The Varnished Untruth

by Stephenson, Pamela

  Classic existential angst . . .

  All very well for you to say. It may not seem that bad to you, but it was really a horrible, horrible feeling. My feet didn’t seem to be properly on the ground. Later on, I learned that I was actually experiencing a pre-psychotic state.

  Derealization? A perception that things going on around you in the world are not quite real?

  That’s it. Really nasty sensation. Bit like the time I tried magic mushrooms in Bali, only, back then, it was deliberate and there was added vomiting. I even experienced a couple of full-blown panic attacks – terrifying! I didn’t realize what was happening to me, and thought it might have been a heart attack, until I recorded my symptoms later and looked them up:

  Portrait of a Panic Attack

  Butterflies in stomach

  Worthlessness – sense of

  Despair

  No power

  Panicky

  Numb

  Glazed

  Sick (nauseous)

  Short of breath

  Lethargic

  Unable to move much

  Stunned

  Fundamentally arrested

  Hmmm. If you’d recognized your symptoms while you were experiencing them, it would have helped assuage them; that’s the first step in the treatment for panic attacks – helping the sufferer recognize exactly what’s occurring . . .

  Yes! As it was, I thought I was dying! Afterwards, though, at least I vaguely knew I was at the beginning of a terribly painful healing process. I clung to the belief that eventually I would feel better; if I’d not had that hope, I don’t know how I would have kept going.

  Aside from the therapy you were receiving, did you manage to find some method of soothing yourself?

  Well, meditation, poetry, prose . . . and I started painting. Oh, and this was so weird, I became obsessed with quarks – you know, the basic building blocks of sub-atomic particles? I painted abstract impressions of them. Now, that may seem way off-centre but, in fact, it made a lot of sense. See, scientists had named some of those quarks, but they didn’t really understand their attributes so they gave them names that suggested kinds of – well, they used the term ‘flavours’, such as ‘charmed’ and ‘beauty’. But here’s the kicker – the quark that had been named ‘truth’ was still waiting to be discovered! In other words, they knew it existed, but just couldn’t find it! I didn’t understand the connection at the time, but now it makes perfect sense that I should have become so interested in those particles, it was a metaphor for what I thought I needed most at that time – to discover the elusive truth about myself.

  Pamela, were you aware that quarks are associated with strong nuclear forces?

  Hmmm, well, I certainly felt I could explode at any moment. It must have been rather difficult for Billy to deal with my considerable unrest at that time. He couldn’t possibly have understood it, and probably felt quite threatened by what I was going through. I was undergoing massive change and was not emotionally available to focus on him as much as I had in the past. In those days, it wasn’t so good to be the King. He did his best to show appropriate empathy: ‘Hey Sugar Tits, I suppose a fuck’s out of the question?’

  I became very interested in dream work, too, and took a DreamTending course at a Jungian Institute in Santa Barbara. Around that time I dreamed I was in a huge living room – rather like our one in LA. In this room there was a fascinating woman, Vigdis Finnbogadóttir, who was the Icelandic president from 1980, and the first woman in the world to be elected as head of state in a democratic election. I introduced her to Billy. She had a beautiful, spirited, white horse with her, who I was told was married. I wondered what that meant for a horse. Suddenly it started rearing up and the task of taking it outside to the beautiful, green, rolling hills we could see through the large windows fell to me. I tried to hold its reins but it resisted and reared up violently, jerking its head sideways. I completely lost control of it just before I woke up.

  What are your thoughts about the meaning of that dream?

  I think I was struggling with a personal metamorphosis within the context of my marriage. I had spent so many years focusing on my husband – all the abuse he’d had to deal with in his own family of origin, and his subsequent issues – alcoholism, self-destructiveness, his own sense of unworthiness – but now I was desperately searching for meaning and peace in my own life.

  I found inspiration in unusual places, unlikely people . . . For example, on a trip to New York I visited the Matisse exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and was profoundly moved by the painter’s life and work. They had designed the exhibition so his art was displayed in chronological order, and so at first I wandered past his early work – canvases he had painted from his parents’ house – finding it dark, repressed, almost sinister. But, as I walked on, more colour began to appear. The paintings were still naïve, with an unfinished quality, yet they had a kind of raw confidence about them. Soon after, I noticed the influence of other artists such as Turner and Cezanne, and the impact that fauvism, cubism and even Persian miniatures had had on the young Matisse. I found myself emotionally drawn to the man and his work. His frustration was palpable; his struggle to find himself – as a man and as an artist – spoke to me. I became aware of some of his personal issues – including his marital ones. His painting ‘The Conversation’ really got to me, with him in his pyjamas and his wife in a robe – him standing, her sitting – clearly more of a confrontation than a gentle chat. Oh yes, Billy and I had been there. Then Lorette, Matisse’s muse and mistress, appeared in many different guises and I became more and more intrigued about what was really going on in his life, and how on earth he had managed to keep those women from ripping each other’s eyes out.

  The landscapes from Couleur, France, rendered during Matisse’s fauvist phase, held my attention less strongly, and the same was true of his New York paintings and those with a Moroccan influence, but when I came across ‘Dance (I)’ and ‘Dance (II)’ my heart began to leap. I found them joyful, alive and free, even though they’re unfinished.

  Now there’s an unconscious subtext there – a strong connection with the role of dancing in your own life . . .

  Wow, yes! Didn’t realize that before. But, anyway, eventually I reached the room that contained the really famous works like that one of the woman with the guitar. Anyway, all the ones I recognized were hanging there. But I was shocked to learn that, at that point, Matisse was pretty much bed-ridden. He was painting with an elongated brush on canvasses attached to his bedroom walls. Incredible – the pinnacle of his work as a painter achieved under such challenging conditions! Reluctantly, I turned the corner to the last galleries, expecting to see the sad, fading work of a dying, eight-four-year-old with a physical disability – but instead I was met with ‘Jazz’! For me, that was a moment of epiphany. I burst into tears. Instead of what I was expecting – decline and death – here were Matisse’s most vibrant, most daring, most colourful and most exciting works. Aged eighty-four and while bed-ridden the man had found cut-outs – his best medium. He could barely hold his scissors! I cried for hours. There is hope, I realized. Even at the end of one’s life. If all else fails, at least it wasn’t too late to achieve what I fundamentally needed – an understanding of myself, and a way out of all my pain. I wrote in my diary:

  I am devastated, grateful, humble.

  Now that I was imbued with renewed hope, my ambition for happiness became utterly unrealistic. Yes, as my Christmas wish list at the end of December 1992 reveals, I was greedy for a tad more than a pair of high-heeled Manolos:

  Passion, Freedom, Truth, Love, Joy, and Grace.

  Was that really too much to ask? At New Year we went skiing in Aspen, Colorado, as guests of the Davises. Well, the kids and I were skiing; Billy was standing by the skating rink, giggling at everyone who fell over. Aspen is hedonistic, crowded and ritzy; I found the place did not match my focus on spiritual and psychological growth, as my ‘New Year’ poem illustrates:
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br />   Plunging down the ice-mountains

  I forgot to count the weeks,

  Or inquire if coloured feather-masks

  And sequin-chested women

  Could hold off flash-flood fury.

  Then, drowning in shock-waves from shattered treaties,

  I stripped the gingerbread house;

  And, comforted by loathing,

  Joined the conga-line of corpses

  Hallowing the strut.

  Yet remembering today the touch of concrete

  How can I now beat my drum?

  Or crush the impossible sadness

  Of a very long time from now?

  Oh yes, I was still in big trouble – and I don’t just mean because my poetry was crap. ‘Take control,’ I wrote in my diary. TAKE CONTROL . . . TAKE CONTROL! Another five months of therapy later, I was still desperate and questioning everything:

  So what is it? Is this truly the beginning of my taking control of my life? Of beginning to ‘tell’ as Sartre put it? Is indeed ‘adventure’ even possible the way my life is structured now? How did I manage to get to this point? I ask myself this so often now. How did I manage to sleep-walk for so many years? Chakrapani [a Vedic healer I consulted] mentioned ‘self-deception’? How exactly am I deceiving myself? It could have meant many things. Whatever it is, it is cruel, and it inflicts the brightest pain, the most pathetic need. Look, at the end of the day, I’m only a little teenager who never got anything like the love and support she needed – and I’m not really big enough to take care of all these other people – WHAT THE FUCK EVER MADE ME THINK I COULD??

  But after another three months, I was beginning to turn a corner:

  Well, it’s over. I feel it. It has to be. Talked again about ‘duality’. Thank God I understand that now. Apparently I can cope with it. It makes a lot of sense. Question: balance – could I ever achieve that?

  I’m excited about what’s happening internally. Suddenly I feel . . . released . . . so there’s the possibility my mind and psyche can develop without guilt or self-doubt . . .

  And, finally, on 4th October,1993, I wrote the following:

  I woke up this morning and this was my first thought (I looked at my painting of the previous night – the most joyful I’ve made):

  ‘I’ve been sad for many years. No blame. A state of my own making – self-delusion and so on – but now it feels as if I’ve been set free – spiritually, mentally, physically.’

  Then I noticed how loudly and happily the bird was singing outside my window . . .

  Thanks to the brilliant help I had received – and my own perseverance – I was a different woman from the one who had first arrived in LA. Not yet in optimum psychological health, but a million times better. Over the next year I continued to work in therapy – in parallel to my academic studies of psychology. And I tried other forms of healing, other courses – including empowering physical exercise like Tae Bo – different types of meditation, the Avatar ‘creative living’ Course, Buddhist retreats, tantra (it’s not just about sex!), Qigong, shamanic healing, motivational speakers like Marianne Williamson, Ayurvedic massage, self-hypnosis, acupuncture and Vedic Healing. Fuck me, I was turning into the cliché of a card-carrying, classic ‘me-generation’ Californian!

  Yes, but it seems to me as if you may have been trying to rework the teenage developmental stage that, due to your trauma, you failed to finish . . . Trying various styles and self-definitions in an effort to find out who you really were . . .

  Mmm . . . I even went back to church, albeit to a kind of all-inclusive place of worship that welcomes everyone from Sufis to Satanists. I know it all sounds pretty weird, but I don’t believe it’s ever a bad thing to be a seeker, open to all kinds of learning. And my approach to all those different disciplines was simply to take what was useful and discard the rest. But, truthfully, while those things were interesting adjuncts to my healing, it was the long, hard work of undergoing psychotherapy that most effectively led me out of my malaise.

  Thankfully, I finally reached the point where I was not only resolved in my own mind, but ready to be of proper help to others. What I’d been through myself helped me understand others – their pain, their despair, their anxiety, their struggles with relationships – and I felt confident about my ability as a psychotherapist.

  But in California in 1994 there was more turmoil to come – if not in my psyche, at least in my physical environment. While driving along the wide, palm-lined Santa Monica Boulevard one January afternoon, I felt a sudden urge to turn into the parking lot of a store I’d rarely patronized. It was a hardware store, one that sells everything from energy-saving light bulbs to barbecue sets. In a bit of a daze, I wandered inside. I was not consciously looking for anything in particular, but something drew me towards certain products. For example, there was a display of battery-powered torches and some emergency kits that all Californians are advised to keep in their homes in case of natural disasters. I already had one of them at home somewhere, but I imagined it was out of date so I picked up another – just in case. And some torches – one for each bedroom – as well as spare batteries and a set of emergency house lighting that I installed the minute I got home. Well, you never knew. Former host of The Tonight Show Johnny Carson once famously quipped: ‘Things are looking up in California – the mudslides have put out the forest fires.’ It was a bit like that.

  Where we lived in the Hollywood Hills, high above Universal Studios, the whole of the San Fernando Valley was stretched out below us. We could see the yellow smog line (I fancied we were above it, but I’m not entirely sure) and, in the summer, dark smoke from the forest fires sometimes blackened the sky. It never seemed like a particularly healthy place to live, but the line, ‘The air quality today could be hazardous to your health’ was usually delivered by such a pretty news anchor, with such a bright smile, it was easy to ignore the threat to one’s lungs. Jesus, what would we hear next? ‘The water’s toxic’? ‘There’s vipers in your mailbox’? ‘The zombies are coming’? ‘But have a nice day!’ Some people actually did keep axes in their cars in case of a zombie invasion . . . Or was it to ward off the junkies who tried to clean your windscreen at traffic lights? Who knows? LA’s a crazy, unpredictable town. And it enjoys a kind off perpetual summer, so driving the kids to school on a rare wet day was always hazardous. The oil build-up on the roads could easily send you into a skid, while rocks – even large boulders – were liable to topple on to the road. And there was a novel way to rub shoulders with your neighbours: whole houses had been known to slip down a hill.

  On 14th January 1994, on my way home from that hardware store, I suddenly decided to telephone my best friend from the car (in those days you were allowed to dial and drive). ‘Hi Sharon! I was thinking . . . You know, I think we ought to . . . um . . . get out of town this weekend.’ ‘Dunno honey, I’m kinda busy . . .’ Billy and Jamie were away, and so was Sharon’s husband Dennis. ‘C’mon! I’ll put the girls in the car and pick you and Kelly up around ten,’ I insisted. ‘We can drive up to Big Bear and see if there’s any snow. I’ll book a place. Bye!’

  I’d never done such a thing before. Why then? In the deepest recesses of my intuition, had I known something shocking was about to happen? Probably. Three days later, at 4.31am on Sunday morning, the beds in our Big Bear hotel started shaking violently. I immediately knew what it was – the dull rumbling and shaking of earth tremors were fairly frequent occurrences in LA – but this was different, far more powerful than I’d ever experienced. We all woke in great alarm. When the girls began to whimper, I clutched them tight and we all hung on for dear life. ‘When will it end?’ I remember thinking, ‘Is the building about to collapse? Should we try to sprint to the doorway?’ But we were being pitched about so precariously it was impossible to move off the bed. The shaking lasted nearly twenty seconds. I know that doesn’t sound like a long time, but when you’re on one of nature’s most challenging roller-coasters it seems like forever.

 
Once the shaking stopped, we turned on the TV and discovered that what became known as the Northridge earthquake had just occurred. Its epicentre was not far away, in Reseda, a city below us in the San Fernando Valley. Thankfully, in Big Bear we were far above the valley. The earthquake was given a ‘moment magnitude rating’ of 6.7, which was disappointing, in a ghoulish way. As Californians we had become pretty au fait with earthquake ratings and could usually guess pretty accurately what level we’d just experienced. ‘I bet this is a three!’ the kids would say as we crouched under a table (‘Drop, Cover and Hold’ was the rule). We would have predicted an eight for the Northridge quake but we learned later that it just seemed that high because the ground acceleration was one of the highest ever recorded in an urban area in North America, measuring 1.7g. The effects were felt as far away as Las Vegas, more than 220 miles from the epicentre. Fifty-seven people died, nearly 9,000 were injured, and the damage bill came to twenty billion dollars. There were endless, nerve-wracking aftershocks – I remember one particularly nasty one when the kids and I were watching a show in a Santa Monica theatre – and an outbreak of potentially lethal Valley fever, a respiratory disease caused by inhaling airborne spores that are carried in large clouds of dust created by seismically triggered landslides.

  But if we were nearly thrown out of bed in Big Bear, can you imagine what it would have been like if we’d stayed in LA? Thank God I installed the emergency lighting, because Jamie came back to the house unexpectedly and needed it when all the power went out and the windows shattered. Had I unconsciously predicted the quake? I suppose, I said to Sharon, if animals can do it, why not a sloth of a psychologist? For years after that she and other people around me got uneasy whenever I felt the urge to leave town.