The Thing

The first time I heard Rufus Wainwright’s voice was in the late nineties, in one of the nineties-est ways possible: on a mixtape made for me by a rad woman I struck up a conversation with in a coffee shop. I didn’t think I liked that kind of singing but, as art will sometimes do, it surprised me to discover a side of myself that did like that kind of music, or at least his kind. I had come to appreciate so many styles and sounds in music, but my first love was the music of the human voice, and the first ones that moved me were on the AM radio of my 1970’s childhood: Stevie Wonder, The Bee Gees, Olivia Newton John. I imitated them, vocally and visually. 

Rufus’s voice had this unaffected warmth and tenderness, like a resonant cello, that took me back to when a voice was my favorite part of a song. The indie-folkie singers I liked at the time could siiiiiing but this guy could SAAAAANG.  He moaned and soared with a self-assuredness that rang a bell inside me and I thought “What does it feel like to feel that way about your voice?” My voice…. whether speaking, writing or singing, I wanted to express myself with that kind of confidence.

Last month, a friend texted me a video of Rufus, now 51, performing a duet with Sara Bareilles of a song she wrote for the musical Waitress called “She Used To Be Mine”. Have you seen this video yet? You really should: It made me cry and knocked me, emotionally speaking, on my ass. For starters, his voice sounds richer, warmer and stronger than ever. The man can vacillate between power and tenderness, tenor and falsetto with ease, and have you wholly convinced that he means what he’s singing. 

Secondly, Sara B. also has a voice that can sing a hole through the side of a truck, and when the two of them join streams in harmony in this performance, it’s nothing short of spellbinding. Their voices couldn’t be better suited for one another. What I read about this pairing is that they met for the first time that morning and had only practiced together that day. Watching the performance, one feels as if they are witnessing Peas meeting Carrots for the first time and even they can’t believe how good they go together. 

Unless you are some sort of organically freakish savant at whatever it is that you do, I think that when most of us experience artistry of this caliber, it’s both inspiring and disheartening at the same time. On the one hand, it’s like “Wow! Art/music/writing/dancing/etc. is amazing and I love how it makes me feel and it’s all I want to do for the rest of my life!” And at the same time, you can’t help but think “But I’ll never ever in my lifetime reach that level of mastery at my craft”.  We’ve been conditioned by an evaluative culture, evaluative schools, evaluative religious institutions, evaluative sporting culture and now evaluative technology, that we either pass or we fail, we are liked or we are not liked, we either dazzle or we disappoint: We must be the best or we shouldn’t do it.

Now that I’m an objectively wise and debonair silver-fox of a man and no longer as much of a precocious, emotionally immature, navel-gazing dumdum, I have integrated and synthesized all the learning accrued by the decades I’ve been alive into a mistake-averse daily regimen of crushing the challenges of middle age (*Um…source needed here). And yet, I still sometimes find myself having these discouraging thoughts and feelings of not-enough-ness with default automaticity. In my experience, constructive self-inquiry doesn’t always require mining the past , but sometimes it’s A) kinda fun, and B) helpful in providing continuity between then and now, to answer the David Byrne Question. (You know…)“How did I get here?”

……………………………………….

It’s after dinner on a school night and I’m standing intensely close to the glass face of an ornate wooden-framed full-length mirror that is in our family dining room/record player room/mom’s sewing room.  I’m leaning on her bureau that houses her voluminous collection of McCall’s tracing patterns for billowy-shouldered ladies’ blousery and modest business skirts and I’m waiting for the few seconds of staticky silence at the beginning of the 7” single I just bought at K-Mart (with my two dollars of allowance money) to crackle and yield to the first few keyboard notes. At that time I will start to sway and seductively pulsate through a Solid Gold-style, lip-synching pantomime of “I Like It” by newly red-hot R&B sibling-group DeBarge, which is all any 5th grade public school student in the year 1982 in Charlotte, North Carolina wants to hear or sing for a good six weeks of that year.

And so, here I am with this…Hairbrush? Paper towel roll? Flat-head screwdriver?...rehearsing to obliterate minds at the school talent show with this performance, but I have to really get the timing right on the freestyle vocalizations at the end when lead vocalist El DeBarge just goes off into that stratospheric falsetto. What’s so difficult about this is that in order to really sell it, I have to tilt my head back as if channeling his ecstatic wail coming from the depths of my Puerto Rican soul though I am not Puerto Rican, and neither is DeBarge, it turns out that he is a handsome Biracial fellow from Detroit, though I do not yet know this because I am passively and assumptively racially ignorant in the way all sheltered, underexposed white kids are at the time and because Wikipedia does not exist yet, but regardless of his origins, somehow I feel that my nine years of lower-middle-class tedium is enough that I get this man and what he is wailing about because I too know what it is to like the way a girl combs her hair and the stylish clothes she wears and I am gonna let her know how much I really care by dropping this motherload of soul right into her heart wherever she may be sitting in the school gymnasium that day and then…..THEN….the life I am meant to live will truly begin because I MUST DAZZLE AND BY GOD, I WILL DAZZLE.

But this never happens because I don’t perform , I experience very uncomfortable sensations that I do not yet know are called anxiety, and take my name off the sign-up sheet. These symptoms subside, but another, different set of paralyzing symptoms color my muscles, organs and nerves. I have again failed to prove that I am exceptional. This is starting to look like a problem for me. I will learn years later that these symptoms are called shame. I never sign up for another talent show.

……………………………………….

Just a few grades prior, I had been labeled “gifted” by some teacher or guidance counselor because of my advanced reading level and my scores on the California Achievement Test, the gold standard of its day. I was put in special classes with special assignments. The adults in my life bent over backwards to tell me how special I was and what incredible potential I had and how far I could go if I put my mind to it. They looked at me expectantly, as if to say “Isn't it an amazing blessing to be so gifted and so praised by us adults who you desperately seek the validation of?” But my gut did not answer yes to this, despite my brain understanding this to be the right answer. I promptly internalized it as an ominous warning that would simmer on the back burner of my mind-stove, even up to my current iteration, because what I heard was “We expect excellence now and you better not let us down”. So there it was, my two options: You will dazzle or you will disappoint.

If these are the two conceivable outcomes of your child-mind’s schema, you may experience an unconscious emergence of twin selves: One that aches with every cell to experience the euphoria of delivering your shining excellence, and another that relishes the warm, familiar, dimly lit relief of failure. You may even grow deep into your adulthood feeling as if you have been living in the middle of a custody battle between these two parental forces of your mind.

Reparenting this inner child (an experiment that remains exhausting and insufferably in-progress, yet so necessary) has been greatly enhanced by a basic understanding of child development and the factors that inform one’s psychic template for self-appraisal. I’m realizing that my nervous system was shaped by two prominent and conflicting childhood messages: Life is good, you are loved no matter what you do and it’s all gonna be ok, contrasted with Life is dangerous and if you’re not always careful and you don’t constantly stay on top of your game you’ll make a mistake that can ruin everything.  This was especially reinforced while growing up in a Southern Baptist religious tradition in which I learned that Jesus loves me and died so that my sins are forgiven, but also that his Dad will put your misbehaving behind on the next train to Hell’s doorstep if you don’t act right.

This dialectic has persisted in varying forms for my whole life and is showing up now, right now as I write this… there is a part of me saying Write, create, it is all you are here for and every second you are writing is a joyful, value-driven life!, while another voice says Fool, you should be working on bringing in more income right now, as everything is more uncertain by the minute and every second you are not bringing in money renders you less safe. The psychology of late-stage capitalism and our new political reality has exacerbated the tension of this either/or binary.

My therapy clients will sometimes imply or directly tell me that they assume that mental health professionals are immune to mental health challenges, as if we all receive a special vaccine upon licensure. I confirm to them that this is true, and that the vaccine is administered in the back of a 7-11 via turkey baster by the ghost of Paul Reubens. This assumption, of course, is poppycock delusion that comes from an antiquated, patriarchal exaltation of the “Expert”, so I then explain that actually, just like them, I too am a person who has lived, who is alive and therefore I have mental health challenges. In addition to my personalized neurochemical inheritance, my Big T and little t traumas, there’s the fact that being alive in this particular era of human civilization is just objectively redonkulous and it does a real number on all of us. At the moment I am writing this, the new president has started some absurd quarrel with a foreign leader that may jeopardize our national coffee supply, and I think that on top of all the other unacceptably inhumane cruelties he is implementing, this one might truly break my mind.

I come from a family with a history of mood irregularities and apparent neurodiversity, so my having grown up displaying a mercurial sensitivity that some call an “artistic temperament” meant that nobody fainted and no pearls were clutched when I first presented with “depression symptoms” as a sullen adolescent. It was like, hella obvious, dude. Therapeutic and pharmaceutical prescriptions ensued and somehow I made it through high school and my first couple of years of college trying to “overcome” depression.

Something really shifted when I saw Pedro Zamora, cast-member from The Real World Season 3, explain to a group of schoolkids on MTV in 1993 that he was not a person dying of AIDS, but a person living with it. I certainly do not mean here to equivocate the experience of AIDS with Depression, but what I took away from what he was saying is that we all have a choice, not whether to feel symptoms or not, but whether to relate to them as crippling deficits, or to accept them as a part of living and focus on what we can control, and how to make whatever life we have count. I’ve been trying to refine my personal version of this acceptance-based approach ever since, with increasingly adaptive results, though nowhere near Pedro-level heroics.

For much of last year, I experienced a pronounced “depressive episode” that was longer than usual and exacerbated by a series of factors I shan’t overshare here (though this has clearly never stopped me before), but let’s just say that experiencing peak mid-life andropausal testosterone decline in a crap post-pandemic national economy during a gloomy election-year political forecast and Voila!....the depression-juice-shooter-outers in my brain went boieeoioioioieeng and down I went to bummertown for winter, spring and into summer. Then, as the summer faded, something changed and things felt different…not as depressed. This is how it goes, I can’t explain it. It’s like it just passes. I felt I could breathe again. It appeared to be gone for now.

And then in late September, we got…let’s say… a little too much rain around here, and over a dozen Western North Carolina counties were dishwashered bare by Hurricane Helene. And then in November, many of my neighbors confused the presidential election for a professional wrestling event and chose an amoral narcissist whose main-event entrance-song is YMCA and whose signature move is the political equivalent of just hiding brass knuckles under his comb-over, to direct the national government at the highest level. My neurochemical profile flatlined, my reprieve was canceled. 

So, while I remain unimmune to the neurochemical affective patterns that come and go cyclically throughout my years, I still gain incremental wisdom with each passing cycle. It’s also true that being a practicing therapist and my ongoing active training in new approaches to self-inquiry in order to help my clients has the added benefit of helping me do the same. I like to call it The Employee Discount. 

Since fall and now through this winter, I’ve taken advantage of this fringe benefit and been doing a deep dive within that has yielded some precious insight about the relationship between the experience I’ve been calling “depression” and the experience I’ve been calling “fulfilling my potential”. After some post-Helene psychic spelunking, the first experimental action I took in reclaiming my control over this relationship, having both metaphorically and somewhat literally dragged the rocky bottom of the French Broad River, was to say DAMN IT ALL…and I wrote.

I wrote, despite the mushy mind-porridge of the lingering depression, despite having experienced the Publix of my creative mind downsize into a Dollar General over months of a writing drought, and as I sludged through, my mind and heart started coming back online- not all the way back to Club Publix status, but maybe like….an Aldi? But then the thing I wrote during that initial push turned out to be one of the best things I’ve written yet (I think, maybe): It got shared a little on the internet and FIVE TIMES as many people read it as any of my other essays. Was it a lot of people? Not by most internet standards, but it was a LOT to me. 

So, if this sounds like a brag, then FINE… it is. This is the new thing I’m trying out. As much as I’ve employed self-deprecation in the service of trying to making people laugh and validating the universality of messy human imperfectness, I have decided that it’s time to integrate some self-celebration into my public repertoire. I’m experimenting with feeling myself. Not from a place of self-aggrandizement but from a place of self-love. As I have stated in various ways in most of my essays, I probably look quite silly in this endeavor but alas, having traversed the desert of mid-life and arrived in the land of Fifty, my once flowing stream of give-a-shits is now but pebble, dust and lizard bones.

I am surprised at how much I am enjoying acting like a confident person whose best is good enough, and even more surprised to discover (let me take a breath before saying this out loud)....

….that I might actually be kind of a Bad MotherEffer.

I don’t mean that I’m the baddest Effer of Mothers, or even badder than you…I mean bad enough. And if you are confused now, I mean bad, of course, in the classic GenX vernacular, in which bad means good.  What I mean to say here is not that I wrote a thing and a lot of people read it and therefore I’m Jules Winnfield’s Wallet, it’s actually the other way around: I had gotten low and tired, and one day I realized I was constantly reacting to the discouraging messages I was perceiving from the world outside of me and decided to invert that directional flow and try living more from the inside out. This was not a new method to me at all, in fact, it’s the core principle of almost every therapeutic approach I use with my clients, and the foundation of the spiritual philosophies I most align with. We can only experience what our mind allows us to experience. It’s been right in front of my face for years. I had just been so focused on perfecting baking that donut for others that I neglected to fully taste it myself SO I OPENED MY BIG FAT FACE AND ATE THE YUMMY DONUT. 

I experimented with not waiting on some condition or achievement to validate my worthiness or value and just summoned the feelings as if I already am worthy and of value and proceeded in that consciousness, that feeling…. and somehow I did better work. And I enjoyed doing it more. And now something is different. It’s better.

Reader: 

“AWWW, MAAAAN….is this the part where he tells us that he “manifested” the life of his dreams and got rid of his depression, and I got tricked into reading this whole thing only to arrive at the goddamn “Secret”?

Writer: 

NAY!!! 

I do not mean that. I did not summon anything out of thin air with my woo-woo white privilege daydreams. This is not an advertisement for spiritual bypassing. I tried imagining what it feels like to be the person I truly want to be, and feeling confident doing it…. and in doing so, I BEHAVED DIFFERENTLY. 

Good writers WRITE. Master therapists WALK THE WALK. Kind people SPEAK and ACT kindly. Physically healthy people EXERCISE. Mentally healthy people PRACTICE COMPASSIONATE SELF-TALK. Good singers SAAAAANG.

In this approach, I do not need to dazzle, I do not need to be concerned about disappointing.  I do not need to be Rufus Wainwright singing “She Used To Be Mine” at the Kennedy Center on New Year’s Eve in a sparkly shirt. I do, however, need to sing like myself, which sounds probably more like when Mary Steenburgen squeaks through the first lines of Santa Claus Is Coming To Town in Elf, which dazzles no one but sounds distinctively, unmistakably hers, and then her shaky voice inspires the others around her to sing and together, their voices FUEL THE GODDAMN CLAUSOMETER and they SAVE CHRISTMAS, and before you know it, BOOM you’ve just been STEENED.

This blog is one year old as of this writing, and this essay is, in some ways, a celebration of its birthday. This birthday matters because I had a thing I wanted to do, and it was scary, and my mind gave me infinite reasons not to do the thing. But I just pretended like I could totally do the thing and thus the thing got did, and I have just kept going. I’m proud of it, it’s good enough. I think if I keep going, my writing will keep getting better, my self-appreciation will accrue. Will I dazzle? I don’t know, but I know that I can no longer disappoint because I no longer care about that.

I am still prone to waves of depression, but in this stage of the game, I aim to suffer less. The motto of the state I have spent my whole life thus far as a resident of is Esse Quam Videri. It means “To be, rather than to seem”. So I am standing here in front of all of you seated on the hard bleachers of the gymnasium, singing into this 2025 version of my hairbrush, not sure if this is any good or not, but I’m singing this song because I love it. Is it finished? Is there more to edit and perfect? Sure. Am I overdoing the italics? Probably, but that’s kinda my style, man, so maybe I’ll just lean into it ;)

Do the thing.