a mind made up,
a made up mind,
of what?
off what?
Psychoanalysis is the unending conversation
of finding new ways of living.
It can be life-long work
rewriting our emotional inheritance.
Psychoanalysis is just another name for attempting
to uncover
something true about you.
“No one could be better at living your life than you. ”
We come to connect, but disconnect at the same time. Anxiety is the desire for what one dreads.
shame into style.
for most of our lives
we’ve gone to the head
when the heart was needed
when the heart was needed
In our dreams we can have our eggs anyway we’d like, but we can’t eat them.
In our games, we can play anyway we’d like, but we can’t be real.
The symptom is a conversation-starter,
an attention-grabber,
the straight-and-narrow,
of a question:
will you
take me seriously?
A good life is a life of redescription.
Knowing as defensive,
as inhibitor,
to the real task
of getting-to-know.
How about this—guilt as spokesperson for what was not created and yet was possible.
“Can’t somebody be a shit their whole lives and try to repair the damage?”
It’s a good thing, waking up from dreams—fantasy is meant to give way to reality.
The aim of psychoanalysis is not to know yourself, although of course it is, but to create yourself; secure the artist.
secure: fixed or fastened as to not give away, become loose, or be lost.
Shame shuts, stifles, cramps our style. Shame says sham am me, that old story.
Who might we be opened, expansive, showing off?
Memory is always selfish; how could it not be?
We learn what we can do with learning.
Our trauma, wherever else it might be, is never just in our stories—it is in the invisible air that we are walking around in and with right now.
somber: oppressively solemn or sober in mood; grave.
“I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose.”
Hissing and Nothing is Hitting, Tyler Gobble
Your voice tangled in phonelines!
No, tangled in birds dying on the phonelines
at fickle intervals. This is the absurdity your god
mentioned—the saving hum, the social network
we call escaping chatter, sneaking out of us, into us.
The static reminds: this village life is an embarrassment
and local babble spawned the douchebag inside of me.
Bring me a compact disc labeled HOW WE GET.
I’m not sure I believe you quite yet. Your declaration
lost in my front yard, like an arrow blanketed
by millions of blades of grass. A vortex of confused
danger. Pellet guns hissing and nothing is hitting.
We grow phobic of loneliness, of frustration, of ordinary minutes and days—our pillars of what is.
Symptoms are leading-lines, introductions; symptoms are always meant to be conversation starters.
Shame is always a conversation stopper.
We tend to believe that those who are self-centered, have had too much attention—need, too much attention—when, of course, the opposite has occurred; narcissism is always born from despair.
Good attention makes a good life.
“Lacan said that there was surely something ironic about Christ’s injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself – because actually, of course, people hate themselves.”
Psychoanalysis knows that everything depends
on what we do with talking and listening.
With how it works, or, with the many ways of how it goes wrong:
going sideways into other terrains: power, vacancy, pretend.
No one survives a real conversation.
Everything depends
on what we would rather do than change.
psychoanalysis as Talking-cure
cure insofar as
we learn to care what we find ourselves saying
caring into curing
curing into caring
what to say then
about Listening?
Withdrawal isn't always bad, we might ask though:
withdrawal from what? to what? to where?
Out of living out of fear.
We would rather murder the world than permit it to expose us to change, the philosopher Cavell provocatively said. We would much rather destroy everything than let other people move us, change us.
“The ways we miss our lives are life.”
Somewhere between the riots of suppression and the theatrics of parades is the scandalously proud ordinary life. Ordinary, not in a sense of prescription, or of someone else’s definition of what a good life is to look like—but ordinary in that sense of being free enough to create the tools necessary to live a life at all. Affection, honesty, desire, cheerfulness, solitude, curiosity, grief, envy, trust, sincerity, courage, gentleness, rage, choice, security, loyalty, truth, loneliness, peace, understanding, betrayal, consolation, change, suicide, shame, spirituality, tenderness, friendship, eroticism, respect, experimentation, family. These all have their place, that is to say their reasonings, in the ordinarily free human life.
MLK says that “No one is free until we are all free.” Yes.
No one can be truly proud until we are all proud.
There are so many ways to live a life, to fall in love.
Shame orders our world, our word, us around.
We make love but it’s also true we make it up;
the story of sex is stand-up.
We are daunted by the number of people we are.
One of the wonders we learn from children is just how promiscuous our attention can be.
What do we want with all of our wanting?
Our racism needs struggled with. Our privilege needs struggled with.
Our unconscious blindness and aloofness needs our struggle.
So, let’s struggle.
Struggle in conversation. Struggle in protest.
Struggle in reflection and learning and education.
As the poet says, ‘Just beyond yourself. It’s where you need to be.’
Fund the Black Lives Matter movement by becoming a Global Partner:
www.blacklivesmatter.com
There’s no shame in the struggle if only one would struggle.
the psyche,
always has choices:
to live for,
to live against,
to live with,
others.
We are children for a long, long time.
fame-shame
shame-fame
fam, sham
ham, am
me me me
“The diary is to discover where one can put one’s faith, as shown by experience. Also, where one does put one’s faith.”
We create our words and our sentences
and our behaviors,
inside-out,
much like an artist
with her paints and her canvas
and her materials;
all within
a private studio.
attention brings being.
his mind-stuff
had gotten into
my mind-stuff.
the voice
is the heart.
(let’s go on)
“The cure is becoming more human.”
Do not be daunted by the enormity
of the world’s grief.
Walk humbly now.
Love mercifully now.
You are not expected to complete the work,
but neither are you free to abandon it.
—The Talmud
the way through?
the way forward?
we all are asking
kindness. community.
creativity.
friendship. love.
those age-old pillars.
“When I was a boy and would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”
Vote With Your Feet: A Treatment for Anxiety, that Damn C-word Virus, and Being A Good Neighbor)
I was in Jay’s office a few weeks ago, as per the usual routine of a weekly therapy, and found myself exploring and trying to work out everything that was going on in the world—politics, this terrible new virus, the economic impacts of Seattle’s changing landscape, and my own personal upheaval of moving my home. I had decided a while back that it felt important and meaningful for me to be in Capitol Hill—Seattle’s LGBTQ+ neighborhood— rather than away, where so much of the Queer population had been forced to be due to soaring prices and unrealistic rents and a tremendous increase of tech money flooding the local area. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love technology and I’m not made of money myself; however, I am privileged and lucky enough to have built and managed my own psychotherapy practice for a living. But it comes with its fair share of enormous expenses to keep going, as any small business owner is intimate with, especially in this town. Yet, I found an apartment that was within my budget and was located on Capitol Hill close to these iconic queer and artistic establishments, and the people which are their lifeforce, that are still enduring and entertaining and creating and taking care of the queer and local neighbors there. I heard myself telling Jay how important it felt for me to be included, to be with, this neighborhood and my people and to let my dollars flow into that important economy, for the sake of my fellow queers and for the sake of of Seattle’s struggling personality and culture. He responded, rather quietly and with a slight smirk, you’re voting with your feet.
There’s an old philosophical idea that considers feet as holy—the thinking being that wherever you find your feet, there you are also. That with your feet comes all of you. Your skin, your face, your voice, your resources, your experiences, your talents and shortcomings, your lights and shadows—your very psyche and soul and one-and-only personality. So to vote with one’s feet must mean something like participating with all of one’s being. To allow all of who you are to show up in a body and participate and relate with the wide world you find yourself in: internally and locally and globally, all at the same time.
No easy task. I’ve spent a lot of my life either only voting with my voice, or with my hands, or in some disconnected way, with my intellect. Hell, I’ve voted sometime for show, or even haven’t voted at all. So the challenge of this concept is the challenge we all must face, all life long. How do we integrate and grow, little at a time? How will we look outside of our subtle narcissism into a world of differing and vibrant others? Who are we, even, and what are we made of and how can we offer ourselves? Our vote, it seems to me, is as personal and divine as our very and varying selves.
Selves that carry and come with a hell of a lot of pain, on an ordinary day. Life is Suffering, the Buddha says. So with all of what’s occurring in Seattle, and the world, this ordinary pain and suffering is only heightened and intensified—however it shows itself in your own particular flavors. Are you finding yourselves even more scared? Or, are you noticing that you are even more indifferent and numb? Are you tempted to throw yourself out into public even more-so, despite the risks? Or, are you inclined to hunker down and withdrawal with a higher degree of permission? Psyches are so colorful and different and personal, aren’t they?
Whether we are aware of it or not, much of the anxiety we are all experiencing has its roots in the feeling of separation—of disconnection and isolation and that deep feeling that we will not be able to help, let alone change, the present situation we find ourselves in. That we will be alone. That we will be abandoned and left behind and unloved and unseen and untouched and shut down—and to varying degrees, that we will die. Physically or financially or emotionally, or all of the above. So we go into a kind of archaic and animal survival mode—everyone for themselves!—and we we come by this honestly. This is the kind of feeling that’s at our doorsteps—and this kind of anxiety is always triggered, in deep ways, by the unknown. Whether relationally, or with massive corporate companies moving in next door, or with a brand new string of a virus that has unleashed itself, seemingly overnight.
The balm? The antidote? The help? Vote with your feet.
Now is our time—friends and neighbors, therapists and patients, tech and nightlife and service workers—to partner with our scared and sacred selves and with our neighbors, in whatever ways we uniquely can. To partner with these terrified feelings of survival and to show them that we can endure, that there are actions we can take and things we can do to take care. There are many of us who, as of right now, are privileged-enough to be able to continue working and paying our rents and remaining relatively healthy in the midst of all of this. And, there are so many others in our neighborhoods, in our communities, in our city, that are having a very different experience. Bills that aggravate that threaten of loss and isolation and catastrophe. Empty seats that intensify the threat of loss of homes and places to go to work and very survival itself. The same four walls of home, that become prison-like, dividing us and separating us and causing us to forget human touch and conversation and a sense of control and freedom and normalcy.
Now is our time to vote.
One of the ways to soothe anxiety is to create and find solutions in the very midst of experiencing and working-with that feeling. How can we do what we can? A little goes a long way. If we have extra resources, what are the ways to find and support those who are suffering more loss? If we feel comfortable enough, can we fill one of those empty seats for a meal or two in our local restaurant or bar? And if we don’t feel comfortable leaving our homes, then can we order in and/or buy a giftcard for later? Slip a server or an artist some cash, whether in person or Venmo, just because? Taking advantage of some of the positives of technology, will we facetime a friend or family member or two to check in more often? Will we keep in touch without touching? Will we research those businesses we know, or don’t, to see how we can help them survive as we are helping ourselves to survive?
No matter how you find yourself responding, it’s okay, and there are so many creative ways you can find to help your neighbor as you help yourself. The paradox is: watch and note what happens to your anxiety levels and your own suffering. Observe what happens with your own sense of self and wellbeing. That unique soul that your feet carries, will feel better—more connected, more compassionate, more in-touch and related and less isolated, less guilty, less scared and nihilistic and ashamed.
You’re voting with your feet, Jay says. Yes, finally. May that expand and grow and deepen with my own soul and my own two feet. May that be the case for you as well, whoever you are, wherever you are. Let’s all move with meaning and love and hope and eyes wide open, knowing that what’s always been true, is true now—we’re all in this together. Together with our friends and families, with our communities, with our beautiful city, with our nest called Earth.
“...change can only happen to the extent that one gets interested in the truth about oneself.”
understanding is loving;
there is nothing more important.
speak our secrets,
speak out secrets,
speak your secrets.
living, itself,
becomes one’s greatest
work of art.
it’s okay
to feel both
fear and freedom
at the truth:
there’s so much
we don’t know.
awareness is not enough
one must
take on take charge take a move
(if only slowly)
awareness is not enough
everything
is in me
that is within
the patient;
everything
is in me.
“Nobody gets well unless (s)he has an increasing sense of responsibility, of participation, and in fact, a sense of pride in her/his achievement of getting well.”
a life.
the creative life is not based in fantasy—instead,
it is based in reality, in the real,
and in work.
long live a life of learning.
we learn, slowly,
how to take
an honest look.
sometimes,
it can take a lifetime
to feel real.
“Thank for you simply standing as I learned to stand on the sand.”
friendship has no short cut.
stand-under
to under-stand
hidden hand around the corner, i am nowhere. slipped into something more invisible. then bubbling brook of backlash
how dare you? how could you? how are you!
hi. hide. hi..don’t even.
diet coke, to go.
December 11th, 2019
Dear Neville,
I’d like to think, now, in your passing, that it isn’t a coincidence that I decided to become an Analyst just this year and that I’ve been saving that good book of yours on the matter (The Analytic Experience) to read last; I just finished it last week and emailed you immediately upon doing so, in gratitude. Perhaps the very power of the unconscious you spoke so much about.
I found it strange to not have heard back—you usually only take a day or two? I know now why.
My good man. My bold chap. Your words and your life and your voice have helped sturdy a very scared and a very shaky young clinician and man. Like any good teacher or mentor, you told me the truth of what you thought, fully, and without a lot of fluff—about my cases and me. As you were so well aware, this is such a hard field, a hard job—there’s so much we don’t know at any given point—but you helped me to grow to value that. To tolerate that, as we all must do, in practice and in life. That knowing is not all that it’s made out to be. That there can be so much more if given space and at-one-ment and plain good conversation.
And, that it is wise to be forever a zealous student, forever learning from these remarkable patients who come to see us—and who undo us, as they do themselves, within a therapeutic process and within these strange rooms we call our offices.
My god, Neville, thank you. I know Psychoanalytic Societies and organizations around the world gave you a hard time for challenging their dogma, their idealized ways, their rigidity and their very narcissism. But, in the end, it’s only because you loved this strange work of psychoanalysis, and wanted to fight for it’s survival as it grew into a modern and ever-changing world. You spoke from an independent viewpoint and yet was always interested in what the other had to say. This, is why you were also beloved by these same places as well—a kind of psychoanalytic prophet. Psychoanalytic trouble-maker.
I want you to know I will carry on the work that you’ve started, not only in our field, but in my heart and life and relationships as well. This work of real truth-telling, simple conversation, authentic encounters to both self and other. And no, not as a Symingtonian Psychoanalyst or disciple—hell no. But as myself.
My truest essence of the self I have been given to partner and accompany and grow. As Daniel Michael Louderback.
Thank you Neville. Thank you and rest well. Lives have been forever changed by you being here.
two people who devour and who are devoured and want devouring and to devour.
he is eating him and she is eating her and they are eating their words.
eat my shorts, eat my ass
EAT!
snakes in gardens, hidden spies watching the act
of forbidden first bites
of desire, of devour-damnation.
flowers reach towards cream cheesecake lips. barely holding on. reds like passion, lover’s hearts. greens of forrest floors
that never quit. she’s always waiting on the other shoe to drop. drip drop. click clack heels hiding drip drop floors.
dependent on this, to get there. what a way to go.
i think
we suffer,
until we are tired
of suffering.
then?
change opens up
as possibility.
listen,
aren’t you tired?
consider
fear as passivity.
Empty December 1st 2019
I stole this pen that I’m writing with now from a kind bartender inside a bar at the Dayton International Airport. I’m not sure why.
I mean, I have plenty of pens. Hell, even enough pens exactly like this black Pilot G-2. What’s one more? What if the bartender brought it from home? What if it was their pen? (Helpful guilt helps us realize that we aren’t alone in the universe, and, even in small ways, we have impact).
Maybe pens are like pictures or like lovers or like friends—one or two or three just never seems quite enough. Eager for this one. More, more, more. A kind of ancient greed.
As long as I can remember there’s been an emptiness inside of me. Maybe empty is too intense a word. What else would you say? Ache? Hunger? Longing? Drive?
Something like this, pulling me towards the world. Pulling me out. Out to others. Out and away. For some, they get pulled in. I’ve had patients and boyfriends and friends who were pulled too far in—so much so, that coming out to live, was the work and the struggle and the heartache.
This place is a scared place for us all. I’m also seeing the word scarred with my word scared, which is also true. Scarred and scared, the human life.
This place for me tells me that I’ll need to get moving if I’m to fill up this empty place; I’ll need to gather whatever materials I’ll need to fill up the hole of a felt sinking ship. Maybe this place, somewhere deep, is afraid I’ll be on a plane for multiple hours with lots of empty pages to write on, but nothing to write with? Grab the pen, this place whispers. (An analyst I admire stresses that before greed in the human personality can be interpreted, we need to look at the person’s cemented experience of living in a world of scarcity).
Sinking ship. There’s a psychic thread to follow here. All throughout my childhood I was obsessively interested in disasters. A deep, childlike fascination, with catastrophes:
The story in the Old Testament where the God character floods the entire world.
A grand ship is made and strikes a piece of ice resulting in massive amounts of life lost.
Ordinary planes are stolen one morning and thrust into massive buildings.
HIV.
Full then empty. Alive then dead.
Good then bad. Cherished yet punished.
In then out. Up then down.
Fine then not.
There’s an almost unbalanced teeter-totter between all of these. There are also many points all along these continuums, yet, for some of us, it can be like a switch or a portal from one to the other.
One of the things I’ve really learned from the therapeutic process is this recognition that my own feelings can really exaggerate themselves, can switch themselves without a moment’s notice, on some of these poles. When I’m feeling loved? I’m the most loved person, the most lucky; A titanic love feeling sails along in my heart. How lucky to be alive! How grand! Yet, when I’m not? Catastrophe. Death. Frigid loss after loss. A loving world gets flooded out, with no survivors.
Yet, a Noah part of me does survive and begins looking on how to go out to find land on which to start building again. I’m enormously grateful for that part. I suppose there’s a Noah part in all of us. (When working with suicidal people, this is the part you want to look for and speak to—the part that wants to live, but has been flooded out by pain and perceived impossibilities).
In psychic life, all of these feelings are useful, but need our partnering and recognition and our struggle.
We can’t walk around full all of the time—much like our biological stomaches, we need to feel full, then empty out for a time. We will lose those we love—which informs how important it is to learn how to be with each other, now. There is much to feel anxious and depressed about—the world is a massive and chaotic place, and we’re not all we could be in order to meet it; we’re not okay as we are; we need to grow up and down and sideways and more fully. We’ve work to do. We will get scared and scarred, over and over and over again—it’s how we will recover and make use of.
Pens will be forgotten or lost or left at home—but what else might we do with the all of the time that’s about to unfold?
“A person’s deep assumptions, deeply rooted personal philosophies of life, are so much a part of the air he breathes that neither he nor his closest friends notice them consciously; it is one of the analyst’s tasks to notice just these, but it may take a very long time.”
On Shame November 25th, 2019
For shame. Shame on you. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Have you no shame?
Shame is here with us all whether we like it or not. Shame, that painful feeling. It is useful and it is agonizing. On one hand, cuts through the soul with a burning hot flash. On the other, shame-as-teacher. Who would have thought shame-as-helper could exist?
Inside and outside shame. Inside, as registration that personality is deformed; personality is not all it could be; psyche is not united rather disconnected, in fragments, bits. I accidentally typed ‘spy’ as I was typing ‘psyche’ just now, and that is also correct. Secrets enclosed by shame that only trained spies could know how to get close to, if they’re lucky. Shame bubbles grow around internal wounds and fragmentations when wounds are not addressed, cared for, treated, brought back together.
Shame bubbles grow around wounds, and if we’re not careful, around our very lives.
Inside and outside shame. Outside, as siren’s call to tend to our social bonds that we need in order to survive. Between-us shame awakens a person to pay greater attention to what one is doing. Shame seems to say: Are you damaging? Are you not considering? Is your behavior right now deformed? —misinformed? Are you going to get us kicked out of the herd? Shame as social feeling, animal feeling. We are, after all, animals. To not have shame is to not give a damn about your neighbor and that is a slippery slope to isolation, or as some theologians would say, hell.
I had a teacher once who, in a quiet moment, whispered that much of psychotherapy is about working with shame. Psychotherapy isn’t the only way, but it a great and useful tool.
The talking cure. Speak your wounds, your secrets, your sins. Talk to another person, in an animal, human, social bond, about the unspeakable things your mind and life produces; about the unspeakable things you have done. You. That you have done. Make the environment dark, make it private, make it anonymous, make it a phone call, whatever the case may need to be—but make it speakable. Burst the shame bubble, both internally and externally. Tell us where it hurts—tell us where you are not evolved properly. We are all uneven. We are all touched and forged and pushed by this shame feeling.
Some of shame is helpful, guiding—a shaman in the night. Some of shame is incorrect—based on mistaken belief and outdated experience and unavailable light and love and help. There are many ways that shame, our feelings entirely, can go wrong; can get warped. We all need help with these processes and these feelings.
There’s no shame. A phrase we try to use to let another know that it’s okay to be human, okay to have needs, okay to have to show up.
Shame / Show up
Which will it be?
image / mirage
image-as-mirage
image or mirage?
psychoanalysis
is that deep emotional experience
between two people.
“We are, all of us, hellish.”
Images November 18th, 2019
As I sit to write and meditate on this word, image, the app Instagram comes to the front of mind. Instagram, instant image. Cell after cell after cell of different snapshots and landscapes and bodies and meals and advertisements of a human life—all evidence of a being being and experiencing and impacting. Funny, the way these archaic forms of communication have traveled across time. Images have been with us from the very beginning; images are the first big-bang to freshly open eyes, exploding into the darkness to light up our world. Looking out, we are bombarded with these representations of things we have no framework or knowledge to understand. As a baby, for us all, how remarkable (terrifying?) it must have been to see our caregiver’s face. This massive thing to us back then—our entire world and universe in one blurry image. Just try to imagine how titanic a face must have felt to such a young creature such as ourselves. Maybe we couldn’t even take it all in at that time—maybe the best we could do was the formation of a mouth, or an eye, or a lock of hair. But these images were only the beginning of many more to come; priming us for a life’s long work of coding and decoding pictures. Bird. Car. Blanket. Kitty. Cup. Bottle. Potty. Tree. Never-ending, infinite images to learn, to categorize, to take in and make sense of.
We are—and have been—working with images all our lives.
Hopefully very gently, and with patient help, we are introduced to more and more images as development occurs. We learn symbols, and languages, and complex words, and mathematical equations, and musical notes, and postures of body. We discover “dirty” pictures of sexuality and genitals and “private” parts of otherwise known representations; we are introduced to road signs and first job uniforms and universal symbols, such as the cross, a star, a fast-food golden M, a Christmas tree. Even as adults, new images emerge: tax forms and licensing deeds and receipts and electric bills and titles and nameplates. It’s not lost on me, especially in this moment, just how much we all take in across a lifetime. We are such sensitive animals, with sensitive psyches that are incredibly impressionable. This psyche does it's best to filter images on our behalf, but many get through to deep levels. Many come inside and get lodged, fixed. Some get elevated and worshipped as a life’s goal to obtain or strive for. Billboards and marquees and flashing neon images burning in the dark of psychic night.
Images are with us and guide us in ways we may not even know. Unconscious images pulling and tempting and informing and pointing.
There’s a psychoanalyst in town who teaches that one of the (many) jobs of the clinician is to emotionally grasp and understand the patient’s “picture of the world” at any given moment. What does the person see? With what texture and what feel? Is it a bright world, full of hope and possibility and love? Or is it slighter darker, depressive and lonely? Or, scarier still, is it an amusement park of horrors, with fear pulsing in every direction? The psyche forms and organizes itself in images. Not only in this way, but in profound and vibrant ways we remember what her face looked like, how our naked bodies appeared in that mirror, the particular crook of their hand in ours. We see grandma’s house, with the gently falling snow signifying to us that it is, indeed, Christmastime. We observe the faded lettering on a tombstone, tucked away in a neglected wood. We create pictures and images of significance that are loaded with personal and individual meaning. In therapy rooms, we are interested in discovering these images and trying to partner with them—trying to become better, friendlier, agents of deciphering them and understanding their purpose. For many of us, these images are inherently painful or shaming or outdated or someone else’s entirely. For others, the pictures we carry aren’t even possible or necessarily healthy for us to be striving for in the first place. For some, the pictures are unspeakable; carrying such pain that the outlines of their picture can’t even be traced.
Returning to instagram: while more complicated than being simply good or bad, it makes sense that this social media experience would be as massive as it is given our affinity for pictures. We believe we are our images. We are attracted to them. Bonded with them. We fight and struggle with them. We want them to be seen and witnessed and liked and enjoyed and lusted after and envied and shared; we want them paid attention to. We also compare and contrast and we feel the need to raise up or put down ours and others, in justification or defense of our own set of pictures. We feel ashamed by the picture(s) of the world the other seems to live in that is not our own. Internal/external pictures, images, then, of what it is like to be human us.
How do we, then, partner with images? with ourselves with them? How do we learn their language more accurately and use them and understand what they are pointing to, or how they are inviting us? How do we see through them when they do not feel entirely honest or true? How do we edit when editing is needed, or let go, when letting go would best serve? Can we paint or draw or sketch or language some of these inside images that haunt us? Even if badly, or poorly, or slowly?
I think what I am asking is something like this:
how do we create, in real time,
and as the artists that we are,
our picture of the world
as truthfully as we can
as we are living it?
collectors of likes,
hoarders of followers,
acquirers of matches.
we are all
hungry for attention,
which is to say
love.
the narcissist,
rather than being one who is full of self-love,
is actually one who has not yet had their fill-enough,
to look out, curiously and genuinely,
into a
wide-world
of others.
teacher and student selves
(in any relationship)
are crucial and critical.
we are
all learning how.
Freezing & Thawing November 11th, 2019
Seattle has had a reputation as a city of being cool‚ in more ways than one. What’s known as the “Seattle Freeze,” this chill is a way of life in which the people here aren’t experienced as being overly welcoming or inclusive or warm in greeting and relationship. Some people, then, as a result, feel the city to be a frozen place; they feel left in the relationally unmitigated and isolate cold. While others feel just fine—perhaps even that the chill has a warmth and a comforting feeling to it. That sometimes it feels good to be left alone when walking from point A to point B, or to have several nights in a row when one’s company is not expected or even asked for. Perhaps it simply depends on one’s given mood for which would be preferable—chilly or warm? Frozen, or a bit more thawed out?
Freezing and thawing, then, both,
as necessary for life.
I’ve been personally interested lately in psychoanalytic training programs across the city and the country to consider whether or not I want to be fully licensed and trained as a “capital P” Psychoanalyst, rather than only being psychoanalytically informed. Psychoanalysis being a deeper and longer term version of psychotherapy which has its own standards of practice and expecations. This is a major decision (and a lengthy process to undertake!) but one I am entertaining because of my direct experience in my consulting room across almost seven years of working intimately with patients.
We need time, you and me.
We need so much time.
We as humans need time to thaw out, and drip ourselves into better ways of being alive. We need attentive and attending minds to let this process unfold; attention as love. Freezing and thawing, inherent as a way of surviving and being in the world. We have such sensitive psyches that can only handle so much at a given time, that freezing and blunting emotional edges become crucial. However, we have gotten so unbalanced in our efforts to survive life, that we have not privileged or valued the thawing out of what’s been frozen to find what more is there. Even in our best childhood scenes and moments, we were often met with parents who simply needed us to tone ourselves down—for the sake of being together—rather than allowing full expression of feeling and mind to be stood-under and supported.
Psyche learns how to stop, how to dam, its own life rather than welcome it in and through, in better and more sustaining ways.
We come to therapy rooms, in part, to safely thaw ourselves in the presence of a caring and attentive partner. We come to give new value and time and space to our own sensitive reverberations that have been there since the start—our own psychic big-bangs echoing throughout our personality. We come to drip, drip, drip ourselves out, a little at a time, and a little more.
Psychoanalysis has been criticized for allowing too much time, for granting too much focus and abundance on what life feels like for the psyche and person, and fair enough, for those not wanting to engage in this kind of work. Yet? I think we are all are in desperate need of more time. I feel behavioral psychologies, while supremely helpful and important in their unique particularities, may unknowingly take part in hurrying a sensitive psyche along once again. That we may push each other to freeze, rather than thaw, too quickly, in order to get about the business of life; in order to get back in the game, so it were. And—even in the longest of therapies, it will never be enough. That, even the psychoanalytically informed therapist, or the Psychoanalyst, still must end a session and require the patient to freeze up a bit, so that the next can come in to get at their own thawing.
Nevertheless, we’ve thawing work to do—in therapy and in our private selves and in the streets.
Nevertheless, in that kind of psyche and soul and personality work,
as a mentor and friend of mine says:
a little goes a long way.
“It is no sin to crawl.”
our imbalances
go in endless directions.
our imbalances
are infinite.
The Misery of Silence November 4th, 2019
Being alone gets a bad rap in our day and age. There are many different associations to what that word alone even means or represents—spinster, single, isolated, lonely. It’s hard to not also included words like broken, ashamed, unloved, unlovable. There is a certain kind of way of relating to aloneness that is not valued in current day, nor in times past. So much more praise and attention and accolade get pointed toward life-in-community and life together; towards the couple; towards being and feeling busy. This is not to say that these sentiments are not of extreme importance, because of course they are (we are social animals after all) but aloneness feels as though it has gotten the short end of the stick of experience.
The truth is we are not good at being alone.
And why should we be? Life in the contemporary day has given us no implications that this side of experience would need or deserve much space. “Go out there and live!” life seems to say, scream even. Get outside—both into the natural world and of yourself and into another!—if you are to find anything worth finding. More excitable and energetic states of being, then, receive cherishing and underlining than their quieter, lower energy, and more withdrawn counterparts.
The psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott believed that aloneness was primary at the birth of experience and that there are many things that can go wrong right at the start. That the infant, without realizing, feels alone and supported by the background attending parent. He called this notion “supported aloneness” as well as “double dependency.” That without this kind of foundational support, aloneness is hard to bear and can even be felt as traumatizing. That, at the start, significance is placed on the self’s experience of itself, by itself, only for itself. Good aloneness depends on good background support.
Wrong, right at the start.
Wrong & Right. Alone & Together.
Quiet & Excited. You & Me.
I think of patients who would add their own words of association into the aloneness definition mix. Words like lazy, wasteful, boring, persecuting, painful, void, dead. That aloneness can not/could not be a rich and alive experience in and of itself, but rather one of excess and proof positive that something else could be being done and accomplished and acted on. That this silence-hole can be and should be filled all the time.
Therapy tries to get at this, tries to get close to nourishing and repairing self alone states. Many therapists, including myself, do not begin the session; instead, we wait. This is not done for psychoanalytic trickery or power. Instead, the stage and space is left open for the other to step onto/into. Many find this incredible challenging. Sometimes, I find this challenging to practice myself. I feel it would be kinder of me to make some kind of small talk, to “fill” this opening, as it were. To put us both out of our misery—the misery of silence. As if leaving someone alone in the opening seconds of a session is cruel, is experienced as a leaving, rather than a giving. I think this is what I mean in general. That aloneness, that quiet, that silence, is a difficult and terrifying experience for many of us, much of the time. That we would much rather be comforted and accompanied by intense flashing lights and background noise and, more often than not, meaningless chit-chat, then endure a few quiet moments on our own. What do we continue to make of this, when being on our own is not only where we start, but also where we are much of the time and where we end up? How do we work with tipping the scales more towards a whole balance of both sides of experience? What could have gone wrong, right at the start?
How, and with what quality,
can we be quiet?
we are trying
to make something
of pain.
who knows
what leads to what?
“Be kind, but be fierce. ”
loathing—the stiffest
drink to drink.
grief spills
onto the streets,
onto dream canvas.
grief drips
down my chin,
& onto the page.
it is the task
of the analyst,
of the theologian, of the lover,
of the humanitarian, of the friend,
of the self, of the neighbor,
to overcome one’s narcissism.
when one has suffered long enough,
one develops.
we are learning
to work-with our madness
for the sake of
soul, psyche, partners,
and world.
dream-life, like good therapy, invites us
to pay attention to ourselves
at every predictable and non-predictable moment.
“What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
“It is a bad way of reading another man’s heart to conceal one’s own.”
inside and outside work,
between and individual work,
depth and surface work,
logic and feeling work,
this and that,
you and me,
past and future,
here and now.
this work?
has it all.
time of day.
dip,
dive,
into being.
the face,
reminding us to wake up
from foggy then-&-there,
and live.
there can be no depth without the way to depth.
how little
we know.
“To realize that we are in a chronic state of emotional indigestion might go some way toward engendering a gentler approach to one another. We might give each other time, sometimes quality time.”
"Did this advance things?" -Neville Symington
I often am always questioning: the contents of a session, of what a patient may or may not say, what this might mean about that, who is actually talking about whom—as well as questioning what it is that I'm supposed to be doing. Am I the analytic therapist who sits back and simply listens? Contains? Absorbs and digests? (Interesting that I would use the word "simply" to kind of demean the invaluable art of listening). Perhaps this speaks a little to the pressure I feel within my own personality. Or, am I the kind of therapist that wants change? That wants to advocate and fight for a kind of subtle (radical) transformation in a person's life? Am I content to leave things in a person's personality as I found them, well enough alone, or do I come and knock at that particular door, again and again and again, as long as the person may tolerate me, like a dedicated salesman who is eager to talk and engage and have someone open the door?
One of my favorite thinkers and practitioners, Neville Symington, asks himself the question after each session: did this advance things? It's possible that he asks himself this after each interpretation, each sentence or word uttered, but I'm not certain if I'm making that up or if I truly did read it somewhere in his work. Did this advance things? Is what I'm thinking, and possibly, then, saying, truly helping nourish or confront something in this other that advocate the conditions for psychological growth? Or am i just talking? Am I just speaking empty words that take up room in the air, not necessarily for good or for worse, but with a kind of benign neutrality that leaves us both feeling safe? Is my patient growing? Is that the expectation? If it becomes the agenda, of the silently agreed upon point of meeting, do we subtly ruin the thing? Is our task to simply meet? There's that word again. As if meeting doesn't provide any kind of advancement or transformation in and of itself. I think of conversations I've had that have shifted my personality. I remember conversations that have, without necessarily meaning to, sent me off on a new direction. Does that count as "advancing things?" As psychoanalytic psychotherapy? And— how many conversations have I been in, that have left me feeling entirely missed and mis-understood and frustrated? How many times have I been the one who has, as the philosopher Martin Buber described, mis-met someone?
How we we, how do I, come to understand what advancement is at all, and what that means for me, for my patients, for my intimate relationships outside of the office? Is advancement in the service of love? Can advancement happen without love? Is it love itself? What is the spirit behind the use of the very word? Is it for a better life? Is it for personal satisfaction? For growth? Is it for both, patient and myself?
"Much of what we do, we do automatically and without thinking." —Stan Tatkin
Much of what we do.
This is a kind way of saying, that much of our lives, if left unchecked, are left to these unthought-through ways of existing. That we as human animals tend to react, act, react again and again in various ways—and that we are more often than not surrendered, passive, to those automatic, or unconscious, ways of operating in the world. Both inside world and outside world.
The analyst Carl Jung said that, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
In many ways, that unless we get to work on learning how to partner with our capacities, unless we get to the hard, laborious work of working-with our own flavors of madness and "crazy" and pain, that these entities will remain lodged, so it were, within our personalities. They will remain and they will influence our automatic responses and become part of the 'much of what we do.'
That trauma or pain or memory, after it is experienced, doesn't dissipate or evaporate in the psyche—but remains in the air of the person.
This is why psychotherapy is for you, is for me, is for the average, flesh and blood individual. This is why this work is so important, so life-changing. For the work on the inside directly relates to the feeling of the outside; we live how we feel. And if "much of what we do" is dictated by these processes, then they are indeed worth our time and energy and our commitment.
“anger. is often grief that has been silent for too long.”
where are we?
who are we?
what can
we learn
about living?
the fate of pain,
the truth of pain,
the weight of pain,
it's happening
now, now, now.
one of the tasks
of therapy
is to find
all that shame
has hidden.
monogamy.
“our minds can change, and with a changed mind our personal world changes.”
we dip into,
we fill, we feel,
psyche's colors.
up, up, up.
come down,
this is our work now.
how tightly
our shame winds us (up).
inside/outside,
you/me,
me-in-you/you-in-me.
growing/shrinking,
big/small,
too much/too little.
shame seems
like a solitary pain,
but it is indeed
deeply relational.
we preheat the oven,
we put on the coffee.
we rack our brains
of how
all of these bills will be paid;
bills of rent,
bills of shame,
bills of electricity and power
and feeling trapped.
we try our best
to live and learn,
to love and lose,
to forgive and forget—
and
it is so hard.
we try our best
at making a life.
Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.
maggie nelson, bluets
the psychoanalyst michael eigen writes
that therapy work is not easy, that pain is a part of it.
but? so is love.
and for some, he contends,
love is the greatest pain of all.
“we create ourselves
by our choices”
we, all,
have holes
in our personality;
we're, all,
traumatized,
in this way
or that.
getting in touch
with that terrible shame,
that no one
would possibly stay.
we search,
we seek,
we try to find,
all that shame
has covered.
blind
emotional life
is at the core
of everyday life—
feelings matter.
“it will be a sore fight letting go
and letting the sea in.”
we learn
to patch together
our bits of life,
to keep ourselves
reaching for more.
therapy as art,
as invitation
to create
from what is
already there.
personality forms and adapts,
shatters and solidifies,
ebbs and flow;
we work with
what is available.
sense-ing,
sensitivity.
what do we do?
how do we do?
thinking, feeling, sensing,
all part of a life.
“it is a joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.”
we are learning
to live in the
flow of feelings -
to understand
that feelings matter.
our selves
are in
our symptoms.
what will we build together?
psyche, like the spiritual, like art,
cannot stay stagnant -
it demands attention, momentum,
partnership.
what will we,
what can we, work-with?
what can we build together?
sometimes,
when something goes wrong,
we go deeper.
the good stuff is in the mess.
this is our time,
this is mine.
a psychic playground,
cast out onto the world.
with characters and short stories,
objects and faces.
narratives,
secrets,
fears.
projection,
idealization,
omnipotence.
(you know,
the classics)
wide-eyed,
open-mouthed,
gaze.
wonder, awe.
shock, contempt.
open it up,
rather than
shut it down.
who are you?
who are we?
what have we become?
“for not to work-with, is to work against”
wombs of hate,
wombs of shame,
wombs of rejection
and obstruction.
wombs that
give birth
to our feeling
of life.
psyche must
be built, created, sculpted.
concerned with
interior design
of interior world -
psychoanalytic aesthetics.
“can we make room for ourselves?”
we protect -
our insecurities,
our insecure senses of ourselves,
our dependencies.
we spend a great deal
of effort, of time, of energy
protecting that which
may not need protection
at all.
psychoanalysis uses words like ego and id, but we forget that we are talking about ourselves.
“to understand many things, you must reach out of your own condition.”
to be human,
is to become
visible.
“...but i cannot know the world to which i am going.”
what happens
when we
welcome
the unwelcome?
control,
too often,
substitutes
for feeling -
for developing
capacity to
work-with.
what if
the scream of infancy
never stops?
“what lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
we all weather
our (psychic) storms
one way or another.
shame tells us that
something is lacking--
something, missing;
something is wrong at
the floor of personality,
and must be hidden.
paradoxically, shame,
must be faced.
even a little
can be a lot.
psychotherapy?
shared
madness.
therapy, therapist,
as (true) self auxiliary,
as (true) self object -
what does one do
with self in the witness
of (an)other?
therapy, therapist,
where the task
is to introduce
patient
to (him/her) self.
“we are traumatized by incapacity to tolerate and work-with what happens to us and within us.”
resolute.
going to be
(okay)
therapy is about survival;
it helps, it teaches
us to taste survival.
it helps us to survive survival,
to learn how to survive better -
more full.
what do we see
when we face faces?
our partner's?
our children's?
our own?
what do we see
when we face faces?
the eyes of our neighbor,
local and global,
glancing, piercing,
longing, fleeting,
avoiding, shaming,
loving, touching?
what do we see
when we face faces?
and what don't we see
when we don't?
even a little
can be a lot.
often,
we become tyrannized
by what has once
saved us.
sometimes,
it takes a long time
to become who you are.
thoughts, without a thinker.
feelings, with no feeler.
experience, with no body (nobody) to have.
it’s one thing to be alive,
and another to live.
“if you aren’t learning, you have not been paying attention. if you have nothing to say, it is because your heart is closed.”
learning.
sometimes joy - full,
oftentimes pain - full.
what's the fate of all of this pain?
who can welcome it?
you? me? anyone?
who can tolerate - suffer - these growing
edges of pain? these growing pains?
learning.
what's the point?
this never - ending sea of progressing,
better said, processing,
that we swim around in.
sink around in.
where faces and stories and tapes
and moments of then and there,
happening here and now,
are recorded,
registered;
or not.
who can suffer learning?
who among us can face it's beauty,
it's demand?
who can open up arms,
and limbs,
real or phantom,
to this eternal
and never - ending
victory
and defeat?
a psychoanalytic session
is in itself
the very unrepeatable and yet repeated experience.
“blame is a failure of understanding.”
slowly, no doubt,
is this work
of learning
to hear the soft voice
of our own lives.
walls.
walled (off) self.
walls, surrounding self,
impenetrable existence
where you stay there and i’ll stay here.
high, tall structures
of wood, of brick,
of concrete grey like seattle sky.
walled off from sun, from ultraviolet space.
walls creating space,
space necessary (or used to?) for life.
protective dividers from unbearable world (self)
of you and i and me and them and different.
walls.
walls (rise) when self touches,
whether pain or pleasure touch.
walls when self feels,
(weather) storm or springtime feeling.
holding perimeters
that keep (us) the elements at bay,
away, afar.
raw material of
love and death and joy and shame,
wall(full) lives of safety,
of shelter, of (sense of) control.
walls of home, of prison,
decorated and lively,
colourful and drab.
walls of fashion, of debt,
no one can afford.
walls.
walls that (sometimes) give way,
crumble down, expose.
experience knocks at the screen door,
and we, wall-less, go to answer,
go to let (them, self) in.
wall-less naked-ness.
naked moments,
naked experience,
naked (psychic) touch;
where only skin is left
to hold the self.
such moments,
make us ready
to work with walls.
oceans and selves,
more similar than different;
like music, like poetry, like stories,
all, take time
to happen.
intrapsychic (inside - mind)
becomes
interpersonal (outside - person)
our violence
(bion wrote of psychic murder)
is our attempt
to reduce
the complexity of meaning.
“this is how we make important changes: barely, poorly, slowly. ”
often,
what we expect to see,
is the
only thing we see.
what’s therapy about?
therapy is about learning;
it’s all about learning how to build,
how to organize,
how to understand and
how to make use of
complicated mind.
“psychoanalysis becomes a place where patient and therapist dream each other into life.”
what we don’t know
how to make room for,
and how to work with,
will persecute us
from within and without.
we need struggle
with ourselves,
always,
and see what else
is there.
we wake up,
we ready the eggs, put on the coffee,
we break fast.
we, as william blake says,
bear the beams of love,
of sun,
of cloud and moon.
we wake up,
we follow our feet, try to be alive to this
last and first,
one and only day.
pressure.
pressing, pressure.
emotional pressure,
per bodily square inch.
upwards, downwards,
pressure(s) from self,
pressure(s) from other.
all over pressure.
force, force(d),
press and
push and
pull.
emotional pressure,
to do and think and be
accepting ways
that aren’t
always true.
tears,
make us
soft again.
we’re always
working something out,
aren’t we?
(i’ll use you,
you use me)
trying to organize,
trying to create,
trying to make sense,
trying to live in the world
with some floor underneath.
the mind
is healed
by truth.
we all
suspect deep things
of one another -
until these things are dealt with,
we will never know
(real) relation.
“much of human psychology is based on the consequences of early life experience, attachment, and nurturance, because that is when the brain lays down its model of the world.”
in the art of love,
we all
must start
from the beginning.
greed is in(timate) with scarcity.
we are learning, how.
how to live, how to work-with,
how to suffer, how to stay,
how to get-our-arm-around,
how to slow.
we are learning, how.
how to hold, how to make room,
how to play, how to imagine,
how to dip and feel,
if only for a little while.
we are learning, how;
we are learning (im)possible things;
we, will never stop learning.
confidence isn’t
the absence of fear or anxiety or doubt;
it’s choosing to take a step
(left foot, right foot, slowly)
anyway.
knots of pressure,
knots of shame,
knots of aggression
and betrayal
and loss of faith
and anxiety;
we long to take care
of knots.
“it turns out, that welcome is solidarity”
love,
(care, responsibility,
respect, knowledge)
is the only thing
that can change
the human heart.
psychotherapy
is the workshop
of heart & mind;
body & soul;
life & death.
the anxiousness,
of not-knowing
this anxious place,
this place of anxiety
(bion wrote of a stomach
for anxiety)
one must have a stomach -
to stomach it,
to hold it,
to digest (to try)
to break-it-down
one, instead,
is tempted
to throw it up,
to shit it out,
to a kind of bulimia nervosa (insatiable nervousness)
insatiable nervousness
untolerable anxiety
where one cannot make use of
the nutrients of anxiety,
which is to say,
creativity.
psychoanalysis (mind-knowing)
is like beauty;
its effects (affects)
cannot be destroyed.
we live
the way
that we feel.
“where shall we seek the nature of man? in the stars? in the earth? in the snarl of a tiger, the terror of the heart? i seek within.”
what is therapy?
a long, slowly arrived at letter–
a bit chaotic,
hard to read, to write
at times,
always unfolding
to new pages.
at the center of psychotherapy,
is a radical faith (not-knowing);
a radical openness;
a radical curiosity (attempting to know).
what
on earth (in the room)
will we discover?
there is no easy way out of oneself;
one must work with oneself
all life long.
grief (spills)
on the streets,
on dream canvas.
grief (drips)
on the page,
the screen.
in solitude, we sit.
we throw on the wet suit,
(too tight, not tight enough)
preparing to dip down
into watery self;
an ocean of known & unknown,
lakes & ponds
of sludge,
of shit,
of slime.
in solitude, we hear our ambivalence,
we feel desire & dread dance,
pivot,
even here (especially here)
desperation;
hunger;
anything to distract–
to get us out & away,
off the hook, they say.
tweet, text, tone–
someone save us from slippery self.
self that spills,
out and on,
every moment,
every day,
every body.
self that cannot
help
but interact,
intwine,
immerse.
(cannot help?)
someone save us from suffocating self–
in a room too small,
walls too close–
that the wetness of feelings
fill up (feel up)
too quickly;
we are all afraid.
we are all so scared (sacred) selves.
someone (you? me? us?) helping to surrender to self;
we are wanting to drown,
to get wet,
to feel,
to explore,
enwrap,
explain,
enliven, at the same time, not interested.
in solitude, it all is here.
in solitude, yes & no.
in solitude, sinking into self
& scared out of mind self, both, welcome.
in solitude, sinking
& scanning, scouting, for higher ground.
we (cannot help) but
try and sit, to live it all.
we are alive
&
trying to learn
something
about living.
endings
are always
beginnings.
what is therapy?
it is beginning
to take apart
the deep stitches of the mind,
in hopes
of sewing,
something new.
“the conscious fear is not being loved; the unconscious fear is that of loving.”
it feels as though we’re no different than the garden snake, you and i,
rubbing,
struggling,
fretting,
to take off the old life.
when we remember,
we do just that:
re - member.
we put back together.
we bring back into relationship.
we hold the hand of.
full of thought, regret, hope dashed or not dashed yet,
full of memory, pride and more than enough
of spilled, personal grief,
i begin another page, another poem.
so many notions fill the day! i give them gowns of words,
sometimes i give them little shoes that rhyme.
what an elite life!
while somewhere someone is kissing a face that is crying.
while somewhere women are walking out, at two in the morning–many miles to find water.
while somewhere a bomb is getting ready to explode.
/mary oliver
wrestle in the sheets of your bed.
pay attention at the stoplight when the memory returns.
bite your lower lip at those waves of affection that warmly grace your shore, from time to time.
live it all.
we sweep the floors,
we sip our coffee,
we do the laundry,
taking down baskets at a time;
baskets of whites,
baskets of grief,
baskets of desire, even worse,
desire unfulfilled.
//
we preheat the over,
we rack our brains
as to how
all of these bills will get paid;
bills of rent,
bills of shame,
debts of electricity and kindnesses and warm feelings of love.
//
we try our best,
to survive–
but even more,
to have a life.
“i’ve learned that making a living is not the same thing as making a life.”
trembling, shaking,
leaving, staying;
drinking, writing,
working, playing;
fearing, losing,
attaching, grieving;
ignoring, avoiding,
facing, weeping.
afraid.
afraid.
afraid.
these,
are the things of a life.
more, more, more–
but all, in best effort,
to fill the emptiness,
to fill the prison,
of
not enough.
change.
changing.
we’re always changing, aren’t we?
our entire bodies–
our hair, our bones,
our blood, our fluids,
our skin, our faces.
change.
changing.
we’re always in a kind of fluidity, like the ocean, aren’t we?
our very persons, the seat of our souls–
our opinions, our tempers,
our moods, our rhythms,
our pleasures, our dreads.
change.
changing.
transform.
transforming.
be.
being.
and
yet–
we strive,
we war,
we set-up,
we demand,
we architect,
we bleed
for certainty.
You will become well
only to the extent
that you become yourself.
the truth is, we’re all beginners.