Palm Sunday, 2010.

He says he needs me to go ahead and do it — to reclaim myself. He says it is important for the world. I dream that he’s telling me the secret, he’s telling me how to do it, but I cannot remember when I wake up. I know I already know. I am so stubborn. The story of misery remains so attractive. Today I am carrying palm fronds in the rain, afraid to show my face in my own church. The priests wear martyr’s red, and I will not even submit to be seen by unstrange eyes, afraid of the questions that may be asked.

The same notebook, next page, a year later:

I have had nothing to say for a length of time now.

I find myself trapped in spaces that I can no longer see because I have spent so much time in them that the objects have erased themselves. They have been erased from every angle, they have not been rearranged in so long. I do not touch them, not even with my eyes.

I cannot leave my cell because the lady will see me go and she will know that I was here and she will ask where I am going and I won’t be able to explain why I am going now and why I did not go before.

These objects used to have meaning to me, they used to remind me who I was. I think if I could still see them, they might tell me again.

I have stopped trying to remember. The one thing I remember about the secret is that it cannot be remembered — you have to rediscover it for the first time.

They say sadness does something to your memory, it goes in and cuts out all the joyous bits and sews all the dark bits together so well that even the seams don’t show. Would you believe I have been so happy I’ve frightened people away?

My father says when he was seized by joy the whole world looked different, the colors more vivid, a walk through the woods became an incredible sensory experience.

The things they tell me to do are so simple: turn on this light, look into it. Cut out a white square, tape it to the wall, try to see it without distortions: just a square. See the distortions.

Right now the only thing I can remember from my entire childhood is the sting in my palm from running it backwards up a sprig of baby’s breath. A handful of petals. I threw them into the air, they landed in my hair like snowflakes, like a wedding, did it over and over again, I never ran out of flowers, my hand was pink and raw but never bled. That, and the grasshoppers we had, the ones that were the size of your hand. Everything in relation to hands, to the body. But haven’t I told these stories before and isn’t that what it is I’m remembering?

Did you know I have not cooked a meal in 9 months, that I haven’t made love in nearly two years. It is so strange how much I used to want everyone to know everything about me, but at the same time I’ve always been so secretive, I’ve always been afraid, I’ve always been hiding, afraid of being seen, afraid of the questions that will be asked.

If I hadn’t had so many choices, would I have been better off? With a 9-yr-old, a 6-yr-old, can you imagine? The other thing I remember is standing in front of my mother and grandmother in a room in the Holiday Inn, they were smoking their cigarettes and drinking their coffee and wear their beige and white colors and I must’ve been one of those ages myself, my performance was standing before them listing everything that was wrong with me until I cried. One eye is bigger than the other. I do not love anyone as much as I want to be loved. One thing after another until I was sobbing, and they would ask what else, and they could not help but burst out laughing. The told me they loved me as they laughed at me. Remembering this, my mother said I was one of the only people in the world who could break her heart and crack her up at the same time, and isn’t that what life is all about, isn’t that the secret to everything?

It really seems that all art now is about time, about the future.

Last summer I went to a party in Williamsburg, the kind of party where both illegal absinthe cocktails and tater tots were being served and there were random Ouija boards and 1980′s hair/makeup/accessory kits aimed at preteen girls lying around on the floor for entertainment. A guy was walking around in a gorilla suit. You know: Williamsburg. The purported theme of the event, which also included an art exhibition of some sort, had to do with epiphanies. Everyone was asked to write an epiphany on a nametag and stick it on their chest. Being the kind of person who basically lives for an opportunity to write a personal epiphany on a “my name is” sticker, I had one at the ready. It was Hell is standing in heaven with your eyes closed, or some variation on that theme. My boyfriend-at-the-time thought about it for a while and then wrote Epiphanies are hard on his. I thought this was a bit of a cop-out, and maybe it was, but more recently I’ve been thinking that this understanding that epiphanies are hard really is an epiphany in it’s own right.

I’ve been thinking about how to deal with epiphanies or insights (which we all have from time to time, including you) once they arise, and the various pitfalls I’ve experienced.

There are many different facets to the universe, and thus myriad angles on the truth and possible insights to be had. All genuine insights must be interconnected in some way, but different people have different cultural backgrounds, genetics, languages, propensities, karma, etc, that allow them to see certain things more or less clearly, and to uncover different false assumptions about the world. Like many people, I seem to have some particular insights I’ve been “working with” for quite a long time.

I’ve written about this many times, but the insight that has seemed most prominent in my life (which is not to say that it really belongs to me in any way) is that I’ve been able to see, to different degrees, from a fairly young age, that the commonly-held belief that pain and suffering are purely negative states is a mistake. Just that, that simple insight, that there is some value in suffering, that it shouldn’t always be avoided at all costs, has had an enormous impact on my life, with deep and profound implications for everything from my sex life to my religious practices.

I’m incredibly grateful for this and every other insight I’ve been fortunate enough to experience, and I’m sure that it really is true, but I’ve experienced a lot of pitfalls with this. Here are three post-epiphany mistakes I’ve made that I think apply to how epiphanies are hard in general.

1. Overreacting. This is huge, and it’s related to what’s called the zeal of the convert. Suddenly, this idea that used to seem true (e.g., suffering is bad) has been debunked, we have more room to move without the wrong idea/assumption clinging to us, a weight is lifted, we feel better, and it’s great. However, it is very easy to then swing too far in the opposite direction. Yes, it is true that suffering isn’t always bad, however, it is certainly not true that suffering is always GOOD. Running from suffering and pain is often a big mistake, but deliberately seeking out suffering and pain is just as big a mistake. A more complete understanding is that suffering is neither bad nor good. If you overreact, you just wind up just replacing one false belief with another, and soon the freshness of the insight you had is lost.

2. Overconfidence, and overgeneralizing. OMG, I had an epiphany! A real live epiphany! Therefore, I must be super brilliant and insightful and plugged into the way things really are. I probably know everything there is to know about the issues of suffering and pain and aversion and attraction and I should go out and share my vast understanding with everyone I know so that they are not lost in the same delusions I was lost in before I had this epiphany and became enlightened. Um, no. This attitude is a huge mistake. Even if you have seen something, deeply, the vastness of what your epiphany is pointing to is so far beyond anything you can conceive of that adopting a stance of having completely understood anything, even just one tiny aspect of it, is ridiculous. Thinking they already know is exactly what prevents people (including you) from having further and deeper insights. You don’t already know. Everything you think you know could open up further, or close, or shift, at any second. That is the nature of things. Be humble, and be ready for the possibility that something that seems obvious for you today might seem completely opaque again tomorrow. This has happened to me countless times, but I still find myself making the mistake of overconfidence.

3. Ownership. This issue is somewhat more subtle, and I alluded to it before. It has to do with taking on the idea that an epiphany/insight is something that belongs to you, that it’s something you didn’t have in the past, and then you had, and in the future you might lose, which would be a disaster. Because we have egos, this kind of thinking is very difficult to lighten up on. However, meditation practice can help with this. The view that epiphanies belong to us is a mistake, because it turns them into objects, or ideas, rather than something fresh and present that we can work with experientially, right now. Thinking we can attain or “lose” an insight is exactly what leads to the subjective experience of “losing” it. Insights are never attained, they are simply seen. They were always already there.

Since I was a teenager, I have aspired to a practice of creating art and then burning it before it can ever be seen. The image of a writer burning her pages every night, but continuing to write in the morning with the knowledge that the words will not persist, that there will be no record, that no praise will ever come, there will be no reward, comes forward again and again as an artistic ideal. This is connected to a belief that the essential is found in the act of creation itself, a specific interaction between the self and something vast, and that the results should be abandoned. There is also a mistake in this though, because it isn’t the art that needs to be burned, but the artist. Results themselves are not a problem, but the hope of a particular outcome is.

Hope of results leads to anxiety and paralysis. My ideas about the effects of my actions, the very ones that I use to justify non-action, are oversimplified and mistaken.

Often I find myself keeping everything hidden, even from myself. If something slips out of my grasp, I try to hide the evidence, shoving it out of sight. I’m afraid to look at these little fragments. They’re stashed in corners, scrawled on the backs of envelopes I happened to have in my bag. They’re in undated, truncated text files with odd names that will make them hard to identify or search for. They’re thrown away and forgotten.

I’ve spent a great deal of time in painful confusion, surrounded by people who could have used my help, but unable to reach out to them, holding myself so far at a distance because I was so certain of my ability to infect. Usually, but not always, I’m aware of my own confusion and desperately want to erase it or at least hide it. I’ve closed myself off in a tiny box because I believed that was the best way to protect the world. I’ve assured myself that silence is a virtue, because I was so afraid of being wrong and misunderstood. I’ve submitted to inertia and allowed precious connections to fall away. I’ve refused to listen to anything else but a listing of my offenses played on repeat. I have wasted so much time indulging in guilt.

In times like these, I often have the thought that I am not alive, not hooked into my own experience. It’s as if everything is dulled and obscured, both memories and present experience of the world. The inability to recall details of my past is even more noticeable to me than my lack of attention in the present. And there is also a sense of being erased from the future. In order to preserve this illusion, I cannot speak, cannot take action, because that might prove the existence of who I am. This should be an lesson that past and present and future are also simultaneous, they all collapse together.

I have a sense that something has been ruined, and sometimes it seems that the cause is familiarity. Once a space has become crusted over with habits, I can no longer see it, I cannot move inside it. The same applies to my own body — How do I delete these extra layers, or at least stop adding new ones? New ideas about what cannot be done, new reasons for doom. I build the boxes and insert myself in them, folding myself up smaller and smaller, with a goal of total disappearance. I cannot remember that I must be beyond the box in order to construct it and to see it, and therefore the thing in the box cannot be all of who I am.

The stories I have the greatest desire to tell all deal with secret things, with love, and sex, and violence, moments of pain and vulnerability and death, with seduction and abandonment, with fragile worlds that disappear. I’ve argued for the value of trauma and suffering, that the path can be found in the very mess we hope to be lead away from. I think this is true. But the line between mysticism and masochism, if it exists, is thin, and my obsession with the intersection can pull me away from reality.

When it becomes a memory, even lightness takes on an incredible weight.

Standing, again, at the threshold, I am filled with terror. I am afraid that, this time, I will simply decide that door is locked, so I will not have to open it.