My sense of purpose in life also came largely from living with animals. It was a purpose that I always regarded as meaningful and ennobling, moreso with every passing year of living. When someone needs you in order to live and to live reasonably well, it gives you a sense of your own value, and it gives your days an important mission. It’s the same set of feelings that parents derive from raising children, and I too had these feelings raising a child: mission and importance and purpose. But the raising of the child lasted a mere seventeen years, and long before the age of seventeen, the child no longer needed me for many things that she had when she was younger. The hands-on doing that my soul seems to need gradually evaporated, as it does with any human child. I need that daily caretaking, that feeding and walking and medicating and litter-box duty, etc. The nuts and bolts of caring for someone who needs you, and whom you need in return. And for me, it is far easier and more rewarding to daily care for animals than for people. I find people difficult, confusing, scary, and deeply unsettling. For animals, all the adjectives are different: easy, straightforward, loyal, always appreciative of my efforts on their behalf.

The animals were always there. My parents had animals when I was born, and continued to have them until my father died in 1999. When I was six, I was allowed to start having animals of my own, in addition to the family animals. They were always there, always around me and always a large part of my life and my personhood, until certain people deliberately and with malice took all of that away from me in 2008. They were food for me, filling up apetites in my heart and soul. They also fed my intellect, since I constantly studied them and their ways, as species and as individuals. Little is as fascinating and absorbing for me as watching and studying an animal.

Purpose number one for forty-nine years: I am a person who loves and helps and takes care of animals. Gone. Wiped out in the space of less than an hour on a hill in Turners Falls, three years and three months ago.

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read…    Lifelines…   Stolen stars…    All my stars…

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Before so much was stolen from me by other people, I took a sense of meaning for myself largely from my animals. All my days I’d been a misfit of sorts, but didn’t find out until I was 55 that a lot of that sense of not fitting came from having Asperger’s Syndrome. I spent a lifetime feeling that when it came to the human arena, I was very often not much of anyone. There were periods, of course, when I felt like I mattered to a certain individual, felt that I, the person Anne, was of some kind of intrinsic value to that individual. The feeling that we all need of being important to someone. But this mattering was never something I could count on: it could always be taken away, and in fact always has been. Not one person, ever, has stuck with me for life. Not a relative, not a friend, not a boyfriend. Either they disappear, or I do. The center doesn’t hold.

In such a reality where the effort to make a lifetime connection with at least one member of your own species unfailingly fails, what do you do? What I did was to find meaning in Anne in the eyes and minds of my animals. Let me make it crystal clear that the sense of meaning they gave me wasn’t the only reason I kept animals for 55 years. It wasn’t simply an ego thing, but only partly an ego thing. As much as I dislike the ego, I do understand that our psyches have good reasons for possessing egos, and that these egos require at least a minimum amount of gratification. One of the things my ego needs is to be loved. Another is to feel that I am important to someone.

The animals gave me this, among many other things. They loved me even though I didn’t smile much. They loved me even though I read “too many” books. And so on. All of the things that humans find so objectionable about me were so much insignificant flotsam to the animals. What mattered to them was that I loved them, that I was kind to them and fed them and played with them and slept with them. To them I was a very special, very big deal. I have never, ever been that to a human being for very long.

Animals were delighted to walk and wander in nature with me, but I can’t say that any person ever has been. I had one cat, Chewy, who used to come inside and beg me to go walking with him: biting gently at my ankles, trying to drag me towards the door while meowing in a pleading tone.

Being toward death. Doing something that gave me a sense of meaning and purpose in my limited time to be alive. All gone now. Now I walk hourly towards the end with only one animal. It isn’t enough. Not for someone like me, who had families of animals for five decades. One animal doesn’t provide my ego, apparently, with a large enough sense of being valuable.

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read…    Neverending solitaire…   Mugsy’s book

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The title of this book comes from the thinking of Martin Heidegger, an existentialist who came up with this idea of being toward death. I didn’t read this straight out of Heidegger himself, but in a book that was discussing his crucial idea.

Being toward death, stated succinctly, boils down to this: We are all going to die. And the best thing we can do with our time to live is to do so in a way that will give us a sense of meaning and purpose. Meaning and purpose will be different things to different people. We each define these things for ourselves.

When I read about this, I realized that Heidegger had defined in philosophical terms what I’d been trying to do in my bungling way since I was a kid: trying to immerse myself in the things that gave me a sense of meaning and purpose, and also pleasure and accomplishment. I say trying because I was always to one degree or another thwarted in my efforts. Children are always thwarted in doing just what they want, anyway. And I suppose teenagers are still getting a certain amount of thwarting going on. But even in to my twenties, and thirties, and on to this day, I’ve always had both circumstances and other people thwarting my drives to live my way, as myself. This happens to others too, often, as in my case, for their entire lives. We don’t hear a great deal about such lives because amerikans crave the success story, the happy-ending story, the don’t-let-anything-get-in-your-way story. Those attitudes work and succeed for some people, maybe for a whole lot of people, but they absolutely do not hold true for everyone.

The elements that I chose from the vast amount there is to choose from, elements that gave me my senses of meaning, purpose, pleasure, and enjoyment, were these: animals, above all else; human family; creative pursuits; learning; nature; music. It’s all just about gone now. When the animals were taken, many other huge pieces of my self were taken with them, as if most of what I knew as me has now been surgically excised.

I have one animal now, new since the destruction of my life. One animal for a person like me is like giving one dollar to a person who has to pay one hundred dollars in rent. Not viable. Not enough to sustain. And I write online. Everything else that filled me all my life has become mostly impossible since those animals were taken. I write, I walk, and I dote on my guinea pig. That’s it. That’s all. That is a tiny fraction of the individual I used to be. And this shadow that I now am, this fraction, marches toward death without the fulfillment of all the past pursuits. Just about devoid of any sense of meaning in my days, purpose in my days, love and sharing in my days. This book is for me, I think, a compare and contrast, a memoire of a dead self and the ashes left behind. An explicaton, for myself, of precisely how much was ravaged.

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.