A different type of surrender

You know how it’s often easier to spill your guts to a stranger in a bar than it is to the people you see every day? This is kinda that, except some of you I do have almost daily contact with, so that’s a bit awkward. But everyone has their cross to bear, and you must do the best you can with yours.

A few days ago, I said I did not like my life and that I hadn’t liked it for quite some time. A remarkable number of people replied and offered to help. I found this incredibly moving. But initially I either delayed responding or I responded with thank you, that’s amazing, I’ll let you know, having no intention of letting anyone know anything about how they could help me.

I have changed my mind about this. I have reasons, and I will shortly give them to you, but as a matter of accuracy, I want to be clear that the reasons came after I changed my mind. I was standing at the coffee machine in the kitchen, a pot of kidney beans bubbling away on the stove (the family are away for the weekend and I’m really living it up), and it suddenly came to me in one piece, this impulse - open yourself to help. Say yes, I do need help.

I do not know what help I need exactly or even if I can be helped at all (a lot of this shit you have to do yourself, which is so fucking annoying, it’d be much better if someone else could do it for me). But: say yes. Say that you are a creature that needs help. Say that you are not someone who is or can conquer the world or even just be mostly happy through their own efforts.

So I wrote to the people who offered to help, saying that. Yes please, I said. Help me! Help would be great! Let’s figure out how!

And now I am extending that openness to the world; in the first instance, to you. I would like your help. What with? Well, we’ll get into that. But for now the first fundamental movement is to say this: I am clearly not figuring shit out by myself, so I could do with some help.

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I promised reasons, so here are some reasons. They are, I think, excellent reasons. But I remind you: they are post facto reasons. I could have decided the opposite and I would have found equally excellent post facto reasons for that. Caveat reasons, as Aquinas probably said.

A basic truth of life is that no one can survive - let alone flourish - by themselves. This is so obvious to me that I will not attempt to defend it. It is simply a truth, one of Euclid’s axioms on which I am about to build a theory of the circle (I think that’s how geometry works? Bit hazy on the details.)

So, we depend on each other. What follows?

Well, for me, one thing that follows is that I want to truly accept that dependence, and not simply as interesting intellectual fact but rather as something that guides my experience and action.

And what does that mean?

Well, right now it means something uncomfortable for me. Because, you see, our dependence on each other is actually quite fantastic when I’m the one who can do the helping. I love helping! It makes me feel good. I also just like it (mostly) when people are happy and doing well and living their best lives. I like taking away suffering. It’s all great stuff, and I do it with delight.

But it’s a fucking pain in the neck when it’s the other way around. When I’m the one helping, well, I’m sorted, aren’t I? I’m doing well, so well that I have the time and resources to help others. But when I’m the one asking for help, well, I frankly dislike it. This is not what I want to present to the world as; actually, more accurately, I don’t care much about how I present to “the world”. But I care intensely about how I present to people I have some kind of relationship with. And most of you are certainly in that group of people, some by virtue of prior relationships, and others simply because you read me and for me that has always meant a very intimate kind of relationship.

Don't get me wrong, Jesus definitely had a hard life. Like, being on that cross must have hurt, and all that other stuff when he got persecuted and thrown out of temples and stuff. But in one respect he had it easy (as far as I can tell). He always went around saving people. He never needed to be saved himself (I think?).

What I'm saying is, it's much easier to be the Messiah than it is to be a naughty young boy. But Jesus was what people call 1 of 1. An outlier. Short of Jesus, all of us sometimes need saving. All of us. And we cannot do it by ourselves.

I’mma try living that truth - both sides of it.

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This is all great stuff but it is still not quite there. You know why not? Because I’m still operating at the level of generality. It’s easier to talk of needing help in general than it is to be specific about what needs help. The generality preserves some ... what? Pride? Dignity? Perhaps. Or perhaps it is fear masquerading as something more noble.

So let us get specific, then. If I am to ask for help, I must say something about where I need it. So let me just list a bunch of things that I am struggling with right now. That’s a starting point:

• I feel lonely. I do not have any close friends where I live. Those friends are scattered around the world.
• I struggle with work. Currently, I earn the majority of my income via ghostwriting. And this is increasingly painful to me. Writing is my thing, it is one of the places where the life force that is in me - that is in all of us - speaks. Writing is where I touch something deeper than my surface self, a voice that feels both mine and not mine, a voice that needs to speak and can only speak through me. Now, none of that means the writing is any good (though when I manage to stand aside and let the energy express itself through me, it is always good). But it means I need it in some way to live, that it in some way gives me life. And it is increasingly painful to sacrifice that life to other people’s ambitions.
• Well, do other work then? Yes. I would like to. I am trying. But money is a thing, innit? And that is another area of struggle. I worry about money and actually don’t have much of it. And it’s got to be enough to provide for a young family. This is a big worry in two ways - first the direct worry of it, and then the feeling of being kinda trapped, of not being free to simply say, fuck it, I’m going to do the things I need to do and forget about the money. I can’t forget about the money. My kids love berries. That shit is expensive.
• I have of late but wherefore I know not lost quite a bit of my mirth. More accurately, intense anxiety, general fear and panic about even the most ordinary situations.
• Since the fire (my home burned down last year, for new or forgetful readers), I have felt completely uprooted from the place I live. In February, at the train station returning from holiday, I had one of those Camus-like experiences of when you look at the world and it does not make any sense. Why am I here? This random Austrian town? What?
• Housman has these lines: alone and afraid, in a world I never made. That’s kinda how I feel.

Ah, man. I could go on. Or rather, there’s enough content to keep going, but psychologically I have hit a limit. I can’t keep moaning / baring my soul / being open. So let me do a kind of high-level summary.

Here goes: I don’t have a place that feels like home. I don’t have friends (here, I have loads of friends in general, ok, loads, and I have a really fit girlfriend in India as well so …). Work is shit. I am dissipating my life force on lives that are not mine. I have not found a place or a voice in this world. And at 43 - well, 42, but on Tuesday I’m 43, happy birthday! - time is running out.

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In the origin story of Alcoholic’s Anonymous, the founder, Bill Wilson, is in a hospital room, tormented by his recurring and incurable alcoholism. This is his account of what happened:

“The terrifying darkness had become complete. In agony of spirit, I again thought of the cancer of alcoholism which had now consumed me in mind and spirit, and soon the body … I remember saying to myself, "I'll do anything, anything at all …

"Then, with neither faith nor hope I cried out, "If there be a God, let him show himself." The effect was instant, electric. Suddenly my room blazed with an indescribably white light. I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. I have no words for this. Every joy I had known was pale by comparison. The light, the ecstasy. I was conscious of nothing else for a time.

"The terrifying darkness had become complete.

"Then, seen in the mind's eye, there was a mountain. I stood upon its summit where a great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. In great, clean strength it blew right through me. Then came the blazing thought, "You are a free man.”"

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I don’t take God from that story. I take the idea of surrender. But not a passive surrender, not the type of surrender that has said no to life forever.

No. A different type. And this email is one of its expressions.

I need help, and if you can help me, I would be grateful.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.