"You need to remember that this isn't a failure," Sandra said a couple of Fridays ago.
This was obviously important - that was at least the third time she'd said it.
"It's not that things went badly, or anyone did anything wrong, just sometimes things don't work out, and that's OK. It's not like it was bad; I think it's been really good for you, it just ran its course which is sad.
"But it's definitely not a failure."
That made four.
It wasn't until three days later that I noticed just how much she'd stressed that particular point; it seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to say and I was in complete agreement, so like a tiny octopus pretending to be seaweed, in the flow of conversation it slipped past me until some time later when I took my mask off and realised it was clinging on to my brainstem just a little too tenaciously. Floating in the current, I inspected my little stowaway whilst it regarded me with nonchalant insouciance in return, and thought:
"Wait-a-minnit..."
Subtlety isn't what you'd call Sandra's "strong suit"; she usually plays clubs, hearts, and spades, exclusively in that order, but like a diamond in the rough and empty places you must walk she occasionally trips you up, because whilst what you've been putting down had all the appearance of having passed over and through her, when you turn your inner eye to see its path you find she's standing right behind you staring back with the hint of a smirk in her bright blue eyes, having picked it up, got a firm grip, and wound it up like a cosh to whack you upside the head before stabbing you with it right between the fourth and fifth ribs, leaving you to suffocate in your own bullshit in the shallow ditch she dug right in front of your feet when you were too busy studying your own navel from the inside out.
It took me longer than it should have to register how hard she was steering me away from the ledge I've desperately needed a win to pull me back from; if I'd realised just how much the stench of failure had been carried on my breath with every word that's come out of my mouth this year I'd have brushed my teeth more, or at least switched brands of mouthwash. Sandra could see the sand my house was built on crumbling away beneath my toes, God-bless her cotton socks, which is handy because I was distracted at the time being broken up with by Bridget, my fascinating Redheaded Distraction.
"If I did have a tumor, I would name it Marla. Marla, the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you would stop tonguing it, but you can't.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
A couple of months ago Bridget and I were out running errands, and I was being a bit vague:
"You've been pretty 'absent' lately."
"Yeah. Everything's been a bit... grey. I'm sorry, it's kinda hard to describe better than that."
"Hmm," she considered, "maybe you should try writing about it?"
I'd barely written anything more substantial than a fart in a wetsuit since last year, and when I had managed to James more than a few hundred reJoyce-ful words together it had been like pulling my own teeth. Nonetheless, I gummed on it, and put some thought into how to describe Depression without it turning into "goth poetry". In the peaceful time I spent packing away the suddenly-surplus second place-setting at my breakfast table for the move back to 1 Pacifica Via, Solitudo, I came up with a metaphor I've come to call The Room.
Imagine finding yourself trapped outside a Room with no walls, which is so completely full of Nothing that there's no room in it for you. The Room is so full of Nothing that it's become condensed, compacted, and concrete; a diamond-perfect lattice of pure atomic Nothing. It's a Void so Perfect you can't even call it a vacuum; it's the Antithesis of Anything, its surface so smooth it has no friction, so clear that at first glance it seems you can see completely through it, completely without mass, but so dense it bends light. The Perfect Void draws you in until you're smeared across the boundary of the Room, so completely you're not so much outside as you are a thin smear around it. For all that you're indelibly adhered to The Room, you find you're still able to move freely, in fact you can go anywhere you want, but no matter where you go or how fast you run, it's right there. You try to tell people about the Void in the Room you've found somehow embedded within your Self, which you've no choice but carry around if you're to do anything at all, but no matter how heavy it is no one can see, touch, or feel its weight, so most of them don't even believe it exists. Even if they do, no one can help you carry it because the Perfect Void in the wall-less Room that you can't enter, but can never leave, exists entirely within the boundary of your own skull, and every time you stare into it you find you're staring back at yourself.
I remember the moment, if not the day, when I discovered that the background-state in the back of my head had a name, and was neither epidemic, or pandemic, but endemic to me. The High School I went to published a Creative Writing Anthology each year, and I used to write little stories, ideas that popped into my head, so I submitted a couple of pieces because "why not?", before promptly forgetting all about it. I was pretty chuffed when they were included and had a bit of a proud moment taking an early-print copy home to show my folks my name right there in black-and-white on Page 13. Over the following days teachers who's classes I'd never been in, or with whom I'd never really got along, started coming up to me in the school-yard reading from a script so consistent it was like I was hearing it in gestalt:
"Hi Peter, how are you doing? Are you OK?"
"Yes, sir. Why wouldn't I be?"
"That's good. It's just... we'd hate for you to... go anywhere... without telling us."
"Erm... k?"
"You know you can always come and talk to us if you want... if you need to."
"O...K, sir. Thank you, sir. I'll be sure to do that, sir?"
"What was that about," Eugene asked in hushed tones as soon as they were out of earshot, "did you get in trouble for something?"
"No, didn't even tell me to pull my socks up or tighten my tie like he usually does. "
"But you ripped the elastic and cut off your top button so they wouldn't stay up..."
"Exactly! He seemed worried I was going on a trip or something."
"Weird. Oh well, Magic at lunch? I've rebuilt my Green Weenie Deck with extra Saprolings."
"Fuck yeah, but me and that Black Deck James loaned me are still going to pwn you!"
Years later I flicked through that cheap, spiral-bound collection of photo-copied stories and teenage-poetry and re-read the piece I'd dreamed up one night, written from the perspective of the voice in someone's head whispering a song of worthlessness and failure in the quiet stillness of the night until the protagonist put a gun to their head and painted the wall with their brain, and as the 90's-era environmentally-unfriendly light-source warmed up to incandescence, I had my light-bulb moment, realising:
"Oooooh, THAT's what that was all about!"
I was 15 when I wrote that, 16 when I was being buttonholed in the schoolyard by a conga-line of button-down, oxford-cloth, private-boy's-school teachers doing their best to balance their nascent SNAG-training with the ingrained toxic-machismo of their own "boys don't cry" upbringing, confused as anyone else who didn't get the memo because it had never occurred to me that there might just be some other way to be, and the way I was wasn't normal.
But "normal" was an undiscovered country that I'd read about in a book once, but never met anyone from; what perspective could I possibly have had at that point? Just look at my friends:
Matt was zany and Singaporean, and always wrote the scenarios for our D&D games.
Adam was a Christian-pacifist marshmallow, who never said boo to anyone.
Mott was Singaporean and weird, but amazing at maths.
James could build a Magic: The Gathering deck out of spare parts that could win tournaments, but was so dyslexic he could barely write a coherent sentence.
Smeghead was an obnoxious little shit, but so loyal you felt like a country he'd fight wars for.
Stubbsie could have run Pheidippides into the ground, and done a victory-lap besides, so long as someone was there to tie his shoe laces for him and tell him when to stop.
Eugene was a an overweight Burmese guy who badly wished he was black.
And then there was me, with a face the bullies broke their fists punching, great grades, a rage Smeghead and Adam could barely drag me back from, a brain full of knowledge, and a black sense of humour.
"Why can't you be normal?" Gary, and Arno, and Michael would yell at me, fists flying.
"What the fuck even is 'normal'?" I'd ask myself while returning their punches in kind, threefold. It was a name I knew, but didn't feel like I had a use for.
The way I felt, how I'd lived for as long as I'd known, that clinging little stowaway I'd always carried around, the country who's citizenship I held, had a name I was only just beginning to discover, and that was Depression.
I got bullied a lot in the first half of High School. The teachers coming up to me wearing masks of concern were the same ones who'd been unconcerned when I was having my ankles kicked whilst marching between classes, getting shoved around playing sport, and taunted in the same schoolyard we were now standing in. Some of them had even reprimanded me for "taking matters into my own hands" when kick came to shove and I felt like all I could do to make it stop was punch on. Appealing to authority only achieved additional aggravated aggression, but breaking my hand beating some bozo's bonce was a small price to pay if it meant they left me the fuck alone.
By that point, Authority had become the name for people who protected my oppressors; no wonder I've always had a problem with it.
By that point my hand had healed with a bend in the metacarpus connecting my left-pinky to my wrist to serve as a permanent reminder for the cost of standing up for myself.
By that point I'd taken the fight back to all of them, one at a time at first, eventually moving up to groups of as many as four at a time, and I hadn't always won the battles but they left me and the boys around me alone, which was what mattered.
I wasn't to know it at the time, but by then the war was over; I never had to fight again all the way through to graduation.
But I was always ready to.
“Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj
Bridget and I had a good run, all told. We met at just the right time, when I was starting to look outside myself for a whole I could be part of, and she was ending it with a partner who didn't made her feel whole. We had a lovely time, and there was love there for a time, but for all the fizz and zing we've enjoyed over the last half a year there's a hole in her mind that no one else can fill, and a hole in mine which I haven't been able to stop tonguing enough to let heal. We've been good for each other; we're both better than we were when we met. We've both been valued; we've proven to each other that we both have value. We're both desirable; there's been no shortage of reciprocal desire. We're neither of us whole tho; there are gaping holes in each of us that no other person can possibly close. Neither of us is so much insufficient as we are incomplete, and whilst I've found contentment in adequate sufficiency she wanted more; how could I blame her? She's suffered from her own depression, and it shows in all the gleaming seams where she's kintsugi'd herself back together. I started out broken, it seems, filling the empty spaces with Nothing so neatly there's no seam to denote where one ends and the other begins, leaving nowhere to find purchase. When Bridget broke she stuck the pieces back together with gold, becoming more beautiful, and she'll do so again; when I fell apart I wrapped myself in another layer of nacre, becoming colder, but even less accessible, and even harder to hold on to.
When she put the idea into my head a couple of months ago that I really should write about my Depression she was right, although I suspect not quite in the way she was thinking at the time. I've not been writing much this year partly because putting time into her meant I've not had so much time for that, but hugely because when I've reached out for a thread to pull on, unravel, and weave into something my hand came back with Nothing worth saying. More importantly tho, you need to understand that under and behind and inside everything I've said here over the last couple of years, something horrible has been growing; something that seems to always have been there, which I keep fed and watered and carry with me everywhere I go.
All I've ever really written about has been my Depression; how my world looks through it, the texture and smell of it, how events feed and shape it, and every once in a while the moments of respite I get from it, I just don't make it the topic. I gloss over it with a pop song, a Shakespeare reference, and a self-deprecating joke.
I hide it behind a smile, wrap it in a metaphor, or blend it in with anger; but it's been getting harder, and colder, and heavier, and I'm running out of strength to keep carrying it around the way I have been, so I decided to try something different, bite down, eschew misdirection, and see if I can spit it out directly.
"The person who is breathing is me."
― Rita Farr in Doom Patrol
Sandra was right to worry that I might see this as yet another failure; my confidence has been shaken so hard this year it's shattered, my self-worth sifting right to the bottom of the rubble like sand under the coarser stones of doubt, defeat, and dread, so who can blame her? She knew we were on the rocks, so it didn't come as a surprise when one of us stopped and shook other out of their shoe. She was there, at the other end of the phone, for the three years I was single before I managed to work up the courage to try "being with someone" again, and how determined I was after Jenna, and Kat, to not make the the same mistakes again. She must have been terrified to think what failing again would do to me after the year-and-change since I moved back to Canberra.
One of the things I've been comfortably sure of is that I'm fucking good at the thing I do for a living, so when I fenced off the shelves in my mental library labelled "306.7: Relations between the sexes, sexualities, love" behind barbed wire and warning signs saying "DANGER! MINE FIELD! DO NOT ENTER", that was what I poured my energy into. Picking up The Job That Brought Me Back To Canberra in early 2022 was the culmination of years of practice, and by that time in the year where we all go and wake up Billy from Greenday I'd not just done a good job, I'd done one everyone had believed was Impossible until I did it. The sensation of knowing, not just believing, but knowing with absolute proof to back it up, that you're as good as you'd always thought you could be isn't just incredible, it's louder than words.
My self-image lined up perfectly with my self-in-the-world.
Me-cursive; Me-sync; I was Me all the way down.
The last of the marble had fallen away, and looking back at me in the mirror was David; I was taller than Goliath, and carved from stone, and for the first time I could remember I felt Absolutely Real.
Sounds like a pretty happy place to be, right?
See, about that...
Nearly a decade ago I was looking over a pile of brightly-coloured glossy images of my brain with my neurologist, talking about my relationship issues, and he made a contemplative noise as his pen traced circles around a darker-than-normal patch somewhere between my ears.
"So... when you're cuddling up on the couch, or post-coitus... how do you feel?"
I thought about it for a moment, and replied, "Uncomfortable? My back will be hurting, or I'll need to move to get circulation back in my leg, or I can't reach my phone to check something.
"Why?"
"Not warm and fuzzy? Relaxed?"
"No. I mean... it's nice, and she likes it, but I get fidgety pretty fast.
"Why?"
"Well there's reduced blood flow in your hypothalamus, and what you've been describing suggests you may not be producing normal levels of Oxytocin. I'm thinking we could try a supplement and see what effect that has."
"You want to experiment on my brain?"
"Oh! It's a naturally occurring neurotransmitter, there's no risk...!"
"Nah, you misunderstand. I'm all about the scientific method and better living thru chemistry. You got a hypothesis about my hypothalamus?
"Let's do science."
A week later I and I'm sitting in same chair again.
"So how did you feel?"
"No different, really. I felt nothing. What was I supposed to feel?"
"Warm fuzzies? Better sense of connection? Some people say they feel 'euphoric'. Did you feel good at all?"
"No, I didn't get any of that. I kinda just got the dumb."
"..."
"I could pay attention to the conversation, but I couldn't keep track of any background thoughts. Someone would mention something that would remind me of something else, but I couldn't think of what that was, and a moment later I'd have lost what it was they said in the first place. I was fine with a sequential train-of-thought, but only one, not the three conversation forks and three unrelated background processes I'd usually be tracking, certainly nothing abstract or inductive.
"I just felt... dumb, stupid."
"Did you feel relaxed at all?"
"I guess, kinda?
"I mean...
"I was calm...
"But I knew part of me was missing.
"And I knew it was there but I couldn't find it.
"And I was kinda freaking out about it to be honest.
"But I couldn't listen to the part of me that was screaming and the conversation at the same time.
"So I couldn't quite get to panicking about it."
By the time I stopped talking John's eyes were wide, his hands planted firmly flat on his desk. He slowly leaned back in his seat, breathed in, then out again, and said, "That sounds... unpleasant. Did you try it again?"
"Yeah, little bit.
"And no.
"Whatever that place was, I'd rather not go there again if that's OK?"
"No.
"No, I don't think I'd ask you to do that, no."
So apparently the "love hormone" that gives people feelings of trust, emotional attachment, safety, all those things we think of as "happy", doesn't work on me. I don't know what I'm missing, if that helps. I don't get to feel happy, but it looks good on other people so I can still get a vicarious Dopamine hit by doing it to them. Other people can't simultaneously keep track of multiply-nested loops in two conversations, rehearse the agenda for tomorrow's meetings, and compose an email to their mother, all whilst playing DJ for Headcheese Radio's Silent Disco, so it's a bit like "swings & roundabouts", right?
Just like Popeye The Sailor Man, I am what I am. I don't need to be happy, I just need a win every once in a while.
When I closed that project off I was at the top of my game, and on top of the world, in a remarkably unique way; usually reaching the peak means climbing over a bunch of other people to get there because being the best means there are a pile of people you're better than. I took nothing away from anyone when I took "no one can do that" and added "except me" to the end, except for the haters who just wanted "that" to fail and... well, fuck those guys. Fuck them right in the ear. I've no interest in competing for a place in the hierarchy; stack-ranking is a demonstrably false economy because almost everyone in a team has something to offer, and if they won't join the team they can get the fuck out of my way. All I ask is a tall problem, and a Purchase Order to Invoice against, and that was exactly the reward offered me, so I kicked my wheels into gear, and with a song in my ears I wound my old life up, spread wings like sails, left Perth in the dust of my wake, and shook my arse back to Canberra.
It's important to remember something tho: I didn't succeed just because I had a unicorn skillset, although that was a critical factor. I didn't do it alone either, because whilst the haters were legion, I joined a team who were working towards the same goal. I made it happen because I marshalled the forces, set up the field, muttered "Victory or death", and went to war.
It was a war I fought with everything and nothing to prove, and everything and nothing to lose.
It was a war I fought because that was the only way to get it done.
But it was a war I never got to stop fighting.
I was a wreck when I stepped off that flight, held together by duct-tape, determination, and the dearest of friends. Less than a month later I was battling locative dissonance, and it was becoming obvious that my war wasn't over. At the time, I said:
"I'm exhausted, on edge, I can be calm, or focused, but not both at the same time, my manoeuvring thrusters are shot, and I'm a whisker off bingo-fuel, but my nose is pointed down the throat of the beast, I have ammunition and fumes enough for one last world-shattering salvo as I make my final burn, and my fist is hovering over the glass-covered button labelled
'Bop in case of Blitzkrieg'."
― Thursday, April 20, 2023 - Full Circle...
I'm neurochemically disinclined when it comes to trusting people, so when the Big Bad Bossman turned out to be a hypocritical narcissist arsehole, and the estimable Bosslady quit the field in a final, desperate act of self-preservation, it ripped a hole in me that only Nothing could fill, not because my hard-earned trust was betrayed, but because I ignored the warning signs and walked brazenly into the minefield like an over-confident fool. Even at the top of my game I zigged when I should have zagged, fell for the neon-signposted Samaritan Snare, and got trapped in my very own Kobayashi Maru. The man I thought was a visionary turned out to be a manipulative, gas-lighting bully. I still remember the evening he "fired" me, then threatened to fire my whole team, because I disagreed with him. I was leaning against a desk so I'd only be an inch or two taller than him instead of six, when he declared:
"You know, I used to have Big Four consultants doing the job your team's supposed to do and they got results," omitting, conveniently, that these were the same people who couldn't do what I'd done for him the year before.
"Fine," he announced, slapping the desk he was standing next to for emphasis, "on your own head be it," and as he turned to walk away declared, "I'll make some calls tomorrow."
He got two steps whilst I sat there, silent and still, before he turned and circled back. The argument carried on for another three-quarters of an hour.
Finding out I couldn't trust the Bossman was one thing, but then I don't really trust anyone. I build a model for who and what they are based on the patterns in their behaviour, and use that model to calculate whether they're a risk or an asset. It didn't matter that he was the most dangerous type of gaslighter; one who absolutely believes, and has always believed, what he's saying even when it contradicts what he said last week, all whilst holding a Master's Degree in Cognitive Dissonance. I was David, and the only person who could actually deliver what he was trying to achieve, and I have a long history of standing up to bullies, and I thought I could handle it. I was wrong, and realising I couldn't trust my own judgement cracked the bedrock. After that it was all downhill.
By July I'd burned through all of the confidence which had made me believe that I could do the Impossible, and had earned the opportunity to keep doing it forevermore, and was burning through my belief in myself. I was alone at home, and alone in the office, undermined by spies and derision. I have the most amazing friends, so loyal they make you feel like a country they'd go to war for, but I felt so incredibly, indescribably alone, just me and Nothing else; alone-liness and war without end.
Colleagues who'd worked with me as allies stopped responding to my requests.
Meetings would be organised about the projects I was working on, and I'd not be invited.
Projects I'd been told I'd be in charge of were quietly assigned to other Managers.
Approvals I requested so I could proceed with the work I'd been assigned would be ignored, whilst the Approver's complaints about my lack of progress escalated.
I was systematically side-lined, and isolated, and had my support cut out from under me.
I was set up to fail.
Throughout, I continued making what small progress I could manage because what else could I do? There was a job to do which I knew I could, even if I was losing belief that I'd be allowed to do so.
In the midst of all of this my contract actually got extended, and for why? All I've ever been able to think of is that he was happy to spend over a hundred thousand dollars of someone else's money just so he could keep beating me until I broke.
To my shame, I took it; I'd taken on a lot of debt to take that plunge back to this side of the country, so I couldn't afford not to. I retain some small pride from how long it took, and how much it cost him.
I remember, sitting here in a chair that will never fit as well as the one I built out of rubbish from the kerbside then left behind when I left Perth, feeling the pressure crushing my chest like I was drowning all over again, and how badly I just wanted it to end.
I re-read my own words in the quiet stillness of the night, with a glass of wine, or whisky, or worse, and my noise-cancelling headphones sealing away my ears, and every time the memory it evokes leaves me drowning in tears whilst I sit here and try to just breathe.
Breathe.
The post I put out recently called Stop; Continue... started months ago, early in the autumn-before-the-winter-which-is-now-almost-over when you could still sit outside a Canberra pub with an old friend in your shirtsleeves without freezing. Most of these are written the same night as the idea which inspires them pops into my head, but when I was finishing the Perthistential Crisis series in November it was getting harder and harder to draw another bucket from that well. By April all that came up was dust, but I'd still try dipping my quill in it every once in a while nonetheless. I was scratching at it one night, making more mess than sense, when Bridget came round and let herself in with the keycard I'd given her and asked what I was working on, so I let her read the draft. When she got to the part about hands reaching out to help she stopped, looked up from my laptop, and declared:
"That's bullshit."
"What is?"
"No one's helped you. No one's done a fucking thing," and I burst into tears.
She held me whilst I wept for somewhere between an hour and 10 minutes and made sure my laptop didn't skitter and dance on the tiles of my balcony, until eventually I looked up and replied:
"I need that to not be true."
So when I finally came back to it, I rewrote it again and again until what I said was.
"It's always darkest just before the dawn."
― Now That's Bullshit
By the time Bridget turned to me and said "I think we need to talk," a few weeks later, half a year had gone by since I'd finally fucked up and given him the excuse he'd been waiting for to terminate me with prejudice, ending 2023 with a bang that sounded more like a whimper, leaving me a man who felt Nothing but hollow. I left the stage gracefully, in disgrace, and ever since have been trying, and failing, to find a way to capitalise on a stale memory of success that's long-since faded to grey. The achievement I thought I'd build an empire from was gone, eroded to dust, leaving me behind with a cart I built out of Nothing to carry all my failure in because there was so much of it I couldn't hold it any more, and that was all I had left to offer her. That confidence which felt indomitable back then is so far gone I almost can't remember what having it felt like, but I remember a time when I did. Years ago Sandra would talk me down off the ledge again and again, saying "Remember who you are!"
But I'm not sure if I can; I don't recognise myself in the mirror any more.
It's just me in a staring contest with the ledge, each daring the other to jump first.
I don't think I can win.
Back when I had a Penpal, in the series of letters which slowly segued sideways from sharing with an ersatz-sibling into screaming into the abyss, she wrote to me:
"I don’t know how to do much in my own best interests. It’s too heavy and I haven’t the strength to drag it around. But it only gets heavier. It seems so petulant to sit in front of the answer and believe that there is a forcefield preventing me from simply reaching out and even acknowledging it is there. I’d seemingly rather sit in the shadow and stare at the key that opens the door, and grieve for the loss of motivation to grab it. What madness. I acknowledge this feeling you are having, of knowing just what you should do and feeling powerless to actually do it. To endure the continuing pain, and for what? The fleeting glory of inhuman success? The complexity of unjustified fear. Is it the deepness of feeling that if discarded leaves a void of any meaningful (painful) biofeedback?"
― Monday 5 Dec 2022, 9:38AM - RE: Struggling
That verisimilitude, that connection of minds-which-are-alike, that tipped-hat acknowledgement that "I see what you did there" resonated with me at the time, and has echoed ever since, such that I've made a point of re-using, re-hashing, and re-mixing those words and that sentiment, in homage and thanks, at every opportunity. Sometimes it's the smallest thing people put down that you pick up and run with. Even something so small and fragile as inch can be the the only thing in the world worth having; an inch can take you for miles. An inch can be all it takes to trip you tho, and my feet are no longer between my face and the pavement.
Now I'm sitting here on my ledge in a chair I bought at a thrift store for $5 that's falling apart beneath me staring into space, the battery light on my laptop is flashing with a rapid cadence, and the fog that's fallen, like the ashes of the bridges I burned on the trip I took to get here, has turned everything a bit grey. My own fall has come and gone, but still beckons nonetheless, and even with Sandra's voice echoing in my ears I'm wondering who I am not to accept it.
Somehow it feels like everything has now come full circle, because my mouth is so full of dust I can't scream any more, but that's OK even if I'm not, because I've Nothing left to say.
I just want it to Stop;
