Feasting On Sunsets
Am I resilient, or do I just know when it’s time to go outside?
On my left thumb, I have a hook-shaped mark where I took a bit of flesh out of the digit with a pocketknife at scout camp.
I have two sets of scars from two different surgeries on my abdomen. One from a hernia that lingered for years until I finally got health insurance to cover surgery, and one from an extremely early-stage kidney cancer tumor removal.
The rest of my body also has a variety of other marks from long-forgotten injuries and incidents.
You can’t get to my age without a few scars. Humans are a fragile species. It’s not hard to break a bone, pierce our skin, or transmit a nasty, incapacitating virus. And that’s just our physical fragility.
We are also a neurotic species. Between our over-anxious nervous systems and the human penchant to wallow in gloom, it’s amazing any of us ever get anything done. If you happen to have a mental illness, you are even more vulnerable.
This past weekend, my anxiety and depression hit me hard. I spent most of my time in a morose despair, lying on my bed or puttering around the house. Part of my mood was the inevitable result of what I call my poetic sensitivity. All the adults in my life said I was an oversensitive child. Naturally, I grew up to be a poet.
Part of the despair was at the general state of the world, especially my country. A bigger part, I’m a bit ashamed to admit, was at the state of my own life and the set of peculiarly personal setbacks that sometimes feel insurmountable.
The scars on my thumb and abdomen never give me any trouble. I wasn’t going to be a swimsuit model anyway. The injuries and maladies my physical scars represent are fully healed.
But the scars to my psyche are a different matter. The secret third reason for my weekend of mental paralysis was that the scars from my psyche do still bother me.
People close to me have often marveled at what they think of as my resilience. I won’t trauma dump on you here, but I have been through some shit, far less than many people, but far more than most of my peers.
I don’t see myself as particularly resilient. I see myself as someone too stubborn to quit and as someone who knows when he needs to go outside and see some nature.
For as long as I can remember, a long walk outside has been one of the only things that has given me enough mental and emotional space to push off a full-blown mental health spiral. When my law practice was collapsing, I would take long lunches that mostly consisted of me walking away from my office into the nearby neighborhood to see some trees and try to outpace my problems.
Later, walking along the Pacific Ocean and the Willamette River became the only ways I could process my childhood trauma, the death of my parents, and the end of my marriage.
About ten years ago, walking stopped being enough. Instead, I converted my long walks into haiku walks where I practiced being in the moment and paying attention to the real world by writing poetry about what I saw.
I’ve tried therapy and pharmaceuticals. Therapy has been helpful from time to time, but walking and art have always worked better for me than drugs, and they are the only daily interventions that have consistently allowed me to keep moving forward. Each one of us neurotic humans is different. For some, medicine is essential. That particular treatment hasn’t yet been right for me.
I’m not resilient. I just know when to step outside.
Sometimes, I feel like one of those frogs listening to a frog in some other pond, too far away to see but close enough to hear. I know there are others like me. But I don’t know how to find them. My writing and art are my way of croaking like the frogs in the ponds, signaling to others that they are not alone, reminding myself that I am not alone, and hopefully providing a way for us to cross the divide and find each other in real life.
I’m a melancholy optimist. I deeply feel all the injustices in the world, but I remain hopeful of a better future. There are a lot of things that have gone wrong in my life that are not my fault, and a fair amount that have been all my fault. Most things are a hybrid of both.
My haiku walks have helped me see that it doesn’t matter who or what caused my problems. Any given issue I face may not be my fault, but it is my responsibility to deal with it. To believe anything else would make me a helpless victim of circumstance.
I’m at my best emotionally and professionally when I live in the reality of the moment, letting go of the phantasmagoria of the past and the holograph of the future.
Tonight, there is going to be another sunset to feast upon and a waning crescent moon pulsing with moonbeams for me to imbibe. I may even hear some frogs looking for love. There will be something worth writing about. These experiences will temporarily seal the wounds in my psyche and give me the strength to face another day.
Maybe resilience is simply doing whatever you have to do to drag yourself from one day to the next. I don’t know.
All I know is that going outside and writing about it is how I survive to fight another day. It’s how I take responsibility for my life.
Jason McBride is a poet-cartoonist. The haiku comics from today’s post are adapted from his book, “Haiku Comics from the Anthropocene,” available everywhere books are sold. If you enjoyed this post, you will love his illustrated snail-mail/email newsletter.
