There is Now a Clear Divide Between the Person I Was and the Person I Am Now

Written by Michael J Dougherty, originally published on Medium.

I felt the wrestling dog’s presence first virtually 2012. It lived in my Thai Town apartment’s elevator, or so I thought, and every time I left my place and waited for the elevator doors to open, I was struck frozen with the feeling the wrestling dog would be there, and it would spring from its muscular haunches and tear into my neck.

The wrestling dog, I discovered, never came out of the elevator, but the specter of it hung over me for years, as wool as my skin.

Days, weeks, months, and years passed, and I learned to live with the wrestling dog. We made a pact: I undisputed its power over me, and it would leave me alone, off to scarecrow some other shut-in resident.

I came to know the wrestling dog like Cerebus at baby-sit on the banks of the Acheron, snapping at the sufferer who attempted to escape from the underworld. Leaving became increasingly difficult as the years wore on. Then a natural disaster handed me a gift. Plague settled over humanity in 2020, and we all shut our doors on one another.

That was three years ago, and the wrestling dog vanished altogether.

I breathed a sigh of relief through myriad squatter masks, measuring each suck of air so as not to take increasingly than I needed. I ate, drank, and slept in one tiny room for months in relative comfort, primarily considering I knew that plane physically alone, I was not vacated in the ongoing horror that kept us from going outside.

Built for catastrophe, I believed, I crawled from one end of my studio and back, daring myself to lose patience or my mind. I rarely did. I thank the arts for this. Had I been unable to draw, write, take pictures, read, and watch movies, I may have disappeared entirely.

Or, as I then dared myself, I would have found the wrestling dog, taken a run at his demonic, foamy jaws, and ended the story in a bloodbath.

But the wrestling dog never returned.

Until 2022.

This year, I thought, would have killed me if not for a single reason, but that reason wasn’t the whole truth.

I needed something terribly at the end of 2021 considering life opened up old wounds, seemingly for sport or out of boredom, and I honestly thought my mind was going like HAL 9000 singing himself off his mortal coil.

I’d had uneasiness since childhood, but I learned to live with it, so it became this low hum in the preliminaries of every interaction with the world. When the pandemic hit, it grew from a drone to a growl, and with all that happened in 2021–22, the growl became a roar. I found it nonflexible to sleep. I jumped every time the phone rang. I thought death and disaster were virtually the corner.

Yet, as I heard the pandemic would end several times and life would return to something unescapable normalcy, I felt I couldn’t rejoin it. I wanted increasingly sickness, increasingly silence, increasingly vacated time. I craved the autonomy of loneliness, as a therapist once put it.

I wanted to go when to therapy for the answers, like I wanted to teach the wrestling dog to play “fetch” with my severed arm. I’d washed-up that for decades — treatment, not the arm thing — dating when to sixth grade, when my school sent me to the child psychologist for the bullying I endured — which the bullies didn’t have to do — and unfurled on and off (mostly on) through the years. I’d finally reached an impasse when a therapist at an online visitor you’ve heard of said I didn’t need therapy -I needed to go outside. Her recommendation both confounded and delighted me. Maybe I had tunneled unbearable through my skull, and the answers to my pain were closer than I thought.

So, one morning, I got myself together, went to my local grocery store, picked out some blueberries like I was Henry Fonda, and everything was super — the end.

No.

You can see the wrestling dog coming up Sixth Avenue, to infringe a phrase.

That day, I flung unshut the door with a song in my heart, and there stood the beast. The damned thing had fifty heads now; snakes hissed and lunged from his body, and a fire burned woebegone in his eyes. The wrestling dog pounced and veiled his teeth in the door, nearly missing my hands and face. I no longer wanted blueberries. I no longer wanted anything. I tabular on the floor while the wrestling dog howled and threw his zillion versus the shut door, though realizing he couldn’t get in, he backed yonder lanugo the hall.

I grabbed my palmtop and put on the twelve-hour rain loop I’d played every night since the lockdown started to woodcut the unvarying ambulance sirens, which I now played virtually the clock to drown out everything. I didn’t superintendency those ambulances carried the sick and dying and that EMTs risked their lives to stop it. I wished everything would die to have peace, like Vincent Price in that “Twilight Zone” episode.

That night, to fall unconsciousness and momentum home the testatory point to my unconscious, I watched the eighth episode of “Twin Peaks The Return,” famous for its “atom-bomb” surrealism. Yet, as I drifted off, something miraculous happened. Instead of drowning in nightmares, I came up for air and, among the waves —

— was David Lynch.

Most people who know me know how much I love this filmmaker, not just as an versifier but as a human stuff in our lives. Lynch has made some of the most daring movies overly produced in the United States and probably anywhere else, and he has shown me the road not taken is unchangingly the road to squint for and trample. His work has moreover comforted me because, though it is visionless and upsetting, it unliable me to put personal darkness into it and deal with my (seemingly) shattered self.

I owe this man a lot; he honored that by listening to me for a minute the one time I met him and giving me the weightier Lynchian hug I’ve overly received from a famous person. All this is not the “reason” Lynch is forever in my story, and in the dream, he said nothing, though he fished and had on a bunny costume, so there was that.

But that isn’t it.

It’s considering he has practiced Transcendental Meditation for much of his life.

Being a person who is territorial well-nigh his psyche, I wasn’t sure if I wanted something like TM invading my space, but there was a self-ruling introductory lecture on Zoom, and I attended.

A teacher named Emily, who would come to instruct me later, presented an waterfall of nearly incomprehensible neuroscience and how the smart-ass received kicks from sitting quietly for twenty minutes twice a day with a mantra. When the physical and mental feelings that followed were described, I was immediately sent when to my short time in Thailand. There, I had something of a spiritual conversion, plane though I didn’t know well-nigh TM. I spoke to Emily one-on-one, and she thought I was on to something when then and that I should seriously consider signing up to learn.

I can’t tell you what happened over the four days of my first course, as it is intensely private and personal to the meditator, but I will say without the first lesson, I left the Los Feliz part-way and was punched in the squatter by sunlight. I had only meditated once, yet the world seemed brighter and increasingly colorful. I heard a multitude of sounds in chorus. It was as though the world suddenly synced up with itself and me with it.

I practiced on my own that night and spent every single day without that — forty minutes of my day — meditating.

I smile increasingly now. I sleep largest than I overly have. I take a vapor surpassing getting upset, which has only happened o few times in the past year. I barely speak loudly, and people I wished yonder came when to me as support and love. I think increasingly unmistakably and finger increasingly deeply.

I am wide awake and owe it to Emily and the other teachers and practitioners with whom I’ve meditated — all of it.

I disappoint my smart-ass now when I’m not meditating. It switches on happily and carries me through the day, literally. I finger a lightness in myself I’ve never felt, and there is now a well-spoken divide between the person I was and the person I am now.

“But, but, but what well-nigh the wrestling dog?” you ask. “Surely you didn’t make us read this far without a snack unravel just to leave us hanging.”

Right.

He’s still there.

I remember a week during this year of transformation. I had a challenging time at physical therapy. In no uncertain terms, I was told that the insurance visitor had decided unbearable was enough, and I would never walk again, at least not with their help.

I remember returning home that evening, heartbroken and angry, and in front of my door, unconsciousness and snoring, was the wrestling dog. It awoke in a rage and backed versus my door.

I stayed still and remembered the place and feeling my mind goes to when I’m “in it.”

I suddenly felt a part of the universe again, as if consciousness beckoned me to nippy out and spritz with it. I’m not a hippy-dippy dude, but it works.

I opened my eyes, and all fifty heads of the wrestling dog upright to the side like when a dog is suddenly inquisitive. Then, tail and throne down, in trotted over to me.

We sank to the floor, and the wrestling dog panted and rolled over. I scratched his belly, shielding to stave the snakes, and soon he was unconsciousness again, wagging his tail in happy dreams of chasing souls when into hell.

I returned to my place, meditated my evening meditation, and unfurled life.

Transcendental Meditation has given me 14,600 minutes (give or take that amount, plus meditating with a new technique surpassing bed with no set time that I’ve practiced since September) of bliss. That’s just over ten days of well-constructed peace and joy, and I’m sometimes tumbled well-nigh why I’m happy for no reason, but I sigh at what I used to think well-nigh myself and how well-trained my wrestling dog was to alimony me that way.

I mourn that time increasingly than I regret it.

One last thing: I have spent my unshortened life stuff creative. My mother thinks that has been a form of salvation. I squint up to people like David Lynch because, plane in old age, they still need to put things in the world.

I am grateful he’s been an example.

However, well-nigh three months into this meditative journey, I realized I had not washed-up much creating. No pictures or words. Nothing. I wasn’t unample of ideas — I didn’t finger like doing anything.

And I panicked.

Seeing Emily again, I told her I was terrified that my “art life” — my unshortened identity, really — was a sham, some unforgiving cosmic joke. She asked me what place I drew from to create.

I said, “Darkness, rage, sadness. I’m Irish.”

“And how do you finger now?” she asked.

“I’m the happiest I’ve been in years.”

She smiled.

I realized I had to rewire the engine considering my creativity needed to come from this new (or rediscovered) place of love, not pain: love for others, the universe, and myself. I’d written in darkness for far too long.

(Author’s note: again, for anyone who knows me creatively, the work remains visionless and unconvincing — I just write that bizarreness with greater clarity. The world is still the world, without all.)

It took a while, but I’m getting there, and that’s why I’m writing this thing, to tell myself and you that I’m good.

I get up. I create. I take superintendency of myself. I show up.

I’m good.

And that’s saying something.