Hotel Heaven

The pain is overwhelming today. I thought I was really onto something with my last post, and maybe I am, but that doesn't console me right now.

Pain like this is ruthless, brutal, cruel. A few days ago I was on top of the world, which makes this crash all the harsher.

It's hard to know if those insights were real, or if they created just a temporary placebo effect, which has happened to me in the past. The muscles and tendons are still very relaxed, but the localized jaw pain is fierce.

Regardless, I've applied to NYU's psychoanalytic institute. I've got to keep trying, but this sharp increase in pain is crushing; it makes it hard to think let alone take some kind of action.

Last night, I took an oxycontin (10 mg), an advil, a xanax and a few drags of pot, and the pain went away completely. When moments like that occur, it's like the pain never happened. I immediately snap back to myself and my joyousness soars. Instantly, I begin enjoying just normal life stuff, normal life thoughts.

Today, I find myself threatening God, saying that if someone up there doesn't help me soon, I'll be checking in to Hotel Heaven in the not-too-distant future, not out of despondency but logic.

Many people with my condition have killed themselves. In fact, when this first struck in 1999, I joined two different online support groups, which was a disaster. People were so devastated by their pain that all they could manage to write was their misery. It wasn't a true support group, where everyone is helping and uplifting each other, but instead a dumping ground of human agony.

I tried to be cheerful and upbeat, but then one of the patients in the first group killed herself. Her husband wrote in to say that she'd just reached the end of the line and took herself out. Needless to say, I immediately opted out of that group.

But then the following week, a patient in the other group also killed herself, and my blood ran cold, mainly because I so completely understood why she did it. I understood why they both did it, and I realized that this pain was potentially fatal.

What's a little spooky is that a few weeks ago, I had that awful premonition again, the type where I suddenly can't see my future. I didn't tell anyone because I talked myself out of it. But I have to be honest; it happened, and now here I am feeling that I just can't go on. I'm not sure I want to. There's nothing left in me; no hope, no will, no motivation.

In my 20s, when I first began therapy, strange and wonderful things began to happen in my life, where something would meet me halfway in terms of the things I wanted to accomplish.

The first instance was my desire to find a music studio, so that I wasn't doing it in my bedroom all the time and potentially bothering my three roommates. When I thought about what I wanted, I thought of a small, separate room in my building that a writer had been renting for years. When I opened the paper to look for rental space, one of my roommates joked, "Are you looking for a new apartment?"

When I told her I was looking for a space similar to the one rented by the writer downstairs, she told me that she'd just seen him moving out three days prior. I thought it an incredible stroke of luck, and took over the space.

But then these "coincidences" began to multiply. Over and over, I was startled at how doors were opening up for me, and I began to tally up these experiences. I didn't know what it was, but there was a true force at work.

In The Power of Myth, Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell call this force the "helping hands" phenomenon. The only explanation I could come up with at the time was that when we follow our bliss, we tap into something extraordinary, and I began to understand the notion that "God helps those who help themselves." It seemed that when I took risks to follow my dreams, there was something there to help me, and it was something I knew I could actually count on.

I suppose my problem now is that I have no dreams anymore. There's no bliss to follow. I'm caught in some kind of negative vortex where I'm completely left to my own devices. The helping hands are gone, and I don't know how to get them back.

The writer in me wants a happy ending to this story. I would love to find my way out of pain not just for myself, but to provide a type of road map for others who come after me. But I'm beginning to feel clubbed to death. At some point, I just won't be able to stand up anymore.

Prayers are welcome, because right now, I can't even pray. Please see my future for me.


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