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It's okay to not understand how or why. This is what I'm learning. It takes time and effort and patience to get well, or get closer to well. It hurts. People who say they care about you will reveal themselves as people who only care about themselves and will show you their ass the moment they see you growing into your actual self. People will act out and speak unbelievably cruel things without realizing the impact of those things, because they feel like they're "telling you as it is." There will be so many microaggressions. There will be so many attempts at manipulation, disguised as that "telling you as it is." There will be puzzled looks and moments of emotional violence.

It's part of the bigger whole.

The bigger whole is the action. The bigger whole is knowing that the uncomfortable shit is temporary and full of wisdom, an education, a gift. The gift is another day with more opportunity to get closer to well, to find peace.

I only want peace. I'm begging this world for peace.

I’m almost positive that the first person to ever lie to me was my father. I know for sure that he’s the one who taught me how to lie. He also taught me how to drink and how to be a bully and how to hurt people with words. He taught me how to be a sore loser and how to con people and how to be completely and totally emotionally irresponsible.

That said, he was still my father.

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Current SITREP:

I am living on a friend’s couch. I am thankful as fuck. I am also going insane. 18 days today without as much as two hours to myself in one stretch. Again, I am thankful as fuck and love my friend for housing me and taking care of me right now. She likes to watch TV at night and the TV is in the room with the couch that I sleep on and sometimes she passes out and I don’t want to bother her because I’m thankful as fuck. So, I end up being awake a lot later than my body wants. My body hurts. The couch is small and I sleep with my knees in my chest and even though that’s kind of comforting, my body hurts.

I have a job. I like the job. It’s not an important job but it’s the kind of job I can do with my eyes and my heart closed, which is how I need to ease myself back into the world right now. The people are super nice and the space is gorgeous and some days I get to hang out with a sweet dog named Buddha. I’m thankful as fuck.

Things are getting better, easier, softer. I wish I had more patience, but building patience is a process and I have to trust that it’s happening.

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Some people never get to have a father, let alone a bad or weird or awkward one. My father was only 22 when I was born, just a fucking dumb kid with dreams and ideas. His alcoholism ruined a lot. His fear ruined a lot. His rage ruined a lot. Those same things have come out of me and done their fair share of ruining, too. The only difference is that I’m nobody’s father. I’m just me, floating along in the world alone, no ties to nobody and no blood of mine pumping through another heart. I know for sure now that I will never be a father. I used to be vehemently opposed to such a thing and then I changed my mind and now the universe changed my mind back for me. It’s okay. It’s really okay.

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It’s not easy floating. I need privacy and space to feel okay. Between working and working the other thing, I’m surrounded by people at all times. I need time to myself but I need to be more assertive about my time for myself and I have a hard time doing so and when I do I feel guilty. I’m trying to learn how to recognize patterns in my behavior to make my life better, easier. I’m trying to dig moats. I’m trying to breathe under water.

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I ran into a friend yesterday I haven’t seen in a long time. He’s a good dude, but for some reason feels superior to me, as if he has life untangled and pretty enough for prom. He threw what he termed some “tough love” at me, telling me he felt like my suicide attempt was some “weak shit,” and that I just need to “man up” and it’ll make my life better. He rolled on and on, not noticing my body language or the way I was purposely not making eye contact with him. He told me he felt like my depression is a crutch and I need to “get over it” because it’s keeping me from making money. I let him talk and talk and talk and talk at me. I said nothing. I let his words ring off of my body and bounce all the way up into outer space. At one point he asked me why I still lived in NYC, and I just smiled at him and shrugged and said “because it’s home.” He stopped talking and looked into me for a few beats before I shook his hand and just walked away. I didn’t look back.

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Don’t look back. Keep going.

Proof of life

Been a while.

Proof of life

Proof of life.

This detox from my meds has been and continues to be very hard. Navigating the buried feelings from the last year or so and the physical weirdness of my brain and body chemistry levelling into a non-medicated place at the same time has felt hallucinatory and like a bad movie. I keep fighting off these massive waves of emotion and these urges to scream or run out into the street and yell and cry and bleed. Why do I always want so badly to bleed? ++++++ I'm trying to make peace with myself and with my memories of people and this place. I'm still extremely paranoid and can barely leave my room, let alone the apartment. I'm teetering between being resentful of how I've been treated and feeling as though I deserve to be punished until I no longer know my name. I'm trying to forgive. You and myself and anyone else. I'm still so raw in the middle of my chest and still so scared about a life in which I don't or can't see a future of any kind. It's hard and it's not anyone's fault and it's real and it's all sorts of fucked up and unreal. I'm also aware that these feelings are good and necessary and temporary. The meat is connecting back into the electrical current and soon I'll Frankenstein my way back into the world, hopefully a different and better version than before. ++++++ When was the last time you bled a little? ++++++ I don't want anyone to be mad at me for anything and I think that's a thing that has really fucked me up in my life. People get mad. People have their own feelings and actions and reactions and sometimes it's necessary to just accept them and keep on living but instead of accepting them I've fought them inside of myself and it's really done a number on me and my ability to be around or present or at times, full-on honest. It sucks. It really sucks that there are people I want to talk to and maybe even clear things up with but never can because of my shit or their shit or circumstantial shit and really, I just want to clear the air and apologize if that's warranted or necessary and maybe get someone to see my truth about a thing as clearly as they see theirs and then we can go from there. ++++++ My heart feels like it's shedding. The light is changing. The desert in my dreams is getting closer.

This is how I want to be remembered.

I have one of those dopey tinyletter things I send out every now and again because there can't possibly be any kind of platform I don't exploit to shoot my dumb words and thoughts out into space. I sent this one out last night: In a long list of really dumb things I have done, I’d put going cold turkey off of my antidepressant somewhere around number four or five. Sure, it’s something people have had to do, and in my situation I didn’t really have much of a choice at the moment and now that I am on day five of this ride, there’s no sense in trying to get back on them right now. That would be another dumb thing. My brain is melting in ways psychedelics never prepared me for and it’s wild and scary and I’ve been having auditory hallucinations and moments of clarity about my past and my feelings and moments where I want to run out into the street and scream at inanimate things like trash cans and police officers, but it’s good. This is good. Right? [Good is a relative term, and I am trying to stay positive.] ++++++ I have to get the fuck out of myself. ++++++ I’ve been watching a lot of videos about stand-up comedians to cope with all of this stuff. There are so many comedians. Almost as many comedians as there are writers, it seems. Some of them are really good and sharp and layered and some of them are fucking hacks who are just going for the top couple of layers of flesh. I dig the ones who go to the bone, who get all the way down in the meat and point out some grand universal thing that transcends everything else and is unfuckwithable. I tried to do stand-up once, back in the late ‘90s. I was high all the time and I would crack on people and some friends told me to go do an open mic and I did it and really, all that happened was I stood there and, as comics like to say, “ate my balls.” Nothing funny came out of my mouth and I was too high to do anything and the stage lights fucked me up and I was sweating from places I didn’t know I could sweat from and all the air left the room and someone yelled something at me from the crowd and I left. I didn’t leave because I was embarrassed or anything, I left because I was taking up space that someone who was actually funny could be using. [That last sentence is a motherfucker to think on, regardless of whatever we are trying to do with our lives. Space is a thing we all need to pay more attention to at all times, damn it.] ++++++ Getting off of cocaine was kind of an easy sell for me. My body hated me for using as much of it as I was using at the time, had a revolution, and gave me a weird heart attack thing. So, being semi-wise, I stopped. I didn’t want to die from a heart attack or an overdose or any number of ways using cocaine could lead to a scandalous death. My mother was already dead and sure I missed her and still do, but at the time I wasn’t ready to test the waters and see if I could meet up with her just yet. This year will be twenty years off of cocaine, which is boggling. My cocaine years are old enough to have student debt and have been fired from multiple jobs for doing cocaine on the job. Just like dear old me. ++++++ Part of why I haven’t freaked out about going off of my antidepressant is because I have been on it for five years and in the last year or two, it didn’t seem to be working the way it should. In the last year I have been wrestling with a lot of suicidal ideation and low-level self-harm impulse and it has taken a lot out of me. Like, so much. I kept on finding myself in these situations where my mind would react to a thing by immediately going YOU SHOULD DROWN YOURSELF IN THE EAST RIVER RIGHT NOW or DEATH BY COP WOULD BE THE GULLIEST WAY TO GO OUT YOU WEAK MOTHERFUCKER, and that just isn’t me, or at least I would like to believe that isn’t me. I did a ton of reading and found that the long-term effects of antidepressants can sometimes lead to suicide. Ain’t that a motherfucker? I don’t want to die, I want to live and love and be loved and all of those Disney things and Lifetime Movie things [sans the poisoning or murder or going to prison for stealing a taco truck]. I want to eventually get another dog. I want to eventually have a healthy relationship with myself. And maybe you, if you’d let me. ++++++ Years later and instead of talking about shit, people would rather walk around holding on to shit that doesn’t fucking matter because it’s only one side of a three-sided story. This is what is wrong with every single one of us. A bunch of abandoned babies, all of us. ++++++ I made some tea with kratom in it tonight. It’s supposed to ease all the crazy shit happening in my mind and body. I went for a walk and it was like the visuals of psychedelics: my body was moving one way, slowly, and the rest of me was trying to catch up in this slow and gelatinous way, like a tracer made of gummy worms. Even now, sitting here typing, when I turn my head to the side everything else follows real slow and I feel like I am underwater. I’m not sure if the kratom has helped or not, because I only made one mug of tea and it was a small amount. I don’t know how long things will feel this way, how long my mind will be melting or acting like a stoned baby monkey. ++++++ I have plans and those plans will get spoken about when they become more solid. Do any of you have plans? What’s your 2018 like? I quit smoking in early January without realizing I was doing so and I feel really good. Like, my lungs feel good and I can breathe like I’m closer to human and I don’t feel gassed after walking up five flights of stairs and it’s nice, really nice. Do I miss smoking? Not really the physical act, but I do miss the ritual of it all. It was a part of my life longer than most things have been and there are moments when I find myself absently looking for my lighter or my pack of smokes and then I start to laugh a little and smile because I QUIT FUCKING SMOKING and that’s some shit I never thought I would do. There are plenty of other things I need to quit, but that was something I know I had been slacking on. Do I think I will ever smoke again? Who knows? I had one after a church basement meeting with a friend and it felt really bad and gross so I handed it to her after three drags and she smiled at me and hugged me because she understood what that moment meant for me. ++++++ We’re all just weird bags of meat full of feelings and molecules and confusion and desires and needs and disappointments. ++++++ I hope everyone is okay and as well as can be and feeling loved/necessary. Holler. Be kind. Be tender. Treat yourself the way you wish someone would treat you without having to be asked or taught. Spend a little extra time in the sun or in the shower or at the mirror and just see who you are and how much light is inside of you and how much this world needs you. Love, Sean

Proof of life

The way electricity moves through nerve-endings when pushing steel through your own flesh is the way the world disappears when high. ++++++ The thing about getting stabbed that has stayed with me the most--even more than the absurdity of being fucking stabbed in the thigh with a screwdriver by a fat and lonely skinhead who thought his friends would like him more for stabbing a Jew--has been the sensation of steel pushing through fat into muscle and feeling that popping as the steel moved through each layer of meat. It happened so quickly that it didn't even feel like violence. It felt like some accidental thing or a hallucination. I remember a girl who was sitting across the room from me making a sound that didn't sound of this earth and I remember jumping up from my spot and throwing a right hook at the kid's fat skull and then he ran out of the room and I sat back down and pulled the screwdriver out of my thigh and it wasn't blood that came out, but it was fat and fluid and I squeezed more of it out while some kid handed me a bottle of vodka that I started to chug from. ++++++ My current state of being is a sloppy mess. I'm between jobs. Between lives, really. I'm working on some cool shit behind the scenes and I'm mostly okay and I'm surviving. I don't have a bank account anymore so paying bills is weird because I not only don't have access to a debit card, but I don't have access to cash in a way that's easy. I don't have health insurance anymore and my former doctor legally couldn't re-up my antidepressant script, so I'm coming off of it cold turkey and I feel wild and foggy and like an exposed nerve in a broken tooth. I quit smoking last month and there are days when my mind remembers how much I loved smoking and days when my mind remembers smoking killed my parents. The suicidal ideation shit is working me over a little. It's hard to explain it. Months and months of it being this humming sound underneath everything else in life and only I can hear the hum. I've done a ton of reading lately about antidepressants and it seems that one of the long term side effects is actually suicidal ideation. And we all know I have been dealing with that a lot. So, I am willing to do this and see if that changes. I don't want to die and I don't want to hurt myself. I don't. ++++++ Part of me wishes I had a USB cable plugged into my brain right now so I could share what has been happening over the last 36 hours in my skull and in my subconscious mind. As my body goes through these wild DTs—and let me tell you, DTs from antidepressants are very different than they are from alcohol or drugs, so much of it is like a weird movie flashing in front of my eyes even when I am lucid, whereas with drugs and booze it was far more physical—I keep on thinking about what was happening in my life when I ended up on these pills five years ago. I was in an awful marriage that I was too afraid to get out of and I was trapped by the illness of someone else and made to feel like a monster whenever I would speak up about how it was wrecking me and I was living in a far more isolated way than I do even now. I was a fucking nightmare of anxieties and fear-based reactionary thinking. The only thing keeping me going then was my dog. I was having panic attacks again for the first time in a decade and they were getting so frequent I was constantly aware of every exit and where every bathroom was, even in places I had never been in before. Messy messy messy. ++++++ The first real wave of sadness hit me hard a few minutes ago. I started to shake and hyperventilate and tears broke loose and started streaming. I felt like everything was closing in on me, like all the pain and sadness and fear were going to fold into a larger thing and just sit on my chest and snuff me the fuck on out. I know this is what happens when you quit taking an SSRI. I know this feeling isn't real. ++++++ I just want to live.

I'm trying to stay here, in this body.

Today was really hard. Not like the day was any different than any other day. It wasn't a significant date and I can't remember anything happening in my life. It was just hard. For days now I've been in a really dark and fragile place, more than I usually am. My depression feels stronger, like someone has been feeding it steroids when I'm not looking, like it has been lifting weights and getting bigger, meaner. I'm trying my best to quell the darkness, trying to find reasons to keep going and keep believing and keep doing. I wish I had better news to report about my current state of being, but I'm not going to lie to anyone, especially myself. ++++++ I still don't have a job. Earlier tonight I was clearing out my emails and saw two interview requests from December I never saw and it made me start crying. I need to work. My friend Mikhail let me come help him inventory and organize his warehouse space the other day and it felt so good to do something and be useful. I keep sending out resumes and all I get back is crickets. This is hard. ++++++ I went and stood by the river for a long time tonight. I watched it's cold and black shimmer. I let the wind raze my face and I took slow breaths and I sipped on a hot chocolate and looked at the buildings with their lights and the way the city glows up and distorts perception of time and space. I thought about taking off all of my clothes and walking out into the river, into the cold darkness. I thought about leaving my phone on the rocks so someone would find it, so someone would maybe open it up to the video I made earlier in the day, the video in which I talked about being tired, about being sad, about being a very ready to die person. Instead, I called the suicide hotline and spoke to a woman who told me that the fact that I called meant that I want to live. She's right. I do. ++++++ The truth is that I have never done anything in my life that feels right. I wonder if any of us ever feel like we've done right by anyone, done right by ourselves. I've made plenty of decisions based on pride and based on fear and based on other factors. I've been reticent and I've been compulsive. I don't believe I have ever been consciously malicious. I don't believe I've ever made a decision based on a desire to hurt anyone or be manipulative, unless my desire for self destruction and causing myself pain can be counted as such. When I can--when given the opportunity--I do all that I can to own my actions, but I'm more than aware that I cannot own the feelings others have toward me. And yet, I find myself, often, at the mercy of what other people think they know about me or how they've decided to feel about me. ++++++ When I was leaving the park tonight after I got off the phone with the woman from the suicide hotline, there were a couple of dogs who ran to me and gave me their faces to pet. Their owners were just standing around looking at their phones. I thanked the dogs and told them I loved them. I love you, too.

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