Crisis Alert!

This is going to be an extremely short update. I just want to let you know, dear readers, that I remain alive and... well, not 'well,' but alive. There is a lot of chaos in the air right now, and to say that emotions are running high across a wide variety of spectrums is an understatement. I'm concerned for more than a few people, and (at least it seems like) more than a few people are concerned about me. It's a very concerning time, if I'm honest. Then of course there's the requisite confusion of the Self which goes along with all of that.

A lot of existential questions and conversations. A lot of total blanks, half-truths, and non-answers. I feel like I'm regressing. More on these and other topics when it's not almost four a.m. I had a nice, interesting topic planned out and partially written, but I'm not sure it's the thing to talk about now. Strike while the iron is hot, I suppose.

I've been doing a lot of creative things, lately. Which is good: it helps keep the crazy under control. Or, at least, I think it does. Today a chapter of my life will be finished, signed, and sent out for publication. I thought I'd feel more liberated; instead, I just feel sad. Sadness seems to be a recurring trend these past few months. Much less fun than the ambivalence I had courted for so long. Regression, I tell you.

What Gaia taught me about grief

I've mentioned several times on this blog that emotions and I have not been super pals throughout most of my life. Everyone remembers that great (terrible?) cave and wall metaphor - something which now certainly is reminiscent of the Cask of Amontillado - and I like to think that I was at least somewhat clear in that post. Particularly when talking about the positives and negatives of opening yourself up. Most of the people who have commented on it to me have said how happy they are that, for me, the wall lies in a pile of rubble.

I wish I could share their enthusiasm, but as I also said in that post, it's a double-edged sword at the best of times. I recently ran into a situation where, again, I reacted quite differently than I have in the past. And while I feel like a large part of that is the different factors involved in this scenario, I can't deny that the wall-shaped hole in my brain may have something to do with it.

I don't want to spend too much setting the scene. At my step-mother's house there are many cats. Or at least there used to be; it seems like that number is shrinking almost daily now. I lived there from summer 2008 to winter of 2013, so a fair amount of time spent in one place. And in that time I got to know all the cats and dogs, like you do. Gaia was one of these: a rescue together with her daughter, Luna, she was a tortoiseshell who was pretty round, kind of like a meatball, and had a real attitude. It used to lead to some stand-offs with her and one of the cats we brought, Ricky, a Scottish Fold who was just super-awesome (and also had a real attitude).

Gaia was nuuuuuuuuts about me. This was often annoying, as cats so frequently are: she would hear my voice in the kitchen and come running, then lay over my feet/in the middle of the kitchen and attack me (playfully, but still) as I tried to walk by; she would follow me around meowing with this urgent cry that made you wanna shake her; she liked to go into the basement (where I spent most of my time) and then refuse to get off the steps, either deciding she wanted to leave immediately or just generally getting in the way of everyone trying to get up and down the stairs all the time. You know - annoying.

But she was also adorable and lovely, and a little nuts (as all torties are). She would lay on my feet, as I already mentioned, and I'd pet her rough and she'd make hilarious noises and rub against my shoes so hard she fell over. She would then attack the shoe, often clinging to it as I tried to walk away so I would be half-dragging her across the floor. Among many other awesome and excellent things she did, but that's the most immediate one. Oh, sometimes after getting her all worked up she would scratch her face/neck and go "mrow-row-row-row-row" VERY loudly. Hilarious.

In the past year or two, however she's been looking worse. She lost a lot of weight, and last year she was in real bad shape - in fact some people already wanted to dismiss her as 'old and dying' and put her to sleep - but through the intercession of my sister she was taken to the vet, they looked her over and helped her out and she was back to her old self. More-or-less, anyway; she never quite regained that lost weight, and Meatball Cat became more of a parody name than a truism.

Fast-forward to this past weekend. I hear from my brother (who is the only sibling at the house right now - my sister is pet-sitting for another family) that she's in bad shape, and will probably be put down soon, so I get ready and I go over there to see her one last time. We spent some time at the pet-sitting house hoping that my sister would get the green-light to come over and leave the pets there for a while, but that never came so my brother and I went home without her.

I can't really describe what it was like. She was in my brother's room; she had crawled under his desk, as cats are wont to do, and was laying there. Stretched out, arms and legs straight out, like she had just fallen over sideways. Her eyes couldn't close, and there was a large amount of liquid issuing from the one, which didn't stop while I was there. She couldn't move or focus the eyeballs themselves. There was a dish of water next to her which she had not touched because she couldn't. I put some water on a finger and tried to get her to drink at least a little, but to no avail. Her breathing was shallow and labored.

But she was still alive, and as I spoke to her and pet her and tried to reassure her however I could over the next two hours and change, I would see glimmers that she was at least somewhat conscious of what was going on. Her face would twitch, the muscles around her eyes moving slightly. Sometimes her paws would twitch. They were cold, so I asked my brother to provide a shirt to throw on over her. It was a small gesture but at least it made me feel like I could do something.

Now, this isn't a post about anger. Anger comes much easier to me than grief, and I right now recalling events I'm feeling a pretty even mixture of both. I learned that she had been virtually unable to walk since Friday - this was on a Sunday evening, I should mention - and that no effort - none, zip, nothing - had been made to get her to a vet. Nothing. So she had laid there, slowly starving and/or thirsting to death, if whatever had happened to her brain wouldn't kill her first, for literally days, with those who could have done something waved it away with, frankly, ridiculous and self-deluding assurances.

But like I said, that's not what this entry is about. I don't mean to offend anyone; that's my interpretation of events, which I feel strongly about and which I believe is justified, but that's another post for another time. See how easy it was for me to distract myself from writing about grief - I don't want to deny I was tearing up while writing those paragraphs describing her last day, because I was - by focusing on anger?

The grief is what hit me the hardest at the time. I couldn't even summon the fire to be angry during those two hours, while I was watching her lay there, so far removed from the animal I once knew. I want to put it out there that I have felt grief. Good God have I felt grief. Our family hasn't been the luckiest in the past few years, and I can't deny that I felt grief when Ricky, our excellent cat we'd had for about 13 years, wandered down to the basement one day, laid down under a desk, made a sickening meowing noise, and then went limp. I was petting him and trying to coax him, but it wasn't working; I then took my dead cat and laid him in a box, to be buried the next morning. Or when I learned our other amazing cat (received all the way back in 2000/2001), Leo, who was Ricky's half-brother (but a straight-eared fold), developed serious issues with his breathing. My brother's girlfriend was handling it at the time, and towards the end it was truly horrendeous - his sinuses had partially collapsed and he just.... I mean I can't imagine. I can't imagine how hard it was for her. Mallory, if you're reading this, I... I mean I thanked you at the time, but I don't think I understood fully. Because it is awful.

Or when our other cats died. Or when we showed up, literally penniless, at a house in New York, rented for the next month, which was coated in mold and was essentially unlivable; a house where we spent the next month, what items we could fit in all thrown into the living room, where we all slept on mattresses and tried to stay out of the other rooms (which always gave me a headache if I spent too long there). Or when we came back from the beach one day in Ocean City to learn that our mother had died in New York. Or at the wake. Or other, also-very-bad things which I probably shouldn't share in a public blog.

The point is, I've felt grief before this. But it had always been like pulling off a band-aid: a quick sting which fades. Some stings take longer to fade than others, it's true, but all fade. That's life, and while I'm not quite sure if Time heals all wounds, it can at least reduce them to festering scabs which sometimes burst open again during heavy exertion or changes in barometric pressure.

But a big part of those moments of grief is that the causes were instant. When Ricky died, he seemed fine, came downstairs, and died. Instant. When we learned our mother had died, it had already been several hours. Instant. When other relatives have died, or pets, or any other horrible thing has happened to us, it's either been at a distance or instant. Or, in the case of the Mold House, as we call it, a long (and difficult) present that we hope will get better.

But with Gaia it was different. I had never sat by and watched something suffer before, with no possibility of recovery. I know that humans are the only animal cursed with their own mortality, but something in the animal mind tells it when it's about to die; elephants have graveyards, gulls have the sea, and cats - well, cats are known for crawling under hard-to-reach places to die, so no one can see them. They don't like revealing weakness, which is maybe another reason why I get along with them so well.

What happens when that instinct goes off, and leads an animal to choose its final place... and then it doesn't quite happen? What if instead of an instant death they suffer slowly, locked in a state between both life and death? In that moment when the instinct fires off, do they realize what's happening? Do they lay there, feeling their breaths become shorter and shorter, their vitals weakening and shutting down, their body losing its heat? Do they know what's happening?

Maybe they don't; I don't know. But it's given me a lot to think about over the last few days, and it was a whole lot to think about Sunday night. The immensity of what was happening was clear, at least to me, though it seemed like most others were either blind to it or numb to it. Which is how I would have been, before, I think. Trying not to feel anything.

Because it was fucking terrible. I was crying for about two hours straight, and while I am not the most masculine man in the world, I don't like crying and I don't cry easily or often. But for two hours I sat there, blowing my nose as the tears fell, and I really thought about all this stuff. And I even recorded a video; I don't know why, but I just began talking to myself and thought this might be a good opportunity to have for future reference. I'll never let anyone see it, I'm sure; though I speak to a third party, it's waaaay too personal. And cheesy: in that moment I was not my most articulate or witty, I'm sorry to say. But I felt like it was important, because it shows me myself grieving, something I have experienced before, but tightly-reined and as brief as I could make it. It shows my reaction to an ongoing incident, one happening right before me, and though I'm mostly incoherent throughout it, or silent, I guess it doesn't really matter.

Just sitting there and being sad is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. I really, really, really really really wanted to leave, go distract myself with something, stop thinking about it. Because that would have been easy, at least for me; I've gotten extremely good at compartmentalizing and dissembling. And it's gotten easier the further it's gotten from Sunday, too. I try to think about it at least once or twice a day, just to keep it in my mind, but it is of course a sad memory and my unconscious tries to not dwell on it. Soon, I'm sure, I won't think about it much unless reminded of it by some outside factor.

But I didn't leave, and that's the point. I didn't distract myself, because I wanted to spend the time with her, and be with her. And I don't even know if she knew I was there, or if she felt anything at all. I hope she did, but in the end it doesn't really matter, because I was mostly there for Me. I felt like she deserved, what, at least two hours of my time, after all the years I spent with her. I watched over her because I actually hated the thought of leaving her alone, which I told to my brother (who wasn't sure if he could sleep in a room with a dying cat - and I totally understand that). He eventually decided to stay, otherwise I would have volunteered to sleep there that night. The thought of her in that condition, in a dark room, alone, slowly dying... I hated it. I hated it. I'm not being overly-dramatic; it was anathema to me. I was not going to let that happen, even if she didn't know I was there, even if she was feeling no pain and wasn't aware of anything around her. Couldn't do it. Wouldn't do it.

The next morning she was taken to the vet and put to sleep. My brother said she had begun twitching more violently, so it's for the best. And he not only slept in the room, but slept next to her on the floor, the whole night. Which... I mean, I know it's pathetic, but I'm crying a bit about right now. Lame, lame, I know. But for some reason that meant - and still means - so much to me.

So that's where I am with grief, now. I let it in; or at least, there was no barrier there to keep it out. And it was about as horrible as I expected, and since very few people enjoy feeling grief and sadness, on some level I wish that the wall was still up, that I could have been affected in the moment and quickly scrubbed it from the emotional receptors of my mind instead of tearing up at just the thought of it half a week later. But I'm also happy, because that wouldn't have been fair to Gaia, or my relationship with her, or how much happiness she brought me during a pretty miserable period of my life. Or even the annoyances when I'd trip over her in the dark and she'd meow in reproach at me and I'd shout back "what do you expect you're laying in the middle of the kitchen in the dark!"

As much as I wish it, life can't be just about the good times. Scratch that, because good times for me are in extremely short supply - it can't even be just about the non-terrible times. A lot of it is about the terrible times, the awful experiences, the waist-high lake of excrement I wade through to get to the opposite bank, though the bank keeps getting further and further away, and the lake gets deeper and deeper, and there's something in here with me, and now that I think about it I'm not sure that even is another bank, it could just be an optical illusion of the boiling sunlight reflecting off of the shit that is my life.

And now that I've engaged in my self-inflicted misery, it's time to watch a video or play a game or talk to someone, anything to get my mind off of things. Just because my life is an ocean of loss and pain, and I'm fully committed to acknowledging that, it doesn't mean I can't have a daydream of thunderstorms and northern lights and crisp mountain air, does it?

Trapped in a Mind send Help

This is kind of a companion piece to my last update, where I was talking about being trapped in my own head and how you can fall into certain cycles of thought. The reason I brought that up, in fact, was due to a conversation I had with my friend/roommate and my brother, where we were talking frankly (because that's the only way we talk, Frank) about the kinds of 'bizarre' mental habits we're afflicted by. It was an eye-opening conversation in a lot of ways. This kinda stuff comes up every so often tangentially, but usually not spoken about at length in such a way. I dunno, maybe you'll find it interesting.

My roommate, for example, has problems with social anxiety. Among the various ways this manifests itself, two stood out for me at the moment (I'm sure there are many more things he did not mention). For one, I've noticed - anyone who's spent time around him has noticed - that he has a tendency to curse or grumble seemingly at random. Asking him what's up leads to a noncommittal 'ugh, nothing' or something similar. It turns out, in fact, that these moments are frequently brought on by thoughts about mistakes he's made in the past - and not big, life-changing mistakes, but minor mistakes, often social in nature, going back months and years. The way he explained it, just remembering saying something that may have made him seem foolish, or a reaction to something that he wished he had controlled better, is enough to bring his mood down. And it happens a lot. It's a mode of thought that seems to be occurring near-constantly, and is (as he has described it) the kind of stuff that you or I may find completely unremarkable, forgotten almost immediately afterwards.

Similarly, my friend explained that he often second-guesses (and third-guesses, fourth-guesses, etc.) his reactions to people when caught off his guard. An interaction as simple as noticing a person you know walking down the hallway is what he used as an example. His initial instinct may be to nod to the person. Midway through the nod, though, he may grow concerned that the person won't notice the nod, so he'll also begin to wave. Then, as he's switched tack midstream, he'll sometimes attempt to smooth that jump over with a third action (for this example, perhaps a simple 'hey').

Once the person is past, though, he will then go through and repeat all the actions he just did in miniature; as he described it, "if someone could see the whole thirty-second interaction, they would see me nod, wave, say something, then as soon as the person was past nod again, make a little waving motion, and mumble under my breath. They would think I'm insane." He does this because he's going through every action and double-checking that they were all sufficient and/or not weird/creepy/etc.

These are two great examples of the patterns of thought we can get swept away by without even really noticing it. This stuff rises so subtly and over the course of our lives that by the time we take notice of it, it's already part of us. Which means it's really, really hard to let go of, and some people don't want to let go. Because it's normal to each of us, even though we may know logically that it's kinda strange and other people don't have the same exact issues.

My brother does something similar, where he'll sometimes obsess over an upcoming interaction with people, particularly if it's important. Which isn't so strange, I suppose, except he gets very, very concerned with it, and rehearses the way it might go ad nauseum so he's not thrown. Then, when it doesn't go exactly has he plotted it out in his head, he gets thrown off his game. Now, thankfully my brother is a suave enough guy (what can I say, it's in the genes) that this usually doesn't negatively impact him much in the long run, but it is something he's very concerned about.

He also has a very strong tendency to stress out over every possible decision. We make jokes about it, actually, because it is so prevalent and often involves decisions which are just not that big of a deal, objectively speaking. He gets so many points of view from so many different people that I begin to wonder exactly how helpful any of it can be, since he almost always gets a variety of different answers. He also often does this with decisions he's already made, maybe in the spur-of-the-moment.

Much like my roommate's social anxiety issues, I feel like most of us can sympathize with some form of this behavior. It's certainly not super bizarre, and I can say from personal experience that there are aspects of these thought patterns that I share - quite a few, in fact. Because I think most of us have social anxiety to some extent, and regret decisions we may have made, and moments we reacted without thinking and wish we could take it back. God knows I do.

Speaking of myself - my favorite topic, obviously - I'll go into some more specifics, if anyone's still reading, since I'm something of an authority on the subject. I also feel a lot more comfortable sharing details about the way I think versus other people, and then judging myself accordingly.

For one, I talk to myself constantly. CONSTANTLY. When I'm alone I sound like a raving lunatic. I'll hold one-sided arguments, go through past decisions, reevaluate current plans, all of it audible to anyone with a wiretap inside my apartment (or wherever I may be). It's just the way I think things through. I mean really think things through. I have a massive tendency to go off onto tangent after tangent after tangent - now realizing this may have been an ever-present symptom of my ADHD - while speaking, and this is magnified about a thousand times worse when it's just in my head. I find it VERY difficult to think in a straight line for an extended period of time (2-3+ minutes) keeping it all up in the ol' noodle. I also often find myself thinking faster than I'm capable of processing information. Does that make sense to anyone?

Have you ever had racing thoughts? Due to a bad trip or drug reaction, or overwhelming stress or something like that? I have. Boy oh boy, that was a bad two days. If you're fortunate enough to never have experienced this, the best way I can describe it is... it's like tripping over your own thoughts. You begin thinking very, very quickly, and the problem is that they're frequently disjointed thoughts connected by only the barest thread - because by the time you're about to formulate a singular notion, you've already jumped onto three more thoughts springing from that idea, and it goes on and on like a runaway train. It is awful.

That's not how it is for me most of the time, however; or should I say, it's an extremely minor version of that very awful experience. How often do you forget what you were about to say? That's essentially what it's like - a thought was fully formed, ready to come out, but somewhere on its way out of the mouth it gets lost. Sometimes you track it down and bring it home, and sometimes it freezes to death in the woods and is eaten by raccoons. Thought-raccoons, I mean. They might stand for, ah... no, I'm not going to waste your time by trying to make this into an extended metaphor, because that would be a real shitshow.

However, when I talk to myself, it forces every part of my brain to hold on a minute. Translating the thoughts into words and then speaking of them is so much less efficient that it slows the whole process down, and in turn allows me to focus better on one idea for longer. Do I still get distracted and forget what I was talking/thinking about? Yes, yes I do. But by processing my thoughts that way, and then hearing myself speak them, I'm able to pick up where I left off soooooo much more often.

This brings me back to my last update, where I was talking about being alone trapped inside my head. One of the reasons I have always valued solitude is that it has provided me with that very opportunity to think things through more clearly. Which is extremely important for me. However, much like my brother and roommate, what may seem normal (and even useful) to me when used in moderation becomes a sort-of nightmare when left unchecked.

Because I will just keep talking. Sometimes I'll be watching a show/movie or listening to music while alone and I will pause whatever it is just because I feel the need to talk. Talk talk talk. Talk some more. And a lot of times, I'm dealing with issues I have already dealt with. They're already done! I will not have received any new information, and often will have already made a decision (if I haven't already put said decision into effect). It's just a retread of what I've thought about before. I have the same arguments with myself, come up with the same solutions, and in general just repeat myself. Over and over and over again. Depending on what I'm thinking about, I can do this for weeks or months - and a few times, for years. YEARS! Of having the same exact conversation with myself.

Taking self-inventory is important, and I feel like I spend a lot of time in introspection. And this process helps me with that, and that's super-great. But once it begins to seem obsessive to me, it becomes something I want to turn off. But I can't. It's always there, and I know it's an exercise in futility and it actually takes up a fair amount of my time, and I want to stop it. But I can't. It's extremely frustrating. I can squash it if I put my mind to it, but it always creeps back in. I'll realize I'm mumbling to myself while walking to class or washing my hands in the bathroom at work, and ffffffff I mean it's just real annoying. Real, real annoying.

Now I don't know if you've seen the link between all these worthless ramblings, but it's basically 'uselessness.' Or futility, I suppose, or whatever you might call it. It's about how your mind can take things that are, more-or-less, healthy and/or helpful - asking those you respect for input/advice, taking care of how you come across to others, giving yourself time to think matters through - and turn them into crutches, and eventually labyrinths. Run through the maze, mouse. It's the same maze every time, and we all know that, but we also know that you're still going to run through it.

On a more uplifting note, however, my point is that we all have these kinds of things. At least, this small sample size does, but I would be highly surprised if most everyone didn't have certain mental prisons they've constructed for themselves. I don't get trapped inside my head the same way my roommate does, or my brother does, or you do. But we all do get trapped up there sometimes, and it can make us feel a little crazy. And frustrated, and useless, and just bad. Bad bad bad. Sometimes we might ask other people if they ever feel the way we do, and if they say no we go 'heh alright nevermind' and drop it.

But while the people you ask may not know exactly what the dimensions of your cell is, or the material the bars are made of, or how many excrement buckets there are (are there excrement buckets? Did you luck out enough to get a functional toilet? You are literally killing me here), I can bet with a good deal of confidence that they have their own prison. Maybe you even know about it. One of them, at least. You now know about one of mine, but the mind is dark and full of terrors. There is plenty of space for a whole Panopticon in there.


I'm thinking I should start breaking these walls of text up with pictures. What do you think. Would that help with the boredom?