A bit of background as a partway method to mitigate the guilt I feel for my two-month blog exile. I have started the 18 month trek beyond theorizing about future clients actually seeing them. It all started about five weeks ago. These are for the most part relatively moderate to high functioning individuals who take an hour of their time to seek the listening eyes and occasional words from stranger with whom they have no outside contact. Little ol' me. Insert mischievous smile.
The first weeks were, obviously, the most emotionally jangling. A touch with terror wouldn't be an inappropriate nominal phrase. Although I had another counselor with me for the first two sessions I met these individuals (as a handover of sorts to another newbie in the shrink trade), the first session after, where I was alone with them for the first time, was the purest experience of possibility I had ever experienced -- and with this, obviously, came anxiety, of which possibilities are its fuel. My biggest difficulty was gaining a concrete memory: I quite literally had a hard time remembering sometimes important details they had told me minutes ago. That's how my anxiety functions. My exterior is cool and collected, and there are rarely any nerves bouncing to cause me physiological feelings of nervousness. No, my head goes fuzzy. I see the individual in the flesh before me and am lost in the dizziness of trying to think of what to say next.
But things did get better. And to use the greatest amount of literary downplay I can muster (it's called litotes, dear autodidacts) in expressing my feelings about myself as a counselor, I can see myself doing this sorta thing, you know?
I like very much where I'm at, tagged as a therapist who spends his free hours drenched in some ungodly subject purely incongruous with shrink-think, the flesh-and-blood puzzles of current clients in my mental background for needed stimulation. It surely is no coincidence that I chose a profession that demands more than any other that I focus on other things, lest the perpetual threat of burnout catch my younger days; God knows other things (rather than one thing) is precisely what encapsulates my interests most. But despite all this security and previously unexperienced vocational contentment, which manifests itself at times as pure overflowing joy and other times as a more subtle feeling that I'm a badass guru who can solve the problems of the world, the thought still touches me gently on the shoulder from time to time:
What do you want to be tomorrow, John? I'd like to be a theologian, joyfully crushed in the academic cliche of juggling my time between books and teaching (with counseling as a practical refresher). Then the other demons tap my shoulder. Write a novel! Focus on poetry! Look into journalism (yes, the silliest persuader yet)! Occasionally the drunkest of them all will pop up belatedly and demand that I twist my time to pursuing literature in grad school.
But there's a daddy demon behind them all. He stays stuck behind the Ozian curtain, voice breathy and seductive, a background radiation to my thoughts that I'm barely aware of save when I capture myself completely: stop enjoying the moment. Turn your unmitigated love of life to a useful activity of some sort. Kill the present through some grand teleology. Make plans. You'll be a better person. -- And that's always where the line is broken and I wake from my self-dream blinking at the bewildering simplicity of life. It's really a question of competition. And often the fight isn't against anyone out there, but my own invented self. Pardon the abstruse philosophical interlude, but Kierkegaard had it down pat: sin is the self's refusal to be its own self, or (and here I'm pushed to the stage) the self that wants to be its own self, created from its own implacable imagination. I want to be my own invention when I'm lost in thoughts of possible realities rather than attending to the singular purpose that constantly unveils moment by moment.
I really wish my blog had a simpler theme than the incessantly repeated (theistic) existential call. Become who you are and everything else becomes nothing else. Find a meaning in life. Pause for the silence to unveil your values, and with it you just might find your self swept in with the metaphysical mix. Then (at last perhaps) nothing will bother you. All distractions will be swept up under your gaze towards your particular (and unreplicable) good. I can only think of Nietzsche via Zarathustra on two separate preachy occasions:
Higher than love of the neighbor is love of the farthest and the future; higher yet than the love of human beings I esteem the love of things and ghosts. This ghost that runs after you, my brother, is more beautiful than you; why do you not give him your flesh and your bones? But you are afraid and run to your neighbor."This is my way; where is yours?" -- thus I answered those who asked me "the way." For the way -- that does not exist."
The poison of our times is that we're at the pinnacle of idealizing our very ideals. We don't just believe in some special principle or idea for our lives and thereby progress; we believe in the idea of progressing, and so our plans take a hollow turn. We take up work not because it's the type of work that's best for us as individuals, but because it's work, and work means a chance to get ahead, the more money or less effort the better. Our rosy roles are good enough, and so for eight hours a day (outside work and sleep) we're left freefloating in nihilistic recreation. The cultural commons are truly Godsends: marriage and children keep us committed, as if forcing our selves before us, and we always have the morning coffee for a transitory sanctuary to praise this world through our wakening states. But we still have plenty of time to lose ourselves in goals not sanctified by a higher power (or, if you prefer, atheists, our Heideggerian authenticity). Turn instead to the love of your own ghost, to the self that hovers over your own immediate self (in the Mephistopholean words of Kierkegaard), and then all will make sense.
Which brings me back to me. Earlier last week I remember the prayer I made so clearly. Repeating the minimalistic intercessory method of Frank Laubach, I asked very directly but with all the heart in the world (not without fear, not without pause): God, what must I do? And you're likely to know the answer if you know me with any depth, which flashed with such an immediacy that my neurons jangled in their cerebral dance just to keep up.
Write.
Of course, I pushed it off, fully conscious of my guilt, and leaned for Tolstoy. I wasn't incapable of writing. It wasn't something that brought with it the terrible literary nausea that beginner's self doubt so incisively instills (note: many great writers are arrogant for a reason). I just, you know, sort of, like, didn't do it. And now here's the downspirited dog, drenched from rain and the pain that comes with a day of useless wandering, back to warm house of self expression through letters organized in a certain fashion, healing myself fully by the very act of writing these pretty complaints.
I wonder sometimes if the only book I could ever write would be composed of false reasons for why I never wrote. A man wakes up in solitude at two in the morning, drowned in the sound of an air conditioner which sings like a fake waterfall, the itch present for the first time twenty-two years since birth. Sixty years later and he is no further along than he was before, life roaring polyphonically in the foreground (career, marriage, children, house, car, etc.), the initial itch left alone yet still contaminating his thoughts in a deep and inexplicable way, like a lover one never quite releases from the heart. Two hundred pages later, with added explosions and sex for the publishers, and there's really something there. Actually, Proust did just this (with a different precipitating event and without the vampiric wishes of publishers, sex not withstanding), and crammed it into a mere four thousand pages, the reverberations of praise still lavished upon him by those rarities who still take reading seriously.
Ah, at least you, dear reader, are entertained. Call this whole virtual literary space my own Proustian blog project. If I wasn't who I was, I'd most certainly enjoy reading about who I think I was here. A bit like a dreamer's soap opera, where hero and villain occupy the same smiling face but constantly change clothes to keep the old ladies and conservative Caucasian housewives bent forward in suspense.
You really can't change the channel now, can you?
