The Power of Naming: Diagnosis and Destiny

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. “
--Anais Nin

I have been preparing to launch this Blog again. Like so many other people I know--spiritual seekers and personal-growth devotees, witches and healers and mothers and lovers—2012 was an expansive and terrifying fast-forward into the so-called New Paradigm.

In addition to the breakup that happened in the beginning of the year in March, a breakdown followed in August. It seems somehow linked to the sacrifice of my words at Lammas... when I threw unsent letters on the fire. When I sang to myself “I am dancing/In the Whirlwind/I am dancing/On the thorns/ I am dancing/with the fire/I am dying/I am born.” Words were one of the things I had to lose or let go of for a while. Maybe that is the real reason I put down this blog.

Just recently, a friend gave me a book “In Case of Spiritual Emergency: Moving Successfully Through Your Awakening” by Catherine G Lucas

So now, with Mercury in Retrograde muddling up communications in the mundane world but fast-tracking intuition, I launch into this enterprise with biblio-mancy and turn to a page in the middle of the book:

“Jung has to deal with fear, fear of losing his mind, “the fear of death, which spread like poison everywhere in my body, and just plain fear:

“You dread the depths; it should horrify you, since the way of what is to come leads through it. You must endure the tempation of fear and doubt and at the same time acknowledge to the bone that your fear is justified and your doubt is reasonable....I have had to recognize that I must submit to what I fear, yes, even more, that I must love what horrifies me.”

My spiritual emergency, my breakdown, my moment of crisis happened this Summer when I could not stop my thoughts. Such a simple thing, thoughts. Poets love to gambol through a mine-field of thoughts and images, ranting Ginsbergs, transcendental Whitmans, spastic slammers and mystic Beats. I wanted to be Hafiz spinning in dissolution, losing myself in God. I was for a period of time so inspired that I had moments where I lost time writing. When this started happening at work, when I could not make the words go away when I wanted to, I began to fear for my sanity. Distracted, crying, tormented by something as seemingly innocuous as the white noise of our new building's ventilation system, I finally realized there was a dark side to this dervish dance. I thought of the poets who did not make it- I thought of Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath-- I knew I did not want to end up with my head in an oven.


A flippant thought, perhaps, just another metaphor (poets eat death for breakfast, so why should I be afraid of a thought?) Why not dance with the muse, with the Red Shoes, until she tired of me and moved on to some other soul to devour? Why should I be afraid of pain, when it was my lifeblood, my destiny, my identity? Yet it persisted, this sense that I could not stop-- my thoughts, my dervish spinning, my tragic manic love stories. I could not stop falling in love. In the course of two months I had fallen in love with married men, with a voice over the phone, with a collision with a distant friend—but it was not love or lust at all it was fear-- my own darkness and despair personified. I could not land in my own skin. I only felt safe dancing, in community, at friend's houses, in the incestuous Nirvana online.

So one day, after a crying jag that did not stop, I left work early, and called the psychiatric emergency number on the back of my therapist's business card. They referred me to a small office in Salem, MA, where I talked to a woman about getting the help I needed. After 7 years successfully navigating depression without drugs, I wanted something to take the edge off. She told me that I had the option of going into an outpatient mental health program at Beverly hospital. They would give me medication, start me right away so I wouldn't have to wait a month for it to take affect. I could attend 12-Step like classes, participate in group therapy, and if I did well I could go back to work in a week.

At first I wanted to protest. I just had one bad day. For the most part, I was holding my shit together. I was terrified of being considered a wimp, a cop-out, a failure at living the life I had chosen for myself. Then I called my Mom, who has struggled with another member of our family who is troubled by mental illness. She was compassionate. She asked me, do I need this? I said I had a week more vacation days this year than I had last. She said use them. She encouraged me not to be ashamed. So I submitted myself to the system, to be analyzed, my poetry and my preoccupations with identity, relationship, and loss turned into a diagnosis of major depression (not really a big surprise there) and a secondary diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder .

I had gone into this program in a spirit of surrender, hitting my personal rock-bottom like they say in 12-Step program recovery. I knew that something more than depression was going on, suspecting that I might have slipped into a bipolar manic episode since I had not been sleeping and I couldn't stand to be alone in my apartment. I was prepared to humble myself, but I was not prepared to hear something about myself that seemed so derogatory, such a sentence of doom.

So little is really known about borderline personality disorder. Hollywood has made cartoon monsters out of those who suffer this disease. My friends mocked me when I try to describe what this has been for me. Come on, they suggested, you've never slashed an ex's car tires. You don't boil bunnies. I remember in my teens seeing “Fatal Attraction” and crying for hours. Before Glen Close's character was revealed to be a killer, I deeply identified with her. I remember seeing the scene where she collapses listening the opera to “Madame Butterfly” and feeling deep empathy for her. It disturbed me, how everyone else cheered when she met her end, a suburban housewife's avenging Fury, a modern Wicked Witch of the West, like my hero, Morgan-Le-Fey.) Did I know then some kind of kinship with that kind of intensity, that kind of self-torment in the name of desire?

There power in naming. We know this as writers, as magic workers-- to name a thing a thing is to begin to understand it. To name a thing is to bring it out of the void, out of the unknown and terrifying into known and seen. To name a fear is to begin to find the courage to face it. This July, when I renewed my commitment to my Wiccan path, I asked my priestess-teacher to give me a name. Ok, she said, but is it something you want to keep or want to work through, want to move past? I said give me a name that is a challenge. So I take on this diagnosis of the doctors, who presume to know me and measure and assess me after a few mere hours of discussion, as something to move past. I take this definition as an opportunity to start from scratch and redefine myself, to know where I am going by knowing where I have been and where I am.

When I read that one of the characteristics of BDP is “idealization and demonization” of a loved one, I shrugged and I said, that doesn't sound like a disorder, that sounds like poetry. It is true, that like many women poets, I shroud my dependency and fears of attachment and abandonment in the language of myth and metaphor. I have always compared lovers to mythological characters, to angels and demons, mysterious strangers, the ultimate Other. I have always needed a dark and a light muse to inspire me and yes, obsess me. The fact that I hold my wrath, my rage, my Fury inside, only releasing it through the rarefied pain of art, doesn't lessen its reality.

So seeking answers I read the book "The Buddha and the Borderline", a memoir of a woman who started an advocacy program for BPD. The author Kiera Van Gelder turns to Buddhism and its concepts of non-attachment to find a spiritual answer to her suffering. She undergoes therapy, and turns her focus on rallying for support for fellow sufferers who have been stigmatized and misunderstood. I found a lot of resonance in her story, although fortunately I have never had a suicide attempt (though many passive suicidal thoughts wrapped up in the language of poetry and obsessive journal writing). I have never had to stay overnight in a hospital. I used the book to find, as they say in 12-step groups, “Experience, Strength and Hope.” I used her experiment, suggested by her doctor, of not sleeping with her new love interest for three months, as an opportunity to really look at my struggles with sexual compulsion, rage, dependency, fear of need and attachment—clinging to image and obsession as a focus when the world starts to dissolve around me in a whirlwind of thought and fear.

Looking back at my journals (there are 20 years of scribblings in various notebooks of so many shapes and sizes) I find that I had some innate understand of my own condition when I wrote describing myself as a kind of Incredible Hulk, mild-mannered and meek until the beast of Need were aroused by the immanent fear of attachment. “Don't make me need you” I might say, “You wouldn't like me when I am needy”.... Fear of attachment, fear of abandonment, dancing in frenzied circles, with broken feet, on thorns, on broken glass. The only hope I believed I had was to draw completely inward, never speaking of these experiences. If I loved you, you were guaranteed to never see all of me, lest you run away in terror. From my earliest explorations into relationship, I knew this. “I'm in love with you”, I once confessed to a boy-writer whose words I worshiped, “but don't take it as a threat.”

What I have learned from personal growth work is that there is no possibility for intimacy without authenticity. If you do not know me—if I will not let you see me—there is no possibility for you to love me. There is no possibility for me to love you, merely create an artistic fetish object out of your image, carrying out secret rituals of emotional bloodletting before my hidden idol. From an early age, I feared there is no possibility of love at all, merely compulsion, predator and prey, false bonds of guilt and habit or the free-fall excitement of desire. And whenever one of I hear one of the Shalom Mountain Principles and Skills of Loving, which says “Love is a response to Need, “ I still cringe inside.

Yet a wellspring of hope has come from this experience. During the summer when I had my fall from grace, I had a friend come and spend time with me after each day of the Day Program. It was early afternoon August, Gloucester at her most glorious. We walked on the Boulevard. We listened to each other's stories, crying and cheering on each other's growth. Her nurturing, deeply embodied presence and passion walked beside me, laughing, shining with a desire for life—to swim, to dance, to risk herself in love. At the end of the day, we stood with our feet in the water, gazing out over the harbor, watching the sky change. Sometimes we talked, about Mary Oliver and other poetry, about God and Goddess, about our secret crushes, and sometimes just stood in companionable silence, breathing in the beauty and the presence of the Summer afternoon.

On this snowy-rainy-dreary February day, I can look across the street and see that same ocean, but not the same ocean. I can remember the eternity of those afternoons, when the insights and exhaustion of the half-day of classes on self-awareness and ineffective behavior patterns would dissolve into rocks and water under our feet, and wondrous colors and and shimmering pageantry of clouds overhead. I can remember and breathe in that gratitude, write and re-experience that awakening, knowing its depths. And I can feel inspired to tell my real story, begin to reach out into the world and share my truth, share my experience, strength and hope, hope my dark journey can light a stranger's way.

Poem: The Kindness of Ipswich Graveyards

The Kindness of Ipswich Graveyards

I love the kindness
of Ipswich graveyards

From inside the apartment
it looks cold
but the Gloucester fog
is soft against my cheek
grey as the down of
dandelions

the ones we picked in the graveyard
and I blew with all my breath laughing
do I make a wish?
I asked you
You wish,
you said,
that my neighbor has a taste
for dandelion salad

and with just a hint of guilt
I watch those fluffy invaders
float into a stranger's yard

But I came here for
kindness
so I shook it off and
followed you

your ponderous gait
your Mayflower name
into the unique New England serenity
of trees and green and stone

I followed you
when I wanted to sprint to the top of the hill

but I was here for
kindness
so I stayed with you on the ground
bending over the markers

to you
it was a hotbed of
Hollywood gossip
Come here to the edge-
Let me show where the sinners are buried
markers with no name
facing away from holy ground


I noticed the wings
under the skull of the
mortal angel
and I wanted to run my fingers over the grooves
between the teeth and wings
capture it between paper and charcoal

but you told me rubbing graves
erodes the stones
and only historians have that right

and I was here to do no harm
so a picture
had to be immortality enough

Then I heard you laugh
coming up short at a stone

with just a date and a finger pointing up
“Well” you said smugly
"He knows exactly where he's going"

I crept closer to take a picture
12 years
I saw imprinted on the stone

How kind I thought
How kind to die at 12 years old
knowing exactly where you are going

To meet the grinning angel
unafraid
enveloped in soft grey mist
as innocent and
delicious
as dandelions