riding it out

It was almost a wallowing evening last night. Hard times.

Instead I found a new webcomic to read. (I'm mad about it; it's so very excellent--go look!)

But all the pain was still there when I was done reading the entire comic. It was still there at bedtime. It was still there all the next day.

In retrospect, I think I probably would have been better off just sitting with those feelings in the beginning, when they first resurfaced. I kind of wish I'd gone ahead and wallowed.

---

When you're a certain type of person to begin with... and then you go through certain types of harrowing situations, it leaves a sort of imprint in your mind and body. Or, rather, your body creates a horrid little save state of itself that it will resume automatically later on whenever it feels threatened in ways that remind it of what happened before.

There's the regular type of flashback, of course--the memory-based kind. That kind is covered in movies and shallow news articles, so pretty much everybody knows more or less what a flashback is. But there's something else a bit more subtle that also happens but doesn't get talked about so often ... it's sort of like an endocrine flashback. All of a sudden, memories or not, you're biochemically back there (in 'Nam or the second grade or wherever your initial poison was administered to you), pumping out all the same hormones as you were during the initial event(s).

Anyhow, that's the particular kind of hard time I was having. I guess that's not too important though. All emotional pain is similar. There are all sorts of fine distinctions we can make between different psychological or philosophical disturbances--and believe me, I love me some fine distinctions--but the practical differences aren't so big. There's not much separating PTSD from existential anxiety/depression/aloneness/dread/angst (or, if you enjoy spinning things in a more optimistic way, "positive disintegration").

Not everybody has flashbacks, but everyone knows what it's like to be scared or grieving or depressed. Part of why I don't talk about modern psychological constructs much on here or identify personally as having xyz condition is because I simply don't agree with the pathologization of normal human emotions or responses to environmental stressors. If you live in an industrialized, modern culture and have never done or felt anything that would qualify you for at least one DSM diagnosis, then in my book you are one seriously sick puppy.

As far as I can figure out thus far, the only choices we have when those moments hit are

1) Medication

2) Distraction

3) Delusion

4) Riding it out... sober, clear, and aware.

Number four is sort of an invisible choice. It always was an option--often it's the default option!--but we don't necessarily want to acknowledge it. We want to fight it. We think we couldn't possibly just deal with it--no! We want to fix it, box it up, ship it out, redraw our lines and definitions so everything is okay again. We also fail to notice our progress in dealing with it.

I remember scrawling out a similar list on a scrap of paper when I was 21 (probably while listening to Tool or Manic Street Preachers or something), except #4 wasn't even on it. Number four, as far as I was concerned, was the problem, not a possible coping strategy.

only three solutions to the big problem:
1) drugs (do not want)
2) hedonism/egoism/materialism (can't manage it very long)
3) god?

What can I say? I am slow to develop in many ways.

I want to learn more about #4 now. There are so many different ways to ride through it--you can cry, you can let it wash over you in acceptance, you can sublimate through art and poetry and music, you can welcome it in thoughtfully and explore every angle of it. You can wallow. I've learned a lot already just by trial and error over the years, but I'm sure there's more to know. And I want to get better at choosing it deliberately and in a timely way.

David Hayward (The Naked Pastor) posted a new painting and a little on this subject today, which I was grateful for:

I have a strategy for sadness that I want to share with you. There are times I just let myself feel all the sorrow. I let myself cry. I have experienced a lot of painful things and there’s no use denying it. And I watch many people go through so much suffering. I allow my body to feel the full impact of the weight of grief. And I weep.

To deny it only strengthens its unconscious crippling power. To dwell in it as all that is real is to drown in it and be overcome by hopelessness and despair.

Even if you believe they are illusion, it is helpful to allow your body to experience the illusion’s impressiveness. Even if it is an illusion, it presents itself as very real. Just notice it. Permit it. Say “I see your sadness“. Observe it. Feel it. It will pass for a time.

I like that a lot. It's something I've found to be true for myself as well, but somehow it always helps to hear this kind of thing from other people. It cements in your own experience a little better.

Songy song now.

"Waste" by Foster the People