0003 | Self-destruct (that didn't take long, did it?)

Remember how yesterday I said I need people? What I really should have said was that I need person.

I am historically terrible at being alone. I have done the therapy to prove it. Love, specifically oxytocin, is my drug of choice. And Ben has been traveling for work this week. Today is day 4. It is no coincidence that today is Day 0003 of the blog. Ben is in Dallas getting high on fast-paced, high level engagement. I am here in the desert quietly looking into the infinity of my own soul and trying to capture some of it in writing before I drown it out with some other, less optimal drug like alcohol, hyperactivity, TV, or anxiety. I know why writers drink and housewives pop pills.

We live next door to a sweet and frantic flurry of nerves, worry, and a life generally fraught with frustration. When I picture her in my mind, I see a drowning person kicking and clawing at still water, fighting wild-blindly to stay afloat when all she would have to do is be still enough to take a breath and the whole struggle would cease. Ironically, she was once a competitive swimmer and still swims daily for exercise. She and her husband are logistically co-dependent but emotionally estranged, presumably tethered to each other by the resentment and daily battle of raising the brilliant child they made together a decade ago, a child who is unexpectedly gorgeous and not unpredictably caught between their two clashing cultures and personalities. Since we moved in, I have imagined that her uptight, white lady energy is at least partially responsible for their marital distress. I see through a different lens today. Whatever the reason they no longer choose to listen to each other, it is quite possible that her palpable anxiety--the painful frequency of the psychic hum in which she exists--is not only a cause, but also an effect. I suspect that her frustration is a mask. I suspect this because I do it, too. My favorite flavor is slightly different, but I get the gist of self-destruction, either slowly or dramatically, to avoid grappling with the real thing, whatever that is. Ben says there's always a thing before the thing. My thing is loneliness. That's not the thing before the thing. It's just the thing before the bourbon.

We have no bourbon in the house. This week, instead of following my first impulse to drink a cocktail first thing in the morning because I wake up and reach over and can't feel Ben's toes with my toes or smile at him or tell him about the most recent in a series of crazy dreams, I postpone my fix and opt for sleep deprivation, shunning the empty, Benless bed in favor of binge-watching prison television drama from the sofa and snacking without the benefit of inhibition. Salted butter on rice cakes tastes like popcorn! I do not function gracefully on fewer than eight hours of full-on, deep, yummy sleep. I prefer nine. Last night I stayed up until two a.m. drinking iced decaf lattes and watching inmates plan their escape. I knew I would hurt this morning. I do. I still woke up as the sun was rising and went for my morning walk around the basin, cranky and contemplating what I'd done to myself and why. (See above)

Here's what I came up with. This self-destruction--however it takes shape--is an old, bad habit, a rusty tool that has outlived its usefulness. It needs to be thrown out to make room for tools that actually work. It, like everything else, warrants interrogation. So I walked around the basin asking myself questions and listening for the answers that feel true.

What if I just sat with the loneliness for a minute and didn't avoid it? Would it be so bad? What if I found that the real thing wasn't loneliness, but fear of loneliness? What if it wasn't even fear of loneliness, but fear of abandonment, of being left alone? What if it was more than that? What if it was some old, terrible suspicion that people who have left (Oh, yeah... I'm lookin' at you, Dad), left because I wasn't worthy of love? (Ah ha! The thing before the thing!) But what if I am worthy of love? What if I always was? What if being alone and being worthy of love can both be true at the same time? Can't it be true for other people? Then why couldn't it be true for me? (Why can't I just take a walk and enjoy the sunrise without blowing up my own brain and smashing all my precious ideas to bits?)

What if, one at a time, every destructive, useless, diminishing belief to which I cling can be named and interrogated and rendered powerless so that I can go about my life and quite literally stop losing sleep over it? Doesn't that sound like increased joy, decreased suffering? What if I look at everything square in the face as though either changing it or being changed by it is part of my reason for being alive? Wouldn't that look like evolution?