You and I are a couple of containers.

I’m a bag of humanity, I’m definitely a bag, and you’re a bag, too, but you might have done a lot of work over time to come over like a box. Firm, neat edges, got it together. No judgement if you’ve opted to go as a box. You have your reasons. Carrying our humanity from place to place is dicey. I’m mailing something fragile, I’m mailing it in a box.

We’ve got our life stories in these containers, our emotional bodies, all the current events that have our special attention at the moment, personal and otherwise, and all these charged memories getting shaken around while we bump through the days. Container management is everything.

There’s no getting out of this analogy at this point in human history without referencing the OceanGate submersible so let’s just do it. Uh…yeah. The submersible. That one had five life stories in it. Not built great. Just going to the bottom of the sea is all, don’t mind us. The boy who didn’t want to go. Just: him.

The Greek fishing trawler with hundreds of life stories on it was probably a perfectly fine boat on its own. A much larger, non-physical container failed when all of those bags of precious humanity broke.

All of this is beyond and to the side of our discussion but it would have felt weird not to look over and say something.

Me, I know myself to be a bag. Not a firm suitcase kind of bag. I’m a soft cloth situation. I feel like my fabric has gotten sturdier, probably more waterproof over the years. I would say there’s not a formal closing of this bag I am. No zipper. Handles up top but otherwise just…open. Born this way. Great in certain situations, a liability in others. I’ve probably sewn a button onto this thing by now with some kind of homemade loop. My potential to cause a mess when I fall is still absolutely there but it’s not a drop dead certainty the way it was when I was…well, not even all that much younger.

When we’re lucky, we feel like we have our containers under control. Our life story is staying where we put it. We’re moving smoothly from room to room with no particular “Oh no, the liquid” feeling. We feel as cool as we’re ever going to feel. We can go out there and meet some other containers in the street and be like, “Hey, what’s up, cool cool” and we’re probably even prone to make social plans at a lucky time like this.

The confidence!

Text:

You want to bring your container to a place and a time to meet my container on purpose?

Subtext:

I think my container’s probably going to be looking pretty good then, everything’s all tucked in, good bag situation, box on point if I do say so myself. Let’s roll these dice!

The threats to our containers are ongoing.

The main threat to our containers is what I’m going to call The Big Dark. It’s a catch-all term. (It’s a bag!) “The Big Dark” is a word bag for something that’s different from person to person, a little ineffable, but it’s a sadness with power, or an anger with power, or an anger sadness with power, et cetera. You get it. You know what The Big Dark is for you, kind of, and kind of you don’t, by my definition. If you can point right to The Big Dark, if you can give it a date and a name and a cast of characters, you’re only pointing to part of it. Shifting, ineffable, yours, dangerous, it’s in your container: that’s all you really know. Good luck!

When the Big Dark overwhelms our containers—when it’s one of our times when that’s going to happen, through tragedy or misfortune—and our containers start to leak or feel like they’re going to fail altogether, it’s a terribly vulnerable sensation.

For one thing we’re at our least cool when we’re in a Big Dark Event. Don’t make like that’s small. We always care about being cool to some degree, even the ones who think they never care about being cool. We might have tears constantly at the ready, or maybe we’re jumpy and touchy and prone to offense, or maybe we’ve got both of those deals operational. And now we have threats coming from everywhere. We’ve got large sensations making life rough in the bag and we’re also looking at possible alienation from the other people riding in their own vulnerable containers.

Every time our container meets another container during a Big Dark Event—no matter whose it is—both parties have to make some fast judgement calls. On the basis of those calls we have to make decisions, and we have to make them fast because that’s the pace of life and standard human communication. You can’t generally introduce a nice, long pause, long enough to take a bath or a weekend trip to think in. (Or maybe you can; that’s one of the judgement calls.)

Container meetings during a Big Dark Event are among the hardest stuff we have to negotiate as bags of humanity on the planet. Hard in terms of finesse, that is, and fraught.

When I was in college, I had a friend named Lee who had a very big dark in his bag. Lee’s sister was murdered at the age of sixteen. She was killed in a gas station bathroom in a mob-ordered hit. A friend of hers was [forced into] trying to convince her to go into prostitution and she’d refused.

Lee showed up at my house one day during summer break. I was eighteen, maybe nineteen. I wasn’t expecting him. He’d never come over before. I didn’t know he knew my address. We’d never spent time one-on-one. The doorbell rang and there he was, there was Lee, trying to look fun and happy and spontaneous but clearly in pain, wanting to know if I wanted to hang out.

I invited him in.

I knew I was on some kind of job here. I didn’t know what it would be yet but I guessed right that it had to do with witnessing some big darkness and I accepted whatever this job was up front. I didn’t find out about Lee’s sister until later in the afternoon.

I’m guessing that Lee had guessed that I was an open bag. He might have known, instinctually, that I would accept this job because I was a person who didn’t know you could not accept jobs or say no to people, generally.

I don’t know that I would have said no if it had occurred to me. I genuinely liked and cared about Lee and I was clearly home that day. “No” would have been an advanced move. Way past me.

We sat on my back porch and the conversation crumbled from small talk into the actual reason for his surprise visit. He was getting overtaken by his darkness and he didn’t want to be alone. Lee told the story about his sister and he either cried or was on the verge of tears all afternoon. I listened and said whatever I could whenever I felt like I had something. I didn’t know how long he was going to stay but I was buckled in for however long it was.

Lee sprung the big idea on me in the evening. The cemetery where his sister was buried was a ten-minute drive away. He felt fairly sure that he wanted me to go with him on a field trip to her grave. I was nervous if not flat-out terrified at the invitation—I didn’t know how his container was going to be able to handle this field trip— but I felt honored, too, being trusted like this. A “no” felt in range for me but I didn’t reach for it.

By the time we left my house it was dark. We drove to the cemetery and walked up to entrance together but the gates were locked. I thought the field trip might be over but Lee decided to scale the wall. He understood that I was unlikely to join him in climbing over but Lee had driven us there so I’d have to wait in the car.

The wait felt long. I wondered, stupidly, if the mob knew we were there and would be mad at us for honoring the girl they’d killed. Maybe they’d be along. Obviously not but maybe. I also tried to imagine and prepare myself for all the worst case scenarios as far as how Lee might appear when he came back.

When he did come back, Lee looked better, better than when he’d showed up at my house in the afternoon. He’d done something for himself. He was grateful to me for keeping him company and he drove me home. Didn’t need to come inside again. He drove off into the dark and I went back into my house, grateful to be off the clock.

We made a lot of independent decisions that day, Lee and I. I don’t regret any of mine. I don’t regret letting him in, even if the hours were taxing and nervous-making. I carry that day in my memory with more wonder than anything. It was like having a wild animal visit and come inside, a wild animal who didn’t break anything or hurt anything, just showed himself to me and left.

I’ve been the wild animal. Wild is maybe a stretch. I would say that when I’ve been the unpredictable sad animal in the presence of another person, I’ve been something more pitiful than dangerous-feeling, but I couldn’t say, having only been myself.

I’ll tell you this, I’ve never once enjoyed being the unpredictable sad animal in the presence of another person. Is this a no-brainer? It seems like it is but possibly not and maybe I’m lying. Maybe I have enjoyed being the unpredictable sad animal getting witnessed on some level, at some point. A person does need a witness sometimes. So maybe “enjoy” is the wrong word. I’ve derived satisfaction from. I have been relieved by. No, right, I didn’t ever enjoy it.

I’ve had whole sad animal eras. Depression, they were periods of depression, something different than grief. And being witnessed in my depression was always humiliating.

During one sad animal era, I had a couple of desperate-feeling lunches with different friends at the same restaurant. I remember these lunches un-fondly. These desperate sad animal lunches took place at the Still Life Cafe in Fremont, for Seattleites who remember. (RIP, Still Life. I had a few peaceful meals there, I’m sure.)

In early 1998 I had a very dark Big Dark Event that was an offshoot of the much bigger one my brother was having. David’s schizophrenia had first appeared a few years beforehand but his illness had gone into remission until it came back in the winter of ‘98 with a fury. This was a loud and terrifying extended Big Dark Event. Nobody in our family suffered harder than he did, not even close, but we were all scared and suffering nonetheless.

I wasn’t functioning well. I hid in my bed a lot. Friends sat vigil with me sometimes. I figured they hated doing it.

These particular humiliating Still Life Cafe lunches that I remember, neither of them were with my closest friends at the time. One lunch was with an old high school friend and another was with a friend I’d never hung out with one-on-one, a guy from a theatre company I was part of at the time. Did I call and ask them to lunch? I think I did. I think I might have surprised each of them with the invitation, on a Lee-level.

My lunch mates were kind and lovely, each of them. I still remember their kind eyes, even if their eyes looked little wary in back where I wasn’t meant to see.

It’s not their fault that I remember these lunches with hot shame.

This is what I remember.

(The lunches were practically interchangeable on a feeling level so they essentially function as one memory lunch.)

The lines on my social persona were not smooth and contained. I was a wobbly-as-hell drawing, a drawing you’d worry about on sight, I felt. You’d worry about the figure on the page, you’d worry about the artist. I was a sloshy and embarrassing bag of humanity, someone I figured it must have been hard to be seen with.

The tables seemed quite wide. Spiritually wide, I mean. On one side of the table the weather was calm and bright. On my side, whole different weather pattern.

My friends on the other end of the table seemed calm and peaceful and pitying, like they were on a distant, peaceful beach having a not-fun picnic with a person fifty feet away who may not have been personally drowning but was in deeper water than she could keep her composure in.

I wanted so badly to be a peaceful-looking person with composure and not a wavy, sloshy, troubling person in deep water. I wanted to be someone you would choose to picnic with in the future for fun. The lunches felt like they were going to cancel that possibility. My face felt like it was canceling the possibility, crumpling against my will over and over. My shaky voice, my leaky eyes.

Tina? Isn’t she the one who’s always wobbling? She sloshes a lot, right? Cries a lot, I mean. Don’t we want a fun picnic? 

I had, I guess, a Big Dark Event recently. Me now, I mean, here in 2023. I say “I guess” because the grief I’ve felt in the wake of my mom’s death nine months ago feels qualitatively different than the depression from previous eras. The grief feels cleaner. The grief doesn’t feel like my fault, even if my earlier depressions weren’t my fault, either. (They felt like they were, what can I tell you.)

I’ve felt no shame in this grieving. I’ve felt entitled to grieve. I was entitled, I am entitled. I’m not entitled to anyone’s time or presence, even if I think I am, even if I believe a grieving person should be tended to, which I do, for a time. I’m entitled to be wild and wobbly and unpredictable, that’s what I’m entitled to. I’m entitled to be what I am, as I am.

Depression and grief both make for a lively, disturbed container, though. I am aware. My grief may feel clean but I’ve still known that I’m a wild animal presence in it, and maybe I was a proper wild animal this time.

I’m calmer and happier and more peaceful than I was in the time immediately after her death. The grief is not sloshing over now. I have some control of the top of my bag. I can get it buttoned.

Animals unnerve me, wild or domesticated, because they need what they need and they go about getting it however the hell they’re going to, and animals don’t care about being invited to hypothetical future picnics. Social code, no. They’re not about it. They’re not navigating that. Fresh ids on the loose all day every day. How do you prepare to be with an animal? What if they need to jump you or eat you or peck you for whatever their reasons are? Am I like one of them? I know about the social code, okay? I’m navigating it, I care about it.

I’m wondering, I wonder, what I don’t know, what I wish I knew, why I’ve written this post in the first place, what I want to know and cannot say, myself:

When your smooth container is breaking—when you’re the wobbly, coming-apart box, the sloshing-over bag—what is your responsibility towards the other humans moving around in their own tenuous containers?

There are quick decisions to make for the person sloshing over, quick questions to answer, answers with consequences:

How much do you let the Big Dark shake your container in the presence of another if you have a choice? Is this a moral or ethical question? Is this a question of consideration? Yes and no? What do we owe to the witnesses of our big dark, voluntary or involuntary? Do we owe them an apology for being so sloshy or scary? Is an apology polite? Is an apology right? Do we owe them the effort to contain the Big Dark? Yes and no? How strenuously should we make the effort to contain ourselves? Should we be on the lookout for clues? When should we be on the lookout for clues? What signs should we be looking for that say “Yes, real yes, I’m meeting you, my container is strong, you can let yours shake around, I am free to see your Big Dark at this time, I know myself to be safe”? What signs should we be looking for that say, “I am not free, I am not on this clock, I am continuing to move discretely in my own container, I don’t want to see your Big Dark at this time, I do not know myself to be safe, I do not feel myself to be interested, I feel myself to be the wrong party to witness your Big Dark at this time”?

Are these too many questions: yes.

Do they have to be answered anyway: yes. Many of them on the spot.

That’s not even all the questions.

The person on the witnessing end has a list just as long and perplexing and they have to make fast decisions, too.

You both hope you have some wisdom on tap, something sturdy enough to withstand a bag earthquake, so you can make decisions that have legs, decisions that will give you the least cause for regret down the road.

You hope you have some kindness, and the sense from moment-to-moment to know when you’re going to want to direct that kindness at the other person more or at yourself more, if you have to choose, which you might have to.

Love, you want that one when it applies, does this even need saying?

Yes, everything needs saying.

Love is tricky. I am not qualified to boss the love inside another person around and say how it will or should move, despite what I strongly believe sometimes. I would boss the love in all the containers meeting me if I could. I’m an animal trying to get what I need. I’m capable of getting mad if you don’t start clambering over the cemetery wall. What good is that, getting mad like that. What good is it wondering what good that is. I’m an animal. I’m a wobbly bag. I have this button on it. I finally sewed one on. Does that help.

I can’t even boss the love around that’s in myself, so I don’t know.

I could make you think—with the Lee story the only story representing me in the witness role today—that I’m always a yes when a witnessing job comes up. I’d love it if that could be true. I’d love to be built like that. Ask my brother if I’m always a yes.

What is my responsibility to him?

No, but how far?

How far into the Big Dark?