The Yellow Brick Road to Synchronicity

 

This piece was written several years ago, while I was still teaching. It is longer than my usual stuff, but holds a great deal of purpose and intent, which will become obvious with the reading. My apologies for the lenth.

For several years now, I have believed that I am on some sort of parallel wavelength with the author, Dean Koontz. Yes, he of the psychological thriller and paranormal horror genre of novels. I can even point out the exact moment it began and why I came to this rather unusual quasi-philosophical bent about my life experiences. And before anyone gets the wrong idea, no, Mr. Koontz is not dependant on me, or my experiences, for his plotlines, characters, or even sometimes uncanny way of seeing things. He’s totally on his own there.

We have never spoken or shared any communication other than that of a solitary reader immersed in a well-crafted story. There is one exception on that last statement. I did, at one point, write and tell him that he saved my life literally and figuratively. He did not respond, either because he gets those kinds of messages quite frequently, or because he took one look at my missive and decided I was a red-eyed drooling fan of Kathy Bates’ proportions (Movie: Misery), or a deadly spy from the Stephen King adulation society.

Just in case Mr. Koontz should one day read this little essay, I assure him and all other readers, I outweigh Kathy Bates and have absolutely no quarrels with any of Koontz’s written outcomes. That’s the very reason I got out of that other author’s texts and began my soulful journey through Koontzville. I call it soulful, because of that parallel path I mentioned above. A path highlighted by synchronistic moments of “aha” enlightenment (at least, that is my interpretation of my own experience).

There were several years when I refused to read anything with the Koontz moniker on it. In the earlier days, I had read one of his books, The Bad Place, and decided I didn’t want to give my space and time to anyone who even seemingly danced with the idea that incest could, or would, produce slavering insanity or monsters. Having spent half of my life dealing with the victims of this and other types of physical/sexual abuse, I was appalled at the implications I found there. My idol (I am a veracious reader) had seemingly feet of clay. I was so disappointed, yet determined to not allow those kinds of misguided ideas (done, or so I thought, for titillation and profit) to mar my own and others’ very real and painfully healed experiences. I quit Koontz cold turkey. Wouldn’t even pick up and read the outer covers of his novels that lined the bookshelves where I shopped, and for numerous years, worked.

Then I found my own Bad Place inside the walls of my own little rented house. I had a very loving relationship with an incest victim who also suffered from DID/MPD. For those of you who are not familiar with those diagnostic terms they mean: Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder. For nine of our years together, we were bound by friendship and a link that I can only call soul-matedness. Although not sexual in content, this was the most intense relationship I had ever known, as well as the most rewarding and satisfying to me personally. In the tenth year, she fragmented and life became a living horror of deception, crisis, chaos, confusion, and yes, panic and fear.

After she left, I simply shut down. Went numb, except for periodic bouts of pain induced rage that dissolved into sorrow so deep, I didn’t think I’d ever climb out of it. I was, for all intents and purposes, functionally dysfunctional. I only moved when it was absolutely necessary and otherwise, sat on my bed or in a chair, turned inward, always seeking something solid to hang onto because I was fairly certain I had fallen off the very edge of the earth and would continue to descend forever into deeper and deeper darkness. Put bluntly, I was suicidal, but so numb, I was unaware of it on any level.

For the better part of a year, I stayed in this state. Unable to do much except give lip service to work or home, and isolating myself from friends who no longer made sense to me, or to my peculiar sense of unreality. Perhaps, I might have continued on this course, but my mother became very ill and I went to stay with her and help her through a terrifying hospital bout and recovery from an infection on her spinal column. I stayed in her apartment when I wasn’t at the hospital, or the nursing home, where she stayed after being released from the former.

During one of those long summer evenings after the nursing home visitation hours were complete, I drove to Shopko, thinking to get myself something to read to pass my time. Once in the store, the only thing that appealed to me in the least bit were two Koontz novels, and for the life of me, I couldn’t think why I hadn’t read one in so long. So, I purchased both of them, and settled down in Mom’s living room to read.

The first novel was Intensity. The story of a woman who became aware of a young girl captured and held captive by a maniacal serial sex killer. She doesn’t know the girl, and only moves on a hunch to follow the evil predator to his lair, where she intends to save this total stranger. Throughout the story, she does things she has never dreamed she could do, finds a strength inside of herself, she may have only hoped might exist. And yes, she saves the girl, brings her home, and begins the process of becoming her principle supporter and caregiver. The girl, so shut down by the trauma she has survived is dissociative to a very high degree, but together they will put all the pieces back in place.

Koontz ends the novel on a philosophical, almost metaphysical plane by having the main character realize that she has dangerously and carelessly risked her life for another human being. That action of careless risking, Koontz tells us, is perhaps the only one we are put on the face of the earth to partake in. The only one that counts.

I was struck forcibly and deeply with the relativity to my own ten year experience with the young woman who had shared my home, my life, and everything I had to offer. I had carelessly risked, and had lost. There were a few scenes within the novel that were so closely related to my own experience that I felt goose bumps on my skin as I read them. It was only after closing the book that I finally remembered why I had stopped reading the author’s writings. It amazed me to know that he had grown so much in the intervening years. Not so much that he had grown, but perhaps had come into contact with something similar and put away that earlier identity. In my mind, and my eyes, he had redeemed himself, perhaps doing some of that careless risking he had written about.

That very personal experience meant that I grabbed the second novel, Sole Survivor, with alacrity and a newly awakened focus that had been absent for over a year. This was the story of a man who lost his only child and his wife in a mysterious plane crash. I know the plotline, but what affected me most deeply were the descriptions the author detailed of the man’s grief process. They so matched my own, that by the second or third chapter, I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that I was supposed to read this book. Read, and see my own convoluted feelings, and shattered thought processes. Watch myself (through the lens of the main character) driven into the ground by a pain that is best described as inexplicable.

In the book, the man gets some support from members of a grief group. Other parents who have lost a child. As I turned the last page, I suddenly knew that I had been suicidal and was still in danger from the grief process that had been forced upon me. There, on the last page, was the National Telephone Number of the grief support group mentioned in the story. Without hesitation, I immediately walked over to the phone and dialed the number. This was completely out of character for me: to place myself at the mercies of complete strangers, hoping they might understand. To do it long-distance and from my Mother’s phone was unthinkable, but I wasn’t thinking just moving.

Connecting with another human being, I haltingly tried to explain why I was calling, and was told, “I’m sorry, we can’t help you. No one died.” Obviously aware of my very fragile connection, the person on the phone gave me another number to call that might help me. Again, I dialed and haltingly explained my situation which sounded, even to my own ears as close to crazy and nonsensical as can be expected. Once again, I was gently informed that I couldn’t be helped because “No one died,” and was given yet another referral.

For someone who had just spent the last year isolating herself, avoiding any and all real contact as much as possible, I find it hard to believe that I continued this process through four phone calls scattered all over the US. On the fourth phone call, yet another woman listened to my sorry little recital, only to tell me once again that I couldn’t be helped and for the same reasons. In my head, I could hear myself thinking, “Okay, I am beyond help, maybe no one has died yet, but soon, real soon because I am dying right this moment.”

Almost as if she heard my thoughts, the woman on the other end of the phone apologized and said, “I can only tell you one thing that has helped me throughout my own grief process. Keep telling your story until you don’t need to tell it anymore.”

Amazingly enough, I heard her words and felt them settle deep inside of me. That day, I began to write again. Something I hadn’t been able to do for almost a year. The pen was just too heavy to pick up, and there had been a total absence of any words to make it move across the page. I had been a writer for years. Keeping a journal on a daily basis and finding it an anchor through most everything. When she said that I must tell my story, I knew exactly what she meant. She had said the only words that made any sense at all to me.

My Mother came home from the hospital and I returned to my little rented house and my computer. I spent months exploring my feelings, my thoughts, my memories. Sometimes for six hours a day, I would sit and type out the words, just letting them take me to whatever destination they wanted to find. Thousands of pages, connections, insights, and deep, deep unthinkable emotions stained the paper as I brailed my way back up to the surface of my own life.

In the years since then, I have continued to write and now teach others to do the same type of exploring into the darker shadows of their existence. I refer to my self-generated courses as Writing Based Personal Growth Classes, often taking part in the exercises myself, because I have found that I am still not done telling my story and learning from my own experience.

I have also acquired almost all of Dean Koontz’s novels, rereading many of them and finding an endless array of synchronistic “aha” moments in the reading. Normally, I don’t reread novels. These I have and even, at times, more than once. And with each reading, I find something that applies to the place I am in almost as dramatically as the two I have mentioned here.

I have my own definition of synchronicity. To me, it is when two or more diverse elements come together to illumine, if only for a moment, the path we are journeying on. They, these elements, seem almost to collide and bring a message that I am in the right place, doing the right thing.

Recently, I have been involved in encouraging others to explore the relationship between fairytales and childhood books to their own experiences. We form our worldview and our coping mechanisms very early in life and they are often based in those children’s stories where we identify with princes, princesses, trolls, magicians, witches and wizards. In going through this material with two different groups at the same time, I have rediscovered new meaning in my life through the story of Dorothy and Toto in the Land of Oz.

I have, right along with my students, struggled to find and identify with the meanings and metaphors in the roles of the characters within the story, most specifically the Wizard who lives in the Emerald City. To me, he had only ever been a phony, and I had no desire to see him in my own existence. However, my students, having learned well the lessons I came to teach, took the time to gently explain the errors of my skewed and stubbornly resistant perspective. They showed me the Wizard who lives inside of me, not a phony, but a mentor who, because she has been in the same space, constantly tells others that the answers lie within, if we learn how to be still and listen to the telling of our own story.

Last week, I bought three new paperback books to read, a real treat. While in the book section, I found the most recent Dean Koontz novel, In the Light of the Moon. I saved it for last, wishing to savor and anticipate the experience. Have been reading it for two days. Last night, about half way through the book, I found this quote, coming out of nowhere:

Not only weren’t they in Kansas anymore, Toto, they weren’t in predictable Oz, either, but adrift in a land where there were sure to be greater wonders than yellow brick roads and emerald cities, more to fear than wicked witches and flying monkeys.

Thank you, Mr. Koontz, for once again, shining a light on the yellow brick road over which I travel, and for being the Wizard, hiding behind the curtain of your well conceived words.

If I should die, think only this of me:

She wrote it all down,
every single word,
never swerved
from her purpose
or intention,
even when that meant,
carelessly risking
everything.

 Elizabeth Crawford 10/26/10

 The last stanza is for Carry On Tuesday Prompt #76 http://carryontuesdayprompt.blogspot.com/

The prompt is the opening lines (in Italics above) from Rupert Brookes’s Soldier.