Epic

This morning, while on the pot, (I washed my hands, I promise) I read an interesting profile in Rolling Stone about Jamie Tworkowski, the teen-suicide-Internet-sensation, and founder of TWLOHA, a non-profit organization committed to providing an Internet outlet for suicidal teens.  His approach to extending a digital hand out to troubled teens has rocked the stately (and some would say archaic) institution of teen suicide prevention, consisting of stuffy psychiatrists in even stuffier offices or mental hospitals with padded doors doling a litany of pills.

Jamie Tworkowski has focused on love and faith and showing kids they aren’t alone in the world, through his TWLOHA website and Myspace page, and now at speeches at schools and community centers.  In the high school world, he’s viewed as a messiah/rock star, some combination of a Jonas Brother and Jesus.

What struck me in this article, though, was a line of dialogue he used at the end: “I want things to be epic.  And everyday life isn’t epic.”

Jamie’s a bit younger than I am, but this line cut me to the core (and almost made me fall off the pot), because I claim to be a writer and this surfer turned teen-angst guru found the words to express how I feel about my life and my expectations for life.  I, of course, being the 30-something, would never use the word epic to describe my dilemma, me being so not cool it’s rather embarrassing, but the way Jamie boiled down his mental struggle everyday was precisely how I feel.

I want things to be epic (colossal, monumental, tremendous) but everyday is not epic.  In fact, every week is not epic, most months are not epic, looking back I’ve lived years that weren’t epic.  So what do you when your expectation for life is on an epic level?  And, where in the hell did we learn to expect this from life?

I see life as a runner on a treadmill.  Life is in decent shape, looks to run a couple times a week, and is handling Level 5 quite well.  Then we turn up the Level to 6 and Life continues along, pumping it’s arms, puffing a bit, but still steady.  Then we turn the dial to 27 and Life looks at us like we are crazy before spinning off the rolling exercise machine.

Everyday I wake up with a feeling that something special can happen.  I think this is probably a common mindset for humanity throughout time.  I’m assuming cavemen woke up with thoughts of downing a wooly mammoth that afternoon.  Humans are strivers, always have been, always will be, our imaginations stretch the possibility, turn the level of that life treadmill up a notch or two, but my generation grew up on television, with movies, and I’ll admit to the fact that I grew up understanding relationships (because I didn’t have a strong example at home) through Dylan and Kelly on 90210.  I knew that 90210 was a television show, wasn’t real, but still, I wanted to be Dylan McKay.  I wanted to be with Kelly.  And maybe at some point the lines of reality and fantasy might have gotten crossed to where I expected that type of passion, that type of intensity in my relationships.  My relationship expectations grew to epic proportions.  And real life events can live up to those expectations, can they; no, Life spins off the treadmill trying to keep up.

I find myself constantly disappointed, and I never really knew why until I read that quote by Jamie Tworkowski, ironically, the leader of a movement focusing on reaching out to teens contemplating suicide, doing drugs, drinking, possible struggling with the disparity between fantastical expectations for the world and themselves and the reality, factors that Jamie Tworkowski himself struggles with, and I do too.

Maybe the linchpin of all this disappointment stems with the desire for today to live up to epic expectations and the impossibility of the real world to keep up with our imaginations.

Who the hell knows.

Deficiency

I don’t usually like to get too personal on these posts.  Other writers seem to be able to cut themselves open on their blogs and not feel weird about, or maybe they spend a lot of time scrubbing their naked bodies with a Brillo pad under scalding water in the shower and we just don’t witness this.  A lot is made about the fragility of an artist.  I still remember No Doubt’s best record, “Tragic Kingdom”, how it portrayed a terrible breakup of Gwen Steffani and her guitarist ex-boyfriend (interesting how I can’t remember his name) and how powerful it was; or Alanis Morrisette’s “Jagged Little Pill” (not sure why all the female artists albums are coming to me now) album, which put out for the world to see, Alanis’s angst and broken heart.  Maybe that’s part of my problem as an artist, in that, I’m a very private emotional person.  A lot of things go on in my life, a lot of issues, and I’m not comfortable, never have been comfortable, sharing them with even my best friends and family, and I think they can sense this, in some way, that I’m hiding things from them and maybe this inhibits us from having as great relationships as I would wish.

My brother left today to go back to San Diego, where he lives, about as far away from us as he can be, and I understand why he lives there, understand this intimately as it was a desire for me to be as far away from my family as I possible could be.  I don’t think that growing up in my family was anywhere as horrible as some stories I’ve heard about kids being locked in cages and girls being raped by their fathers and dealing with alcoholic/drug-addicted mothers, but I will say that all four of us (my siblings and I) have developed into individuals who seem in some way incapable of dealing with a lot of things the world has for us.  In our own ways we are deficient, and all kind of hopeless in fixing the internal issues that impede us.

I don’t know where this came from.  I just know that I have a difficult time processing and dealing with emotions of any nature, whether happiness or sadness, and find it foreign that others can seamlessly absorb a stimulus, have a physiologic response, and move onto the next event.  It’s like my body doesn’t know how to react, how to bring the correct chemicals in my brain together, to produce an apparent reaction, so I appear numb to the whole process.

And I feel numb.  My brother has just backed down the driveway in my mother’s car, on his way to O’Hare airport to go back to San Diego, not to return until God-knows-when, and I know I should feel sad about this, know that emotion is in there somewhere, but I can’t bring it to the service, can’t let it release, whether I want to cry or pound my fist against the wall or go to sleep for fifteen hours or go to the gym and run until I can’t stand.

I feel an incredible nothingness.  And I don’t believe that’s normal.

There’s been some really painful things that have happened in my life since I came back to Chicago this summer and I have no clue what to do with the emotions I feel over them.  They seem to be sitting in my chest or floating around in my head, as though waiting to be called to the forefront and dealt with, in whatever way such feelings are dealt with by normal people, but I don’t know how to do this, so they drift around and latch onto other feelings and emotions and grow and feed off of whatever they feed off of until I really can’t ignore or repress them anymore.  But even then, I’m not sure how to slay these particular dragons, and have found through practice that drinking a lot or running five miles on the treadmill at the gym or listening to Nirvana at ear-splitting decimals or watching porn or messaging on Facebook or packing my bags and moving to Costa Rica doesn’t help.

So, here, now, in the new way I’ve come up with to deal with my sour emotions, I’ll start small and hope it helps.

Good bye brother.  I’ll miss you.