So there’s always been something unconscious bubbling under my impulses in this ongoing self-describing, self-discovering comic strip project, starting with That’s Me in the Corner almost 10 years ago. I’ve talked about it before, and won’t retell it now.
But something new has emerged from it, and I feel transformed – happier to be myself than I have ever, ever been. And this strip is going to change because of it.
Telling the story of Jason was not my intent when I started Music of the '80s – I didn’t know I would have to, and only found out while writing about Brad and being that age that it was necessary. I have always questioned this part of the strip: how do you just drop these painful bombs on the reader? I just had to: I was writing something intensely personal but out in public, as an effort to (a) be seen as I am, (b) justify who I am, and (c) try and get past the phenomenal shame I’ve felt since I was about 11. I knew it was bad storytelling, but I just barrelled through because I had to.
But this has happened:
All these great books I’ve been reading have really pried apart the armour plates in my mind and allowed me to learn how to get past the stuff I’ve been writing about. A major and important aspect of this progress is the storytelling, for sure: trauma is not memory – it is reliving – and a big part of the healing work is making it a memory, by telling it and feeling it as something from the past. Telling that awful story – the only really unknown part of my life story – has helped. (I mean, I’ve told people in the past, individually, but since there was no frame of reference for such a thing (I’ve never met another family who had an event like that), it always dangled weirdly, and I could not not feel the deep shame and I couldn’t not relive it.)
Suddenly, suddenly, suddenly-after-40-fucking-years, I can see it for what it was: a period of terrible shit that I lived through. In the past. When I was little. It feels like a story now - a memory. And your reading of it, and the kind responses you gave me, they helped me get there. Thanks!
Sad Songs Only Say So Much
I’ve had an uneasy feeling lately: I haven’t wanted to continue telling the autobio part of this, the year by year, because it’s just mostly sad. My '80s were not good – they were a shit snowball that started at 11 or 12 and got larger and larger until I stopped it at 25. And clearly, it took another 26 years for it to completely melt. But I do not feel compelled to tell the story anymore. None of the rest of it is a mystery: the only mystery was this invisible darkness that I unconsciously needed to figure out – that missing bit in the timeline.
Here Is What I’ve Realized
Since early in the pandemic my morning meditation practice has included this affirmation: “My name is Jeff Clayton, and I am a good person.” It was hard to start doing – I felt embarrassed to even say it silently, to myself. But I did it – it’s a good thing to do if you’re trying to rewire your mind.
We’ve been travelling in the States, as I mentioned, and I’ve had to face my cannabis habit, which was long out of control. So I haven’t had any weed in a month – and I have not had a good SLEEP in that time, either. The way I slept between 11 and 25, when I started smoking weed, and doing therapy, and taking Zoloft – it all came back. The panics, the waking, the bit where I get amazingly hot and burn with self-loathing around 1 am.
It wasn’t experientially the same, though: I am different now (besides much older), and I had a lot of strategies to use - breathing, self-talk, meditating, yoga, all that. I wasn’t sleeping, but that fact wasn’t ruining my days of hiking in the mountains and feeling amazingly lucky to be here, with Marjan, and alive. I wasn’t depressed. But I was getting kind of fucking tired.
So when we got to Colorado, we went to the legal weed store and bought a little cannabis, and came back to this lovely place we’re staying, and I smoked up. It felt great; I knew I’d sleep.
We’re Getting There I Promise
One of the things cannabis has always helped me with is in figuring shit out. Something about it clarifies things for me by granting me access to a different perspective and a different way of perceiving myself. Weed does different things for different people: for some it’s just relaxing, for others it makes things funnier, for others it can be demotivating. But for me it was always pretty illuminating and helped open me up creatively. (I’m not defending the dependency part – it also helped me not have to deal with why I wasn’t sleeping, etc. Anything can be used too much.)
(Also, just quickly: I am NOT recommending it for people under 25. I am super-glad I did not discover weed until I was older. I feel pretty sure I would have just taken the relief of numbness to heart, and never left Sarnia, if I had found this then. It is not for kids, and if you are a kid who is smoking a lot, look for additional help, because you need it.)
Here:
The combination of telling that story, reading these trauma books, being without weed, being away from my work and my home, having insomnia, finally getting some weed – last night I had a genuine revelatory breakthrough, which I will tell you now: for the actual first time since I was a child, I realized that this thing I’ve been trying to believe (My name is Jeff Clayton and I am a good person) is actually TRUE.
In my mind, it always had a caveat that, while I wanted to feel I was good, if anyone knew my actual deep secret truth – that I’m a piece of shit – I would die. Last night I finally let myself know and feel the truth: I was never a piece of shit. I was always actually a good person. For REAL. My surprise and joy are deep. I’ve never felt this. I keep remembering it, and smiling. And relaxing.
Old Habits
I know I’ll probably have to keep reminding myself – those neural toboggan paths are icy and it is much easier to stay in them than it is to steer out and into fresh snow – but that’s okay, I’m confident in my brain’s ability to do that; I’ve done it before.
I want to shift the focus of this strip – onto the music stuff. The '80s are a surprisingly fertile time for music, despite some of the sounds, despite the sort of plastic frivolity that it normally appears as, and I want to keep writing about that. I feel quite ready to call my own story a Known Memory, and don’t need to wallow in it to figure it out. I’ve figured it out.
Thank you for reading, and thank you for being involved in a process of healing I was barely conscious of. Thank you for kind words, quiet affirmations, and the holy, magical human healing method called Listening and Witnessing. I’m grateful, and I think it’s done. I feel freed to just make art now.
I mentioned it in the Trigger Warning post, but The Body Keeps The Score is an important book (along with the Oprah one and the Gabor Mate stuff). If you want to check it out but don’t want to read it, Bessel Van Der Kolk’s conversation with Ezra Klein (which is how I found it) is wonderful and surprising and will give you the gist.
I’ll start the music-focused era of Music of the '80s TOMORROW with a dive into Adrian Belew and his tangled, interesting web of collaboration and lifetime of music making. After that it’ll continue to come out on Wednesdays.
With love,
jep