Zero

Now it is getting less cold. For the last twelve years my health has been poor and my future doubtful, and I frequently forget to bring gloves with me in the Winter.

Sometimes I would put my hands in my pockets, other times I would keep them out in the air and endure the numbing sear and the tingling hornets upon entering the warmth. In the last two years things were particularly bad, and this Winter I would sometimes be walking out the door, realize I forgot the gloves, and instead of going back, keep my hands out in the cold and feel the numbing sear.

Five or six times I left the gloves at home on purpose to endure the pain in my fingers for a ten minute walk, trying to build a tolerance to pain, to practice suppressing the sensation of my fingers crying for warmth so that, later that night, I might have built up willpower and be able to fall unconscious without feeling the sting of the poisons in my brain.

This process was probably stupid, and certainly not good. I don’t do it anymore, and I try not to be angry at myself for having done it. In the last two weeks, I have tried not to think of the things that nearly killed me, but instead think of the things that caused me to live.

When I get out of Park Street Station, which is often, and I walk up the stairs, if I am lucky, I am able to see what is in front of me, and to hear the cars and the birds and the coughs and the drips of dubious liquids and the impious chant of cheap bluetooth speakers which, hopefully, are off in the distance. If I am mindful and pay attention, I cry.

Before I began to cry when leaving Park Street Station, I would be overcome by the thoughtless pressure of yesterday and the killing pressure of tomorrow. Twelve years ago I had been put on an antidepressant medication, then antipsychotics. At the time, the major trans celebrity was Laverne Cox.

Most mornings, on 600 milligrams of Seroquel and 15 milligrams of Olanzipine, waking up, I could feel my soul gnaw its leg off. Theoretically a soul can regrow. Both opioids and antipsychotics target the D2 receptor. It shows.

Five consecutive years of withdrawal. Ages 23 to 28. Suffering.

Ein

I walked in the same stretch of the Fells allot. There is a killing rhythm in walking in the woods for a prolonged period of time - you see growth and death. Young animals and corpses, buds and logs. The amnesiac effect of all this until recently halved my digit span, so my recollection of dates and joys is hazy. I remember being there long enough to see the winter and also when things had been alive. I remember putting my shoes on to walk - in the four years of concerted withdrawal I have been too tired to find good fitting shoes, so walking is some kind of willpower in and of itself - and going through the woods and feeling like I had looked Death in the face.

Something old and uncaring greeted me in the woods, in between nightmares and panic attacks.

But whoever it was did not discriminate, he took all comers, I found relief in that. I didn’t make him my friend but we came to an understanding that I never had more than a hundred days to live. I would fear him, but not the way most Christians do. I would respect Death and not encourage him, and he would give me the deep fear, but when I died in the coming months, by suicide or the cancer I checked my body for, it would be no struggle.

Until Death took me, I would earn no calluses. This, probably, is when I began to dissociate, something that would save me from the fear for a while. Now that I am warming up, I feel the cost of association, the stinging of my body as it becomes receptive to feeling.

Zwei

Halfway into the taper, I spoke with a specialist for the first time, one of the few in the world. I told him that I felt like I had looked Death in the face. He nodded, suppressed a smile, and told many of the people he treated told him they had felt Death. I could see why he had to suppress the smile: my spiritual revelation had confirmed a trend. Later he would show me charts demonstrating a parabolic tapering schedule, and that was something that caused me to live.

Of course I am transgender.

I didn’t get it then, because the hallmarks of the worst sort of gender dysphoria - suicidality, unease with the body, hatred of the self – were all accounted for in my scale.

I started writing poetry while I was walking in the Fells, and most of my poetry centered around the poor situation of being in a body. Transition was out of the question; for the time, just

continuing to breathe

was difficult enough, and imagining a future in which I could be happy made the present pain sting more.

And there it is, what I have come to view as, more than any antipsychotic, the great poison in my life: my imagining that I might be alive and happy in ten years, or a year, or later today.

I cannot really say for certain when specific things in the last four years occurred, only that they might have, because some things I remember happening were not in nightmares or the occasional dream.

At some point in those yesterdays, probably two years ago, I emerged from the Park Street Station with headphones on. I had a stubble, and was wearing masculine clothes, and knew that I hated this so much that if I endured it I would run the risk of suicide, but I had lived, at that point, for ten years with the suicide risks of antipsychotics and withdrawal. Life while maybe killing myself felt more than manageable, it was all I had done as an adult.

At that point, I had been reading The Heart of The Buddha’s Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh, and I had been doing the progressive body scan, listening to myself. And before I list the joys, I had found that my ankles hurt from improper footwear, my calves and thighs had nail marks from scratching (I was too tired to use lotion), my penis had difficulty becoming erect from stress, my stomach nearly doubled me over in pain from anxiety if I did not manage my mind, my gut and breasts were fat and made finding clothing difficult, the extremities of my hands tingled from stress, my throat was dry and tasted like plaster from the interaction of Lithium and Olanzipine, and my vision was poor from the distraction of continual headaches. In every hurt of mine there was also the seed of joy, and sometimes I died just walking.

But my corpse walked to a coffee shop. I can’t remember which one. That month my mind had given me many things to worry about. First was ants, bedbugs, rats in my apartment - none of which I had, but all of which I could have, and I spent between one and two hours a day checking for their signs, stomach filled with nails from anxiety, time blurred and squished from fear.

Next was a social fear - I had a falling out with a friend, and my mind leaped to the very worst. Without a shred of reality, I was deathly afraid that I would be ostracized from the poetry community in Boston, and that if I remonstrated or mentioned any of this that I would be accused of sexual assault. Was there any indication, from any party, that this was a possibility? No. It was a creation of my worries.

Next were the lesser fears I had endured for three years at that point - cancer, retina problems, impoverishment, and never having a lover. These were old, non-specific fears that had seen me, sometimes tagging in and out, for some time.

Sitting in that coffee shop, I did have a medicine. The medicine was the present moment, which I had read about. It was impossible then to blank my mind.

Meditation and introspection were not useful in that moment, the physical pain I was in, and the physical pain of the anxiety, was such that someone with support or experience might be able to use a blanking technique and gain a measure of peace, but attempts at meditation, the kind that reduced attention to the world, had ended in anxiety attacks a year or two ago, and I hadn’t tried since.

But there was one thing that had worked for me. Having moved away from the Fells and into Cambridge, I found my “grid of streets,” (named after the Grouper album “Grid of Points”), which was a rectangular, traffic free arrangement of backstreets. With the pair of cheap Sony headphones which had seen me through bus ride after road trip and which I adored dearly (they’ve since broken and I’ve thrown them out), I could walk these streets without much fear of traffic.

By learning my walking speed, I could use the regularity of the residential blocks to know how much of my walk was left. Because I went backward and forward on the grid, instead of linearly out, when I needed to piss or shit urgently, I would never be that far from my house. And I walked my grid of streets for hundreds of hours, in the rain sometimes, with my music.

Some whiff of air from the grid followed me into that coffee shop and entered my nose and went down to my gut, which is where the soul lives. I tried to practice Right Thought, or Right View, or Right Mindfulness - I’m not sure which is what right now, frankly. It didn’t matter. I remembered that the Buddha is a physician, and that the Buddha is within all of us because we have Buddha nature. And I saw the fires scalding my nerves, and I denied them their fuel.

Every single worry I had was predicated on a single thing: in half an hour, you will be alive. Every fear that invaded my gut needed that premise. To be afraid, I had to imagine a future in which I was alive. You can only get cancer in six months if you are alive in six months. You can only be driven from your home by ants when you arrive later tonight if you are alive later tonight. By far the hardest was applying this to my friendships.

I could not continue with the social OCD symptoms I was experiencing, created and maintained by the severe stress of withdrawal. I wanted with every part of my soul to keep my friends. But this desire invited anxiety in, it gave it a canvas. It wrenched my soul, but I felt that if I could destroy any conception of the future, if I could prevent myself from thinking about anything other than right now, I might survive.

I felt the killing pressure of tomorrow and knew that unless I changed I would survive only as a lump, a sorrowing scab. I don’t think I had the idea so much as my reading and musical walking meditation made the idea myself: if I wanted to have any joy, I had to give up the hope that in half an hour I would be alive.

For three months I limited my music and media consumption. I walked wherever I could. I stayed off Reddit, my smartphone time killing vice. I played calmer video games when exhausted, and I read when I could - the physical pain made concentrating to read difficult, and the cognitive difficulty made reading novels in particular near impossible.

If I focused my schedule on being outside or at a cafe in a window in the morning, I generally was able to read.

Above all, I focused on one thing, whether on the train, in line at the pharmacy, falling asleep, or crying: obedience to the moment. That is my novel phrasing. I listened, carefully, with both ears and my gut, to the moment, and I obeyed. Increasingly I do not obey the moment but collaborate with it. But back then, if I wanted to live, I obeyed. I did not read much more of The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching. Every few weeks I reviewed the introduction to the Noble Eightfold Path.

There was one section about suffering, and how pain does not guarantee suffering, and how we can learn from suffering if we listen to our Buddha Nature. For the first month, I read that every day. After that month, returning to that passage became too painful. I cannot remember if I have read it since.

I don’t know if what I did was necessary or the most compassionate way to go about it. The hardest part of this process, of trying to obliterate any conception of time, was loneliness. I continued to see close friends for lunch or dinner, and I would practice not thinking about it, not allowing myself to be excited to see my friends, because it was not happening right now. I thought that if I allowed myself to be excited for an upcoming lunch date, if I let myself look forward to it all, it would be an invitation for the fear to return. And it often would - getting excited about seeing a friend invites the idea of that friend who could leave you. Getting excited about going for a walk tomorrow brings up the question of your legs. I cried, and I confided in a close friend how much it hurt to block myself from the future. I don’t know if this was the best way to handle it. It was severe and harsh.

At the same time, I was dying, and my psyche had been pushed to its limit, and the physiological effects of long term and increasingly acute stress were destroying me. I was worried my hair would fall out, and afraid to check. I had a therapist who I enjoyed and still see, and in the scale of this fear, a weekly meeting was more than useless, it clogged up my schedule.

It was a self-inflicted brutality, but one that bore immediate fruit. When I was with a friend, the relief and joy I got was immense. I suppressed the future and past as best as I could, often through scripted thoughts to ritually redirect my mind to the sensation of my clothes on my body, so in the good times, I was present and happy in a way I had never been as an adult.

When I walked around the city or wrote in a coffeeshop, I felt a true joy as well. But the context of all of this was harsh and self restrictive. It was medicine, but not dosed or administered correctly.

Nonetheless I was staggering towards something beautiful, self-flagellating as I went.

So now it is getting less cold. When I come up from Park Street Station, I notice the Buddha-wind. Often I cry. I can walk, I can talk, I can see, I have friends and family and a lover, and I know I will have a safe place to sleep tonight. These are very good things to be happy about, but they may not be around me at all times. Sometimes I am alone walking in the city, or in the bathroom, or waiting for a bus without gloves.

Those people I adore are not there then.

And at any instant my retina could detach, or I could bang my head and lose the ability to speak.

The functions of my body cannot be taken for granted. Nothing is certain in the future,

everything can be taken away. The only refuge we have is in the things around us at this moment.

Through noticing these things and listening to the wind in ourselves we are liberated from the pain of yesterday and tomorrow. The feeling of hope right now is good and joyous.

To be truly happy I had to say goodbye to the hope I held for my own life. In the beginning it was severe, and now I don’t what it is or how I got here, other than that I smile more, and if someone closes a door in my face, I’m not very angry.

Drei

Increasingly I can sleep and physical pain lessens. When I leave my apartment many mornings I cry at the wonder of what is happening - my legs work! I am off to another day, I will meet people, I will read and write, I will sleep! I’m not sure if that’s in keeping with this time-obliteration. I think that in the moment of celebrating the use of my legs, celebration is a present feeling in the body, and the body is meant to be felt.

Otherwise this time-obliteration would preclude gratitude. Later, after I leave, anxiety will return, and I will feel something else in the present - the knowledge that while my legs could stop working at any time, and I may be diagnosed with cancer and die and not see many more days. Right now I can feel the chair I am sitting in, the coffee I am sipping, and the slight numbness in my hands from stress and a chilly cafe. All of these are feelings, like the feeling of excitement I felt earlier. It is very hard for me to say where the line between the feeling of hope and attachment to the future begins. I suspect that is a question for people who are more interested in this than me, I like writing poetry mostly. I can just keep doing these things that make me happier and kinder.

The point of all this, to me, is kindness. I don’t know, having left the maelstrom, what I would do if there were not so many opportunities to be kind in the world. When I was dying on my feet, in those years, I looked for the kindness of strangers. Someone holding a door open for an elderly person using a walker. Giving directions to someone who was confused. Everytime a stranger radiated a casual kindness to me, it was an antidote. When I leave a building, I try to look behindme and see if anyone else is leaving, so I can hold the door. When I ride the train now, I do not wear headphones. One thing this does is make it easy to notice when the train stops, and when it does, I look up to see if anyone could use my seat more than me. Many people will offer a seat to someone else when both parties are standing up, but when all seats are taken, often we are all in our own worlds, and do not notice someone entering the train who could use a seat.

I have gotten into this habit of looking up every time the train stops. Please do not underestimate how much the kindness of strangers meant to me when I was sick.

The most important factor that caused me to live was money. Through this entire process I had health insurance, money to eat out, a warm, clean, independent place to live, money for new clothes and to see a therapist, money to take Uber’s to blood tests in the morning, when otherwise I would be staggering across Boston unable to eat, take my meds, or have caffeine until I made the hour plus journey to the hospital during rush hour. This personal philosophy I am describing would never have come about if I did not have access to money.

Having made it through largely because of this money, and having immense privilege, for a while I felt like I had a debt or obligation. Especially since so many of my brothers, sisters, and siblings who are struggling with their health will not succeed where I have because they do not have the money I was given. I felt that I had a burden to repay, and that eventually I would repay it and move on with my life. That was a nonsense notion.

Living in the moment does not just deny anxiety the fuel it requires. It shears us from our preconceptions. When we look at somebody else presently, we do not see their mistakes in the past, or their accomplishments which make us jealous, and we do not try to predict their future actions. To me, the greatest gift of living in the moment is to see people as eyes and skin and voice and soul - not as what they did yesterday, and whether it hurt you, or what they will do tomorrow, and whether it will be up to your standards. This is an aspect of interbeing. The present moment tears away at divisions the mind imposes on reality which cannot be felt, seen, or heard.

In the times when I am able to live in the present moment, I find anger impossible. I only see someone doing this or that. I cannot possibly hate somebody, even if they are annoying me or about to hurt me. I can only respond with obedience to the moment by protecting myself and leaving or helping them live more harmoniously. When I think of the dense obligations of the future, I am afraid and know I will never live up to them. When I remember that in the present moment very little and everything exists, the call of the wind becomes clear. I do not feel an obligation, having made it through this because of money, to repay this. I see my brothers, sisters, and siblings in need and I try to help. This is simply the action of the moment, it is the only possible action that will sustain us. This instant, and only this instant, creates compassion, and when one is able to see what is in front of them clearly, they will take joy in the act of compassion, and not in the eventual satisfaction having done something good brings. Yesterday and tomorrow occlude us from the joy we will feel if we help others right now.

If one lives well, and there are many ways to live well, then they will find many moments to feel the joy of helping and being helped, and they will have time to rest and do other things as well. But when the wake of yesterday and the shadow of tomorrow loom on this compassionate moment, whichis every moment, we assign words like “duty” to kindness, and we value what comes after. There is no reward after an act of kindness, the act of kindness is the reward, and what we feel after is the continuing joy of the act.

Now, it is getting less cold. Many of the physical pains I felt are receding. Every week I move forward in my gender transition, and slowly the medicines in my body become balanced, having crossed the tipping point of being overwhelming. I am happier than I have ever been, and I hope that after the bleak description of the last twelve years above, it is apparent that it when my pain was at its worst and I could not continue as I was, it was something beyond words that saved me, which at times I call the Holy Ghost, and at other times the Wind.

Presently I wear mala beads, and I make the sign of the Cross when I feel the need to. I also repeat to myself the Nembutsu, and most importantly carry a charmed peach pit a witch friend made for me whenever I depart for a medical appointment I am worried about.

I’m not concerned about categorizing all this because I started doing it all around the same time, and that is when I began to notice things.

————-