Why I Started Trying to Follow The Law

by Mike Brown

“I want to be more honest,” I told my counselor. I’ve gotten used to talking to counselors, case workers, psychiatrists, nurses and nurse practitioners over the past two years. At this point I am down to just a few case workers, one counselor, and one psychiatrist. But so I told this counselor that “I want to stop lying, I want to stop cheating, and I want to stop breaking the law.”

“I think that’s a great idea,” the counselor said. “You’ve really been showing growth lately.” 

These people have all blurred together into an archetype, The Clinician, which I have internalized and incorporated into my ongoing process of self integration. That’s right folks I’m getting integrated. I recommend it. After all, we live in a disintegrating culture. We need integration. 

But I haven’t been working on myself as a means to working on the greater world. I’m not at a point in my life where I can fix the world. It looks like everyone else has that covered anyway. Let them handle it. I scarcely have power over myself. If I’d had power over myself to begin with I would not have ended up on the streets, or in a tent in the Sonoroa Desert for a year, or in one hospital for alcoholic organ damage, or in another hospital for methamphetamine abscesses, or in another hospital for co-occurring disorders that made me a threat to myself and others. I would not have been robbed countless times while passed out on train platforms or nodding off at bus stops. I would not have been arrested repeatedly. I would not have gotten my ass beat. Seen others die. Lost all those teeth. So before I get back to knowing everything about the world I’m going to get to know myself better so that I can get integrated. 

I have an extensive trauma history going back to early childhood, but now in middle age I’m at the point where I have a strange fondness for the worst things that have ever happened to me. Things like being raped or suffering through years of homelessness and addiction. Because now by the grace of God or some miracle of nature I’m actually happy and healthy and have hard won wisdom that allows me to practice a special kind of compassion specifically because I have suffered and healed. So when someone feels so alone in the world that they have become obsessed with murdering those closest to them and killing themselves; or if someone has seen their friend get murdered in front of them; or when someone has been cast out by friends and family after descending into their own personal hell of addiction and criminality; or if someone has been homeless, or incarcerated, or is haunted by having been victimized or having victimized others I can talk to them as an equal and try to help them get integrated. 

It’s important because all of these things can cause disintegration at a spiritual level and that can lead to pain, isolation, antisocial behavior and alienation from the worlds of work, family, friends and community. The end result of it all tends to be things like suicide, homicide, death by cop, institutionalization, incarceration, domestic violence, Hell on earth.

I’ve met more murderers than I can count at this point. Some of them did not get caught. Some of them needed a friend to confess to. This time of year always reminds me of the Christmas I spent with one young man who was lonely because neither babymom (he had two) wanted him around the kids. We were watching college football on his phone in his pickup truck in a gas station parking lot outside of Tucson and he confessed to me that he’d once killed five people for one of the cartels in Florida. He was young, only 30, and he cried like a baby as he told me. But I’ve really gone off on a tangent here. 

So I’m telling my counselor I want to be honest and follow the law. I wasn’t good at that before. I loved breaking the law. Now I’m working with the system. I’d been homeless. I got on Medicaid in the psych ward. I had to reapply when the new administration came in. I filled out new forms and did new interviews. Did the same for food and cash benefits. Then I moved to a new county and canceled my old food and cash assistance and applied for assistance in my new residence in New Jersey. 

But I ended up running into a snag.

“What happened with your general assistance?” my counselor asked me. “Why aren’t they renewing it again?”

“I told them about my bank account but I can’t access it or provide paperwork because I don’t have a valid photo I.D. or access to my old email accounts or phone numbers.”

“Why did you tell them you had a bank account?”

“I’m trying to be honest.”

“Oh good grief,” my counselor laughed. “You’re really serious about this thing.”

I said that I was.

“Well life is complex and involves compromises and you said you wanted to work on your black and white thinking.”

“I filed an affidavit saying I couldn’t access my bank account because I’d been homeless and living in institutions for a year. That will work.”

“Even if you’re being radically, rigorously honest, it’s okay to lie to the Nazis about hiding Anne Frank in your house and it’s okay to lie to social services about your bank account. It’s not like you aren’t broke.”

“I am learning by doing,” I said.

I grew up in a dishonest environment in Ridgewood, New Jersey. My dad was a gangster who cheated on my mom. One of the women he cheated with was my babysitter who also sexually abused and stalked me. All the adults around me were addicts, criminals and sexual predators. Lying was de rigueur from a young age. Lie to teachers, lie to doctors, lie to extended family, lie to social workers, lie to the kids at school, and most importantly, lie to yourself and the ones you love, because the real enemy and the most dangerous thing is the truth itself. Not the police or family services, though they are on the list; and not any potential scandal, though that is also on the list. The greatest risk is that the truth might bring us into contact with our own consciences, and that once it does we might never be able to lie to ourselves again. The suffering that would result from that would be worse than scandal, worse than prison, worse than death. 

This is a common theme in families like mine. You internalize the established ethos of dishonesty as a matter of psychic survival and end up convincing yourself that everyone else is the same and that nobody in the real world is actually happy, healthy, honest or decent. So by a young age I was a cynical alcoholic truant whose own family warned him against reading too much. It’s like they know that if you get too into Plato you might develop a fondness for Truth that could somehow infect the people around you and destroy everyone’s lives.

“So you filed an affidavit?” my counselor asked. 

“I thought you were raised not to leave a paper trail?” he joked. He knew my dad never had a bank account or owned anything in his own name. 

I felt comfortable around this counselor. He had done time in prison himself in the 80s. He’d seen a lot. His son had been murdered. His nephew had died of an overdose. He’d told me stories. He’d helped me get in touch with my conscience. 

“Right. To the point where I stopped caring about my own documents so that I haven’t had a valid photo ID for fifteen years.” 

Flash forward to a little later. I do have a valid ID now. After having spent years without a birth certificate, social security card, photo ID, car, job, residence or friends, I am working on becoming real on paper. This is part of my integration into society after having gotten to a place of integrity within myself. That was the hard part. I’d never really had much of a self. I’d always been unstable, prone to psychosis, bad at relationships, scared and scary. Ultimately I became a danger to myself and anyone around me and entered into a course of institutionalization that I am still involved in. I try to be honest. I try to follow the law.

I was born an outlaw and for a long time I took pride in being crazy and dangerous. But as pride often does this led me to fall pretty hard. In retrospect that was what I needed: to fall hard enough to shatter my own illusions about myself and the world so that I could wake up.

I work on telling the story now because I’m not the only one who felt like he didn’t deserve a home or a bed because he was victimized in his own bed in his own home; and I’m not the only one who ended up on the streets high on hand sanitizer, methamphetamine and fentanyl, telling people that nobody had ever loved me and that I wished I could actually summon up courage enough to shoot myself in the face; and I was not the only one who’d made bad decisions when I knew better and told myself that I didn’t have to take responsibility for my own life because I was the biggest victim in the world; and I was not the only one who thought it didn’t matter what I said or did anyway because I was essentially invisible; and I was not the only one who passed out on the sidewalk as people walked over me and wondered what might have happened in my life that had led to such a moment; and I was not the only one who’d been kicked out of place after place and been beaten up by cops and criminals both; and I’m not the only one who became a violent criminal and victimized others myself; and I’m not the only one who got arrested over and over again and got to the point where I liked it because at least someone was interested in what I did; and I’m not the only one who’s woken up on a gurney in an emergency room out of an alcoholic blackout before signing in and suddenly feeling like I might have found a way out; and I’m not the only one who actually started to find joy in life and see the beauty in small things and take delight in the presence of other people even when they were giant pains in my ass; and I’m not the only one who wants to tell the story without leaving any of the bad parts out just so that I can make the point that life is still beautiful and worth living and that the world and other people are far more beautiful than I used to think.

I’ve had to work at getting sober, trying to be honest, giving up dealing, stealing, violence, vandalism, whatever. I still jaywalk occasionally. Life is complex and involves compromises. I try to be honest and follow the law now because doing so over time has led me to a point of being able to tell who I am and what I’m supposed to do. I can be a good person. 

I’m not particularly good at pointing out what is wrong with the world. It works against me because I have a long history of pointing out the wrongdoings of others as a means of avoiding knowing myself through my own conscience. Deep down I was afraid that if I actually did know myself that I would suffer a fate worse than prison, worse than death. So I’m careful about that.

I’ve spoken with men who’ve been involved in scandals, who’ve gone to prison, who’ve murdered people. A good percentage of them suffer from the feeling that they have cast themselves out of human society and alienated themselves from their own consciences and loved ones by way of their actions. I’ve found that in being spoken to and listened to as if they were men and not monsters they got a glimpse of the light that was buried down at the bottom of it all. They saw that they had vast universes within themselves. Deep in the darkness they too had their stars and their heavens. When people who have been to the outer dark where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth somehow get to the point of seeing a little light in each other it can help them see the light in themselves and many others. This light can awaken a genuine desire to be good.

So when I talk to someone who’s trying to stay off heroin and hold down a job after drifting in and out of rehabs and halfway houses after doing ten years in prison for armed robbery or some shit, I tell him that the truth really can set him free. Because there is a thing that happens when you stop lying and worrying about getting caught. If you can get to where you’re not caught up with thinking about how to stay out of trouble you can find a measure of inner peace that allows for clarity and focus that leads to a more fulfilling and enjoyable life. 

In my experience anyway.

“So you have ID now and you have a sense of purpose and you like helping other people,” my counselor said.

“Yeah, it still feels weird. I actually have a speaking commitment tomorrow night at the big spooky looking mental hospital that looks like a castle.”

“Well you know what to do.”

“Yeah I just show up and tell my story so that other people realize that they’re not alone and that they can get better and have fulfilling lives and good relationships and shit like that.”

“Right!”

“I need a photo ID to get into the hospital,” I said. “But I can swing that now. And I answer the phone when people call now. And I have the keys to the church in Roselle Park, and people actually ask me for advice about life and death situations. How bad does your life have to be that you ask me for advice?”

“Be honest,” he said. “You like it.”

“Yeah I like it.”

“So you can access your bank account now,” he said.

“Yeah I got a new card and everything. I just took all my paperwork to the bank and talked to them. I hadn’t had access for eleven months or so.”

“So now you can give your bank statements to social services.”

“Absolutely not,” I said. I learned that lesson. “It’s all about complexity and compromise.”

Mike Brown is a middle aged public library enthusiast living at the YMCA in Elizabeth New Jersey.