Art Therapy

There are very few things that can't be helped by being creative.  Art definitely soothes the savage beast.  I saw the famous video of the troubled elephant relaxing through art therapy, watched college classmates' scowls smooth out as they sketched during life drawing.  I taught art classes at an abused children's home and witnessed how scratching charcoal against newsprint could lance a wound few psychiatrists could touch.

People strive to get disposable income so they can collect art.  That's a common thing.  Even the cold and calculating find something important about great art, even if it's a only a reptilian desire for a good investment.  Even the poorest of humanity likes to adorn their walls with something creative and meaningful, woven together with ingenuity and artistic creativity.  Art touches the heart of the whole world.

Many of my friends ponder my own existence.  Out of generations, I am one of only a handful of people in my family who never turned to drugs, alcohol or sex during my youth.  We have a genetic propensity for addiction and we oblige it, year after year, generation after generation.  Why, then, did I never have a desire for it?  Why didn't I turn to the obvious to alleviate any of the pain I was going through?  One of my best friends made a suggestion as to the cause, something I'd never thought of.  Art.  I was constantly creating, even as a small child.  I took crayons and carved faces on them with a pin when I was in second grade.  I wrote stories and illustrated them, acted out haunted house scenarios with my friend Carol and drew all the time.  When things were really bad, which was often, I drew monsters with gaping mouths and lashing tails.  When things were sad, I drew beautiful fairies and angels and Greek gods, all smiling and mysterious and always loving.  When things were unbearable, I drew super heroes and super villains with equal relish, making sure they kicked the shit out of each other for at least five pages.  I got my angst out as much as I could.  I lanced the rancid boil that was my existence and I did it by sketching on a pad of paper.  That was my secret weapon.  Secret even to myself.  I liked to draw.  That's all I knew.  I felt better when I did it but I never paid much attention to the philosophy of it. 

So there's another weapon in the arsenal of soul preservation and temper dampening.  Create something. Buy some clay, a pack of copy paper and some pens and just let your hands go nuts.  Draw a picture, squish out a clay sculpture, paint a masterpiece, write a song.  Hands and minds love to run loose, like hyper puppies after a bath, and who knows what they'll come up with together.  They're magical creatures and they come alive when asked to do something so wondrous.  Through them, we become wondrous too.

A Sacred Day

Went to a friend's birthday party last night.  It was outside on the back deck of his house, the air fragrant with barbeque and cool breeze on a gorgeous night.  I sat in the corner and watched all the strangers milling about, grinning with the joy of being with Randall, bouncy in their early-twenties exuberance.  There were slaps on the back, randy comments, manly dares during beer pong, and a general air of gladness.  I knew no one except Randall for the first half hour, and shyness kept me back.  I also love simply watching people; their interactions, the silent glances that tell a story altogether different than the words coming out of their mouths.  Then mutual friends arrived, gathering around me like a warm blanket, disallowing my hiding in the shadows and dragging me into the light.

I stayed a few hours then left, walking home under the stars (Randall lives three blocks from my house), enjoying the ability to stand in the middle of the road and stare straight up at Orion, my favorite constellation.  That's the fun thing about the after midnight hours: abandoned roads and hushed expectancy, as if something magical might dart across your path in this shadowy world.  It's also a great time to think.  The world's asleep and their busy brains and mouths and fingers are at rest under the covers.  My thoughts turned to Randall and his birthday, to the birthday of a cherished friend only a month ago.  Tic toc, my brain touched on all the birthday parties and celebrations and bemoaned age progression of everybody I know, every conversation about birthdays I'd ever overheard, weaving together a jumbled mass of contradictions in my crazy brain.  When do birthdays change in the minds of people?  As they get older, they often grow to dread them, hide the fact of them, lie about the true number of years they've been alive, as if that weren't the miraculous achievement it truly is.  When you're little, birthdays are a time of celebration: cake and ice cream, a year older, presents and well wishes and family get togethers.  Even when I had to bake and decorate my own cake when I was a teenager, I was determined to have a celebratory dessert, come hell or high water.  It was my birthday.  A very important time.  I was going to eat cake and nobody was going to stop me.  I bought the mix, the eggs, even the sprinkles, then proceeded to create the ugliest birthday cake known to humanity.  Didn't matter.  It was Devil's Food with buttercream frosting.  Who cares what it looked like?  I wrote "Happy Birthday Beautiful Child" and had a few friends show up to gnaw it to pieces with me.  Glorious. 

My roommate calls me "the anomaly."  I don't quite fit in with any one set age group, finding toddlers and ninety-year-olds, not to mention everybody in between, equally fascinating and fun.  Their bodies may be one age but who knows how old their souls are?  That's what's fun to me.  Maybe that's why I've never changed my view about birthdays.  I always adore them.  I don't care that I'm long in the tooth, that my body and face look like a wax statue that's been out in the sun a little too long, that each new birthday marks one year closer to death.  They also mark one more year I've been alive.  A thing to celebrate.  One of the perks of being boot-stomped by Life for so long is, once you worm your way out from under those steel-toed cleets, everything is such a gift.  It reminds me of the war veterans who say, every time they feel like they want to bitch about something, "At least I ain't in a stinking foxhole."  That's very true.  I was beaten and raped as a kid, brutalized and sodomized as a young adult, and spent the next decade and a half horrifically sick and married to a control freak emotional sadist.  I contemplated suicide for the majority of that time and even got to the planning stage twice.  But I'm still here.  Somehow, I didn't die, even when I really, really wanted to.  I lived long enough to be where I am now, surrounded by loved ones who love me back, blink-eyed with astonishment that I'm actually...happy.  I've written my book FREAK, which I hope will help other perennial fuckups like myself to try a new view on life, like I did, and find their own path out of hell.  That makes my existence a wonderful thing that can potentially help thousands, but even if I only helped one person throughout my whole life, it would be worth it, and everybody's done that in some way.  Birthdays aren't something to moan or grieve about.  They're joyous, magnificent, wondrous things of magic, darting across a dappled path only once a year, precious and fleeting.  We're all pebbles dropped in a pond: little pearls or diamonds, sentimental emeralds and sassy rubies.  Our ripples spread far and wide, touching everything else in ways we can't begin to comprehend.  Your birthday isn't just for you.  It's a sacred day to everybody, whether they know it or not, whether they comprehend it or not.  It's the day the world was given the gift of you.  It will always be precious.

A Pit Bull with Pointy, Pointy Teeth

I just had a long and heartbreaking conversation with a beloved friend of mine.  Her name is Vivienne.  Our backgrounds are similar, but her ex-husband was physically abusive while her children watched, and the guilt of that crime is eating her alive.  It wasn't until her youngest son stepped in and threatened his father (while Daddy was beating her), that she found the courage to leave.  If the boy hadn't intervened and made her see how awful the situation truly was, she'd still be married to the brute.  Of that, she has no doubt.

She's in the obsessed with "ifs" phase.  If I didn't marry David, if I hadn't stayed with him so long, if I'd gotten a college education, none of this mess would have happened.  If I'd married a good man, if I'd been a decent mother, if, if, if.   Egomaniacal insecure freakazoid at its worst.  The self flagellation bounced from bad choices she'd made, to unworthy physical appearance, to complete responsibility for everything wrong in the lives of anyone she loves and a few she doesn't even care about. 

She has three children, two of whom are clean and one who's been a violent drug addict for four years.  In and out of institutions, jail, psyche wards, hospitals, rehabs, her addict child, who's now eighteen, has taken the usual toll on everybody in the household.  They're exhausted, disspirited, hopeless, bitter and angry.  That too, according to Vivienne, is her fault.  My poor boy,He's such a victim.  He's suffered so much and it's my fault.  This in between exuberant oaths that she'll never allow him back in the house, that she's done with his shit, that she doesn't even feel bad about not paying for his car insurance.  The car he didn't set on fire, that is, but the new one she bought him with the money from her second job.  Or third.  I can't remember which.  she says, referring to the addict. 

Insecurity is a pit bull with pointy, pointy teeth.  Once it latches on, the jaw locks and it's hard as hell to escape from.  Blind as a bat, too.  It makes us blind as a bat to the truth of any situation that has anything to do with us.  One of the great things Daytop taught me (that's the rehab my son Leland was in), is that unless I held him down and crammed that cocaine up his nose, the only one responsible for Leland being a drug addict was Leland.  But how do you get the same point across to somebody who's addicted to their own insecurity?  Who stubbornly refuses to believe one word of praise you give them?  I know what it's like to hear a compliment and not believe it.  Back in my uber basketcase days, my feelings boiled down to one of two emotions when praised: gratitude that the person complimenting me was kind enough to lie to try and make me feel better, or contempt for their idiotic statements.  That was it.  That's a hard wall to scale when you're on the outside, even when you know its dimensions.  I told Vivienne the truth as I saw it about her situation.  I think her son is using her, that she's enabling him, that she needs to stop beating herself up for things she can't change and get to work on the things she can.  I told her I think she's addicted to being kicked like a dog and if her ex-husband or troubled child aren't available, she does a pretty good job kicking the shit out of herself.  I suggested trying some gentle self-love techniques, such as simply saying goodnight to herself before she goes to sleep, and for a time, I thought I might be getting through.  But then she veered back into the groove of self-hatred and began hating me for my big mouth.  Oh, how we adore the rend and tear of those teeth, how we crave the vivisection and gnawing pain of it.  What a comfortable pair of old socks it is, well worn and familiar.  God, I was just like that.  I still feel it in the back of my head, like the phantom friends in the movie A Beautiful Mind: always there, always wanting me to come home to them and their beautiful incisors.  I wish Vivienne could see what I see in her.  She's a beautiful, brave, infinitely kind woman who's been through hell; someone whose biggest crime was loving people who needed a swift kick more than a pat on the head.  They were all about tough love at my son's rehab and good God, it was tough to do after years as a marshmallow.  Once again, I refer to the airplane scenario of putting on the oxygen mask first before you put it on your child.  Vivienne is starving for air, dried up and hollow with the lack of it.  She needs to learn how to breathe in life, to see value in it, even when everything's been grey and awful for most of her existence. 

But I believe in her.  She has spirit inside that sad shell, and she's always gotten up when life or some ham-fisted scumball knocks her down.  After about an hour on the phone, she'd finally had enough of my advise and told me it was horseshit, bullshit, melodramatic blah, blah, blah and she was going to hang up.  With a hasty "I love you" she slammed the phone down.  But I hope she thinks about our conversation.  I want her to see with clear eyes what everybody who's not an addict sees when they look at her: a treasure.  A highly-detailed, exquisite, one-of-a-kind masterpiece, full of colors both dark and light but still breathtakingly beautiful.  Sure, she made mistakes with her life.  But she doesn't have to keep making the same ones.  She ought to throw the lot out and begin screwing up with a whole new set of fuckups.  I highly recommend it.  The old ones get rotten after awhile.  New mistakes keep us fresh and sometimes help us stumble onto good ideas.  I was once a miserable, whining, bitter, disgusted and disgusting piece of grinning self-hatred.  Now I'm not.  I'm still insecure.  It's always with me.  But it's not as loud as it was and I don't let it dominate my every thought and emotion.  A slow, tough process but worth it.  So is Vivienne the treasure. Worth it, a thousand thousand times over. 

The Pompous Hilarity of Pissiness

I'm one of those freaky people who gets a kick out of other people's pissiness.  Not close relatives or dear friends - their pissiness makes me pissy - but strangers and acquaintances.  Prune faces, wrinkled noses, sneering comments - I get a strange thrill in witnessing such silliness.  Nothing is sweeter or more endearing to me than to see the protective masks all the rich tapestry of human nature uses to hide its own vulnerability.  The myriad tattoos and brutal piercings of the bristly leather clad set: they remind me of porcupines, prickly and dangerous but infinitely lonely.  I adore them.  They've lost a bit of their scary enigma since tattoos have become more mainstream.  There's the eternally angry, spoiling for-a-fight scrappers: they're wolverines, snarling and snapping but always alone in their self-dug holes.  There's the academic snobs, pouring disdain and over ripe vengeance on the rest of the non-genius minded: they're rogue elephants, cast out of the herd long ago and unable to forget that bitter rejection.  Having been a waitress for a vast majority of my life, I see them all and I've waited on every one of them: bitter housewives, angry husbands, disgruntled teenagers, broken-hearted shrews, unhappy couples, control freak tyrants...the pissy parade, all marching to their own tune of teeth-grinding displeasure.

I think some of the most misunderstood, ironically enough, are the wealthy.  When we poor folk see all their treasures heaped high, we sneer when they seem so unhappy, or cold and distant.  What the hell do they have to complain about?  They can buy happiness.  They don't have any problems. 

There is a partial truth in this: nobody suffers like the poor, as the late great alcoholic once said.  But the rich don't necessarily have it great.  They just have a lot of stuff.  But oh, how I love that particular mask of pompous pissiness worn by the old money rich.

Some years ago, I worked in a fine gift store, very high end, and there marched through those doors such a parade of pompousness as to be the stuff of legend.  I adored watching it all unfold, especially when they tried to put my gabby, grinning self "in my place."  Oh, it was delicious and strangely endearing, like kittens puffing their fur out to look threatening but only ending up looking cuter.  One man came in, sneer firmly in place, eyelids lowered, silver hair perfect, suit tailor-made.  He was looking for a small gift for his and his wife's anniversary.  I, in my usual uncouth bluntness, asked how many years?  He looked startled, then froze me out with an icy, "Five."  I was still married at the time and replied, "Puppy.  I've got you beat by four years."  This was too much for the poor man.  Nostrils flaring with disdain, he told me, "This is my fourth marriage.  If you count all those years I, in fact, have you beat."  Delighted with his defensive freeze out, I laughed and sang, "Well, na na na na naaa!" and stuck my tongue out like a five-year-old.  He stared in amazement, then laughed himself, shedding his iron mask and showing me his human side.  How very beautiful it was, too.  "My wife always returns everything I've ever gotten her," he told me.  "Everything.  Now I've already bought her jewels and a new car for this anniversary.  I just want a little something wrapped in a box that I can hand to her."  I felt very protective of this poor man who obviously had a bad habit of choosing unwisely in the spousal department, so we roamed the shop in search of the perfect small gift.  I showed him Herend porcelain and Saint Louis crystal, Armani statues and inlaid music boxes.  The whole time, he kept muttering, "She'll return it.  She'll return it, I know it."  He finally settled on an exquisite Meissen vase, a breathtaking morning glory handpainted on the front, his face glowing like a child's at Christmas.  Hopeful.  I wrapped it carefully, crowned the package with a graceful silk rose, and wished him well.  A week later, the wife returned it.  She was so ingrained with her disdain, she wouldn't speak to me.  I kissed that work of art after she'd sailed out, but didn't have the heart this time to laugh at her pompous pissiness.  I thought of his face, and all the wives he'd gone through, women he probably heaped as many gifts on as he had this ungrateful one.  I thought of the wife, and how empty she must feel inside, that nothing ever given was enough, that not even something given in love was enough.  What had happened to her to create such a persona?  What had shaped his ideals to actually want such a relationship?  Who had not loved them?  Who had betrayed their youthful trust and shaped their delicate minds when they were children? 

We're all products of our environment and we usually learn only what we're taught.  Voluntary or involuntary, we absorb lessons from parents, peers, enemies, friends, loved ones.  I sucked up a broth of poison myself for the majority of my life.  It was all I knew.  But I'm trying to gain a scholarship to a new school right now.  The school of the not-so-obvious, the hidden lessons in the sledgehammer tactics of obvious circumstance.  The art of beauty from shit, the patch of blue on the garbage heap, the rose blooming because of manure heaped on its base.  After all these years of being just a curled up, brown-leafed wilt of unfulfillment, I've begun to bloom.  Out of tragedy.  Out of my own personal pile of shit.  Holy hell, my friends.  I've become a garden and I didn't even realize it.  My original goal was to just stop thinking about suicide two weeks out of every month.  I began to step outside of myself, where I realized the world didn't revolve around my own shortcomings. 

I don't look on other people's unhappiness as my fault anymore.  That's a weird thing with insecure people: we think even strangers are unhappy because of something we did or didn't do.  So try an experiment: every time you see a pissy person, think of what animal they are or, as I sometimes still do, what kind of pajamas they wore as a kid.  Pink bunny slippers on a pompous windbag are just too delicious an image to not cultivate.  That way, you're a little less hard on yourself and a little more agreeable to the rest of the world.

Try not to go too far, however.  Guffawing at a tent revival in the Deep South can get you into some real trouble.  Just a word to the wise. 

A Moment of Change

"You know, I was a golden child, Rebecca.  Straight "A" student, on the chess team, popular.  I had a girlfriend, my parents were proud of me, I had friends.  Then I went to one party.  One.  After that, everything changed and now my life's shit."

That's a quote from a good friend of mine, describing his first brush with drugs.  I hear a lot of train wreck stories like that; blink of an eye moments where life is altered forever or eradicated altogether.  The horribly ironic thing with substance abuse cases is, all sides are tragic.  My brother Ian was killed by a hot-rodding teenager who smashed into him on his motorcycle, killing him instantly and maiming his fiancee on the back of the bike.  We lost him, she lost her mobility and the world lost a truly wonderful person. 

But what about the teenager?  Whatever happened to him?  How did his parents and family feel about his awful, avoidable crime?  I think of him a lot, wondering where life has taken him over the past forty years...if he's even alive.  Many people get their hackles in an uproar over such a question.  "Who gives a shit what happened to him?  I hope he's suffering.  No, I hope he's burning in hell, the little murderer."  That's a common reaction.  But how would I feel if I killed somebody?  If my dumbass, ridiculously selfish quest for fun crushed a human being under the wheels of a car I was driving?  If I wanted a friend to experience how awesome it feels to get high and it eventually killed them? 

We had a plaque up in our kitchen when I was growing up that read, "Never judge a person until you've walked a mile in their mocassins."  Can you imagine the dreadful weight of such a pair of shoes?  As to the teenager, I know what happened to him.  He was seventeen years old at the time of the accident, a good student himself, driving his new car and wanting to see how fast it was.  That was all.  Just a need for speed, a laughing joy in the rush of air, a kick in the blood from the roaring acceleration.  Then he blinked.  In that moment, his life changed and my brother's ended.  The boy had a nervous breakdown at the inquest and had to be carried out of the courtroom.  He stalked Ian's fiancee for years, trying to make it up to her, begging her forgiveness, in and out of institutions for decades.  That's one of the sad stories.

Then I think about the really bad cases, the mean spirited ones, the unrepentent aggressors.  There's my dad and his retelling of sexual exploits at the dinner table, my nephew's rhapsodic retelling of unspeakable crimes, my other brother's laughing tales of animal abuse...and I wonder.  When did they have their moments of disclarity?  That's probably not even a word but it's apt.  A loss of clarity, a moment of change.  A blink.  They weren't born monsters but they're monsters now.  What's worse, they like it too much to stop.  Even the cruelty itself has become just another addiction.

I believe in the possibility of change.  I've seen miracles happen.  I've witnessed horrible offenders come back from the wastelands and become drug counselors, college students, good and highly protective parents, reliable and loyal friends, all after their own personal split-second epiphanies.  Another blink.  Another life change, but this time for the better.  Monster to hero.  Scuzball to soccer coach.  Sleazy prostitute to life-saving nurse.  Born pure, gorged on a banquet of filth, ruin and redemption, all in one mind-numbing set of circumstances.  We are all gods and monsters, saints and sinners, scumballs and heroes.  That's the wondrous, marvelous, ghastly truth of it all.  We can choose, even if we don't want to, to change.   Everything's a tapestry and the Fates are weaving every decision we make into the design.  Choose colors that enhance life, even if you never have before.  If you're disgusting, weak, immoral, addicted or broken, that's simply what you are now.  It's not who you are.  It's just a suit of clothes that sucks.  Sluff it off and start again.  Hope is eternal.  That's as certain as death and taxes and even more powerful.  Let go of anything else but don't ever let go of hope.  Even when you're hopeless. 

Especially when you're hopeless.    Take care.

R

Fate's Twinkly Toes

My mom taught me how to waltz and do the polka when I was a little kid.  She always loved to dance.  There's something magical about it: the whirling joy of your body spinning, letting the music take you on an entirely voluntary ride.  Giving yourself up to it.  Music, or at least great music, becomes somehow sentient and alive, playing your emotions and heart rate in much the same way as its musicians play their instruments.  One could even call it a sort of possession, a lilting, graceful control that everything in you hears as well as feels. 

I think Fate is like music: all twinkly-toed and whimsical, headbanging moshpit, or moody serenade.  Whatever the tune, we all dance to it.  I believe that Fate is what we make it, and if we follow the right path, dig ourselves out of any pit we've become stranded in, whatever is needed will be opened up to us.  I also believe that shit just happens.  There's no reason, in my jumbled head, why Fate and our own free will can't coincide.  We can waltz together or step on each other's toes, but the music will go on regardless.

This year has been a monumental one for me.  I moved back to my beloved New York after four years in limbo, and everyone here has welcomed me with open arms.  I've met a kindred spirit, a real one, twenty one years my junior, and it's like looking in a mirror to the past.  I wish, with all my heart, that this person finds their fate and grabs hold with both hands.  I stumbled and fucked up my own path so much when I was their age, it's taken a decade to clear away the brambles and see the road again.  But the path is always there, thank heaven, whether we dumb humans wander off it or not.  There's always a guidepost wherever we end up, pointing the way back.  All we have to do is unbend and look at it.  I've reconnected with a very dear friend from my past, I've met people who seem like angels, I've found a home among the most beloved people in the world to me.  All of this is Fate; all of this is my own doing.  It's like the old saying about clinging to a rock in a raging river, getting half-drowned and bludgeoned by debris, when all you have to do is let go and the river will carry you safely to shore.  For years, I refused to listen to the music, to hear what was best for myself...to dance at all.  Everything was grey, miserable, in mourning, and even my great optimism and sense of humor began to crack under the weight.  But I've finally cleaned up my mess, put on my dancing shoes, stepped out on the dance floor and began to waltz.  With Myself.  With Life.  With Fate.  And wonder of wonders, it seems there's a beautiful tune playing right now and we're waltzing along to it.  I've let go.       

Earth Shattering

There are moments that change everything forever.  I had one today.

You can feel them coming sometimes.  All weekend, I was antsy as hell, impatient, pissy, unable to sleep.  I told my roommate that I felt something was near, something life changing, something positive.  I was right.  Someone I love very much, a lost family member whom I haven't heard from in seven years, wrote me a letter.  I went for my walk and when I came home, casually opened the mailbox...and there it was.  He'd been gone so long, sworn I'd never hear from him again.  It was more than mere moodiness.  He'd been in very bad trouble for a long time and when he vanished, I didn't know if he'd live or die.  Apparently, he lived.  Not only that, he's doing well.  Of all the deaths and suicides and murders from addiction in my family, I worried about him the most.  And he's alive.  Clean.  Actually reaching out...to me!  This is an earth shattering, life changing day.  The one who lived, my own personal wizard, my own beloved prodigal.  Don't think I'll get much sleep tonight but I don't give a damn.  I'm literally buzzing with adrenalin right now.  For anybody out there who's lost the will to reconnect, who is scared to try, who's tried but been rejected: hang in there.  Don't stop believing in magic and miracles, no matter what.  They do exist.  Today proves that for me.  In the words of Winston Churchill, "Never, never, never quit."  Don't ever stop believing in yourself.  Don't ever stop believing you can overcome anything.  You can.  I'm dancing on air right now and feel like I've been hit by a truck simultaneously.  Whew!  Right now, I'm going to create, the best thing for relieving tension.  Art is the ultimate balm.  Be well.