Exposure

“Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry.

All that blood was never once beautiful.

It was just red.”

-Kait Rokowski

Exposure therapy can be overwhelming.

It’s an exercise in going to far, but not TOO too far, in aid of avoiding avoidance and repressing repression in the interests of growth and health. I’m reasonably sure that’s not how Kazimerz Dabrowski, with his Theory of Positive Disintegration, or Carl Jung, with his Archetypes and Shadows, or Tony Robbins with his “Just Git Gud” would have described it, but I feel that I am as least as qualified as any of them to say whatever the hell I want and let posterity pick the bones.

If you wait long enough, everything ever written is just a suicide note, just someone trying to explain the why, and convey what’s going on inside to the outside, to form their OWN bridges between two very separate realities as a necessary outlet to release the pressures created by the intrusions of the outside world. If that’s not art, and if art isn’t that, then I don’t know anything at all.

The desired result of exposure therapy is non-traumatic adaptation. You can heal from a concussion, for example, but it’s measurably better to wear a helmet and not get one. Accidents and bad things happen, though, and we’re often left healing from wounds that, for one reason or another, couldn’t be avoided. The results of these events remain as visible scars and invisible traumata. With an ideal linear progression of experience, our minds and bodies adapt in a measured and manageable way to pressure and resistance, and the result is an ever increasing strength. However, when the impetus of the offence against our being is wildly overscaled against our capacity to resist, vital links are broken, and we are wounded, laid low, pierced, broken, and disintegrated. Disease thrives in such environments, and we lose our resistances, our resiliency, and our will. We become fragile as our defences crumble, and we lie exposed, like a raw nerve, reacting to all stimulus with shocks of pain, provoking the amygdala to respond to all influence as threat. This is the state of anxiety.

The state of anxiety likes to expand it’s borders with exponential vigour. Viscerally, anxiety is a virus, seeking only it’s own ends in a suicidal rush to consume life in a rapid death spiral, a self-fulfilling prophesy. For example, when I struggle with something for too long without surcease, I often get depressed, when I get depressed, I tend to get somatically inflamed. It hurts, and I am thrown mentally into a place where I believe I can remember those ten days when I would have welcomed being repeatedly kicked in the testicles to ease my attention from the exquisite agony of my neck and arm. I’d be a fool to ask for such an odd respite now, but the memory remains, and I would do almost anything to avoid it, including nothing. I do have healthy strategies and harm mitigating coping mechanisms in place, the latter to be used if the former cannot be accessed immediately. It’s not a perfect system by any means, but this is the war I’m in, these are the battles I fight every day to survive the state of my mental health. This is the Art of Pain.

It’s difficult to prove to someone that you are worth the risk of becoming vulnerable with if even you are not certain you believe that to be true. Fostering an environment of trust is an unlikely sum where the denominators are tentativeness, impatience, fear, and self-loathing. Moral courage is a quality much sought after in a partner, but often overlooked as a component in one’s own emotional mechanisms. As a result, one might, with great arrogance, point out another’s faults and weaknesses while disregarding or utterly ignoring their own. I do that. It’s unkind, and destroys trust because, I have observed, usually in retrospect, this assault has the effect of making someone feel inadequate and unlovable, obviating any amount of evidence to the contrary, and the climate grows Sisyphean. The common exposure of one’s faults without the compassionate elements of patience and understanding, nor the appreciation to give context to another’s life’s value of conditioning, not to mention their willingness or ability to accept, is not exposure therapy, it is abuse.

Context is always vital when responding to conditioning. If there is time, or rather patience, information can be collected, validated, and parsed for the purpose of creating context, and this is what we call therapy, or “doing the work”, and the results are generally quite positive if relentlessly pursued. If neither constancy nor compassion are provided for this process, the effects could be almost anything at all, like if you were to mix unmarked liquids and powders that have just as much chance of being sodium and water as anything else, or making dinner from a collection of cans, none of which have any labels. There’s only so much that you can healthily adapt to, is what I’m getting at. The rest tends to get buried under the burdens of the every day unless wantonly exposed by someone who could not possibly realize the criteria for understanding the situation, nor our reaction to it, IF we even understand it ourselves. There’s a reason things get buried, after all, and that is because we’re not able to deal with it right now. The resources are simply not available to understand the story, or even tell it.

But we get triggered, and the pot gets stirred before we’re ready, and ugly things ride the roil, and surface.

A little while ago I walked past a crow pecking away at a tire smashed shellfish. Lost in thought, or possibly just stuck walking in a straight line, I spooked him away from his meal, and he hopped away unhappily. It didn’t have to, I’d never hurt a crow, but he didn’t know that.
Seeing the crushed shell and splayed guts brought to mind something that I avoid as much as I can, but visits more often than I like.

I enter the memory at the same instant every time, the instant where I, in mid-leap over an enormous pool of my friend’s blood, envision what would happen if I don’t make it to the other side. Large quantities of blood are very slippery, and I see myself landing in it, and falling backwards with my feet in the air, arms flailing, to land on my back with a splat, and with my hand inside the back of my friend’s skull where his brain used to be. Isn’t is fascinating how quickly your brain works, and how absurd it can be in it’s efforts of avoidance? I make the leap, landing on the other side of the carnage, and I take a moment to steady myself. I see the suicide note on the table to the left, but I don’t read it. That’s not why I jumped over there. I’m looking for something to cover my friend’s face with. I feel kind of stupid, really, like, why was that important to me right now? I find a (presumably) Guatemalan tea towelly type cloth, then jump back. I squat down and take one last long look at his face. It doesn’t look very good, and I find myself questioning how I had missed that he had blue eyes. He didn’t, his eyes had been brown before they glazed over in death, but aside from that and a few other important things, he looks the same. I cover his face and the remains of his head that weren’t blasted all over the kitchenette, stand, and look around at all the pieces. I see the view out the windows, I see the normal furniture arrangement, table and chairs, couch, coffee table. I see the ghastly horror of my once charming friend partially shrouded by my pathetic attempt at....something, dignity, maybe. I still don’t know. Then I see my other three friends; one of them is on knees and elbows repeating over and over, “How could you do that? How could you do that to yourself?”, another, the one who found him and called me, is sitting on the floor, slumped against the wall, and weeping inconsolably, and desolate. The third is frenziedly short-pacing and saying, “What the...what the fuck man? What the fuck is happening? Holy fuck!”, and running his hands through his hair, pulling on his scalp. We’re all dealing with our own iterations of shock. I look at the aged shotgun, and at the stick, a piece of window trim, used to push the trigger, both lay in a glossy pool of the most perfect red.

I feel sick. Right now, I feel sick. This is so awful even 20 years later.

I don’t think that I was as still and calm as that appalling pool. I remember weeping and lamely calling his name-an epitome of futility-before I felt compelled to cover his face. I guess I just had to DO something, and it didn’t matter what it was, but I believed it would help somehow.
After we talked to the cops and their counsellor, the four of us went our separate ways to endure that first night in whatever way seemed the least awful. I knocked on several doors, and I witnessed what happens when you tell someone that their friend is dead.

Yes, I’m sure. No, I don’t want to say how.

The wake started before the coroner arrived, and I remember being half drunk on the neighbor’s porch and watching the meat wagon drive away. It lasted for weeks, the wake. On the first night someone told me that they were so glad I was there, that I was like a rock for them all, because I could handle it, that I was that strong. But I wasn’t. I was already so hollow, so weak, so confused, already in the early stages of addiction, so guilty and ashamed. I wasn’t strong at all, I just didn’t know how I was supposed to act. That comment, that exposure, was the most damaging part of the whole affair for me because it revealed me, cowering behind my illusion of strength. I promptly fell apart and spent years in addiction.

It’s a terrible story. Everybody has one. Some are not so bad, many are much, much worse. I am still unsure of how that experience affected me, but I don’t think that it was in a good way. The thing is, though, that I’m STILL working on issues that were a problem for me and, by infliction, people around me, long before that even happened, and I’m not sure how even THEY came to be.

I’m not even sure what I’m talking about anymore.

It started out so good, it always does, and I always get lost, hung up, diverted, upset. This has all gone on for so long. I need a break.

-insert elevator music or something equally inane-

Something interesting just occurred to me while I was out staring at the moon. What if I just did something different? What would happen then? I have no idea, truth be told. In all the lives I have lived, in all the different chapters of my story, chapters that keep getting shorter, and who’s common factor is only me and the way they end, I’ve always been scared, and the fear has made me crazy, crazy enough to actually believe that I’d moved past, that I’d grown out of, that I was no longer a victim of every little thing that I was reacting to.

Some things take time, some things don’t. If you want to attain good health when you’re in bad shape, it’s the work of years, but the decision to not smoke takes less than a heartbeat. I’ve made that decision thousands of times, and it’s still not enough. I guess it’s insufficient to simply make the decision to NOT *something something*, that’ll just leave a void, and nature abhors a vacuum, so any random thing could fall in there if you don’t either expand yourself into the void, which is probably the better choice, or stick something else in there before the emptiness eats you alive. Eats me alive.
So that’s where I’m at again, being eaten alive, with wounded people on the trail behind me. In real life, in real time, right now, there are broken hearts bleeding, and I’m alone with an identity that leaves deep wounds in people that try to love me at close range. I don’t like it. I hate it, in fact, and I always have. No one likes being afraid, no decent individual wants to hurt anybody else, so what does that make me? Unhappy, for one. Broken, obviously, like most people are in some fashion. But what if I like it that way? Not LIKE like, but what if that’s my current addiction, pain? It’s been said, but nobody likes to hear stuff like that, and I am no exception, in so many ways. The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable. But then it will set you free! Wouldn’t that be good? Maybe the misery wouldn’t last if you really just grabbed the bull by the tail, had a really good look at the situation, decided what to do about it, and then did that. It’s not pretty, but someone I believe in told me to get real, so that’s what I’m going to do because right now, I’m not good company. Look at it this way, only a tiny fraction of the mass of any blade is it’s sharp edge, but that’s what cuts you, and that’s what draws the eye once you’ve been cut, and it doesn’t matter one teeny fucking bit what the rest of the blade looks like. Huh…I’m actually quite proud of that analogy; it finally all makes a lot more sense to me. Sure, it seems obvious, probably, especially if you’ve been badly cut or burned, but everyone also knows that it’s a bad idea to drink for weeks or decades, do lots of coke, and smoke crack, but that’s not the way I was thinking after I’d just jumped over a six foot wide pool of blood, twice. I made bad choices because I was dying from exposure.

We get hurt bad, we get overexposed, and we react in crazy ways, and those become habits, and habits are hard to break, but I’m not a toddler, I’m fifty years old, and I’ve been sober for years, which proves I have the facility available to make good choices. So I’ll just do that, then.

Who knows, I might even like it. Maybe I could talk to my kids again, maybe I could have someone in my life and make them feel safe, maybe I could let the pain go, and concentrate on better things. Maybe this blog, this suicide note, like the one I never read so long ago, could be a love letter instead.

Could I write a love letter instead?

Just try and stop me.

Man, this full moon is making me crazy!
and yet...

and yet, it could work...

and I think I have one wish left

it’s here somewhere.