As I mentioned at the end of my last post, I recently found a cache of quotes and poems in my old Google Keep. Among these, I was surprised to see more than one poem written by young me (and many of them are quite good, probably even better than what I would be able to write today)!
I want to give these a new home, so every now and then I'll be sharing one of them here. I haven't yet gone through all of them, so they'll come in no particular order. To start, here's one from Oct 2018 that struck me as especially vivid.
A deeper love was born, in the moment, a firefly in a warm breeze, a glowing droplet in a meadow. A touch of warm milk, tenderness and despair coursing through the rivers of my body. When is the time, which is the road.
Unnerving, relentless, chipping away at what we hold dear. From our own, freedom can't be. A drop of water, a whisper of rain, the beauty of a moment. Can we hold it? It is still, a fish can't be caught outside of running water.
What calmness, in a summer thunderstorm. What chaos, in a man's last breath. Both go hand in hand, still, one is the illusion of the other. Without everything in its place, there is no confusion. Without a place to be, everything is as it should. Nothing have the blind to fear from the dark.
Think about it, think not. What can a human be, but a flower pulling at the wind, asking for more, asking for time. But the wind is deaf, it grants no wishes, it hears no prayers, it's empty of itself. Harder it blows, the flower uprooted, blown away, part of the wind.
I don't exactly remember what young me was working through when I wrote this, but it definitely was something! I remember struggling a lot with a mix of hypochondria and fear of doctors, and accepting death. The former created a curious loop in my mind, which I often (seriously) felt like I was driving myself insane, where I would spend many hours (especially at night) thinking about how I was noticing a bunch of issues in my body and how I should just go to the doctor (and often resolve to actually go and stop being silly), then in the mornings I would think myself unreasonable and that really all those bodily sensations were just my imagination. These tensions eventually built up to the point I didn't know if what I was feeling was true or not. How can you trust your thoughts if you've decided some of them are lying?
As you can imagine, this created a lot of stress, and a lot of thinking about the untrustworthiness of my body, feeling unsafe all the time, and pondering death. I would often picture what would happen after I died of these very same sicknesses I was imagining, and how everyone I knew would be saying things like "oh he was such an idiot, why didn't he just go to the doctor earlier".
However, this situation also had a positive effect, in that I started to explore other religions and ideologies, and especially to be curious about how the mind works. Eventually, I found the perfect tradition that could help me make sense of what I was feeling and give me ways to deal with it in the form of Buddhism. It offered an excellent psychological framework detailing where my thoughts originated and their nature, as well as a cosmological view that aligned with my own.
In this poem, you can clearly see all of these influences at play. The despair, the desire for unity and safety, the fear of an unrelenting universe bent on wasting my body, the appreciation of that which escapes the violence, the desire to see things as more than their apparent nature, and finally, death, but framed positively, integrating both streams.
It's not an especially good poem, but I feel it. Very much. Maybe that's not true for you, as maybe what I'm feeling right now is just an echo of what I was going through at the moment. I like it :)
...
For those who might be interested or facing a similar situation, I haven't yet gotten over my fear of doctors, BUT the hypochondria is almost entirely gone (in retrospect, I now realize most times I felt I was seriously ill were really panic attacks that I was misidentifying). My practice of Buddhism helped a lot with settling things and regaining a measure of tranquility, but I was still "unstable", in the sense that I would have a good spell and then a small tingling sensation would just unravel a whole stress spiral, which would take many, many weeks to resolve.
When you have such a condition, you realize that your mind is terribly good at shoehorning explanations to fit the evidence you're seeing. I can't tell you how many times I was 100% sure, completely and absolutely convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I had X or Y. I had all the data points, all the symptoms, everything. But of course, it was just my imagination.
It wasn't until I actually went to see a therapist around the time my first son was about to be born (I was completely losing it) that things started to become consistently better.
She helped me feel safe again in myself and around me. It was a hard thing to talk about. Especially as a grown-ass guy, I somehow felt it was silly, like it was literally a laughable issue, or even scornful. It was nice feeling like it was okay to feel things! She also helped me realize two important ideas: the resistance to therapy was my own hypochondria/fear of doctors; I just couldn't reason well about it, and that was the main reason why I'd not gone to a therapist in the first place (beware of your mind!). The other thing, which was actually a sort of eye-opener for me, was that "my body has worked perfectly all my life, and it has never done anything to let me down, quite the contrary actually". This last thought seems so obvious, right? But to me, it was a sort of revelation. Perhaps it is obvious, but my mind (such a powerful thing, the mind) just didn't let me see it! It didn't let me see that everything was really all right.
Thoughts:
- wow, I think I don't get so emotionally involved in writing a post ever since... since... maybe the very start of my blog? I'm not sure if it's good or if it's bad, but at this point I really don't care. It felt good to connect with the process, and feel like I was writing something completely authentic. No walls, just acceptance.