Drkqs

In trying to trace the path of my life, sometimes I find myself shocked at how quickly it’s gone, and how little has happened in that time. Because I have a tendency to undertake big projects and toil away at them for months — sometimes years — at a go, it’s easy for me to spend vast swathes of time in which the “big” events are all a part of a larger whole that dwarfs them. No matter the satisfactions of writing a new scene or having a new idea, such things will always fold back into the greater work, like a swell receding in the ocean. I complete a project every now and again. It’s hard for me to look back a year and know exactly what I was doing.

Then there’s the strange nature of publishing, at which I am a still a newbie. But it all seems to work at a glacial pace, especially by the standards of one who has grown acclimated to the internet. Your book is sold, then it’s unsold, then it’s sold, and no matter what, it’s going to be months — sometimes years — before anybody sees it. It often feels as though I’m shouting into a vacuum. All there is, for me, is this blog, and its various appurtenances. What was happening to me this time last year? I can look here, I guess.

There are a few problems with that. One is that this kind of public record is, by its nature, performative. Often times I’m trying to amuse or entertain, in my own small way, in this space; that means that what’s happening here, no matter how frank or honest it is, is never a whole picture. I can write from the depths of a depression in a way that people find funny. Often the only islands in said depression are those moments when I’m writing. And if, as was the case last September, I’m deep enough in it, then I won’t write anything at all. In September of last year, I wrote no entries for this blog. Why? I can guess. But there’s no contemporary record.

The reason I wasn’t writing here then was that I was massively, borderline-suicidally, depressed. The reasons are various, mostly having to do with the edits I was trying to make to my book, but they’re less important, really, than the overwhelming fact of the depression. Every day I woke up feeling kinda okay, and by noon I would be so low I could hardly move. In the interim I often moved from my house to the library where I did the bulk of the work on rewriting the book, and I would find myself stuck there like a beached whale, suffocating under my own weight. I would sit by the window of the PSU library and look down at a field where soccer teams practiced, feeling anhedonic, and write nothing. Many times I opened up word processing files with it in mind to write a blog post, and every time I found I didn’t care what I had to say. Current events were thick on the ground — wasn’t it around this time last year that we discovered that the future President liked to grab women by the genitalia without their permission? — but I couldn’t muster the energy. I had no opinions on books or movies or my personal life. I just was. And just barely.

And so it happened that I took another step that would be problematic for this blog. I began to take, not for the first time, an SSRI antidepressant. SSRI stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, a class of drugs that includes Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, Celexa, and Lexapro. I would like to explain to you how it works in your brain, but it can’t, and not just because I last studied biology and chemistry in 1998. The fact is that nobody’s 100% sure how they work. But we do know what they do, at least for most people. The way I’ve described it to my therapist is that they put a floor under my depression. It’s not that I don’t get bummed out when on an SSRI. It’s that I don’t crash way, way down into the depths, where I was at this time last year. I don’t find myself despondently riding the train out to the end of the line, only to ride it back. I don’t skip paying bills I have the money to pay. I don’t spend hours on end contemplating my impending death.

But SSRIs have a battery of other effects, too, each in some degree a bother: they can make you drowsy, make you retain weight, make it hard to orgasm, make your mouth dry. Though I don’t much care for any of those, I’m willing to tolerate them for the benefit of keeping my depression superterraneous. They’re not why I’ve eventually gone off SSRIs, every time they’ve been prescribed to me. No, the reason I’ve gone off my meds repeatedly is that they don’t just put a floor on my mood — they put a ceiling on it, too. There’s a kind of bright, jagged stimulation that I feel, especially when approaching a period of sustained creativity, that I really love and dearly miss when I’m medicated. It’s a state of mind in which music sounds better, plans seem more realizable, words run together on the keyboard. I’m not manic-depressive, technically. Having seen the real extremes of bipolar-one disorder in the last year of my foster brother’s life, I can tell you for a fact that I don’t have that. But there’s a thin line between what I have and what he had. The main difference is that I only lose touch with reality when I’m feeling down, and he tended to lose touch with reality more often when feeling up. There’s a broad middle space where our paths often crossed.

You hear about the suicide and self-harm statistics for depressives and manic-depressives and you might wonder why we would ever go off our meds. There are times when that’s as mysterious to me as it is to you. But there are others when it isn’t mysterious to me at all. You see, part of why this blog has been largely dormant since about November of last year is that I went on Lexapro around that time, and that feeling of bright, jagged happiness has been almost entirely gone from my life — and along with it, my greatest periods of inspiration, the sharpest edge of my (if you’ll forgive a little self-regard) brilliance, and any real faith I have that anybody will ever want to read my opinions on things. Though I haven’t spent a morning contemplating my own death (different from contemplating suicide, but related) in about a year, there have been countless times when I went to tap away at a blog entry and gave up a couple of paragraphs in because of my total lack of inspiration. I often feel flat, spark-less. Not always. Clearly, I’m still able to write sometimes while medicated. But when I am feeling that way, that’s when the appeal of being unmedicated begins to call.

I don’t want my loyal reader to worry; I’m not about to stop taking my meds, especially with winter coming up, which is always a hard time for me. I’m a little low on projects right now, so I’m not really feeling like my lack of inspiration is an enormous problem, not right at this very second. And I’m going to try a new approach. When you’re a novelist, not every word you write can be inspired; there’s a lot of slogging along, placing dull-feeling sentence after dull-feeling sentence, wondering if it’s ever going to come back. I’ve decided to (try to) employ that trick and see if I can’t force a spark through ceiling that Lexapro has put on my creativity. What I’m trying to say is that I’m going to try to update this blog more often, at least until such a time as other commitments make that impossible. I’m shooting for at least a couple of times a week. We’ll see.

I realize now that it sounds like I’m promising a lot of boring, uninspired blog entries over the next few months. Well, shit. I guess maybe I am. But hell, nobody’s forcing you to read them. I’m just forcing myself to write them. Until then, I’ll catch you on the flip-flop.

Relapse, Part One

    I suppose if I’m going to be brave about all this shit, it means a certain amount of real-time honesty. So here we are. I gave total sobriety a go, and it lasted two weeks. Now I have to pick up and start again. Not that this is a game. That’s one thing I have to remind myself — I still was sober for those two weeks. Just because my resolve broke one night, that doesn’t mean I’ve lost all my points and am now behind. It doesn’t, does it?

    I don’t suppose it’s completely fair or accurate to say that I relapsed because my dad, white-bearded and discombobulated by oxycontin and valium, looked me straight in the eye the other night and said, “Can I ask you something? What kind of place is this?” He had been moved from a tiny hospital room crowded with machines, one of which beeped when his breathing got too shallow and prevented him from sleeping, to a much bigger, much quieter room. Having fallen on a patch of ice and broken seven ribs, he’d drifted in and out of delirium for days, wracked with pain, coughing blood, insomniac, drugged, and had indicated earlier in the day that he believed he was fighting in the Easter Uprising of 1916. The answer he expected to his question was this: “It’s a place where they take people to die.” When I told him it wasn’t that kind of place, he eyed me crossways and said, “Are you sure?” I said I was sure, but he didn’t believe me.

    But I also don’t know if that’s not why I relapsed. The two didn’t feel connected, but the truth is that I left the hospital, stopped at a liquor store, and bought a little shot-sized bottle of Grey Goose. As a rule, when I’m drinking vodka I’m doing serious drinking, drinking that isn’t about pleasure or sociability or fun; when I hit vodka, I do it because it’s flavorless, it’s cheaper than bourbon and less filling than beer, and it gets you drunk fast. I sucked down that shot in the front seat of my car as it idled in the garage, not even giving myself time to get out and go into my warm house to at least get comfortable before I got drunk. Within minutes I was on the express train to Drunkville, sitting in a bar down the block and poking around the internet, as I have spent so much of my life doing over the years. By dinnertime I was well and truly blasted. Though I had drunk less than I often did on a regular night in the old days, I was toweringly, hilariously drunk, my tolerance halved by my two weeks on the wagon. I couldn’t think to pay attention to the movies I was trying to watch, couldn’t keep a sentence on a page in focus, couldn’t play a video game to save my life. At one point I got it in mind that I needed more — but when I went outside to go get it, I fell over and bonked my head on the trunk of an old pine tree in my front yard. Just about the only reasonable thought I had all night was as follows: Maybe this means I don’t need anymore to drink. I went inside, barfed up my dinner, and fell asleep on the couch. It wasn’t even 7PM yet.

    The funny thing is, there was no intense craving involved in this relapse; I’m as yet to really experience those, though I’m told they’re common. Instead it happened in a sort of automatic way, my higher functions turned off as I went through the motions of getting righteously, tumbledown drunk. I left my dad ailing in the hospital — in additon to his troubling questions, I’d also seen the massive, flowering contusion that decorates his back in shades from sickly yellow to radiant violet — and bought the vodka without making any decisions. It didn’t feel like a choice. It didn’t even feel like an action. It just happened. Sobriety —> drunkenness. It probably took about half an hour.

    One of the difficulties I’ve always had in addressing my problems has been a stubborn unwillingness to try new approaches. I always thought that one day I would just have to gather the will to quit, like Mark Renton pinned to his bed in Trainspotting, and then I would be fine. I always thought that one day, one of the strangers I picked up in a bar would turn out to be much more than just another drunk out looking to get fucked, that our stumble out the front door and sloppy makeout in the cab and ill-coordinated writhing about in the bed would somehow turn out to be a kind of Meet Cute. I thought that applying for jobs that were beyond my basic qualification would one day land me a gig at NPR or Gimlet. All of these things were, of course, silly pipe dreams, designed to fail from the start, so that nothing ever changed and I got to get up each morning and repeat my comfortable routine of food, exercise, books, and booze. Having recognized their futility, I know I have to change. But what to do?

    How do I approach this problem again, and how do I do it differently? I guess I’m owning up to what happened and have decided to quit hiding it, which is one thing. But that obviously hasn’t been a magic trick that solved the problem; I need something else. I don’t know what that something else is, yet, if it’s a meeting or a new therapist or seeing my current therapist more or what. One thing that I’m fairly sure of, having read a couple of addiction memoirs in the last few days, is this — I don’t need detox. I don’t get the shakes when I don’t drink for a while, my head doesn’t hurt, I don’t get the sweats, and so on. About my only symptom of physical depenedence has been short-lived insomnia. So, if I’m not going to go into some facility and sweat it out with people whose problems make mine look like a hangnail, what to do? There has to be something.

    And I’m worried, too, that this is how I react to bad stimulus. My parents are getting old; this is my dad’s third serious bout with broken bones in the last nine years. These hospital trips are not going to get less frequent as time goes by. I have to find a way to cope with how that makes me feel that doesn’t involve pouring vodka down my throat until I can’t see straight. I just don’t know what it is, yet.

    Oh, also: I’m going to take the advice of one of the addiction memoirs I’ve read, David Carr’s The Night of the Gun: no more addiction memoirs. They appear to be triggering, even as they describe the great folly of getting drunk.

Addictions, Part 4

    I love to drink. Looooooove it. If one were to sit down and evaluate my behavior over the course of my adult life, there’s some evidence that I love drinking more than I have loved any woman I’ve ever been with, any book I’ve ever read, any friend I’ve ever made, any work I’ve ever done, my grandmother, my nieces, and my brothers. I love the taste, the smell, the way it makes you feel (up to a point); I love bars, especially small dark ones with good music playing and no food menu; I love the long, rambly conversations you get into when you’re drinking; I love the way it lowers my inhibitions and makes talking to good-looking women easier; I love the way it turns off the part of my brain that is constantly worrying about everything; I love how it makes it possible to tolerate idiots and boors, which in my experience make up about 80% of the world’s population; I love the unhinged story ideas I get while drinking. Just about the only things I don’t love about it are the hangovers and the fact that it makes you fat. Well, that, and the growing sense I’ve had for a while now that it’s taken over my life.

    One of the things that addicts on TV rarely say is how enjoyable our addictions can be, at least for a while — especially if, as they did for me, the stakes start off very low. I’m always kind of dancing around this fact when I talk to people, but the truth is that the reason I’ve been able to spend the two years since graduate school working on my novel — much as I’ve been able to survive partial-to-unemployment at other times in my life — is that I was born into affluence. I’m not ultra-rich, and I won’t be able to go about my life doing nothing to earn money forever, but there’s always been a floor for me, so that when I fuck up the consequences aren’t that awful, or at least they don’t seem that way. When I was in my early 20s, this was a real recipe for hedonism. I bounced around from California to Portland to DC to Bend, catching up with old companions and getting fat (among other things, I had no idea how to feed myself properly until I was about 27 or 28). My only constant companion was that old friend, booze.

    The first time I can remember worrying about how much I drank was very early on, at a point where it was barely legal for me to do so: I can see myself pouring beer down the sink at the house in Palo Alto where I lived after graduation, so I can have been no older than 23 when it first dawned on me that I was doing this too much. Already, a lot of the sense of the party had gone out of drinking for me. My daily life was a boring, depressing grind, as without the structure of school or the supervision of an interested adult, I floundered. I had a job at a newspaper and discovered that I was an exceptionally poor fit for the kind of work I had always half-believed I was going to end up doing one day (it’s the family business, after all). It filled me with anxiety and fear, which lead to procrastination and poor performance: I could write, but writing is a tiny fraction of the job of a reporter for a daily paper. Most of it is about cultivating personal relationships, calling person after person out of the blue, chasing down people who are too busy to talk to you — all stuff that pressed exactly my sorest spot, the feeling that other people didn’t want me around, that I didn’t understand their motives, that merely being in a person’s presence was a form of asking them for a favor and that if I didn’t put on some kind of entertaining show I was wasting their time. (This feeling persists to this day. It’s why I perform onstage.)

    Outside of work, I could barely handle anything. The insurance lapsed on my car, and after one attempt to get it fixed that went nowhere, I left it parked in the driveway for several months, where all it did was cause me to worry. I was eating too much, burritos for lunch, spaghetti for dinner, and didn’t even quite realize I was doing it; too, the daily routine of basketball and soccer that had left me relatively svelte in college had vanished, and the result was a rapidly-ballooning waistline, again pressing one of my particular buttons: I had been a fat kid (or that’s what other kids told me — looking at pictures now I don’t see it), and my body image has always been very poor. I bought a computer; it broke, and I didn’t get it repaired. The poems I had been so proud of writing dried up, and I had yet to reinvent myself as a fiction writer. Meanwhile, the political situation was a raging nightmare, as the Bush Administration, capitalizing on the blind rage in the country after 9/11, was lying and bluffing its way into a dumbassed war in Iraq that I sometimes felt like the only person in opposition to. There was very, very little pleasure in my sober life, even after I quit the job that taxed me so much. So I turned to drinking on basically a daily basis to get myself through it.

    I came to think of this as maintenance drinking, and the funny thing is, it did the trick. As long as I was drunk, I was relatively happy. I could tune out and play video games or whang on my guitar, and get to feel some of that pleasure that was so hard to come by in my daily life. I learned to like the taste of bourbon, I think because drinking bourbon seemed tough and cool, the kind of thing a writer would do, and left a trail of empty bourbon bottles behind me wherever I went. I cultivated an image as a hard-partying artist type, though the fact was that I wasn’t making any art and the kind of drinking I did when other people were partying was the same kind of drinking I did when sitting at home watching television. If anybody worried about me, I didn’t know it. I worried about myself, though. Grinding worry about my drinking habits has followed me almost as long as the drinking itself, and eventually it would overwhelm the pleasure I got out of it, so that practically all I did was drink, and worry about drinking.

    It didn’t help that nearly everyone I knew had a substance abuse problem of one kind or another in those days. My roommates in Palo Alto were unrepentant potheads who were either stoned or at work every waking hour (and sometimes stoned while at work). In Portland the roommates were drunks and potheads and opiate abusers. In Washington my best friend was a functioning alcoholic who drank himself to sleep every night because his job caused him such stress that otherwise he would lie awake with his mind racing until morning. These were all people I had grown up with, gone to college with, known before any of us developed these habits, and somehow we all turned out miserable and had to self-medicate. I realize now that the year or two right after college is just a scary, unpleasant time, when people work bad jobs for low pay, and nearly everybody feels terror and anxiety about their future — I can remember describing my recurring dream that I was on a crashing airplane to one friend, and she said, I have that dream, too! At the time, though, it just seemed like I was born into an unhappy generation.

    The difference is that most of these other people reformed, eventually, and I didn’t. My pothead roommates from Palo Alto are now a lawyer and a college professor, just as people who graduate from Pomona College are supposed to be. My friend from Washington is a thoroughly domesticated husband and father who no more drinks himself to sleep than he goes out clubbing on weeknights. One of the guys from the house in Portland works for Google. Meanwhile, I lurched around, kept doing desperate and beside-the-point things like moving from city to city, in hopes that somehow, in the transfer from Portland to Washington, or Bend to New York, or New York to Minneapolis, or Minneapolis back to Bend, I would lose my addictions in the same way one might lose a saucepan. As the years ground on, the addictions enabled, and were enabled by, another problem: social isolation. My peripatetic lifestyle meant that I was often in a new place, where I knew nobody, spending a lot of time alone. Doing that sober is boring, and makes me feel like a real loser. I don’t know when I developed this obsession with the fact that I’m an uncool dweeb — I certainly never had it as a kid, when cluelessness about social hierarchy prevented me from ever realizing what a space cadet and a nerd I was — but now it’s one of the things that really, really drives the drinking. Sober up, and I have to look at my life for what it is, which is pretty fucking depressing. Go down to the bar, and I can have a conversation with the bartender, screw around on the internet, and return home to watch reruns of Gilmore Girls without examining just how sad and lonely an existence I lead.

    This quitting thing — which I’m not doing perfectly, by the by; I’m a little hungover as I write this — has been coming down the pike for a long time. When I had a mental breakdown in graduate school, I nearly drank myself out of the program, especially in the last year when I was living alone and didn’t have much structure. For the first time in my life I began drinking in the daytime, would spend days on end intoxicated, bought things two and three times because I’d forgotten I’d already purchased them, tried to write drunk, picked up strange men and women in bars and would wake up next to them the next morning without knowing their names, hurt myself falling on ice because I’d gotten drunk and then realized there was no food in the house and had to walk to the store in blizzard conditions. Just about the only things I didn’t do were go to work drunk, and drive drunk. All the time I knew I had to quit. I had reached a state of emergency I’d been headed toward for a long time. I didn’t have any idea how one might go about doing it, but I knew I had to figure it out.

    The process has been gradual, which came as a surprise to me, though I suppose it shouldn’t have. So much of what you learn about addiction comes from television and other media, in which the story is always, Was a drunk, hit rock bottom, went to rehab, now I’m a recovering addict and I touch nothing. That’s a dramatic story, but it doesn’t feel especially accurate to me, in any of its aspects. First of all, there was never a moment when I, personally, realized I’d hit rock bottom and I had to quit immediately — the election of Donald Trump was close to that, but I’d been working very hard for more than a year at that point on cleaning up my act, including by keeping track of, and moderating, my booze intake. That wasn’t rock bottom, because I was already on the way up. Second of all, quitting all at once — why would that work? It’s like sticking a five-year-old on a bike and saying, Go for it, kid, I know you can win the Tour de France. I’ve been rehearsing sobriety for months now, forcing myself to tolerate the boredom and occasional mind-fuck of not drinking for a few days at a time, so that when the day comes next month and I try to go clean for good, I’ll be familiar with what it’s like. And there’s all this preparation to do — my shrink calls it building a life worth living. I know that if I don’t repopulate my life, if I don’t find people to spend time with and useful things to do, I just won’t be able to hang. One day I’ll be feeling lonely and purposeless and I’ll just find myself back in a bar. I’m a little uncertain about this stuff, but I know it’s necessary.

    And so I don’t have any grand conclusion. This might be the last of these or it might not. I’ll keep you updated on my progress, anyway.

Addictions, Parts 3(a) and 3(b)

A.

    Before I go into this part of the story, I want to lay out two caveats. The first one is this: the other main character in this entry is in no way a pusher or a dealer or any other kind of villain; he was just the person most conveniently available to facilitate a decision I had already made: that I was going to take a lot of drugs in college. I made this decision for a lot of reasons, but mainly it was because taking drugs sounded fun. In the tales of woe spun out by addicts, it should never be forgotten that at the root for many of us is that we were chasing pleasure, once upon a time, and many of us continue to pursue pleasure until it kills us. The question of why we do that is probably as varied as our physical appearances are. The second caveat is this: I’ve disguised the identity of that person, largely because we’re not in contact anymore, and so there’s no way for him to represent himself in the story. If you went to Pomona with me, I encourage you not to try to guess who he is, for the following reasons: (1) the character represented here is a bit of a composite, and (2) you’d probably be wrong, anyway. Please keep your guesses to yourselves.

    On that note: The first person to get me into any drug stronger than your standard college kid regimen of bad beer and overpriced marijuana was a friend of mine who was also, kind of, my boyfriend. I say “kind of” because the entire time our arrangement went on, we were both pursuing other people, he actively (including other straight-ish guys, I suppose egged on by his success with me), and me somewhat-less-actively (as was my wont). But we only ever had sex with each other, in part because our teenaged awkwardness made it hard for us to make other connections. It was very much an any-port-in-a-storm situation for both of us, and though I’d long found myself attracted to the occasional person of the male persuasion, I continued to think of myself as straight even after I’d formed a relationship with another boy. (And let’s be clear here, though we were legally men, we were boys, both of us.) This sort of thing — mostly sex, little companionship or mutual understanding — has been typical of my relationships ever since, and almost all of those have been with women. Just for the record.

    This boy and I simulated intimacy through the use, mostly, of ecstasy, though we also took mushrooms, acid, speed, and just about anything else we could lay our hands on. I found I loved them all, but especially the uppers, because they had the quality of taking my scattered, unfocussed depressive’s personality and turning it into something finely honed and outgoing; coked up, I could chat up girls endlessly, dance to house music endlessly, write endlessly — I loved writing on stimulants, and still kind of do —, drink endlessly, fuck endlessly. The only problem was the crash, the scraped-out, heart-whamming, too-tired-to-sleep bottom that one inevitably reached after a couple of days of this kind of thing. Well, that, and being broke and in college, it wasn’t always easy to lay your hands on the stuff. I can remember buying candy with my flex account, then re-selling it to other people at a discount, just so I could scrape together enough cash to buy a couple of E’s (in Southern California, ecstasy was known, not as X, but as E).

    Eventually, perhaps not surprisingly, the boy disappeared, wandered off into the land of true eccentrics and druggies, and I have no idea where he is today. I didn’t miss him that much, once I got over the absence of regular sexual stimulation. He left behind mostly a real taste for uppers. The other stuff — the hallucinogens, even the ecstasy — I found I could take or leave. No, what I really loved was the rush of blood in my veins, my heart beating so hard that my wrists, neck, feet, and eardrums thumped with it. I loved the feats of concentration I could pull, reading 300 pages of original-source history material in a day or two, firing off a five page essay about Jews in Medieval Spain in a night, the focus and false brilliance that comes along with amphetamines. I loved smoking my throat raw while I wrote bad poetry in emulation of Paul Celan and other terribly serious literary figures. If I could have found a way to live permanently in that state, I would have done it.

    At a place like Pomona, where most people worked themselves to the bone four days a week and partied till they dropped the rest of the time, it was easy to feel that a lot of my behavior was normal. Almost all of my friends drank to excess a few times a week, a lot of them were stoned nearly every waking hour, and many people’s study habits consisted of hoarding the adderall and ritalin that doctors used to hand out like candy to any kid who got bored in school, and then binging on the stuff when tests and papers came up. Because school was easy for me, I was able to go harder for longer than most people, and sometimes did an entire semester’s worth of work in the final week of term — especially in economics classes, which had no attendance policy and were often laughably simple. I felt camouflaged, invincible. I wasn’t even aware, really, that there was a problem, though I can now remember friends expressing concern that I was getting stoned in my room alone. We took pride in our tolerance for booze and drugs and thought of ourselves, for the most part, as sowing our oats: Pomona was full of the future bankers, lawyers, screenwriters, VC speculators, and professors of America; we had worked hard in high school, scored well on tests, and did more reading and writing in a semester than a lot of college students do in four years. We deserved to cut loose. But we — or I, anyway — was trained that the only true pleasure came from the systematic derangement of the senses, and work was something you mostly did so you could reward yourself by taking drugs. Though I didn’t know it, I came out of Pomona an addict, ready to plunge into a life of randomness, denial, shallow relationships, and failure.

B.

    I recently read a book by a journalist named Sam Quinones called Dreamland, in which he lays out in detail — sometimes too much detail, for my tastes — the way in which the opiate epidemic snuck into the backwaters of America, when for years heroin use had been confined to big cities, where gangs were willing to hazard the risks involved in distributing it. I read it with a shudder of recognition, especially when he reported something I realized I already knew: oxycontin reached Portland in late 2003 and took up residence among the young and feckless of the city’s middle- and upper-middle-classes.

    I’m going to skip most of my mid-20s in this accounting, because the most important person involved in that part of the story has made it clear that she doesn’t want me writing about her anymore, and is uncomfortable with the amount I’ve already shared about her in the past. But in 2003 we hadn’t yet met, and I was living in a crappy little ranch house with three other people, in a part of Portland charmingly known as Felony Flats. (I think its actual, official name is Brentwood-Darlington, and it has proven to be one of the few parts of the city immune to gentrification, at least so far.) All four of us were unhappy with the lives we were leading, which consisted mostly of watching television, overeating, smoking pot, drinking, and masturbating. Only one of us had a job; none of us had a romantic partner of any kind; three of us had serious chemical imbalances for which we were not medicated. The dishwasher backed up into the bathtub sometimes. The clothes dryer dried nothing and if you forgot your clothes in there they sat, warm and damp, a breeding ground for fungi. Flies infested the living room. We were in pretty dire straits when one of our number (not me) reconnected with an old childhood friend who ran a sideline in peddling vicodin and other opiate-laden pills.

    Unlike my ex-boyfriend, this old friend was a pusher and a bit of a villain; I was never clear on where he got his gear, but I suspect he stole a lot of it from elderly relatives. By the time we got rid of him he’d reinvented himself as a petty con man and extortioneer, the kind of guy who was always moving from city to city because he kept wearing out his welcome by burning the people he got to know there. Under normal circumstances I’m sure we all would have shunned him. But he had drugs. In addition to vicodin, he had a connect for cocaine, he could lay hands on tabs of LSD, and he introduced us to oxycontin, the powerful opiate that is sometimes called “Hillbilly Heroin” because bored teenagers in the countryside could get it easily from quasi-legal pill mills in neglected small towns, and use it to tune out their stultified lives. In fact, it basically was synthetic heroin. It was dangerous stuff. I liked it a lot.

    For a kid who had been trying to distract himself from a world he felt totally alienated from basically since the day he was old enough to think, oxy was the real solution. Pop a pill, or grind it up and snort it, and your whole being melts into something warm and fuzzy. It’s impossible to worry about anything on oxy; your every concern boils down to the simple pleasures of the body: it is immensely fun to scratch yourself when high on oxy, or to manipulate your testicles in a non-sexual way (I can’t imagine giving enough of a shit to have sex on opiates), or to feel the bright tingle of soda washing down your gullet. Who gives a shit if you’re sixty pounds overweight, unemployed, and you haven’t read a book in a year? Rub your feet on the carpet and nod out.

    We did dumb shit to get opiates. One of the roommates had sciatica, and we figured out that emergency clinics handed out vicodin for sciatica almost as though it were no more harmful than cough drops; we would drive from clinic to clinic, scamming drugs off bored and incurious doctors who wrote the scripts without hardly checking our charts. Once, when I had a root canal, I made sure to combine the percoset they proscribed me with beer, so I could get a real kick out of it; vicodin or percoset and beer, a dangerous combo, left one pleasantly swimmy in the head and warm in the body. I was fortunate never to have over-done that one.

    I believed, or at least I thought I did, that the combination of opiates and alcohol was allowing me to tolerate the world with some measure of enjoyment. But right here I have a song I wrote in that time, called “Opiates”, in which the bridge goes: “You don’t believe me / you can’t relieve me / so why do you seek me / through my haze? / My drunken days / poppy-eyed, dissipate / into opiate.” There are other, more pointed lyrics, mostly about pain, but these are the only ones that aren’t so bad that I’d rather curl up and die than let anybody ever see them. Clearly, whatever I was doing with drugs and booze was not actually making me feel better.

    I believe a few things saved me from turning into one of America’s now-countless number of middle-class heroin addicts. One was that the opiates were very hard to come by in our corner of the world; if, like so many of the kids in Quinones’ book, I had sustained a serious injury and been proscribed oxycontin for the pain, I have little doubt that I would have been hooked by the time I finished the first bottle. Another one is one that stops a lot of people, or so I’ve been told by recovering heroin addicts I’ve met — fear of the needle. I just couldn’t imagine sticking myself with something on purpose, especially given everything I’d heard about the dangers of dirty needles and the constant assault of AIDS news I’d endured during my adolescence. The last was an impulsive lunge I took across the country to try to rejoin my old life with my friends from college, who were all living in Washington, DC, trying to change the world. Despite that I’m often quite cynical about politics, and possessed even then a Foucaultian skepticism that change is really possible, I was young enough that I still wanted to make the world a better place. And, really, I think that part of me was a little worried about what I was getting into. It was the last gasp of the self-preservative instinct that had kept me from drinking and drugging a lot in high school.

    My track record with opiates since then is mixed. I am aware that I like them rather too much, meaning that I’m careful not to go on long binges, and I’ve said no both times I’ve been offered heroin to sniff, aware that what life I have could easily disappear down that particular rabbit hole in a matter of months. But if I have dental work or minor surgery, you can bet I’m going to maximize the pleasure I get out of those little pills. Because, remember, drugs are fun. At least they are until they hollow you out, and wear you down to a little nib, like a raw bone exposed from a severed leg.

Addictions, Part Two

    One of the features of my mental illness — one of the ones that makes it difficult to properly name — is what is known, clinically, as the mixed episode. In a mixed episode, I am in a form of mental agony that cannot properly be called sadness or depression; my mind races, I am compelled to pace, I cannot concentrate on a single course of thought for more than a flashing moment, and yet I am often obsessively thinking, unproductively, about the same thing. I’m also prone to rages, paranoia, and delusional thinking, and I cannot sleep. Sometimes, trying to release my mind from its trap, I will claw at my own skin, pull strands of my hair and beard out, eject audible exclamations in the vein of shut up! or you’re an idiot! The reason this feature of my mental illness has made it difficult for my doctors to nail down a diagnosis is that it used to be that such episodes, lasting at least a week, were part of the differential diagnosis for bipolar I disorder — the most severe form of bipolar, the kind that plagued and ultimately took the life of my foster brother, Jesse. The problem was that, unlike Jesse, I’ve never been prone to the massive highs associated with bipolar; the fact is, you can’t be a manic depressive if you’ve never felt mania. These days, the DSM-V is perfectly willing to treat with the idea that mixed episodes can be a feature of unipolar depression, though it cautions strongly that, if you’ve had them, you’re probably bipolar, you just haven’t had your mania yet. But it’s just not that way for me. Like most artists, I’ve had fits of inspiration, and like most people I have days when I feel much better than others. But I’ve never lost track of reality when feeling good. It’s only when feeling bad that I’ve been truly, plainly out of my mind.

    The reason I’m describing this in a post called “Addictions” is that, not unlike a lot of the other problems in my life, one of the easiest cures for a mixed episode is a good stiff drink or three, and one of the easiest ways to bring one on is to abstain from alcohol for very long. It’s a bizarre and vicious state of affairs whereby my brain seeks refuge in poison, and that poisonous refuge wards off illness better than any talisman or vaccine. I’ll get into the early roots of my drinking at another time. This is about how it can end up feeling necessary.

    The last time I tried to quit drinking was last February, for Lent, in a possibly-ill-advised attempt to simply will myself out of my bad habits and become, magically, a healthier, happier person. It worked for about a week — not an easy week, mind you, not a fun week, but one during which the main symptom of sobriety was intense boredom. But then, one night, it all came flying apart, as my mind, untreated either by the medical arts or the distillative ones, turned inward and began to rip itself apart like an animal cursed to forever try to eat its own heart. I’ve described what happened on this blog before, but to make a long story short, I didn’t sleep for nearly two days and then became delusionally obsessed with my own loneliness and social isolation. Not to say that these things aren’t a problem for me — they are, one that booze both exacerbates and alleviates — but I’m not exactly in solitary confinement or locked inside a secret garden with no other children around. I just don’t call my friends very often, and I’m a little frustrated by my inability to sustain a relationship for more than a few weeks at a time, that’s all. In that mental state, though, pacing around my house, I came to see myself as the loneliest man in the world, completely adrift on the sea of my life, alone in the little raft that was my apartment. Strangely, my only real tether to reality was a series of comic pratfalls — a collapsing bed, a loony Facebook post — that I stumbled into over the course of a few days.

    By the next afternoon, I’d bought a bottle of wine, and though I knew I was doing the wrong thing, the thing I had been struggling not to do, once I had a couple of belts in me the madness was gone. It’s hard to explain, but the alcohol singing through my veins tamed the monster of my mind. The obsessions left, and behind them crackled the pleasant electricity of being a bit tipsy. Though the next day I would feel guilt and shame about drinking when I had sworn I wasn’t going to, at least I didn’t feel frankly, possibly dangerously, insane. It was the bottle or the mental hospital, and I didn’t have the strength to choose the latter.

    Not that these mixed episodes only come on as a result of abstinence; then they would be a clear symptom of withdrawal — and though I drink a lot, most of my life it has not been enough to cause physical dependence of that kind. The most prolonged episode like this came in early January of 2012, when, faced with the long Minnesota winter, a romantic disappointment that now seems minor but at the time felt shattering, the pressures of my first year in graduate school, and the roiling of my unmedicated brain chemistry, I lost touch with reality for more than a week and spent several days obsessively writing the worst short story I’ve ever written, a story so scattershot and nonsensical that I can’t bring myself even to look at it anymore — if anyone tells you that madness makes great art, I encourage you to squint hard at them and sneer. But the only way I could get to sleep in those days was to bundle myself in every scrap of clothing I could lay my hands on and tumble against the wind down to the liquor store, returning home with a four-pack of Surly IPA, which I would administer in quick succession. Then, and only then, would my attention wander from my story and the blaring, channel-skipping radio in my brain, and finally I could tumble into sleep on the couch. I believe it was after this incident that my drinking went from heavy to troubling, though it may have been before or after — that’s the problem with the addict’s memory; it can be unclear.

    And then there are the depressions, the numbing, soul-killing absences that have periodically washed over me, often for what seems like no reason at all. Drinking is good for that, too, though in a different way — instead of slowing my mind down, it speeds it up, slices through the anhedonia like a buzzsaw, makes it possible to laugh or have a conversation or read a book (at least until the swimmy vision sets in). Keep in mind that when I say drinking is “good” for this sort of thing, I don’t mean it in the sense that I recommend the use of alcohol for the treatment of whatever mental illness it is that I have, be it unipolar depression or bipolar disorder or something altogether different; I heartily recommend against it, because the toll it takes, as I suppose I’ll explore at a later date, can be drastic. But in the short-term, it does the trick, and I’m not the only crazy person to have noticed this — practically everybody I know has self-medicated with booze to one degree or another, and I’ve noticed that the more likely it is that someone drinks a lot, the more likely they are to show clear signs of a similar kind of mental illness to my own. The correlation isn’t one-to-one, but alcohol has the wonderful quality of being both numbing and activating, exciting and drowsing, social and solitary. Thus, it’s an easy treatment for a lot of symptoms. You can even, with practice, learn to like the taste.

    Look, I’m not trying to make excuses for myself here. I’m trying to lay out, as much for myself as anybody else, a story, about how it is that I came to be the person that I am in my late 30s. And I’m trying, for once in my life, not to be too hard on myself, because being hard on myself is a large part of how I got here in the first place. It’s become clearer and clearer to me over the last few years that one of the things that I am — a core part of my identity — is an addict; I’m trying to understand why, with it in mind that I might get better that way. I’ll keep writing these until . . . I don’t know, until I understand something I didn’t understand before.

    I’ve set a date for myself, by the way. I’m going clean by the day a certain orange-haired, red-faced pig-man is inaugurated President. I don’t think I can face the challenges that lie ahead if I don’t. So that’s why I’m doing this. I feel a little like I’m in rehearsal right now — I haven’t ingested anything stronger than coffee in a few days now — but the big show is still in the future. This writing is part of that preparation. It feels necessary. It also scares the ever-loving shit out of me. But making big changes requires taking big risks, sometimes.

Addictions, Part One

    The first thing I can remember being addicted to was fantasy. Not Game of Thrones-style fantasy, with magic and swordfights and all that; I’ve always found that stuff a little tedious, notwithstanding the fact that I have watched the TV show and made a run at the books. No, what I was addicted to was the dreamy state of pretend, a world where I was a hero or a great writer (most often) a baseball star. For hours and hours on many a summer day, I would stand out in the front yard of our house on 28th Avenue, a bat in my hands, slowly enacting an entire career that inevitably involved being the youngest major league player ever, breaking every hitting record in the book, winning several World Series, and ultimately being inducted into the Hall of Fame on a unanimous vote, acclaimed generally as the greatest player ever — far, far better than mere mortals like Ruth, Mays, or Cobb.

    I continued to indulge in this fantasy for a long, long time, long after the age at which most people cease so intensely to pretend. As I got older my sense of narrative improved, so often I was drafted by some out-of-the-way team like the Brewers or the Reds, who underestimated my talent until it became so overwhelmingly obvious they could no longer hold me back. I continued in it, in fact, after I was cut from my high school baseball team at age 15, after I passed the draftable age of 18, and even after college, where the closest thing I had done to actually playing baseball was hurt my elbow trying to throw an apple over a dorm while drunk. I did it in much the same way, too, standing in the yard of my parents’ house with a bat or a glove in my hand, acting out the games, inventing the heroics, making myself quite thoroughly a legend, if only in my mind.

    There are a lot of reasons I call this an addiction, but the main one is that the role that these fantasies played in my youth and adolescence was not entirely unlike the role that other, much more harmful addictions would come to play in my adult life: they were a way to check out of a world in which I felt strange, alienated, fearful, bored, fat, ugly, unlovable, awkward, and (increasingly) guilty. In a pretend game of baseball, one that ended with me twirling the final strike or clubbing the final homer, I could be in a world in which what I did was not just good, but unambiguously so. This was also true in a world in which I became a famous director and married Kerri Russell, or won a Nobel Prize for literature and was lauded as the greatest since Shakespeare, or found secret messages from the government under a rock and then rode to the rescue of people in distress. Fantasy had the ability to numb the anxiety and pain of being human, something at which I have never been good. Can you think of anything else that does that?

    Too, this kind of fantasy and my earliest stages of serious drug use are intricately linked. I smoked pot and got drunk a few times in high school, and even then I had an intuition that maybe I liked doing these things too much. The thing is, when you’re a 16-year-old who’s trying to prove he’s smarter than everybody else by getting straight A’s, it’s a little bit easier to just say, “Okay, I like this too much, maybe let’s not fuck around with it.” So for the most part I didn’t. It wasn’t until my sophomore year of college, when I was experiencing my first real breakup from my first serious girlfriend, that the incentives switched. I was so miserable, and so inexplicably — we’d broken up because we lived hundreds of miles apart, we’d been drifting from each other for months, and I’d wanted to do it, and yet still I felt sad about it all the time — that when I got stoned for the first time in years and it put me in a dreamy, otherworldly state not unlike the one I’d once accessed with a bat in my hands in my parents’ yard, I thought, Aha, this is the thing for me.

    And so I think it’s probably not surprising that one of my favorite activities, back when I was a pothead, was to pick up my old baseball bat, and go out in field behind my dorm — at Pomona College, these fields were rather preciously called “beaches” — to construct yet another in an endless string of triumphant baseball careers. People must have thought I was strange, a 20-year-old kid in his bare feet and a sleeveless t-shirt, silently, slowly swinging a bat and then staring into the distance, but I didn’t really care that much. That was part of what I loved about pot, back then; I could retreat into the little world of one where I didn’t feel judged or even noticed, where I could forget the times I’d been rejected or done something awful to someone who didn’t deserve it, and just space out. It was such a relief, especially in college, where my feeling of alienation grew more complex and harder to solve as the issues of sex and sexuality became increasingly present and important. Those were the areas where I was most confused, most likely to have been rejected, and most likely to have done something awful to someone who didn’t deserve it. After that first relationship, I began a pattern I have perpetuated ever since, becoming serially involved with people I didn’t care about much because there was little risk involved and I was (for lack of a better word) horny, and then affecting to be complexly traumatized by people I did care about because I freighted our interactions with such intense, often imaginary baggage. (This was before I had added the real jackpot to the mix, getting involved with people I did care about but didn’t really want to be with, thus adding the double whammy of having done something awful to someone who didn’t deserve it and finding that our friendship had become a veritable No Man’s Land, pocked with emotional landmines and artillery craters.)

    Eventually the pot sort of turned on me, and began to cause an intense self-loathing every time I smoked it — which I continued to do, to diminishing returns, until I was about 23 or 24. With it went my access to that fantasy world, the relatively harmless addiction that, I think, also had its uses: I don’t think I would be a writer today if I hadn’t spent so much of my early life lost in a world of my own construction, if I hadn’t come to feel the power of narrative and a built universe. I’m no longer able to stand in a field of grass with a baseball bat and really effectively pretend that I am a great hero of the diamond, a man whose feats elicit the adulation — and, ultimately, acceptance — of millions. Instead I’ve had to find other ways to numb the pain. But that’s for a later date, I suppose, this has already got longer than I meant for it to.

Election Blues

    I’m struggling to believe that anything will ever work out right now. Some of this, I think, is chemical; I have a mental illness, and once every few years it comes around to make me feel completely numb and hopeless, to remind me of how meaningless human endeavor is and discourage me from ever doing anything. I mean, I have a chronic problem with feeling out-of-control and pessimistic, but this is another order of thing, a waking-up-feeling-awful thing, an inability-to-get-pleasure-out-of-anything thing, a hate-myself-all-the-time thing, a nothing-will-ever-change thing. Now and again I have a spell that lasts a day or two, but it’s much rarer that the mood comes and stays for weeks on end. For whatever reason, that’s what’s been going on with me the last three or four weeks. Every night I go to bed and hope the following day will be better; every morning I wake up and it isn’t. Though I know, intellectually, that eventually it will wear off, it can be hard to see the end of it from inside.

    There may in fact be some causes beyond the chemical, though. I’ve been trying to write something about the election, about the way it’s making me and so many of the people I know feel, but every time I try to bend myself to that task I end up taking stock of where my life is, versus where it was eight years ago, when the current President was first elected. It’s not that my life is worse now than it was then. It’s that it’s the same. I live alone with a cat, I’m completely flummoxed by the idea of getting a job that pays me for the thing I’m best at (writing, natch), nobody outside a very small group of people ever reads anything I create, and I’m chronically unhappy about all of it. I have made attempts to change these things and they just . . . haven’t worked. No matter what I do, I’m still me.

    I went back and read a couple of things I wrote on the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, a couple of really hopeful things, full of praise for the future President and praise for the system that had empowered him. When I wrote those things, I was hopeful, not only about Obama, not only about America, but about myself. The whole country had been so handicapped by racism and resentment, and yet here we were, about to show that we really could do so much better than we had. Why couldn’t I do the same thing? I imagined my life in eight years as a much better, healthier, happier, and less lonely place than it was. It all seemed possible.

    But the last eight years have been a really punishing lesson in how hard it is to change, how much remains to be done, and the dangers of changing in the wrong way — for me, and for the country. A lot of white people reacted to the election of Barack Obama by FREAKING OUT. They could not conceive of a country in which their happiness coexisted with racial equality. In fact, they couldn’t conceive of racial equality at all — attempts to encourage it, to repair the damage of racism, appeared to them to be an agenda of punishing white people for their whiteness. It was either white supremacy or white genocide. There was nothing in between. And now we have Donald Trump, their avatar, doing his fascist messiah thing, ranting madly into the sky, trying to destroy America in the name of saving it. Given the myriad ways in which careful attention to current events will remind an observer that white supremacy is alive and well in the laws and institutions of the United States, it’s frightening and discouraging to see it thriving so brightly in the hearts of the country’s citizens.

    And me? I sometimes feel like my attempts to get better have made me much worse. I went to graduate school, an elite one, which had been a goal of mine for a long time — and while there, I had a comprehensive mental breakdown, a total loss of perspective and self-awareness that left me on the verge of failing out, drinking my days away in an attempt to feel anything other than sadness and shame, sleeping very little, leaving my apartment almost never, abandoning the meager friendships I’d managed to forge there. The me who walked out of that experience was much more damaged, much farther from hope and happiness, than the me who wrote soaringly of the man and country I was so fleetingly so proud of all those years before. It’s now been two years since I got my degree, and aside from the rush of relief I experienced upon leaving a city that I hated and program I felt I had squandered, not much has changed. I’ve struggled to get better, and for a while it felt like I was. But as the country has descended into madness, my own has returned. Sometimes it seems like Donald Trump is an outgrowth of my own psyche, a roaring destructor I’ve designed to torment myself with. I know it’s not true, but it feels like it is.

    The day Barack Obama was elected, I cried, tears of happiness and relief. My entire adult life to that point had been lived in the Orwellian nightmare of the George W Bush administration, which began with a stolen election and ended with a shattered economy, and I was just . . . I was aghast that something good might happen. The day he leaves office I suspect I may cry again, even if his replacement isn’t the screaming madman on the Republican ticket. It’s not because I think Hillary Clinton is such a terrible replacement — she seems perfectly capable, to me — but because the years that intervened have all been thrown away, wasted on reactionary recrimination, siphoned off from a life that we all only get to live but the one time. What a terrible shame it is, to dispose of your time on this planet in such a way.

Flop

1.

You start to feel it coming days before it actually hits. It’s a hard feeling to describe — it feels like your brain has the flu, that it’s feverish, alternately running too hot and then shuddering with cold. You find yourself cancelling stuff, saying no to things, and after a little while you realize that you’ve lost a couple of days and some of the things that have slipped were less in the nature of occasions and more in the nature of responsibilities. A bill you forgot to pay, though you had the money to do it. A change you need to make in a project that you keep not making, though you know it would take only minutes.

Email becomes a source of trouble, and the phone. Mirrors are bad, too — anything that reminds you who you are. The bed becomes a crucible; you lie in it at night, mind swirling with nonsense thoughts, dread of your impending death, the sensation that your life has spun away from you and you don’t know how to get it back — and then when you do sleep, it’s poorly, perhaps sleepwalking or shouting yourself awake in the night, and you wake up well before dawn with a crushing feeling of being alone.

Maybe you try to cure it with booze, but that just makes it worse. Maybe you use exercise, but three steps into your jog you’re already tired and don’t care. You know that going into the world and seeing people would help, but you can’t think of a single one you’d like to see. The day unfolds silently, grayly, until after a while you go back to bed, and eventually you find yourself lying there, joylessly listening to podcasts or trying to read, and it dawns on you: Oh, you think, I’m depressed again. Somehow, though it’s happened so many times before, you almost didn’t notice it happening this time.

And you wonder how long it will last. Seems likely to be forever.

2.

One of the difficulties with therapy is, I think, that there’s a way in which therapists believe — they have to believe — that there is a cause-and-effect nature to the human psyche, that all actions are traceable to other actions, that depressions are caused by things, specific things that you’ve done or which have happened to you. And I’m just not sure I believe that’s true. Years ago I became obsessed with the idea of apophenia, or the human tendency to detect patterns in random data; it is, far and away, the most important principle to keep in mind when trying to wade through the various hobbyhorses and cognitive biases that drive most human discourse. And I can’t help but feel, on some really deep level, that therapy is just apophenia being applied haphazardly to the human brain, which we already don’t understand very well.

What happens before I become depressed? Is it caused when I finish a project and don’t have a new one to work on? Maybe it’s the advent of autumn, with its shortish gray days and dire warnings of what winter will bring. Could it be breakups? Stress? Binge drinking? Spending too much time alone? Failure to get exercise? Some chemical in my brain that just goes AWOL every now and again? I can’t tell you, really. All of those are plausible given the various events that have preceded past episodes. I suspect, however, that there may be no proximate cause at all. It just happens sometimes. My ability to feel goes on the fritz and after awhile I’m back in the bed with Terry Gross blabbing in my ear.

The one thing that therapy has done is help me to recognize when it’s starting, even if I don’t recognize the cause. I can trace this one back to last Thursday, when I made up a bullshit excuse not to go to a show I’d been looking forward to all summer, and instead spent the evening watching baseball and playing video games by myself. The next day was the brain-fever day, the day spent quaking with nameless dread over what might happen when the sun went down, and then the insomnia, the parasomnia, and the dreams. In my dreams I am always less lonely than in life.

So today I’m trying to force myself to break out of it, to adapt, and hope that by engaging in the things I enjoy when I’m not sick, I can treat the symptoms of my illness. I will get a haircut. I will go running. I will close the door to my bedroom and not go back in there until night. I will not cancel my plans this evening. And I will try, very, very hard, not to be glum, sarcastic, and mean to the people I meet. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll bring the nose up on this diving plane.

Crazy / Bernie Sanders People on Reddit

1. Crazy

    About a week ago I was standing in the shower and I had a realization: I’m not feeling particularly anxious or self-loathing right now. I imagine for a lot of people this wouldn’t be any kind of revelation or exciting news, but for me it was, because it hadn’t been true for a long time. So long that I can’t even remember when the last time was that I moved through the world untroubled by those feelings, and a bunch of other, related ones that orbit around them. Years, many. It seems like maybe 7 or 8, though that feels impossible when I think about it. Had I really woken up every single morning for 7 straight years feeling what I would characterize as crazy? How was that possible?

    My particular form of mental illness is insidious because of its changability. Every now and again — it seems like it happens every year or so — I fall, unpredictably and completely, into an arid, desperate place of utter despair, and stay there for a brief period. Sometimes it lasts a few days, sometimes a few weeks. Though this is the disease at its most acute, it’s also strangely less terrible, because it’s descrete, identifiable, and eventually it’s over. Don’t get me wrong, it’s horrible — it feels like my brain is dying while my body lives on — but because I can name it, and know it, I’m comfortable with it. Far more dangerous is the chronic state of low-grade unhappiness and anxiety, punctuated by intrusive thoughts of shame and embarrassment, only occasionally alleviated by a few hours of placidity and optimism. The reason it’s dangerous is that I often don’t notice it; it’s bad, but it seems normal, and therefore eternal. It’s paralyzing, and characterized by a constant awareness of time passing at a terrifying rate. I wasn’t even quite aware of how long this had been going on until it went away.

    Now I get up in the morning and I feel basically fine. Hours and hours can go by without suddenly being brought up short by constant self-criticism or terror that pretty soon I’m gonna be old and then I’m gonna die and I will have wasted my entire life on bullshit. It’s weird, but I keep thinking, Is this what other people feel like all the time? Is this what it’s like to be normal? If it keeps up for very long, a lot of my assumptions about how the world actually works are going to have to change, I think. If you guys all walk through the day just dealing with one thing and the next and not living in a state of constant morbid fear or paralyzing anxiety, a lot of guesses I had made about human nature turn out to be completely wrong. The capacity for both sympathy and empathy is limited by lived experience.

2. Bernie Sanders People on Reddit

    Are fucking crazy. They’ve reached a point where most of them have realized that the primary is going against them, but they just cannot believe that more people don’t agree with them. So many of them have retreated into a sort of fantasy land where shady forces far too powerful for mere regular people to reckon with control everything. Every time someone refers to Hillary Clinton as “a bitch” — that’s a paid Clinton shill, trying to make them look bad. Every time a poll comes out showing their candidate behind, it’s a part of a media conspiracy to keep Sanders’ ideas down. In fact, almost everything is a part of a media conspiracy. It’s a loop of illogic that you can’t penetrate, no matter how hard you try. Lay out the obvious case, and you’ll have a lot of people lay into you: “The Media” is far too large and heterogenous to expect a consistent bias for or against one candidate, you can say, and they’ll just tell you that they’ve been bought off by their paymasters. “The Media” is a group of businesses that want to make money, and the best way to make money is to cover competitive races with a lot of dogfighting and clicky stories, you can say, and they will come back with some nonsense about how rich people prefer Hillary Clinton. Most members of “The Media” are underpaid, overeducated white people who are in constant fear for their jobs, making them natural Sanders supporters, you can say, and they’ll scoff. You can ask, Do you really believe in a hyper-competent, massive conspiracy to rig polling and elections in 30 states, one with an omerta so powerful that nobody has blabbed about what would be the biggest, juiciest story in political history since Watergate, and if you do, why didn’t they just rig Iowa and New Hampshire to run Sanders out of the race before he could build up any steam? And they’ll shrug.

    The longer I observe politics, the more obvious it’s become that the most powerful force in collective action is allegiance to a team, and belief that the other team is both bad and not likely to win. It’s difficult to believe that any member of your team would do anything wrong, and it’s hard to believe that all the work you’ve put in for your team isn’t going to pay off. Because you’ve bought in on the team identity, its arguments have come to seem self-evident to you. When you bump up against the cold reality that other people don’t find them self-evident at all, most people’s first response will be to vilify the other. They are, after all, on the bad team. They must be cheating. Or it must be the officiating. What it cannot possibly be is that the things that seem obvious to me are just a series of subjective opinions.

    The internet makes all of this worse. In real life, a lot of my friends are Sanders people — though not as many as you would expect, in a place like Portland; I think I’m attracted to a certain mindset in people that leads to a streak of independence and an unwillingness to go all-in on ideologues and purity campaigns. But it remains true that Portland is in the bag for Sanders, and I remain friendly with all the same people I’ve been friendly with, not least because talking to people face-to-face reminds you of their humanity. Talking to people on Reddit absolutely does not. It cloaks other people’s humanity in nude language, often language used badly by people who are writing in haste and / or don’t know how to communicate very well via the written word. It rewards quick put-downs, and its system of voting comments up or down gives an easy tool for dogpiling on the other. Go on the Sanders subreddit, and you’ll find some reasonable people. But mostly you’ll find dead-enders — people who still believe that somehow, through some magic, he’s gonna come back and win (a lot of these people have started to take refuge in the idea that Clinton will be indicted, which is the kind of flight of fancy that used to be the exclusive purview of the right); people who will tell you with a straight face that voters in the south don’t matter, Bernie has the momentum, Bernie is electable (perhaps the funniest of the various delusions that get handed around the various Sanders echo chambers on the left), and that superdelegates should pick him irrespective of the primary results (thereby proving once again that the USA doesn’t give a shit about black people, I guess, but most people haven’t thought about that angle); and people who believe with the iron bands of faith that this election was stolen, full stop.

    I know I shouldn’t argue with those people; no one’s gonna change anybody else’s minds. But it pains me to see people with good intentions go so far astray, not least because I think that their candidate's ideas are probably the future of American liberalism (or, well, a slightly more realistic version of those ideas). I still think that in 8 or 12 years you’re going to get a true liberal Reagan — what a lot of us wishcasted for Obama, sigh — who’s going to come onto the scene with ideas very similar to Bernie’s, but with a look, sound, and campaign that more reflects America, and that person is going to shock a lot of people by winning. It’s going to take a lot of hard work, of the institutional kind, the kind that the right did for 16 years that brought the once-thought-crazy ideas of Barry Goldwater into the White House in 1980. But I think people on the left are finally waking up to that fact. Sanders showed there was a constituency for the stuff; the problem is that a lot of people (like me) who are sympathetic to his message flatly didn’t believe that he could get any of it done. Change does not happen in one big wave election. I know people hate to hear that, but it’s true. Political identities (like most other identities) tend to calcify in your early 20s, and they’re very resistant to change after that. That’s why Sanders’ overwhelming support among young people never really spilled over — older people weren’t going to just up and quit believing what they’ve always believed in order to elect some obscure guy with semi-alien ideas who wanted to change, not only the stuff they thought was broken, but all the stuff they liked.

    And that’s the other thing that bugs me, riles me up — the assumption that so many Sanders people had that the reason they were going to win was that all these people who had been living under false consciousness, who had voted for Reagan and Bush and every conservative in between, were suddenly going to come awake to what they actually should believe, just because someone explained to them what that was. It’s insulting, and it belittles people who are already feeling pretty little as it is. I think you have to take what people tell you about their convictions at face value, for the most part. If you want to change those convictions, you have to chip away at them, little by litte, not all in one big flood. If you could do that, they wouldn’t be convictions at all.

The Shuffle

    For about a year now I’ve been trying to write my way out of my life, and into another one. It’s hard to explain what that means, really, in part because it means a lot of things. In some ways it means that I’ve been doing a lot of writing-as-therapy, which can be a good trick but also runs the risk of falsifying the self in the attempt to explain it; going to actual therapy has helped me understand that some of the stories I tell about myself are in many ways not true. In other ways it means that I keep thinking that being good at this can get me out of this interminable rut that I feel I’ve been in since — what? 2011? Jesus, that’s five years ago now. I lost the script in October of my first year of graduate school, so that would be 2011. Anyway, I’m less clear on how being a good writer was supposed to do this, other than that I keep thinking one of these days someone will notice I’m good at it and it will validate my entire existence, which of course is a silly and destructive thing to hope for. But there you have it. Stringing sentences together, at this moment in time, feels like literally the only thing in my life. The rest is flat, meaningless tedium. It’s driving me insane.

    The most recent bout of insanity started on Friday, when I spent the entire day sitting in a chair either watching basketball or playing video games, and then discovered (not surprisingly) that when night came around I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed for hour upon hour. I read for a while, I watched TV for a while, I stared at the ceiling and thought about my life (such as it is) for a while. Then, eventually, the sun came up. After some time there was really nothing to be done but get out of bed. So I got out of bed. Then, of course, I had nothing to do. So I went back and sat in the chair and played video games some more. Eventually there was more basketball on TV. I managed to go to the gym. And then it was night again, and once again I could not sleep.

    This is where it becomes completely clear that writing is not really a solution to most problems. At about 2 in the morning, going on 40 hours of constant wakefulness, I pulled out my computer and gave a run at writing about insomnia. The problem with insomnia, however, is that it doesn’t preclude the condition of tiredness — it just means that the body and / or brain (usually brain) will not shut down enough to allow for sleep. I managed to eke out a couple of paragraphs about why I think I can’t sleep (it has to do with an intolerance for silence) before I began to feel explosively, delusionally weird. I was having difficulty keeping track of what was real and what wasn’t. I got focussed on the name of a character from Parks & Rec: Shauna Mulwae-Tweep. It’s a funny name, and I sat in bed with my word processor open, thinking to myself, Shauna Mulwae-Tweep. Sometimes it made me giggle, and sometimes it made me feel weirdly lonely and sad. And then, abruptly, I became aware of how insane it was making me feel.

    And then the bottom fell out of my bed.

    I heard the sound of wood creaking, then splitting, and then the new bedframe I just bought collapsed on itself, sending me, the mattress, my pillows and blankets, and the cat plummeting to the ground, where we all arrived, more or less intact and healthy, with a thud. In another frame of mind I might have cried out, or tried to fix it, or something. Instead I just picked myself up, walked into the living room, lay down on the couch, and typed a status update on Facebook: Shauna Mulwae-Tweep. Eventually I managed to pass out for a couple of hours. Yesterday was an unfolding catastrophe of tiredness and irritability. I wrote a series of irate emails to Overstock.com, the company that sold me my bedframe, finally demanding that they give me $24.95 so that I could purchase an axe and dismantle the bed they sold me, in order to return it to them “in a similar package” to the one they sent it to me in, as per their request. They haven’t replied yet.

    I was hoping that sleeping better last night would solve a lot of this, but as of right now, that hasn’t been the case. The chief symptom of the brokenness in my life is loneliness, a loneliness that seems impervious to companionship or work, that feels like a thousand light years of steel between me and the entire rest of the world. And here again is the failure of my attempt to write my way out of my life: because my life consists largely of blank, flat aloneness, and writing is a solitary activity. If it can be done in company I’ve never figured out how. If it can seek friendship I’ve never seen it happen. It can’t fix your life.

    I try not to spend too much time wallowing in self-pity, both because self-pity is not a good look on a person and because I think wallowing in it tends to make it harder to wash off. But it can be hard when you wake up every morning and there’s no reason to expect that this day will be any different to the one that came before. I’ll be 36 years old in a couple of weeks, and my life makes no sense to me. I can remember when I was half this age, graduating high school, thinking I was looking forward to becoming an adult and figuring out who I was. I worry now that that’s exactly what happened, and what I’ve figured out is that I am a flat, dull person who simultaneously feels intense loneliness and finds most people completely intolerable to be around.

    Fuck. Sorry. I was gonna try to end this funny, but I failed. Now to go off to my shrink’s office and complain about stuff for a while.

Bummed Out

    You may have noticed that my output on this blog has been a little spotty the last few days. Or, who knows, maybe you didn’t — maybe there’s no you at all, here, maybe this is just me writing bullshit and putting it on the internet, where it will disappear like a drop of water sliding into an ocean. Maybe you is, ultimately, me. That’s a depressing thought.

    Anyway. The reason my output here has tapered is because I’ve been spiralling ever since I hurt my ankle. Maybe it’s more accurate to say I’ve been spiralling for years, and as a result I don’t cope very well with adversity. Maybe not. The problem, in the short term anyway, is that not being able to run has affected my happiness — already tenuous — very seriously. There’s a fair body of research that indicates serious exercise is as effective as antidepressants in lifting one’s mood. For me it’s been more effective. Antidepressants have never helped me one whit, as far as I can tell, but running helps me stay thin, it gives me a sense of accomplishment, and I’m convinced it positively changes the chemistry of my brain. It makes me happier. Not running makes me less happy. I haven’t been able to run in eight days.

    I’m realizing, too, that I had placed a lot of weight on running this upcoming marathon that it really couldn’t — or shouldn’t — bear. I last ran a marathon before I went to graduate school. In graduate school I was deeply unhappy, in a way I hadn’t been in a long time. I gained a lot of weight, I became very socially isolated, and I think it’s fair to say I barely scraped through at the end, when I was so depressed I had difficulty getting out of bed and going to class. Then, at the end of that experience — just days before my oral exams — my life was interrupted by a grisly tragedy that felt sort of like my fault. I left, and was given a degree basically because people felt bad for me. I moved back to Oregon, and started piecing my life back together. I think I had placed all my hopes and expectations — hopes of returning to normal, of making friends, of learning how to be in a committed relationship, of drinking less, of finishing my novel, of getting a real job, etc — on getting back into marathon shape. If I could just traverse those 26 miles outside Tucson, everything would be fine. No, it wouldn’t bring my neice or my foster brother back to life. No, it wouldn’t get me hired by NPR. No, it wouldn’t win me a National Book Award. But maybe I could stop feeling like shit about that stuff all the time, the way I have for a while now. Maybe I could look at myself in the mirror without thinking, What the fuck is wrong with you? Or something.

    All of this was probably unwise, of course, for a lot of reasons — not least of which was that this, injury, was always possible. It’s become clear to me now that I’m not going to be able to run a marathon in two months. I’m not able to run across the parking lot without severe pain, and if you can’t train, you can’t race. This is the third straight time that injury or illness has arrived at almost exactly the same moment, when I’m getting into the serious distance training, to derail my plans. I’ve now failed to run more marathons than I’ve succeeded in running. And the let down — the let down is terrible, not least because of how freighted this marathon training had become for me. I’ve had surging feelings of anger and grief over the last week or so, feelings that seem unrelated to a bad ankle sprain, but which I think kind of are. Not only do I not have the good brain chemistry mojo going right now, I also have this overwhelming feeling that I’m failing at my life. I’m never going to get any of it sorted out. I’ve screwed it all up forever. That’s what it feels like.

    When I hurt myself, I knew this was possible. I was jogging down Burnside listening to The Gist on my headphones, when my foot landed sideways and I brought down the entirety of my weight on my turned ankle. I felt a grinding, and then heard an audible pop, so loud it penetrated the podcast. I collapsed into the dirt. The first coherent thought I remember having was, I’m not going to be able to run this marathon. It’s all over.

    And so here I am. I am on edge all the time now. When people are loud in a bar I am disturbed, and then angry. When my cat wants to sit on my lap I just want her to go away. When I try to read a book by James Salter I think, I hate all these fucking white people. When Bernie Sanders comes up in conversation it pisses me off that idealists like him so much. Last night I dreamt I challenged Donald Trump to a fistfight. I am so fucking sick of the overtanned hippies in this town. I just wish that I could be someone else. Someone happier and thinner and less afraid. Someone less angry. Or, at the very least, someone whose ankles were stronger.

A Taxonomy of Unhappiness

    Depression comes in a lot of different forms. For most of my life it’s been a semi-regular companion, a little guy hanging around telling me that I’m boring, that I shouldn’t try to do anything today, that I’m fat and ugly, and that I probably don’t want to meet anybody because it would just a a hassle and we wouldn’t enjoy it anyway. How convincing I find that little guy’s arguments is the measure by which I can tell if I’m really depressed or not. It’s unpleasant but tolerable, and it goes on forever.

    And then there are what I have come to think of as the episodes. Sometimes these are triggered by events, but often as not they just kind of come screaming out of nowhere. The little guy is gone. Or rather, I am gone, because I’ve become that guy. I can’t move. I can barely think. Even this has degrees, though. At its very worst, it’s like I go through a looking glass and become inhuman. I learned the words psychomotor agitation from a shrink when I described the worst of the episodes. In that case, I can’t move, but I can’t sit still. I can’t think but I can’t stop. And it’s not rational. It is, sometimes, delusional. Borderline hallucinatory.

    Most of the episodes are more like what happened over the last couple of days. For no particular reason, I woke up on Sunday morning totally unmoored from anything resembling a purpose in life. There were no real thoughts in my head. Brain the size of a planet and the only think I could think was, BORING. Everything was boring, but especially me, especially being me. Getting out of bed — boring. Working on the book — boring. (And futile. I’m never gonna finish that book. I was absolutely certain of this yesterday morning.) Eating — boring. Human interaction — boring. And shitty. And . . . whatever, it’s hard to describe. You can describe most experiences because your brain is going when you experiencing them. But in this state of mind, I might as well be asleep.

    You never know how long it’s going to last. It appears to be easing now, about 36 hours in. No idea why, just as I have no idea why it started. I’m noticing the sun as it goes down. But there’s a weird hangover effect, too. It’s like when you get out of the ocean but you’re still dripping wet. You’re cold, and you might as well still be in the water.