Some Positivity For Once

Darkness Must be Neutralized (Sometimes) With Light

Photo by Rohan Makhecha on Unsplash

On both of my substacks—Sincere American Writing being the second—I tend to write from a dark perspective. Just the other day a friend and I were talking on the phone about how “happy” is not a normal state for me. And that’s true. I’m simply not built that way psychologically. One of those terminally “positive” and “happy” people you see perennially smiling I am not. This is, I believe, a mix of nature, nurture and my organic weird self.

I told this friend—and I’ve told my wife many times—that basic day-to-day life is more challenging for me than for most people. The daily sludge of being alive wrecks me in a certain way. The sordid routine of life. Boring, middleclass “bourgeois” life. But also just doing normal things like having to call the IRS, having to call Pacific Gas & Electric (both of which I recently had to do). For most people these are annoying but easy transactions. For me, they are spiritually exhausting.

My parents, I must say, are at least partially “to blame.” I grew up on a steady diet of coddling, being given basically everything I needed and wanted and then some. Despite the fact that I started my first job at the tender age of 14 (clearing trails in the mountains of Ojai, where I grew up), I nevertheless never had that economic pressure that my working-class friends had for real. In other words: I was privileged.

But it’s not all my parents. It’s also just who I am. Depression and alcoholism run deep in my family, and on both sides. There are probably a half dozen suicide attempts entangled in the history of my family and that includes younger versions of both my parents. (Never myself, technically, though you could argue persuasively that my decade of hardcore blackout drinking was a slow-suicide attempt.)

As a writer—dare I say an artist—there seems to be a constantly low metaphysical/spiritual gas-tank for me. In other words, as I said to my wife and my friend: No matter what is going on in my life at any given moment, a sort of low-level, consistent depression seems to always be there. It ebbs and flows but it never truly, completely ever goes away entirely. This is why, when my wife comes home after a long work day and I’ve just been diddling around all day writing, emailing, reading, and doing light chores around the house, I am somehow nevertheless exhausted. It’s not physical exhaustion; it’s emotional.

Just being me often feels draining. Sometimes I feel like an outsider within my own body and mind, like I’m a subgroup within my own weird existence. Someone seeing myself from outside myself, as it were. I remember once attending at AA 12-step meeting in Oakland, California, and a woman in her thirties said more or less the same thing about her exhaustion: She said that the normal things most people did were really tiring and hard for her. I relate. So there could be a component here, also, of alcoholism.

I think there’s also the fact that being a sensitive, deep-thinking artist—especially while living in the cultural desert that is Lompoc—makes everything tougher in the sense that I spend a lot of time inside my head, and I have a deep, rich inner life, which is great for writing (especially fiction) but often bad for reality. I marvel at how my wife can just get up every day at 4:30, 5am and exercise, do her morning routine, pay bills, and then go to work, like clockwork at 7:30am each morning. Me? I need time. And silence. And caffeine. And reading. It takes a whole lot more for me to prepare for Life.

And yet, of course, I have to also see objectively how silly—in many ways—my statements are/must seem. I am very lucky, on so many levels. Starting from the outside: I am an American citizen. Think about all the ravaged third-world countries I could have been born into. War-ravaged nations like Jordan or Pakistan or Gaza or Ukraine. I live in one of the wealthiest, most free nations on Earth. (Even if we do have problems.) And then I was born and have lived most of my life in California, one of the most profoundly beautiful states in the country (and yes, problematic and expensive in myriad ways). And then coastal California. I grew up with class-privilege (and white) with two parents who, far from perfect, were nonetheless good, solid people.

Now, I have a beautiful, loving wife, four animals, time to write and read as I please. I own a home. We’re finally moving the ball in terms of moving to Spain. (We’re thinking Madrid now.) I feel safe. I am 41 and physically healthy. I have had opportunities aplenty. I got to live in New York City for 2.3 years, which, though shorter than I’d hoped (pandemic, Dad’s cancer), had always been my dream.

I’m not one to be solely or overly objective and to casually sweep away one’s emotional landscape. Therefore, I honor my own emotional fears, terrors, worries and frustrations. All I’m saying is that, when you really take a look: I am very damn lucky. I have all the necessities, all the requirements for success. I even now have a book published. All arrows point toward a bright future.

So, in the end, perhaps smiling a little wouldn’t be the worst thing that ever happened. No, I probably will never be that terminally optimistic guy, happy and grinning dumbly at everything for no reason. Frankly, I’m too deep, too smart, and too sensitive for that. But I also can recognize that all darkness makes Jack a dull boy and is draining and unsustainable. This is another way of me saying to myself: Smile, kid; life isn’t that bad. In fact, life in many ways is pretty damn good.

Gratitude for what we have is something I learned about in AA. I have never utilized this tool often enough. But I grasp why it’s important. It helps one see through the thick fog of one’s own fears and insecurities, seeing beyond their own egos to something bigger, wilder, more transcendent.

I think that “thing” is letting go, accepting the ultimate truth of one’s existence: Everything is temporary. Ephemeral. We’re born, we live, we grow old, and we die. (Or we die suddenly when we least expect it.) The most important point here, I think, is to acknowledge that life is often inherently unfair, and sometimes wonderfully, gorgeously warm and loving, and that you have to take the ups and the downs, the goods and the bads, and you have to accept yourself as you are and other people as they are.

Accepting myself as I am and others as they are: This is one of my biggest, most fundamental struggles in life. I’m well aware of my own flaws, my own self-awareness and lack thereof, my own Manhattan-sized ego, my own shades of megalomania, my own writerly ambition, my own selfish drive. I know it. I see it. I struggle with and against it often.

Still, I know who and what I am. I am not bad. Nor am I all good. I am a complex, warped, wounded, intense human being, like most of us, who contains multitudes within me, multifaceted traits. Long ago I learned one of the toughest truths in life: There’s always someone else who has already done it, and/or who can probably do it better, whatever “it” is for you. Such is the nature of reality. In my experience we find ourselves not by trying to be “happy,” nor by pretending to be sad or depressed, but by simply sighing, lowering one’s balled fists, and saying, Yeah. This one life. Right here.

Now.