Last night I got home from my weekly IV session in midtown Manhattan and ordered my usual pizza (I get Domino’s gluten-free pizza on IV nights to reward myself for the torture, though these days they don’t make me as sick but the pizza has to stay!) and started googling old music videos from my childhood. I do this a lot. I was a music journalist for years and it still pains me to not be doing it. Pop music was after all how I learned English in this country—I knew my MTV well in elementary school. I ran into an old music video of a song I loved and that I hadn’t heard since it came out: the Aretha Franklin-George Michael gospel rock hit “I Knew You Were Waiting For Me.” I stayed up for hours playing it over and over—and I realized for once I was staying up past midnight out of joy not agony.
When I woke up in the morning, Facebook memories showed me I made this post last year at this time:
I am really struggling this holiday season. I have been alone for much of this year struggling with biotoxin illness & Lyme & MCAS & other ailments. Some of my closest friends have ghosted in very weird and (I have to admit, I didn't want to admit) truly cruel ways---I would have been more shocked but it has happened to me before. They say pregnant women and chronically ill women are more abused and bullied and abandoned than any other demographic. I don't know. I have not had a home in ages, I have been away from my beloved dog for months. I do feel lucky to have a warm home to crash in right now and some decent doctors--thanks to crowdfunding as I have no income. I begged my parents to visit me here and they just got here but given that they never believe my illness, it's been a lot of fighting and stress. I am at wit's end. I wonder if it is at all possible to heal under constant stress---my life since Jan, after mold illness, Lyme relapse, the sudden traumatic breakup, horrific stress from my publishers, loss of my NYC apt and Harlem community, going from strangers home to strangers home, over and over till I broke down and headed West. Then I kept trying to go back to LA but would become paralyzed and bedridden in my parents home, as they would not properly remediate and the air was so unhealthy. Then I got to Santa Fe where I healed before and I could not afford any housing--it had become so expensive so suddenly--and then I had a caretaker here steal from me--the money still has not been returned. The last people I lived with, who rented a room to me, believed in some very scary things (including bigotry). Santa Fe has been very hard this time--none of the people I used to know have been around--and the few I have to help me now (since I can't currently drive) are getting worn down, I worry. I have major deadlines this month--so grateful for work!--- and the next but am just getting back to reading and writing. My body is still a long way.
I guess I am writing you all for advice. I don't know what to do. Should I attempt to take what little money I have and move back to New York where I had community and friends, even though safe affordable housing feels so hard? No idea how I would even do that though unless someone could take me in for a bit till I could find work. Should I try to move to somewhere like San Diego (weirdly on my mind for months--mild weather and clean air)? Everything is so expensive and I know I would have to share--which would be my preference anyway, to be honest, as I have come to really fear being alone. Should I try to rough out Santa Fe with its tough altitude and cold weather and loneliness--but its doctors and healers-- for some more months? I have never felt so lost. I honestly would go anywhere there is a warm room with no mold problems, no intense chemicals, local access to doctors and hospitals. But I need to find joy and a sustainable life again. My family and apparently some of my old friends can't help me with that. I don't want my life to end at age 40. I have so many dreams, so much I want to do. But I don't know how to do this right now. I feel scared and alone and my body is in so much pain so often I become terrified of new treatments even though I feel privileged to receive them. I have been in solid psychic and physical pain for one year now and it is getting too much. All I know is the stresses of being alone while ill/disabled are just too much to bear and I hope no one else has to go through it ever.
I think what I didn’t write but that many could intuit was that I was suicidal. I was scared of writing that because I did not want to be committed. That should never be how someone’s life ends, I thought, preferring my own ending. And last night as I smiled through tears watching Aretha and George Michael in such perfect harmony I thought there should be a name for wanting to end your life just to be with all the dead instead of the living. When my last beloved grandmother died, I remember thinking all the best people are in that other realm. Why do we stay here as long as we do? It clearly must be better there, it’s so populated with so many good people.
So clearly I still think of suicide but in these other ways. There is obviously something still off with my wiring that I can channel even a sort of positive suicidal ideation. But I often wonder how many excuses we make so we can be at peace with our suffering. And are we to assume everyone suffers the same? Why is it impossible to imagine a life without suffering? Would we even want it?
I used to return to Pema Chodron’s words a lot:
Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
So we have to not just make room for joy but for misery. We have to love death just like we love life. Acceptance is brutal in its politics.
I’ve never been a great Buddhist but it has been my dream for over a decade now to go to Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village. I am hoping I might be able to do so this spring, if I can afford it. I was reading some of his thoughts this morning and ran across this:
I think there's a way of training ourselves in order not to become the victim of fear and grief -- that is to look deeply into ourselves and to see that we are made of non-self elements. And when we look around ourselves, we can recognize ourselves in the non-self elements, like a father looking at his children can see himself in his children, can see his continuation in his children. So he is not attached to the idea that his body is the only thing that is him. He's more than his body. He is inside of his body but he is also at the same [time] outside of his body in many elements. And if we have the habit of looking like that, we will not be the victim of our attachment to one form of manifestation, and we will be free. And that freedom makes happiness and peace possible.
It’s not easy to think we are a part of everything else. By this afternoon at least half this country will be celebrating our president’s impeachment. I remember as a child celebrating the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini. There are so many we share this precious air with whose destruction we dream of, but whose end is part of our own.
In many way I am the same person, fearing insomnia and now relishing it, on the edge of death and flirting with it, making room for all my oppositions. Nothing seems to cancel each other out as we hope. It just all is. There are no sides, I once wanted to say, but I think now there are only sides. If we are to be perfectly honest with each other, there is probably no real equilibrium inside us or out.