April 9, 2024

On How to Be Present

I am frequently very resentful of my therapist because he's good at his job. He's right more often than he's not and he leads me to discuss things I would usually rather not deal with and it's powerfully annoying.

Last week, we spent most of the session discussing my tendency toward avoidance, my inability to ever be still or quiet. I always have sound in my ears, from when I drag myself yawning from my bed in the morning to when I get back into it at night. Podcasts, books read to me by a screen reader, music, TV shows, calls with friends. Whatever I can come up with to cocoon my brain, to insure that I will never have to experience the terror of meeting my own thoughts and keeping company with them in silence. And if ever there's a moment when there's no sound, I immediately take solace in scrolling social media so at least my thoughts have a safe place to land. My therapist called it a form of dissociating, which feels absurdly dramatic to me, the same way it feels to make such a big deal about wanting to change my name when I don't experience the dysphoria some trans people do when they're called by their deadnames.

Whatever you call it, it's an inarguable fact that it's not healthy. I know this. It doesn't keep me from doing it, but I know. The idea of deliberately choosing to focus on my own thoughts, of quieting the noise and seeing what comes up, feels utterly insane to me. It feels unfathomable. Why would I ever want to do that? What could there be to gain? I know what will happen, which is that I'll dwell on everything that's rotten and poisonous in the world and in myself until I send myself into a fit of anxiety it will take days to recover from. The only alternative I can imagine is that I'll just fall into a stupor of boredom without something for my brain to focus on. I need other people's drama, or comedy, or musical output, or fear to immerse myself in because my own life is so devoid of anything interesting or stimulating. I'm so stagnant despite my best efforts at moving forward. Better to live vicariously through the experiences of others than to be present in the here and now.

I got a tattoo on Saturday, which is something I've wanted to do for over a decade and I'm so excited and happy about it, and one of the things I said afterward is that I don't understand everyone who goes on about the pain becoming addictive. It wasn't as painful as I was afraid it would be, but it did hurt, and I didn't enjoy that part. I do understand why someone might go back again and again to get more, though, why the pain would be worth it. Because the thing it did for me was focus my brain on the immediate moment. Mindfulness, a word that makes my eyes roll reflexively whenever I hear it because I associate it with the worst kinds of people, the kind who believe that meditation and breathing exercises can cure everything, the kind who share unhelpful platitudes on social media and spread toxic positivity wherever they go. Unfair, probably, but it's the association I have. Sitting in the chair and allowing someone to slice art into my skin required all my attention, every ounce of brainpower I possessed, so there was no energy left to go wandering down dangerous paths. All I could do was breathe, and feel, and remind myself why this was a thing I thought was worth doing. There's peace in that, and I kind of hope I never get to the point where I'm able to fall asleep while getting tattooed, as I've heard some people talk about.

The only other time I'm able to be fully present with no distractions is when I'm outside, and then only sometimes. I have very terrible neighbors who provide the neighborhood with a ceaseless soundtrack of screaming and swearing and fights, which, as you might imagine, is not conducive to peace or focus. But if I'm somewhere quiet, with birdsong and wind and, ideally, water, I can sit still and remove my earbuds and be only exactly where I am. The lake is the best place in the world for this. Any lake. I can submerge myself in the water and float and think about the miracle of the earth, everything that had to happen just so to allow this body of water to be here and these birds to be here and this sun to be here and me to be here, all at the same time. How sweet, how unbearably luxurious, that I am alive and I get to know how it feels to have sun-kissed skin and lake-tangled hair. That the world would offer this to me, a prayer, an apology for the ways it has been cruel to me..

I'm working very hard on incorporating more of this into my days. I try, when I remember, to savor food, to chew slowly and pay attention to taste and texture for more reasons than disgust when the ARFID rears its head at unpleasant ones. I try to count the brush strokes when I brush my hair, to feel the bristles slide through the strands and the whole weight of all that hair against my shoulders. I seek out things that make me feel rooted in my body in a positive way. I try to bring quiet love to my cats, to pet and cuddle them in the still of the night or the early morning, to hear their purrs and feel their heads bumping my face and hands and be fully present with them. Maybe, eventually, this will lead me to a place where I can coexist with my thoughts without recoiling from them, where I can dabble and play and create in my mind the way I can with words. Maybe one day I can allow myself more than a minute of silence at a time. I'm not there yet, but a world is possible where I could be, I think.

What helps you to be present? What focuses you on the moment you're in? Are there techniques or things or people that make it easier to calm the fear that rises inexorably any time you attempt to leave space for something new to emerge? I'm assuming that you, reading this, are like me, that you also daily find new ways to numb yourself to the awful things all around and inside you and forget how to exist any other way. We can do this together. We can carve doorways within ourselves and rearrange the furniture to make space for the good that can and will come if we stop relentlessly expecting the worst.

Let me show you my tattoo as a parting gift. There is nothing I love more than Anne of Green Gables. Anne Shirley has been my constant companion since I was younger than she is at the start of the first book, and I have incorporated her into all my usernames and URLs, and once, before I was out as anything at all, I wrote a blog post called "I Hate Her Husband: Ways in Which Anne Shirley is Actually Me." Because she is. So it was only natural that my first tattoo should be in her honor. I'm so glad I get to carry her with me as a part of my own body for the rest of my life. Next up: something to represent Persephone, goddess of my heart, and something from Stephen King, and a starling for Mary Oliver, and more and more. But for right now, this.