20 years later

Twenty years is a long time. Two decades is two generations of wolves, deer and bear, and five generations of squirrel, and usually one whole generations of humans. My last twenty years has been eventful. 

I haven't written in a while, and this blog is dusty and the corners have thick spiderwebs. I'm going to take a stab at memoir, though, and this venue is as good as any other. So here are some of my regrets and regretful lessons.

1. Your children will grow up and out and away from you but you will pine for them nonetheless. Twenty years ago I didn't think twice about the distance between myself and my mother and father. They had their lives, and they'd always be there, and I had my life, and what business was it of mine to be more than their child? Twenty years ago my eldest was a bright and lively two year old, and my youngest still in the womb, but here two decades later I still think of them every day. I still miss them every day. I didn't realize this would happen, that your children would become such an essential part of your lifeworld, and I suppose that's because I was dumb. I went out into the world full of energy and enthusiasm, excited to get away from home, counting the days from the age of twelve when I could I finally be on my own. For years I went months without talking to my mother and father, sometimes longer, and I'm sure I must have left them with deep doubts as to whether I loved them, or missed them, or valued or needed their advice.

Now that I'm seeing the same thing happen with my own children I regret the error. I love the conversations I have with my mom now, which are daily for the first time since I was very young. There is so much to be gained communicating with people who love you. I missed years of my father's love because of my distance, because I thought I didn't need it. When my father died he left a huge hole in my life, one that before he left I thought I'd be able to fill any time. Turns out that time is not so kind.

It's not so much that your parents are a font of wisdom. The distribution of wisdom is not random, but its definitely not concentrated in one's parents. They make mistakes, get angry and develop strange ideas all on their own, especially if you're not there to correct them. But it's possible to strike out on your own without losing your roots. You can and should talk to the people who love you. You don't talk to them because they make you smarter, but because everyone will feel better. It took missing my kids to develop that regret.

The usual caveats apply, however, if your parents are abusive. Don't talk to them if they're bad for you. But there's a long distance between parents who are abusive and regular old clueless people you just don't think have much to say to you, or about your circumstances. It doesn't hurt to check in once in a while. There will come a time when the familiar is gone, and you'll miss it.

2. Marriages built on trust soon enough find that's not sufficient. My marriage foundered on a lack of trust, a mutual fear neither of us was safe with the other. That got worse over time until it just seemed easier to be without than with each other. Much of the decay of trust was my fault, because of my mental illnesses, and because I was of a skeptical mind, and because my ex-partner is herself mentally ill and skeptical. And so our trust didn't blossom over time, it just rotted away. The skepticism proved too much for habit and time was too cruel to overcome it.

What we needed more than trust was some mutual interests, and some common motivations. The kids provided some of that, and we liked to run together. But then I found someone who shared a wider range of interests, and my partner couldn't help but suffer for the comparison. The trust had eroded, the foundations collapsed, and so did our marriage.

My former partner is a wonderful woman. I miss her every day. She provided a kind of stability, a form of comfort, in her compulsive and controlling behavior, that I've often looked for since we left each other. But I don't miss the emptiness of our relationship, the sense we had nothing connecting us but our children, or the years of bad feeling we built up because the two of us were both mentally ill with each other.

3. Mental illness doesn't go away. When I say that my marriage foundered on a lack of trust, what really happened was that I was randomly delusional and irrationally irritated and angry, and she was randomly controlling and compulsive and secretive, and we applied those symptoms to each other semi-consciously and rarely with any apology. In the last year, a while after we'd split, I decided I was suffering from delusions and made an appointment with a psychiatric nurse to get a diagnosis and figure out what was wrong with me. But I only got to that point because I was yelling at my poor dog, alternately enraged and persuaded she thought I was a useless human, and it was only because the poor dog had obviously nothing to do with either emotion that I was able to decide there was something wrong with me. In all my years with my wife my alternating enragement and despair always found a source, and I wasn't able to detach my mental illness from what I thought was my partner's position. There was always an excuse, in other words, and it was always her, and while it might have started as a delusion eventually it became her opinion.

This is an atrocious fact, and monstrous in its glaring, pulsing implications. "You mean to say you took out your delusions on your wife?", you ask, and all I can answer is "yes, and my kids too." (Perhaps that's why my kids don't want to communicate as freely as I hoped?) Now, I wasn't always bad; I'd go long periods without an episode, where I was just as sweet and mild as your favorite pastry. Which is to say my illness was episodic, and it's nature should have been obvious to myself and the people around me. But I never drew the connections, until a year ago this weekend. Well, except that I'd been diagnosed as bipolar at 19, and then spent thirty-four long confusing years ignoring that diagnosis.

Since my diagnosis I've begun medication. It was several months of therapy before diagnosis that gave me the foundation I needed to see the disorder in my behavior so clearly. With those two tools plus meditation I've changed my life for the better. But the disorders haven't ended. I've been almost a year now without an episode of irrational irritation or anger, except for a couple moments that were notable in their lack of a legitimate cause and helped me progress even deeper into the healthy-but-guarded state of medicated remission. I'm still discovering parts of myself that I'd ignored because I was hiding my state from myself, because I was taking out my problems on other people. I've just begun the process of owning and atoning, and I expect there will be many more personal consequences of my long mental illness. I am trying to get better, but I deeply regret ignoring my mental illness.

4. It's important to spend time with people you like. This may also be a reason my kids don't want to talk to me; maybe they don't really like me. Certainly at the end of my marriage I didn't feel like I was with someone who liked me. But my current relationship is with someone who likes me, and that difference is noticeable, gratifying, positive and above all healthy. I like her too, and I don't feel that I need to pretend to be someone I'm not. This may all be because we just haven't bruised each other with years of misunderstanding and mental illness. But just being with someone who likes you makes everything else about the relationship easier: The good night kiss, the down days, the physical parts of the relationship, deciding what to do together. 

Before my diagnosis, I doubted whether this woman was the right one for me. I went through periods of lyrical and deep romantic love, the kind of soul-deep intensity that people - including me - write poetry about. Since my diagnosis and my newly-medicated brain has calmed the waters of what used to be a pretty seriously tempestuous mental teapot, I've found myself having trouble with the poetry. I've been afraid to look too deep. I've been content with placid, after a lifetime of watching myself slosh from one nightmare to another, with long periods of desperate hatch-battening in preparation for who knows what. But she and I separated for a time, and I told myself a lot of stories about why we weren't right for each other.

I had a moment a few months after my medication started, where I realized I wanted to talk to her about my day, and ask her opinion, and be part of her bubbly enthusiasm for what she was reading and doing. The poetry is still absent. But only temporarily, and I think as I adapt to my new balance it'll come back. But the desire and the comfort is there, and there is just no better use of your time that to spend it with someone who likes you. I regret not spending more time with people who like me.

5. Not all of your addictions will be forever, but some will just be distasteful. One of the hallmarks of most of my life was a problem with alchohol. I drank because I felt useless, and often I drank so fast I could rarely even taste the thing. I quit for many years, and then would try again during periods of solitude, thinking I could manage it. After many years of wondering whether I'm an alchoholic for real, I've finally got control. I find with my medication that a glass of wine is enough, and I don't really want more. My impulse control is under control, and so I just don't need to continue. A single glass of wine makes me comfortable and cozy. The second glass relaxed and ready to settle in for the evening, and philosophical. A third glass doesn't appeal to me, and I can feel the edge. A half bottle of scotch, or several glasses of calvados and a cigar or two are just out, and I feel sure I would be wrecked, as I was, and I just don't want to be wrecked. This doesn't make me less of an alchoholic, perhaps, but it's changed my relationship with alchohol completely. When I quit I had no trouble with the discipline, once I'd decided to quit. My medication has made it easier to keep my impulses under control, and so perhaps my alchoholism was an impulse control problem? Which is perhaps a tautology? In any event, now that I've got my impulses under control, my uncontrollable desire to get drunk and see what's next has just evaporated.

Cannabis on the other hand is the great time waster, and leaves me depressed. I feel the elation in the moment, and the confidence that I'm thinking great thoughts. But the next day, after everything has cooled down and the self is no longer as interesting, it turns out I've written something that needs a lot of editing and the time is still wasted. Other people find it relaxing and a useful spur to creativity. When I first started smoking that might have been true for me. But I no longer find it pleasant, just a bad way to kill time.

My other great fallback has been self-pity, and what can be said about that as a coping strategy that doesn't make me sound worse than I've already made myself? Up until a year ago I would have put self-pity at the root of all of my addictions and bad personal habits, the main cause of my desire to be drunk or stoned, in social situations or alone. But I've found that self-pity is really no longer a factor, once I started medication. I just don't feel the way I used to. I don't feel like blaming other people for my conditions or affects, and I don't feel that life has been unfair and I deserve more than I'm getting. If anything I feel the opposite: That I've been immensely lucky, and I've been given more chances than I deserved, and that I'm grateful for everyone's patience, even when they ultimately ran out. It appears that self-pity was a consequence of one of my personality disorders, and the correction of the chemical imbalance dissolved the ruminative certainty I'm hard done by. That doesn't mean I don't have long stretches where I'm dissatisfied with myself and my surroundings. But I find the claws don't get their hooks in as easily, and are easily enough dislodged. This tendency is brand new. 

6. You won't find an audience. I thought people would want to read what I wrote, or listen to what I had to say. But except for a small group of people to whom I am influential and a valued source of opinion, that just isn't the case. Some of that has been because mental illness has made my output inconsistent in quality, conviction and timing, and self-pity is a hell of a drug. Some of that is because I have been unlucky enough to be active at a time when the amount of content available to the world has exploded. Not just the new blogs or tiktoks or instagram influencers, but all the old stuff too is also all available on your phone. It's not just Shakespeare and Plato and Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein, but the range of modern content, from Sasha Grey to Josh Marshall, from Kim Kardashian to Naomi Klein, Greta Gerwig to Donald Trump, with a dozen new movies released every week and a hundred new authors clamoring for attention and so much it's impossible to describe and all you can really do is point at Google or Facebook or Twitter and say, here, have at it. This flood of content is deafeningly loud and intrusive. My own thoughts are often complex and imperfectly clear, and for many years my mental illness prevented me from using a conventional logical order when I needed to express them. I spent a lot of time writing the inverse of what people need to see to get the hook. If I did have good, clear thoughts for a while I wrote them and then stopped, usually because I had an episode of illness or discouragement.

So I have no audience. I can publish this on my blog and be very certain that no one will read it, except Russian bots and Chinese bots and gigantic conglomerates looking for grist for their models. My kids won't read this, or my ex-wife, or my family, or my girlfriend. Anyone personally connected to me is unlikely to even read this far, and anyone personally connected is tired of my shit. Everyone else consists of the scripts that blindly pull in text to train the models they're yoked to, and so the most likely use of these words is as one potential answer for an LLM asked the question, "what do you regret twenty years on?"

7. Twenty years ago I just didn't think I'd need to exercise as much as I do now. I didn't think it was as important to my mental health or even, ironically, my physical health. My exercise routine has been sporadic and diligent variously as time has gone on, and I'm nowhere near as good at what I wished I was good at - I can't run as fast as I want, or as far, or lift as much. For many years these deficiencies were sources of a lot of frustration, and I spent a lot of money and time trying to figure out ways around them. But they're built in, partly as a result of my earlier health traumas and partly because I started late. Starting earlier might not have made up that much deficiency in my ability to run consistently, for example, or at altitude. But I would have been healthier, and I should have started sooner.

8. Confession is good for the soul, but you shouldn't seek validation from your kids, or your partner. These are truisms of modern mental health. "Journaling" every day has been really helpful for me lately, but for years I resisted writing in what amounted to a diary. "Diaries" are for teenagers wrestling with small-time angst; "journals" are for men of a certain moral and intellectual heft. I've been journaling lately, and I find it useful.

I regret not doing it sooner. I suppose one reason was because I thought I was writing for someone, that I had an audience, or was in search of an audience, or would somehow be gifted one through some stroke of luck. But I have no audience. I can write as I want, and as mentioned, anyone who might care won't get this far. That's freeing, and may in fact help me more than any audience ever could.