Life on a Planet Not of My Choosing
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My futile quest searching for meaning in a world that defies meaning
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Figuring out life. I perform my own stunts. Trust me, through large parts of my life I would have loved to employ a stunt double and perhaps someday I will. Take my depressions - please. It was around the time I was in seventh grade that I had a profound sense that I wanted to return to the planet that I was born on, any planet but this one. I was small and skinny with glasses and had a nerdy personality.
A nerd is an individual not smart enough to be a geek.
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Every morning, I had to steel myself to get on that bus to school. Ours was the second to last stop, which meant I wound up standing in the aisle, fair game for young sociopaths in the making, the type of people who grow up to become Charles Manson or talk radio hosts (it's hard to tell the difference). Then, again, for all I know, they are now working for Habitat for Humanity.
Who am I? I had to keep asking myself. It's a question I'm still asking. Am I the six-year-old kid who wasn't afraid to ride a bull (okay, a steer), or that skinny nerdy 12-year-old dreading to get on the school bus? The medical profession talks about getting us back to our baseline - the condition we were in before we got ill - but what if that condition is a grown-up version of me at 12 years? Who wants that?
Anyway, I can't help but think about the 12-year-old me that gave rise to the 13-year-old me, which eventually gave rise to the adult me. So ...
What if the present me could go back to that 12-year-old? Imagine how different my life would have turned out. Say I had one minute - 60 seconds - to spend with with that confused kid? What would I say?
No time for a candid heart-to-heart. My message would have to be cryptic, like a Zen koan, something that made no sense, but would lead to an earth-shaking revelation upon further consideration. So imagine if the 12-year-old me had the benefit of the wise counsel of the present me, and I appeared to him in his moment of need, like the disembodied Obe Wan Kinobe to Luke Skywalker.
"John," I would say, in a voice brimming with compassion. "Remember - Hannibal never won a battle with his elephants."
Therein lies the key to healing.
Wait! Hold on. ... A buried memory is coming up. Holy crap! Now I remember! The present me really did visit the 12-year-old me, and this is what he actually said:
"John. Remember - Hannibal never won a battle with his elephants."
Son of a bitch! What kind of idiot thing is that to tell a 12-year-old?
***
Sometimes I do get to return to the planet of my birth. It's just that I can't recall them. I like to imagine it's a happier place than this one, filled with shady trees, with kind people spread out on the lawn beneath, pulling out containers of Thai noodles and watermelon chunks from their picnic baskets, beckoning me to join them.
One of these people would be my good friend and muse, Therese Borchard, author of Beyond Blue. Therese has a way of making me feel that on a planet of six billion strangers I have at least one person I can talk to. One day, she opened a blog piece this way:
I spent my adolescence and teenage years obsessing about this question: Am I depressed or just deep?
When I was nine, I figured that I was a young Christian mystic because I related much more to the saints who lived centuries ago than to other nine-year-old girls who had crushes on boys. I couldn't understand how my sisters could waste quarters on a stupid video game when there were starving kids in Cambodia. Hello? Give them to UNICEF!
Now I look back with tenderness to the hurting girl I was and wished somebody had been able to recognize that I was very depressed.
See what I mean? I just know that had we been in the same class at grade school, while the other kids played ball during recess, Therese and I would have found a quiet spot to sit, sharing cookies our moms packed and discussing how Augustine of Hippo must have felt after Alaric the Visigoth sacked Rome in 410 AD (which is precisely how I felt when George W Bush was re-elected in 2004).
It's a very overwhelming world out there, very difficult to negotiate, and most of the time - very frankly - I don't want to be in it. Certainly, I spent a good deal of my childhood wishing I was very far removed from it. I found refuge, instead, in my own inner world. Over time, I succeeded in tuning out just about the whole world around me.
Engage me in a conversation, and sooner or later you will pick up an odd mannerism: My eyes glaze over, I'm unresponsive. I am not present. Literally - I am somewhere else.
I am probably experiencing what the experts refer to as disassociating. In extreme cases, certain individuals may assume different personalities. Thankfully, my little manneristic quirk comes across as mere inattentiveness. It has nothing to do with that fact that I may find you interminably boring (even if you are). This planet is simply a challenge for me. Always has been. Sometimes, my mind has to flee. Where it goes I have no idea, no recollection. I like to think it's back to the planet of my birth, a place where I belong.
A kind lady beneath a tree beckons me. She serves up a plate of Thai noodles. I help myself to some watermelon chunks. You're safe here, says the look on her face. Welcome home.
Jan 19, 2011
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