The Fabulous Organist @discalced-diapason - Tumblr Blog

One good thing about joking for years that if I were ever going to collapse, it would be professionally is that when I had a dissociative fugue state last year, I was able to actually able to fly the whole thing all the way down.

I don’t recommend doing that the way that I did. I was entirely alone the whole time for the most part, and I shouldn’t have had to do that, but I survived and now I’m writing about how.

Long story short, being a life long systems thinker obsessed with how things fail and falling back on training were major factors in my survival. Who knew my obsession with TWA 800 when I was 10 years old would pay off 30 years later?

#collapse #dissociative fugue #aviate navigate communicate #toward a professional army #charles de gaulle

Anyone else think the bridal mystics were down bad catastrophic for God, or just me?

#bridal mysticism #bernini #teresa of avila #bernard of clairvaux #bridegroom matins #thirst posting for God

I once joked for decades that if I ever were going to collapse, it would be professionally.

And then I ended up having a dissociative fugue state and treated it like a military training exercise combined with an extended aviation emergency.

Turns out my pandemic hobby of aviation accident podcasts and gallows sense of humor came in clutch to keep me oriented to some sense of reality when the buildings melted and I didn’t even know my name to be able to still make that 911 call somewhere in Long Island City last September.

After months of wandering around the eastern US, I had finally been able to bring myself to do the hardest thing in my life: ask for help. At 17 after my second suicide attempt, I had made a vow that I’d kept for decades.

“Not by my own hand”

If despair was going to take me out, the lazy bastard would have to grow legs to take me out himself, I wouldn’t do his job for him. That had carried me through many years and too many moments of the lure of a permanent solution to the temporary pains of life (as terrible as my suffering was) to stay around long enough to see how the next movement would sound.

Once I began to compose later on, I started writing my own music. Sometimes it was a musical joke, a counterpoint exercise titled For Fux’s Sake!. Another time, a repeated dies irae in the middle of an eating disorder relapse for piano and clarinet for composition titled Day of Beseeching for a professor who’d taught compositional restriction as chosen constraints to strip away inherited and expected voices to find the truth underneath.

When you can’t speak truth directly because it’s been punished, you learn how to encode it wherever you can, so that it cannot be appropriated or twisted by those who would otherwise benefit from your silence and who are uncomfortable with the truth of what their actions have done to you.

#personal #short story #true story #memoir #nonfiction

Before you go blaming yourself for a relationship failure, make sure that you understand the conditions you’re in first and that the other person is also doing their own accountability

#trauma #personal #recovery

Well, after so many years of being away I have finally dusted off my old tumblr and I am back.

Let’s see, quick update. I’m not longer a church organist, I left the Catholic Church and became orthodox for a few years, then an atheist, and after a major mental health crisis last year where traumatic childhood memories broke out after 35 years of being buried, ended up with a dissociative fugue state that I barely survived. It was only a shit ton of training that I fell back on during a scary situation that I was unable to rise to the occasion in, and these days, I’m now writing my memoir and looking to share my story with others who are in the middle of navigating their own storms.

Looking forward to sharing more here about what I learned and hope that others will feel seen and figure out their own ways of improvising survival and recovery and learning how to rebuild and live again.

#trauma #recovery #writing

Jumping from Mendelssohn to Moby like “Parkour!”

humansoflatecapitalism

my--darling--dear2-deactivated2

The Narnia series was C.S Lewis’ bible fanfiction

i-am-a-fish

"I am a beacon of sin", I tell the Starbucks barista, who asked me for my name to write on the cup

snommelp

Did Augustine of Hippo ghost-write this?

inthestreetsofx

globalchristendom

Icons for sale in Athens, Greece.

beshnav

pinkcheesecoolarrows

Food is a right only if it is your private property. You have no right to food that does not belong to you; you have no right to food that you have not purchased or produced.

beshnav

Yo shut up

sophisticatedfangirling

hardboiledoldman

scarcity matters when things are actually scarce, and food is abundant. economics is fake.

property-is-theft-deactivated20

The Earth is the common property of all jackasses. If someone is starving they have a right to food. If they are thirsty they have a right to a drink. And if they are homeless they have a right to a roof. If society can provide these things but doesn't then that person is being robbed of whats rightfully theirs.

discalced-diapason

dramoor

“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going, I do not see the read ahead of me, I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.” ~Thomas Merton

(Art: Christ as the Ancient of Days, fresco from St. George’s Monastery church, Ubisi, Imereti, Georgia, 14th century A.D.)