"You should find a support group," my psychiatrist says, the prescription pad resting impotently on one knee. I'm looking past him, out the window at the beautiful steep hillside of Queen Anne, at the side of the building on Denny that's painted with orcas and octopi. Wanting to swim in that painting. I watch the red lights of the radio towers atop the hill blink on and off and on and off and think about how Karen mistook the tallest for the Space Needle and shot many photographs of it as a result. I smile a little bit, because remembering that always makes me smile, even when I'm sitting in the pristine, sprawling office of my new doctor whom I've elected to dole out my pharmaceuticals. His chair is far enough away from mine that he has to raise his voice to be heard over the white noise of the traffic thirteen stories below. "What's so funny?"
I tell him I left AA three years ago because I put Personalities before Principles, one of the big no no's, right up there with Comparing instead of Identifying. Three meetings in a row something ridiculously stupid happened to me, and I said fuck it, and left the program. It took up too much damn time anyway, a daily meeting prescribed by my boot camp sponsor. My Buddhist sponsor who got weekly manicures and was throwing herself shamelessly at a married man twice her age (Identify. Identify.)
I tell my psychiatrist this, loudly, over the traffic. Then I tell him about the Artist Way group I formed, which meets every Sunday for two luxurious hours, and how we always end up talking about much more than "creative recovery". How we all seem so starved for connection, living in this city. That was my last shrink's favorite theory: Urban Isolation. He told me about it every session, never remembering the previous speech he gave me. I started to look forward to it, in that way that a broken spring in a couch can be comforting because it's familiar.
I don't know how to make sense of this world, and words have always been my best shot. If I could put it just right, my understanding would gel, my mind would expand and I could sleep soundly at night. Words have been failing me.
No, that's not even true. I've been failing words. Because they've been here all along, waiting for me to come home and hold them up to view my world through, the Rosetta stone of my consciousness. I have been failing words because the appropriate adjectives have been too dark and morbid to see on the screen. I save them for paper, sometimes, in the morning, because I still write for an hour and a half at the cafe before work. And then I close my hardbound notebook, stow it safely away, and post pretty pictures of stars and kitties napping on purple pillows.
Sitting back at my work desk, I pull up Google. "Support group", I type. And then, to clarify, "Seattle". I stare at my 650,000 results and realize I'll need to be more specific.
And it's here that I am at a loss. What is it, exactly, I need support for? What am I suffering from that can be solved by the wisdom of similarly injured people? In which group can I sit and speak freely about all the issues weighing on my soul these days? I have no disease. I have not physically lost anyone. I'm not involved with an abusive addict.
Yet I am quite certain that this planet is going down the toilet, and us with it, and there's nothing we can do to affect any measurable change because the entire human race is possessed by money and power and the petty desires of Old White Men, and no matter how much effort the millions of little people exert, one Old White Man can veto that motion and all is lost.
In what group can I sit and say, "Hey -- maybe people starving to death is a good thing. Because since the beginning of time, the natural law of population control has reined-in every species, and every time a food supply expanded, a population expanded accordingly. And feeding people who have outgrown their food supply (or whose food supply we have destroyed) is just perpetuating the problem and making it larger."
In what group can I express the dismal grief I feel at having poisoned the four cats in my care with their gourmet, Dick van Patten-endorsed, $40 a bag, grain-free food? And how do I reconcile with my heart as I force them to endure nightly subcutaneous fluid injections via needle while they growl and struggle and try to bite me because I am unable to explain to them that I'm trying to save them? That some fucker in China has a new Rolls Royce funded by the melamine they ingested?
If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.
And maybe some diseases weren't meant to be cured. And maybe it's simply not okay to drive a gas-guzzling SUV, even if that means you're inconvenienced on soccer nights. And hey -- maybe adding three more babies to the US census is not responsible citizenship. Maybe we need a woman president, even if she's not the best candidate. Maybe it's really fucked up that most Americans speak only one language, and most of the world also speaks English. Maybe it's not okay that your coolest shirt was made by a nine-year-old in Hong Kong who works 100 hours a week for a daily bowl of melamine-tainted rice. Maybe putting little animals and our primate cousins into cages and subjecting them to unspeakable horrors so we can perpetuate a handful of miserable human lives another three years is not the best way to go. Maybe me graciously accepting my plush salary and benefits from a company that does just that is not the most ethical choice.
It is here my Buddhism fails me, or as previously phrased, I fail my Buddhism. Meditation lately has been too painful and instead I retreat into a half-gallon of Mississippi mud and a National Geographic DVD. Or I buy furniture and dye my hair.
Maybe I'll start my own group. Call it "life support".
Wanna join?
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