying something to my friend.  Not telling her, hey, I’m madly in love with your boyfriend and it’s eating me up inside.  I didn’t say anything because I was embarrassed, and because I was holding out hope that exactly what did happen would– he would, even for one night, choose me over her.  The exact thing I’d been hoping since the day I’d met him.

And I’m still pissed off at both of us that he did.

A friend in need’s a friend indeed
A friend with weed is better
A friend with breasts and all the rest
A friend who’s dressed in leather…

–Placebo