mental health

Seeking Quiet- Mental Health, Meditation, and How Phillip Marlowe Saved My Life

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CW: Talk about suicide, suicidal ideation, and depression.

Eight months ago, alone at work with a heavy to-do list and late in the afternoon, I wanted to end my life.

I was beyond exhausted and frustrated. It was shortly after Passover and I felt lonely, lost, and hopeless. I felt like my career was at a dead end, and I was burning myself out in an increasingly thankless, stressful, and miserable job for no gain. I was drinking too much. I was taking too much caffeine. My relationships with my family were suffering. I felt resentful of everything and everyone.

All my coping mechanisms that had carried me through so much- meditation, exercise, reading, even writing- were failing me. I was sore and exhausted and bored with exercise. My meditation was rote routine and fruitless. Reading was still good, but I had lost the ability to calm down enough to read a paperback. Audiobooks were just entertaining noise in my ears. I was always stressed about the next shift, the next week, the next month, and what new nightmares would be coming down the chute that I would- inevitably- have to handle.

I never had a plan for how I would off myself, but I did debate how to take care of Emily beforehand. How could I quietly empty my bank account into hers to cover as many expenses as possible? How could I redirect bills? Farther and farther, deeper and deeper as I stared into an abyss of tart shells and almond paste.

Then I thought “What the actual fuck am I doing? This is fucked up. I need to pull out of this fast. I need to put something else in my brain.” Fortunately, I had just finished downloading a new Raymond Chandler mystery novel on Libby. I plugged in headphones and finished my shift to the sound of Phillip Marlowe getting his ass kicked by Los Angeles mobsters.

The nadir of my mental health at that point took about ten minutes. I have been an EMT. I have been in car accidents, lost patients, been actively threatened and assaulted by patients, tended to grotesquely injured people, some of whom didn’t survive.

This was the most scared I have ever been in my professional life… and it was because my mind, body, and heart just couldn’t take it anymore.

A pair of bare feet on a narrow plank. Either side indicates the person is standing at a great height.
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Shadow Work- Doing Your Side Work in the Dark

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Therapy has a bit of a misnomer in people’s minds. We tend to go to therapists and psychologists looking for “cures.” That’s how it works with other health fields, right? If I have a toothache and go to the dentist, I expect the dentist to drill, clean, fill, or whatever else is needed so that I no longer have a toothache at the end.

Therapists don’t work like that though. There is no “curing” mental illness. Instead, care and therapy is directed toward pathology- figuring out how and why a person becomes ill- and managing it to make the experience of that illness less disruptive to daily life. Medication and psychopharmacology is one option where the illness is severe enough that the pathology indicates a chemical imbalance in the brain. “Talk therapy,” what most of us think of when it comes to sitting down with a psychologist, is more like giving people the tools they need in order to piece together their own problems.

Therapists act more like a trail guide than a doctor, giving us the tools and advice we need to face our challenges- but we still need to face them ourselves. Carl Jung called two parts of this practice “Light” and “Shadow work-” and just like skipping Leg Day at the gym, you don’t want to skip on the Shadow work.

But the shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but
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What’s Another Eulogy? My Non-Review of Roadrunner

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Until about 5AM this morning, this week’s blog post was going to be about something completely different. I was going to write about taste, snobbishness, and keeping it in check.

But last night, Em and I decided to go to our first movie in a theater in over a year. It was a toss-up between Black Widow and Roadrunner, and Em decided she could see Black Widow another time. She wanted to see Roadrunner with me. We were both glad for that because in the back of the Laurelhurst Theater, over pizza, popcorn, and spilled beer, we both cried our eyes out.

I came home with mixed emotions and tried to write that blog post about snobbishness… but as of 5 am, aware of the discourse and controversies surrounding the movie, I knew I need to write this all out while it was still fresh in my mind. One of the problems with being a writer is that words vanish from your mind faster than feelings in your heart, so here we go.

One last story from my beloved doomed bastard of a hero, Uncle Tony.

Glad for the hat brim and lighting here- you cant see how red my eyes are.
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Stepping Into The Ring- Leadership, Impostor Syndrome, and Creativity on Demand

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“Well this will be interesting…”

I apologize for the lack of a blog post this past week, but last Sunday I left the French bakery behind and started a new job at a pie company. Despite the fact that pie is, some would say, very much my wheelhouse, that’s not the part that will make this job uniquely interesting or what consumed so much of my time and energy. What will make this particular gig a real challenge started right at the interview. As I sat down with the owner, she flipped through my resume and said,

“Listen, I’m hiring a baker, but you’ve got training experience, right? You can train, schedule, and lead a team? Good- because I am stretched way too thin. Here’s the plan: I hire you, make you my kitchen manager, and turn the production, scheduling, and menu of our sweet pies over to you. That will free me up to run the rest of business. Deal?”

For the first time in my career, I’m scheduling production, training up the team, and choosing the menu. In other words, actually functioning as a chef (at least as it’s popularly defined in America.)

For the first week while I learned methods, recipes, and the rhythm of the kitchen, I stuck to some classics on the menu… but next week I’ll really have to come up with some ideas and prove that I can hack it. Not so much to my co-workers or boss- they have an almost unbelievable faith in my ability to deliver and perform.

No, I’ve got to prove it to me that I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew.

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Getting Back to “Okay”

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When I woke up, I couldn’t tell where the nightmare stopped and reality began. It was all the same.

Imagine having a radio in your head, cranked up to full blast, and the stations changing every few seconds. Wave after crashing wave of gibberish, so loud in your mind you can barely think to breathe.
Your heart pounds through your chest, oxygen seems to stop working, and it’s all you can do to stop from screaming because you can’t get enough air in to make a sound.

Even when it finally stopped, I didn’t know how to roll over and explain it to Emily, who had just gotten in to bed beside me. Any words I wanted to say felt like they first had to come down a long tunnel to get to my brain and then out of my mouth. At 35 years old, I buried my face in my wife’s shoulder and sobbed until the words finally arrived.

“I’ve never been so terrified in my life. I couldn’t make my brain stop. It felt like I was losing my mind.”
Emily reached over and held me. “You’re fine. It was an anxiety attack. I know how those feel.”

Animated line drawing of a person with bags under their wide eyes, clutching their head and nodding back and forth in panic.
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