Friday, April 12, 2013

let me stress..?

I've moved!
After the better part of a decade, i no longer call NY, NY home. This is not necessarily a permanent reality...i'll probably return this summer to produce and act in a play. And NYC may be among the most likely places anywhere to find an audience for public readings of my work. So anything's possible.
But for now...
As i sit here writing, i'm no more than twenty feet from the nearest palm tree. I've spent more waking time naked in the past few days than in the previous entire year. If you had an acute sense of smell, you would sit in this chair and know that an ocean is not far off (or in this case, the Gulf of Mexico).
Why am i here? Because New York was literally killing me.
The past few years, partly as literary investigation and partly as a furthering of my spiritual growth, i have been taking apart those walls of rationalization and denial we all construct around our psyches to make living in this dehumanized society possible. This has allowed me to experience emotions more directly and openly, which can be wonderful. But it's also left me with far less protection from the psychological carnage that surrounds us from birth to death. All the cruelty, anger, jealousies, pains, lonelinesses, and fears that emanate from the faces and spirits of every friend and stranger we know, these things seem to pass right through me these days...leaving me bloodied and raw inside. My own walls were so successfully constructed that i'd spent most of my life largely immune from many of the stresses that eat away at us all.
But over the past few years, stress and i have become more intimate than i ever imagined would happen. If this has made me more human, more capable of understanding the daily experience of my fellow travelers on this drifting space rock, then perhaps it's been worth the price.
But too much more of this would have put me in a hospital or worse. It's already possible that permanent damage has been done.
And to think that, even in the worst moments of these past few years, my life was still free from many of the worst stresses of this world. I've removed myself from the pressures of the rat race...alarm clocks, deadlines, and bosses, all wrapped up in a forty-hour (or more) work week that would be deadeningly alien to any healthy human. If you think humans were born to live like that, you have all the scientific awareness of a lump of granite. I've also exempted myself from the life-sucking pressures of parenting, as defined by the two-parent paradigm. Yet even free of those, here are the stress highlights of these past three years:
-A ceiling that leaked for an entire spring and summer, so severe that it deprived me of sleep on any rainy night.
-Jealousy-related hurtfulness or outright hatred from all three humans i've been closest to these past three years.
-A threat of forced homelessness.
-Four months of bedbugs (meaning five months of unsettled, half-sleep).
-A death threat.
-Being the depository of the misplaced aggression that falls on the heads of mediators or peacemakers.
-Spending at least 950 of the past 1000 days completely unsexed and unheld.
Stress manifests differently in each person. For me, it gathers in the stomach. During the most stressful week of my last month in the city, my stomach felt so sickened that it took weeks for the feeling to mostly pass. It would not be idiotic to wonder whether this means i'm well on my way (or well into already) the life of the ulcered.
I was also always a little mystified when people told me that not everyone falls asleep immediately upon going to bed at night, and that many people apparently don't sleep straight through the night. For the better part of the past year however, my sleep has been best-described as interrupted, with occasional bouts of insomnia. How do you people live like this?
So for now, i come to this sunshine state (or THE sunshine state, rather) looking for healing. I've always felt more peaceful and happy around warmth and water. There are some people in this semi-tropical, overdeveloped paradise i enjoy and love very much. And one in particular, of whom loving (and being loved by) might be the most healing thing i've ever known.
I come in search of the healing that babies know, and lose forever in early childhood...the laughing out loud fifty times a day...the being held intimately every single day.
Heck, i'll settle for twenty and most days.
I come in search of our lost humanity.
I love you all.

No comments: