You want a reason for what happened; you want a way to stop it. You want to stop feeling as if you have murdered yourself. You want that feeling of deep despair to shrink back, you want to enjoy being alive again. That only seems possible as long as you are busy, distracted: thinking about other things, thinking about other people. The instant you have a moment of quiet - a quiet you also want, simply to breathe - the dread rushes back in.
That's when you know: your life is going to be long, and this feeling will never go away. It's not caused by what happened all those years ago; it was the cause itself of what happened. You don't feel despair because of the paralysis, you're paralyzed because of the despair. And that's a much more horrific thought. You don't want to think that the despair is built into you, is a part of you, will never leave you.
But how else do you explain your driving need to figure out how to be happy? Why else are you consumed by psychology, spirituality, psychotropic drugs, alcohol? For what other reason have you always been a cynic, why else do you loathe people their petty inadequacies and stupid furors?
Last night you read Arnaud Desjardins say, "Dare to be happy." It upset you. You don't know how to be happy! You've tried drugs, meditation, thought-puzzles, exercise, helping others... none have worked.
You contemplate suicide, again. You'd never do it, of course: you're too scared you won't follow through on it, or that God with His sick sense of humor will have you wake up in another reality where your suicide plans failed and you have to deal with the consequences. You know that the religions say suicides go to hell, and hell for a suicide is to not-die and for things to somehow get worse. But your grandmother is slowly dying, her mind coming undone with age and all the worry she kept bottled inside of her, and you kind of want her to die because you think it will bring her some peace, some rest.
... And you envy her that. You envy her that she is closer to dissolution than you are. The pattern that she is will appear to melt away, and only her actions will remain. You've heard that's possible here, now, in this life - seeing, being past the pattern to the underlying emptiness. You glimpsed it, once. It was terrifyingly beautiful - and impermanent. They all say it is impermanent; you've not glimpsed past the veil since, don't believe you will again, don't even particularly want to do so. Seeing the inside of a watch is fascinating, but when all you want to do is tell the time, it's not so wonderful.
There was a time - 11, 12 years ago - that you said "fuck it," decided that you were going to do what made you feel good. You gave yourself permission to drink, get high, party, shirk responsibility. You're tempted to do that now, but you know it leads nowhere. It, too, is impermanent. There's always the hangover, the come-down, the morning after, the consequences.
Not that you want to be rid of responsibility either. You're ever so slowly waking up to how you affect others, and the one thing you've never been able to forgive is selfishness. You can't tolerate it in others; you quite literally hate yourself for it. Now you're beginning to see the hidden costs - the externalities - of the things you buy, use, do. It horrifies you to know that your clothes are made from fibers from plants that destroy wildlife and require chemical fertilizers and pesticides, that the farmers who grow them are likely poor and hanging by a thread to subsistence, that the threads are spun and the cloth is woven by inhuman machines running on non-renewable energies, sewed together piece by piece in sweatshops in tax shelters around the world, shipped in cargo containers that burn oil to run, driven by tractor-trailer to a store to be sold by an underpaid sales clerk with no health insurance and two other jobs for a price you think is exorbitant but in no way reflects the actual cost to everyone along the line.
You dread to think about all the other externalities in your middle-class American lifestyle. You know, in the pit of your stomach, that your comfort depends on other peoples' misery, and it disgusts you. Yet the problem seems so huge you don't know even where to begin to tackle it.
All of this horrifies you, torments you, scares you - and you can't sleep. You have things to do, responsibilities to keep, deadlines to make: none of which you want to do any more. You want to run away to a Zen monastery; you want thoughtless work, simple responsibilities, easy routines. You feel harried by everyday life, by your past, by the growing awareness of how what you do affects others.
And your mind continues to criticize you. You want to give yourself a break, cut yourself some slack, but where? If you stop your everyday responsibilities, your life falls apart: everything gets a lot worse. You're desperate to drop your past, but you have no idea how to even go about doing that since the damned thing keeps informing the present. Besides, you don't want to forget the past, you just want to forgive yourself for it. Only, you don't. You're furious with yourself for what you did, and no matter what anyone (including yourself) says about it, letting go of that anger scares you too much. You can't now let go of the awareness of how what you do affects others, either, because therein lies the rub.
And maybe that's the problem. You did all this to get others off your back; you did it because you saw that when you hurt other people, it hurt you. The loophole being, of course, that you can kick the shit out of yourself as much as you like. You don't count; you're special.
You want to be happy. It seems like a small request, a simple task, but it's been the most difficult thing you have ever attempted in your life. You'd sacrifice anything for it; you're waiting to do so, knife poised over Isaac, ready to plunge the blade as soon as the command comes.
So what is the command?
I guess we should start by simplifying. Scale back the responsibilities; shake off the dross and fetters. You have too much stuff. Get rid of it. Stuff leads to thinking, and thinking leads to bad things, like thoughts. Remember that picture in the Gandhi autobiography, showing all the worldly possessions he left behind? It was a pair of sandals, some writing utensils, maybe a book or two. Monks do with as much; perhaps less. There is something in this. And: the less you have, the less responsibility is on you, the less you make demands on others for your own unneeded comfort.
You have homework; you know this, and you despise this. Home is for home; work is for work; ne'er the twain should meet. But for the moment, this means working at work, homing at home. You need to schedule appropriately. If you don't, you forget to do work, end up doing work at home, and spend your life in dread and misery. Set yourself tasks and do them. Take Easwaran's advice: if you find you have difficulty doing something, take the first small step towards getting it done, and that will probably propel you through to the finish. If not, at least you've begun. You're best at beginnings, anyway, so try to make everything a beginning.
You have a lot of obligations, right now. You've spread yourself thin. You have law review, moot court, mock trial, the clinic and classes. You're involved with the Quakers, Prison Dharma. You need to see a shrink soon, and you should probably start looking for a therapist you like better than Celeste. You cook dinner, need to clean the house and make sure the dogs are adequately cared for. You have a wife that needs a husband, minimally.
This is a lot. You keep telling yourself that responsibilities will begin to fall away with time, but this is not true if you keep taking on new ones. So what are the important ones?
You tell yourself that school is most important, but you have begun to doubt it. You don't think you're likely to get the sort of job that you'd like to have, working with the UN or some large NGO. Part of you holds out for that dream, but it has already begun to fade, and you're trying to look at yourself staying here, in CT, for still longer. That calls up emotion on its own: you don't like it here. You never really have. But realistically, this is likely where you shall be stuck, at least until the economy turns around.
This is where the difficulty comes from. You don't want to give up on leaving here, moving somewhere else that you'd like much better, but you don't believe it's realistic. This is something you will need to decide upon, because if you're just going to end up here in CT, working for the Public Defenders, then you don't need to bend over backward so much to really shine. You can drop some responsibilities. Yes, you take pride in accomplishments, working hard and succeeding, but it's a question of cost and benefit. Remember, Dad worked hard and succeeded, but remember the cost he paid to do so. Is that a cost you're willing to pay?
This seems to be the thing upon which a lot turns. The thing you want - non-dependent happiness, happiness from within, rather than without - you think, and feel, should be possible anywhere. After all, isn't this the message you're feeding to prisoners via Prison Dharma? That they do not need to get out of prison to be free from suffering?
But you doubt this, strongly. You've watched what pain can do to a person over the past decade, how it can shrivel patience, quicken anger, rot natural joy like an infectious disease. You fought, tooth and nail, for every nerve cell you got back. You know that you're unhappy here in CT, and would rather be just about anywhere else. You tell yourself what you always tell yourself: wait. You'll meet the people you're missing. You'll find the hole-in-the-wall coffee-shop, the independent bookstore, the little bar with the great local music, the club playing sweet tunes. It will happen. Wait. Give it time. But it's been 6 years now. You've been in CT longer than you were in Colorado, and none of this has happened. And you have a gnawing suspicion that for all that "hope" you try to keep alive for prisoners as much as you tried to do for the Crossover clients, there really isn't any and there never was. The best you can offer is triage: you have no hope for yourself, anyway.
Sure, you've got ideas for how the future could go. You'd work with Bec in her office; you'd find the work intellectually stimulating. You'd go to Meeting and you'd get involved with that community; you'd set aside time now and then to go to Zen Mountain Monastery or Blue Cliff Monastery or some Zen place in the Catskills for sesshin. You'd do political stuff, get an ADA chapter started. You'd go to LCL, maybe. But in your heart, you know this is a bogus story, a pipe-dream.
There needs to be a Middle Way. Actually, it's probably the Middle Way that you've been lacking all along. Some happiness comes from within; some comes from without. The idea of non-dependent happiness: it's just as much an unreality as the pipe-dream you tell yourself.
But you've never been able to find the right mix of the two. In Minneapolis, in Boulder, you were lacking the internal bit. In Connecticut now, you lack the external.
Well, and the internal. Your fucking depression is back, has been back for a while now, if indeed it ever went away. What you think was a lack of depression now looks like strung-out desperation, the thought that it has to get better because they promised you it would. Only, it doesn't and it didn't. Sure, you've put together the rudiments of a life, but you can't and don't enjoy any of it. Anhedonia is back: there is no sense of pleasure in anything.
You can't live like this. You can't eke out your existence. You can't be Mother Theresa: you don't have the will to go on day-by-day, serving a master that you never see and whom you crave. That can't be life, that can't be living.
Something has to change. Something.
