• the unreliable narrator •

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the sun also rises

Wednesday 22 December 2004 | I like a cookie

It’s not the healthiest sign when I start blogging in bed in the middle of the night. Well, truthfully, it’s six in the morning and I would write in my regular journal but there are no lamps and I still haven’t bought new ones and N. left for the bakery like an hour ago and I just can’t go back to sleep. As soon as his alarm went off I was wide awake (just typed “wife awake”) and the word (”worse”) sounding in my head was heartbroken. That’s precisely how I feel. The losses have been too many recently and they haven’t necessarily come to an end. And I don’t have a therapist, and frankly if I didn’t feel depressed before I got back from San Francisco I do now. How did I get here, this crushed, meek place.

Sunday morning I had to start writing my review—Finding Neverland, and I can’t help but notice that the two feature-length films I’ve reviewed, Sideways and this one, both of which I found utterly underwhelming, have between them gathered twelve Golden Globe nominations, so in addition to everything else I’m apparently completely disconnected from the Zeitgeist, even the FC liked Sideways; and when I said I needed to work N. became upset, tearful, saying I know you have to write your review and I know we talked about this while you were still in San Francisco and I still feel lonely and my belief is that you’re never available, you’re always caught up with Mandarin or Herself or the Librarian and or your parents or your not-yet-ex-husband or something, when I come in the door from work you need consolation or listening to and my need for companionship isn’t being met. (I’m paraphrasing and probably therefore getting half of it wrong.)

[This post, by the way, will interminably reference feelings and needs.]

So for a while I hold him and listen and mirror and this seems to be good. Then we move to the couch and I finally ask him if there’s a request he has of me. The request is: find a therapist. And I hear this absolutely with jackal ears, whereas I’ve been able to take everything up until this point on board without too much trouble. But this request presses all my nerve endings and rubs against all my conditioning telling me I’m flawed and crazy and impossible to have a relationship with and broken and inadequate. And another part of me rises up screaming: 1) Why does the fact that your need isn’t being met mean I have to do something to take care of it? Why not find another way to meet your need? It also screams 2) Sure, ask me to do something which takes money when you still owe me money and aren’t making adequate movement (in the screaming creature’s judgment) toward trying to repay me. Finally it howls 3) I don’t have enough privacy or time to myself to write, which is the most powerful tool I have to process things happening to me, to handle grief, so of course I’m emotionally unavailable. So my immediate response to him is, I’m happy to get therapy, and it would help me a lot if we lived separately. Once again, says N. with what seems to me to be disgust, I have a need and we were talking about that and now all of a sudden it’s all about you. I could take this request of yours more seriously if it didn’t always come up like this, as defensiveness.

Promptly I start to go into shutdown/self-hatred, recognize this, ask for more time to process the request. But my reaction still frustrates N., who points it out as just another way I’m not available: I’m too engrossed in self-hatred. “And then it all becomes about you again, and I’m still not being heard.” This—I really want to call it accusation or criticism, but I’m retraining my vocabulary to be less victimized, so let’s try statement—creates a perfect whirling feedback loop in my brain which I can’t resolve at that moment. We stop talking, sit holding hands for a long time—there have been moments in the conversation when he’s wanted to check out as well—and then move into making love, which I take as a resolution of sorts but which, I find out later, he doesn’t. Still doesn’t feel heard, seen, met.

In late afternoon he leaves so I can start working on my article and I discover two things almost as soon as he’s out the door: one, Ms. Librarian has written me, scalded with understandable deep hurt and rage, asking me to pick up my literal Barbies and then leave her family the hell alone. And two, it’s far too dark to see to write my article. I decompensate rapidly. But being a good N. he stays out a good long time, calls me after nine to find out how I’m doing, my voice is clipped and pained and I can’t hide the fact that I am not doing particularly well, he races home and I tell him everything, how much it hurts. And I list all the griefs of 2004, all the people I’ve let down in some way, to whom I’ve given less than my best, been less than preceptual in my thinking, speaking, acting: M. The Lascivious Boss. Herself. Persephone. The Librarian and his family. Mandarin. My mom and dad. More distant friends. And then I end with his name. (I can also easily think of a veritable host of smaller hurts—mostly people who would like to be in better touch with me—but am also realistic as to how large a role I’ve actually played in their lives.) (And what was that, that happened with the Film Critic?!)

Spontaneously, naturally, he creates a ritual space in which I speak to each person in turn, sometimes crying quietly, sometimes sobbing so hard I can’t hold my head up or see, and each person says, I love you and I forgive you. Except the last one—it’s obvious to both of us that he can’t be the preceptor for himself, so to speak. Afterward I eat some Chinese vegetable soup he brought back for me, and smile and we talk more normally, a little. I set my alarm for eight the next morning.

[Why is Mandarin in that list? She probably wonders. It’s because I don’t think I’ve consistently practiced chaste conduct with her, in the sense of “Peacemakers throughout all space and time encounter all creations with respect and dignity, without using or clinging.” As much as she’s given me, so very much, there’s a part of me that’s wanted something more, or anyway something else, no matter how impractical that would have been, and has long been resentful and petulant about not getting it. I can think more clearly now about how the tiniest gesture on her part would cause me all this self-loathing, especially when I was visiting her in California last week—this kind of extreme oversensitivity on my part—and I just think, yeah, well, that’s how a person acts who’s being or who has been sexually rejected and is still acting wounded about it. It’s that repeatedly ludicrous expectation of something not offered that goes beyond my ability to be rational about it and for which I felt the need to atone—if any of that makes any sense at all.]

By nine the next morning, Monday, I’m finally writing, and finish around noon. Then I dress and take off to see N. and his Zen friend at Longevity. This is where it gets weird. I have to park in the public lot ($2) and then buy a tonic ($3.95, it winds up being my nutrition for the day, which is unbelievably stupid or let’s say instead, not very good self-care on my part) and sit down with them. So, what were you guys talking about, I ask, and I try to sound bright but suspect my voice is absolutely threadbare and weary. Your cup size, says N., grinning, and my heart sinks. This is one of those times when he and his friend are just going to be too young for me, I immediately think, and probably would have been too young for me when I was nineteen, because they’re light and happy and I’m saturnine, crone, ponderous and weighted. Sure enough throughout the hour I feel like an adult being a hostess to a young person, trying to find the right questions to draw Zen Boy out, some deep part of me bored to pieces but struggling to keep my surface reassuring (at least I hope so) and kind. But I worry that N. is disappointed. Finally, feeling things going nowhere, Zen Boy polite but, with me there, not really engaging, I start to rummage and sort and make I’m-going-on-errands motions.

Now N. had previously promised to go with me, as my primary errand is to pick up the box of stuff from The Librarians’ house. But now he looks at me blankly. I try to give him an opening, say So what are you guys up to his afternoon, and he just says, I don’t know. I have to run some errands, I say. He tweaks something and says noncommittally, But I thought you wanted me to go with you to The Librarians. I say nervously, Well, I need to get that out of the way first, so I’m going there right now. I wait. Nothing. The two of them are inert. Zen Boy offers weakly that he’d like to buy Christmas presents. N. offers to take him to a health food store to this end. At this point I give up and inwardly resign myself to the Librarians and Cerrillos Road without company. Inwardly I feel shriveled and unlovely and a cold withery feeling I usually call “rejection” but that’s actually not a feeling, it’s a judgment cloaked as a feeling—the feeling is just hurt, but the story is about rejection. I conclude by saying I want to leave the Honda at Auto Angel and ask N. to meet me there after his time with Zen Boy. At first I suggest 3:30 but then I say, no, it’s 2 pm now, that won’t give you guys enough time, let’s say 4 instead and if I wind up finishing my errands first and waiting for you, I’ll just sit in my car and make phone calls. We all go our separate, disconsolate ways.

The Librarians aren’t home. Wal-Mart doesn’t have reading lamps. My errands are fruitless and I’m headed wearily toward the Angel Gabriel when N. calls at 3:48, obviously irate, asking Where are you, his understanding having been that we’d meet at 3:30. I get there at four and he drives us in silence back up Agua Fria toward the Librarians; my stomach churns, he’s furious at me and I’m not sure why but I’m guessing he’s not happy with how I was toward Zen Boy (or is that an old assumptive habit left over in me from life with M.)? Is it that I was late? self-engrossed again? something else?

I knock on the door of their house and the Librarian appears. Hi, do you want to come in? I’m wearing sunglasses so he can’t see my stunned expression (again, at least I hope so) and just hold out my hands for the box, mutely. Oh, so you want to just keep it simple. (No, I want to keep from screaming.) He’s nervous. He gives me the box and I say, barely audible, thank you goodbye, turn and am gone before he can say anything else. Halfway back to Tesuque, N. reaches over and takes my hand.

We go for a longish drive, up toward Española, and afterward sit parked quietly in the driveway for a while. We start talking, hesitantly, and then basically repeat the conversation from the day before, wherein N. tells me why he was angry: because of telling everything to Zen Boy and getting all riled up again and deciding or realizing that “this is basically the behavior of a depressed person.” I feel chilled and sick, thinking of M., again. Thinking of what hell it is to be close to someone who just isn’t there for you. But again I feel called to say that living smack up against someone makes me depressed. I reference the way I felt in Texas, when I had no space, and outline my mental four-step sorites, pathetic and simplistic as I sometimes believe it to be:

1. When I have no space, my most basic needs don’t get met: those for privacy and writing.
2. I feel hatred toward the person or people I perceive as taking those away from me.
3. I feel immediate horrible guilt and self-hatred for even thinking that about those lovely people who have given me so much, and really it’s not that bad, and what’s my problem.
4. I feel self-destructive and fall down in the vortex of, I deserve to die.

N. tries to hear all this but still feels frustrated, still thinks, Sure, and once again it’s all about you and what you need and you haven’t heard my need at all. But if you give me these things I can address your needs, I try to argue, but he points out we’re still at a place where my needs have to be met before I can begin to pay attention to his. At this point we’ve talked until he’s 15 minutes late leaving, 20 minutes late leaving, he’s supposed to pick up Zen Boy and go to a movie and he’s in tears and I’m numb and raw with pain. Just blinding pain, of a new and terrifying kind. Because in the past when someone says these kinds of things to me, the You don’t meet my needs stuff, I usually go straight into self-hatred, involuntarily, maybe to try to elicit sympathy and get them to stop, maybe because any insinuation of my not being perfect, of my making a mistake or not being what they need, convulses me with a desire to obliterate my sorry self. But now N. has in effect taken away that response, because I see with brutal clarity that it does just what he says it does: takes away from the other person what they’re trying to communicate and makes it all about me. So now I still have the overpowering belief that I’m an evil, disgusting, selfish person, but now I can’t say this, can’t give voice to it, can’t act it out, can’t anything. I can barely breathe.

He’s increasingly angry about his being late to pick up Zen Boy and says he can’t handle it any more, the processing, the nonviolent communication, any of it. I manage to say I understand, and I’m sorry he doesn’t feel heard, I know what that’s like and it’s a terrible (”dispositive”) feeling, and I understand. And I’ll get therapy and whatever he wants. I quit fighting, I go limp, figuratively. Not just to make a statement, that whatever-you-want, you’re-right-I’m-wrong-you-win pointed capitulation—but completely. We kiss, he leaves, I sit in a daze. My heart is completely broken, or anyway that’s how it feels, but I know if it were completely broken this wouldn’t be so hard, there wouldn’t be an ego to struggle and assert itself. This is the night where he comes back and goes to sleep and I sit the bathroom and just cry, curled on the floor in my sleeping bag, screaming silently into the air, gagging, wordless, grief and pain overwhelming me.

Since then we’ve studiously avoided anything resembling communicating or processing. I’ve had a long elaborate nightmare in which a cult-leader N. takes my car, cellphone, purse, laptop, kidnaps me, says he knows I won’t like it now but I’ll get used to it in time. I can’t bring myself to kiss him really or say I love him. We’ve had sex but I’ve felt disconnected anyway, suffused with this mental image that where my heart used to be, there’s a raw bleeding messy lump of hamburger meat, bits of gristle and bone and fat all chopped up and undifferentiated from what used to be arms or legs. My chest and arms ache, radiate pain, all the time. It’s seven-thirty a.m. and I don’t know what to say or do. The heaviness doesn’t lift. All I know right now is that when I typed the above sentence—”we’re still at a place where my needs have to be met before I can begin to pay attention to his”—I thought, quite simply, well, of course. Place the oxygen mask over your own mouth and nose first. Of course I can’t try to meet someone else’s needs until my own have been met. And of course the entire point of NVC, of trying to use language which isn’t blaming, is so that we each can take responsibility for our own needs. If he feels lonely, why is it entirely up to me to do something about that? What can he do about his loneliness?

I can’t think well anymore, and haven’t been able to think for days now. I’m just in pain, that very physical kind where it’s hard to draw breath. All the victim words like judged, criticized, blamed are coming up in me. It occurs to me that I have to let him read this. I don’t know where to go from here, don’t know how to proceed, don’t know how to repair the terrible hurt. In one of these conversations I confessed that I had an old feeling of helplessness—I don’t seem to be able to communicate any more skillfully or expertly than I am now; my repeated thought is that I’m at the top of my game, that I can’t do any better than this without help. And I want us to go see the NVC trainer, but he disagrees, says this is not a communication problem, this is a problem with…with what, I can’t remember. With me? But there wasn’t anything wrong with me at the beginning of November, or if there were he didn’t say anything, or have very strong feelings about it.

I reflect on the very hard way I’ve learned things about myself. I tried to live with M. and it was disastrous. For some reason if I don’t write a couple of thousand words a day I’m useless to myself or anyone I love. I should have this tattooed somewhere on my body so I stop forgetting it. I think I forget it because it’s not on Marshall’s universal list of human needs. Other people don’t seem to need it, and so I can all too easily think of it as a fabrication, an excuse, a trumped-up reason to be alone, something negligible, something it’s safe to neglect. But the consequences are severe and I think I’m in them right now, with the near-constant, near-overwhelming craving to strike or break my own skin, to end my brain in no way which seems possible to me. Having spent some time on a site whose URL I won’t blog, but which is basically an enumeration of suicide methods (that would be the night that N. went out with Zen Boy and I stayed home, numb and dry, thinking, I am hopeless, he needs attention and all I can do is drag it back to my suicidal self, what if I just absent this me from his world, it would do less damage overall, oh shit I can’t think this way, I’m just doing it again aren’t I, being self-engrossed, enacting my hurt and stealing the scene), I can say with surety that there aren’t any painless goreless ways to off yourself. It’s a site where people post their horror stories of trying thirteen different methods only to wind up with paralysis and liver failure. That was almost more depressing than anything I’d managed to think to date, though there was one funny part, wherein people were animatedly discussing the best way to position a handgun so that one would be thoroughly killed and not merely maimed—mouth? eye? ear? throat? temple? At which point one apparently extremely sane man wrote dryly: “If you want to kill yourself with a handgun, the best way to position it is to point it at a group of armed police officers, preferably of a different ethnicity than yourself.” I loved him for writing that, and I hope he’s still alive somewhere out there.

There’s one more thing. I go back to something the Professor said to me in the spring of 1995, related to my therapist’s oft-cited epigram unmet needs begin to seem monstrous. I said, per my exploded relationship with Mandarin, well but you don’t know how hard I was to be with, how needy I was and how badly she needed to get away from me. The Professor came as close as she probably can come to snorting with derision: That’s total bullshit; your needs were incredibly simple at that point. They probably became complicated, but they weren’t extra-difficult or fancy, you weren’t being demanding. You merely needed a very simple level of love and care, and she couldn’t give it to you.

So the idea at present in circulation is that in this ersatz depression, my needs become too great and messy for N. to address and I’m somehow too much, we need to call in other people to help with the, as it were, environmental disaster. Great—my heart is like an oil spill. Pelicans flapping in its ugly brown fondue-murk. But I think about a couple of times—the night Rohatsu began, when N. left me sobbing in the Honda and went on to the zendo, when truly all I needed was a very simple thing: to be held. Which Persephone then did, so apparently easily or anyway skillfully that I detected no distaste or fatigue from her (she had the resources, they weren’t depleted). And the night in the middle of Rohatsu when N. said he wouldn’t nightsit with me, and I’d been clinging to that all day, and I sat underneath the tatami room crying and he wouldn’t talk to me (blinking with the obviousness of it: “Of course not; it’s sesshin”) and I ran to Anzan with a kitchen knife in my robe sleeve. (”You don’t have to hurt yourself to get my attention. All you have to do is ask me for it.”) And again it would have taken very little from N. to reassure me. Of course it’s not his job to reassure me, especially during sesshin, and of course it’s almost impossible to be able to reassure someone else if you aren’t able to soothe yourself. These are my rational thoughts but the far-less-rational undermutter says there is a hurt there which is still not healed.