The Only Way Out of Melancholy is Through.
Don’t beat yourself up about it, Baby.
It’s not yet a full month since I took a deliberate, heroic psychedelic journey.
But, here comes the rain again… Falling on my head like a memory…
Who knows how this thing that we call Life is supposed to go? I sure don’t.
Yesterday afternoon, I took Lil’ Josh to the vet for three shots and thought I’d just swing by the nearby Grocery Outlet to see if they had a better can opener than I already have. Maybe pick up some cheap kombucha. That’s all. Just a quick stop for a couple of things to support the healing and integration process I’ve been working through.
Oops.
Rounding the end cap and headed towards housewares, I ran into a man I haven’t seen for close to two years. He’s a friend of the last guy who broke my heart.
I barely recognized him. He had the same experience in my direction. But, then the recognition kicked in and … he jumped into asking me if I had heard that the heart-breaker’s wife had passed away.
I hadn’t. I was shocked. I froze.
The heart-breaker’s friend knew that we’d had an affair about 18 months ago. He carried on at great length as if I’d want to know all the details of how cancer killed his friend’s wife and how much work the heart-breaker was doing to sort out the end-of-life paperwork.
I didn’t want to know any of that. But I just stood there, numb and frozen. That’s how I’ve dealt with shock my whole life: freeze and fawn.
I didn’t want to see that guy and I sure didn’t want to hear one thing about the heart-breaker. Not ever again. I especially didn’t want to hear his friend’s suggestion that maybe I’d want to call the heart-breaker to “check in” again.
Dear God!
I nodded. I think I said a few words. I don’t remember what I said. It didn’t matter at all to the guy in front of me. All he wanted was an audience for his story about how he had a crush on the heart-breaker’s sister-in-law, but since she’s “a man-hater,” he hadn’t been able to get to first base with her.
I got away as soon as I could, scuttling down the aisle to the can openers with a death grip on the shopping cart handle. It felt like my legs would collapse any moment and dump me in the aisle in a heap of tears.
Long story short: no better can opener. No cheap kombucha. Just an unanticipated, unasked-for opportunity to re- stimulate a wound not yet fully healed.
How is it that Life works like this?
I took my psilocybin journey at the start of this month with a strong intention to find a way to forgive people who have hurt me deliberately over the course of my life, starting with my parents and running through the affair with the heart-breaker at 72.
Among other places, the journey led me to the suffocating bottom of the well of grief so masterfully described by the poet, David Whyte.
Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief,
turning down through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe,
will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,
nor find in the darkness glimmering,
the small round coins,
thrown by those who wished for something else.
During my journey, I sank into the abject despair lining that well. There I experienced for myself just how broken both my parents were, long before I was even born. I felt for myself how impossible it was for them to give me the love I needed, regardless of their choice to give me birth. I saw, for myself, I was never responsible for their cruelty, irrespective of how they shamed and blamed and punished me over and over and over.
God, how I loved them. Both of them. But they were always terrified by my love. By seven or so, I went numb to endure the rejection. By the time they died, I hated them.
Thirty days into my integration process, I’m sitting with the grief I’ve carried for seven decades and finding more compassion for them. And, for myself. The psychedelic experience was the first thing that allowed me to plumb that depth, but it was not an experience for the faint of heart.
Regardless of my intention to fully integrate my grief, it really fucked me up to run into the heart-breaker’s friend — out of the blue in the grocery aisle — and hear that he’s now “free for relationship.” He’s not. And, I cannot imagine he will ever be, widowed or not. He’s heavily mired in his own childhood trauma and terrified of looking at it, much less building a loving relationship. That’s why he just disappeared from my life one day. He’s still a playboy, now newly single, having inherited his dead wife’s assets. He’s not “free for relationship.” Whatever he’s free for is just some more alcoholic hell with a bar tab he’ll always be able to pay.
I know these things, cognitively. Yet, for 18+ hours, my child mind bobbed helplessly up and down in a dizzying sea of melancholy as it thrashed through memories and habit strategies that have enthralled me for DECADES, imagining that now maybe the heart-breaker might really be “free for relationship.”
The magic in magic mushrooms does not rewrite our memories or habits. It just shows them to us.
Just the suggestion that maybe I could re-write my childhood grief by helping the heart-breaker through his set my nervous system right on fire.
Thankfully, this morning, a good cup of coffee and some precious quiet allowed me to see that the work of surviving a lifetime of crippling grief (masked by depression, anxiety and the rest of complex PTSD) simply entails changing my lifelong habits of wishing for something besides what Life has given me. Day by day by day by day…to the end of my life.
I will never heal myself by trying to heal anyone else.
Melancholy
The feeling I’m having as I process this simple truth is melancholy. It’s a profound, utterly nauseating sadness at the fact that things aren’t different than they are. There’s nothing wrong with the feeling. It sucks. But, I don’t need to beat myself up for feeling it. The feeling is there. Until it passes. What’s true is that I don’t need to identify with it anymore or, for God’s sake, to think of it as my “old friend.” Refusing to accept Life is what fuels depression.
I worked my way through today’s melancholy by making the image above. I’ve been using my mobile imaging practice for 16 years to help speed things up when painful feelings arise. It kind of helps sometimes. It has certainly helped when I get comforting feedback from others.
That blossom (in the image above) simply emerged too soon to be protected for a long, luxurious life. The cold burned it brown, shriveling its petals just a couple of hours after I made the photograph. That blossom didn’t have a long, pristine life. It had a brief, spectacular life.
People cannot be other than they are. People who cannot love cannot love.
Blossoms that emerge before the weather is warm enough to protect them get damaged. That happened to me. It happened to the heart-breaker, too.
There’s nothing I can do about these things.
What I can do, though, is stop dragging around my childish wish for my love to change the world for anyone else.
Apparently, that’s not what my love is for. And it never has been.
