What Goes Up Comes Around or Maybe Not

Remember this? Something's Happening

It was all a lie.

Not really, but it may have been delusional. I still can't tell. You may have noticed that I have not followed through on anything I declared. You can't have noticed, but it is also true, that the great work I was embarking on, has also fizzled out.

Weeks after that burst of inspiration, I heard myself saying to someone, "that wasn't inspiration, that was mania." After reflection, and after conversations with my new psychiatrist, I have a new perspective on what I was feeling and experiencing.

Back up. Despite some past incorrect diagnoses, I am not now, nor have I ever been bi-polar. Mood swings? Yes, frequently, sporadically, and erratically.

I did spend several weeks, with a renewed clarity and enthusiasm, writing a new version of my story. It was fun while it lasted, and I'm not joking. I was in a positive, productive, and hopeful state of mind. I was writing daily, and feeling good about what I was producing. I thought I was in a flow state for several weeks. Then it stopped. Suddenly.

I heard a depressed person, an actor, refer to his life long struggle as being akin to being hounded by 'the black dog' of depression. I like the image, even if it doesn't resonate with me, so I'll borrow it momentarily.

My flow state ended abruptly when I awoke one morning to find the black dog staring at me. He came with bad news. His mere appearance sent me into a downward spiral. Because that's how this works, meaning the mood swings of CPTSD.

I have never actually been manic. My flow state wasn't mania. But it may have been hypomania, which is an "abnormally heightened mood and increased energy that is less severe than mania." Wikipedia continues,

It is characterized essentially by an apparently non-contextual elevation of mood (i.e., euphoria) compared to the person's baseline mood. It is often accompanied by increased energy, irritability, impulsivity, or disinhibited behavior. The individual with the condition may experience irritability, not necessarily less severe than full mania.

A confounding aspect of CPTSD is that its symptoms can mimic other conditions, including bi-polar, depression, anxiety, ADHD, and more. When the black dog showed up, I fell back into believing I was bi-polar, and by doing so, I talked myself into a deep depression. Again. And again. And again. And so it goes.

When I'm depressed, I can't write. If I try, only garbage comes out. Really insufferably bad stuff. Often when looking back at early journal entries, I find some passages that surprise me because they are well written. I said that? he asks with a bit of pride. This doesn't happen with depressed writings.

In my excited state I wrote, "I will share more of my insights and experiences about having survived my traumas." This has not been the case. I've wanted to do that, but every time I try... gibberish.

I also wrote,

Sorry about all the noise and algorithmic sabotage. I'm still working on those, but I won't be promoting that work here. If you're one of the few who appreciate my messy experimental music and writing, I'm going to have a separate blog for that stuff.

At the time, I already had five blogs, and I registered a new domain name for a sixth: fuckartmakenoise.music. The .music domain is corporately controlled, and it comes with the requirement that I prove I'm a "musician." I figured that would be easy enough, because I have published a bunch of albums of tracks that are, ostensibly, music. But in the process, I was asked to upload a scan of a government ID. I didn't want to do that, so I paused.

I have mentioned periodic urges to purge. I haven't always had five blogs. There were times I only had one. There have been times I had two or none. This is because of my compulsion to start projects, never finish them, then delete them. My blog count is now at three, because instead of creating fuckartmakenoise.music I deleted degenerate.art and frightenthehorses.com.

I am literally resisting the urge right this very minute not to start my music blog at fuckartmakenoise.com, because, of course, when I registered the .music domain, I also registered the .com. And also .us.

I love cool domain names. My current favorite is shit.st. I had a blog there for a little while, but not no more. I'm holding on to the domain, though, because it very definitely maybe would be great to blog under that name.

Is this post shite? Gibberish? According to a previous statement above, it shouldn't be, because I am not depressed this afternoon. I was this morning. I was right up until I started writing this. How interesting... I may have discovered a cure for depression. Solipsistic writing!

I'm kidding, but not really. Here's what I need to say. What I did (to myself) when I posted the wonderful news that "Something is Happening," is I created an expectation for myself that I couldn't meet.

Sorry about all the noise and algorithmic sabotage. I'm still working on those, but I won't be promoting that work here.

With that intention, I betrayed myself. When I'm not able to write, I still have a creative drive to make something. And making noise is turning out to be extremely fulfilling. Making weird art is also fulfilling. As is composing haiQu.

I have been wanting to write here, but I have been unable to, because every time I try, I start from the place of, "what should I write about today," which is always a dead end. I can't do that. I'm not a journalist, nor even a 'writer.'

The plain and simple truth of me is that I'm just a self-absorbed weirdo who wants to write (say) (create) whatever the fuck I want to with full disregard for your (my) expectations of what must be said.

All of this is just to say...

I was in therapy, because of course I was. It’s the one good thing Ethel did for me. When I was fifteen she sent me to a shrink. I didn’t know why. Henry was cool. Long, thin straight hair, wire rim spectacles, and a large thick and wooly black beard. He was known around town as a kind of casual hippy, but he was in fact, a metrosexual. Impeccably groomed and neatly dressed in pastel nehru shirts. Bare feet was the closest to hippy that I noticed.

I enjoyed talking with him, but as far as therapy goes, the sessions were anodyne. I told him that I felt something calling me from afar, maybe from the woods. I was quoting The Moody Blues, “Nights in White Satin.” Expressing my feelings wasn’t anything I had experience with.

Henry told me to get a job. I did. Since then, I’ve had as many therapists as jobs. During one of my final sessions with Henry he told me he believed in UFO abductions. Was he trying to tell me something? If so, it went right past me. I shrugged. I’m grateful for Henry because he got me in the habit of talking about myself to strangers, something I found easier than talking to people I knew.

Getting a job was actually great advice for me. I started washing dishes at a big, fancy seafood restaurant, and it was a blast. Scrubbing the blackened bottom of giant metal pots was hard work, but there were perks. The servers would bring giant trays full of unfinished meals into the kitchen and we all shared in the booty. I’m talking steak, lobster, and cocktails.

The restaurant owner, Michael, was a mafia guy in hiding, only he wasn’t very good at it. I mean, he was better at running a restaurant than he was at hiding. I did not know this at the time of the story below. I mean, I assumed he was mafia, but I didn’t know he was also a rat.

I have zero fucking clues why, but he took me with him to a ‘meeting’ with other restaurant people. Actually, they were more salad dressing people than restaurant people, because they were the owners of the largest salad dressing brand in New England.

One night after work, we drove from Cape Cod to just outside of Boston. Rode an elevator way up high in a hotel, and hung out for a couple hours with gangsters and hookers. They were drinking wine and snorting coke, but they only gave me beer. Like my first session with Henry, I had no clue why I was there.

Typically, I would have been miserable, waiting to get the fuck out of there, but it was surreal enough to hold my interest. Then, apparently, the reason for my presence was announced. Michael wanted to introduce me to these guys. With one hand on my shoulder he bragged that I was the best dishwasher he had ever hired. He was so proud of me he was giving me a 10 cent an hour raise. He also said he hoped I’d work for him for a long time. JFC, I was a fifteen year old socially awkward pimple faced kid and he was, like, actually trying to recruit me into the mafia?

That was it. Afterwards, he took me home. We never talked about it again, because I never saw him again. I was still working a few nights a week, but Michael was gone. Nobody had seen him for a couple weeks when some tough looking guys in suits showed up asking for him. We all assumed they were some of his mafia buddies.

That was the same night that I walked in on Gary, aged approximately 50-something, sucking off my junior schoolmate, aged younger than my wise old 15, in the bathroom. Fuck guys, why don’t you do that in one of the stalls, instead of right there where the door opens? (I thought it was normal.)

Michael, who was really Barry, made the New England newspapers a bunch of years later. Turns out, that while I was working for him, he was in Witness Protection. The toughs that came looking for him were Feds. He had to leave town in a hurry when his cover was blown. The reason his cover was blown? His restaurant was called Michael’s Steak House, which was the name of the previous restaurant he had owned before he became a mafia rat!

(Looking over my shoulder.)

But the articles I read about him weren’t about Michael, per se. He was just mentioned as a participant in some kind of scam involving a Florida bank. The stuff about him being in WitSec was background. The Florida scam was bigger than just the one bank, though. Michael aka Barry aka Snitch was involved in some kind of Savings & Loan scandal.

I had a female therapist in Atlanta who also believed in alien abductions, or was it satanic ritual sacrifice? I always get them confused. I developed crushes on most of my female therapists, but not that one, no offense meant to her.

The only male therapist who became like a father figure for me was also named Henry. He was the one got me to admit I was a Child of the Secret. He hypnotized me one time, and as soon as I was under, I had a panic attack, because I saw my father leaning over me with a knife, intending to kill me, with my mother in the background.

This is not me saying that my father was a Satan worshipper, nor my mother. It was in fact, a convergence of a few different theretofore buried memories. Because most of my early ones are all jumbled up, like a glass jar full of handwritten notes on scraps of paper.

What I want to do with my writing is selfish. I simply want to pull those scraps of paper out of the jar and show them to the world. I want to show myself to the world, or at least some small part of myself to some small part of the world. That's it. I've spent so much time hiding that it's become habitual and I keep falling back into it. I have to stop worrying that YOU (whoever you are) won't like or appreciate my creations (me), whatever form they take. (my pronouns are he/they)

In other words, I don't wanna grow up, I don't wanna go to school, I don't wanna get a job, I don't wanna wear a tie, I don't ever wanna grooooooooooooooow up!

PS - I was approved for Spravato treatment yesterday. I will absolutely be writing about that. I wish I could start immediately, but probably won't be able to get an appointment until November or December.

PPS - It occurs to me, and I hope I'm not dreaming here, that my recent 'hypomanic' flow state is actually my authentic (suppressed) baseline. Maybe that's the light that I'm afraid of, and this is me building up some courage to get back into it.