Amused

As usual, I'm surrounded by drama.  In my family, at work, pretty much everywhere I go.  Generally, I can usually count on at least one fight going on between two people I know at any given time.  I used to be caught up in the midst of all this fighting.  God knows I was kicked out of two high schools for fighting.  Life is inherently stressful.  Shit happens, and people hurt us.  So if I may, I'd like to share with you my solution to this most intractable and difficult of problems.  Quite simply, when other people get you down, be amused.

In 2009 and early 2010 I was pretty much at rock bottom.  My life was in completely shambles.  I had absolutely nothing going for me besides my girlfriend, and even that was on the rocks.  Almost no reason to get up in the morning except to turn the TV on and numb myself to the pain of daily existence.  People sucked (they've always sucked, but when you're down and out and depressed they suck even more), minor irritations were major problems.  Up until this point in my life I'd never understood the draw of reality TV.  But when you feel like shit about yourself, and you think your life is shit, a four-hour block on TruTV every Thursday night watching people get pulled over for speeding, dumb criminals caught on camera, pregnant teenagers on MTV, and in general watching people who make very stupid decisions in life suffering for them becomes very attractive.  Though perhaps my favorite show was on the now-defunct Discovery Health channel, called Code Blue.  It followed the goings-on at a busy ER and trauma department in Savannah, Georgia, and all of the horrific, broken people, patients and doctors alike.

Just about the only remotely health and well-adjusted person featured on the show was the jolly and upbeat Dr. Tchotkis, the trauma director, a Jewish New Yorker who I liked because he had the same accent as me.  Day in and day out he could shrug off absolutely horrific suffering he came across in his work, and as someone with more than his fair share of shit in life, this was a trait I found quite admirable.  He was interviewed in one episode, in the midst of teaching a new resident physician, and he spoke the words that I've made into my life's motto: "It's hard at first, but as soon as you come to understand that everyone comes here to amuse you, you do fine."

Three and a half years later, no truer words have still ever been spoken.  Here's how it works.  I believe, deep down, that my primary purpose in life is to be amused.  That other people exist to entertain me, that the world exists for my amusement, and I am meant to have fun.  Fun does not have to mean drinking and partying, spending time at leisure.  But in whatever I do, whomever I'm with, the number one priority is entertainment.  Surprised?  It's an attitude with a sharp learning curve, admittedly, but if you can keep at it for a few weeks, it soon becomes second nature.  And then everything changes.  The annoying guy in line ahead of you becomes tolerable.  Passive-aggressive coworkers become funny.  Bratty siblings and overbearing relatives are merely cheap sources of a quick laugh.  You start to notice little things.  Discarded wrappers on the sidewalk become jokes.  Misplaced items funny stories.

Everyone and everything I ever come across is here to amuse me.

Some might find this unnerving.  I never understood that.  As if sweating the small stuff and being offended by inconsequential interpersonal conflict was a sign of psychopathy.  Some people were just born with sticks up their butts.  I've never been less stressed and bored so little.  It makes waiting in line at the DMV interesting.  Just listen to the conversations you overhear.  98% of everything is completely absurd if you let yourself see it for what it is.  The modern 21st century Western lifestyle is completely arbitrary.  If you're willing to see it that way, you see that it's quite ridiculous.  All of it.

There are downsides, of course.  Being constantly amused has nearly totally ruined television for me.  It plays with your suspension of disbelief.  It's like a long-term diet.  Your palate changes.  Reality shows, prime-time dramas and sitcoms, they're all junk food.  Take in real nourishment (seriously, just walk down the health food aisle at the grocery store and take it all in.  Read the copy on the labels.  Look at the graphics.  It's hilarious), and the Oreos and Chef Boyardee just seems so...bland and pedestrian.  Which I suppose brings me back to the beginning of this whole journey.  Ironic, isn't it, that television-watching presented me the seeds of its own destruction.

Ah, but it's so much more than that.  You just lighten up, mellow out, live in such a better way.  So when your passive-aggressive boss annoys you, be amused.  Aggravating in-laws?  Amused!  Stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic?  Take a look at the driver next to you.  Amusing!  Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to go stare at my aquarium for an hour and pretend to work.  Very, very amusing.

The Asshole Principle

Last week I sat down with two serious movers and shakers in the mental health community to ask them for help in starting an advocacy group.  The meeting went well.  Not only were they enthused with my ideas, they actively supported my effort.  One of them offered me a speaking position (unpaid, of course) at an upcoming seminar on the mental health system.  I had come into the meeting nervous and shaking.  My expectation was being laughed out of the room.  I was genuinely shocked at the response I actually received.

I don't know why I keep expecting people to be unreasonable. I'm quick to anger and quick to resentment.  It's constantly gotten me into trouble throughout my life.  Ashamed as I am of it, I can admit I'm capable of hate.  But so much of that hate is really presumption, and so much of that is really fear.  Paranoia is an enormously destructive force.  For me to continue my recovery, I must understand it.

I come from a world where trust was impossible.  My mother had ulterior motives; my father broke nearly every promise he ever made to me.  The subject didn't matter.  School was as violent as it was humiliating.  Children fear embarrassment more than anything else.  I still do, in many ways.  I've written about this before.  I was so goddamn gullible.  It was never the fistfights that truly bothered me.  It was all the times someone led me on.  Girls and romance.  Boys befriending me just to take advantage.  In my heart is a little boy, naive and wide-eyed who just wants to believe.  I get hurt so many times I become in my worse moments a bitter cynic who just wants to lash out.  Hurt others as they've hurt me.  But I get angry at myself the most.  In my heart I know I'll be back for more the next opportunity I get.

Those are my two personalities: the boy and the angry man.  I don't know if they can be reconciled.  To live with one or the other is incomplete.  I need both.  The boy gets hurt by people like Suzy Cherry Blossom and the scars feed the man.  The man brings me to situations like I faced last week.  I can tell myself the two aren't mutually exclusive, but it feels almost impossible in practice.  I cling to the boy because I know what the man can be.  The man is the person who calls into talk shows with an axe to grind against the world.  The paranoid gun nut who readily believes President Obama is a communist Manchurian candidate sent on a mission of pure evil.  The teenager who kills his family and shoots up a mall.  But the boy is no good either.  He lets himself be hurt because he wants to believe deep down that everyone is as pure as he is.  Maybe that's true on some deep level, but never in practice.  The belief sells well short the complexity of human emotions, too.  So what do I do?

I've explored two solutions, neither one of them perfect.  I can tame the man and I can empower the boy.  The truth is, I need both.  Right now they oppose one another.  They need to come into balance.  We're neither as good or as bad as they claim.  Yet it's so easy to think in absolutes.  Maybe then it's absolutism that's the problem.  People always think I'm a joke.  People always lead me on.  People can always be trusted if they sound nice enough.  Like anyone else, I'm a lot of different things to a lot of different people.  Who I am is as much where I am as what I want to be.  How many people do I know that never learned this lesson?  Myself included.  I try.  It's neither easy or fun.  This belief that people are all assholes, waiting to mock, humiliate, and betray me is as deep-seated as it is commonplace.  The boy needs the man and the man needs the boy.  Otherwise, the world is a very frightening place indeed.

The Old Piano

Yesterday I got up on a stage and read aloud a piece I'd furiously worked on for the previous three days, whereupon I was judged by a panel of judges and given a score.  It was a fairly middling performance; only my second, at least in this format.  There was praise, there was criticism, as far as the contest went I was in the middle of the pack.  I had no real expectations of glory or winning.  In fact, things went just about as I expected them to.  There were no hard feelings, no harsh words.  But these people were my friends, and I was surrounded by people I knew who were also creative, and even despite this everything was perfectly fine.

When I got home, I immediately went to a collection of old liquor bottles on the floor by the fireplace (not refuse, we were in the process of redecorating) and kicked them, hard.  I wanted something to break.  This was the reason I hadn't wanted to do perform; why my friend the host had to twist my arm to get me to enter.  I yelled.  I kicked.  I screamed.  Took more out on Kari than I had any right to.  This wasn't her fault.  She was simply convenient.  Deserved absolutely none of it.  This is what happens when I grow frustrated.

I've long wondered where this stifling perfectionism came from.  I remember the sound of my piano teacher's voice, never punishing me for mistakes, but in her encouragement always that disappointment just beyond the words.  You're better than this.  Or my parents, wondering where the extra points went.  They never said as much, of course.  I really don't believe that kind of pressure happens so directly (the whole "Tiger Mom" phenomenon notwithstanding).  I suppose in many ways the story of my writing is the story of my piano-playing, and both the cause and effect of always feeling like I had talent, but never the ability to turn it into something real.

If my childhood had a title, the word "potential" would figure prominently.  It was all I ever heard about.  I think it was one of the things that held my parents marriage together when little else would.  I suppose they had good reason.  I did well in school, I was both artistic and musical, and I've always had a natural curiosity and desire to learn.  If I wanted to try something, they let me take it to its natural conclusion.  Praise no matter what I did.  Encouragement.  But laced within it a sense of expectation.  I was going to succeed at whatever what I did.  So when I inevitably didn't (at least not all the time), there was always that moment of questioning.  Me, the anointed one, the superhuman genius who could do anything he put his mind to.  Why couldn't I be a superstar?  I'm better than this.

Praise used ineffectively is just as damaging as no praise at all.  Love used the wrong way is as harmful as no love at all.  Piano was one of those things where I really shined.  I practiced every day, even if I didn't always want to.  The instrument became second nature.  Give me sheet music of a Beethoven Sonata and I could play it flawlessly.  Make you feel what Beethoven felt.  Parents and teachers swooned.  Adults took me more and more seriously.  It wasn't all just about the piano, but that was the most out in the open, and so it stings the most.  Whatever strife I had with my peers was rendered irrelevant.  I had a world to retreat to.  A safe place where I was elevated to the status of Greek hero.  Hercules.  Achilles.

If you've read this blog before, it isn't hard to figure out what happened next.  As much as I've improved my life and as far as I've come, I still can't seem to make myself back into that superhuman at the Steinway.  Nevermind that the boy didn't really exist.  The praise, the adoration, it either feels so empty as to be rendered meaningless, or worse, it was warranted and look what I've become.  There's always the worst of both worlds as well: all praise is empty, I'm actually a pathetic loser with delusions of grandeur.  Some of us choose to call this phenomenon the self-fulfilling prophecy.  It just so happen this is exactly the trap my mother fell into and never did manage to escape.

Succeeding, I've come to understand, means not succeeding for a while.  It also means not succeeding more often than the once or twice a year you work up the nerve to try.  It's one of life's most vibrant contradictions.  One I'm still figuring out.  This is not to blame my parents or my piano teacher or anyone else for my internalizing it.  Not only is that unfair to them, it's also incorrect.  I have no doubt they meant every word they said.  Intentions matter far more to me than results.  This makes it harder, I suppose, but it also clarifies.  All I can do is try, and let myself be wounded.  There is literally no other way to learn.

The Wiseman's House

About a year ago today, I got in my car from my crummy apartment in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and drove down one of the three or four roads out of town.  My destination was ten minutes to the southwest, a town called Greenland.  I was headed to the house of my new best friend: a man I'll simply call the Wiseman.  2012 was only two weeks old, and it had started rough.  We were resigned to finding a smaller apartment, and it was likely we were going to have to leave the city. In a hospital bed in Massachusetts, my estranged grandmother lay dying.  But for tonight, that didn't matter.  A week earlier, the Wiseman had sent me an email telling me a play I'd written had been accepted for an upcoming variety show.  I was heading to the initial read-through, where he (the director) and two actors were going to bring something I wrote to life. It was dark when I arrived, and the house appeared shapeless from the outside. 

The Wiseman greeted me at the door.  He was all warmth and love, and the house felt the same way.  It probably hadn't been renovated since the 60s, minus a solarium addition off the back.  The decor was equally antique, but it felt organic in a way so few houses did anymore.  Nothing manufactured but the appliances.  He herded me and the actors into the living room, where two black cats were waiting.  One, the larger, climbed into my lap and began purring as I sat and watched the actors do their work.  I liked this house.  I liked these cats.  I felt at once at home and deeply envious of this place.  My home was cramped and falling apart.  New and clean this place was not, but it was a home, not a filing cabinet for those who couldn't afford anything better.  I used to hate cats.  But I liked these cats a lot.  They were as warm and affectionate as the surroundings.  Had I known then that within a year both the house and the cats would be mine, maybe things would have been different.  But that was several months away.

To this day I'm not really sure why the Wiseman liked me so much.  He never seemed to really like anyone.  There was what he thought and what other people thought.  What he thought was all that mattered.  Other people were only in the way.  Yet I understood this mindset well.  We shared a contempt for others, even for each other.  Nonetheless, I trusted him and the trusted me.  Maybe this play was his way of breaking the ice.  I know few people for whom our respective idiosyncrasies can go completely unspoken.  I got him and he got me.  As I learned, his youth was even more turbulent than my own.  While mental illness has been my demon, his was drugs.  We had similarly difficult relationships with our parents and we'd dealt with them in similar ways.  I had much to learn from him, I realized.  So he'd talk and I'd listen.  Or I'd talk and he'd listen.  He was in his mid-70s and I'm in my late 20s, but it was if the intervening years were meaningless.  We went for weekly walks in the woods.  He invited me to the theater.  And always, I learned.  Some of what he said was difficult; a lot of it was bullshit.  But over the next few months we became inseparable. So it was, one day in May, when we were walking in the woods, that he told me how he was going to lose his house.  He was mired deep in money problems.  He was moving to North Carolina, to be with an old flame who'd agreed to take him back.  He'd only be here for a few more months.

My life, when I get down to it, pivots on a dime.  Just shy of five years earlier, I'd met Kari and nothing was ever the same.  The right person appears at the right time.  I'll never forget what happened next.  He paused, dramatically, as only an accomplished actor could.  And then he uttered the words "Matt, how would you like my house?"

The arrangement was simple: he had a lien taken out on the house, and he needed it paid back.  This thing with his old flame was serious.  He had no use for the property anymore.  Rather than default, he had a better idea.  I'd pay off the lien for him, and in exchange I'd keep the house.  It needed some repair.  Okay, a lot of repair.  Heating oil in the winter was a concern.  But a risk worth taking.  Oh, and the cats weren't coming with him.  We'd have to take them in.  All problems that were not insoluble.  In October, we moved in.

Try as I may, I'm not sure I fully understand how this happened.  I'm not prepared to simply call it lucky, or objectify it as the power of kindness.  Not only does that feel like an oversimplification, I don't think it does the dynamic justice.  Without these connections I'd have nothing.  Without taking a risk and putting myself out there, I wouldn't have these connections.  We talk all day long without ever really interacting.  If the Wiseman's House is a lesson, this is it.  For too long I held the world in contempt, like I was too good for it.  I know I'm not the only one.  Was it really that, though?  Or was my contempt a reaction to the alienation I felt, which in turn came from not taking the risk.  A catch-22 of sorts.  A feedback loop.  Once trapped within, almost impossible to escape from.

My world reflects my mind.  The smaller my mind, the smaller it becomes.  The more I grow, the more it grows.  Had I not written that play (to date my first and only attempt), would I be here now as I write these words?  Had I not overcome my contempt, would I have this house?  Perhaps, but I think not.  In our darkest days we close ourselves off to the world to protect ourselves from it.  But nothing lasts forever, even our pain.  Only if we're brave enough to reach out do we escape.