Nov. Sprints: The Shit Sandwich Cookbook

A Memoir To-Be

I’ve been told enough times over the past several years that I’m a good storyteller that I guess it’s time I give the idea some proper attention. Personally, I think my acumen in this particular category has been drastically oversold. That said, my therapist also tells me I tend to have a “warped filter” when it comes to my self-perception, so I’m willing to suspend my disbelief, at least temporarily, for the sake of doing something I claim to enjoy. The “something” in this context is writing, in case that wasn’t clear. I’m working on being more clear. I’m also working on being less verbose. You can imagine the amount of stress I am under while trying to accomplish both of these things simultaneously.

As you can probably tell, it’s not going well.

Why does any of this matter? Well, it all started around 37 years ago, when I was born. I have consistently regarded this event as wildly underwhelming and overhyped, and I’d have to say my father agrees with me. Or at least he probably would if we were on speaking terms, but that’s a story for later. That’s my issue with stories, you see…I have so many of them that I never know where to start. This memoir has been building in me since I was 7 years old, as I was sitting outside waiting for my dad to come pick me up for visitation. I realized for the first time that a pattern had emerged. I predicted he wouldn't be coming, and I wrote a song about it. (I promise this book isn’t about my dad, it’s about me. Do not fear, gentle readers-I know that’s who you all came to hear about.)

ANYWAY, stories. I have a lot of them. And I’m easily distracted. It’s one thing when a singular event reminds me of one particular story and I can dive into it whole-heartedly, meandering and bumbling, leading my eager supplicants along as I take them from one twist to another turn, weaving the story in whichever fashion my heart desires. It’s another endeavor entirely when I have to weave these stories together into a larger narrative. Also when you’re telling a story in person, you have the luxury of being able to read everyone’s facial cues. You know, the cues that tell you “ok they’re officially getting tired of my shit, I’d better wrap this one up”. I don’t have that luxury here. Hell, you all might have already thrown this book across the room, or put it down on your coffee table never to be picked up again, and I’d never know. And I really hate not knowing how I’m being perceived. That means I have to just…tell the story the way I want to tell it, regardless of how it’s being received… and honestly that sounds like the worst idea I’ve ever heard…

But this idea of putting all of my stories onto paper has been haunting me for long enough that apparently it’s non-negotiable. The Muse has begun making demands as of late, usually around 2am when I have things to do in the morning. It’s less than ideal. So, here we are. Putting words to paper and hoping they come out in some semblance of a narrative. But the problem persists: where to start?

I could start at birth and work my way straight forward, but I’ve never been good at doing things in the right order (or in any manner that could be described as “straight”). I’ve also never been good at meeting expectations, though I’ve learned to see this as a sort of super power in recent years. See, I’ve learned that people typically delight in the unexpected, even when they like to pretend that they don’t. People claim to value art and beauty and sincerity, etc etc, but what do they really value? Novelty. People value novelty above all else. For example, a genius invents a new technology that will change our lives for the better, and they become an overnight sensation. But, say another genius halfway across the world invents the exact same thing the next day. He’s been busy in the lab, you see, and hasn’t been checking his phone (his mother is very worried), and he has no idea someone else already invented this particular gadget. He excitedly rushes to tell the world about his discovery….aaand no one gives a shit. Because someone already beat him to the punch. So it’s not the genius of invention that we really value, it’s being first, being novel, being new. If you’re not first, you might as well not even exist. Get out of here, loser.

And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the market is a bit saturated when it comes to memoirs. And these are memoirs of people you’ve heard of. And let’s be honest, you haven’t heard of me, unless you’re my mom and I sent you a copy of this and demanded you read it (hi, mom!). So I can’t just tell my story. I have to tell it well, and I have to be engaging, witty, funny, and somehow novel. So, I’m going to do something I haven’t personally seen done before. I’m not going to start in the beginning. I’m also not going to start at the end. Nope. We’re going to break the mold and start smack-dab in the middle.
— 11/1 21:30 (420)

I think I was 28 years old when I finally realized it was time to decide: either die already, or start living. I didn’t realize that’s the choice I was up against until I realized I had to make it now. I was lying on the floor of the shower, drunk on whiskey colas and out of my mind on Ambien at 2am, as was my custom. I was in so much pain that I had numbed my way straight through oblivion and circled right back around to unbearable infinite pain. Funny how that works, yeah? What started as the ultimate goal (numbness), was now something so unbearable that I felt the overwhelming need to escape from it too, but there was nowhere else to run because I had already used up all the other options. I had hit my rock bottom, and there was nowhere to go from here. You could go up? I thought. And then I promptly laughed, hysterically. I was quite the comedian back then, before therapy. I barely had the energy to lay there. In fact, that’s what brought it to my attention that I was at rock bottom. I was doing nothing but laying on the floor of the shower, and there I was thinking to myself “this is too hard. I can’t keep doing this, I’m too tired.” And I thought to myself, “Wait, I’m sorry… you’re too tired to lay on the floor of your shower? That’s gotta be the easiest job on the menu, friend. You literally just have to lay here and exist. If you can’t manage that…I don’t know what to tell you.”

And I thought, maybe if I could just feel a different kind of pain…maybe that would be the answer. Maybe that would snap me out of whatever the hell this was, give me some momentum to do literally anything else with my life.

That’s when I reached for the razor.

To this day I still don’t remember how I even managed it, but somehow in my dissociated state I disassembled the cheap pink plastic razor head and removed a single thin blade, and I began placing very shallow cuts into my arm. Looking back, it was honestly kind of pathetic. I had never done anything like that before, and I can’t help but feel like anyone who has ever been a serious cutter would laugh at my pitiful and short-lived venture into this territory. But that mindset is probably more telling than I’d like for it to be.

If I'm being honest, I don't get the hype. It hurt, but not enough to bring on any kind of noticeable euphoria. It certainly wasn't anywhere near as romantic as all the emo songs from high school made it out to be. And it definitely didn't bring me any relief. What did it bring me? Shame and self-disgust, both of which I already had in spades and needed no additional surplus. As I lay there with the quickly cooling water streaming over me as it attempted to wash away my pitiful attempt at joining the Depression Big Leagues, it hit me. I have to do something different.

"Do you want to die," I asked myself.
"I mean, I don't want to be alive anymore. Not like this, anyway."
"Ok so you want to be dead. But do you want to die?"
"I didn't realize there was a difference..."
"If there wasn't, you wouldn't have been playing 7 Minutes In Heaven with that razor. You would have gone all the way. Are you prepared to do that?"

I thought to myself for a while, thinking over the various options for checking out permanently.
"It's not that I don't want to die," I thought. "I just don't want to die like that."
"Why not?"
"Because, it would fucking hurt."
"Ok, so you're saying there's a level of pain you've yet to reach? The fear of that pain is enough to dissuade you from ending the pain you're already in?"
"I mean, yeah...I guess..."
"So you must not be in enough pain to really want to die."
"Ok, sure... but I also can't keep living with this pain. I'm not far off from a level of pain that would make the razor feel like child's play."
"So what I'm hearing is you can't keep living like this, but you do want to live."
"...Yeah, I guess I'd say that's accurate."
"So, live differently then."
"Because that's so easy."
"Never said it was going to be easy."
"Where do I even start?"
"Well, you can probably start by getting out of this shower, drinking some water, and going to bed."
"Then, maybe tomorrow, we look at trying to find a therapist?"
"That sounds like a great place to start."

I guess you could say I started in the middle back then, too.

The Stupid Witchy Shop and The Exhausted Therapist

Another reason I've put off writing this book for so long is because my memory is absolute garbage, especially when it comes to time. I've always envied those people who could just rattle off what year it was or how old they were when anything even remotely significant was happening. I can't relate. My entire past is just one big wibbly wobbly ball of swirling colors and vague shapes and shadows and weird smells. To remember where or when I was during any particular memory, I have to plant landmarks and lay breadcrumbs as I walk backwards from where I am now. And even that usually only ends in a best-guess scenario.

But since I've already agreed to write this stupid thing for the sake of getting it out of my head, I'll just ask you to forgive me if it later comes to light that my entire timeline is bullshit and half of this barely happened the way I remember it. All of that to say, I think it was a couple of months after The Shower Incident when my best friend Tylr forced me into her car along with two other people I had never met before, and told me we were going to the witchy shop.

Now, for a bit of context you should know that before that day, Tylr and I were your typical 20-something Mean Girls, in our own way. We constantly made fun of "crystal girls" and "dumb skanks" who thought magic was real. When I got in the car and she told me where we were going, I looked right at her in my hungover depressive state and said "Tylr, I don't think I can follow you down this path..."

She laughed and said "Hey, you can always stay in the car." It was the middle of August. I was not staying in the car.

I hung back and let everyone enter first. I might have been finishing a cigarette, I can't remember. I still smoked back then. The point is, I didn't want anyone thinking I was excited to be there, so I had to make sure to look super cool and nonplussed outside for a while before going in. There was a little bell that jingled above the door when I entered, and a giant pump-top container of lavender scented hand sanitizer on the counter. This struck me as odd, and I remember thinking "I guess spells don't work on germs?" (I already told you, I was hilarious before therapy).

But I'll be honest, there was something about this shop. I had never really felt anything like it at the time, but looking back, I often describe it as feeling like my soul was struck with a tuning fork. I now feel that sensation quite often for a variety of reasons, but we'll get to that later. I felt my entire nervous system sit up and pay attention. Something was happening in here. At first, I thought it was just the smell of the incense and burned sage, which reminded me of some of the few good memories I have from childhood. It reminded me of a home that was never truly real. That place only existed liminally, in the small quiet moments between the tides of chaos and pain and uncertainty. But when that place existed, the place that smelled like those things, there was a kind of peace I learned to cherish very early on. It was the only kind of peace I had ever really known: the temporary kind. So I dove into that peace, and I followed the olfactory trail to familiar comforts. I let it carry me past all the polished rocks and tiny brass meditation gongs, around the smudge kits and dreamcatchers, the rose water and abalone shells. And it brought me to an island of familiarity: the bookshelves. One thing you should know about me: I can always find a book I want. It could be an abandoned cardboard box full of rain-drenched cast-offs. I will find a book I want. This day and this shop were no exception.

I moseyed on up to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that covered the entire back corner of the shop, and I tried to keep my face neutral as I browsed titles such as "Spells for The Modern Hearth Witch" and "Backwoods Magic: Witchcraft of the Appalachian Mountains". I had zero expectations that I would find anything worth buying on these shelves, but at this point I was in it for the entertainment value alone. Then I got to the section on Buddhism and mindfulness. This caught my attention, because my new therapist had recently attempted to introduce me to the concept of mindfulness meditation as a way to help me with my complex PTSD.

My first therapist (we'll call him James) was a really interesting character. And bless his heart, he tried so many things to help me in that year we spent scraping the dust and rust off of all the trauma that had been buried deep deep under the surface of my awareness for 10+ years. I'll never forget the way his face whitened when, for our first session, I brought in 3 full notebook pages (front and back) full of "all the shit that's wrong with me" that I clearly expected him to fix for me. And I'll also never forget the way I sob-laughed when he immediately responded with "so I think I'll likely need to see you twice a week... Will that be an issue for you?" I'm honestly surprised it took him a year to finally admit that he was in over his head. But we likely lasted that long because I was one determined trash baby (my current therapist says I shouldn't call myself that anymore, but at this point it's a term of endearment and I can't fix everything all at once). Whatever he gave me to try, at the very least, I was determined to try it just to prove that it wouldn't work for me. I did all the workbook sheets and diary cards and self-assessments. I've always been a teacher's pet at heart, and this was no exception. I would get an A+ in therapy, or I would die trying. That was, at least, until he suggested meditation. I immediately turned into a 4-year-old who wanted to go to the party but was just told they had to put their shoes on first. What is this, prison?

I was resistant. He said he couldn't force me, but he highly recommended I looked into it. I did not look into it. Meditation was for monks who lived in monasteries and taught wily rough-and-tumble teenagers how to catch flies with chopsticks and do karate.

— 11/4 17:30 Mini (440)

Despite my many childhood dreams of being raised by Mr. Miyagi, this was very much not my reality. I was a realist. I was a staunch atheist after a childhood filled with religious trauma and scoffed at those who claimed to be "spiritual but not religious". I had no concept for what that could even mean. I saw meditation as something new-age hippies pretended to be doing so they could pretend like they were better than you. All of this added up to "you're more likely to catch me smoking meth than meditating." Needless to say, it was quite the record-scratch moment when, after about the sixth session of me complaining to my therapist about problems that were almost guaranteed to be helped by meditation, and me refusing to even look into it when he finally snapped. He pulled out his phone and laid it on the coffee table between us. He pulled up Spotify and said "I'm going to play a song. It's literally 2 minutes long. You're going to sit here and breathe until the song goes off. You're going to notice your breathing. You're going to count your breaths from 1-10, and then you're going to start over and repeat that until the song is over. You've been doing hard shit your entire life. You can count your breaths for 2 minutes. If you hate it, I'll never bring it up again. But if you feel better, you're going to start doing this once a day, and I don't want to hear another complaint about it."

So anyway, I've been a practicing meditator for the past 9 years.

— 11/4 17:45 Mini (271)

Another thing you should know about me is: I'm going to fall down a wormhole. I have never been casually interested in a single thing in my entire life. It's blinding obsession or bust for me. And I also have an unstoppable urge to understand why and how at all costs. I have never been able to accept phrases such as "that's just how it is" or "I don't know how it works, it just does." Get that weak-minded nonsense out of my face. I learned pretty early on in my life that I am not the kind of person to partake in "casual" interests, and I accept that about myself. So when I sat there for two minutes listening to some stupid wood flute music backed by a babbling brook and did nothing but count my stupid breaths, and I felt better? I needed to understand exactly what had just happened. And that's the day I became a neuroscience enthusiast. It was two years later that I went on to become a certified mindfulness meditation instructor, and I'm currently back in college at the age of 37, majoring in psychology and neurobiology. I'm telling you…I don't do casual.

I was at the very beginning of that particular obsession, so I immediately perked up when I saw some books in the stupid witchy shop about mindfulness meditation and magic, of all things. I was in the process of learning about this very scientific concept, and it broke my brain completely for a moment to see it mentioned alongside something as esoteric as magic. I had to know more, even if I ended up merely laughing at how stupid the whole thing was. I think I bought 3 books that day. I don't remember all of the titles, because I've since bought and read so many similar books that I can't recall what the first 3 were. But I do know those books changed my life. I still remember Tylr's smug face as I walked up to the register behind her and she turned around to see what Captain Skeptical had found worthy of interest.
She didn't say anything.
"Shut up," I replied.

Reading those books did something I never thought possible. They changed my mind about something I had zero interest in changing my mind about. Realizing that was even possible changed my life on its own. Like Descartes, I suddenly felt the need to upend my entire basket of apples to analyze each and every one before filing them away in the "Things I Accept As Truth" cabinet. These books forced me to reconcile with the reality that my inner narrative was responsible for the bulk of my suffering. Not my trauma, not the years and years of pain and abuse, but my beliefs about myself as a result of that abuse. And boy did that piss me off. Because it meant that I had had the power all along to change my circumstances. It meant that I could have just decided years ago to stop being so miserable that I wanted to die. Like, I nearly ended my own life, and I could have just...decided not to be in that mindset? I was incredulous. I threw many a book across the room during that particular chapter of growth. And before you throw this book across the room, let me be very clear about one thing: it sounds like it's supposed to be easy, as if anyone can do it. That is so far from the truth in so many ways.


— 11/4 1800 Official (605)

The thing is, it really is quite simple, as concepts go. It's the implementation that feels like walking on Legos. Sitting for 2 minutes a day and counting your breaths? Easy as pie. Although that metaphor seems like a poor choice on my part, as I have never successfully baked a pie in my life. My mother still refuses to stop telling the story of the year I insisted on bringing a chocolate pie for thanksgiving and I mistakenly used baking soda instead of baking powder because I didn't realize there was a difference. It was salty, and not in a fun way. Where was I? Oh, right. Meditation. Easy on paper, salty chocolate pie in practice. "It's just observing your thoughts?" I thought. "Can't be that hard." My first mistake was assuming that my thoughts wanted to be observed. Wrong. Thoughts want to be had, not observed. And you're also supposed to realize at some point that you aren't your thoughts, you are the one observing them. Thoughts are also not a fan of this activity. See, your thoughts have found the current arrangement to be quite to their liking, up to this point. That is, the arrangement where you have the thoughts, and they pretend they're the ones having you. They float in, dominate your awareness, and drag you down-river until they get bored and decide to toss you back to the shore once you're sufficiently bedraggled and gurgling.

See, your thoughts really enjoy this arrangement, because they are convinced that they are keeping you safe. Because your thoughts aren't you. Your thoughts are the story your nervous system tells your brain. It's a story based on past experiences where things didn't go the way you expected them to, and this caused a whole lot of problems. In most circumstances, the biggest problem was a big ol' fat and hairy feeling of discomfort, which is just entirely unacceptable. So obviously, we need to do everything within our power to avoid that particular circumstance again. This means we need to tell ourselves the story of that discomfort over and over again, just to make sure we never ever forget what it felt like or what the circumstances looked like that led up to that feeling.

Our brains really are wonderful pieces of machinery...on a good day. On a bad day, they are basically just cantankerous hunks of electric ground beef. Wet, stupid, and likely to kill you if you leave them unattended for more than 30 seconds. On a good day, your brain is a pattern-recognition machine that would rival anything else found in nature, and would even dominate the realm of man-made technology. On a bad day...that piece of fuzz on the bathroom floor is definitely a man-eating tarantula and the only way you're going to survive this is by jumping onto the toilet like a coked-up housewife from the Mad Men era, subsequently slipping and breaking both the toilet seat and your skull. 10/10, brain. Thank you for your service. And this is why our thoughts need to be critically observed, at least occasionally. Which, again, doesn't sound that hard. I love pointing out all the ways my brain is being a moron.

Then I learned that meditation isn't just about observing thoughts, it's about observing them without judgment. "Well, shit," my idiot brain thought. How was I already failing at something when I just learned of its existence? Seems pretty on-par, if I was being honest. Needless to say, I was no meditation prodigy.

— 11/4 2200 Official (594)

The problem with trying to observe your thoughts without judgment is the fact that you really have no idea how many judgments you make from one moment to the next. And "judgments" don't just mean bad judgments either. Good judgments are judgments too, I was so enthused to learn. And that's not to say that judgments by nature are inherently bad. It's just that the muscle you're exercising when you meditate is the muscle of allowing your thoughts to simply exist on their own, with no participation on your part. When you don't interact with your thoughts, they become much less sticky. And sticky thoughts are pretty much the cause of all of your suffering. Now, before you get all worked up over that idea, let me clarify that I didn't say sticky thoughts are the cause of all of your problems. See, problems are an inevitability. Hell, even pain is inescapable as long as we're alive on this planet. But suffering...that's optional. No one and no thing can make you suffer. Only you can make you suffer. And only you can decide to stop suffering. Granted, this is current me who knows all this. The version of me you're getting to know in these pages didn't have the first clue about any of this. It sounded like a bunch of woo-woo mumbo-jumbo to them. Oh, and by the way, I use they/them pronouns. This book isn't about that, though, and I'm not going to beat anyone over the head with it. I just felt the need to offer that disclaimer in case you see it from time to time and get confused.

So, if you find yourself feeling skeptical or a bit lost with any of the concepts, just know you're not alone. I was right there where you are now, and I learned so much by bumbling my way through the last decade or so. One of the first things I learned was the fact that you cannot eat an entire elephant in one bite. You cant' even do it in 10. In fact, don't even think about the elephant. All you should ever be focusing on is this bite. The bite in front of you, or the one in your mouth. And it's the same no matter what we're talking about. Whether it's healing from 28 years of trauma and terrible coping mechanisms, or switching careers, or even taking the dogs for a walk, the formula is the same. You can never be further along than you currently are in this moment. You are where you are. And where you are is the only place that you have any power whatsoever to impact the future. In fact, there's no such thing as the future. There is this moment, and the choices you make in this moment create the next, instantaneously. So we have to practice ignoring the staircase, and zooming so far in that we're not even looking at a single step. We're observing our muscles begin to tighten in our core and legs. We're inhaling as we begin to lift one foot and reach for the railing. We're shifting our weight slightly forward and gripping the railing tighter as we plant our front foot and push off. Do you see where I'm going with this? This is what a mind observed looks like. And it would be exhausting trying to think like that all the time, just like it would be exhausting to walk around lifting weights all the time or sprinting non-stop forever. Meditation is like going to the gym for your mind.

But this kind of practice honestly begins before you ever even try to meditate, which is why I'm bringing it up now. To set yourself up for success, you first have to stop telling yourself you're "bad at meditation". And that was quite the challenge for me, because I truly believed I was bad at everything. The only way you can be bad at meditation is by not doing it at all. Otherwise, that's just the mind doing what the mind do. The mind is meant to think, and it's been allowed to run around unchecked for pretty much your entire life up to this point. It would be a lot weirder if you sat down to meditate for the first time and it was easy. The good news is, you are not your mind. You are the observer of your mind.

I can't currently recall which guru said this, but a common quote in the mindfulness industry is "The thinking mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master." And the more often you meditate, the more often you'll start to see just how true that really is. But again, before we even get to the meditation part, I'll suggest to you a game I first learned about in therapy: The Traffic Game. And before you get too excited, no, the game is not about running into traffic. The Traffic Game can really be played anywhere, with anything, but where I live you tend to spend about two-thirds of your life sitting in traffic, and we're all about working with what we have here. So you're in traffic, or at the grocery store, or waiting for the elevator at the office. You look around at whatever you see the most of, be it cars or people or bags of frozen peas, and you notice them. You notice them and you make observations about them, but not judgments. For example: I'm in traffic and I'm looking at the cars that are passing me. An observation would be, "that is a red, mid-size sedan. It has a cracked window and several stickers across the back window." A judgment would be, "Oh wow, look at that shitty car. What kind of idiot plasters the back of their window with stickers? Those will never come off. I sure hope they never want to sell it. I'll be they don't have insurance either, otherwise they would have gotten that crack fixed." Etc., etc., etc.. See the difference? Notice the difference in tone and quality between the two? How did you feel, even just reading those two different examples? Notice how it feels to be neutral. Neutral is the name of the game, and if you stick with me, you'll soon understand exactly why.

Now, remember what I said about judgments not just meaning negative judgments. For example: You're driving in traffic and an expensive sports car zips past you. An observation would be "That is a very expensive black sports car. It probably cost $X or more. It has dark tinted windows and is going around 90mph." A judgment would be "Holy shit, look at that fancy sports car! I'll bet it feels so good to drive that thing. I'll bet whoever's driving that thing has everything they've ever wanted, and everything I've ever wanted. Must be nice. I'll never be able to afford a car that nice." See the difference? And do you see how a positive judgment can be just as problematic as a negative one?

— 11/5 2200 Official (1199)