November Interlude

Greetings. It’s November 10, and I had started writing a very different newsletter before this week led me into headlong confrontation with inner forces that have dogged and hounded me through all the years of my memories. Forces of self-loathing, self-imposed exile and isolation, paralysis and retreat. I seem to be at war with some of the deeper icebergs of my being, especially my staunch belief that I’m not really lovable (untrue) because I’m prickly and difficult (sometimes true)—a belief that’s been roundly, patiently, and warmly challenged by friends and family in these cold few years. To melt an iceberg is an expression of catastrophe in our Anthropocene age, but in this case I mean it only as an image of thaw after a long interval of ice.

I have more to offer, and more to receive, than pain and confusion. It has been difficult trusting in this fact. I worry that anyone who gets too close will see only seething wounds and layers of scarring, an animal that believes that life is pain but fears its own rage, because rage confirms its monstrousness and monsters can’t be loved. I want to take the leap of faith that I am lovable, and moreover that I can be loving, which is probably the hardest thing for me to believe. As David Berman once put it, I am going to hold the world to its word.

I’ve been writing poems again. It’s been quite a long time. It feels good, natural, improvisational. There is a joy there and that’s what’s important. I want to live a life where joy is also the holding, the honoring, and the letting go of suffering. There is so much suffering in the world. It feels imperative to release some of it.

Anxiety and depression, à la Roast Beef from Achewood

These long-held beliefs have been hard for me to acknowledge. They’ve expressed themselves in maladaptive ways, especially in restless and feverish obsessions about the next job, the next apartment, next city, next film, et al. Those who know me well will find this familiar. It goes to the injury at the heart of my sense of self and identity, this scrambling search for a long-fantasized “feeling of home.” But real feelings of home only come from vulnerability and connection to others. This is a hypothesis I’ve tested extensively and found to be true.

Writing about this and sharing it is a way of making it more true. Lots of things bubble up from the murk of my consciousness, but they mostly do what bubbles do. This, I want to enshrine by writ. More than holding the world to its word, I want to hold myself to this feeling of self-belief: not a leap of faith, but quiet, hard-earned steps in the direction of an honest and loving life.

I’ll leave you with some more Berman:

It is autumn and my camouflage is dying
Instead of time, there will be lateness
So let forever be delayed.

—Dara