When I start to brood over what to write here, I never get started. Saying so gets me started.
I never read. My ever-soothing friend Lynne says, “That’s OK,” and then says (I can’t really remember) something about how most people don’t, or how it is not really necessary, or something just generally soothing. But I still think I should. Read.
I buy books. Usually something fad-y; a physical health or emotional health book, an obscure book related to an unusual incident, or several books on the revision of prehistory. But I never read them. I can’t find any classics in my house, and only a few by writers I like—Mailer, Capote, and maybe one other. Those I have read.
I know about The Lord of the Flies, and even handled a copy in high school, and actually started reading it but never stayed focussed long enough to finish. I did read The Hobbit, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s subsequent trilogy, Lord of the Rings, long before those novels became a novelty. No Shakespeare, no poetry–though I do have two ancient books of poetry of unknown provenance into which I have fallen entranced once or twice. And magazines, like books, I buy but don’t read. Though I was getting—and reading—National Geographic for a couple years. I’m almost ashamed to admit that.
Which, as always, brings me to now. I am semi-stupefied from having taken an Ativan last night. Likely the reason I was so slow getting started up at the top there. Ativan, the insidious chemical soother. It makes going gently into that good night as easy as pie. Just another reason to both love and hate it.
There is a precious discontent, an anxiety about all things—whether it be not reading while one has time, or not socializing when one has the chance, or anything to do with living for that matter—that is both ally, and enemy. I have an anxiety disorder but I think that is a misnomer, as it really is a resistance to anxiety that is the problem. If one sits in the street, one feels anxious at the approach of traffic. One focuses on only the anxiety and wishes for it to go away. Failing relief by death, since traffic stopped, one now becomes the object of the great consternation of many who have been inconvenienced. One focuses on the resulting anxiety and wishes for it to go away. Police come. They yell loudly. One’s anxiety increases even more, and one wishes it would all go away. One covers one’s face and curls into a fetal position. One is picked up by the police and removed to jail. One’s anxiety increases.
A patterned response to anxiety develops in which anxiety initiates a paralyzing fear which, in our little vignette, worsens the situation, increases the anxiety, and perpetuates the cycle. Without modification, such a patterned response can only end when one dies, though it will probably not cause that death. But when the anxious one dies, who will know? And will not the end of his agony be a relief not only to himself, but to the whole world as well?
Anything is possible. But what is likely? A fly stuck in a glass of milk swims around, claws at the glass wall, might get a wing free of the sucking surface tension. He might even, miraculously, fly free of his doom. But most likely he will die, drowned in a sea of nourishment.
That post yesterday was not about what I wrote, exactly. It was about the ecstasy of walking onto the beach, after the ordeal, not dead. I had responded effectively and intelligently–cleverly, even–to the anxiety of my near-drowning. What an exhilarating joy, not only to have survived, but to have joined in intimate battle with anxiety, my perpetual abuser, and won.
I have spent my entire life avoiding conflict, hiding, isolating, and letting anxieties dictate my inaction. Unfortunately, it is not a life and death kind of conflict, for if it were, I would have handled it promptly and without hesitation. Instead I am this; inactive, avoidant, and un-actualized. Something is lacking, and I don’t think I need to be in a perpetually life-threatening situation to be cured. Indeed, the cure is to find a cause for action that is something less than life-threatening.
Still looking.