Recently, I spoke in the VA hospital I was housed in for the worst part of my longest and most severe manic episode. It is on these same grounds that my life was dragged to a point of pain and suffering that I begged an anonymous night to end my life, end my pain, end me.
When I prepare to speak, lecture or train, I have two options prior to beginning the presentation. I can try to rigidly stick to the old discoveries and breakthroughs I have had and further some sortof fictitious image of myself OR drop any image I hold of myself to myself and enjoy the moments of the speech as they happen, creating something organic, revolutionary and authentic.
When the fear presents itself in my stomach and demands a rebuttal to its physical query, my mind will flood me with ideas on how to emulate past talks and guarantee myself the praise and acknowledgement I have once experienced.
I fight from this position and through a series of questions to my frail ego; I plunder the idea of me I am trying to protect through simple negation.
Who will be embarrassed? What am I trying to protect? Is fear bad and why respond to it? Who are you looking to to validate and generate this idea of Eric Arauz? Why must the clock of psychological time keep ticking? Why must you even have a you?
And with each discovery the leaden cloak of self dissipates on my bones until I stand there devoid of an I and devoid of You? In this Buberian ‘divinity by assocition’, the world is me and I am the world.
I can now see each veteran up close and without a windshield to dampen my pain. Their blue hats with thick gold stitching announcing to the world their ship, their unit, their battles, their wars, and their lives, sit comfortably on their unkempt crowns. Men in walkers, carry oxygen and rolling forward in their wheelchairs fill the front rows of chairs in my view and stare vacantly at me.
I see their bloodshot eyes and filthy, crusted fingers. I smell them from 50 feet away and know them as my brothers. I see their childhoods and young adult lives as they readied for active duty in their beloved country’s fighting forces. I know their pride and optimism as they raised their right hands to be sworn into the divine lineage of women and men that fought for something bigger than Self; for You.
I have known the sorrow and pain of diagnosis of serious mental illness and wallowed in the suicidal despair of our shared lives as we crashed through the floors of our lives that were on fire with our dreams and into the nightmare of this hospital. This ward. This NOW.
My fuse is nearing ignition as the group takes their places. The staff tells me not to worry if THEY don’t pay attention. But there is no They, only Us, only We. And into the ALL of my life and pain, my future and dreams, All that I ever could have been and ever so subtly “Am”, I explode into the maelstrom of the perplexed energy of the room.
The cognitive linguist Umberto Eco argues back and forth whether in our conversations with the world and ourselves whether the primary block to understanding is mental cognition or linguistic recognition. Here in this room I offer the landscape of my existence in a vernacular of suffering that SPEAKS THROUGH THE WALLS CONSTRUCTED BY MENTAL ILLNESS, BY CULTURE, BY GEOGRAPHICAL SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND BARREL INTO THE SOULS OF MY FAMILY, OF MY FATHER, OF MY DILAPIDATED SELF TO A MOMENT BURNED OFF OF DELUSION AND CONCRETE IN ITS REALITY.
Knowing the time is over for the day of sharing, emptied from the catharthis of my confession, more St. Augustine than Rousseau, I hug who will hug me and make my way out to my car.
Leaving the grounds, I look back over my shoulder at this Somerset County Hades and know it is one big ward for me now and I no longer desire release. I am neither patient nor doctor. Not disease or recovery. Not anything and therefore…everything.
