Diary Entry from April 1st, 2021

Phillip Roth; Anger; Womanizing; Alcoholism; Self-Love

*I wanted to share this diary entry from April Fool’s Day, 2021. This was just over three months before my father’s terminal cancer diagnosis. About six weeks before my then-16-year-old niece’s serious suicide attempt by car. I was two months away from leaving NYC for the first time in 18 months. The Pandemic was still raging. I had no idea when I left NYC I wouldn’t be returning. This diary entry is VERY honest, gritty and raw. I hope you appreciate it. I lightly edited it for clarity. For the past 17 years I’ve addressed my diary as “Jack,” in reference to my early twenties writing hero, Jack Kerouac. Who else?

Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash

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Jack,

My eyesight is getting worse, sometimes it seems day by day. At some point I’ll have to face this. Ugh. Another human frailty. What a thing, to be human! How frustrating and humiliating. (Not entirely or always, though.) For the record it’s 11:22AM, Thursday, April First—April Fool’s Day—2021. April. We finally made it out of March. March wasn’t so bad though; in fact it was good. Out, finally, of the never-ending fucking brutal NYC winter of December to late February. Snow, cold, rain, storms. Etc. And the fucking Pandemic on top of it all, of course. Now we’re just going deeper still into lovely, green, warm, rainy spring. I. Love. This.

Man. The fucking biggest thing in my life lately, really, internally at least, is motherfucking Philip Roth. How did I miss this motherfucker???! I have of course heard his name for years and years, but I never read him. For some strange reason I’d had it in my head somehow that he was a sci-fi writer or something. I think maybe I got him mixed up with Philip K. Dick? Is that right? Maybe. Not sure. Perhaps. Anyway, it all started when I was waiting to meet Rollo for dinner a week or so ago. I read this piece in the last New Yorker about the new 912-page bio on Roth (already pre-ordered on Audible) which covered his genius and his womanizing and his blurring of fiction, art, and real life; the autobiographical novel, as it were. Dude was Jewish, born and raised in Jersey (which he wrote frequently about) and then lived in New York City for a long while. Born in 1933, died in 2018; came of creative age in the mid-late 1950s. Sort of later Beat age. Kerouac was born in 1922; Mailer in 1924. Etc.

Anyway I ended up having this crazy powerful urge to go out and get some Roth books…I had become bored with Flaubert’s Madam Bovary. I know: A cardinal sin. But it’s just such a hackneyed theme at this point in literary history. The woman pulled between two men and her moral quagmire. Tolstoy did it as well as it can ever be done in Anna Karenena. And I read that beast. Anyway, I’ll probably come back to M.B. later at some point.

So I ended reading first The Ghost Writer (Roth we’re back on here) and then his first novel, Goodbye Columbus. Both were excellent. Deep, profound, self-aware, meta, etc. A little narcissistic and draining…which reminded me of…me. (And most serious male writers of the 20^th century.) Now I am 75 pages from the end of My Life as a Man. Fucking insidious and meta and brilliant. Totally autobiographical satire. Very ironic and witty. Gorgeous prose style, voice and insight. Very emotionally tiring. It speaks directly, very personally, to me. It has made me realize a few big things.

For one, it describes his womanizing very realistically and self-awarely and honestly. He just puts it all right out there. He has no limits. Incest. Something resembling “rape.” Chasing young pussy. A professor screwing his 20-year-old students. We get into his insane first marriage, which makes almost any woman I’ve ever been with seem almost docile. (She eventually kills herself.) And his crazy second big relationship. He goes back and forth between his early to late twenties, and into his thirties, as a new golden short story writer to an esteemed professor of English and Create Writing in NYC fucking every woman that blinks. We see his therapy sessions. His grotesque narcissism. All of this of course reminds me of my former self. How could it not? But Roth is so self-forgiving, it seems, so compassionate for himself and his alter-ego that it touches me. It made me understand a few things. I had a few big revelations.

The first was this: I have still not forgiven myself for my past. You know: What I did to myself; what I did to my parents; what I did to women, especially. The emotional and physical harm I caused. It suddenly struck me, walking the other day (yesterday): Wow, I still have anger towards myself. I still don’t fully trust myself. I still am a little disgusted, even, with myself. My past, yes. Big time. But to a lesser degree even my current present. (Re how I treat women and myself and my friends and my parents etc. Gossip, fear, judgment.) This is a HUGE revelation—not having totally forgiven myself. I need to give myself a break; have some serious love and compassion for myself. I need to forgive myself. It’s Time. It’s taken me 10.5 years to get to this point. To think about letting myself off the hook. As a child, I was a victim. (Like many of us.) My parents were broken, detached, and emotionally stunted. They’d had their own horrible childhoods. I forgive them for that. I have forgiven them. But somehow not myself. (Which is okay. Again: The point is to be light and soft and forgiving with myself.) I was an emotionally abandoned and confused child. Alcohol was my medicine. This created a path I could not get off for ten long, chaotic years. And then in 2010 I hit bottom and got sober. But, despite all my 12 step work, and meetings, it’s actually only now—right here and now—that I see with clear eyes how much I hurt myself, the people I loved, and women. I was so angry at my mother—so full of fear and self-hatred for a “self” I didn’t feel connected to—and so afraid of her, at the same time, that I instead decided to project all that rage onto innocent women. Sex was like stabbing them. I used them like trash. I didn’t care about them, or even really see them. I guess I wanted them to feel the way I had for so long felt: Abandoned, alone, under water, used, forgotten, trashed. I’m not saying my parents actually did that to me…I’m saying I felt that way.

The other thing—which is very much in concert with and connected to the previous point a la self-forgiveness—is that I have realized, in a broader context, that I have to open up my internal space. I have to learn to accept myself in all my glorious and painful and human totality. In other words—I have to include ALL the parts of myself for selection to be loved and held and seen and grasped and understood…not just the parts I like or think are cool or easy or hard or important. This includes, then, my womanizing, both past and present. It includes some of the things I’ve done which I am profoundly sad about. Things I can’t believe I did. Things I don’t want to see or think about because they’re startlingly painful.

I am not a bad person.

My ex consistently said that to me after we broke up, reassuring me that it was not all my fault, and that, yes, I had been an asshole in many ways, critical, mean, even cruel, but that that was only one part of our relationship, my personality, my actions, my words. I am HUMAN, is what I’m getting at here. I have always known this intellectually…but sort of for the first time I am now feeling it emotionally. I have always struggled with intellect versus emotion. I can think but I can’t always fully feel. Not as much as I’d like to. And that, too, is alright. It has to be. It’s the truth. Reality in all its ugly resonance.

I think for a long time now I have not been truly willing—in my deepest core—to completely Let Go and allow all of myself to fully exist. I have not included all of Michael in the space that is Michael. I have been incomplete. Perhaps part of it is that my mother never wanted (still doesn’t) to know about that part of me, which is such a massive and profound part of me. She never wanted to discuss the Darkness. Only the light and easy. I pushed anyway, showing some of the Dark to her…but it was never the whole thing, and it was almost always somehow on her terms. My mother is a Master Denialist; no one I know uses denial like my mother. The truth is: I, to some degree, use it too. Roth, incredibly, I think with his self-awareness and his brutal self-honesty, has torn that wall down for me. I can look; I can see; I can face it. I think all these years I’ve been judging myself. Because I felt as a child judged by my mother and by my father. I still feel judged by them…though I know they love me unconditionally. A friend tells me I am hard on myself. She is right. Of course I am! And yet this too hit me like a revelation. How could I not be hard on myself? I never felt fully worthy of love. My mother always seemed obsessed with herself and her image and her need to prove to her own mother that she was better (my mom); my father always seemed to be living somewhere outside of my cosmos entirely.

The change here needed—the “fix”—is not a woman. A girlfriend. My parents reading more of my work. My mother cracking her denial and seeing me in a new way; my father understanding me for the first time in my life. No. The answer here, clearly—the Solution—is to forgive myself, finally and fully and completely. I need to accept Michael Mohr, a hundred percent. With all of it: The drinking and the womanizing and the violence and the risk and the rage and the self-destruction; the intensity; the FEAR; all of it. Then and now and in the future, whatever that holds. This is about ME. It’s an inside job.

I have to accept my life. Here and now. My past. Roth has a line in My Life as a Man that goes something like, “Perhaps I hadn’t known until now what a past was.” Yes!!! I have clung onto The Past, refusing, stubbornly, to let it go. Let. It. Go. Release my tenuous grip on the slippery, frayed rope I am still clinging to all these years later. It is OK to fall into the Abyss. The Abyss is just self-love and Reality and Acceptance. It is not horrible to be loved. My ex loved me. My parents love me. Friends and family love me. Why can’t I love myself? Ok. Compassion. I want to love myself. I want to treat myself better. To see and understand myself. See! That’s really what it is: Not that my parents or women haven’t seen or heard me. EYE haven’t seen or heard me!!! How did I miss this? It’s always, ultimately, about The Self, isn’t it? Even—perhaps especially—when your first instinct is to scream that it’s about “someone else.”

Anyway. Roth. ROTH! I call him Dad. Or Daddy Roth. D.R., for short. He is like my literary father. Fucker. I wish he were still alive. I missed him by a mere three years. Someone like him with that intense level of honesty and concentration—we get writers like that once or twice in a generation. Henry Miller. Bukowski. But Roth is a better writer, and more refined, than Miller and Buk. (Though they’re great.) Makes me think a bit of Ottessa Moshfegh…but D.R. goes even farther than her. Farther than anyone. Even more than Frederick Exley in A Fan’s Notes.

So what now? I am so afraid—even today—of other peoples’ judgment. Every time a friend doesn’t message me back soon enough for me (ha!!) I feel this rush of judgment, fear and shame, as if I am finally going to be “found out,” or “exposed,” or “seen to be the fraud that I am.” Such self-consciousness and low self-esteem. The funny thing is: 9.9/10 times, in my experience, the person, whoever they are, is most certainly NOT judging me. They aren’t thinking about me at all, in fact. (See there’s my ego and selfishness and narcissism again; everything is “about me.”) Instead, they were writing or working or with a partner or friend or on the phone with someone or taking a shit, etc etc etc. Basically I think—not to self-victimize here—my parents did an emotional number on me when I was a child. But I am now nearly 40! It’s time to shift the blame from parents to life just being life. And to face forward. Own my feelings. Let go. And fall into the Abyss.

God—that makes it sound so easy. But maybe in a way it IS that easy. Stop fighting my own feelings about myself; my own image of myself. The feeling is that I sometimes want to say, You’re a real piece of shit, Michael. But the truth is—of course—that I am NOT a piece of shit. I have a past, yes. I have done wrong in that past. I have been an asshole sometimes in the present and more recent past. But I am HU-MAN. Hu. Man. HU. MAN. Flawed. Imperfect. Like everyone else on Planet Earth. We’ve all done things we’re not proud of. Mine are more insane and vile than some…less so than others. I didn’t kill anyone.

Life isn’t a clean, neat binary: I was A, now I’m Z. No; it’s much more fuzzy and layered and nuanced and complex. I am still my essential Michael Mohr Nature. Same guy I was when I was an angry, fraught eight-year-old, or a wild drunken punk rock teen; or a wayward, hitchhiking twenty-four-year-old; or a sober man of nearly 40. I am me, quintessentially and fundamentally. And yet I have changed in many ways. I have grown. I have evolved into a greater, better version of me. But there is yet still much work to do ahead. I have been cracked and broken in many ways for a long, long time. Maybe my whole life, or close to it. But that, too, is OK. That, too, should be included in the space within me.

I can be free. I can let go. I can see myself from the inside out. When I allow me to be me, with all the sordid architecture laid as the foundation, I believe I can start to breathe easier, deeper, more seriously. I can take myself more seriously. I still feel cowardly and afraid sometimes. I take some risks and avoid others. I want everything and yet I seek total isolation and solitude. All of it is alright. Is FINE. Is good. I am good.

I need to say that again: I AM GOOD.

I am good. I think I believe that.

I think I do.

M