am I who I say I am?

An online acquaintance started a discussion thread asking:
Are you who you say you are? Do you create a persona just for online? Do you act this way in the real world or use the anonymity found here to act contrary to your normal behaviour?

…and here’s my response:
I strive for “what you see is what you get”, both online and in real life. I’m probably more patient and tolerant online than in RL, because of the small delay built into responding in writing. (As a “real” writer, I’m practically incapable of just writing stream-of-consciousness and hitting “send”, and I’m rather puzzled that anyone can regularly do that, as many claim.)

I’m only recently becoming aware of the various (largely transparent or translucent) masks I wear in different social situations. I’m also trying to improve the way I respond to people, situations, and new information. So where is the “real” me in all this? Well, finding that authenticity is an ongoing process for me.

Thanks for raising the question!

Best to all,
M.

a personal note to friends (in the context of the previous two posts)

I’m still working on the balance between personal and more general focus here, but feel obliged to insert a brief note to friends.

Am I suicidal? No. Have I ever been? No, not really. I’m not a teenager. I can imagine a satisfactory and even rewarding life in which I don’t live up to my own expectations or those of others. In fact, that has mostly been the story of my life since I was a teenager.

Do I understand “struggle[s] with an almost paralyzing inability to get [one]self started on projects”? Yes. They are the chief conflict of my life today. Do I “stave off anxiety and feelings of failure by escaping into fantasy”? Me voilà. I live here.

edit 2007-10-02: “Here” in the last sentence refers to the online community where this was originally posted, which was at the time of writing a vivid illustration of my Internet addiction.

thoughts on a premature and possibly avoidable death

Well, here you have it (see previous post):

“Jonathan’s father, a psychiatrist for 25 years at Kaiser Permanente and medical adviser to the Depression and Bi-Polar Support Alliance, has served for years on Kaiser’s suicide review committee. . . . He says Jonathan showed no signs of mental illness, much less signs of being suicidal. . . . But he struggled with an almost paralyzing inability to get himself started on projects and reports, a problem that caused frequent clashes with parents and teachers. He sometimes worked himself into a pitched state of anxiety over his schoolwork.”

“Almost paralyzing inability to get himself started . . . frequent clashes with parents and teachers . . . sometimes worked himself into a pitched state of anxiety.”

But “showed no signs of mental illness”: this from a psychiatrist with expertise on suicide, and a a presumably loving and supportive father.

Well, of course we cut the grieving parent(s) some slack. It’s likely that in his years of reviewing suicides, Dr. Zablotny never, or at least seldom, encountered one quite like this. Everyone agrees that as not-quite-right people go, we neurotics are at the top of the heap in terms of being able to channel and manage our mental and emotional peculiarities. It is understandable that to this particular mental health professional as to others – and as to lay people in general – almost paralyzing inability, frequent interpersonal clashes, and recurrent pitched states of anxiety added up to “no signs of mental illness.”

As a lay sufferer’s guess? Jonathan’s anxiety was chronic and near-constant. His “pitched states of anxiety” were simply when his other coping mechanisms – the likely placid demeanor, the zealous recycling, the obsessive game-playing – weren’t enough to keep the fear from showing, or perhaps from being felt: from manisfesting itself to others and perhaps to himself.

frightened to death?

The following is excerpted from a column by Joan Ryan appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, February 20, 2005. The entire original column may be found at SFGate.com.

On Feb. 1, a Tuesday, [Jonathan Zablotny] jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Jonathan . . . rose at 6:45 that morning, showered, ate breakfast and left for school, a five- block walk from his home. He never arrived. Pedestrians on the bridge spotted his body at 4:46 that afternoon. His backpack, with his books and binders, was still strapped to his back.
. . . .
Jonathan’s father, a psychiatrist for 25 years at Kaiser Permanente and medical adviser to the Depression and Bi-Polar Support Alliance, has served for years on Kaiser’s suicide review committee. He resigned after his son’s death. “I can’t do it anymore,” Ray Zablotny says, sitting with his wife, Mary, in the living room of their five-bedroom Victorian on Page Street.

He says Jonathan showed no signs of mental illness, much less signs of being suicidal. The trigger, he says, seemed to be schoolwork. He was bright, scoring 1400 on his SAT. He had applied over the Christmas break to several top-end colleges, including Reed in Washington. But he struggled with an almost paralyzing inability to get himself started on projects and reports, a problem that caused frequent clashes with parents and teachers. He sometimes worked himself into a pitched state of anxiety over his schoolwork.

The week he killed himself, seniors at his high school had a battery of research papers due that would weigh heavily on their grades. Jonathan, his parents discovered the day before he died, had not even started on his history paper on the 1986 Challenger explosion. He would fail the course if he didn’t turn it in. His parents confronted him. They had just gone through the same infuriating routine in getting him to write his college-entrance essays.

“I apologized the next morning for yelling at him,” Mary Zablotny says. “But I think maybe he was balanced on a knife blade all day.”

Jonathan seemed to stave off anxiety and feelings of failure by escaping into fantasy games. He and [his best friend] Patrick [Fitzgerald] spent hours playing “Magic, the Gathering, ” a complex card game. They played “Diablo II” on their computers, talking on the phone as each played in his own home. The boys were eccentric by teenage standards, seeming, in fact, to revel in their eccentricities. Patrick, pale and bony, wears a beret to school and seems to disdain most of popular culture. Jonathan, tall and gangly, was such a zealot about recycling that classmates sometimes dropped glass bottles in the trash just to taunt him, knowing he would fish them out.

“I think Jonathan has always been a little depressed,” Patrick says. “He was always trying to figure out what other people thought of him.”

But he was never, ever suicidal, Patrick says; his leap from the bridge was an impulse. “He didn’t stop to think that everything (the research papers) would have been over in a couple weeks, and all the stress would have been gone,” Patrick says.

A few days after his death, Jonathan’s aunt came across what seemed to be a suicide note on Jonathan’s computer. It was not dated but was the last file in his school folder. It was addressed not to his parents or to Patrick but “to whom it may concern.”

“I’m a coward im taking the cowards way out and it should be honestly said what has happened. I have struggled with the same problem for 6 years and it is painfully obvious to me that I cannot overcome it for any length of time and be happy. jonathan zablotny.”

His parents believe the problem refers to his struggles with getting his schoolwork done, the history paper being the final straw. Patrick says no one will ever know for certain what drove Jonathan so suddenly to the bridge that Tuesday afternoon. All he knows is he lost his best friend, someone, he says, “who knew things about me I didn’t really know about myself.”
……..
Joan Ryan’s column runs Thursday and Sunday. You can e-mail her at joanryan@sfchronicle.com.

Page A-17
©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

Why I Am Not a Buddhist – a poem by Molly Peacock

Here is a favorite poem by Molly Peacock. I almost began this blog with it, but took a different turn at the last minute.

examining my stance

I’ve resisted blogging. I don’t think the dailiness of my life is that interesting. I don’t read blogs and don’t expect my friends to. But I’m in a process now. I need some clarity. And for me as for so many (perhaps not enough) clarity comes from writing.

Why “nervous” [the original title of this blog]? It’s what I am. The clinical name for it now is anxious; the name I grew up with, and find most useful when I need to explain myself – something I need to do fairly often – is neurotic. “Nervous” neatly dovetails the everyday meaning of anxious and the etymological meaning of neurotic. Oh, and I like the faint echo of how my condition might have been described around the turn of the last century – as a “nervous complaint.”

My condition. Hmmm. Conditions can be transitory or permanent. Time will tell. It’s a good bet that I’ve been nervous – neurotic, anxious – for a good fifty years (some of them better than others, of course, ba-dum-BUM!). And now that I’ve been diagnosed – officially within the last year – I know a little more about things I habitually do and don’t do, that may or not make sense. I know a little more about what and how I think, and how that influences how I feel, and in turn what and how I think, and so how I react to people and to situations. For everyone’s sake, I would like to minimize “explosively” as one of those ways of reacting. “Snidely” and “condescendingly” have largely lived out their usefulness, too, I think. “Kindly” is something I’m working on, and in some ways have a pretty good start on.

Rather than a “condition”, I usually think or talk about a “stance” – a starting point – my baseline likely reaction to just about any phenomenon I encounter. There might be many layers of socialization and intention over that baseline that get me through each day, but every once in a while the baseline – to switch metaphors – acts as a faultline, and something slips and grinds below me, and before you know it I’m ass over teakettle.

Weird to face this. Because the stance is that of someone who always expects the rug to be pulled out from under him. And it’s only by recognizing that that expectation has become a dependency, and that I am my own likeliest rug-puller, that I have any hope of calming down and just getting on with it, as the rest of the world does every day.

That’s close enough to the truth for now.

Best to all,
M.