But what does it mean?
Last Friday I saw my therapist. I shared the results of my homework assignment and conveyed some good moments and experiences from the past week. He made the observation that most of the good moments were semi-meditative.
what do you mean by that
you stop straining and start observing
straining, right. you mean thinking of what I need to do next and trying to do it. trying to stay on top of everything.
what do you think will happen if you stop straining so hard?
the world will collapse inward on itself, my dick will fall off, i’ll miss the coming of Jesus, catastrophe
be serious
Well emotionally that’s what it feels like. In practical terms… some pretty bad stuff can happen actually.
like what?
Today I woke up and remembered to check the oil. Tank’s at 1/4. Enough to get through another four or five days but not a ton more than that. So I called the oil company and tried to set up a delivery but got voice mail, the office is out until next Friday. So I found a different oil company and set up an account and arranged a delivery for Monday. If oil doesn’t get delivered I wake up someday and it’s cold and J complains and maybe some sludge from the bottom of the tank gets into the system and breaks shit and then the heat doesn’t work and maybe pipes freeze and this can cost tens of thousands of dollars and take weeks to fix.
That’s probably the worst thing you can think of though, right?
yes, probably. Other things I forget to do can mostly be managed… if I miss a work meeting or don’t call my mom back or forget to get J’s favorite yogurt at the supermarket — apologies can be issued, forgiveness received and so on. People might think a little less of me but I’ll survive. I just don’t like to let people down.
would you consider trying to have meditative moments every day?
I’ve tried to like intentionally meditate before and it doesn’t really work for me, it doesn’t go anywhere.
It’s not supposed to go anywhere
Do you meditate?
Sometimes. I’m not all that good at it either, to be honest. But many of my patients say it’s helpful.
When it doesn’t work for you, why do you think that is?
(He thinks a minute.) I’m too tightly wound.
I laugh at him. I tell him this reminds me of a fat doctor recommending that his patients lose weight. The advise is probably good but it’s hard to take from someone who can’t follow it.
I switch topics and ask him how he thinks I’m doing over the past year. He says overall better than last year. I say how.
I see you are doing a lot of work. You show up with me and we work on issues. Handling your parents, J’s parents, your relationship with J, the house, your job. You are open with your struggles and this is what allows us to make progress.
I don’t see much progress. And I don’t consider this to be work.
What do you consider it to be then?
I don’t know. A waste of time mostly. Maybe an opportunity for someone to pat me on the head and tell me everything’s going to be OK, that they don’t think I’m crazy. Maybe you’re a failsafe in case I feel really dark and low, someone for me to share the worst parts of myself without consequence.
Talking about it — articulating feelings — it’s all work.
I guess it just doesn’t feel that useful to me, I tell him. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t feel like work — usefulness seems to be a critical component of how I define work. Do you think it’d be more helpful for me to spend this time meditating instead of talking to you?
Why can’t you do both?
I don’t answer him. Inside I think that this is too much time to devote to myself. Therapy and meditating and writing about therapy and thinking about all of this shit — me and my life, my relationship to other people, my relationship to myself, my goals and ego and sense of well being and analyzing how I’m doing and where am I going. Maybe there are limits to how much time we should be devoting to being all existential. Limits to how much care we give to ourselves. I pivot to sharing a story about my mother.
My seventy five year old mother has been sick since June. She blew her back out, went to a lousy hospital, did rehab, and returned home to her apartment a fundamentally different creature.
She constantly has nausea — can’t sleep reliably anymore — takes a lot of xanax to get through the day. I think her nausea is fear and anxiety related. Here is the narrative I’ve created in my head to describe what happened: She went to a terrible hospital and received awful treatment. While she was there she also witnessed nightmare-fuel type shit, patients in rooms next to her shouting make it stop make it stop all night, not because they are in pain, but because they have mental problems. Two straight weeks of this, people yelling and crying out for help, most of them old, all of them down-and-out, all stuck together in a state-run hospital with lousy staff and funding. My mom had to confront the idea that this might be what the end of days looks like for her — which means that dying is no longer an abstraction. Even when you are in your mid-seventies, you can, in the right circumstances, pretend death isn’t going to happen anytime soon and it’ll all be fine. These were the wrong circumstances.
So she’s constantly anxious about dying now. And she’s very religious and feels certain she’s going to go to hell for various wrongdoings. These beliefs do not help to calm her down.
About three weeks ago I convinced her to try some pot gummies for her nausea. She needs to eat — she’s dropped forty pounds in six months, down from 160 to 120, her skin sagging on her like melting wax. Not eating has not improved her mood either. I did some research, found a decent kind to try — low dose THC with a high CBD concentration — both of these things should help with her nausea. Went to a dispensary, bought gummies, sent them over to her with instructions.
She tries them one night because she can’t sleep and told me about it the day before therapy. I bit off about a quarter, she says. An hour later I could definitely feel it. It made it harder for me to think clearly, I didn’t like that.
Well mom people rarely use cannabis to think more clearly. Besides the xanax you take also makes you muddled and you still take that, almost every day.
Well I didn’t like it. And it didn’t help me sleep.
Did it help your nausea?
I wasn’t very nauseous that night so I can’t say.
Well you could try again sometime when you’re feeling sick and can’t eat.
I can’t — I threw them out. And now I’m worried I did the wrong thing throwing them out because maybe a kid will find them in the trash and get high.
This whole conversation makes me exasperated and I realize my mom didn’t give the THC/CBD gummies a fair trial. She was prejudiced against them from the start — they’re “bad drugs” — marijuana used to be a street drug, a drug people took for pleasure. Xanax is a prescription drug, so it’s OK. So I went to all this effort to help her try something for her nausea, and she didn’t even take it when she was feeling sick — took a ridiculously low dose, so low that I doubt she felt much at all other than a placebo effect — and then rejected it all.
I got off the phone as quickly as I could after she told me all of this because I was so irritated with her, and I didn’t want to yell at her because there’s no point in that either.
So I told all of this to my therapist and he asks how I feel about the experience and I say well — I mean I was initially just angry with my mom. She shouldn’t have agreed to try THC if she wasn’t serious about following through in any meaningful way. This would have saved me the effort of putting everything together. Not to mention the cost of it, too.
It feels like a waste.
Dude it doesn’t FEEL like a waste. It WAS a waste. Empirically. It reminds me of a thought I often have — about how much of our lives are wasted. Efforts to do this or that which go nowhere, don’t pan out, lines we wait in for things that we don’t need or don’t help us.
Conversations with therapists that don’t fix all of your problems.
I laugh and say yes, exactly.
Sometimes my therapist is a funny fucking guy.
We turn on a lousy movie to watch over dinner. It’s a “riffed” version of The Little Mermaid, MST3K style. But not the Disney version — the 1975 TOEI animated version that was released only in Europe.
Midway though the movie, there’s an underwater scene featuring, prominently, a rainbow in the background. The colors of it arc down to the floor of the ocean, thick lines of red and yellow and green and blue and purple ending in sand. I tell J that in terms of how the physics of rainbows work, this isn’t possible. You might see a rainbow on the surface of a very still patch of ocean water or a placid lake. These would be secondary manifestations of the rainbow, though — not direct “reflections” of the rainbow you see in the sky. There is no such thing as a rainbow Under the Sea.
J gets goofy on me and imitates the voice of a really stoned guy we saw on Youtube a few weeks ago. Some dude in the mountains, stoned off his fucking ass, looks in the sky and sees a double rainbow. With the camera on him, he starts going on and on about OH MY GOD A DOUBLE RAINBOW IT’S SO BEAUTIFUL WHAT DOES IT MEAN?? OOH MY GOD IT’S A DOUBLE RAINBOW WOW WOW WOW IT MUST MEAN SOMETHING WHAT COULD IT BE WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
He’s at a particular level of baked that makes repetition of his thoughts sound, to him at least, utterly profound rather than stupid, so he just keeps saying what does it mean and it’s so beautiful — the video itself is five minutes long but who knows how long he kept it up in real life.
And now I have J on the couch next to me going on and on too. A rainbow in the OCEAN where it’s not even POSSIBLE for there to be a rainbow OH MY GOD WHAT DOES IT MEAN? WOOOWWWWWWWW OH MY GOD WOOOOOWWW
She snuggles next to me and we watch Ariel toss herself into the ocean because she can’t have the prince.
It’s the bad ending, huh, I say to J. Before all the fairy tales got cleaned up and “Dis”-nified.
Yeah but we have the good ending, J says. Right here. This is what it all means.
That doesn’t even make any sense, I say.
It’s not supposed to.
I know, I say. Nothing really makes much sense if you think about it.
The movie ends and the television reverts to the Roku screensaver, a purplish glow from a scrolling pixelated city lighting the room. Instead of picking something else to watch, we sit in the silence together, her head on my shoulder, a fuzzy blanket draped over our laps, warm and cozy. I can’t say we were doing much at all.
But it doesn’t feel like a waste.