Day 48 - Vanishing Again As The Fear Rises And I Become A Couchaholic

Although the previous post was published today (September 12, 2011), I actually started writing it five days ago, then stopped writing or posting for five days. Once again, I vanished from myself and became the invisible man. In Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, "the book's main theme is the invisibility of the underdog. As the title suggests, the main character is invisible because everyone sees him as a stereotype, not as a real person. While the narrator often bemoans his state of invisibility, he comes to embrace it in the end. He realizes there are a number of advantages to it that allow him to remain undetected and inconspicuous. Throughout, the narrator does not divulge his name." (Wikipedia). This is not the invisibility that I am experiencing. It does not really matter whether society sees me as I am or as I want to be. What matters is that I become invisible to myself, shrinking away into the cover of non-creation and the shadows of the stagnant soul. 

I am like the invisible man, an empty bathrobe scuttling across the floor of forgotten rooms, smoking his cigarette to create a vague impression of definition, lost to himself and thus lost to the world.


In a recent post in his ongoing blog Bleeding Internally, my friend Jason Christopher wrote about the difficulty of writing in a naked and direct manner that is the essence of why Jason's voice is so valuable and needed in this world. Jason wrote: "Writing everyday is very difficult. Training yourself to actually sit at the computer and not watch porn, or gaze at some fantasy facebook life you have created for yourself is a lot harder than it looks. Especially writing every day. If you write like I do, it's just about what is in your head at that very moment. But if the moment hasn't changed in days, weeks, or even months. That story gets old for people who read your shit, and you can only imagine how tired I am of writing that I feel like a total loser. I'm not tired of feeling like that, that is a very comfortable place for me. I'm just tired of writing about it." 

Jason Christopher having one of those Existential Moments in a Bathtub

Jason's point resonates with me because I am tired of writing about my fears and the stagnation they produce when I sag into the couch and become a Couchaholic. I do not want to be that man anymore. But it is easy to get overwhelmed by the reality of this disease, and I start treatment in less than three days, and I am scared. If I do get very sick, will I use the sickness as an excuse to never leave my bed and not do my work, to indulge in self-pity and expect everyone else to take care of me? Will my worse fears about myself become a vibrant reality that I cannot escape from as I languish within the fever dreams brought on by this Interferon that sounds like a nightmare police station or a bad drug in a story by William Burroughs? Will I become a baby in the body of a man? 


There are no answers to these questions tonight, but I know that I must go on a little more. I must go on a long time more because that is why I was put here on this planet and the job of this voice is to write.

Day 33 Afternoon — Vanishing From Myself

Sorry for five days of silence. I hope it will not happen again because it does not make me feel any better but significantly worse not to write in this blog. It's incredible and terribly ironic how often we avoid doing the basic things to ensure our happiness and serenity. Often I get caught in the cycle of wasting time by watching television or making silly memes on the internet or reading comics; basically doing anything other than what I was put here on this earth to actually do and achieve. I don't know exactly why I vanish from myself, becoming in essence an invisible man in relation to my spirituality and my authentic self, but I have some pretty good guesses.

Vanishing From Myself Without A Decent Bowler Hat

The most obvious reason is fear. I will never forget when I was a teenager and read Frank Herbert's science fiction masterpiece Dune for the first time, and I was so influenced by the following quotation: "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." Yes, fear is still and always will be the mind and soul killer, but it offers only the most base explanation of my actions. There is so much more to express when I delve into the details of those character defects.

As an alcoholic, my reaction to fear is an immediate need to escape. In the past, I found such balm through the lens of my addiction to cocaine and heroin. Now I no longer have the option to self-medicate  because I have turned my will and my life over to a higher power that I choose to call God. Still, even though I am sober, I struggle on a daily basis to act through the lens of principles as opposed to fear and the ego of personality. I relapse on my character defects on a daily basis, and my avoidance of these pages is an avoidance of the weight of facing my own truth and the burden of expressing the wonder and the banality of what I experience. In truth, I have so much to write about and so much to say, yet I run away from the incompleteness of these words and the impossibility of perfection.


Does that make any sense? Maybe a little and maybe not so much, but I embrace this journey of expression and I vow to do a little bit better as I continue to progress along this path.