Since You Asked

I don’t have a purpose in life; OK, no one’s fault but mine. But I took online assessment tests until my eyes crossed. I went to Borders, stood there next to the future doctors and lawyers, read books about “finding your path” and parachute colors (and, yes, “Choosing a Career for Dummies”). I polled friends and acquaintances. At the end of it all, I know plenty of things I shouldn’t do. And I learned tons of interesting things about what other people do.

But I’m still confused, and I’m losing faith. “The future” is no longer this pleasant mist on the far horizon. I know my single friends will start to vanish, and the window for no-strings hookups will close someday; I won’t know whom to call if I get too sick to tough it out. It’s dawned on me that, while I thought I didn’t mind giving up my B.A., I might in some ways. That I’m not cut out to be a bartender (so much for Plan B), and that health insurance actually isn’t optional.

Worse, I’m starting to develop a chip on my shoulder. I laugh less than I used to. I read something the other day and caught myself identifying with Karl Rove. Karl. Frickin’. Rove.

I don’t know how to be any more pragmatic. I gave up on starting a family (fine) or getting married (slightly less fine, but it’s grown on me). I told myself that if I was meant to finish college I would have by now; if I was meant to join a profession, it would be clearer which one I could belong to.

You don’t even know me, so it’s not like I expect you could know those things. It’s just, I’ve run out of stuff to try, and I feel like there must be something else I should change, but I don’t know what it is.

Thanks, enjoy the column,

What am I doing wrong?

Dear me, dear me, dear me,

I’m not sure you’re doing anything wrong. You might not be the problem.

Of course this “approach” doesn’t “work.” That’s not how the universe is structured, my friend. We don’t “work” it. It isn’t something we control and manage. That’s a view of reality based in the industrial world, and the world is not industrial. It is in fact magical and mysterious and if you don’t do something soon it is all going to be over and none of this will have mattered and you will have run around trying to fix something that can’t be fixed and trying to control something that can’t be controlled and create some kind of world that can’t be created because you, my friend, are not in control of these things, and all these people you see around you who seem to have it together have no better idea than you do how to actually live a meaningful life, but what they do have is some prior operant conditioning that took well, and the good luck to have fallen onto this mottled surface more or less shaped according to the slots currently existing for them, which is fine if you want comfort and a good slot to fit in. But otherwise what good are they going to do? What are they going to discover, what are they going to create, and why are they going to go through their whole lives having never glimpsed the existential terror that you, my courageous voyager into the heart of the beautiful and terrifying and meaningless,  have made yourself contentedly comfortable with (as comfortable as one can be with the screamingly terrifying and chaotic knowledge of the void)? I picture you, for all your carping about how uncomfortable it is, as a settled English gentleman (or gentlewoman, I presume, in your case) reading the Times of London and chuckling about the madness of it all while the world crumbles around you.

You seem to be at home in this although it terrifies you, is what I’m saying. As a clinical suggestion, I would say you need to put a floor in. Do not let this take you all the way down. When it grips you, acknowledge it, nod to it, say good morning, let it know that you know it, but do not let it take you all the way down. Refuse the complete journey. Just know it is there.

You have the right to do this. This may be indeed considered your destiny. Try taking this approach: that your life is not supposed to be a success in the way in which you conceive it. Try doing the opposite. Your concept of a successful life is for other people, who are not so intensely tuned in to the futility and uselessness of most life’s endeavors, who are not tuned in to the endgame, as it were, as you appear to be. It is too bad indeed that you were not in a different era, an era of the celebration of despair and hopelessness, say, you could be a hippie or an existentialist and say, “None of this crap means anything to me,” and people would say, “Of course, I dig you, I know where you’re coming from, come live with us on our commune,” or even a bunch of punks might have embraced you for your nihilism and hopelessness at a time, but you landed here in a strangely arid intellectual and spiritual moment when everyone is making money and the young have been taught badly.

Well, that whole faux-happy moment appears to have expired. So you are right where you should be: full of trembling and dread, eyes wide open, unable to filter out the chaos of reality.

So, as protection, take up meditation. Spend many hours meditating. Cut down on the coffee and exercise more. See about your metabolism. Make sure you have a floor, a baseline of functionality. But don’t stop thinking these thoughts. These thoughts are your gift, your lifeblood, your connection to what is real.

You’re not a pragmatic person by nature, and yet you’re trying to be so pragmatic! No wonder it isn’t working. Stop using your weak side. Play to your strengths. If you’re not pragmatic, don’t try to be pragmatic. Be magical. Dress the way you want to. Let the world come to you. Perform your magic, your incantations, your strange songs.

So you don’t have a purpose in life. Well, a “purpose in life” is just something you make up to get through the day. That’s all it is. It’s a construct. We make these things up because we can’t handle the terror of the abyss of purposelessness that is really just beyond the curtain we fear to draw back. Who can know what his purpose is? Now, we can do things that make us feel good and call that purpose. That’s what I do. I do this and that because I enjoy it and other people seem to enjoy it too, and I try to keep the mortgage paid, but to say that I have found some magical purpose in life, the answer to it all, is just to invite a huge and surprising disappointment … and to invite those who see more clearly and searingly into the abyss to call us deluded fools.

I think you’re on the right track. Read some Thomas Bernhard. Read “The Loser.” Don’t give up. Stop trying to be pragmatic. Throw out the pragmatic and go with what you know, the magical, the crazy, the searingly truthful and devastatingly honest assessment of meaninglessness and the void.

Go for it! Rip it up! Go onstage. Write it out. It’s refreshing. We’re all so soft and thin-skinned these days that we have to make up these notions of purpose and meaning, but it’s just a fabricated protective balm. We can’t handle the fire we walk over. We can’t handle the heat of the coals. So we make stuff up. That doesn’t mean what we make up is actually there. We’re just trying to shield our eyes from the blinding truth of emptiness.

Ha ha. That was very refreshing. Now I’m wrapping it up. I’ve got to set some rat traps. Seriously. I’m just the handyman. I write on the side. So hang in there. Stay healthy. It’s a lot of work, and very taxing, standing right there in the center of the maelstrom. So take care of yourself. And don’t expect it to abate. Once you’ve glimpsed it, it doesn’t go away. You just learn to live with it.

So if it helps, do this too: Pick a god. Any god. Believe in it. Ask it for help. Tell this god you’re done, you’re through, ask it for guidance. Just turn it over. Ask the god about its schedule. When does it pick up burdens? When does it come down the street in its gargantuan but silent vehicle of restoration, redemption and forgiveness, and when does it come and pick up your stuff? Get your stuff ready and put it on the street. Don’t wait up. Take all your stuff and throw it out on the street. Go to sleep. When you wake up, if the god wasn’t unforseeably detained (or just messing with your head, as gods will do), it will have picked up your stuff and you will be delivered for a period of time.

Give it a try. Worse things could happen. Pick a god. Any god. Turn it over.

You’re not the problem. You’re just aware of the problem.

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Yeah, I know this isn’t all my fault, that it takes two to make a bad relationship, and all that. And certainly there are women — most of them — who wouldn’t even look my way. Great for them. But for those who are willing to look my way, don’t I have a basic human obligation to keep them safe from my horribleness and inevitable failures? Without exception I say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing or just collapse.

So. Given that I contribute nothing to the world but disappointment and misery, and I can’t control my desire for companionship and attention, shouldn’t I just kill myself? Isn’t that the moral thing to do at this point?

A Dangerous Nothing

Dear Dangerous Nothing,

You, my friend, are exactly perfect the way you are. You’re not a moron!

Look on the bright side: You have a technique. Don’t wait to show her your bumbling, fumbling, weak and incompetent side.  Spill your soup on her now! On the first date. Roll your car over your own foot and have her take you to the emergency room. Come out of the bathroom with tape all over your face. Why? Because a person with tape all over his face looks funny!

It’ll break the ice. She’ll thank you for it!

Pour it on  about what a loser you are! That’ll get her going about how you just have low self-esteem and you’re being too hard on yourself.

If you are asking women to marry you and promising to fly them in your private jet to your villa in Portugal and saying you’ll pick them up at 8 o’clock sharp the next morning and then you are not showing up, then women are going to bed thinking about your private jet and then not getting to ride in it. That’s bad.

You should slap yourself in the face once very hard if you are doing that. Then you should force yourself to sell your imaginary private jet at a loss of millions of imaginary dollars.

But killing yourself wouldn’t make any sense at all, and it wouldn’t make anyone happy, not even you.

Besides, there are worse people.

Thanks!

Dear Cary,

Hmmm. I won’t write this like a writer, more like the utterly confused person I am. I’ll sum up. I’ve been with BF/husband (I didn’t want to get married, he did) 15 years. He came with three daughters, all filling pages of the DSM. One is bipolar, one BDP, one ADHD etc., etc. At the time I was 30 and had just lost both my parents very suddenly, I was making a lot of money, had inherited some and was really trying to pretend nothing had happened. We were great. I still think he’s the funniest human I’ve ever met and that we share that thing all good couples do: We think we’re better than everyone else. Fast forward. His insecurity has dogged us from the beginning. Had I been more aware and noticing, I would likely have run.

Three years ago we lost our dog. He was our child. The one thing we had together. It was bone cancer and it was awful. It probably triggered for me the memory of losing my parents so quickly — I went a little nuts. I had an affair, I left, I ended the affair. I was so fucking sad I couldn’t stand it. I drank a lot.

Meanwhile, I’m a writer. Literary, but not totally insignificant. I’ve been sober for about four months, and working desperately to finish this new book I have due.

A week ago I learned that he was setting me up, saying, “Your phone rang and it was a blocked number, is there anything you want to tell me?” All this involves cappuccino and serious face. When I realized he was making it all up, I lost my mind.

I can’t take it anymore. Every day is a prosecution. There’s more, of course. A lot. I tiptoe around him, he’s angry most of the time and his three grown daughters don’t want to talk to him without a therapist in the room. He’s brilliant and tricky and there is no way to win. I can’t fill the black hole anymore.

And why now, besides the obvious? I’m sober, I’m working, this book is good … why would he tear it out from under me? I know it’s not conscious, but it’s incredibly twisted.

I love him, and we were better than everyone else, but he’s killing me. Dead.

Tormented

Dear Tormented,

You’re four months sober. You’re going to have to take this on faith. Nothing else matters. Nothing is going to be the way it was. There is nothing to do but stay sober. This other stuff will get sorted out later.

Four months sober is its own special condition. It may manifest as confusion or certainty, clarity or dullness, energy or lethargy, high or low, but it is an edge; it is a liminal state out of which a strange future is being born.

You can afford to slow down now and not try to figure everything out or fix everything. It wouldn’t help anyway. Your old fixes won’t work. Well, they might seem to work for a while, but the point is that you need to abandon them because they will not lead you where you have to go now.

No matter whether you finish the book or don’t finish the book, stay married or get divorced, as long as this sobriety goes on day after day you are going to reclaim your life, your childhood, your spirit. You are going to see and feel things that were formerly only a dull buzz or murmur. These dull murmurs of being will provide the sinews of a new construct. It will not be the you that you envisioned when you were busy envisioning yourself. It will be different. But it will be authentic and thus suffused with the energy of life.

Imagine looking at what your husband is doing and not needing to do anything about it.

You will shed many illusions. You will shed the illusion of being better than the rest of us — beneath which has secretly lain the illusion that you are worse than us. These troubling illusions of separateness and hierarchy will go away and you will be reunited with humanity on an even footing.

Guard your sobriety as you would guard your life.

Your husband and others will attempt to get back the old you who would engage their craziness. Observe this from a safe distance. Don’t engage their craziness. Stay safe in your four months of sobriety. Finish the book. Take long walks.

Your husband has lost you. You are no longer entertaining him in his madness. So he is reaching out to you. He is trying to get you back.

Don’t go there. You will just have to stand firm.

Guard your sobriety as you would guard your life. Finish your book. Take long walks. It will start to make sense.

I do want to marry and have children. Thus I’ve spent a fair amount of time on self-reflection, either on my own, in a therapist’s office, or on the phone with my sister. I’ve spent several years sifting through the finer details of my relationship with my father — yep, he’s emotionally distant and critical, has an on/off problem with alcohol, you know the drill. So now, I have all this knowledge about me, about my relationship with my father, about why I play the role that I do in my relationships, etc., etc. I’m grateful for this knowledge. However, I want this knowledge to do something for me, because, frankly, I’m really starting to bore myself.

Knowing what I know, how can I, or anyone, for that matter, truly change? How do I stop making the same old choices, drawing in the same old men, putting up with the same old crap?

Sincerely,

Ready for Change

Dear Ready for Change,

I only know one thing about this. When you have had enough then you will change.

Have you had enough? Have you truly had enough? Are you stumbling, blind and desperate? Are you lying on the sidewalk? Have you fallen to your knees and cried out to anyone who can hear that you cannot go on one minute more?

Then you will change.

Until then, you may acquire new skills and insights that alert you to your behavior. You may make better decisions. You may abort certain activities. You may begin to see the patterns in your life with greater clarity. You may become more cautious. You may get better at evaluating potential mates.

But you will not change in any fundamental way until you reach a breaking point. This breaking point may not be dramatic or even visible to others. It may be quiet, a moment  when something shifts inside. You may not even realize it at the time. But a transformation is not an adjustment. It is a shift.

Many desire deep, fundamental change, yet it is elusive. Certain life-changing experiences bring us to our core selves, or force us to make certain leaps — leaps of faith, leaps that take us out of the ordinary and expose us to a more authentic and searing experience of the self. But how does that happen? How can we make it happen?

I don’t think we can make it happen. But there are things that seem to predispose us to it.

Having a fatal flaw can be a blessing. Facing it may bring about the change you long for.

For me it was alcoholism.

That is all I know, personally. I have only experienced this once, when my alcoholism brought me to a condition in which I was willing to do the 12 steps. But people have adapted the 12 steps to other conditions. It seems reasonable that certain psychological conditions would produce the same hopelessness and despair that drive people to do the 12 steps.

Those of us who have found lasting help through the 12 steps can usually point to one defining moment. Such moments are usually preceded by years of difficulty and numerous attempts to change without experiencing any major disruptions in life or having to entertain foreign and sometimes empirically questionable notions. What happens in these moments is qualitatively different from the acquisition of new life skills or psychological insights. We had acquired life skills and understanding and insight but still could not stop doing what we were doing.

So I would suggest if you want such an experience that you entertain the notion that you might be one of those people for whom the 12 steps might work even though you do not seem to be an addict. I have heard people speak of being so demoralized by their behaviors that they “hit bottom” with codependence, sex, anger, etc.

It makes sense. It’s not my story, but it makes sense. Why should alcohol have a special place in the mechanics of human transformation? Why would the universal human experience of hitting bottom and reaching out for help and finding a new way of living be confined to addicts? The history of religion and consciousness shows otherwise.

The important point is that transformation is not acquisition; rather, it is loss. We do not pick up new tools for living first; we first abandon what has served us so far, and in that moment between abandoning what has brought us this far and stepping into a new vessel is a moment of profound terror and joy.

That moment of terror is what distinguishes transformation from mere adjustment.

Since you have are standing at a precipice, I suggest you look into the 12 steps as they have been applied to problems of relationship and family. Al-Anon is a group that started to help the family members of alcoholics but has now been found useful for a variety of human problems.

But the steps are just activities; the results can often seem miraculous but I continue to believe that change begins with some ineffable human shift, whether you call it raw desperation, ego deflation, a moment of clarity, incomprehensible demoralization, seeing the light … it doesn’t matter so much what we call it as long as we understand what we are talking about. So the problem remains: How are we brought to this point? How do we arrive at it? Can it be precipitated, like inducing birth?

Perhaps you will be brought to this point by continual meditation on your problem, or by continuing therapy, or by a sudden realization; perhaps it will come to you as nothing more than a passing thought that has lasting resonance. I urge you to begin with the 12 steps and see where that takes you; doing such activities, if nothing else, seems to keep us attuned and alert to the necessary moment, whenever it arrives, and it always arrives in its own time.

My problem is there hasn’t been a night that has gone by that I haven’t had a “nightmare” about this guy. And the new girl. And his parents, whom I adored. A recurring dream is that I move into a new place (which I did already) and I am so excited about it, and then I walk outside, and there they are, my next-door neighbors.

I have been on a couple of dates and met some really nice guys whom I really don’t think twice about.

I know I did the right thing, but I am so embarrassed and annoyed that my subconscious will not let it go. Any suggestions on what it might take to stop these dreams/nightmares?

My subconscious would really appreciate it.

Over It But Not Really Over It

Dear Over It But Not Really,

My subconscious had a conversation with your subconscious and found out that you’re still totally in love with this guy. Your subconscious is, anyway.

Your subconscious was telling my subconscious how attractive he was and what a good time you used to have until the conversation started to really irritate me and I had to break in and say some things to both of them.

“You’re all about you, aren’t you?!” I said to your subconscious. “Here this girl is trying to get over this guy and she’s asking me for help, but you just can’t get enough of him. You keep throwing him right back in her face. What’s wrong with you?”

Now, because my subconscious and your subconscious were speaking to each other in their own special language, I can’t transcribe exactly what your subconscious was saying. But here’s a rough approximation.

“You really loved him, didn’t you?” my subconscious said.  “You really loved him and she ditched him without consulting you. That’s it, isn’t it? You felt comfortable with him screwing up all the time, not being true, not being able to settle down, not telling the truth? How can you love a guy that much who treats her so badly? Aren’t you and she one and the same? Don’t you have any regard for her? You’re just out for a good time and nothing more?

“You don’t care? Really? You’re her subconscious and you don’t really care that much what happens to her? Oh, you don’t mean that you don’t care, but that you don’t take her fears seriously because they’re groundless ego fears? That she’s not really in danger even though she thinks she is? That she doesn’t really have a broken heart even though she’s crying for months? What are you talking about? [Your subconscious can be a little arrogant and obtuse -- like a lot of subconsciouses.] It’s just “ego fear”? Come on. Really?

“So riddle me this, Her Subconscious: Where were you when she was going through all this with this guy? You were right there? Why didn’t you tell her?

“What? You liked it when he wouldn’t behave? You liked the fact that he was out of control? That is crazy! That is perverse!

“Oh. Right. You’re the subconscious. You’re supposed to be crazy and perverse.”

After having this conversation with your subconscious, I understand you much better. Your subconscious loves the jester and the cowboy and the wanderer, who make for sketchy boyfriends but your subconscious doesn’t care. It’s not that your subconscious doesn’t care about you. In fact, you are all it cares about. But it considers many of your fears to be petty, society-based fears, not grounded in spiritual reality. See, your subconscious is coming from a perspective of pretty much timelessness, infinity, no death, that kind of thing. It’s not in a hurry, your subconscious. It’s got loads of time. It always has a parking space.  When it’s just parking, it’s into parking. If it’s making love, it’s just making love. It’s just interested in what’s happening before or afterward or in different locations. That’s meaningless to the subconscious: future, past, here, there — it’s all the same. Plus, when postage rates go up, it doesn’t have to adjust the meter, if you know what I mean. (That’s the most amazing thing of all, if you’re in a small business. But you don’t know what I’m talking about now, do you, because you’re not in a small business? Well, you should be. As a hedge against inflation and joblessness.)

Anyway, this explains why you are in such a tough spot.

So what can you do?

Well, I know one thing. You have to give your subconscious what it wants, or it will make life hell.

Think of your subconscious as if it were a child and you were the adult having to pay its way and drive it around.

It’s like, OK, if it were playing baseball, it would be the one guy out there who is just enjoying the sensation of playing and doesn’t care about the rules or the score; he loves the crack of the bat and the sliding into base; he loves the feel of the clay and the grass; he loves the uniform and being out in the sun and cheering when something happens.

That’s your unconscious, or inner child, or soul, or whatever. That’s the part of you that is alive and hungry.

Your subconscious misses him more than you do. It misses the sweets. It misses the chance to be on top of the world, in the moment, laughing in the bar, completely satisfied. It misses him, how he took care of things for you, how he made things right while he was making things wrong.

Your subconscious knew all along exactly what he was like and what he was doing and that was fine.

You have no secrets from your subconscious. I think that’s where people get the notion of “God” as somehow all-knowing; it’s our projection of our own unconscious.

Your subconscious is pure knowing. It sees and knows and shrugs. It shrugs, that is, as long as it is getting what it wants, for that’s the other part of it: Your subconscious is also pure longing. It doesn’t care about the rules he broke. It just wants him back. And it will keep serving him up in dreams until it gets what it wants, which is … whatever it wants … which it will tell you about in the cryptic and maddening language of dreams and coincidence.

So what are you going to do?

You have to own it, for one thing. You have to own your own desire. You have to say, out loud, here is my desire for that guy, and it is strong, and I do want him, I want the taste of him, I want the feel of him, I want to do the things we used to do, I miss feeling the way I felt after we did the things we did, and I miss knowing that he wanted me and was there, and all the things that happened while we were together.

Your hungers have led you into bliss but also torment. You are a Western person who takes it for granted that you are in charge and that there are rules, and that a lover can strike out if he violates the rules. What you are encountering, though, is the nature of desire and the subconscious, which does not care about rules and the violation of them but only cares about vision and passion and taste and touch and wanting.

Go easy on yourself is one suggestion. Admit that you are not in charge, that your desires are bigger than you. Observe that moving and changing jobs and changing bars did not eliminate the condition of desire. That is because desire does not inhere in conditions or locations. It is in you; it is your desire. It is yours. Own it.

Satisfy it.

We stayed in touch through the breakup process, which crushed him, and we tried to stay friends although it was awkward at times, to say the least. I stupidly thought that I could break apart from him but remain best friends. Everyone says that doesn’t work. He admitted he was wrong to have denied me a commitment. He told me he wanted kids now. He proposed to me, and swore he’d try everything to get me back. I held off, but stayed in touch.

I joined Match.com and went on a series of somewhat lame dates (but I tried not be so hard on them or myself — I hadn’t dated in 10 years!). My ex bought a larger, less flashy car because, he said, “It’ll be good for kids.”

I moved my life to another part of the city. He kept all the pictures of us up in the house.

I told all my girlfriends I was a strong, independent woman now on the prowl and that they should all fix me up. My ex quietly told only those closest to him.

I told him I didn’t see a future with him. He planned a trip for us to go to Napa, and I — needing a break from work and badly wanting to travel with my “old friend” — went.

We had a wonderful time: We ate, tasted wine, walked along the river, laughed, made love. Everything went smashingly well.

Now we secretly meet once or twice a week (when I’m not out on my Match.com dates!). We make dinner at our old house or my new one, and sleep together regularly. I’ve only told a few close friends, because I don’t want to seem like a flip-flopper. But those few close friends aren’t really shocked because they knew how close we were for so long.

This is not characteristic of me. I am known to be a hard-ass. I’m known to make decisions and stick to them. I don’t turn back. I’ve never even fathomed I would write a letter to an advice columnist. I’m the rock everyone usually goes to for advice.

But I’m flat-out still in love with him, although I’m very suspicious of his 180-degree turn in terms of kids and marriage. I don’t want to go back to him and end up playing the fool. On the other hand, I don’t want to lose the person I could live my life with and make a future with.

Is it just the excitement of the thing that’s getting to me, or is this one the real deal? I’m asking you: Can you think of a way I can test him or test myself to know the difference? Please advise.

Hardheaded in Love

Dear Hardheaded in Love,

You want to test him? You just did. He passed. The test is over.

Can you hear him talking? He bought a sedan. He kept all your old pictures up. He proposed.

He’s saying he’s ready. He’s saying he’s changed. He’s saying he doesn’t want to lose you. He’s saying come on, marry me, let’s have kids.

What more can he do?

He doesn’t want anybody else. He wants you. Maybe neither of you realized it but the whole episode sounds like a test.

Pencils down.

Get married. Quick.