Mountain; High Enough

Several years ago, I climbed a mountain.

It was a (relatively) small one, on Mount Desert Island in Maine. One of the ones in Acadia National Park.

If you’ve never been to Acadia, it’s a prime example of northern forest. Beautiful and quiet, interspersing a cathedral atmosphere with trees reaching towards a distant sun with sweeping views of rocky coastline. You can stand at the boundaries between earth and water and sky, imagining yourself battered by wind and waves like something out of Hemingway or Melville.

This was in another era of my life. In the time of a bad relationship, in the time of fewer tools for dealing with my broken brain. I had camped the night before for the first time in about 10 years and the tent had been battered by rain. I was exhausted. I was not okay. Nevertheless, I climbed. I was unused to serious hiking. I was creaky and slow and self-conscious about being so.

Nevertheless, I reached the top.

It was a deeply emotionally trying day for both me and the ex. The path was steep and I was in deep freak-out mode and it was too misty to see any views from the thousand-and-some foot elevation at the top.

And it wasn’t till later till after sleep and food and a return to my hemmed in urban life that I realized how absurd it was that I’d been feeling bad about having reached the top of a mountain more slowly than someone else.

* * *

When I was young I repeatedly read a book by Richard Bach (of Jonathan Livingston Seagull fame) called Illusions. It was full of a very seventies brand of philosophy which many still turn to – visualizing what you want as a way of instantiating it. More or less the same brand of philosophy that The Secret espouses, as I understand it. Doesn’t work, of course. Visualizing without planning and working does fuckall.

I absorbed it though, at far too tender an age.

There are lines I can still remember. Bach’s amended golden rule “Do unto others as you truly feel like doing unto others,” is one that has some value in some contexts. The pithier one, the one that stuck with me harder is “Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they’re yours.”

What toxic bullshit.

* * *

If you had told me at 10 or 15 or 20 or even 30 that accepting one’s limitations is one of the most freeing things that could ever happen I would have been deeply skeptical.

The fact is limitations are not the same as rules or circumstances. If there’s one most helpful thing I’ve learned from therapy and from all the self-examination and self-reconstruction that came with it, learning yourself and the way you work can free you up to bust through your circumstances and harmful boundaries.

It is much easier to change your environment to help you work better than it is to change yourself to suit the environment.

Accepting this can help you to function with maximum return on investment.

I don’t mean you don’t try new things or learn new things, but there are plenty of habits whose roots are so tangled with other things in your past or your brain chemistry that digging them up is absolutely not worth it and will probably be unsuccesful. There is no reason why you can’t change your living circumstances or your practices of daily self-maintenance instead of roto-tilling your brain.

This all goes double with physical limitations, I think. You can learn new skills, you can grow, but we all have physical limitations and they’re not the same as everyone else. All the positive thinking in the world is not going to help someone who can’t stand and take steps to go up a flight of stairs. Nor will all the positive thinking in the world make doing so hurt less for someone who experiences chronic pain.

We accept a lot of our limitations without thinking too hard about it. We wear coats in the wintertime. We have houses to keep the rain off. We have cars and planes instead of pushing ourselves to learn to run faster or to fly.

I currently work serving students with disabilities — we have this mindset as a culture that certain kinds of help count as not getting help. A lot of people look at an accomodation as an unfair advantage. They’re not seeing that learning is learning regardless of how it happens. A car is an accomodation for people who can’t run sixty miles an hour. A grocery cart is an accomodation for people who can’t carry fifty pounds of oddly-shaped items. A coat is an accomodation for people who can’t keep their body temperature up sufficiently when the temperature gets to a certain point.

As a culture, we’ve agreed that these kinds of help count as nonhelp. And anything beyond them counts as help. Or “extra” help.

We’re focusing on tasks rather than the goals.

To accept your limitations is to free yourself to focus on the goals instead of the tasks. Is the goal to remember your keys? Is it easier to berate yourself about remembering where you put them down or to install a special hook right inside the door and leave them there.

Is the goal to remember your meds? Is it easier to tell yourself to just remember and then remember that you took them or are there systems and helps you can put in place that will take that mental load away from you? (daily pill organizers, alarms on your phone, a sign on your fridge, etc.)

Is your goal to get up and get to work in the morning? What will make that easy on you? How can you make that happen without punishing yourself or squishing yourself into the same shape box you think everyone else is in?

These are the kinds of questions I ask myself. And when I figure out something that will make my life easier, I do it, regardless of how weird it’ll seem to other people (who even has to know) or how contrary it is to what I was taught growing up.

Focus on what you want to do — focus on goals and behaviors instead of tasks and external milestones. Stifle your inner Calvanist that says that how hard you work is more important than what you get done. It could get you farther than you think.

It’s an engineering problem. This is the load your materials can carry. How can you use them to build a strong bridge that will let people cross it? How can you use it to keep the rain off or make yourself safe? It’s what you have. You cannot trade it or buy something new. How can you use it effectively?

Give yourself credit for whatever mountains you’ve climbed, no matter how slowly. And give credit to other people even if their mountains or the way they reach their elevations aren’t the same as yours.

No Bus, No Fuss

I have a rant about public transportation and people’s behavior on it brewing inside me. Trust that I will repress it till a more appropriate time and a better place (in all probability never and nowhere, because rants about public transportation behavior are venting and many of them tend to be pretty much “get off my lawn”-y and achieve nothing positive).

Let’s talk a little, instead, about road trips.

The hero’s journey has been a part of fiction as long as fiction has been written down, as far as I can tell. And it seems that frequently the movement through space often parallels some inner movement or growth. I mean – this is litcrit 101 stuff, really.

But a road trip is something that I think is often both more specific and more vague than just a journey. A road trip is definitely at least as much about the journey as it is about the destination.

The mere concept of a road trip strikes me as really American and rooted in American’s notions of independent lateral movement as one of our fundamental freedoms or something inherent to the American spirit. Road trips in life can be spontaneous, self-directed, and contain arbitrary diversions and twists. This is often echoed when they come up in pop culture, in my experience.

The vital aspects that define a road trip in my head are thus:

  • the traveler is moving at their own pace – there is lots of room for schedule shift
  • stops happen when and as the traveler is feeling it
  • there may be an objective but there is not a point-by-point plan on reaching that objective
  • the traveler is open to the possibilities of the universe or fate or whatever you want to call it and also open to eating some truly awful diner food

The venerable and gravitational TV Tropes claims road trip fictions are usually comedies and are vulnerable to cascades of cliches and to sappiness. And frankly, I am frequently vulnerable to those things myself, and so may not be the best judge of the depth of their truth, there. The road trip stories I like the best, though, often share characteristics I find more poignant than that.

Close Quarters – Magnified Interactions

Anyone who has been in a car with someone for four hours or more knows how it can make a relationship closer or leave it cracked and teetering on the edge of an abyss or even both, by turns. Fictions that use road trips often take advantage of this and give us moments of emotional intensity that is tangential to any intensity of situation.

Sensory Immersion

Real life road trips are steeped in a sense of place and of passing. Movies often echo this and give us a sense of the landscape being traveled through that includes soundscapes, vistas and even visions of foods and scents that can only be transported to the viewer via imagination.

Inner Journey with the Outer

Road trips are not just about getting somewhere. They are deeply about the experience of the interval between leaving and arriving. There’s something mindful about bringing your brain through space and through the different environments and experiences it represents. And even if you just wind up back at home, the brain you come back with isn’t the one you left with. And the only thing that connects the story together is the path that brain took.

Meandering or Lateral Narrative Structure

Like a road trip itself, a road trip story often doesn’t take a direct approach to moving its characters through the story. Emotional beats can switch quickly with place and the shifts in physical space can be like a renewal of the mental – one doesn’t exactly start fresh in each location, but it’s easier to move from one beat to another without direct cause and effect.

Ordinary Obstacles: New Frameworks

People on road trips aren’t exempt from the boring business of keeping the body alive, and often the beats in a road trip story have something to do with meeting a usual need in an unusual location or being forced to meet it in an unusual way.

* * *

Of course, all of this really hinges on what is and isn’t a road trip movie. And certainly there are lots of arguments to be made and definitions one could mete out here. By these criteria, Magic Mike 2 and Priscilla: Queen of the Desert are road trip movies, sure, but so are The Wizard of Oz, or Mad Max: Fury Road. 

I mean – even the TV Tropes folks would agree, I think, that when you start *really* building boxes for stories to go in, you can wind up defining almost as many as there are stories.

And my list isn’t really intended to be a definition, just a group of qualities I enjoy about road trip movies (and about road trips, for that matter). I’ll leave the boundary-painting to other folks.

Ever since I started to be self-analytical, I have realized that I use media as some kind of emotional anesthesia. A constant flow of *story* is one of the most reliable thing to keep my personal demons at a dull roar.

When I was younger, this meant I would sneak in reading pages of a book between school or work tasks. Then later, I’d listen to audio dramas and still later I’d sneak dvds in to work to have them playing in the background of my computer.

Modern technology has really opened up my ability to do this. I can just have a steady stream of podcasts, or netflix shows or youtube videos in my ear as I go about my daily business. Like some kind of a reverse Harrison Bergeron, the constant stream of distraction allows me to do more and live in greater peace.

I truly am more productive with it than without it. There are days when it’s all that keeps me from just falling into a giant pit of existentialism.

I have wondered if I could somehow break myself of this habit if it wouldn’t be better for me in the long-term, somehow, but it’s really difficult to value long-term growth over near-term functionality.

And maybe it wouldn’t be better after all. Who knows? It’s impossible to say, from here. And it’d certainly be a shame to do all the work to hollow myself out and build a different me if it turned out they were no better at achieving life goals than I am.

Narrative – especially character exploration and development – is my favorite drug. And probably it always will be.

Of course a given narrative, even a true one, is never the whole story. And I do worry, sometimes, if one of the main negative effects of feeding my addiction isn’t delusions of plot arc. Lives don’t go the way stories go. There’s no climax and denouement. There are no morals or lessons. There is character development, but it’s a strange, fungus-like outward creep rather than an arrow pointed at a particular goal.

It is difficult, maybe even impossible, to keep from looking at isolated sectional views of my life as narrative arcs. It doesn’t fit in well with the narrow, reactive day-to-day business of survival. It feels like…if life is to have meaning, it needs to have that arc. But life is bigger than that. It has all the details that get left out of a good story and lacks the interpretive thrust that gets put in to one.

Which isn’t to say that I will stop trying to spin stories out of my life – stories are how we teach and learn and understand. From ‘one train leaves St. Louis travelling at 40 miles and hour and another leaves Chicago travelling at 65’ to ‘What is Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba’ to even ‘in the beginning was the word’ or ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’ we use stories to give us new frameworks for our own lives, to interpret current and past events, to find the harmonic resonances in ourselves, to admonish, to grow, to learn and to teach.

A story doesn’t have to be true to contain Truth. And it doesn’t have to tell the whole truth and nothing but to elucidate important things.

After all, humanity is the storytelling animal. Our ability to draw sense out of chaotic events and bullshit our way into the truth is what separates us from other fauna.

If telling myself the story of my own life helps me to interpret it and understand myself better that isn’t a bad thing, nor a small one. It’s only when I bow under the weight of an old narrative and can’t create something newer that serves me that it becomes a problem.

A lifetime is a host of stories. They don’t all wrap up neatly and they don’t have a moral. They aren’t neat and pat and they intersect wildly. As long as I can hold onto the notion that I am not a story, but a rampaging herd of them, that framing is as useful as any to apply meaning to life.

I mean…probably, right?

I remember saying once to my therapist that trying to address my mental illness felt like living in a crumbling house while I was trying to fix it. And getting therapy felt like putting up scaffolding on the crumbling house – you feel safer on it than inside. It also makes it easier to work on the wreck of a house. It doesn’t mean it’s actually easy. Nor does it mean you won’t be envious of people whose houses already keep all the rain out.

It’s also a little like trying to read, write and market a novel at the same time as you’re constantly editing and polishing it. Nightmare. But feels better than getting no writing done at all….most days.

Anyhow. The metaphors are stories, too. So where do they end? They don’t. They’ll always be coming into me and going out till I cease to draw breath. And then they’ll still be happening everywhere else. Maybe even, if I’m lucky, about me…

In the meantime, if stories are what gets me through the day, I’m not going to avoid them out of some neo-Calvanist sense of self-denial equaling virtue. Whether they’re the ones I tell to myself or the ones I get other people to tell me, I’ll accept their smoothing of my road.

 

Ass Over Teakettle

There’s only one good thing about falling dramatically down onto a sidewalk and making a very undignified noise and having your glasses fly off and spilling your coffee after only getting one sip…and that is getting to use the phrase “ass over teakettle”.

I went ass over teakettle last week. Scraped and bruised the living fuck out of one knee and generally felt stupid and had several days of deep muscular soreness.

FUN!

There’s something deeply humanizing about spraining your dignity. I don’t mean to go out of my way to sell any benefits of being human, mind you. It can be the worst. But a dose of humility every now and again is probably good for most of us.

I mean. It’s complicated, right? Like – entitlement is often considered a bad thing. And it is in excess, absolutely. In my opinion an out-of-control sense of entitlement is at the root of a lot of societal problems. But there is such a thing as too little entitlement. You can fail to feel entitled to an opinion (even a knowledge-based one) or to feel entitled to the basic things you need to keep your body healthy, or even to the space that you take up in the world.

It’s a balance thing, right? Too much entitlement equals egotistical asshole. Too little equals low self-esteem or something worse – depression, lack of sense of self, possibly a buy in to any cultural narratives that tell you that you’re lesser, that humanity itself doesn’t establish your worth.

So: a balance thing. You can have too much, but you can also have too little. And I think it’s always difficult to understand or to believe that the amount of entitlement you have may be wrong. We pick up these ideas at a level below the conscious one and bringing them to light and unlearning them is a job of work.

So it’s humanizing to have moments of humility. It’s at least as human to have some sense of entitlement.

Humility visits itself upon me easily and frequently. Entitlement not so much. It’s difficult for me to believe that it’s okay for me to promulgate my opinions, even for stuff I think deep and long about.

I bring all this up mainly because this is the particular dog that has eaten my homework for the past week or so. I may always be thinking about culture but it can be difficult for me to believe there’s any particular value in adding my voice to the throng of folks who talk about this every day — that there is value in my perspective and in the way I express it.

This is a slice of how exhausting it is to have a brain that doesn’t feed you the right chemicals. That, too, is a very human thing, I know. Also (like many human things) a fucking frustrating or even enraging one.

Mentally, I went ass over teakettle before I did physically. And a bruised psyche is harder to allow to heal than a bruised knee. First, you need to accept that it is bruised. Because part of the way depression perpetuates itself is by convincing you that it is the only one who’s telling you the awful truth of your worthlessness. The bruise, it will tell you, is supposed to be there. You’re supposed to hurt. You’ve earned it. You deserve it. And you deserve to experience it in silence.

So how do you get past it? I do not know, dear reader. I’ll let you know if I ever figure out how to leave it behind for good. In the meantime, I must assume that I’ll be back this way again. I know it’s tedious to hear about (but not, as Douglas Adams once said, nearly as tedious as it is to undergo). Thanks for sticking with me. More stuff on actual culture is coming up.

[This post contains one spoiler for Thor: Ragnarok.]

I saw Thor: Ragnarok this weekend and really enjoyed it. I’m not going to review it cause you already know whether you’re going to see it or not.

It did introduce one of my favorite concepts from the comics, though it did it more or less in passing and failed (as the movies often do) to explore or address the implications of it.

In Thor: Ragnarok, Bruce Banner finds he has been under and living as the Hulk for multiple years and he has this moment of deep fear. While he used to feel both he and Hulk each had a hand on the wheel, he said, he feels like this time “Hulk was in the driver’s seat and I was in the trunk.” The tension between Hulk and Banner having to share one body and having totally contrary needs, goals and pleasures is one of the things I find most fascinating about the character(s).

Bruce Banner from the movies saying 'I'm not even sure.'

Bruce Banner in Marvel comics is a bitter, bitter man (when he’s alive, which is a whole other discussion which we’ll sigh and file under “because comics”). He resents the Hulk for taking huge swaths of his life. He fears the return of the Hulk as this force in himself he can’t control or make decisions about.

comic panel from Indestructible Hulk
Bruce Banner speaking to Maria Hill in issue one of “Indestructible Hulk”

It’s a really excellent metaphor for living with a mental illness. Mark Waid, the writer of some of my favorite Hulk stories explicitely compares it to managing a chronic health condition. If you can’t kill it, you have to find a way to live with it as best as possible.

Panel from issue one of Indestructible Hulk

One of the things I hate the most about my depression is the time and energy it steals from me. I think about where I could have been and what I could have achieved if I wasn’t constantly battling with this force inside of me that tries to make my decisions.

It’s a chronic thing I have to manage and figure out how to live with. There have been times it takes up so many resources I feel like the only thing I’m getting done is staying alive. It’s demoralizing.

Bruce Banner spent decades in the comics universe trying to figure out how to get rid of the Hulk. He evenutally realizes it’s not possible and starts to try to figure out how to manage it. And to manage his condition, he seeks help. He knows he can’t do it alone. The Hulk, by definition, is out of his control.

That doesn’t mean he has to be outside all control.

I mean, the metaphor does break down. I only wish my depression gave me near-invincibility and near-infinite strength as powers instead of “has to berate myself for 45 minutes to get out of bed” or “doesn’t think I deserve to eat” powers.

But even one of the ten smartest people in the Marvel universe knows you can’t go it alone.