I am one of the lucky ones.
Year ago, after a torturous 8 month bout of out-of-nowhere SCREECHING Tinnitus, my brain, which up to that point had been in FIGHT mode, switched over to FLIGHT mode which is the equivalent of living in the Middle East during a 24/7 drone strike.
In terms of war this was PTSD at the highest level of supreme panic.
You are no longer capable of sitting still because you FEEL that you are in constant, mortal danger. Any sound louder than a whisper races through your bloodstream right to the panic center of your soul in under a second, so I had to disconnect all my phones because one ring alone was like a nuclear bomb going off in my central nervous system.
Depression is a supreme crisis of faith and amongst the many things that are rusty scalpel sliced out of you is your inner voice that gives you options and or simply tells you to cut it out.
I lived alone in Los Angeles at the time. My kids were off to college and I was my own worst nightmare roomate. I lost forty pounds from pacing in circles 8 hours a day.
LA is not a good place to fall apart. People in my business do not like to approach anyone who may have the communicable disease and accompanying scent of failure on them. The only preventative condom-like measure is to keep your distance. I remember standing at a urinal next to someone I was in a comedy room with for ten months and he ignored me.
So why am I lucky?
Because I was finally rescued in the most improbable way. My once upon a time writing partner and lover who had moved out of LA, screaming like her hair was on fire (which she was always destined to do from day one of her arrival. She did NOT suffer fools and good luck with that in Hollywood which is overpopulated by them. Do not confuse them with dreamers, as I am a card carrying one. I'm talking about the Holden Caulfield despised phonies).
Leslie had moved to Westchester, which as a Queens boy native, I had heard of, but honestly I not only didn't know where the Hudson River went before I left, I didn't even know what was on the other side of the Throggs Neck Bridge.
Well what was on the other side was light and love and support on a level I could never have imagined. Having no alternative than my own long planned suicide, I was finally convinced to throw everything into storage and move into the top floor of her 19th venture house.
Yeah, at first blush it felt weird but I am here, some 11 years later, to tell you that it was the best decision that I made...that I had no choice to make.
Between her get-off-the-couch and go take a walk nudging, a new therapist, new meds, new friends, endless yoga and an abundance of east coast light and love, I little by little found my way out of the bigger than my life maze.
I suffered a lot of loss along the way. My best friend succumbed to pancreatic cancer. My mom died. My therapist died. My chiropractor died.
At first all that felt like endlessly compounding Tetris-like blocks of punishment. But before my loving shrink passed he said to me "You have to metaphorically die...and then the clouds will part." He died before I could understand what her meant...until it all came to me th day I was sitting in a ravaged, Key West garden that I noticed one day was growing back. It was not the SAME garden...it was a brand new version. It had died...and come back. And in that moment, I not only GOT it, but I looked up and the clouds literally parted.
You have to stop craving your former selve when you are Humpty Dumpty shatter broken and instead of fretting about gluing all the pieces back together, you instead, kiss each piece goodbye, thank them for their service...and then release them to the wind.
And when you do, I promise, you will instantly become the Phoenix of rising out of the ashes fame.
Being alone is just an illusion. There is support and love waiting for you EVERYWHERE.
Just go looking for it and the invisible will magically become visible.
Life for my has never been better. I've become an impossibly prolific writer of pilots, plays and books...and I'm about to head back to LA for the first time in 11 years to mount a new series that I co-created.
It's not so much that dreams come true (they tend to at their own rate).
It's more, I think that life comes true.
And by the way: the biggest lesson that comes from dealing with Tinnitus?
You learn that you never knew how to listen.
To yourself or to anyone else.
And when the warning siren stops, nothing is more beautiful than the sound of who we really are.
In other words, I can hear you now.