My First Big Break
This morning, when I was on the phone with a friend, I was talking to her about my last visit to a shrink and how he'd wanted to discuss re-visiting my first break from reality, in the spring of 1994. He thought we should approach it from both a clinical and mythical perspective and see if I could get a better sense of what had happened to me, since it all continues to trouble me...Talking to my friend this morning, I articulated what happened for the first time in years. I had pretty much forgotten about it, but speaking about it again I began to remember just how Real it all seemed when it was occurring. And it probably was - I just haven't been able to integrate the experience into my consciousness in a way that it serves me, though certainly I have tried.
I want to say something about it here...it so much easier to talk about it than "write" about it, and you may understand why in a moment. It was the spring of 1994 and I was working on about thirty credits, (no lie) and papers about all kinds of different topics. Yet, they all seemed to bleed into one another, with writing a little bit over here on this topic affecting what was happened with this topic over here.
By the time I finished the semester, I was a total basket case...my thesis was called "ReWriting the World," and I was convinced I was stuck inside some insane narrative story of my own making. I mean, to a degree, who isn't? But in this particular waking dream, I was convinced that I had the power to write things and make them come true - which was fun, for awhile, but then I began to get really scared about having all this power.
I went in search of someone who could help me and I met this old shamanic looking cat in a coffee shop on Haight Street (which, of course, seems absurd and funny, but that was part of it, it was just so narratively perfect, as everyhing was at that point.) And he told me that I had to dip all my pens in sea salt to break the spell, but that I needed this special sea salt that formed in a cave near the Sutra Baths.
Of course, I almost drowned trying to find this psycho salt, but when it was all said and done with, my pens and my ability no longer had any affect on the world. And I was so deeply utterly lost...I went home, and totally despondent at what I'd done, I started seeing shrinks to try and pull all of that into meaning. I saw astrologers too, and psychics and channelers, but it was then that I began to feel crazy pretty much all the time.
Looks terrible in print. Much funnier when I told the story.
posted by by gregoryp(tm) aka Gregory Pleshaw @ 3:20 PM
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