Going Darker - Of fear, anxiety, stress, and grief

"For I have known them all already, known them all."

reading time: 4 minutes

I chose that quote, written in the past tense, because it seems to me most writings about fear, anxiety, stressed-out times are written in past tense. I think this is because the only genuine expression most people can make in the grip of these feelings or the choke-hold of their sister, grief, is a keening, piercing wail. Or no sound at all. Simply the open-mouthed, silent scream of Edvard Munch.

When I began this Substack writer’s letter, I’d intended to use it as a place to refine optimistic perspectives for lives unfolding into better and better versions of the life we get to live. I’d planned this as a way to compile a second volume of games for minds that tend to go rogue. Helpful ideas to share with you whom I know, and you who I don’t yet know; ways to find equilibrium. I had no intention of revealing what lies beneath this urge, this compulsion to encourage you and you, and most especially me, to continually rescue our minds from chaos.

If I didn’t daily need to take my own placebos, I’d do something other than conjure up ideas of how to stay sane, how to daily re-envision living easy & living well.

I’d do something else. Birdwatch maybe. Wade across the tideland in waterproof boots, a bindle with a homemade sandwich and a cafeteria-sized carton of milk in one hand, bird guide in the other, binocculars dangling from my neck, and a paperback novel by someone else stuffed into my hip pocket.

But, three things have happened since I began writing here:

One—A fellow writer I invited to check out my blog on living easy and living well was promoting her book about her daughter’s tragic death. She recoiled at my invitation. “Oh, no!” she said, “I’m not ready for that!” Apparently the disconnect would be too great between living well and her need to stay in grief, all the way to the NYT Best Seller list. Then, maybe, she could allow herself to live more easily. Her reaction made me ask myself, how dare I hope for ease and health before the fulfillment of my long-neglected promise to do something worthwhile with my own life?

Two—another Substack writer, Helen Redfern. I’m not certain how I came across this British writer, but the first few of her posts I read felt too self-exposing, they made me twitch. I didn’t venture often to her page. Yet, when I read her post celebrating the third year of her Substack wherein she wrote in raw, explicit detail of the intensity of her angst and self-doubt, of her inner critic’s cruel and castigating tirades, of her fears about the worthlessness of her work, I felt encouraged to go on myself as she is going on.

and Three—My body is trying to tell me something. After trying for some time in subtle ways to get me to listen, she’s flat out screaming at me now to pay attention. I am desperate to know what she wants. I’m scared shitless that I actually do know. But, being as honest as I dare to be with you, I’m not going to write what that is. Not yet.

So, here I am at 3am, daring to do this thing. Hoping that this writing is at least part of what my body’s been begging me to do. What she’s now demanding that I do. Daring to give voice to what seethes beneath my optimistic words.

I intend to identify each of these posts as Going Darker, to warn those of you who’d prefer to consider only the nuggets that I have winnowed from the dross. And, to help you reconsider if you’re tempted to read someone else’s unexpurgated journey, I’ll be putting up a paywall. As much as I wish to be as frank, as honest as Helen Redfern about my challenges, I will share this only with supportive people who dare to invest in the experience of deeper connection with me.

I won’t be giving ascriptions or adding links to anyone or anything I mention. All of what I write here will be my own opinions of them; my own experience with them anyway. It can’t be argued or proven wrong. It is this one person having this one life.

Among the truths, my truths, I’ll be sharing from these depths will be how the glib misdiagnoses of doctors nearly cost me my life, how punishment for purjury is a hollow threat, the ugly and ignoble fate of whistleblowers, how I hate the depraved manipulation of human suggestibility that destroys people for profit, about being raped and being a rapist, and how losing courage is the greatest loss of all.

As Helen Redfern, in her response to my comment of gratitude for her post, reminded me, we are not alone in internal torment, even when it feels so terribly, terribly lonely here writing desperate truths.