smouldering

I came to this Gulf of Mexico island ten months ago, with smoke wafting out of my ears.
Figurative smoke, anyway.
Wounded. Bloodied. Raw. After a journey of several years that had left most of my emotional defenses disabled, i'd become so sensitive to all the fear, loneliness, and aggression in the world around us, that normal exposure to those things left me sickened in my stomach. I'd grown so accustomed to that feeling, that i couldn't doubt i was on my way to ulcers and worse. I had also become an occasional insomniac who almost never slept straight through the night (as had always been my habit previously).
The reasons for all this were spiritual, with a side of writerly dedication. I wanted to experience emotions more directly. We all carry a mind-bogglingly complex construction inside us called "self-identity". We're perpetually creating this construct every day, and through it we process ALL our cognitive inputs. Most of our emotional/intellectual responses feel natural or unconscious - this is because we've spent a lifetime training ourself in how "we" feel and think about everything.
So i wished to deconstruct my own identity, to better understand myself and others. Whether i actually succeeded, or just engaged in an enormous intellectual conceit, is perhaps neither here nor there. Focus determines reality, and mine became extremely attuned to the inner life of everyone around me, including my own.
The result? I willingly walked right into mild clinical depression.
People in this society exist in an ongoing state of isolation and misery, made livable only by powerful coping mechanisms. Hardly a revelation...but perhaps you think life's not so bad? That might be because you've spent your life subconsciously maintaining intricate rationalizations, or engaging in perpetual escapist behavior (or both, maybe). Like all animals, we have the ability to endure the seemingly unendurable. Nothing is more powerful than the compulsion to survive. There are single mothers out there working 100-hour weeks, with no sex life or similar release at all...yet most of them somehow endure!
Becoming more attuned to my own pains and joys, i can tell you that highly self-aware, unbuffered loneliness (combined with the touch-deprivation endemic to this society) is the most crippling feeling i've ever known. This is not how humans are meant to live...yet i know that what i'm tapping into is just the state we're all in, minus a few layers of denial or drugs.
So i came to...this island! For healing. Partly in pursuit of a truer friendship than i'd ever known, and partly because tropical warmth and water had always been purely joyful to me.
How's it all turning out?
The friendship part has been a disaster. The warmth/water part, a slow salvation. I haven't been consciously aware of my stomach hurting, for many months. My insomnia is gone, and i sometimes sleep through the night. Helping this process is the fact that an atypically large bankroll (for me, that is) has taken away any need to work. I've worked some, but mostly just helping others, and largely on my own schedule. I can't recall whether i even have an alarm clock.
I've been more of a hermit than i might have wanted, but perhaps in some ways that's helped, not hurt (though i know the deepest healing can only come through being loved). I'm occasionally reminded that my depression isn't gone, the most obvious manifestation of which is anti-social tendencies. I still also occasionally feel depression's inertia - i took a nap the other day, and when i awoke i just wanted to not move. And i understand now better than ever, one particular drug that humans in repressed pain turn to - food (particularly the kind that really bang on the brain's pleasure centers: fats, salt, and sweets). Once or twice, i have put a HURTING on a bag of chips in one sitting. Once or twice, i've felt like i was returning to my youth, when good, white-bread folk had sugary sweets as a part of every dinner(!) For a human in distress, food is the cheapest, most non-stigmatized drug there is...so what does it say about America that we're the fattest country in the world?
As good as i've become at understanding (and trying to fulfill) my psychological needs, there is still an unhealthy streak of protestant work ethic in me. Some well-indoctrinated rat-racer might want to scream that i'm doing nothing, but my life is often humorously reminiscent of the Hugh Grant character in ABOUT A BOY - days broken down into time units (60 units of music, 60 units of reading, 60 units of beach yogasthenics/swimming, 150 units of eating, 180 units of masturbation...just kidding, it's often only 120). Aside from the fact that i myself don't consciously think of time in terms of units, the parallel holds up. And of course much of my time, often hours a day, is devoted to writing. But the point is that even in my devotion to healthy leisure, i'm almost always moving from one activity to the next. I rarely experience stillness with no sense of forward momentum...a stillness i need to open myself to more.
And it's funny too, how so many of our attitudes, even "scientific" ones, are based upon assumptions that have no basis in reality. For example, the inertia that psychologists ascribe to depression...how much of that is simply the desire to escape from a modern life that's staggeringly unnatural? People are depressed after years of doing the same thing forty hours a week? Be amazed that more of us aren't just killing ourselves outright (though those numbers certainly are trending up). Current science shows that the natural state of humans, for around 99% of our history (before we became hunter/farmers), was a life of 2-3 hours work each day. The rest of the time? Farting around, presumably. The notion that humanity's lot improved after the agricultural revolution, is the second-greatest mistunderstanding ever (after that monogamy thing). Seen in that light, clinical inertia should be the assumed state for any homo sapiens attempting a forty-hour workweek.
Anyway...
It's beautiful here.
Feel free to join me.
Take that any way you wish.