I’ve been immobilized all day. I’m staring at the ceiling, imagining the mildew developing on the laundry I failed to move from the washer to the dryer—and contemplating death. By the sixth hour, the suicide scenarios are becoming increasingly hilarious—cinematic in scope, elaborately choreographed as a Balanchine ballet. They involve colorful explosions, cyanide capsules hidden in my spy-glasses, Bengal tigers, katana swords, active volcanoes.
Who am I kidding? I’d never make it to the crater of an active volcano. Possibly, if I’m very lucky, the toilet will become an option before I (not for the first time) take a whiz on myself.
Like most animals, humans are wired to monitor their surroundings for threats. Even when you don’t have low dopamine, it’s normative to wake up with automatic negative thoughts: a surge or irritation at your alarm clock, a full-fledged death wish, or anything between—it’s a vast spectrum. No matter how healthy and happy you are, you probably don’t open your eyes most mornings with a halo of cartoon birds chirping around your head and pixie dust sparkling on everything you touch. That’s okay—especially if you’ve figured out how to delete that first thought like it’s a drunken text message to your ex, and move onto a better, less self-poisoning thought.
Any of the great spiritual teachers, regardless of time, place, or tradition, will tell you the same thing: that high-functioning adults are people who have some ability to separate themselves from their thoughts and feelings. On a good day I can even sometimes manage it:
I am not my thoughts. I am not my feelings.
Thoughts and feelings are happening to me. I am choosing not to identify with them. I am choosing to observe them with minimal judgment.
Yet like my meds, this usually doesn’t last long:
Thoughts and feelings are happening to me.
Why can’t I have better thoughts and feelings? Why does pain need to hog the microphone all the time? I feel sad. Man, I bet that laundry is starting to stink; now I’ll have to wash it again, this time in hot water, and my favorite t-shirt will shrink. Why can’t someone just get my undergarments without pathologizing my current distress? Are my old Speax now on display? Do I have an anger management problem? Is Parkinson’s a karmic punishment for my character flaws? Why does everyone I care about discard me? Am I an inconvenience to everyone near and far? What if I died right now? How many days would it be before someone noticed?
See? It’s not easy being a non-judgmental witness to your own thoughts. No wonder most people don’t even try.
When I was a child my parents were working their tails off, so they didn’t exactly knock it out of the park on “paying attention to me.” I developed behaviors you might call “hypervigilant”’ and “needy” because I was desperate for their attention. When my exhausted mother got up at two in the morning to nurse my younger sibling I would magically wake up too, sensing I’d finally have a captive audience. It seemed to bug her (imagine that) which made the cycle worse. The spoils of being helpful to others included praise, so I focused on being useful and independent without learning how to ask for support.
Don’t get me wrong; I know my mom loves me. I vividly remember having two small children—adorable, fascinating little people I loved with all my heart—and feeling utterly desperate for them to be asleep. Loving someone the way we generally love our children is exhausting. It’s a 24/7 encounter with anxiety: are they OK? Are they happy? Am I doing this parenting thing right? Will they hate me when they’re teenagers? What if they don’t know how to ask for support, and break a bone or have a seizure or get hit by a car? What does “happy enough” look like?
See? It’s so easy to get swept up in the tide of your own feelings and thoughts. We’re overwhelmed because it’s really hard to consistently say Sure, inner voice of doom, but if you really look around, you have to admit that in this moment, no one is vomiting, no one has a bone sticking through their skin, no one’s getting punched on the playground, no one’s missing or going hungry. You’re fine: enjoy it for the eye-blink amount of time it lasts.
Trauma and pain are universal. I know that. Is it worth asking: what if we allowed ourselves to just be that traumatized person, embrace it? What if we invite the depression monster and the anxiety monster and the failure monster and all the other monsters over for tea and chitchat? Clearly, it’s not safe—identifying with your wounds is arguably more poisonous than identifying with your negative self-talk. It’s unsustainable. And ultimately, it’s useless to look outside yourself for solutions, but I still do it. I know switching to “witness mode” is as close as we can reasonably hope to get to “healthy” or “whole” or whatever the hell “happy” is. At the moment, I just want to be capable of standing up and walking.
Rinpoche said the purpose of a spiritual teacher is “to insult you.” By that measure, I’d like to note that you can’t ask for a better spiritual teacher than Parkinson’s. It never stops insulting you. It steals your control over your body and very literally messes with your mind. It humiliates you in public like the worst abusive spouse of all time—and behind closed doors it’s even worse. If it were another human being, you’d get a restraining order against it.
I can’t get a restraining order. I can’t even get my laundry. So I’m here on the floor contemplating how much of a life is “enough,” and how to keep finding things to be grateful for even if I have now technically peed my pants. It gets ugly, so I stretch my fingers out for the TV remote. And of course, the cable is down and the monitor is flashing a THERE SEEMS TO BE A CONNECTION ISSUE message.
If that ain’t true I don’t know what is!
But hey, TV: message received. Escape mechanisms don’t work. Being in a war of attrition sucks. Being in one against yourself is draining and ridiculous, so I’m trying—minute to minute, sometimes—to Be Here Now, without being consumed by anger at my body or resentment of all the ways I’m not getting the help and support I’m absurdly convinced everyone else gets when they malfunction. That’s another poisonous lie we tell ourselves—that we’ve been singled out for suffering and that we’re uniquely unsupported. On a decent day, I still know that confronting your mortality is a solo flight no matter who you are, how old you are, or what’s prompting the confrontation.
The antidote is probably setting your first, crappy thoughts aside, actively reframing them if you can (“Yeah, I feel like I have no help, but in reality, that large spider on the ceiling is totally going to eat the fruitflies that are hovering over the bananas—score!”). And if you can’t? The same panacea as ever: being present, focusing on one breath at a time, appreciating that you’re here to experience the miracle of breathing, knowing it’s all temporary, it’s not just you, we’re all in this together, even if only because in the end, none of us can escape.
See? Bright side! Now can someone possibly rescue my laundry?
*Poison for Breakfast is also the title of a book by Daniel Handler