It is a time of great change. Starting in August I began the process of divorcing my ex-wife. This involved me moving back to my childhood home. At the start of this I was unemployed following work as a temporary therapist. In October I began a new job, giddy with the excitement of finally landing my first permanent therapist position. I wasn’t aware of it at the time but my giddiness was motivated by forces deeper than the ones surrounding my new employment. My car broke down shortly after starting my new job, a combination of the car’s health and my absentmindedness. I ended up purchasing a used car with a stereotypical salesperson, with all of the panache and none of the ethics, a decision that beget many headaches.

Despite all of my stressors and losses, I felt an abiding happiness as well as a growing self-confidence. The latter I used to my advantage in the pursuit of women. Although my presentation may give off a different impression, confidence with women has always been a struggle for me. I am increasingly realizing the pervasiveness of my sense of shame and low self-esteem. I have also become more aware of my overall social anxiety. These vampires of contentment and equanimity were kept at bay as I began my post-divorce pursuits. The first fell into my lap, a continuation of earlier, pre-divorce efforts on the part of the female suitor to initiate something intimate, to put a euphemistic spin on questionably adulterous intentions. My self-confidence skyrocketed after we fucked, the first time I did with someone other than my ex-wife in almost 10 years. Armed with this newfound confidence, I set my sights on a significantly older nurse, culminating in a frisky, passionate makeout session. I was feeling like the man, a novel and intoxicating feeling for me. Things seemed to become effortless. At one point a girl with her boyfriend in the bar smacked my ass knowing full well that her friend was pursuing me. I was feeling great.

Unfortunately I was feeling a little too great. The friend of the ass smacker questioned whether I was on an upper. I chalked up the presentation as being related to my newfound self-confidence and healed shame. A CPS call and a police-ordered psychiatric evaluation revealed that wasn’t the case. All of the stressors mentioned above, and my lack of effective coping, resulted in a manic episode. After enduring an already great deal of loss from my divorce, I was stripped of all that was familiar while being stabilized in the hospital for 11 days. I went from pondering the likelihood of a threesome with two beautiful women to walking around a small, locked unit without shoelaces.

The past 4 months have put me face to face with the reality of impermanence, the fact that all things change. I have been a fearful person throughout my life, afraid to take risks, ever-filled with self-limiting beliefs. I find, as do all humans, solace in the familiar. After just a semester as a college freshman in a new city, I transferred back to my hometown to be with my friends, as well as with the sights and smells that I knew well. I spent less than a week in medical school before dropping out. It is possible that, fueled by nostalgia and comfort, as well as a fear of the unknown and the alone, I married someone I never should have. People close to me questioned the feasibility of our relationship. My mother sensed and reflected an escalating anxiety and irritability as the wedding approached. I never took to heart her and others’ concerns.

Both during and following my hospitalization I was forced to reckon with Yalom’s ultimate concerns, or existential truths, namely death, isolation, meaninglessness and freedom. I perhaps most acutely came face to face with isolation, or the sense that we are alone in this universe. I think I relied, rather codependently, on my ex-wife to buffer me from that hard truth. I also feared having to come to terms with freedom, or the notion that we alone are responsible for directing our lives. Prior to my marriage, I shied away from this scary reality by allowing my mom to deal with many of my burdens and worries, limiting my self-efficacy. It is possible I replaced my mom with my wife. Those more psychoanalytically-inclined would probably agree.

Now that I am forced to be more self-sufficient, as well as live on my own, I am finding that I am rising to the occasion. The loneliness, loss and change has been difficult to bear at times. Under their weight I have retreated to familiar maladaptive coping mechanisms such as smoking copious amounts of pot along with nighttime binging. Yet despite these difficulties I have also felt periods of excitement, an excitement that comes from living authentically and directing one’s life for the better. I tried stand-up comedy after having wanted to since age 18. I signed up for a month’s long yoga class. I have been cooking more frequently, expanding my repertoire of culinary skills and dishes. I am using this blog to write in a way I haven’t before. I traveled alone to the Adirondacks, New York City and Toronto. I eagerly await my next adventure.

I am grateful for the losses I experienced and the change that resulted as I now have an opportunity to live more authentically. I have increased self-awareness of what it was like to live a constricted, fear-based life. I have the potently reinforcing excitement that comes with having taken risks and from putting myself out there.

I was raised in the stilted, unpassionate environment of Catholicism. It brought me together with peers for Sunday school over lifeless preaching and formal instruction. The environment was not at all conducive to fostering connection, real spiritual connection. The formal services were even worse. The closest thing to tapping into the tribal urge to worship, and to use movement as an aid, was slowly switching from seated to standing or from seated to kneeling. The hymns sung from the choir, comprised mostly of geriatrics, did not inspire worship in my 13 year old self, and I wager it did not in many others.

After attaining my confirmation to appease my Catholic-in-name-only mother, I left the church. I left behind practices designed to bring about community and moral education yet I left having experienced neither. What I picked up was some guilt and shame. In around 3^rd and 4^th grade, for our first confession, we were given a list of possible sins that we may have been guilty of committing, if we needed help in compiling our list of sins that were to present to the priest in the name of seeking salvation. I recall reading that my habit of watching porn and masturbating, no doubt stemming from a hypersexuality aimed at self-soothing a dysregulated mind, were sinful in the eyes of the Church. Rather than confess to the priest my shameful acts, made more shameful by the list of sins, I cocooned it around yet another layer of shame and stuck to the easy admissions of fighting with my sister and using profanity. I am sure I would’ve felt better had I confessed my acts to someone, anyone.

While not missing Catholicism, I do feel a yearning for community, for connection with others over a common purpose. I used to militantly decry the ills of organized religion but in my later years I’ve gotten more sympathetic, more open-minded. This sense of sympathy could be related to a creeping loneliness, or mounting social isolation. I am still very much a social being, but I am no longer in school, my mom no longer hosts my birthday party at Lasertron, I no longer play on a recreational hockey team. Great friends, the type of friends you have deep conversations with, soul-revealing stuff, have moved to follow their careers. There remains a lot of connection, no doubt, but there is also a yearning.

About two years ago, I found myself in the unlikely place of an inner city Baptist church for multicultural counseling class assignment. Notably, I was one of three white people in the crowd. Despite this racial and cultural divide, I experienced a resonance during the service that was quite unexpected. The ingredients were rapturous ones, a jolt from the boring conditioning I was subjected to in the Catholic tradition. There was the fiery and insightful preacher, a musical ensemble of an electric guitar, an electric keyboard and drums churning out soul-enlivening music, along with congregants breaking out into worship, however they saw fit. The experience was deeply cool to witness, a testament to the power of what humans can do when they come together. It was especially cool as, had it not been for the class assignment, I would’ve never mustered the courage, or the curiosity, to attend such a gathering.

I have often yearned that there are regular Buddhist gatherings to provide me, and others, with a sense of community and spiritual guidance. As organized religion is clearly ill-equipped to face these increasingly existential threats, clearly something else is needed. Yoga provides me with a way to attune to my body while attuning to others through shared breath and shared struggle, and it is especially great when the instructor suffuses spiritual elements. At the end of my yoga practice, there is a self-satisfaction, a calmness of being, and a camaraderie with all of those who toiled in poses alongside me. Afterward, when driving home, I can’t see how it’d be possible to experience road rage.

Klesha is a Buddhist term for “afflictive emotion,” or a state of being when one is under the grips of intense feelings, as if no longer grounded by rationality. Kleshas are believed to take the form of passion or attachment, aggression, ignorance or prejudice, pride and jealousy. The parallels between these and the seven deadly sins spring to mind. However, even in the mere framing of the states of being considered harmful by Christianity and Buddhism, one sees an emblematic difference. Christianity casts lust and pride as sins and thus those guilty of having committed the acts as sinners. Buddhism is all about relating to oneself with kindness and self-acceptance, which is why you will never heard the word sin, or be asked to enter into any relationship with a judgmental deity.

There have been many times in my life when I’ve been caught in the whirlwind of klesha. I am grateful for the opportunities to recognize these times, be it in the present through mindful attention or in the past through introspection. As a caveat, in keeping with the Buddhist tradition, and in trying to foster greater self-compassion and self-acceptance, I am going to refrain from problem-oriented language. I will instead say, in recognizing ones patterns of behavior that one feels causes suffering in one’s life, one has achieved a difficult and hugely important first step in modulating that behavior in the direction of well-being.

Passion or attachment are feelings that I am familiar with. I have told myself the story that I have a big appetite, a passionate lust for life. I’m an all-or-nothing, extremist type of person. I also have something of an anxiously preoccupied attachment style, so I attach to females quite strongly, sometimes with a bit of a desperation. This pattern has played out in my being something of a serial dater. It has played out in the fervor with which I have been utilizing dating apps in the aftermath of my break up. Fortunately, with respect to the latter, I have slowed down. I have been able to check myself, notice the creeping disorder, the feeling of spreading myself too thin, and have toned it down. I am proud of myself for that, for steering clear of the empty in the name of the meaningful. I remind myself that my times of greatest self-growth, self-understanding and authenticity were times when I was on my own.

Aggression is a klesha I am too familiar with. I have a deeply held need to be right and experience a deep sense of shame if I feel I am not or that I do not know something. Furthermore when I feel that my shame is activated by judgment, then the rage comes out. The shame-rage cycle is one that is well-documented in the clinical literature and it has also been well documented throughout my life. Fights with my ex were nasty affairs, with yelling, name-calling, endless deflections, you name it. They looked nothing like mindfulness, nothing like me keeping my cool. Had I sat with the emotion mindfully, perhaps I would’ve seen what emotion-focused therapists call the primary emotion, the one that hides underneath the secondary emotion of anger or rage. Perhaps I would have seen my feelings of hurt, of feeling small over being judged, of not feeling supported through my struggles that were being help under a magnifying glass.

Ignorance or prejudice I view as states of being opposite that of empathy. When ignorant of someone’s suffering, or someone’s story, one is likely to act prejudicially. I have noticed that I get caught up in quite a bit of ignorance and prejudice when relating to my parents. I reflect back on childhood issues, on my more than a couple adverse childhood experiences, and rile myself up with feeling blame toward my parents. On the one hand these feelings of anger are righteous, yet they must be channeled into a gentle, open hearted dialogue if any productive conversation is to happen. When I am enveloped in my own narcissistic tale of suffering, I lose sight of the fact, or become ignorant to, my parents as human beings. It is as if they become mere perpetrators of my suffering, of my substance use, of my disorder, of my relationship woes. And that is no place to start a conversation.

On the flip side of narcissism is typically a crippling sense of shame, and the narcissism becomes a sort of body armor to protect against that excruciating state of being. While I feel fortunate to not be a full-fledged narcissist, I know that my shame has bred a know-it-all, quick-to-debate occasional pain in the ass of a human being. So yes, pride is something that I am familiar with. It was something I used to suffer from much more often. I felt a compulsion to assert my point of view to anyone who would hear it, and even those who wouldn’t, and this was off-putting and alienating. Once I became more comfortable in my own skin, that tendency to spew, opinions, jokes, observations, became a lot less apparent.

The last one is jealousy, perhaps the least comfortable feeling of this list. In my experience, jealousy was generated by an extreme form of possessiveness that both my ex and I shared for one another. This manifested in our having to abide by the Mike Pence rule, or the policy of not being able to get together with someone of the opposite sex, for any reason, no matter how innocuous or platonic. To say it was stifling would be a major understatement. I was not guiltless in erecting these relational shackles. I clung desperately to my ex, to the relationship and what it represented to the world, and I relied on it, often times desperately. And the desperation with which I relied was directly related to the jealousy I felt, because to cleave the bond would be too threatening, too difficult. Thankfully I am now free, free to better attune to my own wants and needs.

The movie Joker and the show Haunting of Hill House both exist within a world other than realism, yet there are very real elements throughout. There are not many times when it is necessary to suspend disbelief when watching either, which is why they’re both haunting. What they do so effectively is show how the thread of tragedy, when woven into one’s early life, can weave into future tragedy. The tragedy can take many different forms. On one end of the spectrum is the monstrous, murderous, sociopathic Joker, his life carved out in large part by a brutally neglectful, severely mentally ill mother. On the other end, the less antisocial end, we see in Hill House early childhood afflictions leading to later suffering, be it in the form of addiction or suicide.  

I consider both of these works of art sort of origin stories of suffering. They both challenge the viewer to contemplate how people evolve into who they are at any given time. When one sees the childhood abuse suffered by the Joker, coupled with his endless bullying, his murderous impulses become more explicable, human even. When in Hill House, one sees the actual demons inflict the minds of the children, the demons that Luke chases away with heroin is cast in a more sympathetic light. He’s not just a junkie, he is a human trying to avoid the pain from his horrific traumas.   

Origin stories are important because they help to humanize. When it is most challenging, when we are confronted with those we wish to deem monstrous, or subhuman, that is when we most need to ponder the possibilities of what happened, of what environment gave rise to the abhorrent. The statistical link between future perpetrators and former victims of pedophilia is well documented. For me, it is much more difficult to imagine a pedophile as the scourge of society when imagining him as a victim of abuse. An apt quote, one that I found early in my mental health counseling education, is a French proverb, “To understand all is to forgive all.” Everyone is capable of being understood if curiosity guides and abides.

I feel as if I am capable of offering that charity of spirit, the nonjudgment, because of the life I have led and the charity I hope to receive from others. I am a good person who has committed shameful and regrettable acts. I could point you in the direction of my role models, my parent’s divorce, my sister’s addiction, a permissive mother, to highlight the fact that I don’t just call a girl a bitch for the hell of it. That I haven’t driven while deeper under the influence than I should have. These are lesser acts compared to what others have done. All people, perpetrators of all acts, deserve empathy and compassion.

I am high as I write this yet my relationship with pot is a conflicted one. I am by no means one of those stoners who hail it as an unmitigated good. I do not think the plant a physical manifestation of God, or the spirit of the universe. Rather, I think it’s a damn fun thing to ingest. For me when the THC enters my blood stream it’s like I’ve just put on an immersive virtual reality kit wherein everything is the same, just a little bit better. Sometimes a lot a bit better. Emotions are felt more intensely and it seems like the threshold for emotional activation is lower. In other words, sadness can be felt more often and more intensely, yet laughter can too. This later emotion is the one I strive for often in my personal life but with pot, the laughter finds you.

It’s not just that all sorts of inanity suddenly become funny. Sure, I do tend to laugh at dumb shit that I wouldn’t when high. But it’s also the case that pot allows the brain to make connections, usually to some degree tangential that can give rise to the creation of novel and truly funny jokes. Hell, it can allow for the creation of truly interesting anything. I have utilized pot when writing for pleasure as well as when writing stand-up comedy. I am by no means a creative type whose output should be judged as anything good, but it is this very point that I wish to underscore. I am not usually a creative type, and there are some sort of defenses that pot helps to dismantle, or it activates something else entirely, perhaps in tandem, which allows me to put finger to keyboard and pen to pad.

But it’s also unquestionably the case that I have used pot too frequently. Yet even during those phases I often feel conflicted, wanting to abstain for a period, take a tolerance break, engage with life clearly, all the while viscerally feeling the Siren call of the bowl. It’s clearly a temptation much stronger for myself than for others. There are times when I am smoking all the time, engaging in risky shit or just plain stupid shit. But why?

For me it has become clear that I am a shame-prone person and from that I feel a great deal of self-consciousness. Pot can overwhelm one’s sense of self-consciousness by shining a magnifying glass on parts of self that are unexamined, perhaps out of fear. This is a well-documented phenomenon. Although by no means fully examined, I consider myself a fairly examined person, aided by introspective coursework in mental health counseling, my own therapy, reading and journaling, and just being a deeply curious person in general. Oh, and pot has helped in that pursuit, too. But I think that because I am sufficiently examined, whatever that means, that pot doesn’t trigger the self-consciousness and paranoia in me as it does so many. Instead, it diminished my shame-proneness, allowing me to more fully be myself.

What’s nice is that I am noticing that the behaviors I engage in while high are starting to sync up rather completely with my sober behaviors. It feels as if I am starting to feel comfortable in my own skin in a way that’s new for me. The divorce has helped this, kicking me out into the land of singlehood, but more importantly into the land of freedom in being alone. I don’t have another person against which to check my emerging, or unveiling, sense of self, saving me from judgment, real or imagined. As this process unfolds, I feel good, yet I still like smoking up. Perhaps too much.

Dr. Christopher Ryan, in a book he co-wrote with his wife, Cacilda Jetha, Sex at Dawn, advances that humans, at their uncorrupted core, are nonmonogamous. Or rather, that monogamy is really fucking tough. He uses comparative primatology research into Bonobos to bolster his case, along with research on past and present hunter gatherer tribes that coexist nonmonogamously. Imbedded in the argument is the idea that the agricultural revolution, with its introduction of accumulated resources and wealth, brought about a monogamy revolution. This was done for reasons too numerous to detail, but the gist was that kinship, through marriage and giving birth, created a vehicle for the passing of the resources.

I wonder at my own propensities toward nonmonogamy. When I was married I noticed that my interest in cuckold porn ramped up. In our codependent dynamic, there was a great deal of bilateral jealousy, a bit more so on her end but I was definite prone to jealous, possessive thinking. In attempting to analyze my desire to tune into a black guy having sex with a white girl while her white husband looks on, I thought that it may have been a salve for my jealousy. A way for me overcome my jealous fears, through a sort of exposure therapy, aided by a pleasurable orgasm at the end.

But the jealousy antidote would certainly not tell the full story. I, for reasons that may be fleshed out at a different time, am a natural flirt, so much so that I’ve provided myself with the rationalizing belief that flirtation is the spice of life. For me, it really is though. I am all for connection, all kinds at all times. I never cheated but boy did I come close. I racked up my fair share of cheating-adjacent experiences. Strip clubs, a sexting exchange, kisses on the lips of friends, firing up Tinder on my honeymoon after going dancing, sans ring. I am not proud of all these behaviors. They were done surreptitiously, shrouded by shame. Perhaps they were made sweeter by their taboo nature. Or perhaps they were desperate attempts to flee an arrangement I was unhappy in.

So the question is, is it in my nature to be nonmonogamous, to actually try to live out that sort of lifestyle, or is it something that will exist in the realm of fantasy, perhaps played out with a partner in lesser ways. I am presently resisting the urge to drill the answer down to a label or a succinct phrase. At the end of the day, as the Buddhists would recognize, it’s a process and there is only the present moment. Ultimately, I do not know what the future will bring and uncertainty is threatening to my anxious mind but it’s also a freedom. It is a freedom free from the constraints of labels and of expectations. We all want to be free.

The lion, in Shambhala Buddhism, and the Tibetan tradition more broadly, represents one’s path to mindfulness and a present awareness of one’s immediate environment. The lion must be ever aware, to avoid predation and to vanquish prey. But I am out of the predation cycle in the traditional sense. My current predators are ethanol and whatever the hell are in those Juul pods.  My predators are vehicles of slow death but also vehicles of escape, vehicles to what in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is referred to as experiential avoidance. One could say that this is the antithesis of mindfulness. Perhaps it is the state of being the hyena, a scavenger.

I was less the lion and much more the hyena when I felt trapped in an unhappy marriage. In the times of deepest unhappiness, with her, with us, with myself mostly I now realize, I acted very unlionly. When yet another fight reached its fever pitch, which for me was the familiar territory of unregulated anger and name-calling, and which for her became an increasingly familiar land, I was quick to flee. I could sense the familiar rugged road we had traveled down many times before and just wanted to say fuck it, I’m out.

It helped that I always had my friends, a collection of three of them at a shared apartment in particular, to take me in, smoke me up and feed me cereal. It was like my safe haven from the biggest and most constant threat of my environment, my doomed relationship. The gazelle found safety in a perch with its pack. I couldn’t be aware of that aspect of my life because to be aware of it would’ve meant its demise. And clearly, for some reason, despite the toll it was taking on me, I just had to stay in. Call it what you will, comfort, familiarity, companionship. Perhaps it was my desire to show the world I could be stable, that I could be married. It could have been all of those things. But an uglier word for what it also could have been is codependency.

Escapist, or self-soothing, behaviors mentioned above, binging, using substances, and what wasn’t mentioned, masturbation, were familiar to me, conditioned responses used in times of relational threat. Times in the past such as my parents’ codependency and messy divorce, as well as my sister’s heroin addiction. There were others, too. In hindsight it’s almost baffling to reflect on the nights I went to a mountain to go snowboarding by myself. It was freedom, free from the constant source of judgment I perceived from my wife, free to be me. I have my own shame, quite a great deal of it, but no doubt was the shame intensified by our unhappy arrangement.

It’s too bad. We both wanted so desperately for it to work. Clearly too desperately. But it doesn’t mean that there weren’t glimpses of happiness, even greatness. Junot Diaz writes of a relationship, “Our relationship wasn’t the sun, the moon, and the stars, but it wasn’t bullshit, either.” There are times when you just have to defer to better writers.

Now that I am in a perpetual state of freedom, one that does not require a trip to the mountains, I am feeling more and more like the lion. It is easier to be me because I am learning self-acceptance. I am not allowing myself to go back into the box from whence I came, because in that place I wasn’t myself, and I was ashamed of aspects of myself. That’s a dark, uncomfortable place to be. It’s good to be out.

Putting in our headphones, it was as if Allison and I began an ongoing secret in the midst of bustling Rome. We had each other, but we also had Rick Steve’s calming voice pumping into our ears, infusing the city with another layer of wonder, that of history. I am prone to feeling like I am missing out, so setting out on a self-guided tour with passionate and knowledgeable and occasionally insightful Rick helped me to feel like I wasn’t.

I am also fond of alcohol. And let me tell you what a beauty the streets of Rome were in that regard. In virtually every public square and almost every street corner were carts selling cheap offerings. For 1.5 euro you had in your hand the ever fun Peroni. And the best thing of all is that you were able to freely consume in the streets and unsurprisingly I didn’t witness any shameful drunkenness on display. America, the land of the free, isn’t always so free. The beer tastes much like any other green-bottled skunked offering but the pairing of Peroni and the splendor of Italy will forever enshrine that beer as one of my favorites. Having the ability to go on a nostalgia ride to a magical time, through food, drink or art even, is a beautiful thing.

We started in the Campo dei Fiori, a former happening marketplace in Roman times, now a site littered with those engaged mostly in restaurant imbibing, comingling strolling tourists and locals, and study abroad students gathered around the statue with many places to perch, Giordano Bruno. The kinship that I felt with Bruno was more in the vein of his costly free thinking and his willingness to speak truth to power. I say in the vein because my writing a letter to my Sunday school priest at age 15 telling him that I was an atheist pales in comparison to Bruno’s contributions.

Bruno was a 16^th century free thinking polymath, known mainly for his ideas in cosmology, and made infamous by his heretical run-ins with the church. He had a showdown with the Vatican in Rome and ultimately fled the city for his life. I spent a mere semester away from my hometown, so again the analogy breaks down. Contemporary Romans, in an act of fuck you to the Papacy, erected the statue of Bruno around the turn of the century and angled it so that his cloaked personage faced the Vatican head on.

The symbolism of that act is quite clear, with the Romans saying, we will not kowtow to you and the decrees you make in your palace of priceless riches. Rick Steves informed Allison and me that the contemporary Romans have been long known for their subversion and anti-authority impulses, hence why Rome is the birthplace to the majority of Italian comedians. Those in Milan might be too preoccupied with what to wear on stage to issue good comedy.

We drank our Peronis as we drank in the sights, sounds and history. She always drank a bit less than me, in all those respects. She did not have as big of an appetite for intoxicants, allegedly because it made her tired, but plainly because she didn’t like to nearly as much as I did. It was a truth that I fought in the relationship for too long. And she certainly wasn’t as into the immersive sort of travel that I wanted to partake in.

That last part was abundantly clear yet it was a reality that I suspect we both obscured. I in the servicing of pretending that it was not in my nature to want to meet locals and fellow travelers. She in the name of having to categorize me into a place that fit with her expectations, extensions of me or her ideals. She saw the glee with which I became acquainted with the spliff-smoking, St. Petersburg duo of Valiery and Kostas while watching the sunset in Riomaggiore. She needed me to be there, by her side, with my attention set on her and the sunset. I needed her to be there, with me, 4^th in the joint rotation. She wanted small and I wanted big.

I’m a mental health counselor who has a lot to say. As our role requires us to have a sort of anonymity with our clients, with therapeutic judiciousness in self-disclosures, I have found that I have needed outlets elsewhere. Further, I’ve noticed that counselors tend to be free spirits, and if anyone is like me, they find the professional world stifling as fuck. I’ve taken to the stage to do stand up comedy and I’ve taken to here to here to write my vulnerable, human experiences. This is for me.