[8] What It Felt Like to Come Home
Chapter 7: Some Reflections on Happiness and Mental Illness
(A writing exercise in several parts, this part composed in 90 minutes and posted without edits)
Part VIII – Chapter 7: Some Reflections on Happiness and Mental Illness
I write on a strict schedule of “whenever I feel like it.” I never let a day pass without doing exactly as much writing as I feel inclined to do that day. I began this series weeks ago as an exercise in narrative writing and a personal archeology of a strange time in my life but sometimes you need to be in a certain place in life before you feel able to face parts of your past and, for the past two weeks, I haven’t been in that place.
The rest of this series will be concerned with my life and psychological state during that first year back in New York. This involves depression, addiction, sleep issues, and anger. It also involves friendship, love, hope, and excitement. This isn’t ‘The Basketball Diaries’ and I won’t be going into any great detail about any of those subjects but perhaps you want to disembark from the train at this stop. I believe this is what’s known as a ‘trigger warning’ in the popular lexicon of bullshit pop psychology. Of course it’s not really that. It’s just a advisory that the rest of this series may involve dark and sad topics. If you find yourself triggered by things then you should not avoid them. You should progressively expose yourself to them in a controlled environment and therefore desensitize your sympathetic nervous system. Avoiding triggers as a coping strategy for trauma is like abstaining from exercise as a physical fitness regimen, or avoiding all darkness as a sleep hygiene plan.
The impetus that keeps me returning to this year again and again in my mind is the disconnect between my lived reality and my retrospective understanding. I’ve never really been fully psychotic or manic but I’ve had the experience of coming to in an instant and realizing that I remember almost none of the past 3 months of my life, days during which I was walking around, talking, working, playing, etc. It’s a dark and surreal feeling and at the time I thought that it would scarcely be less horrifying had I realized that I had been living life as a ghost. I’ve experienced derealization, the persistent feeling that what you’re perceiving CAN’T be real, that there is some flaw in your vision and understanding that you can’t quite specify… “a splinter in your mind” as Morpheus put it in The Matrix. I have had years when I performed all of the basic functions of life and living with reasonable success and cheer, only to realize that I was laboring under a cloud of intense delusion and disconnect.
Anosognosia is what I believe it’s called: the mind’s built-in tendency to deflect warning signs and paper over its own failures and dysfunction. It’s very common among dementia patients, addicts, trauma victims, and even the incompetent (the Dunning-Krueger effect). 2009 was the year of anosognosia for me. I went through life as if in a dream, only realizing afterwards how much effort my subconscious was exerting to maintain a placid internal fiction. I felt pretty good most of the time, normal - as I careened into an abyss.
So much of the modern era can be traced back to the life and work of Jean Jacques Rousseau: the fixation on inner states, the romanticization of the primitive and the marginalized (two very different things to be sure but equally beloved by our cultural elites, beheld as they are through their nearly opaque rose-tinted glasses), the promotion of intuition and natural impulse as guides for thought and action, the idea of an ‘authentic self’, the celebration of a kind of faux-vulnerability epitomized by the confessional autobiography (recently demonstrated in its purest and most concentrated form by ‘prince’ Harry). We’re all swimming in the waters of our contemporaneous culture, barely aware of its composition. I understand that I’ve been marinating in Rousseau’s ideas for my entire life even though I find the man fairly abhorrent and his ideas only partly logical constructions at all. They’re equally, in my opinion, expressions of disordered personality traits in Rousseau and his intellectual descendants.
The inner state isn’t clear or sacred or often even transparent to the feeler. Primitive people are basically similar to us but are more connected with nature and our primordial state, more ignorant, and more violent. They’re less neurotic and less refined and more superstitious and more brutal. The marginalized gain no automatic special wisdom or sanctity from their exclusion. Marginalization doesn’t create a holy aura of wisdom around most of its victims. It degrades them morally just as much as materially. Intuition and impulse can be decent guides in certain circumstances but there is no true “inner self” and no mystical connection to knowledge or wisdom therein. Confessional autobiographies are indulgent and pitiful when they make a display of shameful deeds or thoughts to celebrate the ‘honesty’ or ‘openness’ of the exhibitionist. When vulnerability becomes lauded and lucrative it’s no longer admirable.
All of that to say that while Jean Jacques probably derived a kind of perverse glee (I think) and humble-bragging moral authority when he publicly wrote about his own shameful life events and private abnormalities I do not. Years of contact with mental health professionals has taught me the value of openness. “Secrets keep us sick,” is one popular refrain. There is also a kind of inverse hierarchy that can begin to develop in group therapy where the most expressive and divulging patients gain status in the group but I never derived any satisfaction from those rewards. Vulnerability has never come easy to me and openness is only achievable because I’m not too concerned with how people regard me. My shame isn’t usually intensified by its sharing – it’s purely a private affair.
I am honest about my past as a rule but I still feel shame. Shame has a bad rap these days but there’s a reason that it’s one of the deepest and most fundamental emotions for social primates like us: shame does what intuition and impulse and ‘authenticity’ only do sporadically: constructively constrain and reform our behavior.
I understand that addiction is a strange and maladaptive neurological setup intellectually and I can even connect with that fact emotionally but I am an addict and so I struggle to see the world through a lens other than my own. I can’t really fathom what it would be like to not love books, to not be a man, to not live in the modern era, or to live free of addiction. I acknowledge that it is a disability and a mental illness but it’s the only reality I’ve ever known and I spend no more time wishing it were otherwise than wishing I was an heir to a great fortune or an NBA player. I believe in the stoic precept: any burden or misfortune can occasion personal growth and wisdom, whereas any privilege can render a person soft and complacent.
Addiction as I’ve seen and experienced it is not primarily overdoses and theft and detox stays, any more than schizophrenia is florid psychosis. A large share of schizophrenics will only experience a very small number of psychotic episodes during their entire life (perhaps no more than a month or two or three out of 60-65 years). The symptoms of schizophrenia that are not as exotic or easily rendered in fiction are more pervasive: blunted affect, deadened gaze, depression, slowed and garbled cognition, anhedonia. Likewise the daily deficits of addiction pertain more to spiritual vitality and intimacy than they do to legal and medical drama (although those surely await most of us who stay on the path for long enough).
Addiction is a progressive illness, which means that over any considerable period of untreated time it gets worse, never better. It’s often cyclical, and that has been my experience. While I have had dark months (years) of complete psychological slavery I have had more time of (subjectively) enlivened and brightened existence while using (and years of recovery and sobriety). Most of my adult life has been spent in some nether region: struggling to perform the duties of an adult fully and struggling to assemble things of value (relationships, homes, careers, hobbies) under a grave burden. When you carry a burden with you everywhere, though, you either break or become fairly accustomed to the weight.
The most compelling image I can draw of addiction is of living life in a kind of malign fogbank, or under a depth of murky water. Sometimes the darkness envelopes one completely, sometimes vision brightens and the murk clears, but generally there’s a sense of distance and inauthenticity. You’re down in the shadows, watching your friends and family walking along a river in the sunshine above, gesturing and laughing and talking while you try to keep up, stumbling and racing along the uneven river bottom. You peer through the muddy water and try to make out what’s being said and try to present a calm and cheerful demeanor, but you can’t quite see what they’re seeing and the sun on their faces is more of a distant abstraction: something attractive, certainly, but rarely felt. You end up saying and doing and seeking a great many things because they seem like the things that a ‘normal’ and healthy person might say and do and seek in your place. There’s sometimes an uncomfortable feeling of artifice but it’s usually pretty reflexive and therefore not troublesome. It HAS to be reflexive to be a mask worn all day, every day, and to be convincing.
I will make no claim for sympathy or consideration for the addict but I would like to make one emphatic point: the addict lies to and hurts others but he lies most of all and first of all to himself. Life is a never-ending series of equivocations and justifications: they don’t really need to know, it’s better for them if they don’t, my lies are protecting them, it’s easier to keep things simple, they wouldn’t understand, they don’t grasp the benefits, they’re overreacting, I AM IN CONTROL. Where one lie is knocked down another quickly rises to fill the gap and in this way a shell of falsehood envelopes not just the intention but the very consciousness of the addict. You become truly lost in a maze of your own rationalizations, numbed and lulled to the blaring alarms which begin faint and only towards the very end suddenly become deafening.
Anorexia nervosa has always seemed like an apt comparison to me. The anorexic knows intellectually that she is weakening her body unto destruction. She understands on a rational level that the fainting and the general concern and the uncomfortable symptoms and the elaborate coping and counting habits are abnormal and unhealthy. Yet EVERY ONE of these data points somehow becomes obscured in the moment and the patient is dragged deeper into an undertow of suffering. The anorexic knows, on some level, that hunger will destroy her. The addict knows, on some level, that his obsession will destroy him. There are so many intermediate steps and half-truths and bargains and equivocations between now and then that this knowledge never actually amends their behavior. Like water running down a sloped and curvy road the beliefs and impulses of the patient might meander and seem naturally variable when viewed from above, but it is always running downhill.
I returned from Afghanistan and put my elaborate plan into effect immediately. Like a soon-to-be-freed prisoner dreaming of the world I had endless hours to pick goals and desires, although in retrospect some of them seem somewhat haphazardly-chosen. I remember one quiet moment with a loved one during which I said “I don’t know… it’s like I can’t feel anything.”
Expectation and momentum will carry a person far indeed. If you are determined to prosper in and love your new job it may take months before you admit to yourself that the entire endeavor is a dead end. I was so excited to come home and live a ‘normal’ life that it took me several months to grasp the fact that happiness and emotional range were increasingly just memories, and the memories were fading.
Within 2 weeks of returning I was a full time student at the CCNY School of Architecture. I will say little about this area of my life other than to apologize to my professors and note that working in the studio was a close social environment and a kind of masochistic lifestyle (what’s the “architect’s breakfast?” Two aspirin and a large black coffee) as much as it was an academic enterprise. My normal incentives for achievement and conscientiousness (never outstanding) were completely out of whack. Anxiety is necessary for most people to meet deadlines and finish projects and attend classes. Ideally it’s not crippling, but the negative emotional valence associated with underperformance and general flakiness is what keeps people fulfilling their obligations (and a great deal of habit, of course, but it’s a pattern of habituation enforced by anxiety). Conscientiousness relies in large part upon anxiety to provide its role of positive social reinforcement and anxious people are usually more conscientious, and vice versa. I couldn’t muster any anxiety for the prospect of academic failure or petty arrest or physical confrontations with strangers. These stimuli barely registered with me after my deployment.
Imagine returning from a years-long Castaway-type ordeal in which you’re pushed to survive on nature’s knife edge in toil and solitude. It would take long time for you to reacquire the equilibrium of polite civilization, in which long restaurant waits and traffic are significant challenges. So it was with me upon my return.
There is some wisdom here, of course. Yes, it is also stoic in origin. What we consider our troubles and deprivations are truly miniscule relative to the difficulties encountered by 99% of our species. Understanding the truly trivial character of modern ‘problems’ can lend one a great deal of happiness but when you’re satisfied to be fed and dry and alive you’re satisfied with those things and the drive to enjoy more and better experiences diminishes correspondingly. This is not a mode of being that benefits our system of consumer capitalism. Our system constantly exploits and amplifies longings and insecurities and frailties to sell us goods and services. Still, through that gate of stoic equanimity lies the promise of increased happiness for a great many people. If adulthood has taught me anything it’s illustrated the absurd and selfish myopia of youth and shown me again and again the great spiritual fact: most troubles are only troublesome because of our attitude. Without changing a single external detail of a person’s life that person can become immensely happier simply through gratitude and a constant acknowledgement of all the terrible things that might befall her but rarely do. To lose your limbs or your family or your sanity or your lifespan would be a crushing blow which we would give almost anything to undo. How joyful would we be if those losses were then reversed, erased? That is the situation we are all in right now. We have all or most of those things and the only barrier to that kind of ecstatic gratitude every day is our own complacency and narrow framing.
THESE are some of the lessons of mental health for those who have lost it and then fought to regain it. When you feel anxious and overwhelmed remind yourself that the stakes are actually quite puny. When you feel discontented remind yourself of the unbelievable riches that you currently enjoy in a hundred different areas. It took me many years to truly learn these habits of course…