Vanity, Insecurity, and Shame

There are things I want to say.

I'm done with my dating phase, which lasted a brief month and a half. Most of it, I'm guessing, was spurred on by that phenomenon called "the rebound". But there was some genuine interest and excitement in the opposite sex. At one point, I said to a friend that life was, at it's core, terribly dull and monotonous, and the only relief from such an unbearable existence came from the charms of a woman and her mysterious ability to distract us men.

While this may be true, I have no desire to entertain the notion any longer. I've enjoyed the time I've spent with women, but I'm prepared to not have to rely on their attention to keep me fully engaged in life.

You can read from my last post that I seemed to have fallen into a state of dissolution. This state threw my father and my ex-girlfriend into a panic about my welfare. Was I using drugs again? Was I drinking?

I candidly told my father on the phone that he had to let me make my own mistakes. "I'm turning thirty years old in July, Dad. Don't you think it's time to let go." But my father worries, like all fathers, and plus, he has seen me through a serious drug addiction.

That was ten years ago. So, not to get off the subject, but I had fallen into a state of dissolution--not unlike that of a depressed person who sleeps for two weeks straight, or an over-eater who binges on ice cream and Twizzlers every night before bed.

I flirted with toxins. I drank cocktails at night, and smoked cigarettes. Nothing more, nothing less. It may not be the healthiest thing in the world, but it sure ain't a crime.

Now, as I was saying, I don't want to date anymore and I also don't want to go out of the house unless I absolutely have to. The truth of the matter is I can't bring myself to seeing anyone right now.

For about four months, I've had a certain routine. I wake up (at whatever time of the day) and I drive to a local Borders to have my coffee and read the newspaper. I read the Sunday New York Times and I read the sections all throughout the week, which generally breaks down to about one section per day. After this ritual, I return home for breakfast if I've not eaten yet and then I begin my work. I work as a freelance writer and Internet marketer for several companies and individuals. I'm proud of my work. I love what I do. And frankly, it keeps my life in check. Even during my dissolution, I got my work done. I never drank while I was working.

After about four hours of work, I eat dinner and then return to Borders for an evening coffee and more New York Times. When I'm fully satisfied with my reading, I go back home, where I work for another four hours or so.

So there you have it. That's my life in a nutshell. The dissolution and the dating occurred on the side, either on the weekends or after my work was done.

The reason why I suddenly cannot go to Borders anymore may then seem a mystery. This was my routine; nothing could tear me from it. Bars and women, I could survive without, but the New York Times, Borders, and a fresh cup of industrial strength coffee was my lifeline.


I don't want to be seen in public now.

If I must go out, such as to get groceries every week, then I will. But I already bought a bag of Breakfast Blend coffee beans from Starbucks which should last me approximately twelve days if I have exactly four cups each day.

If I tell you why I have this sudden urge to stay at home and not go out, you will undoubtedly think it is the silliest thing you've ever heard. And to be sure, it is. To anyone who has lived outside of my world, and to everyone else in this world who is not me, it is indeed the most deplorable, ridiculous, need I say, pathetic reason to not leave the house.

A good portion of my history as a human being has been pathetic and so I'm not discovering anything new. Nevertheless, I will say that my insecurities are not abnormal. I've just taken my insecurities to another level. Well, I only have one insecurity that really dominates my life and has since I was sixteen.

I will reveal my insecurity to you in a moment--the insecurity that is baring me from leaving my own home. But first let me say that I'm not depressed, I'm not angry at the world or myself. In fact, I feel a great amount of self-possession and even contentment right now. I'm at peace.

It is almost as if I needed this poor excuse to escape from the world and to be alone for awhile. And not even "alone". Alone suggests that I want people to leave me alone, which I do not. I welcome people to call me and talk with me. If a friend wishes to stop by, I will not prevent him or her from coming in the door.

But, as I said, I do not want to go out in public unless I absolutely have to. And so, I will conduct all of my business from home, which I do anyways. But I'll also confine myself to my home, which means no coffee runs, no late night drinking at the bars, no meeting friends for dinner.

Whether I should try to give up smoking during this interim is a good question. I might want to take advantage of that. Because it's one less place I would have to travel outside of the house--to pick up cigarettes.

It gives me great satisfaction to think that I can do everything I need to do from my home. An incredible self-sufficiency. If I need to shop for groceries, I'll do so at a later hour, when not many people are crowding the aisles, and at least the ones who are in the aisles look scarier than I do.

Like I said, I'm content, marvelously content, even exuberant at times being here in my house. By not rushing out the door for every little thing, I will have the opportunity to read in abundance. In addition, I will write. I've already gone back to my novel, Lethe in Spain, and expanded the second chapter.

I'm starting to think about the Spain novel again because the illustrator Gerar Gonzalez is swiftly moving through my second novel, Lethe in Vegas, and he will soon be taking up the pages of "Spain" to translate them into graphic form.

But beyond that, I'm experiencing a transformation in my poetry. The poems tumble out of me every couple nights and I have a renewed interested in the literary arts webzine I edit called, Escape into Life.



None of these items should distract you from my original purpose of writing this blog post, which is, to illustrate the state of consciousness I'm currently absorbed in.

I truly look forward to being banished from the public eye, albeit a form of self-banishment but banishment nonetheless. And where I would typically have been bored to my eyeballs by the prospect of not leaving the house; instead, I'm giddy and consumed with my own fantasies. Of course, this might also have something to do with the caffeine I drank only an hour ago, but it couldn't have everything to do with it.

I have no lofty goals for this period of banishment. I suppose I'll write more poems and make more progress on my novel. But I do know for certain I won't be drinking because drinking saps my appreciation for the New York Times and literature in general. It also fogs my mental eyeglasses when writing.

No, I'll stay home until the pimple on my face completely disappears, which, I assure you, will not be any time soon. See there, I've slipped my insecurity in between the lines; probably when you were least expecting it. This saves me some embarrassment because if you are still reading this essay then you are probably willing to know a little bit more about the source of my constant anxiety.

There are no high and noble aims behind my self-banishment. Only a pimple or two or three. I even have a plausible explanation for these tiny, imperceptible whiteheads which have chosen to conglomerate on my bottom lip, right under the lip line. I used Chapstick, many Chapsticks, all winter. I abused the balm and now I have to deal with this buildup of balm. Indeed, the pimples are small. But a couple of them seemed to have joined forces under my lip and formed a somewhat larger pimple.

This to me was a traumatic experience for the last month and a half--because it has been there that long. But I strengthened my resolve and would not give in to such petty preoccupations. That is, I left whatever it was alone and I went out in public as normal people do.

Not only did I go out in public, but I dated, and not only did I date, but I enjoyed a season of illustrious love. This, then, is terribly ironic, because during a time of heightened insecurity, I was actually wooing women. The most beautiful woman I have ever been with, adored me, in spite of my blemish. Until one night I brought it to her attention, for perhaps the second or third time, although surely not the fourth, at which point she called me "selfish". I jumped from my spot on the couch, as if I'd been pierced in the gut. For the rest of the night, we hardly communicated.

Strangely, it was that same woman, who, the first time I pointed out my pimple said, "It adds character."

I want to know why trivial things occupy us human beings.

We have the ability to scale such heights with our dreams and ideals. Just as easily however we plunge into a miasma of the silliest fears and preoccupations.

What are your preoccupations? I want to know. Are they like mine? Are they pimples? Or perhaps you have much more serious matters to deal with. That was Sarah's issue with my bringing up my pimple. It angered her that I was fussing about a blemish when she had far more important worries on her mind.

How does a pimple elicit the same wave of intense emotion as news that a friend has cancer or that you're on the verge of bankruptcy? Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it's wrong of me to suggest it could. But emotions don't discriminate. And often, they arise from something superficial. But buried beneath that superficial symptom is a history of trauma.


I've received a variety of reactions to my obsession. Another woman I recently met-- Well, before we met, we talked on the phone and I told her that I couldn't meet her. You see, we had a date.

She asked why we couldn't meet and I struggled for an answer, when at last I broke down and told her about my insecurity.

"Unless it tries to talk to me, I don't care what it is," she replied.

It took me a couple seconds to get the joke, and she had to remind me to laugh. But then we met and everything was fine.

The dating is over. I can't date in my condition. I can't leave the house. For over a month, that conglomerate of whiteheads haunted me. I checked the mirror every morning to see if it had gone away, but it hadn't. It never budged. It remained buried in my lip line like a determined foe.

One side of my underlip is now red from the marks I made.

I left the house once--to pick up coffee for the week. I drove to the opposite side of town because the Starbucks has a drive-thru. When the cashier handed me my change, I turned my cheek to hide the other side of my face.



More Essays . . .

ARTWORK BY THE GOOD MACHINERY

Aphorisms and Meditations

We use toxins to regulate our emotions.

I use toxins to regulate my emotions.

I vacillate between knowledge of my own condition and boredom.

There is a chamber I retreat to. I have learned to live with isolation, not in it.

My friends are important to me but they exist at a certain distance.

Meeting new people is exciting at first, but later less so.

Your primary world is small, and in that world is you and nobody else. Your friends exist like rings around Saturn.

You want to understand yourself, but you also want the world to understand you. Sometimes you want the world to understand you before you want to understand yourself.

You want to be safe and yet you carelessly endanger yourself.

You want to be loved and yet you create walls between yourself and others.

Loving is something you do because you want to be loved.

Your world is rootless, floating like a city beneath water; your world is rooted only in an illusory sense.

Everything you find inside yourself, you find inside the world.

Your reality is a hallucination that has been rehearsed so many times it appears fixed and stable.

Nothing can be stated with any fixed meaning. Meanings will remain personal and therefore subjective.

Your experience is whatever you say it is. Your experience is--after it happens--only a record of your experience. Told by you, this is any story you choose to tell, in any way you choose to tell it.

Your friends reaffirm your stories; your parents always do not.

As I grow into adulthood, I recognize the need to preserve my father's illusions about me. For his sake, not mine.

The past weighs on my father's mind.

Stories weigh us down unless we are continually revising them and my father is done revising his ideas about me.

I like to think of myself as someone who is re-drafting and re-drafting his life until it makes sense. Life, being irrational, never fully makes sense and so I am continually making up new stories about myself in a creative and naive way.

But this is how children think. Nothing is absolute. Everything is provisional for a child. Tell the child one story, she will believe it, because any story to a child has the possibility of being true.

Adults on the other hand conform to a rigid set of beliefs, true or untrue only according to their own reality.

I write because it is a door I once opened and I continue to go back and forth through that door. I explore the byways and the tunnels of myself.

Whatever I write always has the possibility of being true--at least to me--and to write down my reality is satisfying.

The question of whether what I do is art or not. Sometimes I am intentionally creating art and sometimes I am just writing. The best writing comes out when I am not intentionally doing anything--in fact the best writing comes out when I don't know what I am doing or saying. But I think I like to write because it feels like someone is listening. It feels like what I am saying is not only true to me but true to others as well.

In a way, I am a compulsive writer. I will write because it's a drive.

Maybe I should stop.

Sometimes I do. But when I stop writing, I read a lot and reading activates my imagination and soon I am writing again.

Whatever I've been saying in the last couple pages, I'm not aiming at anything. I'm circling around the mood and the moment of my experience, gladly touching the borders and playing with the edges.

Things are going to change.

For example, I am going to quit smoking. I bought a carton of cigarettes a week ago and it's almost done. I have one pack left.

After smoking for two weeks straight, my verdict is I feel like shit. My body aches, my lungs can barely breathe, and I feel dirty. Worse I feel paranoid about being dirty. Maybe "paranoid" is too strong a word. I feel obsessive about cleanliness. I brush my teeth fifty times a day; I wash my hands twenty-five times a day.

Right now my cat is sleeping and my notebook is resting on his midriff. The official time is 5:03 in the morning. I'm going to step outside for a cigarette, again and again, until I decide to go to bed. I will not go to bed until I am finished writing this.

I'm back from smoking. I learned nothing new, only that I have to quit.

Everyone has their own secret life. We all have minds which are islands--between those islands flow the rivers of our hearts, but the mind itself is lonely. Which is strange, because we retreat into our minds so often. We retreat into our thoughts, our ideas, our beliefs, and we find solace in them even though they are ridiculous.

But there is safety in one's private mind, the thoughts of which no one can read. Because they are private entertainments of the self.

If you have pets, then you know the comforts of having non-human company. The human-animal connection is unique, and for obvious reasons, animals are incredibly loved by humans.

Ultimately, I think what we are stuck with is habit. Whatever habits you cultivate within your lifetime, those are the heavens and hells of your existence. Many habits fall between these two extremes and for that reason our lives are pretty mundane.

Most of our habits are mundane in the everyday sense. We go to work, we eat meals, we tend to our homes and our families, we do chores. Perhaps that's why novelty is so interesting and stimulating.

I seek novelty. If I am not seeking novelty in dramatic and bizarre ways, I am seeking novelty in the miniature sense.

I do appreciate a well-ordered life, everything manageable and in its right place. This stems from the pure gratification of a sense of control. But as far as I can tell, control is something that most people try to exert over themselves and their environments.

My habits are deeply fulfilling mundane rituals that I carry out, such as going to Borders every morning to have my coffee and read the New York Times. To me, the New York Times is my mainstay to a normal, functioning adulthood. I am not saying the specific paper has the same magical effect on everyone. But for me reading the paper is very soothing and it reaffirms my sense of self.

I admire the quality of the writing in the New York Times and I believe it improves my own writing. But there is something else about the ritual which stabilizes me.

And yet, I seek novelty.

Women provide men with an immediate burst of novelty and distraction. If you are ever bored, start a romantic relationship and you will find how interesting your life gets.

But I believe that I ultimately retreat back into my own private mind, and that shared space between me and another person gradually lessens or dries up and dies.

I believe in long-term relationships, I am cynical towards permanent ones.

Right now I don't know where I am in terms of the opposite sex. Do I want to get married? Do I want to have children? Would I prefer to stay single?

The opposite sex is delightful. Loving can also be a doorway to a higher potential for one's being, but in most cases, we are not mature in love for long enough. We stop loving and I cannot explain or understand that.

Love gets degraded over time, diminished, and terribly distorted until it is not even love but something representing its opposite: hate.

Now my cats are quiet. The heater has stopped humming and the only sound in the room is of my keys clicking.

I think about my past life, my life in Spain and in Las Vegas. I think of the adventures I once had and now being here in this moment of early, untainted adulthood.

I'm making the right choices now. Thank God. I am rational about things. I am aware of habit and how it has the power to lull me into a state of unconsciousness.

We grow ourselves. We grow our personalities and our behaviors. Like a garden, we grow ourselves--and once we were sick gardens but now we are growing healthier. Once we were patches of weeds over a dusty mound of dirt, but now we are seeking wholeness and fruit.

We want to bear fruit. For ourselves, for others.

We learn in time to survive, and even better, we learn to thrive.

It is the unfortunate fact of being human that we are constantly working against ourselves. We like to be our own enemies. And I think it is better that we just accept this as a matter of fact, that we accept the demons inside of us which want to destroy us, even if that destruction is a slow-going poison.

Because, ultimately, we must die and we know we must die. So the destructive force inside each one of us is familiar and close. We know the destructive side as much as we know the creative side. We know when we do good to ourselves and our bodies, and we know when we do bad.

Good and bad are only relative to our own individual experiences. Doing wrong to others is doing wrong to oneself.

But it is almost impossible to escape the cloud of unconsciousness that hovers over each one of us. And in an ironic display, we can see everyone else's flaws but not our own.

It is like the inability to smell one's own scent. The smell is palpable to others, but not to yourself.

I don't repress the mystery about myself; I form it.

I also celebrate it.

I have been called naive before, and after all, one of my blogs is called "The Blog of Innocence."

We are all innocent in life. We are innocent to the radical mystery of it.

No matter what we do, what errors we make, what horrors befall us, we are all human, we are all innocent.

ARTWORK BY MOLLY BRILL