Breaking your eye open

When I was in college, my father began to fall apart. It happened slowly at first, and then very quickly. Over a decade later, he’s burned bridges with everyone he was once close to. I’ve been no-contact with him for years. I could probably write a whole separate piece about what it’s like to stop talking to a parent, what it costs and how it haunts, but lately I’ve been reflecting more on how his breakdown in particular hovers over my life.

As far as I know, my father was never officially diagnosed with a mental illness. What I do know is that, when my dad was a kid, his own father suffered a mental break so severe he tried to drive a car off the road with his kids in the backseat, and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. But that’s one of those family stories, handed down piecemeal and secondhand, so for all I know, I have the details wrong. Similarly, I’ve collected evidence of my own father’s behavior, trying to build a list of potential symptoms, but it’s hard to pin down. He sometimes roared with energy and impulse: he’d make huge purchases online, dream up ambitious plans, drive recklessly, get in a fight, send cruel letters. These periods were almost always followed by a precipitous drop: he’d sleep for days, go silent, watch movies and forget what he’d seen, disappear into a back room of the house. He could turn on someone on a dime — not with a regular amount of anger or disappointment, but a sort of total, eclipsing rage. The person became an embodiment of evil. He fixated on these enemies to a sickening degree, harassing people we loved, making them afraid for their safety.

Over the years, I’ve tried out every possible explanation. Alcoholism? Drugs? That never seemed to fit. A therapist of mine told me it sounded like borderline personality order, and he does tick every box on that one, but it’s a kitchen-sink diagnosis to begin with, and still leaves me with questions. What about the mania, and the depression? Would medication have helped? What medication? What “mental illness” explains his later spiral into alt-right conspiracy? Isn’t that just what a million white American men did when they felt threatened? Does seeking a diagnosis mean I’m just looking to separate him from his bad behavior, his own adult choices?

These days, I’ve begun to realize I may never get a clear answer. There may not be a clear answer. Psychiatry and psychology are still evolving sciences, and people are complex. But even without an answer — I feel constantly aware of what I might have inherited.

Sure, I might have a genetic predisposition towards depression and anxiety—that one has already reared its head. But I’ve also absorbed a lifetime of his behaviors and patterns — some that might have emerged from illness, some from coping mechanisms, some from generational trauma, and some just because that’s what he chose to do. And I know that some combination of those behaviors led my father down a road that means he’s spending his seventies totally isolated from his family, having hurt just about everyone he loved. And I know at least some of those behaviors are in me — dormant or otherwise.

I used to be afraid of that. Sometimes I still am. On my good days, it is a reminder to take my mental health very seriously, to prioritize the things that make me see reality more clearly and maintain hope and perspective. For the first half of my thirties, I was focused on things like therapy, medication management, exercise, hydration, sleep, sunlight — and those are, of course, important. (Like, really!)

But in the last year or two, I’ve been thinking about what else makes for a life with “mental health” in the sense that I mean it — not just “feeling okay” but building a life that will not end in self-isolation, that will not convince me to turn on my loved ones, that will be loving and expansive and continually courageous. I’ve become curious about things that make me see the world differently.

I’ve written before about my obsession with birds at the height of grief, and while I make fun of myself a lot for that, the truth is that focusing on birds made me see the world differently. I map my neighborhood by which birds live where, and what they’re up to. They make me think about what the city looks like from high above, or from the murky depth of the canal where the moorhens are diving. They make me think about time differently, about how most of them will die soon. My mom tells me that my first sentence was “Is birds,” which I was apparently moved to utter when looking at birds outside our window. When they flew away I said, “No is birds.” That one might be apocryphal, but she loves to repeat it, and I love to hear it. Is birds. No is birds. My first philosophy, and a lasting one.

Studying history makes me see the world differently. Doing work with brave people who choose what’s right over what’s easy makes me see the world differently. The ocean makes me see the world differently. Black holes make me see everything differently — hence the origin of this newsletter and its name.

And most of all, writing makes me see the world differently. It cracks my brain open and lets a cool stream of air in, from some other place I can’t see or know. It tugs me into obsessions I can’t explain, but that I’ve now learned to follow. It draws connections across a vast universe of ideas, and follows rules that aren’t quite logical, but something else.

If you, unlike me, have not watched every episode of Six Feet Under at least ten times — there’s an episode called “The Eye Inside” where Claire, the artist daughter of a funeral home family, is staring at art books trying to “break her eye open.” Her art teacher has just told her that she essentially can’t see anything new, since everything is heavy with old associations and assumptions, and that in order to make art, she needs to break her eye open, and see it as it really is.

When I think about how to keep myself sane — whatever that means — to keep myself loving and attentive to the people I care about, to keep myself healthy and operational and clear-eyed — I think about that scene. I need to take my meds and get fresh air, yes, but I also need to remind myself that my little mind can’t comprehend all of the world. One day things might snap into focus and look entirely different. The universe is full of black holes. The ocean is full of animals we’ll never see. There’s still art that hasn’t been made yet. Your brain doesn’t have all the answers, and never will.