Dear Vincent, Today I might tell you that I love you, or else I might just ask if you too are a Scorpio, and if so, is it your birthday.

Dear Vincent,

Today I might tell you that I love you, or else I might just ask if you too are a Scorpio, and if so, is it your birthday. Yesterday I got a bit pissed off at my social worker. We were analyzing my answers to a sheet on self-care. I did not score very high on the line about going to a museum or a cultural experience. I do not want to go to a museum or a cultural experience. I want a sustainable sense of relevance and stability, affirmation and orgasms. Also, I want to feel safe.

For homework, the Social Worker told me to make a daily list of three things I am grateful for. A Grat List. Hate that shit. Grat lists make me feel oppressed, and like I am an underachiever. And a terrible person because I am not the single mother of a dying baby with cancer and no legs, and yet still, I seem to suffer.

Last week I saw three professionals regarding my mental health. The Social Worker told me to eat lunch, and generously wrote this down on a post-it note, smiley face and everything. My GP said to focus on protein and the psychiatrist said to do something creative, and that my struggles seem to stem from my personality traits. What do you mean, Dr. Perrier? Once I gain a sustained sense of relevance and stability, affirmation and orgasm, someone should give me 110 dollars an hour to sit in a windowless office and tell people they’re wonderful, and to have a bath, treat themselves to a goldfish, and go to a museum or a cultural experience.

Instead of a Gratitude List, one of my friends recommends a Self-Congratulations List. Items for the Self-Congratulations List equal

Eating something other than Chocolate Covered Almonds for Lunch.

Not Crying when two clients revoke your life purpose and announce that this week is in fact, not a good time for you to wipe the pubes off the sides of their toilets.

Insert something responsible such as invoices, flossing, signing up to pay for electricity and/or purchasing an expensive battery for your smoke alarm nearly two months after you moved into your apartment.

While I was on Prozac, I think I wrote a blog post about the Self-Congratulations List which I referred to as something very frightening and that was the Ta-Dah List.

While I was on Prozac, before it made me twitchy and suicidal, I think I was more grateful, more open to museums and to cultural experiences, less begrudging about taking out the recycling and more pleased with my Self-Congratulations Lists. My personality traits were approximately the same. My boundaries on the internet were approximately the same.

The Social Worker says I put a lot upon my shoulders.

Wouldn’t it be fun if we both ended up being Scorpios, and ran into each other at a museum or a cultural experience?

According to the Tarot cards, I should not send you this email for real, although I always want to. I’ll see you in your windowless office in approximately two hours and forty-five minutes. I’ll be wearing my red raincoat.

Love, Erica.

You too can write imaginary emails to Vincent. The project is called "Mondays without Vincent" and the secret email address is: ericaschmidt85(at)gmail(dot)

Vincent will be delighted to hear from you. He will write back as soon as he can.

Much love, Erica.

This photo was taken before I could include "Shower" or "Got Dressed"
 on my Self-Congratulations List

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Three Easy Strategies for Feeling Smug and On Top of Life
Dear Vincent, Can you hold me?
Dear Vincent, Sorrowful Simon has written you a letter.

Dear Vincent, Now you have three pen pals.

Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Dear Vincent,

So far you have three other pen pals. All of their names are secrets. Except for Sorrowful Simon. His name is not a secret.

“I have never felt enough to be with someone.”

One of your pen pals whose name is not Sorrowful Simon wrote this. So many of my friends have said the same sort of thing. That they will never be enough to find love. I have been known to say this myself. But the truth is, many people who have found love are actually rather obnoxious, or if you look at their lives, at least one or several components are a total disaster.

What does it mean to be good enough?

Dan Savage always says that to enter the dating scene you need to be in “good working order.” I imagine this means a minimum of wailing in alleys, throwing shelves across your bedroom floor, and as you like to say, having to put out all kinds of fires from six in the morning until bedtime. In fact, this past summer, my level of Good Working Order has been highly questionable. Likely, I was Out of Order. Even so, my Meditation Partner still seemed to appreciate the blow jobs, more or less. The Well-Fucked Woman says that Cock Worship and opening your throat to someone else’s genitals is redeeming, both for the cock owner and for whoever is giving the blowjob. You can even have something called a Throatgasm. What a thrill, though, perhaps first you need to be in Good Working Order.

Is peace around the corner? On Friday I moved around the corner to Hutchison street. Friday night, at a restaurant on Bernard, a Chiseled-Cherub-Faced 23-Year-Old Filmmaker asked me about my choice of Asian soup. He ordered chicken, and I had tofu, even though I’ve recently opted to try eating meat, instead of Abilify and Celexa. After our soup, we ate fortune cookies, which always allow for easy poetry. My fortune cookie said that my mind was “sharp, fast and analytical.” His said something about how he would soon meet an auspicious and valuable friend.

I told him I didn’t want babies, and he said, “But you never know. In a decade you might change your mind. You’ll be like a totally different person. I feel like I’m totally different from how I was ten years ago.”

My friend, it killed me not to say, ten years ago, you were having your first wet dreams. These are the pros of hooking up with a 23 year old. Endless earnest, innocent and adorable insight. The cons, I suppose are, what the fuck do I do with my daddy issues?

The next morning, I sent the Chiseled-Cherub-Faced 23-Year-Old Filmmaker my story, The Magical Rock Vagina Cleanse. He texted back gushing that I might be almost be a female counterpart to Charles Bukowski. His text generated unambiguous sensations in my vagina. Even though I am likely far too large him, and far too old.

All weekend I washed all the walls of my new apartment. And all the floors, and I didn’t cry once. Also, my washing machine arrived, and it purrs. Also, last Tuesday I forgot to tell you about this thing that I invented called mood sports. Mood Sports is you against your mood. One fun thing about mood sports is that they only contain one vowel. I always find this sort of thing so soothing.

While I was sleeping on Saturday night, Chiseled-Cherub-Faced 23-Year-Old Filmmaker texted me a peace sign, and asked if I was going nuts. At 5:17 A.M. the next morning, he reported that on his end, nuts weren’t had, but he made a ton of new friends. lol. Happy Face. Haven’t heard from him since.

Ten years ago I felt like a totally different person. I kind of feel the same way about last Tuesday. Everything always arising and passing away.

Happy full moon.

Love, Erica.

You too can write imaginary emails to Vincent. The project is called "Mondays without Vincent" and the secret email address is: ericaschmidt85(at)gmail(dot)com.

Vincent will be delighted to hear from you. He will write back as soon as he can.

Much love, Erica.

Going nuts tonight?
:)


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Dear Vincent, Thank you for responding to my hysterical phone call.
Dear Vincent, Sorrowful Simon has written you a letter.
Chuckie the Horse and the Day Jack Layton Died

Dear Vincent, How was your eclipse?

Dear Vincent,

How was your eclipse? I cleaned all the way through it. Cleaning is healing for the grieving and traumatized people. My Magical Hoarding Client told me that the Navaho people consider it unlucky to watch an eclipse and prefer to stay inside and do something they find sacred. For example, cleaning. What a fucking relief. Hopefully you too were protected from bad luck in your windowless office where you treat people with both delicate and indelicate weeping skills.

Over the weekend, my Monday client consulted me about how to ride her couch of her semi-geriatric cat’s stale vomit and urine residue. I replied with a story about my semi-geriatric Big Black Dog who used to have highly irritable bowels and who used to be the star of my blog. One time my ex-boyfriend, Robbie, the Boatman, the other former star of my blog, fed the Big Black Dog rainbow lucky charm dog food. This caused the Big Black Dog to puke and shit all over our bed and couches. We ended up renting carpet cleaner contraptions from Canadian Tire and I remember the endeavour being extremely soapy. Once the dog died, the Boatman’s mother gave us a new couch. She always had an abundance of couches.

Eliot the Big Black Dog, post Lucky Charms ordeal

I might start making my own homemade Enzymatic Cleaner. You need citrus peels. My favourite kind of citrus is grapefruit. What about you?

When I move to my new apartment, I might also take up fermentation compost, though I am not sure I am meticulous enough of a scientist for this to be an enormous success.

In my neighbourhood, people have so many children they don’t have time to do the dishes, so they eat with plastic cutlery off paper plates, and they drink out of Styrofoam, or more plastic. All the alleys smell like piles of garbage. Kind of like in India.

The day of the eclipse, I cleaned all the way through lunch. At midnight, I woke up hungry and ate some cottage cheese. When I finally fell back asleep, I dreamt I showed up topless to my cleaning shift at the Real Estate Agent’s. This made me feel quite embarrassed because my tits are so small and I really should have showed up to work with a shirt on. In my dream, as I cleaned, I accidentally broke the head of the Real Estate Agent’s crystal Santa Clause ornament. The Santa Claus ornament had red and green wings and the Real Estate Agent’s boyfriend had programmed it to fly around in circles up the Christmas tree. When I showed her the broken head, she just laughed and seemed happy and in love.

After that I dreamt that the Dead Inside Man offered me a cheque for 50 grand, as well as his really weird dog.

Dim's weird dog. Weirdest dog I've ever seen.

Then I dreamt that my mother gave me a voucher of redeeming vitamins.

Then I dreamt that someone gave me a rim job, and this made me feel quite self-conscious. Kim Anami, the well-fucked woman, who lifts chandeliers with her vagina, says that anal sex is powerful because it opens the orifice that leads to your deepest shit. I think I am going to apply to be her copywriter. Yesterday, I hooked up with my meditation partner again. We do not exactly open the orifices to one another’s deepest shit, but at least it took the edge off. And I drank my meditation partner’s cum, which the well-fucked woman claims is a natural anti-depressant. So far I have not taken any Abilify, or Celexa, and I don’t exactly feel like dying. Today, I am translating minestrone, apple crisp, spinach salad, and macaroni and cheese recipes. After that, it’s more cleaning and grieving. Thanks for being there.

Love, Erica.

Vincent was my therapist from October of 2016, and May 2017. After we ran out of subsidized sessions, I began to write him daily imaginary emails.

I called the project, "Mondays without Vincent," and it turned out to be quite healing. You too can write imaginary emails to Vincent. 

The secret address is: ericaschmidt85(at)gmail.com.

Vincent will be delighted to hear from you, and he will not judge. He'll write back as soon as he can. The correspondence can remain a secret, or else we can share it here with others and maybe it could be healing for everyone.  Love, Erica. 



Shiny and happy with Half an Inch of Nip (September 2016)


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Poopy Mango Baby Wipes and the First Day of Christmas
Why I am like Jane Fonda
Lizzie

Dear Vincent, Looks like you got some sun.

Dear Vincent,

Nice to see you on Wednesday. Looks like you got some sun and maybe also a new shirt. I’d forgotten about the headless wooden lady statue on the table between your chair and mine, sharing the space with the apple-shaped stress ball whose stem hovers in a stress-induced moat-like crevice. I had remembered that just like the headless woman, your filing cabinet was quite dusty. Some people don’t give a shit about dust and that’s so interesting. My meditation partner, who I no longer meditate with nor give blow jobs to, also has a wooden lady statue, and she is missing her left arm, from the mid-bicep, and down. What's happening to all these lady statues and their body parts, and why are the human men bothering to keep them?

As I sat down, I told you that my Magical Hoarding Client says that crossing your legs cuts you off from the energy of the universe, but that in my case, it might be an okay choice, since my boundaries tend to be horrendous. My Magical Hoarding Client says the best way to connect with the energy of the universe is to put your feet on the floor and open your knees so your crotch is wide open. In your office, I tried to keep my feet on the floor, my crotch closed. I lasted about three minutes before folding up my legs on the chair.

I told you about last Saturday, one of those days that I call, A Deep Dark Day of Death. Seeping anguished rage onto the Insomnia bed, I called my friend, the Dead Inside Man. D-I-M equals DIM. Dim lives in Toronto, and he was a solid fuck.

“You sound terrible,” he said. “You don’t deserve to feel this terrible.”

Dim is incrementally less dead inside than I am. He told me to haul my ass to the pharmacy and get the Abilify.

On the way to the pharmacy, I passed an old balding lady in the alley, earnestly playing catch with a grumpy seven or eight-year old. Catching and throwing, over and over again, amidst the eight-year old’s frown, and the neighbour’s garbage. I occurred to me that this banal act was heroic, and yet I still felt like dying.

As I waited for the Abilify, I took my blood pressure. It was in the optimal range. Then I started writing a note on my phone, containing my wishes in case of my death. For example, I don’t want to have a go fund me campaign. Another example is, at my memorial service, you can read my poem, We have no idea if the squirrels are happy/ Or/if anyone is.

Back in June, one evening while I was still giving my meditation partner blow jobs, I tucked him in and read him the squirrel poem.

The last lines are, “We have no idea if the squirrels are happy. Or. If anyone is.”

“That’s well done,” murmured my meditation partner in his post-ejaculation semi-coma.

I kissed his cheek, said good night, and then walked home alone.

 

The Abilify was quite expensive, and the pharmacist said it would not likely work unless I committed to the accompanying Celexa, which I wasn’t willing to do. I cried and then left without buying it.

On the front steps of my best friend’s house, I continued with my “Last Will and Testament.” Funeral songs equalled “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” by Neutral Milk Hotel, a bach cello suite, I think the first one, Space Oddity, and Two Headed Boy, Part Two, also by Neutral Milk Hotel. I like that song because it mentions spines. My friend’s partner and two year old appeared in front of the steps, having just returned from ice cream. I helped them park the stroller and we climbed up the stairs. Up in the apartment, my friend’s two-year-old picked up his Cabbage Patch Doll. He let me hold it and the plushy body brought some comfort. Then the two-year-old wanted to carry the Cabbage Patch Doll in his mini baby carrier. As I helped him navigate the confusing straps, I imagined the world existing without me. Like the Cabbage Patch Doll on my chest, this too felt like such a relief. This mind, it has always travelled to great extremes, just to take the pressure off.

Aaron Paul, soothed by Cabbage Patch Kids. Source equals glamour.com

My friend came home and prepared smoothies with frozen bananas and blueberry yogurt, and likely some other redeeming ingredient. She poured some into a mason jar for me. I said thank you.

They left for a toddler dinner party, and I wandered around Mile End, sipping the smoothie. When I was done, I was somewhere on Esplanade close to my Magical Hoarding Client’s house. I can’t remember the exact thought that compelled me to smash the jar upon the sidewalk. Something about all the ends being dead, Abilify, roommates, being the family fuck-up, and how I will never get over my ex from more than two years ago. I borrowed someone’s broom off their front porch, swept up the purply yogurt covered glass, and threw it in someone else’s garbage.


I walked up Esplanade to Bernard, and then turned onto Parc, back toward the pharmacy. Halfway down Parc, though the sun stayed somewhere in the sky, hard, vigorous rain began to pour down, with thunder and lightning in the background. I hid under a store front and texted my friend from BC, about rages and moving and being the family fuck-up, and the self-destruct button, and how everything felt like a hopeless crapshoot. My Birkenstocks filled up with water and my skirt blew straight up in the wind, revealing my saggy underwear to everyone on Parc Avenue. Once the storm passed, I returned to the pharmacy in my squishy Birkenstocks. More wailing and then, I shelled out fifty bucks for the Abilify, which I now carry around like an imaginary parachute that likely will not open right away.
My mind has always gone to great extremes
simply to take the pressure off.

I get to see you again in two Tuesdays. The government will pay. Given my unstable situation, you don’t feel it is ethical to have me to pay for therapy. Plus you believe that therapy has its limits when one’s life – my life – is so consumed with putting out fires. You suggested that I might be better off with a social worker, who could better help me meet Maslow’s first rung of human needs. And well, thanks anyways. For now at least I won’t miss you so much. And I guess I can use my envelope of therapy cash to buy couches, and/or a washing machine.

As you were checking your agenda, I asked you if the headless wooden lady statue sparked joy.

“Spark joy?” you replied, puzzled. “I guess we’ll have to dust it first, and see.”

These days I keep asking myself a version of the question, is peace in every step, or in daily handfuls of expensive fish oil capsules, or in a fancy used sectional couch in excellent condition, or in Cabbage Patch dolls, or by finally giving in to Abilify? Or is peace just around the corner, or in some brief flash that will reveal itself for 37 seconds some time in the next 12 years? For now, I’ll just try to wait another day, and I’m pretty sure I’m gonna buy the couch.

Love, Erica.


The End.


Don't forget that you too can write a letter to Vincent.
The secret email address is ericaschmidt85 (at) gmail.com.
Tell Vincent if you'd like a response, and if you'd like to keep the correspondence between the two of you, or else we could post it here and share it with others, and maybe it could be healing for everyone.

Speaking of headless statues. Here she is again.
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Deep Unyielding Depression, Part Two

What a beautiful face

We have no idea if the squirrels are happy./ Or/ If anyone is.

Dear Vincent, Thank you for responding to my hysterical phone call.

Dear Vincent,

Thank you for responding to my hysterical phone call. I think I found the perfect new apartment to live in. I will just need to get slightly richer and also, a washing machine. So far I’ve felt somewhat better for almost two days. In French, the parts of my body have different ages, while in English, they are different ages. The difference, it could be significant.

When I was fifteen years old, I wrote my memoirs in a scrapbook for Mrs. Cameron’s grade twelve English class. Being a gifted child, I took the class when I was in grade eleven and since I had skipped grade two, I was younger than everyone else. Halfway through the semester, I crapped out with an overdose on laxatives, and ended up going to a psych ward. For much of my homework that year, my teachers let me off the hook, though this didn’t make that much sense, as I still made time to go on 15k punitive runs with ankle weights. But I did complete the scrapbook. Like so many teenagers, the scrapbook is unfathomably intense, awkward, vulnerable, poignant and exquisite. At the end, I expressed having gained so much insight from the hospital and held such hope that I would get over so many of my dysfunctional patterns.

When my father read it he said, “You write well when you write about yourself. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

I joked and said, “Well, I’m much wiser now,” which wasn’t true since I’d graduated from laxatives to puking, from the gym to long distance running, and was now down to the weight I always thought would render me happy, but in fact left me strung out and neurotic.

“No, you didn’t gain any wisdom or insight,” said my dad, never one to provide false praise. “But you write well when you write about yourself.” I do not tend to show my dad all that much of my writing. Otherwise, writing is not all that embarrassing. Only a little bit.

Inside the scrapbook, at the end of the story of my life, I’d made a super intense yet beautiful and highly teenage collage.

 
With Mr. Sketch Smelly markers, I’d begun with an upside down rainbow. I’d considered rainbows to have symbol of my life, if for no reason other than my childhood obsession with the Wizard of Oz, and my childish desire to fly above the rainbow with Dorothy and the bluebirds. Just like in the song, above the Mr Sketch rainbow was a perfect clear turquoise sky, painted thickly with oils, and speckled with yellow petals of flowers someone had brought me in the hospital, and the psych ward craft room feathers. Below were a bunch of fragments. Angry conflicted oil paint from art therapy, a big red x. My trademark Crayola designs emblematic of the hundreds of homemade greeting cards I used to give. A patch from my sister’s childhood Rainbow Bright sheets. And a squiggle of orange and yellow pipe cleaner that symbolized something deep, like rage or conflict, but I can’t remember exactly what.

On the next page, I’d drawn a right-side up rainbow and written the words to Over the Rainbow with a special silver pen. Shiny quarter note and hummingbird stickers also decorated the page.

Then there was an excerpt from my grade one journals from Mrs Vanden Bosch’s class.  I’d drawn a rainbow according to the colours in the song, “I can sing a rainbow.” Under that rainbow stood a row of tiny humans outlined in pencil and coloured in with crayons according to the song’s colour scheme. All the tiny humans had circles for hands with five little nubs for fingers. They all wore top hats. Mrs. Vanden Bosch had granted a green circular sticker and a check mark for my respectable printing of the song’s lyrics, “red and yellow and pink and green, purple and orange and blue I can sing a rinbow.” I only misspelled one word, and forgot the period after blue.

My fifteen year old memoirs contain very few spelling mistakes. A few pages before the angsty collage, I summarized what the psychiatrist Dr. Roberts had concluded were my main problems. Dr. Roberts wore her hair in a bun that was so tight it looked like it was pulling on her face. Her skirts were similarly tight and oppressive looking and all the patients shuddered whenever they heard her coming down the hall in high heels. I used to call Dr Roberts the Nazi Psychiatrist, though maybe the Wicked Witch of the West would have been more accurate, and it would have matched the clever Wizard of Oz motif in the story of my life. But Wicked Witch or Nazi, Dr Roberts left me with decisive conclusions about my life, and some of them still feel almost true.

May 2001, Erica Schmidt, age 15:

“Dr Roberts concluded that because I based all self-worth on external praise, I created all this stress for myself trying to please others. I’ve prevented myself from growing as an individual and I’m stuck at about 12 years old instead of 15 or 16. I changed my personality around different people trying to be the person they wanted me to be and now I don’t know who I am or what makes me happy. I would change my voice and had a bad habit of speaking in an ‘infantile voice’ trying to seem cute, naïve and innocent. She said that not everyone will ever like me no matter how sweet. She said that sometimes too sweet is yucky.”

So often I remember the words, “too sweet is yucky.”

Two nights ago, on the Insomnia Bed, I yelled out in my sleep, because I was dreaming I had cut up the angsty teenage collage into small pieces. Chunks of my sister’s Rainbow Bright bedsheets were scattered everywhere. Though I woke up relieved, the rage I’d felt in and at the collage made sense. For now, nothing is quite destroyed, but I think I will avoid that page in the scrapbook.

September 15, 1993, Erica Schmidt, Age 8:

(Grade Four, Close to the Peak of My Life, Mrs Fournier’s Class)

“As soon as I woke up I decided I’d feed my fish. I got out of bed and got the fish food. I hadn’t even looked at my fish but when I did… Yuck! One of my fish was on the glass it was dead. The other two had black spots. (they looked sick) I told Mom. I found out that two of them died because when Mom took them out two were dead. The other one is fine. I bet it will be as tough as goldie my old fish. She went down the drain and came back alive. Isn’t that amazing.”

See you Wednesday, Vincent!

Love, Erica.

The End.

Vincent was my therapist from October of 2016, and May 2017. After we ran out of subsidized sessions, I began to write him daily imaginary emails.

I called the project, "Mondays without Vincent," and it turned out to be quite healing. You too can write imaginary emails to Vincent. In fact, if you'd like, you can send them to me, on any day of the week.

My secret address is: ericaschmidt85(at)gmail.com.


Let me know if you’d like a response. The correspondence can remain between us, or else we can share it here with others and maybe it could be healing for everyone.  Love, Erica. 

Sometimes too sweet is yucky.

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I Let Go

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The Closer I am to Fine

Not Separate From All That Is

Dear Vincent, Are you lonely? Do you have a pain body?

My name is Erica. I love coffee.

The Best Thing I've Ever Done 

Dear Vincent, How is your headstand going?

Dear Vincent,

How is your headstand going? Nice to run into you on the corner of Beaubien and St-Vallier, on Monday, July 31st, around 5:47 P.M. In fact, seeing you made my legs start to wobble, and my body proceeded to twitch for five and a half blocks before I began to sob in the company of my friend Caroline, as we stood beneath the glass of Plaza St. Hubert and in front of an unapologetic candy store where diabetics could easily eat their way into oblivion and/or death.

Yes, I would like to continue therapy with you. Even though I thought you ghosted me due to the fact that I confessed to writing you daily imaginary emails which might have made me seem to intense and crazy and attached to you. By the way, lots of people get too attached to their therapists. In case you weren’t aware. Though the whole world doesn’t know it, most of the world does know that I do not excel at professional boundaries. Perhaps we can discuss this in therapy. I’d also like to work on dissolving my Ego Project. My friend Caroline would recommend throwing this sort of thing into the Lachine Canal. That’s where I threw all my character defects in March of 2011. My ego likes the sound of the sentence, “The Lachine canal must be inundated with all sorts of thrown out dreams and deadened aspirations.” Inundated, deadened, and obscene. I enjoy all of these words.

Do you have an ego project? Maybe that’s the headstand. I tend to stand on my head between three and five times per week. These days my neck and shoulders are a little stiff. I’ve given up trying to sleep on the floor.

It was nice to run into you on the corner of Beaubien and St-Vallier Street on Monday, July 31st around 5:47 P.M. At least that’s the socially reasonable thing to say. Otherwise I’ll leave the professional boundaries up to you.

Love, Erica.

 The End.

Vincent was my therapist from October of 2016, and May 2017. After we ran out of subsidized sessions, I began to write him daily imaginary emails. I called the project, "Mondays without Vincent," and it turned out to be quite healing. You too can write imaginary emails to Vincent. In fact, if you'd like, you can send them to me, on any day of the week.

My secret address is: ericaschmidt85(at)gmail.com.

Let me know if you’d like a response. The correspondence can remain between us, or else we can share it here with others and maybe it could be healing for everyone. My ego project would love for this to be a success, but I'm trying to let that dissolve, so no pressure. Love, Erica. 

Most Ego Project photos have already ended up on the Interwebs.

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go

Bodhisattva Business Ventures:

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God Box
The Permafrost is melting in Siberia
Lizzie

Dear Vincent, Sorrowful Simon has written you a letter.

Dear Vincent,

Sorrowful Simon has written you a letter. He sounds quite sad. Sorrowful Simon initially reached out to me on the dating site, OkCupid. We’ve never met in real life. My excuse for not going a date with him was that I had already experienced a Sorrowful Simon in a rather extensive way. You, and some other people know that the first Sorrowful Simon in my life ended up jumping off a building. Perhaps my excuse for not going on a date was adequate. Now I have repeated the name, “Sorrowful Simon,” four-and now five-times in one paragraph. That’s enough times. It is time to address Simon’s plight.

 

Simon says,

 

By habit, or because they sense that I’m not doing too good, friends have been asking me how I am feeling more frequently lately, and I’m finding it difficult to answer them with any degree of clarity. Like Erica, I had a therapist which really helped me a few months back, and in the same way I ran out of allowed sessions so we had to part ways. Since then, I have strived to keep clarifying my feelings and emotions in my head, but inevitably I get lazy and stop doing it regularly, which then makes it harder to do so, and the cycle leads to where I’m at right now, I guess: having so much in my head that nothing can get out, or just barely, sometimes when I get drunk/high and start writing poems, or if I start talking with a friend or a lover and I’m in the right frame of mind (but then sooner or later I start thinking that I’m boring that person, imposing, or just not making sense, and I reel back my outspoken outburst).

 

Dear Simon, How are you?

 

So easily this question can trigger such performance anxiety. It sounds like your friends genuinely care and want to know, and yet you feel like you can’t quite open up, because what if the true answer is actually too much? My sense is that many people feel as though if they were to honestly reveal themselves, all their feelings and suffering and struggles, that this would be way too much for those around them. An unacceptable and tedious burden. And so you hold back. But this doesn’t sound like a viable option, since it is building up to more than you can bear. You need a mode of expression, a means of release. I’m sorry that therapy is no longer available. How can you replicate some of the relief it provided?

 

Alcohol and drugs, well, these can have their place, as long as they’re pursued without desperation or addiction. But substances have their limits as long-term sources of comfort. In my experience, they tend to isolate over time, in addition to generating shame and/or oblivion, whether immediate or in their aftermath. Thus, with as clear a mind as you can access, I think you need to reach out to real people, either your friends, or the kind voices at the end of a crisis helpline. Choose the most non-judgmental and compassionate person you can find, perhaps not your mother, but maybe. And then speak. So frequently I hear of people finally opening up to their loved ones, disclosing the deep and seemingly intolerable darkness on their hearts. And you know what their loved ones say? “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

 

Simon:

 

There are so many things I could say right now, things which I know are weighing down on me, but to explain them in a coherent manner would require so much back-story… I don’t know if you would think it relevant or even intelligible.

 

Some of those things concern my ex-wife and children… some are about the situation with my current lover… some are about my day-to-day life and yearnings… about writing, which I still consider to be my vocation, but a failed one… but mostly it’s about Loneliness, which (I realized recently) I am more afraid of than Death (which is paradoxical, seeing as I am a solitary person by nature, and quite enjoy solitude).

 

At some point it will likely be worthwhile to rehash and unleash all the backstory. But right now I want to talk about writing. Writing and then Loneliness. But first writing. Although failing at any vocation sounds immensely painful, writing is a particularly loaded thing to fail at. There are all sorts of so-called empowering self-help books on how to awaken your creativity and write incessantly, prolifically, uninhibitedly, and with unrelenting joy, great brilliance and then you get rich and famous. I have read most of these books. Last summer, I threw out a book called, “The Right to Write” and I hope to avoid encountering such publications for the rest of my life.

 

No book will grant you with “The Right to Write.” It is all yours. Always. As for vocations and failure, humans invented both of these things, and while I don’t want to invalidate your perception, it could be helpful to challenge your beliefs on what it is you are “supposed” to be doing, and what it means to be successful.

 

On the bathroom wall of where I am staying, there’s a list written by a 90-year-old woman, containing 45 lessons that life taught her. The woman’s name is Regina

One of Regina’s lessons is, “All that really matters in the end, is that you loved.”

It’s possible that this sentence provides you with absolutely no relief. It might even fill you with cynicism. But I want you to consider what your list would be. Will becoming a successful writer truly provide you with the redemption you think you need? What societal bullshit are you clinging to? What personal bullshit are you clinging to? When you are 90 years old or younger and dying, what choices will seem like excruciating mistakes? What memories will bring you peace? What does your meaningful life look like? As Oprah would say, “What do YOU want?”

 

I used to think I wanted to be a best-selling novelist. Over and over again, I would write the first 80 pages of “My Life’s Work.” Then one morning after cranking my various spines through a sweaty yoga practice in India, I realized, the hell with it. I don’t want to write novels. The act of writing novels entails a whole slew of tasks I don’t particularly enjoy. For example, making things up. Rewriting drafts of long and imaginary stories over and over again. Writing about something other than myself and my own life. Well, this embarrassing, but honest. And what a relief to let that so-called dream unravel.

 

You get to choose the terms of your own success, creative or otherwise. During the spring of 2015, I decided that I would combat the unrelenting notion that I was perpetually failing creatively by committing to publishing two blogs per week, no matter what. This became my creative practice, and though I only maintained it religiously for a few months, it got me out of an angsty stagnant funk. I came up with a whole bunch of work that I am proud of and that even made me feel more at peace about the possibility of dying. Some people read it and most of the world didn’t. To a certain extent, Margaret Atwood’s experience is not all that different. We are all like Margaret Atwood, and not at all.

 

So I am wondering, Simon, if perhaps you could somehow take the “failure” and “vocation” out of your story about being a writer. Is there some sort of tangible and low pressure creative practice that might bring you a sense of accomplishment and joy? Ten minutes of rambling on the bus, a heartfelt email every afternoon, beginning the day with your pen and notebook and three to five sentences. Come up with something that’s small enough to pull off, but large enough to not feel like a cop out. During the times in my life when I am writing, no matter what I’m writing, and no matter what else is going on, I hate myself less, and am also less lonely.

 

That’s all I will say about loneliness this time. I will leave Simon, Vincent and our readers with the poem Simon wrote at the end of his letter:

 

I’m just half a person

part of me withered

(like Janus looking

at Death & Life

at the same time)

but still

I must take on

the Whole of my Life

 

no wonder

I’m so tired

-by Simon.

 

Yes, Simon, I can see why you’re tired. I’d be tired too. I wish you the deepest and most unshakeable peace available.

 

With love to Vincent and to this and every Simon,

Erica.


The End.


Vincent was my therapist from October of 2016, and May 2017. After we ran out of subsidized sessions, I began to write him daily imaginary emails. I called the project, "Mondays without Vincent," and it turned out to be quite healing. You too can write imaginary emails to Vincent. In fact, if you'd like, you can send them to me, on any day of the week.

My secret address is: ericaschmidt85(at)gmail.com.

Let me know if you’d like a response. The correspondence can remain between us, or else we can share it here with others and maybe it could be healing for everyone. Love, Erica.

"What truly happy person needs to stand in front of the mirror every morning to convince themselves they're happy?"
-Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.
Not me, Mark. No. Not me.




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Dear Vincent, This letter is about saving a begonia. Love, Erica.
Mourning, Wailing, Yearning, Wake Up.
Five Days of Creative Recovery