The Art of You Doing You
Last night I kept waking up to this image of a dark, looming figure sprawled across the walls of my bedroom in shadow, near my bed, ready to pounce and take me away to darkness and death.
True story. I may be dramatic, but this is a true story.
While one part of me (I like to call it the sane side, but given my past I use that term lightly) knew it was some odd configuration of the shadows outside my window playing tricks across the walls of my baby blue walls, another part of me knew my death had come.
This has happened to me many, many times and I really wasn’t sure if I should tell you this, but being raised by a crazy mother has made me crave authenticity — not so much from others, but in how I present myself to the world.
Keep it real or keep away, I always say.
Time and time again last night I awoke to this headless figure, dark and towering, cloaked head, ready to take my life.
She felt like a woman, which made sense, since my mother was the angel of death and redemption for me.
She keeps showing up, my mother, in business deals with people who are both kind and abusive, in the secret wars I have with myself that I’m too old, too late, too something.
I never was good enough for my mother, and today I wrestle with needing her approval from beyond the grave. Illogical, but it’s how so many of us live.
This feeling of doom and death in the middle of the night isn’t new to me. I’ve often awoken sure the moment of my death had come.
This is how it goes.
I bolt up in bed with this single, cold realization: “This is it. I’m dying. Right now is the moment of my death”.
I then literally jump out of my bed in a panic and run to the living room and stand there, heaving, looking at my reflection in the windows: a middle-aged man, hair askew, red and white polka dot pajamas crumpled below his naked torso, a look of panic, bewilderment and embarrassment on his face.
Whenever I catch that reflection in the window I feel like a moron.
I’ve died many times in my sleep. Countless numbers of times.
In the summer of 1997 I had a total of 21 panic attacks. I went to one ER in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan so many times the nurses knew my name, favorite color and often talked about their grand kids as they attached electrodes to my quivering chest for another EKG to make sure (again) that I wasn’t dying of a heart attack.
I was a hot, fucking mess. There were no two ways around it. A sweet, kind and funny one, but a hot, gay fucking mess of a man trying to find his way through the darkness of his neurosis.
Panic attacks today are far and few, except when they wake me up with the feeling I’m being attacked by headless shadows that remind me of my abusive, mentally ill mother whose been dead from suicide over 11 years now, so all-in-all I think I’m good.
I probably shouldn’t put that last part on Tinder, huh?
Panic attacks were never a sign I was dying. They were a sign I was afraid to live.
When I was a boy I was raised with what is called Failure to Thrive Syndrome. That means I came outta my mothers vagina, took one look around, and said “Oh no. I’m good. Can I go back in and come out another vagina? Is Streisand available?”
I didn’t want to eat, be touched or loved for the first 6 months or my life. I didn’t want to live. This is a real thing, Failure to Thrive Syndrome. Look it up.
It means a baby, in utero, can sense their mothers dismay and unwillingness to live, and as such, accepts it as reality.
I have a theory the person who created happy baby in yoga had a mother like mine.
I didn’t want to live coming into this world. I had to choose to live. And I did, 6 months in. My father used to tell me stories of how I was like a Christmas tree when the lights are suddenly plugged in. I lit up. Agreed to be part of something I simply didn’t want to be part of from the start.
I chose to live. We all choose to live or die each moment we take a breath. And for people like myself, who were born into madness, we are the ones with the strongest desire to survive and thrive because we know what the darkness is like, and we love talking about it because, well, the darkness, if we’re lucky, becomes our friend.
When we make a peace with the truth darkness is indispensable to light, then we give up control, surrender to what this Universe is trying so hard to give us, and hold up our hands like we’re on a roller coaster and close our eyes and say “Take me to the ending of whatever this is and along the way I’m going to trust I’m gonna survive every dip, turn and swerve. I may not like that upside down part, but someday I’ll open my eyes. Oh, and I may puke along the way.”
Two weeks ago I was telling my therapist how difficult I find it to remain strong when so much is not happening in my life. He smiled at me and after a few pithy remarks said, “You’re powerful and delicate. It’s your thing.”
“So I just need to accept that” I countered with a deadpan smile.
“Yes, PLEASE,” he exclaimed, his thick Brooklyn accent making him both charming and frightening. “I beg you. If I have to listen to you complain one more time, I’m gonna clobber you.”
He then smiled his trademark, devilish smile and his eyes sparkled like they always do.
I am those things. Powerful. Delicate. And I know the truth: until I can accept and celebrate that potent mix on a larger scale with no attachment to the outcomes I won’t truly soar. And by soar I don’t mean have my own TV talk show (clearing of my throat), but not need all those material things to come full circle to truly chill the fuck out and enjoy my life.
So often we need rock bottom before we surrender and stop trying so hard and just be who we be. When we do grace, love and providence swoop in.
A few days ago I had a session with a client. She’s a lawyer in the middle of America and doing great things in her work. She is, like me, a big personality who wants to use her power for good.
We talk often about ‘male energy’ (whatever that means) and how that energy can be used in one of two ways. It can be used to build, create and lead, or it can be used to destroy, suppress and annihilate.
Energies and emotions aren’t anything in and of themselves. We label them and thus, don’t see the positive aspects of those emotions that are available to us at any given moment.
We are always in control of how we view anything in our life, and if that view softens our heart and makes us feel excitement or the deeper texture of how the grist informs the happy, than that’s the emotional view that changes lives and saves worlds.
That view is what makes us legit superheroes.
When I told this glorious client what my shrink said she threw her head back and cackled. Yes, cackled. One of the reasons I love her is she and I have the kind of laugh that can clear rooms. Topple buildings. Move stars.
Our laughter is like wave. Some find it quenching; others are drowned by it.
Life is all about finding those who are quenched by our waves. They’re our posse. Those are the ones we cherish and adore.
My client laughed and said, “Yes, I guess you are powerful and delicate. I can see that. Powerful, sure. But I see you more like a pansy in a snowstorm.”
I laughed. The room shook. “Okay, I know I’m gay but that gay? A pansy?”
“That’s not what I mean” she said joining me in my rolling laughter. “But you do know a pansy is the most resilient fucking flower there is, right? Like it can withstand anything.”
“You mean like how Cher and a cockroach are the only things that are gonna be standing after a nuclear war?”
That send her into peels of laughter, and after we ended the call she sent me an email with the image that came into her mind when she called me a pansy in a snow storm.
I forwarded it to my shrink and he wrote back “EXACTLY!!!” — with that many exclamation points. I could even hear the Brooklyn accent.
I’ve attached the pic to this post. The dark part of the flower is what pulls me in. There’s a passion and power there, as well as the shrugging off of the bitter cold.
I was listening to this song “This Is Me” from the movie “The Greatest Showman”. The lyrics that kept jumping out at me were:
When the sharpest words wanna cut me down
I’m gonna send a flood, gonna drown them out
I am brave, I am bruised
I’m who I’m meant to be, this is me
When I was a boy I was living a secret life where I was being emotionally abused and, at times, physically abused by a mentally ill mother.
I was sexually assaulted at 12 and became a child sex worker at 13. I still can’t believe that was my youth. Today I drink tea, go to the gym 6 days a week, meditate and help others in life as a profession.
Years ago there was this bar in NYC called Sinners and Saints. I went there often. No surprise.
I have come through life battered and bruised and it has taken a toll on me. It scared me. It scarred me. My heart is full of tiny, healed puncture wounds.
When I wrote my memoir “Creepy Kid” (it was the sweet term of endearment my mentally ill mother called me) the designer came up with this image for the book cover:
I look at those two words — scared and scarred — two words that are almost spelled identically and what I see now is the word ‘sacred’.
Our wounds, our hurts, our secret fears are those things that we want to run away from, yet they are the most sacred parts of ourselves.
The greatest comedians put their mountain of shit on stage for us to see and we marvel at them. They make fun of what a hot mess they are, and we laugh because that is the only way to face the absurdity of life.
They also know something. They know our scars are sacred.
But the real fun of life is when you can be okay with saying, “Fuck this so-called ‘gift’ from being raised by an alcoholic dad and a mother who abandoned me and an abusive step-father. If this is a gift, I wanna take it back and get credit, bitch.”
That’s how many of us feel. Here’s the only escape: surrender to those feelings. Stop fighting them. Don’t grab the drink, the joint, don’t go on the sex app, don’t eat the donut.
Sit with the feelings and feel the rage, the terror, the fear, the anxiety. If you do, it will fade. Don’t attach to the feelings.
Try this exercise: pick two people in your life you love. Who you know love you so much it takes your breath away. See their big, smiling mugs.
Call them. Make a date with them. Write to them if you can’t call or see them. Even a text of pure love and appreciation works.
Show one of them your powerful side. Show one of them your delicate side.
Trust them enough.
Talk about something you’re working on that makes you feel powerful.
Talk about something that happened very recently that made you feel vulnerable. Really get it it. Yell, scream, cry. Go for it.
We can only unleash the full flood of who we are into the world if we consciously choose to spend with time people who find our essence quenching, and not suffocating.
We do this for two reasons: 1) It feels fucking awesome and feeling awesome is the point of life and 2) It’s the building of your armor.
By show showing these sides of yourself only to those who love you, you then build up the armor to not be affected by the views and opinions of others when you do show more of the real you you to the world. And it helps you decide which parts to not show.
How often do you take the time before your day begins to close your eyes and think of all the people around you who love you and truly care about you? How often to you imagine their faces and see them in your minds eye and hug them and thank them for being in your life?
When you’re feeling stuck and down, do you hide away or do you choose to engage and get out into the world even if all you want to do is drink a shit ton of wine and eat, oh, ten pounds of fries? How often do you remind yourself keeping going and running in the rain is the sign of genuine strength and power?
