I missed writing this newsletter last weekend because I’m in the middle of an action-packed trip to the East Coast, and it’s been hard to find time to process it all, let alone write about it. Flipping through the photos on my phone, I can’t believe they all come from one person’s life, and that the owner of that life is me.
I landed in New York on June 7 around 2pm, when the wildfire smoke engulfing the city was at an all-time high, and spent the evening exploring the East Village in a face mask pulled out of my old pandemic supplies. Twelve days later, I am writing this from my cousin’s house in a lush, green hamlet in New Jersey. In between, I’ve danced at my nephew’s wedding upstate, taught a session at NYU, explored remote villages in the Hudson Valley, attended a fancy book launch party in Tribeca, walked in the woods, and led a two-day online workshop.
At night, lying motionless between crisp white sheets and listening to my own breath, images from these events play behind my closed eyelids like I’m channel surfing at high speed. It all feels surreal.
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about unreality and the dreamy inner landscape of memory and imagination. We tend to define what’s “real” as stuff that exists or occurs in the 3D physical world, as opposed to things that exist only in our heads. But I don’t think it’s that cut and dried.
The things that happened over the past week and a half — the wedding, the wildfire smoke, the conversation I struck up with a stranger outside a late-night vegan burger shack off Canal Street — are not less “real” just because they’re no longer happening. Whether or not they left artifacts in their wake, the events themselves now exist only in the shadowy realm of memory. Those recent memories are sharp now but will fade, and many details will be lost, making them seem less and less real over time.
We all know what it’s like to have a hazy memory resurface and feel unsure of whether it stems from a real experience we had, or something we saw in a movie, a dream, or even just a fantasy. Are the impressions rattling around in the dusty corners of our memory banks any more “real” than the vivid pictures in our imagination about something that’s about to happen? Or the elaborate fears and fantasies we have for the future? I think those things are their own kind of real.
When I was eighteen years old, I bungee-jumped off the Kawarau Bridge in New Zealand. Standing on the ledge with a fat rubber cable strapped to my ankles, I looked down at the ribbon of water 140 feet below me and tried to mentally prepare myself for the fall. I’d watched a queue of people jump before me. I imagined the sensation of the drop, what it would be like to swing by my feet over the water, to be lowered into the pickup boat. In that moment I realized that by far the largest part of this bungee jumping experience — its anticipation and then its recollection — would only ever exist in my mind. I thought, “Right now this is happening in my imagination. In three minutes it will be a memory. All I have to do is go through the part of actually doing it.” And then I jumped.
I haven’t always had an easy relationship with “reality”. The subjective, internal realm and the physical external world run on parallel tracks, and the gap between them can be distressing at times, especially when you feel unsure of the validity of your felt experience.
If you’ve experienced acute or chronic trauma you’re likely no stranger to feelings of unreality, which are a major symptom of Complex PTSD. This is because an overwhelmed nervous system will cause us to psychologically dissociate from our bodies as a self-protective measure. At its extreme this can become full blown depersonalization; the feeling that neither you nor the world around you are real.
Movies like Everything Everywhere all at Once that play with ambiguous realities can be triggering for those of us who’ve struggled with dissociation. A few years ago when I was unwisely trying to cram myself back into a situation that wasn’t healthy for me, I tried to watch the animated series Undone, which explores "the elastic nature of reality”. Its protagonist, Alma, is in a car accident and goes on to have what is either a mystical experience or a psychotic break. The filmmakers intentionally leave it to viewers to decide what is “real”. It’s a great show, but I had to stop watching it after it triggered a panic attack.
My first panic attack happened over twenty-five years ago. I was driving back to London after spending a weekend with my sister and niece in Leicestershire, where I had poured out my relationship woes over many cups of tea. I was in the fast lane on the M1 motorway about 25 miles north of the city when my mobile phone rang. This was in the late nineties, when it wasn’t yet illegal to use a mobile phone when driving, so I flipped it open and took the call. It was for my then-partner (couples tended to share a cell phone in those days) and as I heard the person on the other end ask for him by name, I suddenly felt lightheaded. My hands and arms went numb and my vision narrowed, growing dark at the edges. I was blacking out while overtaking a huge truck at 80 miles an hour, with my infant daughter in the back seat.
As adrenaline zapped my nervous system like an electric shock, I dropped the phone, lifted my foot off the gas, slid over to the slow lane and took the next exit, my hands shaking, heart racing, and head swimming. I gingerly parked the car, lifted my baby out of her carseat and spent 40 minutes carrying her around the motorway services, trying to calm my nerves enough to get back in the car and drive home at a crawling pace.
For years afterward, panic attacks became regular occurrences whenever I tried to drive on a freeway, or over a high bridge, or through a long tunnel. I would start out fine, but at some point the cars sliding past me, the view of the road ahead, my hands on the wheel, all started to feel terrifyingly unreal. The sights, sounds and sensations of the road were coming too fast for me to process in my activated state, and the harder I tried to get a grip on them, the less real they seemed. The forward motion of the car suddenly felt like I was plummeting, and I would have to pull over.
It’s hard to explain how distressing panic attacks are to people who haven’t experienced them. For me, it wasn’t that I had a fear of crashing, or of going over the side of a bridge. The thing that I feared was the panic attack itself; the profound sense of unreality that left me feeling unsafe in my body and untethered from this world, sometimes for hours afterward.
Even when the experiences that led me to develop panic disorder were far behind me, the imprint of them lived on. The sense memories in my body and psychological triggers in my mind may have been phantoms, but they were “real” enough to create powerful internal conditions that became manifest in my physical experience.
There’s a fine line between perception (of what is real) and projection (of what is not). We are constantly processing both with the same mental and physical apparatus. If I think I perceive danger, then my nervous system experiences it as real, even if the situation I’m encountering is not actually posing a threat to me. And if I then engage with the world as though that danger is real, it can become so. A panicky driver is a menace to themselves and everyone else on the road.
This is how self-fulfilling prophecies work. It’s a rational explanation of how we do, in fact, create our own reality. This has nothing to do with magical thinking; it’s just that the veil between inner and outer reality is thin, and truth can flow in both directions through its porous membrane.
The good news is that projecting safety, trust, and positive outcomes onto the real world around us works just as well.
It took me many years of self-regulation therapy to free myself from panic disorder. Now I live in Los Angeles, where I drive on freeways without incident all the time, but I’m still cautious about bridges and tunnels, especially large or unfamiliar ones.
To get to my nephew’s wedding, I had to rent a car in Midtown Manhattan and drive it upstate. To state the obvious: it is not easy to leave the island of Manhattan other than by bridge or tunnel. Luckily I discovered Route 9A, which runs along the city’s north-western edge, past the Bronx and Yonkers alongside the Hudson River. The bridge it runs across at Spuyten Duyvil is a tiny one, so I took that route even though it was choked with traffic. Keeping my nervous system calm was as important a goal as getting to the wedding on time; I’m glad to report that I managed to do both. The drive up the Taconic State Parkway was smooth and pleasant, adding another positive driving experience to the memory bank; that “unreal” place that will inevitably boomerang its contents back into my real life. With each success I am deprogramming my trauma response and reprogramming myself to expect and create better experiences.
This coming Thursday I’ll take yet another drive up the Hudson Valley, to the Omega Institute where I’ll be attending a creative workshop with Elizabeth Gilbert and Rob Bell. I’m “looking forward to it”, as the saying goes. Which means I’m already making happy pictures in my mind about it. And then I’ll live through it, and a scant moment later it will move behind me as the thin line of now-ness progresses through time, and it too will become a memory.
When my lived experience is consistent from day to day — sticking to my routines, staying in one familiar place — the fabric of reality is tightly woven and the road ahead feels predictable and secure. But when I travel, when life is full of novel and distinctive experiences, as it has been recently, the mental stream of images is a kaleidoscope of color and noise that can be hard to makes sense of in real time. Did all of that really happen, or did I imagine it? Where has it brought me, and what’s on the horizon?
Life is fluid, and sometimes that river of experience flows pretty fast. Now: Sunlight slanting across a lawn. Now: This dog, eyeing up my lunch. Now: The smell of creosote on the subway. Now: this warm hug, the energy I feel in you, the words we say to each other, evaporating the instant they are spoken but no less real for their impermanence. It’s all real, at least for a fleeting moment.
My relationship to the reality and unreality of life is at its most peaceful when I remember that I don’t have to grasp at it, organize it, or attempt to fix it in place. I can let the changing landscape of my human experience unfurl and recede into the timelessness of memory, always anchored in the truth of the ephemeral, eternal now.