Headthegong.com

I turned thirty-six on Tuesday. My father had four kids by the time he was thirty-six. I don’t have anything else to say about that. It just strikes me as weird. Gives me an uneasy feeling. Ch-ch-ch-ch-change. My entire adult life I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of this mysterious, ubiquitous process. How can I realize the potential within myself? How can I help to facilitate positive change in others who are stuck in self-limiting patterns?

This past week I poured my heart and soul into the kids at the Adolescent Chemical Dependency Center. I was overflowing with compassion, and did my best to make the holiday-in-the-hospital as enjoyable as possible for them. On the surface, everything was moving along smoothly, but I could sense there were things going on behind the scenes. Some folks were up to no good.

I’ve been through this many times before. There’s just no way you can house eighteen teenagers together–most of whom are repeat criminal offenders with frighteningly anti-social tendencies–and expect anything but manipulation, conniving, and blatant dishonesty. But this time it got to me. This time it really hollowed me out. By the time I was through interrogating them, I found out that several kids were involved in a plot to sneak contraband onto the unit. Two of these kids were our “star pupils,” having consistently said the right things in therapy groups and buttered up staff members with tearful expressions of gratitude. Another kid had stolen some magic markers from staff and inhaled the fumes to get high. When I confronted these kids and explained the possible consequences of their actions (further, long-term treatment; going back to jail), several other kids decided to come clean about their true feelings about the program, rallying to support their peers with shouts of “Everything you all teach here is bullshit!” “Honesty is bullshit!” “Sharing feelings is bullshit!” “If we want to get clean, we can do it on our own! You all don’t know shit!”

To say the wind was taken out of my sails would be an understatement. I had invested so much time and energy into these kids, and it turns out that the majority of them had been fronting their way through the program and simply telling me what I wanted to hear so they could go home as soon as possible. They had been pulling time. Nothing more. They never wanted my help. They never wanted to change. They just wanted to get the authority figures off their backs.

I tried all my usual rationalizations to lessen the sting: “Hey, there are at least a few of them who seem to want help.” “Maybe I’m planting seeds for later.” “They’re just kids. They don’t know what they believe.” Nothing did the trick. I just felt sick, sick of trying to help people who don’t want my help. You can’t force change. People have to learn their own lessons I guess. I’m still learning mine.

Being a therapist can leave one hollow and hopeless. I will enjoy my two days off; spend time with my wife; play my guitar; get some exercise. By Saturday, my perspective will have changed. It always changes.

I have many fond memories of family vacations at the beach when I was a kid. I was never one for state fairs and other crowded venues. I’ve never been to the land or world of Disney and I hate shopping malls. Too much artificial stimulation. Too many bells and whistles drive me into the fetal position. But I always loved the ocean. There was such a depth of sensory satisfaction–the smells, the sun, the sounds of the surf–and the arresting sense of wonder that only nature could deliver. When it was time to close my eyes and the end of the day, I would see wave after wave crashing to the shore, these images seemingly etched into my brain. Of course, I later came to understand that whenever I immersed myself in an activity for hours at a time, the experience would smolder in my neuro-circuitry, firing up the moment the lights went out or my eyes fluttered closed.

After twelve hours at the hospital yesterday, I could barely keep my eyes open to drive home. But when they did fall closed I could find no peace, just an unending parade of sights and sounds from the work day, keeping me locked in a posture of rapt engagement, my attentional aperture stuck in focus. I tried all the little tricks I know to disengage, to fuzz out. I focused on my breathing and bodily sensations, but they were quickly sucked into the black hole, giving way to sound bites of tearful teenagers and flashes of the florescent-lit group therapy room. Typically, at this point in the battle, I will go straight for the atom bomb–the orgasm. If anything will override the cerebral circuitry at 3am, it’s a sexual release. But even this has failed to bring peace on more than one occasion, and last night I didn’t have enough fight in me to reach for the button.

I think I finally drifted off around 5:30am, having long since surrendered to the process on its own terms. After hours of getting pummeled by the unrelenting waves, I finally let myself get sucked under and washed ashore.

Three years ago my guts were twisted about whether to move to Kentucky with my girlfriend or stay in North Carolina with my bandmates in My Dear Ella. I left the band, joined my girlfriend (now my wife), and my life abruptly changed course, as it had numerous times before. I’ve stayed in touch with Eric (MDE mastermind and my closest friend) since my departure, and several times I’ve flirted with the idea of moving back to NC, at least for the nine to twelve months my wife will be doing her doctoral research in Mexico. Per the original game plan, my wife figured she’d be heading off to do her research in the fall of ‘06, as in right now, but the vagaries of grad school have been such that things have been considerably delayed, so now we’re looking at next fall at the earliest.

So many twists and turns, and it turns out that Eric recently dissolved My Dear Ella and formed a new outfit, Death of the Sun [pictured above]. It also turns out that D.O.T.S. needs a bass player to complete their line-up so they can take the world by storm. Do I smell the intoxicating effluvium of destiny? Or is it just the same old clump of bull-poop I’ve been dragging around on my boot-heel for years?

I don’t know. Part of me would love to cast off the shackles of normalcy and step out on that thin limb again. Maybe this time things will be different. Maybe I’m ready for greatness. But then again, having been down this road before, I’m all too aware of the costs, the doubts, and the insidious pattern that compels me, every four years or so it seems, to jump whatever ship I’m on in favor of the S.S. Something Else.