punky, this is Black Jack. I've found some wonderful friends/healers on the remicade site. I am fifty-two and psoriatic arthritis, ankylosis spondylitis, tendontis, ad infinitum have put me in tremendous physical pain. Hey, I suffer from depression. I've been on meds for 12-13 years and have seen good counselors, psychs, and some bad ones, cruel and unscrupulous ones. I know how you feel about
being crowded out of rooms. I live that way, too. Funny, I have a stretch of good years and then slam! Someone breaks glass over my head with his or her unconciousness. I am always striving to be a better Christian--I have a strong Catholic background--but, I am aware when I am being aloof, rude, superior, hurtful, etc.
I will tell you that I have come to realize that we all live in three realities simulaneously: past, present, future. You don't know how many years, accumulated, I waste by writing letters I never mail; fantasizing about the right words to say to wound someone enough to wake that person up to how offhandedly or intentionally he or she hurts other people. I have found that people are like wolves. They hunt in packs. I don't know what wolves feel, but I know the people that haunt my rooms are scared people, greedy people, and they think power is everything. Well, I'm an individualist, a loner. That gives me my freedom, but it also leaves me open....I'm feared because I'm independent and the pack can't stand what Keats called "negative capability," the ability to straddle two realities at once--for example, fear and resolve, being wounded and grounded, but rising without memory of your own wounds when someone needs you. I know the rage of it all, punky. Trouble is we're not prone to harming anyone. I hope I am not projecting myself onto you. I know that we all have differences. So, I will say that in my case, I loathe hurting anyone, anything, in any way. But I have been hurt (What a childhood I've climbed out of! But the details are not important. People like us start life six feet under, to use a metaphor, and we struggle with broken fingernails and gloveless, bleeding fingers, to get a look at level ground.). It's the tension I live with--my inability to forgive cruelty, any shade of unkindness; my wanting to be an avenger; my knowing that I cannot live as an avenger, which is to say for revenge. Yet, I hang suspended on my orb of wounds, past and present, and my imagined victimhood for all my days to come. I'm a poet, but I can't write for the public right now. Just for myself. I've stopped publishing and, as I have done in many past lifetimes, I've thrown myself into listening to music. I am making my family crazy with the thousands of hours of playing Leonard Cohen songs. He's a genius. He has suffered enormously, and, you may know this, blues music always makes us feel good. We're not alone! Not unique! Let me end with a few lines from one of Cohen's songs, so many have beome mantras for me, and they give me strenght to stand alone and to continue to try to shed all the vermin that I have let under my skin, in my bed, etc. I hope this helps you: "Like a bird on the wire. / like a drunk in a midnight choir, / I have tried in my way to be free."
I am suffering body and soul, again, punky. I feel better when I'm that "drunk in a midnight choir." Imagine it! I know where you are, punky. I'll think of you. Black Jack