The Map

Somewhere, in recent years, I heard this wise little nugget; that you make the path by walking.

And, man…did I need to hear THAT, because until that moment, the central premise of my self-pitying mid-life crisis narrative had been that a half-century of cautiously side-eyeing and waiting for “the way” to clear before I walked on it has delivered me to only a sad, rusty lawn chair atop a mound of decomposing journals and notebooks wherein the mostly-unrequited yearnings of my life had been dutifully inscribed, only to rot and wither into dust with the paper they were written on. Jeez-Louise, that’s dark.

But when I considered the inversion implied in this idea of walking first, it became possible to consider that I have already been making a “path” by “walking” since the Reagan presidency (I know…olden times). That’s when I first started writing things down in a journal, when I first got the idea that my tiny life might be worth writing down.

30-something years later, mired in the obligatory post-40 questioning of what-was-it-all-for and who-is-ever-gonna-read-any-of-this, but while also experiencing the gracefully liberating all-outta-give-a-shits, I’m willing to take the chance on somebody getting something of value from reading what I write and maybe accepting that my not doing so would be a real middle finger to the universe that done madeth me bornt, to obstruct this flow of linguistic rascality because of some petty self-doubt. So…what follows on this site is me trusting that all this scribbling has mattered, and maybe modeling (for whoever needs it) what I like to call the good kind of EFF IT.

I was a child in an era when the prevailing pop psychology of mainstream grownups asserted that the steady diet of TV-screen exposure my generation was absorbing would clip our attention spans and arrest our intellectual development (oh just y’all wait, I want to scream across the decades). Indeed, I attached myself to our faux-wood-veneered Zenith floor-console like it was Harlow’s cloth mother and I a wee suckling monkey-babe (that’s a psychology joke, strap in- there will be more to come). So, by the predictive methods of the late-1970s network news media (baseless, fear-driven speculation), I was headed for a life of inoperable doofus-ness.

Ironically for myself and many of my generational peers, sitting two feet (often less) from the screen, watching PBS educational programming until my eyeballs dehydrated into prunes meant that I learned how to piece together phonemes, syllables and letters pre-Kindergarten; by age four I was reading the TV Guide aloud to my astonished mother. After mama’s special little boy mastered the skill it takes to report that Ses…a…me…St…reet comes on at 9 a.m. and that The…E…lectric…Com…pa…ny comes on at 9:30, I moved on to scrawling letter-ish hieroglyphs on lined construction paper and began scripting my own stories.

By the 2nd grade, I was the runner-up in a story-writing contest at my elementary school for my one-page novella about a suburban family who wasted electricity frivolously until one day, inspired by the moving, televised plea of their great leader Jimmy Carter, awakened to the folly of their ways and converted to an eco-conscious lifestyle in which one turned out the lights when leaving a room and never left the refrigerator door open for more than five seconds. I got to read this poignant masterpiece aloud (with dramatic emphasis) into a microphone in front of the whole student body. Then, as a reward, I got to dip my hand into a large salad bowl filled with quarters and keep whatever I didn’t drop. For a moment, this writing thing appeared to hold some lucrative material promise.

A few grades and a president later, a Facts Of Life episode showed Tootie (actress Kim Fields, a big crush of mine in those days hooo lordy) spilling her intimate confessions into a diary, and I was all like “Hey, girl…I got secrets too” so I started one in a discarded school notebook and have somehow kept it going (on varying media) ever since. This inspired moment may best symbolize the first, but not the last time that the thing that was supposed to ruin me, didn’t. It would appear that the armchair psychologists of the evening news were wrong: The big, glowing dumbing-box didn’t lobotomize me, it showed me the map.

Since then, writing and playing with language has helped me to relate to my life as a story in progress, and as such, it is editable. Therapeutically, it has been an unjudging someone to talk to (or sometimes scream to), a scratch pad for half-baked theories, ideas and cockamamie schemes, a permanent home for cathartic letters I will surely never send, a darkened cellar for atrociously gothic adolescent poetry experiments, a document of details and events, a place for reminiscing, a meditative sanctuary to explore gratitude in, and a playroom in which to toy with words for the simple joy of it. It’s not everybody’s thing, but for some reason, it became mine.

Now… It’s one thing to metaphorically ralph your teenage guts out onto the pulpy, ruled pages of a for-your-eyes-only Mead-brand spiral-bound plastered with Bones Brigade and INXS and pizza-scented scratch ‘n’ sniff stickers that you hide waaay in the back of your bottom desk drawer- It’s another to publish your writings on a website on the world wide web as a grown-ass, middle-aged man.

But see, I have this “day job” as a licensed psychotherapist, and in that job, I spend a lot of time and energy supporting others in making meaning out of whatever peaks, abysses and banal mundanities they experience and helping them to cultivate the courage to own it and share it, ideally, with the world, possibly with me, and at the very least, with themselves. And yet, I cannot un-remember the counseling professor in my grad school training who told me years ago that “You can never take a client anywhere you’re not willing to go yourself”.

Like Daniel Larusso in The Karate Kid learning “Wax on, Wax off” while not yet knowing how useful this motion would become for him, I see (now, not so far from my impending Mr. Miyagi years) that learning how to tell my mom that Chips came on TV at 8pm was more than it seemed. It turns out that curious and willing four-year-old me is directing grumpy-ass, set-in-my-ways, fifty-one-year-old me to unset those ways and reclaim the potential of a skill that might be of use now more than ever.

So…no more standin’ on the wall like I was Poindexter.

With my aforementioned checking account of give-a-shits irreversibly overdrawn, I share with you this website, these writings. Though I’m (among other things) a therapist, this is not a “therapy blog” in the typical sense, because (roll with me here) I don’t want to write so much about the cooking, I want to write about the eating. The point of engaging in therapy is not because the therapy itself matters, it’s because the living and learning, the suffering and healing from suffering, and (if you are willing) the marveling does, and this is why our stories are worth telling. This is what the therapy is for.

This site is my “non-drowsy-formula”, my remedy for the woozy head-cold of sleepwalking through life on autopilot, a deliberate awakening from trance to the aliveness of meaning-making, humor and story. As far as I know, we only get this one life in this form, so I’m representing and telling it like it is up in here, what it’s like to be this wave, this singular expression of the vast, vast ocean. It’s what I encourage anyone to try in whatever mode of expression comes naturally to you.

My writings have been gifts to myself, and now they’re also for you. I now know from experience that there can be validation in having genuine messy humanness modeled for you, and in having the imperfection of that process not only on display but celebrated. This is how the writers I love most saved my life. My greatest teachers (writers, therapists, clients) have shown me, amongst other things, how poetic license can play a crucial role in healing- it turns steaming piles of cow shit into robust fertilizer for your garden.

Perhaps what you read here can help you do that with your own metaphorical bovine excrement. I hope at the least that you are entertained, and at best, you’re inspired to consider how you might already, in some way, be walking on a path you’ve been looking for.