This Is How (17 page)
Authors: Augusten Burroughs
But they were objective facts; they were remote. What mattered to her was her son and his suffering.
The fact she was missing was
his
fact. He loved alcohol. He died doing what he loved most.
I still think about this woman, all these years later. I wonder if she has found any comfort at all in what must be life’s most uncomfortable place. I wonder, too, if she continues to be eaten by regret, by thoughts of wishing she’d been with him or if she was able to see that the experience was so very different for her son than for her.
And I hope she does not live in a dark world. Because even the most terrible loss doesn’t have to make you darker; it can make you deeper.
H
OW TO
S
TOP
B
EING
A
FRAID OF
Y
OUR
A
NGER
A
NGER IS PRETTY MUCH
considered a trashy emotion that modern, civilized people can choose not to feel; they can “rise above” it by taking a number of deep breaths, thinking about something positive, and then moving on.
By ignoring anger and applying a thick coating of positive thinking on top of it, you can successfully contain it. Until, that is, the most inappropriate moment imaginable where your anger will roil up inside of you, rise up your throat, and be propelled out of your mouth at a pregnant woman who reaches for the avocado at the same moment that you do at farmers’ market on some Saturday morning.
In my experience, people frequently repress small pieces of anger: office indignations, various slights, something hurtful a partner says or does. These little angers are swallowed and gulped down at the moment they are perceived.
Because, it doesn’t matter. Or, they didn’t mean it. Or, I’m overly sensitive. Or, I want to focus on the positive. Or a thousand and twelve other reasons.
But these little angers are promiscuous; they breed like epidural addicts. And in time, you’re sitting across from your husband at dinner and when he opens his mouth to take a bite of garlic bread, you clench your teeth, smile, and think to yourself, “I despise the way he chews. How could I have married a man who chews like such an animal?”
Anger that you
shush
will metastasize and can cause massive damage to yourself, your life, and those around you. Anger that remains unvented can lead to depression, suicide, and other self-destructive behaviors. If anger isn’t correctly processed and expressed in a productive fashion, raw, unrefined, 100 percent natural anger can result in murder.
Anger is a natural emotion, not a character flaw and not a weakness. But unlike joy or sadness, anger needs just a little bit of a polish before you release it into the world.
Even though it’s horribly uncomfortable, you could try expressing how you feel to the subject of your wrath. “Alisa, I don’t want to make a big deal out of this or anything, but I’m feeling . . . ? Like, the anger? At you because I just think you should have told me you were dating my dad.” You can even use California art-college up-speak if it makes communication easier for you.
Another quite useful and healthy outlet for anger is writing. Even if you “can’t write.” Because actually, if you can speak, you can write. It’s just a period of adjustment using your fingers instead of your mouth. But if you write—or type—exactly what you’re thinking, without even a single change, when you read it, whatever you wrote will sound like you, talking. That’s writing. No MFA required. Especially if what you’re going to
write is a letter. This is exactly the method you should use to express anger at people like your boss. You can write your letter immunity-from-prosecution style so you don’t need to be rational or reasonable or even justified in your anger. You can just cut loose and wish them under the wheels of a bus with one thousand beautiful words.
Just don’t send it.
The difference between writing the letter and sending it and writing the letter and not sending it is mental health.
Here’s something about anger: if you are the kind of person who absolutely dreads anger and confrontation, you may have noticed that when you are involved in a confrontation where there is anger in the air, you may feel especially clear in your thinking. Even if you also feel withdrawn emotionally and say not a word.
Because anger can be clarifying. Anger isn’t always irrational and blind, like rage—which is anger with the volume turned all the way to the right. Anger can serve to clarify how you feel in one sharp instant. With this clarity can come fuel.
Screenplays, novels, bodies of photographic work, sculpture, needlepoint, films—all of these forms of art can be fueled on ordinary, everyday, unleaded anger.
When I was a teenager, I was in a state of almost constant rage. Rage is so energizing that it makes your face warm. Rage is the stuff of double homicides, high school shootings, courthouse bombings. Rage cannot be directly expressed with good results.
While anger is often clarifying, rage mined directly from the earth of your emotions is the opposite. Hence the moniker
blinding.
Rage needs to be mixed with an alkaline, like pen and paper, or third-person-in-the-room-with-a-degree-in-psychotherapy.
Rage is also honest. When you feel rage, there is no doubt that you have reached the rock-bottom truth of how you really feel. This is what makes rage something not to fear or try desperately to crush back, but to express. And to express it in a way that puts its phenomenal power to the best possible use.
It was a moment of pure rage that I experienced when I was living in a slum in Western Massachusetts, on my own at seventeen, in poverty and watching my father—who had just paid me a visit—drive away from my building. Our exchange triggered a rage so fully consuming that the choice I made in that instant—to succeed at something—was fueled until I made it to California and got my first real job several years later.
That’s the other thing: eventually, you’re going to want to stop for gas. Because you can fan a burning rage by never questioning it or reexamining it. It’ll keep you fueled. But it will also keep you angry.
You will be an angry person.
You will hate a lot of things.
You will punch walls. You will be that person who snaps insanely, out of context, over the smallest things at work or in line at the supermarket.
Harboring a chest filled with rage year after year wears you away. It grinds you down until you are all nerves and bone.
You need to get rid of it. This is where rage is a lot like physical obesity: the treatment is similar. The more rage you contain, the harder you need to work physically.
And by “work” I do not mean “emotional work” as in therapy; I mean work as in housework, lawn work. Bench presses at the gym, gymnastics, a trapeze class.
Smart people sometimes feel like they are “of the mind” and not of the body, so they pay perhaps less attention to this area of their lives. But even Einstein was a sack of meat.
Rage is associated with a low serotonin level. Exercise cranks up the levels of this neurotransmitter. The effect is soothing.
When you live with very old, still-too-hot-to-touch anger, it fucks with you by making you feel rotten inside. By rotten, I mean decayed. I mean foul. I mean ruined. So much anger over so long a period makes you believe that somewhere along the way, you got broken and now you don’t work anymore. It’s a powerful emotion that endures, it can seem like a part of you. But it’s not. It’s a feeling, just like
surprise.
It’s neurons in your brain and neurotransmitters in your blood. A kickboxing class is good for you, mechanically. Psychologically, what helped me was to not allow rage to be blind and anonymous, but to know its source.
And then get on with it. Because tracing an emotion to its root cause doesn’t mean you then go and mentally move back into the past and live with it.
Also, you have to try to be nice enough for somebody to like you enough to be willing to rub your back.
Pissed-off people need back rubs and they also need gym memberships.
H
OW TO
B
E
S
ICK
S
OME PEOPLE MISUNDERSTAND THE
phrase, “nothing worth having comes easy.” They think it means hard work. Like, if they get into the office an hour before everyone else and they don’t mess around online they’ll be rewarded with The Good Things in life.
It has nothing to do with hard work.
What that phrase really means is, the most valuable moments and experiences that life has to offer are found only along its most treacherous paths.
“Nothing worth having comes easy” is not about showing up early at the office. It’s about showing up in your own life. And living inside the very moment you want to run away from.
Your husband goes to the doctor because of a rash. The doctor tells him he has cancer of unknown origin.
On Tuesday your girlfriend is bored out of her mind. On Wednesday she’s told she has MS.
How could you survive such news?
The day of diagnosis will seem like the end of your life and the beginning of your death. Now, instead of a future when you contemplate what’s next, you will see only a large gray CAT scan machine blocking your view of the terrifying unknown behind it.
The first thing you must understand is that when something is new the novelty or newness itself carries weight. This makes the message weigh more.
Bad news is even worse when you are first told of it.
The diagnosis will never be as terrifying as it is the first day it is given to you.
Because you must also bear the weight of surprise.
New things occupy more volume than the laws of physics should allow. Just place a single new object in your living room and let the dog in. The new object is the only thing the dog will see.
The day of the diagnosis will be terrible and overwhelming. The day after will be less so. But before I take you through some very specific, real-life, cut-to-the-chase truths, I have to tell you the single, overriding, deepest truth about disease. And it’s true no matter what the diagnosis: once you’re in it, it’s okay.
Often, when you receive a diagnosis, you will be given a prognosis as well. The prognosis may be uselessly vague or
horrifyingly specific. There may be features of your disease that are simply too awful to contemplate. Or very little information at all.
In disease, it is the
anticipatory stress
that causes much of the suffering and anxiety. Thinking
about
something that could happen to you is always worse than when the very thing you dread actually happens. When it does, you are surprised to see that it’s okay.
I paid with more than six years of my life to learn this particular truth. Had I known it from the beginning, I would have gained those years instead of losing them. I’m going to say it again because when you read it the first time, it almost sounds like I’m saying, “You’ll be okay.” And that’s not what I’m saying. It looks like that’s what I’m saying if you read it too fast.
Once you’re in it, it’s okay.
Whatever it is. However bad it gets. It won’t be the way you imagine it will be from where you stand now. It won’t be anything like what you imagine right now. It will be more like
today
than the way you think it will be.
As a matter of fact, it will be exactly like today. Except, not exactly the same elements will be in place.
It is always easier to have six days left to live than it is to be
told
you have six days left to live. This is the fundamental and profound truth of illness.
The difference is, living in the moment versus living in a state of obsession about how many moments remain.
One of the things I dreaded most was the possibility that at some point in the future, George could become so sick that he would be completely unable to work. He could require twenty-four-hour-a-day nursing care. He could be attached to IV lines
and have to have a pole beside him, even when he went to the bathroom. He could even end up with one of those ghoulish, awful chest tubes. And if he ever became this sick, the vigorous, outdoor-loving man that I knew could be rendered into a shell of a man, unable to even leave his home. Unable to drive, unable to go outside for a walk. No longer able even to walk his own dog. The thought of this healthy man being plunged into such a useless and pitiful life was almost more than I could bear.
When everything I dreaded did come true, and the nurse installed the tubes, George wanted to watch a movie that was on TV. I had thought we would talk about the tubes or “deal” with the tubes. But there was nothing to deal with. Suddenly, there were tubes. And there was a movie on. We watched the movie. He was connected to tubes. It was fine. Tubes never mattered. George no longer worked and could not leave the house. I wouldn’t have noticed this unless I paused to realize it. We were so busy with a life that certainly would have looked horrifying to anybody peering through the window.
I had spent all those years dreading what were now the best times we’d ever shared. It was awful. Not being able to even take a walk cannot be spun into something positive. But it didn’t matter. And that’s the truth. It didn’t matter at all that he couldn’t go outside. We had all we needed inside. It was very warm and comfortable there, in the heart of the fatal disease. I hadn’t expected that.
The day of diagnosis will be overwhelming, frightening,
and confusing. The first thing you will do when you get back home will be to Google the name of the disease. Here you will read many terrifying things, but also some very hopeful things, perhaps.
You’ll see certain features of the disease that are quite sobering and that you think might be best kept to yourself. That’s a good instinct:
do keep it to yourself.