the joys of self-analysis

(Written 21 January, 2008, front desk, Dave Wood Mazda)

I am officially sick of self-analysis. My stomach feels like I swallowed a length of tubing and my mind churns in its ever-efficient mechanics but it's as though something in the wiring has been stuck or rerouted so all that work just turns into a degenerative feedback loop. I'm almost certain it causes damage: definitely it causes the wires to overheat.

I spent the weekend taking part in wedding festivities for some close family friends who tied the knot on Saturday. I even played a song for the couple's first dance and danced with the bride myself. I drank some vodka. I ate some cake and smiled at everyone. I stood beside the dance floor and watched people dance.

Almost everyone there is engaged to be married or is already there. The people who are engaged are so excited, the energy is almost palpable. The people who are married are either very happy or totally despondent and on the edge of a divorce. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of middle ground.

I talked to a friend of mine whose wife left him for his brother a couple of years ago. It took him a long time, but he lost a lot of weight, got his life in order and now has a beautiful girlfriend with two children of her own, and he loves all of them dearly. Obviously there is no fixed bar by which to measure the varying levels of misery and joy that come from interpersonal relations.

The words people speak at weddings are so powerful even though they've become clichés thanks to thousands of Hollywood romances. Until death, to have and to hold, cherish, love, protect. This is heavy stuff, not to be taken lightly or undertaken for the wrong reasons. I really hope the new Mister and Missus have enough of their shit together to be able to persevere in the face of odds that lean farther and farther against them with every passing fiscal year and every newly released set of statistics.

The funny part is I don't even know them that well, personally speaking, but I just think so highly of their commitment to one another and the way they present themselves publicly that I can't help but hope every good thing for them. It makes me happy to know that some people are still good for other people, and that even in such a jaded age we can still have something as neat as the concept of undying love.

I'm not sure I know what that is, empirically. Everybody thinks they know; everybody says when you know you just know, and that's all there is to it. Of course that isn't true: it's hard work, loving people. Humans are a vast tapestry and all that, but people seem to share certain characteristics in common with one another, and almost all of those fall under the category of weaknesses. Jealousy – God, that's a big one. Possessiveness has got to be the worst feeling in the world for a lot of reasons, but the most difficult part of possessiveness is the instability it introduces into your life. You can't control anything, not really – you can wish as hard as you can to the contrary, and even devote your whole life to working against it, but chances are the sun is going to rise and there's nothing you can do to stop it. So, not being able to control it can be frustrating, especially if you really, really don't want the sun to come up for some reason. In Alcoholics Anonymous they equate getting over that feeling with "serenity". That's an interesting idea.

Initially the word "serenity" calls to mind images of transcendence or at least elevation – you have to be above pettiness and insecurity in order to really let it go. I don't know how you go about elevating yourself that way, and honestly I don't know if I agree with the idea anyway. I don't like to think that you have to get out of your body or out of your head in order to accept the things you can't change. In fact, that sounds a lot like an excuse an alcoholic might offer for drinking: I have to get out of my body or out of my head to let it go, and alcohol is a vessel through which I can do that, albeit temporarily. The fact is they're only half-right, because you don't actually go anywhere – you just put blinders on for a while and convince yourself that if you squint real hard and turn the lights down you'll see something that isn't there, or more often, you won't see what is there.

So what do you do instead? Alcohol and drugs and exercise and sex and anything physical don't give you the ability to get out of your head, they just focus your energies elsewhere. And that's evasion. I have always been the kind of person that feels an intense need to meet problems head-on, but my characteristic risk-aversion makes it a formidable and sometimes seemingly-impossible task.

That's why serenity as I've imagined it here has always been so attractive to me. It's easier to cloud your vision or concentrate elsewhere than it is to face up to something unpleasant and "deal" with it, so to speak. In fact, I'm not sure I even know how to face up to certain things. I do know everything that the books say, everything shrinks tell you. I do know every tactic that has been turned into a cliché by the Doctor Phil generation.

I think the problem is that I, like most people, believe in their heart of hearts that there has to be a pain-free solution to a problem. That's where that nasty control habit comes back in to play. I figure if I can control enough elements of a situation I can make it turn out the way I want it to, and barring that, I believe if I can control enough elements of myself – particularly my subconscious and my emotions – then I can get better faster, skip the mourning process, hop over all the innate pain of that process, and get to the good part. If I can just shut myself off and stop self-analyzing to the point where I'm dissecting my own organs, if I can just shut myself off and stop feeling things – things I think about too much – then I'll get through just fine. Of course, that's all malarkey, because nobody can do that, least of all me with the way my brain works.

So serenity is out, control is out. I have no idea what that leaves. Except – maybe writing, and music. I've stopped counting clichés at this point, but I think it might have a kernel of truth to it. Unlike whiskey or mile-long runs, I am not focusing my energies elsewhere or hiding from anything when I write, or when I play. Last night when I played the wedding, the song I performed was a somewhat less saccharine love song than others I've heard at similar functions, and it was goddamn hard to get through because all I could do was think about how it has applied to my life. So I sure as hell wasn't avoiding by playing that song. In this particular situation I was giving someone a gift – expressing hope for their life together by playing a song that voices a lot of positive sentiments. It was no longer "my" song in that regard; the pain that I associate with it didn't matter anymore in the face of its importance to the two people for whom I played it. It became "their" song instead, and was imbued with all the strength of their feelings for each other. I'm not trying to be overly emotive or melodramatic, because if you think about it that's what songs do. They suggest tones but their true life is in what the listener invests.

When I listen to the music of my youth I am almost overwhelmed by very strong sensory memories because of the relation I have, personally, to that song. Wonderwall was a chart-topper in 1995, and every time I hear that song on the radio I am, in a very real sense, transported back to that time, nearly fifteen years ago, and I can smell stale cigarettes and taste the stickiness of Coke in my mouth and feel my stomach churn with familiar, pubescent anxiety. Other songs I relate to differently, and those relations change over time. Your Winter was a song I couldn't listen to for years because it brought back painful memories of a failed relationship that I had desperately wanted, at the time, to succeed. When I listened I could see her eyes and smell the detergent she used to clean her clothes and feel the roughness of the second-hand sheets on her bed, and it felt like somebody was stabbing me over and over again just like it did the day she broke it off. But time changes people. I listen to that song now, and I still really like it, but I no longer get the stabbing feeling, because I've since built other relations with that piece of music.

Can you do the same thing with people? Can you relegate your relations, the trappings of what feels like a totally different life, into a particular partitioned area, leave them there, and start fresh? Shit, I don't know. But I do know that I am starting to notice patterns of weakness in myself, and to reference AA again, the first step is admitting to it – seeing through the blown glass that you put up in front of your face to distort the world and yourself to your liking. I want to smash that glass so that I can see what's beyond it, what's actually there. I want to listen to people the way I listen to a song and impart my own meaning, get something out of it other than what was given. Above everything else, I want to feel this, not shut it out or hide. Congratulations to my friends on their marriage. I got something out of it too.