This past week I’ve been squirming about the post I published last weekend about the prairie town in which I spent a torturous adolescence. It’s an ok piece of writing, not my favorite, but that’s not what makes me uncomfortable. It has some ugly words in it. Ugly memories. (Believe me, there are far uglier ones that I did not share.) I feel shy; I guess I have what Brene Brown calls a vulnerability hangover.
I write quite a lot about dark and difficult things. Even if it sometimes leaves me feeling self-conscious and exposed, I have to do this because I’ve made a commitment to myself to write from a place of honest self-expression, to let my curiosity and intuition guide the direction of my writing. When a painful memory or hard truth steps forward and asks to be seen, I no longer push it away.
Sometimes I worry that with all this focus on death and anxiety, trauma and grief, you might see me as a terribly fucked up person, emotionally incontinent and bleeding out on the page. Or that you might find my writing unpalatable, too bitter to swallow.
In those moments I have to remind myself that making art is not a bid for approval, no one is for everyone, and I can only paint with the colors on my palette. When my colors are stormy, I paint thunderclouds. When they are bloody, I paint bruises. When they are bright, I paint the sun. These are the colors that have been gifted to me, and using them is the only way to make a faithful self-portrait.
I do try to “write from the scar, not the wound”. What this saying means is that active trauma is no fit place for insightful reflection, so writing that comes from an open wound of unprocessed pain usually lacks resolution and can even retraumatize both writer and reader.
But scars are settled. Although every scar is born of some sort of violence, the story of a scar is not merely the story of the injury itself but of its healing. This makes writing from the scar an act of service to the reader and closure for the writer.
I feel a certain fondness for my scars. They are the record-keepers of my personal history.
If you were to look at the soft flesh on the side of my right knee, you would see a small, dark gray line beside the rope-like ligament that connects femur to fibula.
It’s not a scar exactly, but this mark also tells a story. My fifth-grade teacher had just told the class to go get our graded test papers from the table under the classroom window. We all jumped up from our desks and rushed forward in a tight pack. As I pushed myself into the scrum I bumped up hard against a classmate, and the freshly sharpened pencil I was unwisely carrying jabbed me in the leg, piercing my navy blue tights.
When I got home and changed out of my school uniform, I examined my leg and was astonished to see not a red scab, but a little gray streak under my skin. I wondered if the pencil tip had broken off and got lodged inside of me, but I found no hard lump there, just the ghostly trace of a tiny graphite dagger. I’d given myself an accidental tattoo.
Over the years I’ve forgotten and then remembered this little mark, occasionally checking to see if it’s still there. I always feel comforted to see that it is. It is evidence, forever recorded in the tissues of my body, of a thing that happened way back in 1981, and can never un-happen. If I live to be 100 years old, the old woman I’ll become will have the same dark fleck on the back side of her right knee.
For a long time, I couldn’t write at all, and I think this is because my emotional wounds were too fresh. Worse, I kept reopening and rubbing salt into them by drinking too much, by co-creating and staying in volatile relationships, and by plain ol’ mean self-talk. I had nothing to offer but a howl of frustration.
I’ve broken each of those habits now, and my world — inside and outside — is very different. It’s no longer painful to think, speak, and write about the bad old days because I’m not trapped inside them anymore.
The point I want to get across here, the thing I really, really want you to know, is that it is possible to feel better. Even if you’ve always felt anxious, or resentful, or disengaged from your life. Even if you have a huge back catalog of trauma ballads playing in heavy rotation in your head. Even if you’ve been on a healing roundabout for years and still haven’t managed to find an exit from your patterns. Even if you feel hounded by the need to prove your worth, in your relationships, in your career, in your artistic practice. Even if you’ve struggled to make meaning of your life. Even if you’ve grown weary — or have always been weary — of this human experiment we’re conducting as a collective.
I don’t claim to know The Truth, and certainly won’t presume to speak to your truth. But I now know my truth, and it has set me free.
My truth is that the purpose of my life is to learn how to let go of unnecessary suffering and then enjoy the ride. That’s all.
My favorite beacon of light and liberation Martha Beck puts it this way: The way to end unnecessary suffering is by coming into integrity — meaning wholeness, or you could say alignment — with your essential self. And the simple steps to doing this are: to know what you really know, feel what you really feel, say what you really mean, and do what you really want.
What I really want right now is to do this work of putting my emotional history in order.
I was thinking, as I hiked along a high, dusty trail this morning, of my past experiences — good, bad, and neutral — as objects in my mental attic. There are delightful playthings in there, beautiful paintings, and charming porcelain figurines. There are live landmines too, rusty old knives, black boxes, and many warning systems still sending out a decades-old SOS.
Writing, for me, is like sorting through this haul, pushing a reset button on the alarms so they can finally stop blaring at me. This collection is my personal endowment to myself, and it is all worthy of close consideration, even the most hideous gargoyles. Each time I sit down to write, I dust off another object, examine it with soft hands and a curious eye. What can it teach me? What do I want to do with it?
Some, I’ll polish up and display. (There are many delightful, long-neglected treasures to rediscover!) Others, I’ll discard. Plenty of this crap was never mine to begin with. How freeing to let it go.
Revisiting my archives in this way does not pull me backward or drag me down; it unburdens me. It is good, wholesome work that settles my spirit.
Another thing I really want to do: To share the transformation of these objects with you. By taking them apart and even melting them down if necessary, even the ugliest pieces can be refashioned into purposeful things that might be beautiful or useful to another human being. That’s a double blessing.
It’s true that the old story in my head is largely a story about shitty things that happened and my struggle to get past them. Even my moments of celebration, connection, and repair played out against a backdrop of What Happened, Words Spoken, Things Witnessed, and all the ways in which I made a bad situation worse.
Yes, the old story is kind of a bummer, but I don’t berate myself for that anymore; it makes sense. Every experience leaves a mark. Compassionate inquiry is the balm that silvers the scar.
Now I am making room for a new story. The new story doesn’t erase or deny the facts of the past; it builds on the old one, reframing its events and leading to a different conclusion. And the meaning of any story is in its conclusion.
By conclusion I mean a moral message, not a static endpoint, because this story has no end. It’s a story about a journey through life. About movement and evolution. It is about patience and curiosity, and potential that is constantly expanding. The new story is one of paradox, of multiple truths, in which degrees of mastery in some aspects can coexist with being a rank amateur in others. It is about the synthesis of youthfulness and maturity.
The new story is about seizing the day with action and experimentation. It is about allowing the now of today to be different from the now that was yesterday. In this fluid matrix of constant transformation, the new story is a foundation on which to build, and a place to rest.
On Friday I saw a map of my brain, and it was a gorgeous sight to behold.
The map was a set of graphics representing data from a QEEG (a scan that measures the electrical activity in the brain) that I had done last week at the Peak Brain Institute in Culver City. I had several rounds of neurofeedback sessions there between 2018 and 2020 when I was getting back on my feet after a very difficult relationship.
I’m not going to attempt to explain the science behind neurofeedback, but in a nutshell, it’s a noninvasive process that uses a visual reward system to adjust the quantity and location of various frequencies produced by the brain. These frequencies correlate (somewhat) to a person’s lived experience. Each human brain has its own frequency patterns, which develop over time and usually remain fairly consistent from day to day. This is partly why it’s so hard to change your life through insight and intention alone. Your brain is the rut you are stuck in. Neurofeedback is not a replacement for therapy and inner work, but it can help to make both more effective.
The QEEG I had last week was a checkup to see what’s changed in my neurological wiring since my last scan three years ago. Turns out, quite a lot.
On the left, my 2020 brain map showed angry red and orange hotspots — overproduction of high beta, which generally indicates hyper-vigilance, anxiety, and rumination. Check, check, and check. On the right, my 2023 map shows a calmer landscape mostly of cool green. A nation at peace after a longtime war. What a marvelous thing, to have this external validation of my internal experience.
Our emotions, behavioral patterns, and interpretations are all super subjective things, and it can be hard to trust our perception of them. Are we making progress, or just imagining it? Were things really as bad as they felt, and are they really any better now?
Subjectively, it’s true that I feel far more settled and at peace with myself, even through life’s inevitable ups and downs. Thanks to ongoing inner work, meditation, and better choices, I feel better able to navigate the rapids without crashing on the rocks. And here is the objective data to back it up; a literal picture of the mark that my efforts have made on my gray matter.
Neurofeedback was just one of the interventions I used to reshape my life. I have lots more to say about how I finally broke my worst habits, the tools that worked for me, how I deal with my emotions and challenges now (because of course they don’t ever go away!) Maybe I’ll write about it. Let me know if you want me to do that.
Until then, you’ll have to just take my word for it: Life can get better, when we attend to our old wounds. And I can prove it.