Choosing to Let Go

"I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me... but it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life..."

I love this quote from the movie "American Beauty" said by Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey). In case you haven't seen it - if you haven't, I suggest you should - the movie centers around Lester and his quest to take his life back from who he perceives as the toxic people around him - his wife, his daughter, his boss, the company he works for.

This movie is one of my all time favorites and has always resonated with me, despite Lester's and my struggles being very different. I actually struggle with anxiety and depression which manifest as a vacillation between emotional paralysis, self-destructive behavior, and intense episodes of self-loathing and self-doubt. Phew, that felt good.

At baseline, my happiness level is much lower than most people's. I have people and things who make me happier: my wife, my kids, my work. Recognizing this, I have spent the past few years actively pursuing happiness; what I perceive to be this paradigm of contentment which has always seemed to elude me.

I read self-improvement articles constantly. I have explored Buddhism and all all sorts of "isms". But, I can never seem to even partially grasp anything I read or explore. That spikes my depression and anxiety and I end up worse than how I started. It's maddening and infuriating.

When it's bad, it's bad. I feel like a punching bag and my mind is getting a good workout on me. It doesn't stop and no matter how hard I try, I can't turn it off. It was one such acute episode of this last year which convinced me I needed help.

I got on meds and recently started going to psychotherapy. While it's helping, I'm still far from well. I know this is a long-term journey that, graphically, when it's all said and done, would have an upward trend. That said, even upward trends have deviations from the norm, some of those total anomalies. Last night, arriving home late from an intensely frustrating Board of Ed meeting, which followed my Ground Zero experience yesterday afternoon, my mind started spiraling out of control. I was emptying the dishwasher and started getting really freaked out that I still had all this stuff to do, despite it being so late, and I was obsessing over what exactly I was going to eat today. 

"I need to have vegetables with my lunch. But, I don't want vegetables. God, you're so fucking pathetic. If you don't want to be fat anymore, eat better. Jesus, why can't you do that? Why don't you have any self-control? And stop checking Facebook at work. Successful people don't do that. You want to be successful, right? Do you think Steve Jobs spent as much time as you do futzing around? No, the articles say work straight for 90 minutes and then take a 20 minute break. You probably won't do that. You'll just end up checking Facebook or Twitter. Just do better."

Imagine not being able to turn this off. Imagine knowing this is bullshit. That you are smart and accomplished. That you're working for a reputable company that is a world standard for media and information workflows and that you've been asked to join them in an effort to change the paradigm of not only the way they do business, but how the industry does business. You want it to stop. You tell it to stop, both audibly and inaudibly. But, it doesn't. It just keeps digging and scraping. It reminds me of MG-42 machine gun fire you take in Call of Duty.

While this isn't my daily experience, it happens enough for me to know I am not well. I know it has triggers (see above). I know I can be mindful of those triggers and talk them out with my therapist or R. (Thank you, sweetie, for talking me down last night) R made a good point: I know I'm not happy and I think I know what I need to be happy, so I chase this magic pill - figuratively - that will POOF! make it all better.

One of the things I read that always made me more depressed and now just makes me roll my eyes is that we can be happy simply if we choose to be happy. That might work for some, but for me, and at the risk of speaking out of turn on behalf of other depressed people, we simply cannot do that. We literally have a chemical imbalance in our brains that precludes our being happy at the drop of a hat. It's not an excuse. It's science. 

That said, we can make the choice to work to become happy. We can see a psychiatrist and/or a psychotherapist. We can work through our issues, getting down to the most fundamental feelings we have, we can work on getting around them, or we can simply just talk. Even just talking to someone objective who you know will not judge you helps. 

One of the things R imparted on me last night is that I should just let it go. Not necessarily push it away or just stand back and let it buck and kick unbridled in my mind. But, to hone in on it with someone who's not experiencing it and highlight what's really behind it. In my case, it was some stress I have been carrying for the past week, my experience at Ground Zero yesterday, and finally the agonizingly late meeting. As an analytical person, this type of root cause analysis was just what I needed. And it enabled me to let it go.

While I will still meditate, be mindful, and reflect on how I can do better - as a husband, father, employee - I am going to stop reading the self-help poppycock out there. While it might work for some, it doesn't work for me and causes me to set unrealistic expectations that don't help me and that I never realize. I have realized that when I focus on the WHY, the HOW is a lot less daunting.

Be well.

Ground Zero

Today I learned I hate tourists. Not all tourists. Not even for the obvious reasons. Let me explain.

To me, tourists are like pigeons; they're just a part of the city. I generally ignore them and am not generally annoyed by them. Are there instances where they're in the way when I'm trying to get somewhere? Certainly. Are there instances where I have to jump out of the way of a photo? Yes. Do these things bother me? Not really. It's part of commuting to and working in the city, especially Downtown. Not to sound glib, but it is what it is.

When I quit smoking, I decided that once a day, sometimes twice, given the time, I would take a walk. New York is, after all, a walking city, so why not take advantage, take a break, get some fresh early fall air (even if it is interspersed with diesel fumes), and replace my bad habit with something good? The loop around City Hall Park and by the Brooklyn Bridge is perfect, but it's gotten stale. Broadway down to the water and back is great, but it's too long and too crowded. Today, I decided to take a loop around Ground Zero and come back. Perfect distance. Perfect day. Perfect amount of time. I mapped it and set out into the glorious afternoon sun.

I stepped out onto Fulton Street - which I have learned is wide by Downtown standards - and headed down to Church, hooked a right onto Church, and ran smack dab into a tour group with matching red hats. I meandered through them and subsequent groups, crossed Vesey, cut left and inside another tour group into a mass horde of more tour groups, smaller groups of European tourists, and PATH commuters. It was a game to me. I snaked through group after group, hitting the brakes, looking for my hole, and swoop! Repeat 10-15 times.

I continued on Vesey through a cloistered almost-tunnel, in typical Downtown early-20th Century architecture, and hooked left across Vesey onto West, which surprisingly was not as crowded as the first part of my journey. Once I passed 1 WTC and saw the park, my first thought was I realized where all these tourists I have been seeing since I started working down here have been going. It was like every single one of them, every one of them that has bumped into me, asked me for directions, walked by me speaking in a different language to each other, it's like they were all there. All at that one time. It was a true lightbulb moment.

I continued to meander and snake. Tourists of all size and stripe stood at the sides of the 1-acre pools - footprints of where the towers stood - taking pictures. Of the pools, of 1 WTC, of each other, of themselves. I thought about the time I came to New York in 1990. I thought about riding the bus down West Street with my parents and being confronted by this enormous silver monolith.

"Dad," I asked. "Is that the World Trade Center?"

"Yeah," he said. "That's one of 'em."

My ten-year-old self had never seen anything of that size and scale. I was blown away. And there were two of them! To stand between them felt like you were at the center of the world. That's what I thought about on 9/11.

I was never one of those people who got all emotional about 9/11, besides in the typical non-New-Yorker, non-Washingtonian sense: find the bastards who did this, hang them by their balls with meat hooks, and give any American who wanted to the opportunity to land one solid punch in their face. It was what I thought was the most fitting punishment. Yes, 9/11 was an affront to me as an American, but I didn't have to live with it and be reminded of it every single day. Even now that I'm working Downtown, my first thought was "Uggh, is it gonna be a zoo down here on Thursday?" (It actually wasn't)

But, I digress. Walking around those footprints, something stirred. Something dark, something mean, something depressing. And these people just flock here everyday to take pictures of it. I started to realize these were familiar feelings. I had them at Auschwitz, which is sacred ground for a Jew. Maybe I had more emotions about 9/11. Maybe I had empathy for New York and it's people that I never knew I had. I started to get angry - it's usually where I go when I get sad. I had to get out of there. OK, be cool. Just finish the loop and get the hell out of there.

As I walked on the east side of the Tower 2 footprint, three Spanish girls where trying to pose themselves for a picture. They weren't getting their act together. They were jabbering on about angles, and where to stand. I became incensed. As one of them put her iPhone up to take the picture of another, I walked within six inches in front of the phone, ruining her picture. "Gracias!" she said, sarcastically. Without turning around, I flicked her off and kept walking.

There were so many things I wanted to say and do that I was disappointed I only flicked her off. "Fuck you and your picture, you vapid touron!" was one of them. Knocking the phone to the ground and breaking it was another. The burning tingling was still roiling in my stomach as I turned to the south side. "I need to get out of here," I said to myself, barely audibly.

I turned right back on to West and almost had tears in my eyes. This is sacred ground to me, I realized, and is to many, many people. And tourists like these girls just wanted to get their selfies. It was a photo op for social media. They don't have these feelings of angst and sadness that I now know I have. And I hated them for it.

On the way back, I dodged people like I did on the way down, but this time it wasn't a game; it was with a purpose. St. Paul's beaconed me; "Come back to where it's safe." Fulton Street never looked more welcoming. As I entered my building, I exhaled emphatically. I was safe. All that was left to do was to ride the elevator up 10 floors, where I would be perched above the streets and the ambling masses.