Note:These reflections were written in March 2019, in the immediate aftermath of a personal experience that destabilized me more than anything I had previously encountered. They were never intended for publication and have not been revised.I’m sharing them now as a record of that moment—not as a finished account, but as a document of what it felt like to be inside it: heightened, contradictory, and often unclear even to myself.

I have written at length about my experiences with the woman I am calling Isobel. You can find the narrative series here, here, and here. You can also find the play I wrote about this time here.

3/28/19:

I went too far.  I cannot tell if I went too far on purpose; certainly I pushed and pushed until I came to the end of the line.  Like an explorer bent on reaching the furthest possible point, I pushed my mind and body until they could take no more.  Now, the wind has gone out of my sails, for how long I cannot say.  Perhaps for a long time.  Yet I am not at peace, not yet, not now.  “I came so far for beauty/ I left so much behind.”  

Why was it that I had to roam so far out?  What was I running from?  Why did I lock my heart up so tightly that it had to explode in order to feel?  Was there a point at which I could have taken another turn, or was it all slated to occur just as it did?  You can ask why forever and get nowhere.  This I know.

So I met a woman and this shook me up.  She shook me up.  She wasn’t trying to, but she did.  My carefully balanced psyche, assembled and jury-rigged over decades, came apart in a matter of days.  Anything could have happened, and by the grace of god I was able to retain some kind of governing function, however weak, which helped me stay safe.  Over seven weeks everything that could be thrown at me was.  I was under massive physical and psychological strain and only my years of amateur study of consciousness and the unconsciousness saved me from succumbing entirely.  If I could do it over again (a terrifying notion), I would do almost nothing the same.  However, I understand why I made the choices I did.  There is little point, really, in interrogating the choices that we made in the light of the circumstances that were in place.  Things were, and I reacted to them as I did.  There is no getting around this.  

Still, I made every mistake in the book.  A classic mid-life crisis.  Stereo-fucking-typical, scripted to the t.  The funny thing is, I knew all about the blueprint and it still happened.  “My Dinner with Andre” was a foundation text.  I’d read Jung and James Hollis on midlife, extensively.  Paradoxically perhaps, the very knowledge of the blueprint may have helped bring the symptoms into being.  Or not, maybe I was semi-consciously gathering resources with the implicit foreknowledge that one day they would be needed.  Either way, advance information about the terrain only allowed me to stay on my feet—it did not allow me to change course.  

I was a Gemini warrior on a private quest, one unseeable from the outside and barely even discernible to myself.  So many windmills, so much striving for the grail.  To what end?  A window seat—a temporary sinacure—and a chance to draw breath at sea level.  That’s about it.  Can I learn to live as it seems others do, with a little less metaphysical strum und drang, present in the world of the senses, just living?  I don’t know what it is like not to live in my head and don’t remember when I started living this way.  What I know now though it, it’s a trap.  A mire.  An maze with no exit.  A road to nowhere.

In five years time will this all seem to have been necessary—just part of the process of being a human?  God I hope so.  That’s what the literature says—the final stage is acceptance.  How I am doing with that?  I accept that what happened happened.  I accept that I made choices that made sense in the moment.  I accept that that my personality was in large part a construct and that I am better off without a lot of it.  And, I accept the possibility of a silver lining somewhere down the line.  The magnitude of the experience and its ripple effects, these are things I am still coming to terms with.

I have seen some things that many will never see.  Beautiful and fantastic things, awful things.  As a result, I am shaken and somewhat unsteady.  That’ll happen when you stray too close to the light.  But those things are not mine—they do not belong to me.  They have their own location, their own zone, at the edges of the known.  I was granted, or gained, access to a sliver of another realm, yet I do not know how deep or how wide that realm is.  Right now it is enough to know that it is there, more than enough.  Both climbers and divers may feel sick when returning to sea level.  I don’t know if I have been climbing or diving or, somehow, both, and in the end it does not matter.  Leonard Cohen’s ladies man dies again and again throughout the ages.  “It’s like a visit to the moon or to that other star/ I guess you’d go for nothing/ if you really want to go that far.”  I didn’t want to go that far, not really, but I did anyway.  

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3/29/19:

Why did I give up on my job?  Because let’s face it, I gave up.  Let’s get some things out in the open.  I managed my energy very poorly for a long time.  I was using shortcuts and papering over energetic issues to keep going at the pace I was working.  For the last three or four years I was also withdrawing bit by bit—taking more half days off, shrugging more off, and putting off longer term planning that was necessary for the program.  I was basically exhausted on an energetic level and this led to taking more time for myself and spending too much money just to get a space to reset—to feel something.  

What was it that was so exhausting?  As I’ve spoken about to many, the constant pushing of the stone uphill, the constant battle to get needs listened to, was certainly tiring.  The feeling that it was really just me, a middle man, at the top of a huge operation and I didn’t have the tools or the power to do the things I needed to.  The feeling that there were so many program areas that were not as good as they could be.  The growing gap in my marriage which allowed me to seek feeling connections recklessly and a little randomly.  

After a while, my psyche was being held together by string, by a thread.  I was carrying deep wounds from the past which I hardly knew existed, had hardly ever looked at.  I was an unitegrated personality in many ways and have no real root here in Japan.  The sense of being included in an extended family that existed when I met my wife was long gone.  My dream life was giving me warnings and maybe I could have done something with them.  I was primed for a crack-up.  

What was it about Elodie that enraptured me so entirely?  I think it was the combination and sexuality and motherliness, her openness, her painful past which she was so open about, and some kind of deep inherent similarity that we both felt, and proceeded to blow out of all proportion.  And she wanted to spend every minute with me!  I was around the bend about her within a day.  There are funny parts to the story—man I knew I was in trouble.  That’s why I was listening to the Mendoza Line non-stop.  “Mistakes were made tonight” indeed.  I recognized that I was right on the edge and programmed myself not to step over it on the conference.  And then I got on the plane and proceeded to step right off the cliff in another way.  Long term, I guess it was a better cliff but how I thought I was in the right frame of mind to make that kind of decision, I’ll never understand.  The correct move I made was to put people around me to keep me safe.  The mistake I made was to recruit them into my plan to leave my job when I should have sought advice and depended on them to guide my decisions.

I feel like I want to say this—school leadership was poor.  My decision to leave was not a direct result of the lack of leadership; it was a result of a massive energy change/ charge that took my system by storm and caused me to lose all perspective.  However, the energy issues were in many ways a result of stress and repression of anger and frustration over how things were being handled, both over the short and the longer term.  The issues were deep—still today my body is not right.  I’m fragile, I’m weak, I’m a shell of my former self.  

“This is the new not normal”—I’m listening to the new Lambchop album.  It’s good of course, but kind of all sounds the same.  That’s OK though.  How can I get used to this new not normal at this office?  There is nothing to do.  Maybe that will change, and maybe I can make it change.  Right now I am the definition of a clock-watcher.  I know I put myself in this position and I’ll endure, but at what cost?  Something needs to change, but I know I can’t push myself back into a bunch of old patterns even if I could.  Maybe I was acting like an INTP—maybe feeling was the most buried function of all.  This is probable.  

My damage is deep, generational.  If I am right in imagining that for some bizarre reason I had a role to play in clearing up or shouldering this burden and sort of resolving it, well that’s something I did.  I certainly felt this way last fall, and that sense, that notion is still present.  And now what?  I am not special just because I have begun to own up to my damage.  The best thing I can do now is to pass on as little as I can to my son—to be as present as I can with him as often as I can.  

I also need to extend my working lifespan.  This is a priority, and I need to be realistic about this.  However, I’ve been stressing myself out to figure this out like today and that I can’t do.  My priorities have to be: i) to minimize spending and pay the bills; ii) to cut way back on drinking; iii) to network and think positively about the future little by little.  Anything can come.  Tell yourself, anything can come.  Anything can come.  

FIN        

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3/30/19:

There is no point in trying to write well right now.  I am writing just to pass the time and continue to process my guilt and my heartache.  The sense that somehow I was wired wrong is persistent, despite people who care about me trying to tell me otherwise.  I mean, I have not been practical, have not made ordered decisions about securing my life and that of my family.  I have made ordered decisions in so many other areas, not this one.  How could that even be?  I have no real answer to this—magical thinking, arrogance, the feeling that I could somehow tread water forever. I don’t know.

Ann wrote that I might have a form of PTSD from the collision with Elodie.  This rings true.  Meeting her shook up my mind and body at a core level.  The ideas of animating archetypes are not just ideas.  They are real.  When Elodie and I fell into one another, I lost all sense of self.  I wanted to give everything and anything to her, falling over myself to do so, to explain, to unburden myself.  She was attracted and fascinated by some of this, but was also overwhelmed by the extent and speed of it all.  On my end, I was overwhelmed too, overwhelmed by the depth of the attraction and how far I fell into her.  We talked, and I could not figure out was this an ascent or a descent.  So strange that it could be both.  It was more a trip into the infinite.  A trip for sure.  I exited London and I was undone.  I was terrified and thought I was bulletproof at the same time.  I should have leaned more into the terror—I should have slowed down and assessed.  This I did not do.

Calling Lynn and getting the idea of the kundalini was helpful.  This was another juncture I could have turned for the better—tried to get grounded in a more appropriate way.  Like the runner I once was, I just thought I could run the energy to ground.  In the end I did, too late and with too much cost.  So here I sit in a purgatory of my own making, bereft.  Is this what I was destined to have to deal with—the emptiness, the total lack of self without the worldly tasks that were set me?  I am having new thoughts—thoughts about the break up of extended families and that this is one of the core problems in modern life, perhaps the core one.  Loneliness is probably an epidemic, almost certainly.  

For a moment there was music, there was dance and movement, there was sexual confidence, there was bravodo.  No longer.  Why can’t those feelings, those urges, be regulated and controlled?  I suppose they can, with practice.  Apply myself, that’s something I’ve always had difficulty doing toward a skill.  Variety seeking—always on the lookout to change direction.  How boring.  

I know I need to focus on my health, but how can I do that with these days stretching in front of me like this?  I am in a tough situation.  This is a fact.  I can’t write my way out of this.  What am I supposed to be learning?  What is it even possible to learn here?  Patience, humility?  Patience for what, for reinstatement to the culture that pushed me over the edge?  I read about principles under stress in Australia and no one wanting the job.  I can understand why.  I never wanted to be that high up either—really didn’t.  I only accepted it because I was apparently the best person.  What could have been different?  I did all I could to delegate, well, I tried.  I felt guilt over my classes being below-par, could not stop working on the weekend, got worn down.  

There has to be a silver lining.  Well, one is the conference lifestyle is over.  That had to end, and an end was forced on me.  That’s a net positive.  I may be able to address my habits.  This is going to be super hard because of the sleep and because I gain pleasure from the pub.  Can I keep the pub and drop the rest?  That has to be the goal.  

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Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also take up the difficulties of modern romance.

Simona

Mariko