On self-defeat, part 2

I just wrote about how Wife's whole life—so it seems—has been one long exercise in self-defeat. This is a line of thought I started after looking at the journals she left behind when she vacated Son1's apartment.

But my reflections didn't stop there. Oh no.

Father undercut himself the same way. I've talked here and here about how he undermined his own authority as a businessman. I don't know the details of his stint as a university professor, except that he failed his first tenure review (after three years) so his contract was not renewed. Decades later he found a letter he had written to the Dean after his contract was canceled, and read it to us over the dinner table. As a piece of rhetoric or invective—as a letter that burst into flame upon reading—it was a remarkable piece of work. But by that time I was already an adult, and in fact I was a manager with employees of my own. And what I thought privately (though I never said it aloud) was, "Gosh, if that's where your head was at the time, I'd have fired you too." The letter was all about him, and never mentioned the needs or strategies of the university. And even if he didn't care about the university, anyone who wanted to play the employment game should know enough to pretend to care. Not Father. 

After he retired from business, he tried to make a living as an actor. There he was dogged by a special kind of bad luck that repeated over and over. Time and again, he would get a part in something very small whose schedule neatly prevented him from auditioning for something large and rewarding. To hear him tell it, this happened so often that he could almost count on it. Now was this self-defeat? I have no idea. All I know is what I heard from him, and he made it sound like random bad luck each and every time.

On the other hand, we've all heard the saying: Once is chance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. I just don't know which "enemy."

In other words, the topic of self-defeat is one I probably need to spend some time with, because I've lived around it much of my life. First Father, then Wife. That's definitely why I need to think about it. Right?

Ha. I should be so lucky.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have discussed my own self-defeating behaviors many times. Good luck seems to be wasted on me. And I never had the skill to advance up the corporate ladder. I hide myself, and I seem to court failure. You can multiply other references throughout the blog without breaking a sweat.

I think this is why Kimberly Steele told me (three years ago!) that publishing my book "is going to be an act of will that will act as one of your major tests in your life." I have spent too much of my life trying actively to fail. I have worked at defeating myself, and I have surrounded myself with masters at self-defeat. So the challenge is, Can I pull out of such a dramatic dive? Can I get my ass in gear and make it happen?

The questions about Wife matter to her therapist, but I'm not her therapist. The questions about Father are of biographical interest, but after all he's dead. The questions that have to matter to me are about me. 

I have achieved two long-term goals in my life. The first was my marriage (and children). The second was my separation. What comes next? Now that I'm a senior citizen, what long-term goals can I still accomplish? And can I do them without ruining myself in the process?

Those are the questions that matter now. I suppose I should be grateful to Wife's old journals for making me think of them.   

           

On self-defeat, part 1

I've been thinking more about those journals that Wife left behind, when she moved out of Son1's apartment.

She must have been writing them under the guidance of some psychotherapist, or at any rate under the guidance of some psychotherapeutic ideas—ideas that she might have read somewhere, or might have gotten from a therapist in the past. The journals specifically talked about her experience of compulsive thinking, and she set up tables to work out concrete examples.

• Column 1: Initial idea.
• Column 2: Compulsive idea that it triggers.
• Column 3: Rational idea towards which she should redirect herself.
• And so on ....

Examples included:

• Initial idea: "I hurt Hosea by my infidelities and by overspending the budget."
• Compulsive idea: "I am a terrible human and don't deserve to live."
• Rational idea: "I did cause pain but it will be manageable if we work together on it." [Actually I don't remember this entry, but I assume it would have to be something like that.]
• I don't have more examples, because you remember I left the journals there.

It all looks like a very logical therapeutic approach. But the single most important fact—overwhelming everything else—is that it didn't work! Self-understanding counts for bupkes unless it results in meaningful changes of behavior, and Wife's behavior never changed! So all these journal entries were just masturbation, nothing more.

During my most recent visit, Son1 mentioned as an aside (as if it were an obvious point, while explaining something else) that Wife still suffers from these compulsive ideas. Someone criticizes her and right away she falls into a spiral of ranting, "Oh I'm a terrible human and don't deserve to live!" Then whoever's talking to her backs off, because he (or she) didn't mean the criticism to be quite that extreme. And therefore nobody ever succeeds in talking to her about behavior that she actually has to fix.

As I typed those words, I found myself thinking, "Nice work, if you can get it."

And indeed, in the short run it seems like this uncontrolled and disproportionate response is an effective tactic to prevent Wife ever having to face any serious criticism. It insulates her. If narcissism means having to preserve her self-image at all costs, it's a very sturdy form of narcissistic defense, ... even if it is awfully remeniscent of Russian roulette. 

In the long run, of course, the tactic is self-defeating because it means she never confronts the habits that make her fail. So she never learns new habits instead, and she continues to fail. At this point, Wife has failed:

• As a musician. (Good enough to be a church organist, not good enough to be a professional.)
• As a scholar. (She dropped out of one graduate program for complicated reasons, and then failed her Qualifying Exams in her second program.)
• As a businesswoman. (She alienated several employers and they fired her; then her health collapsed while she was still working for the last one and she had to go out on permanent disability.)
• As a church-goer. (I don't know as much about this. But she transitioned over the years from Wiccan to Baptist to Mormon. She was pretty open—to me and the boys—about joining the Mormon church because they look after you. But I think I remember her saying a few years ago that her bishop had actually thrown her out of the church for some reason. Maybe freeloading.)
• As a friend. (Wife keeps making new friends and then keeps alienating them. She tried to contact her friend Leia to say goodbye before leaving town, but no such luck.)
• As a wife. (OK, maybe I'm prejudiced on this point. But read the first ten years of this blog to see my perspective on the question.)
• As a mother? (Whatever else is going on, Wife has clung to her identity as a mother of two wonderful boys. But the last long email I got from her makes me think she is reconsidering what that relationship really looks like.)

If you run into an asshole one day, well, tough luck, you ran into an asshole. If everyone you meet, all day long, is an asshole—it's because you are the asshole.

What this means, in turn, is that Wife's whole life is one long exercise in self-defeat. And it didn't have to be. It was all avoidable. I mean ... maybe her bad health was baked in from the beginning. But the dysfunctional personality, that squandered every opportunity she was handed? That seems to have been something she did on purpose. And it is sad.

           

Could Wife have Asperger's?, 3

OK, the last time I asked this was five years ago. I think the answer is definitely "Yes" based on lots of experiences that are all more or less summed up in this post. Wife herself thinks the answer is "No" (or that's what she said when I asked her), as described in this post and then this one right after.

But then this evening I was reading John Michael Greer's Ecosophia blog, specifically the comments to this post, and he makes the following remarks in comment #58:

My late wife was the same way — she was on the autism spectrum, and from late childhood on preferred to hang with boys (and then men) rather than girls (and then women) because she disliked the informal-power realm and never could do it well. That’s one of the reasons why she became the first female presiding officer of an Odd Fellows lodge in Washington state; when the Odd Fellows decided to let women join, the brothers of my lodge (who all knew her via social and charitable activities) asked her to join and then voted her into the big chair because they all knew her, liked her, and knew she’d follow the rules of formal power rather than trying to twist them into comformity with the ways of informal power.   

I read this, and right away I thought of Wife's career as a high school teacher.

She spent four years teaching at all-boys Catholic high schools. (That's one year before graduate school, and three years after.) Then she finally had a chance to teach at an all-girls Catholic high school. She jumped at the chance: partly for practical reasons (it was a lot closer to home, and her daily commute had become very difficult), but mostly for idealistic reasons. Wife called herself a feminist. She had gone to an all-women's college, and valued all-female spaces. She looked forward eagerly to training young women so that they could achieve the best they had in them.

Be careful what you wish for.

Wife was very successful in teaching boys, but she failed utterly at teaching girls. She held that job for only one year. If she had not been accepted at another graduate school after that (which rendered moot any question of her further employment) she would surely have been fired, and might have had to go back to secretarial work.

Of course I wasn't on campus. I had my own job. But the way she described it, the girls were all two-faced and treacherous.She often summarized the difference like this:

Back when I was teaching boys, I'd do something one of the boys didn't like and right away he'd shout out in the middle of class, "Oh, Mrs. Tanatu, that isn't even fair!" Then I'd tell him, "Suck it up, Johnson, this isn't a democracy." And we'd be done—the whole problem would be over. But with the girls, any time I do something they don't like they smile and smile just as sweet as pie. I never even know there's a problem. But then they go tell all their other teachers that I'm picking on them, and the other teachers come and ask me quietly, "Why are you being so mean to Sonya? Or Tanya? Or Suzie? Or Betty?" And these little conversations in the hallway are the first I've heard of it! I literally never knew there was a problem before this. But now the whole faculty thinks I have some kind of crazed vendetta against this or that girl, just because she never turns in her homework and wants me to coddle her anyway. God, but I miss teaching boys!

Is it just me, or does that sound pretty much exactly like what Greer says about his late wife? That she—like my Wife—understood formal power and could work with it effectively, but that she—also like my Wife—was totally at sea when it came to informal power, those quiet conversations in the hallway, and the focus on whether you like someone rather than on whether she's following the rules.

Sara Greer was like this because she was on the autism spectrum. Isn't it the most natural thing to assume that Wife was also somewhere on that spectrum, if she got identical results? 

   

"Can't"—part 2

A while ago—gosh, it looks like it's been more than nine years already—I wrote a speculation about why Wife insists so devoutly on her illnesses and her incapacity. I said she must be getting something from seeing herself as weak.

Just this evening I read an article by the School of Life ("The Upsides of Being Ill") which proposes much the same thing. This article goes so far as to suggest, in fact, that every illness has a psychological upside, because it protects us from some realization we'd rather not face. Or at any rate the article suggests that we would do well to ask ourselves whether this is the root cause every time we get sick, as a way to keep honest with ourselves. It can be a kind of discipline, for the sake of moral and intellectual hygiene (at the very least).

So then I suppose that (rather than stopping with a discussion of Wife) I also have to ask myself … what benefit do I get out of compulsively reading Twitter? And while I recently stopped drinking for 30 days in a row, what benefit do I get when I start up again?

          

"Neopagan disability cult"?

A few days ago I was reading John Michael Greer's latest weekly blog post—plus the comments, which are always valuable—and in replying to one comment he made a passing reference to something he called the "Neopagan disability cult." Someone asked him what he meant, and he explained as follows:

"May they name a disease after you!"

There's a great Yiddish curse which runs, "May you become famous, so famous they name a disease after you!" (See, for example, references here and here.) But once upon a time I actually contemplated this for Wife. 

As you know, Wife was diagnosed years ago with systemic lupus. Lupus is an autoimmune disorder where the body's immune system overreacts to simple, normal stimuli and ends up attacking healthy tissue. But think for a minute how exactly this description mirrors Wife's temperament, as she chronically overreacts to minor setbacks or random bad luck with outrage and fury, as if the Universe were out to get her, personally. There were years where I thought, "If only we could document this correlation and submit it to a journal somewhere, Wife could be immortalized by having the syndrome named after her!"

Turns out other people have had the idea that there might be a connection between personality and disease. In a recent blog post, John Michael Greer explains that Eliphas Lévi wrote "Most physical maladies derive from moral maladies, according to the unique and universal magical doctrine and due to the law of analogies." (The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, chapter 20) And on his other blog, Greer has written that when he worked in nursing homes, experienced aides could identify what disease a patient suffered from simply by the patient's personality type, without ever looking at the chart:

• The heart-attack personality is "the famous Type A personality."
• "The cancer personality represses his or her emotional life, takes on extra responsibilities, and is constantly worried about not being good enough."
• "The diabetic personality is self-indulgent in a particular way, and -- yes, I know, it sounds like a pun -- rather sweet."
• "The multiple sclerosis personality is the kind that will ring the call bell fifteen times in an eight hour shift because the patient wants you to adjust the position of some little item on the nightstand, which the patient could adjust herself. It's weakness and constant requests for help as a means of feeling in control."

So maybe there's a "lupus personality." Maybe I can get someone to name it after Wife.

   

Crime, revisited

The more that I read John Michael Greer, the more that I find myself in worlds of thought that are different from the ones I used to frequent. And so an idea occurred to me earlier this week — a silly one, trivial really, but I figured I'd record it here because why not?

For years I'd joked to myself that I'd married Wife deliberately, knowing it was going to be a painful slog, "as punishment for my sins." I'd say this, knowing that consciously I didn't believe in any metaphysics that could make sense of it, knowing that consciously it had to be a joke, and yet feeling that at the level of some subterranean emotion there was something to it. A few years ago I even tried to think my way through this paradox, in a pair of linked posts here and here. And maybe that explanation is the true one.

But Greer is a magician and an occultist. So he takes ideas like reincarnation and karma absolutely seriously, and talks about things like "the work you have to do in this life." And so it occurred to me, ... did I deliberately choose a life where I'd marry Wife, in order to burn off some karmic debt acquired earlier?

More generally, I thought about the affection I have always felt for narcissists and crazy people: people I've known personally, like Wife, Scarlett, D, and even Tartuffe back when I was a little kid; but also authors, like William Blake, or Julie Powell, or Robert Pirsig. (See also this movie review.) And all of a sudden I wondered, "Might it be that some of the work I have to do in this life has to do with dealing with crazy people? This could explain the inexplicable attraction" I feel towards them. In other words, if that were defined up front — before my birth — as a boundary condition, it wouldn't have to make sense to me in-universe (as indeed it doesn't) so long as it was a fact (which it is). 

I don't know what to think of the doctrine of reincarnation itself. In fact, I wrote out my thoughts on it earlier this evening and posted them here, on the Patio. But the idea did cross my mind.

        

"As long as you're making progress"

Socrates: Now if there was someone who loved Alcibiades' body, he wouldn't be loving Alcibiades, only something that belonged to Alcibiades.

Alcibiades: That's right.

Socrates: But someone who loved you would love your soul.

Alcibiades: By our argument, I think he'd have to.

Socrates: Wouldn't someone who loves your body go off and leave you when your beauty is no longer in full bloom?

Alcibiades: Obviously.

Socrates: But someone who loves your soul will not leave you as long as you're making progress.

Alcibiades: That's probably right.

Socrates: Well, I'm the one who won't leave you -- I'm the one who will stay with you, now that your body has lost its bloom and everyone else has gone away.

— from Plato's Alcibiades, 131 c-d, translated by D. S. Hutchinson

I thought that was going to be me. Back when I met Wife, she wasn't a stunning beauty, not physically, but there was something dynamic and energetic about her. I found her exciting to be around. And she had great ambitions for the future.

To honor that energy and ambition and excitement, I was prepared to stick around even when the uglier parts of her soul started to become visible. 

And then somewhere along the line she just gave up. Not like Alcibiades, who gave up being a pupil of Socratic virtue and went on to become a dashing, daring, romantic and scandalous traitor. That might have been kind of fun, to tell the truth. No, what Wife gave up was the energy and ambition, not to mention the intelligence and insight and humor. She gave up her "spark of divine fire." I don't know why. And with that, I lost the heart for sticking it out.

I don't tell you anything in this post you don't already know. With all those links to earlier posts, it's more like a "greatest hits" collection than an essay on its own. I guess I was just struck by the discussion between Socrates and Alcibiades, when I read it this morning. It's too bad, is all.  

    

Is this a meditation practice?

A few nights ago, I attended a free class (via Zoom) on Embodied Mindfulness.

I assumed that it was going to be a run-of-the-mill meditation class, but it was nothing of the kind. The presenter was a mindfulness teacher who visits schools: primary, middle, high, or college. And her topic was how to deploy the basic skills of mindfulness in relationship with other people, regardless whether you have a regular, formal mindfulness practice of your own. In other words, she started with the three fruits of mindfulness practice as taught by the Unified Mindfulness approach (the one developed by Shinzen Young): concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity. And then she illustrated how each of these can come into play when you are talking with somebody else, particularly if you are talking about something that is difficult for them (or, I guess, for you). She told stories of interactions she had had with other people to illustrate each one in turn, and a lot of the advice came down to simple stuff that you might hear anywhere else but in different terminology: focus on what the person is really saying, let them say whatever it is that they are really saying even if you don't like it, and ask clarifying questions to follow up (both for your own understanding and also -- sometimes, potentially -- to help them see things about their own situation they might not have seen before). I'm pretty sure all of these techniques fall under the general heading of "active listening."  

What I found fascinating was the idea -- and these are my words, not hers -- that this kind of attentive listening might itself be a sort of applied mindfulness practice. Wait, what? When Wife was in one of her panic attacks and I was trying to unwind her slowly without accidentally setting her off again, I was actually meditating? Wow, who knew? (And I remember once when I did the same thing to D, that she later looked back on it and laughed ruefully, saying something about how I clearly had a lot of experience "dealing with hysterical women." 

It would be great if I never had to use this particular skill again, but I'm involved with Marie these days so we're probably not there. (Although I have said as much to her, stretching a point out of generosity.) So in that case it's nice to know that it counts as meditation. I guess.

      

Madness road

Last month I explained an idea that had occurred to me many years ago, that there was a connection between Wife's openness to the invisible world and her mental illness. On the one hand, she did seem (at least in the early years) to have some demonstrable level of psychism, sometimes knowing what was going to happen before it did. The psychism, for that matter, seemed to run in the family: her mother had the same Gift, and talked about it in the same matter-of-fact way that she would talk about her sewing or her needlepoint or the latest gossip from the local Historical Society. Wife's oldest sister had the Gift as well; she lived in another state so I didn't know her nearly as well, but again she took it as a matter of course. Wife's middle sister never talked about the Gift, not even with Wife or their mother, and apparently didn't have it (or else turned her back on it). All three brothers — so I was told — lacked it as well. (I met the middle sister many times, but never met any of the brothers: one had killed himself, one had died of cancer, and one had abandoned the family — all many years before I ever met her.)

As I say, sometimes Wife knew what was going to happen before it did. Not always, of course, but once in a while. She also had remarkably good success reading Tarot for herself or others. I watched her do reading after reading while she was learning the cards, with the result that I kind of picked up the textbook meanings associated with each card. And I learned the layout she usually used. But then I would watch her read for a total stranger — some friend of a friend that she met at a party, who asked her to do it. She would shuffle, lay out the cards, ... and then confidently tell them things about their lives that had nothing to do with the textbook meanings of any of those cards. Afterwards it would turn out that she was right.

And she was very good at "aspecting" the Wiccan gods or goddesses, most often Cerridwen (her patron) but any of the others as well. I mean by this that she was good at making herself a vessel or channel through which one of Them could speak — good at letting her own personality step aside so that the Deity could possess her body and speak with her voice. (I mention this briefly in a couple of paragraphs here, and I allude to it in this poem. Not sure if I explain it anywhere else in the blog.)

Anyway, some years ago I began to wonder whether there might not be some kind of link between these abilities and her mental illness. I don't mean it in an insulting way ("People who think they are psychic must be crazy!"), but in a clinical or diagnostic way. In other words, I wondered whether the reason that some people have a greater ability to do these things than the rest of us is that they are somehow born with naturally thinner shielding around their minds. The rest of us have naturally thick shields, and screen out all the psychic or supernatural data that is normally in the environment; therefore we don't see it, and assume it doesn't exist. But maybe a few people are born with thinner mental shields: then on the one hand, they are able to perceive data that the rest of us miss (so that they exhibit psychic abilities); but on the other hand, their minds are correspondingly more fragile and break down a lot more easily.

On this view, Wife's mental illness — along with all the misery that it caused her and me and everyone around her — was somehow in the nature of a tragedy. On this view, her neuroses and all her craziness were just side-effects made possible by the same natural endowment that provided her Gift. And on this view, her total collapse once she got sick was just a predictable consequence of the same thing. She came into the world as a delicate instrument who could pick up signals the rest of us could never hear. But delicate instruments don't fare well when they are dropped. And when, because of the normal vicissitudes of life, she slipped off the shelf ... she hit the floor and smashed into a hundred pieces.

For several years I tried to comfort myself with that story. In some ways, it is a very generous story because it makes so much of what happened to be Not Her Fault. But I never knew if it was just a private conceit, or if it was the kind of thing somebody else might come up with too.

Until today.

Today, while I was wasting time on the Internet, and found a link which took me to Galina Krasskova's blog Gangleri's Grove. Once there, I saw a post from New Year's Eve called "Treading the Path of Memory," in which Ms. Krasskova spells out the striking similarities between ballet and shamanism. (If those don't sound related to you, read the article. Once she gets into the details, it becomes a lot clearer.) In particular, though, she has some very specific things to say about the relationship between shamanism and madness. She writes as follows:

Long ago, I learned that there were two paths to becoming what many might term a ‘shaman': madness road or death road. The idea is that you are cast down from your world, shattered and in the process of rebuilding and restoration, one comes back stronger and more resilient than before. There is a third way though, and that is the road of art. What is that? It is living a life where you are fully given over to the daimon of an art – in my case dance. Every inch of your identity, everything inside and out by which you exist and define yourself as a human being, centers around, relies upon, and is defined by one’s art. Then…usually at a terrible and critical juncture, that is stripped away and the result is a psychic shattering of the self. You rebuild (or not, but “not” involves consequences that are a luxury for a spirit worker. “Not” involves destruction, devolution, sometimes madness, drug addiction, and death). You claw your way back into some semblance of existence. You learn to live again and eventually, if you’re lucky, to find some measure of joy. If this is part of a spirit-worker’s journey, then this is when the Gods begin the process of direct formation. (In the end, I think every spirit worker or shaman ends up traipsing painfully down every one of the roads at some point in their life as we are remade again and again in service to our Gods. It is the way of things – formation never ends). The easiest and most productive thing to do is to embrace the process.

This could have been Wife's story, with only cosmetic edits. 

• She started out wanting to play music, and became accomplished on the pipe organ. Then her teacher told her she could never play professionally because her hands were too small — playing for church services was the best she could hope for. 
• So she gave up music and threw herself into scholarship and teaching. That lasted until she failed her qualifying exams in her second graduate program and had to leave school. 
• Then she gave up scholarship and teaching for the world of business. And that was taken away from her when her health finally collapsed and she could not go on another step. 

One by one, her goals were taken away from her until she had none left. If you ever wondered about the source for the despair she shrieked out in this post ... well, this is where it came from.

An interesting consequence of Ms. Krasskova's perspective is that Wife's losses stop looking like disasters, and start looking like tests, ... steps along the way towards learning to become a Priestess. I don't remember if I ever proposed that she look at things this way. Some days she would have taken my head off for saying anything like that. But that's the kind of thought I had in mind when I wrote:

The road marked for my wife is hard,
With pain and sickness closely barred.
But those who will to serve the gods
Must meet their tests, despite the odds.

Anyway, it was nice to find that someone else sees it all the same way.

__________

P.S. [added the next day]: The thoughts in this post are also connected to the line of thought I pursue in this post from three years ago. The difference is that the kind of "dying" I talked about back then is nothing like as dramatic as the things Ms. Krasskova discusses above, and nothing like as dramatic as the physical or mental illnesses that wracked Wife and destroyed her life. Also I have never claimed to be a shaman or spirit-worker. But there is an echo here, however distant.   

        

The news from Cassius

In the first few years of this blog, the posts were urgent and angry. These days they are mostly a lot more sedate and reflective. Some years ago I wondered about that and decided it was because Wife was no longer a major character. Or at any rate, Wife-as-she-was-back-in-the-day was no longer a character, partly because we had separated and partly because she is no longer the dynamic, brazen bitch she was back when I met and married her. In one respect, the blog really lost something when it lost her as a central character.

But after my long phone call with Cassius on New Year's Eve, I think maybe the whole problem could have been avoided if only I had let Cassius add posts of his own. Of course, literally speaking that would never have happened, because I was totally out of touch with him. But what he told me to fill in the history of the missing 37 years made his story sound just as exciting as mine.

It's late tonight, but it has also been a couple of days and I haven't posted any of this yet. So let me post the details briefly. Then maybe later I can discuss some of them at greater length, at least to try to wrap my head around them.

Cassius mentioned that he had been diagnosed with ASD, and he then explained further that this is The-Syndrom-Formerly-Known-as-Asperger's. That news didn't surprise me much. I mentioned before that Cassius usually sounded scornful and acerbic when I knew him back in college. If he were somewhere on the autism-spectrum -- somewhere well towards the high-functioning end, but still on it -- that might explain why he would routinely speak in a way that risked alienating people. It's just a thought, and perhaps wrong ... but it did mean that I wasn't surprised by this particular piece of news. That makes this point stand out, in a conversation that largely had me raising my eyebrows ever higher.

Then he told me his wife had died a few years ago. Nothing strange in that, right? Only his wife was 22 years older than he was. She already had two daughters at the time she met Cassius, girls who therefore became his stepdaughters. (He has no children with his own DNA.) One of his stepdaughters was three years older than Cassius, and one was three years younger. I remarked that this narrow age gap must have made his relationship with them rather ... umm ... unusual, if not actually strained. But no. He said that the girls told him that the years their mother had with him -- the 28 years their mother had with him [damn near as long as I was with Wife!] -- were the "only" happy years of her life. I'm left thinking that this must be a remarkable story, although Cassius didn't go into it a lot. He did mention that the age gap gave her a level of power in the relationship that could almost turn abusive, though he didn't dwell on this point. (He had more dramatic things to talk about later. See below.) 

But I do wonder what the story looked like from his stepdaughters' perspective? ("Oh look, Mom has married a boy our age! And it sure seems that things are better for her now than they were -- say, just for example -- all the time we were growing up!" I'm just saying that it's probably a hell of a story.)

Some time after his wife died, Cassius entered a relationship with a nonbinary individual that I'll call M. I'm not sure how long this relationship lasted, but apparently it ended only about a year ago. 

With Cassius getting a restraining order against her ... sorry, them. 

A restraining order issued some time after M had threatened his scalp with a machete ... and smashed a plate glass window with something they were throwing at him ... and ... oh gosh, there was more but I don't remember it all. 

But in the course of the account, Cassius definitely used words like violent, sociopathic, and narcissistic. Also the word abuse. He used that one a whole lot, actually.

So he and I spent a while discussing what it is like to come to the realization that you are being abused, long after the events themselves.

But there was even more after that. Or it might have come before, ... I don't quite remember. This post is a logical reconstruction of the call, and not a chronological one.

On top of the rest of it, Cassius explained that he has been in therapy recently (no kidding!); and after deep reflection, he has come to understand that he suffers from gender dysphoria. And so he is currently considering (or perhaps planning) whether to transition to being a woman.

Honestly, I had not expected this last point. Even with all the rest of it.

This evening I talked with Marie over Skype, and I brought her up to date on the news from Cassius. (We had all been friends together back in college.) She said the gender dysphoria didn't surprise her, and she reminded me of one Halloween when Cassius decided to dress elegantly as a woman. I remembered the occasion, but I thought he had just dressed up like that for the hell of it. Marrie said yes, of course once Cassius had established his character as scornful and acerbic, anyone would naturally interpret his choice to dress up as a woman as no more than a way to tweak everyone's expectations. And that was certainly how he played it at the time. But she added that just because he played it that way doesn't mean that was his real or only motive.

I've mentioned before that Marie is really smart. Right?

Anyway, my conversation with Cassius was really long.

           

What happened to her, anyway?

I don't know why I'm writing this now. It's late, and I'm far from sober. If I want to write a think-piece, much less an analysis of someone's personality, I should take time over it. I should have all my wits about me. Right?

Whatever.

To this day I cannot give a satisfactory answer to the question, What the hell happened to Wife? How did she morph from this into that? Honestly, it looks like magic: I don't know how else to explain it. And since magic was her whole métier, back in the day, I guess that's an appropriate explanation. Any way you look at it, it's bizarre.

Back when I met Wife, she was strong, energetic, and magical. We were both academic nerds, and of course the normal question then — even before you get as far as a pickup line — is What's your major? If you want to be really classy, you can ask, What's your research about? Her research was about the Arthurian legends and the character of Merlin. She knew, seemingly, everything there was to know about King Arthur and Merlin, and could trace both figures effortlessly back into the prehistory of Celtic mythology. She had ambitions to pursue these topics through a Ph.D. and into a tenured professorship somewhere important, and the same passion also fueled her dedication to learning real magic and her commitment to achieve a third degree as a Wiccan High Priestess. Even then she could be difficult, but she was invigorating to be around. Her conversation crackled with a tangible passion and energy.

Today? She's tired, spent, cranky, and totally self-centered. Everything wrong in her life is the result of bad luck or ill-treatment by others — none of it is ever her responsibility. (Just ask her!) Everyone picks on her, and then they abandon her. And wait, wait — let her tell you about all her physical ailments! She's got these debilitating headaches, plus of course her doctor tells her that she's permanently disabled so it's not like she could work to earn even one thin dime. Basically she's helpless, completely helpless — also miserable, but in a way that precludes her taking any steps on her own behalf, to make her own life better. Life has just been really difficult for her, you see, and it doesn't help that her ex-husband is such a heartless son of a bitch ....

And so on.

What the hell happened?

Part of it was that she got so sick. I mean, even back when I met her, she would sometimes get sick with weird symptoms that no one could really identify. Somewhere around the year 2000 (when we had been married for 16 years, and when the boys were respectively 4 and 2) she was finally diagnosed with systemic lupus. Probably a decade before that, she had been diagnosed with depression and put on Prozac. 

Privately I suspect she suffers not simply from depression but from bipolar disorder — a diagnosis she got just once, and which was never repeated, and which she has resolutely denied. But the phenomenology of bipolar disorder includes those marvelous, manic highs as well as the deep, depressive lows; and I think those highs are exactly what made her seem so magically exciting and attractive back in the early days. In any event, she denies that she suffers from bipolar disorder but these days she is treated with mood stabilizers that are normally reserved for bipolar patients. Her excuse is that these are the only medications that work on "treatment-resistant depression." Sure, babe. Whatever.

Anyway, I think the combination of physical and mental illnesses knocked the stuffing out of her, and convinced her that she was never going to achieve any of those great things she'd always dreamed of. Certainly there were years when she achieved almost nothing. Back when Son 2 was about three years old, he drew a picture of her and then ran to show her. "See Mommy? I drew a picture of you! I drew you lying down in bed, because that's where you always are." She absorbed comments like this into her own self-image rapidly, indeed almost eagerly.

On top of her health issues, she ran into a lot of obstacles in her professional life even before she left work on permanent disability. 

• Some of these obstacles may have been health-related, like when she did unexpectedly poorly on her qualifying exams for her doctoral program, as a result of which she failed to get a second master's degree and left school forever. 
• Other obstacles resulted directly from her execrable social skills, that led her to get fired from one job after graduate school and almost fired from the next. (In the end she went out on disability because of her lupus just before her boss lost patience with her forever, so they agreed to call it "permanent disability" and avoid the ugliness of termination-for-cause.) 
• Strictly speaking, these same execrable social skills meant that she had burned all her bridges back in graduate school, so when she did (as I say) unexpectedly poorly on her qualifying exams she had exactly no leeway with the department in which to lobby for retaking them, or working for another semester and trying again, or any other reasonable accommodation. No one was willing to extend her any more than the strict letter of the law; and the letter of the law was that she failed. Too bad, so sad. Goodbye!

In case it's not obvious, these are the same execrable social skills that I described earlier this evening — the ones that have left her virtually alone for Christmas, because nobody wants to spend time with her. 

And so she gave up.

Over the years — back before I, too, gave up and decided to leave her — I spent a lot of time trying to reconcile these two different pictures of her, Before and After. Some days I settled for a simple explanation: that her anti-bipolar mood-stabilizing drugs did indeed smooth out her emotional affect, but that in the process they also eviscerated all the energy and power that had made her so attractive back in the old days. 

Other times I explored a more metaphysical explanation, that there is some correlation between (on the one hand) an openness to the gods, to divine revelation and to magical experience, and (on the other hand) an emotional fragility or instability that easily collapses into mental illness and pathology. For what it is worth, I think this principle is true: that is, I think there really is such a correlation. Think of any of the great prophets of the past: if they lived among us today, I think we'd find them emotionally fragile, and we'd probably consider them mentally ill. But, as Nietzsche pointed out, just because they are sick doesn't make them wrong. [I don't have a reference to hand, and it's too late at night for me to want to look it up. But I know he said it somewhere.] Or, as the Who once expressed the exact same idea, "Sickness will surely take the mind / Where minds can't usually go / Come on the amazing journey / And learn all you should know."

Anyway, I told myself that an openness to the gods required this mental and emotional fragility. And therefore, I went on, it was just bad luck — but totally predictable — that Wife's mind and emotions collapsed under the strain. In every generation, so I told myself, there are a few people who are able to access the divine, who can communicate with the gods more clearly and easily than any of the rest of us. But they pay dearly for this gift, and Wife's collapse was an example of what this payment looks like. [Compare also, if only for sheer preposterous grandiosity, this post here.]

I spent years telling myself these things. But were they true? Or was I just making excuses for her, the way I made excuses for her emotional abuse over decades and refused even to call it what it was? Honestly, I have no idea. 

What this means is that, to this day, I can't give you a good explanation of what the hell happened to her. I don't know how she changed from this to that. 

All I know for sure is that it was bad.    

   

Could Wife have Asperger's?, 2

 Unsurprisingly, she doesn't think so. When I asked whether she had ever been tested, she replied:

No, I haven't, and I don't have any reason to believe I'm on the autism spectrum. I'm curious as to why you asked, though. What makes you think I might be?

I wasn't going to give her my real reasons for thinking so, which I hint at here and here and here (for example) … and in other posts linked out of those ones. Any suggestion that she is in any way imperfect makes her furious, even though (or perhaps because) she thinks of herself as a failure in many ways. (See e.g. here and here.) So I wanted to write something that put any onus on me but might make her look at the data just a bit. I replied:

Obviously I’m no doctor. 

But I was reading something about it the other day, and realized that the specific manners in which I often tried to communicate with you would have been very unsatisfactory for anyone afflicted with Asperger’s or anything like it.

Reasoning backwards made me think that IF (hypothetically) you had suffered from any syndrome along that spectrum, then it would be perfectly obvious why some of the ways I tried to communicate were in fact so unsatisfactory for you. (And I think neither of us ever claimed communication with the other to be a real strong suit.) 

That’s only enough to raise the question, and clearly not enough to deduce an answer. Logically speaking, my communications could have been unsatisfactory in plenty of other ways too. But it made me wonder. And I know you have collected enough zebra-weird diagnoses over the years that it’s entirely possible there was one I didn’t remember.

If nothing else, you can tell Counselor that I asked so the two of you can get a good laugh at what a silly question it was. :-D

No answer yet.

      

Could Wife have Asperger's?

 As I was mulling over the events I describe here, I had an idea. Is it possible that Wife suffers from Asperger's syndrome?

It might explain why she is so terrible at picking up the emotional nuance in interpersonal interactions (see here and here and pretty much anywhere else in the whole blog that I talk about her). In fact, it would be consistent with her poor social skills even in the face of superior linguistic ability. It could also explain why she has never found other people's emotions contagious.  (And actually when I went to find the link for that last post, I see that Janeway already suggested then that, "Wife sounds as though she might fall somewhere on the autism spectrum," and I commented that D had said the same thing. I even followed up with these remarks here. Gosh, I had forgotten all about that exchange.

But also, I remember years ago that Debbie told me she had been angry for decades at how emotionally unresponsive her ex-husband was, and then he was finally diagnosed with Asperger's and she decided she had to cut him some slack. Could that be true here too?

I emailed her to ask if she has ever been tested. I said nothing beyond that. Maybe she'll ignore the email, but I'll let you know if she replies.

     

While I'm comparing Wife and Father ....

My post of a few hours ago about Father competing with Wife one Christmas was specifically intended to echo a post from some eight years ago about Wife competing with Brother. But it also reminds me that I have often felt there were significant similarities between Wife and Father. That's one reason why, once I was disentangled from Wife, I thought about using this blog in a slow and relaxed way to meditate on my relationship with my dad. If it worked to help me figure out one problematic relationship, maybe it could help with another. (As soon as I wrote that I started browsing through the blog to find where I say so. I'm sure I do somewhere, but my indexing isn't very good and I can't find it. I can find this post where I wonder if I still need to keep the blog at all; and by the time I got to this post I had already made that decision some time in the past. But I can't find where. Oh well.)

Here's one similarity that struck me some months ago. I jotted it down, and if I write it now I won't have to keep the note. Both of them think (thought) of people schematically, "putting them in boxes" as it were. 

I wrote about this with respect to my dad in this post here. (And actually, come to think of it, you can cross-reference this essay over on the Patio.) But Wife always used to do it too. (I suppose it is likely that she still does, but I don't have any recent data.) She listens to what someone tells her and then uses that to construct a two-dimensional picture of him or her that she then uses as the basis for her future interactions.

In fact this is one of the things that frustrated her the most when she first met my dad. My father was fond of floating ideas to see how people reacted, and sometimes he would introduce one with the words, "Well I always thought that ...." I grew up around him, so I knew that this meant "Here's something I just thought of." But Wife assumed it was a statement of deep religious principle, and was therefore puzzled and frustrated to hear him contradict it blandly the next time they talked. (I just did a search and found that I mentioned this same fact about their interaction in this post here. Maybe after a while everything I say is just repetition of one sort or another.)

Anyway, it's not a profound point. But it's definitely a similarity. One of many ways that maybe, in a weird karmic sense, they deserved each other. Given how famously they got along, that's a funny thought.
   

The absolutism of youth

I debated calling this post "But you have so much to live for!" It is still possible that would have been a better title, but "the absolutism of youth" picks up a phrase I used in a post a couple days ago. Mostly I just want to capture an idea I have had for some years, so it is recorded somewhere.

Why do the young commit suicide? From the perspective of those of us who are no longer young, it looks foolish: they are throwing away decades of future opportunity, and there is every likelihood that somewhere in those decades the thing that is upsetting them so badly will resolve itself in some other way. So it just looks inexplicable.

The thing is, that's not what it looks like from the inside. When you are young, the choices that you can see look very stark. And frequently all the available options look pretty bad. When you try to take an inventory of what you have inside yourself, what tools you have to confront a threatening and terrible world, it's a pretty bleak and empty picture. The tool chest doesn't have a lot in it. The room you live in, when you retreat deep inside yourself, is shabby and spare. There's not much furniture, and the carpet shows wear and holes.

And as a result, suicide doesn't look nearly as irrational as it does to those of us who are older. We are accustomed to think of the opportunities lost as worth something, and so we look at the suicide of the young as an incredible waste. But the young themselves have no way to assess what these hypothetical -- or perhaps imaginary, fictitious, fantastical -- opportunities are worth, so they tally them up as worth nothing. Zero. When they try to evaluate the worth of what really is there, that they might be throwing away, it's easy for them to overlook assets (I mean spiritual or psychological or emotional assets) that they have never had to imagine life without; it is easy to treat those as just part of the wallpaper. And so again, it is easy to come out with a much smaller, paltrier inventory than an older person would sum up. And if are in great pain, and all you have to give up to get out of that great pain is a handful of pocket change, ... what the hell? Why not throw it away and be done?

Of course, the old kill themselves too. Minutes before I started typing this, I googled the question how suicide statistics vary across age groups, and found (for example) this article which states that, "In general, the suicide rate increases with age," although it then goes on to concede that there is "a major spike in adolescents and young adults." But my own recollection from my days as a teenager or an undergraduate or a graduate student is that life felt like it had less ballast than it does today (in my late fifties). Maybe it is just that back then my own depression was undiagnosed and I wasn't taking antidepressants. Maybe the whole experience is chemical. But it feels like ballast. And back then my life did feel much lighter and flimsier, much sparer and emptier, much cheaper and easier to imagine throwing away without losing much. I never did it -- I'm afraid of pain, and I often drag my feet before taking any big steps; so then I'd go to bed and wake up feeling less dismal the next day.

In other words, the very thing that makes the old so alarmed when they see they young kill themselves -- that they have their whole future in front of them -- is exactly what makes it (comparatively) easier. Nobody can feel the future. It is purely abstract. And so if all the value that gives substance and meaning to your life is in the future, that's the same as saying that you have none of it in your hands to draw on right now. It's like when you say, "This stock has tremendous growth potential," and what you mean is "It's selling for a penny a share so there's nowhere to go but up." Having so much (in the future) to live for is all very well, but it is only after you have done some of that living, after you have converted some of that potential into actuality (for better or worse), that you can really feel like you have something to lose.
           

Further thoughts about "Joker"

A couple weeks ago I posted this piece about having recently gone to see the movie "Joker". And what I wrote to you, I also wrote to Marie.

But then we discussed it some more and I so I expanded on what I'd said, as follows:
__________

You understood that when I talked about living with mental illness, I was talking about my 30 years with Wife, right? Interestingly, I’ve been looking up reviews (or just articles) that specifically address the question of mental illness in the movie, and I’ve found two types.

(1) There are some that condemn the movie bitterly (or just sadly) for linking mental illness with violence: these writers all quote the statistic that people who suffer from mental illness are more likely than the average person to suffer violence (not commit it), and so they blame the director (who also wrote a lot of the script) for adding to the popular stigma around the disease. All of these writers appear intent on burnishing their credentials as Concerned Liberals, and they all sound like they have learned about mental illness from books.

(2) Then there are articles by writers who say up front “I have suffered from mental illness for decades” or else “I work with the mentally ill every day of my life.” These articles breeze past the link that the movie allegedly makes between mental illness and violence, because — geez! — it’s a supervillain origin story. Of course he’s going to end up being violent. He’s the Bad Guy. What they focus on with laser precision is how hard his life is, and how little anyone else in the world cares about him — how little anyone else in the world wants to deal with him at all or even to be around him, and how this invisibility and isolation make his already-difficult life twenty times harder — and they all say the movie NAILS IT! Yes, exactly that. That’s what it’s like. 

There’s actually a point right near the end where he’s talking to another character about all the bad things that have happened to him, and about the crimes he has already started committing ... in response? ... as a result? ... post hoc ergo propter hoc? ... well, whatever. And the other guy gets kind of huffy and says, “I’m hearing a lot of self-pity from you. Do you really think your bad luck justifies the things you just now confessed to doing?” And maybe I didn’t hear the Joker’s answer correctly, because I’ve seen nobody else pick up on this part of that conversation. But I really believe that at that point Joker says, “No.” No, he doesn’t believe that his bad luck justifies his crimes. But he does see a connection that the bad luck nonetheless caused his crimes. His bad luck doesn’t make his crimes acceptable, but does make them happen. As I say, maybe I heard him wrong. (I’m getting old, you know.) And even if I heard him right he took a lot less time with the point than I have taken right now. Even if I heard him right, 75% of the explication I’ve just given is mine, unpacking what I think he said. But I think in that moment he showed that he may be mentally ill, but he’s not crazy. In other words, he understands the difference between right and wrong and knows that A does not justify B; but he’s also trying to make the point that — regardless what moral theory might say — you can’t expect anyone to suffer the things he has suffered without snapping and reacting the way he has reacted. 

One clarification. In all this, I have to add that when I talk about “his bad luck” that’s a little like describing an elephant as “his house pet”. Really. This man has the most phenomenal bad luck you have ever seen. But then so did Wife, which means I believed it instantly rather than treating it as a weak plot device. But I have to warn you that at a certain point your ability to sympathize over bad luck shuts down from overload — or mine did in real life — and you start assuming that, statistically, nobody can have random luck that bad so she must have done something to cause it somehow, by pissing people off or whatever, so that they then treated her badly. Likewise him, the Joker. See, I really do hear an echo between them, even though Wife never became a supervillain.

Thanks be to God. 

But could I have ever imagined her turning violent the way the Joker does in this movie? Based on the many bad things she suffered; and also on her (perhaps) diminished capacity (because of illness, physical or mental) to absorb suffering, roll with the punches, and bounce back? Sure, why not? That’s part of what I found totally plausible in the movie. And I chalk it up to good luck (for a change) that it didn’t happen in real life. 

__________

 

Here are some of the reviews I found that agreed the movie portrayed mental illness well.

 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/movie-review-joker-honest-treatment-of-madness/

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/10/joker-joaquin-phoenix-psychology

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/10/joker-mom-movie-penny-fleck

 

https://losangeleno.com/features/psychiatrist-analyzes-joker/

 

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2019/10/15/joker-tells-the-truth-about-mental-illness-and-its-long-overdue.html

 

Happy viewing.

    

What if Wife had become a supervillain?

I saw "Joker" this afternoon. (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt7286456/) It's very intense. Afterwards I texted Son 1, who asked me if I liked it. I wrote him,

I don't know yet. There's a lot there and I'm a little stunned. Reviews criticized it for pushing a narrative about the mentally ill and social services that isn't a well thought through platform, but for Pete's sake it's not a frapping political platform in the first place. It's a super-villain origin story, and a very dark and heavy one. But then ... he's the Joker. It would have to be.

But part of what I thought was that it was a little bit like Wife's story. The protagonist, Arthur Fleck, suffers from mental illness; so does Wife. He has chronically bad luck; so does Wife. He reacts to things with emotions that are out of phase with the emotions of the people around him; so does Wife. He has a very difficult and slightly creepy relationship with his mother, to whom he is nonetheless deeply attached; so did Wife. His mother has emotional problems of her own, and is either delusional or very badly used by others; so was Wife's mother. In fact, I almost thought I could summarize the movie for Son 1 by saying, "Take your mom's story; make it even worse; give her a slightly different set of diseases; and have her end up as a supervillain." (I chickened out in the end, and didn't say it.)

At one point, though, we look over his shoulder as he is writing in his journal, and we see a sentence that I'm sure she could agree to:

"The worst part of having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you don't."

Yup. I've watched that be Wife's experience, and I've also been the one expecting her to behave as if she didn't. It's tough.

I guess it's good she never became a supervillain, huh?

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