It's Not About Them: It's About Us
Surviving, thriving, and being who you were born to be in a world that wants to kill your mind, body, and very soul
I always felt close to nature and animals. I’ve always loved stories about battling the elements and have even loved battling the elements myself.
I loved reading, and often wrote stories about survival, with my imagination fluttering like a crippled bird trying to fly, barely edging toward thriving and happiness.
I’ve only recently realized that nearly every day, in nearly in every way, those of us in the United States, and to a lesser extent, Canada and Mexico, as well as other nations where westernized culture holds sway, are in a life-and-death battle with our entire society and way of life.
Such a large amount of our daily lives are devoted to flapping like winged baby birds from one danger or trap to the next.
The Delicate Ballet of Prescription Medications, Life, and Death
Life sucks, you take a pill. Back in the 90s, my best friend met a man online, had a whirlwind romance, and married him. She moved away from our So Cal hometown and all her family and friends.
The marriage didn’t last very long, but it was so terrible and he was so abusive that she sought psychiatric medications to cope with her depression and anxiety.
None of those things “came naturally” to her. She’s a naturally happy, joyful person everyone loves to be around.
I didn’t take psychiatric medications for my stress and anxiety, which resulted from the need to care for my grandmother with Alzheimer’s who was running away from home three out of every five nights, my baby daughter who was nursing and in diapers, and my father who was dying of congestive heart failure, as well as a demanding fulltime job as the Executive Director of Family Service Assn. in my hometown of Redlands, California.
I just smoked cigarettes.
I smoked for stress relief and also from a terror of being fat. What a combo.
I quit smoking July 27, 2014 at the San Diego Comic Con. We were launching Chameleon Publishing and Is She Available? I had hired my daughter and her best friend Kiele and they gave out 3 stickers and went drinking in the Gaslamp District. I had such bad IBS that I could barely stand and walk, and I saw an online message in an IBS support group: “Well, you know just about all of us are closet smokers.”
Not much else came out of that massive event, except I quit smoking cold turkey that day. For some time, this made a great improvement in the painful, potentially debilitating condition.
I’d been smoking cigarettes off and on since I was 13 years old. For my babies’ safety, I quit while I was pregnant and nursing both Meredith and Anthony. I started smoking again a few weeks after Anthony died and had smoked a pack a day in the ten years in-between.
As most people know, but I didn’t until I was well into my 40s, nicotine is a powerful drug that alters brain chemistry leading not only to addiction, but also calming effects which don’t produce a noticeable “high” after you develop tolerance. For many years, and certainly when I was young, I did not see cigarettes as a “drug” like heroin or cocaine.
Or caffeine. Or social media.
Many years ago when I was seeking to lose weight and looking into competitive bodybuilding (a short phase), one of my coaches said “Food is the most powerful drug you’ll ever put in your mouth.”
This is now more than ten years after I quit smoking, and I’ve been tobacco-free the entire time. I no longer even think of cigarettes, and now that I know what they are, I’d never smoke one again, nor use nicotine in any other form.
I gained the exact amount of weight they say that those who quit smoking gain. Following that, I was getting progressively heavier and less fit every single day until in 2018, Bruce gave me a Fitbit (at my request) for Christmas. I used it when we were staying in Pacific Grove over the holidays that year, and I put it on and walked from our hotel to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, approximately 2 miles, slightly uphill. I realized then how out of shape I was. The device told me that my resting heart rate was 70 beats per minute. “Good!” it said.
Bruce and I love to eat, so we followed a pattern for years of eating out at least two nights a week, with a real pig-out session every weekend. Bruce has been sober for 28 years, so he didn’t drink alcohol, but my average night-out drinking was always three drinks, and sometimes more.
Over time, I began to think “these are habits, why can’t I break them?”
But by instinct, the biggest habit of all that I’d had, I’d actually broken right before I met Bruce. It was a habit of writing stories with ‘invented’ characters that fit some market need I imagined. I wrote Like Fire simply by using the fantasy world (quite original) that I’d invented for a prior series of YA fantasy books I’d written (and overwritten) that had gone to Pub Board at Scholastic. Good books, but not great.
What Is Winning At Life and Breaking Free of Addiction?
I told Bruce one day, “I think the COVID pandemic actually was the 28 Days Later type of Zombie Apocalypse,” and he poo-poohed me (as he often does — he’s 9 years older and that is a long generational divide to overcome when talking about real sci-fi ideas that don’t date from the 60s or 70s).
COVID was a watershed moment. Some view it as forced social behavior, while others see it as a bioweapon that was either accidentally or deliberately released. My first memory of the pandemic was Tom Hanks and his wife making a video from Australia saying they’d both been infected — everyone lock down!
Most people by now probably have an instinctive understanding that the rich and the famous aren’t “the most evolved” humans, much less someone to look up to: they are often the opposite. The same is true of the type of entertainment purveyed by mass media companies. 99% of it these days consists of what the wealthy and powerful find “entertaining,” or what they think is “good” or “suitable” for those who are not wealthy or powerful.
In other words, the entertainment version of table scraps as illustrated in this article’s header.
I think about people like Neil Gaiman (not much, but when I see his picture on my Facebook feed being demanded to “friend” him there he is).
Over the course of my college teaching career (1998 to 2020), more than half of my students who enjoyed reading would mention Gaiman’s books, and I would say at least 15% listed him as a “favorite” writer.
It wasn’t my job to tell them, “There’s better writers than he,” it was my job to encourage their reading and writing of anything, in any way.
When my friend Igor Goldkind, the author of Is She Available? (the book being launched at that long-ago ComicCon when I quit smoking) told me that Neil Gaiman was his friend, and would blurb the book and help to sell it, following Igor’s contribution to Neil’s career, which would have been coining the term ‘Graphic Novel’ and selling Gaiman’s first graphic novel to all the UK booksellers, I didn’t have the heart to tell Igor, “Gee, I’m not sure about that …”
Did Gaiman come through with a blurb?
Is Donald J. Trump a nice man?
[no]
Everyone who understands what I just wrote should also realize that the character, reliability, and decency level on both of these gentlemen is identical.
The Relentless Drumbeat of Bringing Us All Down to Their Level
Remember that 1997 Green Day song? (“Nice Guys Finish Last”). First, it was a 1975 hardcover book co-written by famous Major League Baseball player and manager, Leo Durocher.
The bromide was endemic when I grew up, especially in sportscasting circles.
But the true statement is, “Nice guys live well.” Like my grandfather.
Or like my boss Art Seidenbaum, or Vin Scully, or Oliver Sacks.
All men? How about this lady?
It’s very difficult for us women in most, if not all, cultures around the world to live truly well, as our lives are so transcribed by our children and our husbands or partners as well as the restrictions our cultures place upon us, but I think my mother most certainly must have. I know the decision she made during the last year of her life was one that I would have made. I also know that she left the stifling atmosphere of our 1940s hometown and her mother’s stifling, omnipresent, hypercritical, abusive influence and became the woman who redesigned Mr. Magoo. She may have died of pancreatic cancer at only age 40, but my mother made choices that I failed to make soon enough in my life, although I think now, I’ve been able to make all of them.
We all have a place in this world, for example — a place where we are happiest and healthiest. I’ve found mine: Southwest Florida.
We all have a type of work we are happiest doing. I have always been so fortunate in being able to write and earn at least part of my living by doing that. Now, I’m able to earn a good living doing what I’m most-able to do every day, using my innate intelligence and work (teaching, fund development, business development and coaching) and writing background.
And I, someone always interested in science and the future, am actually working to build toward it, and if you’d asked me as a young high school or college student, “Would you like to actually work to build artificial intelligence that could help humans to reach the stars,” I would have said “GTFO!”
No, I wouldn’t have. I learned to use foul language and initialisms in daily discourse by being on the internet for the past three decades.
It’s One Day At a Time to Recover
It seems to me that the ultimate or most basic goal of the majority of people is to have a happy, healthy life. Yes, there are some for whom misery and a totally debased life is a desired status. I’m not writing to them or for them, miserable people: there’s more than enough advice, guidance, help, and life conditions that they can achieve your goals of misery, devastation, and grief through this life and into the next.
For those of us who want to build our joy, daily rewards, and physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health and happiness, the process really is one day at a time. This is especially true for those of us who were raised in abusive environments.
I would not be writing — or even alive today — had I not had the benefit of my grandfather Bampy’s wise and consistent teachings and modeled healthy, responsible, strong, and caring behavior.
One part of this, and perhaps this is where I should draw to a close, is understanding the difference between habit and addiction.
Those who have financially or personally profited off the addiction side of the ledger know what I’m about to tell you very well, and among the most infamous of them are the opioid Sacklers. Other infamous individuals who’ve profited tremendously from the darker side of human nature are the pistachio/water hoarding Resnicks. Thanks to the film Pistachio Wars and my own background in housing and economic development (including such horrible realizations as ‘the same six landlords own all of South Los Angeles rental housing’) I wrote my first big bestseller: a viral tweet series with 45 million views and a million “likes”.
There is no other explanation for the horrors being visited on Gaza than addiction.
It is the same addiction that caused the Vietnam War.
It is the same addiction that fuels credit card use, that keeps us in jobs we hate doing work we know is wrong, or just boring.
It is the same addiction that tells friends to cut off friends or even family members over electoral politics. Yes, Red and Blue MAGA: I mean both of you.
It is the same addiction that keeps us buying and consuming food that we know is killing us.
It is the same addiction that keeps us going to see doctors who can’t even spend 30 seconds talking with us, but who throw a prescription in our direction, a paper that we tell ourselves will make us well — until the side effects force us to revisit this doctor and we are given … another prescription.
Lie upon lie upon lie to advantage the seller just as El Chapo’s dealers on street corners pushed the medicine that let people escape from their miserable, stress-filled lives for a moment, as Philip Morris made those cowboy coffin nails that I smoked for the overwhelming majority of my years on this planet.
What will you turn your back on today, to move yourself one step closer toward being healthy, happy, and doing what it is you were born to do? Something easy to turn down? Or something very hard —
It doesn’t matter what as long as you do it.
And yes, Virginia: this includes that social media post you were going to make about a current politician and a current controversy you saw on social media. If you’re a white man and have income over $150,000/yr and have no nonwhite other person, preferably a woman, to speak to as a friend?
Why not go fucking find one because guess what? The glass-walled all-white all-male fishbowl you live in is starving you of human experience and is genuinely killing you.
It is why you must pay for sex or why your wife shrinks away when you move to touch her.
It’s not my job to heal you and it never was though I spent so much of my life doing only that and ever only that.
It’s your difficult — conversely, so easy — job to do it yourself.