This has not been my only Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS) bump in the road. About six months ago I had a bad one. It took over a month to clean up the mess and recover. This current challenge is in many ways just something else that needs to be cleaned up and set right. This MCS trial is just matter of cleaning up both my internal and external environments*. Despite all the challenges I still have a place to live, a vehicle to drive, food in the fridge and friends who want to spend time with me. Even at work where some of the worst MCS triggers have presented themselves, I have still been able to do my job to a needed degree. The ability to function in my life to a needed minimum standard has in no way been compromised. But functioning at a required minimum is not thriving.
Every two to four years since I have started my healing journey I have encountered subjects that have absolutely fascinated me. Each time I find such a subject I will often spend years devouring all the material I can find on the topic. Out of all of the questions I have looked into the big three have been: ‘Buddhism’, ‘Physics as related to consciousness’, and finally ‘Evolutionary psychology and social dynamics as it relates to human interaction and attraction’.
The first subject was spiritual philosophy with a focus on Zen Buddhism. I read about twenty books on the subject, listened to several audio programs, and even watched a few videos. In the end everything I encountered on the topic said the same thing. Go perform your chosen spiritual practice. Getting information means nothing after a certain point, I had to go out and do it. After a few months of resistance I found a Buddhist church, sat Zen meditation with the group three to four times each week and eventually went on weekend long retreats. This study completely changed how I viewed the world. I could no longer see people, places, events or even myself as static items. Everything became much more fluid, only a moment in a continuum of change. Just about everything I saw as capitol ‘T’ Truth was now, in many ways, only a story that people, including myself, had placed upon their surroundings. Of course I didn’t live in the immediacy of this amazing state all the time but the fact that I could often call it up when needed was an astonishing gift.
Studying Zen had prepared me for the next topic; asking the question, ‘Does consciousness relate, and if so how, to a modern upstanding of physics’? The homeopath that I have mentioned before in this blog suggested I see the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know”. The film posited that our consciousness, more to the point our desires and expectations that show up in our consciousness, can directly affect the material world around us. This had been a topic that was briefly touched upon in my readings around the subject of spirituality. I was excited, could this be real, could our expectations actually change the so called material world? I realized that I didn’t really know that much about physics so I read many books directly on the subject of our modern understanding of the mechanics of the material world.
I read about how relativity works, about how quantum mechanics works and how both relate to our middle world described by Newton. I read about how Einstein’s relativity and quantum mechanics didn’t mesh with each other and how string theory may solve this. I picked up books about both western and eastern understandings and speculations on the nature of consciousness. Could we actually say why we are Awake? Could we actually say that the act of observing the universe would change the world in a desired, non-random way? In the end I have to say the best possible answer to this question is a good solid, ‘Perhaps’. Even if my central questions could not be fully answered, devouring the stacks of material I had acquired on this subject had changed my view of the world once more. Where Buddhism made things much more fluid, physics had made things a lot more dynamic. The universe was not really put together in the ways I had always believed it was. Existence is a lot more mysterious and a lot less absolute then than I had previously imagined.
The third subject, ‘evolutionary psychology and social dynamics as it relates to human interaction and attraction’ came to me in the form of ‘The Pick-Up Artist’ and relates directly to a topic I have mentioned repeatedly in this blog, social skills. A large portion of my time on this planet has been marked by a desire to greatly improve this area of my life. As talked about before it was my love affair with the great social elixir, alcohol that brought about MCS for me in the first place. Over the years I have hit on an occasional book or program in this area. Although these few items may have pointed me in the desired direction none of them really gave me the skill set I wanted. That is until a couple of years ago when I sat down to lunch with a female friend of mine.
I talked with her about how I was entering a career in sales. She told me that she had seen a reality TV show about a group of guys with absolutely no ability with women who were being taught by a Pick-Up Artist (PUA) named Mystery. Mystery set out to teach these men how to interact with the opposite sex. She told me that if I was interested in sales then this was the best display of teaching raw sales ability I would ever see. I went home that night and watched the show. What I saw blew my mind. I saw men with considerably less social game then I possessed who were learning things and getting results I never thought possible. I was enthralled. I watched more. By sunrise the next morning I had watched the entire season. My mind had been opened to a possibility that I never knew existed. Toward the end of the show those men that remained were doing things that I had only previously seen the ‘naturals’ do. I knew that what I had always wanted to know was indeed learnable. I could have the social interactions that others seamed to live naturally.
I dove into this learning with fervor. I read Mystery’s book. I scoured the internet for any other information I could find. I discovered that there was an entire underground network of people know as the ‘seduction community’ who had devoted years to unraveling the technology of teaching men how to interact not only with women but all people. I found the works of David DeAngelo, the works of Neil Strauss, the works of Ross Jefferies and much, much more. I read every book I could get my hands on, I watched every video I found and I listened to every audio file I could scrounge. I spent the better part of the next two years taking in every scrap of knowledge I came across. It helped my sales career tremendously. It changed the way I interacted with both women and men. It gave me a perspective I had never before known and it dissipated the belief that other people simply had some social prowess that I could not posses. I knew for the first time in my life that the social success I had always wanted was the result of learning an acquirable skill set and not some accident of fate that had passed me by.
If Buddhism and Physics had made things fluid and dynamic then these social leanings made the world navigable. Just as a surfer could learn to find the way in an ocean wave, I could learn to find the way in the ebb and flow of human interaction. My lifelong goal of feeling one with the social world around me could be gained.
The understandings I gained by studying this material healed something profound inside of me. Within my life there had been a deep ache, a wound that would simply not heal. In fact this pain had been there so consistently that I didn’t even consciously realize it existed until I was twenty. Over the summer that year I took a seminar series called ‘Context’. Context was a series of classes and retreats designed around: personal growth, self discovery, and building success oriented life skills. I learned things about myself and other people that amazed me. The deep sense of unworthiness or ‘I Suck’ that had been there my entire life was momentarily gone. I felt a sense of internal ease that I had never known before. I experienced that sense of euphoria one feels when a physical pain suddenly disappears. But a few months of learning could not undo a life time of emotional habit. The deep ache came back in a relatively short time. The only difference was that having the ache gone for a time made me acutely aware of its moment to moment existence when it returned.
I have talked in previous posts about where this pain came from (early childhood issues around my relationship with my parents and their complete lack of social teachings). During the years of recovery I have done several things that have lessened this pain but it never fully disappeared. It would often manifest itself as memories of every social failure I have ever known. A painful replay of each perceived awkwardness. But after studying the ‘seduction community’ material something changed. Suddenly I saw that my past perceived failures were not caused by some inherent flaw in my being but rather a flaw in my social knowledge. No longer did I see my past as ME being rejected but simply a rejection of my social skill set at the time. What had been rejected is what I knew and not who I was. In fact I could on a daily basis take what I had learned and create a new social experience for myself. Each day I could prove to my inner beliefs that the creation of positive interactions with all sorts of people could be made. I had for the first time in my life the experience of not only the pain going away but also the certainty that I possessed the skills to make sure it never came back. For the last two years I have been free in a way I have not previously known.
Just as the material I read when studying Buddhism all said that the real learning comes from practice, the material I have studied around social interaction has said the same thing. Getting knowledge is an important part of the process but the real learning happens ‘in-field’ actually talking with the people I desire to interact with. Since Amy has gone off to collage I am now free to practice my new found social knowledge in a way I have not yet allowed myself. I can go out, talk to all sorts of people and have the freedom to see where these interactions may take me.
So what the heck does all of this have to do with my present MCS bump in the road? I have the knowledge to go out and practice being social in a way I have only previously dreamed of, but… I don’t want to right now. I have spent most of my time since Amy has left not feeling well from an MSC point of view. I have all too often been spacey, tired, and decidedly not charming. My ability and desire to live this new experience of social interaction has been temporally put on hold. I am finding this increasingly frustrating. Although I am grateful for the day to day recovery from this temporary setback, this has kept me from truly thriving in the realm of the social. I look forward to my present setback being put behind me and exploring a new chapter of thriving in my life.
*If need be I will also do what I can to strengthen my internal state. As I have talked about before this it can be done by returning to the homeopath & naturopath, perhaps fasting, and researching what else may be needed.
