My official birthday is August 8th; that’s on all of my documents and papers. That’s the one we celebrate.

Privately, and until now, secretly, I celebrate a different date. October 1, 2, or 3rd, 2008. I remember it was the beginning of October, but I can’t say I remember the exact date. I do remember it was this time of year.

I heard the voice again; it comes around almost every year about this time. It whispers, “happy birthday.” When I first heard it, I thought it might be the voice of the two children we lost years ago. But that didn’t make sense.

Then I realized it must come from somewhere deeper inside of me.

I remember my actual birthday coincided almost precisely with the outbreak of the Great Recession; I won’t forget the terror I felt looking at the TV monitors at the San Francisco airport as I began one of my last book tours. Soon after, I began to see the world anew.

I’ve mentioned before that I have suffered from mental illness. I was in treatment for more than 30 years, analysts, psychologists, spiritual healers, drugs, the whole thing. I finally broke down completely during this time, got divorced, left the ordinary world, moved to the country, bought a farm, met Maria, and began the never-ending process of healing.

With mental illness, you can get better all of the time, but I don’t believe one can ever completely heal or forget yours. All around me, people celebrate long friendships, deep family ties, memories from school, outings with their parents. I don’t remember any of those things because I don’t remember much of anything 15 years ago when I built a happy, healthy, and primarily everyday life.

When they made that movie about me, I had devilish thoughts. If only they knew.

I realized this week that I’ve never even fully explained all of this to Maria, who often asks me about my life before us. And why should we? Oddly, there is not much to tell that I remember.

I have some memories, more come through now than before, but most of it is a blank. I don’t care to remember it. Twelve years ago, I opened my eyes, wailed to the universe, and began life over.

I am filled with gratitude; I know I am so lucky to be alive, have healed, and have rebuilt my life in the way I wished. I am sorry that I hurt several people along the way, some of who are dear to me, most of whom I will never remember.

I admit to some loneliness too, a sense of isolation sometimes, and aloneness beyond people.

Those wounds, I fear, will never heal. I know that few people as sick as I was get to recover as much as I have, which is not to say these ghosts and demons will not always be with me. But I never stop walking and running to the place where the hope is. I could be sleeping on a sidewalk somewhere. I shiver whenever I see them.

My shrinks, some of whom I still speak with, say I have done very well; I am healthier than most of the “sane’ patients that they treat. They praise my hard work and determination.

I’ve pretty much found and built the life I always wanted, with Maria’s help, but never quite know how to remember, blinded as I was by terror, anger, and extreme confusion. I see bits and pieces now.

I talk to my sister once in a while, but our relationship is complex; we trigger bad memories in one another,  and I am in touch with almost no one from my original family, and no friends, colleagues, neighbors, or anyone from my life before my breakdown and Maria.

I don’t have a single friend from before that I remember or know of; I can’t tell anyone I didn’t meet before moving up to the first Bedlam Farm. There is no memorabilia, no trace of my early life other than a notebook my mother kept of my writing scraps. I looked at it a few years ago but can’t do it again; I wonder if it was me.

I was a refugee from my own life, there is no one to tell me about it, and if there were, I don’t think I would want to listen.

I have few, almost no, memories of my childhood, my parents, or the friends and relatives and teachers in my life. I can’t recall their faces, names, or connections. I worked with thousands of people in my other life, and I can hardly remember a dozen of them. Some of them are already dead.

The shrinks say it is a trauma symptom. For me, my life did begin about 12 years ago.

But I don’t miss them; I have so much around me to love and be grateful for. The Gods put me through my paces and cut me some slack. And I have worked hard every day of my life to make good use of the time I have. I won’t lose track of my life again.

Maria marked the beginning of my return. I learned from her how to love and trust someone. It all began to work after that. That was the building block; I took it from there, as did she.

No one’s life is easy; life is not easy.

Some people are lucky, some not so fortunate. I feel fortunate. And I feel thrilled, and I never take contentment for granted because I never knew what it was. So many people – billions of people – have it harder than I did, but I don’t try and complete for suffering. We all suffer in our way; we all find joy and meaning in our way. We all know what pain is.

Today, while sitting and meditating in my soft chair, I heard the voice again say, “happy birthday, Jon, “and I thought I was dreaming; it startled me. It had to be me, speaking to myself.

How weird, I thought. I do believe in the subconscious, which I have been struggling with my whole life.

I know it’s there, and I know it sometimes rears up and smacks me on the head and reminds me just who I am and where I came from. I appreciate that. I don’t want to be someone else. I want to be me, good or bad.

That voice of remembrance came from somewhere, as it does every year or so.  I think that’s a good thing. I never want to deny the truth of who I am and where I came from. So I dared to stay with the pain rather than run from it.

It is a beautiful thing to stay with my loneliness and pain. But it is not easy. I smother them with love.

A part of me has always wanted to nurse my pain and escape my fantasies about people who will take it away. But then, I stopped wanting to make it go away. They have every right to be there. My God doesn’t like to know me in this way; he wants to touch me differently, in a way that fulfills my deepest needs, not dwells on my deepest pain.

I own my pain and suspect it will one day go away on its own to look for a better place to live.

I’ve done that.

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Painted cross by LB