Autumn Christian's Blog

For years I’ve had a recurring dream of being lost. Sometimes I get fired from my job and kicked out of my apartment. Other times, an old boyfriend breaks up with me, and I don’t know where I’m going to live anymore. I wander through labyrinthine hallways of memories, through seaside apartments and nighttime suburbs, searching for a place to go.

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Then I remember that I’m married. I actually do have a home. At any time, I can choose to leave my confusion and go home. I’m flooded with relief, like I’ve burst through a bubble of warped delusion. I run out the closest door in the direction of him. The sun rockets back into existence. I wake up.

I am not afraid of losing my love. I am afraid of forgetting that it exists entirely. I am afraid that it will become something I’ve buried in my heart, in the substrate of me, like a little treasure without a map to guide me back to its location. I am afraid that I will wander the earth searching for a thing I already possess.

Before I met Robert I didn’t know that love was supposed to feel like home. I thought that home was a thing I was destined to lose. In the early years of us dating I’d travel to writing conventions and have complete bawling meltdowns in airports and hotels. I’d sob myself to sleep because I became convinced that he’d be gone by the time I came back.

But he was always there when I returned.

He pulled the bedsheets over my exhausted body and for the first time in days I’d be able to sleep without nightmares. My nervous system relaxed in his familiar presence. I was home.

I was home.

Someone asked me to write a piece about soulmates a few weeks ago. Even if you don’t believe in the concept of soulmates, you still probably want one. Even if you don’t believe in things like souls, or fate, or eternity, you want someone who can touch the deepest parts of you and make you better than what you are. You want a love that is so all-encompassing and compelling that it holds you in its thrall and transforms you for its purpose.

I wish that I could give advice on how to find the love of your life. I wish that I could explain how to become the kind of person who is worthy of such a great love. But I can’t. When I met Robert I was a walking wreck, and in many ways so was he. (I told him once that he reminded me of a great horseshoe crab who’d been stepped on, and through its cracks the secrets of the universe were oozing out.) I was enamored with the idea of my life being a tragedy. I was going to live in such an epically bad way that people would be left gasping after my inevitable suicide. My oeuvre was going to be a violent blow to existence itself. I’d be such a beautiful victim of God.

I can’t give advice, but I can say that when I was with him, it felt like for the first time in my life there was a different way to write my story.

When I was 20 years old I moved to Austin with pretensions of being a starving artist. I’d dropped out of college and started writing $15 articles for eHow about taxes and gardening. (Things I knew nothing about.) Several months later, I ended up at a place called ‘The Dead End’, with about ten other people, including heroin addicts, burners, rage addicts, and an alcoholic bipolar artist that I was dating. (Sort of, but not really.) After a few months of drinking whiskey on the balcony and tripping on shrooms near the backyard fire pit, I wasn’t getting much writing done and I needed money. So my Dad told me to apply for a video game testing job at a nearby company called Edge of Reality.

I got called in for an interview. I got lost on the way there and barely made it in time. I walked into the huge building feeling disoriented and out of place. The receptionist escorted me to a glass interview room. There were three people on the other side of the table, including Robert. I shrugged out of my huge coat and sank into the seat in my ill fitting black dress and worn out boots.

I thought I bombed the interview but later that day I got an email with a job offer. I tried to quit my first day when I read the Dev notes in my email and panicked because I couldn’t understand any of it. Robert talked me out of it and insisted I needed time to learn the job. So I stayed.

Several of the employees called me retarded behind my back because I was so quiet and unassuming. I didn’t have a good sense of my worth, but Robert did. He told me I was intelligent before I understood or believed it myself. He stood up for me behind the scenes when other employees expressed their doubt about my abilities. He gave me tasks that I myself didn’t believe I could complete. But I did, and my self-confidence grew. Robert placed me on load testing and certs, which was one of the more complicated divisions of testing. Once a dev came to me and said he couldn’t replicate a complicated crash bug that I’d written a report for. I went over to his desk and picked up the controller and reproduced it within a few seconds. His jaw dropped. I heard him bragging about me to Robert and the producer, Jim, from across the cubicle divide. “Autumn is amazing!” He said. I’d never thought I was amazing before. Robert was the first person I’d known who’d really committed to bringing it out of me.

A few months into my job, my “boyfriend” broke up with me and I had a complete meltdown. I was kicked out of the Dead End. Robert found me in tears at work the next day and took me to talk in the parking lot. I felt like I couldn’t function. I didn’t know where I was going to live. But Robert had just moved out of his apartment and still had a month left on his lease. He offered to let me live there until I figured something out. I agreed.

He came and picked me up from the dead end after I packed my meager belongings - a couple clothes and some Philip K. Dick books, and took me to the apartment. I helped him clean up all the discarded cigarette packs and Coke cans. I made a joke about how he shouldn’t leave me alone with his sword and bottle of whiskey.

I said it laughingly, but he just stared at me and said, “Autumn, if you want to kill yourself, I can’t stop you.”

I’d expected him to be another person to rail against. I was used to people trying to curb my bad behaviors, treating me like a child, trying to “help me.” I wanted him to be horrified at my joke so that I’d have an excuse to rage, to feel like a trapped victim yet again.

He did none of those things. Instead, he stepped aside and told me that I was the one in control of myself. Nobody else I knew had ever tried to make me understand that I had agency over my own decisions.

That moment changed the entire trajectory of my life. It was like a florid bullet that pierced through the shell of my misconception of self and pushed its way toward my heart.

Robert ended up taking a job at BioWare in Canada. I cried when I heard the news. I’d never cried for anyone like that, and it seemed inappropriate to cry about your boss. I even heard a song he’d recommended while driving home, and that made me cry again. I didn’t know I was already in love with him.

I ended up taking a job as a designer in Seattle. I didn’t see him for several years after that, not until I came back to visit Austin and he had moved back as well. I threw a little party and invited him. I didn’t actually expect him to come, but he was the first one to arrive.

He said, “People are usually too intimidated to invite me to things. But you did. So I figured I’d show up.” We ended up going on a date the next night, before I had to leave to go back home.

I’d never remembered being so nervous before. I couldn’t believe someone like him was giving me attention. I felt unworthy, unfamiliar with myself. I’d gotten used to acting coy and silly, creating a kind of charming little shroud around myself. But every time I started to tell a glib half-truth, he’d look at me in a way that I could tell he saw right through it. It thrust me out of my own body so I could actually observe myself, and I saw how delusional I’d become. I knew that with him only the truth would be acceptable, but I’d been so twisted up over the years I didn’t even know what the truth might be.

Yet even through all that, he smiled at me with such naked affection. He listened intently to all my silly little half-truths, and responded to them seriously. He was not afraid of his own earnestness.

Later at the airport I texted him, “I’m glad that I know you.” He told me afterwards that because of that text he made it his mission to have me. He said the text was so pointed, so thoughtful, that he realized I actually loved him.

Back in Seattle I texted him, crouched in a bathroom that was decorated like the Red Room in Twin Peaks, while my friends drank in the next room. I told him I was at a “liminal point” in my life because I didn’t want to admit to myself yet that I wanted to throw away everything to be with him.

I’d call him after work as I sat on the rooftop of my building and made stupid jokes about how I wanted to throw myself off of it. That was my way of flirting. I clung to his voice across the line. Then we’d stay up late, talking until 4 or 5 in the morning. It felt like I didn’t need sleep anymore. I’d bounce into work on one hour of sleep, smiling, blood made of fire. I barely ate, either. Sometimes I’d bop over to the corner store grocery and buy a bottle of wine, but I didn’t feel like I needed food anymore.

I sent him pictures of myself drinking coffee or Redbull, or looking out a window with a half smile. He was 2000 miles away, and yet I felt his presence bathing my perception in a new light. Every mundane moment took on special significance. Everything became better, more joyful and more exquisite, when I was being perceived by him. He made me beautiful.

At some point I decided I was going to move back to Texas. I wanted to take things slow. I was hesitant. I thought I’d move to Denton and work with my dad, and then meet up with Robert in Austin on the weekends.

But it didn’t matter how quickly, or slowly, I tried to take things with him. I was not in control like that. I could not put a leash on my affection. I was in love. I’d bitten down on a star and it’d exploded in my mouth.

Besides, that, he saw right through my attempts at safeguarding my feelings from him. He was kind about it, but he made it clear that keeping him at a distance would not improve our chances of success. We both had to be all the way in.

And I wanted him.

I wanted him so badly that I knew if I didn’t pursue him with all the power that I possessed, that I’d regret it for the rest of my life.

So one night I held my breath in, felt the tight nervousness in my body, and exhaled. I told him I wanted to move in with him. In the next few days he sent me a video of the new apartment he’d leased for us.

I quit my job and bought a one-way plane ticket to Austin. My flight was at 4 A.M., and I didn’t sleep all night. All of my friends and I went out to a bar last night and I kissed my ex goodbye through a mesh window. I arrived that morning in Austin wearing thigh-high socks and a little miniskirt. He waited for me at the bottom of the escalator, leaning against a pillar. We embraced. I was still so nervous I couldn’t look him in the eyes.

In the car he put his hand on my leg and smiled at me and said, “I’m so glad you’re finally here.”

He drove us to our new apartment. We crossed the threshold and for the first time, I came home.

I wish I could say that this was the end of our storybook romance. That I could close the book here because everything that came after was just awash in a glow that was so brilliant and so boring it didn’t even warrant an epilogue.

Of course, it didn’t happen like that. I was only twenty-four years old and running on familiar destructive patterns. And when I think back to those first years together, a lot of them are fragmented. My memory turns on itself, smashes itself apart, eats itself. Little moments bob in and out of my awareness, buoyed out of the dark. I barely understood who I was. I was hopeless when it came to understanding the world around me. My perception came to me fractured. I didn’t know at the time I had borderline personality disorder, or PTSD, or had been running on a script of self-destruction. I just felt lost.

I remember one evening after Robert got home from work he ordered us some Chinese food. I was so exhausted that I couldn’t even get up from bed to eat it. He came to the bed and kissed me and said, “That’s alright, baby. It’s in the fridge when you want it.” It was such a simple gesture, but I’d never felt such overwhelming love before. I could tell in that moment that he wanted nothing for me except my happiness.

And I also remember sobbing alone in a theater while watching a Nick Cave documentary, assaulted by an alienating loneliness because I was convinced that he no longer loved me, and I would be consigned to being alone. Even his love for me couldn’t stop me from trying to run familiar scripts of pain.

Home is not a thing that waits for you. It’s a thing you have to build. All those years ago Robert drove to pick me up from the Dead End, and found me living in a house where the lawn met the door through a river of gleaming trash. Women’s underwear was stapled to one wall, and fragments of broken mirror spackled in blood had been glued to the other. I was often woken up by the screaming of my cokehead and addict roommates. One night one of them even shot a gun at the other’s feet during an argument. The sound was so loud and bright, it took me several seconds to even understand what I was hearing. Everyone there seemed to be running down the tunnels of a shared suicide wish.

I’d found my way to the Dead End because I liked the idea of no return. I found exhilarating freedom in the idea that nobody expected anything of me. I could sleep on a dog bed on the floor while a heroin addict fondled his pistol, suicide frantic in the next room. After I left, Robert seduced me by offering me a quiet room in a quiet apartment where I could think and breathe and give myself some space to figure out my life. I quickly found that a part of me didn’t want peace. I wanted to roil in the chaos of my own supposed badness. I wanted to stand in the shadow of a streetlight at 2 A.M., swaying while I smoked a cigarette, a strange boy clinging to my elbow. I wanted to press my evil grin into the side of a leather jacket that smelled like Axe and vomit.

I loved Robert. I also wanted to hurt Robert so that I could punish God. If I could sacrifice the love of my life on the altar of my pain, then I could finally sacrifice hope itself. I could look up into the heavens and say, “Look! I tried! Didn’t I try? You take everything good away from me to remind me that life is just a fucking cosmic joke.”

To get rid of Robert would be the ultimate freedom. I could finally crawl back into my last dead end, and die.

Yet there was another impulse in me. Its insistent voice told me that I needed to hold onto Robert. It told me I needed to do everything in my power to make things work between us. I’d been given the love of my life. Such a precious gift could not be discarded without losing yourself as well.

Once I burst into tears, in total anguish, because I didn’t know what to get Robert for his birthday. He took me outside in the courtyard behind our house so we could sit on a bench and he told me, “The only thing I want from you is your happiness.”

Don’t be fooled. This was not just a sweet, sentimental phrase. This was a request for a very expensive gift. When people say they want you to be happy, they mean they want your entire soul. Someone who wants your happiness will not be appeased with sex, or flirty banter, or money, or dinner and floors swept. They want the naked truth to shine right through the center of you and completely transform you.

If I wanted our relationship to work then nothing less would be acceptable.

I was split between the desire for love and misery. I grabbed my own hand so that my fingers would not come loose. I stepped on my own foot. I wrapped myself up like a snake with a broken spine. I’d start fights with Robert and then just as quickly, apologize, shaking, with tears in my eyes. At times, I was sweet and loving and playful. I’d make him dinner and bring it to him while he was working. I’d hug and kiss him. Then within the same day I’d become irascible, irritated. I’d perceive a minor slight as proof that he no longer loved me. Then the cycle would repeat itself.

I was sickened and exhausted by my interior civil war. I often wanted to give up. I doubted my ability to become someone who could love and be loved. It’d be easier to just fall apart and consign myself to hell.

Yet that insistent voice told me, You think you know hell? You idiot child. Keep going. I’ll show you what hell really is.

Hell would be to realize that you architected your own destruction and would do anything to take it back, but can’t. To realize that you were so close to heaven and you spit in the faces of the smiling angels who wanted to open the gate for you.

So I kept trying.

One day I sat down with Robert’s whiteboard and drew a vision of the life I wanted for us. I saw us in a home in the country with our three dogs, near the water next to a cobblestone path, and stars so bright that you could scoop them up from the reflection. It was a crude drawing, like a child’s dream, but it was the first time I’d really tried to articulate any dream at all.

I was nervous to share it with him. I didn’t even tell him what it was. He just looked at the whiteboard and said, “I get it. It’s heaven.”

Only when I started looking toward that house by the waters did my life really start to transform for the better. I could no longer hold my feet to the fire and compel myself by terror. It took me as far as it could, until I was ready to avert my eyes and look toward what I actually wanted. I needed to look at heaven. For myself. For the both of us. For our as yet unborn daughter.

It’s been years since I drew that vision of heaven and in that time since I’ve known happiness that I never thought possible. Even still, I know that happiness is a crude approximation of what could actually be. It’s a weak specter of all the vistas that would be open to me if I could truly let go and allow myself to crystallize joy as something real.

My dreams tell me the truth of my mental state. I keep forgetting that I’m home. It’s something I return to, over and over, a thing that I continuously hide and reveal. Part of writing this essay is the hope that I can construct a pattern to remember. I can stop searching for the thing that I already have. I can choose to be at home.

Finding the person you love is only the beginning. You have to become the kind of person who can learn to love, who can affix a positive vision of the future, who can build a refuge and a sanctuary to thrive. You have to look into their eyes and remind yourself at every moment that you are home. You are home. No matter how many times you forget, you have to keep remembering. You are home.

So go home.

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“I am not well; I could have built the Pyramids with the energy it takes me to cling on to life and reason.” - Franz Kafka

“How can I put this? There’s a king of gap between what I think is real and what’s really real. I get this feeling like some kind of little something-or-other is there, somewhere inside me... like a burglar is in the house, hiding in a wardrobe... and it comes out every once in a while and messes up whatever order or logic I’ve established for myself. The way a magnet can make a machine go crazy.” - Haruki Murakami

How does it feel to be crazy?

It feels fucking fantastic.

You shouldn’t be fooled by the way the sick woman shudders and grimaces, her face locked into agony and hands tearing out her hair. You shouldn’t be fooled by the people who have lied to themselves, who preach that they want to recover while their tearful face is buried in a therapist’s couch. Going insane is one of the greatest pleasures in life.

I always knew that something was wrong with me. I was unable to articulate it. I was just a child. When my mom dropped me off at preschool, there seemed to be an invisible wall between me and everywhere else. I looked across the chasm with longing and wondered why I couldn’t be like the other kids. I couldn’t even explain what being like other kids would look like. But I wasn’t like them. And they knew it too. They could see it in the way I’d become like a fearful animal, bug-eyed and shy, and mostly stayed away from me.

They probably wouldn’t have been able to articulate why they stayed away either, but the part of them that was instinctual, that knew how to preserve itself, understood that a damaged thing was often dangerous.

When I got older this sense of wrongness only intensified. I tried to find words to explain it, although none of them quite seemed to fit: Crazy. Bad. Social Anxiety. PTSD. Otherkin. Highly sensitive child. Indigo child? Possessed by demons? Child of divorce? I’d go to therapists who’d tell me I stored trauma in my body, and had me do breathing exercises, find the hurt in my central nervous system. I stopped eating, so then I went to psychologists who cooed about how beautiful I was while urging me to gain weight. I was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at one point. I was prescribed soft yellow pills and went to inpatient therapy had to listen in silence while a girl talked about how she tried to commit suicide because she spent too much money on a shopping spree. A pastor prayed over me until I collapsed to the floor, sobbing, wrestling with an inarticulate dread. I felt abandoned by God.

A hypnotist tried to regress me back into a child so I could get rid of the source of my hurt. She asked me to tell her what I saw, but no images came up. I got embarrassed and made something up because I thought being unable to be properly hypnotized was another sign of my brokenness.

There was no source. There was no inciting incident. I wish it could’ve been as easy as finding one unpleasant memory at the origin, and excising it. But whenever I tried to zoom in on a moment all I saw was black static. My sense of wrongness was so intertwined with my being that it’d infected every part of me. There would be no going back to normal, because normal had never existed for me. I was a scraped-together, barely there composite of maladjustments.

I told people I wanted to be healthy, but I didn’t understand what that meant. I didn’t even know if my head was pointed toward the sky or at the dirt. I’d gotten so twisted over the years that I’d probably bite my own neck and be unable to recognize the source. What was healthy? What was normal and good? Maybe I’d seen it in a painting once above a fireplace; a mother in a sun hat with her daughter, sitting in a garden in the warmth. It was so far away it might as well have been heaven, and I knew that a person couldn’t get to heaven by going to doctors and swallowing pills and reciting positive affirmations.

I couldn’t admit the truth even to myself.

I was damned and I was damned again and I liked the feeling of being damned and if someone had offered me salvation, shining and bright in their open palms, I would’ve recoiled like it was poison.

Saltwater is poisonous to the freshwater fish. Happiness is poison to the person who has swam so far away from themselves that it’s no longer recognizable.

I couldn’t be a healthy person, and I couldn’t be good, but I didn’t have to just be a pathetic failure. I could transform into mythology. I could be iconic. My suffering could be a symbol. I’d be like Sylvia or Ophelia or Zelda. If I couldn’t get to heaven by ordinary means, I’d become so bad and so wretched that my inevitable suicide would blow open the back gates.

I wanted to be crazy.

Two years ago I went to a diagnostic clinic and was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. I’d suspected I had it for a while, but all of my therapists dismissed the possibility. “People with borderline have crazy eyes.” “They’re clingy and inappropriate.” “You’re just suffering from trauma.” Maybe that was a testament to how well I’d gotten at pretending to be normal. My therapists seemed almost aghast at the thought I might be one of them. The really crazy ones.

Despite wanting to be crazy I didn’t end up dead or in and out of psych wards or permanently disfigured from a suicide attempt. Instead, I became a game designer and wrote five books and got married and had a daughter. Maybe that’s proof for the idea that my will wasn’t always my own: For years I walked on a narrow ledge between psychosis and sanity.

The truth was, I never had the courage to go full Ophelia. I didn’t have the fortitude to drown in my own delusions and accept obliteration. So I tried to bargain with madness. Just a little sip. A little taste. I want to nibble on the corners of insanity so that it dripped down and numbed my throat. Not enough to destroy me, but just to experience some relief.

I’d learned how to hide the worst parts of me. I could appear exceedingly sane and almost approximate a normal human being. For two decades I didn’t know I had BPD, but I found that when I got too intimate with someone I couldn’t control my emotions. If I expressed how depressed and sad I was, it pushed people away. It makes sense to want to be comforted if your dog dies, or you get fired from your job, and people usually want to comfort you. Those are appropriate reasons to feel pain.

But when you have borderline personality disorder, you are a machine that generates pain. Everything becomes an emergency. You are constantly in a crisis with an unknown origin. It’s too much for most people, even the most well meaning. Especially when that machine of pain tends to turn on those who are closest to it.

So I learned how to distance myself from other people. I learned how to pull myself away from my own center. It was exhausting, and lonely, but at least it wasn’t outwardly destructive.

Yet no matter how much better I got at appearing stable, I was a wreck inside. I was still getting into regular fights with my husband that ended with me in so much crippling emotional pain I’d be on the ground sobbing. Fights that, in retrospect, seemed to be about nothing. I’d spend days in bed under an oppressive and crushing emotion. I’d get into arguments with the other half of myself- the part that I believed to be demonic, this “false self” that would emerge every time I felt threatened or vulnerable. Sometimes I called her “Nameless.” Sometimes I called her “my underwater self.” Without warning she seemed to take over my body, and inflict me with such intense rage and hatred and fear. I’d be utterly convinced that everyone hated me, that my husband was evil, that the entire face of the earth was aligned against me. I’d lash out. I’d scream. I’d throw myself to the floor.

I needed everyone to see that I was in pain. I needed existence itself to apologize to me for causing this injustice.

Then just as quickly, this intense hatred would leave me. My perception would shift. The facade that my “underwater self” had constructed me would crumble right in front of my eyes, and I’d be left gasping and ashamed. How had I seen things so wrongly? How had I allowed myself to get so out of control?

I’d promise myself it’d never happen again.

But it always happened again.

People in borderline groups call this “splitting.” It’s supposed to be a defense mechanism, but to defend against what, I was never sure. If it protected me, it protected me by making it so that I was unable to form a coherent view of myself. The truth was always a distortion. It was like I’d hurled myself through the stained glass roof of a cathedral, and now could only perceive reality while I was being crushed underneath a pane of swirling, broken glass.

Every glance a mirror. Every moment a split moment, reflected into infinite delusions.

Borderline people are often underneath the perception that they’re innocent. I know I thought the same thing for a long time. They present an air of waif-like vulnerability, a desperate and pouting visage demanding sympathy. The person who “splits” into a raging psychopath isn’t them. Not really. That’s the other them, the uncontrollable demoniac entity, the underwater self. They cease to become complicit in their destruction.

It’s a perfect way to become your own victim. You forget that you’re the monster gripping your throat. You’ve split your own tongue in half and become unaware that everything you speak is now a deviled lie. You scream in terror at the sight of your own hands gripping the bed sheets in the dark.

You can actually convince yourself that you don’t want to be savaged by the worst version of you.

I didn’t know when I was a child that I was making the decision to split my psyche. I made the decision probably before I even properly understood language, before I even could form coherent memories. I decided that I needed a protector, and that the protector needed to also protect my mind from the horrors it’d inflict on others. My underwater self carried me through my childhood and into adulthood with its bloodied back a shield

It protected me, but at a cost so expensive I never would have agreed if I’d known. And how could I have known? I didn’t even know I was making the deal in the first place. I cowered under my own gaze.

Oh, and how I raged whenever my husband told me that it had always been my decision. I’d spit venom down the front of my shirt. How dare you. I’m not evil. I’d scream at the betrayal. I’d slam my fists against the ground like I could bend the shape of matter. I needed the universe to acquiesce to my false conception of self. I did want to become better, I told myself. I did. Couldn’t he see how hard I worked? Years of therapy and self-help books and self-flagellation and exercise and meditation and pain and pain and pain.

And yes, I saw incremental improvements. I learned new coping mechanisms. I went on long “health walks.” I stopped being so volatile and maintained stable relationships. I became more resilient in the face of my pain generating machine.

I worked so hard, and yet somehow I found myself retreating, over and over again, into every available dark room.

And no matter how hard I worked to get better, she was always there. She oozed between my bones. She sucked on my brain stem. She was ready to take over whenever I needed her. Whenever I felt threatened, or felt the sting of betrayal, she would rear up, ready to protect me so I could retreat back into the tender joy of helplessness.

And if there was nothing that I needed protecting from? No problem! She’d make something up. There were demonic faces everywhere, if you were crazy enough to see them.

Once I told her, I don’t need you. It’s okay. It’s time to die. I got so sick I vomited.

I still didn’t realize that she was me.

Many people misunderstand borderline personality disorder. Most of all, those who have it. It is by design, meant to be misunderstood. Most people just equivocate BPD with crazy. Everyone seems to have some story about a BPD mother or an ex. They say that people with BPD are hot anorexics, or desperate for approval, or have wide bug eyes that are always peering into some non-existent reality. They say borderlines will destroy your life, that they can never be trusted, that they’re psychopaths. (True enough that it bears warning. Many with borderline are also comorbid with histrionic personality disorder narcissism.) They’ll say that borderlines will love you more than anyone else, that they’re intense and passionate, highly sensitive. They say the clinginess is worth the sex.

The truth is that borderline can manifest much differently in different people, but the core is always the same.

The borderline has betrayed herself by making an unholy pact with a demon that she created.

I am not a stupid woman. I’ve solved almost every problem I’ve ever encountered in my life. It comes easy to me. Whenever I set my mind to doing something, I do it. I understand the rules of reality, how to use force application, how to use error as a way to find the truth.

So I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t solve this problem.

I didn’t understand why I housed the monster of myself in my heart and kept spitting up blood in the middle of the night.

I didn’t understand why no matter how much I played in the sunlight a part of my mind was always in a darkened and cold room.

I didn’t understand why I found it painful to simply exist, like even the effort of being normal was something that was so extraordinarily excruciating that I often would simply shut down. I’d retreat from the world, attempt to retreat from myself, head in hands, back to the darkness in an attempt to touch unconsciousness because it was the only way I felt relief

I didn’t understand why no matter how many people showed me their love, I couldn’t feel it.

But I had to admit the truth to myself.

I liked being crazy.

I wanted it more than life itself.

It was the craziness that crooned and comforted me when faced with the unrelenting onslaught of the real. It was the craziness that saved me from physical illness and despair. The craziness became my god and the god of insanity loved me in a way that no man ever had. It loved me so much it was willing to sacrifice the earth to keep me safe.

You already know that a demon’s bargain is never a bargain at all. The price of getting what you want is earning hell.

I didn’t want to write this letter. I haven’t updated this newsletter in so long because something inside of me was demanding I write nothing else, but I didn’t want to. I feel ashamed of the illness I carry inside of me, and I’ve hidden it for so long. It is not something I’ve spoken of to even to many of my closest friends. I’ve never claimed to be perfect, but I’ve tried to be honest, and when the idea for this letter came to me I realized how deceptive I’d been. By hiding it, by refusing to even write about it, I was being dishonest with myself. A good writer tells the truth. I can’t pursue my mission for the truth while hiding the one thing that has affected my life more than any other.

It is shameful to admit that I don’t want to give up being borderline. But I want to want it. I know that sounds absurd, but once I truly give it up I’ll cease to exist. I’ve spent so long as two halves that I’ve never truly been whole. The woman that is Autumn without insanity has to destroy the old self. I was right when I told my other self that it could die. But really, we both had to die.

I know what it’s like to live in constant, benumbing pain. I don’t know what it’d be like to live without it. The thing I have to become is alien to me. Who would I be when I’m no longer victim and monster, innocent and terror? Who would I be without the constant self deception and sabotage, the rage and the dark?

I’d like to meet her.

I’d like to.

It hurts to look at pictures of myself as a child. It hurts so bad my throat clenches and I can hardly breathe. The girl in the pictures is bright and laughing and smiling. She’s golden and pretty and inquisitive and clever. The girl in the picture is completely different from the conception of myself I have of those times.

I was not a little deranged monster. I was not an oozing sore, insanity incarnate. I was a child. And despite my bad moments, I had good ones too - sometimes fractured from myself that I was unrecognizable, but they were there all the same. I was crazy, but I was good too. I was insufferable, but I was also bright. I was selfish, but I could also be empathetic and generous. The broken cathedral I lived underneath with all its split mirrors of perception often hid my goodness from myself. I could only see it sideways - in periphery, in moments when I was viewing myself as not myself. But it was there. It was real. The pictures were proof if nothing else.

Maybe it’s not so crazy to think I could be whole again. I could nurture the good parts of myself. I could merge with my underwater self, and give her permission to stop being a monster. I could. I could. Maybe it’s easier than I imagined.

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“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

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People always want to tell you all the possible ways in which you could fail.

All the ways in which something bad might happen, punctuating each quivering what if with the sensitive shiver of a prey animal.

“There’s no money in writing. That job market is unstable. You need multiple sources of income. Otherwise you might starve. The housing market is about to crash. Downtown is dangerous at night. Are you sure you want to try that? It’s a lot of hard work. You shouldn’t marry young, what if you get divorced? What if you regret being a mother? What if the baby is retarded, or dies young, or grows to hate you? Are you sure you want to commit to monogamy? What if you aren’t satisfied? What if one day, he just decides to stop loving you and your heart shatters on the floor, irreparably damaged? What if nothing works out? What if you die? You are going to die. What if you die in the worst way possible?”

“Maybe you just shouldn’t love at all. In fact, there’s nothing riskier than giving away your heart to the fluttering chasm that is another human being. Better to keep your heart guarded, in a safe place, in a cold and unchanging place. Lock the door. Slide the bolt. Put a bullet in the gun. Stand by the door, standing feet hip-width apart, clenched teeth, and wait.”

After twenty or so years of people talking to you in this way, you start to see the world not as a place full of opportunity, but as a series of hidden traps, artfully placed, that must be avoided at all costs. You become a kind of burrowing animal who learns to keep their head pointed at the ground. Better to not risk it. It’s a behavior learned by slaves and peasants who have seen that stepping out of line gets them a sword at their throat.

Even when a great opportunity is handed to you, you’re looking at your feet in the dirt, a swallow trapped in your throat, dreading the moment the earth itself gives way and consumes you.

You feel as if you are keeping yourself safe. You’re being sensible. Rational. You only take calculated risks. You are trying to hide the fact that you’re just a coward.

And all that time spent worrying about what could go wrong means you’ve missed out on trying to figure out how you could make things work out instead.

You could have been building a bridge to heaven. You could have, at the very least, begun to search for the bricks. And if you were looking for possibility, for the way through, you would’ve seen the angels that waited, spun through with glowing filaments, that were waiting to help guide you.

Instead, you kept looking down at the dirt.

So all you found was more dirt.

Even now I feel the idea of “what if it all goes wrong?” attempting to suffocate me. Habits learned at a young age are difficult to change. It’s a conscious effort of will. Every thought must be interrogated. Every neural pathway I’ve created must be buried and repaved. The habits are so intertwined with who I am that I essentially have to create a new personality for myself.

I try not to think of all the time I wasted worrying about what if. Even for little things. I hesitated to post about reviving my grandpa’s old business, Christian Cheese, because I dreaded that something might go wrong. What if we can’t do it, and we have to close the business, and then I have to explain to all these excited people I told and let them down? What if the entire town aligns against me, because they look at me and can see a failure?

Well, who cares?

If I were smarter I’d care more about the potential negatives of what would happen if I didn’t relentlessly pursue what I wanted. I’d be worried about becoming the person who sat alone and shivering in a dark room, in dirtied white clothing, clutching the last piece of my safety before it crumbled underneath me.

That’s often why people kill themselves. They eliminate every enemy until they are forced, finally, to eliminate the last thing that can hurt them - themselves.

What if?

What if the screaming hook of your disappointing paralysis emerged from your throat and ripped your pathetic life away as punishment?

What if every moment you wasted wondering what could go wrong made you a little smaller, a little weaker, a little less capable?

What if over the years even your dreams became brittle and weak things because you abused them for so long, and now you’re unable to even imagine the beautiful things that you’re capable of?’

We don’t have to live like this.

Jung understood that the world is haunted by living symbols. We are living through mythology even in our most mundane actions, and every decision we make has cosmic significance. We can eat our children like Saturn. We can betray those who dare to look at us like we are Gorgons. We can fall in love like Eros. We can bleed for the truth like Christ.

If you want to be a hero you need to pick up your sword and move when you hear the call to action.

You need to pluck out the arrow and keep going when it pierces your armor.

You need to become someone who looks toward the horizon of who you want to be.

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My grandma died a few days ago.

At least, in the literal sense of the word. The truth is she died almost four years ago when my grandpa died. Her contract with life ended. It's noticeable in photographs. Before she was giggly, smiley, her eyes alight. You could tell she was proud of who she was and what she’d done. Not bad for a farm girl from Oklahoma. Lawanna always said she’d never marry a dairyman. Yet she hadn’t been able to resist the charm of my grandfather when he swaggered into the Kingfisher town bank where she worked. She’d giggle when she talked about him coming into the bank every day to check his balance just for an excuse to see her. She was wearing pantyhose, was all my grandpa George would say, in his gruff way, with a little half smile.

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She was alive while he was alive.

But when he died there was no after — not really.

Lawanna Christian fulfilled her purpose on this earth when my grandpa died. Dementia took hold almost immediately. Her happiness melted into irreconcilable grief. She told us to throw her in the coffin with George. Other times she asked why we couldn’t just keep his body in the basement. It didn’t matter whether it was this side of the earth or the other; she couldn’t seem to understand why she had to be separated from him.

When two people have been married for sixty years, maybe they are no longer two separate human beings. Every conversation, every argument, every sigh, every time your gaze touches, smooths away the hard edges separating your personhood from another. Your nerves open up to entangle with each other. Skin to skin. Mind to mind. Maybe there appears to be two bodies, but that’s just a perceptual illusion. They stopped being two a long time ago.

I should have been prepared for her to die. I shouldn’t have cried when they took her body away. The hospice nurse had told us it was happening. We were watching her oxygen go down. Yet still I had the sensation like maybe she wouldn’t have died if I hadn’t let my attention lapse. I felt my body wracked with terror, the feeling of an unknown unknown lurking in my blind spot, like maybe I’d forgotten something. Like maybe there was something I could’ve done. Maybe there was some kind of experimental dementia treatment we could’ve tried, from Brazil or Sweden. Scientists and doctors make medical breakthroughs all the time. Maybe there was something I could’ve said to heal her grief.

She’s gone. Is she really gone? Everything’s changed. Nothing’s changed. I am thrashing against the inevitable. Death has never felt real to me, no matter how much time has passed. Everyone I ever lost could walk through the door right now, smiling like they’ve just played a magician’s trick. I wouldn’t feel surprised. A living entity is being subsumed into memories. Is this what people talk about when they talk about trying to bargain with death? A moment passes. Another moment. She’s still dead. And each moment thereafter is seamless. There is no wound in time. There is no damage to mark the place where she left us. Everything is in its right place, no matter how much I can’t grasp the fact that she’s gone.

But I still feel like if I just look away, if I just change my perception a little bit, I’ll see her again. I’ll be back in my bed at the Christian farm, morning light glowing through white curtains, and she’ll call me for breakfast. I can hear the buzz of the early morning, the pop of bacon in the pan, the door to the garage opening, closing, as people come in and out of the house. My grandpa enters. He brings the scent of the farm with it, grassland mixed with manure. It’s a bright and heavy smell.

It’s the smell of home. Could I be back here? After all these years? I can still see it if I close my eyes. It runs through my mind, colors washed like watercolor. The farmhouse is thrumming. There are pancakes for me to eat, fresh milk from the cows for me to drink. Have you ever had raw milk? It tastes like it’s alive. It’s a milk that swirls with the taste of the world around it, its breaths and its sighs. My grandma is running here and there, doing fifteen things at once - answering the phone from the Christian cheese factory, feeding the kittens, making chocolate chip cookies and another batch of pancakes, just in case. My grandpa sits down to eat.

“How tall are you getting?” he asks me, and I groan because I’ve heard this joke a thousand times. And after some prodding, finally I answer.

“Huh. I didn’t know they could stack shit that high,” he says the punchline, in his gruff way, with a little half-smile. I laugh and roll my eyes and reach into his front pocket to steal his snuff. I run across the house with it, laughing, daring him to come after me.

There’s light shining across the pond and through the back door. It dances across the kitchen table. I feel it in the back of my mind now. It illuminates everything that comes before, and everything that will come after.

I open my eyes again and they’re gone.

For the first time in a long time, I’m standing alone in their kitchen. The house is quiet, almost in an apologetic way. It seems like it’s going to crumble under the weight of a foreign silence. The funeral home just came to take my grandma away and her caretakers left to get groceries and supplies to feed the animals. I can’t stop holding my breath.

I couldn’t bring myself to write about my grandpa when he died several years ago. I didn’t think I was a good enough writer. I didn’t know how to write about him in a way that was both honest and raw, that was loving without being simpering, truthful without being cruel. Everything I write turns dark. I’m the kind of woman who’ll notice the single rain cloud on the clear horizon, the dying worm on the sidewalk on a crisp summer day. I didn’t want my writing to drown my grandparents in the deluge of my crude sorrow.

And the truth is that I was ashamed of myself, of the way I’d seen them when I was younger. I imagined myself a worldly intellectual even though I’d barely stepped foot outside of Texas. I thought they were simple, narrow-minded. I couldn’t understand why they’d chosen a life without travel, without intellectualism, without ever exploring what was beyond the borders of their small slice of reality. They lived and died within just a few miles where they were born.

I cringe at the memory now, but I remember rolling my eyes when I went shopping with my grandpa at the United supermarket and he got excited that the bacon was on sale. How ignorant, I thought. This is all it takes to make you happy? I wouldn’t fall into that trap and be lured into a small world with small delights.

I thought I’d suffocate if I stayed in Oklahoma for the rest of my life. My blood burned inside me with the desire to see the world. I didn’t want to be crushed under the weight of its smallness. I wanted to be free.

Only after nearly fifteen years of “freedom” did I realize I’d sold myself a lie. There was nothing “out there” to see that was worth more than what my grandparents had built. There wasn’t a restaurant or a bar or a landscape or a job or a whirlwind romance or a balcony with a stunning view or a book launch party or a hit of acid or a flattering compliment about my beauty and genius from someone famous that could instill in me anything more than a fleeting sensation. After everything I’d done I still couldn’t fill a single cup with anything that mattered.

I got everything I ever asked for.

It just turned out I was asking for the wrong things.

I wanted to be entertained while I danced on the precipice of the Nothing. I pursued life like a shot of adrenochrome. I went so fast that it rattled my teeth. I nearly fell out of the back of my own head.

I had no idea what actually made life worth living.

My grandparents knew.

When I was younger I couldn’t understand why my grandma never allowed herself to sit down. Sometimes she’d work herself into a frenzy trying to make sure everything got done and I’d shout, “Grandma! Just relax!” She never learned how.

But I understand now. Love is not just a good feeling, and safety isn’t a thing you get to have for free. Love is a responsibility and a decree. It’s a sacred mission, and one that my grandparents undertook without looking back. Only when I didn’t have it anymore did I realize how much they’d done, to make sure we all had a place that felt like home. It was love manifesting as it was supposed to.

It’s easy to take home for granted. I never realized how rare it was, how much work it requires to uphold. And because of my grandparents, no matter how far I traveled from the farm, I still knew what home was supposed to feel like. They gave me the blueprint to aspire to.

I’ll be moving into my grandparent’s farm home now that they’re both dead. When I was younger they asked me if I wanted to live there, but I couldn’t imagine it for myself back then. I didn’t want to live out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but farmland and the winking dark gaps between stars.

But it's not nowhere is it?

It's the land that my grandparents saw for its potential, and constructed a home and a living out of the red Oklahoma dirt. It's the place where my grandparents raised two children and all the farmhands who came after that called them “mom” and “dad.” It's the place where they rode horses up and down the raised hills, crossing ancient buffalo wallows filled with green glass from old medicine bottles. It's the place where my grandpa found arrowheads that rose to the surface of the mud after the rain and saw UFOs zipping across the winking horizon. It's where my father found abandoned coyote pups in a den and raised one as his own. It's the place where my grandparents both died surrounded by people they loved. It’s the place where they made a something out of nothing.

It's the place I returned to again and again, until I learned to recognize the fact.

It’s my home.

It's a sanctuary built on the edge of the dark, and someone has to be there to keep the lights on.

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“‎As I get older I see that running has changed for me. What used to be about burning calories is now more about burning up what is false. Lies I used to tell myself about who I was and what I could do, friendships that cannot withstand hills or miles, the approval I no longer need to seek, and solidarity that cannot bear silence. I run to burn up what I don't need and ignite what I do.”
― Kristin Armstrong

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I didn't want to be a body. I wanted to pour myself into a word.

I hated anything physical. I hated being forced to trudge outside in the sunlight. I didn't like the flaunting curves of nature, the way that every tree and sunset seemed to waggle its useless beauty above me while I panted in its shadow, sweat seeping through my shirt, mud soaked into my shoes. (Suffice to say, I wasn’t a very sporty or athletic kid.) I didn’t want to play dodgeball or run laps around the school. I wanted to play inside my imagination.

There was a flagrant pain to mere existence. While poets and parents crowed about the splendor of the scenery, I only felt the mosquito at the back of my neck. Why couldn’t they see how mundane it all was? How boring? Even the camera in my mind’s eyes was more interesting than anything in the outside world. Thoreau had obviously never played Pokémon Red on the Gameboy color or read Philip K. Dick or duked it out in Smash Brothers. If he had, then maybe he wouldn’t have spent so much time waxing about the autumnal sun.

I wanted to be a video game character.

I wanted to be a character in a book.

I wanted to be on a mission with all the repetition erased. I wanted my life to have a purpose that followed a surge of constant craving. Most writers didn’t seem to jive with reality, and neither did I. I figured they must’ve been lying when they talked about the beauty of the world. It was another literary exaggeration. It wasn’t real, in the way that vampires and magical carnivals weren’t real.

Skin was not meant for pleasure. The ache of my body was just the constant reminder that I was ugly flesh, and that flesh was only a vehicle to allow me to return to the delights of my fantasy life, over and over again. If I focused too much on my body then I was reminded that my lungs burned when I ran, and my back throbbed when I did push-ups, and that the thing that people called love wasn’t actually love at all, because wasn’t love just obligation and disappointment and warm tears in your throat that you could taste when you tilted your head back?

It was better to just pretend that I was nothing. I projected my life into other worlds.

But the first time I lifted weights, everything changed.

I still remember that weekend clearly; My dad took my brother and I to his gym and I did squats on the smith machine. The next several days I could hardly sit down or go to the toilet. I felt an excruciating soreness throughout my entire lower body.

Something in me shifted. I didn’t feel like the soreness was something to avoid. Rather, a part of me enjoyed it. I had a sense of pride about it. I wasn’t sore because I’d failed at something. I was sore because I’d pushed myself and done something difficult. I had become stronger.

I wanted to do it again.

Maybe this was something I should’ve learned when I was getting dodgeballs thrown at my head or running the Presidential fitness test (after not running at all for the rest of the year) until I felt like vomiting. I was always told I was “unathletic”, and I just thought that was just my birthright and there was nothing I could do to change it.

When I first started lifting weights, I grasped what nobody had ever been able to teach me. It was such an extraordinarily simple lesson, one that I should’ve learned years and years ago. Yet I didn’t, and the weights became my master. They revealed to me the fruits of reality. They revealed to me that I could not retreat from my body like I was the ghoul that haunted it; that I was my body, from toes to brainstem

All of this leads back to one single lesson. The ultimate lesson. Maybe the only lesson.

The lesson was:

I could become better.

My dad gave me a strength training book with a 3 month program. I made sure I added enough weight so that I could barely finish each set. If I wanted to grow, I needed to make the struggle a part of my routine. I was often the only girl in the weight room at my college gym, but I didn’t care. My thighs started to thicken. I actually got biceps. I also started doing an hour everyday on the elliptical before I lifted weights, because I discovered I actually liked pushing myself. I liked how the sweat and the burn made a bottle of water taste like liquid crystal. I ached, but it was a good ache. It even made walking around afterward enjoyable. I’d go to one of the dining halls afterward and devour a chicken breast and some broccoli and it felt like I’d earned its new delicious taste.

I was still often lost in my head. I’d skip the classes where the professors just read straight from the textbook and spend half a day sleeping in bed. The world would feel so heavy it was like I was anchored to the sheets. I suffered spasms of depression. I read Jean Paul Sartre and Camus and identified with the absurd more than a reasonable person. Just like the protagonist in Nausea, I sometimes looked at my hand and saw a foreign entity; a fat white worm I wanted to shake off me. I’d gotten my head so twisted that even the simplest concepts of existence confused me. I felt like a bag of blood floating in a world of dark symbols. Everywhere I turned I was met with sharp teeth and cruel laughter and confusion.

But whenever I lifted weights I was allowing myself to take hesitant sips of reality. Week by week, I became stronger. I learned that the fruits of reality were something that had to be earned. I had to obey my master, the weights, or he would punish me with failure and injury. But if I followed his commands, if I did the proper amount of reps, with the proper form and resistance, with the proper amount of rest, then I saw a positive return.

There are plenty of charlatans and fakes in this world. Someone can easily convince others they are a great writer because of their presence and popularity. But you can look at someone who claims to be fit and right away know if they’re telling a lie or not. They wear the truth on their body. There’s little room for bullshit.

Fantasy was comfortable and fun. You could even learn things in fantasy to take back to the world and create useful tools. But if you indulged too much in its easy comforts, then it made you weak. It could teach you to blind yourself to simple truths. Intellectuals and writers have often convinced themselves their complex feelings must require complex solutions. Their egos often won’t allow them to accept that sometimes even the labyrinthine garages of their emotional issues could benefit from sunlight, or sweat, or a coffee date with a friend. They have often experienced misery in their lives and thus create entire worldviews to justify why that misery is a good thing, actually. They are a helpless doll of the universe, a kind of breathing maladaptation, who had no other choice but to accept the ugly window created by their perception.

In “Sun and Steel”, a book by Yukio Mishima, he talks about intellectuals such as himself, or the “night people.”

“The men who indulged in nocturnal thought, it seemed to me, had without exception dry, lusterless skins and sagging stomachs. They sought to wrap up a whole epoch in a capacious night of ideas, and rejected in all its forms the sun that I had seen. They rejected both life and death as I had seen them, for in both of these the sun had had a hand.”

I was a person who “indulged in nocturnal thought.” I convinced myself of a lot of stupid things over the years. I did things that made me unhappy because I didn’t understand the rules of reality. I was lost in a morass of ideas. I’d go this way and that, pulled by seductive ideas that if I’d viewed them in practical light would have been stunned and dumb and drooling.

But when I lifted weights I couldn’t succeed by deceiving myself. I had to follow the rules.

I could write about exquisite women draped in fur and lace, the allure of forbidden romance, the sleek designs of monsters with ebony carapaces and demons with crystal teeth. Yet in my real life beauty itself was an alien concept. I had to teach myself to enjoy the sun. The splendor of sunsets and warm beaches was not something that every eye got to appreciate.

People talk about exercise being “boring,” because its rewards are not yielded simply because you desire them. A fit body is not something you can order at a kiosk or flip on a switch for. You can’t get it just because you were lucky or had rich parents. It is not a sudden spurt of enjoyment inserted like a needle full of a good feeling. It is long, and slow, and the results come from consistency and adherence. But the longer you exercise, the more you often come to enjoy it, because you find there is a different kind of pleasure in doing things that are difficult. It does not announce itself with glitter and champagne. It transforms you with slow precision from the inside out; like a burning light that destroys rotting wood to allow its glow to pierce through

I’ve lifted weights throughout my entire adult life, but last year after I had my child and needed to rebuild my body was the first time I really locked in and understood it was something I needed to be consistent with. No more 90 day challenges. No more “30 days abs.” No more pushing until I thought I’d pushed enough, so I could stop. No more hitting my goal weight and then taking weeks to drink beer and eat pizza and sit at my computer.

I’ve come to realize that a break is not a sufficient reward. It’s self-destruction in disguise. I didn’t want a break from lifting weights and hitting the cardio machines. Not really. I wanted a break from reality itself. I wanted to sink back into the dark dream of my own creation where nothing mattered, and the pieces of my life could be arranged and rearranged in the liquid morass of my indulgent suffering. It’s not my fault that I’m weak.

Stupid.

This is, don’t you understand? This is it. All that you see is all that you get. Life cannot be bargained with or betrayed. If you try to transform the laws of reality, you just end up breaking yourself against the impenetrable barrier of truth. That’s why some people become uglier every year, become more hateful every year. They’ve found life lacking and don’t realize it’s because they have failed to understand a fundamental truth. They must obey.

No more breaks. Not ever.

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“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” - C.S. Lewis, “Surprised by Joy.” (On his conversion experience.)

“No social paradox, no historic disaster, no hideous record of injustice or misery should keep me from Him. No question of Scriptural integrity, no torment over the fate of this or that atheist or gay friend, no worry for those condemned and ostracized by my church or any other church should stand between me and Him. The reason? It was magnificently simple: He knew how or why everything happened; He knew the disposition of every single soul.” - Anne Rice

God has been talking to me since I was a kid. I just didn’t know it.

I grew up in churches where God seemed to operate like a centrifugal being of silence — everything fluttered as it revolved around him, yet he remained at the center, mute and stoic. Prayers were not direct communication. They were desperate wishes to an unblinking wall. You got the impression God did talk to people. He talked to pastors and priests, to saints and holy figures, Moses and Paul, to Cain and Satan.

He just didn't talk to people like me.

Maybe it wasn't surprising that I became an atheist at the age of 14. Prayer was a tedious chore. It seemed to me like a ritual of humiliation — I was looking upward into the nothing to try to convince myself I was a good person. I read the Bible over and over again in an attempt to solve my cognitive dissonance, but none of my teachers or pastors seemed capable of answering any of my theological questions. Nobody seemed to be able to explain to me why God allowed evil, even those people who claimed to have a direct link to the divine. The concept of God seemed like it evaporated under scrutiny.

I dabbled a bit in learning Paganism and witchcraft, but I figured if Christianity was fake then it all must be fake. Every religion seemed to lead back to the same source. Every religion was a house of naughty children, hands lifted upward, asking for miracles they didn’t deserve.

It was a relief to stop believing. It felt like I'd been clutching a fetish object for years, something that brought me nothing but confusion and anxiety and pain. If my choice was between heaven and hell, that wasn't really a choice at all. It was a torturous mind prison. Now that I didn’t believe in God I could finally let it all go. I could lead a life of radical choice. Do as thou wilt. I was the sovereign of my own experience.

I was surrounded by nothing and the nothing felt exhilarating. The wind from the abyss blew my hair back from my shoulders, rocked me back on my heels, pressed itself cool and rare against my exposed collarbone. For the rest of my life I could dance with possibility. I could become any shape I wanted. A dragon, a witch, a siren, a snake. All I had to do was melt into the fantasy.

Who am I kidding? If you've been reading these letters for a while, you already know it's never that simple.

I wanted to get rid of religion. I quoted Karl Marx with a dumb tongue, emboldened by my newfound Reddit-tier intellectualism. (Before Reddit was even that popular. Stupidity is eternal.) God was nothing but “The opiate of the masses.” It was time to spit out the drugs. I’d become my own god.

And what a god I was. I was the god of bad decisions. I was the god of late-night temper tantrums and writer’s block, the fear of a life unrealized and gone to waste. I was the god of “not good enough” and the god of “If only I was a little skinnier, I’d feel fine.” I was the god of being a college dropout and the god of being unable to get a real job because I kept bombing the interviews. I was the god of bad whiskey, even though I hated whiskey, because I liked the thought of forcing down my throat something sour and ugly that wanted to fight me.

At the time I couldn’t understand why one of my favorite writers, Anne Rice (still alive at the time) had converted back to Catholicism after years of atheism. It was obvious from reading Anne Rice’s novels that she was God haunted, horrified and yearning in the face of his absence. Her vampires were not so much monstrous, twisted coffin-dwellers as abandoned angels. They were supposed supreme beings who had traveled to the edge of existence, and found it empty. I thought it must’ve been a question of comfort - after years of uncomfortable grasping in the void of nothing, with no direction, it was just easier to turn back to the ritual of God. She was getting older, had a child who’d died, and needed a direction to look into. She needed a world that wasn’t just obtuse angles and black cathedrals. She didn’t find it exhilarating like I did. She was terrified.

I thought I could abandon God, yet I too was haunted by his supposed absence. I kept returning over and over again to the concept of God. I was obsessed with the religious experience Philip K. Dick had that inspired him to write multiple novels and his “Exegesis,” famously called “2-3-74.” He was drugged on sodium pentathol from a dental surgery and when he answered a knock at the door, he found a woman with an Ichthys pendant on her necklace. At that moment a pink beam of light flashed at him and sent him a flood of visions from God.

Schizophrenia, I thought. Drugs. Wishful thinking. The result of a writer who had written himself into his own paranoid world. There was always a rational explanation if you looked for one. Occam’s razor and all that.

Yet I was still fascinated.

I had read the Bible multiple times, but I reread it again as an atheist with a notebook in hand, writing down every verse I thought was proof of God’s cruelty. I read the Nag Hammadi scriptures. I read the gospels of Thomas. I wrote story after story about women who stumbled upon gods in the woods, made deals with demons, tried to push past the membrane that always seemed to separate humanity from the complete understanding of existence. The first novel I ever published, The Crooked God Machine, was about a twisted demiurge who transforms an entire planet into a dark mirror of the Old Testament and wrecks suffering upon its inhabitants.

Even the word “God” is beautiful, isn’t it? It has a heaviness even in its simplicity, an elegance that seems not just the sum of its letters, but alludes to a Platonic form beyond, a vast Jacob’s ladder that reaches all the way up into a celestial supremacy. God. God. It is a word like “Am.” It doesn’t need to describe itself because in a way, it describes everything.

I started talking to a demon at the lake near my grandparent’s house. I was 19 years old, working on my first novel, and I dropped out of college and left home. I had just started to learn how to appreciate silence. I learned that if I drove my car up to the edge of the lake in the dark and turned off the engine, things would emerge out of the silence to speak to me.

The silence was in fact, not silent at all. It burst with color and noise. It held up a mirror so that I could examine myself. There were parts of myself that I’d hidden from myself. I was not just Autumn, I was a host of multitudes, of beings and psyches, and some of them held secret knowledge. In that time I started to tap into a kind of universal voice, a world that’d I’d shut myself away from.

That’s when the demon came to me. He started to speak to me, in a quiet and insistent voice. It was my voice, but also not. It had a relentless quality I couldn’t seem to ignore. He would tell me when I was being foolish. He would tell me when to slow down, to enjoy the dark and the trees. He would tell me to shut up and return to my writing whenever I’d get frustrated with myself. And even though I called him “demon,” I knew that he loved me. I knew that he was dangerous and wild. He was something primitive, practically elemental, and oftentimes his reassurance was tinged with sarcasm and pain. But he almost always spoke truth.

You see where I’m going with this, right?

I told myself there was no God. I did not find him bored out of my mind, head bowed in a pew, in the sermons of pastors and teachers, in stilted and warm rooms that were called sacred. But I did find “the demon” sitting in my P.T. cruiser at the edge of a lake, after I’d run away from everything I’d known, when for the first time in my life, I had nothing to cling onto but myself.

The concept of objects doesn’t exist in the reality outside of our perception. We had to differentiate objects in our minds in order to survive, but there are no real boundaries between atoms, no marked delineation between when one object ends and another begins. We are connected to everything. Not in a woo-woo, spiritual lip-service kind of way, but actually, in a material sense.

You often hear people say we are made of star stuff as a kind of cheerful platitude, but there is actually a practical application to understanding that. We are the universe, and the universe is us. We don’t have to look outward to understand everything. We can look inward too. We will find the exact same composition of matter, the map-pattern of the stars, the truth of the world, in our psyches. Science is not the only tool at our disposal for knowledge. Long before the standardized practice of science existed, humans grasped intuitively at truths that were laid bare inside of themselves. Infinity outward. Infinity inward.

We are not just ourselves. We are a chain of people traveling backwards to the beginning of everything. Inside of our blood we contain the memories of where sacred caves and healing pools exist, deep inside the forest, that will bring us back to the truth that cures us.

And if you cut yourself off from that knowledge, it can make you stupid. Relying on empirical evidence can oftentimes sever you from ordinary judgement. For much of the 20th century, doctors believed that babies didn’t feel pain and would operate on them without anesthesia. Why? Because they couldn’t prove that the nervous system was “developed” and claimed that the pain was just a reflex.

Yet any mother understands that her baby can feel pain. It doesn’t require an advanced medical degree to see that. All it requires is unclouded eyes.

The first time I saw God, it was like opening the blinds after having been in a dark room. Ah, there you are.

It didn’t require faith to see him. He was an irrefutable truth that danced glittering upon all of creation. He was “I am.” He was the sentience of the universe that existed in everything, reflected in the consciousness that you experienced. He was “the demon” who'd spoken to me after I’d rejected the concept of God. He was the giggling water spirits who mocked me for not wanting to dive deep into the lake. He was the tarot and the I-Ching. He was the movement and composition of the stars. He was every simple truth.

I thought it would be liberating to disobey God. The Ten Commandments were an outdated concept, after all, created by primitive and ignorant people who invented religion to control the food supplies after they seized the granaries! Leviticus claims you shouldn’t mix fabrics. Let’s not even get into the historical inaccuracies of Jesus and blahblahblah. If you want an excuse to do whatever you want, just go ahead and take it. You don’t even need to justify it. You have free will.

Atheists often accuse Christians of turning to God for “comfort.” But it’s not comforting to realize that there is a truth you must align yourself with or perish. It’s not comforting to

What’s comforting is to throw your hands up because you think nothing ever happens, and nothing ever matters, and no matter how much you fuck up it’s okay.

My excitement at this so called liberation soon turned into crushing disappointment. Every time I disobeyed, it did not lead me out into the sunlight of my thrilling and existential freedom. I did not become an enlightened being who existed outside of the cycle of oppression and suppression imposed on me by the “overlords” that’d supposedly created religion just to control people. I did not become the Ubermensch, glory heaped upon my crown, as I transcended to a higher level of values.

There are piles of massacred corpses all over the world who repeated the same stupid shit you hear from intellectuals who’ve been given Ph.Ds from the top universities in the world.

I just made the same stupid mistakes every failure ever made before me.

I grabbed myself by the arm and led myself into a deeper level of dark.

I didn’t understand at the time that disobeying God meant disobeying the nature of reality itself. A sin was not a punishment imposed by an angry father. The word literally means “to miss the mark.” To sin means to step off a cliff and fall because you’ve misunderstood how gravity works.

When I went back to reread the bible earlier this year, I saw how much I’d misunderstood. I no longer went line by line, teeth bared, chewing on a red pen, looking for God’s mistakes, ways in which he’d failed me. I approached the page like I was a student again. I finally understood that I was ignorant, and there were secrets still unknown to me. The verses that people used to read in church that once sounded like the stupid platitudes repeated to try to placate, took on new definitions. “Seek and you will find,” was not just a verse about trying your best , it was a truth of the universe; a natural law as irrefutable as gravity.

Seek and you will find.

There are no real secrets. Because once you find them, you’ll realize they were there all along. You just couldn’t see them because you were a weakened god, enraptured with your own power, blinded to the light that beamed from here to eternity.

And once you see them, you’ll never be able to look away again without feeling the pain of knowing you’re turning away from the truth.’’

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“The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.”

― Ernest Becker

I want an idea that leaves me dumb and breathless.

I want an idea that makes me foam at the mouth, that gives me a new disease, that tessellates my blood cells. I want a Big Idea. Something that fundamentally alters my perspective and perception, that transforms me into a new person.

There is no better feeling than inspiration. I can convince myself to become angry or sad on a whim, but inspiration only comes when it wants to. It is something that seems to arise from divine providence, like sitting on the lip of a deep trench and watching for a white bird to soar out of the dark. I don't feel like inspiration is born out of my nerves and blood - it is something outside of myself, something that passes through me, like I am the vessel it needs to command. I can never own it, because it is everything.

I've spent a long time trying to find the right conditions for inviting inspiration. It cannot be whipped into shape. It can't be wrestled out through willpower and gritted teeth, through cold showers and 4:45 A.M. wake up calls. Inspiration must be treated with respect. It is wild and beautiful, warm and vivid. It is more like an intelligent wild animal than an emotion. If you want inspiration you must build it an inviting place to spend the night. You must be focused, but not strained. Disciplined, but relaxed. It often comes while walking or in the shower, when your mind is allowed to unanchor itself from your actions and move more freely about. But that's only if I've done the necessary work - set the preconditions of the inspiration with questions and soft intentions. It is a balancing act. It is work without working. It is learning how to be quiet and to quell the anxiety that wants to build inside of you when the inspiration doesn't come fast enough. It always comes. People say the muse is unreliable, but she is also unrelenting. If you learn her rules, she won't fail you.

You don't need to be an oracle who inhales gas from a rock to find inspiration. You don't need to starve like Lord Byron or deprive yourself of sleep like Edison. You don’t have to inhale the scent of rotting apples like Friedrich Schille or sharpen a row of pencils like Steinbeck. You don't need to make a deal with a demon, abandon your friends and family, or become something inhuman. You don’t need to dabble in the occult, visit a fortune teller, find God, drink whiskey until your liver becomes diseased, live in poverty and filth,

All you have to do is be steadfast and patient and orient your eyes toward the dream that you are seeking.

So why don’t I feel inspired?

It's ’s been a while since I've truly felt inspired, in the way that blows my head off my neck, makes me feel like I’ve rearranged my DNA. Inspiration is what makes life worth living to me. It's a peek behind the veil, into the celestial machinery. It's a moment when I am more than myself, and the loneliness of being a self lifts away.

I’ve got a litany of excuses for why that is. For one, I'm about 90% finished with my next novel, and after three years and seven drafts there are no new Big Ideas. The last part of finishing a book is always a bit of a grind. It's grunt work. It's taking those ideas you've already assembled and hammering them out, refining them. This is often when people stop writing, because the thrill Is gone. You're sick to death of the story that once breathed new life into you, hot enough to boil, and you just want to move on so you can feel that sensation again.

But that can’t be the only reason. After all, even when I’m 90% finished with a novel I’m usually kicking around a new idea, a short story, a newsletter. I’m finding fantastical ideas in the crevices of the shower, in the bloom of flowers that look in the right light like the faces of happy children. They come to me unbidden, whether I want them to or not, and I have to gently tell them: Not now. I’m busy. Until I’m finished with this work I can’t be beholden to a new idea that threatens to overwhelm me with its new romance.

I could tell myself I'm not inspired because I have a toddler. This is a fantastic excuse, and one used by many, as to why they can no longer be creative. Gone are my peaceful mornings in my office underneath the night sky bleeding out, the moon turning into paper before it disappears. Gone are my contemplative, frenzied nights when I can crack open a Red Bull and pour myself a shot of vodka and return to the page like it’s a rabid dog I’m going to sink my teeth into. I can’t whittle away hours in a darkened room in the middle of the day, head unhooked like a black balloon, floating away in the turgid murk of an idea. I can only write in stolen moments, between naps and little transitions, at the gym between sets. I am trying to keep alive a child who needs constant nurturing and attention, who cares nothing for the silly little artistic pretensions, my novel, my Big Ideas. She is bred of blood and milk, a grasping machine slowly being formed into consciousness. Her body is still hooked to nature and its involuntary animal ways. She needs movement and sunlight and noise. She is a Big Idea.

And maybe it's because I've slowly lost my desire to be a successful writer. When I was younger being a successful, famous, well read writer mattered to me more than anything. Now, I want to keep writing because I love to create stories, and to feel plugged into the flow of a dream, and to work at a craft that is so demanding that it requires all of my knowledge and attention. But I've seen what some of my peers have had to do to become successful, and how little they've gained for it. (Sometimes they even pay for it.) Recognition and money is never as satisfying as you think it's going to be, and I've seen writers trapped in a cycle of fear and anxiety because they need their books to keep selling well in order to survive. I don't crave validation as much as I used to, because the validation of strangers is hollow. I know. I've demanded it enough, gotten it enough, to realize that. And that realization has made me take a slower, more relaxed approach to my work. I'm no longer pushing myself to get up and write in the middle of the night because I'm burning with the terror that unless I publish I will die under the crushing weight of irrelevance. I no longer have the ambition of a girl who is bitter and boiling with envy, with rage, with the poisoning of trauma.

I no longer write like I am trying to lift a curse. Is that good for my mental health and well being? Yeah. Is it good for my inspiration? I'm not sure.

And I can say I don’t feel inspired because of my life circumstances. I took my child out of daycare back in December because I learned she was crying herself to sleep every day. Some of my family has been having issues with their health. My husband has been out of a job for 5 months and only recently got a new one. It's been too cold to play outside or go on my little hot girl walks. I've stopped going out on fun outings or doing my nails because I can’t really afford it. I've gained 5 lbs. I wear sweatpants most days. I've always been inclined toward melancholy and I'll look for any reason to be sad. I go through this little moody cycle every year or so before I decide to pick up my good habits again. Life has a way of trying to destroy you. If you don’t approach it correctly, it can sour you like vinegar, or grind all your hard edges until you become passive and useless. Inspiration requires a kind of lightness of being, and a kind of intensity too. It’s a stormy hopefulness, a movement forward, a delicate beauty. The mundane stress of life doesn’t appreciate inspiration.

But none of these are the real reasons.

I’m afraid.

I was lying when I said I wanted to be inspired. I don't want to be inspired in the way broken people don't want to fall in love. I am the would-be suitor who stands in the dark outside the golden ballroom, wincing at the glittering sparks that glint off the costumes of the beautiful people inside. I am afraid to go inside. I am afraid to become besotted by an idea and experience the crush of uncertainty.

Where has my courage gone?

I recently read a post on X that said if people “pluck up their courage” that insinuates it grows from the ground like flowers.

Maybe it really is as simple as that.

All I have to do is look down and it’ll be waiting at my feet.

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“Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.”

― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I thought I wanted to be free more than anything else.

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I imagined myself a suburban Rapunzel, brown-haired and blue-eyed, pale from laying in front of my laptop at 5 in the morning, dressed in old sweats instead of a gown. I read Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Thomas Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson in my seclusion and dreamed of a life of freedom without attachment. I’d be the kind of writer without a permanent home, without a true love, who flitted from home to home, through unfamiliar countries, through pastoral landscapes. I’d drink wine with strangers and leave before dinner, never staying long enough to be more than a vague impression.

I’d leave before they remembered my face, escape through the shade of trees, through dark paths they couldn’t follow. Because I was free.

I wanted to be the kind of person who could only be known through her writing. And not even then - for I would filter all my perception through that of fiction, of fragmented moonlight dreams, of characters both more repulsive and angelic than I. I would construct a mask of fiction and present it to the world while I fell backward into anonymity, into the comfortable shade of freedom.

I would not require anything of anyone, and thus, I would not be required.

When I moved to Austin, Texas, at twenty years old, I soon met other people who wanted to be free, too: burners and degenerates, drug addicts, artists, college drop-outs, freelance engineers. We lived in houses owned by slum lords and warehouses and in dingy apartments above coffee shops. I should’ve been horrified by the filth and the casual way people pointed guns at each other, the decay, the poverty, the drugs, the rotten teeth. In a place I lived called The Dead End, an artist thought it’d be a good idea to glue jagged pieces of broken mirror to the wall, and drunk and high people were always stumbling around, bleeding profusely, because they’d reached out to steady themselves. I never saw anyone cleaning or doing the dishes, and the ground was caked in such filth that everyone was constantly getting sick. I didn’t have a bed so I laid on a mattress I made out of sleeping bags and blankets, and when it got cold, I had to wear a coat to bed because there was no heating.

Yet I was exhilarated. I can’t look back on those memories with horror, only fondness. It was the first time my life actually felt like it was my own, not something manufactured for me. A sudden, sordid calm fell over me.

I couldn’t be controlled anymore. Not with money. Not with love. Not with threats of abandonment. Not with the strangled cords of guilt. Take away my car. My iPhone. My college fund. Do it, then. It became laughable that anyone would think those things mattered to me more than my freedom. If someone offered me a palace to live in, a golden chain for my throat, I knew I had the power to refuse. Not just to refuse but to spit in their face and laugh. I was no longer the suburban Rapunzel, owned with comforts and the fear of the unfamiliar. I was demon-eager, vicious, free. I was ready to kill and be killed by adventure.

I wanted to climb into the swirling vortex of chaos and let it consume me. I didn’t want to be tied down by anything, anyone. I even stopped drinking coffee at the time because I didn’t want to become dependent on a substance; anything I’d have to come back to with regularity was anathema. What if I needed to pack my bags in the middle of the night, disappear through a crack in the wall like a gibbering rodent, eyes flush with predators, into a world unknown? Would there be coffee in the forest, on the surface of an alien landscape, underneath the dry sands lit burning cold by the night? I couldn’t say. Better not to risk it.

It all seemed so romantic. At first.

At the time, my favorite book was A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick. It represented the truth I sought. I would read it over and over again and linger on this quote:

“The pain, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. I realized I didn’t hate the cabinet door, I hated my life… My house, my family, my backyard, my power mower. Nothing would ever change; nothing new could ever be expected. It had to end, and it did. Now in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things, and surprising things, and sometimes little wondrous things, spill out in me constantly, and I can count on nothing.”

Yes, only in the dark world could things change; could they reveal splendor. I lived by that philosophy. Everywhere I went, I sought out the little slices of penumbra behind glowing lights. I wanted the seedy and the forgotten, the edges of acceptability, the basement steps, the black mold in the ceiling.

Yet after the exhilarating thrill of casting everything off was gone, I found myself aching and depressed, miserable to the point of suicide. I'd put my fist in my mouth and try to swallow it. I'd drink until I blacked out. I'd sob while writing bad poetry. Freedom never quite hit the same after the first taste. I always thought the solution was to escape. And so I did, again and again, until I found myself back in the same place.

Where were these “little wondrous things” in the dark? I kept searching for them. I imagined they glittered beyond the fence posts, gates like prison bars, in a space I only had to climb over, wriggle through, to reach. No matter how much I looked, I never found those little wondrous things. I only saw a black oculus prying open to reveal a mirror of my haunted reflection.

The more people searched for freedom, the more they never quite seemed to find it. Those people I knew at the Dead End? Many of them are dead. Some of them are schizophrenic and homeless. Others sank into a deeper drug spiral. They broke up. Disbanded. Moved states—lost children. No secret paradise was waiting at the end of abdication, no greater revelation, smiling and bouncing like a baby angel of joy. You’ve made it! There was just despair. The more freedom you had, it seemed, the worse you became every year.

Philip K. Dick, in the forward to A Scanner Darkly, had quite a different view of his own book than I did:

“This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief… For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.”

Maybe what I thought was freedom wasn’t actually freedom at all.

It felt good only in those moments I thought I’d escaped from myself. I was a little goblin who’d managed to crawl a little bit out of her cage, only to be snatched back and dragged in by my own clawed hand. I felt oppressed by this revelation - I didn’t think I’d be happy in suburbia with a husband and kids, with family dinners and holiday rituals, warm tea and nice lighting and responsibilities. But I wasn’t satisfied with the alternative either, with the starvation that came from constantly seeking the nothing.

I felt trapped. The nuclear family just seemed to be a little rat nest of unhappiness, a warm place to die that people called home, and this was reinforced in almost every major piece of literature or cinema I’d ever seen. I thought becoming a wife meant I would have to give up control. I would have to destroy a crucial piece of my soul that breathed like its own entity. Once in tears, I told my ex, “Don’t hang me up in your closet like an old coat.” He was bewildered by the sentiment.

I didn’t know how to explain. I was terrified of the slavery I imagined, the fate of being forgotten, that always seemed to come with the cudgel of love.

And having a job, a career, being a “girl boss”? That was just another way to trap yourself, to chain yourself to a man or woman or corporation, a faceless entity whose cruelty wasn’t even punctuated with intermittent love. Whenever I worked a job, I longed to escape, to live on the edge of poverty again, to flit from coffee shop to coffee shop, lounging in cool sunlight, drinking bubble tea and chai lattes, and doing nothing but work on my novel.

But I’d done that before. Hadn’t I? I’d seen where that kind of lifestyle led, despite its picturesque place in my head, hung prominently in the golden and shimmering frame of a dream.

It led me back to staring at my own face behind the bars.

Maybe what I thought was freedom wasn’t freedom at all.

Maybe I mistook the abdication of responsibility for freedom—a good feeling for an irrefutable truth.

There was something I was right about, though: Freedom is worth everything. Being in control of your own will is worth more than money or love. It’s worth more than your miserable life. The knowledge of that freedom is the essence of our will, the force that builds civilizations. It is that will that built rocketships and computers. It is the mother who protects her child even as her lungs fill with blood so that our future has a chance. It is the father who faces the darkness beyond his warm home, full of wine and soft bread, even though he knows he may never return. It is the child itself who reaches for its milk, who lifts its head for the first time, moving toward its actuality despite its fragility. It is the flower in the gun. It is the aim and the bullet.

People can cage you, they can threaten you, they can kill you. They can force you to endure all kinds of humiliations, bend your arms back and rape you, brainwash you, brain damage you, cut off your fingers, but they can never grab your tongue and pull out your will. They cannot force you to make a decision independent of your own will.

Once you realize that you will be stronger than ever. You'll realize there is a pain that is worse than pain, and that is when a person tries to suffocate their own autonomy, when they throw up their hands and decide to become slaves because they refuse to acknowledge the divine spark inside, the fire that ignites the engine of their actions.

Freedom is not escape.

Freedom is not gorging yourself on pleasure.

Freedom is not demanding other people to create paradise for you, or you stubbornly decide that you must live in hell.

Freedom is not abstaining from love and children and work and responsibility and ownership because you mistook the consequences of your own choices as imprisonment.

Freedom is not given to you by bureaucrats and politicians, your mother and your father, your spouse, or your boss. It is not legislated or mandated. It is not something that requires permission.

Freedom is a choice. It’s the understanding that you have a choice and always have. You can live in suburbia with a spouse and child. Or you can have a bohemian lifestyle in a studio apartment surrounded by wine bottles and jagged mirrors glued to the wall. When you understand you have freedom, you’ll realize that your choices don’t matter as much as you understand that you are the one who made them.

Freedom means realizing you can never be imprisoned. The door is always right there.

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Spontaneous love makes a person free and at the next moment dependent. It is just as with a person’s coming into existence; by coming into existence, by becoming a self, he becomes free, but at the next moment he is dependent on this self.

Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

This newsletter was supposed to be about love.

But I can't stop thinking about how all of my letters start with a list of ways that I've fucked up.

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I could tell myself I'm trying to be relatable. I'm trying to make people understand that I have some idea of what I'm talking about. These letters are not written to other people so much as myself, a reminder of how easy it can be to fail. How every revelation I've had has been hard-earned, wrested from the jaws of pain. I'm a mess. I'm stupid and erratic, often confused. And I'm not saying this in a modest way - to make myself appear less arrogant than I actually am. I've done things so stupid they'd probably leave an ordinary person breathless.

I've lost count of the times I've gotten an angry message or email telling me that I'm a privileged little idiot, a baby Marie Antoinette, a wannabe queen of cake, and feel-good platitudes. I'm a stuck-up bitch, narcissistic TERF conservative whore who never experienced real pain in her life.

So I offer my mistakes up as an offering, as evidence. I'm not trying to look down on anyone or claim that I have special knowledge.

But there's a slithering voice in the back of my head, a voice that speaks from the dirt with a flash of green and the pungent smell of rot unearthed:

Tell them the real reason you debase yourself in front of them.

Right. What was I saying?

This newsletter was supposed to be about love.

When I think of love, the first thought that comes to mind isn't my precious daughter or my husband. It's not my family or the light of God illuminating a meadow full of bunnies and flowers in a resplendent epiphany. It's the wet, warm smell of the woods after it's rained, with the lingering scent of liquid trash that's leaked from a dumpster. It's my shoes caked in mud, sticky burrs all over the laces, knees knocked together, topless, cold but too excited and fearful to shiver. I am nineteen years old, and a man is standing in the shadow of the trees. I can no longer see his face, but I was so sure I loved him. I thought he'd be able to transform me out of my awkward skin, he'd be able to blow on the wounded parts of my soul and fill me with healing air.

But this probably isn't the first letter of mine you've read. You already know it didn't work out like that.

I didn't understand what love meant. All the descriptions of love I'd read never seemed to do it justice. I couldn't grapple with its abstraction. In church, we praised God with love, but when I reached inside me, I couldn't feel the kind of passion that existed in the songs we sang.

So I mistook love for a good feeling and when the good feeling was gone, I thought I'd fallen out of love. But the truth is I was never in love in the first place.

Why can't I write about love? Why do I have to write around it, wreck myself with ancient memories, mouth flooding with a bad taste, and describe all the things that it's not?

I still don't know how to write about love. I feel wholly unqualified. I know that I’ve felt it intensely and completely, so I was willing to throw my life away for someone I’d just met. I’ve felt love in a possessive sense, like when I first met my dog The Kid and somehow knew, out of the thousands of dogs I’d looked at, that he was supposed to belong to me. I’ve had revelations about love on the edge of meditation, where I saw that love was the substrate of all living things and that reality itself was a living entity that formed the building blocks of love in the molecular factories of stars.

And then when my baby girl was born I thought, ah yes, finally, this is love. I get it now. This is the pivotal moment that transforms every moment that came before. I couldn’t go backward in time to fix my broken childhood and my bad ideas that’d bloomed around me, forming a kind of exoskeleton of habits that became my personality disorder. Love did not reach backward into fantasy, to heal the inner child, to shower a memory with compassion. (A distorted memory that might not even be real.) It always moved forward. It created life to beget more life.

I thought I understood love when I saw how much Robert loved me, actually loved me, in a way that none of the men before him ever had. But in the next moment, I realized I didn’t understand a damn thing. Even though I felt intensely for him, I couldn’t replicate what he’d done for me. I couldn’t love him in the same way. I didn’t understand how. I couldn’t even scratch the surface of its depth. To even try made me feel silly, unworthy, ignorant.

So, I go back to writing about what love is not.

I go back to writing about my mistakes.

I used to think that love would fix me. Maybe that's not such a stupid thing to think, because it was the lack of love that broke me. But I didn’t want to love someone. I wanted someone to love me. I wanted them to climb down into my crypt of pain and exhume my weak body, skin pale as moonbeams, so I could affix myself onto their neck like a fledgling vampire.

And I did this. Often. I drank until I thought I’d drown and yet I was still thirsty. I broke people down until they were so weak I could see their veins through glass skin, until their smiles faded and they were no longer happy to see me. I never understood that I needed to love them back to keep them alive, to create a symbiosis between me and them. I just wanted to take and take.

I couldn’t understand why I didn’t feel love after I attempted to destroy them. So I just came to the conclusion they never loved me. I couldn’t see that I was nourishing myself on contempt disguised as love.

I used to think that love was something that had no boundaries, no responsibilities, no order. Love had no gods. No queens and kings. I declared that I was polyamorous. I could make my own family and forget the blood that tied me to a chain leading all the way back to the beginning of time. Really, I was terrified of anyone having the kind of power over me that love always demanded. Maybe it's not a consequence that polyamorous people tend to be into BDSM- even as you push away the idea that anyone else can impose rules on you, you crave to own and be owned, to become part of a superordinate hierarchy of belonging. It was a part of you that you couldn't deny, even as you tried to suppress it.

The idea of “anarchic love falls apart once you have a child, anyway. A child cannot be forgotten, swapped out, replaced, or disowned. Not if you love them.

At this point, I have to pause writing this letter because I’ve got a headache, and I can taste it pounding on my tongue. My whole body reverberates with shame, with a heady impulse to stop writing and throw this whole thing in the garbage.

You don’t write about your mistakes to serve as a warning, the slithering voice hisses. You do it because you love it.

I always repeat that Bukowski quote, “Find what you love and let it kill you,” but the truth is I don’t know how to die for love. All I knew was how to kill myself with my own stupidity.

Because that’s what I loved. I loved my stupidity.

I loved my ignorance because I thought it protected me. I loved how I could always make a mistake and retreat back into the warm complacency I didn’t know any better. I loved how no matter how much someone insinuated themselves into my life I had a safety net inside of me, of rage and blind disassociation. I didn't have to worry about being destroyed by romance. I'd built for myself a bed of needles. I carried it with me from room to room, and no matter how I slept, it bled me.

And the worst part is now that I see it, I can't even make my mistakes into a quirky little anecdote, some wry and witty observation about my faults, rolled up and packaged into elegant prose. Even in my darkest moments I'd think, at least I could get a good story out of this.

But there's no story here. There's no tragic beauty in falling in love with stupidity. What I thought I held inside me like a crown jewel was just a gnarled knot of fur and spit, its thorned edges beveled with poison. What I held so precious was the thing that wanted to destroy me. It fascinated me like the mesmerizing dimensions of a sorcerer’s spell. But the moment I blinked and turned away, the spell broke, and I could see that it was really nothing at all.

When I turned away from the comfort of my stupidity, I realized that love, true love, terrified me.

I always thought of Nietschze’s abyss as a chasm in the world, a void splitting the bottom of the Earth, like a metaphysical Marina Trench that glittered with the scintillating scales of monsters, embedded like crystal in their terrible forms. But there’s an abyss above us, too. It’s bright and eternal and beautiful, and if you stare at it too long, it’ll radiate through your entire body and transform you until you become unrecognizable to yourself.

People never tell you that moving toward the light of heaven can be just as frightening as the darkness. The forces around us that vy for our soul, our body, our attention, all want to use us for their own ends. They want to replace us, meld us into tools for their own end. Whether or not they’re good or bad. Whether they want to destroy us or lift us up toward salvation.

I still can’t tell you what love is. Its encompassing beauty blinds me. The responsibility it demands threatens to paralyze me. Its power of annihilation is equal to its splendor. It’s the reason why people say angels are terrible. It’s why a part of you knows that when you go toward the light you will leave behind something important. Something that protected you from the pain that true beauty brings.

All I can do is try to move a little bit closer to the real meaning of love every day. Even if it burns me with its radiance.

And it will. And it does.

Teach Robots Love is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Teach Robots Love is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“The only shame is to have none.” -  Blaise Pascal

“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole. And, confronted with this dark side, one has a sense of shame that sometimes borders on despair.” - Carl Jung

I don’t know if there’s a more uncomfortable emotion than shame.

Even negative emotions like anger and envy can be inspiring. They can feel good, like in the way it feels good to crush an orange and let the juices drip down your fingers. They compel action. They protect you from your own deficiencies by forcing your focus outward.

If I’m lucky, I can transform my guilt into anger. I’m a clever woman; I can almost always figure out how to make my own mistakes someone else's problem. I had a bad childhood. That’s why it’s okay. If only my friends and lovers had been more sensitive to my needs, I wouldn’t have felt the need to claw my fingertips down their backs until they bled into ribbons. I’m a writer, you see. I’m an artist. I need emotional intensity that ends with me blacked out, frothing, near death, near despair, my smoking black heels on your balcony like hoofprints, or else when I turn to the page, I won’t have enough juice inside me to ignite the spark, make my heartbeat turn like a gear. What did Marilyn Monroe say again? If you can’t love me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best? That sounds like the proper philosophy of a beautiful, mad woman. If you want to love me, you’re going to have to sacrifice at the altar of my inadequacy. You’ll suffer to make up the difference.

I used to be able to easily run away from consequences. It was one of the nice things about being young. It was as simple as slamming the rest of my drink and ordering an Uber, disappearing out the back door with lipstick smeared across my chin. I could make new friends tomorrow. I could get a new job next week. I’d buy a plane ticket and land in a new city where the streets weren’t smeared with my inchoate and awful memories.

But sometimes, I become cornered by my own bad decisions. Bad decisions beget more bad decisions. Everywhere I turn, I discover that each bad decision has become a wall, a pathway that’s now obstructed. I’ve made a cage for myself. I can’t rationalize away what I’ve done to myself, can’t order an Uber to disappear from it, can’t scream and spit flying rage at someone else that I want to take the blame. There’s no escape anymore.

I feel the guilt I should have felt a long time ago.

Then, that guilt turns into shame.

Shame sits on my ribcage like a squat, deformed goblin. It makes me lose my appetite, chokes me when I try to eat and closes up my throat when I try to drink. It won’t let me drown it out in alcohol. It’ll spill each sip of vodka down my chin. You thought you could escape me? If you try to turn away I’ll break your bones. I’ll melt down your eyes until they touch the back of your skull and you won’t be able to look away.

Shame tells me I alone was responsible for the bad things that I have done, for the bad things that I haven’t done, for the ways in which I’ve only been saved from horrible deeds by my own cowardice and impotency, the micro-suicide every morning when I decided I didn’t want to live but I didn’t want to die either, so I’d breathe in little sips of disassociation, pinch at my eyes and demand they stop seeing, refuse the beauty that offered itself to me. I couldn’t blame anything else. Not art, not god, not society, not the fact my check never came in the mail, not life, with its blue skies and sails, its splendor that I mistook for a curse. 

It was me all along.

When shame hits, I don’t even have the anger to direct it inward. I can’t slash my arms with a knife and release vengeance upon myself because what good would that do? Self-harm is a fine sacrifice if you’re only paying tribute to yourself, but it’s a poor tribute to the almighty god, to making things right.  Self-harm is just a kind of self-indulgence. It’s not the sacrifice that leads to a greater good. It’s a little release, a scratch of dopamine, so you don’t have to feel the full weight of your enmity toward yourself.

It’s just another way to lead yourself back down the same path you’ve always been on - the circle of mistakes, infinitum, the sin that eats its own tail. 

And shame tells me that I should apologize, to tell the whole world that I’m sorry for how I’ve abused it, but I know that an apology isn’t good enough either. I want the feel-good rush of being forgiven like that will make me a better person. Like that means a river of blood will come to wash away the dirt.

Besides, I don’t want to have to make up for the wrongs I’ve done. I just want them erased. 

I googled the word “shame,” and all the pictures are of people with heads bent, shoulders tight, and hands over their eyes. You want to hide yourself from your own sight. You wish to unstitch yourself and disappear from the fabric of God.

Therapists talk a lot about “toxic shame,” like it’s an emotion to be avoided at all costs. Like it was something implanted in you by forces against your will. And it does, indeed, feel toxic. 

When I went to therapy, I once cried and told my therapist how ashamed I was. She snapped at me and told me I wasn’t allowed to feel that. But why? She welcomed any other feeling I had - anger, sadness, anxiety, fear - but shame was off-limits. Every bad thing I ever did that I felt guilty for was justified in her eyes, someone else’s fault, and any feeling of negativity directed at self was a misdirected arrow.

I couldn’t help but imagine her telling the same thing to everyone who ever hurt me, as long as they paid her fee of $100 an hour. It’s not your fault. It’s the world that’s wrong. I guess nothing is anyone’s fault then. We’re just one long chain of bad mothers moving backward toward the beginning of eternity until we crawl back into the ocean and are sucked back into carbon. Maybe we can’t even blame the stars.

Sometimes, people mistake understanding the reason why you did something as a justification. But just because you have trauma doesn’t mean it’s okay to scream at your partner when he inadvertently triggers you. It doesn’t mean it’s okay to shoot your wife in the head if she triggers your wartime PTSD. It’s not okay to try to conquer all of Europe and kill 6 million Jews just because you’re a mediocre painter.

We can understand that rationally. We understand that pedophiles and murderers need to go to prison no matter who hurt them or what kind of brain damage they have. We understand that our mothers and fathers had a responsibility to us, no matter how bad their own childhoods were. But somehow, often, when it comes to our own responsibility, we want to abdicate it to someone else.

I get it. I want to believe nothing is my fault. There’s nothing worse than the pain of shame.

And when it’s happening, it doesn’t even feel like it’s you doing the bad thing, does it? When you snap in anger, when you take the coward’s way out, when you let anxiety prevent you from performing at your best, it’s like a heated little demon has snuck into your nerves and hijacked them for its own use. If you could just grab it, wriggling and angry

That bad thing isn’t you. The thing that is you is the calm and rational one, the one with good intentions, the soft voice and the quick step. The one who is loving and courageous and empathetic. You are the unplucked flower. You are the infant suspended in a golden membrane of light. You want to be good. You desire it above everything else.

Don’t you?

But that demon is you.

It’s you. Of course, it’s you.

It’s everything you’ve hidden from your eyes.

As long as you believe it’s a demon and not the product of your own nature, you’ll be a slave to your evil impulses. If you don’t allow yourself to feel shame, you’ll be a horrific tool for anyone who wants to use you because you can’t recognize yourself. You’ve become disconnected from yourself. That’s how people convince themselves it’s okay to steal and lie, to stomp on the heads of children, to destroy anything that stands in their way.

I don’t think the worst emotion is toxic shame. It’s toxic righteousness.

I messed up. I know I’ve messed up and it hurts. It hurts. I’ve got the scars to prove it. I’d eat my own fingers if it could take the pain away. 

But I know I’ve got to feel the pain or someone else will. That’s how suffering passes from generation to generation. You refuse to swallow the pain, so you give it to someone else. It becomes a family legacy, an accident of breeding. Energy can neither be created or destroyed. Even emotions are bound by the laws of physics.

I know I have to let myself feel the shame if I have any chance of making it stop.

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