Where Is My Mind?

In 1989, my father came and asked me how I felt about moving to England.

I was 9 years old at the time. I had no idea what "moving to England" really meant. Neither did my Dad really explain it to me because, I guess, he didn't really know what it meant either. Not that it would necessarily have made a difference anyway, since my father's mind was already made up, and (being 9 years old) I would have done anything to please my Dad. Our tendentious relationship hadn't yet started.

When I got to England, I ran into culture-shock, a broader and stricter pedagogy, and (I guess) my first real identity crisis. I didn't fit in. In an all-boys school, I didn't know how to play rugby or cricket, didn't know the football stars, didn't play football (soccer) as well as everyone else, didn't get the cultural references, didn't know the history of the place, didn't know the social tropes... worse still, I didn't know enough of the American things that the boys there thought I should know about: the rules of American football, for example (I could tell you baseball - I liked baseball - but I never learned American football because I never played it). I was the proverbial stranger in a strange land, only I also didn't know all that much about my own land either.

The experience was traumatic. I didn't fit in, but neither did I stick out. I was a blank, a background, an unnoticed entity. My father was at work most of the time, and my mother was busy with my (newborn) baby brother. I had to learn to handle the situation largely on my own.

Simultaneously, I was ill a lot. I had repeated tonsil infections on top of a good deal of allergies. This meant that I also didn't get out much. I had no friends, spent a lot of time at home and by myself, so I turned inward.

I guess this was the beginning of what I now call a "spiritual" life. I made up an imaginary friend, Julius Caesar, to play board-games against. I developed a rich imagination. The times when I was well, I would get on my bike and explore the footpaths in my town and the ones nearby, pretending they were other lands far away. I read a lot. I went to the movies by myself. I learned to cope with being alone, though I was none-the-less intensely lonely. I got by.

When I was 10 or 11, things began to change. I had my tonsils and adenoids removed, and the infections stopped. I was less ill, discovered what the sense of smell was, and put on weight. I began to acculturate. I started hanging out with kids in my class. I found a best-friend. I fleshed out an identity: I wasn't good at most sports, but I could run track. I liked computers. I became a bit nerdy. My grades, which had not been the greatest, began to improve. By the time I was 12, I was thinking about taking my GCSEs, going on in the English curriculum.

Then we moved again. To Minnesota.

There was less discussion, before this second move. My Dad kinda made the decision for the family: it was a good career move for him, and so there was a great deal of pressure on us all to accept the decision. My sister and I, having both learned to fit in finally, wanted to stay on in a boarding school or similar. We were talked out of it and/or given a categorical "no." I was more the former, my sister the latter. After talking with my parents, I thought that I could move, thought I could do it. Maybe it was "hubris," but I thought that if I could move to England and fit in - even if that was difficult - then I could move back to the United States and fit in, even if it was difficult.

Maybe that was the first big mistake of my life, because the transition back to the United States was even more traumatizing than the move to England. You have to remember: I was 12. Puberty had begun. Adolescence was starting. Suddenly social dynamics was everything. Hormones meant that girls were important, and if girls were important then social standing - being as close to "alpha male" as possible - was everything.

God's cruel joke being, of course, that at the same time we all go through this, He gives us growth spurts, acne, vocal changes, dropping testicles, menstruation and the like.

Shy, an outsider, not getting the cultural references (again), not understanding the sports (again) nor being particularly good at them, terrified of girls having gone to an all-boys school in England, having no clue about the (American) Civil War (I could tell you all about the English in detail) or Teapot Dome... I fell to the bottom of the pecking order. I was Omega Male, shunned by all around me.

Like the previous time, I retreated inward a great deal; but something - the hormones, I'm guessing - made the experience much more traumatic. It was... scarier. More lonely. More saddening. More... depressing. My chronic, lifelong fight with depression began around this time.

Then, one day, my 7th grade class was taken out ice-skating. I hadn't ever really been ice-skating before; while everyone around me (who had grown up in MN) whizzed about on the ice, I spent my time falling down consistently.

On the way back for a 7th-grade dance (a novel concept, to me), I sat alone on the bus. I doodled in the condensation on the window - absent-minded doodling. I drew a swastika. Now, I was not, am not, and never will be a fan of Nazism or white-power or the like. I'm a Muslim socialist who does human-rights work and is married to a Jew. Being around right-wingers gives me hives. I drew the swastika without any intent to cause harm. I just drew the damned thing because I was doodling in the condensation.

My cohorts didn't see things that way.

I don't blame them. We were 12 or 13 years old, play-acting at an adulthood that suddenly and for the first time seemed attractive and "good." And part of that adulthood meant not-liking Nazis. I didn't like Nazis either. Indiana Jones fought against them.

So at the dance - a traumatic experience for every 7th-grader anyway, I think - one by one, or sometimes in pairs, my classmates came up to me to register their disapproval of me. "How could you draw that?" "Do you know what that means to me, as a Jewish person?" "What you did was awful." "I can't be friends with you." "The fuck is wrong with you?"

It was my own personal middle-class American version of a Maoist "struggle session," where your friends and neighbors tear you apart, verbally and emotionally.

Coming on the heels of the recent move to the United States, this experience pushed me over the edge. I wasn't just excluded; I was shamed. I wasn't an outsider; I was a pariah. In this adolescent world where social status meant everything, I wasn't the omega male. I wasn't anything.

I took the lesson to heart. I am a bad person. I desperately want acceptance - but I don't trust that anyone will give it to me. More than acceptance, I want to be welcomed, but there is no "welcome" that can ever satisfy me. I am, and always will be, an outsider. I can never be a part of a group. When I become part of a group, I consciously or unconsciously edge my way to its edges; if I can, I try to leave it. I know that, soon, they will not just shun me, they will punish me. It won't be for anything I can prevent; it will be for something I do wrong without knowing it. I am bad by default.

In some moments, when I have fight left in me, it's not my fault. In those moments, it's you: it's your fault. You are cruel. You don't know the whole story, and punish people for things that aren't really their fault. You jump to conclusions, act rashly and irrationally. Here is the original of my do-gooderism. I jump to defend the defenseless, stand up for the victims, the little guys. I see, in them, myself. But it means that you and I are always at odds. It means you have no capacity for compassion, mercy, or good in you; or at least, not enough. And I will never trust you because of that.

I always need to know more than others. Knowledge is power: if I know all the cultural references, then you will never have any "legitimate" reason for ostracizing me. I will fit in, and the only way you exclude me is by disliking me. Of course, I can never fit in - my gut tells me I can't - and since everyone will or does tell me (on some level) that I am less-than, I will tell myself than I am more-than. I am smarter than you are, a better person than you are; and I am worse than you are and I have suffered more than you have. Because I am so vulnerable, I will become arrogant, aloof, a know-it-all. I'm desperate for your approval, needy for you to want to be around me, but I won't let you near me.

Since women (in this adolescent world) hold all the cards, women became my focus. I "need" to be accepted by them; preferably, desired by them. I was obsessed with having a girlfriend. When I had one, I was elated; when I didn't, I was catatonic. When I had one, I was looking for another, better one; when I didn't have one, I was looking for one, any one. At the beginning of a relationship, I was excited: here was potential, here was the possibility of finally being accepted, wanted, welcomed. The more time passed, the more than wore off and the greater the fear of discovery - of being "found out" - became. And so I would begin to preemptively pull away: become cruel first, before cruelty could be meted out upon me.

Meanwhile, that inner life that I had ripened - and rotted - into a spiritual life. God - or nirvana, or THAT - was and still is the ultimate Relief-with-the-capital-R. He is the All-Accepting, the Merciful, the Forgiver, the Compassionate. He is the Power and Strength that I need; if I have Him, then all the rest would fall away.

The problem was - and is - that I recapitulate all the same behaviors I employ towards women in my relationship with Him. The only difference is that He is the Absolute, and they are the relative.

I am compulsive and obsessive about my relationship to Him. I am desperate for any tidbit of information that will give me an "in" with the Almighty, and so I purchase and read spiritual literature like it's going out of style. I make spiritual life into a vastly more complex process than it actually is. As I grow closer to Him, I fear He will find me out, and so I begin to look elsewhere; when that "elsewhere" doesn't pan out (as the relative is wont to do), I drift back to Him.

I became a "God" addict. About 10 years ago, I had a moment of non-dual bliss, a taste of absolute love. I became obsessed with recapturing it with whatever cheap, easy, simple and direct method I could find. It has caused me a great deal of pain, both emotional and physical, and in spite of the consequences I have not stopped grasping after Him, hoping that this time, with this new insight, we can be reunited.

It has been the only really real and lasting relationship with anybody or anything that I have maintained, consistently, throughout my (admittedly brief) life. It has been a sick relationship, undoubtedly unhealthy for me and undoubtedly not of any benefit to Him.

Where I am now is a precipice.

I've seen... well, myself, or my self. I've seen a long-standing pattern of thinking and emotion and behavior, and I've seen how on the one hand it protects me, and on the other hand, it harms me. In a grosser, more obvious, more harmful form it has actually destroyed my life.

But do I get rid of it? Maybe that seems like an obvious question: if it's harming you that much, get rid of it. I don't know, however. The question becomes: if not that, then who? Meaning: if I let go of this set of behaviors, this identity, then who I am? What's left? What becomes of me?

And that's where the fear comes in. Because I have no idea what life without these behaviors - without this identity - would be like. Would it mean giving up my spiritual life? How about my collection of spiritual books? How is it going to affect my relationship with my wife? Any change in one person in a relationship has the potential to seriously destabilize the relationship itself. We just got married - what if this leads to a divorce? What about my relationships with women generally? Wouldn't it just mean being - once again - a stranger in a strange land who doesn't know about his homeland either?

Mostly, though, the fear is silent. It sits just below the surface. If I have something to do, something else to think about, then I don't notice it. The instant I have a quiet moment, though, there it is: a rim of fear around what seems like an entire ocean of loneliness and sadness. Or rather, like the fear is a dam, a barrier, holding back this ocean's worth of sadness. The dam is beginning to crack, and I'm concerned that the ocean will drown me, if the force of that emotion smacking into me like a tsunami doesn't crush me all at once.

Meanwhile, a woman has written me online. It's rather like throwing chum in the water. My mind, prodded by all that fear, went insane: here is a woman expressing an interest in, well, me. So obviously, here is the potential for the acceptance and welcome that I so desperately want.

In my head, a thousand permutations of the possible relationships we might have are being played out. They range from the ridiculous - a polygamous marriage including her and my wife - to the incredibly unlikely - I leave my wife, marry the new girl - to the very unlikely - we have an affair - to the possible though not likely - we become best of friends forever - to the possible - we become close friends - to the likely - we become friends - to the more likely - we become acquaintances - and so on, along with all possible combinations of these and more.

This crazy, fantasizing part of me knows it has been found out. It knows that very soon, it might be "killed off," after a fashion. So it's working overtime to repeat the pattern behavior, just this one last time. Like an addict about to go to rehab, it wants one last hurrah before it has to stop, and it's working furiously to make that happen. Just this one, last time. For old time's sake. Besides: maybe this new girl is the answer. Maybe she'll win out where all the others - and God Himself - have failed.

It's running around like crazy, trying to mortar the dam before it gives out. I'm sitting, leaning back against a tree, watching him. The world is about to end. Israfil is blowing the first blast of the trumpet, the mountains swirl like dust motes in late afternoon sunlight. My center cannot hold and I'm watching it all fall apart.

The Inner Critique

I did a good deed today. I went to my grandparents' home this afternoon, armed with a DVD, and I sat and watched it with them. In Spanish, with the English subtitles (because my Spanish is, sadly, not as good as I would hope it to be).

I came up with the idea to do this last night, in a bout of ill-advised self-righteous guilt, condemning the rest of my family for the way in which they treat my grandparents but not doing anything myself to make their lives a little bit better. Condemning my mother and sister and father for trying to get them to eat more healthily at 80+ years of age, for trying to get them to exercise, or even just get out of the house more, for trying to uproot them and change long-standing patterns and habits. My family does this out of love, but the simple answer is that my grandparents do not really want to change. Otherwise they would.

So the question is how to make them happy, and the simple answer to that is: just be there.

Hence the movie, and going to see them.

Of course, I feel guilty because I don't particularly want to spend time with them. I had no innate desire to hang around them. I wish I could see them as repositories of wisdom, elders with insight, to be admired and honored. Only: I don't. Folly of youth, I guess.

But what does it mean, to honor your elders, when they are so clearly fucked-up themselves? How do you do that, when they are patently insane, in that geriatric sort of way? It's one of the odder, and more difficult (in my opinion), of the commandments. Because if I listened to everything my elders said, then I would probably not drive a car. Ever.

But somehow, armed with the knowledge that they are not long for this world, I find it a little easier to show my grandparents a degree of patience, tolerance and love I would not ordinarily have for them. The previously difficult-to-swallow now rolls easily off my back, if I may mix my metaphors.

And in the midst of all this, I felt as if I had something... something good inside of me. Something real, and pure, a desire to do something genuinely right for the world. And that is an odd position for me, because normally I don't think of myself that way, and so this good felt, in fact, alien, foreign, not of me but bestowed to me as a gift to bring to other people. Of myself, I am nothing, just this selfish, pathetic little thing, but this good... this good is something better.

Maybe it's some residual Catholic guilt, there, a twinge of original sin. Or maybe it's because after the awful things that I've done in my past, I feel irredeemably stained and forsaken. I don't know; I just know that I have a difficult time thinking of myself as being a genuinely good person. Some inner critic is always present, pointing out everything that is wrong, questioning every kind gesture I might make, but also holding out some idealized sainthood as bait.

Deep down, that's what I've always wanted to be, of course: a saint. I've wanted to be good, noticeably good, genuinely good, but I've always fallen short of the ideal and therefore, I guess, figured that I must not be good at all. Sort of like wanting to be an Olympic athlete and giving up the sport entirely once realizing that no amount of training or determination will allow this to come true. Which begs the question of why one entered that sport in the first place.

I'm tired inside, so very tired of this struggle, that I don't even want to be good any more. I want to be selfish and I want to lie and I want to have whatever I want whenever I want it because what I want seems so bloody reasonable anyway, only... only I fear the critic inside, whom I presume to be (in reality) external critics, telling me that I have to continue, that I can't take time for myself or give something to me.

I want to be good without having to do anything.

Lately, the only thing that's been saving me has been this inkling that it's OK, that I'm alright, that I don't need to be better and I don't need to improve, because I'm loved and accepted as I am. Now and then I feel that in my prayers, feel like I'm alright and I don't need to worry, and that helps.

Because the rest of the time, I grind my bones into flour over this worry.

I'm really far from being very OK, mentally.

Dignitectomy Personality Disorder

Once, a long time ago, I lost my dignity.

Nobody had explained to me what to do when one lost one's dignity; mostly, it seemed, they stressed that one was never supposed to lose it. Dignity was sort of like your passport, your social security card, your PIN - something you're supposed to keep close to you and never let out of your sight or control.

One thing you can do when you lose your dignity is to hide the fact that you lost your dignity. Problem is, dignity is one of those things you don't really notice until you've lost it. So what you end up doing is imagining what having dignity must have been like when you had it, and then pretending to be that way. Only, it doesn't really work. It's like losing a leg: you can pretend all you like that you've still got it, but the more that you pretend like the leg is still there, the more noticeable it becomes that you don't have it. The instant you try to walk on the non-existent leg, the whole charade comes crashing down. Literally.

But dignity is a totally different matter. Dignity is supposed to be intangible, invisible; if you lose it, you should be able to hide the fact far more easily than hiding a missing leg, right?

What I discovered, though, is that pretending that one still has one's dignity is just as noticeable as a lost appendage. There are tell-tale signs and characteristics - symptoms, if you will - of dignitectomy personality disorder (DPD). In DSM-IV style, DPD is characterized by two or more of the following criteria:

• Seriousness of affect and complete lack of humor, as demonstrated by the utter inability to take a joke;
  
• Heightened sense of self-importance, including transient, stress-related delusions of grandeur;
• Belief that one is being purposefully humiliated by inanimate objects;
• Pervasive inability to admit lack-of-knowledge or inferiority-of-skill in any area of expertise or life-experience;
• Affectation of a maturational level beyond one's actual maturity;
• Indirect conflictual or harmful behavior towards others, such as gossip, backbiting, slander, theft, cheating, etc.;
• Deep-seated fear of being just like everybody else.

To the best of my knowledge, DPD is incurable, though treatment may create a remission of symptoms.

DPD can be treated, I've found, by confession of one's fault(s) to another, maintenance of a sense of humor, and most especially by the ready willingness to recognize and accept the utter absurdity of human existence and one's place in the grand scheme of things.

The interesting thing about DPD, I've found, is that treatment does not necessitate the restitution of one's previous dignity or the acquisition of new-found dignity; in point of fact, proper treatment requires the relinquishment of all of one's dignity, a further abasement of one's self, as it were, to the lowest possible levels of humiliation, foolishness, degradation, and patheticalness.

The more interesting thing, though, is that the treatment has the potential to heighten the perception of one's dignity in other people's eyes, and that the further down the ladder one is willing to go, the higher the estimation of one's self, one's virtues, one's honor and one's dignity in the eyes of witnesses about you. Of course, to act in a manner by which one wishes to gain an estimation of dignity in the eyes of others immediately renders treatment ineffective, and therefore a willful abasement and loss of dignity is the key.

'Tis an interesting paradox, is it not?

Acceptance

I have one student in my lineage, who consistently fails. I've tried again, and again, with every skill I have, with every bit of knowledge that I have, with every shred of kindness I have, to help him along the Path; but he never seems to make it. When all is said and done, I can only do so much; I cannot walk the Path for him.

It has gotten to a point now where I don't even want to help him. Facing him - no, facing my inadequacy, my inability to find an answer - disturbs me. Here I am, one who has tread the Path before him, the teacher, the one who is supposed to have answers for him, and I have none left. Nor, if I did, would I want to give them to him, because I feel that if I gave them to him, he would use them and fail, and I wouldn't have anything any more.

But I cannot give up. That Imam Hussayn (sa) taught me, by his martyrdom. I am not allowed, by creed or conscience, to stop trying.

I'm worn out, though. I want the problems to go away. I want to stop looking at people and seeing this problem or that issue; I don't want to think in solutions or answers. I've created the situation myself. I stopped looking at people, I started looking at their problems, and so now, to me, the whole world is a mess of problems.

And I've cracked. I think. Something inside of me has given up. Something inside has begun to accept that it's a fucking mess without a solution and so fuck it.

There's liberation in that, of a sort. Because there aren't any answers, and nothing is ever going to get better, I feel free to be happy with things here, things now. And maybe I can start speaking with people again. Maybe I can let their problems be, not get involved, just live my own fucking life without having to be the answer-man.

Which means: I'm not a good person. I'm not a wise person. And that's OK. You know what? I accept that. I'm a liar and a cheat and a thief. I'm selfish and not very nice. I don't care any more. Because God made me this way, and obviously He did so for some reason, and more importantly, I like who I am. Because I know that in spite of all that stuff, I'm honest and good and generous and loving.

I'm tired of thinking. Today, I went throughout my day just doing each little task. I tried not to think about anything beyond the task. Got up. Got dressed. Made my bed. Checked email. Ate lunch. Went to work. Did each task at work. Came home. Just little bits, one by one, checked them off in my mind, doing each as each arose and checking it off, not thinking about the next one on the list, not thinking about the last one.

And I found the tiniest, the smallest bit of peace. And then I realized that I had a practice to, well, practice. Do each little thing. Don't think about it. Just do it. Very zen, 'n' all, just like doing dishes or folding laundry. Chop wood, carry water.

Practice, practice, practice.