From the Archives: The Trump Within: Mental Illness, Activism, and Self-Care

The following is a repost from an article I put out on Medium on August 12, 2017:

It started sometime during the first presidential debate. I stopped merely being horrified by the content of Trump’s speeches, responses and general bloviating, and started being horrified by their form. I was proctoring an exam that evening, so I could only see the delayed, phonetic transcription of Trump and Clinton’s inability to share the same reality, but the faux-mogul’s debate style, which many news sources accurately described as “unhinged,” still came through.

In the second debate, far from the uplifting schadenfreude I had come to expect from seeing intelligent, nuanced politicians tear down frothing monsters, I was treated to the stomach churning sight of an ambulatory Trump doing his best impression of an intractable ghoul: lurking just behind the former Secretary of State and threatening, with TV-serial killer glee, to have her investigated and imprisoned.

In the third debate, I had a moment of empathy with him that was far more distressing than the previous revulsion.

This requires some explanation. I suffer from some moderate mental illnesses. I have been diagnosed with both OCD and Rejection-Sensitive Dysphoria (a disorder that sounds more relatable than it is). This has had a myriad of deleterious effects on my life but the most notable — my psyche’s wretched key to all mythologies — has been a pronounced inability to comfortably inhabit my own opinions and feelings.

I have opinions and feelings, of course. They are numerous and powerful and often feel overwhelming. But, more often than not, I find myself unable to let them exist unmolested. For each moment of thoughtful clarity are three of uneasy doubt.

If I say to a friend, for example, that I love the Lord of the Rings movies more than anything in the world and they reply that they think they’re overrated, a voice that I cannot remember not having clears its throat informs me that, just maybe, my opinion is invalidated by my friend’s. It tells me that this difference between us means that one of us is wrong and, because I am a terrible human being who has never experienced a valid feeling or opinion, the wrong one is probably me.

I then have two options. I can either suppress my own feelings and admit that my friend is correct and that my love for those films is childish and stupid or I can double down on my opinion and argue, mercilessly, that my friend is incorrect and my feelings are the valid ones. I can kowtow to that pernicious voice’s whispers, or I can attack it head on by lambasting its unwitting surrogate.

Thirty four years into this cycle (or however long since the combination of brain chemistry and ill-timed trauma created the inciting incident for this pattern), I have become a person with an elemental fear of conflict. I avoid people whose opinions differ greatly from mine. I rarely contradict people when they voice criticism for statements I have made. I have (mostly) private meltdowns when, say, a Facebook status of mine becomes a flashpoint for controversy among my friends.

None of this is healthy. I should clarify that, when I am letting a subject go or admitting that someone else may have a point, I am rarely “agreeing to disagree.” I am privately falling apart, getting filled with resentment, and generally trying to justify my anger, whether it’s aimed at the person I’m debating or at myself, for not holding a more valid opinion. When I try to build consensus, it is almost never motivated by a belief in the fundamental value of empathy; rather, it is the result of a gut-churning terror of and bedrock conviction that I will be on the wrong side of everything and therefore be left out in the cold, a pariah who couldn’t figure out how to just think and feel like everyone else.

Needless to say, this has played havoc with my activism. In this age of overt bigotry, vindictive delight in oppression, and a culture war where intolerance becomes a political virtue, I find myself mostly unable to directly engage with self-identified conservatives or right-leaning folk, in general. In place of this, I find that much of my deepest anger is reserved for fellow progressives whose righteous rage, black and white thinking, and ultimatums always end up feeling (mostly unjustly) like a personal attack.

I understand and condemn the fundamentally thin-skinned chauvinism of men who who cry “not all men” or whites who scream that “all lives matter.” But I also understand the inclination to do so. When your sense of self is fragile, it becomes easy to conflate your personal privilege with immorality. You start believing that, so long as you benefit from the color of your skin, the shape of your genitals, or the security of your bank account, you can never truly be a good person and the beleaguered, self-abused, auto-gaslit tatters of your dignity and self-preservation start wanting to scream out that you too are worthy of love, even though no one ever said you weren’t.

And that brings me back to Trump on the night of the third debate. When Clinton said that Putin “would rather have a puppet as President,” Trump — ever the schoolyard bully, ever the (I suspect) rejection-sensitive dysphoric — replied “no puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet!” It was funny. Almost. It was shocking and petty and vain and inarticulate and unworthy of any serious political discourse. I laughed. My partner laughed. I posted about it on Facebook. Everyone I knew agreed it was the height of ridiculousness.

And yet, some part of me felt harrowed by that response. Trump engenders disgust and loathing and incredulity in me, but I wanted to offer him kindness in that moment. It was not because he was correct in his assertion but because I saw him recognize just how fragile he was and try, ineptly and painfully, to prove his worth not to Clinton or to Chris Wallace or to America but to himself.

Now, I recognize that my struggles with mental illness have not had the nation-threatening effect that Trump’s have. I did not build a psychic wall around the glass and paper totem of my sense of self, and let my insecurity curdle into poisonous narcissism. But I am also not convinced that I chose not to do these things. I find myself ruminating on my life and wondering: if, by an accident of circumstance, fear hadn’t ruled my childhood would I be one of those MRA trolls demanding sex from women in exchange for basic decency? Had I been raised by affluent white parents in a less diverse community, might I be one of those bastards who today in Charlottesville are chanting “you will not replace us” in a desperate bid to shut up the voices in their heads that claim they are worthy of replacement? Is my mental illness, for all it has done to make my life miserable, the source of my progressivism and empathy?

That line of thought gets difficult fast. It simultaneously lacks a clear answer and threatens to become an ontological tautology that gets increasingly abstract, meaningless, and privileged, the longer it turns over in my head. Nevertheless, I find it useful, in short, deliberate bursts, for reminding myself that the miasma of my self-doubt can help me connect with others as well as keep me from them. Empathizing with Trump and his supporters need not be a sign of sympathizing with them. Recognizing fragility in others can help ground the idea that your own is something that exists primarily within yourself.

On days like today, when the suffering of others is at its most stark and obvious, it is painfully easy to go down the rabbit hole of punishing oneself for practicing self-care. The same voice that demands one do more than buy a bumper sticker or like a friend’s Facebook status can, with alarming facility, be just as sated by hating oneself for inaction as by loving oneself for the inverse.

On days like today, I can more easily remind myself that the internal monologue that delights in calling attention to my fragility and ineptitude has not metastasized into the credo that says “the only true happiness comes from eliminating disagreement.” I can look at the inner Trump — the broken bully that demands the world accommodate him so he does not have to accommodate himself — and feel the smallest measure of relief in my own discomfort.

The original post can be found here

Word of the Day #1

From a post I made on Facebook on March 19th 2019

My word of the day is definitely “glister.” Derived from the Middle English “glistren”—also the probable root for “glitter”—it means more or less the same thing as its cognate: to sparkle or give off light. It’s most famous use is probably in Merchant of Venice where, Smashmouth lyrics notwithstanding, the famous line is “all that glisters is not gold.”

I think I like it because it sounds so much like a portmanteau of “glitter” and “blister.” It has always implied a malign sort of festering to me. Pebbles in a stream may glitter. The overgrown gilded encrustation of Rococo interior design definitely glisters. Perhaps it is also the association with Shakespeare, but I cannot imagine using it for anything other than a warm, yellow-orange sort of luminescence—gold glisters but silver cannot. Those colors feel sordid to me. They are not the clean, sparkling whites of moonlight or bone. They are not deeply mysterious jewel tones of an emerald or a ruby. They are the the sparkle of human folly, of corrupt light, of grimy avarice—the firelight glow that tells you a house may not be as empty as you originally thought. Gold glisters with a sparkling, luminous version of yellowing parchment, or tea-stained teeth, or jaundiced flesh. To glister is to stand out in all the wrong ways.

The Somnambulist's Diary VII

In my dream, there is a prologue. In it I am back in high school. I have my PhD, but I am back there all the same, in a classroom full of seniors, being taught by an English instructor I had who I never got along with. I am in his office, asking if the presentation I am supposed to give is powerpoint. I am terrible at powerpoint and afraid that, despite having good information, I will be graded down for being unfamiliar with the tech. He says that I will be fine but yes, powerpoint is necessary. The day of th presentation, I begin to narrate my project: a comparison of Jane Eyre to other Bronte sisters' novels, proving that Charlotte's is not, in fact, Gothic. As the presentation begins I am swept into a Gothic story, ostensibly Jane Eyre, though it bears no resemblance to the novel.

That was the prologue. My dream takes place within this Gothic world. I am simultaneously viewing it as a novel I am writing about, a film adaptation of the novel, and a lived experience, as I am also inside the world described.

It is a swampy valley whose high hills border the sea: a rocky coastline covered in shattered bridges and old causeways. I can't tell what time period it is, part of it feels like early Renaissance Italy, another like Victorian England, and yet another seems like something out of a hitchcock film: the late 50's or early 60's.

I am arriving with a small party of friends for a vacation at the manor of the man who owns the valley. He is perhaps an analogue for Rochester, though the part of me observing this as a film thinks he's been cast far too old and weaselly. The master of the house reminds me of no one so much as Roddy McDowall. As he approaches, I see that he is strapped into something halfway between ornate armor and a palanquin, elaborately enameled wings on his shoulders. The faceplate of his helmet depicts a cherub, though it only covers him down to the lips, so that I can see them move, and the gray whiskers on his chin. It looks as though the cherub is speaking through a hole in his neck.

As he reaches us, the servant unstrap him from the palanquin, more cage-like than anything, and he greets us. I see him linger on one woman in our party. She is dark haired and shy and I can tell he intends to marry her, perhaps against her will. We enter the manor, he slinking behind us, dressed in the black, ascetic coat and collar of an Anglican priest beneath his armor.

We spend the next few days exploring the grounds, and find ourselves on a shattered bit of railroad tracks, extending over a rocky gorge, that sunders the coastline. One of our party, a woman who looks as though she stepped out of a Hitchcock movie--frosty and blonde and unreadable--says that she can make the jump to the other side. She attempts and misses and falls onto a spongy patch of sand below. I watch her fall, disinterested. She is splayed out as though dead, a fact we confirm when we reach the shore. A doctor in our party says it is unlikely the fall killed her. We find a bite mark on her neck, something bit her, something poisonous.

On the return to the manor--now a suburban home where nothing feels quite finished: furniture un-varnished, carpet not yet cut properly--we see our host, leering at the brunette. Clearly we have interrupted him in his seduction. He tells us that what bit our friend was one of the eels that lives near the manor. He says they are quite dangerous and we should stay away from them. We ask if they live in any particular pool and he gestures around. Everywhere is a pool, the whole manor sits in a swamp. The eels are already in charge.

From there the dream becomes more of a horror show. I drop the levels of distance as an observer and presenter. The eels begin to worm their way in through all the windows, up through the pipes. They are huge, as long as a man, and nearly as wide. They have great, billowing mouths, like basking sharks, and spiked pedipalps on the sides of their mouths, like spiders. We begin to see them, over the net few days, swallowing guests whole, using their pedipalps to ease them down their gullets. People burst into rooms carrying struggling eels as big as they are and tossing them out windows. It would be comical if it weren't so grotesque.

The last stand is up in the attic of the manor. Those of us left are fending off eels at all turns and tossing them down below, onto a suburban street with a portable basketball hoop. Others beat them with baseball bats once they've hit. It's a scene of utter carnage, but I am too caught up in my fear and hatred of the eels to notice.

I wake up.

The Somnambulist's Diary #7

This was my dream a week ago.

I am with a friend of mine and a girl I went on a couple of dates with a couple of years ago at the latter's family cabin in the pacific Northwest. It is more than a cabin--rather a two story home in the middle of a clearing in the pine forest, strangely dry for this part of the country.

We are tasked with making it to the coast where they have another cabin and her family is making dinner. So we pack up some supplies in a backpack that I wear and begin hiking into the forest. There is mist here, especially along the highway. We try hitch-hiking a few times but the only cars are dilapidated pick-up trucks. They pass us after leering at the two women.

Eventually it becomes clear that there is a bear following us. It is a huge grizzle bear which starts by shimmying down a pine tree, moving with such lithe and quiet motions that we do not notice it at first. We try to not betray our fear, moving calmly and quickly forward, trying not to glance behind at the bear stalking us through the mist and the trees.

We are just about to break into a run, thereby alerting the bear to our presence when we see a school up ahead. We make a break for it, flying into the front doors as we hear the bear's roar. And I am separated from my companions. I am running as fast as I can. There are  small children, 6 or 7 in the halls and in my mad scramble I am pushing them out of the way. I can hear the bear just behind me, his claws scratching the the child.

I smash through some doors into the gym. There is some kind of parent teacher conference going on. One woman at a podium is talking about the need for better security at the school. No one notices me as I climb into the bleachers. The backs of my thighs have been raked by the bears claws. My backpack has been torn open and there is candy inside: our supplies.

It's a melange of over-sized lollipops, halloween candy, pocky. I realize the horrible truth. The bear was following me. He was following the candy in my backpack and I led him into this school where children will be mauled. I begin to stuff the candy into my mouth, trying to destroy the evidence of my mistake. I am sobbing as I do so, knowing it will be ineffective.

At that moment a child comes into the gymnasium. He is bloody from head to toe, holding in his organs with one hand at his midsection. Bits of his skull are visible underneath huge raking wounds from the bear's claws. He shouts, almost like a soliloquy that his friend was killed and eaten, that he has seen horrors. That it's his tenth birthday and that none of this should have happened today.

I wake up.

The Somnambulist's Diary #6

In my dream I am with a woman I intend to seduce away from her boyfriend. Or else she intends to seduce me in spite of her boyfriend. The intentionality is somewhat blurred. She lives in Glendale, which, in my dream is across some great expanse of sparsely populated outskirts and greenery. It is this peculiar shade of green I associate with the Pacific Northwest rather than with Los Angeles. It is certainly no version of Glendale I have ever been to.

We are walking back to my place which is actually my apartment in East Hollywood. I can see it in the distance, just across the river, the Los Feliz bridge small but visible as it abuts Griffith Park. As we make our way closer and closer, however, the distance keeps getting father and farther. Soon we are going through the back rooms of restaurants: shiny stainless steel cabinets gleam with menace. We are creeping over low wooden fences, or hugging the backs of abandoned buildings, overgrown by ivy.

We reach her place, which is not the destination. Her boyfriend could be there after all. And I realize that, no matter whose idea this was, it has soured in my mind. I wait at the bottom of the stairs in their townhouse, the floorplan feeling more familiar than I would like. It's quite a bit like some of the old apartments at UC Irvine graduate housing. I worry that it might in fact be one in particular and I step out onto the patio. I say we should go to my place, but what I really mean is I should leave. I need to leave.

She follows me, even though I am now walking briskly. We seem to be walking up some sort of highland meadow. A great fissure in the earth runs through it, making for a craggy drop into a deep crevasse. At the top of the headlands, there is a forest--perhaps merely a copse of trees. It is thin, mostly bare pines and aspens. She follows me into them and I can see her boyfriend walking near us. He has been following us since the townhouse and we are both aware that the other knows. She, however, doesn't show her cards, or maybe she is oblivious to the scene that is about to commence. As we walk deeper into the trees, the noonday light becomes oppressive through the dappling.

We see that there are burnt trees up ahead and she asks me what caused it. I begin to tell her a story. As I tell it I know it to be an old urban legend. There was an old race of people in these woods. Like faerie folk or elves and they made their home in the forest. As I narrate I can see the events unfolding. The fair folk lived in relative safety in the woods. Only these woods were high up in snow-capped mountains. It doesn't look anything like the Glendale/Santa Cruz/Pacific Northwest that I am currently moving through.

They found some primal power of fire. It is contained in a vaguely bluish chunk of stone and the flames burn dark, nearly black, rimmed with purple and crimson. It helped them light their torches and cook their game. But power fell into the hands of their King, a tyrant who wanted it for himself.

Back in the real world, she and I have reached a log cabin in the middle of the woods. Where the headlands of the chasm went, I have no idea. But I am sure I am not getting to my place anytime soon. The interior is a single room, devoid of furniture save a sink and a wooden table. Some pots and pans hang by a window.

As I think back on the story I am telling we get to a dark chapter. The faerie folk rose up against their king and blinded him for good measure. I can see the king, a sallow, broken, portly creature, blind now with no irises or pupils in his eyes, crouching down to the grass while the other elves debate what was to be done with him. The victory came too late, however. I can see beyond the summit where the council is taking place the rest of the forest is on fire, black smoke pouring into the blue skies.

The fair folk make the decision to leave their world and enter ours. A great purple light envelops the spit of land on which they are debating and it appears in the real world, causing the headland to split, and the burnt grove to appear.

Suddenly, as I realize that we are in the dwelling of one of these elusive creatures, the door bursts open. Standing in the glare from the noon light is the shade of the tyrant king. He is not the broken creature I saw in my vision. He is a smoking shadow in the shape of one of the creatures. His eyes are pits of purple and crimson fire and his mouth is lined with sharp, shadowy teeth. He rushes at us and we bolt from the house. It bursts into flames behind us. The fire is spreading from the forest. And I lose track of the woman I am with. Maybe she is with her boyfriend. I am running from the shadow, moving in daylight, trying to get back to my apartment but the path keeps extending out before me, elongating no matter how quickly I traverse it.

I wake up.

The Somnambulist's Diary #5

In the dream, my sister and I are traveling through a dream version of Italy. It is a very specific place with stable, dream contours and familiar monuments: a cobblestone square next to a small canal. We quickly leave this familiar part of the world for a series of country roads, like the outskirts of Parma. While the streets are unpaved, there are modern-looking houses lining them and small fields full of wheat or grapes can be glimpsed between them. As it begins to get late, my sister and I stop at a hostel, though it looks like a large mansion.

Inside, it is very strange. It seems to be populated by one family: grandparents, parents, in-laws, cousins though no one under the age of twenty or so. They have a distinctive look, big teeth, small, close-set eyes. They are friendly but there is something off. My sister and I watch TV with them. All the rooms are over-sized and this one is more of a home theater. Old, dilapidated couches sit at odd angles, and my sister and I settle into them, pressed up against the many family members. I am seated next to a very old man with rheumy eyes. He keeps slapping me on the back and pointing at the giant projector screen. There is soccer on it, teams in North Africa.

The bedroom looks like a hostel at least: lots of rows of bunkbeds in an un-adorned white box. In the middle of the night I need to get up and use the restroom but the one I passed by earlier is filthy. I wander out onto the front porch, which, covered by a tarp, extends some twenty feet in front of the house. There is a door that leads into a wing of the house I did not notice before. I open it and find a very modern, well appointed bathroom. The design is Art decco, the furniture is comfortable. And there is a door from the restroom deeper into the new wing.

I open the door and find stairs leading down into a basement rec-room--very well kept and pristine. Compared to the somewhat ramshackle nature of the rest of the house this is also a shock but it makes me uneasy. That's when I see them, glowing eyes in the relative darkness of the rec-room. They come closer, attached to children, horribly deformed, their flesh streaked and scarred and, suppurating keloid flesh hanging in tumorous clumps. They are dressed in nice velvet dresses and tuxedos, crawling on their hands and knees towards me. I scream and run.

The next day, my sister and I are driving around the outskirts still, looking for a place to stay, or our parents, or just trying to avoid going back to the hostel. We are driving by a school and there are a lot of children crossing, It is utter chaos and I am switching gears constantly, cutting a slow path through the crowd. That is when I back up into something. There is a crunch of metal. I get out of the car and see that I have hit a man's bicycle. It is twisted up under my back bunker. The hostel is down the street and I am eager to get away from it, so I approach apologetically. The owner is 7ft tall and sinewy, rail-thin. His face is gaunt and he has gray, stringy hair down to his waist. He is dressed in a clean, red tracksuit. and there is something so threatening in his eyes, so menacing in the clench of his teeth that I start to back away. He raises a wrench in one hand and starts striding towards me. I put my hands over my face and sink to the ground. He walks past me and smashes my rear-windshield with his wrench. Then he bolts, letting out an unearthly howl.

My dad appears at the end of the street and beckons my sister and I to follow him up onto the highway. As we do so, I wake up.

Shadows in the Noonday Glare

Given its mythic importance in my mind (as the birthplace of my grandmother and the cultural center of the part of my heritage with which I most strongly identify) I never had a very clear image in my head of Mexico City. 

The closest I ever got were conflicting descriptions of a city high atop a mountain, a city built over a drained lake, a city densely populated and overpolluted. None of these came with a clear mental image. Even now that I've been, with my less than thorough investigation of its various districts and barrios, I have only a perfunctory impression of the place. It was not what I expected. 

The center of town feels like it could be Manhattan or Milan, with wide crowded streets and austere edifices, many stories tall. But as one spirals out from the Zócalo, a different portrait begins to emerge. The city is green, greener than any American city I have been to, with palms and cactus and stunted, twisted pines growing up, over a d around the buildings. There is a very clear feeling of shadow beneath all those trees, a palpable darkness in the canopy that feels like the mysteries of dense jungle, or, more accurately of bayou, with crepe myrtle and willow obscuring the views of gated courtyards. Though I did not see any, it reminded me most if the eucalyptus forest I remember from my childhood spent in both Woodland Hills and at the LA zoo. The shadows in the trees are equal parts comforting and dangerous.

The buildings arou d which this foliage grows are pleasantly dilapidated with unfinished, unpainted facades and dark tendrils of water stains reaching down their sides.  Everything gives off the sense of decay, of once-grandeur, affably sliding into disrepair, passively allowing itself to be reclaimed by the trees. 

And then there is the pollution. I am used to LA smog--an oily smear at the edge of the horizon which turns to magic and fire as the sun sets. Here, it takes the form of a luminescent haze. I did not see the sun once in my stay, though the skies were often cloudless. The light is too intense to look upon as it drifts down through the occultation of the trees. 

This was most true in the neighborhood of Coyoacan, where Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera lived in their Casa Azúl. My sister described it as New Orleans square at Disneyland, but it is more somber than that, despite the crowds, street vendors and blaring calliope music. The city has a peevish dignity, a feeling of suffering you to be there. 

As you leave it, you understand the description of a city in the clouds. You wind down out of large sloping peaks, scores of homes and apartments clinging like lichen to their stones. At the base is unmitigated urban sprawl, an endless field of white drywall, black tangles of wire and gray billboards cryptically displaying only a telephone number. Looking back, the peaks of the mountains, where the city sits, are wreathed in mist and haze, the sky darkening yet still, somehow, glowing like a computer monitor, displaying nothing but quite clearly on. 

I was there as a tourist, with all the arrogance of travel--wondering at the lives of people I thought I knew through a moment of eye contact on the street. Looking back, this description is full of that arrogance: wanting to see a thriving ruin instead of a major metropolis whose decrepitude I assume only from the tangle of its foliage and cracks in its paint. In the end, despite my being of Mexican descent, I know nothing about the city or its people and no three day trip could make it so. That was, however, the city I saw, the city whose imagined pristine history, unclear in my mind, was dashed apart by seeing it, alive and real and overgrown by itself.