Coming into focus

The original name for this blog was Eye of the Brainstorm. This name appealed to me because I liked the idea of the calm within the storm, the idea of finding peace despite the persistent unease of my mind. But calm is not what I need. My existence, over most of its 24 years, has tended toward an increasing calm at the cost of life, a numbness called upon in emergencies to cover wounds too deep and shocking to bear. This numbness grew into a lens through which I viewed all of life; I constantly searched for and guarded against the threatened pain beyond the horizon. To protect against old and new pain, to hold together a spirit never allowed to heal, I was forced to maintain an increasing emotional rigidity, to never reach so far out in pursuit of a hope that an old wound could be reopened. Calm is what I have, but it is not what I need.

I came to see the danger of this lifeless calm by my last year of college. Over the four years I spent in college, my ability to motivate myself withered significantly. I always managed to hold it together well enough that one had to look closely to see my internal stagnation; I maintained good grades, wrote an honors-worthy thesis, kept up with friends. But I spent the better part of my days in a haze of emptiness, dull guilt, and the ever-available distractions of the internet and television. School was not hard enough to force me into real activity, and I felt hopeless at the prospect of ever motivating myself.

I thus sought a source of external motivation upon graduation, and I joined a program that put recent college graduates into struggling and under-resourced schools. I was placed in a rural region in New Mexico, living and soon teaching in a town of 20,000 that lies on the edge of the Navajo Nation. This is when things got really bad. While I was relieved to finally be doing something that mattered, and while I truly loved my students, every day was a living hell: not being able to meet the demands placed on me (internally and externally), dreading school from the moment my alarm went off, sitting exhausted and defeated and sobbing after I got home. Thankfully, my mother and best friend convinced me to go on antidepressants and my life became bearable again, but still very difficult. I never had enough to give my kids, and I never had anything left over to give anyone else in my life: my internal resources were completely dried up. I realized that no amount of approbation, of prestige, of doing what I thought I was "supposed" to do, was worth feeling this bad. It was finally okay for me to radically change my life because the path I'd always seen myself on--honors, brilliance, success--was not worth living if it felt like this.

I left New Mexico at the end of the school year, thus breaking my two-year commitment to the (prestigious) teaching program I had joined. I decided to move to an urban area so I could find a good therapist, and to my great fortune a friend from college convinced me to move out to green and sunny Oakland, CA. My decision to make this move grew from my burgeoning awareness that it is necessary (and thus okay, according to my poor twisted conscience) for me to seek happiness.

Immediately upon moving to Oakland I found a job working for a lawyer; within a couple of months I'd found a good therapist. I grew progressively unhappy in my job because my boss treated employees and customers extremely badly, and while my depression was not as bad as it had been in New Mexico, I was desperate to find a new job, a difficult task in this economy. This situation created the circumstances for my second, even more radical, departure from the status quo in pursuit of happiness.

A close friend, who saw how miserable I was in my job, offered to help support me financially until I was able to find a new job so that I could quit. Because my friend comes from a wealthy family, he has access to considerable resources and it was not a hardship for him to offer this support. But what a prospect! I was raised to believe that hard work and responsibility are the most fundamental qualities of a good person. I believed (and still have a hard time not believing) that my worth as a human being is directly correlated to the work I produce. I feared that I would feel guilty--nay, be guilty--for accepting such a generous gift and temporarily leaving the work force. But again, my misery outweighed my reservations, and I stepped out onto a completely unfamiliar path.

I am now three months into this path. For the first couple of months I took a much-needed rest from work and focused purely on therapy and putting the pieces of my new life together. More recently I have built up enough energy to start looking for work again. I am seeking a job that will place light enough demands on my time and energy that I can maintain focus on what I am now fully committed to as the main point of my life: finding my happiness.

My hiatus from the world of recognized "honors, brilliance, success" may seem like a retreat, an attempt to burrow into that suffocating calm, but nothing could be further from the truth. By questioning the standards of success that I absorbed from my society, by recognizing my own inner needs and risking judgment and disapproval (not only from others but also, most damagingly, from myself), I took steps that were possible only because I had courage. I am now learning how to grow this courage. I hope to use this blog to chronicle my thoughts and observations as I learn how to use courage in my everyday decisions, reach out further in pursuit of hopes, risk pain, and find life.