Autumn Christian's Blog

A Sanctuary Built on the Edge of the Dark

My grandma died a few days ago.

At least, in the literal sense of the word. The truth is she died almost four years ago when my grandpa died. Her contract with life ended. It's noticeable in photographs. Before she was giggly, smiley, her eyes alight. You could tell she was proud of who she was and what she’d done. Not bad for a farm girl from Oklahoma. Lawanna always said she’d never marry a dairyman. Yet she hadn’t been able to resist the charm of my grandfather when he swaggered into the Kingfisher town bank where she worked. She’d giggle when she talked about him coming into the bank every day to check his balance just for an excuse to see her. She was wearing pantyhose, was all my grandpa George would say, in his gruff way, with a little half smile.

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She was alive while he was alive.

But when he died there was no after — not really.

Lawanna Christian fulfilled her purpose on this earth when my grandpa died. Dementia took hold almost immediately. Her happiness melted into irreconcilable grief. She told us to throw her in the coffin with George. Other times she asked why we couldn’t just keep his body in the basement. It didn’t matter whether it was this side of the earth or the other; she couldn’t seem to understand why she had to be separated from him.

When two people have been married for sixty years, maybe they are no longer two separate human beings. Every conversation, every argument, every sigh, every time your gaze touches, smooths away the hard edges separating your personhood from another. Your nerves open up to entangle with each other. Skin to skin. Mind to mind. Maybe there appears to be two bodies, but that’s just a perceptual illusion. They stopped being two a long time ago.

I should have been prepared for her to die. I shouldn’t have cried when they took her body away. The hospice nurse had told us it was happening. We were watching her oxygen go down. Yet still I had the sensation like maybe she wouldn’t have died if I hadn’t let my attention lapse. I felt my body wracked with terror, the feeling of an unknown unknown lurking in my blind spot, like maybe I’d forgotten something. Like maybe there was something I could’ve done. Maybe there was some kind of experimental dementia treatment we could’ve tried, from Brazil or Sweden. Scientists and doctors make medical breakthroughs all the time. Maybe there was something I could’ve said to heal her grief.

She’s gone. Is she really gone? Everything’s changed. Nothing’s changed. I am thrashing against the inevitable. Death has never felt real to me, no matter how much time has passed. Everyone I ever lost could walk through the door right now, smiling like they’ve just played a magician’s trick. I wouldn’t feel surprised. A living entity is being subsumed into memories. Is this what people talk about when they talk about trying to bargain with death? A moment passes. Another moment. She’s still dead. And each moment thereafter is seamless. There is no wound in time. There is no damage to mark the place where she left us. Everything is in its right place, no matter how much I can’t grasp the fact that she’s gone.

But I still feel like if I just look away, if I just change my perception a little bit, I’ll see her again. I’ll be back in my bed at the Christian farm, morning light glowing through white curtains, and she’ll call me for breakfast. I can hear the buzz of the early morning, the pop of bacon in the pan, the door to the garage opening, closing, as people come in and out of the house. My grandpa enters. He brings the scent of the farm with it, grassland mixed with manure. It’s a bright and heavy smell.

It’s the smell of home. Could I be back here? After all these years? I can still see it if I close my eyes. It runs through my mind, colors washed like watercolor. The farmhouse is thrumming. There are pancakes for me to eat, fresh milk from the cows for me to drink. Have you ever had raw milk? It tastes like it’s alive. It’s a milk that swirls with the taste of the world around it, its breaths and its sighs. My grandma is running here and there, doing fifteen things at once - answering the phone from the Christian cheese factory, feeding the kittens, making chocolate chip cookies and another batch of pancakes, just in case. My grandpa sits down to eat.

“How tall are you getting?” he asks me, and I groan because I’ve heard this joke a thousand times. And after some prodding, finally I answer.

“Huh. I didn’t know they could stack shit that high,” he says the punchline, in his gruff way, with a little half-smile. I laugh and roll my eyes and reach into his front pocket to steal his snuff. I run across the house with it, laughing, daring him to come after me.

There’s light shining across the pond and through the back door. It dances across the kitchen table. I feel it in the back of my mind now. It illuminates everything that comes before, and everything that will come after.

I open my eyes again and they’re gone.

For the first time in a long time, I’m standing alone in their kitchen. The house is quiet, almost in an apologetic way. It seems like it’s going to crumble under the weight of a foreign silence. The funeral home just came to take my grandma away and her caretakers left to get groceries and supplies to feed the animals. I can’t stop holding my breath.

I couldn’t bring myself to write about my grandpa when he died several years ago. I didn’t think I was a good enough writer. I didn’t know how to write about him in a way that was both honest and raw, that was loving without being simpering, truthful without being cruel. Everything I write turns dark. I’m the kind of woman who’ll notice the single rain cloud on the clear horizon, the dying worm on the sidewalk on a crisp summer day. I didn’t want my writing to drown my grandparents in the deluge of my crude sorrow.

And the truth is that I was ashamed of myself, of the way I’d seen them when I was younger. I imagined myself a worldly intellectual even though I’d barely stepped foot outside of Texas. I thought they were simple, narrow-minded. I couldn’t understand why they’d chosen a life without travel, without intellectualism, without ever exploring what was beyond the borders of their small slice of reality. They lived and died within just a few miles where they were born.

I cringe at the memory now, but I remember rolling my eyes when I went shopping with my grandpa at the United supermarket and he got excited that the bacon was on sale. How ignorant, I thought. This is all it takes to make you happy? I wouldn’t fall into that trap and be lured into a small world with small delights.

I thought I’d suffocate if I stayed in Oklahoma for the rest of my life. My blood burned inside me with the desire to see the world. I didn’t want to be crushed under the weight of its smallness. I wanted to be free.

Only after nearly fifteen years of “freedom” did I realize I’d sold myself a lie. There was nothing “out there” to see that was worth more than what my grandparents had built. There wasn’t a restaurant or a bar or a landscape or a job or a whirlwind romance or a balcony with a stunning view or a book launch party or a hit of acid or a flattering compliment about my beauty and genius from someone famous that could instill in me anything more than a fleeting sensation. After everything I’d done I still couldn’t fill a single cup with anything that mattered.

I got everything I ever asked for.

It just turned out I was asking for the wrong things.

I wanted to be entertained while I danced on the precipice of the Nothing. I pursued life like a shot of adrenochrome. I went so fast that it rattled my teeth. I nearly fell out of the back of my own head.

I had no idea what actually made life worth living.

My grandparents knew.

When I was younger I couldn’t understand why my grandma never allowed herself to sit down. Sometimes she’d work herself into a frenzy trying to make sure everything got done and I’d shout, “Grandma! Just relax!” She never learned how.

But I understand now. Love is not just a good feeling, and safety isn’t a thing you get to have for free. Love is a responsibility and a decree. It’s a sacred mission, and one that my grandparents undertook without looking back. Only when I didn’t have it anymore did I realize how much they’d done, to make sure we all had a place that felt like home. It was love manifesting as it was supposed to.

It’s easy to take home for granted. I never realized how rare it was, how much work it requires to uphold. And because of my grandparents, no matter how far I traveled from the farm, I still knew what home was supposed to feel like. They gave me the blueprint to aspire to.

I’ll be moving into my grandparent’s farm home now that they’re both dead. When I was younger they asked me if I wanted to live there, but I couldn’t imagine it for myself back then. I didn’t want to live out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but farmland and the winking dark gaps between stars.

But it's not nowhere is it?

It's the land that my grandparents saw for its potential, and constructed a home and a living out of the red Oklahoma dirt. It's the place where my grandparents raised two children and all the farmhands who came after that called them “mom” and “dad.” It's the place where they rode horses up and down the raised hills, crossing ancient buffalo wallows filled with green glass from old medicine bottles. It's the place where my grandpa found arrowheads that rose to the surface of the mud after the rain and saw UFOs zipping across the winking horizon. It's where my father found abandoned coyote pups in a den and raised one as his own. It's the place where my grandparents both died surrounded by people they loved. It’s the place where they made a something out of nothing.

It's the place I returned to again and again, until I learned to recognize the fact.

It’s my home.

It's a sanctuary built on the edge of the dark, and someone has to be there to keep the lights on.

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Only a Body

“‎As I get older I see that running has changed for me. What used to be about burning calories is now more about burning up what is false. Lies I used to tell myself about who I was and what I could do, friendships that cannot withstand hills or miles, the approval I no longer need to seek, and solidarity that cannot bear silence. I run to burn up what I don't need and ignite what I do.”
― Kristin Armstrong

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I didn't want to be a body. I wanted to pour myself into a word.

I hated anything physical. I hated being forced to trudge outside in the sunlight. I didn't like the flaunting curves of nature, the way that every tree and sunset seemed to waggle its useless beauty above me while I panted in its shadow, sweat seeping through my shirt, mud soaked into my shoes. (Suffice to say, I wasn’t a very sporty or athletic kid.) I didn’t want to play dodgeball or run laps around the school. I wanted to play inside my imagination.

There was a flagrant pain to mere existence. While poets and parents crowed about the splendor of the scenery, I only felt the mosquito at the back of my neck. Why couldn’t they see how mundane it all was? How boring? Even the camera in my mind’s eyes was more interesting than anything in the outside world. Thoreau had obviously never played Pokémon Red on the Gameboy color or read Philip K. Dick or duked it out in Smash Brothers. If he had, then maybe he wouldn’t have spent so much time waxing about the autumnal sun.

I wanted to be a video game character.

I wanted to be a character in a book.

I wanted to be on a mission with all the repetition erased. I wanted my life to have a purpose that followed a surge of constant craving. Most writers didn’t seem to jive with reality, and neither did I. I figured they must’ve been lying when they talked about the beauty of the world. It was another literary exaggeration. It wasn’t real, in the way that vampires and magical carnivals weren’t real.

Skin was not meant for pleasure. The ache of my body was just the constant reminder that I was ugly flesh, and that flesh was only a vehicle to allow me to return to the delights of my fantasy life, over and over again. If I focused too much on my body then I was reminded that my lungs burned when I ran, and my back throbbed when I did push-ups, and that the thing that people called love wasn’t actually love at all, because wasn’t love just obligation and disappointment and warm tears in your throat that you could taste when you tilted your head back?

It was better to just pretend that I was nothing. I projected my life into other worlds.

But the first time I lifted weights, everything changed.

I still remember that weekend clearly; My dad took my brother and I to his gym and I did squats on the smith machine. The next several days I could hardly sit down or go to the toilet. I felt an excruciating soreness throughout my entire lower body.

Something in me shifted. I didn’t feel like the soreness was something to avoid. Rather, a part of me enjoyed it. I had a sense of pride about it. I wasn’t sore because I’d failed at something. I was sore because I’d pushed myself and done something difficult. I had become stronger.

I wanted to do it again.

Maybe this was something I should’ve learned when I was getting dodgeballs thrown at my head or running the Presidential fitness test (after not running at all for the rest of the year) until I felt like vomiting. I was always told I was “unathletic”, and I just thought that was just my birthright and there was nothing I could do to change it.

When I first started lifting weights, I grasped what nobody had ever been able to teach me. It was such an extraordinarily simple lesson, one that I should’ve learned years and years ago. Yet I didn’t, and the weights became my master. They revealed to me the fruits of reality. They revealed to me that I could not retreat from my body like I was the ghoul that haunted it; that I was my body, from toes to brainstem

All of this leads back to one single lesson. The ultimate lesson. Maybe the only lesson.

The lesson was:

I could become better.

My dad gave me a strength training book with a 3 month program. I made sure I added enough weight so that I could barely finish each set. If I wanted to grow, I needed to make the struggle a part of my routine. I was often the only girl in the weight room at my college gym, but I didn’t care. My thighs started to thicken. I actually got biceps. I also started doing an hour everyday on the elliptical before I lifted weights, because I discovered I actually liked pushing myself. I liked how the sweat and the burn made a bottle of water taste like liquid crystal. I ached, but it was a good ache. It even made walking around afterward enjoyable. I’d go to one of the dining halls afterward and devour a chicken breast and some broccoli and it felt like I’d earned its new delicious taste.

I was still often lost in my head. I’d skip the classes where the professors just read straight from the textbook and spend half a day sleeping in bed. The world would feel so heavy it was like I was anchored to the sheets. I suffered spasms of depression. I read Jean Paul Sartre and Camus and identified with the absurd more than a reasonable person. Just like the protagonist in Nausea, I sometimes looked at my hand and saw a foreign entity; a fat white worm I wanted to shake off me. I’d gotten my head so twisted that even the simplest concepts of existence confused me. I felt like a bag of blood floating in a world of dark symbols. Everywhere I turned I was met with sharp teeth and cruel laughter and confusion.

But whenever I lifted weights I was allowing myself to take hesitant sips of reality. Week by week, I became stronger. I learned that the fruits of reality were something that had to be earned. I had to obey my master, the weights, or he would punish me with failure and injury. But if I followed his commands, if I did the proper amount of reps, with the proper form and resistance, with the proper amount of rest, then I saw a positive return.

There are plenty of charlatans and fakes in this world. Someone can easily convince others they are a great writer because of their presence and popularity. But you can look at someone who claims to be fit and right away know if they’re telling a lie or not. They wear the truth on their body. There’s little room for bullshit.

Fantasy was comfortable and fun. You could even learn things in fantasy to take back to the world and create useful tools. But if you indulged too much in its easy comforts, then it made you weak. It could teach you to blind yourself to simple truths. Intellectuals and writers have often convinced themselves their complex feelings must require complex solutions. Their egos often won’t allow them to accept that sometimes even the labyrinthine garages of their emotional issues could benefit from sunlight, or sweat, or a coffee date with a friend. They have often experienced misery in their lives and thus create entire worldviews to justify why that misery is a good thing, actually. They are a helpless doll of the universe, a kind of breathing maladaptation, who had no other choice but to accept the ugly window created by their perception.

In “Sun and Steel”, a book by Yukio Mishima, he talks about intellectuals such as himself, or the “night people.”

“The men who indulged in nocturnal thought, it seemed to me, had without exception dry, lusterless skins and sagging stomachs. They sought to wrap up a whole epoch in a capacious night of ideas, and rejected in all its forms the sun that I had seen. They rejected both life and death as I had seen them, for in both of these the sun had had a hand.”

I was a person who “indulged in nocturnal thought.” I convinced myself of a lot of stupid things over the years. I did things that made me unhappy because I didn’t understand the rules of reality. I was lost in a morass of ideas. I’d go this way and that, pulled by seductive ideas that if I’d viewed them in practical light would have been stunned and dumb and drooling.

But when I lifted weights I couldn’t succeed by deceiving myself. I had to follow the rules.

I could write about exquisite women draped in fur and lace, the allure of forbidden romance, the sleek designs of monsters with ebony carapaces and demons with crystal teeth. Yet in my real life beauty itself was an alien concept. I had to teach myself to enjoy the sun. The splendor of sunsets and warm beaches was not something that every eye got to appreciate.

People talk about exercise being “boring,” because its rewards are not yielded simply because you desire them. A fit body is not something you can order at a kiosk or flip on a switch for. You can’t get it just because you were lucky or had rich parents. It is not a sudden spurt of enjoyment inserted like a needle full of a good feeling. It is long, and slow, and the results come from consistency and adherence. But the longer you exercise, the more you often come to enjoy it, because you find there is a different kind of pleasure in doing things that are difficult. It does not announce itself with glitter and champagne. It transforms you with slow precision from the inside out; like a burning light that destroys rotting wood to allow its glow to pierce through

I’ve lifted weights throughout my entire adult life, but last year after I had my child and needed to rebuild my body was the first time I really locked in and understood it was something I needed to be consistent with. No more 90 day challenges. No more “30 days abs.” No more pushing until I thought I’d pushed enough, so I could stop. No more hitting my goal weight and then taking weeks to drink beer and eat pizza and sit at my computer.

I’ve come to realize that a break is not a sufficient reward. It’s self-destruction in disguise. I didn’t want a break from lifting weights and hitting the cardio machines. Not really. I wanted a break from reality itself. I wanted to sink back into the dark dream of my own creation where nothing mattered, and the pieces of my life could be arranged and rearranged in the liquid morass of my indulgent suffering. It’s not my fault that I’m weak.

Stupid.

This is, don’t you understand? This is it. All that you see is all that you get. Life cannot be bargained with or betrayed. If you try to transform the laws of reality, you just end up breaking yourself against the impenetrable barrier of truth. That’s why some people become uglier every year, become more hateful every year. They’ve found life lacking and don’t realize it’s because they have failed to understand a fundamental truth. They must obey.

No more breaks. Not ever.

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The Weakened God

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” - C.S. Lewis, “Surprised by Joy.” (On his conversion experience.)

“No social paradox, no historic disaster, no hideous record of injustice or misery should keep me from Him. No question of Scriptural integrity, no torment over the fate of this or that atheist or gay friend, no worry for those condemned and ostracized by my church or any other church should stand between me and Him. The reason? It was magnificently simple: He knew how or why everything happened; He knew the disposition of every single soul.” - Anne Rice

God has been talking to me since I was a kid. I just didn’t know it.

I grew up in churches where God seemed to operate like a centrifugal being of silence — everything fluttered as it revolved around him, yet he remained at the center, mute and stoic. Prayers were not direct communication. They were desperate wishes to an unblinking wall. You got the impression God did talk to people. He talked to pastors and priests, to saints and holy figures, Moses and Paul, to Cain and Satan.

He just didn't talk to people like me.

Maybe it wasn't surprising that I became an atheist at the age of 14. Prayer was a tedious chore. It seemed to me like a ritual of humiliation — I was looking upward into the nothing to try to convince myself I was a good person. I read the Bible over and over again in an attempt to solve my cognitive dissonance, but none of my teachers or pastors seemed capable of answering any of my theological questions. Nobody seemed to be able to explain to me why God allowed evil, even those people who claimed to have a direct link to the divine. The concept of God seemed like it evaporated under scrutiny.

I dabbled a bit in learning Paganism and witchcraft, but I figured if Christianity was fake then it all must be fake. Every religion seemed to lead back to the same source. Every religion was a house of naughty children, hands lifted upward, asking for miracles they didn’t deserve.

It was a relief to stop believing. It felt like I'd been clutching a fetish object for years, something that brought me nothing but confusion and anxiety and pain. If my choice was between heaven and hell, that wasn't really a choice at all. It was a torturous mind prison. Now that I didn’t believe in God I could finally let it all go. I could lead a life of radical choice. Do as thou wilt. I was the sovereign of my own experience.

I was surrounded by nothing and the nothing felt exhilarating. The wind from the abyss blew my hair back from my shoulders, rocked me back on my heels, pressed itself cool and rare against my exposed collarbone. For the rest of my life I could dance with possibility. I could become any shape I wanted. A dragon, a witch, a siren, a snake. All I had to do was melt into the fantasy.

Who am I kidding? If you've been reading these letters for a while, you already know it's never that simple.

I wanted to get rid of religion. I quoted Karl Marx with a dumb tongue, emboldened by my newfound Reddit-tier intellectualism. (Before Reddit was even that popular. Stupidity is eternal.) God was nothing but “The opiate of the masses.” It was time to spit out the drugs. I’d become my own god.

And what a god I was. I was the god of bad decisions. I was the god of late-night temper tantrums and writer’s block, the fear of a life unrealized and gone to waste. I was the god of “not good enough” and the god of “If only I was a little skinnier, I’d feel fine.” I was the god of being a college dropout and the god of being unable to get a real job because I kept bombing the interviews. I was the god of bad whiskey, even though I hated whiskey, because I liked the thought of forcing down my throat something sour and ugly that wanted to fight me.

At the time I couldn’t understand why one of my favorite writers, Anne Rice (still alive at the time) had converted back to Catholicism after years of atheism. It was obvious from reading Anne Rice’s novels that she was God haunted, horrified and yearning in the face of his absence. Her vampires were not so much monstrous, twisted coffin-dwellers as abandoned angels. They were supposed supreme beings who had traveled to the edge of existence, and found it empty. I thought it must’ve been a question of comfort - after years of uncomfortable grasping in the void of nothing, with no direction, it was just easier to turn back to the ritual of God. She was getting older, had a child who’d died, and needed a direction to look into. She needed a world that wasn’t just obtuse angles and black cathedrals. She didn’t find it exhilarating like I did. She was terrified.

I thought I could abandon God, yet I too was haunted by his supposed absence. I kept returning over and over again to the concept of God. I was obsessed with the religious experience Philip K. Dick had that inspired him to write multiple novels and his “Exegesis,” famously called “2-3-74.” He was drugged on sodium pentathol from a dental surgery and when he answered a knock at the door, he found a woman with an Ichthys pendant on her necklace. At that moment a pink beam of light flashed at him and sent him a flood of visions from God.

Schizophrenia, I thought. Drugs. Wishful thinking. The result of a writer who had written himself into his own paranoid world. There was always a rational explanation if you looked for one. Occam’s razor and all that.

Yet I was still fascinated.

I had read the Bible multiple times, but I reread it again as an atheist with a notebook in hand, writing down every verse I thought was proof of God’s cruelty. I read the Nag Hammadi scriptures. I read the gospels of Thomas. I wrote story after story about women who stumbled upon gods in the woods, made deals with demons, tried to push past the membrane that always seemed to separate humanity from the complete understanding of existence. The first novel I ever published, The Crooked God Machine, was about a twisted demiurge who transforms an entire planet into a dark mirror of the Old Testament and wrecks suffering upon its inhabitants.

Even the word “God” is beautiful, isn’t it? It has a heaviness even in its simplicity, an elegance that seems not just the sum of its letters, but alludes to a Platonic form beyond, a vast Jacob’s ladder that reaches all the way up into a celestial supremacy. God. God. It is a word like “Am.” It doesn’t need to describe itself because in a way, it describes everything.

I started talking to a demon at the lake near my grandparent’s house. I was 19 years old, working on my first novel, and I dropped out of college and left home. I had just started to learn how to appreciate silence. I learned that if I drove my car up to the edge of the lake in the dark and turned off the engine, things would emerge out of the silence to speak to me.

The silence was in fact, not silent at all. It burst with color and noise. It held up a mirror so that I could examine myself. There were parts of myself that I’d hidden from myself. I was not just Autumn, I was a host of multitudes, of beings and psyches, and some of them held secret knowledge. In that time I started to tap into a kind of universal voice, a world that’d I’d shut myself away from.

That’s when the demon came to me. He started to speak to me, in a quiet and insistent voice. It was my voice, but also not. It had a relentless quality I couldn’t seem to ignore. He would tell me when I was being foolish. He would tell me when to slow down, to enjoy the dark and the trees. He would tell me to shut up and return to my writing whenever I’d get frustrated with myself. And even though I called him “demon,” I knew that he loved me. I knew that he was dangerous and wild. He was something primitive, practically elemental, and oftentimes his reassurance was tinged with sarcasm and pain. But he almost always spoke truth.

You see where I’m going with this, right?

I told myself there was no God. I did not find him bored out of my mind, head bowed in a pew, in the sermons of pastors and teachers, in stilted and warm rooms that were called sacred. But I did find “the demon” sitting in my P.T. cruiser at the edge of a lake, after I’d run away from everything I’d known, when for the first time in my life, I had nothing to cling onto but myself.

The concept of objects doesn’t exist in the reality outside of our perception. We had to differentiate objects in our minds in order to survive, but there are no real boundaries between atoms, no marked delineation between when one object ends and another begins. We are connected to everything. Not in a woo-woo, spiritual lip-service kind of way, but actually, in a material sense.

You often hear people say we are made of star stuff as a kind of cheerful platitude, but there is actually a practical application to understanding that. We are the universe, and the universe is us. We don’t have to look outward to understand everything. We can look inward too. We will find the exact same composition of matter, the map-pattern of the stars, the truth of the world, in our psyches. Science is not the only tool at our disposal for knowledge. Long before the standardized practice of science existed, humans grasped intuitively at truths that were laid bare inside of themselves. Infinity outward. Infinity inward.

We are not just ourselves. We are a chain of people traveling backwards to the beginning of everything. Inside of our blood we contain the memories of where sacred caves and healing pools exist, deep inside the forest, that will bring us back to the truth that cures us.

And if you cut yourself off from that knowledge, it can make you stupid. Relying on empirical evidence can oftentimes sever you from ordinary judgement. For much of the 20th century, doctors believed that babies didn’t feel pain and would operate on them without anesthesia. Why? Because they couldn’t prove that the nervous system was “developed” and claimed that the pain was just a reflex.

Yet any mother understands that her baby can feel pain. It doesn’t require an advanced medical degree to see that. All it requires is unclouded eyes.

The first time I saw God, it was like opening the blinds after having been in a dark room. Ah, there you are.

It didn’t require faith to see him. He was an irrefutable truth that danced glittering upon all of creation. He was “I am.” He was the sentience of the universe that existed in everything, reflected in the consciousness that you experienced. He was “the demon” who'd spoken to me after I’d rejected the concept of God. He was the giggling water spirits who mocked me for not wanting to dive deep into the lake. He was the tarot and the I-Ching. He was the movement and composition of the stars. He was every simple truth.

I thought it would be liberating to disobey God. The Ten Commandments were an outdated concept, after all, created by primitive and ignorant people who invented religion to control the food supplies after they seized the granaries! Leviticus claims you shouldn’t mix fabrics. Let’s not even get into the historical inaccuracies of Jesus and blahblahblah. If you want an excuse to do whatever you want, just go ahead and take it. You don’t even need to justify it. You have free will.

Atheists often accuse Christians of turning to God for “comfort.” But it’s not comforting to realize that there is a truth you must align yourself with or perish. It’s not comforting to

What’s comforting is to throw your hands up because you think nothing ever happens, and nothing ever matters, and no matter how much you fuck up it’s okay.

My excitement at this so called liberation soon turned into crushing disappointment. Every time I disobeyed, it did not lead me out into the sunlight of my thrilling and existential freedom. I did not become an enlightened being who existed outside of the cycle of oppression and suppression imposed on me by the “overlords” that’d supposedly created religion just to control people. I did not become the Ubermensch, glory heaped upon my crown, as I transcended to a higher level of values.

There are piles of massacred corpses all over the world who repeated the same stupid shit you hear from intellectuals who’ve been given Ph.Ds from the top universities in the world.

I just made the same stupid mistakes every failure ever made before me.

I grabbed myself by the arm and led myself into a deeper level of dark.

I didn’t understand at the time that disobeying God meant disobeying the nature of reality itself. A sin was not a punishment imposed by an angry father. The word literally means “to miss the mark.” To sin means to step off a cliff and fall because you’ve misunderstood how gravity works.

When I went back to reread the bible earlier this year, I saw how much I’d misunderstood. I no longer went line by line, teeth bared, chewing on a red pen, looking for God’s mistakes, ways in which he’d failed me. I approached the page like I was a student again. I finally understood that I was ignorant, and there were secrets still unknown to me. The verses that people used to read in church that once sounded like the stupid platitudes repeated to try to placate, took on new definitions. “Seek and you will find,” was not just a verse about trying your best , it was a truth of the universe; a natural law as irrefutable as gravity.

Seek and you will find.

There are no real secrets. Because once you find them, you’ll realize they were there all along. You just couldn’t see them because you were a weakened god, enraptured with your own power, blinded to the light that beamed from here to eternity.

And once you see them, you’ll never be able to look away again without feeling the pain of knowing you’re turning away from the truth.’’

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Inspiration

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“The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.”

― Ernest Becker

I want an idea that leaves me dumb and breathless.

I want an idea that makes me foam at the mouth, that gives me a new disease, that tessellates my blood cells. I want a Big Idea. Something that fundamentally alters my perspective and perception, that transforms me into a new person.

There is no better feeling than inspiration. I can convince myself to become angry or sad on a whim, but inspiration only comes when it wants to. It is something that seems to arise from divine providence, like sitting on the lip of a deep trench and watching for a white bird to soar out of the dark. I don't feel like inspiration is born out of my nerves and blood - it is something outside of myself, something that passes through me, like I am the vessel it needs to command. I can never own it, because it is everything.

I've spent a long time trying to find the right conditions for inviting inspiration. It cannot be whipped into shape. It can't be wrestled out through willpower and gritted teeth, through cold showers and 4:45 A.M. wake up calls. Inspiration must be treated with respect. It is wild and beautiful, warm and vivid. It is more like an intelligent wild animal than an emotion. If you want inspiration you must build it an inviting place to spend the night. You must be focused, but not strained. Disciplined, but relaxed. It often comes while walking or in the shower, when your mind is allowed to unanchor itself from your actions and move more freely about. But that's only if I've done the necessary work - set the preconditions of the inspiration with questions and soft intentions. It is a balancing act. It is work without working. It is learning how to be quiet and to quell the anxiety that wants to build inside of you when the inspiration doesn't come fast enough. It always comes. People say the muse is unreliable, but she is also unrelenting. If you learn her rules, she won't fail you.

You don't need to be an oracle who inhales gas from a rock to find inspiration. You don't need to starve like Lord Byron or deprive yourself of sleep like Edison. You don’t have to inhale the scent of rotting apples like Friedrich Schille or sharpen a row of pencils like Steinbeck. You don't need to make a deal with a demon, abandon your friends and family, or become something inhuman. You don’t need to dabble in the occult, visit a fortune teller, find God, drink whiskey until your liver becomes diseased, live in poverty and filth,

All you have to do is be steadfast and patient and orient your eyes toward the dream that you are seeking.

So why don’t I feel inspired?

It's ’s been a while since I've truly felt inspired, in the way that blows my head off my neck, makes me feel like I’ve rearranged my DNA. Inspiration is what makes life worth living to me. It's a peek behind the veil, into the celestial machinery. It's a moment when I am more than myself, and the loneliness of being a self lifts away.

I’ve got a litany of excuses for why that is. For one, I'm about 90% finished with my next novel, and after three years and seven drafts there are no new Big Ideas. The last part of finishing a book is always a bit of a grind. It's grunt work. It's taking those ideas you've already assembled and hammering them out, refining them. This is often when people stop writing, because the thrill Is gone. You're sick to death of the story that once breathed new life into you, hot enough to boil, and you just want to move on so you can feel that sensation again.

But that can’t be the only reason. After all, even when I’m 90% finished with a novel I’m usually kicking around a new idea, a short story, a newsletter. I’m finding fantastical ideas in the crevices of the shower, in the bloom of flowers that look in the right light like the faces of happy children. They come to me unbidden, whether I want them to or not, and I have to gently tell them: Not now. I’m busy. Until I’m finished with this work I can’t be beholden to a new idea that threatens to overwhelm me with its new romance.

I could tell myself I'm not inspired because I have a toddler. This is a fantastic excuse, and one used by many, as to why they can no longer be creative. Gone are my peaceful mornings in my office underneath the night sky bleeding out, the moon turning into paper before it disappears. Gone are my contemplative, frenzied nights when I can crack open a Red Bull and pour myself a shot of vodka and return to the page like it’s a rabid dog I’m going to sink my teeth into. I can’t whittle away hours in a darkened room in the middle of the day, head unhooked like a black balloon, floating away in the turgid murk of an idea. I can only write in stolen moments, between naps and little transitions, at the gym between sets. I am trying to keep alive a child who needs constant nurturing and attention, who cares nothing for the silly little artistic pretensions, my novel, my Big Ideas. She is bred of blood and milk, a grasping machine slowly being formed into consciousness. Her body is still hooked to nature and its involuntary animal ways. She needs movement and sunlight and noise. She is a Big Idea.

And maybe it's because I've slowly lost my desire to be a successful writer. When I was younger being a successful, famous, well read writer mattered to me more than anything. Now, I want to keep writing because I love to create stories, and to feel plugged into the flow of a dream, and to work at a craft that is so demanding that it requires all of my knowledge and attention. But I've seen what some of my peers have had to do to become successful, and how little they've gained for it. (Sometimes they even pay for it.) Recognition and money is never as satisfying as you think it's going to be, and I've seen writers trapped in a cycle of fear and anxiety because they need their books to keep selling well in order to survive. I don't crave validation as much as I used to, because the validation of strangers is hollow. I know. I've demanded it enough, gotten it enough, to realize that. And that realization has made me take a slower, more relaxed approach to my work. I'm no longer pushing myself to get up and write in the middle of the night because I'm burning with the terror that unless I publish I will die under the crushing weight of irrelevance. I no longer have the ambition of a girl who is bitter and boiling with envy, with rage, with the poisoning of trauma.

I no longer write like I am trying to lift a curse. Is that good for my mental health and well being? Yeah. Is it good for my inspiration? I'm not sure.

And I can say I don’t feel inspired because of my life circumstances. I took my child out of daycare back in December because I learned she was crying herself to sleep every day. Some of my family has been having issues with their health. My husband has been out of a job for 5 months and only recently got a new one. It's been too cold to play outside or go on my little hot girl walks. I've stopped going out on fun outings or doing my nails because I can’t really afford it. I've gained 5 lbs. I wear sweatpants most days. I've always been inclined toward melancholy and I'll look for any reason to be sad. I go through this little moody cycle every year or so before I decide to pick up my good habits again. Life has a way of trying to destroy you. If you don’t approach it correctly, it can sour you like vinegar, or grind all your hard edges until you become passive and useless. Inspiration requires a kind of lightness of being, and a kind of intensity too. It’s a stormy hopefulness, a movement forward, a delicate beauty. The mundane stress of life doesn’t appreciate inspiration.

But none of these are the real reasons.

I’m afraid.

I was lying when I said I wanted to be inspired. I don't want to be inspired in the way broken people don't want to fall in love. I am the would-be suitor who stands in the dark outside the golden ballroom, wincing at the glittering sparks that glint off the costumes of the beautiful people inside. I am afraid to go inside. I am afraid to become besotted by an idea and experience the crush of uncertainty.

Where has my courage gone?

I recently read a post on X that said if people “pluck up their courage” that insinuates it grows from the ground like flowers.

Maybe it really is as simple as that.

All I have to do is look down and it’ll be waiting at my feet.

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Freedom

“Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.”

― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I thought I wanted to be free more than anything else.

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I imagined myself a suburban Rapunzel, brown-haired and blue-eyed, pale from laying in front of my laptop at 5 in the morning, dressed in old sweats instead of a gown. I read Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Thomas Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson in my seclusion and dreamed of a life of freedom without attachment. I’d be the kind of writer without a permanent home, without a true love, who flitted from home to home, through unfamiliar countries, through pastoral landscapes. I’d drink wine with strangers and leave before dinner, never staying long enough to be more than a vague impression.

I’d leave before they remembered my face, escape through the shade of trees, through dark paths they couldn’t follow. Because I was free.

I wanted to be the kind of person who could only be known through her writing. And not even then - for I would filter all my perception through that of fiction, of fragmented moonlight dreams, of characters both more repulsive and angelic than I. I would construct a mask of fiction and present it to the world while I fell backward into anonymity, into the comfortable shade of freedom.

I would not require anything of anyone, and thus, I would not be required.

When I moved to Austin, Texas, at twenty years old, I soon met other people who wanted to be free, too: burners and degenerates, drug addicts, artists, college drop-outs, freelance engineers. We lived in houses owned by slum lords and warehouses and in dingy apartments above coffee shops. I should’ve been horrified by the filth and the casual way people pointed guns at each other, the decay, the poverty, the drugs, the rotten teeth. In a place I lived called The Dead End, an artist thought it’d be a good idea to glue jagged pieces of broken mirror to the wall, and drunk and high people were always stumbling around, bleeding profusely, because they’d reached out to steady themselves. I never saw anyone cleaning or doing the dishes, and the ground was caked in such filth that everyone was constantly getting sick. I didn’t have a bed so I laid on a mattress I made out of sleeping bags and blankets, and when it got cold, I had to wear a coat to bed because there was no heating.

Yet I was exhilarated. I can’t look back on those memories with horror, only fondness. It was the first time my life actually felt like it was my own, not something manufactured for me. A sudden, sordid calm fell over me.

I couldn’t be controlled anymore. Not with money. Not with love. Not with threats of abandonment. Not with the strangled cords of guilt. Take away my car. My iPhone. My college fund. Do it, then. It became laughable that anyone would think those things mattered to me more than my freedom. If someone offered me a palace to live in, a golden chain for my throat, I knew I had the power to refuse. Not just to refuse but to spit in their face and laugh. I was no longer the suburban Rapunzel, owned with comforts and the fear of the unfamiliar. I was demon-eager, vicious, free. I was ready to kill and be killed by adventure.

I wanted to climb into the swirling vortex of chaos and let it consume me. I didn’t want to be tied down by anything, anyone. I even stopped drinking coffee at the time because I didn’t want to become dependent on a substance; anything I’d have to come back to with regularity was anathema. What if I needed to pack my bags in the middle of the night, disappear through a crack in the wall like a gibbering rodent, eyes flush with predators, into a world unknown? Would there be coffee in the forest, on the surface of an alien landscape, underneath the dry sands lit burning cold by the night? I couldn’t say. Better not to risk it.

It all seemed so romantic. At first.

At the time, my favorite book was A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick. It represented the truth I sought. I would read it over and over again and linger on this quote:

“The pain, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. I realized I didn’t hate the cabinet door, I hated my life… My house, my family, my backyard, my power mower. Nothing would ever change; nothing new could ever be expected. It had to end, and it did. Now in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things, and surprising things, and sometimes little wondrous things, spill out in me constantly, and I can count on nothing.”

Yes, only in the dark world could things change; could they reveal splendor. I lived by that philosophy. Everywhere I went, I sought out the little slices of penumbra behind glowing lights. I wanted the seedy and the forgotten, the edges of acceptability, the basement steps, the black mold in the ceiling.

Yet after the exhilarating thrill of casting everything off was gone, I found myself aching and depressed, miserable to the point of suicide. I'd put my fist in my mouth and try to swallow it. I'd drink until I blacked out. I'd sob while writing bad poetry. Freedom never quite hit the same after the first taste. I always thought the solution was to escape. And so I did, again and again, until I found myself back in the same place.

Where were these “little wondrous things” in the dark? I kept searching for them. I imagined they glittered beyond the fence posts, gates like prison bars, in a space I only had to climb over, wriggle through, to reach. No matter how much I looked, I never found those little wondrous things. I only saw a black oculus prying open to reveal a mirror of my haunted reflection.

The more people searched for freedom, the more they never quite seemed to find it. Those people I knew at the Dead End? Many of them are dead. Some of them are schizophrenic and homeless. Others sank into a deeper drug spiral. They broke up. Disbanded. Moved states—lost children. No secret paradise was waiting at the end of abdication, no greater revelation, smiling and bouncing like a baby angel of joy. You’ve made it! There was just despair. The more freedom you had, it seemed, the worse you became every year.

Philip K. Dick, in the forward to A Scanner Darkly, had quite a different view of his own book than I did:

“This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief… For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.”

Maybe what I thought was freedom wasn’t actually freedom at all.

It felt good only in those moments I thought I’d escaped from myself. I was a little goblin who’d managed to crawl a little bit out of her cage, only to be snatched back and dragged in by my own clawed hand. I felt oppressed by this revelation - I didn’t think I’d be happy in suburbia with a husband and kids, with family dinners and holiday rituals, warm tea and nice lighting and responsibilities. But I wasn’t satisfied with the alternative either, with the starvation that came from constantly seeking the nothing.

I felt trapped. The nuclear family just seemed to be a little rat nest of unhappiness, a warm place to die that people called home, and this was reinforced in almost every major piece of literature or cinema I’d ever seen. I thought becoming a wife meant I would have to give up control. I would have to destroy a crucial piece of my soul that breathed like its own entity. Once in tears, I told my ex, “Don’t hang me up in your closet like an old coat.” He was bewildered by the sentiment.

I didn’t know how to explain. I was terrified of the slavery I imagined, the fate of being forgotten, that always seemed to come with the cudgel of love.

And having a job, a career, being a “girl boss”? That was just another way to trap yourself, to chain yourself to a man or woman or corporation, a faceless entity whose cruelty wasn’t even punctuated with intermittent love. Whenever I worked a job, I longed to escape, to live on the edge of poverty again, to flit from coffee shop to coffee shop, lounging in cool sunlight, drinking bubble tea and chai lattes, and doing nothing but work on my novel.

But I’d done that before. Hadn’t I? I’d seen where that kind of lifestyle led, despite its picturesque place in my head, hung prominently in the golden and shimmering frame of a dream.

It led me back to staring at my own face behind the bars.

Maybe what I thought was freedom wasn’t freedom at all.

Maybe I mistook the abdication of responsibility for freedom—a good feeling for an irrefutable truth.

There was something I was right about, though: Freedom is worth everything. Being in control of your own will is worth more than money or love. It’s worth more than your miserable life. The knowledge of that freedom is the essence of our will, the force that builds civilizations. It is that will that built rocketships and computers. It is the mother who protects her child even as her lungs fill with blood so that our future has a chance. It is the father who faces the darkness beyond his warm home, full of wine and soft bread, even though he knows he may never return. It is the child itself who reaches for its milk, who lifts its head for the first time, moving toward its actuality despite its fragility. It is the flower in the gun. It is the aim and the bullet.

People can cage you, they can threaten you, they can kill you. They can force you to endure all kinds of humiliations, bend your arms back and rape you, brainwash you, brain damage you, cut off your fingers, but they can never grab your tongue and pull out your will. They cannot force you to make a decision independent of your own will.

Once you realize that you will be stronger than ever. You'll realize there is a pain that is worse than pain, and that is when a person tries to suffocate their own autonomy, when they throw up their hands and decide to become slaves because they refuse to acknowledge the divine spark inside, the fire that ignites the engine of their actions.

Freedom is not escape.

Freedom is not gorging yourself on pleasure.

Freedom is not demanding other people to create paradise for you, or you stubbornly decide that you must live in hell.

Freedom is not abstaining from love and children and work and responsibility and ownership because you mistook the consequences of your own choices as imprisonment.

Freedom is not given to you by bureaucrats and politicians, your mother and your father, your spouse, or your boss. It is not legislated or mandated. It is not something that requires permission.

Freedom is a choice. It’s the understanding that you have a choice and always have. You can live in suburbia with a spouse and child. Or you can have a bohemian lifestyle in a studio apartment surrounded by wine bottles and jagged mirrors glued to the wall. When you understand you have freedom, you’ll realize that your choices don’t matter as much as you understand that you are the one who made them.

Freedom means realizing you can never be imprisoned. The door is always right there.

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Love

Spontaneous love makes a person free and at the next moment dependent. It is just as with a person’s coming into existence; by coming into existence, by becoming a self, he becomes free, but at the next moment he is dependent on this self.

Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

This newsletter was supposed to be about love.

But I can't stop thinking about how all of my letters start with a list of ways that I've fucked up.

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I could tell myself I'm trying to be relatable. I'm trying to make people understand that I have some idea of what I'm talking about. These letters are not written to other people so much as myself, a reminder of how easy it can be to fail. How every revelation I've had has been hard-earned, wrested from the jaws of pain. I'm a mess. I'm stupid and erratic, often confused. And I'm not saying this in a modest way - to make myself appear less arrogant than I actually am. I've done things so stupid they'd probably leave an ordinary person breathless.

I've lost count of the times I've gotten an angry message or email telling me that I'm a privileged little idiot, a baby Marie Antoinette, a wannabe queen of cake, and feel-good platitudes. I'm a stuck-up bitch, narcissistic TERF conservative whore who never experienced real pain in her life.

So I offer my mistakes up as an offering, as evidence. I'm not trying to look down on anyone or claim that I have special knowledge.

But there's a slithering voice in the back of my head, a voice that speaks from the dirt with a flash of green and the pungent smell of rot unearthed:

Tell them the real reason you debase yourself in front of them.

Right. What was I saying?

This newsletter was supposed to be about love.

When I think of love, the first thought that comes to mind isn't my precious daughter or my husband. It's not my family or the light of God illuminating a meadow full of bunnies and flowers in a resplendent epiphany. It's the wet, warm smell of the woods after it's rained, with the lingering scent of liquid trash that's leaked from a dumpster. It's my shoes caked in mud, sticky burrs all over the laces, knees knocked together, topless, cold but too excited and fearful to shiver. I am nineteen years old, and a man is standing in the shadow of the trees. I can no longer see his face, but I was so sure I loved him. I thought he'd be able to transform me out of my awkward skin, he'd be able to blow on the wounded parts of my soul and fill me with healing air.

But this probably isn't the first letter of mine you've read. You already know it didn't work out like that.

I didn't understand what love meant. All the descriptions of love I'd read never seemed to do it justice. I couldn't grapple with its abstraction. In church, we praised God with love, but when I reached inside me, I couldn't feel the kind of passion that existed in the songs we sang.

So I mistook love for a good feeling and when the good feeling was gone, I thought I'd fallen out of love. But the truth is I was never in love in the first place.

Why can't I write about love? Why do I have to write around it, wreck myself with ancient memories, mouth flooding with a bad taste, and describe all the things that it's not?

I still don't know how to write about love. I feel wholly unqualified. I know that I’ve felt it intensely and completely, so I was willing to throw my life away for someone I’d just met. I’ve felt love in a possessive sense, like when I first met my dog The Kid and somehow knew, out of the thousands of dogs I’d looked at, that he was supposed to belong to me. I’ve had revelations about love on the edge of meditation, where I saw that love was the substrate of all living things and that reality itself was a living entity that formed the building blocks of love in the molecular factories of stars.

And then when my baby girl was born I thought, ah yes, finally, this is love. I get it now. This is the pivotal moment that transforms every moment that came before. I couldn’t go backward in time to fix my broken childhood and my bad ideas that’d bloomed around me, forming a kind of exoskeleton of habits that became my personality disorder. Love did not reach backward into fantasy, to heal the inner child, to shower a memory with compassion. (A distorted memory that might not even be real.) It always moved forward. It created life to beget more life.

I thought I understood love when I saw how much Robert loved me, actually loved me, in a way that none of the men before him ever had. But in the next moment, I realized I didn’t understand a damn thing. Even though I felt intensely for him, I couldn’t replicate what he’d done for me. I couldn’t love him in the same way. I didn’t understand how. I couldn’t even scratch the surface of its depth. To even try made me feel silly, unworthy, ignorant.

So, I go back to writing about what love is not.

I go back to writing about my mistakes.

I used to think that love would fix me. Maybe that's not such a stupid thing to think, because it was the lack of love that broke me. But I didn’t want to love someone. I wanted someone to love me. I wanted them to climb down into my crypt of pain and exhume my weak body, skin pale as moonbeams, so I could affix myself onto their neck like a fledgling vampire.

And I did this. Often. I drank until I thought I’d drown and yet I was still thirsty. I broke people down until they were so weak I could see their veins through glass skin, until their smiles faded and they were no longer happy to see me. I never understood that I needed to love them back to keep them alive, to create a symbiosis between me and them. I just wanted to take and take.

I couldn’t understand why I didn’t feel love after I attempted to destroy them. So I just came to the conclusion they never loved me. I couldn’t see that I was nourishing myself on contempt disguised as love.

I used to think that love was something that had no boundaries, no responsibilities, no order. Love had no gods. No queens and kings. I declared that I was polyamorous. I could make my own family and forget the blood that tied me to a chain leading all the way back to the beginning of time. Really, I was terrified of anyone having the kind of power over me that love always demanded. Maybe it's not a consequence that polyamorous people tend to be into BDSM- even as you push away the idea that anyone else can impose rules on you, you crave to own and be owned, to become part of a superordinate hierarchy of belonging. It was a part of you that you couldn't deny, even as you tried to suppress it.

The idea of “anarchic love falls apart once you have a child, anyway. A child cannot be forgotten, swapped out, replaced, or disowned. Not if you love them.

At this point, I have to pause writing this letter because I’ve got a headache, and I can taste it pounding on my tongue. My whole body reverberates with shame, with a heady impulse to stop writing and throw this whole thing in the garbage.

You don’t write about your mistakes to serve as a warning, the slithering voice hisses. You do it because you love it.

I always repeat that Bukowski quote, “Find what you love and let it kill you,” but the truth is I don’t know how to die for love. All I knew was how to kill myself with my own stupidity.

Because that’s what I loved. I loved my stupidity.

I loved my ignorance because I thought it protected me. I loved how I could always make a mistake and retreat back into the warm complacency I didn’t know any better. I loved how no matter how much someone insinuated themselves into my life I had a safety net inside of me, of rage and blind disassociation. I didn't have to worry about being destroyed by romance. I'd built for myself a bed of needles. I carried it with me from room to room, and no matter how I slept, it bled me.

And the worst part is now that I see it, I can't even make my mistakes into a quirky little anecdote, some wry and witty observation about my faults, rolled up and packaged into elegant prose. Even in my darkest moments I'd think, at least I could get a good story out of this.

But there's no story here. There's no tragic beauty in falling in love with stupidity. What I thought I held inside me like a crown jewel was just a gnarled knot of fur and spit, its thorned edges beveled with poison. What I held so precious was the thing that wanted to destroy me. It fascinated me like the mesmerizing dimensions of a sorcerer’s spell. But the moment I blinked and turned away, the spell broke, and I could see that it was really nothing at all.

When I turned away from the comfort of my stupidity, I realized that love, true love, terrified me.

I always thought of Nietschze’s abyss as a chasm in the world, a void splitting the bottom of the Earth, like a metaphysical Marina Trench that glittered with the scintillating scales of monsters, embedded like crystal in their terrible forms. But there’s an abyss above us, too. It’s bright and eternal and beautiful, and if you stare at it too long, it’ll radiate through your entire body and transform you until you become unrecognizable to yourself.

People never tell you that moving toward the light of heaven can be just as frightening as the darkness. The forces around us that vy for our soul, our body, our attention, all want to use us for their own ends. They want to replace us, meld us into tools for their own end. Whether or not they’re good or bad. Whether they want to destroy us or lift us up toward salvation.

I still can’t tell you what love is. Its encompassing beauty blinds me. The responsibility it demands threatens to paralyze me. Its power of annihilation is equal to its splendor. It’s the reason why people say angels are terrible. It’s why a part of you knows that when you go toward the light you will leave behind something important. Something that protected you from the pain that true beauty brings.

All I can do is try to move a little bit closer to the real meaning of love every day. Even if it burns me with its radiance.

And it will. And it does.

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Shame

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“The only shame is to have none.” -  Blaise Pascal

“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole. And, confronted with this dark side, one has a sense of shame that sometimes borders on despair.” - Carl Jung

I don’t know if there’s a more uncomfortable emotion than shame.

Even negative emotions like anger and envy can be inspiring. They can feel good, like in the way it feels good to crush an orange and let the juices drip down your fingers. They compel action. They protect you from your own deficiencies by forcing your focus outward.

If I’m lucky, I can transform my guilt into anger. I’m a clever woman; I can almost always figure out how to make my own mistakes someone else's problem. I had a bad childhood. That’s why it’s okay. If only my friends and lovers had been more sensitive to my needs, I wouldn’t have felt the need to claw my fingertips down their backs until they bled into ribbons. I’m a writer, you see. I’m an artist. I need emotional intensity that ends with me blacked out, frothing, near death, near despair, my smoking black heels on your balcony like hoofprints, or else when I turn to the page, I won’t have enough juice inside me to ignite the spark, make my heartbeat turn like a gear. What did Marilyn Monroe say again? If you can’t love me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best? That sounds like the proper philosophy of a beautiful, mad woman. If you want to love me, you’re going to have to sacrifice at the altar of my inadequacy. You’ll suffer to make up the difference.

I used to be able to easily run away from consequences. It was one of the nice things about being young. It was as simple as slamming the rest of my drink and ordering an Uber, disappearing out the back door with lipstick smeared across my chin. I could make new friends tomorrow. I could get a new job next week. I’d buy a plane ticket and land in a new city where the streets weren’t smeared with my inchoate and awful memories.

But sometimes, I become cornered by my own bad decisions. Bad decisions beget more bad decisions. Everywhere I turn, I discover that each bad decision has become a wall, a pathway that’s now obstructed. I’ve made a cage for myself. I can’t rationalize away what I’ve done to myself, can’t order an Uber to disappear from it, can’t scream and spit flying rage at someone else that I want to take the blame. There’s no escape anymore.

I feel the guilt I should have felt a long time ago.

Then, that guilt turns into shame.

Shame sits on my ribcage like a squat, deformed goblin. It makes me lose my appetite, chokes me when I try to eat and closes up my throat when I try to drink. It won’t let me drown it out in alcohol. It’ll spill each sip of vodka down my chin. You thought you could escape me? If you try to turn away I’ll break your bones. I’ll melt down your eyes until they touch the back of your skull and you won’t be able to look away.

Shame tells me I alone was responsible for the bad things that I have done, for the bad things that I haven’t done, for the ways in which I’ve only been saved from horrible deeds by my own cowardice and impotency, the micro-suicide every morning when I decided I didn’t want to live but I didn’t want to die either, so I’d breathe in little sips of disassociation, pinch at my eyes and demand they stop seeing, refuse the beauty that offered itself to me. I couldn’t blame anything else. Not art, not god, not society, not the fact my check never came in the mail, not life, with its blue skies and sails, its splendor that I mistook for a curse. 

It was me all along.

When shame hits, I don’t even have the anger to direct it inward. I can’t slash my arms with a knife and release vengeance upon myself because what good would that do? Self-harm is a fine sacrifice if you’re only paying tribute to yourself, but it’s a poor tribute to the almighty god, to making things right.  Self-harm is just a kind of self-indulgence. It’s not the sacrifice that leads to a greater good. It’s a little release, a scratch of dopamine, so you don’t have to feel the full weight of your enmity toward yourself.

It’s just another way to lead yourself back down the same path you’ve always been on - the circle of mistakes, infinitum, the sin that eats its own tail. 

And shame tells me that I should apologize, to tell the whole world that I’m sorry for how I’ve abused it, but I know that an apology isn’t good enough either. I want the feel-good rush of being forgiven like that will make me a better person. Like that means a river of blood will come to wash away the dirt.

Besides, I don’t want to have to make up for the wrongs I’ve done. I just want them erased. 

I googled the word “shame,” and all the pictures are of people with heads bent, shoulders tight, and hands over their eyes. You want to hide yourself from your own sight. You wish to unstitch yourself and disappear from the fabric of God.

Therapists talk a lot about “toxic shame,” like it’s an emotion to be avoided at all costs. Like it was something implanted in you by forces against your will. And it does, indeed, feel toxic. 

When I went to therapy, I once cried and told my therapist how ashamed I was. She snapped at me and told me I wasn’t allowed to feel that. But why? She welcomed any other feeling I had - anger, sadness, anxiety, fear - but shame was off-limits. Every bad thing I ever did that I felt guilty for was justified in her eyes, someone else’s fault, and any feeling of negativity directed at self was a misdirected arrow.

I couldn’t help but imagine her telling the same thing to everyone who ever hurt me, as long as they paid her fee of $100 an hour. It’s not your fault. It’s the world that’s wrong. I guess nothing is anyone’s fault then. We’re just one long chain of bad mothers moving backward toward the beginning of eternity until we crawl back into the ocean and are sucked back into carbon. Maybe we can’t even blame the stars.

Sometimes, people mistake understanding the reason why you did something as a justification. But just because you have trauma doesn’t mean it’s okay to scream at your partner when he inadvertently triggers you. It doesn’t mean it’s okay to shoot your wife in the head if she triggers your wartime PTSD. It’s not okay to try to conquer all of Europe and kill 6 million Jews just because you’re a mediocre painter.

We can understand that rationally. We understand that pedophiles and murderers need to go to prison no matter who hurt them or what kind of brain damage they have. We understand that our mothers and fathers had a responsibility to us, no matter how bad their own childhoods were. But somehow, often, when it comes to our own responsibility, we want to abdicate it to someone else.

I get it. I want to believe nothing is my fault. There’s nothing worse than the pain of shame.

And when it’s happening, it doesn’t even feel like it’s you doing the bad thing, does it? When you snap in anger, when you take the coward’s way out, when you let anxiety prevent you from performing at your best, it’s like a heated little demon has snuck into your nerves and hijacked them for its own use. If you could just grab it, wriggling and angry

That bad thing isn’t you. The thing that is you is the calm and rational one, the one with good intentions, the soft voice and the quick step. The one who is loving and courageous and empathetic. You are the unplucked flower. You are the infant suspended in a golden membrane of light. You want to be good. You desire it above everything else.

Don’t you?

But that demon is you.

It’s you. Of course, it’s you.

It’s everything you’ve hidden from your eyes.

As long as you believe it’s a demon and not the product of your own nature, you’ll be a slave to your evil impulses. If you don’t allow yourself to feel shame, you’ll be a horrific tool for anyone who wants to use you because you can’t recognize yourself. You’ve become disconnected from yourself. That’s how people convince themselves it’s okay to steal and lie, to stomp on the heads of children, to destroy anything that stands in their way.

I don’t think the worst emotion is toxic shame. It’s toxic righteousness.

I messed up. I know I’ve messed up and it hurts. It hurts. I’ve got the scars to prove it. I’d eat my own fingers if it could take the pain away. 

But I know I’ve got to feel the pain or someone else will. That’s how suffering passes from generation to generation. You refuse to swallow the pain, so you give it to someone else. It becomes a family legacy, an accident of breeding. Energy can neither be created or destroyed. Even emotions are bound by the laws of physics.

I know I have to let myself feel the shame if I have any chance of making it stop.

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A Letter to Autumn, From Autumn

Dear 21-year-old Autumn, 

I still cry on my birthday.

Maybe if you thought about this, it wouldn’t surprise you, but you’ve never thought about being 35. Not really. You often told people with a dreamy look on your face, half-smile, “I’m going to kill myself someday,” like you were sharing a private joke. And when you tried to envision being happy, you didn’t have the imagination for it. You could imagine a thousand demons, bristling with fangs, slicked-back hair, singed tails, and oiled claws, crawling and slithering and flapping toward you.

Even then, imagine was the wrong word. You thought they were real. They were 3-dimensional cut-outs, shadows from your basal ganglia that siphoned your blood and hooked their reptilian tongues to your central nervous system.

And happiness? Happiness was a vacation poster pasted onto a dirty tunnel wall. It was a place that might have existed once, somewhere, for someone else. Maybe happiness had warm beaches or cold mountains. It didn’t matter. There’s no point in really trying to envision them. You only thought about happiness because sometimes the characters you wrote needed to have a dream you could crush later. 

Something you could never quite articulate. It tasted like battery acid on the tip of your tongue.

I still cry on my birthday for the same reason you do. It’s a period of reflection, a day to remember all the ways we’ve fucked ourselves. We had an entire year to become better people, but we didn’t do it. Not to our satisfaction. We wanted to throw a party like we were the female Great Gatsby, our heartbreak dressed in glitz and gold, fountains flooded with chilled champagne, but we never really learned how to enjoy parties. We’re still broken, and every year we heal ourselves a little bit more just to uncover more damage. Thirty-five is too old to go out like Jesus, too old to have that newborn foal kind of hope, that possibility and excitement when you see an open door ringed with sunshine. Yet, thirty-five is too young to be bitter. Too young to witness the full and complete arc of destruction that you’ve tried to carve out for yourself. I know that one of your greatest fantasies is being old and diseased, laying alone in a bed in a dark room, in a dark house, waiting for death like she’s the only person who will ever give you a genuine smile.

You wanted to be laid to waste by now? Try to calm down. Our liver still works and our skin is still mostly clear.

This newsletter was originally going to be a “35 Lessons that I learned at 35,” but I ended up scrapping that. It felt insipid and numb. Stupid. I didn’t need to fill the Internet with more nonsense like “Truth is the only thing that matters” and “Everyone needs an adventure.” These things are true, but until you’ve experienced them, they’re only platitudes. You could put them on a corkboard in your kitchen and let your eyes glaze over them.

I do have wisdom to give you, younger Autumn, but you probably wouldn’t be able to hear it. Not like that. I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve read about “life lessons” that meant nothing to me. Happy and successful people often forget what it was like to be miserable. It’s probably a good thing that we can’t always remember all the ways we’ve failed on the path to getting where we want to be. I’ve recovered from anorexia. (Sorry, I know it’s a major part of your personality.) I can eat a bacon and egg sandwich for breakfast without my throat closing up. I don’t even really have to think about it anymore. But I tend to forget all the times during recovery that I had to crawl across the kitchen floor, eat my food while weeping, grasping at my stomach while it swelled, and I thought I might become so huge I’d collapse through the floor.

So, how can I speak to you in a way that you’d understand?

I don’t want to lie to you. I don’t want to pretend that I’ve figured everything out, that the gap between us was some impossible chasm that I’d climbed with the pure strength of my intellect and will. I wanted to show you that things are still difficult and that I still experience pain. Let’s be honest with ourselves: you still don’t trust any experience that isn’t painful. I know you wouldn’t trust even me, an older version of yourself. You can’t believe that I’m happy. It’s easier for you to believe that I’ve come back in time to torment you with false hope, my regret and bitterness having transformed me into an agent of my own destruction. Yeah. It’s not enough to hurt myself. I’ve got to become an ouroboros of pain in every dimension, reaching to peel away the skin of every iteration of my being. I’ve got to bend backward through time, heels smoking, teeth filed into fangs, and reach out to grab a fistful of my own hair.

That sounds like something you’d write, doesn’t it?

I know that if someone gives you a glass of champagne, your first instinct is to piss in it before you drink it.

I know you want to die. Well, sort of you. You want to die without dying, in the way that cowards do. You want to give up because you think you’ve peeled back the illusion of this world and seen its great mysteries and found that they’re nothing special. A great darkness sits on the lip of every positive feeling. Sure, you’ll say that you don’t understand anything, just like all the great philosophers, but you’re full of yourself. You’re too arrogant to really believe that. You think you’ve got it all figured out. All that’s left to do is to learn how to write it well enough that everyone else can see. 

You think the only thing keeping you from greatness is that you haven’t found the most beautiful words yet. But you only believe in the kind of beauty that sits in a damp hole with gleaming eyes and a predator's tongue, so how could you possibly?

I also know that despite yourself, you can’t give up.

No matter how much you want to be called by the darkness, you can’t help but stir in your sleep so that your face is warmed by the sun that rises.

You’re stupid, and you’re broken, and you’re blind, but you did that to yourself. Your right hand stabbed your left to keep it from reaching for the truth you didn’t dare expose yourself to. You have to press your hand to your heartbeat to remind yourself that you’re still alive because you’ve worked so hard to numb yourself from any sensation that might penetrate all your protective layers and wound you with truth.

But you can’t help yourself. Bruised and crippled, spine hunched like a snake that wants to bite you, you still crawl towards hope.

You won’t live like this forever.

My happiness has reached heights you never thought possible, that you thought didn’t even exist. You abhorred the quiet, still voice of God that came with a moment of peace. Everything alien, even happiness, can be a little terrifying. But you’ll get used to it. You’ll watch a hand of sunlight stretch out across your mind, and those demons that seemed so real will dissolve.

You’ll feel relief once you realize that the stories you told about yourself were just stories. You were a writer trapped in the universe that you created for yourself. It’s happened before, even to the greats. Someone who is clever enough to fool other people with honeyed words usually just ends up fooling themselves. 

But once you realize a story is just a story, all you have to do is create a new one.

You met the tall, dark, and handsome stranger you always dreamed would save you. And he saved you, but not in the way that you thought he would - by inviting you into a darkened, dimly lit mansion in the countryside, his life already arranged for you, so that you could step into a well-stocked kitchen and a chiffon wardrobe but keep all your bad habits. He saved you by teaching you how to save yourself. With his guidance, you pried yourself open and saw the ugliness inside but the beauty, too. Not the fantasy you’d told yourself, but the truth as it was laid out as a mandate of reality.

The truth didn’t hurt as bad as you thought it would. You used that truth as a light to illuminate the path forward.

One day, you’ll write a bad sentence, a bad paragraph, a bad story, and you won’t feel the need to beat yourself up, screaming and hoarse, about what an insufficient human being you are. You’ll just delete it and move on. You once thought you had to motivate yourself with flagellation. That’ll stop when you recognize that error is a part of progress.

At 35 years old, you’re not a fresh-faced ingenue anymore, compensating for your awkwardness with youth, but you’re more beautiful than you’ve ever been.

You’ll recognize that Autumn Christian, as The Writer, is not the sum total of who you are. You cling to writing like it’s the only thing that matters, but the aperture of your experience will start to open up. You’ll start to appreciate moonlight and cold ice water, the feeling of wind on fresh hair, and the smile from someone who loves you. Not just as experiences that you can consume for fodder for literature, things that are only felt so they can be torn apart and analyzed, but as things that deserve appreciation as they are.

You’ll figure out that love is not a disease, not a biological impulse of retrograde chemicals. Love is the motion of everything as it flows toward eternity. It is the appreciation of existence itself. You'll realize you've fallen short of being a loving person. You mistook a strong feeling for love even though your actions weren't loving. That's okay. You can learn.

You thought family was a trap, but one day, you’ll find yourself looking down at a baby girl sleeping in a stroller, her breath fragile but also seemingly infinite, and you’ll never be more certain that you made the right choice to have her.

None of this happened by accident. There was luck, of course. You’ve had plenty of luck. But you suffered for every scrap of progress that came to you. You’ll cry out in the darkness for someone to help you over and over again because you keep forgetting that the only one who can truly help you is yourself. You’ll never lose that impulse. I still want to be rescued in the way that a puppy is rescued from drowning, shivering in the arms of someone kind and warm. 

It hurts sometimes to look at pictures of you. Your haunted eyes beg for a savior.

It won’t always seem like you’re making progress. Some days, you’ll want to turn back to the comfort of darkness and small dreams. You’ll want to abandon your family and write sad little stories in a closet while swigging warm white wine and watching your hands get old on the keyboard underneath a dim light bulb. You’ll have a revelation and then forget it. You’re good at that. Forgetting. You’re my favorite amnesiac. You’re so adept, so skilled, in all the ways you can hide from yourself. 

I still cry on my birthday because I know how to feel regret in a way that’s impossible for a twenty-year-old. I grieve everything I’ve lost and will never get back because that time has slipped away before. I can see that the things I thought were foundational to my personality, the things that protected me, were just rot and decay. I tried to protect my heart with my rage, and all it’s done has slowly killed me. Sometimes, I still wake up in the middle of the night with my hands gripping my throat. A part of me aches to destroy everything I worked so hard to build.

But I also have people who love me and remember me. A family that sends me flowers. A husband who makes me steak (Yeah, we eat red meat now. I know you’re surprised.) and drinks cocktails with me while we never run out of conversation, a two-year-old who is bright and healthy, three dogs, a nice place to live, a book project to work on, new dreams, surprising dreams, that unfold with extradimensional, glittering angles, revelations that seem to border on the supernatural. 

You can’t feel this yet. You don’t even want this yet. I understand. I promise you that God isn’t as cruel as you imagined. Not every good feeling is a demon in disguise, a clever machination designed to wring more pain from you.

Sometimes, despite yourself, often in direct opposition to yourself, you still manage to move forward. One day, you’ll look back and see how far you’ve come. You’ll laugh at yourself like I’m laughing at you now. You’re a jaded little girl, Bukowski's attitude without Bukowski’s experience, who had no idea how much there was still to discover. Each mystery hides another mystery inside of it. Each living thing, no matter how broken, holds the memory to recreate a thousand copies of itself. Every day the sun quenches itself in the light of the moon. The moon burns away to reveal another sun and, with it, a new and glittering aspect of life.

You wake up and think, this is it?

I wake up and think this is it.

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Truth

“The poet that beautified the sect that was otherwise inferior to the rest, saith yet excellently well, "It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tossed upon the sea; a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below; but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth (a hill not to be commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene), and to see the errors and wanderings and mists and tempests in the vale below.” - Francis Bacon, Of Truth

I was so lost. From the ages of 18-26, life seemed like a cruel joke, and my suffering was the punch line. I couldn't orient my head in the correct direction and no matter how I turned, the sky was lost to me. I always ended up looking at the ground. 

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I lost my religion. I left my family. Boys always claimed to love me when I was in the backseat of their car, moonlight and unfamiliarity magnifying a good sentiment, but I never could seem to keep them from growing to hate me. And I couldn't write enough stories about sad and broken girls finding love to fill the void inside me that only real love could fill.

I didn't understand the truth.

So, what was real to me? When I asked myself what was the truth, what did I think? All I knew was that I was a self-hating slab of meat. My stomach hurt so badly it felt like I was full of screaming animals. Every corridor I turned just led me back to the center of my hatred, a trick house maze with windows only for clowns to peer inside and laugh at me.

I tried to find a worldview that would justify how badly I felt. I knew that dark matter comprised 98% of the matter in the universe. I knew that dead animals orbited the earth, stuck in cruel Soviet vessels. I knew we never found life on another planet, but the deep sea was full of unimaginable horrors, a subterranean mansion of monsters underneath our feet. God was dead, but plenty of villains were willing to use his corpse as a puppet.

Love? Beauty? Truth? Those weren't real. That was just the gold paint flaking on top of a dead hand.

And if that's what you believe, but you're not willing to end the joke of your suffering and take yourself out - the only option is to become a terrible person. 

Fine, then. I’ll be terrible. You want to hurt me? Then I'll hurt you first. I'll turn my body into a fortress to keep all of you out. My eyes will become moats you can't cross without drowning. I’ll sharpen my fingernails to a point and use them to puncture everything I can get my hands on. The universe despises my pleasure, so I’ll get it any way I can. I’ll sneak into the darkness and steal it. I’ll hold its body to mine and suck it dry. I’ll abuse my body and turn it into a bleached and empty canvas to showcase my pain.

Then after all that, I’d still fall to the ground, ribs heaving, clutching my stomach, crying, and ask myself why I wasn’t happy.

Nothing about me or what I believed was designed to make me happy. 

Those early years of adulthood felt like a fragmented nightmare. There are huge holes in my memory, eaten away by shame and bad decisions. I disassociated from myself, and so much I can only remember as if I pressed a warm, damp rag against my face. When I met my now-husband, Robert, he would often quote Francis Bacon when I was in the throes of agony, unsure of where to go, what to do, or even who to be.

“Nature to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

I thought I understood what it meant, but of course I didn’t. I started to get irritated every time he said it. Yeah. I get it. I get it. I thought I had everything figured out, even though I was slowly killing myself. I told myself I wanted to be happy but I sneered at happiness. Whenever I experienced brief moments of joy, it was like a foreign object lodged in my throat. It was something I had to expel or else I’d choke on it. And when I saw others being happy it felt barbaric to me. Look at these idiots, enjoying themselves, surrounded by children and grandchildren, their smiles as bright and effortless as sparkling wine. If only they knew the truth. If only they knew that life was just a funnel straight toward death, a machine to generate corpses. They wouldn’t dare to smile then.

The truth. It’s funny now when I think about it—the truth.

“Nature to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

What I thought to be true was merely the raving, flailing gesticulations of post-hoc rationalization and cope because I didn’t want to feel like a failure. I believed in whatever meant that I could be justified in feeling like I was helpless while I was crawling toward hell. I’d rather have my throat burn with thirst than try to reach out for a glass of water. All the while I’d be telling myself something like, “The desire for water is a clever biological illusion. Thirst is a cruel mandate of evolution. The only appropriate and logical solution is to allow myself to die of dehydration.”

There’s plenty of people like me, too. I know I’m not the only one. They used to call themselves realists, but lately call themselves intellectuals and rationalists. They’re often well-educated and intelligent and dress nicely so that you might miss their eyes are haunted by self-mutilation, and no matter how successful they appear to be, their personal lives are a wasteland of poor decisions. They’re sophists. They’re wordcels. They’ve got the answer to everything, a personal bible full of quotes and facts of statistics to back them up, yet they’re perpetually unhappy. (And if you bring this up they've also got studies to show that smarter people tend to be more depressed because they “see reality as it is.”) They’ve got whiplash smiles and charming party personas, but if you displease them they’re quick to tell you that you don’t matter. Because nothing matters. The mass of human beings doesn’t even compare to the mass of dead insects they walk over, you see. Say, have you read Thomas Ligotti? Have you read Camus? The sense of injustice you feel is just an electrical impulse, everything is an electric impulse, and look here, this optical illusion means that you can’t even trust your eyes, so why do you think it’s reasonable for me to trust you? Just like that, the universe has absolved them of responsibility for their behavior. We are the last vestige of living rot that squirms on top of the dead matter that goes down forever. 

They tell you that life has no meaning, so we’re free to create our own meaning. They’ll usually say that the meaning of life is to be happy, or to love your friends and family. But a meaning easily given can be easily taken away, a meaning that has no real truth behind it, is nothing but a ringing hollow noise. If you observe their behavior you’d see that even they don’t believe in this newfound set of values. They’ll be happy until there’s a convenient reason to complain. They’ll love their family, until they’ve done something to displease them. Marriage doesn’t have to be forever, because a contract for forever is beholden to nothing. Discard your love. Discard your friends. Discard your family. Find replicas to replace them. Look after yourself first, even if that means throwing yourself off a bridge into the churning water below to avoid confronting the unpleasant feelings of failure. They don’t feel that the meaning is actually something that needs to be achieved above all else. Why would they? It’s not real. Nothing is.

Create your own meaning? I used to think I could do that too. It’s laughable now that I think about it like I could conjure “meaning” like something out of thin air, free from my flesh and bone, free from the eternal tug of time, of history like the rules of physics and natural law somehow did not apply to my own thoughts. Like my mind was not my body, and my body was not my mind, and all that I experienced was a floating ghost. “Meaning” was not a joker to be flung out of a deck of cards to get me out of trouble.

I paid for my stupidity. Dear God, did I pay for it. I paid for it in blood and a thousand tears on the bathroom floor. I paid for it in all the people I hurt. I paid for it when I did acid to “fix myself” and all I could find inside of me was shards of broken glass, a ruined cathedral turned into an abattoir. No revelation to be found. I starved myself down to 85 pounds and then, terrified of what I’d done, ran to a doctor who told me my heart was going to fail if I kept it up. Was, in fact, already starting to. Then I resented her for this, because I wanted her to tell me that I was fine. I wanted permission to continue destroying myself.

“Nature to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

I thought I understood the Francis Bacon quote because I understood the truth. All I had were facts. It can be easy to get them confused.

Truth is not just a mere collection of facts that can be assembled on a whim, to be discarded or acquired when convenient. An infinite number of facts surrounds us. Billions. Trillions. If you try to orient yourself by facts you’ll find yourself drowning in them. If you look down into hell, you’ll see facts. If you look upward toward heaven, you’ll see facts. If you already have a preconceived conclusion, you can find any fact to justify your worldview. 

Then you find yourself thinking, “Why do I feel so confused?” when you have so many facts on your side. Then you can start thinking, “Maybe I’m supposed to feel confused.” You begin to believe that the universe is a slanted mouth, a devouring machine. Evil. Bad. Why else would the facts lead you to the dark hole that consumes all your sight?

Truth is the light that dances upon all of reality. It illuminates the world so that wherever you focus your perception, you can orient yourself with it.

Truth is the fundamental structure of everything. It is the mechanism of how things work. It is the ultimate thing that cannot be avoided. Even when you think you’re avoiding it, it bears all its weight on you. Truth is not how I think the world should be. It is not a desire and a whim.

The truth is. It is what is.

I wasn’t obeying nature. Whenever I tried to discern the truth, I thought, “This is how I want life to be, because life as is feels so fundamentally unfair,” and then discarded any revelation that might show me otherwise. I wanted to be free of the yolk of my origins, my animal self. I wanted to make my own meaning. I wanted to be free of God, of demons, of good, of evil. I wanted to be a spirit without a body. I wanted things to be fair.

Reality didn’t care what I wanted. I wasn’t obeying nature, so I couldn’t command it. Instead, it destroyed me.

If you want to understand the truth, you must start trying to understand how things work on their fundamental level. Oftentimes you’ll be wrong. You’ll fuck up. People make miscalculations all the time. But once you learn how to decipher truth, you’ll never feel quite so lost again. You’ll know how to get yourself out of the dark.

If like me, you were so lost you couldn’t decipher up from down, here are some questions you can start asking yourself to find the truth.

What do I want?

Is what I want possible?

If it’s not possible, then why do I imagine that I want it?

Is it possible that I am lying to myself because I am afraid?

What has gone wrong?

What had gone right?

What would it look like if I stopped lying to myself? How would I feel?

Does my desire produce positive results for me and the people around me? Do I need to recalibrate what I desire in the first place because maybe what I thought I wanted was a result of ignorance?

Are my actions leading to the results that I want? If not, then why do I continue to engage in those actions?

Am I experiencing resistance when I try to put my ideals into practice? Why is that? Is it because the world is wrong or because I don’t understand the world?

What do I understand about this situation? What do I not understand?

What actions could I take to move toward a greater understanding of what’s going on?

In my experience, truth is not a black pill that you swallow like poison. Cynicism often masquerades as truth when it's nothing but a twisted mirror of truth. Even the worst truth usually comes with a sense of relief because truth points you toward action and gives you power over what to do next. 

“Nature to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

Truth illuminates the majesty all around you. It reveals epiphanies hidden inside ordinary things. It's immortal, eternal, and omnipresent. It persists no matter how much you try to avoid it and always welcomes you when you run toward it.

It really is beautiful once you see it. As Francis Bacon quoted in his essay, On Truth, “No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of the truth."

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The Philosophy of Doomscrolling

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The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.” - David Antin

“The Internet gave us access to everything; but it also gave everything access to us.” James Veitch

I should be writing my final installment of my Evil Series Newsletter. It's supposed to be grand and riveting. It’s supposed to be bold and provocative, but also at the same time, elegant and restrained. It's the kind of letter I'd want to write in a leatherbound book, hand white and cramped from the strain of trying to perfect each word with dignified style, like it'd later be scrutinized by scholars with Byzantine tastes. It would help me prove to myself that I don't have brain damage. I haven't lost the spark, I can still write. I still have the mandate of heaven. I haven't been bleeding for nothing, and the spear I've been sleeping with, dipped in ichor, slipped between my ribs, like the sword of Damocles but it's already fallen, hasn't infected my mind, hasn't killed my heart, hasn't murdered me in fragmented slices and nightmares and sighs, and despite all the exhaustion and pain I put myself through it never will. I'll never let it. Here is the proof.

It's a lot to ask a piece of writing to accomplish.

Three weeks have gone by and I haven't even started drafting it. I don't even know where to begin. I am a wounded bird fluttering in the foam of its dark ocean. I am standing at the edge of its depths and every time I want to take a hesitant step forward, to get the damn thing written already, all I can see is the vast and monstrous landscape of the Unwritten unraveling all around me.

So instead of even trying, I end up doomscrolling on X or TikTok or Reddit. I play Persona 5 on my Nintendo Switch. I pick up my Kindle and read one book for two minutes, then another, unable to find something to hold my attention. I stuff my brain with noise, data like junkfood, until my weak and wobbly and whiny little inner voice is quieted and I'm left with nothing but a vague sense of unease.

Sure, I know the steps to get through that feeling. I know how to fight procrastination and anxiety. I've been a writer long enough to understand the oblique ways in which I have to approach an idea, the tricks and tips to take an enormous inner landscape and make it a manageable little story. I've learned to be comfortable with the constant, vague sense of disappointment that comes with every sentence I write. Words are imperfect vessels, after all, and writing is a medium that's somehow both too sophisticated and primitive to ever fully capture the true essence of a thought. With one hand you’re trying to transcribe the message of God. With the other, you’re whipping your own back with a cat-o-nine tail because you know you’ll never be able to.

Most of the time I like the agony of art. I like debasing myself in front of the infinite, dancing like a court Jester as it laughs at me, laughs at my silly little attempts to write something that matters, flings stars and the weight of gravity at me, all of the unknowables at me, burns me up, uses me up, a day at a time, until there’s nothing left to burn. I know that my words will be chewed up by the great maw of time, and all I have to sustain me in the knowledge that maybe what I’m doing has any impact at all is an email every couple of weeks that my writing touched someone’s heart, or a 4 star review on Goodreads, or a message from my publisher that we sold a decent amount of books. That’s fine with me. I knew the price of doing what I wanted, on my own terms, was that I’d have to do what I wanted on my own terms. Success and praise were never guaranteed. Better writers than I have been destroyed by the great consuming machine of life. Bukowski said to find what you love and let it kill you, because anything pursued with passion is bound to kill you. I am okay with my body breaking over my computer keyboard. (Or my phone, which I'm writing this on right now.) I am okay with arthritis and ugliness and poverty, not enough money to afford Botox, not enough money to afford a decent nursing home. I understood the price of true love. It’s always death.

So why can't I bring myself to write this newsletter?

I guess I just want to feel inspired again.

I want to feel like what I felt three years ago when I went to the edge of Lake Elmer in the misted afternoon, in the deep noise of protracted isolation, and I was so connected to my creative self that I whispered speak and the giggling spirits all around me chortled and changed and swung from every. Wade into the water, they told me, in voices tinged with amusement, in giddy joy at my bumbling ignorance in the face of the eternal. Wade into the water. What are you, afraid? All you have to lose is everything.

Some people say that there is no real inspiration. That the muse is a myth. They say you have to sit down at the computer day after day, like some kind of broken workhorse, and beat your fingers against the keyboard until they break. And while there is some truth to that, some days you do just have to push yourself, how can they say there is no such thing as inspiration? Like it's some kind of construct, an illusion, perpetrated by amateurs and wannabes looking for an excuse to give up?

Have they never seen the face of God, shining on the water, illuminating the surface of the dark heaven that spirals out in all directions forever?

That was an inspiration. That was divinity. In those days I fully and truly saw the link between creativity and psychosis, not a line or a divide, but an endless tunnel, a place that I could either swim or drown in, that sang with the endless pulse of all life, its teeming and unbroken mass of infinite data. No drugs required. I just had to look and see. I had to be honest with myself. I had to be willing to bow down in front of all the angels and spirits, admit that I knew nothing, and ask for help.

But that sounds terrifying, and like a lot of work. And I have a toddler to take care of, you know. Can I bring my toddler with me to the edge of the stream of madness, in that place where all sense of space and time is lost, where I have to wade carefully, lightly, lest a conflagration of demons catch me unaware? It's probably irresponsible.

So I go back to doom scrolling. I gorge on TikTok videos about anabolic protein cheesecake recipes. I delve into hairTok where everyone is putting rosemary oil on their scalp to try to stimulate hair growth. I look at Reddit posts and then screenshots of Reddit posts and now suddenly I feel like I need to have an opinion about the man who wouldn’t open a can of beans for his daughter. I scroll through the infinite feed of Twitter, which right now is just showing me a bunch of posts about the “gender discourse,” where adults in their 30s and 40s are fighting each other while being locked in a prolonged adolescence.

When I get a moment to stop and think, I think:

What am I doing?

Why am I stuffing my mind with all this noise?

Shouldn’t I be working on my newsletter?

When I was a child I used to scroll the Internet for hours, searching through arcane websites and buried message boards. My dad used to work at Paradigm (Which later became THQ), and he’d take me and my brother to the office during his overtime. I’d grab an orange soda from the vending machine and find a free computer to scroll on. It never felt like wasted time. I always learned something new, or found an entertaining tangent, or a fun game to play. It's difficult to admit that place is gone. The Internet was a new frontier, and now it's not. It's a worn out path, paved over with “content.”

Every writer and creative person I know hates the word “content.” It implies a tepid, homogenous mass of slop. A thing without texture or edges or end that goes down easy but never quite fills you up. I don't want to doomscroll. I don't want to consume “content.”

I want to sit on the edge of a new world and look over until my stomach flips upside down. I want to grit my teeth and have my hair blown back with the anticipation of the new. I want to gorge my eyes on things that I've never seen before. That's my vision of heaven. Not an eternal, unchanging paradise, where we all join hands and sing in celestial praise. But a cyberpunk wild west, where all possibilities are available at my fingertips.

Like I said before, I want to be inspired.

In the middle of writing this newsletter, which is about writing another newsletter, I went and asked my husband, “If the Internet is no longer the new frontier, then where is it?”

He replied: “Outside.”

“Outside. You mean, like, meatspace? I don't think I'll find the new frontier in a town like Kingfisher, Oklahoma.”

“Yes you will,” he said. “It's everywhere.”

I thought about this before a little bit, and then went back to doomscrolling. I looked up coffee shops in Dallas, Texas. I read a Wikipedia article about yellowtail fish. I read a Twitter thread full of angry parents, each with a violent and decisive opinion, about whether or not the husband should have to parent and do chores after coming home after working 40-80 hours a week. I read advice on a DBT forum on how to access wise mind, which seemed to get me even further away from any kind of wisdom, and catapulted me instead into a dark unease about how I seem unable to put my phone down and do any kind of laborious spiritual work.

Carl Jung once wrote that “the mystic and the psychotic drown and swim in the same waters.” I feel like I'm drowning, but I'm not even close. I'm just sitting in waist-high tepid water. I stir it up just enough that I don't smell the stagnation that collects on the surface.

Maybe my husband is right. I should go outside.

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