I suffer from whatever is the opposite of writers’ block and am possessed of even vast amounts of verbal energy. If I strike some as bright, vibrant, humorous, okay, yes, that’s exactly who I am. But another someone resides within me, the child whose father killed himself when she was nine, whose mother was then committed to long years in a mental hospital.
The Empty Chair
When this little girl was told by someone they were sorry about her dad, she’d squint, study their faces like they were speaking a foreign language, then tell them, “Well, it’s not your fault.”
It wasn’t their fault, I knew: was it mine? was it his? All this was infinitely confusing.
After decades spent in all kinds of therapies I’ve become someone clinically deemed “well compensated” — this means I pass as someone adept at overcoming adversity. How is this managed? My own penchant for self-destruction has been eased by a more powerful desire for the more ordinary things. I wanted to fall in love, have children, write the books I needed to write. I’ve accomplished all of this, if not exactly in that order.
But this too is absolutely true: Like that child, I’ve always lived with the most persistent sense of impending doom.
You don’t? This is the fall of 2017 — what the hell is wrong with you?
Spiritual Sisters
How does someone make it out of that kind of upbringing? by taking on the pain and -- even adaptively — coming to own it. My way has been to haul and thrust and yank the wreckage of my childhood into stories, these being the raw materials of my work.
Survivors become psychologically muscular— resilient— in this way.
But the alienation lasts, the sense that you’re so profoundly damaged as to no longer resemble other people in the most basic ways. You feel not only strange but entirely alone in your strangeness.
So imagine my pleasure when the galleys of a book were recently put into my hands, one of the few self-help books I’ve found to be both enlightening and truly helpful. It’s by Nancy G. Shapiro and is called The Book of Calm: Clarity, Compassion and Choice in a Turbulent World.
Nancy Shapiro is my spiritual sister: her father, like mine, was married, an architect. Like mine he left young children when he ended his own life.
Nancy G. Shapiro, author of The Book of Calm
Whose Fault Is It?
Self-murder results in this circular and unending questioning, its survivors suffering the most vexing and un-understandable of griefs. This is the crime, we remember, in which murderer and his victim reside within the same tragic and elusive person, the one no longer here with you to explain himself.
This is maybe why Dante awards suicides their own circle within the Seventh Level of Hell, where they may suffer in all eternity, right there next to that supreme betrayer, Judas Iscariot.
Those of us who have lived through this most confusing of losses find the act of mourning to be both endless and excruciating, a sorrow that goes oddly numb the moment it approaches the white heat of anger as you contemplate what feels like existential betrayal. This painful mix resides in you, wants to haunt and define you. It can become your life’s theme, secret preoccupation or part-time job. For some it echoes, calling out as destiny.
People wonder why you’re simply unwilling to let go. You wonder too, and this clinging to this past of yours becomes yet another shameful part of you.
Though it happened more than 50 years ago that little girl still stands at the window on that foggy Wednesday morning, watching as her father drives off toward the offices on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile from which — in perpetuity — he will never return.
A Search for Meaning
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl says that those with him in Auschwitz had to take on their own suffering as conscious task if they wanted to remain both sane and human, that they needed to do this not just individually but collectively.
Nancy and I belong to another of those unfortunate communities, another clutch of anxious survivors. All of us share a certain commonality: if we are all entirely convinced the most terrible things imaginable can absolutely happen, this is only because they have!
Hurricanes unlike any witnessed before on this Earth? disastrous wildfires? ice caps melting, seas around us rising? civil strife in which armed Nazis now appear on our American streets? These are existential threats to not just our shared emotional stability but to this precious world of ours, our island home. These are threats that feel massive, immediate, Biblical, epic.
In the year 2017 we are in the process of sharing a widespread and collective geopolitical nightmare, as Nancy Shapiro says. The only good news is that we are not alone in this, that the horrors of our present age have rendered even most of us post-traumatic.
We are together in this and it’s our blessing that — in travail — we now begin to find one another.
Buddha, Mendocino
Quieting the Monkey Mind
The events of her life have left the author with the spiritual and mental agitation she has come to term the turbulent brain. This is that state of anxious alert – both chronic or acute – my psychiatrist diagnoses as hypervigilence, what my Buddhist husband calls the Monkey Mind. Those of us who suffer have often arrived here by way of trauma, the terrified conviction that the absolute worst is just about to happen.
What can we do to stop being bullied by our terrors? The Book of Calm contains not only the personal history of the author’s own progress toward constructive stillness but the practical means by which this has been attained. Here are the self-therapeutic tools that allow Nancy Shapiro to enter into a positive state of inner peace, a place she’s arrived only after long practice.
My task has been to find a spiritual homeplace: in work, in community, in the love of friends and family, and, finally, in the Episcopal church of my youth to which I’ve only recently returned. And it is no accident that I live ten miles from the hospital where I was born and so find myself under the same arc of heaven that my tragic brilliant parents discovered their own brief happiness.
Nancy was raised as a Presbyterian in Boulder, Colorado, and is an adult convert to Judaism. In seeking a sense of home, she’s traveled widely, settling in San Miguel de Allende in Guanajuato in Central Mexico.
It was in Bhutan, however — that tiny Buddhist country in the Eastern Himalayas, bordering Tibet— that she began to step into what she calls “the pause.” This is a spiritual rather than a geographic space in which she’s found the calm that resides within her. It is this calm that offers her “a non-reactive way of being in the world.”
This is the calm, she says, that lives within each of us.
One World, Our Shared Sorrow
This world in its present state is a source of constant sorrow and all we need to be confirmed in this is to turn on the TV or open our laptops. We must accept suffering as our human fate as it is suffering that binds us to one another.
This life is just too difficult to be lived all on our own.
But by learning to approach the events of our daily lives with a calm mind and a peaceful heart we not only do not give in to the mindless panic some of us find so natural, we become the resilient ones, those with the strength, the courage and wisdom to step up during these dark times and actually be of help.
The Book of Calm, published this week, is available online here and from your local independent bookseller.