The Road to Crazy

This is a difficult post to write. It may be hard to read as well. It sure as hell is long.

I’ve been experiencing what can charitably be described as a partial nervous breakdown. I don’t honestly know what that means, but I’ve been unimaginably frustrated, VERY angry, horribly stressed, and prone to spontaneously break into tears for at least a week. Tonight my wife wanted me to “let it out,” and did I ever. The gist of this is that I’ve spent my entire life doing terrible damage to myself, just as I was taught, and it’s finally all spilled out into the open. No more recess!

The apparent catalyst was a backlog of website work for half a dozen clients–ever-rising guilt, resentment at having to do the work instead of doing my own thing (supposedly), and unspeakable tension. Not that this is anything new in my life, you understand: I have a history of deciding that my evil employer (or my friends, the place I live, the weather, national politics, having to mow the grass, etc.) was preventing me from fulfilling my true destiny, forcing me to “free” myself. Once I do that, however, it always turns out that I’m suddenly poor, and immediately the creative process I thought I was jumping into becomes perverted by the need to make it pay. After a while, depression and panic ensue, and I fall back into doing something I don’t want to do, just for the money. Before long the new activity becomes That Which Oppresses Me, I quit again, and the cycle repeats, over and over and over.

I could get away with this for short stretches when my wife was a professor and all I had to do was shave and be nice. “Someday” was far, far away back then, but now it’s here. Man, is it ever.

One of the reasons we moved from Maryland was because it was killing me, or so I thought: the constant sameness, living where my parents grew up, the perceived injunction to do things in a certain way, and the evil humidity, of course. If we but moved to New Mexico, everything would be different! I’ve had plenty to bitch about with respect to Taos too, though, as one might easily anticipate. Housing. The MUD. The cold…)

All of this was (and is) bullshit, of course. Nothing ever truly oppressed me. That was all projection arising from FURIOUS buried anger at my parents, who did everything they could to push me into a box and convince me I’d be happy there–trying to do the “right thing,” naturally. Good intentions, ugly consequences.

A few days ago I woke up already depressed about all the work I had to do and couldn’t stand. Before I’d had my second cup of coffee, my beautiful, long-suffering wife had a moment of her own and blew up in a scathing rage: the MUD, the ice, the dusty house, the filthy slipcover on the sofa, the lack of space, the getting nowhere with our lives! It was fearsome to behold, and although it wasn’t directed at me, I took it hard and added tons of guilt. My lack of material success surely figured into this, I thought, and you can imagine how happy I was to sit down at the iMac to change the color of a client’s webpage links…

Meanwhile, my wife took off to run some errands. About 30 minutes later, she phoned from the plaza to report a nasty “thumping noise” coming from the back of the car. I made her walk around the car and look. Yes, a flat tire–and she’d driven on it for at least five miles! (Oh my God.) I drove to town in my truck and changed the tire. After having it checked and confirming that it was ruined, I spent the rest of the day deciding what to do: whether to buy two new tires or get a whole new set, where to look for them, wondering what we could afford, and so on. Somewhere in this process, the septic tank overflowed again, and I put in a call to have it pumped out. No flushing for the rest of the day. I should mention that our out-of-state landlady’s scheduled arrival that very afternoon to “discuss certain issues concerning the property” had enlived the brew. Naturally I didn’t get a lick of work done, giving me even more to feel guilty about. (The plot thickens…)

So tonight I “let it all out.” The details of what emerged will wait for other writing, but I can tell you it was homicidal anger at the ones who raised me. I wanted to go back in time with a baseball bat and beat them senseless–I still do, and not just them! The main thing is, I relived everything again, and in the course of telling this, I fell into a scary state which soon had me fighting with the one I love. Idiotic stuff, petting the cat and not hanging on my every word, etc. Paranoia, you see. I’d returned to the nexus, the origin of my pain, and in so doing became possessed once more.

All of this is way more intense now than I can ever remember. It must be closer to the surface, where it needs to be, because I’m just too fucking old to have a forever of tomorrows, and this shit has to stop. Good God, I’m grateful for the work people give me! We need the money, and there’s nothing preventing me from writing from the heart and making a living from it at the same damn time… (Knowing me, I’ll quit the other stuff soon enough, regardless.)

But now I understand: the telltale is resentment. Anything that I hate “having” to do goes right back to the box and lack of recognition for who I really am, for what I really love to do. Lack of love, really. Whenever I feel unjustly repressed, I’ll now recall the actual source and bleed off more encapsulated agony. Sooner or later, the air will clear. However it goes, I’ll write myself out of this, even if it’s the last thing I ever do.

Given the mileage on this body, that will likely be the case!

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