“The hunter is always slightly smarter, but the prey is always wising up. In evolutionary theory, the tension between predator and prey is one of the great engines that has driven the creation of intelligence itself, each side successively and ceaselessly responding to the other.”

Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art.

Wile E. Coyote’s business card states that he is a “genius.” It’s hard to disagree, if we are talking genius of the 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration type. “You’re kind of a psychopath, aren’t you?” asks down-and-out lawyer Kevin after seeing Coyote concoct yet another series of devious inventions to achieve ends that are usually, at best, morally neutral. It makes sense that coyotes feature so prominently in Hyde’s book on “trickster” archetypes around the world. At the heart of this film is a veneration and exploration of Wile E. Coyote’s trickster essence—how he drives intelligence and culture by straddling the sacred (valuing connections with others) and the profane (his connections are often destructive).

“If trickster stirs to life on the open road, if he embodies ambiguity, if he “steals fire” to invent new technologies, if he plays with all boundaries both inner and outer, and so on—then he must still be among us, for none of these has disappeared from the world.''

“Trickster…needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people and institutions and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that their boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly disturbed.”

The last quote here is describing one of the mechanisms of humor: safe play that transgresses boundaries just enough to induce thought, laughter, and possibly change. Trickster uses himself as the instrument to induce play on institutional and societal levels. Wile E. Coyote is witty at times, sure, but he’s heartbreakingly serious about his passion: catching and eating Roadrunner. The humor he creates comes from his singular focus on his goal and the boundaries he will cross and push to achieve this goal. His boundary pushing is animalistic, innocent, and a byproduct of unwavering commitment to his craft. Wile E. Coyote represents everything Foghorn Leghorn chose not to be: as ceo of Acme Corporation, Leghorn has literally learned to speak a human language…and lost touch with where he came from. He’s persuasive, calculating, and should know better than to endorse products that cause “pain” to other animals. His past is a tool he uses to justify his corrupt corporate ruthlessness. His only craft is weaponized, self-enhancing rhetorical razzle-dazzle and his only goals are to continue flying on private jets, threatening subordinates, and playing golf.

Wile E. Coyote, our trickster hero, saves lives by virtue of simply being himself. He inspires a flawed mortal, attorney-at-law Kevin Avery, to rise to the major challenge he finds himself in. Kevin (and Roadrunner!) testify to the power of Wile E.’s unorthodox methods of building friendships with them. Kevin’s task is to learn how to be a friend to himself and to others. The movie puts it simply at the end: his law firm is saved because trust was finally built with his cartoon clients. Trust looked like ripping up Acme’s secret million-dollar-check and publicly characterizing Coyote as persistent and resilient, even when Acme was making a case for Coyote being a loner and a loser, bullying him under the guise of making a legal argument.

“Coyote vs. Acme” suggests you don’t need to “win” structurally, you need to play with the structures and keep your eyes on the prize: the trust and love of the people who really matter.

That’s all, folks! xoxoxox

Two songs that have been speaking to my pain lately are linked above. They both contain the word “howl”, but otherwise they’re pretty different. “Everything You Want” reminds me of being five years old in a car parked in a strip mall and feeling wistful. “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” was what I played over and over when I cut my abusive mom out of my life and realized I was living very differently than I ever thought I would.

I love the drama of “Everything You Want.” I love the cinematic twist at the end where the narrator takes ownership of his perspective. I love the fantasy that you can be a lost and broken person with THE PERFECT GUY pining for you in the wings; a guy who is also everything inside of you that you wish you could be (insert millennial-cry-laughing-emoji here because when one person is everything, the other must be nothing).

Still, read this:

Somewhere there's speaking, it's already coming in
Oh, and it's rising at the back of your mind
You never could get it unless you were fed it
Now you're here and you don't know why
But under skinned knees and the skid marks
Past the places where you used to learn
You howl and listen, listen and wait for
The echoes of angels who won't return

and

You're waiting for someone to put you together
You're waiting for someone to push you away
There's always another wound to discover
There's always something more you wish he'd say

I read these lyrics and I’m in my twenties again, alternating between displaying behaviors designed to alienate other people and then desperately seeking validation and “love” anywhere I thought I could find it. Trace elements of this cycle can still be found in me today, but I try to override those impulses if at all possible. “Echoes of angels who won’t return” makes the song eerie for me—looking back, I can pinpoint the exact moment I broke/cracked/fell apart to April 2012, when my grandmother died of ovarian cancer a month after being diagnosed. She was the only person in my life who had given me unconditional love with any semblance of consistency. I turned eighteen that same month, and knew I was not up to the task of being an adult or even a person. If your greatest wish in life is to disappear, that’s a serious problem.

The last time I saw my mom, earlier this year, she said she’d be drinking until she died. She shamed me for how much I was paying my therapist. She pointed out how much weight I had gained. And she told me she didn’t say any of those things. I left her in the apartment, said I felt alone, and walked to the train station by myself.

What do you think you'll do, then?
I bet they shoot down the plane
It'll take you a couple of vodka and tonics
To set you on your feet again
Maybe you'll get a replacement
There's plenty like me to be found
Mongrels who ain't got a penny
Sniffin' for tidbits like you on the ground

My therapist, Danielle, and I disagree on whether she told me I had “no sense of self” or “very little sense of self” when I started seeing her seven years ago. I didn’t ask her what it meant. Back then, I didn’t communicate. I talked! But I didn’t communicate. Instead, I went to the search bar on Psychology Today and read everything about “sense of self” that I could find. She was right, I thought to myself. Moreover, she had a PsyD and I didn’t, so she was most likely right, right?

That was the thing: I didn’t trust anyone. It makes me laugh now, but at the time I was so alienated that I didn’t understand my therapist’s facial expressions and was always wondering if she could be trusted. It was a few months into therapy, but she was already kinder to me than my prior two therapists (a story for another time). She actually listened to me, let me weep openly in sessions, and had cool tattoos.

A few years later, she answered the phone when I was in the psych ward. I couldn’t get over the fact that Mount Sinai let an angry nurse shove a magazine in my face and shout, “YOU GET IT NOW?!?!?” at me—in the CPEP of all places. (DISCLAIMER: This was probably a visual hallucination.) So when I heard Danielle’s voice—unamused—I told her, “You don’t know what they’re doing to me in here!” She replied, “You still don’t trust me,” and said she had to go.

Danielle has a remarkable knack for introducing life-changing yet basic concepts at exactly the time I need to hear them. Another quote from early in therapy: “You need to understand other people.” When she says something intriguing, I turn the car around and rearrange my life to find out what she means.

And so, quite a few years later, I find myself still thinking about trust and understanding. But I no longer feel like Danielle possesses a knowledge of life that I can’t access. The student has developed her powers and is now making use of these concepts as only she can.

So what am I doing with them? At this moment, I am staying up late to write, wash dishes, and deep clean my apartment. I am giving myself about a week to stop scrolling, give up added sugar, and ditch processed foods. I am thinking about the precious public figures who have recently killed or harmed themselves. I am reminded of what it feels like to humiliate yourself publicly and feel bottomless shame about who you are.

Lately, I’m choosing something other than red-hot shame. I am choosing to honor my own humanity, inherent worth, and capacity for change. Part of achieving that is feeling it, and the other part is acting on it. David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish asks us to picture an image that has stayed with me since I first encountered it: the rubber clown suit of negativity.

There’s truth in paranoia and truth in your deepest fears about yourself. Sorry! But thinking that’s the whole story would be to make a HUGE MISTAKE. Actually, it’s the ultimate huge mistake because it wastes time and leads you into self-fulfilling-prophecy quicksand that eats you alive. I return to Joan Didion to explain this fate best: “One eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.”

I was the patient of a supervisor at one of the most prestigious analytic institutes in the city for six months a couple of years ago. She told me that if I killed myself, “people” would think it was “another act of aggression.” She told me she wasn’t sure if it was “narcissism or something else.” She declared me “resentful” and ended the treatment, saying she couldn’t help me. She said I didn’t have schizophrenia. One day as I was talking, she took her shoes off and put her bare feet on the ottoman.

Her words were on loop in my head for so long… and I never knew her. A lot has happened in a few years, but I’m no longer in denial about cruelty when I encounter it. Deciding to trust others is possible when you understand who they are and you basically know who you are. They might not say it directly, but they will spell it out in everything they do if you’re paying attention. When the disrespect begins, you can end it right there. You have enough information. The only question that remains is: Who the fuck are you?

6. Discernment

At twelve years old, I finally got fed up with being my next-door-neighbor’s punching bag, and I said as much to her via a text sent by Motorola Razr straight to the heart. I lost a friend group at school and was completely ignored/bullied by members of her family for the rest of my days living there, but I gained something else: a newfound understanding of the Beatles’ brief masterpiece “I’m Looking Through You.” The unbearable agony of facing middle school alone became a little easier knowing I could go home at night and listen to Rubber Soul or the White Album in the dark and live in universes that were actually a joy to be a part of. That was the first time I blew up my life, and the consequences were so severe and long-lasting that I figured I’d never live through something comparable again. A favorite phrase of mine is the lyric, “I was wrong/ Again, I was wrong…” from Billy Strayhorn’s original version of the gorgeous “Lush Life.” It applies in this instance because I was wrong.

To develop a psychotic condition is to keep blowing your life up ad nauseam. I think its been…what….five times now? This last time was different though. I didn’t want to keep failing to learn the same lessons. I listened to the wisdom of psychosis and honored what it had to teach me: by taking action in ways I knew many would not understand. Another song!

One too many times
I fell over you
Once in a shadow
I finally grew
And once in a night
I dreamed you were there
I canceled my flight
From going nowhere

… One too many times
I twisted the gate
When I was crazy
I thought you were great

Just when my life was starting to remind me of that godforsaken quote about the definition of insanity (not reproducing it here), I decided to take the blinders off. There were things I had experienced that I was deeply in denial about. There were things I had allowed that I couldn’t square away. There were people in relationship with me that were exploiting my tendency to ignore what I knew to be true or right or just. Like Eve trying in vain to cover herself with small leaves, I felt ashamed and exposed when I put my experiences together in a new light. Two assumptions helped me move forward; the first being that it’s never too late to do the right thing and the second being that truth always illuminates.

Once in a shadow/ I finally grew.

Welcome to my ongoing series in which I claim victory over madness prematurely and tell you how I did it. I’ll start here today: I wrote both of the first posts on the tail end of a manic episode. I believe the mania led me to have a greater understanding of myself and my illness…while at the same time I was sicker than I have been in a long time. This past week my mood has been excruciatingly low, but I’ve been Doing The Work, Opposite Action, Never Giving Up, etc. The good news is I’ve decided to stop treating an illness as a character flaw, which I used to think was something the mentally ill did to excuse their behavior. I sent my friend a series of messages today that took a short time to send and a lifetime to conclude.

I know what you’re thinking: she’s claiming mania AND psychosis now? Pick a lane! Unfortunately, that is exactly what I am doing. In fact, the mania has been so real that I lost a friend over it in the last week. I also worried many others. I want to be gentle on myself tonight but I’m also in the mood to send you all a Postcard from the Edge, so here is the next entry in my pretentious list.

5. Anger

Here is where “Crooked Teeth” comes in. I’ve been returning to it because it captures something so true about my first thirty years of life: the feeling of being utterly failed by places that promised hope and community. At this point, I have a clearer understanding of the role I played in the repeated rejections, but the sting may never go away because I can’t unsee the role they played too. Bertram Karon wrote in The Tragedy of Schizophrenia Without Psychotherapy: “Understanding persons with schizophrenia means facing facts about ourselves, our families, and our society that we do not want to know, or to know again (in the case of repressed feelings and experiences).” I’m a Christian now; I’ll never go to church. I’m a “leftist”; I can’t relate to many of the people I’ve met who label themselves as such. I love books; I rarely speak of them out loud. I write a Substack; hundreds of people read it and I don’t know who they are. In many ways, I’m still someone looking for what Martin Luther King Jr. called “beloved community.” I get glimpses of it—at my job, with my friends, making small talk with strangers. But the real thing? I wonder where it is.

This one makes me sad. Growing up, I tried to use humor as a way to find friends and relate to other people. I had perpetually crooked teeth, a half-paralyzed face, no hand-eye coordination, an obsession with pop culture and books that survives to this day, my own sense of style, and…I was trying to fit in at a literal country club every summer. From an uncomfortable pool chair, I fantasized about putting a bow in my hair, donning some Lilly Pulitzer, and shocking everyone with my athletic prowess. I knew I was funny because I had Lemony Snicket and dial-up internet. But it didn’t really show much because I spent most of my time being anxious and depressed. Even when I was talked to—which was rare—I found it hard to sustain any friendship based on positivity or fun because that was NOT where I was living. Life after childhood was what you could accurately call A Series of Unfortunate Events…until I started to laugh again approximately six months ago. Weirdly, I give my gym membership and my beloved friend Andres half the credit for this development. He asked me to join with him, and we spent many nights going home laughing, high on endorphins. It started to seep into the rest of my life. I realized humor was part making people laugh, part laughing with them, and part laughing at yourself. So far, this formula has served me well. Also, humor is magical and kind of impossible to write about successfully so I’ll leave it here and hope you get the joke.

3. Hope

When I was placed in a PROS program that I thought I was above (is there a G&T for schizophrenia recovery?), I would show up early every day and read psychosis recovery journals. I found many of them to be both bleak and fascinating. I think this is where I saw a qualitative study where people who recovered from psychotic disorders were asked what factors contributed to their recoveries. The number one factor reported by almost everyone was hope. I had been hopeful all my life but also disappointed all my life. Reading that study was the moment when I decided to lean in to hope and never let it go.

4. Love

One thing about me is that I have become the prickly, strong cactus I am with a lot of indirect sunlight and very little water. Harsh conditions? Yes. But maybe I was also built to get love from other places. Music is a big one. The Powerpuff Girls soundtrack? I remember it well. Liam Lynch’s 2003 masterpiece “The United States of Whatever”? I am singing it at Bushwick’s the Cobra Club, by myself, because I couldn’t find anyone to go with me that Friday. Another thing I love is fashion and beauty. I delight someone else almost every single day with something I’m wearing or with my fifteen-minute, fifteen-step, always-sparkly daily makeup routine. A beautiful detail can transform an outfit, like the orchid clip I wore in my hair today (pictured below). I try to live with love, which is to say ethically. That means RESPECTING THE ANIMALS WE SHARE A PLANET WITH. Two things happened to me that changed my relationship to animals. One: I was on a roof with my small dog who has since passed on and was adopted from bad circumstances. A random man told me I don’t love my dog. I said, excuse me? And he told me I was letting the dog’s teeth rot. He was right of course, and after that day I began to take care of my dog (and myself) properly. My dog and I weirdly ended up having the same dry-left-eye problem, and as I’d put drops in his eyes every few hours, I’d think back to that guy on the roof. Would someone who didn’t love their dog do THIS? Years later, my vegan therapist told me you can’t love animals and eat meat. So now I’m a vegetarian. I didn’t want to because I love a smashburger, but I’ve found that my homemade Impossible Burgers leave less of an aftertaste behind. Lastly, I am a people person. I try to do my best by them and come up short sometimes, yet even haters of mine have called me “warm.”

The signal in the sky-oh…that’s when I know that I have to fly-oh. PART THREE is on the way!

My point is that Billy Joel has been part of my recovery soundtrack for a long time. A few weeks ago when I cut off my parents, “My Life” was there. I almost titled this essay “Either way, it’s okay, you wake up with yourself.” When I finally began to be on my own side, “River of Dreams” started to sound real to me. I consider recovery to be a homecoming. It’s just that not everyone who recovers from schizophrenia is lucky enough to be from Long Island—what a shame. Fortunately, the qualities I am about to outline can be attained by any person, anywhere, regardless of whether they hail from the best greater metropolitan area there ever was or will be.

*RECORD SCRATCH FROM A MOVIE*

I’m going to invoke Green Day at this point to explain the grief that comes from “coming home again.” It’s all I can feel tonight, it seems. I’m trying to celebrate, but I keep replaying the wounds I incurred along the way and feeling like my pain is never-ending.

Left me here alone
And I shoulda stayed home
After ten cups of coffee
I’m thinkin’
(Where’d you go?) Nobody likes you, everyone left you
(Where’d you go?) They’re all out without you, havin’ fun
(Where’d you go?) Everyone left you, nobody likes you
(Where’d you go?) They’re all out without you, havin’ fun

These lines to me represent the absolute rock bottom of continuing to live after experiencing your first psychotic episode and receiving a highly stigmatized diagnosis from some punk psychology intern who told you that you didn’t seem like you’d fail out of college during your mandatory intelligence testing. I returned to my shitty coffee-shop job and had to leave one of my first shifts back because my limbs felt “too heavy.” My therapist was helpful with this and told me, “That’s because you were depressed.” That that was shocking news to me shows how lost, alienated from myself, and confused I had become. Nobody liked me. Everyone left me. And they were all out without me being 23 years old.

In the crowd of pain
St. Jimmy comes without any shame
He says, "We're fucked up, but we're not the same
And Mom and Dad are the ones you can blame"

Psychosis is the worship of a false idol; a dopaminergic St. Jimmy that lives in your head and tells you it’s everyone else’s fault and gives you a license to be strange and angry. And like St. Jimmy, that guy is going to abandon you at the worst possible moment and leave you to claw your way back into society via humbling grunt work that your doctors say you should probably avoid.

Here they come, marchin' down the street (Ooh-ooh-ooh)
Like a desperation murmur of a heartbeat (Ooh-ooh-ooh)
Comin' back from the edge of town
Underneath their feet
The time has come and it's goin' nowhere (Ooh-ooh-ooh)
Nobody ever said that life was fair now (Ooh-ooh-ooh)
Go-carts and guns are treasures they will bear
In the summer heat

The world is spinnin' 'round and 'round out of control again
The 7-Eleven to the fear of breakin' down
So send my love a letterbomb and visit me in Hell
We're the ones goin'

Home, we're comin' home again
Home, we're comin' home again

Yes, Billie Joe Armstrong is celebrating the return to the person you always were. Nobody ever said life was fair, but you have treasures from childhood still with you and a shadow (“visit me in Hell”) to embrace as an adult. The music is triumphant. Take the deal, it’s a good one.

I Defeated Madness…What Did You Ever Do?

1. Curiosity

Life itself had never not been confusing to me. It felt like everyone was handed a manual at birth that I didn’t get, and then when I saw the manual, it looked like extremely dry IKEA assembly instructions I couldn’t understand. But I didn’t let it stop me from looking, listening, and learning as much as I could. Even when it was painful. Especially when it was painful.

I have 11 more for you, folks. PART TWO drops this weekend <3333

I recently attended a talk on the subject of trauma, where the speaker said a lot of people don’t want to work through their trauma, but that instead they want to go over it again and again in therapy without resolving it. The speaker indicated that one must realize they have internalized some aspects of whatever was perpetrated against them and leave behind an adolescent mindset wherein they are innocent, isolated, and/or uniquely victimized. They said the person carrying trauma must realize their pain may never go away or be healed, and that “recovery” is often an illusion.

I don’t exactly disagree with this but I believe the traumatized person’s inclination to dwell in the trauma is the natural aftermath of the events they went through. If they didn’t become frozen at the point the trauma overwhelmed them, then it would not be trauma. Additionally, my life experience has shown me that PTSD symptoms can coexist with good mental health (that is to say, happiness). Achieving this in my own life has coincided with achieving the relative maturity I alluded to in my first post and beginning to live in the present and future rather than the past. I’ll always have “scars”/pain/“symptoms”, but those things are small in comparison to living a life I’m proud to have built.

In Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson gives us characters who ultimately become unstuck in time, which here means the opposite of Vonnegut’s “unstuck in time”. They once again begin to grow as people after years spent in limbo. What I love about their stories is that this growth comes at a cost, as it always does. As Anaïs Nin once said, the day eventually comes where “the risk to remain tight in a bud [is] more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” The tension in these films comes from the way the characters persist in their stagnation until the consequences are so severe that they have to change. This was true for me as well this year. I’ve watched what I unconsciously thought was the very essence of my being (my intensity, hyper-vigilance, incessant worrying, and flair for the dramatic) become relics of a more chaotic way of living that I’ve left behind. Instead of performing my life, I’m finally living my life. This is why Rushmore’s Max Fischer is my number-one ultimate Hero of Film. He shows us that the dropping of pretenses and psychological defenses takes a trial-and-error mentality that can lead to both mortification and glory. Max discovers that he can still be an ambitious person while being more relaxed about how other people perceive him. Hence, letting Miss Cross gently take off his glasses at the end of the film.

The Royal Tenenbaums also shows the honesty it takes with oneself to let go of a maladaptive shell-personality that was formed as a response to trauma. In Rushmore, the characters we care about find themselves healed or doing better than ever by the end of the film. In The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson complicates the picture by suggesting that redemption or healing is rarely total or neat. Royal Tenenbaum saves the lives of his grandchildren and finds some level of acceptance within the family before he dies, but no one speaks at his funeral. The film may be suggesting that some things, like abusive or narcissistic parenting, remain unspeakable because the damage reverberates continuously. Royal’s children contend with this damage by having to face themselves just like their father did. After Richie attempts suicide, he finally addresses one of the root causes of his deep shame and begins to move forward on an uncertain path.

Life is hard. You could write a book on PTSD like Slaughterhouse-Five and still be a difficult father, as Mark Vonnegut attests to in Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So. You can apologize profusely for what you’ve done and be met with nothing but tepidness or resistance as Royal did. You can fuck up profoundly and lose your scholarship like Max. But you can also catalyze change in the people around you in ways you could’ve never predicted. You can try your best and show up honestly and see what happens.

My introduction to this song was a Goo Goo Dolls cover from 2004. It must have gotten radio play because that was how I found new music aside from dutifully spending weekend mornings watching music videos on VH1 and MTV. The song stands out in any era (not unlike “Iris”). It has a straightforward message of love and care carried by a perfectly matched melody. But “straightforward” here does not mean it’s easy to practice love or care or write a good melody. Supertramp is showing us what it feels like to come out the other side of hard work with a skill set. The song ends with: “What a long ride/ Come a long way/ Oh, sing it tonight.” As we were discussing in Catherine Liu's seminar on Walter Benjamin this weekend, many people are finding it challenging to actually listen to other people. They signal they’re offering care and attention, but in practice, they’re far from giving any of their time to someone else. This is where The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm is useful. How do we arrive at a place where love is as effortless as “Give a Little Bit” sounds? The Art of Loving offers guidance without prescribing.

I Was Going To Write A Bulleted Summary of Concepts That Help One to Give More of Themselves and Receive More In Turn <3 But I Got Derailed By A Concept Introduced Early In The Book

• On page one, Fromm calls out people who “listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love”! Is that you? Couldn’t be me.

• “Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.” Nothing to add here.

• “What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.” This is cynical and also still true. Okay. We’re going to skip ahead to Part Two: The Theory of Love, where I read a sentence that stopped me in my tracks.

• He begins this section (“Love, the Answer to the Problem of Human Existence”) by explaining that prehuman, animal, instinctual harmony is lost to us, so we need a new harmony as human beings. Since we are “life being aware of itself,” he theorizes that the knowledge of being separate from others is the source of all anxiety. Being separate is to be “helpless, unable to grasp the world—things and people—actively; it means the world can invade me without my ability to react.”

• Fromm continues to explain the story of Adam and Eve through this lens—their guilt and shame came not from being found naked (Victorian explanation), but in the recognition of their differences as man and woman without having discovered love as a way of bridging the gap between them (as evidenced by Adam blaming Eve instead of defending her).

• Then Fromm goes ahead and explains the not-so-obvious: “The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness. The absolute failure to achieve this aim means insanity, because the panic of complete isolation can be overcome only by such a radical withdrawal from the world outside that the feeling of separation disappears—because the world outside, from which one is separated, has disappeared.”

• This reminds me of what Bertram Karon had to say about the development of clinical insanity, aka the entity known as “schizophrenia”, in this article and elsewhere. In every instance of schizophrenia, “if one listens carefully to the patient, the disorder always makes psychological

  sense and seems inevitable in terms of the life as experienced by the person.”

• “He who understands nothing is worthless.” The person with schizophrenia makes manifest the utter worthlessness they feel inside by embodying not-knowing and making this known in ways both creative and destructive.

• In “The Art of Being Schizophrenic,” Jay Haley claimed that people with schizophrenia are parodying not society at large but their own dysfunctional families. But not-knowing, while more all-consuming in people with schizophrenia, is a problem on a societal level. Many of the forces that become the focus of psychotic anxieties have been unmasked in America and around the world. I can imagine Jay Haley scratching his head at recent developments and Bertram Karon not being surprised.

• Whose fault is it when someone is absolutely unable to connect? Depends who you ask, clearly. But it would be a disservice to the afflicted to not convey—some way, somehow— that inner resources must be summoned and strengthened if they are to have a fighting chance at any sort of life beyond marginalization.

• Anyway, just take this pill. It will help you think more clearly.

With this cover, Supertramp really said: this greatest hits collection presents perfect pop confections that have emerged unscathed from the prison of living. How did they pull that off? In no particular order, let’s refer to the songs themselves.

"Take the Long Way Home"

“When you go home tonight after the concert…don’t forget to take the long way home,” Supertramp warns us at the beginning of the linked 1979 live performance of the song. This isn’t my favorite version of the song because they increased the tempo, which seems antithetical to the vibe. The vibe is established cinematically and incredibly in the studio version, which begins with anticipatory strings, the piano riff, and the first palatable use of harmonica in the history of popular music. Okay, wow, I think I just discovered my Subway Take right there. Even if Ethan Hawke already did it (IYKYK).

Anyway! This is a song wherein the protagonist wakes up and realizes they’re “the joke of the neighborhood.” They thought they were a “Romeo playing a part in a picture show,” but their wife and everyone else disagree. This is how it feels to see potential in yourself that no one else does. I’ve found that you don’t need the neighborhood or even your wife to believe in your capability or even your sanity (oh the calamity!). You need people who get it. And when you look around and find your life’s a catastrophe, it’s time to hit the road and find those people. Even if it requires taking the long way home.

"The Logical Song"

This one’s my favorite. If Just Planting Seeds were a Myspace, this would play as you viewed the site. It’s an identity song. The narrator begins in childhood: “When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful/ A miracle, oh, it was beautiful, magical.” My childhood was difficult in many ways but this captures the sense of wonder I felt about nearly everything I enjoyed. Jumping on a bed while listening to the Spice Girls. Biking to the end of my driveway on my eighth birthday and forcing myself to remember that moment forever because I was growing up (LOL). Playing Backstreet Boys on my boombox and dancing around for hours on end.

But then they sent us away and taught us things we associate with adulthood: dependability, logic, cynicism, intellectualism. The song implies that something is always lost along the way, and maybe some terrible things are added. I recently read about a study that said babies learn “deceit” as young as eight months old. They sneak food and pretend to ignore the sound of their parent's voice. But Supertramp isn’t lamenting the presence of innate negative traits that are shared by most people to varying degrees, such as lying or cruelty. The Logical Song is concerned more with the unnatural constraints that get introduced as we age. And by “unnatural”, I am referring here to capitalist logic. If you don’t self-monitor closely, we have a litany of labels for you. And if you’re invited to play with us, you have to be respectable, presentable, and, most of all, a vegetable. It reminds me of when a friend brought me to their parents’ house and the first question one of their parents asked me was, “You’re a ____? Not a lot of money in that is there?” I almost spit out my Progresso. Respectable adults will let you know when you don’t measure up to the standards of a system they sacrificed their…dignity for.

Stay tuned for Part Two.

This Peanuts cartoon speaks to the messy b*tch who loves drama inside of all of us. As I admitted yesterday, I’ve been known to rely on “battle cries” to get me through situations that can range from mildly to extremely challenging. James Carse explained the reason for this better than I ever could in Finite and Infinite Games:

“As we enter into finite play—not playfully, but seriously—we come before an audience conscious that we bear the antititles of invisibility. We feel the need, therefore, to prove to them that we are not what we think they think we are or, more precisely, that we were not who we think the audience thinks we were.”

Who among us hasn’t done this? This is acknowledged in My Chemical Romance’s video for “I’m Not Okay (Trust Me)”. Someone warns Gerard Way at the very beginning that he’s never going to make it because of all the things he is and is not (he likes D&D, Audrey Hepburn, and Harry Houdini but he can’t swim, dance, or do karate). Labels and value judgments can be so fun sometimes! Unless they are devastating and almost impossible to remove.

Carse understood this and gave us a solution that I think about way too much:

“Whenever we act as the genius of ourselves, it will be in the spirit of allowing the past to be past. It is the genius in us who is capable of ridding us of resentment by exercising what Nietzsche called the “faculty of oblivion,” not as a way of denying the past but as a way of reshaping it through our own originality. Then we forget that we have been forgotten by an audience, and remember that we have forgotten our freedom to play.”

This, my friends, is the philosophical equivalent of the “Fuhgettaboudit” sign you may have seen when driving across a New York State border. And it’s been my experience that this is the best option we have in the face of our own suffering. Creatively reshaping the past means that we get to try our hand at our version of success. Even if some guy in high school told us that would never happen because we can’t dance. This is the joy of being the genius of yourself. I found out yesterday how deeply satisfying it can be to take the mud of your life, shape it into something useful, put it in a kiln to solidify, and display it. I’m both so proud and dying to know what you think. I think I’ll go for a swim tonight and consider the future.

Please note that the title of this post is an ode to Miss Piggy. The subtitle is an earnest attempt to keep up with psychoanalytically informed publishing trends—both to garner critical acclaim and, ideally, increased revenue.

I have several more posts planned in this style: On Loving Snoopy. On Quirky Earrings. On Being Obsessed with Candles.

Write what you know, they say. So I shall.

Let us begin.

“It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.” — Susan Sontag

For the sake of clarity—and by clarity I mean a gross and somewhat offensive oversimplification—I offer the following structure:

Part One: A False Self is Born

Part Two: Breakdown

Part Three: Trauma Ensues

Part Four: My therapist Danielle Saves My Life fr

Part Five: Basic Trust Is Eventually Achieved

Part Six: Assholes. Assholes Everywhere.

Part Seven: The Asshole Within

Part Eight: March 2026

We begin our story in March of 2026, because I want to. For the first five days of the month, I couldn't eat much, had trouble sleeping, and was blasting music in my pale yellow headphones at odd hours of the night. “Shark in the Water” by VV Brown was intensifying a feeling that was both beautiful and tragic: limerence. I had never heard of this state of being until I sent my friend a homemade meme inspired by Dexter’s Lab that will hopefully never see the light of day. Her reply: “Limerence is a helluva drug.”

Limerence is a cousin of resonance. Being seen and appreciated for exactly what you are by a person who knows what to look for can make everything else worth it in an instant. I felt a song in my heart. That first weekend of March, I went to a local bar by myself and sang “Paris 1919” by John Cale to the best of my (limited) ability. I had wanted to perform that song for a long time, but now I knew I was ready. “William William William Rodgers put it in its place,” I sang earnestly. I knew the combination of irony, satire, and sheer beauty that enthralled me time and again would be missing in a karaoke rendition, but I made them listen to me anyway.

By day four, I was crying and agonizing and bargaining. At that point, to say to this person how I was feeling would be something akin to the end of Eminem’s “Stan”, when the aggrieved stalker makes it clear that he wanted to be together and then dies in a fiery car crash of his own making. Still, I wanted them to know. So that I could know they knew. Yet more than that, I realized I wanted them in my life more than I wanted that. And then, as quickly as it appeared, I was freed and feeling normal again, if also completely exhausted and bewildered.

My longstanding dilemma with men I like always goes like this: I adore you, and I think I want to BE you too. Not in the sense that I want to be “a man”, but that I want to try on your outstanding personal qualities and make them my own and maybe even improve upon them and keep them for the rest of my life so that I’ll always have part of you with me. Normal stuff!

You may have noticed a tinge of desperation in my typical crushes. Limerence is what happens when that desperation is writ large and disrupting your entire life for days on end. After the crash, I thought a lot about what I was so desperate for, and realized it was something that had been eluding me for a long time.

Dignity.

That’s what it was, is, and always will be. It’s not self-respect exactly. For more information on self-respect, I direct you to Joan Didion, Vogue, 1963. I see it as a state of absorption in the world where you’re just flowing. You are part of nature itself and therefore in possession of both its force and its responsiveness to the unpredictable.

If you’re lucky, dignity is conferred in childhood by alchemical developmental processes that my psychoanalytic colleagues are still trying to quantify. It grows over time and cushions the unfair and tragic elements of being alive. I think this is a better path than having to acquire it later on. Yes, there’s a certain satisfaction that comes from raising yourself, but there’s also lost time, missed opportunities, and life-threatening trauma that goes hand-in-hand with developmental arrest.

“My emotions keep hitting me like a frying pan in the face,” I texted Danielle in the midst of the limerence episode. A powerful metaphor, but one I should’ve saved for my next life-altering experience: maturity. By the second week in March, the jig was up. I looked back on the things I had done and said to the people who mattered most to me and felt mortified. Then I had a brief phase where I attributed their attunement, guidance and patience to none other than the “hand of God.” Soon after, I realized the “hand of God” was just adults behaving decently most of the time. And that landed as so miraculous that I became deeply afraid of losing the people that made my life so precious.

I thought I had achieved so much. I know who I am now. I am no longer a child perpetually wearing a dunce cap. I am a real boy. These were the battle cries that got me through my days. But I was ultimately still playing a game, and worse still, I was losing. To see, and not just look; there was my task. So I began.

“Elegance is learned, my friend.” — Luann de Lesseps