What's Your F@*king Problem (WYFP) is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and share advice, pootie pictures, favorite adult beverages, and anything else that we think might help. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?
This being human is a guest-house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture...
-Rumi, "The Guest House"
Coleman Barks Trans.
I have a fk*ing problem.
Like the patients on the psychiatric unit at the prison where I work healing the minds and spirits of those often considered the least among us, I have a mental illness AND what some would consider a neurological disorder. I only recently learned of the latter and of its connection to the former. And this learning has helped me change my life.
...for here there is no place
that does not see you.
You must change your life...
R.M. Rilke Archaic Torso of Apollo
One of my girlfriends declared this 'Our Year' way back in January. Gradually, the rest in my circle have signed on board. It's like that when you're in the presence of inspiration. Since jumping aboard that transformative train, grabbing hold of the speeding, lurching, belching locomotive, scrabbling and hanging on for dear life with the sort of determination that typifies someone trying a last time to evoke change; the most amazing things have happened. Most importantly, I've started to get myself unstuck at the source of the stuckness. Recently, as a part of this work, I took myself to a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst to understand from someone objective the issues that were contributing to my seemingly unremitting clinical depression and my long-standing difficulty completing tasks. Why was I as old as I was and so behind my peers? Why couldn't I let myself get to my joy?
By the end of the psychiatric consultation, two things were crystal: That seeing a 175$ a 45-minute-hour shrink who did not deal with insurance companies was well worth the sacrifice; that the diagnosis was as clear as a bell to the skillful and parsimonious diagnostician in even me: Attention Deficit Disorder, Inattentive Type.
So stuck have I been in my career and my life, that despite my personal antipathy to Big Pharma, the decision to try medication was effortless. A no brainer.
Since that time five weeks ago, a Miracle (yes, with a capital M) has occurred. Finally, huge movement in my life in terms of my effectiveness and ability to complete tasks. Abilities I always thought I did not possess, due to my own failures and lack of discipline, I now understand do exist and are well within my capacity. It may be hard for a group of my Kosstastic peers to understand, avid readers as we're supposed to be, but since the age of 13, when I landed at fundie boarding school and surveyed the enormous, beautiful library only discover that it contained nothing but nonfiction books, I've had a shameful secret. And given my advanced education, it's quite a secret: I've been unable to read and in fact, all through college and graduate school, I've never successfully read a book in its entirety. Fiction, if its excellent fiction, I can get through. Nonfiction, texts, literature, favorite poets works, even ourHunter'sbeautifully tuned and masterfully written diaries, I cannot. And writing a diary, or quickly crafting witty, well-reasoned comments good enough to play in this tough room with its rich encyclopedic minds? Forget about it.
The problem has not been one of ability. IQ tests taken during my graduate training revealed exceptional giftedness in the area of verbal functioning, albeit barely average performances in arithmetic and tests of nonverbal abilities- important clues, missed by myself and the professor I once shyly chanced to mention an ADHD hypothesis. The issue was having a mind that wouldn't, couldn't focus for more than a few lines before letting go and wandering, disturbed by a random thought or ambient noises even with ever present earplugs; my frustration always building, building at having read the last line repeatedly and still not comprehending. Lectures were even worse. Childhood, adolescent and adult classroom experiences were spent writing poetry and daydreaming.
In the weeks since my life started moving again, I've started working my way out of the mess that has been my life; Organizing everything from the ground up at home and at work, de-cluttering and filing and prioritizing the doing of such chores. Also, doing the important self-work that is becoming apparent with my self-insight freed up. My one holdout has been trying to read books. Lovely (pristine, in my case) books. Books that fill my house and my shelves and to do lists-for I have been a pretender, who was keeping up appearances. My fear was that the Miracle, my holy f@*king Miracle, would stop there. After-all, the little pill, split down the middle and taken morning and afternoon, that I can not even physically tell I have taken, surely would not touch that-would not gift me books too!. How often are we taught and do we learn from experience that if it seems too good to be true, it usually is?
Monday night, buoyed by a day that could not get any worse and the burgeoning awareness of having reached that blessed point where I was willing to look my fear in the eye because not looking was worse, I picked up a book on Positive Psychology, bits of which I would often try to read to validate my preposterous idea that being a cultivator of happiness in an ungiving system like a prison was indeed a part of my calling. I read effortlessly for two hours, sometimes tears welling with happy relief at my good fortune arriving 28 frustrating, self-castigating, shame-filled years after standing outside that boarding school library, looking in.
My depression too, has responded, a good reminder for me with my own patients, that when an antidepressant seems not to be working, continuing to consider and problem-solve the role of situational factors is so very important.
Importantly, I can see my joy. Mostly, it is there in the distance, furtive still, but less elusive somehow. In fortunate seconds of time when I am aware and allow myself the respite of the present moment, I can feel it. Joy. A quiet, shy presence, new. It bends and caresses such moments, cajoling me to my future, healing my grief at the lost Time, its past absence affording me at last the willingness to accept whatever comes next.
My 'Friends of many distances...,' especially those with flagging hope and absent joy, WYFP?