The Strangeness (Crushing Guilt and other things)

Some things in life are not easy to talk about, not because they evoke negative emotions that I shy away from but because it is hard to articulate the truly ambivalent. And "ambivalent" itself is difficult, because it once meant "strong contradictory feelings simultaneously" but has come to mean "meh".

In my experience, ambivalence, so things that are not shades of grey, but good and bad simultaneously are for most people incomprehensible. Something about modernity and even postmodernity that makes us feel obliged to rule on the question of good OR bad. Like we are all dialled into a 5-star rating system that forces us to split the difference and call it 2.5~3 rather than both 1-star and 5.

But enough contextless rambling. I had to leave two dogs behind that I became and still am, quite attached to. These are waters I haven't charted, though my previous dog Bess whom I had for 15 delightful years, was a dog that I didn't see for extended periods when I travelled overseas, or had different living arrangements from between high school and graduating University...she was still a family dog with shared custody and I was never forced to abandon her, she like all my previous experiences, died, sad but concrete. 

In the present case, there is immense uncertainty as to if and when I see them again, beyond the propensity of dogs to die prematurely by accident, misadventure or ailment, all of which are likely heightened in a country like Mexico.

I depend on friends and housemates to send me photos, and the whereabouts and custody of my Mexican dogs are hard to keep track of, with my ex being largely uncommunicative, for reasons that are hers, not mine, despite our amicable separation.

All of this is to say, usually I get an update once or twice a month, and there's a delicate art of trust that can break down - where I try to patiently await the next update for as long as I can bare, and they try to send updates often enough so I don't have to pester for them.

That side of it is not that difficult, but something I do to survive a long period of waiting, is go back through old photos and download some onto my phone, though, like watching a replay of an AFL match, it is not the same thing is seeing how the dogs are doing today, know what I'm saying?

Which brings me to this photo:

Now you may notice, it is not a photo of a dog, but a person. My friend J who is now deceased via suicide. This was a photo he took and posted himself, and you know if you wanted to torture me for...well not eternity, but some good while, you would trap me Clockwork Orange style, having to look at it.

I can look at it now with a kind of serene detachment, I can project something...else...than I was first inclined to, like this is the slightly knitted brow of someone trying to align there own face in their phone screen to take a picture without producing a double chin. 

I used to look at it and assume more context, which lead me to project an intense loneliness onto my friend, which in turn evokes in me a crushing guilt - begging the question - not as a misunderstanding of the fallacy, but as a desperate cry for release from shame and self-recrimination - as to where the fuck I was, when he was feeling this lonely. And in my particular case, it was more than once that J gave me the call and I answered, until he didn't call me or anyone. 

Now, amongst all the people who lost J, I count myself among the lucky who knew about his earlier suicide attempts and how serious they were and that they were most certainly not cries for help but just dumb luck that he survived them and gave us more time. I learned after his eventual death that many had no idea there'd been extra time.

I've written much about my processing J's death, and so I don't want to write much more, because its actually kind of embarrassing despite the best of intentions, that in the fullness of time I suspect I have among the least to offer. Indeed, particularly off in Mexico where I luxuriated in processing, I feel often like I am the last to move on, the straggler, the guy who got stuck, is stuck and the things to process keep piling up, including los dos perritos.

So as an artefact of my ongoing process, I would just offer this. The crippling guilt I feel when a photo forces me to imagine this man I love, alone and lonely, just somewhere in front of an uninspiring ad for a bank, "waiting for no-one" as Dave Graney somehow captured. You know, it's imagination, probability says J almost certainly at some point felt the crushing loneliness I imagine, just not necessarily then, not necessarily captured by the above photo. That is my shit, read into/projected onto it.

But hold a mirror up to that emotional shit in me, and there is in equal part, my almost unbridled rage that J killed himself and left me, in a self-conception sense that is as real a sense as balance or proprioception, all alone in the universe. In many senses it is true to point to me as a complete failure of the grieving process, because I feel tethered by a black cured and desiccated umbilical chord to a corpse irretrievably in the abyss. 

One that means I have to dwell around the event horizon of the abyss, because a part of me is dead, and it's as annoying and distasteful to me as it is to those who love me and try to love me - but they, unlike me have the added burden of not knowing as I know myself, that I have no plans to say 'fuck it' and jump into that abyss, so it all seems rather morbid to observers and all I can do is my best effort at the universal shrug that says "wut?".

Sure the abyss promises that next-next-level peace of infinite unconsciousness, but I love it here too much, experience feels like the only game in the universe.

I had a dream I was able to tell a fellow survivor about, where I was trying to tie myself a noose from the chord that held my basketball shorts up, and I was struggling with the task until someone came to ask me if I was okay, and in my dream I was finally able to express that rage at J's having abandoned us, and after the dream I realized I was carrying that rage and needed to express it. Even to a proxy in a dream. 

(Incidentally, I also realized that the dream most likely came from the fact that my black brand jordan basketball shorts that I wear most often, were J's and came with no drawstring, so I've had to source one and rethread it myself, a process that is long and tedious and gives one plenty of time to contemplate the possibility that the original drawstring was confiscated so he couldn't use it to hang himself, hence the dream.)

So that's where I'm at and there's enough distance now to say I am well beyond the steep part of the grieving curve and I have no idea when I'll pass the next milestone or if there is even a next one. I am open to surprises and I kind of trust my brain to process what it can. What you should keep in mind is that I no longer trust my brain to know where I'm at with this, and whether it can tell the difference between progress and regress.

Bringing me to pictures I dug up while trawling old chats for photos of my dogs:

Blogger and Usma

Now, truth be told I'm probably as doughy right now as I am in this picture. The other thing is, inanimate dogs often look depressed on account of how much sleeping and lying around they do between the prospects of a walk, food, or best of both worlds - a walk to the kitchen or local taco stand and all it's leavings. So I'm never bothered by how sad dogs look in photos that actually have really great lives, that is, after all, how they get you.

What strikes me is that much as I project a kind of lonely despair onto J, I look at this photo and see an intensely unhappy self. A self I don't really recognize or recall, and as such, this old photo seems like supernatural quackery to me, like old fake double exposures that try to prove the existence of ghosts. This feels like sadness projected onto me, which it is, by me. For all I can guess, I was likely happily singing some song to Usma and then looked up to the photo and this expression was captured in momentary transition. It isn't the long hard stare of a broken and defeated man.

Which at least, I can say, it wasn't. I don't know what happened to me in Mexico, beyond vague descriptors that being approximately right, are better than being precisely wrong. Things like "stagnation" better capture, without providing any real insight, anything else I can articulate about particularly my last two years in Mexico.

And again, it's hard to talk about because those last two years were honestly some of the best of my life.

I am still partial to articulating it as "I never stopped trying I just stopped functioning" and I infer this from far more objective occurrences than my actual lived experience.

For example, when it came time to move out into a halfway house, because when breaking up involves half the planet Earth in distance and potential deportation, it is good to make sure breaking up is the right thing to do. Based on my personal history of breakups, I very much anticipated a break-down. In the lead up to moving day, I had had my parents use new covid telehealth developments to fudge a mental health care plan, booked in a telehealth appointment with my psychologist as the first thing to do at my new bachelors accomodation, and I'd also lined up close friends and family as my mental health safety net. I moved out to live with my first and oldest Mexican friends, and lived within walking distance of my old apartment and the dogs. 

The anticipated breakdown didn't come though. The hardest thing was the sudden absence of dogs in my daily life, and they had really been my main mental health lines as both I and my partner had struggled with the inertia and stagnation of our situation.

Instead, I felt palpable relief. Like a knot I hadn't even known was there between my shoulder blades released, as in the failure of our relationship, I was relieved of tremendous pressure I had just been coping with, constantly, possibly for years.

I lost weight, got in shape, cut my hair off all relatively quickly. A matter of months after I had struggled for years. It was also not a result of a depressive loss of appetite, but some renewed vigour. I ate roticery chicken, pizza, steak, burgers, burritos. I had ice-cream or agua frescas every day. I got visitation to the dogs, and when I couldn't, I still enjoyed my life. About the only major change was that I would go to the movies alone because I wasn't going to miss "The Meg 2" not when tickets are under $5, but I did stop buying popcorn and drinks, like how I was raised.

The last obstacle was pushing back against my parents desire to bring me back from, in their words "purgatory" ASAP. To implore them to let me have a few months, that ended up pretty close to six, to recover, to acclimatize rather than just go full system shock. As most of my friends already know, when the culture shock was loaded on, it was pretty tremendous for me.

With that out of the way, I got better. I don't want to make any hard and fast generalizations. For me at least, my weight is a good indicator of my mental health. Obstacles to me staying in shape are more often emotional than the next-best-candidate being injury. 

Maybe I'm reflective now, because I've seen myself in others like bookends of my experience. Taking on responsibilities you can't handle, and shutting down. In highschool I borrowed this kid's sunglasses for a shitty high school production at an offsite and lost them, having at that time no conception that anyone would spend $400 in Y2K money on sunglasses. I had no income, and once lost-and-found didn't turn them up, I basically was responsible but couldn't do anything, just wound up with a protracted situation. 

The thing is, the kid I had economically deprived was a nice guy, the situation was unambiguous but it only resolved by me getting to a breaking point after just living with a baseline level of stress that spiked as we came into each others orbits and then over time I eventually broke and had to fess up to my parents that I'd screwed up and they bailed me out like good middle-class parents do. I had no idea that was an option, I just felt screwed due to my just not having money.

I've seen people take on a project at work that they just don't know how to do, or can't do for lack of resources, and subsequently don't do it. It's not hidden that it isn't getting done, it just goes on for a protracted period beyond anyone's forecast. 

And I'd like to say that my own experiences have made me more sensitive to the very real emotional obstacles that prevent people, such as myself and others, from functioning, but alas no. I am only conscious this is a thing, but it took me 3 weeks of getting frustrated by someone's inaction before they alluded to an emotion, before the greatly depreciated penny dropped for me.

Fortunately in that case, the emotional obstacle was easy to overcome, it was pretty much a George Costanza "Downtown" project situation, where the emotional obstacle was just fear to admit that they don't know how to get started.

My own case, same same but different, and just larger. What killed me was how to account for all the time that passed. I would look at my life and feel incredibly busy (also clearly stressed based on the knot between my shoulders that was so omnipresent I didn't notice it until it released) without producing anything. Even this is not true, I published a subscription based substack serial fiction with art that fell over because I couldn't hit my production deadlines, I made a season of a podcast and picked up a bunch of new skills...

It's probably worth a diversion and comparing then to now. There was this obvious elephant on my back back then which was the need to get a stable source of income in order for us to progress in life. It was the bottleneck through which everything else was held up. It pressurized my environment and it was not only important but urgent.

I'm convinced that the problem I had, has a solution to this very day, I just couldn't solve it. Evidently there are people with the skills and know-how, that have invested the time in the right places to build up the contacts, to just freelance from anywhere in the world. There is also a path from where I was to there, that I just could not navigate.

Furthermore, with so much effort riding on it, I didn't even know how to try, fail and learn. I didn't at that time even know basics of networking, like you don't ask your network for a job. I approached it in a manner where I was bound to get rejected, and with so much at stake, the fear of rejection became crippling. I couldn't use what meagre network I had, because I couldn't face using it up.

So I had this thing that I needed to do and was supposed to be doing and was clearly the number one priority. That meant everything else I could do, that might produce social goods, or even personal goods, became procrastination.

I maintain the difference between procrastination and rest is solely the felt obligation that you should be doing something else. Hence a videogaming experience differs greatly depending on whether you have an assignment due at the end of the week or you are beginning a weekend. 

And I say "you" but I'll come back to that, eventually. Because I had said I was comparing then and now. One of the harder aspects of coming back, was that my parents basically applied the same kind of pressure to me as had been so constantly debilitating (without my conscious knowledge) when I was living in Mexico. As such, in 2024 I had work, I was repairing myself financially and quickly, it just wasn't enough work or the kind of work that would relieve that pressure. As of 2025, I got full-time work that uses my degrees and nobody times my breaks or asks me why I was three minutes late etc. 

That is sufficient to take the pressure off, and though I am not publishing, I am drawing and creating again and I will start ekeing out the kind of social and personal goods I want to create regardless. I just don't get to work on them when I'm under pressure, indeed I can't.

Now though I feel the time poverty of full time work accutely, I am producing more, because what time I do have is my own. There is no longer a perceived elephant on my back telling me I really should be spending any and all time on the number one priority.

Diversion over, there's probably something worth articulating and getting down, if only for myself. Two things actually, where counter-intuitively I wonder if I fared worse, because of these traits.

Many people, if not most, in the situation I was in, would have reached their own breaking point fairly quickly. I remember once being part of an office that gathered round to wish a young woman leaving the company all the best on her adventure of a lifetime to Europe. It was a big deal, she was much beloved and had been with the company longer than I at that point despite her youth and off she went on a planned 6 month trip.

She returned after 3 months, after blowing through her budget buying European designer purses and what-not. 

Finance was only one component of it, but I prolonged my own situation by managing it really well. I stuck to a budget and from the get-go knew I may not be able to secure income on any predictable time-frame and my savings needed to last. Which they did for like 2 and a bit years. The bigger things were the cope though. I was really good at cope and thus didn't crack.

I sometimes wonder, that the people who can't cope and need to hit the bottle or something stronger, transmit a much louder cry for help that would have actually spared me, perhaps even prompted the competent intervention and investment that could have solved that bottle-neck problem.

On balance, I more recently suspect that people who break-down under the pressure and don't cope in healthy sustainable ways, just run too bigger risk. I suspect more often the case where someone long-term unemployed starts day-drinking in bed instead of embracing domestic work, exercise and intellectual stimulation, probably finds their life fall apart even further.

I mean, J's cries for help were as loud and clear as physically possible, and the investment in intervention was probably as large as can be reasonably expected. J has been dead 7 years now.

In a similar vein I was also getting the feedback from my support network that I was coping really well. Something that metaphorically killed me was that I kept carrying the self-imposed expectation that I could figure it out, kind of like with my art career, a story that I propagate, but also gets reflected back to me, is the idea that if anyone can do it out of the available known person's it's me. I am a frontiersman.

Now, what is buried, is that most of the time I was tremendously happy. That is not just how I remember it but how I experienced it. All the pressure was a question not of quality, but sustainability. It's another post, but I can appreciate how for others, including my partner, what we had was not enough.

But an acute point, is that necessity is subjective. Are credit cards and cars necessities? I recently had to research the depressing business model of personal finance and for many people, a car is life itself, and they likely are not wrong. They are at the mercy of an economy and urban planning that subsidizes those wealthy enough to afford a car at the expense of everyone else who cannot. I'm middle-class in the UK sense, which is to say upper class. I got an education that allows me to apply to the jobs that don't even require a valid driver's license and aren't located anywhere where one needs a car, or to live at their work to be gainfully employed.

For many their highest qualification is not a high-school certificate but their drivers license. They live in a place where their local council has provided them the solitary options of driving around the town from home to warehouse or office-park, or catching a bus into town, switching to another bus back out of town to get to work. The infinite recourse of the wealthy, is to assume such arrangements are karmic retribution for a lack of effort put into education and training. If poor people could just do maths, including depreciating the vehicle, they would realize it's crazy not to get up at 5am and take the bus to and from work, instead opting for a 30 minute drive having gotten 6 hours sleep and prepared your kids school lunches. In such circumstances, the car becomes a necessity, and so then too does the personal loan they can secure with their bad credit history.

My judgement is on the inept and incompetent people that designed the infrastructure that subsidizes the rich and taxes the poor so unfairly. But that's another post, that I'm not going to write, because this video is better.

Where the fuck was I? Oh yeah, I had everything I need to be happy. I was living in a good place, with a good partner, two dogs, two cats and it was virtually impossible not to be happy, there and now. The only question was the trade offs available to sustain such happiness indefinitely.

At some point, though I tend to undervalue what I did achieve, the daily self-soothing necessary to overcome that baseline stress and anxiety that the present would one day run out and I'd find myself in a future without those fundamental ingredients of happiness (which I did) meant that I got up, made the bed most days, scrubbed the yard, went to the gym or ran, showered, walked the dogs to the shops or market, ate some sugary snacks, got ingredients for lunch, prepped lunch, ate lunch, washed dishes that would take me through to 1 or 2pm, shortly afterwards my partner would finish her 8 hour work shift and we most likely would watch shows we liked together, then she would go out to one of her myriad commitments and I would get between 4~6 hours to do unsupervised production of whatever.

By the end though, I'd need more self-soothing or self-medicating behaviour during those times. There was a lot going on, it's hard to break down, but there was also the awareness that are relationship was headed inevitably toward collapse so there was actually a lot of conscious enjoyment of my partners time and attention while I still had it. 

I'll try articulating it this way. My dog Bess died from her Kidney's packing it in, more or less at exactly 15 years. We were able to use medical intervention to keep her alive and feeling well enough to put her down at home when the whole family could be there, but from go-to-woe she died within a week. 

While she remained alive but we knew she would die, it erected a kind of prison that her death relieved me of, because I didn't want her to die, and I wanted as much quality time as possible. But making the most of the time you have remaining takes work.

So I don't have any diagnosis, and despite lining up telehealth appointments with my psychologist wanting to talk about what happened to me, my psychologist assumed my sessions would want to address the breakup and the same issues I had seen her for in the past. It took a session and a half for me to say I wasn't worried about the break up process and the future, I wanted to figure out what happened to me in terms of my inability to function over the previous two years.

I had a sneaking suspicion that I had some form of high-functioning depression, alas that's a self-diagnosis and pungent bait for setting people off on a self-righteous public awareness campaign of a condition people assume they have. The same phenomena satirized as "asymptomatic tourette's" in English Teacher. All I know is something, likely within the normal range of human emotion and likely within the range of normal reactions to the environment I was in, happened that stopped me functioning as I can.

The only other candidate abnormality I frequently revisit, is something like the "ordinary half-life of grief-provoked-enlightenment" which is, most frequently expressed as the phenomena of even the least insightful and thoughtful people you know, when bereft saying "It puts everything in perspective doesn't it." These people are noticing that yesterday they were incredibly dialled in to the cashier at the supermarket not accepting their coupons for 50c off chuck steak, and today that seems trivial because somebody they know, love and possibly respect are dead and they'll never see them again.

The normal thing to do is to level out the chemical-emotional experience and snap back to caring about trivia again. I mean there's something to "manifesting" as an observable phenomena. I'd just sooner not read "The Secret" and observe that it's more that due to generalized incompetence the people who tend to get things are the people who tend to ask. People are hired because a vacancy needs to be filled, far more often than they are hired for reaching or exceeding a competence threshold. People tend to get sales by asking for a sale, and asking repeatedly, not because they successfully understand a problem that needs to be solved and propose an exchange of different goods of roughly equal value to each respective party.

In many ways, not having perspective is adaptive, at least in the short run. Because as much as you believe in "don't ask, don't get" and whatever other expressions get to the core of "manifesting" I suspect most people who believe in all this materialistic wisdom from "location, location, location" to "grit" to "lean in" to "hussle" and whatever, it is my experience that very few refute the observation that almost nobody on their death bed regrets not spending more time at the office.

I think an area in which I am retarded, is that I take this forecast to heart. That when I die, and indeed now, I don't regret that my dogs and my partner got my best energy, such that it was, day-in-day-out for three years, when all that time I could have been providing customer service to travel insurance policy holders as a remote worker for 38 hours a week and had an even nicer place to live. 

Nor do I want to cop-out with "well it was what it was." Should I get another opportunity at such a happiness factory again, I should wish to sustain it for longer. Ideally much longer. A full terrier life-span at least.

Bringing me at last, to all of you. So introduction over. Let's talk about the Strangeness.

The Strangeness:

This year one of my goals is to beat the loneliness epidemic statistic, which says most men over 30 or something have less than 10 close friends. At the time I heard it, I was like "I have 3" (and I'm assuming family don't count). 

By 3 I meant 3 people that return my calls or messages, and that call me such that we stay in touch, it isn't just me reaching out every 3, 6 or 12 months. 

Now my thing is, its not for lack of trying. So I was coming across this strange phenomena where I just couldn't get people to return my calls, and it went right back to when I relocated to Mexico.

Something that prevented me from addressing it, was my recognition of the hypocrisy, the thought crime, of even thinking my friends had abandoned me when obviously by packing up and moving to Mexico I clearly abandoned them first.

I also marvelled at the sheer misfortune of it. I do not have infinite energy to reach out and connect with people, I tend to pursue my friends more or less one at a time. So if one dicked me around with scheduling a video call for 3 months, it meant I spent 3 months lining up one video call. That basically means if everyone is that hard to schedule with, I can have 4 video call social interactions a year, because I just don't have the emotional reserves to deal with not even rejection but the tedium of chaotic friend(s) plural. 

It was even true of my Mexican friends. Karen, who I met as an organizer of a meet-up for artists and was one of my closest friends in my first year in GDL, and whom I stayed in touch with during lock-down, took 3 months to catch up with upon my return, and it took so much chasing from my end that I never bothered again.

So there remains this question of "did I just get unlucky with prioritizing first the friends that were real social bottlenecks?" on this front, I don't really believe in luck, and that was the beginning of what I call "The Strangeness"

Artist Gaetan de Seguin displayed on someone's smart phone (fittingly)

The strangeness is the ghost-world feeling of not so much everyone being dead-to-me but for me, being dead-to-everyone. Now, I wanted to write this post around new years, and my take would have been much less confident, but because I did a bunch of new years messages first, I amazingly heard from a bunch of people that had been ghosting me for half a decade, so I can write with some confidence that the status quo I'm calling "the strangeness" is being dead-to-eachother. A general withdrawedness.

I haven't ruled out mundane explanations though, those being:

1. The problem is me. I'm an arsehole and going to Mexico gave most of my friends the opportunity to realize that, and how nice life was once they'd acclimatized to life without me.
2. We in general tend not to appreciate how much social work, work and school does for us. Most of our closest friends tend to be people we've been forced to spend time with. We find brothers and sisters in arms, and when you aren't being paid to hang out, you tend to naturally drift apart. I would not be so sensitive to this drifting apart if I'd gained work and subsequently new friends to help me forget my old friends.
3. A bunch of my friends have kids, and are basically going to be walking zombies for the next 18 or so years.

These mundane explanations don't quite explain phenomena like the precipitous drop-off in facebook usage, which remains the largest social media platform by a longshot. Perhaps the rise of TikTok is the same phenomena really because there is something hyper-avoidant in TikTok and it's generalised contentless content.

The mundane explanations also don't predict well my experiences of actually eventually catching up with those who do reply. They can't really explain why shit takes so long to organize, or they do explain it as a startlingly common phenomena - of being unable to face socializing themselves. It's not me, it's been them. Texts and messages roll in and they just can't answer them. The phone rings, they see the number and can't bring themselves to connect the call.

I hate this, because I hated the people during lock-down talking about a mental health crisis being caused. Alas, I think the most likely, most uniform candidate for "The Strangeness" is the lingering effects of the Covid year(s). 

My problem is, the people yelling themselves red in the face about dictator Dan's lockdowns causing a mental health crisis, I found, from direct experience, totally disengenuous. They more often impressed upon me that they believed through the power of self belief they were immune to Covid, that they didn't really care about the people who could and would die from Covid because they basically thought they were low-life scum or other-people's-grandparents, and they were mostly outraged that lockdowns prevented them from going to the pub for friday night drinks.

I mean, maybe it was genuine, and these people were so mentally unwell, that if they didn't get the friday night drinks in, they were going to fall apart. Unfortunately, the lockdowns don't explain why I saw this strangeness in Guadalajara, that had no lockdowns, just masses of deaths. 

I have to concede though, I think Covid did cause a mass mental-health crisis. I think it broke the social contract, or the illusion of control or something. Something has happened that has rendered most people's day-to-day existence as having a sense of persistent meaninglessness. Perhaps the practical demonstration that we are not masters of our own destiny, but largely dependent on a large and rudderless mass of strangers and which way they all tend to herd.

I don't know, but I'd like to know. It's kind of like, vitally important to me, because of how much I beat myself up over my personal failings during my Mexico years. When I get out of myself and look around, it actually does seem plausible that actually most people have experienced an era, similar to myself, regardless of whether they are employed and/or raising kids, have bought a house and are paying things off.

A big damage done to me by the lockdowns is that I was forced to conclude that I can't trust my neighbours. We aren't a community all looking out for one another. That's both huge and sad. 

What I'd be reluctant to conclude is that we are facing a "crisis of meaning" and not just because Charlie Church's jump all over this with the pretense that some scripture they identify with contains meaning. It cannot be a crisis of meaning because we've never had it. It is more likely that we're having some kind of crisis of adjustment, after what I hope is an enormously positive ending of myopia. I think people have likely gained wisdom but not agency, because the economies we live in are largely environments of habit. 

I don't know it's very strange, I know too little, that's for sure so consider this sharing, a mere first step.