I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. Wait, that’s not quite right. Driving by his van every day has got me thinking about myself is what I really mean.

We live these lives that are so stressed out. We have these pressures and obligations and burdens and responsibilities but the truth is that these are things we build ourselves. Bills, appointments, whatever. We think that it is these things that cause us so much stress, but we could easily walk away from all of them. That guy in the van doesn’t have a mortgage payment or five conference calls in one day or a hot tub repair guy who doesn’t return phone calls.

But I don’t think the answer is to be the guy in the van. Then we’d have an entirely new set of stressors. Obviously.

Life is like a see-saw. The obligations and responsibilities make it possible to sit with friends and have a bottle of wine and watch the sunset, to fly to Brazil and stand under Christ the Redeemer. The key, as always, is balance.

She said what she always says about how change is a process and I may not know the end, I only know what’s next. But she also said that it sounded like I was trying to avoid getting irritated when perhaps it was perfectly reasonable that I was irritated. And then we dove into the analytical waters of learned behavior and past coping skills needed for survival (perhaps no longer needed) around keeping emotions hidden and so on with the childhood angst.

Anyway. I said I would work on having feelings, but she told me that my homework was that I don’t have homework. So, there’s a conundrum.

Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something. Last week I was in despair about what to do with my life WHILE I WAS WALKING IN THE SUN ON A BEAUTIFUL BEACH. And not only did I have no problems that day, but it was actually particularly good.

In my last entry, I was writing about how just finding a way to be happy with my current situation used to be the wrong answer, but that doesn’t mean it’s always the wrong answer. And maybe it’s not about being satisfied and accepting of everything around you, but it’s about recognizing and appreciating those parts of your life that in fact are pretty great. But in my typical binary fashion, I can’t seem to wrap my head around that.

So maybe what I should do is this: any time I get irritated and angry and disgruntled and mean, I should stop and make a list of all of the good things (about that situation particularly, if I can find any). For instance, when I get to the airport, I hate everyone because airports are terrible and all of our personal freedoms are taken away, and you are at the whim of the airline employees, and then you have to go really high up in the sky in a claustrophobic tube and try not to fall thousands of feet and die.

But I could look at things differently. I get to travel somewhere. Not everyone gets to do that. I might even be going somewhere warm. And so on.

I thought of this today as I became irrationally angry at something that didn’t even matter. And yet it was impacting my entire day and in fact, making me further question my current career path. Because this one thing made me angry, I should completely change careers as not to have to encounter it anymore? It’s possible I take things to extremes.

I want to make a list of everything that’s good.

Only there’s no time. There’s never any time. And I’m back to where I started, wondering how I got here. Wondering how to get to a place where I don’t feel behind with everything all of the time. Tired, so tired of hearing myself wonder how to get that.

And so it goes like that.

I’ve been reading the archives here and the patterns are frustrating. Looking back, I thought the problem was circumstance, so I jumped off the speeding train. Only the lack of time, the crushing weight, the sinking realization I had to do everything all of the time, it all followed right behind me. Then, I thought maybe the problem was my response to circumstance, so I worked hard to change my reactions. And again. And yet. These things help, but now I wonder if what I really need to learn to do is change my perception. Appreciate the good things.

It’s tricky. In some ways, that’s what got me into the worst of it all — I was so focused on pleasing everyone else but me that I thought what I wanted didn’t matter. I thought the answer was to be happy where I was, when where I was would never make me happy.

Our fears and hopes and reactions are often based on past experiences, not what’s in front of us now. Sometimes, that serves us very well. Other times, not at all. How can we know which time is which?

When I escaped to the desert, one of the counselors there said I had trouble with discernment. I don’t trust anything, don’t count on anything, because when I have, I’ve been let down. She said it wasn’t that nothing can be trusted, but that I had been trusting the wrong things, the wrong people. Maybe.

It always seems like all or nothing, but it never is. It’s just what comes next.

Apparently it’s not my responsibility to solve the problems of the entire world. Who knew? This is a fortunate turn of events, since as it happens, I’m not actually able to solve the problems of the entire world. It’s weird how I realized long ago that I can’t be my mom’s savior, but it’s seemed perfectly logical to try and be the savior for people I don’t even know.

Anyway, that’s new.

I was talking to my therapist today about this new perspective and mentioned how the reason I started a company was not because I wanted to run a company or had some grand vision, but because people kept contacting me asking me for something that didn’t exist (as far as I knew) and since I knew I could create it, it didn’t cross my mind that I had any course of action open to me than to do so. Which is not to say I didn’t get anything out of it. That’s one of the harder parts of all this, of course. We keep doing these things because they work on some level, even if in other ways they don’t work at all. (See for instance: transformative event for the parts that don’t work quite so well.)

So once again, I rethink everything I ever knew. And all of the definitive statements I’ve ever made here might not always be true after all.

So many things remain undone.

I’ve been doing all of the healthy recommendations to move past debilitating depression and anxiety: I’ve seen medical doctors and have had batteries of tests; I’ve gone away for a relaxing technology-free break; I take walks; I practice breathing; I eat flax seed and whole grain bread and vegetables; I take herbs; I burn aromatherapy oil; I lift weights; I sleep in; I see a psychologist; I take Xanax. And yet.

Tonight, I’ve decided to try drinking. If nothing else, surely it will help with the insomnia. Alcohol has fewer calories than ice cream or chocolate, so I figure it will look less glaring on the daily log where I keep careful track of my nutritional intake, as part of the set of healthy recommendations I am following to try and get better. I admit (here, I mean, not to the nutrition diary) I ate an entire chocolate bar a few days ago and neglected to write it down. I told a friend about it. “One of those little mini candy bars?” she asked. No. An entire large chocolate bar. (For those unfamiliar with tracking every nutritional data point, a entire chocolate bar has around 500 calories and 40 grams of fat, around one-third the suggested daily intake of calories, and just about the entire daily intake of fat for someone such as myself for an entire day.)

I feel like a jerk. I have so much more than so many. And yet all I can do is complain. A friend said I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. That maybe I have the foundation and the tip of Maslow’s hierarcharcy of needs, but I’m missing the middle. Can you have self-actualization without love, belonging, and safety? And from a logical perspective, I really have safety nailed down too. I guess I just don’t operate as though I do.

Every night, I think: tomorrow I will have the energy to do that. (That being everything from making a five minute phone call to completing a two week project.) And yet I don’t. And part of the problem is that I have no sense of perspective, no depth perception, no way to know who to trust, what to believe. Every step is into the unknown, into darkness, no way to know if I’ll land on solid ground or fall into the abyss.

The first way involves introducing small changes that you repeat over time until they become habits. The only way for something to stick, one hears, is to start small, one change at a time. Only if what you’re looking to do is make lots of really big changes, that’s not really the advice you want to hear. Admittedly, the reaction to such advice doesn’t make much sense, which is to not make any changes at all. After all, if you’d started making those small changes one by one a year ago, you might have an entirely different life by now.

But still, when one is trapped in fear and desperation, the idea of somehow ignoring all of that and going about your day, slowly becoming untrapped, undesperate, and no longer paralyzed by anxiety and soul-crushing sadness doesn’t always sound like a fun option.

The second way involves having some transformative event that completely changes one’s life a la the Biblical Road to Damascus transformation of Saul to Paul. You hear about these types of events all the time: “it changed my life”, someone might say, and they don’t mean that in the way that everyone’s life changes all of the time with everything we do, but rather that they went from one kind of life to a different kind of life. I had hoped that a near-death experience would have come complete with a life exchange silver lining, but you can’t get everything you wish for.

Perhaps fortunately, a complete mental breakdown may be all that a girl needs, so I’ve been exploring that possibility. I had been toying with the idea of having myself (hopefully temporarily) committed to an institution whose sole goal it is to provide transformative events through serious medical treatment, but I’ve since discovered one of those more peaceful (by which I mean luxurious, by which I mean expensive) locations that celebrities retreat to due to “exhaustion”. And now that I have taken enough Xanax, I even feel stable enough to book into the non-clinic portion of said location (by which I mean, the section that doesn’t have admittance rules banning sharp objects).

Will it really help? I have no idea. The mental breakdown itself is already dramatically changing my behavior. “You’re saying no to things. That’s great!” says my breakdown-triggered newly appointed twice-a-week psychologist. It’s not the result of the efforts of something I’m trying to do, I explain. I mentally have no ability to add anything else. I’ve become completely non-functional. I have no choice but to say no. She suggests I look at things differently. I’m still meeting deadlines, finishing projects, running a company. I finished the manuscript for the new edition of my book. I’m going to the gym. I may not be as functional as I’m used to, but I’m functioning.

I think of all of the things I haven’t done. Everything I’m completely blocking from my mind because it’s the only way I can function at all. The mornings I need a Xanax to get out of bed because I wake up mid-panic attack. The times I’ve been unable to move from the couch. For hours. How I went to bed last night at 8pm and slept for 12 hours, waking up only for the nightmares. That doesn’t feel like functioning to me.

So maybe that’s the transformative event. I can’t go on feeling like this. Insanity, after all, it doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So if I want to end up feeling differently than this, I will have to do something other than what I’ve been doing (by which I mean for my entire life).

Backstory: Perhaps ironically, only days earlier I was at a book event, where bookish people walked around and eyed us author types as one might evaluate lobsters at one of those pick-your-own seafood places. We (the authors) smiled behind our books in likely the opposite fashion of said lobsters (pick me! pick me!) and tried to helpfully answer questions from reluctant potential buyers in some way other than “yes, I can see that $25 is a steep price to pay for that year I spent pouring my heart and soul into the words on those pages. Totally reasonable point.”

I had it easier than the memoir writers, of course. I was exceedingly impressed they didn’t say that to each and every person who flipped through their book’s pages dismissively. After all, business books have little detail of personal torment and sorrow. Although I hope my fellow writers were in turn impressed that I didn’t respond to the person who asked if she would actually learn anything from my book or if it was all stuff she already knew with “I’m not sure. Show me your book and let’s compare.”

But the point is that every so often, we lobsters would escape our tanks. On the plane the night before, I had read one of the memoir-style books: this one about a fast-paced TV news producer who had a brain hemorrhage and nearly died, and then took stock of his life and made some changes. I was chatting with him about the experience and he told me that how you figure out what’s important is what you think about in those moments when you truly think you’re going to die. That it’s not if they got the right person booked on the show that day. It’s your family. Your spouse. Your children.

Well, fuck you. I don’t have those things, so what the hell can I do about that? Only I only said that to him in my head. He was very nice, actually.

In any case, as it turned out, I had cause to try out this theory less than a week later, while on a tiny plane with my seven-year old niece. After the worst turbulence I’ve ever experienced (context: I have been on over 90 flights this year alone), things suddenly took a turn for the worse. The plane began plummeting out of control, everything not tied down flew through the air (for instance: passengers), everyone was screaming. It was your ordinary, every day, basic plane crash scene from a movie. Or perhaps the pilot episode of Lost.

After several hours (possibly this was actually less than a minute, but I’m pretty sure it was about three hours), the pilot seemed to regain control of the plane and we went back to the much calmer state of the worst turbulence I’ve ever experienced. He then came on to apologize. A lot. And reassure us that we would be landing soon. No really.

In those moments — not the actual I’m-going-to-die-we’re-crashing moments — but the ones just after, with the bracing that the really actual death was likely coming any moment, a part of me tried to focus. What did I think about when I knew I was dying? Is that a clue as to the meaning of my life?

This is what I thought: “Oh my fucking God. I cannot believe I’m going to fucking die right now in a plane crash.” Which isn’t all that helpful in life focus other than it supports my theory that I don’t really want to die. My post-crashing moment thoughts were about my sister and about how sad she would be that her daughter died in a plane crash. So, I guess I’m not entirely selfish.

My third set of thoughts (after the “fuck I’m going to die” and “my poor sister” ones) weren’t helpful either, to the extent that I can’t even really write about them. They were all self-pity and woe is me and wishing for things that don’t exist. (Despite what people tell you, your dreams can’t always come true. Dreaming for a pet unicorn that takes you on rides to your friend the leprechaun’s house won’t actually get you very far, sadly.)

My point is that I didn’t gain any new life insights from my near-death experience and I’m kind of mad about that because if you almost die, shouldn’t you get something positive out of it? All in all, I guess I can’t really recommend this method for seeking clarity. In case you were considering it.

1) I’m too old (that is, smart) to believe in the white horse, in Lloyd Dobler holding the boom box in the rain, in that feeling that someone who I only want wants only me.

Stupid girl, I should have known, I should have known.

2) Love is the most important thing in life.

Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.

The latter quote from the Hyperion series (the former, of course, from the font of wisdom Taylor Swift).

I was talking to someone about Hyperion’s message that love is like gravity and he said that that was a perspective I likely didn’t agree with. But maybe he’s wrong about that.

Love isn’t something that you can plan; the best one can do is hope. And what’s the point of that? Except Gandhi said, “It is the law of love that rules mankind. It gives me ineffable joy to go on trying to prove that.”

So no wonder I avoid it. The most important thing in life. And there’s nothing one can do to reach it except wait and hope.

I’m trying to tell you something about my life…

I sailed my ship of safety till I sank it…

I went in seeking clarity…

The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.

This is the lesson I keep learning over and over again my entire life. I can’t know it all. I can’t control it all. I have no idea what’s going to happen next. But sometimes, sometimes. Couldn’t I just have some assurance, even just a little?

I know, I don’t even like the Beatles, but I wonder sometimes: “there will be answer, let it be”. Is that a statement or a plea? I repeat it to remind myself: Let it be. There will be an answer. Even though there’s not an answer right now. Even though the road is so dark and I can’t see at all into the blackness.

When all I want is to be enough, even then. Let it be.