Heart

Sixteen months ago, at the ripe age of thirty three, I had a heart attack scare, which clarified a great deal about my relationship with my mother. At the time, I was broke, depressed, and trying to get back on my feet while I lived in the RV parked outside her house. I’ve already written the full account of what happened that day in a personal manifesto called The Source, so I will just quote that here.

It’s 6am on a Saturday morning, and I’m making coffee in the RV when my chest begins to tighten. It starts around my heart, like a hand reaching up from the depths and giving a good squeeze. Just a nibble at first, enough to get my attention. But over the next half hour it slowly, violently clenches. The tension spreads from my heart to my entire chest, then my neck, back, and shoulders, ending in my jaw. It dawns on me this might be a heart attack, and that my life could end today, at thirty three. Tick tock.

I ask Perplexity what to do in such a situation. If I’m going to perish from this earth, I’m not going to spend my final moments scrolling through SEO spam hell. “Get your ass to the emergency room, bro,” the AI chatbot chides. “And whatever you do, do not operate heavy machinery in this state.” Ugh. Fine.

I skulk over to the main house and ask my mom to drive me to the ER, my chest tensing tighter still as I sit in her dining room, waiting to leave. After an EKG and X-rays and bloodwork and a bevy of biomedical tests, we await the prognosis. My mom hovers anxiously around the hospital bed, eyeing the monitor with my vitals. It feels as if she’s searching for physiological evidence of why her adult son has become so defective this year. Why is he so broken? She makes a comment about how surprisingly healthy I seem. The doctor arrives as an act of mercy. “Your heart is fine,” he says, “but we’d like you to stick around for another hour just to be sure.”

You tell your mom she can go home and get some breakfast. When she leaves, you notice a bit of the turbulence in your chest leaves with her. You spend 90 minutes scrolling twitter before the doctor returns and, once again, gives you a clean bill of health. You ask him what the hell you just experienced, and he shrugs. Cool. You choose to walk home. After a string of unseasonably hot days, winter has arrived in Tucson, and you delight in the cool October air, the sun on your face. You’re grateful to be alive.

Upon returning to the RV, you make another cup of coffee. Your mother walks in, carrying with her the same heavy-handed energy of concern. Why is he so broken? You feel your chest clamping down again, and blunder out something inarticulate about how her presence is stressing you out, and you can’t have her around right now. She’s clearly hurt, but she leaves you alone. You two hardly speak for the next six weeks. But a badly drawn boundary can still be an effective one. In the weeks ahead, you realize what’s happened here. Your immune system has rejected the story of brokenness, and created an opening for something new to take root.

About a month after this scene, two days before Thanksgiving, my mom marched in the RV and handed me a letter, outlining all of the reasons she thought I should be ashamed of myself, and telling me that she was evicting me because of how toxic I am. At the time, I could already tell this was a blessing in disguise, because I wanted nothing more than physical and emotional distance from her presence. Just as she wanted me out of her life, I wanted her out of mine. It was mutual.

Over the course of the following year, back out on my own, I made a valiant attempt at getting stable and right with money, yet somehow, by year’s end, found myself at an even deeper rock bottom. I worry that I’ll never escape this cycle. That no amount of commitment can break me free of it. But in January, I start again in earnest. Recommit to recovery, to taking care of myself, to writing. I refuse to stay down.

Four nights ago, I dreamed I was back with my mother, in our old house in Centennial, where we moved together in the months after Jack died. In the dream, a friend had just dropped me off at home, but I’d left my backpack in their car. It had my laptop in it, and I was anxious to get it back, as I needed it for work. But my mom kept coming into my room with that same overbearing, heavy-handed energy that I felt possessing me during the heart attack scare, making me feel even more small and broken.

In the dream, I can tell she’s utterly ashamed of me and my failures, and angry at me for making her feel that way. I’m trying so hard to take care of the basic steps in front of me, to call my friend and get my laptop, but she’s just there, hovering, fuming. I want to scream at her. I want to tell her to get the fuck out of my room and leave me alone. Part of me also wants to be the adult in this situation, and calmly explain that what she’s doing, and the energy she’s bringing to the table, is exactly the thing that’s keeping me paralyzed, ineffective, and self-destructive, that the shame she wields as a weapon of control turns me back towards being a scared little boy who can’t take care of himself. If she really loves me as she claims to, she’ll let up, step back, and trust me. None of that comes out of my mouth, though. I just remember feeling hurt, small, consumed by the fire of shame in my chest, unable to function as a human being. I want to hide from her.

I awoke from that dream in a state of dread. All through last Friday the feeling sticks with me. I have a deadline to deliver a shitty first draft to a client that day, but I cannot for the life of me sit down in front of my computer and work. I feel paralyzed by perfectionism, and a strong desire to hide, to eat, to numb. And that’s exactly what I do. I send my client a note that I’m running behind and will get him the draft the following day, and I fall into my predictable old patterns as I indulge the fear, the shame, the insecurity in my system, self-medicating them away. I feel like I’m losing my grip, and that the gift of this client is being squandered.

There’s a song I’ve been listening to on repeat the last two months by the rapper NF. There’s one line in particular that jumps out, which is along the lines of “I told the world I was sick of running, and now I’m back to running, what a joke!” That’s how I feel when I go back and read that manifesto I wrote 16 months ago. I remember at the time believing with all my heart I’d made a breakthrough in my mental and spiritual health, and that I’d surely be okay from there, having exorcised those demons of shame once and for all. I confidently claimed as much to myself and to the world. But it turns out that scared little boy still holds great sway in my psyche, and that even though my mom evicted me, I have yet to evict her.

On Saturday, despite falling off the wagon the day prior, I stand back up, and recommit to keep moving forward, however imperfectly, in all that matters to me. I pray. I put in a few hours of work, and send my client a draft that feels uncomfortably half-baked. I have a call with one of my recovery fellows, a woman I haven’t talked to half a year, and who’s been worried about me because I disappeared and went into hiding. I eat a few good healthy meals, and take a long walk in the sun. I go to work and deliver pizzas with a smile on my face. I get a good night of sleep.

There’s a quality to my thinking in moments like these, a black and whiteness that I’m getting better at noticing. I’m either on the wagon perfectly, or off it entirely. I’m either king of the mountain, or the worst loser known to man. It’s such an instinctive reaction whenever I’m not doing well, when the scared little boy starts acting out. I start treating him in much the same way my mother treats me, hovering over him with the iron fist of shame, absolutely beside myself at all the trouble he causes. But in what I can only conceive of as grace, I’m getting better at noticing this impulse in real time, and getting better at choosing compassion for myself and for him. The conversation continues, one day at a time.