I have noticed a number of writers lately taking a stand on the subject and experience of marriage. Cristina Nehring’s book A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century totally kicks the ass of “companionate marriage;” as does Sandra Tsing Loh in her Atlantic article “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” which narrates the story of her surprising divorce after a long union. Most recently, there is Lori Gottleib’s book rather provocatively titled Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough.
I find myself very interested in the discussion because I have been trying to conclusively decide stuff about marriage—or, the most intimate one-on-one relationships we can have, whatever their legality—in my own life. 12 years ago an astrologer (don’t laugh: this was an Ithaca astrologer: brilliant, had studied Sanskrit) told me that if I ever figured this issue out, I would die. I believe his words were: “Your marriage certificate is your death certificate.” After this prediction, I should not have expected any marriage I entered into would have a good outcome (to my ex-spouse, now happily remarried: sorry about that). However, what he meant was less dire, and more metaphorical: basically, that this area of life is a complex and passionately meaningful one for me—and, clearly, for so many other people—and in that sense it can never be resolved, in the box, finito. (I think he also described my relationship life as being “like a Russian film with French subtitles, dubbed into Chinese.”)
As I see it, there are two basic ways of thinking about the whole romance/marriage conundrum—not that these ways can’t overlap, but they can become very polarized. You can try to be wise, or to go deep. If you are trying to be wise, you want to approach the whole thing rationally to achieve the most positive and successful “result” possible. Dating websites, which I explored recently, are a good example of this kind of attempt. On such sites, you clearly articulate, or try to, just where you are in life and what you’re looking for: your qualities, the qualities of your ideal mate; your astrological sign, salary, body-type, who lives with you (dogs? kids?), what you do on weekends. You try not to be sucked in by the bad guy with tattoos with whom you could have bottomless, but non-practical, sex; instead, you look for a life partner, someone who will not emotionally body-slam you but who will nicely complement your life and goals. You say lucid, absolutely true things like: “No relationship is going to completely fulfill me, and there is no ‘The One’ (sniff sniff); I just need to be a certain percent happy and get X and Y needs met…I’m going to need to compromise and to work hard for the commitment I want. And listen to a lot of Dr. Phil…” You go out with the person who is perfect “on paper” (similar interests, intelligence, values, charm, perhaps a skilled and considerate lover), at “the same place in life,” but somehow does nothing for you from day one. You keep going out with him or her, even as that doesn’t really change. Eventually, you can marry this person—probably with the full support of your mother. I think you’ll be pulling your hair out soon enough due to repressed desires and a sense of suffocation. But go ahead…
Partial kidding aside, Lori Gottleib has the right to nurture this results-oriented vision of marriage and relationship, and so do millions of other people. Personally, I think this approach, if taken on its own, fails to invite a certain kind of depth (maybe why Gottleib is still unwed: she is, after all, not so compelled by her own idea of how such a relationship should come together). What I mean by depth is that you are listening to your real desires and irrational knowledge, the kind of knowledge that maybe “sounds crazy” at first, and makes you feel vulnerable and uncertain. This listening is not the same thing as what some may call perfectionism, or super-pickiness. It is being real and not lying to yourself, and I assert that whatever form it takes, it is the making of your psyche (or soul, if one cottons to that concept), drawing you into an experience with uncertain results; possibly ending in futility or “failure," if any relationship that doesn’t last forever is somehow invalid (questionable).
The force that initiates one to the unknown may be called intuition, imagination, whatever…madness, inspiration—Andre Breton’s Amour Fou. This kind of shit is outside the social structure. Maybe for some people, following such inklings in themselves actually leads to happy marriages with compatible partners. I imagine it could, maybe (certainly, the mojo could be expected to fade over time), if the people involved are self-aware enough, had healthy childhoods, or are just lucky. For me, following my romantic impulses has led to some pain and hardship that has come with divorce, and now, with being a single parent. I feel caged in relationships, eventually; and lonely when single. But after chewing this over for years, and trying to be wiser, I decided I am going to keep on. (If not, this blog probably would not be titled “Falling Over.”) The positive thing is that over time, living this way, you actually act less crazy and more intelligently, even as you are still guided by insane-making feelings and impulses…you aim to surf the turbulence and Do No Harm.
I can’t recommend that everyone, or anyone, follow my lead, though some already do and will recognize this kind of path (if “lead” it can be called, since we don’t know where we’re going). But I am aware that these disparate tugs toward eros and love—rational and irrational—are ancient. They’re not going anywhere. Many more books and articles (and blogs) will be written, and have been. In Russian, French, and Chinese.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Just in time for Valentines Day
A man in a bar kissed my hand last night, and I am still floating. He is unavailable. But I am enjoying the feeling…which seems to encapsulate my emotions about New Orleans so far. I am bewitched, and the door is closed, all at the same time.
Houses all over the city now have their Mardi Gras bling up (as of a week or so ago), which consist of green, gold, and purple decorations. Often there are rows of beads slung over a black iron fence, or there are masks, the main Mardi Gras symbol. The other day I saw two shiny paper masks displayed beside each other on someone’s door: a happy and a sad face. It reminded me of the Tibetan Buddhist deities I learned about during my years working for a Buddhist publisher—there is often a duality to them, with one deity possessing several aspects (masks?), such as peaceful and wrathful. The wrathful face of the deity, which can be frightening to look at, is supposed to be helpful to meditate on in order to give a space to that part of one’s experience or emotions…and to channel that energy so it can be used to fuel something ultimately beneficial, not only to oneself but to all beings and all life. (Here are a few names I found, translated from the Tibetan, of some wrathful deities: “Hidden Sheet of Mail,” “Horse Neck,” “Great Black One”) If there had been a concept like this in Catholicism, maybe I wouldn’t have left. Anyway, seeing the side-by-side faces so theatrically and anonymously trumpeting the duality of the basic human experience, in this city that juxtaposes rich and desperately poor, celebration and mourning (as in the expression “jazz funeral”), I had a thought I jotted down in the notebook in my purse: sorrow and joy are masks of the true destination.
Houses all over the city now have their Mardi Gras bling up (as of a week or so ago), which consist of green, gold, and purple decorations. Often there are rows of beads slung over a black iron fence, or there are masks, the main Mardi Gras symbol. The other day I saw two shiny paper masks displayed beside each other on someone’s door: a happy and a sad face. It reminded me of the Tibetan Buddhist deities I learned about during my years working for a Buddhist publisher—there is often a duality to them, with one deity possessing several aspects (masks?), such as peaceful and wrathful. The wrathful face of the deity, which can be frightening to look at, is supposed to be helpful to meditate on in order to give a space to that part of one’s experience or emotions…and to channel that energy so it can be used to fuel something ultimately beneficial, not only to oneself but to all beings and all life. (Here are a few names I found, translated from the Tibetan, of some wrathful deities: “Hidden Sheet of Mail,” “Horse Neck,” “Great Black One”) If there had been a concept like this in Catholicism, maybe I wouldn’t have left. Anyway, seeing the side-by-side faces so theatrically and anonymously trumpeting the duality of the basic human experience, in this city that juxtaposes rich and desperately poor, celebration and mourning (as in the expression “jazz funeral”), I had a thought I jotted down in the notebook in my purse: sorrow and joy are masks of the true destination.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Chosen
I’ve kinda had a fantasy, of late, of becoming a Jew, as Charlotte of Sex and the City put it (it always sounds weird to say “Jew,” but this is the correct street term, yes?). And, unrelated but related: I just read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed. I admire her integrity in so clearly laying out her thoughts and feelings (mostly thoughts) about intimacy and marriage, and I enjoyed it, not as much as her previous book written when she was miserable…but one thing sticks out. She asked women of her acquaintance and, one assumes, high intelligence level and socio-economic status, why (God, why?) marriage appeals to them given all the bullshit that has gone along with it, and its high non-success rate. One woman replied that she just wants to feel “chosen” in a special way by someone, above all others, officially, and thus affirmed in front of the world (symbolized by the wedding day). It’s clear that Gilbert is a bit horrified by this desire though she makes polite noises about respecting it…as if such a wish is mainly immature, like a toddler’s temper tantrum that is all ME ME ME, CHOOSE MEEE!
Tonight I was thinking of my ex-husband…something about life lately has stirred up the specter of my failed marriage (not Gilbert’s book, in particular)…and I Googled our names together to see if any trace of our union remained in cyberspace. (I had read an interview with him in 2008, on the occasion of his winning an NEA or Pushcart, in which he cleanly omitted me from his biography, admitting only to his first, 14-year marriage. Soon after, he remarried; and I assume he did not want it widely known that this was his 3rd. Can I blame him?) I was strangely comforted to find one entry surviving: an old bio that accompanied one of his published works and stated that “he and his wife, Elizabeth Green, live in Alabama.” I was compelled to read the sentence several times, with tears pricking my eyes, just letting the “chosen-ness” soak in: I had been chosen. I was (and on this webpage still am) a “wife.” I was one of them! Someone had loved me that much.
In a life that feels like a bridge burning under my feet as I run (I assume I’m not alone in this feeling), this idea of a solid identity of some kind—one that binds me permanently to something larger, to the enduring social structure—feels necessary and poignant. I am always forlorn on holidays when there are no special rituals to mark them. Nothing I invent feels as if it has enough weight and texture behind it. It doesn’t count. Hence the idea of adopting a religion, a culture: so I can add a bunch of special days to my calendar and on those days, participate (with other people, ideally) in actions/events that humans have been performing, with their own individual nuances, for thousands of years. I want to be part of that club.
Tonight I was thinking of my ex-husband…something about life lately has stirred up the specter of my failed marriage (not Gilbert’s book, in particular)…and I Googled our names together to see if any trace of our union remained in cyberspace. (I had read an interview with him in 2008, on the occasion of his winning an NEA or Pushcart, in which he cleanly omitted me from his biography, admitting only to his first, 14-year marriage. Soon after, he remarried; and I assume he did not want it widely known that this was his 3rd. Can I blame him?) I was strangely comforted to find one entry surviving: an old bio that accompanied one of his published works and stated that “he and his wife, Elizabeth Green, live in Alabama.” I was compelled to read the sentence several times, with tears pricking my eyes, just letting the “chosen-ness” soak in: I had been chosen. I was (and on this webpage still am) a “wife.” I was one of them! Someone had loved me that much.
In a life that feels like a bridge burning under my feet as I run (I assume I’m not alone in this feeling), this idea of a solid identity of some kind—one that binds me permanently to something larger, to the enduring social structure—feels necessary and poignant. I am always forlorn on holidays when there are no special rituals to mark them. Nothing I invent feels as if it has enough weight and texture behind it. It doesn’t count. Hence the idea of adopting a religion, a culture: so I can add a bunch of special days to my calendar and on those days, participate (with other people, ideally) in actions/events that humans have been performing, with their own individual nuances, for thousands of years. I want to be part of that club.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
This is one of the most challenging times of my life, but there have been others. I was thinking this while walking through my subtropical neighborhood this morning with its narrow cobblestone sidewalks, having just broken off another friendship with another woman who disappointed me. I seem to keep paring my life down to almost nothing, then expecting to survive on the scraps. What is it in me that is so ferocious, and so hungry?
I recall being 22 and dyeing my Italian hair blonde “to own the glam,” I wrote in a notebook. Whatever that means. I was writing a lot in a notebook, in lieu of actual human contact. I had recently graduated college and ended a highly dysfunctional 1-year relationship with someone I was still in love with. I shared a house with 2 guys, fellow graduates of my school, who drew breasts and penises on our bathroom wallpaper, used a Victoria’s Secret catalogue as toilet paper once, and didn’t seem to like me very much. Well, one of them did climb into bed with me at 3 AM one morning, and we ended up smoking on the front porch both naked (but not post-coital), tapping the ashes into a tomato sauce can, in a moment I am not sure really happened. But that’s another story and for the most part the 2 men avoided me, and vice-versa. I read a lot of Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Khalil Gibran, as well as dipping into the Confessions of St. Augustine: not a good idea if one is young, female, and looking for reasons to live. Due to severe indecision regarding my future, I worked late-night and early morning hours at a hipster coffeehouse in Collegetown. All the regulars, mainly Cornell students, smoked and the windows—high up at the front of the atmospherically dark, narrow space—were tinted brown-yellow from it (this was just before smoking in such places was banned in New York State). I inhaled a pack a day of Camel or Winston Lights, not yet having become scared of actually dying—it seemed so far off, no matter my destructive behaviors. Yet there was a vivid beauty to that time, maybe because of its intense, on-the-edge quality. I remember walking home from work at 3 AM, after sweeping and mopping the floors to the pounding beat of Tricky and slamming dirty pint glasses into the 3 sinks behind the bar. I had an adrenalized feeling of just having accomplished something physical and real and having been set free into the night on my own, into a pure loneliness that was the blue of snow or water on those northern streets; trees and their shadows; streaks of moonlight on car windows that slid past on my walk up the hill to the Belle Sherman neighborhood, where all the families in the houses around ours were bedded down for the night together.
This patina of grace does not adhere to memories of London in the fall of 1995, when I lived there on study abroad, and desire and isolation made me feel I was on the edge of the earth alone. All I could think about was a ponytailed guy back in the States whom I had been orbiting for several semesters as he dated other women, talking about them with me at length (one of his most memorable musings was scatalogical: "I give part of a shit about you, part of a shit about Chloe..." and he went on dividing the imaginary shit between all of us women in his life, who would doubtless have been happy to receive it). My flatmates—students from my college, who had been friends before we lived together—were not so much speaking to me, maybe because none had been trained to deal with a clinically depressed person. They explored the city with its street markets and museums, gleefully stuffed the Thanksgiving turkey, dressed the male students from our group in drag, and otherwise acted like 19-year-olds enjoying a foreign country. I kept a bottle of Bailey’s under the bed, and had to call my friends in the States at weird times like 3 AM—10 PM back home—from those red outdoor British phone booths. It seems that I spent the 3 months either in a phone booth, with the Baileys in my purse; or in the darkness of the movie theater in Leicester Square watching the latest American films alone, night after night, using a Visa Gold provided by my mom (to her later rue). In retrospect, looking at it all through a rational lens, I’m aware that London is a fabulous, world-class city. But I didn’t see it. All I experienced was my misery.
I’ve lost days, months, even years of life to this dark force. Living with it is like hauling around a black hole, so that various holidays and events get sucked in and I wake up somewhere else: older, clearer about what keeps happening, but no more enlightened.
I recall being 22 and dyeing my Italian hair blonde “to own the glam,” I wrote in a notebook. Whatever that means. I was writing a lot in a notebook, in lieu of actual human contact. I had recently graduated college and ended a highly dysfunctional 1-year relationship with someone I was still in love with. I shared a house with 2 guys, fellow graduates of my school, who drew breasts and penises on our bathroom wallpaper, used a Victoria’s Secret catalogue as toilet paper once, and didn’t seem to like me very much. Well, one of them did climb into bed with me at 3 AM one morning, and we ended up smoking on the front porch both naked (but not post-coital), tapping the ashes into a tomato sauce can, in a moment I am not sure really happened. But that’s another story and for the most part the 2 men avoided me, and vice-versa. I read a lot of Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Khalil Gibran, as well as dipping into the Confessions of St. Augustine: not a good idea if one is young, female, and looking for reasons to live. Due to severe indecision regarding my future, I worked late-night and early morning hours at a hipster coffeehouse in Collegetown. All the regulars, mainly Cornell students, smoked and the windows—high up at the front of the atmospherically dark, narrow space—were tinted brown-yellow from it (this was just before smoking in such places was banned in New York State). I inhaled a pack a day of Camel or Winston Lights, not yet having become scared of actually dying—it seemed so far off, no matter my destructive behaviors. Yet there was a vivid beauty to that time, maybe because of its intense, on-the-edge quality. I remember walking home from work at 3 AM, after sweeping and mopping the floors to the pounding beat of Tricky and slamming dirty pint glasses into the 3 sinks behind the bar. I had an adrenalized feeling of just having accomplished something physical and real and having been set free into the night on my own, into a pure loneliness that was the blue of snow or water on those northern streets; trees and their shadows; streaks of moonlight on car windows that slid past on my walk up the hill to the Belle Sherman neighborhood, where all the families in the houses around ours were bedded down for the night together.
This patina of grace does not adhere to memories of London in the fall of 1995, when I lived there on study abroad, and desire and isolation made me feel I was on the edge of the earth alone. All I could think about was a ponytailed guy back in the States whom I had been orbiting for several semesters as he dated other women, talking about them with me at length (one of his most memorable musings was scatalogical: "I give part of a shit about you, part of a shit about Chloe..." and he went on dividing the imaginary shit between all of us women in his life, who would doubtless have been happy to receive it). My flatmates—students from my college, who had been friends before we lived together—were not so much speaking to me, maybe because none had been trained to deal with a clinically depressed person. They explored the city with its street markets and museums, gleefully stuffed the Thanksgiving turkey, dressed the male students from our group in drag, and otherwise acted like 19-year-olds enjoying a foreign country. I kept a bottle of Bailey’s under the bed, and had to call my friends in the States at weird times like 3 AM—10 PM back home—from those red outdoor British phone booths. It seems that I spent the 3 months either in a phone booth, with the Baileys in my purse; or in the darkness of the movie theater in Leicester Square watching the latest American films alone, night after night, using a Visa Gold provided by my mom (to her later rue). In retrospect, looking at it all through a rational lens, I’m aware that London is a fabulous, world-class city. But I didn’t see it. All I experienced was my misery.
I’ve lost days, months, even years of life to this dark force. Living with it is like hauling around a black hole, so that various holidays and events get sucked in and I wake up somewhere else: older, clearer about what keeps happening, but no more enlightened.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Indian Feast
I react to the possibility of joy, it seems, by cooking large quantities of cauliflower curry and stuffing myself with as much as possible.
I’ve been saying to my friend Danielle over the phone: I just need one thing to go right. Then yesterday and today, just after I’d had this big-feeling realization (again) that I need to go back to school to become a therapist—and stop trying to miserably carve myself into another person—the following non-negative things happen: my landlord calls saying he will replace the heater under my freezing old house with a new one twice its size. One of my new poems, part of my second collection (though the first has yet to find a home) is accepted for publication in a great journal. And I have a really nice, possibly imaginary moment with a really French (really married?) bartender at my favorite restaurant. Ah, oui?
This morning, after getting the email about my poem, I decided to keep my daughter home a second day from daycare though her fever was gone, and that we would have a relaxed day.
First, we both mourned the sudden absence of the huge sparkly Christmas tree inside the little "mall" adjacent to my daily coffee shop. Our ritual is to retire to this open indoor space, framed by a few little shops, where I sit on the bizarrely unstable/uncomfortable benches and crunch sugar from the bottom of my iced coffee while she plays, going up and down the mini flights of stairs; touching the ornaments on the now-retired tree; or, sometimes, kneeling to do number 2 in her pullup (“I have to poop” she unselfconsciously announces).
After, we went to Borders, where she made me buy her yet another clear rubber ball with glitter floating inside (this one also has a smart-alecky white cube with writings on it, like fortunes: “in your dreams” and “true dat”), and to Whole Foods (“whole paycheck”), where I assembled the ingredients of what I thought of shimmeringly as an Indian feast. When I’m depressed I don’t cook and just want salt, sugar, and wine to be IV’d into me. So to be gathering the potatoes, tomatoes, lemon, and large goldish cauliflower into plastic bags felt hopeful.
The other morning, following the revelation about returning to school, I had a dream that I wanted to keep while it was going on. I lived in a house with a group of people. The house was beautiful and complex: large, and with an architecturally impressive or interesting design I studied from outside and in, trying to memorize its vivid, real-seeming details. The environment inside was very warm and free in a way unfamiliar to my waking reality, past or present. In this house, I could just be or express anything publicly, in front of the people around me, and feel embraced and self-accepting.
I’ve been saying to my friend Danielle over the phone: I just need one thing to go right. Then yesterday and today, just after I’d had this big-feeling realization (again) that I need to go back to school to become a therapist—and stop trying to miserably carve myself into another person—the following non-negative things happen: my landlord calls saying he will replace the heater under my freezing old house with a new one twice its size. One of my new poems, part of my second collection (though the first has yet to find a home) is accepted for publication in a great journal. And I have a really nice, possibly imaginary moment with a really French (really married?) bartender at my favorite restaurant. Ah, oui?
This morning, after getting the email about my poem, I decided to keep my daughter home a second day from daycare though her fever was gone, and that we would have a relaxed day.
First, we both mourned the sudden absence of the huge sparkly Christmas tree inside the little "mall" adjacent to my daily coffee shop. Our ritual is to retire to this open indoor space, framed by a few little shops, where I sit on the bizarrely unstable/uncomfortable benches and crunch sugar from the bottom of my iced coffee while she plays, going up and down the mini flights of stairs; touching the ornaments on the now-retired tree; or, sometimes, kneeling to do number 2 in her pullup (“I have to poop” she unselfconsciously announces).
After, we went to Borders, where she made me buy her yet another clear rubber ball with glitter floating inside (this one also has a smart-alecky white cube with writings on it, like fortunes: “in your dreams” and “true dat”), and to Whole Foods (“whole paycheck”), where I assembled the ingredients of what I thought of shimmeringly as an Indian feast. When I’m depressed I don’t cook and just want salt, sugar, and wine to be IV’d into me. So to be gathering the potatoes, tomatoes, lemon, and large goldish cauliflower into plastic bags felt hopeful.
The other morning, following the revelation about returning to school, I had a dream that I wanted to keep while it was going on. I lived in a house with a group of people. The house was beautiful and complex: large, and with an architecturally impressive or interesting design I studied from outside and in, trying to memorize its vivid, real-seeming details. The environment inside was very warm and free in a way unfamiliar to my waking reality, past or present. In this house, I could just be or express anything publicly, in front of the people around me, and feel embraced and self-accepting.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Drug Wars
Is unhappiness a disease that can be medicated? I never thought so. But then, I’ve always had a bit of a problem being happy.
Through the past 16 years of struggling with episodes of Major Depression, I always felt that going on a drug would erase my identity and mean I was weak. And I didn’t want to gain a bunch of weight and have deadened sex organs. These seemed like valid concerns…but people in my life kept recommending antidepressants. Recently, when I couldn’t get through a day without hysterical crying sessions, I called a friend in Ithaca who said she’d had a great experience with Lexapro, and I stopped resisting. It felt good to just let go of the burden of depression, give it up to the gods of the pharmaceutical industry. They know what they are doing, right? I even considered that maybe, if it worked out, I should stay on this drug permanently because my regular personality was just no good (as my grandfather once remarked to my dad, during his courtship of my mom: “Have a drink, Dave. You’re no good as you are.”). My regular personality could not hold down a job for long, or earn more than $15 an hour. It ended up single over and over; got a divorce, got knocked up, and had worse meltdowns than my now 2-year-old daughter. My regular personality wanted to drink a bottle of wine per night alone (but didn’t, yet). It had spent its entire 20s studying poetry, and not having enough sex. Accumulating grad school loans! Blowing up my first car, a Chevy Caprice, due to infrequent oil changes! I started envisioning the chemically-altered me as someone who would be “stable,” open her mail more than once every few weeks, create crafts and snowman-shaped pancakes for her child, marry a kind man and be able to stay married.
It was a snap to get Lex prescribed by my family doctor, and the first day of the drugged reality was pretty damn positive. I kept thinking, So this is what normal people feel like…! On the way to the store I got mad at some rude driver, as always, but did not then collapse into tears and consider self-annihilation; instead, I soon bounced back toward a vague cheerfulness. I had more energy and a sense of purpose; I functioned and accomplished shit. It was as if someone had turned a light on inside my brain, and I saw how dark, wet, and sad it had been before.
However, less than two weeks later I decided to wean off and explore the gentle world of yoga, vitamins B and D, and other less drug-induced cures because I couldn’t stand the price that is exacted: the inability to keep a thought in one’s head, complete loss of sexual function and creativity, and flat-lining of all emotions, like I can’t feel any of my feelings and am floating by the ceiling. I know that these drugs have side-effects which typically take four weeks to fade but these features, from what I have read, were not going to go away because they are the main things that such a drug accomplishes: the shutting-down or blunting of one’s feeling centers, which zaps bad feelings and, in the process, any really good ones. No thanks.
Ultimately, feelings are information, I think. We used to utilize them to keep from being attacked by wild boars; now, we modern folk don’t know what to do with them, how to let them offer their valuable, sometimes paradoxical messages and pass through our systems without getting stuck or needing to be escaped from. I’d like to get to the point where I can have a bad day and not need to unwind with a load of fries and wine. Then again, the idea of really not needing fries and wine sounds awfully Zen and slightly creepy.
Through the past 16 years of struggling with episodes of Major Depression, I always felt that going on a drug would erase my identity and mean I was weak. And I didn’t want to gain a bunch of weight and have deadened sex organs. These seemed like valid concerns…but people in my life kept recommending antidepressants. Recently, when I couldn’t get through a day without hysterical crying sessions, I called a friend in Ithaca who said she’d had a great experience with Lexapro, and I stopped resisting. It felt good to just let go of the burden of depression, give it up to the gods of the pharmaceutical industry. They know what they are doing, right? I even considered that maybe, if it worked out, I should stay on this drug permanently because my regular personality was just no good (as my grandfather once remarked to my dad, during his courtship of my mom: “Have a drink, Dave. You’re no good as you are.”). My regular personality could not hold down a job for long, or earn more than $15 an hour. It ended up single over and over; got a divorce, got knocked up, and had worse meltdowns than my now 2-year-old daughter. My regular personality wanted to drink a bottle of wine per night alone (but didn’t, yet). It had spent its entire 20s studying poetry, and not having enough sex. Accumulating grad school loans! Blowing up my first car, a Chevy Caprice, due to infrequent oil changes! I started envisioning the chemically-altered me as someone who would be “stable,” open her mail more than once every few weeks, create crafts and snowman-shaped pancakes for her child, marry a kind man and be able to stay married.
It was a snap to get Lex prescribed by my family doctor, and the first day of the drugged reality was pretty damn positive. I kept thinking, So this is what normal people feel like…! On the way to the store I got mad at some rude driver, as always, but did not then collapse into tears and consider self-annihilation; instead, I soon bounced back toward a vague cheerfulness. I had more energy and a sense of purpose; I functioned and accomplished shit. It was as if someone had turned a light on inside my brain, and I saw how dark, wet, and sad it had been before.
However, less than two weeks later I decided to wean off and explore the gentle world of yoga, vitamins B and D, and other less drug-induced cures because I couldn’t stand the price that is exacted: the inability to keep a thought in one’s head, complete loss of sexual function and creativity, and flat-lining of all emotions, like I can’t feel any of my feelings and am floating by the ceiling. I know that these drugs have side-effects which typically take four weeks to fade but these features, from what I have read, were not going to go away because they are the main things that such a drug accomplishes: the shutting-down or blunting of one’s feeling centers, which zaps bad feelings and, in the process, any really good ones. No thanks.
Ultimately, feelings are information, I think. We used to utilize them to keep from being attacked by wild boars; now, we modern folk don’t know what to do with them, how to let them offer their valuable, sometimes paradoxical messages and pass through our systems without getting stuck or needing to be escaped from. I’d like to get to the point where I can have a bad day and not need to unwind with a load of fries and wine. Then again, the idea of really not needing fries and wine sounds awfully Zen and slightly creepy.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Dining Alone
If I could marry a place, I would want it to be The Delachaise, a restaurant on St.
Charles Avenue in New Orleans. And not in the “objectum sexuals” sense—as in folks,
usually women, who fall in erotic love with inanimate objects such as the Eiffel
Tower, a church banister, or a picket fence. Although I fancy the building
itself—its curved, elongated shape, sparkling outside and inside with tiny
white lights so that I feel I’m in a cozy, Christmasy train car—it is more than
the structure that I want to merge with. Forgivingly dim lighting; decadent,
eclectic small plates (the fries, done in goose fat with a creamy aioli, always
make reality sting less); wine served in decanters so scents and flavors can
unfold over time; cute bartenders, one with a 50s pompadour; a European feeling
of sophisticated yet soccer-game-casual privacy that makes me comfortable
sitting there alone with a book... Do I really need a reason? I go at least
once a week, swallowing my financial guilt, alone and with my latest novel or
poetry collection; and have written unsalvageable poetic nothings in a
Moleskine while sipping Malbec, eating Shrimp Clemenceau, and eyeing one of the
friendly yet beautifully distant staff members. Outside, a lit streetcar
bearing tourists glides past every few minutes; the sky grows darker and darker,
letting me know that it will soon be time to regretfully take a last sip of
wine, close out my tab while flirting slightly and I hope imperceptibly, and
hurry to Sara’s daycare to pick her up (Mommy is not drunk...).
At almost 3 years in length, my relationship with The Delachaise is among the longer of my passionate entanglements. It was the first place in New Orleans that my child’s father, now ex, and I ate at—I instantly loved it, his response was lukewarm. We'd traveled down from upstate NY to check out Tulane, where he was considering completing his undergrad degree. I still have a picture on my cell phone from that early March night: reluctant to be photographed, J. is sitting across from me, with his muscly arms crossed on our table, wearing a green “Ithaca is Gorges” shirt. Every time I looked at this image after our return home, it reminded me with a rush of why I was in love with him: this surly, not-to-be-captured sexiness that filled out his T-shirt and watched me guardedly, yet with a melting hint of openness, from across the dark little table.
At almost 3 years in length, my relationship with The Delachaise is among the longer of my passionate entanglements. It was the first place in New Orleans that my child’s father, now ex, and I ate at—I instantly loved it, his response was lukewarm. We'd traveled down from upstate NY to check out Tulane, where he was considering completing his undergrad degree. I still have a picture on my cell phone from that early March night: reluctant to be photographed, J. is sitting across from me, with his muscly arms crossed on our table, wearing a green “Ithaca is Gorges” shirt. Every time I looked at this image after our return home, it reminded me with a rush of why I was in love with him: this surly, not-to-be-captured sexiness that filled out his T-shirt and watched me guardedly, yet with a melting hint of openness, from across the dark little table.
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