Multitudes

I woke up this morning and was too afraid of my thoughts to want to get out of bed. So I tossed and turned for a few more hours, hoping for just one more dream. I dreamt I was in New York and I was worried about being cold in the approaching winter. My family was visiting me and they had a small tiger and my cousin’s family, who was also vacationing in New York in their RV, they had a small tiger too, and I was playing with the tiger cubs. Somehow this has something to do with my fears, if I had to take a guess I’d say that it means I am approaching winter and I shouldn’t be afraid, that my great big fears are just little tiger cubs. Who knows. 

It’s not a cutting and gripping fear like it’s the middle of the night and I just heard my door open, but it’s more of a disorientating sense that I don’t know where I am. I gave up control a while ago, but at least I could be shown a map and have it explained to me where I am on that map. Is that too much to ask? 

It’s a basic fear of the future, looking through the lens of my ego, which still desperately wants to be somebody, to accomplish something. At times, I can detach myself from it, but other times it fills the room like mind-altering smoke. Like a creative way a killer might abduct you. I look for answers. I talk to God, but I mostly just confess, “I’m sorry for always making it about what I want.” I feel slightly guilty because I know better, I’ve woken up, and I know God is in me and in everything and the current of love streams all around me at all times. But my ego never surrenders. 

Of course, oh Jesus, of course, this has to do with writing. 

I am having serious, serious doubts about my decision to write. Am I creating this story in my head that I’m meant to be a writer? Is it healthy to identify as an artist? Then again, am I just being a little scaredy-cat who is facing a challenge and is finding out that this is going to take more grit and endurance than anything I’ve ever done in my life? I feel like I’m in the beginning middle of my epic journey up the mountain, which started twenty months ago when I died and rose again, sober. I look back on my life and realize I’ve never really done anything that takes grit and endurance. Whenever things got hard, I got high. 

The problems began soon after I committed to writing a book and finishing it this summer. Holy shit, what a feeling. I’ve never felt so unqualified in my life. I have thousands and thousands of words in my computer of stories and memories, about my life, my heartbreaks, stories from my childhood, my parents upbringings, and my teeter totter battle with religion and addiction; but it feels like I’m shipwrecked at sea and all these elements are floating around me. Okay, now what the fuck do I do? How do I decide which of these elements to combine and what story am I trying to tell? How can I be honest? I have about six ideas for books but can’t seem to organize any of them into something. I’ve written about six introductions.  I have this expectation to write a masterpiece. I read masterpieces, New York Times best selling memoirs, some of my favorite authors, and the whole time I’m reading them I’m just envious because I’m nowhere near their ability. Then I go to work on my book and it’s like I’m retarded. I can’t see it. I can only barely feel it, some mysterious emotional memory I’m trying to put on paper. And the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. But as much faith as I have that this is all part of the process, I also feel delusional. I like talking about writing. I like telling people my dreams about writing, that I’m a writer, which is progress I guess. But I hate writing. I mean I love it, but it’s torture. It’s okay, I think I’m near the truth about myself; the messy, confusing, bare and brutal truth. Whitman wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

What is the meaning of all this? Maybe I’m just coming to terms with the idea that “I am large, I contain multitudes.” I wonder if we’re all afraid of this part about ourselves, which is why we like religion so much, it makes things a lot simpler and digestible. We can hold onto ourselves like a coin, this side of me is bad, this side of me is good, and as long as we just keep the coin flipped good-side up, we’re okay. But it’s not true, we are multitudes, we are galaxies spinning and morphing and changing. We are the silver the coin is made of and the fire that melted it and the mountain it was found in and the star dust which made the earth and the void that came before it. God can only be understood so little that it’s more accurate to say God cannot be understood at all, not the way we try to understand things to soothe our fear. God is as mysterious as life itself, as our very beings, and as my desire to write. God cannot be defined, or explained, as the pastor does on Sunday. God can only be felt and experienced in the fear when you first wake up, or the leaves slowly falling from a tree behind the coffee shop, or the thousands of shadows as you hike through the forest. God cannot be understood, not fully, not as we understand the way a vending machine works; God can only be known and trusted. And in essence, that’s where I’m struggling, to trust. To let go and trust. 

That’s all we can really do in life, just trust and keep going. Put one foot in front of the other and look around. Notice. Appreciate. I can do that, whether or not I’m a famous, published author; whether or not I’m a newly sober, confused, almost middle-aged man with a bag of hopes and fears that I sit down and open from time to time, whether or not I’m ego-inflated, grandiose dreaming and humble, sex craving and self-controlled, enlightened and ignorant,  courageous and terrified, present and worried, happy and sad, content and hungry… I can keep going. 

I feel like I’m at a turning point of commitment to the dream. Like one day in a field in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, two brothers with beers looked out over the rolling yellow fields, undulating with waves of wind, and gazed into the impossible and just agreed upon the holy sentiment of “fuck it, let’s keep trying.” And in faith they clinked their beers and smiled at the fear. Because when God gives you a dream, it doesn’t have to make sense, or even be possible. It’s hardly a decision. It will haunt you like the night, breathe upon your neck like the wind, and expose you like the desert sun. All you can do is keep going.