A Dead Star Looks at 27

I’m bad at being ceremonious around milestones. There are a lot of reasons for it that I’m aware of, and probably more that I’m not. Of the reasons I do know, I think my biggest handicap to developing a healthy relationship to milestones is a lack of anticipation. Despite being a seasoned time traveler to the future thanks to my anxiety disorder, one of my superpowers is preemptively convincing myself I’m out of contention for many of the most basic rites in a human life. So, I always operate on the assumption that even a mundane milestone—say, living to the age of 27—is a longshot and thereby not something to plan for, certainly nothing to hope for or hype.

On an objective level, the thinking is fundamentally baseless. There’s nothing about my life that is inherently more risky than anybody else’s—not in any way that would make me a more likely candidate for an early grave. But at the foundation of my predilection for counting myself out is a lifelong program of hating myself.

Though I think we can all identify with some version of self-loathing, I’ve been made to realize in the past year that I’m a pretty extreme case. In fact, it was this time last year (pretty much to the day) that I started psychotherapy for the first time as a way of getting context around the vagaries of what I’d long-suspected was my poor excuse for a brain. Before this time, I had started working from home on Fridays to reduce my time in an office environment—it had never been my cup of tea, but I had started to hate it something fierce during what I did not know at the time would be my final months living and working in Northwest Washington, DC. I had probably hit a wall during one of those uninspired afternoons working from home and couldn’t concentrate when I decided to stop what I was doing and consult the internet for what the DSM had to say about extreme, hyper-programmed cases of self-loathing. There’s not as much as you would think outside of one specific disorder: avoidant personality disorder. I didn’t have to look into too many different sources before I noticed a theme wherein I felt like I was getting the results of a neurological 23andMe test back just from reading the basic diagnostic features.

Having a taxonomy to assign to my neural pathways was a relief at first. It certainly helped make my therapy experience productive from very early on. But it’s not like having some more terms for my brain chemistry and behaviors afforded me any advantage when it came to, I don’t know, changing it. The fact is that just doesn’t happen. That’s something I already knew. And the way that I came by that understanding is something I’m inclined to revisit for a few reasons. For one, as of 3:13pm MT today, I have been on this planet as a human being for 27 years. I know the time of day I was born not just from consulting my birth certificate recently (which I did do to get an enhanced version of a license that ostensibly enables me to cross U.S. borders without incident). I know it because I do put some stock in birth charts.

More on my birth chart if you’re up for it later. For now, I think it bears to say that as far as mundane milestones go, 27 is a weird-ass age. On a basic level, it means you’ve been a legal adult for a third of your life. I can’t be the only person who feels like the “adult” designation is still excessive and generous, even for this ripe age. For two—and this is more specific to my experience—27 years to speak of means I’ve lived now for two decades with the idea that I kind of wish I had never been alive—not as a human at least. Not here and now as I’ve known it.

Twenty years is a long time to have a relationship with anything, suicidality included. But here’s the thing about this milestone: it does mark a significant effort of cognitive dissonance. Along with the pressing wish that I’d never existed, I’ve had a debilitating capacity for empathy for as long as I can remember. It’s some tough mental jiu jitsu. For me, it means I’m repeatedly confronted with wanting to disappear and the cruel reality that there’s no Irish exit option when it comes to my own mortality. Once you’ve been alive and had a name and a material body that allows you to leave DNA in your wake, there’s no way to leave the planet quietly, or on any terms that won’t cause people grief or trauma. It’s a tough burden to live with. And I assumed it would always be just that. I never expected to gain any kind of different perspective on my relationship to suicidality, but my 26th year surprised me—first just by virtue of happening, then for giving me new perspective around false binaries.

It’s possible that a significant majority of my frustration with the world owes to a lack of nuance in how we communicate. It occurred to me for the first time this year that suicidality is one of those things that we’d benefit from being able to talk about more as a spectrum. The current discourse still positions it as either something you can’t relate to at all or, if you can, something that you’re going to actualize right away. Like me, most people I trust who have a history of suicidal ideation don’t locate themselves in the province of acting out. Meanwhile, society encourages people who have no relationship with suicidal ideation to react to every mention of it as if it’s an extreme case. I have to believe that that’s a reflection of our values as a culture, which has a way of imbuing in people that sadness and pain are things to suppress and medicate and bandage and censor, not just mundane things we can have measured conversations about. That’s never sat great with me and I don’t think it’s very useful.

Back in June, the last time I visited Washington state before moving there, I made it out to a show at the Gorge for which Brandi Carlile, as a way of celebrating her birthday, recruited Emmylou Harris and Neko Case to play sets before her. The show happened the day after news of psychedelic music pioneer Roky Erickson’s death. Neko closed out her set dedicating “This Tornado Loves You” to Erickson’s memory, saying, “People who aren’t afraid of the dark—we need more of them.” I was immediately taken with that statement, but it took me about another six months to figure out exactly why. So, here’s what I got: I think there’s a healthy way to have a reciprocal relationship to things that touch death, like suicide. I would go so far as to say that our lives are probably more examined and less impoverished only after we are able to say that we’re still living despite our better judgment. That equanimity with death seems a lot healthier than the repressive relationship to darkness that society has modeled for most of us. For my part, I’m suspicious of people who have extreme reactions to the mere invocation of suicide or depression. To me, that signals that they aren’t taking their job—the hardest job, being a human—seriously. My theory is that somebody who reacts with histrionic concern to heavy things has one of two things going on. Either they’re terribly out of touch with their own feelings, or they’ve never tried to empathize with probably the most complex and interesting people in their life.

So, here’s where having both avoidant personality disorder and a depressive disorder gets sloppy. That failure of empathy that I fault other people for because they can’t have an adult conversation about depression and suicide works in reverse. Having a lifelong obsession with my own sense of inadequacy is its own kind of failure to empathize. It’s made it easy to dismiss any kind of value that people might place on my existence. It sounds so stupid to say, but up until this year, I’ve avoided the hard work of trying to understand why people might actually like having me in their life. I mentioned before that there’s an odd relief in getting diagnosed with something like a personality disorder. There’s an “oh, no wonder that’s always sucked” factor built into the process of having a life’s worth of pain and isolation brought into focus for the first time. It’s great for a while, charming even. But it starts to lose its luster once you have to confront that actually changing any behavior based on the new context is really fucking hard. And this might be a controversial take, but my relationship to my particular personality disorder is such that I think of it less as something to be treated than something I just have to reconcile with. I view it as part of who I am. And that means that changing my behaviors short- and long-term involves a lot of going against my own instincts. Because I have an anxiety disorder in addition to the other two ingredients in this psychic cocktail, I have a lot of experience in going through the motions with irrational urgency. But even with a lot of practice in the mind-over-matter department, changing the way you do shit is hard, particularly when it involves overriding a factory setting that’s so committed to self-sabotage. What you’re reading here is partly a deliberate act of override. But it’s a few other things, too.

I mentioned earlier that I’m bad at being ceremonious around milestones. It’s really a shame because I did decide earlier in my adult life that I thought it was healthy and valuable to consciously take stock as a way to acknowledge life’s natural beginnings and endings, even if the markers are arbitrary. I do think that idea came from a fairly grounded place that I wish I was in now. But, even though I’m less inclined to attribute outsized significance to standalone events or moments anymore, I’ve been trying this new thing where I force myself to reflect in a public-facing way around some of these arbitrary milestones. It’s a way of externalizing it, turning it into a shared experience. It’s also a form of obeisance to a past version of myself that I still have respect for, even if our attitudes toward some things are now dissimilar.

Oddly, the equalizer at the core of my tenderness for past versions of myself going back to age six or seven is that we share the same basic position that being alive sucks. Having held that contention for 20 years now, it’s unlikely that I’ll ever feel differently. But in those 20 years, there has been a lot of wisdom informed by lived experience that has added complexity to how I hold that line. The idea that has altered it most recently is related that thing I mentioned earlier—about putting some stock in birth charts.

So, birth charts. Alright. It would be incomplete to say, 27 years along, that astrology has radically altered my relationship to suicidality. Not to mention, kind of an oversight. Because the truth of it all is that my relationship to suicide has been neutralized by a concept scientists have been telling us about for a long time. So, it’s kind of a failing on my end that I just never gave adequate consideration until this year to the fact that everything carbon-based—so, us—is made of dead star matter. Now, for the uninitiated, birth charts essentially riff off that notion by mapping out where we were relative to other planets for the particular time and place we were born, and giving some language around what that alignment can say about our tendencies. Because I have a complicated feelings toward being alive, I initially thought there was an inherent cruelty in that odd, cosmic-scale manifestation of the laws of conservation of mass and energy. Never mind the temperament piece for now. Just from an ethical standpoint, it seems fucked up that the dead star proto-version of me wasn’t consulted about whether or not I wanted to be alive on earth as a human starting in the early 1990s (even if it was a world where the Pens had won their first two Stanley Cups). But the thing about that gripe is that it’s grounded in the assumption that some pre-human assemblage of matter out there had a cognizant ego resembling my own. It also overlooks a few other key steps in human procreation, but for the sake of this existential exercise, let’s table those for now. Although there’s no way of knowing whether an identifiable version of our egos exist before we do as humans, my guess is they don’t. And maybe therein rests some of the novelty of being a human being: you get to construct an understanding of yourself, an ego, based on a mix of things—many of which aren’t in your control. It’s like an ultimate exercise in making lemonade, and I kind of dig that.

I think there’s something to be said for consulting multiple sources to get the context you need around your existence and do your level-best at making your brand of lemonade. To put it differently, though our preoccupation with ego can do a lot of damage, it’s also the lens by which we find dreams, and realizing those often has a really constructive effect for society as a whole. That dreams are so inextricable from ego has been tough to hold alongside the knowledge that an expression of ego, my obsessive self-hatred, is at the root of my personality disorder. My ego is the thing that causes me the most pain and makes me feel the most isolated, but by this whole logic around dreams being a worthy thing to seek and try to manifest, it behooves me to find ways to relate to my ego with some equanimity. I think any lens that helps with that is valid. Birth charts are a lens. Psychotherapy is another. Together, they’ve given me a different perspective on my temperaments and especially my attraction to weighty concepts. And that makes me suspect that Neko is really onto something when she remarks on our need for more people who aren’t afraid of the dark. To boot, this came from the lady who wrote songs called “Star Witness” and “I Wish I Was the Moon,” so I’m inclined to go along with whatever wisdom she has to confer—existential, cosmic, or otherwise.

Anyway, it’s taken all of two decades since I was in second grade to realize that maybe there’s something cool about being the kind of person who’s still here against my better judgment, and maybe despite wishes that I had ridden the big one sooner. To the best of my abilities, I’ve traditionally gone into a bunker on my birthday as a proactive way of avoiding attention. Now that I have language around avoidant personality disorder, that makes a ton of sense. Like, of fucking course the idea that anybody would want to celebrate the day I was born would make me uncomfortable on the magnitude of trauma every year.

I’m still going out of my way to lay low today, but this is the first time in a minute that I’m contending with my birthday in any kind of public way. Wanting to show some respect for a past versions of myself—ones I admire in some ways now but don’t envy, ones I envy in other ways but don’t admire, ones that definitely wouldn’t have banked on me having this kind of run—is part of it. But it’s also a gesture of obeisance to whatever star energy is running this shit because my Co-Star app has been telling me repeatedly, sometimes twice in a single day’s updates, to “figure out how to get paid for being yourself.” This is more or less what I’ve been hearing from an old co-worker of mine (a fellow Sag whose own birthday is just a week ahead of mine) for the past few weeks since I finished up with the DC nonprofit that I worked at for nearly four years before moving to the Olympic Peninsula. To be clear, revamping my website and throwing a long-winded update out into the world about how I’m 27 and feeling fucking weird about it is not me making money off of being myself. Every word I’ve written since leaving a school newspaper staff after my first year of undergrad has been entirely uncompensated. And much as I’d love to be proven wrong, I don’t see that changing any time soon. Nonetheless, I still have a lot of work to do in getting to a reciprocal place with my own ego, and changing the identity of this corner of the internet over from something that was impersonal to something decidedly personal is a form of self-imposed exposure therapy. It’s also a form of giving the stars the benefit of the doubt. It’s also a form of just changing my behaviors and seeing what happens. That said, I’ll be back here a lot more before the end of the year, mostly reminding y’all to not let the fascist bastards get you down, start therapy if you’re insured, and reach out if you need help.

Speaking of help, this time of year can be a bear. I’m saying this as somewhat of a formality, but mostly as the person who said “what counts?” the first time a therapist asked me if I had a support system. Just know that if you truly feel like you have no support in this, I’ve been there and I see you and there are resources. If you or someone you know is in crisis and needs immediate help, call the toll-free, 24/7 hotline of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255). Also, in the interest of just sharing the information that is out there about a disorder I didn’t even know about more than a year ago, here’s a look at the diagnostic features of avoidant personality disorder.