Journal Entry - July 19, 2011

The buzzing-and-grinding has returned to my brain. How can a small pink pill make it stop? But it does. Can I allow even this? Can the buzz be a hum that sings me awake? Can the grind refine me to an easy surrender? To just this? All is aching for God. But the ache is in a fundamentally incorrect assumption that God is not here. The eyes are wide with searching; searching for what? All is already given. There is nothing lost; therefore nothing to be found. 

Still stimulus everywhere! It's too much. Can I just breathe? Fragmented thoughts, swirling. Can I catch one? Watch the turmoil of my being, and contemplate its return. Returning, returning, all returns. I can clamp my eyes shut and try not to see while the entire process I witnessing effortlessly.

Probably the most profound realization is this: A pill cannot stop anything. Only I can. Unnecessary reliance on the exterior is shadow-hugging, ignoring my own capacity to stop the incessant obsessing. Somehow I was made victim of a monster called OCD. The anxiety and scrupulosity that have been for years "attacking me from the outside" are nothing more than cut-off and alienated parts of my self: Excitement to experience the world in its fullness, desire to create a life of my own, capability to make decisions for myself--all numbed and dumbed down by repressive rules and others' agendas. They turn against me under the insidious disguise of a diagnosed disorder that no longer fits, that I now disown.

Worry. Fear. Anxiety. Guilt. Dread. My whole lot my whole life. Every day, I wake up with a sour pit churning my stomach. "What did I do wrong?" "Who's mad at me?" are the first thoughts to rudely intrude my conscious mind. I was raised to believe that God is watching, and a little disappointedly at that, in everything I do. No one thing caused the belief--it was a perfect storm of poison, dose by dose absorbed into my bloodstream. Have to do right, think right, believe right, say right. . . Or what?! I don't know.

Though having left that world behind (I think), the leftover pathogens creep and crawl into my new habitat. The ego has changed costumes. Apparently I am "more aware," "more awake," "more mature," "higher up the mountain of evolved consciousness"; but it's the same shit: The "should" dilemma demands my very freedom and haunts my every thought, paralyzing my ability to fluidly act, think, speak, be. I feel guilt if I don't meditate, failure if I don't reach a particularly aimed-for state, worry if I eat something not organic, fear and paranoia of losing sleep if I drink too much caffeine, dread to fulfill a teaching commitment with hopes that no one shows so I don't have to deal with my own self-criticizing insecurity. . . "Is this okay? Am I okay?"--sheepishly looking over my shoulder for the proverbial head-nod from some authority outside myself. Still obsessed with do-it-right-say-it-right-think-it-right. . .even be-spiritual-right. And if I don't? I still have not found out. "Something bad for sure," it says. Something bad for sure.

I am now off medication for the first time in fifteen years and nothing is clear. The liberating power of having done it myself is intoxicating, but no clue what to do next; never functioned without the synthetic chemicals doing it for me. This goes deeper than neurological malfunction and pharmaceutical weaponry anyway--this is shadow itself; this is the mind, my mind, and the mind is only the mind is only the mind is the only the mind. This is the mouth of the lion; the mainframe motherboard; the heart of the beast; the root of disease. This is my wound dealt with a deadly blow that only the precision of a surgeon's hand can heal. And this is my offering to the world in its despair, my gladness to its hunger, the "touch my side" sign of real pain endured, my thorn of sufficient grace, and the wound by which I heal the world.