I am done with medications because medications cut me off from Source. PART ONE...
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Patrick Gaffney, a soft-spoken bodhisattva and the heart-son of my root teacher Sogyal Rinpoche, once quoted Winston Churchill at the end of a long summer retreat. I referenced that quote in episode 10 of my comic. It comes to mind again today. Why?
Because this is the last blog post that’s going to use Father. Mother. God. as my jumping off point. I don’t have any more episodes - or videos - standing by.
NOTE: The final episode of Father. Mother. God. (video above) is called Bashert. A Hebrew word for ‘meant to be’, bashert typically refers to a soulmate or a life partner. Destiny. Fate. Well friends, my destiny is to be medication-free. And my soulmate? For starters, that’s got to be me.
If (I should say, WHEN) more artwork is shared here, there’s a very good chance, aside from my soul scribing projects of last year, or making a quick iPhone recording of one of my songs, that I haven’t created it yet. Now of course, I can just keep writing the blog with words. No videos or artwork required. And yet. It feels like the training wheels are coming off. Like my focus is being stretched. Tension heightened. And that’s ironic, because when I tuned into what I should write about this week, I got the opposite topic, in a way. Going back on meds. Responding to crisis mode. Putting the training wheels back ON.
In Inheritance, I wrote about the closest I ever came to taking my own life, at age 19. And then my encounter with the writings of Chogyam Trungpa and the idea of basic goodness, which launched my subsequent journey into a new paradigm. I put the meds down, I put the opium down (I hung onto the weed and alcohol et al for decades more), and I took matters into my own hands. I eventually found the dharma and lasted seventeen years without prescription medications. There is a lot that could be said about those years, but not now.
Instead, I’m going to skip ahead to May 7, 2016, ten years ago next week, when my dad took his life on the eve of Mother’s Day. We had been estranged at this point for almost two years.1 This meant, in a way, that I had pre-grieved some aspects of his loss. I had done loads of therapy. Designed and held sacred ritual space with five other women to midwife me into a new identity, transforming my relationship to myself, and him, and his absence. But all that did nothing to prepare me for his actual passing. I wasn’t sober then, and while the drugs and alcohol were not enough, not nearly enough, I still couldn’t put them down. My marriage was in crisis, I was in a career transition (leaving my desk job and finally trying to build a creative business from scratch. In the midst of complex grief, a foolhardy idea, yet I persevered). And as the months of grief and emotional dysregulation wore on, my own SI (suicidal ideation) grew. And grew, quickly becoming a formidable foe. Before long, the main thing I could hope to accomplish in a day was, if I were lucky, to fight it and win.
My wife and I had moved into a house with an attached garage. I couldn’t even go in there without imagining my dad’s dying moments in his own garage. I had no sense of perspective. “I should just die” was the emotional response to pretty much everything. Every minor irritation, every setback. Even forgetting where I’d put something down, or why I’d walked into a room. “I should just die. You know how I could do it…” I couldn’t rank events according to urgency or importance. Every sensory or emotional input, no matter the size or subject, was a crisis. Executive functioning was entirely offline (this was years prior to my ADHD diagnosis, so honestly, I didn’t even know what executive functioning was. But I sure didn’t have it). And as I watched myself start to slip, I worried that I’d end up following in his footsteps. Not because I actively wanted to die, per se. Just because I was bound to lose the battle, one of these days. It was such a precarious daily grind. And the ways out were so close at hand. The garage was right there…
By the next summer, 2017, I was actively living in fear for my life. Therapy wasn’t enough. Meditation and mind-training wasn’t enough. I didn’t have any other tools, or even know that they existed, let alone where to find them. And so finally, in desperation, I got a referral to a psychiatrist. And after seventeen years without head meds, I started taking lithium, which, as far as psych drugs go, is ‘not that bad.’ By which I mean, it’s technically a naturally occurring substance. A member of the periodic table of elements. It’s in spring water and crazy water and cashews and walnuts and hey, in small doses in its natural form, it’s been relied on for probably thousands of years for its therapeutic effects as a mood stabilizer.
But in pharmaceutical formulations, it’s a bit different. The first thing that happened was my body broke out in hives. A systemic rash response across my legs, arms, and face. I looked like a red, puffy squirrel. I itched like crazy. I was traveling abroad at the time and I just kept taking whatever antihistamines I could find at the local pharmacies, and none of them touched it. Eventually it resolved itself. No harm, no foul, I guess? But the other thing that happened - within literally days of starting the medication - was that the floor was raised. My bottom, suddenly, wasn’t so dangerous. I could reach it, and rest on it, even, and stop the free-falling. The bottom didn’t feel good. But it didn’t reek of death, either. It was a safe place to recombobulate myself. Something had changed.
There are moments, like this one, where the meds work.2
Back now, in the summer of 2016 - it was the day before my 36th birthday when my brothers and I found out that our dad’s death was definitely a suicide. It had been two months since he died. We’d wondered all along, of course. Sudden death in a garage sounds pretty suspicious for a fit, able-bodied 64 year old man, even if you haven’t spoken to him lately. But the truth had been covered up, you see, by his second wife. She’d lied to the cops, lied to our entire family. She even tried to get the coroner’s report overturned when it was released, and it wasn’t until we got our hands on the full police report ourselves that the facts were finally brought to light.
When the police got to the house that night, there were two cars in the closed garage with our dad’s body. There were keys in both ignitions, and both engines were still warm. There was enough carbon monoxide trapped in the house that the fire department had to run massive fans to air it out before they’d let anyone back inside. It was no accident.
Inside, in the kitchen, was a Mother’s Day card for dad’s wife. And under it, as if to say “I give up. You win. Isn’t this what you wanted?,” was his life insurance policy. A policy he bought when I, his oldest child, was first born. A policy that we were always told was for us three kids. But he’d revised it, naming one primary beneficiary: her.3
When my brothers said to me, that July 4th morning after talking to our uncle, “Dad killed himself,” my response was three words. “Let’s do drugs.” But even the drugs I did that day did nothing to protect me from the latent SI that I always carried inside. I remember picking my way across some stones in a rushing Colorado river. Slipping on one of them, in the space of the half-second it took to regain my balance, in slid the thought “you’d be better off dead.” I was used to it. It happened all the time. By a year later though, it was constant, insidious, and more than I could bear. And the reason I mention this at all is because, in England that next summer, again with one of my brothers, but now on lithium, for maybe ten days or a week at most, there was a moment when, sleep-deprived, exhausted, crewing for him in a footrace that kept us all up for an insane amount of time, and after days of this systemic rash nonsense making my body an unbearable place to inhabit, I tripped over my own two feet while slowly running along the canals towards the finish line in London. And I didn’t think “you’d be better off dead.” I didn’t think anything at all. I just regained my balance, and kept shuffling along.
That’s the difference, when the meds work. It wasn’t fireworks (well, except for the rash). It was simply the absence of something that could have been lethal. If you didn’t know better, you might not even notice the change. The lithium was working. But that did not mean that I was ever supposed to take it forever.
To be continued…
His second wife had made him choose between his three adult kids and her. tl;dr, we lost.
The rash subsided. The dry mouth and thirst persisted. Tradeoffs I was willing to make.
I remember years earlier, before we’d become fully estranged, my dad mentioned to me, almost in passing, that his new wife was insisting he update the policy and leave it to her instead of his children. He seemed uneasy sharing this news with me, uncomfortable with the ramifications of it. And of course, I vehemently protested. But in the end, his wounds overrode his ability to stand up for himself, or us. In active addiction, all our better judgment goes ignored.
