Vietnam

Until this year, I have only left the country a handful of times, and when I did it was on someone else's dime.  A man's dime.  My dad took us to Europe a couple of times when I was a kid, and he took me to France nine years ago.  The Reptile took me to Portugal in 2010.

So I wanted to go somewhere on my own dime, and I wanted to go somewhere other than Europe. So, semi-arbitrarily, I settled on Vietnam.  It was supposed to be beautiful, it was supposed to be cheap, Anthony Bourdain loves it and I love Vietnamese food.

But I was intimidated by facing Asia on my first solo trip abroad, so I went with a tour.  In a way, this was a good decision, because I think trying to figure out everything on my own would have overwhelmed the stress to pleasure equation on the stress side.  And I had a good time, because it turns out that Vietnam is beautiful and cheap and people are generally lovely although the language barrier seemed huge to me.  And there were some opportunities to get off the tourist track.  I didn't much hit it off with my group though, who were mostly younger and bigger drinkers, and not all that interested in street food or local culture.

The highlights were--

A street food tour in Hanoi, just me and a local guy and later an Egyptian surgeon who was there for a conference, and who I didn't tell he was eating pork. We ate a long thin sandwich with a pate and pickled vegetables, the little pistolette was some of the best bread I've ever eaten.  A sort of rice crepe with pork, a sweet potato fritter, seafoods grilled on our little child's table on the sidewalk, fruit in ice and sweet cream, and the best coffee I'd had to that point in the back and upstairs from a silk shop, with a beautiful view of the lake.

The coffee in the morning on the otherwise revolting Reunification Express.

A bike ride through the countryside outside Hoi An that ended with a swim in the sea.

Rowing through the Mekong Delta.

The Cu Chi tunnels, sort of. 

More coffee on the streets of Saigon, and being on my own to wander around in the steam on the last day.

Managing all of this sorta/mostly on my own and becoming a little bit more of a woman of the world.

Edd Seay

I had a dream that I remarried my ex-husband, but the marriage only lasted a few days. Phew. Then I realized I had actually gotten back together with him, or tried to, several times in the last few decades. To review, my ex was terminally ambivalent about whether he really wanted to be with me, and I was not particularly attracted to him, although we were good companions in some ways, and he expanded my world. He introduced me to Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Star and “Here My Dear.” He non-figuratively introduced me to Alex Chilton. Yeah, but it turns out having compatible good taste in art and culture does not in itself make for a good relationship. Yet, as the dream suggests, I have repeated this formula ad infinitum. Thanks, dreaming brain, for this teaching moment.  The thing is, though, that I thought I had realized this and learned my lesson and I still did it all over again with Captain Crabbypants.

My first date with the ex-husband was fairly mediocre, although I didn't have much to compare it to at the time.  Then he decided he didn't want to get involved with me, I think mostly because we worked together. I was devastated by this all out of proportion to what happened, and in reaction or resistance to his rejection I ended up convincing us both that we should be together, even though I was fundamentally just not attracted to him.  Hey, this sounds familiar.  Then we had an unhappy time for several years, then it was painful and scary to break up even though it had never been very good between us.  Yep, this is ringing a bell.

Important in Your Life

 

This picture of the ex, who I will call Captain Crabbypants, makes me sad to look at.  I have been missing the bantering, chitchatting and joking that was, in some sense, the essence of our relationship.   I have been resisting the urge to complain to him about how hard he is to engage in banter these days, even though we both sincerely intended to stay friends.  I am trying to refrain from drama queenish behavior.  I understand that space and disengagement may be best for both of us.  But I realized today what I miss is knowing that I am of central importance in his life; that maybe what is scary and sad about being single is not being of primary importance in anyone's life.  

I thought about the boyfriend before him, who I will call The Reptile.  I was not happy or satisfied in our relationship, yet the pain of our ending was long and strong, lasting many times longer than the relationship itself lasted.  And this was because of how clear he made it that I was not and had never been important to him.

My relationship with Captain Crabbypants was so hard and confusing, because I was never very attracted to him.  In fact, at times I recoiled from him, not just in the sense of not being physically attracted to him, but that it some very basic way, my gut instinct was that he was not for me.  Sometimes I would have walk out of his apartment and stand in the hallway because his apartment made me claustrophobic.  So, from that perspective, I should have trusted my gut and never gotten involved with him.

But there are reasons that I didn't, some wholesome and some pathological.  I genuinely liked him and found him entertaining.  We always had a good time talking to each other.  That would be the most wholesome reason why I wanted to override my gut and try to work things out.  

The least wholesome reason was because of my pattern of getting sucked into a certain kind of drama.  He was emotionally entangled with another woman most of the time we were together, and I had the unfounded, not entirely conscious conviction that if he finally and definitively chose me and let her go, everything would be solved.

A reason in the middle ranges is that up until now, no matter how bad things got, and even when we were broken up, he always made me feel like I mattered to him, that I was crucial to his life. I have to let that go, I am letting that go, but it hurts.

Chemically Induced Enlightenment, Part 2

This is an account of my second psilocybin session in the "Spiritual Practices" study.  It was written the evening after the session, which was August 29, 2012.

The first part of the experience seems nearly impossible to write about. It is very hard to remember, it sort of defied words, and the person who is sitting here typing this was barely there.

I think the first thing I experienced was brightly colored, lighted, moving geometric shapes. I remember that this was like what I saw in my first session, but this time they

seemed brighter or more visceral. The way it looked seemed at once very ancient, like Sanskrit writing come to life, and something new that young kids might understand but that would be beyond a middle aged woman to “get.” I also described it as Sanskrit meets computer circuitry, but all lit up and vibrant with moving colors. It also seemed linked to the music in some way.  I remember feeling surprised that European classical music would “look” like this.

I had the sense of my normal self completely, or almost completely, dissolving. I didn’t feel particularly anxious about this. The string of words that I had identified with in my last session slowed to a very erratic drip. When I sort of asked myself to think of it, I could barely remember my name, that I worked as a lawyer, and I could remember the names of a few people in my life but they didn’t seem to mean much.

I remember being aware that I was really just this point of consciousness watching this five‐dimensional pyrotechnic show that the drug or my mind or the universe or whatever was putting on.  I felt grateful that I got to experience this.

I remember laughing, but I can’t explain why. I was vaguely aware of being in the room, but it seemed very far away. I was vaguely aware of my body, but it seemed oddly flat and like it was floating in space.

I remember thinking something like “aha, now I get it” or “oh” or even that “this” was what meditation was trying to get at, but at this point I can’t remember or explain what “this” was, other than just that sense of being consciousness not attached to any particular identity.

It seemed like this went on a long time, or that there wasn’t any time. It was peaceful and I felt accepting of and grateful for this experience, I was even happy in a sense, but it seemed a very impersonal and abstract experience, as if the ultimate reality, either of the universe or just my brain, was brightly colored mathematics.  Actually, as I write this I realize I’ve had the sense before of music being both very mysterious and impossible to really understand, and also of music being like animated math, and that is what this experience was like.

I was aware that this was going to end, and I sort of didn’t want it to. Then I gradually re‐formed into my recognizable self, and as I did I felt really sad and disappointed by how impersonal and emotionally cold the earlier part of the experience was.

I had wanted an experience of universal love—and instead I found universal animated mathematics. And somehow this all snowballed into a despairing sense that there was no love for me in the universe, that  God doesn’t love me, that I am not loved or am not loveable, and/or that I was/am “autistic” in some sense, incapable of tuning into love, but

instead that I am just tuned to something that might be profound but is not warm or comforting.

And I just lay there for a long time feeling sad and alienated. Crying but at the same time feeling disconnected from my emotions. Mary said some soothing things to me, but I had the sense of them being the things she had been trained to say, that they really had nothing to do with what I was experienced.  I felt that Rosemary and I had maybe rubbed each other the wrong way sometimes in some subtle way, that I knew she didn’t really like me, that she and Mary were both doing a fine job of doing their job, but that’s all they were doing.  I remember Mary saying there was love there for me if I would let myself feel it, but I had no idea how to do that.

And this just seemed to go on forever, with me at first waiting for the experience to change and for God to pop out and say Surprise! I love you after all!, then just waiting for the happy music to come on so I could get up and put myself together and face this cold reality that I had discovered.

I remember Mary asking me if any people had come to my in my experience, and there hadn’t been, which just intensified the experience of alienation.

Toward the end I thought about the ex‐boyfriend I always refer to as “The Reptile.” I had the sense that we were both the same, that what was inside us was mathematics, that were both emotionally alienated. I sort of knew that, as much as it might seem like a cliché, that this feeling of not being loved by the universe was because of not feeling loved as a child, and I knew that that was true of him to, and I felt a glimmer of compassion and forgiveness for him. I was aware, too, that it was Yom Kippur. Both the Reptile and my current troublesome sort‐of boyfriend are Jewish. I was aware of doing a sort of reverse atonement for or to the Reptile.

I got up and I talked about all this with Mary and Rosemary; somehow we got into talking about my scary, troubled, possibly violent grievant who believes I was anointed by God to avenge him. Somewhere in there I had the insight that the love in the world, if I want it to be there, comes from me putting it there, which is about dealing with others, even the crazy and difficult ones, in a compassionate and present way. It’s not the emotion, it’s the intention.

At some point Mary showed me the picture of me and my sister as children with my Dad. I know she wanted me to see it because it showed that my father loved me. It was interesting that when I looked at it, it looked to me like my dad was wearing a yarmulke.  We aren’t Jewish. We talked about in being Yom Kippur and what atonement meant, from various perspectives.

The sense that the love comes from my intentions was reinforced with interactions with Barbara, who came to pick me up at the end of the session. Before this we hadn’t really been close, even though we like each other, she was someone I had my guard up with maybe even more than usual.

In the car, I described my experience to her a little bit. She said she hadn’t really ever done any drugs, but she had gone to a sweat lodge and had an experience of dissolving and then re‐forming. She felt this was a spiritual experience.  She said this had happened on the same day as her daughter had her first communion, and that part of her experience was the understanding that her experience and her daughters’ experiences were the same, of the unity or essential sameness of spiritual or sacramental experience.

Then she started talking about the problems she is having with her husband.  She doesn’t feel that they are really married—they are not really partners in life, he keeps himself and his finances separate from hers, they don’t have any shared plans for the future, he goes on trips with his buddies but they don’t go places together, he treats her as if she is just the most mature and reasonable of the children.

I was able to really listen to her compassionately and express that to her. I was also aware that there was a lesson in this for me—that a man can marry you and make an outward commitment to you, and can still have all the same commitment and intimacy issues and hold himself apart from you.  That her experience with her husband is something like mine with John.

At some point she said something about how great I am and how great my life is, with my weird meditation and psilocybin studies and the rowing and my interesting work, and I thought and said that I usually walk around feeling sad and dissatisfied with the state of my love life, but I could see that in a way the problems with love and connection and commitment were the same no matter the outward relationship status, and that actually my life is pretty great.

Chemically induced enlightenment, Part 1

 Last year about this time, I was accepted as a subject into the "Spiritual Practices" study by Dr. Roland Griffiths.  It involved starting a mediation practice, weekly meetings that were a bit like psychotherapy sessions, and, on two occasions, coming in and taking a dose of clinically manufactured psilocybin.  This is my account of my first "session," which took place on August 29, 2012.  The account was written the evening after the session.

We were looking at pictures of puppies because what could be less
anxiety-provoking than puppies? But towards the end of the book I
started to be aware that something was happening. I remember starting
to cry almost immediately. I don’t know is that was the drug or just a
reaction to knowing that I had done it. That I had swallowed the pill
and I was on this ride.  I felt woozy and unsteady like I was drunk.

I was sitting on the couch and I looked at that painting and I was
aware that it looked really bright and intense, and I noticed it was
moving, and I realized this was happening. I didn’t really like the
painting, but it was interesting to look at. I remember saying that I
was scared, that I didn’t know if I was ready for this. I felt jittery
and antsy and I just wanted to walk around. I didn’t want to lay down.
I felt this was going to be a fine, interesting experience and I was
going to be okay as long as I could keep my eyes open and walk around.
 I felt like I just physically wasn’t capable of lying down because I
felt so jittery, but I also knew that I was afraid of lying down and
surrendering to the experience.  I felt like it was important to keep
up a normal stream of conversation with Mary and Rosemary even though
it was hard to concentrate on what they were saying.

I was scared but I wasn’t deeply terrified. And at the same time I was
scared I also felt like it was okay and also that this was kind of
funny and entertaining. I sort of became aware that Mary and Rosemary
were just at work doing their job while I was having this
semi-meltdown. And they were funny with the things they were trying to
get me to do to work through my jitteriness, shaking their bodies to
try to get me to do the same and all that.  But at the same time I was
aware that they really wanted me to lie down, and I wasn’t ready to
lie down.

I went to the bathroom and noticed the pattern on the shower curtain
was moving around.  I looked at my face in the bathroom mirror and I
felt like I would like to keep looking at it. But it was also
reassuring to see myself looking normal and I felt like I would go in
and lie down.

But it was still a struggle to do it. I think I must have sat down and
got up a few times. At one point I know I put the mask on but I was
walking around with it on the top of my head.  Mary had me repeat my
passage and I could say it but it didn’t seem to mean anything.  She
asked me what was scaring me about lying down and I said I didn’t
know.

I remember I told them that I thought the point of doing this was to
get ready for the time when I was going to die and I wasn’t going to
have any choice about letting go. But right now I still had the choice
and I didn’t want to let go.

But I started with just putting the mask on.  I put it on and there
was nothing really scary about the mask per se. When I put it on I saw
colored lights and geometric shapes. I took it off for a minute and
looked at the rug and it was okay.


I thought, okay, I’ll just do this one step at a time. The mask, then
lying down. I realized I liked the music, but I felt like I just
wanted to listen to it without the headphones for awhile. I didn’t
want to feel covered by the blanket.

As soon as I put the mask on and lay down I felt like it was going to
be okay. There might have been a moment of trepidation, but it didn’t
last. Then I felt okay, let this happen. The thing is, not long after
that, the visual hallucinations faded away.

I remember thinking, I was so scared of facing what was inside me, and
all that is inside is just a bunch of colors and shapes. At first I
saw moving geometric shapes, then it was like I was looking into deep
space and there was a constellation of colored lights, which was an
octopus, and it was moving.  This kind of an actual octopus and a
constellation of stars at the same time, and it wasn’t scary, it was
just kind of out there in space.

Then after that the visual stuff stopped. I remember thinking I was so
scared of this and it’s just lying on the couch listening to music. I
remember feeling sort of disappointed, like I had finally surrendered
to the experience, and it was just lying on the couch listening to
music. I wanted more of the experience and it was receding. I remember
being aware that I wasn’t having a particularly spiritual experience
and feeling sort of disappointed by that.  I was trying to remember
whether I would get to do this again, and hoping that the next time I
would have some really profound experience. But then I also thought,
if this is not the high dose I don’t know if I can handle the high
dose.

But I felt like it was okay. For the most part, after I laid down
everything felt peaceful and calm. It was okay to just lie on the
couch and listen to music. I remember laughing because I had been so
scared and it turned out to be perfectly okay.  All the things I
resisted the most were what I wanted now. I had been somehow afraid of
the music and being covered by the blanket but now I wanted more
music, I wanted to go into it.

I was crying at some point, too and I don’t know exactly why, there
might have been something vaguely there about my mother, but more just
some sense of accepting this and this was what it was and this was
what I was and it was fine.

Even though on one level it was just listening to music and I was
always aware I was lying on the couch listening to music, I was
hearing the music in a very deep way. It was like my head was a big
hollowed out space and the music was in there in a very palpable way.
The classical music seemed very European and cloudy and gray, but this
wasn’t a bad thing. A vague sense of gray storm clouds.

Even though I wasn’t really seeing anything anymore, I had a sense of
being in deep space, a sense that my chest had sort of opened up and
there was all this space in there. I sort of felt like it would be
okay to just dissolve into space, but I didn’t dissolve, I was still
there on the couch.

I has the understanding that the self I identify with is just sort of
this endless string of words, this endless narrative I tell myself.
The whole time I’m having this experience, I’m thinking about it and
try to describe it to myself. I had the sense that the self that makes
the words is the words. To let go of this self would be to let the
words go. I felt like it would be okay to let the words stop. But the
words didn’t stop, and that was okay, too, although what drew me to
the music was that it was non-verbal. I felt like I didn’t want to
have to explain this all over again to Mary when she asked me what I
was experiencing. Like it would be good to have a break from stringing
together words.

I remember thinking about how my initial motivation for getting in to
this, or at least part of it, was because I wanted to figure out what
to do with my sort-of boyfriend John or find some peace with my
relationships, and I was asking myself is this helping me figure that
out. And thinking not really, but screw that anyway. But along with
the sense of being essentially a string of words was the sense of
relationships being conversations, that our conversation was the
important thing, that my conversation with John was the one that
matters most to me, that the rest of it or figuring out what label to
put on it doesn’t really matter.

Some music came on that was Indian chanting, and it really seemed deep
and interesting and complex and comforting. At some point I realized
they were chanting “om namah shivaya” which was a mantra I had tried
out and rejected because it seemed too complex, too many syllables,
but now I really liked it and would have been happy to listen to that
all day. For some reason this also brought up the Muslim cabdriver who
brought me to the session, and I felt like he had been some sort of
mascot or guardian angel for me. I don’t know why, I know that’s a
totally different religion, maybe just because he had the aura of
being a good soul.

After that I got up again to go to the bathroom and I was aware of
being mostly back to normal. The painting wasn’t moving anymore, nor
was the shower curtain. I told Mary and Rosemary about what I had been
experiencing, even though in a way I didn’t want to indulge in even
yet more verbalizing. Mary showed me the rose, but it just looked like
a rose. Early, when I had been pacing, I had noticed that was a very
intensely saturated color, but now it was back to normal.

After that it was just listening to the music, and it was mostly a
less intense version of what had come before. Hearing the music in a
more intense way that usual. Aware that I was not entirely comfortable
on the couch, but it was okay. Aware that I was a little disappointed
with the experience, but feeling that it was okay. Sad, but in a way
that felt okay. Towards the end Louis Armstrong’s “Wonderful World”
came on and that made my cry a lot all over again, but that song can
make me cry even without the assistance of drugs. I had been aware
that I was doing this on the 7th anniversary of Katrina, and this
brought up a lot of emotions about New Orleans, and also knowledge
that Katrina had been the thing that knocked me off one course and set
me on the course to living in Baltimore and the string of events that
led to me being in this study.

I felt like this was a good experience, but, oddly, a sobering one. It
was at once easier and harder than I feared or expected. When Darcy
came to pick me up and the first thing I said to her was “Geez, Darcy,
put on some pants” I felt bad and disappointed in myself, like I am
still the same flawed, snarky, insensitive person I was when I
started.

Fourth of July

This is certainly not a great picture.  It’s not even in focus even though I was using automatic—well, I’m learning.  However, this is a picture of people.  Okay, children who are well on their way to being people.  The kids are the children of my cousins, the grandkids of my Aunt Georgia and Uncle Jim

I went to my aunt and uncle’s cabin in the “mountains” of central Pennsylvania for the Fourth of July.  Uncle Jim is my dad’s youngest brother.  He seems the sanest of the five siblings by quite a bit.  The youngest sister has been hospitalized for depression and is probably bipolar.  The oldest brother and sister seem to be deeply unhappy and stuck in the ruts of their personality.  I credit my dad for having changed a great deal for the better over the course of his life, but when I was a kid, he and my mom were pretty unhappy and did nearly as much emotional damage to us as their parents did to them.

So being with my aunt and uncle and their family was a little surreal—they are or were just a little more emotionally healthy than my parents but that little bit makes a profound difference.

I’m afraid that what I’m trying to say here is going to sound like I am idealizing their family.  I’m not around them often, but I can see some flaws—the strains in the cousins’ marriages, a snobbish and materialistic streak here, an angry and morose streak there. 

But I also see that all three are married, and their marriages are settled and appear to be solid.  They make money and are not in any financial distress.  They have kids.  Their kids are good kids, and loved kids.  The oldest girl makes me think of what I might have been like as a child if my intelligence had been met with affection instead of the barbed combination of pride and resentment that shaped my parents’—especially my dad’s—attitude toward me.

In any case, my cousin who I am not close to invited me to join them at their cabin, and I went.  I played with their kids in a cold mountain stream, drank with them, and let them rib me a little bit about how much my grandmother, my dad, and whoever used to brag about me.  I know that many of my cousins resent me because other people bragged about me a lot when none of them, the braggers or their audience, really knew me at all. So I allowed them to finally get a glimpse of me.

Cat portraiture with olloclip

House divided

I still don't have the nerve to take pictures of people, but maybe you can see the people by what they make.  I have been reading about the enneagram and I am so a 4 in my self-isolating tendencies, my social awkwardness, and my superiority/inferiority complex.  I have an idea it would help me crack the grip of this personality to talk to people and ask to take their picture.  But I feel like I need to come up with a story to tell about what I'm doing. 

Locust Point, Baltimore

Big glittery hearts, Hampden, Baltimore

I want to work up the nerve to take pictures of people, until then I give you their big glittery hearts in the sunshine.

Hampden backyards, Baltimore

I got a real camera...

So I can take better pictures of my hilarious and personable cats.  And maybe some other things.