by Restin Wells
Chapter 15
So, why all the trouble to do everything just right? On the surface it was for life to be tolerable. I did what helped the bad feelings. If it happened to be religious, that was a plan far above. But there was another reason. It has to do with feeling life is worth living. The illness made me spacey and tired, or downright depressed. I had to change that, or die of it. I needed that spark of energy that starts a person up... that feeling of zest that makes things easy to do. But the strangest thing about it is how it seems to be related to feelings about another person…a special person that makes a difference in life. When someone like that is around, you're charged with showing them what you can do when somebody appreciates you. It's like a glowing, magic wand laid upon you, transforming you into a knight, endowing you with powers, ready to go out and conquer the world.
Lets say you're dragging through a dull morning, unable to get started. You're drooped over your second cup of coffee, mulling over all the things you ought to get up and do. About then, you receive a call from a special friend...someone you intensely admire... someone that boosts your ego. After talking with that friend for a while, you find yourself lifted up on a high and moving plane, like stepping onto a jet ski. Suddenly you feel like taking on a project that's been neglected a long time. And, as you get into it, you get on a big roll all day, and accomplish a lot of genuinely good work, while you imagine your mentor person observing how good you are at it!
This magic is something that can happen over anyone you look up to, young or old, male or female. Though it always happens when you fall in love, it isn't just a lover's thing, or sexual thing. It doesn't matter, when you look up to someone as superior, as someone who is already accomplished at doing the things you dream of doing. In fact, it feels a little confusing, in some cases, to put sexuality next to your feelings about them. And there is a special reason for that. But, all they have to do is just look at you, and sometimes not even that much, and you feel all inspired, challenged, energized. It feels for all the world as if it's a marvelous love thing they do for you. You wish they could be in your life more, so you could have that kind of energy all the time. You feel you could actually be somebody if they were around. You feel they understand you as no one else has bothered to do, and see in you the unique ways you can be if someone will only bring it out. And you sincerely NEED that feeling to keep you going in this hardnosed, stingy world. For that reason, certain someone else’s can become almost life and death important. You've found LIFE through them.
Most people call that love, and they're desperate to keep someone around to be in love with, or looking for a new lover, or hero, so they can have that spirit that races them over the frustrations of life like an airboat skimming over a saw grass swamp. It can get you through a hot, dull summer, and even through a war. And there's certainly nothing wrong with that, if you're lucky enough to have a good person there who is staying by you. But what if they're not there? And maybe you're also one of those savvy types who realizes that the object of your affection may not even know you all that well. Or maybe you don't know them well enough to know what they really think about you. Or maybe they're a movie star, or sports star you've never even seen in real life. Or perhaps they are even arrogant and rude when you do meet up with them. This is a great mystery. It just doesn't add up to the facts. Yet, you can't deny the strong feelings you have, either. You admit the feelings are still there, regardless.
Even more, there may also be a growing conflict between what you need that important person to do, and their willingness to do it. You may feel an urgency to make them know how important it is to you. You can become clinging and anxious. Then, what about how it feels to lose someone so necessary? Then you' re stuck in a tar pit of depression or hate for years, when they break your heart and discard you like a worthless peanut shell, after they've sucked all the goodies out of you. What inspires your life and work then?
Did Einstein or Edison require a mutual admiration affair before they could get up out of bed in the morning and go invent some earth-shaking wonder like the electric light? It would be wonderful if you could just reach inside yourself and turn on the switch of your own energy--all by your little self. Not that you have to give up on special relationships, but just that you could do things on your own too. What I'm trying to say is that it isn't as far from your ability as you might think. You can't do it because you've tried, by sheer will power. But then you discovered that getting jump-started by someone else did work. So, someone else holds the ignition key to your motor, which you really ought to be in charge of, since it's your body, not theirs--who might be going on a month's vacation to Europe, or mad at you and not even speaking to you these days. "But it works", you say. Okay, if it's working, but to persist on this line, another person, maybe not even so good a person, serves as a message bearer from whom you receive a special song about yourself. All you are definitely aware of is how good you feel when you're with them, without analyzing too much the underlying reason for it. A starving person doesn't ask where his food comes from, anyway, you know.
Now, I'm not trying to say that you, or I, just need to give ourselves pep talks before a mirror, and paste a smile on our face. This isn't pop psychology here. The wellspring of vital energy penetrates deep into concerns archetypal and collective. It swells forth spiritual yet sexual, ecstatic and horrific. It is the flowing spring of life energy and creativity that surges through your soul and the history of the human beings. It is both behind and beyond, above and beneath, tapped into the Creator of the Universe.
But, putting aside the flowery language, a down-to-earth picture is to imagine turning on the power at the breaker box in your house. It isn't something you make happen, it's something you tap in to. Suddenly the whole house lights up, and comes alive with humming, scintillating, electrical readiness. Every facility jumps alive at the touch of a button. Likewise, your body and mind are wired for life's energies. So, if you can't turn them on, you may have things in the way, and such a tangle that you can't find the plug anymore. That needs to be gotten into and cleared away. It may be a little, or a lot, but it's important to get into that and start thinking, while you're lying on the couch unable to get out the door.
Here is the place: the more you discover about your own true self, your own deep needs, and legal ways to help them, the more you release the energy. You may have decided that work, and the job, and money, are only what counts, and you may have turned to it in a resentful way, from having to give up so much of your interests as a youth. Money and practical living are important, that is for sure, and it really is wrong how much we have to give up just to make a living in this world. But somehow, you need to start giving yourself some time for what you really longed to do more than anything else in the world, before financial obligations, and other people, rearranged all those wants. Plan for some time each week to start doing, and thinking about that, as if that were your religion--not just a luxury. Not that you have to quit your job, or run away, but to start somewhere, some way. You will be surprised, by the way, how closely that is related to religion too, and the next step to it.
Giving yourself some time isn't just to give yourself a break, though that is a good enough reason itself. It is the way to find your true center again, a way to learn what is real about yourself. It's the starting point for change, for tapping into the positive energy that makes life worthwhile. It will give you the sense of being real, not so vacuous. You go to the deepest core of you and mess around in there until you start putting things together, and moving a direction. You can learn to know what you really want, regardless of what you actually have to do in life. Even that helps. That is important. You won't become strong by trying to force a feeling of strongness. You don't get self-confidence by just conjuring up the feeling. It comes from knowing your good and bad features, your needs, fears, and dislikes that truly define you. It comes from respecting and allowing expression of them in healthy ways...or at least trying to find a way.
Stop parading your contempt for all that as if it's some kind of perverse virtue. Start forgiving yourself, and start being the kind of mentor that you would want a fair judge to be if he were in charge of your case.
Lean on God's forgiveness. Place your hand in the Hand of God, and get up the courage to look at yourself as you are, as others most likely see you, a bit at a time. Instead of shaming, think of some ways to initiate a change. Listen and follow.
I also went to the public library and picked out books that seemed to deal with my concerns. I got into therapy, but changed therapists until I found someone I could relate to in depth. You may find the right one the first time. Therapy is important, if you can possibly afford it, and gets through stuff much faster. It keeps you at the work when you might quit if it's just up to you.
I also tried to discover how religious faith fit in with all of it, in ways much deeper than I had known before. When my illness first came, inertia took the place of ambition. Depression hung on as long as unfinished business sucked the life out of me all the time. Trying to use sheer will power, or putting myself down, was like trying to whip a dead horse. Worse than that, berating myself made me so sick sometimes I barely stayed out of the hospital that week. I was very close to my gut level in those days and could see a direct connection between the put-downs I said to myself, and the damaging effect they had.
I now can say there is just a mild case of heartburn, a physical reaction, when I'm doing wrong. I can endure delay in fixing it a lot longer. I didn't remain so sensitive as I gradually learned to do things right. So, I learned about feelings, and what makes them go and stop, and how to manage them. Dishonesty with myself, pretending I was someone I wasn't, is what caused the maze in inner confusion. But what's great is how new ways of dealing with old stuff can make such a difference.
There were many outdated assumptions I had about life that got me stuck like giant wads of old bubblegum laying around on the road. It's really amazing how compelling the unconscious can be. My challenge was to learn how to reconcile with distorted issues in need of adjustment. Out of that I learned how to make the forces there work for me. I had to learn how to go with a strong, dangerous feeling--the way I learned how to ride a horse, or drive, or roller-skate. But learning to work with myself, and tap into my energy there, was so much more important than any of those things.
Why is it some people are full of life and ideas, while others seem never to have the ambition to carry through with anything? Never mind roller-skating,how do people get the ambition to build bridges, paint murals, go through ten years of college to get a doctoral degree, or something of that caliber? Why do we become bored when there is so much to do? And how is it that certain other hero people can light that fire for us like a miracle, with just an encouraging word, or a certain look?
No wonder one can feel such a unique resentment at the suggestion he could do it all by himself. However, even if you do love someone, it is possible to learn how to detour around other mortal people enough to take rightful possession of what is God given… your own vital spirit. By knowing yourself, by going to your gut-level passions, you can learn how to make those powerful forces work reliably instead of being mere driftwood floating upon their tides. It is the fear of those powerful forces that hold people back. But they are like any thrilling sport or skill that requires practice. You can talk forever about how you would love to snow ski, but you have to get out there and do it to have the thrill without the broken bones. We are so brave with all those kinds of things, but cringe at the thought of battle with our own inner dragons.
At the time of my breakdown, I lived only on the conscious side of myself. I was a typical left-brain person, relying only upon my reason and will power to control my world, and try to control other people as well. I was a behaviorist, par excellence! But I was thrown into the ocean of the collective unconscious, like Jonah thrown into the sea to be swallowed by the whale. I was swallowed into the belly of the beast, because I couldn't go there when bidden. It was sort of like someone being drafted into the army. He goes to fight on the front line of a war he formerly cared nothing about. Like him, I fought only to keep from getting killed, until I got better at it just from having to do it.
The unconscious domain of my brain, the right side, as they call it, was unknown and hostile territory. I was so resistant that I was thrown in, to sink or swim. My ego, my arrogant rational self, took a terrific fall and got trodden into the ground like a dandy rooster beaten into a heap of dirty feathers! If only I had started early in life traveling from left to right brain, between feelings and reason, leaving the doors open, reconciling the conflicts, I would not have been so taken by surprise, so knocked down and out.
But, as it happened, I soon found out that there was a lot more to me than I ever could have guessed, and that my reasoning self was just one member in a circle of chiefs in my own camp, where I had to learn how to use a little protocol if I expected to be heard at all. I had formerly believed that logic and education could handle all things. I would decide what was best, and proceed to do it. I thought that was all I had. Yet, there was a lurking fear that I might not be able to keep everything under my thumb. Expecting myself to be able to deal with all things was an illusion of course, as the universe is ever so much larger and powerful than one puny human daring to wave his fist up at it.
My shallowness first came as a mild "break" when I was seventeen. I signed on to initiate the horsemanship program at a summer camp, and was in charge of twenty-six horses. I had several assistants that were almost useless. I wasn't good at delegating authority anyway, and tried to do everything myself: I rode out into a huge pasture at daybreak and found the herd, then ran them into the corral area. I hastily got each horse into his own stall; fed, and partially saddled, in time to go get breakfast myself back at the main pavilion. After that, the campers would come in groups for the trail rides. I would get each bunch of screaming, squirming kids up on the horses, and riding down the trail, several groups of them in the morning, and more of them in the afternoon. I taught riding lessons in the evening, then did the unsaddling, feeding again, and running the herd out into the range for the night.
I did it over and over each day, plus dealing with problems like horses fighting, running off the trail with a kid, breaking gear, and getting laid up with saddle sores on their backs. It was a lot for anybody. Trying to get everything done on a tight schedule, and tighter budget, put on even more pressure. After ten weeks of it, I found myself trying to hold back a desperate feeling, and tears I couldn't stop. I finally went to the camp nurse, in great embarrassment. I was the Horse Wrangler, you know. I could hardly admit I wasn't able to stay on top of that for which I was supposed to be an expert. As it turned out, I got hold of things enough, with her excellent advice, to make it through the summer. But that was the first lesson in a part of life that almost everyone has to face at some time or other. That was ten years before my major breakdown, about much deeper problems. It was a harbinger.
Though my ego has an important place, it had to give up its conceit and need to see all things. It had to realize that some failure didn't mean everything would go irreparably haywire. Many things actually will coast along, even if it doesn't seem possible, and be guided by systems more ancient and venerable than I. Other people could actually come in and do some of what I thought only I could do, even if I couldn't see where they could possibly come from. After some work on that, the rational part of myself seemed to feel some relief that it wasn't expected to manage all things all by itself. I began to see better where I was needed and where I was in the way, in the inner world.
After my major illness later, I went through that kind of lesson in the most intense way. After I discovered the primal, child part, I went through an ordeal of reconciliation. Many times a day, every day, I would have to listen to, and learn to respect, her moment by moment needs. If I were watching TV, and felt stabs of fear from the child inside, I would turn off the TV, regardless of how harmless it seemed to my adult self. If I were reading and I felt the fear, I would close the book no matter how neutral the topic seemed. Every move I made had to be guided by the inner threat. As long as it were not a moral question, I would obey it. Daily chores were tucked in between. Even those came under scrutiny as to how essential they were. I was learning to work together with all my inner constituents. I was gradually looking over all the patterns that made up me. And yet, that was the way of a normal child growing up in a normal home, a way that is so gradual the average person doesn't really know how he did it.
It's hard for "normal" people to comprehend what the mental patient means when he says he has to "push his own blood through his own veins." But the person who has a mental disorder is like someone whose computer didn't get all its programming done correctly. Things don't run by themselves, and you are either trying too hard or not hard enough, to make up for it.
A normal child grows up with his emotions and reasoning braided together and working together. It's a solid core that is taken for granted as he grows into a young adult who gets through the trials and grief that come to everyone on this planet. It was where I had totally failed to prepare for adult life. I remained brittle and retarded in the realm of emotions and relationships. My simplistic policy was that I just wouldn't let anything bother me. I would just make it shut up, and go on my way. But that was a small gun when what I needed was big guns for the really big trials of life. I do wish to say, though, that putting on a tough act has its time and place. It is very important in facing a lot of what life throws at us. We all have to do that a lot, really. But there was the lurking truth, a gut level knowing, that there was weakness that some things most people can take are going to do me in.
I dreaded the thought that I could "lose it" under certain circumstances, in public too, in spite of myself. So, I avoided situations where I might be embarrassed. But I couldn't avoid them all. I came to realize the hard way that I couldn't be a John Wayne merely by putting on the right grimace, talking macho, and standing with the right degree of Cool. I had to fess up to some of my faults and weaknesses and start working with them. It's a hard job at first if someone has a lot to do, but gets easier, and eventually runs it's own "maintenance program' without so much conscious attention. I don't mean to overwhelm anyone. People in the midst of their breakdown especially need to be encouraged, and not try to bite off more than they can chew. Just take it a step at a time.
I had to understand, gradually, that everything in life is in pairs of opposites. Love/hate, patience/assertiveness; soft/hard; fast/slow, spiritual/carnal, and on and on. It's the extreme of any of those that causes trouble. It's also important to realize that we are capable of each of those; and if we think we cannot be one of them, we are in for a surprise some day when we least expect it. But we shouldn't expect to work on those all at once. Life, or God, or whatever it is, has a way of bringing you to them step by step. Work on your assignment for the moment, not the whole world’s. I would feel my conflicts, then find a resolution I could live with that day, that week. Maybe later the same one would come up again, and I would go a step further.
I can't say I am so great at all this, but I have done parts of it that I have been led into. I feel that it has been well worth it, what portion I have done, and not just a temporary fix. That's when I gained power and self-confidence. That isn't faking it with phony tough talk. It's true strength through inner unity. The various features of oneself are woven together to make thickness. It is that thickness, and the awareness of it, that results in real emotional confidence. Best of all, it got my energies flowing instead of being trapped like the Dead Sea. I could go do the things I needed to do, and feel okay about it.
Copyright ©
Restin Wells