The Zen of Loss

I was talking with my friend A about hedonism today and it occurred to me that I tend to attract two kinds of folks in my life: bohemians (many of whom are hedonists) and hippies (many of whom live ascetically).

For much of my life I believed that hedonism was the opposite of asceticism. But our talk reminded me of a personal epiphany I had a year or more ago, that hedonism isn't actually the opposite of asceticism at all. I think deep asceticism is actually the heart of hedonism.

An ascetic seems to give up all the fluff of life. All the meat, all the neat stuff. But it dawned on me that one doesn't do that because that stuff's not great. But because the greatness of that stuff is intrinsic to everything. If you get a buzz from fine clothing, when you're poor, you're nothing. If your buzz comes from sex, then when you're alone, you're bereft. If your buzz comes from food, real hunger is the end of the world. But if you strip away every distraction, and look hard enough til you can experience that buzz from BREATHING, then there is nothing in life that is anything but bliss. An ascetic's so far into hedonism, they don't need the stuff anymore. Everything bestows that joy.

I bring this up because it's core to what's going on with me right now. I've said to many that I'm feeling much better lately. A lot of folks probably don't even know what was so bad in the first place, so in a nutshell here's what's been bad: a lifetime of PTSD, depression and social anxiety that spiraled into full blown chronic panic attacks for the last 7 years. And this last year I was so shut down I barely functioned at all.

So, when I say I'm feeling much, MUCH better, I mean that. I feel FUNCTIONAL. I cannot stress how much of a rush that is when you've felt inert every day for a year or more. I'm still scared, I'm still shy, I still struggle with sleep. But there's no similarity between functional depression and nonfuctional depression. It hurts terribly when it's moderate depression. But when it's so bad you can't do anything, it makes that moderate depression look like a half-hour cartoon special about Strawberry Shortcake singing about how berry, berry wonderful everything is. Moderate, severe; no relation. I feel better than both of those.

What happened to bring that about? That brings me back to the musing on asceticism. I got a flat tire three weeks ago. I'm poor--I could manage a tire, probably. With difficulty. It's money that should go elsewhere. But another thing will soon break on my old car and there's no way I could afford to fix anything more than a tire. I'd been meaning to get rid of the car for ages now. I can't afford a car. But the idea of getting rid of a car, while you're driving it to the store in the snow, is too scary to think about for long. I've been living in mortal terror the car would die on me. And basically, it did.

I melted down. I clambered into bed for six hours and hoped I'd never wake up. The universe cruelly denied my wish. I got up, but the hopelessness was gone. I had a meeting the next day I didn't want to miss. I walked to the credit union, by the bus stop that would go to where I needed the following day. I timed the walk. I got money from the ATM for a bus pass. I came back and checked the bus schedule. It occurred to me the curse was a blessing. It was the best season to start walking--spring. It was the most readily adapted-to thing I could have break down--much better than an eviction or a heart attack. It was timed and chosen exactly suited to my needs.

I felt more actualized and accomplished than I had in maybe 7 years. I hate cars. I always have, even when I was too scared to live without one. They're cop outs. They're crutches. I realized I didn't need one. But I would need to plan. Plan my days around bus schedules and around grocery store runs. I'd need to plan my weeks around laundry trips to the nearest laundromat, miles away.

It brought me out of my house. It brought me out in the sun. It forced me to exercise. It forced me to eat small (only so much I can carry back home). It put me next to people who I started talking to again. It gave me energy and a feeling of control. It made me feel human again. I started enjoying sun, clouds, wind, sky, rain. I'm enjoying life more because the simple stuff is harder, so it's harder to take for granted. It gives me less time to endlessly fret over the big stuff.

I carry a backpack with me everywhere; pen, notebook, book, phone, water, shopping bag. I feel so much more alive. Everyone has their own way to that feeling. I don't recommend everyone give up their cars. But I wish the feeling on everyone, no matter what you have to do to get to the feeling.

I remember now how great I felt living in SF without a car. And while there were other factors more key, I know that I began to spiral down when I got a car. So, while there are still other factors, some more crucial, I feel like I'm ready to start the slow spiral back up. On foot.

I Spy

A decade ago I was a dance-obsessed maniac. Every night, every week, all the time. It even got so every few minutes at the temp job I was on I'd take a break because the men's room was enormous and usually empty and there was a looooong mirror I could practice my steps in front of. My bosses must have thought I had the first ever terminal case of IBS. But I was too dance-crazed to care.

That might suprise people who knew me back in school. I was an introvert in school, which conversely might surprise some of my dance friends. I found enough equilibrium in High School to be able to work around it some, but before that, it was almost crippling.

I just exploded when I found Lindy Hop. I was stunned by how good I felt, all the time.

It's not that I'd stopped being shy. I had a hell of a time getting around the shyness at first, going out to dance socially. It took over two years to get to that first crazy flush of euphoria on the dance floor. Starting classes, abandoning them; going out to dances, leaving early and crying in the car. But I kept at it until I broke through despite myself. And after a while I went into a frenzy. I thought I'd finally found my way past the introversion.

I was wrong.

I found a brief reprieve. The momentum I gathered while in that reprieve carried me through 13 years of dance. But eventually the social anxiety came back, stronger, and over time, it shut me down. I'd still force myself to go out, but instead of breaking through, I began to break down.

I got very good at the invisible departure. The more anxious I got, the quieter I got, and smaller. Until I got so small and silent I realized I'd made myself invisible. At which point, I'd slip like a ninja right out the door and no one would realize I'd left.

I started doing it a lot until I got uncannily good at it. It became a very easy, very bad habit. And eventually, I vowed to stop. I made a promise to myself that I'd leave social functions when I wanted, but I'd do so visibly and say good bye to friends and hosts. In some ways it meant I was going out even less, but at least I was doing it visibly.

Tonight I fell off the visibility wagon. At a dance party, I couldn't even work up the momentum I can usually muster for a few dances. Without any momentum, I sat. I began to panic. I grew silent. And all at once my feet were carrying me out the door and I was gone just as it was dawning on me that I was in danger of running.

I totally blew the invisible part too. It turns out I was out of practice--I timed it badly, so I was heading out the door when eight people were heading in. But it still played out the same and I drove off cursing myself.

So tomorrow I start over again at being visible, with my counter reset to zero.

The Valley that Time Forgot

There’s billions of ways to define what makes for good art, one for each person who has a relationship with art—which we all do. And even if we all applied just one person’s definition, we’d still disagree over what art is its best embodiment.

For me, good art chimes. It picks up the light from the rest of my life, and shimmers with that significance, like it already had my personal metaphors built into it. And it causes the rest of the world around it to chime too, reverberating and echoing with shared symbolism. Everything mundane around me can suddenly become charged with a deep importance.

I had that experience recently with a musical group. I’m still having. Weeping, laughing, gaping slack-jawed. The first flush of experiencing music that’s new to me is intense enough that it’s almost like an affair. I can’t even think of other music for a while. I just loll about listening to the same songs over and over, talk about it like a religious fanatic to anyone who is too polite to tune me out, run the lyrics through my head without end, google every reference I can find to the group or songs online.

This time, there was something I found myself circling in the music, trying to get at it. I couldn’t make it out but they were saying something to me, reminding me of something I’d forgotten, or forgotten how to feel with immediacy. Then I stumbled across a reference online in someone else’s blog, about how this group’s music evoked something about Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. And there it was. And suddenly, there I was, too. Again.

There was a woman in Seattle. We’d met at an event in Portland and felt a connection. I began making trips up to Seattle to explore that connection, as she would come down to San Francisco to do the same. We danced and played Nina Simone at each other for hours. After several such trips, she rented a cabin up in the Cascades one weekend and we got lost in the green and the fog that folded the entire valley into a separate universe. I fell for her that weekend. And I think that was the weekend she gave up on exploring that connection with me any further. That was 10 years ago.

I never stop loving anyone I’ve shared parts of my life with, no matter how brief. I suspect no one does, but I know for sure I don’t. In that way, I do still love her. I know we weren’t a good fit for one another, her and me. She made the break, because making breaks is something I’m terrible at, and I was utterly blind at the time to the need to make one there. I know she made a good decision. Now.

But I was devastated for a long time. Much longer than most people realize. It took time but I’ve long since moved past pining for her. And while she was an amazing woman, and no doubt still is, a lot of the time it took to get over her had to do with something beyond who she merely was. There was an energy she brought into my life, a kind of honest rootedness, that I am still madly in love with. She seemed deeply attached to her life and made me feel bound to mine. Or at least left me feeling like I wanted to be. And that feeling still moves me. That rooted feeling she shone with was a large part of why that valley grabbed hold of me so firmly. I’m in love with the valley, with the music we listened to, with the deep sense of place and time and connection I felt when I was with her. Something in her presence made me want to gather my family and loved ones around me, made me want to reach out into my life and dig my hands hard into the soil of my personal landscape, get my hands dirty planting something, some large green thing we could all gather under together and celebrate. Something more real than any tree, any family, any party, that I could just soak in the sheer corniness of it all and not be embarrassed by how cliché it might otherwise seem, the way it sounds to me now trying to describe it.

I really don’t know how to bring that energy into my life on my own. I’ve grown to let go of expecting someone else to manifest that for me, certainly. And if she and I had stayed together, that feeling would have faded long ago leaving me groping for it now all the same anyway. But this music swells around me and for a while I’m back in that ludicrously green valley, bundled in fog, amid those tightly knotted mountains and trees, by that river we could hear but couldn't find and I suddenly feel hopeful in a way that I haven't felt in almost 10 years.

I know the feeling will pass. And come again later. But it will have to be something else that triggers it. There’s only so much one collection of songs can do.

e, Silent or Otherwise

I used to collect nicknames. None really stuck, but that was hardly important. Getting them was more important than if they stayed put. When I wrote, I used another name. When I turned in schoolwork (back in those days of school), I used another name. Among my closest friends, I used another name.

My name as it was, got misspelled constantly. I took to spelling it Airyque in school in order to muddy the issue of spelling beyond discussion. If pressed, I'd joke it was spelled Airy3que, borrowing the old Tom Lehrer line "the 3 is silent, you see." That seemed to appeal to some of my friends and for a while, we all had 3s in our names.

When I'd moved to San Francisco and fell into a deep life-long love with Lindy Hop, I began collecting nicknames again after a hiatus of several year. Most were pretty unremarkable: E. E-baby. E-love. E-money. And a few interesting ones aside, I was often just E.

After dancing for a year or so, I'd started to DJ events. The first San Francisco Swing Dance Festival was one I DJed at. I was sick the week before the event. The day before the opening dance, I was helping the organizers set up. And in the chatter as everyone bustled around with equipment, my voice faded out. My throat couldn't take it anymore and I lost my voice.

It was kind of a great thing. It's hilarious asking strange women from across the country to dance without a voice. And I remember conversations anyway. I remember George Reed coming up to me all weekend, mimicking my miming "Sorry I have no voice" with nonsense sign language at me, grinning from ear to ear. I remember just before my voice went out saying to Dawn Hampton "I'm no dancer" and her responding by telling Ron from London "Slap him in the mouth."

When I got on stage to DJ the first time, I had no voice to say anything to the crowd. Paul announced me as "DJ Silent e". And it's appealed to me enough ever since, so I still sling it around, even if no one else does. Having it, after all, is more important than if it stays put.