~
Jack,
It’s 2:51pm. Wednesday, Feb 21, 2024. I’m tired, in multiple ways. I feel drained and misunderstood. My mom needs a lot of help right now after her back surgery, for one. I stayed with her for two days, actually closer to three, and it was very emotionally exhausting for me. I have such a complex emotional connection with my mom. On one hand we’re very close and we love each other incredibly. On the other I can barely stand being around her.
Part of it is her survival mechanisms. They exhaust me. The lying. The gaslighting. The denial. The control issues. And couple all of this with the fact that she is hyper sensitive and thinks she’s basically always right. And again add an even harder aspect: Her delicate, complex dance she does regarding my sister and brother-in-law, where she on one hand fervently defends them and on the other condemns them in the next breath. (She sees no contradiction here, another problem.) The real crucible of the problem is that she has literally zero self-awareness. Zero. And that is fucking hard.
I’m sure from her point of view dealing with my anger from the age of say 11 or 12 until now (less now) and my constant (over the years) finger-pointing at her for all my life problems and constantly saying she hurt me and couldn’t protect me as a child, and my constant writing about “My Dark Childhood” has created the yin to her yang; in other words: On some fundamental level, how could she not feel and act the way she does, as a simple manner of reaction and self-respect/self-dignity?
And yet. It’s not easy. For either of us, I know. Problem is my mom likes to argue and fight. She pretends she doesn’t but it’s clear that she obviously does. Call it her maternal “love language.” It’s essentially how she communicates, which is challenging because it’s not very helpful or clear communication. To say it’s combative is an understatement. And my father—who for all my life acted as a healthy barrier between us—is gone, dead for eight months now, since June 2nd, 2023. With that strong barrier gone, I find myself crashing again and again on the barrier reef that is my mother’s pain and suffering. (Physical and emotional.)
This is tricky, of course, because I have my own pain and suffering, emotional, spiritual and constitutional. I am an artist; a writer. That is never easy. Yes, I get to “work from home.” Yes, I come from “class privilege.” Yes, I have family and friends who love me and support me. Yes, I am 13-plus years sober (thank God). I’m grateful for all of this. But at the end of the day it’s not easy being me, being Michael. Every day I fight an inner battle within myself which feels diabolical and taboo. I think grotesque, looping thoughts which never cease. I feel frustrated and disappointed with life, not because anything is necessarily “wrong” in the conventional sense—I have a wife I love dearly, and all the other things I mentioned above—but rather because I am terrible at accepting things exactly as they are.
Like many artists have written and said—and many sober people: Life for “people like me” is just harder. Nothing has ever come easy for me, especially regularity, conformity, convention, or accepting life on life’s terms. I have more of my mother in me than I want to admit. There are two sides. One side is fantastic: Intelligence; creativity; conversationalist; drive; ambition; supportiveness; etc. But there’s the other side: Angry; controlling; hypocritical; resentful; fearful of people; wanting solitude all the time; afraid of fully opening my heart; narcissistic; in some ways lazy, in other ways hard-working.
We’re all deeply conflicted, divided internally, confused to various degrees, driven by inner contradictions; genetics; environment; childhood trauma; etc. I have much of my mother in me, as I said, but also much of my father. And my father was the precise opposite of my mom: Highly practical (this one often eludes me); rational; arrogant; intelligent; down-to-Earth (ditto), very conventional and safe (not me at all), happy to do as he’s told and just exist in the background (not me at all), unemotional (not me), aggressive about certain issues (politics, work, finances), etc.
In the end I am them and also my own unique inherent nature. I wish life felt easier to me. I wish I were one of those people who could just relax, sit back and allow life to “happen.” But I’ve never been that person. I’ve always expected too much from people. (Ergo have always felt let down.) I’ve always wanted—sometimes demanded—more than people can give, especially those closest to me. (This is an epic reverberation of my mother’s personality, too.) I’ve always clung onto unrealistic expectations. I’ve always felt fundamentally on some level as if the world owes me something. I’ve always felt I was “special” and “different” yet knew deep down inside I was just another complicated set of cells and neurons in a meat suit.
What separates me intrinsically from my parents is that they lack one crucial component which I possess in abundance: Self-awareness.
Possessing high levels of self-awareness is both a good and a hard thing. It’s good in the sense that it helps me to change; I can see myself which means I can observe my flaws which means—theoretically—I can adjust my behavior. But can I really adjust my behavior? And if I can: To what degree can I do so in real time? How much “free will” do any of us honestly, actually have?
It's hard because, even when I cannot change, I am still “forced”—for lack of a better, more accurate word—to see myself, like an older version of myself pushing a younger version of myself down into a pile of steaming brown animal shit. I can’t pretend it’s not happening. I can’t do the denial thing—but of course I can, it just means I’m aware of my denial as I deny—like my mom does so expertly, because I have too much extra-sensory vision.
Being self- and other-aware means that you see what others do and what they don’t do and what you yourself do and don’t do and then you ponder it; you think about it. Thinking, for me, has, like self-awareness, always been complicated and hard. On one hand I need to think deeply, as a thinker and writer and—dare I say it—intellectual. Yet on the flip side when it comes to certain things—especially emotional expectations—thinking can get me into deep trouble. I go down the cognitive rabbit-hole and it starts to look like a vague, stormy Kafka nightmare down there, with O.C.D. added to boot. And that’s not a healthy place to be.
Sometimes the solution—so far as there is one—is to simply stop thinking. Thinking, in some areas, for me, becomes loaded down with spiritual cargo. Instead, it’s wiser often to meditate or listen to an audiobook or read a physical book or write or exercise, etc.
I just published my debut novel, The Crew, a literary adult/YA crossover. I feel so anxious about getting reviews and making sales and all of that. I started this book in 2008, when I was the tender age of 25, living in San Francisco. It’s been through countless drafts, been read by dozens of professional literary agents, had a Random House editor go over it with me, had almost every line and every word dissected over the course of sixteen years. Here I am, 41 years old, and I finally pushed my 16-year-old baby out to literary sea. I feel scared, disconnected, hopeful and proud.
I know I cannot control how things go, whether people read it or not, whether people like it, criticize it, etc. I have reached out to dozens of book reviewers. Some are reading it now. Many have not responded. Writing has always been the spiritual ship which has saved me, gotten me across the sea of childhood and adulthood and fear to the safety of the shore, to the cliffs of sacred islands. This book is a testament to my willingness to push past the boundaries of myself, to show the world my true nakedness and declare that I am alive and real.
Though I cannot control any of this, at least I can rest assured that my genuine self is being offered. That I am being true to who I am as a human being. That I am showing you The Real Me.
This is who I am, inside.