My Library is an Archive of Longings

The title of this post is a quote by Susan Sontag, and I'm sure she meant her actual library rather than anything metaphorical.

I, however, am stealing it and adopting it and intending it to be metaphorical. I'm changing the meaning of 'my library' to mean the collection of works that I have myself created. I am often moved by a word, a thought, an emotion, or a person when I am called to create something and birth it out into the world.

It's usually pretty easy for me to point to a story, or a line therein, or a painting, or a song (which prompted a new DJ mix) and say "this is who/what/where inspired me to make this thing you now get to enjoy." This library of mine - my collected works - often come from a place of longing, of wishing to fill some void inside me. They are the physical stories of things that never were, might possibly be, or will never come to fruition. My longings are legion and as long as my hand can give voice to those longings, they'll continue to do so.

I've been active in birthing out new pieces of art this summer and I couldn't be happier with the results of each finished piece (new pieces will be posted near the end of this entry). My muse has been a strong, massive, and wonderful influence this season and I'm very much looking forward to seeing the riots of color and design she will pull out of me over the next several months.

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"Grief with Silver Lining" (December 2021)

Up until this year, a great deal of this output has come from a place of pain or loss, most of it grief-related, but certainly not all. If you've been following along with my past posts, I have retread a lot of emotional valleys over the last two years. I also can't begin to tell you how much fucking work it's been to get to the place I am now. I am at my healthiest, my happiest, my most clear-headed, and my most emotionally-balanced than I have been in a very long time.

At the outset of things, I began my jaunt into therapy. I tried several therapists through my work's Employee Assistance Program, and only one of them really seemed to do me much good. She was great, but not someone I'd go back to, knowing what I know now.

After that, I worked with my company's HR department and my bosses in order to simply take time off from work that was separate from my PTO. I knew that I was close to burning out (or possibly causing minor self-harm) if I didn't completely dissociate from all responsibilities for a little bit. I liken this to taking the boiling kettle off the stove and simply opening up the nozzle to release all the steam. Most of April and May were the best weeks I experienced during the entirety of 2022. I can't even properly express how much that time off helped me get to a better place mentally and emotionally.

And then the winter came and I became pretty secluded, withdrawing into myself and becoming overly introspective. The last few months of the year (and the first few that started the next year) were not great for me in many respects. More 'two steps forward, one step back,' but at least there was still progress being made.

In March of this year, I began working out consistently 5-6 days a week. Twice-daily walks around the neighborhood and 5 or 6 mini-workouts throughout the day helped to not only get my body into a much better place, but when I started to look good, I also started to feel good. The more I did, the better I felt, and so that's simply become my standard now. I'm less interested in the idea of getting beefy or going full-tilt into watching my carbs or any of that nonsense and more interested in simply working out. The consistency of it, the routine nature of it, is what's key for me. The results are VERY nice, but it's the act that's doing more for me than anything else. I remain a steady 250lbs, but I'm becoming a much leaner, stronger 250lbs, which I'm thankful for.

And then the summer hit and I knew I needed to shake off my monastic nature and start going out more, doing all the things, eating at all the places, having all the funs. And my mood began to really lift again; I began to feel much more like myself, knowing full well that I wasn't done scooping out my brain- and heart-matter and holding both up for closer examination.

* * *

Then there was my brief trip to San Francisco for some chemically-guided therapy last month, which was an experience.

My dear friend Makenzie has become a minister at the Congregation for Sacred Practices in SF. She and I have been having a lot of LONG phone chats these last few months, mostly to keep in touch, but also because her mom was diagnosed with cancer not long after my own mother passed from the same. So, there's some extra, specific bonding that we've been doing and talking through some of those unique experiences.

Because she knows me as well as she does, and knows that I've been struggling with some big depression and several of my creative outlets being plugged up, she asked "why don't you come out and do a ceremony with me?"

So I booked a flight for Labor Day weekend and left Kansas City that Thursday night, getting in around just after midnight. I stumbled through her apartment, accidentally opened up her bedroom door (incorrectly assuming it was the spare room I was supposed to be in), startled her awake, then settled in for a few hours before finally crashing.

The next morning, we'd planned on finding a patio brunch, but the weather was drearier than we expected and instead stumbled across a great spot called Sweet Maple in the Lower Pac Heights, just north of Japantown. UNREAL delicious breakfast. Highly recommended.

After brunch, we went searching for a new bed frame (and potentially new mattress) at the Sleep Number store next to Target. While fun, it wasn't quite what Kenz was looking for, so we sought out a single frame in Target and came up empty. We then headed off to Emeryville across the bay and checked out the Purple Mattress store with our friend Brian. And while that ended up being a better fit for Kenz, the pricing was...deceptive...at checkout. So we bailed and headed back to her place in the Mission, snagging a hex-bolt tool and some potential extra screws for her frame on the way there.

Once home, I tore her frame apart and put it all back together so she had something solid to sleep on. While I showered, she got the ceremony ready for me.

We "opened" the room with prayers to all 7 directions (N, S, E, W, Up, Down, Self) and I ingested my chosen substance and we eased into the ceremony.

Now, I've had some prior experience with the substance used in the ceremony, so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect out of my body. I also knew that the purpose of the ceremony was for me to go swimming deep inside my heart-mind and get some shit figured out. And I'll tell you, I tend to be more movement-based on this stuff; I like to get up and be active, so fighting against that urge in favor of staying still and focused was mad difficult for me. But...it elicited some great learnings. Some I already had an inkling about, some were new...all became important once vocalized and spoken out into the air.

Thankfully, Kenz was very good at coaxing more information out of me. I thought I was going to be more talkative than I was, but she was great at pulling on certain threads of thought or redirecting my way of thinking to other avenues that eventually ended up revealing new (or deeper) revelations.

While I won't go into all the details of the session, I will say that I found it to be incredibly helpful and thought-provoking. Even more so, I'm glad Makenzie recorded the session and gave me a transcript of what all was said and what all occurred so I could revisit it during more clear-eyed moments in the weeks that followed.

Once done, we "closed" out the room with with prayers again and I was up for a good long while after that, trying to find a way to come down proper. I don't know when I finally fell asleep for good, but it seemed to take forever.

The next morning, Kenz and I wanted to make the day a hedonistic one. We took the BART into the city and headed toward the Ferry Building, hoping to buy food and drink from various vendors and create our own special SF breakfast that way. But, we both forgot it was a holiday weekend and, despite the fact that half the city was probably at Burning Man, the Ferry Building was overpacked, super busy, and wasn't going to provide the experience we wanted.

After polishing off some wine at the wine bar there, we left and headed down the Embarcadero to have brunch on a patio overlooking the Bay Bridge. Properly full and well on our way to being tipsy, we decided to ixnay the drive up the coast to get oysters at the Marshall Store (our favorite spot) and instead went back to the Ferry Building to take a ferry across to Sausalito, where we ended up at Barrel House and ate our weight in oysters while trying damn near every fancy cocktail on the menu. Once done, we took the last ferry back to the mainland and got treated to a stunning sunset while sitting up top.

Once back, we both crashed out hard. The next morning, I left Kenzie's place to meet up with my friend Nic at a local coffee shop and got to hang with her for a brief time before having to head to the airport some 30 minutes away. My flights home were less than stellar, and I got home several hours later than I wanted, but the trip was a good and necessary one.