WillSpirit!

Where Will meets Spirit
∞ Love, Clarity, Balance, Peace, & Bliss ∞

A science, mental health and spirituality blog written by a physician.

Disclaimer
- Dear Visitors:
  Although I trained and practiced as a physician, my background does not include formal instruction in psychiatry beyond basic medical education. This journal presents ideas about treatment philosophy, but must not be considered therapeutic advice. Abrupt changes in one's psychiatric medications can trigger profound cognitive, emotional, and physical symptoms, including suicidal thoughts and actions. Consequently, pharmaceutical agents should not be increased or decreased without supervision by a mental health clinician.
- ON THE OTHER HAND, your brain belongs to you, and your opinion counts. If you decide that changing your medication regimen will serve your best interest, then I believe your providers have an obligation to help you try to achieve your goals. I want everyone to be educated about their options, and do what will be most helpful for themselves. No one should feel pushed around by dogmatic and/or limited viewpoints, whether those of psychiatrists, anti-psychiatry advocates, or myself.

The Evolutionary Spirit

Why did our minds evolve with the capacity to go mad? Why are our emotions capable of disabling us? Why did we end up with feelings at all?

Let’s start with the last question. When evolutionary biologists study emotion, they usually ask about its survival value. What is it that makes feelings useful to a creature’s reproductive success?

This approach troubles me, because it suggests (implicitly) that animals might just as well have evolved as heartless robots, devoid of any true investment in life. The only reason for feelings in this style of evolutionary logic is that they increased mammalian ability to foster viable offspring. And note that the word mammalian is not arbitrary. Such hypotheses generally go on to assert that reptiles, amphibians, fish, and invertebrates are devoid of meaningful emotion. Which, if you think about it, is another way of saying they don’t care about their lives.

But as I’ve pointed out in another post, even spiders seem pretty insistent on their preference for living over dying. So-called lower animals don’t appear robotic and unaffected. They behave quite passionately when their survival is threatened. Could it be that feelings aren’t just utilitarian, but fundamental to life?

Consider next how this reductionist style of evolutionary reasoning gets applied to psychiatric conditions. How does this rubric explain the persistence of mental afflictions in human populations? After all, psychiatric conditions strike during reproductive years and carry a significant mortality rate (possibly as high as 20% for bipolar conditions). If we argue by selection, we must conclude that the reproductive benefits outweigh the risks.

What are the positive qualities that accompany mental instability? Here we start by considering that intellectual and artistic abilities might have evolved because they increase a mate’s desirability. The idea is that the cavemen who could paint evocative bisons had more success with the cave-ladies. Those who created also procreated.

Then remember that mental health conditions occur more commonly among artists and visionaries. Could the persistence of madness result from its tendency to increase creative output, not to mention reproductive drive?

It’s a reasonable argument, and probably one with some underlying truth. But to me it seems a surprisingly uninspired view of inspired lunacy. It sounds like something a bureaucrat would think up.

And in fact, one criticism of Darwinian theory has always been that it suits capitalists. Bean-counters like “survival of the fittest,” because it justifies the hoarding of beans. To say that passion, creative drive, and wild thinking evolved through better baby-making may not be wrong, but it may leave out mysterious and vital undercurrents in human life.

Let’s imagine, momentarily, that there is more to the cosmos than the material realm. It could be, after all, that mystical forces affect our lives. In which case we might expect that some of our qualities result from influences other than competitive insemination and over-protective child-rearing. We might have lessons to learn, for instance. Maybe some human qualities arose to help us evolve in the spiritual rather than biological sense.

So could it be that mental health problems are serving a higher purpose? Just possibly, the pain of psychiatric distress serves to break down egos and open minds to realms beyond the physical. Maybe “mental illnesses” are not as disastrous as many believe. Maybe they are Grace in formation.

If that were true, and I admit to wild (creative?) speculation here, we would be completely misguided in trying to suppress such conditions. By doing so, we would be robbing people of their chances for growth. We’d be better advised to help the potent energies of psychiatric distress play out in safe and instructive ways.

Unfortunately, the choice in current society is all-too-often between medication and alienation. Or between hospitalization and jail. Inner turmoil no longer has any chance of creating shamans or prophets, because we drug down or lock up anyone who deviates too far from the claustrophobic modern mold.

This is the danger of accepted wisdom. Everyone assumes that natural selection is the sole element at play in evolution only because that’s what everyone assumes. While selection is no doubt a potent force, it has not been proven to be the only influence on evolution, and many scientific facts suggest that we need a more encompassing theory. Postulating purposeful nudges that supervene among the changes sculpted by selection would resolve the evidentiary problems in conventional evolutionary theory. (These nudges wouldn’t necessarily require an omnipotent deity, but could arise as part of the natural self-organization of the cosmos—but this is a topic for another essay.)

Yes, it may be that feelings, madness, artistry, and the like can all be explained in terms of robotic animals competing for resources and mates. But let’s at least admit that richer and more interesting possibilities remain. Until they have been ruled out, we are neither scientific nor inspired if we dismiss them from consideration. And if other explanations deserve attention, then so do other treatment models. If mental conditions are meant to teach us, our society should honor rather than abhor them, and our psychiatric care should promote rather than hinder their flowering.

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Organism, Writ Large

In an earlier post, I praised Douglas Hofstadter’s vision of consciousness as a product of recursive and resonant self-reflection. The point of that essay was to highlight the profound value of observing one’s inner life: mindfulness brings one to the threshold of the sacred. Without in any way focusing on meditation, Hofstadter captures the essence of contemplative practice.

There are aspects of his philosophy that trouble me, however. In particular, I mentioned in passing that Hofstadter believes a computer could embody a self if it were sufficiently complex and possessed motivational drive. Although this sounds sensible in theory, in actual fact it seems unlikely that a synthetic consciousness could ever be similar in any meaningful way to a human mind. I’ve been reading a number of authors who write about consciousness, the brain, and the prospects for artificial intelligence. As near as I can tell, they divide fairly neatly into those who think machines will someday emulate the human mind, and those who believe computers will never achieve consciousness. On the whole, it appears that those with primary backgrounds in mathematics or computer science tend toward the former position, while biologists tend toward the latter. Those with religious perspectives also contend that consciousness is uniquely human, but I’m setting their positions aside for the purposes of this post.

Since I am a former research biologist and a trained physician, it should be no surprise that I believe human consciousness lies beyond the capability of machines, no matter how advanced. Hofstadter has made an important contribution in recognizing reflection as the key to an entity having a sense of self. It may be that auto-observing machines will someday be created, and perhaps they will have selves of some sort. But whatever awareness arises will not be human, or even human-like.

The philosopher Alva Noë makes the point that even minute single celled organisms have well-defined agency. They move toward nutrients and away from threats, for instance. In other words, there is a motivated quality to life all the way down to the unicellular level. The fertile yearning and striving characteristic of living things arises at the very trunk of the tree of life.

I think this is a central and important point. Much of our conscious experience comes from our biological imperatives. In fact, some have proposed that even our capacities for art, song, and innovation evolved because early humanoids with such skills were more sexually attractive than those less talented. The patently biological reproductive drive may underly the most rarefied human activities.

Even if a machine could be designed to pursue goals in an internally motivated way, such behavior would be a high-level addition to its programming. The device might look very human-like to an external observer, but its motivation would be an accretion onto a logic-gate architecture; it seems very unlikely that the inner experience of such a machine would resemble human consciousness at all. Semiconductor logic gates do not embody desire, whereas yearning is utterly fundamental to life. Self-reflection may engender the mysterious quality of conscious awareness, but drives establish the core experience of every biological organism.

As we all recognize, biological drives also underpin much of our misery. Who hasn’t been stung by amorous (read: reproductive) yearning? Who hasn’t developed excessive hunger for one or more bodily pleasures? How much of our suffering comes directly from our identities as organisms with powerful instinctive desires? The same is true for our joy, at least in its less refined forms. Isn’t it the case that passion and excitement come directly or indirectly from biological currents? In some sense or another, these currents can be detected in every living cell.

So although self-reflection may be central to our feelings of self-identity and conscious awareness, much of our experience originates far below any such complex mental activities. Much of our sense of being human results from the more ancient condition of being a living organism, writ large.

The key to satisfaction is to reconcile the high-level awareness that comes from self-reflection with the surging forces of instinct roiling around our cells, tissues and organs. The watcher may be the product of recursive self-reflection, but what it watches is the moist and messy business of life.

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The Watcher

Watchtower

In reading about Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT), mindfulness, and other subjects, the concept of the watcher comes up often. The terms vary; other names for this entity include the observer, the true self, and simply consciousness. Quakers call it the still, small voice within.

Isn’t it odd the way something important about yourself can be discounted until you’re finally ready to deal with it? For years I’ve recognized that part of me is aware of my mistakes even as I make them. Often, when I’m about to do something ill-advised, an inner voice will comment: “that’s a dumb move, but you’re going to make it anyway, aren’t you?” Long ago, back when I still consumed alcohol, I would watch myself pour another drink knowing full well that my behavior was already edging out of bounds. Or I would say something unkind to a lover, knowing that it was uncalled for and would lead to a big blow-up. This observing part of my mind has always been wise, but until recently it remained largely passive. It seldom took the reins and averted disaster. As a result, I disregarded the watcher within. It seemed like a prudish and annoying sibling, quick to point out my folly but slow to assist. Only recently did I recognize that this watcher is my truest and strongest self.

Early on, I heard the watcher as a voice speaking words because nothing else penetrated my awareness. But the soul’s natural language is stillness. These days, by listening to its silent voice, I understand the observer better, and I am able to more frequently align myself with its resonant peace. Unfortunately, in my most despairing moments I still feel locked in a mind that convulses with regret, fear, and self-loathing, while the watcher seems far away and unable to help. In the midst of severe emotional upheaval, I have yet to find reliable refuge in my calm, silent center. Even so, I am glad that in lesser states of distress I align with the observer fairly often.

Surprisingly, the occasionally intense pain I feel in my neck has helped me find solace in my soul. As I’ve explained in past entries, severe spinal arthritis ended my surgical career. Physical pain has plagued me for years, and the experience is made worse when the discomfort reminds me of how I lost my former occupation. When that happens, I feel a hollow, nauseating sensation in my stomach in addition to the hot, gnawing ache in my neck. The pain is almost never completely absent, and sometimes its severity makes it difficult to concentrate on anything else. For several years I used narcotic pain relievers; they lessened the discomfort, but caused a new suite of problems. Before long the only time I felt good (physically or emotionally) was shortly after I took the pills; my life revolved around waiting for the next dose and the next relief. These days I take only Tylenol, and the pain is unending, though variable.

I describe the pain so I can show how it has taught me to adopt an observing stance. In times of severe neck discomfort, identifying with the watcher allows me to sidestep a lot of suffering. I can feel the pain, but in a detached and accepting way. There is a point at the very top of my head where the pain doesn’t reach, and I observe my body’s discomfort from there. Although the shift in perspective is difficult to describe, watching the pain from a distance is far better than living in its midst. For some reason, the observer stance is easier for me to adopt when the pain arises from physical rather than emotional sources, but having learned watching skills with physical pain, I can apply them to emotional distress.

Although I still get swept away by the most powerful emotional storms, I’m improving in my ability to watch feelings without losing myself in drama. The other day I found myself in a whirlpool of distress. Because I am taking fewer psychiatric drugs, my emotions are more easily and more powerfully triggered. Shortly after an upsetting situation, I found myself awash in tears and practically convulsing with anguish. Then, for a short time, I moved into what I call the ‘watchtower.’ From a safe distance, I observed the emotional turmoil. I fully acknowledged the frustration and fear, yet I did so from a wise and detached perspective; my awareness centered in the observer, not the observed. Because it was the first time I’ve successfully established a watching stance in such despair, the moment was brief, and I was soon swept back into the roiling currents. But I enjoyed a moment of peace and quiet clarity.

Without doubt, if I stay committed to watching rather than living emotional distress, my skills will improve. My practice of detaching from physical pain will generalize into an ability to separate myself from all forms of suffering, including the emotional hurricanes that have always been features of my psychic weather patterns. Who would have guessed that the neck disease that ruined my old life would provide me the key to peace in my new one?

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On Being Public

After being called on the negativity in my recent posts, I’m questioning my philosophy. To date, I’ve committed to being open about my true spiritual and mental condition; when I’ve been excited and confident it has come through in my writing, and when I’ve been discouraged and pessimistic my words have reflected those feelings. Between May of 2009 and January of this year, my only public forum was this blog. Since I’ve looked at this site as an online journal, it has made sense to report the ups and downs of my mental condition. It seemed consistent with what I read in other mental health blogs, and it fit the pattern of all my personal interactions: throughout my entire adult life I’ve been very open about my problems and struggles.

More recently, I’ve started writing for the Bipolar Advantage blog on PsychCentral, and I also gave a public presentation about mental health and consciousness. I see now that presenting a message of growth and recovery to the world may mean accepting the burden of being a good example. Is it fair to write about how well one can do by attending to humility, acceptance, ego suppression, etc., and then spill out all my neurotic fears and insecurities? Am I undercutting the message by my own inability to live it perfectly? Until recently few people read this blog or knew my name. But one of my Bipolar Advantage posts went through a short run of being viewed over eight hundred times a day. Although that is a pittance compared with the kind of readership truly popular voices attract, it still makes me far more public than ever before. I’ve been getting comments and personal emails that show me people appreciate my message. Is my greatest obligation at this point to the elevated consciousness that I hope to maintain and help others reach? Or do I still have the luxury of admitting that I’m a flawed, insecure person who sometimes feels enlightened and sometimes doesn’t?

The most important question is: what will most help others? Do people get more out of believing in a teacher who never falters, or out of seeing that another struggling human manages to find moments of clarity? Am I on the road to becoming some kind of leader, of all things? In the past I looked at myself as a loner, a tormented soul who thinks a lot about life and then writes. Do I need to rethink my role in the world? Does the gift of speaking publicly about growth comes with a price tag?

These are all questions I am asking myself today. I don’t expect to answer them right now. My hope is to gradually gain enough emotional maturity that a state of insight will predominate, and I can write honestly about my feelings while sustaining a positive message. I appreciate those who have confronted me about my recent complaints (you know who you are), and set me thinking about what path to take from here. It may turn out that the best way for me to achieve the improved state of mind I aspire to is to edit out the negativity in my thoughts and writing. Maybe maintaining a positive message will help me maintain a positive direction. This is not to say I want to write only things that are sweet and light; it’s not a question of unvarying happiness. But it might be best for both me and my audience if I at least remained committed to looking at life as a worthwhile adventure, in spite of its pain and disappointments. Like I heard someone say recently, no matter how dark and cloudy the weather, the sun is always shining.

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Off the brink…

Yesterday I sat in my therapist’s office in the midst of an inky cloud of sorrow; I can hardly imagine a greater sadness. There was no talking me out of it. The despair did not attach (too much) to any particular complaint. I just felt a broad and bottomless emptiness, an utter absence of hope. Fortunately, suicide has dropped off my mental menu, but if I could have pressed a button and been sucked into a black hole, crushed to the size of a proton, I’d have pressed it. The nights leading up to this session had been spent hoping to die in my sleep. The physical pain I’ve mentioned played into my despair. So did returning from the Sierra Nevada foothills, where my wife and I live part-time; I always feel grief after leaving that area. (As an aside, I attribute some of that sorrow to flashbacks of experiences growing up. Every summer, the day after school ended in Los Angeles, I was shipped to my loving relatives in the midwest: Michigan, Indiana, Ohio. Then summer ended, and the day before school started I had to board the plane back to Hell. The terror and bereavement I felt every single summer has been seared into my psyche, and gets resurrected each time I come back from the Yosemite area.) Another fount of despair derives from all the memoir-type writing I’ve been doing. I posted the story about my stepmother not long ago (now updated, for anyone who wants to observe a work-in-progress making progress—editorial suggestions will be welcomed.) I’ve also written stories about my mother and father in the past six months. All of this history is dreadfully sad, at least to me. I did take a break to write about a backpacking trip, which long-term readers might remember; plus a story about how I got into ophthalmology. But the positive (or at least zany) memories do not outweigh the burden of discouragement loaded onto my heart by all the awful sagas of childhood. The past ten years of repeated disappointment and failure have not helped.

cliff

My therapist’s goal, to the extent I understood it, was to get me to sit with the darkness and not allow it to germinate into analysis about my life. From that bleak landscape, absolutely nothing in my current world looked good. So he kept steering me to just experience the sorrow. I sat drenched in tears, wishing I could vanish into another dimension. An exhausting experience, to say the least. Before this, or while it was happening, I would have said that I often allow the grief and despair to permeate my psychic universe without blaming my present circumstances. I believed I had learned to just live in the depression without either running with it or away from it. Not so. From the safety of today, my posture on the precipice of yesterday looks like a new creature in my taxonomy of mood states. For a few moments, I stood at the cliff’s edge without looking either up or down. Not trying to talk myself out of feeling so rotten (actually, there was little danger of that,) or dwelling on my complaints (a much more tempting activity.)

I realized that whatever the ultimate cause of my despair (residual grief and fear from childhood, disappointment at having no career and facing financial uncertainty, anxiety and discomfort from worsening arthritis,) the proximate cause was some kind of neurotransmitter warfare in my brain. Maybe that goes a step further, with some demon pushing the chemical buttons (I do not think this very likely—but who knows?) Either way, I realized it was a state of mind that I could not control, could not explain in terms of current circumstance, and just had to endure. Like bad weather in the brain. So I sat there without an umbrella, without running for a nonexistent cabin in the wilderness, without starting a fire. Nor did I dive into the rising floodwaters and drown. I just let the rain and tears soak me.

Today the sun is not exactly shining, but I can see it. I think the switch can be attributed to yesterday’s session. A not-too-disrupted night of sleep helped. Settling into this house, and getting past the departure from the other, also helps. And I’ve been taking more NSAIDs and Tylenol to alleviate my pain. But mostly I think the improvement comes from letting the demons assault me until they got bored and drifted back into the dispassionate ether. A bit like a method I’ve heard for combatting recurrent nightmares: rather than running away from your predators, turn and face them. When you look them in the eye they stop charging, and you can welcome them into your psyche like domesticated prairie mustangs. I don’t expect, maybe don’t even want, this to be the end of familiarity with my bottomless psychic cesspool. I know, with every molecule in my brain, that the storms will recur. But perhaps next time I can pull off the trick of letting them pass through my mental atmosphere without wrecking my opinion of myself, my life, and my surroundings. One can always hope. One should always hope.
cloudbreak
Obviously, there are times when hope remains hidden. But right now, at least, I can see it its cheerful face behind the dispersing clouds.

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‘Karma Chameleon’

The idea to write about chameleons in my last post came via a mailing from the California Academy of Sciences. Only I did not mention chameleons, and wrote about the institution’s new building instead. Thinking about why I got sidetracked, I realize the structure has peeved me ever since I visited it after completion. In the process of learning to be a docent, I attended a series of some twelve lectures about the new structure, and it sounded like the coolest thing ever. But when I entered it, the place just seemed sterile to me. The exact opposite of what I expect from a museum about life and nature. Why the place struck me that way remains a a bit of a mystery. Inside, they built an enclosed rainforest. Yes, an actual jungle with trees climbing dozens of feet, vines, waterways, and all manner of creatures. Granted, the animals all live in display cases (except the butterflies, which flutter freely), but the glass boxes present the organisms well. They look as natural as possible under the circumstances. The effort to do something unique and mind-blowing succeeded. And that without even taking the vast aquariums into account.

Maybe I complain about its success. The museum does such a fantastic job of bringing a tropical jungle environment to San Francisco, that it reminds me of the words from the 1970 Joanie Mitchell song, “Took all the trees, put ‘em in a tree museum”. She wrote the lyrics about a botanical garden in Hawaii, but the Academy takes the concept a step further. Oddly, the sense of that song fulfilled as a prophecy bothers me as much of anything. Has it come to that? A jungle in a bubble?

So I ended up writing about glass enclosures, and comparing them to the way our culture encourages people to rope in feelings, sensitivity and intuition. Our emotions are ‘supposed’ to remain confined, and not let out into the rational world of purchase and finance. We are to wall them off, the way the museum separates dirt, leaves, and bugs from the people walking concrete ramps in designer sneakers. A doomed and misguided stricture, it wipes all the messy ‘nature’ from the human psyche, leaving us with the machine like computations and reasoning of the brain’s neocortex (the evolutionarily ‘newest’ area of the nervous system, much enlarged in humans). When one compares the neocortex to the ‘older’ parts of the brain, sometimes called the ‘reptile brain’, a clear cut difference in regularity and modularity jumps out at you. On a functional level, the neocortex consists of repeating units of nearly identical cellular arrangement, which the brain adapts to different types of information processing in different regions. The ‘lizard brain’ on the other hand, looks chaotic, disorganized, and confusing. More organic and less like a biological iMac. The neocortex, don’t get me wrong, must be the most miraculous structure in the universe. Its capacity for figuring things out, speaking and symbolizing, creating art and song, and all the other human accomplishments must make God proud, if there is a ‘creating’ God (frankly, I kind of doubt that, but I remain open-minded and respect others who have faith that an omniscient consciousness built the universe).

Still, we share the more ‘organic’ appearing and deeper brain structures with a larger proportion of the animal kingdom. Like chameleons. (Did you think I’d forgotten about them?) What I read in that Academy publication said that chameleons don’t change their color so much in order to blend into their surroundings, as they do as an expression of ‘emotion’. It gladdened me to see affective responses freely ascribed to an organism as foreign as a lizard. When people muse about whether other animals have feelings (a discussion that happens more than I like) it immediately occurs to me that they have never loved a pet. Anyone who has bonded with a dog or cat does not need to conduct experiments to try to figure out if the animals emote. Those who love pets know that our non-human companions never stop expressing inner states that look very much like what we would call (for example) happiness, frustration, desire, or love. But I’ll have to admit, seeing the label ‘emotion’ attached to the interior world of a lizard surprised me. Not that I disagree. Even spiders seem to experience fear, for instance (ever tried to catch one and seen how it runs away in a ‘panic’?). Still, I usually think of chameleons as rather prosaic creatures.

Apparently such thoughts border on homo sapien bigotry. I humbly apologize to all reptiles for assuming they lack strong feelings. A male chameleon, in the throes of romance, will display crimson and green in vivid patterns, while puffing up like a decorated soldier on review. The female, if impressed, responds with a toned down version of the same coloration. If bored and uninterested, she turns brown. Would that human females were so easy to read.

Emotions are ancient. We share them with many (perhaps most) creatures on earth. They comprise one of our most touching bonds with the animal kingdom; unlike rational thought, which sets us apart. Emotions transform animals from machine-like entities with robotic needs for food and sex, into souls. Rather than acting like stimulus-response algorithms (if low on fuel, move toward food; if tanked up, search for a mate), they become seductive and flirtatious, ravenous or comfortably sated. Maybe just semantics, you might respond. How do we ‘know’ that a lizard flirts? Aren’t I just anthropomorphizing, to suggest such a thing? Yes. I am doing exactly that. If it looks like seduction, why not assume the lizard ‘feels’ amorous. Why should we jump to the arrogant conclusion that the chameleon has nothing going on inside. Just because we make machines that are incapable of emotion (though people try to make robots that emulate feelings; with eyebrows that move, for instance), have we justification for assuming that evolution works the same way? Does it really make ‘rational’ sense to postulate that emotions as we experience them popped into being along with the neocortex? Isn’t a more parsimonious explanation that they have been here all along? That the only human addition to the realm of feelings is the ability to speak, write, paint, and sing about them?

In that view, which I believe makes the most sense (even though it cannot be validated scientifically), emotions have an primeval heritage that we would do well to honor. Passions animate. They bring us the luxuriant and consuming experiences in life that intellect cannot comprehend. They are the language of the soul, and may even be the closest biological correlate to the ‘spirit’ world. They make animals precious. If other creatures have feelings, then they demand better treatment than they often receive. And so do we.

If feelings come to us from the earliest forms of crawling life, then they define the animal kingdom in a fundamental way. (Some would even say plants have feelings. I am not ready to go that far, but who really knows?) As I said in the last post, emotion should not be treated like an unnecessary and accidental nuisance. A world of ‘Spocks’ would be an uninteresting planet (would you want to be a Vulcan?). Feelings have a noble lineage, bond us to the natural world, and bring texture to life. Reason just figures things out.

When younger, I thought of myself as a chameleon. I used the term in a sense that the Academy tells me was inaccurate. Chameleons do not go around matching the environment. So calling people who try to blend in with every crowd by that name spreads a false myth about the lizard. In any event, my camouflage skills worked poorly. Yes, I changed from group to group, but even so I seldom ‘fit in’. I made a poor chameleon, in that sense.

With my new understanding of the animal, however, I deserve the chameleon gold medal. My emotions spread through my whole being, and completely change the face I put toward others. When depressed, I am distant, pessimistic, and terse. When happy, I become intimate, excited, and voluble. Two completely different animals.

We are all chameleons in that sense. We all change our aspect according to our inner world’s weather. Some hide their condition better than others, and alter their hue less obviously. Perhaps their inner winds blow less intensely, their passion heats without searing, and the sleet of sadness stings only a little. Or maybe they just enclose the storms better than those with more demonstrative behavior. Either way, we also know people can have such histrionic responses that the main body of humanity shies away, calls them ‘ill’, and wants them to ingest synthetic chemicals. I’m one of those ‘overly emotional’, and ‘too sensitive’ human animals. Society tells people like me to settle down.

Je refuse! I plan to wear my heart on my sleeve with gusto. Not that I want to create havoc in my life, harm others, or ‘lose it’ at inopportune times. But when the ‘spirit moves me’, I shall dance. I will boogie with all the myriad beasts on this earth, and be proud of my strong emotions. My feelings will bind me in spirit with all my furry, feathery, and scaly companions on the dance floor. Including the ‘cold-blooded’, but kaleidoscopic and ardent chameleon.

(I modified the wording of this post on 12 September 2009, c. 04:10 PDT.)

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Prepare for the prodigal’s return

The California Academy of Sciences moved into its state-of-the-art museum and research facility almost exactly a year ago. My training as a docent was conducted in their temporary location near the financial district of San Francisco, in a set-up which I actually liked better than this impressive and environmentally responsible new structure. The designers had made the interim setting look a bit like the laboratory of a nineteenth century naturalist: varnished oak cabinets fronted by glass, exuberant displays of furred and feathered taxidermy next to boxes of crystal-encrusted rocks, and row after row of walnut-colored beetles the size of mice. Every specimen had a neat, penciled label gone sepia with age.

The new place is all steel and glass and concrete, topped by a ‘living roof’ comprised of an undulating carpet of native regional grasses. The broad awnings hold 60,000 photovoltaic cells. There is no traditional HVAC system; instead, the windows actually open. Award-winning and impressive, it no doubt helps the Academy move forward into the third millennium as a significant environmental research organization. But I miss the decorating style of Darwin’s day, when naturalists bragged about the number of ‘specimens’ they collected (read, organisms they killed and mounted). Not that I applaud the wanton destruction of life, just that there was something organic, musty, and mysterious that has since been lost. It almost seems as if, in an effort to compete with the sophisticated equipment and terminology of molecular biology and genomics, ‘natural history’ is editing out the dirt and repackaging itself as another gleaming, sterile technology.

Hopefully, this will help the scientific mission and mandate to rescue the planet from ongoing ecological rape. Perhaps the makeover will convince young women and men to enter the field, by making environmental science look cutting edge, computerized, and cash-rich. Still, I can’t help but feel like a steel and glass partition has been built that separates humans from nature. As a kid, when I went to science museums, it was the dark earthiness of the places that drew me in. The dim lighting needed to protect the exhibits, the smells of soil and fur tinged with formalin, and the sprawling display cabinets filled with dead things all spoke to me on some biotic wavelength that gets blocked by the flashy and hygienic new paradigm.

When the emphasis rested on dead specimens, the implication was: ‘there is such an endless profusion of life out there we can afford to kill hundreds of creatures to show it to you.’ Obviously, that lie has been exposed as a dangerous illusion many times over. But now the message has become, “here are a few living creatures that you can look at in a gigantic display case, but if we don’t do something soon this will be the only place these organisms will survive.’ A much more accurate and socially responsible communication, but it is also ineffably sad. Life has gone from seeming fecund and unstoppable, to something weak and in need of our help.

Life on earth is not weak. And it is not the earth that needs assistance, it is the human race. In fifty million years, chances are very good that humans will be extinct. After another fifty, life will be as luxuriant and diverse and breathtaking as it was a mere thousand years ago, before people began leaving widespread technological footprints on the planet. Flora and fauna will recover. What we risk is not life on earth, but the human spirit. We evolved in an ecological web of soil, and sun, and plants, and prey, and predators. The homo sapien heart has not forgotten this. The further we push the natural world out of our experience, whether by destroying it or simply staying indoors, the more lifeless our lives become, bereft of the inexpressible majesty we all recognize in the tiniest buttercup flower. By packaging nature in steel and glass, we are actually locking ourselves in the display case. We think we are free, looking at precious organisms carefully tended by automated climate control. But in fact, we are the ones under lock and key. Life just keeps evolving, and growing, and pollinating, and copulating, and dying, and rotting, and germinating, and giving birth. While we live in concrete boxes and eat microwave popcorn.

This blog has the tagline ‘Where Will meets Spirit’. Our human ‘will’ has brought us to this point. We have bent the forces of nature to serve our desires. But like anything that gets bent, those same influences patiently await the day they will snap back to their native form. Parts of the natural world will be irreparably broken before that happens, it appears. But the momentum of life is stronger, and older, than the human trajectory through earth’s history. Nature cannot be held back forever.

If you put a small number of bacteria on a fresh petri dish, at first the population will multiply and spread at an alarming rate. But the petri dish, like the earth, is a closed system. Sooner or later the bacteria deplete the resources, or a viral pathogen comes in, or some other counterbalancing influence stems the rate of population growth. Ultimately, the numbers crash, until once again the dish holds only a small number of living bacteria. Or none. Humanity sits on the steep upward ascent of the population trajectory. But most of us recognize that the tide must turn, the growth rate will slow, and in all likelihood a catastrophic drop in numbers will be suffered. Many scientists expect global diseases to strike and cause this, but famine or world nuclear war are other possibilities. Even more likely is a combination of influences leading to a sharp drop in the burden of humanity on the globe.

Nature will reassert itself, one way or the other.

In the same way that our global society is attempting (futilely) to crush and control the forces of life, it is also working hard to stifle the human spirit. We are enslaved by a cold and rational mindset that denies the importance of emotion and instinct. By locking the human mind into analytical modes, and trying to devalue or even ridicule sensitivity and feelings, those who profit from the current set-up attempt to guarantee their ascendancy. But by endeavoring to reign in the human pneuma, they are actually enclosing themselves in glass. Those of us whose emotional make-up does not permit us to live in a detached and predictable way remain free. We breathe more deeply, and live more richly out here in the fertile valleys, where moist, black soil is underfoot, and unruly vines cover everything.

We are told that because of mental ‘illness’, we are closed off from the ‘healthy’ condition of stability and dispassion. But like the viewers in the new museum, who eat candy as they look at terrariums, it is those in the hermetic glass houses who are trapped. The rest of us are free to experience the currents of stirring, lush, and earthy emotions. We remain more in touch with the human spirit, and by extension the essence of life on earth, than those who think emotions are atavistic and superfluous, like an appendix. Feelings are not an almost purposeless add-on, prone to abscess and treatable by excision. They are the heart of the human experience, and (for that matter) the human body.

We are the future. Sooner or later the poverty of denying the value and inevitability of emotionalism will be as obvious as the short-sighted stupidity of not living hand in hand with nature. The human spirit may stay bent for a long time, but eventually the organic forces in our hearts will assert themselves, restoring the balance. Let us recognize that we are the ones who have stayed close to our ancestral home, and be ready to welcome the wayward children back to the land.

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‘Progress, not Perfection”

(Click image to go to the 'Vintage Calculator Museum')

Although no posts came out of it, I have actually been working quite a bit on WillSpirit. In the first step, I found software that would allow me to run Internet Explorer on my Mac. I had tried this before with a product or two that did not work, but at a local ‘Mac’ store I came across a sale copy of ‘Crossover’. I am now able to run IE6 and IE7. Crossover won’t run IE8, however. Despite that, I was able to move on to figuring out what the problems were when I saw my blog behaving so shabbily at the library. Just being able to use IE7 and IE6 puts enough in hand for me to feel comfortable putting the old WillSpirit theme back up. It appears the problem was limited to IE6. For instance, the pernicious gray box around the ‘roots’ photo only shows up there, not in IE7, or Firefox, or Safari. Also, the ‘disclaimer’ did not work in IE6, but did in everything else. (Actually, the footer is way too long with Opera, but so few people use opera on home computers I’m not going to worry about it.) Something got fixed between IE6 and IE7 so that it complies with the standards better. I’m assuming Microsoft would not have gone backwards and made IE8 noncompliant, so I put the old theme back in place. (If you are using IE8 and see problems, however, you would win my eternal thanks if you told me about them.) I am also grateful to anon, who pointed out that many of the glitches I saw at the library may have just been one-time loading errors. I believe that to be the case now, since they have never reappeared. Sadly, I was forced to set things up so that IE6 users no longer get to see the awe-inspiring ‘roots’ graphic, and might have to suffer with a small but always-visible disclaimer (that will probably be temporary). In case these awful losses prompt some people to upgrade their browsers, I am providing the link to the free download for Internet Explorer 7 and/or 8. That’s the technical update.

As for a personal update. My mood has lifted. I had a session with a therapist (and to tell you the truth, I’ve just about given up on therapy), that really made a difference. The experience could have been out of a movie: deep seated wounds, fears and anxieties that I’ve repressed since childhood came roaring to the surface. I wept with a mixture of sorrow about the past, and relief that I can finally let it go. The therapist validated the trauma I suffered and guided me through the pain. I actually feel freer today. It’s only taken about a thousand (literally, a thousand) therapy appointments over thirty years to finally have a session that made a decisive difference. There are a number of reasons why this happened, one being that coming off Cymbalta has released my emotions. Silly things, like cheesy inspirational emails, right now have the power to spur a rivulet of tears. I don’t want this to be my emotional condition for the rest of my life, so that my eyes well up at the slightest suggestion of something sad. But it is nice being able to let down my guard and experience some deep emotions. For years my feelings have been limited to little more than an oppressive fist of depression on my chest. I am tired of watching the angry teeth of cynicism bite the flesh off my experience, in service of guarding my most sensitive wounds. Yes, without flesh there is less pain, but there is also neither movement, nor passion, nor embrace.

Adding to the good feelings brought on by that ‘breakthrough’, I came home to find my email box holding messages from members of Lon Gallagher’s family. Lon was my very good friend during the years after my hospitalization in 2000, until his death a little over a year ago. I posted a tribute to Lon in July, and his daughter came across it. She and some others of Lon’s family wrote nice comments and/or emails to me. It feels good to know they saw my little piece, and so understand how much Lon meant to me, and also what I observed as he deteriorated toward the end of his life. Best of all, it seems to have brought them some comfort, too.

The internet continues to astound me with its power to help people communicate despite the distances that separate us, and the fact that we are lost in an ocean of six billion people. Just to give a sense of how many human animals the planet holds, if you said one person’s name every second, it would take 190 years to say the name of every individual on Earth. The internet helps people with similar interests and concerns find one another in this unfathomable crowd.

Such a thing was unimaginable when I saw my first hand-held calculator in 1971 (or so). It cost almost $400 (US) at a time when you could by a VW bug for $2000. All it did was add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Not long after, I hitchiked over a long distance in the middle part of the US. I got a ride from a man in an unremarkable light blue sedan, covered with dust on the outside, and reeking of tobacco inside. We talked for hours as we rolled through miles and miles of late season cornfields, the stalks froming green walls on either side of the road. The terrain had no hills, and the road had few curves. As we travelled through this monotonous landscape, I told him my grandmother’s story. She had been born in a time of horse-drawn carriages and kerosene lamps. By her ninth decade, she lived in a world of color televisions, jumbo jets, interstate highways, and telephones she could use to call relatives across hundreds of miles of separation. The complexity of all this ‘stuff’ almost overwhelmed her, but she knew she had lived through a landmark epoch of human history: the rise of the technological age. As this man and I zipped along at seventy miles per hour, I related what my grandmother believed: that my own life would not see anything like that much technological progress. I tended to believe her.

My companion disagreed. He told me that before I died, computers would have spread to involve every aspect of human life. Even simple household appliances would be run by computer. Everyone would have a computer at home, and it would be more used more often than the television. Medical technology would be unrecognizable in its advances. He had many predictions along these lines.

I did not disbelieve him, exactly, but it sounded pretty far-fetched. Then, in the early eighties, I watched as magnetic resonance imaging scanners were first deployed in clinical use. Still in medical school, I happened to be at the University of California, San Francisco, which had a lot to do with the technology’s development. The pictures of the brain those machines provided (the brain having always been my major interest), seemed literally miraculous. Without surgery, or (ionizing) radiation, you could see nerves exiting the brainstem that aren’t much thicker than spaghetti strands. This is old news, now, but at the time the advance thrilled anyone involved in the field. Perhaps that marked the time I realized that the anonymous guy who drove me across Indiana had quite likely given me a true picture of the future.

Looking back, it is obvious that he articulated a clear and accurate vision of the world we now inhabit. I don’t know if those ideas were in common parlance among computer specialists in the seventies, or if he was a visionary. Maybe a little of both. I wish I knew his name, so I could look him up and see what his role was in bringing about this computer-run world, where I can make friends with someone in Australia, exchange messages regularly, and have the communication pass instantly and without charge. Or where I can write a note of affection for a deceased friend on my computer one month, and have it reach his family and make a difference to both them and me several months later. Best of all, we have this forum where people affected by the mental health system can interact, share stories, strategize, support one another, and work together to improve a bad situation.

Computers are not always positive forces, of course. They allow our governments to keep tabs on our activities in ways Hitler could only have dreamt of. They tag people with mistakes they made as youths, so that they can never fully remake themselves and leave the past forgotten. They allow corporations and swindlers to shuttle fortunes from one corner of the globe to another with a few keystrokes, thus evading government control and opening whole new universes of expolitation and fraudulence.

But for once I would have to say that this particular technology is actually doing more good than harm (though I would not argue strenuously with someone who believed the opposite).

Writing this blog has brightened my life in countless surprising ways. I had hoped to build a platform for an eventual book. I don’t see that happening, but so many other connections and projects have blossomed, that it no longer matters. To tell the truth, I feel like I was born to blog. I’ve always enjoyed writing short essays about controversial, complex, or just interesting subjects (for instance, this was a role I got to play regularly when I served as Editor-in-Chief of the campus paper at UCSF). I’ve always liked to toy with visual imagery. I have a short attention span, but a wide ranging field of interest. I know a little about a lot of subjects (though a lot about almost none). I am not a very private person, and have never been uncomfortable discussing personal issues with groups of people I hardly know (like Alchoholics Anonymous). And I have a strong belief, bordering on a sense of obligation, that I should make my opinions known. I tend to think my ways of seeing things are unique, and that I have something to add to discussions about subjects that matter. (It is perhaps my one and only area of true self-confidence.) All-in-all, it makes me feel like I have at last found my true vocation: blogging. Too bad it isn’t an income, but it’s a good occupation.

Not many people read this blog. But those that do mean the world to me. Because of them, I write many days a week, for hours at a time. I explore other sites, read the opinions of others, and communicate with kind and fascinating people across the globe. I think more deeply and organize my ideas more thoroughly than I would otherwise. In the process, I learn more about the topics that matter to me, and begin to see ways I can use my education and (hopefully not imaginary) talents to further important causes. Most of all, I get to make friends with people who can understand what it’s like to live with a mind that operates differently than the norm. Who know the stigma and shame that mental conditions can bring. But who also share the hope that things can get better, and validate one another that very often, ‘different’ is another word for ‘better’.

I modified this post a bit on 3 September 2009. Mainly, I added the photo of the children learning about communication via computers at the Museum für Kommunikation Berlin (obtained, as usual, from Creative Commons–click on photo to see source.)

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‘Through a glass, darkly’

Sometime back I promised a post about how one’s attitude changes with drugs. When I quit Cymbalta almost a month ago, I quickly lost my confidence, started to feel tired and discouraged, and decided life did not have much value. I fear that without my strong connection, devotion, and commitment to Mandy I would have succumbed at last to the suicidal tendencies that have dogged me since my first major depression at age twenty. Yet not long before things had looked pretty rosy to me.

At present I am coping with some medication-induced injuries that will never leave me, even though I’ve quit the drugs that caused the damage. I find the destruction visited upon my body demoralizing and infuriating. But before stopping the Cymbalta, it seemed like my grip on the situation had improved, and I had hope that with a little time and meditation my distress would abate and I would settle into a more-or-less calm acceptance. Not long after my final dose of that drug (I continue to take several others), the problem started looming large again. I felt, once more, like my life had been destroyed. Given that my passion for breathing (and all the other essential components of human life) has always been lukewarm, suicide started to look like a logical and acceptable solution. How much grief, defeat, and loss can one person take?

As I’ve implied, my agreement with myself and Mandy is that I will stay around for our relationship. So although I had a well-worked out plan for my demise, I never set a time frame, and just sat out the foul emotional weather. In just the past day or so, I have started to feel more like I can continue to live without merely gritting my teeth and waiting for natural death. Life has begun to look worthwhile again. Mandy and I have more frequent affectionate moments, I smile more often, and I feel like my energy has returned. Today we happen to be enveloped in smoke, due to a supposed ‘controlled burn’ that escaped its lines and is now raging in Yosemite. Every few hours the wind shifts to carry a thick cloud of particulate haze into our region. If we did not have so much air pollution, I’d be outside catching up on all the chores I neglected as I fought my way through this withdrawal. It feels good to recover the desire to be productive. I hypothesize that my brain is building more serotonin and norepinephrine receptors to compensatefor the reduced levels of those transmitters that followed stopping Cymbalta. (See this discussion about what is probably going on.)

My optimism would be greater if this had not already happened once. About two weeks after cessation there came a previous time of relief from the whirlwind, but it only lasted five or six days. So I will not be surprised if the curtain descends again. But right now I am feeling better, and I won’t spoil it by predicting another setback. This is how I ended my post back at the time of the last break from despair: “What I’ve written so far is the introduction to my real topic: the relationship between the chemicals that traverse my brain and the ‘person’ that the organ produces.”

For a number of reason I never got back on-subject. Today I am going to try to tackle, in a small way, the relation between chemical changes in our brains and the people we think we are.

In my opinion, it comes down to something like different vantage points. I wrote during the last storm break about how my little house in the hills would be invisible to a passenger in one of the airliners that regularly stretch contrails above me. I live my drama down here in the trees, yet those in the aluminum tubes soaring overhead have no clue about my problems and discouragement. They just don’t see my world of concerns. When I am medicated, it is like I am flying in the stratosphere. I observe my anxieties glide beneath me, but they look tiny and far away. Sometimes they get obscured by the pretty scenery, and I can almost forget they exist. But when I stop the drugs, I land flat on my belly on the August-baked earth, and gasp for full breaths in the smoky air. The pharmaceutical agents become the proverbial ‘rose-colored glasses’, that make a dim world look bright.

If they worked as well as I describe, I’d have to ask why one should fight the way I do to end my dependence on the medications. But if you look through pink-tinted lenses long enough, you no longer see the pink. Your mind adjusts and everything starts looking the way it did before. So then you are no longer jetting through the upper atmosphere close to the speed of sound, and instead end up bouncing along at ground level in a dilapidated truck. What’s more, even though the chemicals no longer help as much, the side effects continue. That is why I stopped Cymbalta. It helped my mood a bit, but the benefit diminished until it no longer seemed worth the heavy cost in adverse reactions (primarily anorgasmia). So I stopped taking my daily green pills, and have been fighting to regain my footing ever since.

If my entire opinion about whether to live or die hinges on a chemical called duloxetine marinating my brain, the question becomes, who am I? The suicidal man who feels life has dealt so many injuries it no longer warrants engagement? That is to say, am I ‘really’ this troubled person who emerges upon cessation of the drugs? Or am I instead the (kind of) bubbly soul that can discover benefits even in raw wounds and festering infections? Am I ‘in fact’ the wry middle-aged guy who emerges when the drugs (occasionally) work perfectly well?

Or am I both? Or neither?

At least I now recognize that my feelings change. It used to be hard for me to see that my attitudes shift. If the world felt awful, I believed in an unshakeable way that my feelings at that moment accurately summed up the nature of life as it had always been. On the flip side, if things looked cheery, I had a hard time remembering how it felt to be depressed. After years of gyrating feelings and world-views, I now recognize that tectonic shifts have repeatedly rocked my inner environment. My ability to predict eventual good feelings even when I am mired in deep depression has improved. I have recollection when I feel rotten that life once seemed fun, and vice versa.

As that sort of memory consolidates, I start to appreciate that my feelings are transient little things that have no direct relationship to outside reality. They are my internal filters, and not firmly connected to either the external scenery or my actual ‘self’. The same person (me) and the same life (mine) can look ashen through one set of spectacles, and sunny-yellow through another. I am the person behind the glasses, or even further back: behind the eyes. Possibly the real me looks through yet another screen: the brain. Some believe that our true selves have no material biology, but exist as ethereal spirits. I don’t go quite that far, but there is no question that somewhere separate from all the opinions, all the filters, all the moods and feelings, sits a person who is protected from the storms, and watches with a wise and tolerant eye as all the hurricanes and earthquakes and volcanoes thunder over the landscape. I’ve mentioned Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) before, and I am touching here on ACT’s core assumption.

I am not the earth’s tremors, or the volcano’s blast. I am not the wind or the sun or the rain. I am the ‘self’ that observes all the changes, all the weather, all the thoughts and feelings. But this is so easy to forget. It is as if, while watching a movie, I confused the events on the screen for things in real life. If I think that somehow my identity is that of a scared and lonely man, hemorrhaging and forlorn, I am overlooking the fact that at other times, with different chemicals in my blood, I feel like ‘someone’ entirely different.

It could be that I am nothing more than a memory stream. A dynamic album of photographs that keeps adding page after page after page. My identity cannot be pinned down to any particular image, not even the most recent ones. Instead, to get any sense at all of ‘me’ as a stable and defined entity, you have to look at the entire book as a unit.

By changing my drug regimen I am not creating a different person. I am just turning the page, putting in new pictures taken through different lenses. What I think and feel today is just an addition to my identity, not the summation of it.

Does this make any sense at all to others? I know these ideas are not mine alone, and no doubt writers more eloquent than I have stated something like the same point of view with greater clarity and logical support. But this is what I meant to bring up two weeks ago, during my previous respite from the Cymbalta-withdrawal nightmare that has been my ‘reality’ since August first. I am aware of some texts I need to read that touch on similar streams of thought. When I get more information, a wider perspective, and time to digest, I will return to this subject of self and how it relates to the turbulent currents of mood, opinion, biochemistry, and experience.

For now, I am glad of the break from the pain. It feels good to expand again, and fill my wings with blood the way a newly metamorphosed moth pumps itself up before taking flight into the moonlit sky. For now, at least, I can nourish myself again, and savor the nectar of daily life.

(Click here to link to a nice video showing a moth feeding on nectar.)

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Letter to a Friend

The post I planned to write today will come later.

For the past several months a counselor practicing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) has been teaching me to expand my philosophy, and quit struggling against my hardships. My insurance granted pre-payment for twenty sessions, and I have completed 12 or 13 so far. My relationship with this clinician started at a propitious time, and dovetailed with my involvement in Bipolar Advantage, which teaches one to take a more positive attitude toward mood fluctuations. These two influences spoke to my gathering awareness that being frustrated and unhappy with ‘the way things are’ serves me poorly. They also bolstered my resolution to wean myself off as much medication as possible, a step made more essential when I awoke to the horrific damage psychiatric drugs have wreaked on my body.

This therapist’s work underlies much of what I write about accepting life’s deprivations, acquiescing to grief, and appreciating the sublime qualities of emotional distress. Knowing that outside of the sessions this person has kept up with my blog posts, and sends me insightful comments on how they relate to my individual story, adds to my feelings of gratitude. I wrote a letter (actually an email) of thanks this morning, and ended up sketching part of my core emotional landscape. Posting a slightly revised version of my message on this site offers my audience a view of my inner milieu, while at the same time publicly expresses my appreciation. Knowing that others share your experience can be very healing. I hope that one or more of my readers will resonate with my longstanding ambivalence about life, and also my growing desire for more engagement. ACT teaches, among other things, that while we all undergo times of distress and cataclysms of sorrow, we can remain open to common joy. Even more, during those shaded times when our days feel bleak and fortune has violated all its promises, it remains possible to enjoy being alive. Perhaps it is akin to loving one’s child even as he spits hostile words at you. He may not be pleasant, but he is still an infinite gift.

A large segment of the population staggers under a burden of emotional agony. If that were not so, investors in pharmaceutical stock would not be so well rewarded. No doubt people have always been afflicted by almost unbearable feelings, but in this era of education, abundance, sanitation, and comfort, I believe we can do better. Not that the pain will go away, but perhaps our appreciation of day-to-day reality can increase. Imagine a world where even in the midst of wage-slavery and fears of violence people relished being alive. Where they accepted their pain to the point that they had energy to fight against injustice. Where financial and material trappings became less important than human relationships and creative expression. The way to achieve this vision lies in opening up, ‘sharing experience, strength, and hope’ (as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous), and collectively learning how to thrive in the midst of a challenging world. I try to do my little part by deconstructing my rusted and creaking mental mechanisms to a behavioral health audience, and handing on the tools and lubricants others have provided to help me get things running more smoothly.

This therapist gives me much in this regard. I publish this letter as a public statement of gratitude, with the prayer that programs and messages such as ACT will propagate outward into our culture, like the rings stretching away from a pebble pitched into a pond. Where the surface of my depression once looked as solid and impenetrable as a pane of glass, ACT shows that all pain has depth and rhythms, and that I can learn, grow, and even enjoy myself while exploring these textured realms. Of course, the ideal often lies beyond my grasp. My ability to take such a philosophical stance, and savor the warm sensation of blood pumping from my wounds, depends on practice and motivation. But I have been fortunate to meet someone who has had the patience to sit with me as I bleed, until I understand that unlike the blood that flows through my body, the blood of the soul is infinite. No matter how much I hemorrhage, I will always have the vital spirit to go on, if I choose. So much better than my previous experience in the mental health world, where the philosophy has always been to apply pressure and tourniquets. Sure, drugs can slow the rivers of emotion, but once you tighten the tourniquet the limb goes dead.

I place the letter here because it is more personal and less intellectual than much of what I write. I want to allow people to get to know what I’m really going through, rather than always hiding behind a facade of philosophy, analysis, and weak attempts at lyricism. Fact is, I am making progress, but slowly. I see the path ahead, but have yet to walk most of it. This message shows one footprint along the trail.

Dear [M],

I’m glad that my last blog post provided, at last, some good news in regard to my mental state.

Contemplating death as a solution has always seemed reasonable to me, given how my mother checked herself out of life as I watched. In the suicide hotline we always ask about prior suicidal behavior; I’ve only made a few weak attempts, none of which had a high likelihood of lethality. But suicidality has become a part of who I am. Even twenty years ago I was pretty sure I would some day kill myself. Obviously I have not, and may never, but I no longer feel alarm about thoughts of destroying myself. I think that attitude helps me support people who call the hotline in crisis.

On the other hand, I respect that such talk upsets others. I wish when in my worst moods I could censor my statements better. In particular, it is hard on Mandy to know how often thoughts of death go through my mind (not that I talk about it all the time, but it only takes occasional mention to make the problem apparent). Accepting that life brings pain, and that pain can be endured or even seen as a kind of beauty does not automatically translate into a desire to keep experiencing it. I am OK with that disconnect, but I am not so pleased that my ambivalence about life pollutes the happiness of those around me.

Back to today. Bottom line is I feel better, and happy to keep going. I truly do have a commitment to stay around for Mandy, and I would never leave my dogs unprotected. I even look forward to the future, no matter what it brings.

Thank you for paying attention, and supporting me as I work out a philosophy and mind-set that will carry me through the last several decades of my life. I need to have some kind of framework to both endure and see positive aspects to further declines in health, increased physical pain, and the probable loneliness that await me. Having a deteriorating neck that hurts all the time, and threatens the integrity of my spinal cord, plus knowing how few close relationships I have other than my marriage, does not give me a rosy picture for the future. I appreciate that ACT is not about convincing myself that my fears are unfounded (they aren’t), but rather gives me at least a glimmer of hope that I can survive the struggle. There is even that astounding suggestion that no matter what happens, my future can be enriching and full of adventure.

I look back at what I’ve written here and almost laugh at myself: this is how I think when my mood is more or less good (although I’m realizing my spirits are not as upbeat as yesterday). I don’t know how you feel about getting saddled with me for twenty sessions, but it has helped me that you have been so understanding. And I am thrilled that there is at least one person reading my blog who really ‘gets’ what I’m writing about. Of course, it’s not surprising that you do get it, since you taught me much of what I’m saying. What’s nice is that you’ve taken the time to read how I’ve been thinking about the acceptance philosophy. (You’ll note that I don’t do much with commitment, at this point. I need to more fully commit to staying alive before I can talk with any authenticity about fidelity to values, etc.)

To try to end on a positive note, I am highly motivated to search for reasons to stay alive, and to be glad I am. I want to build something more than a stoic fortitude to not abandon Mandy. Writing helps me feel good about breathing and thinking. Knowing that you (and hopefully a few others) find what I produce interesting makes it even better. In the end, creating something attractive and worthwhile out of tragedy and sorrow has been the task of artists throughout the ages. After decades thinking of myself as primarily a scientist, I now see that creative expression will be my salvation. That requires the knack of appreciating the heavenliness of heartache, which you and ACT have taught me.

Thank you.

(I modified this post on 2009 August 15, c. 17:45 PDT.)

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WillSpirit!

The Evolutionary Spirit

Organism, Writ Large

The Watcher

On Being Public

Off the brink…

‘Karma Chameleon’

Prepare for the prodigal’s return

‘Progress, not Perfection”

‘Through a glass, darkly’

Letter to a Friend

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