Existential Angst
or
When does this end?
I am almost 75 years old and yet I find myself embedded in a seemingly endless search for signs of intelligent life, not just in the universe per Lily Tomlin, but within the heady confines of my own mind. How long can I negotiate with my past? How long should/must I? How long do others? How many have dysfunctional/traumatic/heavy childhoods? I suspect every person on earth my age is at this exact juncture. But why do I think mine unique? Maybe that’s a clue.
Uniqueness
This is the core concept of humanity writ large. Our individualism. Our uniqueness. It is imbued in us all at birth, before birth if you, like me, believe we have some engagement with our past lives and our future souls. The extent to which we each believe in our own speciality is a fungible asset. Our parental and societal rearing guides and/or dictates how well we incorporate our early vision of ourselves into our adult personas. This raising up is the pivotal moment in our progression. How much and how thoroughly do we assimilate the formulas we are given as children? How well do our eventual adult selves reflect and project these core principles we try on while growing?
Mostly, how the hell do we stop obsessing over all this?
And when?
I went into serious therapy at age 73 for a variety of reasons. Primarily because every medium, seer, tarot reader, and psychic I have encountered since I was 15 years old has told me that my end date was 83. While sixty years ago that futuristic number seemed forever-off, it became a bedrock touchstone of my core. A helix spiral of my internal DNA. I incorporated that number into the brick and mortar of my soul. As such, and with what I believe(d) was my last decade in this human form at hand, I wanted to clear up all the loose ends, sort through my cluttered mental closets, and jettison a bunch of crap.
I wanted 10 years of peace.
But the process is much more than a spring cleaning. It is akin to renovating an historic old house. Years of neglect and deterioration, layers of old paint reflecting moods and eras long past; tasteless shag carpeting and avocado appliances. The discard heap of my particular life was daunting. It is for everyone, I assume, but then not everyone is as introspective and curiously morbid about their pasts as I am.
Or are they?
Universality is another concept I wonder about. Just how alike are we all? Our friendships are bonded via similar interests and experiences, but we rarely talk about our deeper, inner, hidden, selves. The ugly bits we fret about when we turn out the lights at night. Things always seem more important in the dark; more freighted with import and a sinister heaviness. A lighter dawn always arrives though. At least that has been my experience, so far.
Now, as we age-out, these troublesome tendrils of trauma seek the light and, like ivy crawling through cracks in the mortar, they begin to cover and overtake the sturdy brick facades we have painfully constructed for decades. Their tensile weight pulls at our core, strangling what lightness and joy we have and using it like food to thrive and grow.
We are covered in Kudzu and crumbling
The link is for those not from the South, but Kudzu is a great analogy for the strangulation of our lives and our seeming inability to control it. Phones, internet, AI, you name it, we are being consumed by consumer goods that we all cannot now live without. We are the last generation who can still remember a time before all this. Before we were deluged by a tsunami of our own making, one that we all willing accede to, and that now controls every aspect of our lives.
The real kicker is that none of this has made us better, happier, or more peaceful. Instead, it has ramped up our stress levels to catastrophic highs. Our life expectancy is actually dropping. Really? With the sheer amount of medical advancements in just a single generation we should be close to immortal by now. Instead, people my age are living on borrowed time and replacement parts and shorter lifespans than our parents.
Age, it’s true, is not for the faint of heart. Personally, I never expected to live THIS long, not by a long shot. Yet here we are. Here I am. Outliving all the doomsday diagnoses I have received in the last fifty years. Talk about PTSD. The diagnosis I currently inhabit is now named CPTSD, Complex PTSD and I am its poster child. If the physical breaks and beatings are not enough, the mental assaults are even more permanent in their collectively lasting effects. Just how many times can a person hear “You have about six months. I’d suggest you get your affairs in order now.”? Personally? I can count at least three times on ready recall, so far.
I no longer have what is classed as a terminal disease but back then, last century living, I did. The warnings were “normal” then and almost every person I knew in those days was either already dead or actively dying so why should my situation differ?
But it did
I lived. Live on. And on. Despite all odds I have stumbled my way through a life I never anticipated. The frustratingly sad part, to me, is that because of this fatalistic resignation at the time, I took up a mantle of misery if you will. I neglected to cast a critical eye to the future. I erroneously assumed I had no future so why plan for an eventuality I could not envision and did not anticipate? This gap of conceptualization colors every discussion I have had, then and now, and still today. Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda. I live a life that was stumbled into like a drunk into the nearest open bar; giddy with the prospect of another drink, another adventure, another moment of false bravado that only a death sentence can imbue.
What a pathetic squandering of a life
This sounds like textbook self-pity, and, in a very specific manner, it probably is. I believe I earned the moment and the mood, but my mission is to move through it and beyond and drop the manacles that self-pity binds us with. Thus, my obsession with self-examination; remodeling of the soul as I prefer to look upon it. It is akin to the afore mentioned crumbling house. Unfortunately, the foundation is still cracked and off center but I believe, with a This Old House-worthy refresh, I could become an historic home, complete with bronze plaque “Circa 1952”.
So, my goal, with assists from my therapist, Ketamine, and whatever other psychedelics I can muster, is to open some long-shuttered windows, let fresh air in, and replace and recharge a lot of old, rusty, wiring in my brain. And while we’re talking brain, I should disclose about now that I did have a major brain snafu five years ago, in the midst of Covid. A significant fall (we’ll talk falls more in a bit) left me with two brain bleeds, subdural hematomas for the more medically inclined, that made their presence know about six weeks after the fall. I was a stumbling, shuffling, slurring brain fog of a mess that, moments after I went to the ER, got me a neurosurgeon, an ICU bed, and I promptly had four holes drilled in my skull.
Skull closed (I have titanium man-hole covers now), my brain drained, I started a new career the next week. I was so busy and buried in new avenues of uncharted growth that I had little time to assess impacts, either on my own thought processes, or more importantly, on what others around me might be cataloging. It was some time later that a few close friends finally said things like “You were a hot mess there for a couple years”.
Pause. Examine.
It was just this past month, while rewatching Animal Kingdon, a series Dave and I both loved, that I had yet another anti-bias confirmation if you will. I got to seasons five and six and had no recall of having ever seen them. Midway through I called Dave and asked if we had, in fact, finished the series. He was firm in his insistence that we did, in fact, watch all of it. As I watched the finale of the series, I was as surprised as a newborn gulping air for the first time. I had no clue who died, who lived, and what the end of the six seasons felt like, a thing I wait for when a beloved series ends.
I then, to satisfy some curiosity, wandered into MyChart. I had to dig through five years and hundreds of pages and entries to finally find the dates I was looking for; brain surgery May of 2021, seasons five and six aired fall and winter of 2021. No further information needed. Except maybe what else have I missed? I say missed because I do not recall ever having had this knowledge so how could I be labeled as having forgotten it (much to the dismissal of many friends). It’s just a Swiss cheese of a section of my memory banks that I can never turn into a creamy Fontina. The missing buffet, if you will.
For the last few years, I have been taking what I refer to as The Pause. I take two months out of each year, tending more in the summer now as global warming and my shook-up internal thermostat (brain thingy, again) have made it physically impossible to live in the desert in the summer. This summer, I am in San Francisco. I am in a literal fogbank instead of simply the figurative one in my brain. This Pause is multi-layered and full of intention.
It is fifty years this summer since I moved to San Francisco. My Half-Centennial if you will. It stuns me every time I say this out loud; again, the gift I never believed I would receive, these fifty years. I came to this Pause with a fully formed list of intentions, and room all throughout this list for serendipitous popups that I knew would happen. I am proud to say I am well on my way to accomplishing most of my heady goals. Not without help I might add.
Help was designed by me as a period, three months, of low dose Ketamine therapy to maybe unlock some of the answers I have been seeking for years, make sense of the missed opportunities that I squandered throughout my life with such willing abandon, and hopefully to rewire my damaged brain and, in doing all these things, possible find the peace I have been longing for. I am six weeks into this year’s journey and pleased to report that progress is being made.
I started this year in a wheelchair with a new pacemaker (the latest in human hardware upgrades) a healing, badly broken leg, and a chasm of depression the likes of which I had not felt since childhood and maybe not this deep even then. I think that with age and experience we tend to freight our emotional ups and downs with a lot more lived experience and we know the consequences in a way we could not as children. Hence a depression that felt suicidal at worst and severely debilitating at best. I was having dreams of my own death, some with a curious clinical remove, others sweat-inducing night terrors. This was not normal. This was not me.
Ketamine has helped; the drug, not the providing company, they are a living nightmare. I will shine a light on them and others like them in another piece. But the drug? First dose, eye-opening. I cannot describe with any precision yet exactly what it feels like or how it works. I think time will be the true test of this show. It has been trial and error with dosage, and I fired the company, quickly, but retained the drugs! I can report that my mind is much more engaged with my life and less focused on my death. All good. Depression is receding into background noise, for now, and I am determined to push it into its own grave, without me along for the ride.
A host of other behaviors, most OCD-ish (these reared up and amplified recently, I have never experienced them before) are rapidly abating and my mind, a hot mess of jumble mumble, is calmer, way less stressed, and my outlook is 180 degrees from where it was two months ago. I am no longer wedded to my step counter app, this was SO feeing and only looking back do I understand the prisoner that I was to that, and many other behaviors.
I am not done. I will never be done. I want to stress this. Life is not a spectator sport. The game is never over. We can never leave the stands and go home to analyze the after game. We are in it, if not to win it, then to at least feel like we played each quarter as well as we could. We lived through our mistakes, we regrouped, and we got back on the field with a renewed vigor and a mindset that allows us to continue the contest.
I’ll be so ready when the final whistle blows. Honestly. I have no fear of the end. It will most likely be an end of my own making after careful thought and planning, unless something unforeseen takes me out ahead of any schedule I might have in mind. Shit happens. I am aware.
Yet with all of this, this sturm and drang of living, I am coming through this process not unbruised, not unbroken, but I am repairing the broken bits as best I can and with some creativity, some patience, and a lot of help, I am stronger once again than before. There is plenty of blame to toss around in our world today. I will not name even one piece of that negativity. All I have it me and successful or not,
It Ends With Me