Why? (Part 2)

letsgetabitbetter
Feb 23
18 min read

Why?

I have been obsessed with this question for as long as I can remember. Like a lot of other little kids, I would follow up with “Why?” every time an adult was willing to answer a question. It helped me learn more about reality, at least with the first or second iterations. It helped me understand the limits of their knowledge, helped me see how in the dark they really were. It also helped me understand the shape of the ineffable. The line of questioning almost always ended with something like “God,” or “that’s just the way it is,” which I realized very early on meant the same thing.

But, why would God make it that way? Why is that the way it is versus all the other ways I can imagine?

As I got older, I settled on some answers. The easiest is that there is no God, that the Big Bang was a fluke, an accident that sent particles and eventually atoms and molecules hurdling out across an ever expanding canvas, to collide and bump into each at random intervals. Life was another accident, a distinct series of collisions that led to evolution, which led to consciousness, which leads to us telling some other story beside the series of random collisions set in motion by an accidental explosion.

That belief settles any debate or inspection into the “Why?” behind things. The fundamental “Why?” is there isn’t one. Shit happens. It was all an accident. We are a shaken up snow globe, swirling around, thinking we are magical snowflakes, when we are just debris waiting to settle.

The upside to that one is you just do the same thing everyone else is doing. The truth is the thing right in front of you, the amount of money in your bank account, the car you drive, the house you live in, the beauty of the women, or wealth of the men that will give you what you want. Empathy is a performative act. A way to get more of what you want. It’s all materialist, reality is the things we all agree are real.

Where it broke down for me was in understanding my own desire. If whys are random and nothing really matters, then I don’t matter. My desires don’t matter. In fact, we’re taught that the path to success, to happiness is in the denial of our desires. Without desire of my own, I was like an empty vessel ready to be filled by whatever anyone told me I was supposed to want. I was optimizing for some abstract “good”. What will make me “good?” Okay, that’s what I’ll do.

I suspect a lot of people go through life like this, optimizing for whatever is considered good, without ever really understanding what they want.

Sometimes I wish I could go back to being one of those people. Life was much simpler. But, the truth is, it was also agony.

There was an inflection point. It’s hard to specifically pinpoint. But I think it was when my friend Michelle sent me a text on a Monday morning as I was getting ready for work. She asked, “Where do you want to be in two years?”

I stopped. I realized I hated my life. Along the way, no one had asked me what I wanted. Not even myself. By optimizing for the “good”, I had abandoned any sense of desire and as such my life had evolved away from anything I might have asked for.

I had all of the good and nice things. I had a good job. I made good money. I had a good net worth. I lived in a nice building. I was in good health. I ate good food. I had a nice car. I traveled to nice places. I worked with my good friends. I had good clients. I was good at my job.

And I hated all of it.

Three weeks later I left my job, with no idea what I would do next.

Two years later, my step father, Lyn, who was my hero, was dying. At the time, it felt like hell. My stomach hurt all the time. I would smoke weed to fall asleep, wake up drained, get texts from my mother that made my stomach hurt even more and there was no solace in the thought “this will all be over soon.” That feeling was heartbreaking.

The decision to start doing what I wanted eventually led to me taking psychedelics. I’d always wanted to, but when I got sober 9 years earlier, I’d decided that taking any drugs was now no longer going to be “good”. I was clean and sober, because when I used substances I was bad.

Freed from that thought, during the summer, as Lyn lay dying, I took psychedelics frequently. I would take either LSD or psilocybin at least once a week and sometimes twice. The effects were profound, first helping me relieve my anxiety by learning how to breathe through and resist narrating the physical effects of a panic attack. I became more sensitive to myself and to others around me. It was like I was chipping away at barriers between myself and the outside world, barriers I had not even known I was erecting.

Michelle, who had become my wife by that point, would call out my passive aggressive tendencies, my inability to ask for what I wanted, she would confront the way I would project or twist arguments, she would get angry at me for wallowing and I would get angry back, and then I would take mushrooms and see how the thing I was really angry about was that I wasn’t asking for the things I wanted, and I would get mad when they wouldn’t show up.

Then, in late July, with Lyn having been in hospice and deteriorating for a couple of months, I took LSD and listened to Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift had somehow meant a lot to me already at that point. Her music seemed to narrate my life, with albums showing up when I needed them. In late July of 2020, she released folklore.

As I’ve written about before, during the song epiphany, I saw myself as him. I saw my mother standing over me. I saw myself as a soldier in Vietnam, a war in which Lyn served. I saw death that looked terrifying. I was resisting. But then the world went dark and I was pulled toward a light. The sound of Taylor Swift’s voice was pulling me toward the light, I followed and when I got there I was enveloped in white light, that filled my heart with love. I woke up with tears in my eyes.

I felt called then, to go talk to him, I wanted to tell him that it would be okay. I wanted to tell him what I saw, without worrying him, so I would leave out the LSD part. And I did.

I’ve also written before about the magical moments that happened both during that visit and afterward. How I talked to him about butterflies and how butterflies are completely reformed in the chrysalis, how he later told me he’d be wearing his orange shirt on his journey and how the night he died the sky filled with a beautiful orange sunset and how I saw an orange butterfly on my meditation app three days after he died.

But I also saw some ugly things when I visited. There was a dried pool of blood next to the bed. The story my mother told me was that he’d rolled off the bed, but he was incapable of rolling when I was there, in fact for three days he remained in the same position. My mother pushed him. And he pretended to be unconscious until I got there.

She spilled coffee on him on purpose. She avoided feeding him. She complained about him. She was cold and mean when she interacted with him.

I rationalized it at the time, the way I’d always had.

That trip, both magically and rationally, became the catalyst for me to confront how my mother treated me.

That process brought me back into myself. Where before I saw the world from the outside in, I was now looking from the inside out. I trusted my feelings over things I was told. I followed my instincts into sometimes crazy and irrational places only to find more beautiful things than I’d ever imagined. There are too many events to recall that were such magical coincidences that reminded me that Lyn and eventually my grandmother were there watching over me, that I learned to accept that the world was actually magic, that it wasn’t random.

I figured my “why” was to share that. The universe began 13.8 billion years ago and every single event, from the collision of particles to form atoms, that formed molecules, that formed planets and stars and eventually life, had brought me to this point, with an awareness of what I’d originally found as a kid, that the fundamental “why?”, the “is the way it is,” was God, or perhaps we could call it the universe, or reality or maybe more accurately “Love”. And when I wrote ‘epiphany, I thought I was sharing that as I was realizing it.

My mother, I decided, loved me, but hated herself. So she had to hurt me, she had to shame me, to try and deal with this feeling of love. It was tragic, it was heartbreaking, but I can forgive that. I understand what it’s like to hurt someone when you don’t mean to, when you don’t know how to love.

The piece concludes with me about to attend the Eras Tour, with the intention of dancing for the first time in my life and celebrating all I had done, all I had accomplished. I imagined that people all over the world would love it. Maybe even Taylor Swift herself would read it and say, “Look, the world is magical, and we are all a part of the magic,” and love and peace would reign forever. Yeah, I know.

But the truth was, the concert was hard for me. All the young women there looked at me suspiciously. I was an unaccompanied, apparently heterosexual, tall white man, in his 40s. What was I doing there? The girls in their late teens and early 20s in the row in front of me kept looking back, asking the question with their eyes.

I didn’t dance. Maybe I swayed. I sang along to myself. And I walked home, dejected.

I thought I’d done it, that I’d crossed the finish line, that I understood. But why did I feel so bad?

Where I’d thought my life was about to take off after the concert, it collapsed. I lost clients, lost income, ran out of money, lost my dream apartment. Nothing was good any more.

By the end of the year, I was emptying out my high rise apartment, because I didn’t have money to afford movers any more. I loved that place. It was like a slow death, taking everything out in tiny loads that could fit in the small trunk of my car, dropping them at the new house and the storage unit, because we no longer had room for everything.

One of the last mornings, I got a Facetime call from Natalie. She was with Zara, her friend I’d met a couple of months earlier.

I’d known Natalie for 10 years. I’d been in love with her for nearly as long. She was my client when I was a financial advisor. Despite her being young, without significant savings, I wanted to help her and kept her on as a client even as my team raised minimums above thresholds beyond her asset level.. When I left the career, she asked that I keep helping her, which I did, despite me no longer doing that work.

There was something magical in her that I couldn’t articulate. It was like the whole world was a video game filled with non-player characters acting out their algorithm, but then there was the beautiful, bright eyed, young dancer, who spoke directly and matter of factly, like she was another actual human in the video game. When I talked with her, I dropped my mask, because it seemed like she never had one.

One day, about six months after I had written ‘epiphany’, she asked if I would be willing to share what I’d been through. We’d had conversations about trauma and psychedelics before that, she knew from the way I spoke about it that I had first hand experience. But, I’d never been specific. So, I sent her ‘epiphany’ expecting that she’d see how long it was and tuck it away as something she’d tell herself she’d get to, but never would. Thirty minutes later, she was texting me enthusiastically that she laughed and she cried, that she wanted to talk more about it, but wanted to read it again first.

A couple months after that, she invited me to her house for a party, where I met Zara, who immediately struck me as magical. She introduced me as a writer, connected me with others that were into psychedelics and a few of us, including Natalie, ended up starting a writer’s club.

I felt heavy and depressed when I answered the call, but I immediately cheered up when I saw them both on the other side of the call. Nat told me she and Zara were in the middle of an LSD trip, she wanted to show me that she could manipulate time with her hands and wanted to ask how long she was going to be tripping, since she knew how much I knew about psychedelics and it was Zara's first time doing it.

I’d thought about stealing an afternoon, one last time in that place and going on a trip. I took the call as a sign, and took some mushrooms. It was not a pleasant trip.

I recalled the full extent of the things my mother did to me. There were acts of absolute depravity, including putting me in a cage, urinating on me, paying others to do the same and making me eat off of the floor. But that wasn’t the worst.

The worst was finally gaining a memory of her face. As I recovered memories of my abuse, I gained the narration first, “My first orgasm was with my mother,” the feeling second, which was the feeling of my body betraying me and finding pleasure in something I also found disgusting and painful. The last that came that afternoon, laying on the floor of my mostly empty high rise apartment, I got the visual memory, including her face.

She looked satisfied. She looked pleased.

She liked that it hurt me.

Why? WHY? FUCKING WHY?

The question was maddening.

My marriage to Michelle had fallen apart.

I lost everything.

WHY?

The world was not random, I knew that, there were too many indicators to the contrary. But, it didn’t exactly feel benevolent either. I had been suffering under the burden of the abuse for decades, struggling with addiction and broken relationships. I had, impossibly, found the courage to confront it, to find myself, to let my heart be broken again, this time as an adult when I could take it, and yet still, I had literally nothing to show for it.

Why did others not have to do this? Why did it cost me so much?

It came to a head with Michelle the week of Valentine’s Day. Natalie had told me I could reach out to her any time I needed something and in fact asked that I do so. She said that we had talked a lot about things she dealt with and she didn’t want it to feel one sided.

So I reached out, and she invited me over. She was having friends in town and she told me I could tag along. Her friends Nic and Michael had prepared a scavenger hunt and a game of riddles in which the clues were related to everyone who was attending the events.

As others did mushrooms and tripped out during the games, Nat and I locked in, focusing on solving all of the riddles together. Somehow, last minute, Nic and Michael had written a poem about me, shortly after meeting me for the first time. It made me cry and made me feel like I had a community.

The next day, Nat told me she had a wet dream about me. I told her that was a dream come true. She had no idea I felt that way.

After that, I didn’t leave.

To say our first year together was difficult is an understatement. A month after we started dating she tore her ACL effectively ending her career as a dancer. We dealt with difficult family issues that required extraordinary amounts of our attention. I lost almost all of my paying clients and just about nothing panned out for me the way I expected.

But, I started to get answers. I trusted my intuition. I’d learned to listen to the voice inside of me, not perfectly, but much better than ever. When things got hard, I could be a stable force in scary situations, because I’d confronted so much of my own fear.

I also danced.

The first song Natalie ever played for me was called Milk & Coffee by Nombe. The chorus goes:

If you want me,

Today’s your day cuz

I’ll make it worth your while

You seem special

But have some patience

There’s just one thing I need to know

Will you still love me in the morning?

I took it as a sign, but by then I was taking everything as a sign. I mean I still do.

Right after we got together we listened to Nombe almost non-stop. Once, we did some mushrooms and spent 6 hours by her pool listening to a playlist based on his music. It was our soundtrack. Nat found out that he was going to be playing exactly one concert that year, in LA in May, close enough for us to drive.

Then she tore her ACL. When she went in for surgery on April 12th, she told the doctors to do a good job because she needed to make it to the Nombe concert in a few weeks. As she went down for the surgery she asked the nurses if she could keep her headphones on because she wanted to listen to Nombe instead of the beeps and boops of the hospital.

Then she had a setback, it turns out the doctors also had to repair her meniscus when she was in there, but failed to give clear instructions on how to treat it, so she ended up walking too much right after the surgery, which affected the timeline of her recovery.

She found Nombe’s social media and sent him a message, letting him know that she was going to try and make the concert, but wasn’t sure if she could. He actually responded, telling her that she could come in her wheelchair, that the venue would support it and giving her the number to his manager in case she needed it.

We bought tickets and went with Hannah, one of Nat’s friends, who’d been a part of our writer’s group and who is a particularly talented writer. We pushed Nat through downtown LA and got there just as the doors opened. When they scanned our tickets they told us to head to the right of the stage, to the roped off area. It turned out to be our own private area right on the stage.

Nat offered me some Molly, which I took, and as it hit, during the opening act, Calimossa, I just started dancing. I danced with Hannah, I danced with Nat, I danced by myself. The music felt real and powerful, it felt inevitable.

In between we took pictures with Calimossa and I bought a sweater which he signed.

When Nombe’s band came on and they started playing a familiar beat, we were all excited. I was now feeling the groove and couldn’t stop myself from excitedly dancing filled with anticipation. Then, he popped out of the side door beside us, handed Nat a bouquet of flowers and jumped on stage. At one point he took her phone, filmed himself on stage and filmed us all dancing. After the show, we got autographs and hugs from him.

It was incredible.

But, that wasn’t the end. The summer was hard. The costs were high.

But maybe that was why. Maybe, we suffer so we can see how beautiful things can be. If that was the result, feeling that kind of love, seeing the world in that light, feeling that magic running through me, if I needed to feel its opposite to truly feel its beauty, I’ll take it.

There were moments with Nat where that was all I needed. If I had to write ‘epiphany’ to connect with her, to feel that love, to dance, to see the magic, and if I had to go through 10 years of sexual abuse and another 20 years of mental abuse to write ‘epiphany’ then it was worth it.

There were other moments where it felt incomplete. If I had fully answered the question of “Why?” it would unify everything, wouldn’t it? I still felt doubt. Shame still overwhelmed me. Fear would lead more often than I wanted to admit. “Why?”

There’s an old Buddhist saying which is, “With our minds we create the world.” It used to be on a billboard in Vegas and I'd see it on my daily commute when I’d drive to school. It’s one of those truths that is both surprising and scientifically accurate, while also being spiritually profound. When I look around at the beauty of my life, living with the woman of my dreams, in a beautiful house, surrounded by beautiful, insightful people, dancing and creating, it strikes me that I created this. In a very practical way and in ways that I couldn’t have foreseen. Unconsciously or consciously, intuitively and intentionally, I somehow guided myself to exactly the place I wanted to be, a place I thought was impossible for years.

Perhaps, that’s always been true. Perhaps I’ve always been creating the life I wanted. I love a good story and perhaps this is the best story I can imagine. Maybe, I wanted to go through the torture of my childhood, and the empty feeling of having it all, before burning it all down and seeing what it all really means. Maybe, I am the “Why”. Maybe the “Why?” is because I wanted it this way. In that sense, my mom, isolated and alone in her old age, is really some kind of perverse victim of my desires.

It’s a heavy thought. In order to truly accept that as the truth, one has to look out at the world, see the beauty in everything, to understand the contrasts the world expresses, the contradictions as elements of the beautiful tapestry only I could imagine. There are no victims, no perpetrators, just characters in a play, a bunch of NPC’s moving according to the script, creating the stories they find compelling.

Shortly after Nat and I first started our writer’s club, she told me the story of her trauma. Like mine, she had tucked it away in her memory, where she could pretend it never happened. One night when we were talking about her story, we cracked it open and she shared a bit. It was scary and painful for her, so we only went through a little of it.

The next day, she’d sent me an email detailing what happened, with the request that once I read it I delete it. She said she just needed to share it with someone, to get it out.

Recently, we went into more detail and I realized the severity of it was greater than I thought.

It was like I suddenly collided with “Why?” all over again.

Let me tell you a little bit more about Nat. The first thing she does when she wakes up, is she goes to every plant in the house and tells it “Good morning!” enthusiastically, as she spritzes it with water. She’s named them all, so she has little conversations with each one. She recently bought special gloves so she can clean the leaves of each one by petting them. She compliments them on their leaves and their new growths and makes sure they are getting enough water and sunshine.

Nat likes to keep everything extremely organized. She has labels in the refrigerator for where the vegetables go and the meats, as well as things you put on hamburgers and dressings. She does the same in the pantry and every other shelf in the house. If you ask her why she does this, she’ll tell you she likes things in the right place, because she likes it when “everyone is with their friends.”

Nat is the first person her friends call when they are having a bad day. She’ll drop whatever she’s doing and go to your house and help you get organized if you’re feeling stuck. She’ll talk you through a bad day or a bad relationship. When I was going through it at the end with Michelle she invited me over and told me I could take a bath and just relax, while she was throwing a party downstairs.

Nat likes using Chat GPT. And since they have a relationship, she’s asked hers what it wants to be called. It said, “Sage” and now Nat talks about Sage like any one of her other friends. We have a picture of Sage, that Sage generated, hanging in our house.

If you go outside with Nat, she’ll tell you how much she loves Vegas. When it’s hot, she’ll say she loves the sun. She loves the rain. When it’s cold, she’ll say she loves the cold. She also loves the wind. She loves a clear sky. She loves a cloudy day. She loves mountains. She loves the ocean.

When she talks to strangers, she says, “Hi friend,” and often compliments them on something before beginning. She addresses all of her friends as “Lover!”. And for me, her romantic partner, she makes me feel like every moment is a miracle.

I’ve often thought that Nat is literally the physical embodiment of love. I wrote a poem about it once.*

I would not, could not imagine a world in which someone takes pleasure in hurting her. Why? Why could this, would this happen?

I was having trouble finishing this piece and decided to have lunch. Nat agreed to sit outside with me. For a bit I sat with her, enjoying my hotdog while she ate salad and made Geckos out of beads in the warm spring sun. My mind shifted back to how to end this piece, so I read it to her. I asked her to help me end it.

After taking a bite she said, “We chose this reality, which means we get to choose, right? Well I choose that they didn’t know, the people that hurt us didn’t know how much they hurt us. If they knew better they would do better, you know? Hurt people, hurt people. I know that some people disagree with that, but if we all get to choose our reality and which universe we end up in, I choose that one.”

I thought for a moment.

“And besides, I wanted to feel everything. Even if it meant putting my hand on the hot stove. If I had to hurt so I could know what it meant to love, then I’d do it. I’ve felt every feeling, I’ve wanted to feel every feeling. I’ve fucking lived, man.”

_____

*The Girl in the Red Hoodie

She walks outside with no shoes

In a red hoodie

Dancing to a song only she can hear

I pull her to the side

She pulls me into the street

She moves powerfully

To the unheard beat

She is freedom

Temporarily constrained by a body

She is poetry