****************
The second time I overcame a block was pretty undramatic, just flexing muscle memory. I had a photo of Jesseca that I wanted to draw...funny, all this time later, I know longer recall how I was going to render it except that it specifically was not going to be pencil. Probably pen and ink, simple lines and blocks. The point was specifically not pencil because - ugh - too long away, too daunting. But I got to the folds of the jacket she was wearing and...juuuuuuuuust couldn't help getting drawn in by them, really, really wanted to dive in and explore them. So I ended up with the first finished pencil drawing since probably Franklin. Let's see, that was (I think) 2009. That's a hell of a block. 25 years. But I did it.
The first time, though...that's another story. I warn you right now that it's very uncomfortable, very private and personal. Intimate. I offer it to the depressed, the hurt, the lonely, the blocked, to any who may be helped by it...but above all I offer this to Dana Cooper, an enigma and beloved friend, cherished and badly missed. I write this as a spell from my soul and set it free unto to the world, may it heal where it needs to heal. May it find Dana's heart.
As high school came to a close, I didn't know that I had depression. Neither did anyone else, so I got yelled at a lot for the piles of homework I didn't do. No one could say I wasn't paying attention in class, because I aced the tests and knew the material, but when it came to transforming a blank page with the info in my mind it always worked the other way around. (Tryin' to keep this short and give you the basics, but I do need to set the stage.)
By the end of '84, Dana had left for L.A. via a holiday in Europe. She sent a few postcards, and I discovered that when I tried to write her the same thing happened as with the homework. I couldn't make it happen. It was about this time I fully admitted to myself that I was head-over-heels in love with her, and wondered how I'd managed to keep that squelched. In love? I wanted to marry her!
I did a handful of plays, including an independent sci-fi bit in which I met and fell in love with Lori Hamilton, who by strange coincidence I had never know at Franklin. She was class of '83. By the end of that year, 1985, Lori also was gone - just packed up and vanished, no word to anyone, no way to reach her.
I was still attempting to draw, less and less, and never finishing anything. I did a small painting, and several pen and ink works - posters for plays, print ads for White's Collectibles.
In 1986 I had an unusual dream. I dreamt of an acquaintance from school. She was a ta a mall (in the dream), we met and said hello. This was someone I had never seen anywhere save one class in one year of school, and never expect to see her again. The very next day I went to a different mall from than the one in the dream. She was there, we met, said, hello, and that was that.
My friend Jesseca would say that was a testing of the signal to see if I was tuned in and paying attention. A number of minor incidents of the same sort followed, inconsequential but fun. Skeptics of ESP like to argue that believers who've experienced it have a prior bias: they want to believe it because it's fun. The barrage of dreams that lasted throughout 1986 were neither wanted nor fun, and I desperately tried to believe that ESP was not real.
I will not detail these dreams (that's you knocked over with a feather, right?) except to say that they all took place in L.A. Some were about Dana, and gave me no real information at all except that she was miserable and apparently isolated. The rest were about Lori, and those were rich in details. There was also an evolving and consistent narrative concerning the nature of the scene she was immersed in and the company she was keeping.
These were not normal dreams. They had an intensity like few I'd ever had before. I'd awaken fully from them, convinced that they were actually taking place. The dreams were not strictly literal - that is, they still had bits of dream-embroidery about them - but the meat of them was overwhelmingly real. A mutual friend of Lori's, Robert, began to appear in the dreams. He would try to persuade her to save herself from the situation, and she'd laugh him off.
My friends, these two women I was madly in love with, were in trouble and I had no way to help them. I made more attempts to write to Dana but the block was firmly in place. Lori, I had no one to contact to find her. I began trying distance myself from the dreams. I mean...they're just dreams. Be real. Lori could be anywhere in the world, why would she pick L.A.? And then another dream would hit. It was irrational how guilty I felt. Dreams, really.
A pattern began early that year. I began to lose sleep. Those hated dreams, I tried to stay awake days at a time to avoid having dreams. I would raid a local video rental outlet for movies of all sorts to binge-watch. I could make it awake for the better part of a week.
But still the dreams would come. All year for a year. 1986. Then I stopped having them.
1987 was uneventful until nearing the end, Winter, when I had a surprise phone call from Robert. I asked if he'd heard any news of Lori, and he said "Man, you better sit down..." When Lori had left Portland at end of '85 she'd gone to Los Angeles. From there Robert proceeded to lay out her story, what he knew of it. The details were the same as from my dreams, with a few variations. Lori had been in trouble, willfully, self-destructively, and when Robert arrived on the scene and tried to persuade her to help herself, she laughed and ignored him. Eventually, though, she did come to a sense of herself and extracted herself from all of it. That was around the time my nightmares had stopped coming.
I could not have known any of this...but I had. It all came to me in my sleep.
(So...the dreams of Dana? They were real too? But they had told me nothing, I didn't know what had troubled her so! And were they too resolved, if no more bad dreams called to me?)
Lori had returned to Portland. She was having trouble meeting with most of her old friends for personal reasons, but she was doing well. I asked where I met leave a letter for her and was told she often came to her father's house. I wrote her a letter - in itself a huge breakthrough but not the one I'm building toward. My art was long gone by then, no longer even trying.
I didn't hear back from Lori. Which is...about as far as I care to delineate that memory. It triggered the depression that had been growing in me. It was perfectly reasonable for her part, I must have been an association to a past she wasn't ready to engage with yet. But for my psyche it was too much. I'd spent a year terrified for her and she couldn't even say 'hello'. I crashed.
I began having fantasies about my death, about how she might feel when she learned. These became suicide fantasies.
Now...it's one thing to read or hear about depression clinically, or even anecdotally, as I had many time before. It's another thing to be inside it. It wasn't something I recognized. Part of me kept thinking there must be something wrong with me, but I kept that brutally crushed. There are people out there with REAL problems! How dare I claim to have a problem? How privileged! Besides, I'm just...fantasizing. I'm just indulging in a little fantasy, the way someone might do putting on a sad movie when they're down. (No. People, no. Readers...no.) Or the way you can't leave a loose tooth alone but keep nagging it with your tongue.
This is how the brain-chemistry imbalance feeds itself, pushing the balance even further out of alignment until it reaches a critical point. Listen, please, if you reading this recognize yourself in what I've written, if you're there now - whatever you do, you must stop those thoughts. Do whatever you can to distract your brain. And tell someone. Your thoughts will kill you. Literally. Stop feeding the imbalance. Right the boat. They're not just fantasies, and you do have the absolute right to claim this problem for yourself. You're not alone. Plenty of us have been there.
I'm reaching the nadir.
I had heard of a phenomenon called the "suicidal urge". It's not a general leaning but an explicit impulse. Talk is that if you've never felt it, you cant know just how primal it is. That's the kind of things that sounds like hyperbole to everyone else. One night in February 1988 I found out for myself.
I had taken to sitting in my room for hours at a time, inanimate, overwhelmed with longing and rejection and pain and a loss for answers. My mind wandered. My mind was numbed. My mind was battered. Then, suddenly, for a moment, my mind was sharp, clear - get up. go to the kitchen, get a knife, bring it back, put it to my wrists. It wasn't how I wanted to go, but...I could do it. Easily. Right now. Middle of the night, no one will see and ask questions. What is this clarity, is this what they call the "suicidal urge"? It's like my brain has produced a batch of chemical imperative and flooded my system with it, an "off-switch" message stored in the lizard brain and invoked when things pass a critical point of no return. Before it had been speculative, fantasy, but I could. Right now. But it would have to be right now because I've heard that the urge is fleeting, that it only lasts a moment and then is gone. That's probably right, the chemical "shut down" command would break down quickly, dissipate, so if I'm going to it needs to be right now. I don't want to be walking back to my room with a knife in my hand and then not be able to use it, that would be humiliating. I want this, this relief, finally, I don't have to go through this anymore. I can actually feel my right arm plunging itself toward my left forearm and elbow! This is fascinating, my body is locked and won't move but I can feel the tension of my right arm struggling to be free and use a knife I never went and got. I can't make myself stand up. None of my muscles will move.
And then it was over. As intense as it had been, I was in a dense fog again. I remember thinking absolutely nothing, just getting out of the chair and walking to my bed, laying down and falling into a dreamless sleep.
I don't know how many days it was after that that I ran across a lecture on PBS about depression. I put it on as background noise while I did something else. It's a marvel how the mind works...sometimes it will do something that's brilliant in a Homer Simpson kinda way. As I listened, I recognized myself as the subject. Hey! This thing I've been telling myself isn't a real problem? It's got a name! It's a diagnosis! I'm not imagining it after all! Here's the 'D'oh!' part of it: it was such a relief that a great lot of the depression lifted!
Part of what had kept me from writing to Dana all those years was the fear of having to explain to her why I had remained silent for so long. Simply, I couldn't. I didn't have the understanding of it. Learning that I had depression solved a lot of that. It unlocked something.
There was a night when I was walking one of my nieces home in the dark, and we talked about things...I spoke about Lori and about Dana...and as I was talking I became aware that in the back of my mind I had already made the decision to write to her. More, that I was fully capable of it. The letter wouldn't be perfect and didn't have to be. She might reject my explanation and my apology, but that would be okay. If she didn't get it, I did and would have made the effort. When I got home, I wrote to Dana that very night. It came back undeliverable a week and a half later, but I took it to her former address here and tried again. Her father Ralph met me at the door and said he'd pass it along to her. By that point I had already written a second letter, and put them both in the same envelope. It was a review of the D.O.A. remake that had just been released. Dennis Quaid finds out he's been poisoned and has days to live.
She wrote me back, happy to hear from me. I didn't tell her that I was on love with her. Or that I'd been suicidal, or about Lori, or about the ESP. Dana keep asking me if...how did she put it? I have the letters but it hurts to look at them...she kept thinking I was holding something back and urged me to open up. When I finally did it was too late. I think in hindsight, when she sensed me hiding something she was thinking of something else entirely. But I wouldn't know about that for a few months yet.
*******
For Dana Marie Cooper, with deepest love and admiration
12:34 AM
11/26/2017
No comments:
Post a Comment