Thursday 14 August 2014

A Few Thoughts About Robin Williams

I've thought better of writing a post about Robin Williams. Everyone has an opinion about Williams, mental illness, suicide - but I feel like there is part of the equation that I haven't seen articulated yet. Many are commenting on the fact that he was a success, famous, not uber-wealthy but not a starving artist by a long shot, etc. That's how we see him, but I'd like to speculate (and this is pure speculation - I did not know the man) about how he may have seen the world.

For those of us living in the cheap seats, the view of the rich and famous is glamorous, exciting and somewhat carefree. We also assume those at the top have value and that our reverence for them is earned and deserved. So imagine getting to the top and instead of being surrounded by demi-gods and a glorious world, what you find is a kind of grotesque self-indulgence, a weird surreal wealth and absurd moralities that are almost unfathomable? Williams may not have disappointed us (though I know a few San Francisco comedians who vehemently accused him of stealing their material), but what if the world disappointed him?

Having only glimpsed and been privy to part of the business Williams was in, I can tell you that there are parts of it that are disgusting, distasteful and in some cases, outside the laws of community and humanity. Entourage makes fun of some of the lighter bits but the decadence and depravity of some of the people who work and run Hollywood would curl your toes. (I don't wonder too much why he lived in the Bay Area, the air quality and the culture notwithstanding.)

I read an interview in which Williams shared what it was like performing for the troops in the Middle East, and some of what he alluded to was a real unease he had with the people he met who were in power, places he stayed that made him entirely uncomfortable and things he saw that stopped him in his tracks. In some interviews, you can hear in his voice a real sense of despair - that may not be entirely based on mental illness - a sense of limitless disappointment and futility of trying to make a difference in a business and a culture based on indifference. It's a tone you hear a lot in Good Will Hunting.

Imagine creating something like Comic Relief while living amongst assholes (yes, complete utter, self-indulgent, self aggrandizing assholes) who throw shit fits because they can't get 100 bottles of Crystal at the night club because the owner only ordered 99 bottles. I've seen worse. I've met people in this business who I would love to watch being eaten by Hannibal Lecture.

Then there are the real horrors who make their way to the business like pilgrims to Mecca and who would be, in any rational, human world, utterly grotesque pariahs. Men who use their influence to get whatever they want (including a producer I met once who had young boys of 11 and 12 brought up from Mexico to 'play' with). Women who would sell the souls of their children to get what they want (Lady MacBeth would blush). These people take their toll on humanity in all sorts of ways, I'm speculating that maybe, just maybe, we all just witnessed one more of those tolls.

Imagine believing in the world and thinking that it gets better as you get more successful - that you get to meet 'better' people (there's hugely flawed logical there to begin with but a lot of people think that successful people are better people for some reason) - that you will have better experiences - that you will be happier - that you will influence the world for the better. And now imagine that none of that can or will ever be true - and the more you try to use your influence (this fame and money and success that everyone is saying he had) the more you see how truly hopeless it all is?

Williams probably saw more of the world than most of us and he saw it from a vantage point that while privileged was also probably uniquely shocking. The rich and famous can build penthouses in the tree tops, but the scorpions that live among them are venomous, ruthless, and impossible to ignore.




Tuesday 6 May 2014

Rider on the Storm




Last Friday I had one of those classes – one of those classes when something truly extraordinary happens. This epic piece grew from the simplest exercise. While it was clearly extraordinary for the students, it was equally amazing for me. The work worked exactly the way it’s supposed to work. It flirted with disaster and then went beyond anything I could have expected or imagined – I let the moment of panic – the moment when I thought I needed to save it from completely collapsing go – and the moment after the panic, it became something absolutely astonishing. It was inevitable and surprising and exactly what it needed to be. (And just so you know I’m not exaggerating, when the exercise was over, one of the students who was watching said he was exhausted just from being in the audience.)

So should I be surprised that when I woke up on Saturday morning, I felt well – for the first time in 5 months – I felt well. I felt capable, simply capable. I didn’t feel hollow or hungry (which has been very interesting because I’ve been feeling famished for months and have gained a ton of weight). And while I’m physically heavier than usual, I felt unencumbered - not euphoric, not elated, not invincible, not heavy, not black, not dragging under – just balanced and in accord. I had made a break though. I had accomplished something.

I’ve been very leery about feeling euphoric. About 6 weeks ago I found that I was spinning through an entire manic/depression cycle in a single day, day after day. I would feel euphoric and then panicked and anxious before plummeting again into black. It was too much for me. It frightened me. Spinning through entire cycles every day had not happened before, as far as I can remember.

I should say at this point that one of the most important people in my life is my ex-husband, Joe. I call him the Stephanie whisperer. He was with me through my last serious breakdown in graduate school and he walked me through my diagnosis and recovery. He has been just as helpful this time even though he is remarried and 7,000 miles away. (I should also say his wife has also been very supportive.) I check in with Joe about what happened last time because I don’t remember many of the events. The endless spinning is a new experience but it’s probably a new experience because I’m not medicated this time.

I went to a GP to get a referral to see a psychiatrist about 5 weeks ago. Even though the referral was urgent, I still haven’t been contacted to make an appointment. This is not a condemnation of the entire system, just the system for those who don’t have money or private insurance. I’m in a particularly bad financial situation at the moment so I can’t afford just to go pay for counseling (but that’s a different kettle of fish). The point is, I’ve been left to my own devices to get through this – not something I recommend but it has forced me to be vigilant about my own well being.

There are many thoughts and questions swirling around my head about this. This feels like when I got over the Chicken Pox or when I got over a really bad bout of food poisoning when I was a kid. I just woke up and felt healthy again. But that points to this being an illness, not a state of mind or a mood swing but an illness. I don’t know if the distinction even matters, but I sometimes get the feeling that mental illness is looked at as something I should be able to control. But we don’t look at our physical health that way. You could get pneumonia tomorrow, should you be blamed for that? Even if you have asthma - which pre-disposes you to respiratory illness - would you be blamed for getting sick?

I have felt blamed for this breakdown. As if having a condition predisposing me to mental breakdowns should actually be used against me for having a breakdown I’m biologically predisposed to.

I also feel like mental illness is looked on as being self-indulgent. Maybe I just feel that way because I stop being an over achiever when I’m depressed and I just do what is sufficient to get through the day. I hate that getting through is all I can do, but you can’t stop a hurricane. You just have to deal with it and get through the best way you know how.

I’ve begun to think of these last 5 months as a very long psyche hurricane. There was a build up of high and low pressure that gathered and pulled me way off balance and then the hurricane struck and raged until the balance was righted again. Thankfully, this storm didn’t cause as much devastation as it could have – and that is solely do to with the friends I never really realised I had. Friends who gave me financial support and emotional support and who just came to me and said, 'let's meet, let's talk, what do you need.' It floored me because I didn't expect it. I try not to let people get close to me because I'm too difficult to deal with personally but they found their way through and I'm very glad they did.

I have one friend to whom I can say anything – anything. He is the only person in the world who knows my worst secret – and he never judges me, and he would do anything for me. He chatted to me for hours during one of the darkest nights of this whole thing and he didn’t try to fix me. He just told me that my resolution was deeply flawed. We are terribly honest with each other, which means there are times when things get really uncomfortable. I have sat on his balcony while he wept with me and he has walked through my unique little hell right by my side. Everyone needs at least one friend like this. Go find that person. They must be your True North and you have to trust them, even when you hate what they are saying.

I’ve been as public as I can be about recent events and it’s been humbling to get the response and support I’ve gotten. There have been some who have completely turned their backs on me, but I expected that from everyone and it didn’t happen. Putting this out in the world the way I have is deeply uncomfortable, and I worry about the ramifications of it in the long run, but being public about this has humbled me. It’s one thing to strive for excellence from a place of open, flawed, vulnerability; it is another thing entirely to expect excellence in the world while hiding and hording an inner brokenness and weaknesses.

The thing that I wonder at most is the use of medication in treating depression and manic/depression. If I had seen a doctor 5 weeks ago and they had offered me medication or even a stay in the hospital, I would have taken it. I was doing so poorly. But if I were on medication, I would not know this shift that has taken place. I would not feel capable. I would feel dependent on a pill. The one thing I kept repeating to myself with wonder on Saturday is, ‘I feel capable.’ I feel able to go forward now. I feel steady. I feel grounded. I feel responsible and I feel capable.

I wonder how many others like me could find a shift like mine if they were given the time and the space that I had to find it, rather than a prescription? And I’m not saying that what has happened would or can happen for anyone else, but how will we know when we are so rushed to make things better? It has made Friday's class a bit of a parable. When I didn't try to fix the impending disaster waiting to happen in class, the most amazing experience came out of it. I just needed to be patient and let it be what it was, without judging whether it was right or what it was supposed to be - every rule was broken (except 1) and that allowed something amazing to evolve.

We are constantly driven to fix what’s wrong as quickly as possible without actually exploring it. We want it to pass, we want to move on, we want to get over it – but what if it needs exploring and experiencing? I didn’t have a choice this time, professional help has not been forthcoming, but professional help probably would have medicated me and masked the experience and I would have missed this - as I obviously did last time.

Doctors and scientist are discovering that the quick fix isn’t always best and can be detrimental. The over prescribing of antibiotics to quicken the recovery of minor illnesses the body is perfectly capable of enduring and fighting are now responsible for resistant strains of super bugs – which begs the question – are we making mental illness worse by treating it with drugs? Does the darkness, the black depth of the psyche get worse because of the way we treat it? Will every Columbine give way to a Newtown because it has to escalate?

All I needed was time and space to sort myself out. The pressure that came to bear and pushed everything over the edge was money. Think about that. In societies where mental health services are scarce and where there are tangible symptoms of mental instability that make earning money difficult or impossible, a horrible pressure builds that exacerbates an already dysfunctional situation.

I’m not sure how to solve this but I have to start thinking of a different solution for myself because riding out the storm was necessary. You can’t stop a hurricane. You can’t fix a hurricane. You can’t undo it. You can’t change its course. You can’t make it better. You have to let it run its course and you have to know that at some point it will disperse. And right now that seems like a very healthy course of action with the support I got along the way.

It made me think of Riders on the Storm. Into this house we’re born/Into this world we’re thrown/Like a dog without a bone/An actor out alone/Riders on the storm.

Thursday 10 April 2014

The Fairyland Paradigm


When I was 10 or 11, my mom told me to do my chores before she left for work in the morning. It was summer so we were out of school. I had this habit of watching TV all-day and waiting until the last possible moment to get my chores done. I knew the sound of my mom’s Pinto and would spring into action as soon as I heard the putter of that pathetic motor coming down the road before it turned into the cul de sac where we lived. Over the years I had figured out how to get most of the dishes done or most of the family room picked up from the time I heard that car until she walked through the front door. If she came home and I was doing my chores, I'd get away with it.

On this particular summer’s day, she came home around lunchtime, which was unheard of even though she worked less than 10 minutes down the road from where we lived. I had sprung into action as usual and was in the middle of vacuuming when she came in, but most of my chores weren’t done. For whatever reason, she didn’t tell me that morning that she was coming home early to take my younger brother and me to Fairyland at Lake Merritt that day. Since I didn’t have my chores done, I was left behind to finish them.

Even thinking about this now, over 35 years later, my body shivers with remnants of rage and abandonment, with a healthy amount of betrayal thrown in but only in hindsight. I don’t actually feel these emotions now, I have let them go, but my body remembers the experience and the fragment of an image of the sunlight on the huge weeds in the backyard and the sound of the door slamming behind my mom still pierces my mind.

I spent the rest of that afternoon giving back everything my mother had ever given me by taking everything out of my bedroom and stacking it in her room. It took me hours. I have a vague memory of my older brother coming home, seeing what I had done, and telling me to put everything back, but I’m not sure if that’s what really happened. The point is that I spent a hell of a lot effort and sweat trying to get back at her and expelling my anger, which turned out to be absolutely futile and made a huge mess of my room.

What stays with me or what I’m trying to explore is the overwhelming sense I get that I’m always being tested and that I’m always getting caught before I can finish vacuuming the family room floor. If I had just known today was Fairyland day, if I just had more time to finish, if I just had more money, more resources, more….

I know enough rationally to understand that there are events and circumstances in my life well beyond my control, but the Fairyland paradigm has found deep roots in my emotional psyche – and it is a very muddy tangle:
·      Most of the time I feel like the world is going to pull the rug out from under me any way, so why put in any effort in the first place
·      On the flip side, I have huge amounts of guilt for my procrastination and laziness
·      When I do apply myself, especially with great rigor, I get unbelievably anxious
·      And with the rationale of an 11-year-old, I wonder where and to whom do I return my life when the rewards of good work never materialize?

I can’t be bitter or ungrateful. I just refuse those options. I’ve been around people who are bitter and ungrateful about everything and I can’t go down that road.  It’s the one shred of light in my life. I honestly see the world as being good. It’s me who isn’t worthy of it, not the other way around.

Letting go of anger isn’t easy, but letting go of the helplessness that spurs the anger is a very welcome change and one I’m trying to employ. My mother never had any clue what that day did to me. I don’t think she even knows that I stacked every outfit, every book, every shoe, every everything that I had at the ripe old age of 11 in her room and then moved it all back while she and my little brother were gone. Over time, I've come to realize she had no intention of causing the tidal wave of rage and powerlessness that still makes me shake, but I’ve blamed her for that quaking ever since it started. And I have felt helpless to change it for just as long.

So today I’m left wondering – what if I had just done the work? What if I had just turned off the TV? I don’t agree with my mom’s parenting style – and a little follow through back then would have been invaluable - but I can either blame the world for my missing out because I don’t know what’s at stake or I can just choose to do the work.

I find it interesting how much my psyche resists this train of thought. I find it amusing how my ego throws up snippets of memories of people who tell me how productive and what a hard worker I am. They see the marvel of someone who can do last night’s dishes in the 4 and 1/2 minutes it took my mom to drive down the block, into our court, up the drive way and walk through the door. They don’t see the 3 hours of TV I watched before she came home. I find it a little bewildering how much of me wants to be lazy so I’m at liberty to blame rather than taking the risk of applying myself (and still possibly getting nowhere).

I read a blog on Tuesday about becoming a writer. It said if you want to become a writer, read every day. Write, every day. 1,000 words a day. I have had an idea for a novel in my head for 7 months and most of the free time I’ve had since then, I’ve spent scrambling to get work and on Netflix. Yesterday, I woke up and read and wrote. By 2pm, I had written 1203 words (100 of those words are the beginning of the novel and the novel drew up the memory that started this post).

Today I woke up with a headache, scared and depressed. It’s just part of the cycle I’m in.  I hadn’t published this yet so I thought, fuck it, I can just give in to this feeling of despair. But I really can’t let this swallow me whole. If I want this cycle to change, I have to change it. So today I wrote about how some Google changes to secure search will affect online marketing data. It doesn’t matter, I wrote. I changed today when it wasn’t easy, when I didn’t want to, when my heart wasn’t in it. It makes me realize the luxury of motivation.

I don’t know if I’ll get to go to Fairyland if I get anything done – I may not even like Fairyland (I’ve never been) – but I at least want to be the master of the effort. I don't want to be at the mercy of not knowing if I could have done better because I didn't bother to try.

I also know that starting is easier than persevering, which is part of the reason I’m saying this out loud. If I announce my intentions, then giving up isn’t just lack of commitment in my head, it’s real.

Sunday 30 March 2014

Possible Insight into L’Wren Scott’s Suicide



I’ve spent the last month or so thinking about suicide. I had already been thinking about it for weeks before L’Wren Scott killed herself, and beyond the sensationalism of the press, I recognized something in her choice. It made sense to me. 

Before any alarms go off, I want to say this is nothing new for me. It’s a rare day that goes by when I don’t think of suicide. It’s been an ‘out’ for me since I was about 12. It’s the trap door in the stage floor that only I know is there, and if the drama gets too much or the melee gets out of hand, I can just drop through that escape hatch into oblivion.  Until a few hours ago, I thought the trap door gave me strength and courage, but I’m beginning to see that it might just be a pressure point that raises the stakes beyond what is safe or would be considered rational.

I was diagnosed 12 years ago with Hypomania on the bi-polar II spectrum. My manic episodes are mild and manageable and the worst that comes from them is a fair amount of envy from friends and colleagues who think I’m super human because I can be amazingly productive. I don’t know anything about L’Wren Scott’s mental state, but you don’t get to run a fashion empire without being a little extraordinary in terms of energy and drive – not to mention talent.

The depression part however is bleak and desolate beyond imagining. I’ve only had 3 breakdowns in my lifetime that were severe enough to be life threatening (from suicide): one about 30 years ago, another 12 years ago and one that started just before the holidays and seems to be lifting now.

This last one might be too fresh to write about, but I’m trying to articulate the experience because it’s not talked about much and it coincides with this very public and sensationalized tragedy, that might be better understood.

I should probably state straight out that I don’t have a psychiatrist or counselor. I’ve had very bad experiences with the profession and I don’t trust it or the people I can afford to avail of in it. (I’ll blog about this at a later date.) When I was diagnosed in 2002, I was put on Lithium, one of the few drugs that can be used for bi-polar disorders. The problem with Lithium is that it can be fatal if taken incorrectly, something the slimy, school appointed shrink who diagnosed me relished in explaining in some detail as he wrote out my prescription. He then made me promise, like an impressionable school girl, not to kill myself by overdosing. It was like handing a loaded gun to Sylvia Plath wrapped in love letter that Ted Hughes wrote to someone else.

This doesn’t mean I ignore the disorder. When I was first diagnosed, it was a relief to know that something was causing the world to flip and spin, and I realized that patience is my biggest ally. I also found early on that exercise works far better than Lithium and the side effects are far more beneficial. When I’m anxious or keyed up, exercise evens me out, and when I’m down, it lifts me up. (Again, more on this in another post.) So part of my personal therapy is getting up every weekday to lead the daily warm ups at the school where I teach. I walk 15 minutes in and back and do a 15 minute physical warm up - even on days when I don’t teach a regular class - because it keeps me even and it also benefits the school and the students. A real win/win.

What I’ve only begun to grasp this week, and particularly in the last few hours, is that there is a very insidious side to this disorder to which I haven’t been paying enough attention. A significant part of many mental illnesses is an inability to appropriately consider the consequences of behaviour and actions. In other words, I take risks most people wouldn’t because I can’t or don’t figure in the consequences. From a rational point of view, I must look stupid at the very least and self obsessed and nihilistic at the very worst.

Usually the risks I take are moral or artistic. I won’t get into the morality issues this go – stay tuned – and the artistic ones have to be taken, it’s part and parcel of working in the arts. I know it’s also part and parcel of working in fashion. (Hell, it’s part and parcel of working in the sciences, too, it’s just that the funding problems in the sciences are different.)

So I’ve begun to wonder if the suicidal trap door allows me to ignore any thoughts of danger or consequences in the plans I make? My fearlessness is another of those traits that some friends and colleagues envy, but they really don’t know the half of it. I usually think, “Well, if things get that bad, I can kill myself.” I never think of how to deal with fallout like a human being. I consider myself above that, stronger than that, and willing to sacrifice my life if that’s the cost.

The issue I am just realizing is that if I am not stable when the consequences occur, I cannot see them or address them rationally and the whole train comes off the rails. So it’s not just a matter of not being able to assess the probability of consequences, it is also a matter of not being able to appropriately address the magnitude of the consequences once they are inevitable and not knowing how to take responsibility for them and rectify them like a productive adult.

So this week, I came very close to killing myself because I can’t afford to pay my rent. If that sounds irrational, the rest is going to sound absurd. As my impending inability to pay rent got closer, I asked for a loan. It even turned out that someone owed me about that amount from decades ago, but in the end I refused the money because I just felt like more of a failure having to ask to be paid back.

Again, if this makes no sense, it’s because everything in my mind gets distorted when I’m in the throws of a depression. The amount of money didn’t matter to me; it was a failure and I was a failure and I didn’t feel anything was worth the effort – especially the effort of being paid back. I was willing to sacrifice my life because it wasn’t worth the cost of getting help.

In reading the worldwide speculation about whether L’Wren had killed herself over money and whether or not she had asked Mick Jaggar for financial help, I felt like my situation was being played out in the rock/fashion world with much more talented and better looking people. I also felt like the press and everyone was focusing on the money rather than on the substance of the issue.

The lack of money or debt represents a failure but it’s not really about the money, whether it’s 5 million or 500 (L’Wren’s apartment was worth 8 million, if it were just about money, she could have absorbed the loss). Failure isn’t quantifiable the way money is. Failure is about quality, and once you lose your sense of quality – value – worth, nothing else matters. And if you take that a step further and feel like you must punish yourself for your failure, then you have a seriously dangerous situation.

Unless her friends are lying, everyone who knew L’Wren, saw her as beautiful, talented and successful, but that probably made no difference to her. Those who don’t agree that you’ve failed just don’t understand the failure, and those who unwittingly compound your feelings of inadequacy, lead you to further depths of despair and hopelessness. None of which is anyone’s fault. Blaming anyone for their mental illness or blaming those around someone with mental illness is like blaming empty pie tins for obesity.

The media does really suck when it comes to covering these kinds of stories. I’m not sure whether they print sensationalized crap because it sells papers or whether the public will only buy sensationalized crap so they have to print it, and while the coverage of Mick Jaggar’s response was jackal-like, it made me realize that suicide causes damage from which loved ones and friends don’t recover.

It’s that thought that stopped me in the end, and while it still feels like I deserve to be punished for failing, I’m not willing to sacrifice the lives of those who care about me or who happen to be in a class I teach for my gnarled sense of absolution. The twisted irony being, that in the end it was the realization of the consequences of my actions on others that stopped me from self annihilation, but had the consequences only been mine, I might have disregarded them all together. The questions I have to address now are: is the trap door gone forever now that I know the consequences go far beyond my own? And what affect, if any, will this have on my ability to assess and take risks?

I would venture a guess that L’Wren Scott couldn’t ask Jaggar for help, or once she did, it made her feel even more inadequate. I would venture to guess that her leaving everything to him was a way of letting him know she had a kind of value or worth that the world recognizes but that she could not feel (pessimistically, this might also be sprinkled with a fair amount of 'fuck you,' but where a person kills themselves and who they intend to find them says a lot more about that). I would even venture to guess that L’Wren might have had an undiagnosed disorder, which can unfortunately reek havoc on our sense of reason and our ability to adequately judge the ramifications of our actions which most often ends up hurting those around us more than it hurts us.

Tuesday 4 March 2014

A Late Tribute to a Late Friend


I was doing some online banking this morning, when I noticed the date – March 4. It took me a moment to remember why the date is important. It’s the birthday of friend who died almost 2 years ago, but then I remembered another friend, who died 17 years ago. Wasn’t his birthday also in March? I couldn’t remember if today is his birthday or if it’s the 6th or if his birthday is in October or if today is the day he died. It upsets me that I can’t remember and I’ve been wracking my memory all day but I still can’t remember either of those dates. Troy died in 1997 before our lives were documented online and I don’t have any way to find out.

He was my best friend for most of my life. We met when I was a freshman in high school. We were dance partners in our high school production of West Side Story. We were both 14, but he was a year ahead of me in school. I should have known he was gay when another boy in the show came up to us at rehearsals and said, as he was looking down my top, “Man, I wish she was my partner.” To which Troy replied, ‘No, you don’t. It’s just more dead weight you’d have to lift.” He was kind of brilliant that way - matter-of-fact and bracingly honest. There were times I was never sure if he was joking.

I often think about how he affected my life and how I wouldn’t be who or where I am if it weren’t for him. 

He found out about auditions all over the East Bay and took me, sometimes kicking and screaming, with him. He got me out of myself, out of my head. He either didn’t see obstacles or he didn’t give a shit about them.

When I was 16, I made a pretty serious suicide attempt and had to be hospitalized. After the mandatory 72 hour hold, I was allowed to go home for a weekend before having to admit myself for another 30 days. He came over the night I got home and decided to get me out of the house. When my mom asked what movie he was taking me to, he said as deadpan as ever, “Better Off Dead.” I can still see the look on my mom’s face as he grabbed my arm and pulled me out the door before she could recover from her shock to say ‘no.’ Needless to say, that movie was just what I needed.

When I got out of the hospital, I dropped out of school and after a couple of months of being pretty much agoraphobic, he showed up at my door and told me to get dressed and come with him. He spent the next couple of hours taking me to stores and restaurants to fill out applications. In a few days I had my first job.

A few months later, when he was doing a show at a nearby community college, he would pick me up to go out with the cast after the show or to cast outings. He went out of his way to include me and I ended up marrying one of the cast members.

I could go on, there are more incidents of his influence on my life, but those are the major ones. He eventually got cast in a national tour and I didn’t see him for years at a time, but he came to visit me in Long Beach in 1996. 

He had been in the hospital with pneumonia. He mentioned it vaguely while we caught up on each other’s lives. (This gets a bit complicated because by 1996 I was divorced and living with a new boyfriend.) At some point, we had to go to the store and as we walked there, he told me he had Pneumocystis. I had been involved with AIDS Project Los Angeles as a volunteer and had done a fair amount of work on a piece about AIDS that included in depth research on the disease and interviews with the head of AIDS research at UCLA. I had read And the Band Played On and much more. I knew that Pneumocystis is AIDS but he never said he had AIDS.

I could tell by the way he said 'Pneumocystis,' that he didn’t want to talk about it. When he left the following day, I was unsure if I had really heard what he said. It was all so vague and I was unable to grasp what he meant. I was unsure of how to handle the news or myself. I didn’t know what to say and my fear kept me from asking questions.

A few months later, Troy called and told me he was moving back to Phoenix. When I tried to ask about his health or if moving so far away was a good idea, he just shut me down. Again, I didn’t know how to talk to him. I felt helpless and cowardly.

Somehow in July or August, I decided to go to Pheonix to see him. I think we had talked on the phone. I knew he was working for AT&T out there and he had a nice apartment but I can’t think of what made me go there in the middle of summer. I drove out there on a Saturday morning and arrived in the sweltering afternoon.

If I had met him anywhere but at his address, I would not have recognized him. He was shockingly thin and his skin was dark. He had always suffered from eczema and he didn’t have Kaposi sarcoma but his skin was leathery and his eyes were very sunken with very dark circles under them.

He wanted to go out for lunch so we jumped in his car and headed to the mall across the main road from his apartment complex. He ordered a big meal but ate almost nothing. He told me that he had an ulcer in his throat and it was excruciating for him to swallow. He was also telling me stories about work that didn’t make much sense and he would fade out when I was talking, but I only realized the extent of his condition when we left the restaurant.

He had trouble remembering where we parked and he resisted me when I walked to where I knew the car was. When we were getting into the car, he said that I looked pretty in yellow, but I was wearing a black and white outfit. When we started to drive out of the parking lot, he kept making right turns taking us through the long mazes of the mall lot. I tried to guide him out to the main road, but he ignored me. As we went around and around, I could see his apartment complex. At one point, I thought about asking him to park again and just walking back to his place. It took us 2 hours to get out of the lot. I have no words to describe those 2 hours, the language to convey that experience has not been conceived.

When we got back to his apartment, he laid down and didn’t get up again for another 23 hours, well past the time I needed to leave to get back to LA but I couldn’t go. When he finally woke up, I asked him how he was still working and he admitted that he hadn’t worked for the last 6 weeks. There was no food in his apartment, only juice and there was a big hefty bag of different pharmaceuticals in his bathroom. He was on an AZT cocktail that required him to take something like 30 pills 3 times a day. He wouldn’t talk to me about any of it (I inventoried the pills and dosages while he was sleeping.) When I asked him why the pills were in a garbage bag, he explained that the ulcer in his throat made it impossible to take them.

I resolved to move him to Long Beach with me and my boyfriend, Joe. Joe didn’t hesitate when I called to ask him if we could take Troy in. I drove back to LA through a harrowing lightening storm in the middle of the night completely undone by how surreal the situation was.

Our landlady refused to allow us to take Troy in so we started looking for a new place to live. I also called the Phoenix AIDS project to find out if someone could go check on Troy on a regular basis. I was told that was not possible and that unless I had power of attorney, I could not advocate for Troy’s care unless he was in a critical condition. The definition of critical being when the person is unable to call 911 themselves. I found myself caught between the rules of patient autonomy (which I applaud) and common sense, which didn’t seem to be very practical.

It was an unfathomable situation. I don’t recall what came next but somehow I convinced Troy’s mother to let him move back in with her. She had moved to Manteca, California and I had convinced Troy to make the move there until Joe and I could find a place where Troy could stay too.

So on September 1st, Joe and I went to Phoenix to move Troy back to Manteca. We packed up everything while Troy puttered and slept. At this point his dementia was quite bad. When I put on gloves to clean the bathroom, he flipped out a bit. It wasn't until much later that I realized I had offended him. He thought I was protecting myself from him. 

The next morning we got our truck and Troy’s car packed. When we went to leave, Troy refused to let me drive his car. He wouldn’t give me the keys and he just sat in the driver’s seat. It was frightening. Joe wanted me to ride with him if Troy was going to drive, but that couldn’t happen either. We refused to go for about half an hour but Troy still wouldn't move so in the end, I went with Troy.

All I can say is thank god for cell phones and dumb luck. We got on Arizona highway 17 heading South and Troy got in the fast lane driving very slowly. I thought he knew where he was going, but he wouldn’t get over to get on the 10. Finally at the last minute, he crossed 4 lanes of highway (thank god there was no one in our way) and got on the 10. The problem was that Joe couldn’t make the same move. It took about 30 minutes for Joe to get back to where Troy and I were.

The rest of the drive was beyond description. Troy drove 40mph in the fast lane across Arizona into California. I lost count of how many times we were almost killed before we reached the central valley. It took us 18 hours to get from Phoenix to Stockton and still Troy refused to let me drive. Finally, after he drifted over a lane and almost plowed into a semi, I screamed at him to pull over as I grabbed the wheel to pull us back into our lane of traffic. When we pulled off the highway, Joe was sheet white and shaking. He told me he was sure he had just seen me killed in a car accident; he couldn't believe that we didn't crash. I drove the last few miles into Manteca.

At 3am we arrived at his mother’s house and we still had to unload his things. Troy went straight to bed, furious at me. No one was awake to welcome Troy home. When we left, Joe was really upset and we still had a 2 hour drive to Castro Valley.

Joe and I left for Maine the following day to get engaged. When we got back to Long Beach we started looking for an apartment where Troy could move in with us. In the mean time, I had a consultation with a friend at AIDS Project Los Angeles. He was going to law school and he implored me to get power of attorney before allowing Troy to move in.

By this time, Joe and I had found a place 2 streets from the old apartment and the landlords where more than happy to let us move Troy in, but Troy refused to give me power of attorney. He would barely speak to me on the phone. The problem was that without POA, I couldn’t do anything on Troy’s behalf and the more incapacitated he was, particularly from the dementia, the more important it was that I have decision making power over hospital or hospice care.

I can’t remember the day I got the call from a mutual friend that Troy had died. I know I was in our new living room because I was staring at the still unpacked boxes. As I recall, there was no funeral for him and he was cremated without a burial.

I think I left a message for his mother, but I don’t remember talking to her. I felt a kind of guilt I have never spoken of because I was relieved that Troy hadn’t moved in with us. He begged me to come get him. He didn’t want to die in Manteca and I was too afraid of what would happen if he lived with us in Long Beach.  

Troy was 29.  In one of the last lucid conversations we had, Troy told me about the night ‘he got sick’ (his words). His contract was ending with the show and he had auditioned for the next tour and didn’t make the cut. While he was still on the road, he spent one of his last nights with another cast member he knew ‘was sick.’ He couldn’t explain what he had done, but he told me he had no regrets. He was resigned to a fate he couldn’t bring himself to name.

I wish there was a moral to this story. I was hoping to find some redemption as I wrote it, but more often than not there is no answer. There are no conclusions to draw, but that doesn’t mean the story should remain untold or unexamined. Life is irrational and murky, and particularly in this case, it shouldn’t be sentimentalized. I just don’t want to wake up years down the road unable to remember more than what I’ve already forgotten.

Tuesday 25 February 2014

WHEN THE WORST POSSIBLE OUTCOME IS EXACTLY WHAT’S NEEDED


It’s been a rough couple of weeks – and I’m trying to get back in the swing of things. I’ve spent the last 10 days in stasis, unable to be productive in almost every way.

I failed 10 days ago – a big, ugly, fundamental failure. A failure I didn’t see coming because I’ve always been able to pull something out of my ass when I need to most. Not this time. This time a huge wall loomed up out of nowhere and I went straight into it, full speed. 

My confidence is low. I’m not sure if I know anything or how to do what I do and I’m beginning to see that that is the point. It’s a humbling experience. To be honest, it sucks, the way heartache sucks, the way missing the last turn-off before a bridge sucks, the way losing or coming in second place sucks.

We don’t celebrate failure enough. We talk about it in the arts as something not to fear and we even go so far as to recommend it – ‘fail big.’ Samuel Beckett advocated for it: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” Right now, I want to tell Beckett’s dust to fuck off. If this were a quote from a gutter rat, asleep in a pool of his own vomit, I might be less bitter, but coming from a Nobel Prize winning author it’s a hard pill to swallow. There’s nothing more galling than an exceedingly successful genius expounding the virtue of failure. (Personally, it’s the ‘no matter,’ part of the quote that chaps me most. Right now it feels like all that matters – but maybe that’s his point.)

Failure is different than being incapable. Failure is being capable and not succeeding. If you can’t climb a rope, you haven’t failed if you don’t reach the top. You can’t climb; you’re incapable. But if you can climb, and have been doing so for decades and you come to the rope one day and don’t make it even half way to the top, no matter how much effort, skill or means you put into it, then you have failed. Striving to become capable has its own frustrations, but it is nothing compared to the hopelessness of real failure.

For a fleeting moment, I wanted to blame the rope, but I know that’s a lie. Blaming anything else at this point is a lie. I’ve been doing this for too long. There isn’t a circumstance or obstacle that I haven’t faced before that ever prevented me from getting up the rope, and this latest rope wasn’t anything special. I should have been able to climb it with one hand and no legs.

After spinning this around my head for 10 days trying to figure out how to fix it, I’ve realized the failure in itself is kind of perfect. In the way that a success is better and more dynamic than the sum of its parts, this failure is more profound than the sum of its mistakes. It is its own entity – and if I look at it objectively, it serves its own purpose.

I have spent most of my artistic life looking for the best way to express ideas and concepts, emotion and intellect, chaos and human existence, but I’ve somehow missed the forest for the trees (and the irony of not being able to express the crux of this failure except in an analogy about a rope is not lost on me). The situation has caused me to start to question what I know and what I rely on, which is like peeling back your own skin layer by layer because you have to get to the bones. You have to get to the structures that hold everything up, the foundations upon which all the muscle and sinews grow. 

Surprisingly, I have not lost faith in the theatrical theories to which I subscribe and which led me down the garden path to this freshly mowed hell. Much as it would be easier to give up on abstraction and play it safe with realism, I know that merely depicting life as we know it on stage fundamentally reduces the art form to its least powerful aspect. And while I fear that some involved with this failure and some on the sidelines will use this as proof that abstract expressionism does not work in the classroom or at the theatre, I have to let that battle go. It’s like fighting a religious war and it’s distracting me from my real work.

The thing is, I feel like I’m on the verge of a fundamental breakthrough, I just don’t know what it is yet – and this puts me back in the Petri Dish slogging away for an answer. It’s not pretty, and it comes at a cost, but it’s exactly what’s needed if I am ever to fail better. (That sounds neat and tidy and like sentimental bullshit at the moment, but again Sammy may have a point.)

My point is that I think we need more discussion about failure. Like death, we need not be afraid to look at it head on, to go deep inside and see the abyss, and as Nietzsche said, let the abyss look into us. If we can look at the void without flinching and allow ourselves to be seen for what really are, removing all defensive posturing, then maybe expansion is possible. Because if I can walk into a rehearsal without ever being sure of anything, if I can let go of needing to believe in anything (myself, the process, the story, the actors), then what might I discover? Because it was the things I was sure of that let me down 10 days ago, and if I had not been sure of them when the process started, I would not have relied on false premises to begin with. I actually feel like I know nothing right now, and while my identity is slightly impaired by this, it is oddly liberating and possibly exactly what I need right now.