It’s Raining Meaning

This is how we learn to dance with the Void

Here’s a thought from the dreamworld. It’s pouring rain outside on the streets of Los Angeles and it’s 6:30 AM, I’ve been up for a few hours with the boy child, and he is finally asleep.
I have this thought that desperately wants to break through from the other side. It starts with the understanding that when I am depressed, I can’t find the meaning in anything, and when I am manic, every last little bit of everything is completely imbued with multiple layers of meaning.

But what is this meaning?

One quality of the meaning is that everything feels connected to everything else. I have the ability to take any two things in the world, and make them relate to each other, and then just make it exponential. But in order for everything to have meaning, there has to be some kind of unifying force, or understanding of a unifying force: something much larger than everything else, and I have come to see that unifying force as a creator. I was not raised by people who thought like this, but it makes intuitive sense to me.

Now I am the person who is thinking these thoughts and writing them down and so sometimes it feels as if I am the creator. But then I have my Copernicus moment and realize that the universe doesn’t revolve around the earth, the earth revolves around the sun. In other words, I am not the center of things, there is something much bigger that I am revolving around. And that thought: the thought of being very small and connected to something very large, it brings this whole cascade of fractalized thoughts, that everything we see is multi-layered and self similar in different scales — there are repeating patterns that are holding the universe together, and we are all very much part of the universe. Even though it’s hard to see on the surface, the world is bound by secret knots.

It’s thoughts like these that comfort me, that allow me to feel connected to something much larger than myself, and I assume that anyone with faith in God, or some spiritual framework, has some version of these thoughts, or this deep feeling of connectedness. I think everybody has this feeling inside of them, even if it’s often hidden in the material world.

But here’s another other thought that comes along with it: I’ve never tried saying this before out loud, but it has something to do with where I feel like my place is in the universe. When I am depressed, I have the visceral sense that I have been cast out of the Kingdom, of the Garden, that there is something fundamentally wrong with me, and I have deeply hurt people who will never forgive me and therefore I am condemned to live all alone in the Void. This feeling of having wronged others, of being objectively Bad, of having to hide who I really am so that no one sees how terrible I am, it haunts me, it is the loneliest feeling in the Universe.

Back in December I slipped into a state that I could only call “ psychotic depression” where I felt like I was right on the edge of slipping into the Void, and I was terrified. I literally felt like I was going to fall into a deep abyss, and there was nothing to hold onto. The surreal part was that I seemed to be able to be present for all the people in my life and get all my work done, but I was fighting off a deep sense of terror.

This depression I have lived with, since I was a teenager, and probably earlier, is an important part of my personality, mostly because I’ve fought so hard to stay away from it. My inner world is built around protecting myself from ending up in the Void. Because I always know it is there, somewhere, waiting for me, I have worked so hard to do everything in my power to not go back there. My depression is like a black hole and it is the most terrifying, God-awful state of existence, where it feels like my soul is being annihilated. I lose my language. I lose my sense of self. I lose my sense of purpose. I am lost in an eternity of suffering. And my escape from it has fueled many of the most important things in my life.

So on the other side of the psychic walls there is a sense of meaning and purpose and I have left myself and incredibly intricate and beautiful trail, a complex series of maps, for how to stay out of the Void. And mostly they work for me. They also help me work with other people who struggle like I do.

But honestly, when I’m fighting off the depression, sometimes all I have to do is ingest the tiniest amount of marijuana, and I am back in the deeply complex, glistening chambers of meaning where everything is connected and I play an important role in making those connections. It’s like stepping over to the other side of the mirror where I have a completely different set of memories and tools at my disposal. It is like a Never Ending Book I am writing, or maybe just reading, and I’m not worried at all about running out of time, because I am confident that linear time does not exist in the way we think it does, and everything has already happened over and over and over again. I am just where I am supposed to be.

This is the same realm that I go to in my dreams, and it is the fountain of meaning that I am drawing from right now, using the fountain pen of my voice as the sun is rising, as I lie on the floor leaving myself a trail. It is essential, it is completely necessary to have a connection to this world, even if I can’t bathe in the waters as much as I’d like to. (I have to be very careful with the marijuana because it disturbs my sleep and then I start dreaming while I’m awake. I’m very careful how I use it and I go for long periods where I don’t touch it.)

But this is the thought that I was determined to bring forth from the dreamworld when I picked up this phone, lying on the floor of our kitchen with the rain coming down at the beginning of February 2024. Everything else I just said was just the context.

When I think about systems of meaning that people live under, I think about different religious traditions and cultures, and I think about the way that tight knit communities can support each other, but can also hold each other back from growing new branches and tendrils, the way that the form of a community subconsciously keeps itself intact is by keeping people in line with shame.

And then I have a parallel thought: that I was raised in a family system where I was too scared to be myself, raised by larger than life parents who didn’t know how to give me space, and I hid some of my most intense emotions to try and maintain some delicate and elusive equilibrium of stability between the warring factions. I was always back-and-forth between two systems of meaning that were always clashing, desperately desperately wanting everyone to get along, and I could never find myself in the middle of the war.

It was like a Cold War I was raised in, and when you’re a little kid you think you’re the center of the world so when your parents are angry with each other of course it feels like your fault. The yelling, even if it’s at someone else, goes directly into you as the child, and becomes part of your inner ecology. When those parents carry unresolved shame from their families of course you take on that shame. When kids pick on you and make fun of you in school and you don’t have a strong sense of self of course you internalize those voices and they grow into an inner cacophony you can’t distinguish from yourself. Somewhere, buried under all that noise is a Self trying to shine through.

But this is what it looks like in my particular life: in order to maintain my own system of meaning, I have found it really hard when other people are angry with me, when I feel rejected by people whose opinions I care about. But I’ve come to see that I have also unconsciously sought out people who would get angry with me and purposely anger them to play out some old mythology from my childhood to try and get it right. It’s really strange sometimes what we do to try to heal.

There is this language in the psychiatric literature of“ Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria” and they are basically saying that people like me, who are born sensitive, have a biological predisposition to feeling the pain of rejection stronger than other people. While I don’t have any definitive opinions on this, it seems like this theory was developed by people who have a very different meaning system than I do.

I have struggled since I was young, but most dramatically in my adult life, with a sense of being rejected by others, but I don’t think it’s biological, I think I was just raised in a way that left me really insecure, without a clear sense of myself, and so I developed really strong internal protectors to keep me feeling like I have a place in this world. Maybe my sensitivity predisposed me to ending up feeling ostracized, but to call that an aspect of mental illness is a bizarre line of causality.

For so many years, what allowed me to put myself out there and be opinionated and to have the strength of my convictions in a public way was that I felt I was part of something much bigger than myself. First, it was the punks where I found home, then the anarchist and the squatters, and then it was The Icarus Project, which I helped create, so anything that happened in it, it felt like it was a reflection of me. But I was so sensitive that any criticism just stirred up my inner Void. I didn’t know how to protect myself while keeping this larger sense of Connection to a greater comunity. And there was so much conflict, and I was the focal point for a bunch of it, and it drove me to the psych ward because I didn’t know how to deal with it.

There’s a thing that happened to me when I was a teenager, that has happened and continues to happen to so many people in the society that we live in: we have deep trauma, and instead of it being resolved and integrated, we are put on psychiatric drugs and told we are mentally ill. I’m a 49 year old man who has done a lot of healing to get to the place where I’m raising children and people pay me to be their therapist, but there are some deep wounds of mine that keep rising back to the surface because they want to be healed. And for me, in my version of this reality, my wounds are surrounded by minefields of shame and horror. I am learning, after all this time, how to diffuse the shame mines, and figure out who I am underneath all the layers.

As it turns out, I was right all along about everything being connected and everything being filled with meaning, but the sense of being cast out of the garden and ostracized, in the end, that’s a drama that’s all happening inside of myself, and I just need to bring all the parts together.

I wrote this for myself so I could come back and connect a bunch of other pieces. If you’re reading it and it resonates with you I’d love it if you’d reach out and let me know. This is how we make beautiful things in the backdrop of the Void.

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