Chaos Precedes Creation

Lines from Therapy for the Painful Present

Chaos precedes creation. That’s what my first therapist said. It was an invitation to embrace the mental mess I carried into her office.

I was always the one who held it together. Decades—I held it together for decades. Because terrible things would happen if I didn’t.

So I won’t apologize for all those years when the pain was hidden, when I did not see to my own needs. I failed to put the oxygen mask on my own face before helping others with theirs. It was not in my mother’s interest to teach me to do so. My brothers and sisters needed to be fed. Every damn day. And terrible things did happen once my back was turned.

Later my child needed my protection. All those wise pronouncements about taking care of oneself first strikes this mother tiger as really rather privileged.

I went to a training for interim clergy. We all filled out a questionnaire about stressors, with points assigned to different life events. The point of the exercise was to demonstrate that interim clergy, by the nature of the job, have a lot of life stressors. So we need to mind our self care. My colleagues looked at my score. For the rest of the week, they treated me like a stroke about to happen.

But it would be decades more that I held it together.

Until I didn’t.

And it was very messy indeed, that chaos.

They used to call it nervous breakdown, which conveys well the collapse of walls that had once held up the appearance of a functioning human being.

Now they say episode. That’s a bland word. It needs a modifier to convey much at all. Though from this end of the recovery spectrum, I do appreciate the implication that episode carries—whatever it is, it will come to an end. At least until the next episode.

Oh, and then there’s it. My wife leads a retreat for people who have had a life-changing injury or illness. It could be cancer, car accident, breakdown—anything. After the first round of story-telling, she has participants call it it. The word creates common ground, and becomes the object onto which they can project whatever they need to project.

I call my “it” when my brain blew up. That phrase captures the fire inside my head. It raged through and burned down what had been my greatest strength—my ability to think, to find solutions, to fix.

Before the blowing up came the slow building pressure. I suppose what happens in therapy is that people learn how to release that pressure safely. Good for them.

Anyway, I began this post with the image of a volcano. It’s not entirely a metaphor. It’s part of the story. As my brain was about to blow, we bought a house in Costa Rica, on the ring of fire.

There is a line around the Pacific Ocean, that traces 75% of all the volcanoes and 90% of the planet’s earthquakes. They are caused by tectonic plates moving against each other. Sometimes they slide, sometimes they crash, leaving chaos in their wake. This line is called the ring of fire.

Living on the ring of fire, under the threat of that chaos and influence of that energy, my own creativity emerged. I wrote a book. I began a novel, and another book of essays about suicide. One day, as I walked beside the volcano Arenal, a whole other novel outlined itself in my head.

Word upon word, sentence following sentence, I rebuilt my brain, and rebuilt my life.

That experience teaches me the truth of what Toni Morrison has to say about the coming chaos. Yes, it’s coming. Some celebrate it. Political, religious, familial, environmental chaos—the fire rages not just on the ring but across the whole damn planet.

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. Toni Morrison

Creativity is the tool for this time. It is the energy. It is our power.

More to come . . .