I take Cary's point, in a follow-your-bliss kind of way. I arrive at a similar point, but more round-about, with cautions.

I know someone who in following his bliss is falling to many of his worst reactive inclinations. This is someone into self-improvement, as well, so his blindness is a little creepy.

In reading your letter I'm hearing a lot of trying to fulfill yourself by helping others. Helping others is healthy if at first you're fulfilled. But if you're acting out of your unhappiness,...

You talk about "the unlikely and meaningless circumstances of being alive on a planet". This is not happy talk. But it is precisely the unlikeliness of our being alive on a planet, the rare precious fewness of it, that gives it meaning; that here we have our short time to experience our days. It is not an either/or proposition, either aunt or do one of many other things. (Dysfunctional thinking?) You can do a number of them at approximately the same time. But if you are not operating out of your core, your found core, if you are not often in the one and only moment of experiencing vital life, it may well be pissing in the wind.

Not that you can't do aunting while you're straightening things out. The cautions of other letter writers are germaine, of course. But if you're helping while you're unhappy - Well, do you have it firmly in mind that helping others to do what they can or should be doing for themselves only helps their abilities atrophy? There's a word for that. Do you understand the ramifications of a needy person trying to fulfill others' needs to get one's own needs met? the round-about danger of it? Central is to give freely with no strings attached.

Is there addiction in your family?

Your heart's in the right place. Yes, it can be followed. It also knows, though, to go to places you might want to avoid.

Best,

Monty

(more, for free: google "Rabid Fanatic" +"Monty Johnston")

My breakthrough came at 44. Or within a couple years of 44, actually, once the gyz began to jell. (The breakthrough was not about success.)

Your lack of connection to years of co-workers stood out. Not quite contempt, but the saving grace of my years of scut work has always been more than a few of my dear co-workers. What delights. What delightful companions, shoulder to shoulder, doing this crap so many of us have done to survive.

To me the bottom line of any discussion of art and insanity - not that this is necessarily one of those - is that any art must have some real intimate contact with reality in order to resonate with people. That's my concern for you now. Our reality base, life on life's terms, though too often prickly, is not fundamentally contemptable. We live in it, we learn to look at it, touch it, breathe it.

At a certain point something came to me. I couldn't bear not recording it.

Your struggle now, though, seems to be between getting others to tell you what to do and you telling yourself what to do.

I stuck with my therapist (when I was 32), got familiar with the world, sang, and went to work. Advice? Protect your hearing. Protect it from the shamers, too.

Best,

Monty

(more, for free: google "Rabid Fanatic" +"Monty Johnston")

Late letter, and I've been pondering this since the beginning Thursday night. How do good journalists do it?

The following may be rude, and wrong, but I'll run it - Some years ago, visiting a friend and his family, I came into the living room full of them standing around and his mother was talking. It wasn't clear who she was talking to. Soon everyone, one at a time, slipped out, leaving her and me, her talking. She didn't seem to be talking to me. I mean, I didn't even know the woman. So I left.

This was, I admit, back in my drinking days. The story has been corroborated.

"I think, therefore I am," Decartes said, expressing a central pathology of the Western world. To many, ego is self; running your hard drive is self; monkey mind, as the Buddhists say, is self; rather than that experiential consciousness is self. Peter Ouspensky talked about the myth of continuous consciousness; that we think we're always awake and aware when we may in fact be lost in thought, or being motor mouths. Asleep, is what he calls it.

So, dear letter-writer, it's not clear how much you've been experiencing your dad, or your fella. From where I'm sitting, nothing matters till we let go of that which comes between us and what's important; till we're experiencing our experience. Meditation helps. Exercise too can bring one into the present, and therapy. I can't really tell about your drinking, but 12 Step programs also wake one up.

About medicine: When people say that one needs to changes one's electrochemistry, so take medicine, know that meditation, exercise, therapy, 12 Step meetings, and many other activities change one's electrochemistry. You may in fact need medicine, but there are things to do short of that.

My main question is about willingness: Do you really want to change? We keep the old mind spinning when we're afraid we'll disappear. Back to Descartes, that if thinking is existing, stopping thinking can, to many, mean ceasing to exist; if you don't yet know that full consciousness = existing. It can be very uncomfortable to patiently keep letting go of perpetual thinking. Our squirrel cage is after all an ego defense mechanism, and the world can look pretty raw at first without its protection; till one gets the hang of it; when things began to make sense; fall into place and make sense; when we intuitively come to know things that used to baffle us. See, the paradox is that the real thinking begins once we stop thinking.

Best,

Monty

(more, for free: google "Rabid Fanatic" +"Monty Johnston")