6. SIDE EFFECTS

It took me several more months, but I landed back in New York. I shlumped back to my parents’ house, which was embarrassing and hard, to put it lightly. I was forced to face my thoughts without running away.

At home, I whine, “I would desperately like to have been born in a different century. I would desperately like to crawl back into my mother’s womb.” My mother informs me that those aren’t feasible options, so I’m gonna need to come up with a new plan.

I’m starting to meditate, and I’m starting to pray, and I’m starting hella therapy (and Narcotics Anonymous). I’m finally climbing out of this depression. I bitch to my mom about how much I want to go back to California: how all this therapy-bullshit is a terrible, terrible mistake: “I was happy in California! I’m just confused! I NEED N.! I WAS HAPPY WITH N.!” But were I to run the hell out here, I know, that I would have the desire to run somewhere else. So I quit my griping.

I haven’t been in contact with N. Well, that’s a lie. I sent him a string of emails a few weeks ago, telling him it was all a mistake—that I loved him and wanted to go back to California, and that I had made a terrible, terrible mistake—but he told me that I would just leave him again. He rarely checks his email, which makes our break-up easier.

I wish I could say that I was writing up a storm, and that my life was on track, and that I’m doing just great. But none of that is true, and that’s OK. “There is no nirvana without samsara,” says my friend David: which means something like (in my layman’s understanding), no bliss outside of this endless wheel of suffering. It’s just life.

I’ll light a candle for Dean Young’s poem “Side Effects”:

First you wake in disbelief, then in sadness and grief and when you wake
For the last time, the forest you’ve been
Looking for will turn out to be
Right in the middle of your chest.

Everything I say about traveling being an escape is true—but everything is an “escape”: watching TV, reading the newspaper, going to work, eating food. The difference is when there’s nothing to escape from. I’m really excited to be sober. I’ve been sober for five months now. It’s cool.

But I resent feeling like I should be ashamed of my travels. Yes, they were wild and foolish and chaotic; and yes, they left me with a lot of tears, and maybe drove me loony. But I went on them because I wanted to experience more world, and that included lunacy and mania and scabies and MRSA and trying-to-free-your-soul. I will punch any damn psychiatrist that tells me I’m crazy for getting scabies, and who dares dismiss my commune as a “cult.” (They’re called intentional communities, dudes!) This is my life, and I’m happy for all of it. ♦