Living a Dream

Dreamwork reflections and a brief hello from Thailand.

Hello dears,

Thank you for beginning this journey with me. I’ve started this newsletter for a few reasons: first, I’m terrible at maintaining any social media presence and my family in the U.S. demand to hear some sort of notice that I am, indeed, alive.

Second, I write constantly. Some days it’s juvenile and worth keeping private, but on occasion, it can be beautiful. Ideally, I would express my wonder with the world through spoken words in a bright pair of human eyes, but the ether of the internet will suffice.

Lastly, it holds me accountable. As many of you know, I’m working on a manuscript. John McPhee, in his guidance to writers in Draft No. 4, suggests in the face of writing block to begin with: ‘Dear Mother.’

You write to your mother all your frustration and despair and complaints, then start explaining your problem. What you’re trying to write about, how it’s supposed to look, what it really is if you could only get the words down.

“And then,” he advises, “you go back and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ and all the whimpering and whining.”

After a wildly productive start to the year, sometimes reaching the insane rate of 3,000 words a day, I haven’t touched the book in three months. Without a mother to write to (though almost every word that comes from me is an ode to her) you all are my method to push through muse-less days as I peel it open again.

I hope for this blog to be a space to share memories and moments; reflections on what I’m reading and contemplating; songs, art, thoughts, and dreams as they bubble to the surface of my mind.

Writing and dreamwork are like feeling your hand along a hallway in the dark. You touch the cool, painted-over wallpaper and find the ridges where seams were buried. You toe your way forward upstairs, sometimes imagining there is one too many or one too few.

This week, I had a portent; a dream I was struck by as soon as I woke. I rarely analyze my dreams. It’s an energetically exhausting process, groping along that hallway without knowing whose hand you may find or boot you might trip over within yourself. But the outcome is always profound.

…

I am in a large house with two of my writing mentors; a motherly, generous figure and a confident, action-oriented editor. The motherly woman has offered me a room in her home, and the three of us are standing in the large, light, and spacious room. They’re helping me as I decide how to arrange my space.

Without hesitation, I take a writing desk and set it straddling a corner between a wall and a floor-length window with an expansive view of the ocean. In the opposite corner of the room, there is a large wood stove. Three pieces of furniture sit, waiting to be placed: a bed, a tall, leather armchair, and a green, flowery couch.

“You can’t keep them all,” says my editor, “if you want to make this room your own.”

I stand, feeling but not yet acting on my choice. The bed doesn’t need to stay. It takes too much space, it’s too tempting to escape into. I appreciate the armchair’s formality and imagined it pleasant to read in, but it doesn’t match the couch. And the feminine, green couch with pink flowers dotting it is exactly what my space needs.

…

From waking, I knew the dream was about my book. I’ve been working on a book on and off since the fall of 2020. It originally was going to be about the curious life and complex death of my brother, Quentin; a story of suicide that doesn’t paint his death as damnation, but as, perhaps, the only means of self-liberation he had.

With this story in mind, I moved to Vermont. I started working at the therapeutic treatment center where he was happiest, but also where he committed suicide. Within a five-minute walk from my bedroom door, I could stand at the place where he died, touch the stump of the tree he’d chosen.

I’d only been working there for one month when my mother committed suicide. I distinctly remember my series of thoughts, after I got the phone call.

I was sitting, looking out my window above the altar where I’d meditated each morning. There were cows grazing in the field above.

This was always going to be the worst day of my life.

It didn’t matter if I was 16 or if I was 60. This loss was always coming, and it would never be painless.

Thank God for the mothers I have.

The women who have mentored me, loved me, raised me, shown me—all flashed through my mind. I have so many mothers.

Well, you fucking changed my book.

It has become a love story; the tale of a mother and son. Both who, for their own reasons, with their own pains, in their distinct yet intertwined lives, ultimately made the same choice.

…

I spent a few hours in mild anguish biting my lip and staring off into a lake, scattered sentences punctuating my hours of dissociation. Dreamwork needs its space. And if you don’t give it, it’ll take it from you. By the time the morning and afternoon had rolled past, the meanings were mostly clear.

The woman extending her home to me is a representation of my support system; my support system is creating space for me within the world (the home). My editor symbolized my own motivation, drive, and conviction. And the room was, unsurprisingly, a physical manifestation of my creative work, of this book. I am working with you, my support system, and my own conviction to create this book and give it space in the world. Thank you.

I moved with swift decision to place the writing desk (my creative inspiration/muse) between groundedness (the wall) and insight (window) into the subconscious (the ocean).

The hearth, after a lot of teasing apart of subconscious threads, I realized to represent my hopes and fears for this project. It’s both warming and comforting, lighting my space in darkness, but also volatile and potentially dangerous.

The furniture puzzled me most. What could they mean?

I need a place in which to draw myself closer to the woodstove, these hopes and fears. The furniture each symbolized a different avenue I could pursue in writing the book. The bed represented family; a space to recede to when tired or overwhelmed, connoting ease, but also lethargy and depression.

I worked on the book both in my grandmother’s home in North Carolina fall of 2021 and in my father’s in Bangkok at the start of 2022. In both places, I could easily sleep for twelve hours each day. Without structure, only writing or reading to do, I would be up until 3:00 am or later and sleep until the afternoon. I wasn’t seeing much daylight, very little of the external world. Living was too soft, surrounded by down pillows and heavy quilts. Words were coming, but there was too much darkness. There is no space for a bed in this room.

The armchair is masculine, rich, studious. Something out of a study, so tall and straight with brown leather and brass detailing. It symbolizes academia.

Working at the therapeutic center where Quentin died, I realized that my greatest skills are ones that were never taught academically, that I had inherited in my complex and imperfect upbringing with a disabled brother and a chronically depressed mother.

I love people. I am fascinated by people. You never know what they’re going to do, and life is infinitely rich when you take people as they are. Because what else can you do? There is no changing them. Just see them and love them as best you can.

Since my discovery of work in psychology and social work, I’ve been inspired to go back to school. To get a Master of Social Work or (most tantalizing, depending on the day) a Ph.D. in clinical psychology.

In the dream, though I appreciate the sturdy beauty of the armchair, it does not fit my room. I am trying to configure a way to make it work, to keep it in the space, but as my conviction says to me, “You can’t keep them all.”

I am in love with learning. Currently, my freelance work includes editing transcriptions of lectures for York University in Toronto, through which I get to sit in on classes about political science, meteorology, philosophy, whatever. For the last few months, I’ve been working part-time as a middle school physics teacher in Koh Phangan. Every day I would learn about space or leverage or sound waves, then teach my students.

One day, I will have the perfect room suited to the armchair. The time in my life for a return to school will come, it’s inevitable. I enjoy learning too much.

But I was thinking about an advanced degree in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons. For the sake of the book, I imagined that a Ph.D. would lend me more credit, and would validate my lived story and the lives of my family more than if I wrote it as just a human being with a heart.

Meanwhile, the most natural, beautiful, comfortable, and light piece of furniture was the couch. Feminine and earthy, soft and delicate and bright. That, I realized, is the life I’m currently living. Each day I wake in the jungle. Each night I sleep to the sound of rain or insects I don’t yet know the name of. Some could call it lounging, but it’s the only space comfortable enough to face the crucible of grief.

…

In waking life, my editor once laughingly commented on how this writing process has gone for me.

At first, I wanted to face the losses I face as closely as possible. Nose to nose, cheek to cheek, I wanted to embrace the hurt and hold it as it held me. I entered a valley full of Quentin’s echoes and memories. In the wake of losing my mom, I signed myself up for weeks of workshops on death and dying in different sects of Buddhism. I started reading a life’s worth of journals, all in my mother’s hand.

I wrapped myself so tight in the experiences, thinking I was brave but feeling numb, wanting to be open but constricted with self-wrought pain.

To really write, I had to push myself away. Not across state lines, not to havens of known safety, but to the other end of the planet. I have put as much physical distance as is possible between myself and the story of my life so far; and yet it continues.

Here I am growing roots for myself in Thailand. Loosely, gently, I probe dark soil and strengthen my grip on what it means to be here, to evolve, to bloom.

I’ve found a home in which opportunities for self-development abound if you take advantage of them. Mid-August, I’m attending a weekend-long workshop on Jungian Shadow work. A week after that, I’ll be attending my first Vipassana retreat, meditating in silence for seven days.

…

Writing is an embodied process. What I’ve written so far has come from a very cerebral place; what are the facts, how do we analyze them, what is the truth and where is the explanation?

Since moving to the island of Koh Phangan, messages have come from many directions, guiding me to not think too much. Not to let my mind run away with itself, taking me out of the moment and my physical body and this great pleasure of living.

This book can’t originate from the mind alone. It’s my story as well as theirs. It’s my heart that breaks and heals in silent cycles. After over a year and a half of clinging to the mind, I’ve returned to my heart. However murky, it’s these dark waters that I’ll wade through. Casting nets and dredging up what may get caught, I’ll drag things ashore and be able to discern and sift through what is mine and what may not be.

As I sit here in the humidity, scratching at bug bites and fungal infections (you have to love the tropics), monitor lizards swim lazily through green water and an olive-backed sunbird just flew to the line above my head, cocking its black eye to me in curious greeting.

Life is kind and hard in turn. Right now, I’m filled with gratitude. For this place, for all I’ve lived through, for all of the people in this world who care and support me—I am grateful. I’ll part with a snippet of a song I wrote a few weeks ago:

This moment is a blessing

Though it didn’t come by choice

This may not be my future

But for now, let’s rejoice